“Where are we with everything?” he asked.
“I spoke to the woman today,” I began. I explained how we had caught a bit of a break that the teenager inserted herself in the process, as she seemed to have a more flexible moral compass than her mother. I hinted that summoning the surgeon had been a stroke of genius, because he was expensive, and the daughter wanted her mom to have the best. I didn’t tell him how I had lain awake that night hating myself for doing this, because lawyers are supposed to be dispassionate, and my feelings were irrelevant.
“The woman, Holly,” I continued, “she pushed back a little, but I think she’ll settle into the arrangement.”
Jack nodded, then peered down into his glass for a long, mournful beat. I wondered if he was waiting for me to say something more. When he finally spoke, his voice was somber.
“What was it like at the scene? Y’know, after?”
The fact that I’d made it to the scene before they had loaded Holly into the ambulance was nothing short of a miracle. I don’t live anywhere near the valley neighborhood where the collision occurred, but I happened to be in the area at a lunch with a local developer. LA had a terrible housing shortage, and Jack had asked me to look for opportunities to invest in affordable housing because, as he liked to say, It can’t always be about making money. When I got the urgent call, I had just paid the check and was walking to my car.
I described the scene for Jack the best I could without letting myself get emotional. The man had likely died on impact. The woman was knocked down and rendered unconscious, with a head injury. “I don’t imagine she saw much,” I said. “And she has a concussion, so even if she did, her memory will likely be unreliable.” I tried to sound clinical, detached, unaffected. The performance was not just for him.
He nodded, then asked, “What about witnesses?”
So far, no witnesses had come forward, but I was still holding my breath. “There were fourteen bystanders on the scene when I got there,” I told him. “It’s unclear if any of them witnessed the collision, but I’ll keep an eye on it.” I thought about the man with the camera phone but decided not to mention it. The video had not gone viral yet, unlikely it would now.
Jack nodded again. I could tell he was concerned—we both were. But I had a good handle on who was there. I had videoed the crowd on my phone, making sure to document the faces and cars of every onlooker in the vicinity. We were fortunate that there were no banks or government buildings within line of sight that might have had surveillance cameras near the intersection, I’d made sure to check.
“And the dashcam?” he asked somewhat reluctantly. “What’s the plan for that?”
The existence of a video was problematic. And the fact that it was in the hands of a teenage girl was more troubling still. I knew how these teenagers are, every damn moment of every damn day winds up on Snapchat or WhatsApp or whatever platform they’re using now. If Savannah ever decided to post that dashcam video, things would get ugly real fast.
“The girl gave me the camera and the original data card, but—” Jack stopped me with his hand. We both knew she was smarter than that. In the digital age, if there was one copy, there were a thousand. Savannah probably already had it saved on multiple devices and a cloud or two. There was only one way to keep that video from seeing the light of day, and that was to keep Savannah happy.
“Yeah, I know,” Jack said. “It was a stupid question.” Jack ran his hands through his graying hair. It was still thick, and his hairline mercifully hadn’t budged. He tamed it with pomade that smelled like oranges. I noticed how he spiked it in the front to give the illusion of height. It was still standing tall—unlike the man who’d styled it.
We were doing a bad thing, but Jack wasn’t a bad man. In fact, he could be quite generous. If his wife identified a worthy cause—home for battered wives, local boys’ clubs, school drama program—he gave generously and anonymously. He had worked hard to build a good life for himself and his family, he was not going to let it be destroyed by one unfortunate accident. Shit happens, and people make mistakes. The world was not going to come tumbling down—he had me to make sure of that.
“The woman,” Jack started, “she’s OK with, y’know . . . burying the video?”
“It was the teenager who nabbed the dashcam,” I said, sidestepping the question. “And it’s a damn good thing she did,” I added to remind him how much worse things would be if she hadn’t.