BLIND TRIAL Brian Deer (best novels for beginners TXT) 📖

biggest buddy, back in the day. He used to come to the house till Ben was nearly three. “Once a month, or so.” Never less. Aged eleven months, Ben let go a chair and took his first steps… to Hoffman.

But when the government started sniffing, Henry’s friend stopped coming. Then he called one Christmas Eve, years later. The conversation went badly. She hung up. He called again. And he promised he would help her son.

“I told him, ‘Stay away. We don’t need your help. We’ll look after ourselves.’ And he laughed.”

Ben felt his face sweating. This was seriously freaky. But now it made sense. That was it. He did know Hoffman in a previous life. Just like he thought all along.

MONDAY JULY 21

Thirteen

THE BERNEWERNER Building, on Tenth Street, Atlanta, sat four blocks south of a family of towers: signature structures of the upper Midtown neighborhood. The daddy of the district: One Atlantic Center (fifty neo-gothic stories in Rosa Porrino granite with the crockets of a Boston church). To its east: the GLG Grand and Four Seasons Hotel (fifty-three stories in pale red granite with a hint-of-art-deco bronze accents). And among others: Promenade (forty stories in rose glass, topped with ice-palace pinnacles and a spire).

Ben drove toward them in his green BMW like a surfer ascending a wave. From the trough, two miles east on Monroe Drive, he climbed Piedmont Avenue, swung a right at Fourteenth, and crested onto Peachtree Street.

Ever since moving south, he’d felt the pull of these buildings. “You’ll be doing cool stuff,” they seemed to purr. “And even when you’re not, you’re making money.”

But this morning they loomed silent, as if in secret agreement with the news he’d learned last night. He’d gotten this gig from a friend of Henry Louviere’s. His mentor must be some kind of crook. All those slaps on the back, the dickhead dialogues, the classic car crap… Another asshole.

Long past midnight, Ben had weighed his mother’s words. A lot made sense. A lot didn’t. And, after dishing the dope on Theodore Hoffman, she’d lapsed into a mantra she’d banged on with forever. “Your father’s deserted you. Your father’s forgotten you. You need to forget him too.”

Ben was eight years old when he broke that commandment. He found a phone number and called it. Twice. It was summer, like now, when Chicago was hottest, its skies were rainiest, and its citizens turned their faces toward the lake. The first time: a woman’s voice. The second time: a man’s. Both times, he hung up, saying nothing.

Years later, there was media: newspapers, TV. The Louviere scandal dragged on and on. After his father’s second trial—when state prosecutors finally nailed him—WGN ran a feature, “Corruption in Court,” that its producers had worked on for weeks. He remembered Henry’s perp walk—slow-motion, black-and-white—before and after each break for commercials. From the crowd to the handcuffs to his father’s slow-mo blink.

Over and over, for half an hour, from 9:00 p.m.

ON TENTH STREET, Atlanta took a turn for the worse at BerneWerner’s North American headquarters. Here the surfer wave drained to the Downtown Connector, and the skyline shrank to a developer-designed hexagon of seventeen yellow brick floors. Apart from the extravagance of bronze window glass to cut aircon bills, you’d think the architect was inspired by the aesthetics of the fire house in Bumfuck, Missouri.

Ben edged into a space in the parking garage and climbed to the lobby. It was steaming. A delivery guy hauled cartons of The Time Has Come videos, loaded onto memory sticks. A carpenter hammered nails into a Proud of our Products stand being erected between reception and security. A central bronze lantern was draped with banners that, so far, spelt:

T_E TIM_ _AS _OME

Two weeks back, he’d found a file in a drawer with the original plans for the building. They proposed twenty-seven floors in travertine and marble, with a sixty-foot atrium, Doric columns, and a twenty-foot fountain in the lobby. But, despite a frenzy of tax breaks and, you’d have to think, bribes, BerneWerner AG rehung its hat in Basle, Switzerland, and the Midtown scheme was downsized.

Stepping into an elevator, he greeted his reflection. He wore a white suit of Luke’s, white shirt, and gray loafers: suitable attire for a major life event—say, a divorce or a job termination. But after last night’s tutorial about the company’s general counsel, it didn’t seem likely Hoffman hired him to fire him. Dr. Crampton could shove his laptop up his ass.

At the fourteenth floor, the elevator dinged into the hubbub of the Marketing Department. The building was furnished in Knoll Reff Profiles (“A progressive and architectural design solution”), which here meant beech-style laminate in eighteen cubicles one third the size of module B. The occupants—his colleagues—each got an L-shaped worktop, two J-pull pedestals, and a choice of closet or bookcase.

“Hot damn—what a night.” The voice of Darlene Ruffin. She sprinted to walk beside him, arm-in-arm. She was a high-haired redhead—mid-forties, from Fort Worth—with a country singer’s complexion, a thirteen-year-old’s wardrobe, and an infinite capacity for hope.

“Ben Louviere, let me tell ya, you’re one hell of a lover.”

She dragged him into the office they shared.

Displays and Presentation was three times module B, overlooking a MARTA subway station. Here, Knoll Profiles meant real beech veneer, with a midsize workstation, D-pull pedestals, storage tower, closet, and bookcase.

Nothing had moved since his trip to DC. Printed screenshots lay scattered on his desk. No matter his Juris Doctor from a credible university, he’d been assigned to reconcile a forty-minute script with twenty-seven PowerPoint slides.

Slide: Stimulate division of immature white blood cells

Slide: Influence ability of certain cells to kill microorganisms

Slide: Vendrecol—The Quality of Life

He’d nearly finished the task before leaving for the conference, but then came a summons to Crampton’s office. He’d assumed it related to the work in progress, but the Vice President, Marketing & Product Communications talked only “lost laptop,” “poor evidence of motivation,” and a “generally lax attitude to work.”

Now Ben looked down at the MARTA