The Quiet Boy

1.

The cherry-red flip phone was not his normal phone, it was a special phone, and so the very instant it rang, Jay Shenk answered it, snapping it open and holding it to his lips and singing out, high and hopeful.

“Helloooooo?” he called. “Hello?”

“You’re gonna love me so much today, Brother Shenk,” said the gruff voice of the only man who had this number.

At the sound of Malloy the Boy on the line, Shenk’s whole body brightened. His skin prickled and sparked. His spirit beamed and reached up toward heaven.

He pumped his fist and ran faster.

Jay Albert Shenk, attorney-at-law, was running on the treadmill in his office, doing a nice steady six miles an hour, looking out onto the intersection of Overland and Palms, and he had his cell phone connected up so he could talk via the little speaker built into the dashboard of the treadmill. Shenk was jogging in an undershirt and track shorts, and there was sweat on his temples and his ponytail was bobbing pleasingly against the nape of his neck, and he was working his five-pound arm weights too, up and down, up and down, and through the office window he was catching the sweet breeze wafting up from Gloria’s Glorious Donuts just downstairs, and he was watching a foxy young mom navigate her stroller around a hobo who’d colonized the patch of sidewalk right up to the curb line, and he was just generally reveling in the scruffy workaday glamour of West Los Angeles while he listened to Malloy the Boy’s basso rumbling out good news.

“You’re just gonna love me to fucking bits,” said the Boy, and Shenk laughed.

He already did—there was no denying it—Shenk had loved his man Malloy forever. His affection for Malloy the Boy, the most reliable of his various intelligence agents, was like a wide blue rush, borne before the tides, river-wide and river-strong. Jay turned one of his arm weights sideways and used the fat end to hit STOP on the treadmill, and then he rolled off backward and surfed the momentum over to his desk.

“Ready, brother,” he said, and leaned forward, dripping sweat on a fresh legal pad, clicking open a ballpoint, clickity-click-click. “What’ve we got?”

“Wounded bird,” rumbled Bobby, and Shenk’s body tightened with anticipation. His eyes glowed.

“Sad,” he said.

“Always,” said Bobby. “But unless I’m way off, Jay, this one’s a real humdinger.”

Bobby’s voice was low and conspiratorial, like a sexy midnight disc jockey. Jay could picture the man, a goateed male nurse, a burly white guy somewhere north of six foot seven, crouched in a storage closet at the Pasadena hospital where he worked. All 300-plus pounds of Bobby, in his pale green scrubs, with his gleaming bald head and pirate earrings, big Bobby crowded in with the folded sheets and the blood pressure cuffs, the ID bracelets and syringes and gowns.

Bobby sat at the center of a statewide web of nurses and nurse’s assistants and orderlies, many or most of them small, efficient Filipino ladies who paid keen attention to their bustling wards, who were simultaneously supremely competent at the work itself and smart enough to read between the lines of the charts, to see with a single sidelong glance the invisible dollar signs imprinted thereupon, and who knew right away when to slip into a stairwell and fire off a text to their friend and patron, Bobby the Boy Malloy—who would in turn call it in to Shenk & Partners, the little law office that could.

Jay took copious notes on this new humdinger, filling page after page of the legal pad with his florid hand. Bobby didn’t have a lot by way of details. It was all piecemeal, all coming through filtered, from Bobby’s nurse to Bobby to Shenk, but the nitty-gritty wasn’t Bobby’s part of the job. All the careful collection of facts, the arrangement of those scattered stars into a constellation of meaning, which could then be translated into the threat or the reality of legal action—all of that would come later. All of that was Shenk’s job.

Sweat was drying on Jay’s chest and at the small of his back. Out the window, a guy in a Dodgers cap hustled out of Gloria’s Glorious, clutching the top of a paper bag, lust in his heart.

“OK, Bobby! OK! That’s wild.” Shenk studied the notes. Wild. “And we’re pretty confident of the sourcing on this?”

“Damn right we are,” said Malloy, his tone slightly affronted. “This is from Rosa. Rosa knows her stuff.”

“Of course, of course,” Shenk said. “Just making sure. You know me. I’ve met Rosa, haven’t I? From the fractured pelvis? In Dana Point?”

“No, Jay. That was Marina.”

“Yes, right, of course. Marina.” Shenk could not keep these women straight, but he didn’t need to. He had but one nurse. He had Malloy the Boy.

“All right, then, so where does Rosa work? Providence? In Burbank?”

“Naw, man. Valley Village.”

Shenk nodded, jotting away. At some point he had planted himself in his office chair, and his restless right foot bobbled while he wrote. Valley Village Methodist was a midsize not-for-profit, located in North Hollywood despite the name. It had a bustling ER, a regionally regarded practice in ortho and peds, and a total operating revenue northward of $665 million per annum. Valley Village was covered for both general liability and medical malpractice by the Wellbridge Insurance Group, Shenk was pretty sure, but he could look that up. He made a note to look it up.

Shenk had been doing this for nineteen years, since he came out from under the wing of the cantankerous sharpshooter J. J. Barnes, and he could give you the lowdown on every sawbones, on every hospital and clinic and urgent care in Southern California. Which doctors dispensed opioids like they were Peanut M&Ms? Which doctors couldn’t resist trying out their charms on the nurses, opening themselves up to harassment claims and distracting themselves from their life-or-death work? Who among the preening cohort of Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeons had a heavy hand with the Botox, and whose breast implants burst most frequently? Which ERs, though so alluringly busy, were naught but a constant churn of immigrant laborers with ladder falls or gardening accidents, none of whom had so much as a Medi-Cal card in their pocket?

Malloy the Boy’s knowledge was similarly encyclopedic, and he shared Shenk’s appreciation for all the variety and nuance of their distinct but overlapping trades, which was part of what had made their partnership so efficient and remunerative lo these many years. In their time together, Malloy had directed Shenk’s keen attention toward the wounded, toward the grieving next of kin, in every corner of the Golden State.

Most recently had been one Marvin Thomas III, a handyman whose pelvis had been shattered by a three-story fall he took, through no fault of his own—the fault lying entirely, or so Jay successfully argued, with the wobbly stepladder produced by a deep-pocketed Canadian steel-machining company. When all was said and done, Newfoundland Tools had been good for $250,000, negotiated out in a pretrial settlement, meaning without any trial costs, meaning a cool eighty grand and change for Shenk & Partners. A few weeks after he deposited that check, during a wholly unrelated social call to Malloy the Boy’s surprisingly tasteful gay-bachelor pad off Sunset Boulevard, Shenk had absentmindedly left behind a doughnut box containing a half dozen of Gloria’s most glorious, along with four grand in tightly rolled hundred-dollar bills.

Not that all the Boy’s phone calls ended in clover—not even close. Medical malpractice claims in particular are trickier than they look, as Shenk liked to tell his son, Ruben, when he was reading him the specs on a case, testing its soundness out loud for the boy’s edification: you gotta show a specific doctor was responsible for care, and that the doctor failed to deliver that care up to the standards of the field, and that the failure caused an injury, and that actual damages resulted from the injury.

“And that, my love,” Shenk would say, spreading the file out over the kitchen table, “is a lot of ands.”

Meaning a lot of solid-looking med-mal cases melted under the heat of close scrutiny. The potential payout would be too low to make it worthwhile, or the victim or victim’s kin would lack the stomach for a fight. Or, worst of all, one of his shark-suit scumbag competitors would snake in first and snatch the prospect before Shenk could make his pitch.

This one, though—this call—there was something special here.

Gleaming up from among the Boy’s handful of details, there was an undeniable sense of potential. Elusive but brightly present, like the fairy glow from a forest floor.

Shenk, with two fingers of his right hand on his carotid, feeling his pulse begin its post-run descent toward normal levels, ran his left hand very gently over his notes, tenderly touching the individual pieces of information like children.

“All right, man,” said Bobby into Shenk’s thoughtful silence. “Lemme know how it turns out.”

“You know I will. Thanks a ton, my brother.”

“I live to serve.”

Shenk closed the flip phone and stood gazing out at Palms, just giving the moment its moment, tilting his chin up slightly so the sunlight could catch him on both cheeks. Maybe he’d cut Malloy a little something extra on this one. Yeah—probably he would. Shenk lived with a constant low fear of Bobby’s getting restless, finding himself some other lawyer to whisper to, in some other second-floor office.

Shenk peeled off his undershirt and mopped sweat out of his chest hair, which had lately begun a midlife transformation from pure black to a pleasing manly color, like dark slate. He looked at his watch, calculating how long it would take to run home, grab a shower, and get on the 405, and was disappointed to find it was before two o’clock.

Ah, well. Without letting the thought take conscious root, he had been hoping it was after three fifteen, when he would have been able to scoop up his son, Ruben, from school and bring him along for the ride out to the Valley. Let the kid play wingman while he ran this thing down.

Should he wait the hour and a half? Maybe even go over to the school and pull him early? Rubie was a freshman at a small and mildly shmancy private high school in Playa Vista called Morningstar, where the administration was always touting the importance of teaching “the whole child”—a dictum Shenk was often tempted to interpret as a mandate to educate his son on the workings of the law.

No, he thought. Don’t do that. Leave him be.

The wisest voice in his head still spoke after all these years in the raspy-sweet tones of his Marilyn, of blessed memory. The voice reminded him that school came first, and that after school Monday/Wednesday/Friday Ruben had his poetry-club thing, and he shouldn’t miss.

Jay smiled, tightening his little ponytail. He was so proud of that boy. Tonight they would have dinner together, just the two of them, and Ruben would fill him in on his busy little life, and Jay would tell his son about the new case.

The humdinger, Shenk thought. Hoped. Believed.

Trotting down the metal staircase outside his office, waving to Gloria behind the counter of her eponymous doughnut shop. A real humdinger.

2.

Shenk in a hospital lobby was Shenk in full: chin angled up, chest thrust forward, ponytail dancing at his nape, marching forward like a man at the head of a parade.

Shenk was an aficionado of hospital lobbies, of their informational kiosks and layered odors and vast, soaring atriums. How many times had he passed through the whoosh of automatic doors, strode along the speckled linoleum tiles and down the beige hallways, past the seascapes and the still lifes and the soft-light portraits of elderly philanthropists?

He loved all the lobbies, without prejudice or discrimination. He loved the slick modern lobbies with their ergonomic furniture and meditation gardens and minimalist sculptures; but just as fervently did he love the humble old-school lobbies, like this one at Valley Village—with its dribbling water fountain and analog signage, with its dreary little gift shop, offering generic teddy bears and individual Mylar balloons, each balloon tethered limply to its cardboard stick.

And the people! As Shenk bounded through the Valley Village lobby, his heart swelled with love for the hospital people. Here, a clutch of prideful doctors in sneakers and scrubs, speaking softly to one another by an elevator hallway; here, a small, cheerful legion of nurses in six shades of hospital green; and here, a bulky orderly in repose, fists wrapped around the handles of an empty wheelchair, awaiting his next charge.

But whom did Shenk love the most? Most of all, Shenk loved the clientele—the consumers—the customers. The sick and the families of the sick, murmuring and muttering, worried and weary, leaning on the walls or wandering confused in search of a vending machine or a bathroom. Or just slumped in those lumpy overstuffed lobby sofas, under the too-bright lights, hungry but unable to eat, weepy but unable to cry. They were alone or stood in groups of two and three, clutching at scraps of tissue and sipping lukewarm coffee and staring wanly out the tinted glass, in baffled contemplation of a loved one’s mortality and, inevitably, their own. They sat grimly, waiting for news; they made exhausted phone calls, keeping someone out there in the loop or keeping themselves tethered to the rush of life that continued while they were in here, in the tedious no-time of hospital waiting.

“No,” a woman was saying—shouting—at some pinhead administrator she’d buttonholed, backed up against a door to a NO ACCESS