Chapter Ten
I gathered my laptop and thirty-plus pages of handwritten notes. With the adrenaline slowly subsiding, my left hand felt numb from gripping the pen so tightly. I needed food and a gallon of water.
Last minute client meeting. Grabbing food then coming up, I responded as I rode the elevator down to the lobby. I grabbed a premade salad and Smartwater and sprinted back to the forty-eighth floor. I excitedly swung open the door to an empty office.
I dumped everything onto my desk and fished out my iPhone. Back in the office, where are you?
He responded immediately. Ran down to SDNY for last min filing. But glad you’re alive (also wtf??!)
I chugged the bottle of water. Crazy morning. Thankful I didn’t die in my sleep from alcohol poisoning.
He typed a question mark, and I reminded myself not to put anything in writing. Text me when you’re on the train back, can meet you at Joe’s on your way up, I wrote back.
I sat at my desk, looking at the view of uptown Manhattan for what felt like an eternity.
I spent the next ten minutes reading through my notes from the meeting.
I was struck by how fascinating it all was on a second read.
This was the reason I had gone to law school. The reason I wanted to work with Eddie.
It was clear Andie was a force of nature.
For four hours, she’d told us everything, starting at the very beginning, when she first moved to Los Angeles and found a job as a personal assistant to a high-net-worth entrepreneur who liked to have other high-net-worth friends over for a weekly poker game.
One day, she was making music playlists and charcuterie trays.
Soon after, she was running an empire. Celebrities, titans of industry, studio heads all wanted to get into her game.
The price of admission was in the hundreds of thousands.
Players either won or lost way more than that.
She didn’t even know how to play poker, but she knew the mind of a poker player inside and out.
I couldn’t believe I was part of her defense team.
Charlie looked exhausted as he waited outside Joe’s a couple of hours later.
“Late night?” I winked.
He groaned. “I already had my wild days as a paralegal. My body can’t tolerate that little sleep.”
I filled him in as we walked back to the elevator bank, careful not to repeat any names.
“I just want to nail this memo. It feels more make or break than anything.”
He grinned. “Nah, you’re in the circle now. All you have to do is stay in the circle.”
I crossed my fingers. “Can we talk about how ridiculous some of those people were last night?”
“Oh, yeah. I figured I’d let you form your own opinion, but those events are garbage. There’s a reason the firm opens them up to seat fillers, and it’s not because they’re generous.”
“If they all end with getting staffed on cases like this, I’ll fill a seat anywhere they need me.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Okay fine, I’ll be your plus-one, but only for the free booze and titillating conversation. And I’m not even talking about ours.”
I rubbed my temples as we sat down at our desks. “I might have to crawl under the desk and nap before I can turn these notes into any sort of coherent memo.”
Charlie peered over the desk divider at the stack of pages, which I promptly grabbed and put on the side of my desk.
“Highly confidential!” I exclaimed, yawning simultaneously.
“You nap, I’ll flip through them.”
“I’m serious. Can I trust you to leave them alone if I just put my head down right here for five minutes?”
“Not a chance. You know what I just went down to court for? Some real estate investor got an eviction notice from a commercial building in Midtown, and we had to file a temporary restraining order. I’m desperate to read anything that doesn’t mention REITs.”
“Don’t make me ask.”
“Real estate investment trust.”
“You’re better than that.”
“I’m not Hollywood material. Too nerdy.”
“And I’m an Italian girl from Virginia. Probably the last person who belonged in that meeting.”
Charlie grinned. “You’ll belong wherever you decide you want to belong. Not sure if high-stakes poker is really your scene, though.”
I took a deep breath and glanced warily at the stack of notes. “No napping. I need this memo to be the best thing Eddie ever read.”
I harnessed a second wind and started summarizing recent rulings of Second Circuit cases where the antigambling statute was front and center. I was struck by how judges could write such dry opinions about gambling.
“Is poker easy to learn?” I asked a few minutes later.
“I’ve got a game going right now on my phone.” He grinned. “I can give you a quick tutorial, if you want.”
I hesitated. “I don’t really have time. I have to keep going on this memo.”
He shook his head. “A good lawyer becomes an expert in whatever their clients are into. Otherwise, you’re a half-baked advocate.”
He swiveled his chair toward my side of the desk. “Here. I’ll show you the basics.”
The “basics” were all I needed to realize poker was complicated.
“It’s honestly fucked that the government lumps poker in with all the other games where you clearly have no control over the outcome. It’s a game of skill, not chance,” Charlie said.
“Kind of tooting your own horn there.”
“Think about it. You have just as much of a chance winning roulette or the lottery as anyone else. But if we sat down and played a game of poker right now, I’d crush you.”
I frowned. “This article says the antigambling laws were enacted to crack down on racketeering.”
“Uh, yeah. We’ve all watched The Sopranos. The government figured out a long time ago that gambling and organized crime go hand in hand.”
I made notes to draft a section pointing out Andie’s lack of connection to organized crime. And learn poker and watch The Sopranos.
Charlie was on calls for the rest of the afternoon. His phone voice filled every square inch of the office. It was the auditory equivalent of manspreading. I tried putting in AirPods, but it was impossible to concentrate.
Two hours later, Charlie got off another call, and I was starting to feel desperate. The hours were slipping by. I needed to focus.
“I reserved the small conference room down the hall. Just need to bang this out,” I said. I hadn’t figured out how to diplomatically say there are two of us working in here, please shut the fuck up.
“Shit, am I too loud? I swear I talk louder when I’m working,” he said apologetically.
I mimicked an understanding smile. “I don’t think I’d even hear you if I weren’t so focused on nailing this.”
I unplugged my laptop from my monitor and slipped out to the small conference room at the end of the hall.
The clock in the upper-right corner of my monitor read 12:13 a.m. I’d relocated back to our office around 9 p.m. after Charlie texted he was finally heading home. Without looking, I took a distracted bite of the half-eaten protein bar beside me and chased it with cold coffee.
“My first all-nighter,” I muttered, the office feeling still and small. Outside the window, Park Avenue was a clear runway with barely a headlight all the way uptown.
I wanted Eddie to have the memo in his inbox by morning.
I’d spent countless hours reading dozens of New York and federal cases to get a sense of how courts ruled whether something was an “illegal gambling operation.” Everything hinged on whether Andie’s poker games would be considered an illegal gambling business that would put her within the crosshairs of Section 1955.
If convicted, she was facing up to five years in prison.
I’d made pages and pages of notes, but somehow only drafted a few coherent lines for the memo.
Memorandum
Attorney Work Product
Privileged
(ii) involves five or more persons who conduct, manage, supervise, direct, or own all or part of such business; and
(iii) has been or remains in substantially continuous operation for a period in excess of thirty days or has a gross revenue of $2,000 in any single day . . .
Charlie’s words about poker being a game of “skill” kept replaying in my head.
I typed “poker: game of chance or game of skill?” into Google.
There was a recent news story about a case that centered on that exact question.
The court had declared Texas Hold’em, a popular form of poker, a game of skill and therefore not an illegal gambling business.
The ruling was on appeal, and if the higher court upheld the lower court’s decision, we’d have a compelling argument that Andie’s poker game wasn’t an illegal gambling business either.
I ended the memo referencing the Texas Hold’em case.
It wasn’t a slam dunk by any means, but it was something.
My phone screen lit up in the reflection of the window. I rubbed my eyes to readjust my contact lenses as I saw Ben’s name.
Hey.
Short, simple, confusing. My mind raced. It was late. Was he drinking? Had he meant to text me?
My palms felt sweaty.
Since I’d been in New York, I had narcissistically tried to focus on everything but Ben. Partly it was survival. If I thought too deeply about how much I’d hurt him or how our marriage had failed, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to channel the forward motion I needed to succeed.
I stared at the phone long after his name disappeared, then moved it to the opposite side of my desk. I leaned back in my chair, a knot forming in my stomach. Who said avoidance was bad? Facing my past seemed worse.
I jumped as my office phone emitted a high-pitched ring.
“This is Sam,” I answered shakily.
“Oh my god. It’s after midnight. Go home!”
I exhaled an unsteady breath.
“Christ, Charlie. You suck. Let me work,” I said, trying to steady my voice.
“Okay fine, but we were out till three a.m. last night! You need sleep. Hope you’re winding down.”
“Night. Bet I’ll still be up before you in the morning.”
He chuckled. “You already are. Get some sleep.”
I hung up and decided to put off responding to Ben until I finished the memo. My mind felt like a sieve.
I was pure OCD as a junior attorney. Four hours later, I had spell-checked the memo eight times, read the cover email aloud three times to make sure it flowed, and deleted and retyped Eddie’s email in the “to” line too many times. Finally, I squeezed my left eye shut and hit send.
I ordered an Uber as I leaned against the cool metal wall of the elevator, willing myself to stay awake until I got home.
As I settled into the Uber, I checked my Gmail and saw an email from Ben with everything the text hadn’t said.
He was coming to New York next week for a conference at the Federal Reserve. He had work dinners every night but was free Wednesday. Did I want to have dinner?