Read A Conflict of Interest Online
Authors: Adam Mitzner
Tags: #Securities Fraud, #New York (State), #Philosophy, #Stockbrokers, #Legal, #Fiction, #Defense (Criminal Procedure), #New York, #Suspense Fiction, #Legal Stories, #Suspense, #General, #Stockbrokers - New York (State) - New York
A Conflict of Interest
A CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Gallery Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Adam Mitzner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books hardcover edition May 2011
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Designed by Renata Di Biase
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4391-5751-0
ISBN 978-1-4391-9644-1 (ebook)
To my daughters, Rebecca and Emily
In the middle of the journey of our lives
I found myself in a dark wood where
the straight road had been lost sight of.
—D
ANTE
T
he first time I set eyes on Michael Ohlig I was beside my father’s casket and he was standing toward the back of a group of mourners comprised almost entirely of my father’s extended family. Ohlig was a good half foot taller than everyone else, and unlike my paternal relatives, his head was covered with his own hair, a shade of silver usually reserved for much younger men anchoring the evening news. He wore it a little long, almost to the base of his collar, just enough to say that he fancied himself a nonconformist. I likely wouldn’t have noticed him at all if he hadn’t seemed so out of place. To be blunt about it, he looked too good to be associated with that crowd.
Ohlig was twice my father’s closest friend—at the beginning and the end of his adult life. As far as I know, he was my father’s only friend, the thirty-some year gap in their contact seemingly occupied only by my mother and his hardware store.
The story I heard growing up was that Ohlig and my father were playing tennis at the courts in Central Park on the same day my mother was on a good Samaritan mission to keep a girlfriend company on the train from Queens to Manhattan, so her friend could watch her boyfriend play. My parents disagreed about which one of them approached the other, but the one part that never varied in either of their renditions was that it was love at first sight. They were married less than six months later, and I arrived in November the following year.
I don’t know why it never seemed odd to me that, in all the subsequent retellings, my parents provided little detail about Ohlig. I never knew what he did for a living or whether he was married or had children. If I had ever been told how he and my father came to be friends, or why they lost touch, it went in one ear and out the other. For me,
he just seemed like a historical figure, no different from Caesar or John F. Kennedy; someone who I took on faith had actually existed, but who had no relevance to my life. Even when my father shared with me the coincidence of running into Ohlig at a bookstore shortly after my parents moved to their retirement community in Florida, and that he was now living in a neighboring town, I had little curiosity about Ohlig’s life.
Three times Ohlig poured a shovel full of dirt on my father’s casket, fulfilling the ritualistic last act of a Jewish burial. Each motion was deliberate, as if his movements were intentionally drawn out to prolong his time to say good-bye. But it was the powerful way he approached the shovel, and the force with which he yanked it from the dirt, that most caught my eye, stating unequivocally that he was not someone to challenge.
Watching this I had no inkling that Michael Ohlig would become the central thread in all that followed. Even now I can hardly fathom how it came to be that a man who had never been anything more than a minor character in the story of my life would come to dominate its plot.
Perhaps stranger still, Michael Ohlig would undoubtedly say the same thing about me.
1
L
ike my best closing arguments, my eulogy is short, as I think all eulogies should be, especially when delivered in the hot Florida sun to people past retirement age. I can sometimes spend a week crafting a presentation to a jury, but I didn’t put pen to paper about my father until last night. The words came to me easily, however, a sign that I’d been composing my father’s legacy, at least as seen through my eyes, for years.
As I knew she would, my mother smiles approvingly when I mention that my father was a man who had few close friends, and that while she had tried several times to get him to befriend the husbands of her friends, it was usually without success. “I remember one time,” I tell the thirty or so mourners gathered in front of the gravesite, “my mother said he must be one of those unique individuals who didn’t need anyone else. A complete unit unto himself was the phrase she used. My dad was not a man prone to displays of affection, but his eyes got moist and he wrapped both his hands around hers. Very softly, as if he didn’t even want me to hear, he told her that it wasn’t that he didn’t need anyone; he just didn’t need anyone but her.”
My father died three days ago. He was sixty-seven and had never been sick a day in his life. For a man of small stature, he was freakishly strong, and while the ability to toss around boxes filled with air-conditioner units as if they contained nothing more than Styrofoam peanuts is not a contra-indicator for coronary disease, it made the shock of his death that much greater.
After the funeral, a few people accompany us back to my parents’ house, which is located in a gated retirement community in Boynton Beach, Florida, about ten minutes from Palm Beach. Boynton Beach is littered with these communities, and the developers who build them must believe all elderly people secretly want to be Italian, because each project is named for someplace in Italy—Roman Gardens, Florenza
Court, Venetian Islands. My parents’ development is called Venezia Castle III, which means somewhere, probably within five square miles, there must exist two other “castles.”
The house is much smaller than the home I grew up in, which was by no means large, and anyone with an eye for construction can see the corners that were cut—the hollow doors, the lack of molding and the cheap fixtures. In New York City real estate parlance it would be called “charmless.” Despite all this, my mother has never made any secret that she prefers this place to the home where we all lived in East Carlisle, a New Jersey suburb about an hour outside of New York City. I’ve always thought that it’s the newness she finds so appealing. In fact, other than family photographs, my mother made a point of not bringing anything from our East Carlisle house with her to Boynton.