The Up and Comer

by Howard Roughan

Genres: Suspense; Thrillers

Synopsis

Poised to become his Manhattan law firm's youngest partner, up-and-coming attorney Philip Randall takes risks and a mistress--his best friend's wife. Then the game changes and the stakes get higher. Someone begins following Philip's every move, waiting for the chance to strike--with a vengeance. Soon, Philip is at the center of a murder investigation that can end his career, his marriage, and his fabulous life.

Release date: July 5, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 336

Sample

“THE UP AND COMER is a millennial, Wall Street version of The Player—a tale of a Yuppie prick who gets his comeuppance. Beyond the sheer speed and undiluted excitement with which THE UP AND
COMER is told lies a cruel comedy of manners about overprivileged, spoiled New Yorkers.… Sleek entertainment and a malicious
thriller: fast, nasty, jolting.”


—Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho

“First-timer Roughan knocks one out of the park with this satisfyingly lean and propulsive thriller.… An impressive debut.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“If F. Scott Fitzgerald had written ‘The Perils of Pauline’ and set it in contemporary Manhattan, the result might well be
the brilliant THE UP AND COMER. With pitch-perfect ear and dialogue for days, Roughan has written a funny, smart, and start-to-finish
riveting chronicle of life as it is lived among upwardly mobile young Americans. A killer first novel, as entertaining as
it is authentic.”


—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

“A supremely hip, brazen debut.… As Roughan wraps his crafty plot around some impressively tense moments, the novel morphs
into an engaging, cinematic page-turner.”


—Publishers Weekly

“A screamer. Fast, fun, and dead-on compelling. A great ride of a book.”

—Robert Ferrigno, author of Heartbreaker

“Wry, self-deprecating wit… has a hypnotic charm.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“Great characters… an entertaining and very contemporary examination of how far a man will go to protect the life he’s so
happily settled into.”


—Ridgefield Press

“What makes this thriller so good is the narrative voice… elegant writing, fine dialogue, and deft jokes at the expense of
lawyers and Manhattan society.”


—Tatler magazine

“An irresistible page turner.… The plot is fiendishly brilliant and tautly woven.… Roughan’s book crackles with wit and sharp
dialogue, yet there is a dark, serious undercurrent that keeps you riveted on several levels.”


—Greenwich Time

“Roughan has an ability, like Donald Westlake, to combine comedic elements with serious matters.… I was howling with laughter
while almost falling off the edge of my seat. At the same time, Roughan plots so well, and so simply, that in the end everyone
gets what they deserve. Well, almost everyone.”


—Bookreporter.com

“A wonderful decline-and-fall story for our well-heeled times… written with great rude brio.… Roughan is a natural. He tells
a story with deceptive ease, making you compulsively turn pages… and he captures, with spot-on accuracy, the dubious underside
of anyone who believes ‘careerism’ is a noble calling. This is a terrific debut.”


—Douglas Kennedy, author of The Big Picture

Absolutely incredible!”


Tracy stood before me, loaded shopping bags in hand, a smile ear to ear. She’d been gone a good six hours.

“Back so soon?” I said, barely looking up from my Sunday Times. But it was clear there wasn’t enough sarcasm in the world to burst my wife’s bubble. She just ignored me.


“Everything fit; everything I tried on fit me like a glove. It was like karma… clothes karma!” Tracy said with a giggle. “That’s
what it was!”


Now hold it right there. Were this most anyone else’s apartment and the same scene was being played out, odds are the guy
in my shoes would start huffing and puffing about how much this little shopping spree was going to set him back. Some heated
words would be exchanged, followed by a full-blown argument that in turn would give way to any number of tantrum-related activities
such as kicking, screaming, or heaving a vase across the room.


But this wasn’t anyone else’s apartment, this was our 3,500-square-foot penthouse loft in Chelsea, paid for in cash by my
father-in-law, Lawrence Metcalf, as a wedding gift two years ago. Which is not to say I married for money. No, I married for
a lot of money.


So when Tracy would go four figures deep into Bergdorf’s or Bendel’s, or, on this particular Sunday afternoon, Saks Fifth
Avenue, I, Philip Randall, couldn’t really give a shit. It wasn’t our money she was spending, it was Daddy’s, and you didn’t
have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out that whatever moral or self-esteem issues one might have with that,
it simply wasn’t worth acting on them. Period.


“Philip, if you want me, I’ll be in the bedroom.”

That was code, of course. It meant Tracy wanted to have sex. As if wealth wasn’t a blessing enough unto itself, it so happened
that spending money made my wife horny. Really horny. And the more she spent, the more horny she got. It actually made for
an interesting post-coital ritual. We would finish up, and depending on whatever it was she had let me do to her and how much
she had been into it, I would try to guess how much money she’d just spent. Once, on a whim, she bought herself a Cartier
Pasha watch at Tourneau. It was the only time we ever had anal sex.


“That was at least three G’s,” I gasped, rolling off her.

“Two thousand,” she gasped back. “Though not including tax.”

(Truth be told, I wouldn’t have rated it much more than a couple hundred, however, I had learned early on to always come in
at a higher number.)


Tracy got up from the bed and headed for the bathroom. I watched her. She was still very thin, as thin as when we first met
four years ago. Her breasts were not large, but they were round, a nice shape. Occasionally, after too much to drink, she’d
talk about getting implants, though I knew it was something that she’d never do.


“Oh, guess who I bumped into?” came her voice from the bathroom.

“Who?”

Tracy reappeared in her robe. “Tyler Mills,” she said.

“No shit.”

“Yeah, he remembered me and everything. Of course, I didn’t have a clue who he was at first. He looked horrible, though.”

“Funny how a suicide attempt will do that to you,” I said. “Where’d you see him?”

“Outside of Saks. He was standing by the doors.”

“By himself?”

Tracy nodded.

“What’d you talk about?”

“Nothing, really; I asked how he was doing and all that. It was— Oh, on second thought, he did say something strange; well,
not really strange, just kind of weird.”


“What was it?”

“He said he hoped to be talking to you soon.”

“You thought that was weird?” I asked.

“It was the way he said it, like it was something that you might not want to do.”

“What, did he say that?”

“No, I got the sense that there was more to it, though,” she said. “Do you know what it’s about?”

“Not a clue.”

“Anyway, I gave him our number as well as your one at work. That was okay, right?”

There are probably more lawyers in Manhattan than in any other city in the world. I say probably because I’ve never really taken the time, or more accurately, had the inclination, to find out for sure. Statistics like
that are just assumed by New Yorkers out of sheer egocentricity.


Many of the lawyers I know say they wanted to be one at an early age. Often it was because they had a parent who was one,
or in some instances they’d been influenced by a character who was one on television or in a book they had read. I’d bet To Kill a Mockingbird alone is responsible for over a hundred lawyers in this country easy. No matter what the influence, though, the mere thought
of there being a bunch of pubescent types walking around knowing they want to be lawyers has always seemed to me to be ludicrous.
Always will.


As for me, I didn’t know I wanted to be one until my last year at Dartmouth. It was no great epiphany or anything like that,
and there was hardly any deep soul-searching involved. In reality, it was on account of a lame classroom exercise in a poli-sci
course.


We were doing a simulated United Nations conference in which every student represented a member country. Given the current
political context of the time (a diminishing Cold War, budding capitalism, blah, blah, blah…), the objective was to advance
your country’s interests as best you could. I represented Hungary. I kicked ass.


I managed to persuade the voting majority in the class on every initiative I introduced. No matter what dissenting argument
was presented by another student, I ripped it to shreds. It was pretty wild, and the most amazing thing about it was that
it was also pretty easy.


When the class was over, there must have been six or seven other students who came up to me to tell me how well I had done,
and practically every time they made some comment on how I’d make a really good lawyer. One guy, who I’d never even said as
much as hello to, asked me if I planned to take the LSAT. The LSAT?

Just like that, people saw something in me that I’d never seen for myself. I was skeptical at first—there were, after all,
a fair number of dimwits in the class—but the more I thought about it, the more I thought they could be onto something. Maybe
I could make a good lawyer. Besides, it wasn’t like there was anything else shaping up for me to do. French lit may have been
a fun major and a good way to get laid, but even I knew there was no way to make a living from it.


I took that LSAT, scored a Reggie Jackson (44), and got accepted at the University of Virginia School of Law. I concentrated
on criminal law and memorized a whole bunch of crap over the course of three years. When the recruiting season started, the
only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to work in Manhattan. I got three offers.


Then one day a professor pulled me aside after class and told me that Campbell & Devine was looking to hire an associate.
It was like being tapped for a secret society. They were a small Manhattan firm with a huge reputation. The Green Berets of
law. Having roomed with Jack Devine in college, the professor said he could arrange an interview for me. Not to piss on myself,
I told him, but why me? Because you’re exactly the kind of son of a bitch he’s looking for, he said. It was one of the best
compliments I’d ever gotten.


I don’t remember the flight up to New York. I couldn’t tell you if it was good weather or bad. I’m pretty sure I ate, though
your guess is as good as mine when it comes to what. The only thing I remember was sitting down across from Jack Devine, a
huge leather-inlaid desk between us, and him holding my résumé in the air… and then ripping it up. Slowly.


“We won’t be needing this now, will we?” he said with a hint of melodrama. He let the pieces of paper fall to the desk. I
could’ve sworn they fell in slow motion.


The interview lasted five minutes. It consisted of one question and one request, neither of which had anything to do with
law. Or so I thought. The question, which came first, caught me completely off guard.


“Philip, why are manhole covers round?”

Damned if I knew. Though I had a sneaking suspicion that wasn’t the answer Jack Devine was looking for. So I sat there and
stared at him. At least that’s what it surely looked like to him. What he couldn’t see was a guy’s brain scrambling for its
life to deliver something, anything, that would seem plausible. Finally, without even knowing it, I blurted out an answer.


“Because the holes are round.”

Jack Devine sat there and stared back at me for a moment. Then, he let out with a huge bellowing laugh. It was like a thunderclap.

“Because the holes are round!” he yelled. “Fuckin’ A! Donna, you gotta hear this one.”

A big-haired brunette in a tight skirt appeared all curvylike in his doorway. Staten Island, without a doubt.

“Because the holes are round,” Devine said to her with a “get a load of this” staccato.

“Good one,” Donna said, looking at me with a trained smile before walking away.

Hell, I’m on a roll, I thought. What’s next? Why’s the sky blue? What’s the difference between AM and FM? The mating habits
of horseshoe crabs? Bring it on, Jack!


He brought it. “You see that pen?” he asked, pointing at a Bic sitting atop a nearby credenza. “I want you to sell me that
pen.”


There was no hesitation on my part this time. Though a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, a little confidence can
do wonders.


“Sell you the pen?” I began, getting up and walking over to the credenza. “Shit, Jack, you can have the pen!” I picked it up and tossed it on his desk. “And there’s plenty more where that came from.”


Three days later I got a phone call back at school from Donna. She told me to hold for Jack. Deleting the constant flow of
“ums” I uttered, the conversation went something like this:


At 9:01 the next morning I called Devine and accepted the job. He welcomed me aboard and told me to prepare to be great. That
was five years ago.




“Morning, Philip, how was your weekend?”

“Great,” I said. “And yours?”

“It sucked.”

My secretary, Gwen. Candid to a fault.

I had once been at this law school wine-and-cheese party where this guy with a tan, some senior partner at a firm in Miami,
was bending my ear about the dos and don’ts of the legal world. Most of it was forgettable, except for one thing. He said
no matter what I did, no matter how many rules I bent or truths I stretched, never, ever hire an attractive secretary. The
temptation, he said with a mouth full of Gouda, would prove too great a distraction. It seemed to be an insightful observation.
Even more so when I learned that his second and third wives could each type better than eighty words a minute.


So I made sure Gwen was unattractive. Actually, her parents made sure of that. I simply made sure that she worked for me.
Gwen was fat, had acne scars, and her hair was even thinning. (Okay, so I went a little overboard.) But damn if she didn’t
know how to cover my ass.


“The Devine One was looking for you,” she said, following me into my office. “He came by twenty minutes ago. I told him you
were at a deposition.”


“Good save,” I told her, looking down at my watch. Nine-thirty-five. Where did I think I worked, an ad agency? I started to
head back out the door.


“Don’t bother; he only wanted to make sure you could sit with him this afternoon at two,” Gwen said.

“Any details?”

She shook her head. “No, just two o’clock in his office.”

“Tell Donna to let him know I’ll be there,” I said.

Gwen went back to her desk and I settled into mine. The offices of Campbell & Devine were on the thirty-first floor of the
Graybar building, right smack in the middle of midtown. It was an okay area to work in, I guess, though I’d never had anywhere
else to compare it to.


After sorting through a couple of files in between long stares out my window, I got up and closed my door to make the call.
After two rings, Jessica picked up. We exchanged hellos. Then we got down to business.


“I can’t today,” she said in a super-hushed tone. As an ad sales rep for Glamour magazine, Jessica was subject to the virtual-office concept and the lack of privacy that went with it.


“Aw, c’mon,” I said.

“No, really,” she continued, her voice trying to sound more earnest, “I’ve got a presentation this afternoon and we’ve changed
around some of the charts. Everything’s a mess. I’ve got to get it in order.”


“Bring the stuff,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

She laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“Seriously, I will.”

“Philip, I—”

I interrupted her. We had a rule about not using our names, especially on her end. She broke it regularly.

“Sorry,” Jessica whispered. It was all the leverage I needed.

“Listen, I’m busy too,” I said. “I just really want to be with you today, that’s all. We’ll keep it to an hour, max.” I could
sense the tide was turning. “I’ll bring lunch, chicken Caesar wraps from Piatti Pronti.”


“And a diet peach Snapple?”

“And a diet peach Snapple,” I repeated back. Victory. “See you around twelve-thirty. I’ll be the early one.”

Jessica Levine was born, raised, and will probably die in New York City. Depending on your opinion of Woody Allen movies, that’s
either a blessing or a curse. Her father lost a battle with cancer when she was six, a precarious age as far as someone’s
memory goes. One time when we were lying in bed together she began to cry over no longer being able to recall how he smelled.
She knew it was a sweet smell, not flowery or anything like that, just somehow sweet. Only suddenly she could no longer smell
it. Mere weeks ago, she said, she needed only to think of him and breathe in to remember. Now nothing. Another casualty of
the distance the advancing years were putting between her and her memories of the man.


Her father had been a successful financier and, as one might have expected, very well insured. So Jessica, her mother, and
her younger brother, Zachary, had carried on very nicely in their duplex on Park Avenue. As Jessica would tell it, her mother
suppressed her grief by joining practically every committee for the arts there was in the city. Consequently, Jessica grew
up going to anything and everything that featured a curtain, velvet ropes, or raging homosexuals.


She was pretty, not turning-heads pretty, rather the kind of pretty that seemed to develop slowly before your eyes. I tried
to explain that to her once by comparing her to a Polaroid snapshot. I don’t know what I was thinking. Let me get this straight,
Jessica said, what you’re saying is that at first I’m an out-of-focus blur? Okay, not the best analogy, I assured her, switching
immediately into my backpedal mode. She understood, though. She always understood.


Affairs may be first and foremost based on sex, and yes, there was barely a time that Jessica and I were alone together that
we weren’t proving that point. Nonetheless, there was something else going on. It was as if the two of us both lived our lives
dreading the thought that one day, with death imminent, we would look back and ask ourselves with a defeated sigh, “Was that all?” Ours was a greedy generation to begin with, and she and I still seemed to want more than most others. We were two driven
individuals for whom the idea of being selfish wasn’t such a bad thing. In short, we were to each other what our spouses had
turned out not to be. Kissable ambition.


Logistics. When the affair first started we had to pick a place to rendezvous at. We discussed renting a small studio, but
the more we talked about it the less it seemed like a good idea. Having to sign a lease, nosy neighbors, and the prospect
of one day having to hear, “Honey, what are these keys for?” were way too much to handle. No, a hotel would be the better
choice, we decided. But which one? Jessica suggested the Paramount. I suggested that we’d have less chance of being discovered
if we confessed on Nightline. The idea, I reminded her, was to not have to worry about bumping into friends and acquaintances. The hotel didn’t have to
be a dive, it merely had to be a little out of the way.


We settled on the Doral Court, off Lexington on Thirty-ninth Street. It was one of those places that you’d never know was
there unless someone pointed it out to you. It was clean, conveniently located for both of us, and had all the pretensions
of being discreet.


We never walked in together and we never left together. The way it worked was like this. One of us, usually me, would be “the
early one.” This meant that I would go ahead and get the room (using my corporate Am Ex, of course, with the monthly statement
being mailed to me at work). Once in the room, I would call Jessica at her office and let her know the room number. Ten minutes
later we’d be between the sheets.


Two, maybe three times a week this would happen. At Jessica’s office she would claim that she was taking lunch. At my office,
where eating at your desk was the norm, I claimed to be going off to the gym. I even carried a gym bag around with me.


To some people, I imagine, this would all seem a little paranoid. Then again, those people have probably never had an affair.
The odd thing was, all the precautions had become more than two people making sure they wouldn’t get caught. They had become
part of the attraction. Simply put, the secrecy was a turn-on. It made the bond between us stronger. And yes, it made the
sex better.




I picked up lunch for the two of us and headed over to the hotel. Checking in had become almost comical. The day shift had
obviously come to recognize me, and it wasn’t too long before they figured out what was going on. Naturally, they pretended
not to know, and in doing so had turned somewhat robotic in their actions. They would smile and say all the pleasantries required
of them, but their movement was stiff around me, and all of them avoided making unnecessary eye contact. All of them, that
is, except for Raymond.


Raymond, as his name tag read, was a young black guy who stood out not because of his skin color but because he seemed actually
to enjoy his job. While his coworkers all wore the faces of opportunities missed, Raymond walked around like he had grabbed
the brass ring. He was tall and lanky, with a shaved head and a diamond stud in his left ear. I had little doubt that his
supervisor had checked some handbook when he first started to see if male employees were in fact allowed to have an earring.


Not only did Raymond know what was going on, but he let me know that he knew. It was a look. A slight smile combined with
a tilt of his head as he would hand me my room key. It wasn’t as if he was trying to embarrass me. If anything, it was more
like, Hey, man, does she have a sister?

Raymond didn’t check me in this time, though. It was Brian. He was new to the hotel and had only been working there a couple
of weeks. This was the second time he had waited on me. I pictured him at the coffee machine in some backroom being clued
in by another employee about me and my nooners. Did he laugh? Did he want to know more? Or did he simply nod, not really giving
a shit? Perhaps Jessica and I were just one of many affairs that were going on in the hotel. Maybe there was a whole parade
of indiscretions passing back and forth in front of these guys. It was a big city, after all.


“Here’s your room key, Mr. Randall. Enjoy your stay.”

You bet I will, Brian.

There’s a weird sense of anticipation when you walk into a hotel room for the first time. Even when you basically know what
it’s going to look like. A bed, a bathroom, a television, a desk or table of some kind. Except now it’s suddenly your bed,
your bathroom, your television, your desk or table. At least for the night. Or in my case, just an hour or so in the afternoon.


First things first, I headed straight for the phone and dialed. One ring.

“This is Jessica,” she said.

“Room four-oh-six.”

“Okay.”

We both hung up and I leaned back against the headboard. I was a terrible waiter, regardless of whether or not the wait was
for something good. My parents (we’ll get to them) maintained that it was because I was born nearly a month premature. The
pattern was set, they said—it made me a restless child who in turn grew up to be a restless adult. While that’s a little too
simplistic for my liking, I will concede that from the womb to my marriage, I perhaps wasn’t much for the feeling of confinement.


I checked my watch. Twelve-twenty-seven. I opened my gym bag and took out my toothbrush and a tube of Colgate. Improved oral
hygiene: the unintended benefit of having an affair.


I checked my watch again, this time with better breath. Twelve-thirty-two. I started to pace, something I did a lot, and when
that didn’t cut it, I sat back down. I grabbed the remote and turned on the television. A soap opera appeared. A very good-looking
woman was telling a very good-looking man that she couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t say what the “it” was that she could
no longer take, but she looked really serious. Time was you couldn’t pay me to watch this stuff. Way too ridiculous. Now it
didn’t seem so farfetched.


Finally, a knock on the door. When I opened it, Jessica came bursting in with an angry huff.

“My boss is such an asshole!”

“What happened?” I asked her.

“She’s an asshole, that’s what happened. I’m the top producer in the entire group, and the bitch reshuffled my accounts around. . .