“Tell me more.” He smiled. “Wait. Before Eddie gets here—whatis Andie Reese like? Is she difficult? He won’t spill a word,” he griped.
I took a breath. “She’s intense. Whip-smart. I’m a little bit scared of her.”
Leo laughed. “You’ll get over that. As long as she’s scared of Eddie, everything will be fine.”
“I know she respects him. He breaks everything down in a way that I appreciate as much as she does, given I’ve been at this for about two months.”
“I remember when I first started at the firm. Never had any plans to make partner. I thought I’d bang it out for a couple years, pay off my law school loans, then try to be an agent or manager. At the end of every year, I realized I was just happy enough not to leave. And then the longer I stayed, the more it became who I was. And now it’s been fifteen years.”
“I used to think I wanted to be an agent too. Would you ever make the jump?”
“Nah, can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Plus, I’d miss the drama of this gig.”
“There must be a special type of drama that goes along with representing talented people.”
“Oh, yeah. Few clients can get into this level of deep shit without being brilliant.”
“I guess I never thought of it that way. Andie strikes me as someone who was so smart, she outsmarted herself somewhere along the way.”
“How so?” he asked, looking genuinely curious.
“She created something people wanted. And she made it so desirable, it got the attention of some not-so-great people, which is how she got on the government’s radar.”
“Do you think she’s guilty?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I really don’t. She may have had some questionable business practices. But so far, Eddie doesn’t think anything she did warranted a criminal indictment.”
He handed me the wine list. I skipped over the Willamette Valley pinot, trying to ignore the pit in my stomach.
“Are you originally from LA?” I asked.
Leo shook his head. “Just outside of Philadelphia. I went to college at Penn. When I got into UCLA Law, I chucked all my turtlenecks and never looked back. Life is good out here. When I graduated, entertainment work was exclusively on the West Coast. My parents wanted me to go into politics, but I chose this. I started out only doing litigation and then, somewhere along the way, my clients forced me onto the deal side, and now I’m about fifty-fifty. It’s not common, but it works for me, and more importantly, it’s what the clients want. They know when I’m putting a deal together, I’m keeping in mind all the ways past deals have fallen apart.” He smiled ruefully. “And at the end of the day, I’m just an insecure asshole who likes to be needed.”
“I wanted to start in litigation too. But I’m also really interested in doing transactional work at some point, and it always seemed to me like it would be harder to try to learn litigation later.”
“That’s a smart approach. Not a lot of junior lawyers have the foresight to realize that. I’ll try to find some deals that you can dip your toe in. I can’t totally steal you away from Eddie right now, but you never know what’s coming down the pipe.” He raised his martini. “To playing both sides,” he said cheerfully, then checked his iPhone. “Eddie said he’s running later than he thought ... One more round so we can wait him out?”
The wine was draining what little energy I had left but also distracting me from thinking about Ben. I nodded, and he signaled the waiter for another.
“Okay Samantha,” he said, leaning in. “Your turn. Where/what/who/why?”
“Let’s see—I grew up on a horse farm in Virginia. Then I went to UVA and law school in Washington.”
“Georgetown?” he interjected.
I nodded.
“Why entertainment?”
I took a deep breath. “I was a theater kid all the way through my first year of college. I thought I wanted to become an actor. I woke upone day and couldn’t do it anymore. My family’s financial situation changed, and I needed to either drop out or switch to something more pragmatic. But I always missed it. So eventually I thought maybe I’d become an agent, and then I discovered entertainment law. And law school seemed like a safe bet. When I read about your practice and Eddie’s, I knew this was where I wanted to land.”
I paused. Leo had a way of making me feel like he already knew everything about me.
“Pragmatism is hard at any age, but I imagine it’s tough to have the rug pulled out from under you like that in college.”
“It just meant I needed to find a job. Which honestly wasn’t a terrible experience. Balancing a full-time course load with a full-time job was like boot camp. It made me a much more focused person when I eventually got to law school.”
He smiled. “And the who? Is there someone special in your life?”
