FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER I was driving across the elevated bridge where I-71 ends and I-90 picks up. I looked at the Cleveland skyline growing bigger the closer I neared. I put on my signal for the East Ninth Street exit and moved into the right lane.
Even today, with all the changes the city has undergone, the skyline was still dominated by the Terminal Tower, a soaring Art Deco middle finger to the naysayers of the world who ever doubted the city’s ability to survive. Closer in stood Progressive Field, the home of the Indians, who over the years reversed fortunes with the Browns, who in my day—as my dad observed—actually won a few games, while the Tribe were rarely out of the basement of the standings. Talk about a 180-degree turn for both teams. Browns Stadium was on the far side of downtown, on the lake, and so out of view for now. Just as well. I might or might not swing by. For just a second I heard first the roar of a crowd in my mind, then an increasingly loud rumble of boos. No matter how much I wish it were lower down on my Wikipedia page, it’s always near the top: Hayes also holds the Cleveland Browns franchise record for most interceptions in a single game: five, on the last day he ever took the field.
Exiting off the highway, pangs of regret washed over me like the ritual dumping of a Gatorade bucket I never received up here. After my senior-year debacle at Ohio State and the criminal conviction that followed, I’d been given a second chance in the NFL and proceeded to shit all over it. True to form, I spent the night before that record-setting last game barhopping with a woman through the west-side suburb of Lakewood before ending up back in her apartment, which featured an authentic A Christmas Story leg lamp in the living room. I awakened in her bed the next morning around the time I should have been checking into the locker room, the pounding in my head as if the linemen’s sacks had already begun. Afterward, I couldn’t get out of town fast enough.
And yet.
More than once I rued the lost chance to set down roots here. In my limited time in the city, I learned to appreciate Cleveland’s brassy attitude, Old World ethnic diversity, and blue-collar work ethic, not to mention all those pierogi. Living here would also have provided a welcome break from the fanaticism of Ohio State fans in Columbus who couldn’t forgive me for two-decade-old sins no matter how much time passed. Browns fans could be just as rough in the moment, but they had more experience with heartbreak and so tended to let bygones be bygones after a blue streak or two. I likened it to the difference in how certain married couples settled disagreements: the shout-it-out-and-move-on mentality of hot-blooded eastern European types, compared to the sit-and-sulk vibe of morose midwesterners.
But moving here would never happen. I owed it to my sons, if no one else, to take my medicine and stick around central Ohio. Spouses strayed, workers faked injuries, and witnesses held clues to crimes in Columbus as often as anyplace else, and increasingly, as the population climbed, more so.
I shook my head. It had been a charming walk down memory lane. My personal stroll of shame. But it was time to assemble my game face. I had to figure out the best approach to Schiff, I had to do it fast, and I had to be sure I didn’t put Laura in danger—or more danger than she was already in.
DRIVING UP EAST NINTH past the Erie Street Cemetery, I reviewed what I knew at this point about the man I was on the way to confront. He and Laura both competed for the most prestigious scholarship at Ohio State’s law school, with Laura coming out on top. Did Laura know he failed to win the Berman Prize, that she triumphed at his expense? My guess was yes, in part because they dated at some point after matriculating. Pillow talk was pillow talk, no matter how competitive.
Later, Laura broke up with Schiff to go out with Paul Thayer, who she would one day marry. She and Schiff remained friends of sorts. Study buddies. Along the way, she kept up her GPA and landed a summer job at the DOJ in Washington, a feather in her cap but necessary too, since she needed that component to keep the scholarship. That stint led her back to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Columbus, where her work as a federal prosecutor helped launch her political career. I reminded myself of the call I needed to make to my contact in that office. An AUSA named Pete Henderson, renowned for his ability not to hang up on me straightaway.
Fast-forward a couple of decades. Schiff, a lawyer in his hometown of Cleveland, contributes generously to Laura’s Supreme Court campaign. First on his own, then through PG Inc., a cloud-computing company tied to a rising European AI firm. Those companies were connected to a developer interested in a wetland whose fate Laura held in her hands. The obvious conclusion: Schiff had his own interest in the swamp, or at least the hundreds of acres surrounding it. I recalled Flota’s unsuccessful efforts to launch a project in Indiana. If not there, next stop Ohio? Was the failure to launch in Indiana the reason for the secrecy about the project in Columbus?
Then, as the Mendon Woods lawsuit wound down, someone delivers Laura’s son an ominous warning. Accidents happen. A warning which implies Laura has ignored a request—a demand?—to rule against the coastal tanager and give the developer the victory. In the meantime, I’m attacked during an innocent nature hike through Mendon Woods, meaning someone has connected me to Laura. The person who attacked me—my old pal Tear Drop—has part of Schiff’s business card with him outside a barn holding a freezer filled with dead birds. And who were Tear Drop and friend expecting from Columbus that night?
Question one: Were Schiff and Tear Drop connected? Almost certainly, it seemed to me. But how? Whatever else you might say about my attacker, he didn’t seem the law school type. I thought idly of the apartment complex Schiff owned. A connection there? Anything was possible at this point, I supposed.
Question two: Was Schiff the one putting pressure on Laura to rule against the coastal tanager? Less certainly, but circumstantial evidence said yes. Again, why the secrecy?
Question three: As all this was happening, why would Laura trash the certificate of the Berman Prize, one of her greatest early accomplishments? Was she now ashamed of it for some reason? Was that shame connected to a renewed acquaintanceship with her former lover and ex-classmate Randall P. Schiff?
I thought again of the summer Laura spent with the DOJ. In all the time we were together, it was the one experience she shared with me, if you count five minutes recalling her thrill at walking those corridors and working on, as she put it, “Cases that really mattered.” Her equivalent of a schoolgirl gushing over a cool field trip. Translation: it was a summer that meant a lot to her, and not just because it allowed her to keep her scholarship. Although that had to be always on her mind. Then there was the line you could draw from that experience straight to her campaign for the highest court in Ohio.
Lots of questions. But no answers that added up to much of anything yet.
I pulled into a parking garage off Chester just south of Superior, drove up two levels, and squeezed my van between an Escalade and a Mini Cooper. I lifted my phone off the passenger seat and scrolled through my contacts. Time for one more call. I found Pete Henderson of the U.S. Attorney’s Office right where I left him, retrieved his number, and pressed the green send button.