If you walk into the Federal High Court in Ikoyi on a Tuesday morning, you'll still hear the whispers. They don't start with his name. They start with a case he killed a decade ago, a look he gave a judge, a story about how he once billed a client for the silence in the room while he thought. Then, inevitably, someone will say it: "Derrick Kane." The name hangs in the air, a ghost in a three-piece suit.
His rise wasn't calculated. It was a fucking earthquake.
He wasn't from just "Mushin." He was from the particular, pungent stretch of Ojo Street where the gutter water ran rainbow with dye from the textile factory and the air was thick with the smell of overripe mangoes and petrol. His mother, Grace, didn't just "sell fruit." She had a cart with a wobbly left wheel, and she could tell the sweetness of an agbalumo by thumping it twice with a dirt-caked thumb. His father, the clerk, had a nervous stutter that only appeared when he spoke to men in ties.
At ten, Derrick wasn't reading newspapers for fun. He was dissecting them for leverage. He saw a story about a land dispute, remembered the surveyor's son he went to school with, and told his mother which family to avoid at the market. At sixteen, he didn't spout a clean, prophetic line about owning the law. He stood in their one-room apartment, watching a cockroach navigate a crack in the wall, and said to his mother's back, "The law isn't about right. It's about the cracks. I'm going to learn how to widen them."
He didn't join "Olayemi & Co." He cornered Senior Partner Olayemi in the car park of the Metropolitan Club, his second-hand shoes slick with rain, and presented a five-point plan on how the firm could bleed their biggest client, Atlas Holdings, dry by exploiting a loophole in their shareholder agreement that Olayemi's own team had drafted. He was hired not as an associate, but as a predator.
The nickname "Entrepreneur Lawyer from Hell" wasn't born from a frustrated mutter. It was spat into a crystal whisky glass by Chief Davies after Derrick had not only gotten an injunction against him but had also, in the same motion, acquired a controlling stake in the Chief's flagship company by calling in debts the old man didn't know Derrick owned. "That boy," Davies slurred, his face a mottled purple, "is not a barrister. He's a fucking entrepreneur... from the deepest pit of Hell.
Derrick loved it. He had the phrase framed in gothic script behind his desk.
The Turning Point
The Lagos Metro Case was his masterpiece. The evidence wasn't just overwhelming; it was a mountain of concrete and rebar. His client, Tunde Abbasi, was guilty as sin and smelled of cheap cigars and fear. For six months, Derrick didn't fight the evidence. He made it irrelevant. He found that the lead prosecutor had an illegitimate daughter whose school fees were paid by a "mysterious benefactor." He didn't blackmail him. He simply sent the man a photo of the girl, with a note: "She has your smile. It would be a shame if the press thought so, too." The prosecutor's case suddenly developed a limp, a stutter, a fatal lack of conviction.
Derrick won.
The protesters outside his office in Victoria Island weren't just holding signs. A woman with tired eyes and a faded Ankara wrapper hurled a rotten tomato. It hit the marble column next to his head, exploding in a burst of red pulp and seeds. Some of it dripped onto his Brioni suit jacket. He stared at the stain, mesmerized. It looked like a little map of a country he'd destroyed.
That night, his mother called. Her voice wasn't frail; it was thin, stretched tight with a disappointment he hadn't heard since he was a boy caught stealing a handful of naira from her purse.
"Derrick," she said, the line crackling with the distance between Victoria Island and Mushin. "I saw the tomato on the television. The people are angry." A long pause, filled only by her labored breath. "That man you saved... did he do it?
Derrick, the man who had an answer for everything, found his throat packed with sand. He looked at the suit jacket, slung over a chair, the tomato stain now a dark, ugly blotch.
"He won, Mama," was all he could manage, the words feeling like a betrayal of a language she had taught him.
"That is not what I asked you," she said softly, and hung up.
He didn't just "not sleep." He spent the night scrubbing at the stain on his jacket with a wet cloth until the expensive fabric began to fray, the map smearing into a meaningless, brownish smear.
A Man and His Reflection
The change wasn't dramatic. He didn't stop smiling; his smile just became a technical maneuver, all teeth and no eyes. He started taking the long way home, driving through the neighborhoods he'd helped evict tenants for new developments, seeing the hollowed-out shells of buildings where families used to be.
When his mother died, the funeral wasn't full of elites and cameras. It was in Mushin, on Ojo Street, and it was packed with fruit sellers, market women, and old neighbors who wept openly. They weren't there for him. He stood apart, a king in a foreign land, and as they lowered her casket, he didn't see a reflection of a man he didn't recognize. He saw the boy she'd raised, staring back at him from the other side of that crack in the wall, and the boy was ashamed.
The Disappearance
He didn't "shut down overnight." He spent three months methodically dismantling his empire. He didn't transfer his assets to a "known human rights advocate." He summoned Amara Onuorah, the fierce young lawyer who had once called him a "cancer in a wig" on national television, to his office.
She arrived, expecting a fight. Instead, he pushed a stack of documents across his desk.
"It's all yours," he said. "The holding company, the offshore accounts, the building. Use it to fight people like me."
She was suspicious, furious. "Why? Is this a trick? A tax write-off?"
Derrick looked out the window, towards the lagoon. "A tomato stained my best suit," he said, as if that explained everything. "And my mother asked me a question I couldn't answer."
The last thing he did before he walked out was take the framed "Entrepreneur from Hell" quote off the wall. He didn't smash it. He simply dropped it into the trash, glass and all.
The rumor isn't that he helps young lawyers. The rumor, the one the old women in Mushin tell, is that a man who looks like him, but dressed in simple clothes, sometimes buys all the fruit from a struggling seller's cart, pays triple, and then walks away, leaving the agbalumo for the children to devour. They say he never speaks, and that he walks with a slight stoop, as if still carrying the weight of that stained suit jacket.