Impact (11 page)

Martha only shrugs. “I heard he didn't like the size of his office.”

“Which office did he want?”

“Mine,” Martha notes without inflection, then stands, smooths her skirt, adjusts her jacket. For just a moment, her back arcs triumphantly.

She and Dan Griffin have been rivals for a decade, the contenders for his empire jostling for the seat at his right hand. De jure, Griffin has been senior, his name before Martha's on the letterhead and door. De facto, Martha has been primary since spending seventy-two hours in the office without sleep or supper to meet a deadline that had fallen through the cracks in Hawthorne's scattered schedule. From that time hence, Martha has been in charge of the office calendar, and deadlines are no longer missed.

He watches as she perfects her look. She is svelte and, in a form-fitting suit of blood-red suede and a high-necked blouse of off-white silk, particularly majestic this morning. He wonders if she knew Dan's surrender was imminent and had dressed to suit the occasion.

“You do twice the work that he did,” Hawthorne says tentatively, trying a justification on for size. Because he knows no reason for Dan Griffin's defection, he sits guilty of all conceivable ones.

“Closer to triple, I'd say. Not that Dan saw it that way.”

“How
did
he see it?”

Her smile is cryptic. “That he'd been with the firm longer than anyone but me, and that I didn't count because I'd slept my way into the partnership.” She laughs to herself. “He also thought his credentials were more impressive than mine because he'd been a law review editor, and that because he was a man and a father and a sole provider and whatever else it is that men think makes them more valuable than women, he should be top cock.”

As with most of Martha's utterances, there is a provocative slant to her version of events, but the possibility that Dan's desertion implies a personal failure on his part prompts Hawthorne to probe further. “We were
carrying
him. He never stayed in the office after five, never worked weekends, and always got sick when his cases came up on the trial calendar. He was a nervous wreck whenever he had to be anywhere but the law library.”

“True.”

“So why leave now?”

Martha stops fiddling with her dress and looks at him. “He got a client. Some movie star. A law school buddy down in Beverly Hills referred the case to Dan.”

“What case?”

“SurfAir.”

“Already?”

“Well, you know those show biz types. If it involves anything more demanding than eggs Benedict and bullshit, they start looking for someone else to do the work.”

Hawthorne slams a fist onto the desk. “He can't take files out of here like that. If he weren't in this firm, he'd never have gotten that referral in a million years.”

“You and I know that, and Dan
used
to know that; I doubt that he does anymore.”

“We'll stop him.”

“How?”

The problem is suddenly in a familiar mode—a quarrel amenable to maneuver. “What firm did he go with?”

Martha shrugs. “I heard he shopped himself to Scallini a month ago, but Vic was fending off another malpractice crisis, so he wasn't interested.”

“If you hear anything definite, call whatever outfit he signs on with and tell them we regard SurfAir as an office matter, not Dan's personal property. Tell them we'll file a lien on any monies due him out of the case, tell them—”

“It may not be worth the trouble,” Martha interrupts, retaking her seat and crossing her endless legs. Though she wears no stockings, her shins bear a perpetual burnish from an unseasonable source that Hawthorne cannot fathom.

“Why not?”

“This so-called actor. Name's Clarence Autrey or some such. Got a supporting actor Oscar for playing a dipso in some western a hundred years ago, which apparently was typecasting. No wife, a couple of adult kids. Hasn't worked in anything but dinner theater in years. We'll be lucky to net fifty thousand.”

Hawthorne refuses to be dissuaded. “It's the principle, damnit. We can't let lawyers walk out with whatever happens to catch their eye. We've got bills to pay, for Christ's sake. We've got—”

She sniffs. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Draft a letter to Dan, for my signature, saying we regard that matter as ours and all other cases he was working on as well. Tell him to list any other pending matters he regards as his, tell him to list any and all items of personal property he removed from the office when he left. Make it nasty. I—”

Martha smothers his outburst before he combusts. “Right. What else?”

Hawthorne seethes to silence. Martha eyes him as curiously as an anthropologist at a mating rite. “Nothing now,” he surrenders. “Not on Dan, at least.” In need of another focus, he eyes the notebook atop her naked knee. “What else do you have?”

She flips a page. “Status conference. You're going to Rome on Friday, and the troops need to know where we stand on the active files. Plus, we've got two new bodies to break in.”

“Can't you do it?”

She shakes her head. “These young geniuses didn't join this firm to work for
me
. Let them see you know they're alive. Hell, one of them turned down Pillsbury
and
Cravath to come with us.”

“He won't last a year.”

“I know, I know; you think trial work is too messy for the intellectuals. Maybe you're right, but if you don't start doing a little PR around here, you're going to have more Dan Griffins on your hands.”

He sighs. “Give me five minutes, then round them up. How many do we have now?”

“Eighteen lawyers, thirty staff. Only ten of the lawyers are in town.”

“Jesus. I keep thinking this is a small operation.”

“The only thing small about it is our bank balance.”

Martha is out of the room before he knows it. In the rarefied air of her absence, Hawthorne leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. Dan Griffin. Not a genius or a wizard in court or a business-getter or a deft closer, either. Just a guy who worked hard hours if not particularly long ones, a nice guy in a profession where nice guys are as rare as a well-turned phrase. And he hadn't even said goodbye. It is an apparent legacy of the decade that nice guys are as greedy as the rest of them—$120,000 had purchased a year of labor but not an ounce of loyalty. Christ. Running a law firm has become as treacherous as owning a ball team.

He looks out across the bay, toward the island where traitors like Dan Griffin had in times past been imprisoned. Tears come to his eyes—without Dan there is no one in the office who remembers the old days, no one except Martha, and she regards the past as putrid, a cadaverous repository of hypocrisy and misplaced sentiment.

On many a Friday evening he and Dan had shared a little Scotch and a lot of exhaustion and reminisced about the early years, when Dan had been in the library researching the case law and Hawthorne was traveling Indian country trying his first crash cases. Planes with names indigenous to the land—Apache, Comanche, Navajo—went down in a veritable blizzard, for reasons ranging from disintegrating propellers to collapsing nose wheels to defective altimeters to the wrath of weather to drunken pilots to—who knew? Sometimes planes just crashed and the reason died with the pilot, who probably never knew it either.

Plane by plane and trial by trial, Hawthorne had forged his knowledge of the industry—aeronautics, avionics, meteorology, traffic control, operations and maintenance procedures, safety regulations, pilot training. It had become a quest, in the end—the more he learned, the more he wanted to know. Living out of ratty motels, his private life confined to the telephone and every other weekend, he tracked down witnesses, interviewed survivors, inspected wreckage, debriefed passengers and pilots and controllers, doing it all himself. As he'd mastered the technical data necessary to ferret out the cause of the disasters, he'd mastered the workings of the human body to the extent that by the time he moved up to the big cases—commercial disasters like SurfAir—he knew more medicine than most of the doctors in the city, knew so much that he hadn't consulted a physician about his personal health for years.

Doctors. He still laughed at the memory of the pompous “experts” the manufacturers trotted out to oppose him, so secure in their theories of why the plaintiffs weren't injured that badly, hadn't suffered that much pain, wouldn't be disabled for all that long. Then wham—a day of cross-examination would leave them looking angrily at their lawyers and longingly at the door and imploringly at the judge, who wasn't doing nearly enough to stop the slaughter.

In the old days he could ambush them—they had never heard of Alec Hawthorne, had no idea what was coming till he'd deftly removed their scalps. Now, they knew details about his career he'd long forgotten, were thoroughly prepared and prepped, so careful and cautious he was lucky if they spelled their name for the record without allowing for the eminently reasonable possibility they might have gotten it wrong.

But it didn't matter. Despite their wary reticence, the hirelings of the defense teams almost always lost, not because they were incompetent or unintelligent, but because after the years in Indian country, Alec Hawthorne was the best in the West at persuading jury after jury that his opponent's cause was foul. Victories piled up and his reputation grew, not because he was smarter or better prepared or even luckier than the defense, but because in the bedrock of his soul Alec Hawthorne believed his cause was just and the incandescence of that conviction made twelve men and women believe it was as well.

He still hears from them once in a while, those early clients, telling him how their broken bodies or broken homes were mending, describing rendings in their lives that all the money in the world could never heal. And on the days he does, he does not regret what his life has cost him.

The door opens and Martha reenters, followed by a string of young men and women—handsome, alert, aware—the lawyers in the firm. Hawthorne gestures toward the grouping of couches and easy chairs at the far end of his massive office and waits while they take their seats.

They eye him bravely, eager for his counsel. They are more than a little brash, which was why he'd hired them, the absence of neutrality and niceness being the essence of a trial lawyer. Building a law office is a bit like cloning, Hawthorne supposes, or even playing God, for what he has tried to gather around him is a group of men and women who could double for the Alec Hawthorne who had begun to ply his trade in Indian country some twenty years before.

He looks at Martha and nods. “First,” she begins, “the offer is up to nine hundred thousand in the helicopter case.”

“Have we nailed the skid thing down yet?”

“Not quite. We still haven't located the mechanic—the last we heard he was TDY in Chad. But we'll get him.”

Hawthorne frowns. “I hate to settle till all the teeth are pulled—this can go to a mil and a half if we lock up liability a little tighter. One thing that occurred to me—we're claiming it wasn't the crash but the bounce that did the damage, right? Why don't we send the tower tapes to a voice-print analyst, show the pilot wasn't under that much stress when he hit the ground the first time, which would imply he thought he could handle the situation until the skids turned the damn thing into a basketball.”

“Okay,” Martha says, then looks at one of the young men. “Mike?”

Mike nods and takes a note.

“As for the settlement itself,” Hawthorne continues, “someone from Union Casualty called me yesterday, said they had a new annuity package we'd be interested in, that could be tailored to any type of structure we use. I want someone to talk to him and see if it's as good as it sounds. A point either way on the annuity tables can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of the payout.”

Several heads nod. Martha look at one of them. “Pam?”

“Right.”

“Just be sure we're straight with the IRS. Revenue Ruling 79-220 says if we release the defendants from liability, the payments will count as income to the recipient.”

“Right.”

“That it for the chopper?”

Martha nods.

“Next?”

“The defendants in the Grand Canyon crash have agreed how to share the damages,” Martha continues. “They're going to stipulate liability next week.”

“Are we ready for that to happen?”

“Not if it limits our discovery, which is what they're trying to do, to keep us from getting hold of their maintenance schedules. They want us to waive our punitive-damage claim in return for the stipulation, of course.”

“What do you think?”

Martha snarls. “I think they should fuck themselves. We've got a real chance at punitives for willful disregard of the Airworthiness Directive. A court in Oregon just upheld punitives against United in the Portland crash, which is the first time a jury award of exemplary damages against a major airline in a crash case has been affirmed on appeal. We don't have a smoking gun yet, but it's worth it to keep looking.”

“You always think there's a smoking gun,” Alec says with a grin that Martha clearly sees as condescending.

“That's because there always is,” she retorts hotly. “If we can't find it, it's because Hawley Chambers has
buried
the son of a bitch.”

Hawthorne looks toward his button-down acolytes. “Hawley Chambers is chief counsel for Federal Airline Underwriters, which insures most of the major airlines in this country. Martha sees insurance companies as only slightly less craven than the Mafia.”

He expects her to smile at his jest. “Tell them about Pago Pago,” she directs instead.

Hawthorne laughs. “Back in 1974, a Pan Am 707 went down while trying to land in Pago Pago. Ninety-seven killed, not from the crash but from the fire afterward. Seems the exit doors didn't open, and everyone was trapped inside. Well, before any independent investigators could get to the scene, someone—the insurers, the airline, someone—ordered the wreckage buried where it lay. They just dug a hole with bulldozers and shoved the 707 down in it, then covered it up. So no one ever knew why only four people got out of that plane alive.”