This Case Is Gonna Kill Me (3 page)

“Thank you, Mr. Ishmael, I’m very happy to be here.”

He stared down at me, puzzled, and shook his head. “So formal, Linnet?”

I smiled. “I work for you now. I need to be respectful.”

He threw back his head and gave a sharp laugh. “I have a hard time reconciling that with the little girl I watched grow up. When I think of you, I think impertinent, cocky, brash—”

“Pert, flippant, cheeky, insolent, saucy, sassy, smart-alecky.” I broke off and gave him a quick grin. “I can play Thesaurus too.”

Shade laughed again and glanced at Chip. “You see what you have to contend with? You are forewarned.”

Chip had gone from looking aghast to grinning. He nodded. “I think we’re going to get along fine.”

Shade patted me on the shoulder. “You’re in good hands. Chip is the most meticulous lawyer I’ve ever known.”

An image of his cluttered office flashed through my head. Shade seemed to read my mind. “Don’t be fooled by his surroundings. He keeps everything.” Shade tapped his temple. “Up here.”

As we walked back to the elevator, I said softly to Chip, “Don’t get hit by a bus. At least not until I know where all the bodies are buried.”

I spent the rest of the day beginning to read through seventeen years of pleadings, depositions, and interrogatories. Chip packed it in around seven o’clock. I hung on until eight p.m. and felt I’d made the right choice. Most of the human associates were just leaving.

The assistants’ desks, wooden ramparts guarding the doors to the lawyers’ offices, were unmanned at this time of the night, but the central reception area was awash with departing lawyers. Expensive suits and snap-brim fedoras on the men, pencil skirts and elegant jackets for the women. Goodbyes were exchanged; a few people made plans to meet for drinks. There didn’t appear to be a lot of office romances, either brewing or actually up and running. If you were male and hoped to make partner and be made a vampire, you knew marriage and a family weren’t in your future. If you were male and weren’t interested in making partner, you probably lacked the ambition to be hired at a White-Fang firm. Thus, most of the women attorneys knew their male coworkers were a bad bet.

David Sullivan stood in the doorway of his office and watched the humans mill with an expression of sublime indifference. He caught me looking at him, turned on his heel, and closed the door of the office. I joined the mass exodus and stood in a clump of people awaiting the arrival of an elevator. The moment of Briefcase Comparison had arrived—the ultimate legal version of dick measuring, or whatever the female equivalent would be.

There were Forzieri and Brunelleschi cases with leather like butter. Caroline had a pale green leather Dior bag that she had thrown nonchalantly over her shoulder. She looked poised and elegant. Mine was a roller bag that held my small MacBook, up to four files, a legal pad, pens, a book to read at lunch, and sometimes a lunch. I looked like a geek.

The elevator arrived with a melodic
ding.
People crowded in. I tried to follow. “I don’t think there’s room for the both of you,” Caroline said with a nod at my roller bag, and she let the door to the elevator close in front of my nose. I could hear the laughter as the elevator began to descend.

Why did there have to be one like that in every office?

2

As I walked from the subway, I realized I didn’t want to cook. There was a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant just around the corner from my apartment, so I stopped there for takeout. I didn’t bother to check the mailbox in the entryway. I had moved in three days ago. There wouldn’t be any bills yet, and who wrote letters anymore? Then I thought about my foster liege, and his meticulously maintained fountain pens and heavy, creamy stationery embossed with his initials. Okay, vampires still wrote letters, and tried to get you to take notes in longhand, which meant I made a sharp turn and returned to the wall box to find a letter from my vampire liege/foster father. I hooked the bag with my dinner over the handle of the roller bag and read the letter as the ancient elevator wheezed its way to the seventh floor.

Dearest Linnet, first day on the job. I hope it wasn’t too daunting. I was thinking of you, and the entire household is very proud of you. Love, Meredith.

I kicked off my heels, dropped the sack of food on the coffee table, and headed to the windows. The July heat made the place stifling. I resolved to get to a hardware store over the weekend and buy a window air conditioner. I had to stand on a chair to unhook the window latch, and while I was up there I paused to take a look at the Hudson River. The rays of the setting sun danced on the water, making it look like a river of glass. The view was why I had rented the apartment, though I had to stand on a chair and cock my head to actually see the river. It was small, but I did have an actual bedroom, and I loved the old ten-story redbrick building that had been erected in the 1920s. It had leaded-glass cabinets in the tiny kitchen, the wrought-iron radiators were heavily decorated, and the floor was hardwood.

The smell of lemongrass and chili made me remember I was hungry, and I jumped down as the last of the light faded. I located a plate for the pad thai, a bowl for the tom yum soup, and a fork and a spoon, then pulled out my cell phone and called my best friend, Ray. He wouldn’t mind if I chewed in his ear, and he’d want to hear how my first day had gone. I knew he’d be home. It was a Monday night, and the show in which he was currently dancing was dark on Mondays.

“Hey, Munchkin,” he said in his soft baritone. “I’ve been thinking about you all day. How was it?”

“Fine. My new boss seems nice.…” My voice trailed away.

“I hear the paranoia,” Ray said.

“I can’t help thinking I just got the job because Shade knew me.”

“Please—you were third in your class at Yale. You did all that crap good little law students do.…”

“Law Review and Moot Court,” I mumbled around a mouthful of pad thai.

“Which is why I cannot take another month of you working through the emotional trauma of getting the job.”

“Hey!” I tried to interrupt, but he was on a roll.

“Last month, you were sure you blew the interview. I had to listen to six days of you replaying all the things you should have said. Then there was the week where you tried to figure out what you’d do if you didn’t get this job. Then there was ice cream therapy when the depression hit because you just so knew you weren’t going to get this job—”

“And you were no help,” I grumbled. “You kept eating Tofutti while I was pigging out on Ben and Jerry’s.”

“Hey, I have to keep my girlish figure.” I made a rude noise. “And I’m lactose intolerant. So, come on, tell me there was some moment of joy before you returned to your usual habit of looking for the black lining in every cloud.”

I smiled, relishing a memory. “I did send gloating e-mails to everyone on my law school LISTSERV after I landed the job. And I made damn sure my worst enemies received the e-mail.”

“Now that’s what I like to hear. Petty vengeance is the very best kind.” I heard Gregory, Ray’s partner, calling loudly in the background. “That’s the dinner bell,” Ray said. “Gotta go. Brunch on Saturday?”

I agreed. Ray hung up, and I sat in my dark apartment and realized that right then all my clouds were silver and bright.

*   *   *

By Friday, my clouds had turned into thunderheads. During the past week, I had read through eight years of arbitrations—just nine more to go—and the files were getting thicker with each passing year. The takeaway from all my reading was that Chip was right: Our clients were crazy. After reading Marlene Abercrombie’s depositions, I decided that if I’d been Henry I would have left her too. And her kids were just as irrational, grasping, and greedy as their mother. I dreaded meeting them in the flesh.

I mentioned this to Chip, and he looked at me with an expression I couldn’t really identify. “Yeah, and we’re trying to put the most powerful private army in the world in the hands of these people. Kinda makes you wonder what we’re doing.” He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t follow up. One of the first things you learn in law school is that the law isn’t necessarily about justice. It’s about process. And you try not to make value judgments about your clients. That’s not your job. Of course, that’s honored more in theory than in practice. We’re human beings, not robots, and we have emotional reactions. We just have to try to keep them under control when we’re in front of a judge.

By the second week, it was clear that Chip was definitely not in any kind of loop when it came to the firm. Most lawyers handle lots of cases. It seemed like Chip just had
Abercrombie v. Deegan
, because we never talked about, and I never worked on, anything but
Abercrombie, Abercrombie,
and more
Abercrombie.

At first I had thought it was because
Abercrombie v. Deegan
was so important, but it wasn’t. It was small potatoes when compared to the contract negotiations that McGillary was undertaking on behalf of one of our clients. They were going to be
taking over power generation for Argentina.
Caroline was assisting Gold on a massive and potentially very lucrative class-action tort case about long-term use of Botox.

And I had the crazy-people case.

It only took a day for me to notice that my fellow associates went off to lunch in groups of three and four. At first that level of camaraderie encouraged me. In a lot of White-Fang firms the competition between the human associates is so fierce that it precludes friendship, and can even tip over into outright warfare. I thought the fact these folks socialized together was great. I took to loitering in central reception at lunchtime, but an invitation was never extended. Instead I “overheard” remarks about “drones,” and classmates who were just wonderfully qualified and really ought to be working at IMG, followed by pointed looks. Then, on Friday, Caroline’s bosom buddy Jane had mused about the hiring policies at the firm. One of the male associates, Doug McCallister, had smirked at me and said loudly, “Every firm has the legacy or the patronage hire.” Caroline delivered the coup de grâce when she said, “And you just hope they realize they’re out of their league sooner rather than later, and seek their own level.” That was when I stopped hanging around the lobby looking to be included.

My stomach growled. I looked up from the file, rubbed my burning eyes, and realized it was 1:15. Definitely time for lunch. I kicked off and sent my ball chair rolling back from the desk. It didn’t have far to roll—the room was tiny. I came up hard against the back wall of my office and nearly lost my balance on the ball. The framed print from the Santa Fe Opera, a time-lapse photo of stars over the theater, shivered on its hanger. I quickly rolled forward again. The way things were going, the picture was going to come down off the wall and brain me.

I left my office and headed toward the kitchen on the seventieth floor. It wasn’t as nice as the one up in teak heaven—the plates were paper and the utensils plastic—but we did have an espresso machine and a big fridge. There was also a sunny and pleasant break room off the kitchen where the secretaries tended to eat. I had eaten there on Wednesday, but it was very clear I was not welcome. I couldn’t really blame them. It was their only chance to dish about the attorneys. After that I had taken to just eating at my desk.

I snatched my brown bag out of the refrigerator, grabbed a plastic spoon, and hurried past the door to the break room. The whispers from the secretaries pursued me. I returned to my postage stamp–sized office. I pulled out an apple and a carton of yogurt from the bag, then found that my appetite had vanished. I stared morosely into the unblinking stare of my tiny wind-up toy Godzilla. He staked out a corner of my desk, ready to fight off any monsters that might threaten me. I wound him up and set him marching toward the tower of
Abercrombie
folders. He walked into them and promptly fell over.
Abercrombie
had defeated even the mighty Godzilla.

I pulled back the foil top on the yogurt and thrust in the spoon as the odor of pineapple and banana washed up and crashed against my nose. It was gross. Whatever had possessed me to buy such a disgusting yogurt flavor? I jiggled the little container in my hand, then decided, to hell with it, I’d treat myself to lunch out. I would save the apple for a mid-afternoon snack.

I decided to try to entice Chip to join me, so I stopped by his office. His door was closed, and his secretary, Norma, was in the break room eating. Chip’s basically sweet nature had won me over, and after two weeks we had pretty much stopped standing on ceremony with each other, so after a quick knock I opened the door and walked in.

Chip was on the phone, studying a piece of paper, and I heard him say, “Of course it’s convenient, but there’s one more angle—” He broke off abruptly and muttered into the phone, “Gotta go.” He hung up and quickly shoved the paper deep into one of the piles on his desk.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

He waved off the apology. “No problem.” He grabbed an ice cream sandwich, unwrapped it, and took a bite. “Going out?” he asked.

“Yeah. Want to join me?”

“Nah, but thanks. I bought lunch from the Sandwich Girl,” he said, making it into a title.

“Well, I guess that qualifies as a sandwich, “I said.

He looked startled, glanced at the ice cream sandwich, then laughed and picked up a white paper-wrapped sandwich from the desk with his other hand. I smelled the greasy, garlicky scent of pastrami.

“Life is short, eat dessert first. That’s my motto. Have fun,” he said, and turned back to the files.

I gathered my courage and asked, “Chip, do we have any other cases other than
Abercrombie
that I might work on?” He looked up at me with an expression that clearly said he found the question baffling.

“Why?”

“Well, I just feel like I’m sort of wasting the firm’s money. I’m just going over the same ground, and I’ll never be as up to date on this case as you. So, I thought maybe I could take some … other case … off your plate.” I wound down, suddenly, desperately afraid I would discover that he didn’t have any other cases.
But he had told me he did
, I reminded myself.