Skipping Christmas

The gate was packed with weary travelers, most of them standing and huddled along the

walls because the meager allotment of plastic chairs had long since been taken. Every

plane that came and went held at least eighty passengers, yet the gate had seats for only a

few dozen.

There seemed to be a thousand waiting for the 7 P.M. flight to Miami. They were

bundled up and heavily laden, and after fighting the traffic and the check-in and the mobs

along the concourse they were subdued, as a whole. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving,

one of the busiest days of the year for air travel, and as they jostled and got pushed

farther into the gate many asked themselves, not for the first time, why, exactly, they had

chosen this day to fly.

The reasons were varied and irrelevant at the moment. Some tried to smile. Some tried to

read, but the crush and the noise made it difficult. Others just stared at the floor and

waited. Nearby a skinny black Santa Claus clanged an irksome bell and droned out

holiday greetings.

A small family approached, and when they saw the gate number and the mob they

stopped along the edge of the concourse and began their wait. The daughter was young

and pretty. Her name was Blair, and she was obviously leaving. Her parents were not.

The three gazed at the crowd, and they, too, at that moment, silently asked themselves

why they had picked this day to travel.

The tears were over, at least most of them. Blair was twenty-three, fresh from graduate

school with a handsome resume but not ready for a career. A friend from college was in

Africa with the Peace Corps, and this had inspired Blair to dedicate the next two years to

helping others. Her assignment was eastern Peru, where she would teach primitive little

children how to read. She would live in a lean-to with no plumbing, no electricity, no

phone, and she was anxious to begin her journey.

The flight would take her to Miami, then to Lima, then by bus for three days into the

mountains, into another century. For the first time in her young and sheltered life, Blair

would spend Christmas away from home. Her mother clutched her hand and tried to be

strong.

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The Rainmaker

MY DECISION TO BECOME A LAWYER was irrevocably sealed when I realized my

father hated the legal profession. I was a young teenager, clumsy, embarrassed by my

awkwardness, frustrated with life, horrified of puberty, about to be shipped off to a

military school by my father for insubordination. He was an ex-Marine who believed

boys should live by the crack of the whip. I'd developed a quick tongue and an aversion

to discipline, and his solution was simply to send me away. It was years before I forgave

him.

He was also an industrial engineer who worked seventy hours a week for a company that

made, among many other items, ladders. Because by their very nature ladders are

dangerous devices, his company became a frequent target of lawsuits. And because he

handled design, my father was the favorite choice to speak for the company in

depositions and trials. I can't say that I blame him for hating lawyers, but I grew to

admire them because they made his life so miserable. He'd spend eight hours haggling

with them, then hit the martinis as soon as he

walked in the door. No hellos. No hugs. No dinner. Just an hour or so of continuous

bitching while he slugged down four martinis then passed out in his battered re-cliner.

One trial lasted three weeks, and when it ended with a large verdict against the company

my mother called a doctor and they hid him in a hospital for a month.

The company later went broke, and of course all blame was directed at the lawyers. Not

once did I hear any talk that maybe a trace of mismanagement could in any way have

contributed to the bankruptcy.

Liquor became his life, and he became depressed. He went years without a steady job,

which really ticked me off because I was forced to wait tables and deliver pizza so I

could claw my way through college. I think I spoke to him twice during the four years of

my undergraduate studies. The day after I learned I had been accepted to law school, I

proudly returned home with this great news. Mother told me later he stayed in bed for a

week.

Two weeks after my triumphant visit, he was changing a lightbulb in the utility room

when (I swear this is true) a ladder collapsed and he fell on his head. He lasted a year in a

coma in a nursing home before someone mercifully pulled the plug.

Several days after the funeral, I suggested the possibility of a lawsuit, but Mother was

just not up to it. Also, I've always suspected he was partially inebriated when he fell. And

he was earning nothing, so under our tort system his life had little economic value.

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The Firm

The senior partner studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he

disliked about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper. He had the brains, the

ambition, the good looks. And he was hungry; with his background, he had to be. He was

married, and that was mandatory. The Firm had never hired an unmarried lawyer, and it

frowned heavily on divorce, as well as womanizing and drinking. Drug testing was in the

contract. He had a degree in accounting, passed the CPA exam the first time he took it

and wanted to be a tax lawyer, which of course was a requirement with a tax firm. He

was white, and The Firm had never hired a black. They managed this by being secretive

and clubbish and never soliciting job applications. Other firms solicited, and hired blacks.

This firm recruited, and remained lily white. Plus, The Firm was in Memphis, of all

places, and the top blacks wanted New York or Washington or Chicago. McDeere was a

male, and there were no women in. That mistake had been made in the mid-seventies

when they recruited the number one grad from Harvard, who happened to be a she and a

wizard at taxation. She lasted four turbulent years and was killed in a car wreck.

He looked good, on paper. He was their top choice. In fact, for this year there were no

other prospects. The list was very short. It was McDeere or no one.

The managing partner, Royce McKnight, studied a dossier labeled:

Mitchell Y. McDeere,

Harvard

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The King of Torts

The Office of the Public Defender is not known as a training ground for bright young

litigators. Clay Carter has been there too long, and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of

a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged

with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another of the many senseless murders

that hit D.C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a

conspiracy too horrible to believe. He suddenly finds himself in the middle of a complex

case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and looking at the

kind of enormous settlement that would totally change his life—that would make him,

almost overnight, the legal profession’s newest king of torts.

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The Chamber

Young lawyer Adam Hall volunteers to take on the defence of a convicted murderer on

Mississippi's Death Row. His client is seventy-year-old Sam Cayhall, whose crime was

the killing of two Jewish children in a 1967 Ku Klux Klan bombing. Sam despises

lawyers and Northern liberals, and there is little hope that he will hire the young man. But

Adam has a secret, hitherto hidden in his own tortured past - he is Sam's grandson. Adam

wants to find out what drove his father to suicide, destroying his family, and the answer

lies with Sam, unrepentant and as prejudiced as the Old South.

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The Partner

I FOUND HIM in Ponta Pora, a pleasant little town in Brazil, on the border of Paraguay,

in a land still known as the Frontier.

They found him living in a shaded brick house on Rua Tiradentes, a wide avenue with

trees down the center and barefoot boys dribbling soccer balls along the hot pavement.

They found him alone, as best they could tell, though a maid came and went at odd hours

during the eight days they hid and watched.

They found him living a comfortable life but certainly not one of luxury. The house was

modest and could've been owned by any local merchant. The car was a 1983 Volkswagen

Beetle, manufactured in Sao Paulo with a million others. It was red and clean, polished to

a shine. Their first photo of him was snapped as he waxed it just inside the gate to his

short driveway.

They found him much thinner, down considerably from the two hundred and thirty

pounds he'd been carrying when last seen. His hair and skin were darker, his chin had

been squared, and his nose had been slightly pointed. Subtle changes to the face. They'd

paid a steep bribe to the surgeon in Rio who'd performed the alterations two and a half

years earlier.

They found him after four years of tedious but diligent searching, four years of dead ends

and lost trails and false tips, four years of pouring good money down the drain, good

money chasing bad, it seemed.

But they found him. And they waited. There was at first the desire to snatch him

immediately, to drug him and smuggle him to a safe house in Paraguay, to seize him

before he saw them or before a neighbor became suspicious. The initial excitement of the

finding made them consider a quick strike, but after two days they settled down and

waited. They loitered at various points along Rua Tiradentes, dressed like the locals,

drinking tea in the shade, avoiding the sun, eating ice cream, talking to the children,

watching his house. They tracked him as he drove downtown to shop, and they

photographed him from across the street as he left the pharmacy. They eased very near

him in a fruit market and listened as he spoke to the clerk. Excellent Portuguese, with the

very slight accent of an American or a German who'd studied hard. He moved quickly

downtown, gathering his goods and returning home, where he locked the gate behind him.

His brief shopping trip yielded a dozen fine photos.

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