A Good Marriage(18)

It was exactly the kind of thing that would enrage Paul. He was even more maniacal about ethics than he was about hard work. He’d fired associates for far less. Right before I arrived, he’d even pushed out a fellow partner for “behavior unbecoming.” Unbecoming what, no one seemed willing to specify. And yet Paul liked to consider himself an outsider in the corporate world, and hence a renegade at Young & Crane. It was a volatile combination.

I headed over to his open door, feeling even more hesitant about mentioning Zach. I could not imagine that being friends with an accused wife-murderer would reflect well on me. And the one time I’d heard Paul talk about associates taking on cases, he’d been pissed at even the suggestion. I certainly did not want him pissed at me.

Paul was seated with his back turned away from the door, hunched over something. In his early sixties, he had a carefully shorn gray buzz cut and that very fit, weathered handsomeness that only increased with age.

I sucked in a breath, reminding myself that this conversation was merely a formality so I could get on to the real business of getting Zach the right lawyer. Finally I knocked firmly on the door.

“Yep,” Paul called, without looking up.

I could now see that he was fidgeting with a small wooden puzzle on his lap, black reading glasses on the end of his nose. I came to a stop in front of his huge, perfectly organized desk. On the credenza behind him were framed photos of his four college-age children with his beautiful, silver-haired first wife. At least, I was assuming. I’d heard from Mary Jo that all of Paul’s subsequent wives had been much younger, but that he carried an enormous torch for his first.

“A gift from my oldest son,” Paul said, eyes fixed on the block. “It’s Senegalese. He’s living there. Damn thing is impossible. Probably sent it to torture me. He always was kind of an ass.” He looked up, eyeing me hopefully over his glasses. “Want to give it a go?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not very good at puzzles.”

“Hmm,” he said with obvious disappointment.

I often felt Paul sizing me up and finding me wanting. Then again, it was the same matter-of-fact disdain with which he seemed to regard most people. No one met Paul’s exacting standards, which probably explained why he’d been divorced three times. Holding the puzzle in his other hand, he extracted a stapled set of papers from a neat stack and tossed it onto the corner of the desk in front of me. He returned to the puzzle.

“Your revisions to the DOJ response were an improvement, but our position remains shit.”

After Sam had fallen back asleep, I’d finished my changes to the letter and sent it to Paul. It had been 2:00 a.m. It was 8:30 a.m. now, and Paul had already reviewed them. That was the problem with Young & Crane: no matter how hard you worked, there was always somebody working harder. Paul was especially hard to beat.

When I first came to the firm, I’d worked for several different partners. Lately, though, I worked only with Paul. He and I had come to function as a mini white-collar practice within Young & Crane, one where I did most of the work and Paul criticized it and me. While it was stressful working with Paul, it did spare me the precarious juggling of various partners’ demands that other associates had to contend with. It would not, however, make it easier for me to make partner myself, if and when the time came. Partnership required numerous allies and a savvy political strategy, neither of which I had any interest in. Nonetheless, the fact that for the past four months I’d performed well enough to be worthy of Paul’s continued criticism was apparently nothing short of a miracle. Thomas, my legal assistant, had told me stories about the dozens of associates Paul had taken only days to dispense with.

“Agreed,” I said. “The positions aren’t strong, but they are the only ones available.”

In other words, the client—Young & Crane’s client, our client—was obviously guilty. Everything we wrote was simply an attempt to disguise this fact. And as my boss Mary Jo used to say, “Pretty bows on a pile of shit just make it harder to flush.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s—ha!” Paul shouted triumphantly. The puzzle had snapped loudly into place. He set it on the edge of his desk like a punctuation mark, then looked at it for a moment before composing himself. “Shall I assume from the way you are nervously lingering there that the letter to the DOJ was not the sole reason for your visit?”

“It wasn’t.” I crossed my arms and then uncrossed them: defensiveness was akin to weakness with Paul. “I have a question about firm protocol.”

“This firm’s protocol?” Paul scoffed. “For Christ’s sake, you can hardly fire people here for arguably illegal behavior. This firm’s protocol is bullshit, if you ask me.” He paused, took an annoyed breath. “But I suppose I can do my best. Shoot.”

“It’s my understanding that associates can’t take on their own cases,” I began. “A friend asked if I could help with something, and that’s what I told him, but I wanted to confirm.”

“You are correct,” Paul said. “We need some kind of quality control. We had one yo-yo trying to sue some Upper West Side bodega because his ‘uncle’ supposedly ‘fell.’ I may not agree with a lot of the crap they do here, but at least Young & Crane doesn’t chase ambulances. What kind of case is it?”