Scott Turow - Personal injuries

But there was rarely silence during the long stretches they spent in the car each day. When Feaver was not on the phone, which he could dial from a little panel above the temperature controls, he lectured her on any subject that crept into his head. By now she was in mind of a phrase of her father's-the man ran over at the mouth like he'd busted a pipe. Did he ever keep a thought to himself? Ostensibly, he was familiarizing her with the details of his practice, but he clearly felt he was entertaining. He was also quick to recognize that the car was the one place he could comfortably break cover. There had been no further problems in the office, but in the Mercedes Feaver was like a grade school bad boy who needed recess so he could behave himself in class. He was forever trying to pry details about her identity, or offering commentary about their meetings with Sennett and McManis. She'd face the window and watch the tri-cities whiz past, or close her eyes to savor the armchair luxury of the passenger seat.

The silver plate on the trunk lid identified the car as an S600-top of the line, Feaver told her several times. The creamy leather, with its pinpoint air holes, had the feel of the calfskin shoes she could never afford, and the dark walnut of the front cabin reminded her of a museum. Yet it was the quiet that impressed her most. In this thing, out side was really outside. The heavy door thudded shut with a cushioned sound reminiscent of a jewel box.

Feaver was enraptured with his Mercedes, which he had purchased only a few months before. He often spouted the staggering price, $133,000, unabashed that the car had cost more than some of the four-bedroom houses they passed in outlying developments. Secure within the elegant cabin and its fortress feel, Robbie was apt to become a random element. He zoomed around as if he were in a spaceship. On the way back from the Greenwood County Courthouse, he would pop in on his mother, who was at a nursing home along the way, or visit Sparky, a scalper who was holding tickets for a Hands game which Robbie was sending to a referring attorney. Feaver also loved to shop. He was a devotee of sales and fancy name brands and frequently made impulsive stops at the malls. Under the bright store lights he'd scrutinize the merchandise, then call his wife from the car to describe what he was bringing home, as if he were a big-game hunter.

In every venue Feaver entered with a sense of membership: he was known; there were friends of decades and tireless stories. For Robbie, all the world was in some measure a fraternity, a place for upbeat banter, tasteless jokes, and booming laughter. Arriving for a dep where he hoped to eviscerate the opposing party, he nonetheless greeted the other lawyer with cheerful enthusiasm. At the tony haberdasher where he acquired his expensive wardrobe, Robbie had his own salesman, Carlos, a Cuban refugee who welcomed him with the palms-up grip of a brother. The store was full of men like Robbie, with careful haircuts and a showboat air, guys who considered the fit of their garments in the mirror with an exacting look at odds with the carefree swagger with which they strolled down the avenue.

One day in the third week of January, apropos of nothing. Feaver cried out that they had to go see Harold, who turned out to be a client disastrously injured in a collision with a delivery truck. Evon could barely stand to look at the man. He was hunched to one side in a wheelchair; there were sores on his arms and face. Robbie, however, took Harold's hand and with barroom gusto told him he looked great. Feaver chatted away for nearly twenty minutes about highlights of the basketball season in the Mid-Ten. Afterwards, in the car, he told her he was determined to keep Harold alive. The defendants-the auto manufacturer, the state highway department, the trucking company-had dragged the case out nearly nine years in the clear hope Harold would die. If he did, a case presently worth $20 million, with comps-compensatory damages for lifetime care-might bring one-fifth of that, most of which would go to repay his medical insurer. There would be zilch for Harold's mother, a large-bellied, middle-aged woman in a shapeless dress, who had greeted them and who had cared for her son since his wife deserted him shortly after the accident.

"What about your fee?" Evon asked dryly. "That goes way down, too, doesn't it?"

"Hey," Feaver answered. "You ever meet Peter Neucriss, he'll tell you before he says hello about all the good he's doing for the world, sticking up for everybody who gets abused. Not me. The rules of this game are that we give people money to make up for their pain, and everybody who steps on the field knows how we're gonna keep score the judges, the jury, me, the client, the folks on the other side. It's money. How much do we get, how much do they keep. Whatever people say, let me give you a fast translation: You can dress it up and make it say Mommy, but this baby's really talkin do-re-mi." He nodded firmly. "That's the play."

As always, his smugness was exasperating. Of all the people to think he'd figured everything out.

"What is `the play' anyway?" she asked suddenly. "It's always the excuse. And I never get it. Are you saying, like `I made the play' in sports? Or `I have a part in a play'? Or `I played a trick on you'?"

"Right," he said.

"Come on."

He waved a hand past his nose at the difficulty she was inviting. They were in the suburbs, a land of recently built houses with peaked roofs and few exterior graces. From the highway, she saw two little boys across the distance, smacking at a tetherball in the cold.

"Well, shit," said Feaver, unable as always to endure his own silence. "It's just The Play. It's like life, you know? There's really no point, except getting your jollies, and even that doesn't add up to anything in the end. You think any of this makes sense when you stand back from it? You think God made an ordered universe? That's the laugh with the law. We like to pretend it makes life more reasonable. Hardly."

She groaned. Which made him more insistent.

"Tell me what sense there is that Lorraine is sick like she is. Any? Why her? Why now? Why that terrible motherfucker of a disease? It doesn't add. Or take a look at our cases: forty-eight-year-old lathe operator. Machine goes down and he turns the power off on the line to fix it. The foreman comes back, figures some joker is fucking with him like they do twice a day, and throws the switch. Hand is cut in half. Off-duty fireman's at somebody's house washing the storm windows. He's gone for two minutes to get more Windex and the three-year-old climbs up on a stool to look outside, and goes right through the open window, DOA at Mount Sinai. Or Harold, for Chrissake. One minute you're a cheerful salesman on the highway, the next minute you're a meatball in a wheelchair. It's The Play. Ball hits a stone on the infield, hops over your glove, and you lose the World Series. You go home and cry. It's really chaos and darkness out there, and when we pretend it's not, it's just The Play. We're all onstage. Saying our lines. Playing at whoever we're trying to be at the moment. A lawyer. A spouse. Even though we know in the back of our heads that life is a lot more random and messed-up than we can stand to say to ourselves. Okay?" His black eyes lit on her despite the highway traffic. Something-his intensity-was frightening. "Okay?" he asked again.

"No," she said.

"Why not?"

She crossed her arms, deliberating on whether he deserved an answer.

"I believe in God," she told him.

"Me too," he said. "But He made me and this is what I think."

An exasperated sound gargled up from her involuntarily. Didn't she know? Who told her to try to argue with a lawyer?

One of those mornings in January, Feaver and Evon were in the 600 only a few blocks from work when they became snarled in a honking line of stalled traffic. Far ahead, heavy plumes of what appeared at first to be smoke expanded in the frigid air, swirling above the yellow blinkers atop a cordon of striped barricades and emergency vehicles. Approaching by inches, they eventually saw a covey of city sewer workers in quilted vests and construction helmets leaning on the yellow rail they'd erected around an open manhole. They were engaged in no visible labor other than shouting down to a couple of their colleagues who had descended. A young woman in a hard hat waved a red flag, sending the traffic along through a tingle lane. When she stopped them abreast of her, Feaver lowered his window, admitting a sudden riffle of cold.