Scott Turow - Personal injuries

When I asked what the agent had meant about his family, he sagged a bit.

"Sick wife," he said, "sick mother." Waging a running war against the medical establishment, Feaver, like many personal injury attorneys, had absorbed the lexicon of physicians. His mother was in a nursing home. "CVA," he said, meaning a stroke. His wife, Lorraine, was worse. She had been diagnosed nearly two years ago with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-ALS, or more commonly Lou Gehrig's disease-and was on a certain downward course toward total paralysis and, eventually, death.

"She's got a year maybe before things get really hairy, no one knows for sure." He was stoical but his black eyes did not rise from the carpet. "I mean, I can't leave her. Not practically. There's nobody else to take care of her."

That was the agent's point. Feaver would talk or be in the penitentiary when his wife reached the point of total helplessness or passed. The dark shroud of that prospect fell over us both.

In the resulting silence, I picked up Sennett's card, which Feaver had laid on my desk. Without it, I might have questioned whether Robbie had identified the right man on his doorstep. The United States Attorney, with ninety-two assistants and several hundred cases to supervise, would ordinarily have no direct role in a straightforward tax case, even one against a successful personal injury lawyer. Whatever Stan Sennett had come to Robbie's house to say last night must have been a mouthful.

"What did it mean," Feaver asked, "when Sennett said that George Mason would be an interesting choice? Does he hate your guts or think you're a pushover?"

It was complicated, I responded. I believed in some moods Stan would say I was a close friend.

"Well, that's good, then, isn't it?" Feaver asked.

When it came to Stan Sennett, I never knew the answer.

Sometimes friends, I told Feaver. Always rivals.

In the fashion of most high-ranking bureaucrats, the United States Attorney's personal office was vast. The shag carpeting was tattered at places into little raveled strands, and the drapes of greenish raw silk had covered the wall of windows on the north since sometime in the fifties. But the space could be measured by the acre. There was a bathroom, with a shower, and a hideaway study. In the corners of the principal space, a sturdy government-issue conference table stood on one side, while across the room various endangered species, seized by Fish and Wildlife inspectors from a rogue taxidermist, were displayed in a long row of mahogany cases. A bald eagle and a spotted snake adjoined something that looked like a marmoset. Behind a desk the size of a tomb, Stan Sennett, one of those dark, driven little men who turn up so often in the law, rose to greet me.

"Hey there, Georgie," he said. I attributed this rare mood of impressive good cheer to Stan's eagerness to talk about Feaver.

"Blue stuff," I told his secretary when she offered coffee. We loitered a minute over personal details. Stan showed off the photos of his only child, Asha, a three-year-old girl, dark and gorgeous, whom Stan and his second wife, Nora Flinn, had adopted after years of futile fertility treatments and in vitro. I recounted the leisurely progress of my two sons through their higher educations, and bragged for a second about my wife, Patrice, an architect who had just won an international design competition to build a spectacular art museum in Bangkok. Stan, who'd been stationed in Thailand in 1966, told me a few funny stories about the country.

In his most relaxed moments, Stan Sennett could be a delight, a stylish wit, an amusing collector of arcane facts, and a canny observer of the fur-licking and hissing in local political circles. The rest of the time, you had to deal with a more complicated package-a thousand-megahertz mind, and a potful of seething emotions liable to scald anybody nearby before Stan managed to slam down the lid.

He had graduated first in our class at Easton Law School. At the bar, it is possible to travel forever in the slipstream of law school success; but Stan had bypassed the riches or policy pinnacles in Washington that usually reward his kind of legal intellect. He was a prosecutor. After clerking for Chief Justice Burger, he had returned to Kindle County to join the Prosecuting Attorney's Office, rising on indisputable merit until he became Raymond Horgan's Chief Deputy. In the early eighties, when his first marriage dissolved, he joined the U.S. Justice Department. He went first to San Diego, then D.C., and had just returned to California when President Bush named him U.S. Attorney here. He had established relations with local law enforcement agencies and no political ambitions. He therefore had figured to make it through his four-year term, which would end next year, uncompromised by the cabals and rivalries that had broken out after the death of our legendary Mayor and County Executive, Augustine Bolcarro.

Like most persons, I was wary of Stan's lethal side, but we had always been companions in the law. As students, we shared our learning: he informed me of the deeper implications of the cases we studied; I was, so far as I know, the first person to tell him that a gentleman did not tuck his necktie into his trousers. In practice, we had been ongoing opponents since he became a deputy P.A. while I was in my first legal job with the State Defenders. At all times, we were tied together by a mutual admiration that bordered on envy. My casual, highborn manner, a false front in my eyes and thus always something of a burden, represented an ideal, I think, to Sennett, for whom sincerity and charm were mutually exclusive. I was impressed, first, by Stan's abilities, but even more by his committed sense of high purpose.

Some in the defense bar, like my friend Sandy Stern, could not abide Sennett's sanctimony or his ham-handed methods, such as his late-night intrusion on Feaver. But Stan was the first U.S. Attorney in my quarter of a century here who was fearlessly independent. He'd begun a long-overdue era of zero tolerance for the scams and dirty dealing that were forever viewed as a perk of local office, and he took on the mighty commercial interests, like Moreland Insurance, the largest private employer in Kindle County, whom Stan had nonetheless prosecuted for fraud. Sennett's agenda, in short, had been to let the light of the law into the crabbed corners of Kindle County, and, as his friend, I often found myself applauding behind the mask of horror I was required to wear as a defense lawyer.

Eventually, he turned to my new client.

"Odd fellow, I take it," Stan said with a calculating glimpse my way. We both knew that, even dressed up in Armani, Robbie Feaver was your basic Kindle County hustler, complete with South End accent and too much cologne. "No, he must be peculiar. Because what they did with that account over at River National was pretty strange. The partnership of Feaver amp; Dinnerstein hasn't reported an annual income of less than one mil for a decade. Four's been more the average. I hope you knew that, George, when you set your retainer." A sweet little smile zipped by, the proper revenge of a man who's lived his life within the confines of a government salary. "Odd to be chiseling forty K on taxes when you're showing numbers like that, isn't it?"

I dipped a shoulder. The explanation would never make sense to anyone but them, yet over the years I had learned that it was only the poor whose desire for money was bounded by pure reason.

"And here's something stranger, George. They'll go months sometimes without a hit on this account, then boom, it's ten, fifteen thousand in cash inside a week. And in the meantime, George, they both bang their ATMs on a regular basis. So why this sudden appetite for currency?" Stan asked. "And where's it going?"