Scott Turow - Personal injuries

This debriefing about Kosic followed Robbie's payoff to Walter by several days. It was occasioned by Wunsch's warning that Robbie couldn't expect a 'miracle-of-the-month club' regarding the three new contrived cases that had landed on Malatesta's docket. From the start, Sennett and McManis had known that there was a finite number of complaints they could file in a short period. Tuohey's cohort would feel put upon and suspicious if there were too many `specials'; Mort could become curious about the extraordinary volume of referrals coming upstairs from me; and the judges might grow wary if Robbie and McManis kept showing up as matched opponents, like Tracy and Hepburn. On the other hand, Stan was under continuing pressure from D.C. to keep the Project moving forward. By now he'd taken a small coterie of Assistant U.S. Attorneys into his confidence, never seen by us and rarely mentioned, but whose presence was indicated by the volumes of paperwork forthcoming in connection with each of the new complaints Stan had produced every ten days or so.

But the judicial assignments on the new cases continued to fall out inconveniently. Besides Malatesta, two cases had gone to Gillian Sullivan, who was temporarily unapproachable. At the moment, Judge Sullivan was under intense media scrutiny that resulted from some ridiculous inebriate remarks she'd made to a Hispanic attorney who'd arrived late in her courtroom. Only one case had gone to Sherm Crowthers, who was proceeding with it at his usual phlegmatic pace. And none had been assigned to Barnett Skolnick, the only judge who accepted money from Bobbie directly and the one whom Sennett was dying to bag as a way to quiet the doubters in D.C. When Sennett had suggested trying to transfer a case or two from Malatesta to Skolnick, Robbie had scoffed.

"Sure, Stan, I'll just give Rollo Kosic a bang on the phone and tell him the FBI prefers Judge Skolnick." Besides, Robbie pointed out, Kosic was clearly favoring Malatesta at the moment, probably because his docket had been consumed by a lengthy environmental tort case that had limited the business he could do on the side. But now McManis had recognized that an opportunity was presented by Walter's warning that for a while Malatesta wouldn't risk more favorable rulings for Feaver.

"That's your excuse to talk to Kosic," McManis said. "Because you need results on one of these cases right now."

Naturally, Stan was excited by the prospect of breaching Tuohey's inner circle so soon. But Robbie continued to insist it was impossible.

"I don't do Rollo. I mean, I talk to him. He'd bounce into my usual pop stand now and then, so sometimes I'd buy him a beverage. But Rollo's the kind of guy, you hear from him when he wants. I never call him. And no matter what, I don't talk dirty to the guy. I couldn't sell it. 'Always act in your own person,"' Robbie concluded, another quote from Stanislavsky.

"Sure you can, Robbie," said McManis soothingly. Jim had removed his glasses. He did this whenever he became intent, so much so I'd become convinced that the glasses were windowpanes, merely part of a disguise. Now he extolled Robbie's abilities as an actor and a salesman, and told him there'd be no problem setting up a meeting to appear accidental. "We have this little thing we do called surveillance," said McManis. He pointed outside, meant to indicate Joe Amari. "We'll tail Kosic for a while. When he shows up at your spot, you'll get a call."

Jim had never pushed Feaver before. He was a model of reason and caution, but he'd clearly noticed what I had in Robbie's quick-eyed resistance, something I hadn't observed in the months I'd been his lawyer. This wasn't a down mood, or even pre-game butterflies. Robbie Feaver was flat-out scared.

One afternoon in late February, as Robbie and Evon were prepping a client, Heidi Brunswick, for her dep, Bonita put a call through to Robbie. He was sitting in the tall leather chair behind his desk, and as he listened he did not move. Evon assumed Lorraine had taken another bad turn. Instead, he ended by saying, "You're the greatest," and buzzed Bonita to get Mort, who was defending a deposition in the Palace. "Let's go," he told Evon. Suzy, the other paralegal, was summoned to finish with Heidi, and Robbie, with apologies to the client, ran to the door.

"New one," he told Evon in the elevator. By now she recognized the look. After nearly eight weeks in his office, she'd seen Feaver through major depositions, even one day of a trial that settled after jury selection. Yet nothing excited either Robbie or Mort like the prospect of signing up a new client. They reached a state of high alert, as if they'd smelled gunpowder on the air. The fact that Robbie's days in practice were limited and that he could expect to share in the fee on these cases, even from a jail cell, did nothing to lessen his enthusiasm. But for Robbie, charming and landing a new client was a thrill in its own right, a supreme moment of performance in which success meant he'd persuaded at least one person he was a better lawyer than anyone else in the tri-cities.

The present matter was what Robbie referred to as a "good case," meaning there were prospects for a huge recovery. The would-be client was a thirty-six-year-old mother of three. Yesterday her doctor had sent her home from his office telling her that her chest pains were bronchitis. The paramedics had just brought her in to Sisters of Mercy's emergency room, unconscious and fibrillating in the aftermath of a major coronary infarct. Evon understood enough of the grim alchemy of this practice, in which misfortune was turned into gold, to realize that the damages could escalate dramatically if she died, leaving three motherless children. Feaver pushed the Mercedes toward eighty on the highway. He had been tipped on the case by the administrator of the E.R.

"We were real good friends for a while," Robbie explained.

He clearly knew his way around the hospital, slamming the pressure plate on the walls that swept open the doors to the E.R. with a hydraulic whoosh. His open topcoat floated behind him like a cape as he hustled to the administrator's office.

The woman was striking, African-American and something else, Polynesian perhaps. There was a trace of some high-cheeked ancestral beauty. She was in her mid-thirties and carefully put together, wearing a large designer scarf that covered her shoulders and was knotted mid-chest. Bobbie kissed her on the cheek. She placed an arm around him in greeting and directed him at once down the corridor into the waiting area for the emergency room.

The space was crowded, most of the people in the four rows of plastic chairs evincing the beleaguered blown-apart look of anxiety so intense it had grown numbing. A bloated young woman, with a ratted hairdo in some disarray, cradled one child, a newborn, while two more, both boys, near three, climbed around the seats, raising a commotion. She spoke to them harshly and occasionally flicked out a hand to deliver a swat that each child was already skilled in avoiding. She finally caught one of them and his howls filled the small area.

In spite of the cold, an African-American teen was dressed on top in nothing but a white T-shirt, on which blood had already dried brown. He held one arm with the other. A crude bandage of gauze and tape was visible near his shoulder. An older woman, his mother, Evon guessed, sat beside him, humped up in a bulky brown winter coat, tossing her head in chagrin every now and then. The boy, Evon took it, had been stabbed.

In the very last row were the people Robbie and the administrator, Taylor, were looking for, the family of the woman who was somewhere behind the curtains a hundred feet away, struggling for her life. A lumpy-looking younger man with the pallor of a potato and thinning hair appeared to be the husband. He had his hands folded piously and looked completely bewildered. Beside him was an elderly couple, a porky, hard-faced man with black hair and a pack of cigarettes bulging in his shirt pocket, and his wife, whose jaw was already trembling from the strain of prolonged weeping. She cried again as soon as she saw Robbie with Taylor. She could not wait to tell her story. Still in his coat, Robbie slid into the chair beside her and immediately took her hand.