Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"Did I offend you?" he asked.

No more than usual, I assured him.

He rumpled his lips and stood. I thought he was going to show me out. Stan was famous for that, for abruptly announcing a meeting was over. But instead he perched on his long mahogany desk's front comer. I remembered yet again that I had always wanted to ask how he got to four-thirty in the afternoon with his white shirt unwrinkled. But the moment, as usual, wasn't right.

"Listen," he said. "I want to tell you a story. Do you mind? This is a real chest-thumper, so get ready. Did you ever hear the one about when I knew I was going to be a prosecutor?"

I didn't believe I had.

"Well, I don't tell it often. But I'm going to tell it now. It has to do with my father's brother, Petros, Peter the kids called him. Uncle Peter was the black sheep. He ran a newspaper stand instead of a restaurant." That was meant to be a joke, and Stan briefly permitted himself a less constricted smile. "You want to talk about hard work-I listen to young lawyers around here pull all-nighters and complain about hard work-that, my friend, that was hard work. Up at 4 a.m. Standing in this little corner shack in the worst kind of weather. Bitter cold. Rain, sleet. Always there. Handing out papers and collecting nickels. He did that twenty years. Finally, near the age of forty, Petros was ready to make his move. Guys he knew had a gas station down here on Duhaney and Plum. Right in Center City. Place was a gold mine. And they were getting out. And Petros bought it. He took every nickel he had, all that he'd saved from twenty years of humping. And then of course it turned out there were a few things Uncle Peter didn't know. Like the fact that the corner, the whole damn block actually, was scheduled for condemnation under the new Center City Plan, which was announced only two or three days after Uncle Peter closed. I mean, it was a flat-out no-good, dirty Kindle County fraud. And every drachma the guy had was gone.

"I was only a kid, but hell, I'd read my civics book. I said to him, Uncle Petros, why don't you go to court, sue? And he looked at me and he laughed. He said, `A poor man like me? I can't afford to buy a judge.' Not `I can't afford a lawyer.' Although he couldn't. But he realized that anybody who knew in advance what the Center City Plan provided couldn't be beaten in the Kindle County Superior Courthouse.

"And I decided then I was going to be a prosecutor. Not just an attorney. A prosecutor. I knew suddenly it was the most important thing I could do, to make sure that the Petroses of the universe stopped getting screwed. I'd catch the corrupt judges and the lawyers who paid them, and all the other bad guys who made the world so lousy and unfair. That's what I told myself when I was thirteen years old."

Sennett paused to regather himself, absently fingering the braiding carved beneath the lip of the desk. This was Stan at his best and he knew he was impressive.

"Now, this crap has gone on too long in this county. Too many good people have looked the other way, hoping to persuade themselves it's not true. But it is. Or telling themselves that it's better than the bad old days. Which is no kind of excuse." Somewhere in there, as he had bent closer for emphasis, my heart had squirmed. But it was ardor that energized him, not any kind of rebuke.

"And so I've been watching. And waiting. And now I've got my chance. Augie Bolcarro is dead and this stuff is going to die with him. Hear this carefully, because I'll get that son of a bitch Tuohey and his whole nasty cohort, or flame out trying. I'm not going to send a couple of low-level schmoes to the joint and let Tuohey become head of the court in a year and do it all again, on a bigger scale, which is how it's always gone around here.

"And I know how people talk about me. And I know what they think. But it's not for the greater glory of Stan Sennett. You know the saying? `If you shoot at the king, you better kill the king'?"

A paraphrase, I told him, of Machiavelli. Stan tossed that around a second, not certain he liked the comparison.

"Well, if I shoot at Tuohey and miss-if I miss, George-I'll have to leave town when I step down from this job. I know that. No law firm in its right mind will go near me. Because neither I nor they will be able to set foot in state court.

"But I'm going to do it anyway. Because I'm not going to have this go on unchallenged. Not on my watch. You will forgive me, George. You will please forgive me. But it's what I owe my Uncle Petros and all the other people of this county and this district. George," he said, "it's what's goddamned right."

"How this started," Robbie Feaver said, "is not what you think. Morty and I didn't go to Brendan and say, Take care of us. We didn't have anything to take care of, not to start with. Mort and I had been bumping along on workmen's comp and slip-and-fall cases. Then about ten years ago, even before Brendan was appointed Presiding Judge over there, we got our first real chance to score. It was a bad-baby case. Doc with a forceps treated the kid's head like a walnut. And it's the usual warfare. I got a demand of 2.2 million, which brings in the umbrella insurer, so they're underwriting the defense. And they know I'm not Peter Neucriss. They're making us spend money like there's a tree in the backyard. I've got to get medical experts. Not one. Four. O.B. Anesthesia. Pedes. Neurology. And courtroom blowups. We've got $125,000 in expenses, way more than we can afford. We're into the bank for the money, Mort and me, with seconds on both our houses."

I had heard the story several times now. This rendition was for Sennett's benefit, a proffer, an off-the-record session in which Stan had the chance to evaluate Robbie for himself. It was a week after I'd visited Stan in his office and we sat amid the plummy brocades of a room in the Dulcimer House hotel, booked in the name of Petros Corporation. Sennett had brought along a bland-seeming fellow named Jim, slightly moonfaced but pleasant, whom I marked as an FBI agent, even before Stan introduced him, because he wore a tie on Sunday afternoon. They leaned forward intently on their fancy medallion-backed armchairs as Robbie held forth beside me on the sofa.

"The judge we're assigned is Homer Guerfoyle. Now, Homer, I don't know if you remember Homer. He's long gone. But he was a plain, old-fashioned Kindle County alley cat, a ward-heeling son of a bootlegger, so crooked that when they buried him they had to screw him in the ground. But when he finally maneuvers his way onto the bench, all the sudden he thinks he's a peer of the realm. I'm not kidding. It always felt like he'd prefer 'Your Lordship' to `Your Honor.' His wife had died and he hooked up with some socialite a few years older than him. He grew a fussy little mustache and started going to the opera and walking down the street in the summer in a straw boater.

"Now, on the other side of my case is Carter Franch, a real white-shoe number, Groton and Yale, and Guerfoyle treats him like an icon. Exactly the man Homer would like to be. He just about sits up and begs whenever he hears Franch's malarkey.

"So one day Mort and I, we have breakfast with Brendan, and we start drying our eyes on his sleeve, about this trial coming up, what a great case it is and how we're gonna get manhandled and end up homeless. We're just young pups sharing our troubles with Morty's wise old uncle. `Well, I know Homer for years,' says Brendan. `He used to run precincts for us in the Boylan organization. Homer's all right. I'm sure he'll give you boys a fair trial.'

"Nice that he thinks so," said Robbie. Feaver looked up and we all offered the homage of humoring smiles to induce him to continue. "Our case goes in pretty good. No bumps. Right before we put on our final expert, who'll testify about what constitutes reasonable care in a forceps delivery, I call the doc, the defendant, as an adverse witness, just to establish a couple things about the procedure. Last thing, I ask the usual jackpot question, `Would you do it again?' `Not given the result,' he says. Fair enough. We finish up, and before the defense begins, both sides make the standard motions for a directed verdict, and, strike me dead, Guerfoyle grants mine. Robbie wins liability by TKO! The doc's to blame, Homer says, he admitted he didn't employ reasonable care when he said he wouldn't use the forceps again. Even I hadn't suggested anything like that. Franch just about pulls his heart out of his chest, but since the only issue now is damages, he has no choice but to settle. 1.4 mil. So it's nearly 500,000 for Morty and me.