Scott Turow - Personal injuries

At the age of twenty-two, with my degree from Charlottesville, I'd become a hand on an ore freighter, which had brought me in time to Kindle County. Ostensibly I'd joined the Merchant Marine to avoid Vietnam. But I was really fleeing my parents' hermetic world in southern Virginia, escaping from my mother's relentless social pretensions and, even more, from my father's call to the inviolable credos of a Southern gentleman. A lawyer before me, my father adhered to what he regarded as the right things Christ and country, family, duty, and the law. He found late in life, as he watched less able and principled colleagues promoted to the spots on the bench which he craved, that his unwavering virtue marked him in many eyes, probably including his son's, as a bit of a fool.

In the raw democracy of Kindle County, where honor was not a matter of social attainment, I'd felt free to live a life of reasonable adult accommodations. But with my father gone, I suddenly feared I'd cast away too many things he had exalted. I was a decent man, but seldom brave. That was why Sennett for the moment seemed so formidable. Like my father, he was a person of rigor, of standards, a purist, who believed powerfully-and uncompromisingly-in the wide gulf between evil and good. As a boy, Stan had briefly been a seminarian preparing to enter the priesthood of the Greek Orthodox Church, and I always sensed that in his mind-as in my dad's-law and God were not far apart. Yet, unlike my father, Stan had the fiber to recognize that in this world good things do not happen by accident. I realized now that a piece of me had always seen Stan as the man I might have been were I more determined to be a loyal son.

So I knew I'd have no peace with myself if I turned away from Robbie Feaver. I remembered the lines from Frost about the road not taken. And then, like the poet, turned to follow Robbie and Sennett down that unfamiliar path.

THE Lesueur building, where Robbie and I both made our law offices, had been erected just before the economic collapse of the 1920s. It stands on a part of Center City called the Point, a jut of midwestern limestone that the river Kindle in its swift course somehow chose over the eons to avoid rather than wear through. The building commemorates the French missionary explorer, Pere Guy LaSueur, whose family name was perpetually misspelled by the unlettered settlers who followed him two centuries later to this part of the Middle West.

The LeSueur was built in the era of Deco. Waif-like naiads modestly shield their nakedness behind the leafy adornments embossed at the center of the elaborate brass grilles that decorate the elevators, the air vents, and much of the lobby. A cupola of stained glass, the design of Louis Tiffany himself, rises over the seven-story center atrium and lures frequent tour groups who often obstruct the tenants racing to work. For the most part it is law, not art, which preoccupies the denizens. More than half the space in the building has always been leased by attorneys, inasmuch as the LeSueur stands at a favored location, the center of a triangle formed by Federal Square at one point, the state criminal courts on the second, and on the third, the architectural recycling bin that is the Kindle County Superior Court Law and Equity Department.

Late in November, a lawyer named James McManis leased a vacant suite in the lower-rent region of the LeSueur's eighth floor. McManis, who appeared to be near fifty, was making a late start in private practice. For many years, he explained to various lawyers in the building to whom he eagerly introduced himself, he had been an associate general counsel for Moreland Insurance, situated in their South-Central Regional Office in Atlanta, in charge of personal injury claims. McManis told a complicated story about leaving Moreland so his wife could tend to her elderly mother in Greenwood County, and said his move had been supported by Moreland's General Counsel, who had agreed to jump-start McManis's practice by hiring him to conduct the defense of various personal injury claims brought in Kindle County against Moreland's insureds. Listening to McManis's tale, one could not avoid the impression that it had been sanitized a bit, and that McManis was actually one more middle-aged expendable cut adrift in another of the ruthless corporate downsizings familiar to recession America.

Jim McManis quickly assembled a staff. Every few days, there was a new employee-a secretary, an investigator, a receptionist, a law clerk, a paralegal-each of whom was offhandedly introduced to the adjoining tenants. All, of course, were FBI agents hailing from locales far from Kindle County. Given the fact that not long into January, The Law Offices of James McManis had four separate matters against Feaver amp; Dinnerstein, it was not unusual that Bobbie and his paralegal. Evon Miller, made occasional visits downstairs. So did I. My cover, employed with the greatest reluctance, was that I was the referring attorney on these cases, the lawyer who'd put the plaintiffs in touch with Feaver and who would be entitled to a piece of Robbie's fee in exchange for working with him on the lawsuits. McManis had also joined the Kindle County Bar Association's Task Force on Civility in the Courts, chaired by Stan Sennett. Thus Sennett, too, became a frequent visitor to McManis's.

Each of us came to Jim's office-referred to by the agents within as `the off-site'-at least once a week, far more often in the early days. We approached at prearranged intervals, always equipped with a briefcase or an envelope as a prop. Arriving in the reception area, richly paneled in red oak, I felt as if I were watching TV from inside the set. Everyone was playing a role, but until the steel-lined doors to the conference room were secured, all maintained a convincing atmosphere of earnest busyness, phones bleating, printers groaning, the various `employees' dashing back and forth. What each of them was actually up to was not shared with me, but in one of the early meetings a door was left ajar on a wall-length cabinet in the conference room, where I noticed a full bank of electrical equipment, stuff with blinking lights and digital readouts.

As for the so-called Evon Miller, she was the first to respond to an ad for a paralegal Feaver amp; Dinnerstein placed in The Lawyers Bulletin in early January. She was interviewed the next day by Mort, Robbie, and the office manager, Eileen Ruben. For the interview she wore a trim blue suit, a ruffled white blouse, and a doubled strand of costume pearls she'd probably worn four times since getting them for college graduation. Her glasses were gone now in favor of contacts, and to give her the jazzier look Sennett preferred, she'd also had a makeover at Elizabeth Arden on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, at Bureau expense. It included bleaching her hair bright blond and trimming it into a high-styled do buzzed down to fuzz on one side as it slid toward her ear.

On the first day after 'Evon Miller' was hired, Robbie strutted her around the harshly lit corridors of the firm. He explained the layout, introduced other employees with maladroit quips, and unapologetically boasted about the lavish decorations. Gaudy contemporary pieces-resin figures, neon sculptures, huge clocks-were clustered on the silky peach-colored paper covering the walls. The conference room was dominated by the longest table she had ever seen outside a museum, an oval of pinkish granite surrounded by Italian-designed armchairs, its polished surface glazed with the oblique light from the large windows on the LeSueur's thirty-fifth floor. Feaver referred to the room as `the Palace.'

"See, we lay it on thick for the play," he said. "Know what I mean?"

She didn't.

"My first legal job, I worked for Peter Neucriss. You've heard of Peter, right? Everybody's heard of Peter-the Master of Disaster, that's what the papers call him. Peter can be understated. We're Feaver and Dinnerstein. Who are they? The arrogant docs who come here for their depos, our clients, who are mostly little people from the apartments and bungalows, they all want to know one thing: Are these guys successful? Do they win? So it's gotta show. You drive a Mercedes, you wear Zegna, and your office looks like Robin Leach should be coming through the door any second. I told Mort, when we started-think Beverly Hills."