Paul Levine - Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor

She’d be prepared to search for the truth, to do justice.

She’d do all of those things in every case… except one.

The case of Laubach v. Atlantica Airlines, Inc., would be different. She already had read the file. She knew the issues and the arguments on both sides. Even more important, she knew who had to win.

“I’ll do it, Max. I’ll do it for you.”

“Great! I knew you wouldn’t let me down.” The tension drained from him, and he smiled triumphantly. “We make a great team, Lisa.

When your clerkship’s up, you should come into the airline’s legal department. Pete Flaherty’s going to retire in a couple of years. How would you like to be general counsel?”

“Max, please stop planning my life. Let’s just get through this.”

“Whatever you say, darling.”

His smile was still in place. He had done it. And he hadn’t even used his trump card: the truth. If Lisa knew that his life was tethered to such a slender thread, she would have rushed to help him. But this way was better.

She’s doing it for love, not pity.

Max felt invigorated. Oh, there was much more to be done. She had to get the job, and she had to convince her judge-the swing vote, according to Flaherty-to go their way. But he had great confidence in Lisa. He would trust her with anything, a thought that made him smile, for he was doing just that. He was trusting her with his life.

Late that night, lying in bed, staring at the liquid numbers of the digital clock melting into the enveloping darkness, as she listened to Max snoring alongside her, Lisa confronted the stark, bleak truth. Yes, she would do what Max had asked. Not because she loved him, for at this point, she didn’t know what she felt. Not because she owed him, because that was never part of the bargain.

She would do it because her loyalty to Max outweighed her newfound principles. Max had been right all along.

She didn’t believe in the words carved into stone.

Her soul was as barren as his, her heart as icy.

Deep inside, she was just like him.

NTSB FAILS TO FIND CAUSE OF CRASH

WASHINGTON D.C.-(AP) The National Transportation Safety Board announced yesterday that it could not conclusively determine the cause of the crash of Atlantica Airlines Flight 640, which claimed the lives of 288 persons in a fiery crash in the Florida Everglades in December 1995.

Citing contradictory evidence and the failure to recover all the essential parts, the NTSB said in a lengthy report that it could not state with certainty what caused the aircraft to lose its hydraulic systems on approach to Miami International Airport. However, Board Chairman Miles McGrane pointedly stated that there was “substantial evidence” to support the widely held belief that a bomb was detonated inside the tail-mounted engine of the DC-10, causing engine fragments to sever the hydraulic lines.

“ Traces of PETN were recovered from the nacelle of the number two engine, but many of the engine parts, including the stage one rotor fan disk, were not found,” McGrane said. “Presumably, they are buried in the muck of the Everglades and will never be recovered. Without these parts, we cannot perform the metallurgical tests needed to reach a definitive conclusion.”

PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is a component of plastic explosives. McGrane added that there was no evidence of pilot error or mechanical failure, other than loss of flight controls, which followed the apparent explosion in the number two engine.

Pressed by reporters, McGrane expressed frustration with the months of delays and endless speculation about the cause of the crash. On the day of the accident, armed U.S. Navy jets were conducting flights from the Key West Naval Air Station. He discounted the theory that a ground-to-air missile or an errant heat-seeking missile from a military jet downed the aircraft. None of the jets reported firing a missile.

Two weeks prior to the crash, a Cuban exile group in Miami threatened violent reprisals against Atlantica Airlines which, through a foreign subsidiary, had begun charter flights from Mexico City to Havana. Two members of the group, La Brigada de la Libertad, were arrested for allegedly spraypainting anti-Castro slogans on the fuselage of an Atlantica aircraft after climbing a fence to gain access to a hangar at the Miami airport. The group vigorously denied all responsibility for the crash of the New York-to-Miami flight.

The Junior Justice

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sat here. Oh, not in this chair. Not even in this building, if we’re being tediously literal about it, Sam Truitt thought.

But Holmes sat here, at the far end of the bench, to the chief justice’s left, when he was the junior justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.

So what the hell am I doing in old Ollie’s chair?

Which was also, at various times, figuratively at least, the chair of Brandeis, Cardozo, Black, Frankfurter, and Brennan. Giants of jurisprudence whose thundering pronouncements were engraved in stone for the ages. Men of soaring intellect and towering integrity.

How will I even begin to measure up?

It was a rare moment of insecurity for Sam Truitt, who frequently was described as egotistical and vain, even by his friends. His enemies called him a left-wing, Ivy League intellectual snob who was out of touch with the real world. But friends and enemies alike agreed that he was brilliant and eloquent. His opponents feared that eventually, with a long enough tenure, he would be worth two or three votes on the Court, using his superior intellect and persuasive skills to sway others.

At the moment, though, Truitt wasn’t capable of persuading cats to chase mice. Deep in a crisis of confidence, drowning in waves of self-doubt, he was an imposter, a graffiti artist in the Louvre, a trespasser in a shrine.

Though he was a broad-shouldered man, over six feet and two hundred pounds, a former athlete still fit at forty-six, at the moment, he felt he was a dwarf in the imposing, marble-columned courtroom.

Sam Truitt still had not recovered from the confirmation process. Looking back now, the stinging vitriol of the personal attacks had caught him by surprise. On CNN and before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republicans hauled out their hatchet men, and the sound bites dug deep wounds. He remembered his discomfort at being grilled by Senator Thornton Blair of South Carolina, mouthpiece for the right-wing Family Values Foundation.

“So if ah git this right, Per-fessor Truitt,” Blair droned, waving a fistful of Truitt’s Harvard Law Review articles on civil liberties, “you’d hire gay teachers but ban the Bible in our schools. You’d give away condoms to our innocent children and take away guns from our law-abiding citizens. You’d have federal marshals protect baby-killing abortionists but leave the public defenseless against rapists and murderers. Does that about sum it up, Per-fessor?”

“That’s a fallacious representation of my views,” Truitt said, sweating under the lights, sounding uptight and uncool, even to himself.

“Fal-la-cious, is it?” the senator asked rhetorically, making the word sound obscene. “When’s the last time you attended church, Per-fessor?”

“I don’t see the relevance of that,” Truitt said, backpedaling, trying to keep his feet on a rolling log in a treacherous river.

“Didn’t think you would,” Blair said, turning to the committee chairman. “With lawyers as thick as fleas on an old hound, you’d think the president could find one that reads the Good Book on Sunday mornings.”

The hate mail delivered to his Cambridge office had shocked Truitt. Protesters spewed invective and picketed in Harvard Square, calling him a card-carrying ACLU leftist and a pornography worshiper who cared more about spotted owls and snail darters than jobs and families.