David Kessler: No Way Out

A mix-up about her starting date had meant that she spent the morning sitting in a room reading brochures and web-based material about Levine amp; Webster instead of beginning her induction and being introduced to the staff. The Human Resources Manager wouldn’t be back till Monday, so it was left to Paul Sherman — one of the partners in the firm — to lead Andi along through the maze of desks, as some of the younger (male) members of the staff leaned out from their shoulder height partitions to get a glimpse of the new girl. The women, for the most part, kept their attention to their photocopying or papers on their oak desks, only glancing round briefly to size up the competition.

“It’s not really a department,” Sherman replied nervously. “It’s more of a section in my department.”

Andi experienced the first hint of unease as these words wafted over her.

“I don’t understand. I thought I was going to head up a department over here.”

Sherman squirmed with embarrassment. He was only slightly shorter than Andi, yet she seemed to tower over him, possibly because of the nervous, shifting way in which he stood. He reminded her of some character out of a Charles Dickens novel, she just couldn’t put a name to it.

“Well my department covers torts and, for our purposes, tortious liability of criminals is a sub-section of that.”

Sherman seemed embarrassed, as if perturbed by Andi’s confrontational approach, but reluctant to follow suit.

“Well anyway, I won’t try to second guess you. When we’ve got a victim case to litigate, you’ll be the one whose desk it lands on. You’re the expert in that field. I’m just a humble negligence lawyer.”

Humble! That was it. He reminded her of Uriah Heap in David Copperfield !

The uneasy feeling was growing in Andi. This wasn’t what they’d promised her when they offered her the job. They had given her the job without an interview, based on nothing more than her resume and the recommendation of her department head back in New York. But what Sherman was describing now wasn’t anything like what they had described when they made the job offer. If anything it was a step backwards.

She had made this move because it had become clear to her that in New York she could only move sideways. But now it looked like she had been suckered into this and was going nowhere just as fast and without even the benefit of old friends to comfort her. She felt betrayed.

No, she told herself. Don’t prejudge. Maybe it’s not what it seems. Maybe they just have a less formal structure in this firm.

“So let me get this straight Mr. Sherman. Any crime victim wanting to sue the perp is mine?”

She was watching his face carefully now.

“As long as it falls exclusively within your remit. There might be some areas of overlap, in which case we’ll have to discuss it. But nobody’s going to go behind your back, let alone over your head. Everything’ll be done on a consensus basis.”

It was obvious that he was trying to sound encouraging: to make her feel at home. It was clear that they respected her or they wouldn’t have hired someone from the other side of the country and made such a generous pay offer, not to mention paying her relocation costs.

“I guess it makes sense. It’s just not what I had in mind.”

“Well let’s see how it goes,” he said encouragingly. “You’ll have a lot of autonomy. And in most cases no one will try to second-guess you. The other partners will probably defer to your judgment. You’re the specialist after all.”

“Okay,” said Andi brightening up. “Let’s get to work.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Sherman stopped, prompting Andi to do likewise.

“So where’s my office?”

Again Sherman looked embarrassed.

“Well it’s not really an office,” he said nervously. “As you can see we’re open plan here.”

“You mean only the partners have private offices?”

“Well, no, some of the others do too. But we didn’t have a spare room, apart from the conference rooms. You’ll get one too when we’ve got things sorted out. It’s just a matter of re-arranging things. In the meantime, you’ll have a booth in the corner — away from most of the noise… what?”

He had noticed the expression on her face. “What?”

“Look, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’ll spell it out to you. This isn’t what I signed on for. I signed on to have an office, even head a department. Not to be an orphan or a step-child.”

“Well check out the ass on that!”

Alex shot an angry look at the leering redneck in torn jeans who was nursing the near-empty Bud can. The man looked back as if to say “wanna make an issue of it buddy?”

The truth of the matter was that Alex didn’t want to. But he was ready to. He was more afraid of the professional consequences to himself, as a lawyer, than the possibility of getting beaten up. The guy was bigger than Alex. But Alex had trained in krav maga — an Israeli martial art — and reckoned the odds at about fifty-fifty.

Not wanting to feed the redneck’s desire for attention, Alex returned his attention to the table that the lithe, 34-year-old, dark-haired, Chinese-American woman was bending over.

They were in the Embassy Billiards Club in San Gabriel. The place had been packed for the men’s snooker event — the fourth in the six-venue US tour. But the hall seemed half-empty as the woman in black pants and matching vest lined up her most crucial shot of the frame — if not the entire semi-final match. In America, where nine-ball pool was well established, and British snooker was a strange foreign animal, even the men’s game was only just beginning to get established — and then mainly in the cosmopolitan areas like New York and California. On both coasts it was helped by the Chinese-American population who in some cases loved snooker with the same passion as that of the native Chinese.

After a few seconds, the chattering settled down to a pall of respectful silence as the crowd held their breath with eager anticipation, wondering if Martine Yin could pull it off.

She took the shot with cool ease, not tentatively, but with the firm confidence of some one who knew that there were no prizes for second best. And when the last red ball in the chain dropped into the right corner pocket and the cue ball rolled slowly to a halt a foot away from the left cushion, the small crowd of appreciative aficionados who were there to watch the game and not just gape at Martine, let out a whooping cheer for the skill of not just sinking the pot but also getting the cue ball into an ideal position to set up the next shot.

And Alex was amongst those applauding wildly — although he had to admit that he was one of those who was there to watch Martine more than the game.

They had been going out, on and off, for over a year now — if you could call it going out. It had started after the Clayton Burrow case, when Martine had spent several months pursuing Alex for an interview. She was a TV reporter and she had covered what had now become Alex’s most famous case: the Burrow case. She had in fact been one of the reporters in the observation room adjacent to the death chamber when they got the fateful call to abort the execution.

And then, she had witnessed, albeit from a distance, Alex’s intense conversation with his legal intern followed by the intern’s arrest. This whole surreal episode had culminated in a high-speed car chase in the dead of night, ending in a fatal crash that unfortunately evaded the cameras of the news helicopters.

After the case, Alex had offered some considerable resistance to Martine’s interview request, and when they did finally talk about it, she got the impression that he was holding something back. At first, she had been determined to break his resolve and get in under his guard. But somewhere along the line, she sensed that what Alex was holding back had more to do with his personal feelings than with any hard facts about the case itself. She realized that notwithstanding the time-honored lawyer jokes, Alex was all too human and this in turn impressed upon her that there were limits to how predatory she could be in her own chosen vocation.