New York Dead

Chapter 32

The Four Seasons was busy, as always. The hum of voices from the Pool Room echoed enjoyment of the surroundings and the food, but Bill Eggers had a table in the Grill, next to the bar.

“It’s quieter here,” Eggers said. “It’s crazy at lunch, but at dinner everybody wants to be in the Pool Room. Here, we can talk.”

Stone wondered exactly what they would be talking about. This felt something like a job interview, but he couldn’t see Woodman amp; Weld hiring a thirty-eight-year-old novice as an associate.

They had a drink and dawdled over the menu. Eggers seemed in an expansive mood, relieved over the resolution of his Los Angeles case. “It was a bastard,” he said. “A bicoastal divorce case of one of our biggest clients. He was claiming New York residence, and she claimed they lived in California – she wanted community property.”

“Who won?”

“I did. The LA office is mostly into entertainment work, so I did the dog work while they fronted for me in court. Don’t worry about the lady; she’s doing very well out of this, but she’s not getting the thirty million that community property division would have given her. She’s pissed off now, but she’ll get used to living on the income from six million.”

“You do a lot of divorce work?”

“I’m sort of the firm general practitioner. I have a lot of clients whose personal legal work I handle, and that often leads to divorce work. It’s nasty sometimes, but, if you can keep a certain detachment, you can live with it.”

“Must be lucrative.”

“Not all that much. We only do divorce work for the firm’s existing clients, and we don’t charge them the earth. In the case of the men, when they see what the wife’s lawyer is demanding, they’re grateful to us for not taking them to the cleaners; in the case of the women, they’re grateful to us for not demanding high fees. That builds client loyalty.”

“I should think so.”

They ordered their food, and Eggers chose what Stone thought must be the most expensive bottle of wine on a very expensive list. If Stone had been interested before in what Bill Eggers had to say, now he was really interested.

Eggers tasted the wine and nodded to the sommelier. When the man had gone, he turned to Stone. “What do you know about Woodman amp; Weld?”

“Not very much,” Stone admitted. “I get the impression that it’s a prestigious firm, from what I read in the papers, but I’m not very clear on why it might be so.”

“Good. That’s pretty much the impression we like to convey. We see that the people who might need us know a lot more, but we keep a fairly low public profile.”

Stone sipped the wine; he thought he had never tasted anything so good. “It’s a lovely burgundy,” he said to Eggers. “Thank you.”

Eggers nodded, pleased that his largess had been noted. “Let me give you the scoop on us. We’ve got eighteen partners at the moment, and thirty-six associates. That’s certainly not big by Manhattan standards, but it’s big enough for us to be able to cover a lot of bases. There are seven corporate specialists – we tend to attract companies somewhat below the Fortune Five Hundred level, outfits that don’t have huge legal departments; we have four estate planners – that’s very important to wealthy individuals – and, just as important, four tax specialists, all Jewish. Nobody seems to take a tax lawyer seriously who isn’t Jewish. We’re something of a polyglot firm – blacks, women, Irish, Jews, Italians – not unlike the New York Police Department, I expect. That’s important to us, because the firm is active in liberal Democratic causes – you’d be surprised how much business comes in that way. Finally, there are three generalists – two of them Woodman and me.”

“I liked Woodman when I met him.”

“Woodman is a genius, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a client man, first and last; he inspires trust. Also, he has a facility for going into a meeting – corporate, tax, whatever – and immediately grasping the issues involved. Clients think he knows everything, which isn’t exactly true, but he can give that impression effortlessly. I’d be willing to bet that he could engage you in conversation about a homicide investigation and make you think he was an ex-cop.”

Their first course arrived, and they dug in.

“You didn’t mention any criminal lawyers,” Stone said between bites.

“We don’t have a criminal lawyer as such, although you’d be surprised at how much criminal work comes our way. Nowadays, it’s the corporate executive or stockbroker who’s stepped over the line; also, our clients’ kids get into trouble – drugs, rape, sometimes even murder.”

“How do you handle that?”

“In different ways. If it’s something big, we refer to a hotshot mouthpiece; more often, we bring in a consultant and handle it internally. A client likes it when his own lawyer seems to be in charge. Of course, there’s a fine line there; we have to make the judgment on when an outsider best serves the client’s needs. We can’t afford to make a mistake and underrepresent a client. We’re very, very careful in the matter of malpractice, and we’ve never had a suit against us.”

“That seems a good area to be careful in.”

“In short, Stone, we’re a class act. Every single partner is as good as any lawyer in town at what he does and better than ninety-nine percent of the field. We’re low profile, highly ethical, and extremely profitable. I will tell you, in confidence, that no partner in our firm is taking home less than half a million a year, and that’s the low end. I made a million two last year, and it wasn’t my best year.”

Stone sucked in a breath at the thought of so much money and what he could do with it.

“Now that I’ve stunned you,” Eggers said, noting Stone’s expression, “let me tell you why we’re interested in you.”

Somehow, Stone didn’t think that he was here to be offered a partnership and half a million dollars a year.

“As I’ve said, we’re taking on more and more criminal and domestic work, without even trying. We’ve handled some ourselves, farmed out some, and brought in consultants on others, but we’re still spread thin. Sometimes we need investigative work done, and we’re troubled by the quality of the people available to do that sort of thing. There are some high-class people around, but they charge more than a good lawyer gets; generally, what we see in the investigative area is sleaze – the worst sort of ex-cop, the ones who got the boot.”

“You might say I got the boot,” Stone said.

“But for all the right reasons,” Eggers replied. “We have a pretty good idea of why you were pensioned off.” He took a deep breath. “Another thing about investigators, they have a tendency to look wrong for some of the work we give them. They dress badly, drink too much, and sprinkle a lot of ’dems, deezes, and dozes’ around their conversation. You, on the other hand, look right and sound right.”

Stone shrugged. Eggers was looking for a private detective, and the thought didn’t interest him much.

Eggers must have read his mind. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re not looking for somebody to just kick down bedroom doors, although I wouldn’t rule that out. What’s interesting about you is a combination of things: you understand how the police department and the DA’s office work; you have a fine grasp of criminal justice procedure; you are a highly experienced investigator; and, unusually with all that, you have the background, education, demeanor, and the language skills that will let you fit easily into any upper-level social situation. In short, a client would be perfectly comfortable explaining his problem to you.”

“What exactly do you have in mind, Bill?”

“You could be very useful to us; let me give you some typical examples. One: a client’s son and heir, who has a three-hundred-dollar-a-week allowance, is, inexplicably, caught selling an ounce of cocaine on his college campus. We need somebody who can show up at the station house, talk to the cop in charge, deal with the DA, and get the charges dropped or reduced to a misdemeanor that the kid can plead to as a youthful offender and that will, in time, be expunged from his record. Two: the kid does something really bad – rapes his date, batters, maybe even murders her. We’ll need our own investigation into the events, and we’ll need to know how the cops and the DA are thinking. A third: A client suspects his wife of having an affair; we need to know for sure, before we can proceed for him. That’s not the whole range of problems that might arise, but it’s a good sampling.”

“I see.” This sounded better than hanging around the criminal courts, picking up burglary and drunk-driving cases.

“Let me lay it out for you. We don’t want you to join the firm, as such. Not yet, anyway. What we’d like you to do is set up your own practice, a professional corporation, which would be associated with us.”

“You realize I haven’t even passed the bar yet.”

“Oh, I forgot; that was my news. You passed.”

“Now how the hell could you know that? I only took the exam yesterday.”

“Friend of a friend had access. He pulled your papers, looked them over, and he reckons you’ll finish in the top third, and, since the New York State bar is the toughest in the country, that’s damn good. It’s not official, of course, but you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Bill, this friend of a friend didn’t… improve my score, did he?”

Eggers looked shocked. “Absolutely not. There’s been no tampering here, you don’t need to worry about that. I told you, we’re an ethical firm. Information was all we were after, and that’s all we got; no law was broken; we don’t do that.”

“Well, in that case, thanks. It’s a load off my mind.”

“Anyway, as I was saying, we want you to be at our disposal. Of course, you can’t actually practice law until your admittance to the bar is official, but you can advise and investigate. In a trial, you can sit at the defense table and whisper into our man’s ear. Then, when you’re admitted, you can accept cases of your own. We just want priority.”

“On what basis?”

“When we hire a freshly admitted associate, the current starting salary is fifty-five thousand. We propose to offer you a retainer of seventy-five thousand dollars annually, against an hourly rate of a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

“What’s your hourly rate, Bill?”

“Two fifty to three fifty, depending, but I’ve been with the firm for twelve years and a partner for eight. Don’t misunderstand me, Stone, it’s not our intention to keep you at arm’s length forever. We’re feeling our way, here, with a new kind of association for us. If this works out the way I hope it will, then you would eventually join the firm, and, sometime in the future, a partnership might come into the picture.”

“Would you care to be a little more specific about ‘eventually’ and ‘sometime in the future’?”

“No. I can’t be. This is simply too new a situation for us. But I’ll tell you what I tell our new associates: there are no guarantees, but if you work your ass off for the firm, if you show you can bring in business of your own, and if you can make our clients trust you, then a partnership is almost inevitable. That’s what they told me when I joined, and it was true. Of course, under the terms we’re offering you, any new business you bring in will be yours entirely. Then, if and when you join us, you bring your clients with you.”

Stone leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Bill, I accept. I’m delighted to accept. And, I’ll tell you the truth, this could not have come along at a better time.”

Eggers leaned forward. “A cash pinch?”

Stone told him about the situation with the house and his bankers.

Eggers took out a pad and made some notes. “You’re being badly treated, and I think we can correct that. May I represent you in this matter?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I’ll get you an advance against your first quarter’s retainer, too.”

“Thank you, Bill; that would certainly take the pressure off.”

Eggers stuck out a hand. “Welcome aboard.”

Stone shook it. “When do I start to work?”

“Tomorrow. We’ve got a couple of things in-house you can look at and advise on. And I think I’ll have an investigative job for you soon.”

Stone walked home, not even noticing the light rain. He was employed. He wouldn’t have to sell the house. The thought of marriage – suppressed because of his financial condition – broke through into his frontal lobe. He flashed ahead five years: he was a partner at Woodman amp; Weld; the house was beautiful, and it was his; he and Cary were throwing elegant dinner parties in his elegant dining room; maybe there was a child. Maybe two. Things were suddenly falling into place.

A miracle had occurred. He didn’t pause to wonder what it might cost him.