with a green tie that he wasn’t sure matched. The tie had little orange patterns shaped like the state of Florida, a gift from the governor to the first Floridian ever to sit on the Supreme Court. Truitt had left his suit coat in his chambers, purposely setting an informal tone, trying to put the young woman at ease. He’d shaken enough sweaty palms the last few weeks to know just how much pressure his young charges were feeling.
Truitt made a mental note to put his suit coat back on when he went out to lunch. A memo from the chief that very morning announced with considerable distress that certain justices had been seen in the corridors in their shirtsleeves. Truitt toyed with the idea of putting on a powdered wig and flowing robe for his promised meeting with His Holiness.
He approached the young woman, who sat demurely in a chair in his outer office. “I’m Sam Truitt.” He smiled and extended his hand, getting his first look at her. Startled by her beauty, he nonetheless maintained a judicial demeanor.
She rose from the chair and gave him a polite, how-are-you smile. “I’m Lisa Fremont” said the stunning woman in the navy double-breasted blazer. Her handshake was firm, dry, and warm. She had a fair complexion, eyes nearly as blue as her blazer, golden red hair, and what appeared to be a great figure underneath the conservative outfit.
No way will I hire her. No fucking way. Too good looking. Way beyond attractive. Connie would kill me.
“I see you’ve met Eloise,” he said, gesturing toward his secretary, a plump woman in her sixties who was perched in front of a word processor, eyeglasses dangling on a rhinestone chain looped around her neck. “Elly was with me in private practice, at legal services, at Harvard, and now here. She keeps track of my appointments, corrects my misspellings, and warns me when I have gravy on my tie.”
“At Harvard, you didn’t wear a tie,” Eloise said, without looking up from her keyboard, her voice disapproving. “Blue jeans and chambray shirts, you looked like a cowboy in a Marlboro ad.”
“Elly remembers when I couldn’t find the courthouse door.”
“His first trial was a pro bono criminal case,” Elly said, momentarily stopping her typing. “His presumably innocent client stuck a firecracker into the ear of a friend.”
“A couple of drunks in a bar,” Truitt explained.
“Boys will be boys,” Lisa said, easily working her way into the story.
“Exactly,” Eloise agreed. “So here’s young Scrap-that was his nickname before he got so high and mighty- dancing around the courtroom like Fred Astaire, cross-examining the victim.” She dropped her voice a couple of octaves and sang out, “Isn’t it true, Mr. Fiore, that you suffered no permanent injuries?”
“And the witness looks at me,” Truitt broke in, “and says-”
“I beg your pardon,” Lisa interrupted, cocking her head and putting a hand to her ear.
Truitt looked at her in astonishment.
“That’s right!” he said, impressed.
The story was meant to loosen up the applicant as well as test for a sense of humor. This was the first time anyone had the courage or intuition to beat him to the punch line. It did not occur to Sam Truitt that Lisa already knew his often-told tale from reading an obscure legal newspaper that had profiled him.
If only you weren’t so distractingly, maddeningly beautiful I could be as chaste as one of the chief’s monks in the monastery, but with my reputation, he’d still think I was shagging you.
Nearly all the 532 resumes Truitt had received were from qualified candidates. Top students from the best law schools, they could all write, research, and analyze. For his three clerks-he was entitled to four but wanted a smaller staff-Truitt sought a team with camaraderie. They’d have to put in long hours, but they should also be able to have a beer together. He admired hard workers, and perhaps because of his own background, appreciated those who did not have a law school education handed to them as a legacy. He also wanted at least one woman, and someone from west of the Mississippi.
So far, he had hired two men. Victor Vazquez came to Florida from Cuba with his parents on the Mariel boatlift, attended Miami High, worked two jobs at Tulane, then earned a free ride at the University of Michigan Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Law Review. Next was Jerry Klein, whose IQ was off the charts and who had dropped out of medical school to enroll at Yale Law because he thought it would be fun. He won the job by telling Truitt that the only difference between the two professions was that lawyers merely rob you while doctors rob you and kill you, too.
“I think W. C. Fields said that,” Truitt responded, testing the chubby young man.
“Actually it was Chekhov.”
“I know,” Truitt told him. “I just wanted to see if you’d correct me. You’re hired.”
Either Klein had chutzpah, or he lacked the natural instincts to be wary of correcting his boss. Either way, Truitt liked him. He sensed that Lisa Fremont had the same self-confidence. Only difference, the obese, pimply Klein looked like a sausage stuffed into an ill-fitting suit. This goddess standing before him looked as if she just stepped off the cover of Cosmopolitan.
Ten years ago, hell five years ago, he would have relished the sexual tension, the flirtatiousness that is a constant companion in the workplace. But there was a difference between a university faculty and the Supreme Court. The chief justice, bless his scurrilous heart, was right about that. The tabloids would love to have another scandal as juicy as the President and the intern.
Truitt was determined to be polite but brief with Ms. Lisa Fremont, then dismiss her and continue the search for the female equivalent of Jerry Klein.
“Let’s go into my office and talk,” he said. “If you’re up for it, Elly makes a potent cafe Cubano. Any that’s left over, we send to Cape Canaveral for the booster rockets.”
“Sissy,” Elly called at him.
“I’d love some,” Lisa said. “I missed my morning coffee.”
It was the first lie she would tell that day, but by no means the last.
Sitting primly with legs crossed in an antique chair more handsome than comfortable, Lisa sized up Sam Truitt’s office. It had that messy, genius-at-work look. Trial transcripts, pleadings binders, the official records of a hundred cases covered the mahogany desk, a brown leather sofa, and portions of the plush blue and gold carpet. Somewhere on that desk or on a wooden cart nearby, Lisa knew, would be the consolidated cases of Laubach et al. v. Atlantica Airlines. There would be copies of the pleadings, the summary judgment dismissing the cases, the one-sentence affirmance in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the plaintiffs’ petition for certiorari, and the Supreme Court’s four-to-four decision-prior to Truitt’s confirmation-to hear the case. Although it would take five of the nine justices to overturn the summary judgment, under the Court’s time-honored Rule of Four, a majority had not been necessary to grant review.
Lisa had already read the file, courtesy of Max’s lawyers. She knew the facts. She knew the law. All she did not know was how to convince anyone-much less the humane and sensitive Sam Truitt-to close the courthouse door to nearly three hundred grieving families. But that would have to come later. First, she had to get the job, and she was beginning to feel the butterflies. She tried to chase a recurring thought-that she didn’t really belong here. That all the higher education, and the fine clothes and the superficial gloss that came from flying first class and staying in penthouse suites couldn’t hide who she really was. Draping a streetwalker in mink didn’t make her a duchess.
All this time, I thought I’d come so far, but have I? Why do I feel like the same scared kid who ran away from home?
She feared that Sam Truitt would see right through the facade, that she would be humiliated and never get the job. For a moment, Lisa felt lightheaded and thought she might faint. Then she sipped the demitasse of Cuban coffee, waiting for the caffeine to surge into her veins. As she half-listened to the justice explain the law clerk’s duties-all of which she knew-she forced herself to calm down and concentrate.
Max is counting on me, and I can’t fail him.
She studied the chambers, looking for clues to Sam Truitt, the man. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered one wall. The books contained every decision of every federal court since the founding of the Republic. The latest edition of the United States Code, the federal statutes, were there, too, as were the tens of thousands of regulations of federal agencies. A computer at the desk was linked to databases that could research in seconds what would have taken days or weeks in earlier times. In the corner, half-a-dozen cardboard boxes remained to be unpacked.
