Both are significant leads that need to be tracked down, but there’s something else I need to do first. So the next morning, when the doors of the shuttle slide open in Times Square, I’m one of the five hundred or so suckers ready to go to war for four hundred spaces.
The same quick first step that got me to the NBA gets me onto the car, and as the subway lurches the quarter mile to Grand Central, I feel as full of purpose and anxiety as any other working stiff in New York. I’m a workingman now. Why shouldn’t I be a commuter too? Jeez, I’m even wearing a suit. And it’s neatly pressed.
At the other end of the line, the urgent scramble resumes, this time upward toward Forty-second Street. I drop a dollar in the purple lining of an open trumpet case and head east until I’m standing in front of the marble facade of 461 Third Avenue, the suitably impressive home of one of New York’s most venerable white-shoe law firms- Walmark, Reid and Blundell.
Before I have a chance to lose my nerve, I push through the gleaming brass doors and catch an elevator to the thirty-seventh floor.
But that just gets me to the
Instead of an armed sentry, there’s a stunning blond receptionist wearing a headset and looking like a cyborg.
“Good morning. I’m here to see Kate Costello,” I say.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“I’m a friend.”
To the receptionist, that’s the same as a no. Maybe worse. She directs me toward a leather purgatory, where for the next twenty minutes I sweat into a thirty-thousand-dollar couch. Last night, coming here unannounced seemed a stroke of genius, and during the three-and-a-half-hour train ride from Montauk, my confidence never flagged. Well, not too much anyway.
But witty conversations with yourself and mock rehearsals can never duplicate the tension of the actual moment-and now Kate strides toward me, low heels clicking like little hammers on the marble floor.
I wonder if she knows how little her austere navy suit does to conceal her beauty. And does she care?
“What are you doing here?” she asks, and before I say a word, I’m back at the bottom of the hole I dug with Kate ten years ago.
“I need your help to defend Dante Halleyville.”
This is the point where I figured Kate would invite me back to her office, but all she does is stare through me. So I make my pitch right there in the lobby, laying it out as succinctly as I can. What I say makes perfect sense to me, but I have no idea how it’s being received. I stare into Kate’s bright blue eyes but can’t read them, and when I stop to catch my breath, she cuts me off.
“Tom,” she says, “don’t ever come here again.”
Then she spins and walks down the hall, the clicking of her heels sounding even chillier than when she arrived. She never looks back.
Chapter 45. Kate
I RETREAT FROM Tom Dunleavy’s totally unexpected ambush to the sanctuary of my office. I know that sounds superficial. It’s just a room. But I’ve only had it a month, and the elegant furniture and dazzling East River view haven’t lost the power to make me feel better the instant I step inside.
Thirty-one e-mails have come in since nine last night. Eight are related to the cease-and-desist letter I messengered to the lead attorney for Pixmen Entertainment last night. Our client, Watermark, Inc., considers Pixmen’s new logo too close to one used by one of their divisions, and my letter accused them of trademark infringement and raised the prospect of aggressive legal action, including a possible freeze on all Pixmen income for the last fourteen months.
In an e-mail sent at 3:43 a.m., Pixmen’s attorney reports that the logo has been deleted from all outgoing product, and e-mails from Watermark’s attorneys express their satisfaction and gratitude. Persuasively threatening cataclysmic doom is one of the cheap thrills of my job.
A dozen other e-mails are the fallout of an embarrassing feature in
At exactly 9:00 a.m., Mitchell Susser arrives to brief me on the upcoming insider-trading trial of former Credit Mercantile managing partner Franklin Wolfe. An earlier trial, handled by one of our senior partners, ended in a hung jury, and I’ve been assigned the retrial.
“Relax, Mitch,” I say, not that it does much good. Susser, a brand-new hire who was Law Review at Harvard, has been reviewing the trial transcripts. “Wolfe,” he says, “spends way too much time implausibly denying activity that isn’t clearly illegal. It costs him his credibility and gains him almost nothing. I think a second trial is a great opportunity.”
We’re considering which of our defendant-preppers would make the best pretrial coach when Tony Reid, the “Reid” of Walmark, Reid and Blundell, sticks his eminent gray head into the room. Beside him is Randall Kane, arguably the firm’s most valuable client.
“Got a minute, Kate?” he asks rhetorically.
Susser sweeps up his papers and bolts, and Tony Reid and Kane take his place in the seating area at the far end of my office. “Of course, you know Randy, Kate.”
I don’t need to have met Kane to know him. In the process of making Bancroft Subsidiaries one of the fastest- growing corporations in the world, Kane has become an iconic business leader, the embodiment of the hard- charging CEO. With a proposal jotted down on a napkin, a colleague in another division just got him a six-million- dollar advance for a business book.
But as Reid explains with exactly the right degree of urgency, all that could be jeopardized by a just-filed class-action lawsuit. It charges Bancroft with tolerating a work environment hostile to women and allowing a pattern of widespread sexual harassment. The suit names Kane directly.
“I know I don’t need to tell you,” says Reid, “that this opportunistic litigation is nothing but thinly veiled extortion.” Based on my own experience with class-action lawyers, that’s probably true. Sophisticated ambulance- chasers, these lawyers come up with a target, prepare a suit, and then trawl for victims.
“I’m not rolling over on this one, Kate,” says Kane. “It’s total crap! Three of Bancroft’s eight senior vice presidents are women, and the company was cofounded by my wife. They’ve got the wrong guy. If I have to, I’ll take it all the way to trial.”
“I can’t believe that will be necessary,” I say, “but I assure you our response will be aggressive.”
“You bet it will!” says Randall Kane.
The rest of the day is wall-to-wall briefings, meetings, and conference calls. The company dining room delivers a chef’s salad for lunch and sushi for dinner, and when I turn off the light at 11:00 p.m., I’m not the last person to leave.
The lovely fall night reminds me of the lovely fall day I’ve missed, and I decide to walk awhile before catching a cab.
I’m taking my first steps toward mostly deserted Park Avenue -when a tall figure rises from the shadows of the small stone plaza beside our office building.
