person in charge, is Glyndora Gaines. When I came in she was on her feet, studying a clipping torn from the newspaper. The paper itself was spread on her desk, the only thing there besides a framed photo of her son. As soon as she saw me, she walked away.
I was in my overcoat, on my way out to see Peter Neucriss. I'd called Glyndora three or four times now without response, and I asked if she'd gotten my messages.
'Busy,' she said, the gal who'd just been reading the
'This is important,' I added.
I got a look that could have smelted lead.
'So's what I'm doing, man. We're 10 percent below budget and looking for ways to reallocate every expense we got. Don't you want to make
Boy, this is a lady with an attitude — capital A — one of those powerhouse African-American women whose chief regret seems to be that she has but one life to fume over the indignities of the last few centuries. No one gets along with her. Not the attorneys, the paralegals, the staff. During her years as a secretary Glyndora worked with half the lawyers in the firm. She couldn't cut it with another woman and lasted only a week with Brushy. She'd been far too intimidating for Wash — and many others. In all the ensuing scrapes Glyndora's been protected by — guess who? — Martin Gold, patron saint of the local eccentrics. He seems to find her amusing and, as I knew well, is inclined to forgive every sin except sloth for the sake of ability. Able Glyndora is. That's the problem. She resents the way she's been enslaved by circumstance. She had a kid at fifteen, whom she raised on her own, with no chance after that really to make her way.
Recognizing that Glyndora could not resist the chance to prove how capable she is, Martin had ultimately teamed her with Bert, the lawyer for whom she'd worked longest. Glyndora filed his motions, kept his schedule, wrote the routine correspondence, filled in the blanks on the standard interrogatories, made excuses when he took a powder, even went to court for him in a couple of emergencies. (And had an income about 10 percent of his, if you'll excuse the son of a union man.) The only problem was that about a year ago they began to fight. Here I am not being euphemistic. I do not mean occasional cross looks or even one or two sharp words. I mean standing in the hallway bellowing. I mean papers flying, clients in the doorways of the conference rooms staring down the halls. I mean Scenes. Finally, someone who must have been in the army or on a police force got the right idea: promote her. Glyndora was less a tyrant as a boss than she had been as an employee and she clearly enjoyed having a universe of her own. Bert, naturally, carried on like a baby when they took her away. And Glyndora undoubtedly enjoyed that too.
'Glyndora, it's this Litiplex thing. The money.' That stopped her. We were in front of a row of bone-colored cabinets. Her face was narrowed by her customary suspicion. 'When you searched for the paperwork, I think you could have missed a memo. From Bert. Maybe attaching some kind of agreement with Peter Neucriss?'
She shook her head immediately, a copse of long hair, dulled by straighteners. I nodded firmly in response.
'Hey, man.' She swept her hand wide. 'I got 80,000 files here and I had my nose in each one. You think you can do a better job, Mack, help yourself. We lock up at five.'
The phone rang then and she picked it up, long sinister sculpted nails painted bright red. Glyndora is past forty and showing little wear. This is one good-looking woman and she knows it — built like the brick shithouse you've always heard about, five foot ten in her stocking feet and female every inch of it, a phenomenal set of headlights, a big black fanny, and a proud imperial face, with a majestic look and an aquiline schnozzola that reports on Semitic adventures in West Africa centuries ago. Like every fine-looking human I have ever met, she can be charming when there's something she wants, and with me, in certain moods, she's even something of a tease, picking up, I guess, on a certain susceptibility. I've lived most of my life with women like this, who were suffering from the peculiarly female frustration of feeling there had never been any way out to start — and besides, a body can't ignore how she looks. I've heard men speak of Glyndora with admiration for years — but only from a distance. As Al Lagodis, an old pal from the Force, told me one day when he came by for lunch, you'd need a dick like a crowbar.
She had no use for me now. 'I told you, Mack,' she said when she was done on the phone, 'I don't have time for this.'
'I'll see you at five. You can show me what you went through.'
She laughed. Glyndora and non-essential overtime were mutually exclusive. 'When?' I asked.
She picked up her purse, dropping something into it, 118
and gave me a little tight smile that said, Go jump. She was on her way down the hall, where I couldn't follow. I said her name to no avail. She left me by her desk. The newspaper from which she'd ripped that item was still open. It looked like it had been an article, an eighth of a page. A little portion of the headline remained. WES, maybe part of a ‘I. West? I looked up. Sharon, one of Glyndora's underlings, was watching me, a little brown woman in a pink outfit that was half a size too tight. Twenty feet away, she eyed me from her desk with suspicion — worker against boss, woman versus man, all of the workplace's silent little competitions. Whatever I was looking for, she figured, I shouldn't know.
I tried a silly smile and stepped away from the forbidden zone of what was Glyndora's.
'Tell her to call me,' I said.
Sharon just looked. We both knew I had no chance.
B. Prince of Darkness
TransNational Air Flight 397 went down in a horrible fireball at the Kindle County Municipal Airfield in July 1985. A TV crew was coincidentally at the airport to cover the arrival of the Peking Circus at a nearby gate and so the footage played again and again across the country, you've probably seen it, 397 bouncing on its front wheel and taking air again, looking a bit like a kiddie's book where the hippopotamuses dance ballet, all quite slo-mo and graceful until the thing canted forward, hit square on its nose, and fire ignited, flashing through the cockpit first and then rolling back through the plane, lighting the windows as it went, until the engines and underbelly blew off in a memorable eruption of orange and yellow flame. No survivors — 247 fried.
At this point, the plaintiffs' lawyers took the field, the guys and gals who prate to juries about the misery of the widows and orphans and then take a full third of what is forked over in sympathy. As someone who works the other side of the street, I'll spare the high and mighty — let me just note that Peter Neucriss, Barracuda-in-Chief of the local plaintiffs' bar, had filed three lawsuits in behalf of the families of crash victims not only before the remains were buried but in one instance before, quite literally, they had cooled. Within six months, there were more than 137 cases on file, including four class actions in which some enterprising lawyer claimed to represent everyone. All of these cases were consolidated before Judge Ethan Bromwich of the Kindle County Superior Court, a former law professor at Easton whose brilliance is exceeded only by his regard for his own abilities. And in every single suit, TransNational Air, our client, was the lead defendant.
Being the airline in an air crash case is sort of like driving a bumper car at the carnival. There are more drivers than you can count; no one knows or cares about rules of the road; everyone's headed in his or her own direction; and every single one of them seems to get his jollies out of ramming you in the behind. It's not just that there are 247 individual victims, each one with relatives and lawyers looking for money to assuage their misery, but you also have ten or twelve co-defendants, ruthlessly pissed off to be involved. Everybody gets sued, not just the airline and the pilot's estate, but any poor son of a bitch who left so much as a fingerprint on the plane: the folks who made the body, the engine manufacturers, the flight controllers, even the company that distilled the gas — anybody with deep pockets who might conceivably be blamed or forced by the prospect of a decade of expensive litigation to throw a few million bucks in the pot. And every one of those folks has a stop-loss insurer who steps to the plate looking for a way to deny coverage to the company that pays their premiums, or, if that won't work, to blame somebody else and get them to pay. There are weathervanes that do not point in as many directions. We blame the people in the flight tower; they in turn say the ailerons weren't working; the manufacturer speaks of pilot error. The plaintiffs all stand on the side and gloat.
About a year after 397 went down, Martin Gold began an effort that seemed to me as romantic and ill- considered as the Crusades: settling 397. Martin has a mind like a cloud chamber, that device where nuclear physicists trace the course of complex atomic reactions; he is probably the only lawyer I know who could even have
