Irreparable Harm (4 page)

“I’ve been locked away working on an appellate brief. How’s your mom doing?”

Naya’s smile faded. “About the same. Some days she knows who I am, some days she doesn’t.”

Naya’s mother had Alzheimer’s, and Naya was doing her damnedest to keep her in her home. She’d declined to the point where she needed round-the-clock care, though. Naya’s brothers and sister either couldn’t or wouldn’t help with the costs of full-time in-home care, so she was shouldering the expense herself. For now, at least. Naya had pared her own expenses to the bare minimum and was pouring almost everything she earned into paying for her mother’s care. Sasha wondered how much longer she could afford it.

“I’m really sorry, Naya.”

Naya pasted her smile back on, all business. “So, what brings you down this hallway?”

Sasha nodded, indicating the
Post-Gazette
’s website open on Naya’s desktop. Not surprisingly, news of the crash was front and center on the local paper’s website, as well as the print edition. Sasha had scanned the headlines in the lobby coffee shop; the crash took up the entire front page. Naya followed Sasha’s gaze to the monitor and looked back at her.

“Metz called Peterson last night,” Sasha told her. “The team’s already in place, except for a legal assistant. You want in?”

“Hell yeah!”

Naya’s eagerness was partly professional and partly pragmatic. The case would involve high stakes and interesting work, as well as lots of overtime. Unlike the attorneys, legal assistants at Prescott were eligible for overtime pay. A senior legal assistant who worked a lot of overtime would bring home more than the contract attorneys and most of the junior staff attorneys. Naya had never shied away from long hours, but now with her mother’s condition worsening, she was more willing than ever to volunteer for extra work.

Sasha knew Naya would jump at the chance to get on the team, but she also knew she didn’t have the juice to get Naya pulled off her other matters. Legal assistants also differed from most junior lawyers at Prescott in that the partners didn’t view them as fungible. The smart partners realized good legal assistants were irreplaceable assets and protected them accordingly.

Whether the associates Sasha had tapped for her team realized it or not, there would be little to no pushback about her pulling them from their document review assignments. As an honest, if tactless, partner had once noted, junior associates were like goldfish: if you lost one, you flushed it and replaced it with another one just like it.

Sasha asked, “Are you sure you can swing it?”

Naya inventoried her workload in her head. It would be brutal but she would make it work. “Yes,” she said simply.

Sasha smiled. “Team meeting at eight thirty. Mellon Conference Room.”

Naya called after her, “Thanks for thinking of me, Mac.”

Sasha drained her coffee as she rounded the corner by the kitchenette. Each of Prescott’s eight floors had its own coffee and tea station. Prescott provided free drinks for its employees. Whether out of generosity or the belief that caffeine-wired lawyers billed longer hours, Sasha neither knew nor cared. She tossed the takeout cup into the recycling bin and poured a fresh cup into a navy blue and cream mug emblazoned with the firm logo.

A hostess was assigned to staff each kitchenette during business hours, charged with brewing fresh coffee, restocking milk, sugar, and cream, cutting lemons for the tea drinkers, running the Prescott & Talbott mugs through the dishwasher, and keeping the area spotless. Most of the hostesses were older women—widows whose pension and social security payments weren’t quite enough to get by on—and a few were young woman, very young, Asian immigrants.

Sasha’s personal ranking system put the coffee hostesses somewhere below a good legal assistant but well above the first-year associates. She smiled at Mai, the hostess—who had retreated to the supply closet when Sasha had approached—and raised her mug in a salute on her way out.

Sasha was well aware that she, too, had once been a hapless first-year associate, and she knew that, just as she had, some of the current crop would blossom into real attorneys. Her cynicism stemmed from the knowledge that most of them would be long gone before she could tell whether they had what it took to be lawyers.

The reality of being handed a six-figure position with no real-world experience and no meaningful guidance tended to cause one of two reactions:  One, the new lawyer was paralyzed with fear and refused to make any judgment calls or take any proactive steps. Or, two, he or she swung to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and became a self-important twit, abusing secretaries and barking out bizarre and wrong-headed orders to anyone in earshot. Both styles were a recipe for failure. The deer-in-the-headlights types generally faded away after a few years, and the Napoleons usually flamed out in spectacular, scandalous fashion.

Every crop of associates had just a handful of survivors. Some were those who had gone to law school as nontraditional students. They were older and had been in the workforce—many even kept working while in law school. Maybe they even had kids already. To them, the stakes were higher, the prize of the high-paying job sweeter.

Others were the golden children. They were the offspring of lawyers and judges and had grown up knowing they were destined for the corner office. Whether it was nature or nurture, they were programmed to succeed, whether they wanted to or not.

Sasha had gone to law school straight from college, but she sometimes thought of herself as part of the nontraditional student group. She was nontraditional for Prescott & Talbott, at least, because she’d grown up poor. Not
poor
poor, to be sure, but working class poor.

Sasha approached the rarified world of Prescott & Talbott and everything it signified differently than her colleagues who’d grown up with maids, vacation homes, and country club memberships. She worked as hard as she could, saved as much of her salary as she could, and took care to dress and speak like one of
them
, but she never pretended to be anything other than what she was: a half-Russian, half-Irish working class kid with no pedigree to speak of.

Chapter 8

At eight twenty-five, Sasha walked into the Mellon conference room. Instead of numbering the conference rooms, the decision makers at Prescott had chosen to name them after prominent old Pittsburgh families and luminaries. Sasha assumed all the industrialists and robber-barons whose names graced the conference rooms had once been clients of the firm; some still were.

She knew for a fact the naming system was confusing to everyone from new employees to clients to visiting attorneys. There were seven floors of offices, each home to four conference rooms, and a second floor conference center, which held another eight. That made for a total of thirty-six conference rooms, none of them numbered or identified by location.

As she entered the conference room, Sasha smiled to see Lettie, her secretary, fussing around with the catering tray and restacking napkins and coffee stirrers that had been stacked perfectly neatly in the first place, as far as Sasha could tell.

“Hi, Lettie.”

Lettie looked up from the pastries. “Good morning, Sasha.”

Sasha waited for the barrage of information that was coming. Lettie Conrad had gone to secretarial school right after graduating from Sacred Heart High and took her career seriously. She was pleasant, meticulous, always helpful, talkative, and probably one of about four people who knew exactly where every conference room was by name.

Lettie took a breath and launched in. “After I saw your e-mail, I reserved this conference room for one hour a day for the next month. That’s as far out as the scheduling software will let me block out, but I’ll talk to Myron about extending it. I ordered breakfast for twelve and coffee for eighteen.”

She paused and pursed her lips to remind her boss how she felt about her coffee consumption and then continued, “I arranged for Flora, from the secretarial pool, to be assigned to the work station right outside. She can make copies, set up conference calls, or whatever you need. If you need me, though, just buzz me and I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

Sasha nodded, peering through the door at Flora, who smiled widely and waggled five very long, dark purple fingertips at her. Sasha glanced down at Lettie’s short, neatly trimmed nails and made a mental note not to ask Flora to do any word processing.

“Sounds good, Lettie. Thanks.”

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Lettie’s hand snaked behind a coffee carafe and reappeared holding a clear plastic cup of yogurt parfait and a spoon.

“Here. I know you won’t eat that stuff,” she nodded toward the danishes and softball-sized chocolate muffins on the catering tray, “so I ordered this for you. Yogurt and granola. Please eat it.”

She placed the cup in front of Sasha and patted it gently.

“Thanks.”

Lettie turned to leave, then remembered something and turned back. “How was your date?”

Sasha looked at her blankly.

“Your date? With the architect?”

“Oh. I had to cancel because of the plane crash.”

Lettie fixed her with a long, disapproving look but said nothing.

She crossed paths with Peterson on her way out and greeted the senior partner formally, “Good morning, Mr. Peterson.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Conrad.”

Noah might not have been able to pick any of the junior associates out of a lineup, but he knew all the veteran staff members by name and, in most cases, knew their spouses’ and kids’ names, too.

He crossed the room and plucked a frosted cinnamon bun roughly the size of a salad plate off the tray. As he raised it to his lips, he tilted his head toward the door. “Is your secretary angry with you?”

Sasha shook her head. “More like disappointed in me,” she said, prying the domed lid off the parfait. “I canceled another date last night.”

Peterson laughed softly. “She’ll never get you married off at this rate, Mac.”

He sat down at the head of the table and turned his attention to his cinnamon bun, as its frosting began to ooze down the side, coming perilously close to his muted, silk tie.

Despite Prescott’s move to a business casual dress code during the tech boom in the late 1990s, Peterson, like many of the older partners, still wore suits most days. Sasha, who joined the firm after the switch, did too. She figured the senior attorneys were more comfortable in business suits because they’d worn them for decades. She wore suits for the practical reason that most casual clothes in her size involved glitter, ruffles, and lace and made ample use of the colors pink and lavender.

She could, however, find petite suits and have them altered to fit. Pants were problematic—too much tailoring involved—so she had settled on a uniform of sorts. She wore sheath dresses with matching jackets. Occasionally, she swapped out the jacket for a cardigan.

Today, because she would be sitting in on the meeting with Metz, she was wearing one of her most conservative suits. A navy sheath with white piping and a long matching jacket. She’d added pearl earrings and a choker and had pulled her hair back into a low, loose chignon. She watched Peterson appraise her. She knew she’d pass muster. Not like the legendary flameout of an associate who’d shown up for a client meeting with a new neck tattoo peeking out from above his collar. She couldn’t even remember his name, but he lived on as a cautionary tale to new hires.

“Did you line up a paralegal?”

Legal assistant
, Sasha thought, but didn’t bother to correct him. “Naya Andrews.”

“Excellent.” Peterson dabbed the icing from his lips with a napkin. There was something dainty about the gesture. He scowled at his watch. “It’s 8:32. Where is everyone?”

“Probably wandering the halls trying to figure out which room is Mellon.”

Peterson half-smiled, conceding the point. He brushed a stray piece of lint off his jacket lapel. “We’re in Frick for the lunch with Metz.”

Sasha poured herself a cup of coffee and looked out the window toward Point State Park and the three rivers that met there. The sun was struggling out from behind the clouds but the water looked gray and cold.

Sasha had been disappointed to learn as a child that, despite Pittsburgh mythology, the rivers didn’t really form a triangle. Her disappointment had been tempered some when her father told her there were actually four rivers. A secret river flowed underground, beneath the city. In fact, it was this fourth, unnamed river that provided the water for the enormous fountain at the Point.