No Way Out (4 page)

“What’s that?”

“It’s the National DNA Index System.”

Bethel smiled nervously. But then she said something that struck Bridget as rather strange.

“What if his lawyers dig up stuff that they can throw at me?”

“So how big is this Department then?” Andi asked the lean bespectacled man in a light grey suit as they walked across a dark blue carpet past the desks in the open-plan office.

A mix-up about her starting date had meant that she spent the morning sitting in a room reading brochures and web-based material about Levine & Webster instead of beginning her induction and being introduced to the staff. The Human Resources Manager wouldn’t be back till Monday, so it was left to Paul Sherman – one of the partners in the firm – to lead Andi along through the maze of desks, as some of the younger (male) members of the staff leaned out from their shoulder height partitions to get a glimpse of the new girl. The women, for the most part, kept their attention to their photocopying or papers on their oak desks, only glancing round briefly to size up the competition.

“It’s not really a department,” Sherman replied nervously. “It’s more of a section in
my
department.”

Andi experienced the first hint of unease as these words wafted over her.

“I don’t understand. I thought I was going to head up a department over here.”

Sherman squirmed with embarrassment. He was only slightly shorter than Andi, yet she seemed to tower over him, possibly because of the nervous, shifting way in which he stood. He reminded her of some character out of a Charles Dickens novel, she just couldn’t put a name to it.

“Well my department covers torts and, for our purposes, tortious liability of criminals is a sub-section of that.”

Sherman seemed embarrassed, as if perturbed by Andi’s confrontational approach, but reluctant to follow suit.

“Well anyway, I won’t try to second guess you. When we’ve got a victim case to litigate, you’ll be the one whose desk it lands on. You’re the expert in that field. I’m just a humble negligence lawyer.”

Humble!
That was it. He reminded her of Uriah Heap in
David Copperfield
!

The uneasy feeling was growing in Andi. This wasn’t what they’d promised her when they offered her the job. They had given her the job without an interview, based on nothing more than her resumé and the recommendation of her department head back in New York. But what Sherman was describing now wasn’t anything like what they had described when they made the job offer. If anything it was a step backwards.

She had made this move because it had become clear to her that in New York she could only move sideways. But now it looked like she had been suckered into this and was going nowhere just as fast and without even the benefit of old friends to comfort her. She felt betrayed.

No, she told herself. Don’t prejudge. Maybe it’s not what it seems. Maybe they just have a less formal structure in this firm.

“So let me get this straight Mr. Sherman. Any crime victim wanting to sue the perp is mine?”

She was watching his face carefully now.

“As long as it falls exclusively within your remit. There might be some areas of overlap, in which case we’ll have to discuss it. But nobody’s going to go behind your back, let alone over your head. Everything’ll be done on a consensus basis.”

It was obvious that he was trying to sound encouraging: to make her feel at home. It was clear that they respected her or they wouldn’t have hired someone from the other side of the country and made such a generous pay offer, not to mention paying her relocation costs.

“I guess it makes sense. It’s just not what I had in mind.”

“Well let’s see how it goes,” he said encouragingly. “You’ll have a lot of autonomy. And in most cases no one will try to second-guess you. The other partners will probably defer to your judgment. You’re the specialist after all.”

“Okay,” said Andi brightening up. “Let’s get to work.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Sherman stopped, prompting Andi to do likewise.

“So where’s my office?”

Again Sherman looked embarrassed.

“Well it’s not really an office,” he said nervously. “As you can see we’re open plan here.”

“You mean only the partners have private offices?”

“Well, no, some of the others do too. But we didn’t have a spare room, apart from the conference rooms. You’ll get one too when we’ve got things sorted out. It’s just a matter of re-arranging things. In the meantime, you’ll have a booth in the corner – away from most of the noise… what?”

He had noticed the expression on her face. “What?”

“Look, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I’ll spell it out to you. This isn’t what I signed on for. I signed on to have an office, even head a department. Not to be an orphan or a step-child.”

“Well check out the ass on that!”

Alex shot an angry look at the leering redneck in torn jeans who was nursing the near-empty Bud can. The man looked back as if to say “wanna make an issue of it buddy?”

The truth of the matter was that Alex didn’t want to. But he was ready to. He was more afraid of the professional consequences to himself, as a lawyer, than the possibility of getting beaten up. The guy was bigger than Alex. But Alex had trained in
krav maga
– an Israeli martial art – and reckoned the odds at about fifty-fifty.

Not wanting to feed the redneck’s desire for attention, Alex returned his attention to the table that the lithe, 34-year-old, dark-haired, Chinese-American woman was bending over.

They were in the Embassy Billiards Club in San Gabriel. The place had been packed for the men’s snooker event – the fourth in the six-venue US tour. But the hall seemed half-empty as the woman in black pants and matching vest lined up her most crucial shot of the frame – if not the entire semi-final match. In America, where nine-ball pool was well established, and British snooker was a strange foreign animal, even the men’s game was only just beginning to get established – and then mainly in the cosmopolitan areas like New York and California. On both coasts it was helped by the Chinese-American population who in some cases loved snooker with the same passion as that of the native Chinese.

After a few seconds, the chattering settled down to a pall of respectful silence as the crowd held their breath with eager anticipation, wondering if Martine Yin could pull it off.

She took the shot with cool ease, not tentatively, but with the firm confidence of some one who knew that there were no prizes for second best.  And when the last red ball in the chain dropped into the right corner pocket and the cue ball rolled slowly to a halt a foot away from the left cushion, the small crowd of appreciative aficionados who were there to watch the game and not just gape at Martine, let out a whooping cheer for the skill of not just sinking the pot but also getting the cue ball into an ideal position to set up the next shot.

And Alex was amongst those applauding wildly – although he had to admit that he was one of those who was there to watch Martine more than the game.

They had been going out, on and off, for over a year now – if you could call it going out. It had started after the Clayton Burrow case, when Martine had spent several months pursuing Alex for an interview. She was a TV reporter and she had covered what had now become Alex’s most famous case: the Burrow case. She had in fact been one of the reporters in the observation room adjacent to the death chamber when they got the fateful call to abort the execution.

And then, she had witnessed, albeit from a distance, Alex’s intense conversation with his legal intern followed by the intern’s arrest. This whole surreal episode had culminated in a high-speed car chase in the dead of night, ending in a fatal crash that unfortunately evaded the cameras of the news helicopters.

After the case, Alex had offered some considerable resistance to Martine’s interview request, and when they did finally talk about it, she got the impression that he was holding something back. At first, she had been determined to break his resolve and get in under his guard. But somewhere along the line, she sensed that
what
Alex was holding back had more to do with his personal feelings than with any hard facts about the case itself. She realized that notwithstanding the time-honored lawyer jokes, Alex was all too human and this in turn impressed upon her that there were limits to how predatory she could be in her own chosen vocation.

It was only after that, and because of this softening in Martine’s character, that the relationship between them really started to develop. And even then it was a relationship at a distance, which tended to stunt its growth. She was based in Los Angeles; he in San Francisco.

“I’d like to put one in your pot babe,” the redneck called out, as he swaggered to the bar to get a refill.

“Why don’t you can it,” said Alex turning round again.

“Wanna step outside and settle it?” the man challenged.

“Why don’t you
both
can it!” Martine snapped. “I’m trying to concentrate.”

By this stage, the referee could no longer hope that the situation would play itself out without his intervention. He called a couple of bouncers to escort the redneck off the premises. The redneck was all set for a punch up, when his friends hauled him off and convinced him that it wasn’t worth the hassle.

 Martine turned back to the table and – taking a deep breath to regain her composure – potted the black and then another red. She had come to the table with four points and eight frames on the board against her opponents 61 points and eight frames, after a nail-biting battle of safety shots. Her opponent, a petite blonde, had missed a two-cushion escape from a tricky snooker and this gave Martine a final chance to save the match on this final frame.

But only if she made every shot.

Keeping her cool she made another black and then a red. But this time, the cue ball drifted towards the balk end of the table and she had to settle for a pink instead of a black. She knew that there were no more chances. After the pink she had to pot the last red and get on the black. She sank the pink and came a little too far on the final red. Not that she couldn’t pot the red. It was an easy shot in itself. But if she just rolled it in she would be on the wrong side of the black.

She had to play it with pace and come off three cushions in order to get back down the table to the black. But if she played it with pace, she also had to play it with deadly accuracy.

She took the shot with pace… a lot of pace.

The red ball was still rattling in the jaws when the cue ball came off the first cushion and moved at pace to the balk end. Still in a tense state after the would-be punch-up with the redneck, Alex held his breath and prayed…

The ball dropped into the pocket to shriek’s of delight from the crowd. And to top it all off – the crowning glory – the ball came to rest with perfect position to pot the black one final time before the clear up.

From there it was almost an anticlimax as Martine cleared up, yellow, green, brown, blue pink, red and black. But when the frame ended, there was thunderous applause. She had made a break of 58 and a frame-winning score of 62.

The crowd loved it when a match came down to the wire, however nerve-racking it might be for the players. Consequently, Martine found herself having to sign many autographs before she finally got to talk to Alex.

“You were great,” he said.

“Do me a favor,” she replied, “Don’t ever do that again.”

“What’d I –”

“You
know
what I’m talking about. I don’t need you to get into fights for me. You don’t have to prove anything.”

“But he was –”

She held up her hand.

“Let’s go grab a bite.”

“The reason we got a drug problem is ’cause the
Man
flooded the ghetto with cheap cocaine!” the black militant shouted into the microphone. “And the reason things haven’t changed brother Elias, is because we’ve still got Uncle Toms like
you
blaming the
Brothers
for what the
white man
did to us!”

The audience broke into loud spontaneous applause, especially the large group of the black militant’s own supporters.

Elias Claymore was enjoying himself, as the white supremacist on the other side of the studio struggled above the roar of approval to make his answer heard. It was guests like these who made Claymore’s ratings. The militants might get the anger off their chest, but it was
Claymore
who’d make more money.

Claymore was just as black as this militant guest of his. Now in his late fifties, of average build, his colorful life had run the gamut from left-wing radical to Islamic fundamentalist to neo-conservative and born-again Christian.

This was meant to be a three-way debate between secular black militants, black Muslims and the Klan. But the black militant had turned the debate on conservative blacks, including Claymore himself, and made the white supremacists in the studio – who had raised the drug issue in the first place – largely irrelevant.

“What
they
did to
us
is no excuse for what we’re doing to
ourselves
brothers!” Claymore replied. “We have to stop blaming others. We used to be slaves to the white
man
. Now we’re slaves to the white
powder
. I say it’s time for us to break the chains and set ourselves free once and for all!”

Again the audience burst into thunderous applause, except the small cadre of militants. Claymore looked around and saw the approval on the faces of most of the audience, black and white. The black militant had almost won them over, but Claymore knew that with a few well-chosen words he had won them back.

Then a man wearing a suit and a bow tie with a crescent on it spoke up.

“If you think that joining the white establishment is a solution, then you’re as big a fool as he is.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Claymore sneeringly.

“I mean you’ve jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. You’ve betrayed your people twice over.”