Wolf in the Shadows (3 page)

I sighed. “And that means …?”

“Look what the cat dragged in.”

During the past weekend Ted had come across a gem of a book by one Henry Beard entitled
Latin for Even More Occasions
. Ted, who is an odd combination of Renaissance man and efficiency expert, read and memorized the entire volume and was now
planning to search the stores for all the other Beard titles, as well as seriously considering signing up for a refresher
course in the dead—well, apparently not so dead—language. Recently I’d been worried about him because he’d seemed depressed—not
an unusual emotional state for a gay person who had lost at least a dozen friends to AIDS during the past year—and I welcomed
this improvement in his spirits. But if he was going to greet me every morning with such expressions as
Expergiscere et coffeam olface
(Wake up and smell the coffee), I wasn’t altogether certain how long I could endure this bizarre new enthusiasm.

I motioned at the closed doors. “I take it they’re annoyed with me for being late.”

Ted shrugged.

“Should I go in?”

“Hank said they’d send for you. If you ever showed up,” He went back to his computer.

Terrific, I thought. The summons to the meeting had sounded ominous from the first, and now I was out of favor for being late.
Bad initial impression, and if I went in there preoccupied with Hy’s situation, I was likely to compound it. What I needed
was to put Hy out of my mind for the moment. Perhaps some diverting conversation—and not in Latin— would help.

Instead of going up to my office, I went down the hall to the cubbyhole under the stairs that belonged to my assistant, Rae
Kelleher. She sat at her desk, one foot tucked up in the chair, the other scuffing rhythmically against the floor as she spoke
on the phone. I squeezed past her and curled in the armchair—my former ratty armchair that she’d slipcovered in blue and
white—and waited while she finished a conversation relating to one of the background investigations she was working. The
office, a converted closet that the building’s former owner had the gall to call a den, was overly warm and stuffy; I glanced
at the ficus plant Rae nurtured under an ultraviolet bulb and saw its leaves were dusty and drooping from lack of water. Rae
herself seemed similarly uncared for; her curly auburn hair needed washing, and her jeans and sweater looked as if she’d slept
in them. It didn’t surprise me; she’d had a big disappointment the week before. Her current love, jewelry chain owner Willie
Whelan, had demanded she sign a prenuptial agreement before he’d present her with a diamond engagement ring, and Rae had flown
into a rage at his remarks on her inability to wisely handle her own finances. Since then she’d handled her hurt with alternating
fits of fury and dejection. This must be a dejected period, because when she hung up the phone and swiveled toward me, I saw
her eyes were red.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Oh …” She waggled an outstretched hand from side to side.

“Another fight with Willie?”

“Look, I can’t talk about him, I’d just start crying again. What’s with you?”

I’d come here for diversion, so I wasn’t about to explain the Hy situation. “I’ve been summoned to the partners’ meeting.”

“Uh-oh. How come?”

“Don’t know, but Hank acted mighty shifty when he asked me to be there.”

“Weird.” She screwed up her freckled face in thought. “I’ve been hearing a word around here lately—‘reorganization.’ ”

“Yes, Hank said that’s what they want to talk about.”

“Well, it sounds to me like a euphemism for demotions or layoffs. This place is getting too corporate, if you know what I
mean.”

“I do. And I hate to sound like I’m wallowing in nostalgia, but I miss the good old days.” In the old days All Souls had possessed
a certain laid-back ambience as well as an excitement about the challenge we were presenting to the legal establishment. Now
we
were
establishment. We’d incorporated; we’d bought the Victorian and spiffed it up with its first paint job in decades; we’d rented
two additional houses across the park out front for our support staff; we had an 800-number hotline for clients; we had marketing
people to sell the membership plan to large northern California employers.

But those were only surface changes. Others went much deeper, and the fact that I was currently sweating over attending a
meeting of the partners told me just how deep. The partners: my friends.

Hank Zahn, senior partner and sole remaining co-founder of All Souls, was my oldest and closest male friend. He was one of
several people I’d shared a house with in Berkeley while getting my degree in sociology. His wife, Anne-Marie Altman, another
founder of the co-op, had left to become head counsel for a coalition of environmental organizations—including the foundation
Hy ran—but she remained my closest woman friend.

Jack Stuart, our criminal specialist, wouldn’t be at today’s meeting because he’d left town this morning to sort through some
painful feelings about the case he and I had just concluded. But Larry Koslowski, our corporate specialist, would be present.
Larry, our resident health nut whose good intentions and peculiar culinary concoctions had nearly poisoned me on any number
of occasions. And then there was Pam Ogata, the tax attorney who had filled Anne-Marie’s shoes—a Japanese-Hawaiian whose
exquisitely decorated quarters on the second floor spoke of her homesickness for the islands. Pam, with whom I’d shared many
an expedition to flea markets, thrift stores, and antique shops.

How on earth could I shrink from a meeting with such friends? Of course, there
were
two relatively unknown quantitie.…

Rae asked, “Shar, what do you think of Mike Tobias?”

It was as if she’d overheard my thoughts. Mike Tobias was one of the unknowns—a newish partner. His background—a childhood
spent in the drug- and crime-plagued Sunnydale projects and a stint as a social worker before attending Hastings College of
the Law—had made him a tireless crusader and perfectly suited him for working with our needier, less empowered clients.

“I’m not sure,” I told Rae. “I like him, and I certainly admire him, but I don’t really know him.”

“The reason I ask is that this corporate stuff became more pronounced about the time Mike made partner.”

“Well, the incorporation and the new partners all happened at the same time. That was when Gloria came on board, too.” Gloria
Escobar devoted her attention to equal-opportunity and civil-rights cases. I knew even less about her than I did about Mike,
because she seldom socialized with any of us.

That was another difference from the old days: back then I could count on knowing all my colleagues well. Many of them had
lived in free rooms that the co-op provided to offset the low salaries a poverty law firm offered. All employees were welcome
to attend the frequent potlucks, parties, and poker games. Today everyone was adequately compensated, and the few who remained
in communal living quarters—Ted, Pam, Larry, Jack, and Rae—paid fair-market rent. A number of the newer associates and employees
led personal lives that were strictly segregated from their work lives, and while the potlucks, parties, and poker games continued,
they catered to an ever-diminishing core contingent.

Rae said, “Mike and Gloria seem like good people, but I can’t warm up to either of them. I get the feeling that anything not
strictly relating to work is off limits, and you’ve got to admit that neither of them has a sense of humor.”

“They’re crusaders, Rae. People with missions often don’t see much to laugh at.”

“Well, if I couldn’t laugh at stuff, I’d go totally insane. Even this thing with Willie has its funny side, if you think about
it.”

I agreed—both about the thing with Willie and the need for laughter. If I lost my ability to laugh at life’s snares and pitfalls—to
say nothing of my own foibles and pomposities— I’d end up in the bin within weeks.

Ted stuck his head through the doorway. “They’re ready for you, Shar.”

“Thanks.” I got up and followed him, smoothing my long red sweater over my jeans and feeling ridiculously like a little kid
being called to the principal’s office.

As I slid open the parlor door, Ted whispered, “
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
”

I glanced back at him. “What?”

“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

They were all there, seated in various attitudes and degrees of repose. Hank was sprawled on the piano bench, leaning back,
elbows propped on the keyboard cover. Pam, always more comfortable on the floor, had her back to the ash-clogged fireplace.
Larry slouched in the overstuffed armchair, his feet propped on its hassock. He had a big pottery bowl in his lap and was
fishing walnuts from a sack and shelling them into it. Mike anchored one end of the maroon sofa, Gloria the other.

I shut the door and looked around for a place to sit. The only one was between Mike and Gloria, but being hemmed in by the
two partners I was least comfortable with would put me at a psychological disadvantage. Finally I went over and plopped down
next to Hank, poking him in the ribs to make him move over.

“Sorry I was late,” I said. “I got hung up on a case I’m working,”

Hank held his ground, poked me back, then sighed and relinquished the center of the bench. Larry tossed me a walnut. Pam smiled
and said, “Better late than never.”

Pam loves to utter aphorisms in a manner that makes them sound like arcane bits of Asian wisdom. I said, “That’s deep, Pam.
Maybe you should get Ted to translate it into Latin.”

She made a face at me. I glanced at Gloria and Mike; neither looked amused. Gloria’s eyes were impatient, Mike’s somewhat
annoyed.

Well, no wonder, I thought, recalling the conversation Rae and I had just had. To them the law and its trappings— even All
Souls’s shamelessly casual partners’ meetings—were a serious matter.

Both Gloria and Mike had struggled to achieve what Hank, Pam, and Larry took for granted. While I knew only the outlines of
Mike’s earlier years and nothing at all of Gloria’s, I was certain neither had enjoyed the slightest privilege or luxury.
In contrast, Hank had been raised in an affluent Peninsula suburb and hadn’t worked a day until he graduated from law school.
Pam’s childhood had been spent on a Lanai pineapple plantation; private schools, both there and on the mainland, had prepared
her for law school at the University of Chicago, where the worst hardship she’d endured was snow. And Larry—he’d been a rabble-rouser
all his life, bummed around Europe for a couple of years after college, then skated through Yale Law. It was a wonder any
of them had developed so much as a shred of social consciousness, but in some way they had. I supposed that the assurance
and feelings of entitlement instilled in them by their upbringing had enabled them to simultaneously take the law seriously
and engage in antics such as poking and joking and walnut-tossing. Just as the lack of said assurance and feelings of entitlement
made such antics seem inappropriate, if not downright offensive, to Gloria and Mike.

In an odd way I empathized with them all, because my own experience bridged the gap. My father had been a chief petty officer
in the navy, underpaid and often out to sea. In his absence, my mother’s hands were too full raising five problematical kids
to supplement the family income. True, we owned our own big rambling home on a large lot on one of San Diego’s finger canyons,
but there were years when we depended on the largess of my uncle Ed, a commercial fisherman who brought us catch after catch
of rock cod and sea bass and halibut. To this day I will not willingly eat fish.

In my family, high-school graduation was supposed to be the cutoff date for financial support, and unlike a couple of my freeloading
siblings, I’d taken the rule seriously. I went to work in retail security, lived at home, paid room and board, and tried to
save toward an apartment of my own. Given my spendthrift tendencies, I suppose I’d still be living there and saving toward
the apartment if my supervisor at the department store hadn’t encouraged me to go to college. That, plus incredibly high SAT
scores and a small scholarship, had gotten me to Berkeley. But even then college hadn’t exactly been a carefree interlude—not
when I was working nights and weekends as a security guard.

Maybe, I thought now, I’d forgotten where I’d come from. Lost sight of who and what I really was. Maybe because I’d achieved
more than I’d expected to—a certain professional reputation, a newly remodeled home of my own, a comfortable life-style—maybe
I’d lost my ability to relate to people like Gloria and Mike, people who deserved far more credit for their accomplishments
than I for mine.

The thought unsettled me. I wasn’t like that—at least not in the self-image I valued.

Hank glanced at me. Whatever expression I wore seemed to sober him. He said to the others, “Okay, let’s come to order again—if
possible.” To me he added, “We asked you to attend the meeting to discuss a promotion.”

A promotion. They weren’t going to lay me off, or even demote me. They wanted to give me a better job.

So why had Hank acted so goddamn shifty earlier? Why did he now fail to meet my eyes? Why was Pam staring down at the rug,
her face hidden by her shiny wings of black hair? Why did Larry’s waxed handlebar mustache twitch as he burrowed through his
bag of walnuts? Only Gloria and Mike looked at me—expectantly, as if they wanted to share my pleasure.

“What kind of promotion?” I asked, trying not to sound suspicious.

Hank cleared his throat before speaking. “As you know, with the growth of the firm, the investigative caseload has become
extremely heavy.”

I nodded.

“We want you to hire more investigators. Two, to begin with. You and I can go over the salary budget later. In essence, this
creates a department, which you’ll head up.” He paused, seeming to search for words. So far this was all good news; why was
he having such a hard time delivering it?

“With the increase in responsibility, of course, will come an appropriate salary increase for you, plus other perks,” he added.