The Associate Read online

  Daniel swiveled his chair toward the window and watched the darkness gather over the Willamette River. When was the last time he had left these offices when it was still light out? Molinari was right. He did have to learn to say no, to relax a little, but he worried that he would earn a reputation as a slacker if he turned down work. Just last night he had awakened, drenched in sweat, from a dream in which he cringed in the dark at the bottom of an elevator shaft as a car descended slowly, but inexorably, toward him. You didn't have to be Sigmund Freud to dope out the meaning of that one.

  At 6:45, Daniel finished rereading a draft of his memo. He stretched and rubbed his eyes. When he pulled his hands away he saw Susan Webster smiling at him from the doorway. He couldn't decide what was more shocking-that she was smiling or that she'd deigned to pay him a visit.

  "Hi," he said casually, consciously keeping his eyes off of her runway-model figure.

  "Hi yourself," she answered as she perched gracefully on the arm of one of Daniel's chairs. She glanced at the papers spread across his desk.

  "If you're not at happy hour you must be working on a case of monumental importance. Is that a brief for the United States Supreme Court or a letter to the president?"

  Susan looked and dressed like a cover girl, but her degree from Harvard was in physics and she'd been in the top ten at Stanford Law. Because of their science backgrounds, Susan and Daniel had been chosen as part of a team that was defending Geller Pharmaceuticals against a claim that one of its products caused birth defects. During the six months that they had worked together she had never asked Daniel's opinion on anything and rarely addressed him, so he was surprised that she was talking to him now.

  "This is a memo for Mr. Briggs," Daniel said finally.

  "Oh? Anything interesting?"

  "It's another one of Aaron Flynn's cases," Daniel replied.

  "Flynn again, huh? He sure has his fingers in a lot of pies."

  "I'll say."

  "Which of our clients is he suing, this time?" Susan asked.

  "Oregon Mutual. They insure Dr. April Fairweather for malpractice."

  "The therapist?"

  "Yeah. How did you know?"

  "Arthur had me do some work on the case, too. It's really weird. Do you know the facts?" Susan asked.

  "No," Daniel answered. "I'm just working on an evidence issue."

  "This college student went to Fairweather because she was depressed and having trouble sleeping. She's alleging that Fairweather hypnotized her and caused her to develop false memories that her folks were in a satanic cult that did all sorts of stuff to her when she was a kid."

  "What sorts of stuff?"

  "Weird sex, torture."

  "Sounds kinky. Is any of it true?"

  "I doubt it."

  "I met Dr. Fairweather once when she was with Mr. Briggs," Daniel said. "She seemed normal enough."

  "Do you have a lot more work to do on the memo?"

  "No. I just have to proof it once more."

  "So you're almost done?" Susan asked.

  "Pretty much."

  Daniel didn't really imagine that Susan was going to suggest a drink or dinner-he pictured Susan's dates as rich, GQ -model types who drove exotic sports cars and owned homes in the West Hills with fabulous views of the mountains-but for just a second he fantasized that she'd been won over by his curly black hair, his blue eyes, and his engaging smile.

  Susan leaned forward and spoke in an inviting whisper.

  "Since you're finished with your work"-she paused dramatically-"could you do me a huge favor?"

  Daniel had no idea where this was going, so he waited for Susan to continue.

  "Coincidentally, it involves another one of Flynn's cases, Geller Pharmaceuticals," Susan said. "You know he made that request for production weeks ago?"

  Daniel nodded.

  "As usual, Geller took forever to get the documents to us. They're supposed to be delivered to Flynn by eight in the morning."

  Susan paused.

  "Renee has it in for me," she said. Renee Gilchrist was Arthur Briggs's secretary. "She knew I had important plans tonight, but she told Brock Newbauer that I could review the documents this evening. She claims that she forgot, but I know she did it on purpose." Susan leaned closer and spoke conspiratorially. "She is jealous of any woman Arthur works with. That is a fact. Anyway, since you're done, I was wondering if you could finish the document review?"

  Daniel was exhausted and hungry. He'd been looking forward to going home.

  "Gee, I don't know. I still have some more work on this memo and I'm pretty beat."

  "I'll make it up to you, I promise. And there's not that much to do. Just a couple of boxes and you'd only have to give the papers a cursory review. You know, check for attorney work product or privileged stuff. It would mean a lot to me."

  Susan looked desperate. He was almost done, and there wasn't anything he was going to do tonight. Maybe finish a book he'd been reading, if he wasn't too tired, or watch some TV. What the hell, it never hurt to do a good deed.

  "Okay." He sighed. "I'll save you."

  Susan reached across the desk and laid her hand on top of his.

  "Thank you, Daniel. I owe you."

  "Big time," he said, already feeling like a sucker. "Now go and have fun."

  Susan stood up. "The boxes are in the small conference room near the copying machine. Make sure they get to Flynn's office by eight in the morning. And thanks again."

  Susan was gone so quickly her disappearance seemed magical. Daniel stood and stretched. He was going to take a break anyway, so he decided to see what he'd let himself in for. He walked down the hall to the conference room and turned on the light. Five banker's boxes covered the table. He opened one. It was packed with paperwork. Daniel did a quick calculation and came up with a ballpark figure of three to five thousand pages per box. This would take all night, if he was lucky. This was impossible. He'd never get home.

  Daniel hurried into the hall to see if he could catch Susan, but she was gone.

  Chapter Three.

  The Insufort case had started with the Moffitts. Lillian Moffitt worked as a dental hygienist and her husband, Alan, was an officer in the loan department of a bank. The day they found out that Lillian was pregnant was one of the happiest days of their lives. But Toby Moffitt was born with severe birth defects and their happiness turned to heartache. Alan and Lillian tried to convince themselves that Toby's bad fortune was part of God's mysterious plan, but they wondered what part of this plan could include heaping such misery on their little boy. All became clear to Lillian on the day she went to her neighborhood grocery store and saw a headline in a supermarket tabloid about Insufort, which called it the "Son of Thalidomide."

  Thalidomide was one of the great horror stories of the mid-twentieth century. Women who used it during pregnancy bore babies with dolphinlike flippers instead of normal limbs. The article in the tabloid claimed that Insufort was as harmful as Thalidomide and that women who took the drug were giving birth to monsters. While she was pregnant Lillian had taken Insufort.

  The night that the Moffitts read the article about Insufort they prayed for guidance. The next morning they called Aaron Flynn. The Moffitts had seen Aaron Flynn's television ads and they had read about the flamboyant Irishman's multimillion-dollar judgments against a major auto company and the manufacturer of a defective birth control device. "Could Mr. Flynn help Toby?" they asked. "You bet," he told them.

  Soon after the Moffitts hired him, Flynn ran newspaper and television ads informing other mothers who had used Insufort that he was there to help them. Then he posted information about his case on corporate protest sites on the Internet. He also alerted friends in the media that Toby Moffitt's case was the tip of a product liability iceberg. This strategy brought in more clients.

  One of the first things that Flynn did after filing Moffitt v. Geller Pharmaceuticals was to serve requests for discovery on Geller through its law firm, Reed, Briggs, Stephen
s, Stottlemeyer and Compton. Flynn asked for every document Geller had regarding the testing and analysis of Insufort, the warnings that had been provided to physicians dispensing the drug, copies of other lawsuits that had been filed, reports from physicians and others telling of problems with Insufort, data about the manufacturing process-and any other information that would help him discover the connection between Insufort and Toby Moffitt's terrible deformity. The boxes of paper that Susan Webster had conned Daniel into reviewing were only a few of the boxes of discovery that had flowed through the offices of Reed, Briggs to the law offices of Aaron Flynn since the Geller Pharmaceutical litigation had commenced.

  Daniel was furious with Susan, but he took every task seriously, no matter how routine. At first he tried to read each page of each document, but his attention to detail waned after a few hours, as did his energy. By three in the morning he was barely aware of what was on each page. That's when he went to a small room on the twenty-eighth floor with a bed, an alarm clock, and a washroom with a narrow shower that was used by associates who were pulling all-nighters.

  When the alarm went off at six, Daniel showered and shaved and, coffee in hand, attacked the remaining documents. There were still two boxes to go and an eight o'clock deadline to meet. Daniel remembered Susan saying that he only had to give the documents a cursory review. He hated doing anything halfway, but there wasn't much more he could do in the time remaining. At 7:30, Daniel began stuffing the remaining papers back in their boxes. He was almost through when Renee Gilchrist walked in, immediately noticing the boxes spread over the conference table and Daniel's obvious exhaustion.

  Arthur Briggs's secretary was in her early thirties. At five nine, she was almost as tall as Daniel and she had the sleek, muscular build of an aerobics instructor. Renee's dark hair was cut short. It framed wide blue eyes, a straight nose, and full lips that were pursed in an angry frown.

  "Is that the Geller discovery?" she asked.

  "All one billion pages of it," Daniel answered groggily.

  "Susan Webster was supposed to review that."

  Daniel shrugged, a little embarrassed that Renee had found out that he'd been duped into doing Susan's work.

  "She had plans for last night and I wasn't doing anything."

  Renee started to leave, then she stopped.

  "You shouldn't let her do that to you."

  "It's no big thing. Like I said, she was busy and I wasn't."

  Renee shook her head. "You're too nice a guy, Daniel."

  Wheeling a dolly loaded with cardboard boxes across the lobby of Aaron Flynn's law office gave Daniel the same queasy feeling he would have if he saw someone running keys along the side of a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. The exterior of Flynn's pre-World War I office building gave no hint of the grandeur Daniel encountered when he stepped out of the elevator on the seventh floor into a huge lobby that soared upward two stories. The lobby floor was made of shiny black marble and the space was decorated in rich dark woods and bronzed metals. Several columns of lapis-colored marble supported the ceiling. A balcony containing the library ran along three sides of the upper story. Carved into the middle of the lobby floor was a medallion displaying blind Justice holding her scales. Written around the rim in gold leaf were the words justice for all.

  A young woman sat at the far side of the lobby on a high dais that looked more like a bench for a judge than a desk for a receptionist. Daniel was asking the woman where to leave his load when the man himself strode through a door that led to the inner sanctum. Aaron Flynn was talking quietly to another man with the shoulders and neck of a serious bodybuilder and the craggy, weather-beaten face of an outdoorsman.

  "Let me know as soon as you find out where the card was used," Flynn said.

  "I'll get on it," his companion answered. Then he walked past Daniel and out of the office.

  On television, Aaron Flynn's deep voice asked viewers if they needed a champion to help them take on the mighty corporations that had wronged them. "You are not alone," he promised, his face at once sober and compassionate. "Together we will fight for justice, and we will prevail."

  Flynn was equally impressive in person. He was tall and broad-shouldered with red hair and a face that radiated self-confidence and sincerity. His clients saw Flynn as a savior, but Daniel didn't trust him. Part of Daniel's duties on the team defending Geller Pharmaceuticals was to review the animal and human studies conducted on Insufort. They showed it to be a safe product. Daniel was convinced that Flynn's claim that the drug caused birth defects had no factual basis. It would not be the first time Flynn had tried to make millions by creating causes out of whole cloth.

  Five years ago one of the networks had broadcast a horrifying story about a six-year-old boy who was killed in his driveway. His mother swore that her sports utility vehicle had surged forward suddenly when she stepped on the brake, driving her son through the garage door. Other victims of "sudden acceleration" surfaced. They claimed that their SUVs would surge forward when the brake was applied and could not be stopped.

  Aaron Flynn had just opened his practice in Portland, but he had the good fortune to represent the plaintiff in the first "sudden acceleration" case. His million-dollar judgment against the manufacturer of the SUV made his reputation. In the end, the explanation for "sudden acceleration" proved simple. It was not caused by a mechanical malfunction but by human error: drivers were stepping on the gas instead of the brake. By the time the truth came out, the manufacturer had paid millions in damages and settlements, and attorneys like Flynn had made out like bandits.

  Daniel had been introduced to Flynn when the lawyer visited the Reed, Briggs offices for a deposition, but the introduction was quick and Flynn had barely glanced his way during the proceedings. That was why Daniel was surprised when Flynn smiled and addressed him by name.

  "Daniel Ames, isn't it?"

  "Yes, Mr. Flynn."

  "From the way you look, I'd guess you've not had much sleep."

  "No, sir," Daniel answered cautiously.

  Flynn nodded sympathetically. "Lisa can bring you to our coffee room for a mug of java and a muffin."

  "Thanks, Mr. Flynn, but I've got to get back," Daniel answered, unwilling to accept gifts from the enemy even though the idea of coffee and a muffin sounded like heaven.

  Flynn smiled to show he understood. Then he turned his attention to the stack of boxes on the dolly.

  "So Arthur's got you slaving away doing document review. Not what you expected, I'll bet, when you were studying the opinions of Holmes and Cardozo at Yale."

  "Actually, it was the U. of O."

  Flynn grinned. "Then you must be one of the really bright lights if you were able to squeeze in between the lads and lassies of the Ivy League. I'm a graduate of the law school at the University of Arizona myself. Middle of the class."

  He looked at the boxes of discovery again and sighed.

  "You know, when I filed Moffitt v. Geller Pharmaceuticals this firm consisted of two partners and six associates. But since your client has been kind enough to answer my requests for discovery with such thoroughness, I've had to lease another floor and hire five new associates, ten paralegals, and eight support staff people to work on my little set-to with Geller."

  "You're keeping me employed, too, Mr. Flynn," Daniel said, making a nervous joke to keep the conversation going. There was something about Flynn that made Daniel want to prolong their meeting. "It seems like you cross swords with Reed, Briggs pretty often."

  "So I do," Flynn answered with a laugh. "If you ever grow tired of toiling away for evil corporate interests and decide you want to engage in some honest labor, give me a call. We public school boys should stick together. It was good seeing you again."

  Flynn stuck out his hand. As they shook, the elevator door opened, attracting Flynn's attention.

  "Before you go, I'd like you to meet someone."

  Flynn released Daniel's hand and led him toward the office entrance. A haggard-looking woman in he
r late twenties was propping open the door with her shoulder and pushing a stroller into the lobby. In the stroller was a baby boy about six months old. His head was down and Daniel could not see his face. Flynn greeted them both.

  "Alice, how are you? And how is Patrick doing?"

  At the sound of his name, the little boy looked up. He had a mop of blond hair the color of new-mown hay and sky-blue eyes, but below his eyes something had gone terribly wrong. Where his lip should have been was a raw and gaping hole so wide that Daniel could see the saliva that moistened the back of the baby's throat. Patrick's left nostril was normal, but his deformed lip had pushed into the right side of the baby's nose, stretching it wide like Silly Putty. Patrick should have been adorable, but his cleft palate made him look like a horror-movie monster.

  Flynn knelt next to the stroller and ruffled Patrick's hair. The baby made a whistling, hissing sound that bore no relation to the cute cooing sounds made by normal babies. Daniel fought with every ounce of his energy to hide his revulsion, then felt guilty for being repelled by the child.

  "Daniel, this is Patrick Cummings," Flynn said pleasantly as he watched the reaction of the young associate. "And this is Alice Cummings, Patrick's mother. She had the misfortune to take Insufort during her pregnancy."

  "Nice meeting you, Mrs. Cummings," Daniel said, managing somehow to keep his tone light. Patrick's mother was not fooled. She could see that her son's looks repulsed Daniel and she could not hide her sadness.

  Daniel felt awful. He wanted to get out of Flynn's office as fast as possible, but he forced himself to say good-bye and to walk to the elevator slowly so Patrick's mother would not think that he was fleeing from her son. When the elevator doors closed Daniel sagged against the wall. Up until now the children in the Geller case had only been names on a pleading, but Patrick Cummings was flesh and blood. As the car descended Daniel tried to imagine the life Patrick would lead. Would he ever have friends? Would he find a woman who would love him? Was his life over before it had started?