Listening, Sarah could only hope that Senator Fasano failed, and that Mary Costello's day in court would come. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder. Turning, she saw her assistant hovering with a look which combined urgency with hesitance at interrupting.
"Pardon us," she said to Nolan. Turning from his annoyed expression to Janet's worried one, she knew immediately what had happened.
"It's the phone call you were waiting for," Janet whispered.
* * *
Though they had not spoken since their meeting, Norman Conn blurted without preface, "I refused to meet with their lawyer—a man named Nolan."
The reedy tautness in his voice confirmed Conn's stress. Sarah glanced at the closed door of her office. "Who asked you?"
"Our general counsel. If I don't meet with them, they're going to depose me." His voice rose, quickening. "They say if I stole records or gave away corporate secrets, they can sue me and take the house I've had for twenty years."
To Sarah, the telephone felt like a copper wire, a conductor of Conn's tension. "I left you a message," she said, "referring you to a lawyer in Hartford who specializes in protecting the rights of whistleblowers . . ."
"I was going to see him." His voice broke. "Now I don't know."
Sarah paused, suspended between pity and desperation. Bent on his own redemption, Conn had disdained to fear the loss of something as trivial as a job. But one could fear things as simple, and as profound, as the loss of the familiar. A house.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "But if they notice your deposition, you'll be required to testify under oath."
"What if you tell them I'm not going to be a witness?"
At once, Sarah was reminded of Martin Bresler. "I could do that. But I won't." Her voice was softer yet. "I'm sorry, Mr. Conn. But I have a duty to my client. I suggest you ask the lawyer I mentioned about how to protect your rights. Because I'll use those documents you gave me to make sure that you don't lie."
This was an empty threat, Sarah knew—a self-discredited witness was useless at trial. In Conn's silence, she wondered if he knew this.
"I understand," he answered with a croak which, nonetheless, had a measure of dignity. The line went dead before Sarah could say more.
TWENTY-FOUR
Riven by doubts, Chad Palmer prepared to commence the debate on gun immunity.
Senator Palmer had always thought of himself as conservative—a believer in free markets, military preparedness, and individual accountability and initiative. With others of his Senate colleagues—Cassie Rollins among them—he had watched in rising dismay as men like Paul Harshman equated "conservative" with the unfettered gun rights and a militant social agenda fueled by fundamentalism and financed by those for whom, too often, a truly free market meant freedom from the constraints of law.
The latter forces, Palmer knew, bought influence in either party. But while their Democratic beneficiaries adopted what Palmer thought of as a simpering hypocrisy—claiming to take large donations in self-defense— the Republicans of Harshman's stripe cast their voracity for special interest funding as a constitutional right. Thus, Chad's battle against money in politics had earned him the bitter enmity of those within his party for whom guns and money and religion were a recipe for power.
This was why he had struck his Faustian bargain with Frank Fasano, trading gun immunity for a clear shot at campaign finance reform which Kerry Kilcannon wanted almost as much as he. But Kilcannon was President. For the senior senator from Ohio, seemingly blocked by Fasano and his supporters, reform might be his only recompense for a career paid for with his daughter's life. And so Chad went to the floor of the Senate, supported by his most ardent enemies, to oppose a friend whose own wounds Palmer felt more keenly than his allies of convenience ever could.
It was best, Chad knew, to stick with what he truly believed.
He stood at his lacquered desk, notes in front of him. The Senate was full. At its front were Frank Fasano and Chuck Hampton, separated by the narrow aisle which divided the two parties.
"This pestilence of lawsuits," he told his colleagues, "is both symptom and disease. For many small and honest businesses, it is terminal. But for all of us it symptomizes a breakdown in our social fiber where law replaces morals, mischance becomes opportunity, and the courtroom converts neighbors into predators.
"The Civil Justice Reform Act is an effort to restore the time when lawsuits were not a form of social insurance; when lawyers were advocates instead of opportunists; and legislators—not judges—made our laws."
* * *
The Senate was still, attentive. Unlike some of their colleagues, Frank Fasano reflected, Chad Palmer was most effective when he spoke from core belief—he was too free of self-delusion to be facile at dissembling. To Fasano, equally free of delusion but far more inclined to pragmatism, it was what made his Republican rival both admirable and dangerous. To be allied with him, however briefly, was a luxury to be enjoyed, and to have turned Palmer on Kilcannon a genuine work of political art.
"We are told," Palmer continued, "that class actions are the last redoubt of the small investor against financial fraud. If only that were so. But most investors are lucky to recover a dime on a dollar, and only after their wealthy lawyers have pocketed a multimillion-dollar fee." Palmer permitted himself a smile. "For one such lawyer, the definition of a 'small investor' is the pet client who has purchased one share of stock in every company listed in the Fortune 500. Enabling his legal champion—as of yesterday—to bring twenty-six class actions in his name.
"Let there be no doubt who ultimately pays this lawyer's fees. We do—in higher prices, lost jobs, and the erosion of the principle that the purpose of a lawsuit is to gain genuine redress for an authentic wrong."
Palmer paused, gaze sweeping the chamber. "But I have another concern," he said firmly. "That lawsuits have become a tool of our own corruption, funnelling money from litigation into our political system so that trial lawyers can wield unprecedented—and in my mind—unprincipled power."
Fasano glanced at Senator Hampton, who remained inscrutable. "This debate," Palmer continued, "is about more than the corrosion of our justice system. At its heart, it is about the corrosion of our politics through money, and whether we have the courage to stop it."
At this, Hampton acknowledged Fasano with an ironic lift of his eyebrows. What about your special interests? Hampton seemed to say. But perhaps he was conveying more—his admiration of the neatness with which Palmer had moved the debate to grounds more congenial to him than to Fasano.
Smiling with his eyes, Fasano shrugged in answer. The truth, though Hampton might not know it, was that Fasano had expected nothing less. Whatever its momentary discomforts, a Chad Palmer in character enhanced Fasano's chances of capturing Cassie Rollins. Toward the rear of the chamber, the junior senator from Maine watched Palmer with unwavering attention, heedless of the packed gallery of press and public gazing down on all of them.