I followed her up a flight of stairs and through twists and turns of broad hallways. I passed desks of grim secretaries typing efficiently into their word processors and caught glimpses of well decorated rooms from which worried associates darted back and forth. There was a hum of activity in those offices, a melange of sound emanating from the fluorescent lights, from the computer fans, from the laser printers squeezing out page after page after page, from the incessant soft ring of the phones and quiet voices explaining that Mr. Wilson or Ms. Antonelli or Mr. Schwartz was on another line but would get right back to you. To a lawyer the sound was of more than just run-of-the-mill office activity. It was the sound of billable hours, it was the sound of money. It was not a sound I heard too often. In our hallway what I heard instead was the hush of financial desperation.
She ushered me into a large corner office, an office bigger than my apartment. The view stretched south and west. Straight ahead Broad Street ran like a mighty river to Veterans Stadium in the distance, and to the right I could see old Franklin Field and the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, whose law school, along with Harvard’s and Yale’s and Stanford’s and NYU’s and all the other top ten’s, had rejected my application. Prescott’s office was wood clad, like a judge’s chambers, furnished with an elegant living room set at one end, a long oak table piled with briefs and exhibits in the middle, and a large, gilded desk in the windowed corner, with two tapestry-covered chairs before it and a low wooden credenza behind it. Across one of the walls was a flurry of framed photographs, pictures of mayors and congressmen, senators and presidents, each smiling as they stood next to a tall, stern-faced patrician, the photographs inscribed across the bottoms. On the far wall, above the living room set, hung a large neorealist painting of two boxers circling each other against an angry yellow background. The boxers’ bodies were clenched, they peered over their gloves, waiting for the moment to explode into violence. The painting was as tense as a coiled spring and the eyes of the fighters were filled with hate. It was a litigator’s painting.
“Mr. Prescott will be right in,” said my guide. “Make yourself comfortable.” She gestured at one of the chairs before the desk and I sat like a trained puppy.
On the credenza was a picture of the perfect family, three smiling beef-fed kids, a pretty wife, the tall patrician once again. In another the children were older, the wife wider, they stood before a beautiful country home with a wide veranda surrounded by thickly leafed trees, the patrician now in a wicker chair with a newspaper and a pipe. In that sad fall of my life such teeming family bliss seemed the most remote of all the ambitions I had so far failed to achieve.
I had never met William Prescott III but I had heard of him, everyone had. He was a great man, this William Prescott, the pride of his old and revered family. Skull and Bones at Yale, the law review at Harvard, he was a former deputy attorney general, a former ambassador to some obscure country in South America, a former Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar. He was a pillar of the Republican Party and served on the boards of the Art Museum, the Free Library, the Philadelphia Orchestra. And now he was the top trial lawyer, the prime rainmaker, the managing partner at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. One had to wonder what price he had paid for such success. He had everything a lawyer could ever want, but was he happy? Well, to tell from the pictures, he was ecstatic. I had never met this William Prescott but already I despised him.
“Victor, thank you for coming up to see me,” said a grayer version of the man in all the photographs.
I stood quickly, like a thief caught in the act, when William Prescott swept into the room. He entered like an emissary from some great nation-state. Very tall, very thin, with narrow lips and high prominent cheekbones, he peered from beneath bushy black eyebrows with blue eyes of startling clarity. He was not a classically handsome man, his nose was too long and his lips too thin, but he was a compelling presence, the very image of integrity. He wore a navy blue pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit, a banker’s suit, which he kept formally buttoned as he reached out in greeting. My hand was swallowed by his. Despite his slenderness, I had the unpleasant sensation that had he wanted to squeeze my hand until the bones crumbled he could have.
“You know Madeline Burroughs, Victor, I’m sure,” he said as he led me to the living room set beneath the painting of the boxers.
I hadn’t seen her there, my attention drawn so completely to Prescott and his presence. “Yes, of course.”
“Hello, Victor,” said Madeline. She was a round-faced, frumpish woman who dressed and acted like a spinster though still in her twenties. She smiled awkwardly for a moment; it was like a fist opening and closing.
“Sit down, please, both of you,” said Prescott. His voice was precise, graveled with age but still charmingly formal, like the wide unpaved driveways leading to Versailles. He came from the same world as Winston Osbourne and that was in his voice too, but where Osbourne’s voice betrayed all his innate snideness, in Prescott’s it was well hidden if it existed at all. I sat in one of the easy chairs, he sat directly across from me on the couch, leaning back and crossing his legs in a way that put me immediately at ease. Madeline sat tensely in the bend of the couch off to the side.
“I may call you Victor?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Normally I love the autumn, don’t you? But the grayness of the skies this year takes all the pleasure out of it. It might be time to visit our Miami office.” His blue eyes smiled at me and then turned cold. “Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors, Victor. That’s why we’re here today. How long have we been tangling over this case?”
“Three years, sir,” I said. The “sir” came instinctively, drawn out by his very demeanor and appearance. He seemed to accept my deference as his due.
“You’ve been hanging on all that time like a bulldog. Three years on a complaint not worth the filing fee. A bulldog. Good for you, Victor. Now Madeline here, one of our toughest litigators, has filed four motions to dismiss but the judge has kept it alive out of mercy.”
“Judge Tifaro is too timid to make a decision,” said Madeline, breaking into the discussion.
“What you’re both trying to say,” I said, “is that all your attempts to kill our case have failed.”
“Yes,” said Prescott, giving me an appraising look. “That is it exactly.”
Saltz was the weakest of those cases my ex-partner Guthrie left behind when he fled our firm on his way to success. A real estate limited partnership had gone bad, as they all seemed to have gone bad, and Guthrie had convinced the investors to sue those who had syndicated and sold the deal. There was a lengthy complaint with wild allegations of fraud and conspiracy. We had the case on a one-third contingency. I had thrown away a pot of money investigating only to find that there was no real evidence of anything other than stupidity on the part of all involved. My investigation wasn’t helped by the fact that a crucial witness, the accountant who prepared the prospectus, a weasel named Stocker, had disappeared, taking certain of his clients’ trust funds with him. Without him we had nothing but a hope that we could bluff our way into a settlement. Which was why I was there, to take one last look at my hand, to press my lips together, to look around the table and back at my hand and then to raise, confidently, in the faint chance the bastards would fold. Not likely. I had been asking for half a million, hoping they’d give me a counteroffer in the mid-five figures, upon which I planned to leap.