I sat at my desk and read:
Whatever the motive may be, I am going to write it and then decide whether to mail it or destroy it.
Even if I mail it I will not sign it because I do not want to give it legal validity. You will of course show it to the police, but without my signature it will certainly not be released for publication as coming from me. Since the context will clearly identify me by inference, this may seem pointless, but it will serve an desired purposes, whatever my motive may be, without my signature, and those purposes are moral and not legal.
I will try not to dwell at length on my motives. To me they are of more concern than the events themselves, but to you and others it is the events that matter. All you will care about is the factual statement that I wrote the anonymous letter to the court giving information about O'Malley's bribery of a juror, but I want to add that my motive was mixed. I will not deny that moving up to the position of senior partner, with increased power and authority and income, was a factor, but so was my concern for the future of the firm. To have as our senior partner a man who was capable of jury-bribing was not only undesirable but extremely dangerous. You will ask why I didn't merely confront O'Malley with it and demand that he get out. On account of the source and nature of my information, which I won't go into, I did not have conclusive proof, and the relations among the members of the firm would have made the outcome doubtful. Anyway, I did write the informing letter to the court.
Starting a habit, I said to myself, of not signing things. I resumed.
Q'Malley was disbarred. That was of course a blow to the firm, but not a fatal one. I became senior partner, and Kustin and Briggs were admitted to membership. As the months passed we recovered lost ground. In the late summer and fall of last year our income was higher than it had ever been, partly on account of Kustin's remarkable performances as a trial lawyer, but I think my leadership was equally responsible. Then, on Monday, December 4, a date I would never forget if I were going to be alive to remember and forget, I returned to the office in the evening to do some work and had occasion to go to Dykes's desk to get a document. It wasn't where I expected to find it and I went through the drawers. In one of them was a brown fiber portfolio and I looked inside. The document wasn't there. It contained a stack of neatly assembled sheets of paper. The top sheet, typed like a title page, said "Put Not Your Trust, A Modern Novel of a Lawyer's Frailty, by Baird Archer." Through curiosity I looked at the next sheet. It began the text, and the first sentence read "It is not true that all lawyers are cutthroats." I read on a little and then sat in Dykes's chair and read more.
It is still almost incredible to me that Dykes could have been such a fool. Through his connection with our office he knew something of the libel law, and yet he wrote that and offered it for publication. Of course it is true that lawyers themselves will do incredible things when their vanity is involved, as O'Malley did when he bribed a juror, and Dykes probably thought that the use of an assumed name would somehow protect him.
The novel was substantially an account of the activities and relationships of our firm. The names were different and most of the scenes and circumstances were invented, but it was unmistakably our firm. It was so badly written that I suppose it would have bored a casual reader, but it did not bore me. It told of O'Malley's bribery of a juror (I use our names instead of those Dykes used) and of my learning of it and sending an anonymous letter to the court, and of O'Malley's disbarment. He had invented an ending. In the novel O'Malley took to drink and died in the alcoholic ward at Bellevue, and I went to see him on his deathbed, and he pointed at me and screamed, "Put not your trust!" In one way the novel was ludicrous. Its ending assumed that O'Malley knew I had informed on him, but there was no adequate explanation of how he had found out.
I took the manuscript home with me. If I had found it by accident and read it, someone else might, and I couldn't risk it. After I got home I realized that I would be unable to sleep, and I went out again and took a taxi to Sullivan Street, where Dykes lived. I got him out of bed and told him I had found the manuscript and read it. In my agitation I did something incredible too. I took it for granted that he knew I had informed on O'Malley and asked how he had found out. I should have assumed that he had invented that.
But it didn't matter. He really had found out. I had not written the informing letter to the court on my typewriter here at my apartment, on which I am writing this. I had taken the precaution of writing it on a machine at the Travelers Club. There wasn't more than one chance in a billion of any risk in that, but that one had been enough. In connection with our defense of O'Malley on the bribery charge, we had photostats of all the exhibits, including the anonymous letter to the court., Dykes had made himself a fairly good expert on documents, and as a matter, of routine he inspected the photostat of the anonymous letter. He noticed that the "t" was out of line, crowding the letter to its right, and slanted a little, and he remembered that he had observed the same defect in some other document. And he found it. He found it in a typed memorandum to him which I had typed two months previously on that same machine at the Travelers Club. I had forgotten about it, and even if I had remembered it I would probably have considered the risk negligible. But with that hint to start him, Dykes had compared the photostat with the memorandum under a glass and established that the two had been typed on the same machine. Of course that was not conclusive proof that I had typed and sent the letter to the court, but it convinced Dykes.
It bowled him over that I had found and read the manuscript. He swore that he had had no intention or desire to expose me, and when I insisted that he must have told someone, possibly O'Malley himself, he swore that he hadn't, and I believed him. He had the carbon of the manuscript there in his room. The original had been returned to him by a firm of publishers, Scholl - Hanna, to whom he had submitted it, and he had put it temporarily in his desk at the office, with the intention of putting it in the hands of a literary agent. The longhand manuscript, written by him in longhand, from which the typist had worked, was also there in his room. He turned both the carbon copy and the longhand script over to me, and I took them home when I went and destroyed them. I also destroyed the original of the typed script two days later, after I had reread it.
I felt that I was fairly safe from exposure. I had of course done nothing actionable, but if it became known that I had informed on my partner in an anonymous letter the effect on my career and reputation would have been disastrous. It was not so much anything O'Malley himself could or might do as the attitude of others, particularly two of my present partners and certain other associates. Actually I would have been a ruined man. But I felt fairly safe. If Dykes was telling the truth, and I believed he was, all copies of the manuscript had been destroyed. He gave me the most solemn assurances that he would never speak of the matter to anyone, but my chief reliance was in the fact that it was to his own self-interest to keep silent. His own future depended on the future welfare of the firm, and if he spoke the firm would certainly be disrupted.
I saw Dykes several times at his room in the evening, and on one of those occasions I did a foolish and thoughtless thing, though at the time it seemed of no consequence. No, that's wrong-this occasion was not at his room but at the office after hours. I had taken from the file the letter of resignation which he had written months previously, and it was on my desk. I asked him, for no special reason that I remember, if the title "Put Not Your Trust" was from Shakespeare, and he said no, that it was in the 3rd verse of the, 146th Psalm, and I scribbled it in a corner of his letter of resignation, "Ps 146-3."