“What?”
Gracie was nodding. “The U.S. government never touched it.”
Arlie Rosen’s voice on the other end of Gracie’s cell phone was a wonderful sound.
“I got your message, Gracie. It’s truly over?”
“We won! The FAA is withdrawing their allegations.”
“How?”
“I can’t tell you for certain,” she said, carefully composing her words. “But I think they simply got scared at a high level of how this would look if they were wrong and we got a major court decision out of it.”
There was a tired sigh on the other end. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
“Where are you, Captain?”
There was a hesitation. “Up in Canada. On the west coast of Vancouver Island. Someone was chasing us.”
“I heard. That will stop now, too, whatever it was about.”
“Are you sure, Gracie?”
“Yes. Absolutely. Highest authority.”
“Because we’re armed and safe up here.”
“You’re armed?”
“Yes.”
“In Canada?”
“Yes.”
“Captain, get the hell out of there! Fly back immediately. Unless you somehow cleared a hunting rifle with customs, you can’t have guns up there and I don’t want to have to bail you out of a provincial jail.”
Gracie knew better than to read too much into Ben Janssen’s voice, but it was hopeful that her call for an appointment on return to Seattle had been so cheerfully received.
She used the circular stairway from her floor to the top floor and rounded the corner to Janssen’s huge office, wondering how closely Ben Janssen might have read the e-mail memo she’d sent from Washington reporting the call from Bernie Ashad in excruciating detail.
“Well, well, Gracie!” Janssen said. “Come on in. Home from the wars, I see.”
“Yes, sir.”
Janssen had left his desk to greet her with a handshake and a pat on the shoulder. He motioned her to a dark burgundy leather divan, and settled into an adjacent matching chair around a low coffee table.
“Tell me what transpired in your case for Rosen,” he said, smiling at her, his demeanor one of ease as he sat back, hands behind his head, and waited for her to chronicle the sequence of events. When she was through, she added the fact that the wreckage had never been in Navy possession, and Janssen nodded, dropping his hands to his lap as he leaned forward.
“Did you feel a little silly?” he asked, nailing her emotions.
“Yes.”
“Don’t. We do the best with the facts we’ve got, and I would have arrived at the same conclusion.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“I know a bit more than you think about this,” he added, his smile triggering the unsettling thought that somehow her body language had transmitted a state secret learned in the Oval Office.
“You do?”
“Well, I do have a few friends in both low and high places, and one of them called me the other day to say that a particular lawyer from my office had suddenly appeared before him like a sort of feminine cloudburst. Fact is, he said you’d chased him down at a formal dinner, gently but effectively twisted his arm, gained the unprecedented honor of being added to an appellate argument schedule at the last minute, something even solicitor generals can’t do, and filed a well-reasoned brief.”
“Judge Williamson?”
“Exactly. Sander Williamson. I went to law school with the old reprobate.”
“So, he called you?” she asked in stunned affirmation.
Ben Janssen was enjoying the moment and nodding. Either a good sign or one of impending execution, meaning she had no idea why he was in such a good mood.
“Yes, he called me, all right. He said one Gracie O’Brien presented herself at argument well groomed, well prepared, poised, fearless, and factual, all attributes he admires. And, he says you virtually stood the court on its head by reminding them of something all three judges had apparently forgotten for years, that not only do they, in fact, possess primary equity jurisdiction concurrent with their appellate role, but they can hear something as obscure as a plea for interlocutory decree even in the matter of a temporary restraining order.”
“They were surprised?”
“‘Stunned’ would be a better word. Sander called your use of the argument as nothing short of brilliant. He was very impressed, and convinced.”
“He understood we had settled with the FAA conditioned entirely on reinstatement of Captain Rosen’s license?”
Janssen smiled again. “Well, let’s just say he understood that would be the only reason you’d back off and move to dismiss.”
“Good.”
“Which was very fortunate for you and your client.”
“The settlement? Yes. It was.”
“No, actually, Gracie, I mean the fact that you were able to move for dismissal was very fortunate on a separate plane.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, you panicked the government into settling because they were convinced you were going to win and embarrass them. That’s very clear. But although Sander Williamson was convinced, and the government lawyers and the FAA were convinced, the other two judges up there held the trump card. According to Sander, they agreed they had the power to consider your petition and issue an interlocutory order, but they weren’t convinced the case justified it. In other words, Gracie, you would have lost.”
She felt suddenly very cold inside as Ben Janssen continued.
“But, what I’m most delighted to hear is that one of my team did such a great job of thinking on her feet in the face of extreme intimidation and with little experience. Well done.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Oh, one more thing.” He got up and moved with suprising agility to his desk to retrieve a thin manila folder, which he laid in Gracie’s lap before sitting again.
“What’s this, sir?”
“A pathology report. You never did get the matter of drinking and flying resolved for Captain Rosen, did you?”
She shook her head.
“And I imagine that’s still rattling around in your head, and perhaps shading your formerly pristine view of the man with latent suspicion?”
“Oh, I know he wasn’t drinking. That’s not like him.”
“Bullshit, Gracie. You’re talking to a recovering alcoholic. The propensity is always there.”
She looked at her senior partner in silence for a few moments, her heart sinking. There was something in the folder that she didn’t know about Arlie Rosen, and she hadn’t processed the small bomb he’d already tossed.
Janssen shifted in his chair and leaned toward her. “Gracie, I know how much this fellow means to you, so I had one of our investigators take a look. He found Rosen had suffered a few deep cuts the night of his crash, and there was considerable blood left in his exposure suit. The Coast Guard had retained them both. There’s a sophisticated little test that can be run in certain cases to get a snapshot of the alcohol content of spilled blood at the time it was spilled.”
“You… he ran the test? He found enough blood?”
“Read,” Ben Janssen directed. Gracie opened the folder and forced her eyes to focus. The blood-alcohol percentage of Arlie Rosen’s blood within a few minutes after the accident was precisely zero, and she was losing the struggle to hold back tears.
“Have you made your decision?” Ben Janssen added suddenly.
“I’m sorry? Oh! Yes. I dearly want to stay.”
“Wonderful, because we dearly want to keep you.”
“But… I have one request. You gave me three weeks off, and I’d like to take one more and make it a total of four. I… really need to spend some time with friends and decompress, and then come back and hit the deck running. I understand that none of the time will be paid.”