In Firm Pursuit Read online

  Truth be told, I was psyched about trying the case for reasons of my own. If everything remained on schedule, my anticipated victory in the Randle case would come about a week before my law firm’s partnership vote. Having another big win under my belt days before the vote would cinch things for me. I would soon become O’Reilly & Finney’s first African-American partner. I was not about to let Judge Sloan steal my thunder.

  “Your Honor,” I said, looking him fearlessly in the eyes, “my client isn’t interested in settlement.”

  Sloan propped an elbow on the desk and pointed at me with a finger the size of a wiener. “You and your client are making a big mistake,” he said with a controlled fury.

  I swallowed hard and said nothing. Pissing off a judge, particularly a federal judge, would mean hell for me the next time I appeared in Sloan’s courtroom. He could be as retaliatory as he wanted with no fear of repercussions. One of the many perks of having a job for life.

  Sloan snatched a legal pad from his desk and started writing. “You want to try this case?” he said with a cruel smile, “then you’ve got it. I’m expediting the filing of the pretrial documents. I want the trial brief, the jury instructions and all motions filed by Monday morning. And I’d like to see you two back here Tuesday afternoon for another status report.”

  “Your Honor!” Jenkins whined, cracking the knuckles of both hands this time. “I’m a solo practitioner. There’s no way I can get all those documents drafted in four days.” He took a Chap Stick from his jacket pocket and nervously dotted his lips.

  “That’s not my problem, Mr. Jenkins. Perhaps you’ll be able to talk some sense into Ms. Henderson before Monday morning.” The judge grabbed another handful of almonds. “You can leave now.”

  As I followed Jenkins down a long hallway that led back to the main courtroom, a flutter of apprehension hit me. What if I didn’t win?

  Luckily, the flash of self-doubt did not linger. Reggie was a lousy attorney. Going up against him would be like trying a case against a first-year law student.

  The Randle case was going to trial and I was going to win it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Reggie Jenkins made it back to his office on the low-rent end of Wilshire Boulevard in less than thirty minutes. Instead of getting to work drafting the pretrial documents for the Randle case, he gazed out of a window clouded with years of grime and sulked.

  He could not understand why Vernetta Henderson was so adamant about trying the case. Especially after he had made a perfectly reasonable settlement offer. Women attorneys, particularly the black ones, always made everything so personal. The girl acted like she wanted to punish him for even filing the case.

  The view of the alley two floors below did nothing to lighten Reggie’s sour mood. To the right, three bums nodded near a metal trash bin overflowing with debris. The stench managed to seep into Reggie’s office even though his windows had been glued shut for years.

  Reggie regularly fantasized about having an office with a real view, in a swanky downtown high-rise with marble floors, round-the-clock security guards and windows so clean you could see yourself. His name would appear on the door in fancy gold letters: Reggie Jenkins, Attorney-at-Law. Or better yet, Jenkins, Somebody and Somebody.

  His secretary, paralegal and sometime girlfriend, barged into his office without knocking. “I just wanna make sure you gonna have my money on Friday,” Cheryl demanded. Her fists were pinned to a pair of curvy hips.

  Reggie’s teeth instinctively clamped down on the toothpick dangling from his thick lips. “I told you I would, didn’t I?”

  “You said the same thing last month, then you didn’t show up at the office for three straight days.”

  Reggie snatched his checkbook from his briefcase and scribbled across one of the checks. “Here,” he said, thrusting it at her. “Just don’t cash it until tomorrow.”

  As Cheryl sauntered out, Reggie shook his head and frowned. One day, he was going to have enough cash to hire a real secretary.

  He stared down at his cluttered desk, realizing that he was about to lose another one and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Although he had promised Henry Randle his day in court, Reggie had never actually intended to make good on that vow. It was much easier to settle cases—the winners as well as the losers. He’d only had six trials during his thirteen years of practice and had lost every single one of them. He thought about calling Randle to update him on today’s court session, but what would he say? You’ll get to tell your story to a jury, but you’re going to lose.

  Reggie had checked around and learned that Vernetta was an excellent trial attorney. He clearly was not. Juries unnerved him. Whenever those twelve pairs of eyes focused on him and him alone, something inexplicable happened and he turned into a bumbling idiot. If a witness responded with an answer he had not expected, it startled him and he froze up. When an opposing counsel yelled Objection—hearsay in the middle of his question, it wrecked his rhythm, causing him to stumble like an old drunk taking a step off of a curb he didn’t know was there. By the time the judge had ruled on the objection, Reggie did not know what to say next because he could not even remember what question he had asked.

  He rummaged through the unruly stack of papers in front of him and pulled out the Randle v. Micronics complaint. The day Henry Randle had walked into his office and told his story, Reggie felt like someone had handed him a blank check. He had never had a case with allegations of race discrimination and whistle-blowing. Randle swore that he had never even laid eyes on Karen Carruthers before running into her in that elevator, and he certainly had not grabbed the woman or tried to kiss her. And Reggie fully believed his new client’s claim that Micronics trumped up the whole thing to silence his complaints about the company’s fraudulent billing on some multimillion-dollar contract with the Air Force.

  But as the litigation progressed, Reggie’s enthusiasm for the case waned. Just as it always did. Now he simply wanted his thirty-three percent of whatever settlement he could get so he could move on to the next one.

  He turned on his ancient computer and prepared to get to work on the pretrial documents. Before he could open a blank screen, an idea came to him and his dour mood immediately brightened. After mulling it over for a few minutes, Reggie grabbed his car keys, checked his breast pocket for his cell phone and rushed out of the door.

  If his brilliant little plan actually panned out, he was about to turn the tables on Ms. Vernetta Henderson and her scheming client.

  CHAPTER 3

  After being released from detention in Judge Sloan’s chambers, I headed back to my office, where I checked my voice mail messages and quickly browsed through twenty-three new e-mails. Finding nothing that couldn’t wait, I made my way to Haley Prescott’s office on the other side of the twelfth floor.

  Haley was a second-year associate assigned to assist me with the Randle case. She had only been with the firm for six months, having clerked for a federal judge in D.C. after graduating from Yale Law School.

  The sweet smell of lavender prickled my nose the minute I stepped inside Haley’s office. The place smelled like a florist’s shop. The oversized bouquet sitting on the corner of her desk looked like it had just been picked from somebody’s garden. Haley’s fingers were gliding across her computer keyboard, her eyes glued to the monitor in front of her.

  “Hey,” she said flatly, not bothering to look my way. Haley saved her more enthusiastic greetings for male attorneys. The partners in particular.

  “I just got back from court,” I said as I walked up to her desk. “I hate to deliver bad news, but Judge Sloan wants all the pretrial documents in the Randle case filed by Monday.”

  Haley’s fingers froze in place. “That’s not possible. I’m spending the weekend at my condo in Mammoth.”

  As hard as I tried to like the girl, she never failed to get on my last nerve. What bothered me most was her air of superiority, something that was no doubt bolstered by having a mother on the N
inth Circuit Court of Appeals, a politically connected father and the looks of a runway model. Almost every attorney in the firm—partners and associates alike—treated her as if she were rainmaking royalty. Considering the potential clients she would likely attract to the firm because of her parents’ connections, she probably was.

  But ruined travel plans came with the territory. So I ignored her grousing. “Which documents have you drafted so far?” I asked.

  Haley rudely went back to typing. “None of them.”

  “I thought you told me you had already started drafting the trial brief and jury instructions,” I said.

  She paused to tuck one of her curly blond locks behind her left ear. The girl had long, feathery, Pamela Anderson hair. And from what I could tell, it was the real thing, not that dull, pasty shade that came from a peroxide bottle or years of overexposure to the sun. It was no doubt the only genuine thing about her.

  “This isn’t the only case I have,” Haley snapped. Her voice took on a Bostonian pitch that hadn’t been there a second ago.

  “I don’t know what other cases you have,” I snapped back, “but I’m sure they aren’t going to trial in a matter of weeks.”

  All I could do was stare at the girl. It was times like this that I really missed my friend, Neddy McClain. She’d been the only other African-American attorney at O’Reilly & Finney besides me. Neddy and I had started out on rocky ground, but ended up getting pretty tight after defending a big murder case together. She had recently moved to Atlanta, where her new fiancé, a former police detective, had opened his own private investigations firm. I would’ve loved to see Haley give Neddy the kind of attitude she was throwing my way. Neddy would’ve had Haley running from her own office in tears.

  Haley’s lips remained pursed into a tight pout. “Like I said, I really can’t work this weekend.”

  My right hand went to my hip. “And, like I said, the documents have to be filed by Monday.”

  As far as I was concerned, the fact that Haley’s mama was one step below a Supreme Court Justice did not mean she didn’t have to work just as hard as everybody else. I was actually glad to be throwing a wrench in her plans.

  Haley allowed several beats to pass, then fixed me with an infuriated look that didn’t need translation. “Fine,” she said tightly.

  I turned to leave, but Haley stopped me. “I forgot to give you this.” She shoved a document at me. “One of the secretaries from Micronics’s HR Department faxed it over this morning.”

  I quickly scanned the four-page fax and felt a heavy pall come over me. It was a memo to file written by Bill Stevens, Micronics’s former in-house attorney. When Stevens left the company, the Randle case was transferred to O’Reilly & Finney. The memo briefly summarized allegations of sexual harassment made against six Micronics employees, not including Henry Randle, during the past five years. Most of them had been accused of misconduct far more egregious than what Randle was accused of doing. One of the men allegedly grabbed a woman’s breast. All six were white. To my dismay, even though an HR investigation confirmed the charges against each of them, none had been fired.

  I looked at the date in the upper left-hand corner of the page and thought I was seeing things. “This document was written months ago,” I said, more to myself than to Haley.

  “The secretary said the memo was misfiled with another case,” Haley explained, her full attention still on her computer screen.

  “Why didn’t you call me the minute you got this?” I paused and tried to collect myself, not wanting Haley to pick up on my rising stress level. “You knew I had a court appearance in the Randle case today.”

  Haley huffed out a breath of air. “Actually, I tried,” she said. “But you apparently didn’t have your cell phone on. I didn’t leave a message because I figured you were already in court.”

  I felt a light pounding in my chest. I walked over to close the door, then turned around to face my subordinate. “I just passed up a chance to settle this case,” I said. “Something I probably wouldn’t have done if I’d known about this fax.”

  Haley shrugged. “I was out when it came in and I didn’t think you’d be discussing settlement at a pretrial conference. It wasn’t scheduled until two o’clock. If you’d come into the office this morning, you would’ve known about that fax.”

  “I had a dental appointment,” I said testily. Why was I explaining myself to this child? It took most junior associates until their third or fourth year before they stopped being intimidated by the partners and senior associates. But my senior status apparently meant nothing to Haley.

  She tucked another loose curl behind her ear. “How much did Jenkins want?”

  I exhaled. “Thirty thousand. And I should have taken it.”

  “I thought you were so eager to try the case.”

  “I was.” I waved the fax in the air. “But this changes everything. This memo basically proves Randle’s discrimination case. Every one of these guys—who all just happen to be white—got off with a mere slap on the wrist. We can’t take a chance of going to trial with these facts.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing, Porter’s not going to be happy when he finds out you passed up that settlement offer.”

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  Porter was the partner in charge of the Randle lawsuit. He’d been riding me ever since we got the case, something he seemed to enjoy doing to most associates.

  “Well, look at the bright side,” Haley said. “That document is attorney-client privileged so we don’t have to produce it. And the odds are pretty good that Jenkins won’t find out about those cases on his own. He didn’t even ask for information about prior sexual harassment claims during discovery. The man is totally incompetent.”

  I suddenly felt protective of my fellow black brother. I could call him incompetent, but I didn’t like hearing him criticized by this pompous little sorority girl.

  I reread the fax and my rage slowly shifted from Haley to Micronics. Why hadn’t somebody at Micronics told me about these other cases? I was certain that I had asked HR about prior sexual harassment claims. Hadn’t I?

  “If you ever get another fax or letter or telephone call or anything else with important information about a case I’m working on,” I said, “I want to know about it. Right away.”

  “No problem.” Haley gave me a Cover Girl smile.

  I headed for the door and did not bother to look back.

  “I’ll expect to see a draft of the trial brief and jury instructions by noon on Saturday.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The CEO of Micronics Corporation strolled down the spacious hallway of the Cypress Club with a decided, purpose-filled gait. His eyes bore straight ahead, ignoring his elegant surroundings. The rich wood paneling, the expensive Oriental rugs, the Picassos and Monets that lined the walls. Any other time, J. William Walters would have taken notice of the Pavarotti aria wafting from the expensive Bose speakers. Not today.

  A casual observer might have assumed that Walters’s brain cells were consumed with annual reports, stock prices or one of his company’s newest inventions. But in reality, unshakable images of newspaper headlines and prison cells had been his primary focus for several weeks now. At night, it was becoming increasingly impossible to shake the visions—he refused to call them nightmares—of SEC agents raiding his posh office, slapping handcuffs across his meaty wrists and taking him on a preplanned perp walk as cameras from all the major networks shined blinding lights into his eyes.

  Making a sharp left, Walters headed for the Ronald Reagan Room, one of a dozen or so private meeting places reserved for the Cypress Club’s most exclusive members. Exclusive in Walters’s world meaning not just rich, but rich and powerful. When he reached his destination, he did not bother to knock before thrusting the door open and stepping inside.

  It took a second for Walters’s eyes to adjust to the near darkness. The ominous room seemed more suitable for a late-night poker game than clandestine
corporate decision-making. He nodded in the direction of the room’s sole occupant, sitting in a red velvet club chair. Rich Ferris, Micronics’s Vice President of Human Resources, was a fair-skinned black man who was as buttoned-up as a born-again preacher. Ferris nodded but did not otherwise greet his boss of the last seven years. Instead, he quietly took a sip from his second vodka of the evening.

  The CEO was a long-time member of the Cypress Club. Thanks to Walters’s connections, Ferris had recently been extended an invitation to join the elite society. Unlike some of his colleagues, Walters had not raised a fuss when the club finally gave in to outside pressures and began actively complying with its nondiscrimination provision. No matter how many blacks or Jews walked through the door, it would have no tangible impact on his life. Certain people were impervious to change. At least, that was how it had been.

  “Well, let’s get to it,” Walters said, wishing he had a drink, too. He eyed the fully stocked bar in the far corner of the room. The thought of getting up to fix one for himself had not occurred to him. An attendant would arrive shortly. He would wait.

  “How’re we going to fix this?” Walters’s harsh eyes rested pointedly on his subordinate.

  Ferris did not rush to respond to the question. In his own right, he was a well-educated, impressive businessman whose innovative workforce strategies had earned him profiles in publications like Forbes, Black Enterprise and the Wall Street Journal. At the moment, though, he looked like a scared little boy.

  The CEO let the silence linger to the point of punishment. “You don’t have any ideas?” The sarcasm in Walters’s voice failed to mask his anger. “Let’s not forget that we’re in this together. If the feds come calling for me, they’re eventually coming after you, too. So I’ll ask the question one more time. How do we fix this?”

  Ferris sat forward and cleared his throat. “I’ve taken care of it,” he said. He raised his glass to his lips but did not take a sip. “In fact, everything is well under way.”