Anderson Parker, attorney-at-law, glanced past the picture of his wife and two children toward his assistant, Sandy, who stood in the doorway giving him The Look.
         Anderson, who had been practicing law for the past three years with the aggressive Tampa law firm known as The Law Offices of Justin Cartwright II, felt his heart sink. Anytime Sandy gave him The Look it meant that Justin Cartwright II, the main partner and the attorney for whom Anderson did Amost of his work, wanted to see Anderson immediately. It also meant that Justin, for some reason or another, was definitely not amused.
         In his three years at the firm Anderson had never seen Justin amused, except for those moments when the defendants the firm represented were absolved of guilt in the industrial accidents, car accidents, and other mayhem for which the defendants were liable in fact, if not in the courtroom. The rest of the time Cartwright, whom everyone knew to be a multimillionaire with a second home (which he seldom visited) on Cabbage Key, went about his business as if every plaintiff suing one of his clients was a potential thief out to steal not only the money of his clients but also his own hard-earned cash.
         Gossip at the firm had Cartwright’s wife on the brink of divorcing her husband, whom due to his 65- to 75-hour workweeks she never saw, but the “golden handcuffs” of her prenuptial agreement prevented her from actually making good on her threat to leave. Cartwright’s two daughters barely knew their father, and there was one famous story in the firm about how Justin had come home one Sunday morning after an all-nighter at the office to find his youngest daughter sitting in the living room, watching cartoons on TV. When the little girl saw Justin, she burst into tears. She had seen so little of him in her short lifetime that she had no idea he was her father.
         Anderson closed his eyes for a moment and allowed the back of his head to slump against the top of his luxurious office chair, one of the perks of working at a top place like The Law Offices of Justin Cartwright II. He thought of his own wife, Ruth, whom he rarely saw before eight o’clock at night, and his own children, with whom he had never spent an entire weekend uninterrupted by work. It was insane, he knew, but he rationalized the long hours and the time away from his family by telling himself that this was how you paid your dues to become a top-flight trial attorney. You had to learn the ropes. You had to learn how to try cases, and you had to learn from the best, even if the best lawyers didn’t always make the best human beings.
         Almost every contact with Justin Cartwright II was a painful, often gut-wrenching experience for Anderson. The one good thing to say about Justin was that he was an equal-opportunity bastard of a boss—he treated everybody badly: all the paralegals, all the attorneys, even the clients if they did not bend quickly to his will and follow his guidance to the letter. Anderson considered Cartwright’s behavior and tone of voice infantilizing, and Anderson fantasized about the day, most likely three or four years down the road, when he could say farewell to Justin and start his own firm. He and his wife had just built a house, a large house, the kind of house a young lawyer in Tampa at a top firm ought to have, and if it weren’t for the debt service, the cost of his children’s private schools, and the general high cost of living well—the golf club, Ruth’s civic involvements, the whole nine yards—he would quit sooner. To be honest, though, Anderson just didn’t know how much more of Justin he could take.
         Anderson opened his eyes half-hoping that Sandy would dematerialize, as in some science fiction movie, and with her the summons to Justin’s office. They were working on a particularly unpleasant case, a young woman who had been shot in the head and suffered brain damage after an assault at an ATM at a Florida Second Bank branch. Florida Second was the client, and Justin Cartwright had put it on the record that he would be goddamned if this woman took one red cent from that bank.
         Sandy was staring at Anderson with a look that said, “You’d better get in there.” Anderson thought he saw something else in Sandy’s eyes. A challenge, a question: “How much more of this shredding of your manhood can you take, even for the high salary and the lifestyle?”
         Some lifestyle. Tampa was a beautiful place to live. Boating, golf, the beach, professional sports—it was all here. But what good was any of it if you were marooned at your desk seventy-five hours a week? You couldn’t leave the office any earlier than Justin did. Nobody could do that and survive.
Anderson checked his watch. It was a quarter to eight in the evening. Why, he wondered, can’t that multimillionaire of a boss of mine just go home at six o’clock?
         Wearily Anderson pushed himself back from his desk and headed out of his office, past Sandy’s disapproving look, and down the hallway toward the office of the head of the trial department, main partner Justin Cartwright.
         Anderson was still two offices away when he could hear Justin’s voice booming down the hallway.
         “ Anderson, get in here,” he commanded in the same imperious tone he took in the courtroom with stubborn witnesses. “We need to talk about the Brittany case.”
         “ Coming, sir,” Anderson murmured. As he reached Justin’s door, he realized he had forgotten his yellow pad, the sign of servility in any law firm and an object not to be forgotten when entering the inner sanctum of Justin Cartwright II.
         Cartwright, his body lithe and trim from his hobby of running (he actually would dictate memoranda or interrogatories as he ran), his head shaven in a military-style crew cut, glanced disparagingly at Anderson’s empty hands. No yellow pad. Justin brusquely motioned Anderson to a seat.
         Cartwright leaned forward behind his large mahogany desk and waited for Anderson to seat himself in one of the two client chairs positioned in front of him. Cartwright, sensitive about his height, had gone to the trouble of erecting a small, unnoticeable platform for his desk and chair so that he could sit at a slight physical advantage over his guests.
         “ How long have you been with this firm?” Justin began.
         “ Three years,” Anderson replied, surprised by the question. Surely Justin would know how long Anderson had been with the firm. Justin knew everything.
         “ You work long hours,” Justin said. “You’ve even successfully tried some jury trials for both plaintiffs and defendants. But I don’t think you’ve got the slightest clue as to how this system works.”
         Anderson swallowed hard. The abuse had begun, slowly at first, as always, and it would soon be an onrushing torrent.
         “ I think I do understand how the system works—” Anderson began, but Justin cut him off with a dismissive glance.
         “ There’s nothing in this response to the plaintiff’s interrogatory,” Justin said, tapping a document on his desk that Anderson had drafted, “that gives me the slightest indication that you have an inkling of how the system works.”
         Anderson tried to control himself.
         “ Sir?” he asked.
         “ What do you think this Brittany case is about?” Justin asked, drumming his fingers on the desktop.
Anderson wasn’t quite sure how to answer, so he started with a recitation of the facts. “Last April,” he began, “Sheryl Brittany was working as the cashier at a Chinese restaurant on Howard Avenue. After work—it was a Thursday night at approximately 11 p.m.—she left the restaurant with the night’s receipts and drove herself to Florida Second Bank’s branch office location on Kennedy Boulevard.”
         Anderson studied Justin as he spoke. He knew that he wasn’t going to change the emotional temperature in the room with a recitation of the facts, but he didn’t know what else to do, so he plunged ahead.
         “ Ms. Brittany left her vehicle,” he continued. “She walked to the ATM/depository located on the west side of the bank. An armed assailant approached her and demanded the bag she was carrying. When she did not immediately hand over the money the assailant shot her in the head, and she suffered brain damage.”
         Anderson glanced at Justin again. Justin was looking at him as if he were a particularly stupid child who had smacked a softball through a window or done something else equally unthinking, and now he, Justin, would have to clean up the mess all by himself.
         “ Ms. Brittany has now brought a civil lawsuit,” Anderson continued gamely, “against our client, Florida Second Bank. She alleges that the bank was negligent because it allowed its premises to exist in a dangerous condition, by having shrubbery too close to the ATM, so that an individual could hide in that shrubbery and attack her. She claims the bank’s negligence was a cause of her physical injuries, along with the gunshot wound to her head. The bank is self-insured up to five hundred thousand dollars, and First Casualty Insurance Company provides liability insurance up to a limit of five million dollars.”
         “ A paralegal could have summed up the case just as well as you have,” Justin said. “And for a lot less money per hour. Now why don’t you tell me what we are doing on the case?”
         The snide tone of Justin’s cutting remarks infuriated Anderson, but it wouldn’t do any good to get upset with the boss. No good at all.
         “ As defense counsel for the bank,” Anderson said, “we are trying to evaluate the liability and damages aspect of the case, so we can advise our client as to what settlement offer to make.”
         Justin pounded his fist on his desk. “Wrong!” he shouted.
         The only good thing about what was happening, Anderson told himself, was that pretty much everybody else at the firm had gone home, so that his humiliation would have the fewest witnesses. Justin never cared how many people were in the office, how many clients, how many support staff, and he always left his door open when he was administering a tongue-lashing to an attorney or a paralegal. It made no difference to Justin; if anything, people thought Justin liked to maximize the number of eavesdroppers, because it made everybody else work harder.
         “ You really don’t understand a goddamn thing,” Justin continued, his tone increasingly angry. “We are the top defense lawyers in southwest Florida. Wealthy clients come to us when they have serious problems. Like this. Our job is to do whatever is necessary to win these cases. And winning means not paying out a goddamn dime.”
         Anderson stiffened in his seat. It was one thing to want to win the case and minimize the exposure for a defendant. But in a case like this? Where the defendant was clearly wrong? Permitting clients at an ATM to be preyed upon because the bank didn’t have the good sense to cut down the adjacent shrubbery? Surely even someone like Justin Cartwright II would understand that a woman like Sheryl Brittany was entitled to something. Shot in the head, brain-damaged—all because she was trying to earn her ten dollars an hour, or whatever they could have paid her in a Chinese restaurant in Tampa.
         “ We have the resources,” Justin was saying. “We have endless funds, which can buy the best investigators and experts. We can outspend and outwork plaintiffs and their sorry-ass lawyers every time. We can wear the plaintiff’s lawyers down. Make them work long hours with the possibility of never seeing a dime for their efforts. We’re paid retainers and hourly fees. They’re working strictly on contingency. Anderson, that’s the system. And I don’t think you understand that at all.”
         Anderson understood it all too well. The disparity between the resources of wealthy defendants, on the one hand, and cash-strapped plaintiffs and their attorneys, on the other, bothered him tremendously. Anderson believed it was one of the most galling inequities not just in the legal system but also in our entire society. Justin didn’t seem to mind it a bit.
         Justin lowered his voice and continued. “Counsel for Ms. Brittany alleges that the ATM/depository area was dangerous because the lighting was inadequate. You left that out, Anderson.”
         Anderson shifted in his seat uncomfortably yet again.
         “ And then you had those bushes, in which, Ms. Brittany’s distinguished counsel says, our client permits intruders to hide and then rob bank customers. What’s our position, Anderson?”
         Anderson, not looking up, could feel Justin’s eyes boring into his head.
         Anderson said nothing.
         Justin answered his own question. “Our position is that the area was not dangerous,” Justin said as if Anderson were too stupid to waste time on. “The sole and only cause of the unfortunate shooting—” the way Justin pronounced the word unfortunate made it sound to Anderson as if the whole thing were just a big joke to Justin and not a situation that left a woman, a mother of three, with permanent brain damage, “was the criminal actions of the robber. And that shrubbery is there for aesthetic reasons, and it actually benefits the users of the ATM.”
         This was the routine every single time Anderson was forced to step into Justin’s office—browbeating followed by a rehashing of Justin’s win-at-all-costs philosophy. Now Justin finally got to the point.
         “ Let’s talk about the work I assigned you on this case, Anderson,” Justin said. “Counsel for Ms. Brittany forwarded to our client written interrogatory questions. Question 5 asks, ‘Were there any incidents before the subject incident, where a person was assaulted and/or injured in the area of the ATM/depository?’
         “ You provided a draft answer to me,” and Justin pointed to the document on his desk that Anderson had drafted as if it were something too unseemly for gentlemen even to discuss, “describing how a woman was knifed and robbed at the corner of the bank building, near the ATM/depository. Why the hell did you draft that answer? Don’t you know that prior mugging will be used against the bank to suggest the area was dangerous?”
         Anderson was confused. “I don’t create the facts,” he said with a stubbornness that surprised both men. “I met with the bank regional safety manager and he told me about the mugging, so I accurately responded to the question.”
         “ You didn’t think,” Justin said accusingly. “Plaintiff’s counsel drafted a question that asked about incidents in the area. The mugging took place twelve feet away from the depository. So it was not in the area. So the correct answer should be ‘no.’”
         Anderson, his jaw dropping, stared at Justin.
         “ We must do whatever is necessary,” Justin concluded, “to make sure that plaintiff’s counsel never learns about that other mugging.”
         Anderson could feel himself going ashen. It was a violation of legal ethics not to provide information about that mugging to the other side. Anderson could end up in serious trouble over something like that. He couldn’t believe that Justin was serious, but then he realized that Justin would do whatever was necessary to win, even if it meant placing his subordinates at risk of perjuring themselves.
         “ It’s plausible deniability,” Anderson heard himself saying.
Justin blinked several times, as if he couldn’t understand what Anderson was talking about.
         “ It’s beautiful,” Anderson said, rising to his feet and staring down at the little man behind the huge desk. “You tell me to remove any mention of the prior mugging from our response. Best-case scenario, plaintiff’s attorney never hears of it, and there’s no prior evidence that the ATM area was dangerous. But then if they somehow do find out about it—if they talk to somebody at the bank themselves, or just look up the history of the bank branch on the Internet, it’s my name that’s on the legal pleading. Not yours. I get into trouble. And you’ll testify that this whole conversation never happened. You bastard.”
         Justin looked as though he had been slapped. He struggled to his feet. “What did you just call me?” Justin asked, not believing his ears. He looked like a little boy whose candy had been snatched away by a bigger, meaner child.
         “ I called you a bastard,” Anderson said calmly. “I could call you an asshole or I could even call you a fucking little prick. Take your choice. I’ve taken all I’m going to take from you. If I don’t see you in court someday, I’ll see you in hell.”
         Anderson stormed out of Justin’s office, past an open-mouthed Sandy, who obviously had heard the entire conversation, and out of the office. How he was going to explain to Ruth that he had just thrown away his legal career was something he hoped to figure out before he got home.