The King of Torts Read Free

budgets she had received less money than the year before. Her quandary at the moment was which paralegals to terminate and which lawyers to force into part-time work.
    Like most of the other PDs, Clay Carter had notentered law school with the plan of a career, or even a brief stint, defending indigent criminals. No way. Back when Clay was in college and then law school at Georgetown his father had a firm in D.C. Clay had worked there part-time for years, and had his own office. The dreams had been boundless back then, father and son litigating together as the money poured in.
    But the firm collapsed during Clay’s last year of law school, and his father left town. That was another story. Clay became a public defender because there were no other last-second jobs to grab.
    It took him three years to jockey and connive his way into getting his own office, not one shared with another lawyer or paralegal. About the size of a modest suburban utility closet, it had no windows and a desk that consumed half the floor space. His office in his father’s old firm had been four times larger with views of the Washington Monument, and though he tried to forget those views he couldn’t erase them from his memory. Five years later, he still sat at his desk at times and stared at the walls, which seemed to get closer each month, and asked himself how, exactly, did he fall from one office to the other?
    He tossed the Tequila Watson file on his very clean and very neat desk and took off his jacket. It would have been easy, in the midst of such dismal surroundings, to let the place go, to let the files and papers pile up, to clutter his office and blame it on being overworked and understaffed. But his father had believed that an organized desk was a sign of an organized mind. If you couldn’t find something in thirty seconds,you were losing money, his father always said. Return phone calls immediately was another rule Clay had been taught to obey.
    So he was fastidious about his desk and office, much to the amusement of his harried colleagues. His Georgetown Law School diploma hung in a handsome frame in the center of a wall. For the first two years at OPD he had refused to display the diploma for fear that the other lawyers would wonder why someone from Georgetown was working for minimum wages. For the experience, he told himself, I’m here for the experience. A trial every month—tough trials against tough prosecutors in front of tough juries. For the down-in-the-gutter, bare-knuckle training that no big firm could provide. The money would come later, when he was a battle-hardened litigator at a very young age.
    He stared at the thin Watson file in the center of his desk and wondered how he might unload it on someone else. He was tired of the tough cases and the superb training and all the other crap that he put up with as an underpaid PD.
    There were six pink phone message slips on his desk; five related to business, one from Rebecca, his longtime girlfriend. He called her first.
    “I’m very busy,” she informed him after the required initial pleasantries.
    “You called me,” Clay said.
    “Yes, I can only talk a minute or so.” Rebecca worked as an assistant to a low-ranking Congressman who was the chairman of some useless subcommittee. But because he was the chairman he had an additionaloffice he was required to staff with people like Rebecca who was in a frenzy all day preparing for the next round of hearings that no one would attend. Her father had pulled strings to get her the job.
    “I’m kinda swamped too,” Clay said. “Just picked up another murder case.” He managed to add a measure of pride to this, as if he were honored to be the attorney for Tequila Watson.
    It was a game they played: Who was the busiest? Who was the most important? Who worked the hardest? Who had the most pressure?
    “Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday,” she said, pausing slightly as if Clay was supposed to know this. He did not. He cared not.