Waiting for Armando (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) Read Free

could hardly be expected to invest in quarters they would soon be abandoning. Had not Bellanfonte himself shown me plans for new offices atop the CityView building on which ground would be broken any day now?
    On this day I took the interior stairs down from the firm’s data processing department on the thirty-ninth floor. As I passed thirty-eight I gazed wistfully at the elegant reception area in which clients awaited their expensive attorneys. Then I proceeded doggedly to thirty-seven. This time I noticed an array of cheesy photographs on the stairwell walls, four eight-by-ten enlargements of old, Caucasian men. The prints were amateurishly framed and hung askew on carpet tacks banged into the walls. Portraits of the founding fathers, no doubt.
    The door leading from the stairwell to the main corridor jammed on some duct tape that patched a three-corner tear in the carpeting, so I had to yank it open. I turned right and traversed the narrow aisle until I came to the half-empty double pod outside Bellanfonte’s office.
    Dismayingly, nothing had changed. Once again, Charlene sat at her computer, typing busily. My space, which struck me as an odd term for quarters so small, was still cramped, dusty and surrounded by cartons of files. The cheap veneer on the desk was held in place with tape in several spots. The computer station looked relatively new, but the transcription machine had a headset that would have done the Marquis de Sade proud.
    “So how’s it going?” asked Charlene in an attempt to make conversation as I stood there numbly.
    How on earth do you stand this? I wanted to shriek, but Charlene appeared to be perfectly composed. “It’s an adjustment,” was what finally came out of my mouth, and one I have no intention of making, I finished silently. I sank into the antique secretarial chair and held my leather shoulder bag in my lap like a shield.
    “Yes, I remember,” Charlene offered sympathetically. “Listen, I really have to visit the women’s room, and there’s nobody else around to answer the phones. Hey, why don’t you give it a try? These three are Donatello’s lines, and these two are Victor’s. The top two on your console are your lines. The others belong to me, the land analyst in the office next to Donatello’s, and the paralegals behind that partition over there. Just punch this button here whenever you see it blink more than twice, and whoever’s line it is will roll over into your console. I’ll be right back.”
    “Wait a minute,” I protested. “Answer all these phones? I mean, aren’t there people here who do that?”
    Already halfway down the aisle, Charlene looked over her shoulder at me and chuckled, eyes merry. “Why, yes, and now you’re one of them! By the way, call me Strutter . Everyone else does.” She winked and sashayed down the aisle on impossibly curvy legs, leaving no doubt about the derivation of her nickname. Two telephone lines began ringing simultaneously.
    By Thursday my pipedreams of simplicity, reflected glory, and the esteem of a gracious superior had evaporated. Bellanfonte was back in town and popped out of his office continually to bark cryptic orders. He seemed convinced that because it took him ten seconds to outline a task, it should take me no longer to accomplish it. The phones rang incessantly and had to be answered swiftly and professionally. No electronic menus at BGB, no sir. When you paid up to four hundred and fifty dollars an hour for a BGB lawyer’s service, you got a real person on the phone every time.
    Then there were the demands of the legal proceedings themselves, which were extraordinary. Add distraught clients, delicate and competing professional egos, and the unrelenting demand for perfection in the face of each day’s thousand-and-one opportunities to screw up, and you have the antithesis of simplicity. You have a tiptoe through the minefields.
    As for the reflected glory of working for a top gun, I soon realized that in a law