Wrongful Termination Read online

  “I even checked some of the dates in the bills,” she said. “He billed forty-seven hours to Lacewell Industries the week he was on vacation in Hawaii. At his five hundred fifty dollars an hour, that’s over twenty-five thousand dollars. And then there’s Boston.”

  “What’s that about?”

  “He was supposed to be in Chicago yesterday, but when I talked to him last night, I saw a boarding pass on his desk from Boston’s Logan Airport.”

  “Maybe he had a change of plans.”

  “That’s what I thought at first, but I looked in the file this morning, and he just sent off a report letter to Lacewell Industries detailing a meeting in Chicago. He’s just making it all up.”

  “He knows how to work the system.”

  “What system?”

  “A partner’s compensation is purely numbers-driven…how much he bills and how much other lawyers bill on his cases. The twenty-five thousand he billed on vacation and the fifty thousand y’all will bill on the depos and documents will go in his column and beef up his numbers. And that’ll drive his compensation up.”

  I worked my hands higher, followed the bend of her knees and on to the backs of her thighs. I couldn’t remember the first time I had done this or how Meg and I had started. I think it was after a weekend of tennis, and it had soon progressed to the office. However it started, we had reached the point where it seemed natural. My hands melded to her firm legs, even though I knew partners were not supposed to massage the supple bodies of the female associates.

  “So he’s gonna screw his own client just to pad his wallet,” she said.

  “That’s the name of the game. We’re like rats fighting for the same piece of cheese, and that’s the easiest and fastest way to make his piece bigger. Patterson McBain…alone…paid us over a million dollars in fees last year.”

  She screwed up her face in a sour look. I had long ago tasted disillusionment about my chosen profession, and it had gone down bitterly. No reason why it shouldn’t for her, too.

  I worked my hands around the sides of her thighs and on to the top. She sighed, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes again then slid down to the edge of the chair. She opened her legs slightly to accommodate my thumbs on the insides of her thighs. Her skirt had reached as high as it could go, bunched at the bend of her pelvis. The faint triangle of white lace beneath beige hose disturbed me. I averted my eyes and tried to concentrate on our conversation, an uphill battle at best.

  “If you believe Tripp’s numbers, he bills an average of two hundred twenty hours a month,” I said. “Of course, billing isn’t exactly the same thing as working. But that all adds up to make him the highest paid partner in the firm.”

  We both sat silently for a few moments, running the numbers in our heads while I massaged. As I squeezed her upper thighs, my fingers came dangerously close to the triangle. I tried not to think about it but instead looked at her face. She sat with her eyes closed, her brow furrowed. I wondered if she knew what was exposed and what she was doing to me. I didn’t see how she couldn’t.

  I tried to distract myself by concentrating on Tripp, a ploy that quickly worked. I let my disgust with him and our compensation system swirl around in my head as Meg digested what I had said.

  “The real question is why clients put up with it,” I said, breaking the silence. “How does he explain it to Patterson or Lacewell?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sooner or later Patterson’s gonna get a bill and see all this work that was done after the summary judgment was entered.”

  “So let me repeat my original question,” she said. “What do you do when you know a partner is doing something unethical?”

  I thought back to my grilling by the Grievance Committee the day before. And to my deposition just three months before in the malpractice suit Alyssa had filed against me and the firm. I remembered the meeting where my partners had openly discussed expelling me. I had only narrowly averted a vote and still wasn’t sure how a vote would have gone had it been taken. Having experienced all that, I mustered the best advice I knew.

  “You keep your mouth shut, and you mind your own damn business.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’ve been down that road before. Nothing but heartache at the end.”

  “You did the right thing, Bay.”

  “The cost was too high. Learn from my experience.”

  She pushed me away and stood. Without a hint of self-consciousness, she pulled her skirt back down and smoothed it.

  “That’s not good enough,” she said. And then she was gone.

  “It’s the best I can do,” I said softly as the door closed behind her.

  Chapter Three

  Meg had just left when the door opened again and my secretary came in. Barely five feet tall, with red hair over a round face, Ellie had worked for me for thirteen years. Now thirty-five, she had grown from a giggly, immature secretary into an invaluable part of my law practice. She had also become my friend.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She looked around then glanced out the door. “Somewhere else?”

  An unusual request. Sensitive topics were usually discussed behind closed doors, but she seemed reluctant to broach her subject on firm soil. I searched her face, but it gave away nothing. She would have made a good poker player.

  Five minutes later, we sat at a small table in an underground mall amidst the usual downtown hustle, coffee cups before us. Offset lighting failed to chase away the shadows, so our table was dimly lit. All the way down, Ellie had been tight-lipped. I had teasingly tried to pry her secret from her, but she had rebuffed me without so much as a smile. As she sipped coffee, she fidgeted, still saying nothing.

  “Well,” I said.

  She held her cup on the table with both hands, twirling it. She kept her eyes cast down.

  “Ellie?”

  “We were talking, some of the secretaries, and someone asked if you and Meg had something going on.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face. “What do you mean ‘something going on?’”

  “Like an affair.”

  “She’s single, I’m divorced. Can you have an affair if neither of the parties is married?”

  She cut me off with a look. She was in no mood for word games.

  “Who asked?” I said.

  “I can’t tell you. But I didn’t know what to say when it came up.”

  “Well, you can say what’s true. Meg and I work together, and we’re friends.” I looked around, searching for familiar faces, afraid that others would overhear. “Why’d it come up?”

  “Because you’re always in each other’s offices. People see you going to lunch together all the time, just the two of you. You leave together at the end of the day. You play tennis together on weekends. And the door is closed a lot when you’re in each other’s offices.” She paused, continuing to twirl the coffee cup. “People are talking.”

  “What people?”

  “Just people.”

  “And what exactly are they saying?”

  “That y’all have something going on. A romance. An affair. The secretary who brought it up heard it from her boss.”

  “And you won’t tell me who.”

  “I can only tell you that she works for a partner.”

  I stared at the table, watching her push the coffee around. I took a sip of my own, which had suddenly grown tasteless.

  “What else are people saying?” I asked.

  “That she’s using you. That the reason she’s getting good work assignments…going to depositions and trials while other associates are stuck in the library…is because y’all have something going on.”

  “That we’re sleeping together.”

  “That’s not what they said.”

  “But it’s what they mean.”

  She looked back at the tabletop. “Are you?”

  “I’ve worked with other first-year associates before,
and I’ve always given them the same kinds of work assignments. You know that.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m not treating Meg any differently than I’ve treated any other associate.”

  “What about the closed doors?” she asked.

  “If we hadn’t come down here but had stayed in the office, wouldn’t you have wanted to talk behind a closed door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And there would have been nothing inappropriate about that, would there?”

  “It’s just that people were talking, and I thought you should know.”

  “And I thank you for telling me.”

  She met my gaze again. “So there’s nothing going on? Nothing I should know about?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I would know, wouldn’t I?”

  She swept her hand across her brow as if wiping off sweat. “Whew! You don’t know how scared I was to ask you that.”

  “Would it really matter, anyway?”

  “It’s another black eye you don’t need right now.”

  She was right. I didn’t. I smiled, and she smiled back. “Don’t worry about me,” I said.

  “Someone has to.”

  Chapter Four

  For me, home is Forney, Texas, a small farming town thirty minutes due east of downtown Dallas. Distances in and around Dallas are typically measured in driving time, not mileage. I had never clocked the actual mileage, but I figured it was something less than thirty miles. Even in traffic, my drive took less time than many of my brethren spent driving ten miles to their north Dallas homes, north being more prestigious than the rural east.

  Others of my partners, like Tripp Malloy, lived in Highland Park—called Camelot by some because it was a pocket of wealth and snobbery in an otherwise middle-class area. Still other partners opted for the ever-growing, crowded suburbs to the northwest, near the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Out of over two hundred partners, only I called Kaufman County home. I found it a comfort to have cows for neighbors instead of lawyers.

  I arrived home that evening a little past six o’clock, the summer sun still high. My twenty-six-hundred-square-foot house, modest by my partners’ standards, sat deep on a one-acre lot in a neighborhood of similar styles. One story, but with a high pitch to the roof that made it look like two, I had built it immediately after my divorce. Alyssa had always resisted my efforts to move eastward and rural-ward, so I had bought the lot and built the house as a gesture of my newfound independence.

  I parked in the garage and entered the house through the kitchen. Rufus, my year-old yellow Labrador, greeted me at the door. I could count on his greeting each day and, on days like today, looked forward to it. Unconditional love had a remarkably soothing effect on a troubled spirit.

  “Hey, Rufe. How’s my boy?” He jumped to lick my face. I had to bend over to offer him my cheek, but I needed his kisses.

  I wandered through the kitchen, down the long, hardwood hallway back to my bedroom. Oak furniture—king-sized bed, armoire, nightstands, and triple dresser—themed the room. Hawaiian prints added an artistic touch, reminding me of my annual vacation to the islands. I stripped off my suit and put on gym shorts and running shoes. Rufus was beside himself, recognizing my ensemble for what it meant—we were going for a run. He generally set a blistering five-and-a-half-minute-mile pace for me.

  We exited the front door then set off into the countryside. Rufus bounded ahead, covering twice the ground I did as he zigzagged, sniffing trees and marking territory. I followed at a modest distance, cruising along in the ninety-six-degree heat, soaking up more sun on my bare back.

  I thought back to my day. Throughout my tenure at the firm, I had heard my share of gossip—who was seeing whom, who was doing what with whom—but so far as I knew, I had never been the subject. I often wondered how I would feel if I was, and now I knew. I hated it.

  I hated it mostly for Meg. I was already a partner in disrepute. Rumors about an affair with an associate wouldn’t have any effect on my wounded career, but the same couldn’t be said for her. Lawyers have long memories and, when Meg came up for partnership in six years, rumors would cloud her chances. In the interim, she would become the object of scorn from her peers for her allegedly loose morals. And, I knew, inevitably some other partner would view her as fair game for his advances. All because of me.

  I crossed the countryside, struggling to keep up with Rufus in the midst of cotton fields. Sweat matted my hair and streamed down my chest and back. I struggled to put my feelings in proper perspective. I enjoyed working with Meg. She was bright, lively, and honest, the perfect combination. I could talk and joke with her, share thoughts, opinions, and insights, as well as observations and laughs. She made me feel important. She cared what I thought and felt. I believed she looked up to me, which was flattering, and thought we shared the same value system. It seemed as if I had known her all my life when we had actually known each other only a short time.

  I was physically attracted to her, as well. Undeniably beautiful, she was at once wholesome and sexy. I knew I had been tempting fate by our closed-door massage sessions, creating sparks of sexual tension that threatened to ignite at any moment. But did I really want them to? Did I really want to strike up a romantic relationship with a woman almost twenty-five years my junior and my employee to boot?

  And what about her? What was she thinking? I knew she surrounded herself with dozens of friends from college and law school, many, if not most, of them male. Young, good-looking guys with whom she had more in common. But I was from another generation—a baby-boomer and not much younger than her parents. Even if she was interested in me—and surely she wasn’t—nothing could ever come of it. I was sure of that.

  But I still wondered what she was thinking.

  *

  Hector Cortez wheeled his bright red Cadillac low-rider with orange flames on the side past an apartment complex in the area of Dallas known as Uptown. The stereo boomed Latino music, bass rattling the entire car. He and his passenger, Ramon Flores, wore blue bandannas on their heads. Teardrop prison tattoos adorned both their faces, mementoes of their recent stay in Huntsville, courtesy of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

  Hector turned off of a main thoroughfare, into a poorer section of town that contrasted with the trendy street he had just left. A narrow street of frame houses, most of them poorly maintained. Hector slowed as he approached the middle of the block. Ramon rested the barrel of a TEC-9 on the window’s edge. As the Cadillac rolled by a pale blue house, Ramon fired off a burst, leaving a rainbow arc of bullet holes across the front room and shattering glass in two windows.

  Hector floored it and the Cadillac roared away.

  Chapter Five

  Full of self-importance, Tripp Malloy sat in a guest chair in Bill Patterson’s luxurious office at Patterson McBain, Inc. In his early sixties, Tripp wore his hair heavily sprayed into place—classic helmet-hair, over a thin, harsh face and wire-rim glasses. All angles and straight lines, he looked like a Picasso print. He wore an elegant tailor-made suit, rigidly starched white shirt, and wine-red silk power tie. His clothes custom-draped his slender, almost anorexic-looking frame. His very appearance made some people want to whip his ass.

  From Tripp’s vantage point next to a broad expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows, he looked down twenty stories to the rest of Las Colinas—a miniature downtown of glass, steel, and granite that had sprung up in the city of Irving, just northwest of Dallas. In the plaza below, a sculpture of wild mustangs raced through a fountain, splashing water with their hooves.

  Patterson, the graying, pot-bellied chairman of an international oil and gas firm, leaned back in his chair, lizard cowboy boots propped on his desk, and listened politely to his lawyer. In contrast to Tripp, Patterson’s appearance spelled good old boy, tracing his West Texas roots. On the wall behind him, an oil painting called Winter on the Rig depicted a snowy day in a West Texas oil field.

  “I fi
gured there was no way we could lose,” Tripp said. “Not as well-postured as we had the case. The only question was when the judge would rule, not how.”

  “That’s not what you told me when you sent those big fee statements. You kept talking about what a dangerous case it was and how you had to pour all those man-hours into it.”

  “It was dangerous. All those man-hours are why it ended up being easy.”

  “I suppose.”

  “All in a day’s work,” Tripp said.

  “Think they’ll appeal?”

  “Oh, no doubt. But I think we can make it stand up. Still gonna be a lotta work, though. It’ll be expensive, I’ll tell you that right now.”

  “It always is.”

  “But it’ll be worth it.” Tripp folded his arms across his chest, taking care to first drape his tie across his forearms so as not to crush it against his chest.

  Patterson took his feet off his desk and leaned forward. “This other case is a little different, though. It’s not going to be as easy.”

  “Like I said, it was only easy because we worked it hard. We’ll do that again.”

  “You know what I mean,” Patterson said, waving his hand. “I don’t think there’ll be any summary judgments this time. And there’s going to be a hell of a lot of discovery involved.”

  “Just leave it up to me,” Tripp said, mentally counting the billable hours.

  “You’ll use Meg Kelly, won’t you? She’s a smart girl…I like her.”

  “She’s already part of the team.”

  “And I want you to add Bay Muckleroy.”

  The friendliness left Tripp’s tone. “Why?”

  “Because this one’s got some of the same issues as that one he worked on a few years ago. The gas processing systems over in Louisiana.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I remember.”

  “Bay did us a helluva job on that one. He cuts through the bullshit and gives us a lot of bang for our buck.” Patterson paused then added, “Not that I mind paying your fees, of course.”