LITMIR.BIZ

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have to call the cops! Right this instant!” He points to the telephone on my desk. “What are you waiting for?”

      “I can’t do that. I’m not even sure about the car. Maybe I’m imagining—”

      “Mary, you’re not imagining this!” He waves the note in the air like a warning flag.

      “I can’t just call the cops. Can you imagine? Cops asking everyone in the department—even partners—about me? That would be terrific right now, right before the election.”

      “Mare, what’s the matter with you? Someone is stalking you and you’re worried about making partner?”

      “They’re not stalking me, you don’t have to make it sound like that.”

      At that moment, my telephone rings and we exchange uneasy looks. Brent takes charge. “Let Lucinda get it. And they are stalking you. What do you think it’s called when someone follows you around?”

      The phone rings again, and Brent looks at it angrily. “Fuck! Can’t she get off her ass for once? I pick up for her!”

      The phone rings a third time.

      I reach for it, but Brent heads me off. “No, let me. If it’s that asshole, I’m gonna scream my fucking head off.” He snatches up the receiver. “Ms. DiNunzio’s office,” he says, in a crisp telephone tenor. Then his face blanches. “Okay. Right now.” He nods, hanging up.

      “What?”

      “Berkowitz wants to see you.”

      “Why? Is something the matter? Was that him?”

      “It was Delia. She said he wants to see you right away.”

      “Great. This is all I need.” I dig in my purse for my compact and check my reflection in its round mirror. A circle of dirty-blond hair, shoulder length. A circle of dark brown eye, an extended-wear contact lens afloat on its cornea. A circle of whitish teeth, straightened into Chiclets by orthodonture paid for in installments. Mike used to say I was pretty, but I don’t feel pretty today.

      “What are you doing? Get going! You’re worse than Jack with that mirror,” Brent says. Jack is his lover of five years, a bartender at Mr. Bill’s, a gay bar on Locust Street. Judy calls him Jack Off, but Brent claims he thought of it first. “Go, girl, you’ll be late!”

      Berkowitz’s corner office is on Pride, and Delia’s desk blocks its entrance like a walnut barricade. She types as she listens to the teaching of Chairman Berkowitz through dictating earphones. Even the ugly headset doesn’t mar her good looks. Lustrous red hair, a perfect nose, the sexiest pout in legal history. Brent is right. Delia is a stone fox.

      “Hi, Delia.”

      “I’m busy.” She doesn’t look up but continues to hit the keys of her word processor with spiky acrylic nails. Click-click-click-click. It sounds like a hail on a rooftop. Too bad it will look like jciywegwebcniquywgxnmai. I know, I’ve seen her work.

      “Oh. Sorry.”

      “He’s in there.” Click-click-click. Oreuhbalkejeopn?

      “I’ll just go in, then.”

      “Suit yourself.”

      This is even more attitude than I’m used to from Delia; I wonder what’s bothering her. I walk to the open doorway of Berkowitz’s office, but his brawny back is to the door. A tailored English suit strains at its shoulder seams as Berkowitz hunches over. The only time Burberrys has dressed a major appliance.

      “Go in already!” snaps Delia.

      The command startles me into the sanctum sanctorum. Berkowitz is on the telephone and doesn’t turn around. I walk the three city blocks to his desk and sit down in a massive leather wing chair. The decor here screams Street Kid Who Made God—I mean, Good. The desk is a baroque French antique with a surface that was polished by a Zamboni. The high-backed desk chair could have belonged to the Sun King. Photographs of Berkowitz’s first, second, and third sets of children adorn curly-legged mahogany end tables. I feel like a scullery maid at Versailles.

      “I don’t care, Lloyd! I don’t give one flying fuck!” Berkowitz bellows into the telephone, as he swivels around in his chair. “You tell that little bastard if he thinks he’s going to fuck me, he has another thing coming! We can take his fucking little pisher of a firm, and we will!” Berkowitz is so engrossed in making what constitutes Terroristic Threats under the Pennsylvania Crimes Code that he’s oblivious to me altogether. This is why Judy calls him Jerkowitz, but I think she’s being unfair. Berkowitz grew up in tough West Philly and made it to the peaky-peak on sheer brainpower and force of will. If your Fortune 500 Company is in deep shit, he’s one of the few lawyers in the country who can save your sorry ass. Guaranteed. But not in writing.

      “Where the fuck does he get off? I told him what the agenda was, and he tries to make a fool out of me! He’ll be offa this committee so goddamn fast it’ll make his head spin!” Berkowitz is yelling at one of his apostles on the Rules Committee, which he chairs. It’s a twelve-man panel of federal judges and prominent litigators that meets at our offices to propose changes in federal court rules. If something didn’t go well at a recent meeting, heads will roll, and balls too. Everything rolling, off down the hall.

      “Don’t tell me to calm down! I am calm! … No! No! No! You deal with him then!”

      Berkowitz slams down the telephone receiver. The glaze in his eyes tells me he’s back on Girard Avenue, decades ago, fighting off the punks who want a peek at his foreskin. Or lack thereof.

      Berkowitz shakes his head, his face still florid. “Can you believe this fucking guy? Can you fucking believe this guy?”

      I gather the question is rhetorical and say nothing.

      He rubs his eyes irritably and leans back in his chair. His look says, Heavy is the head that wears the crown. “You want my job, Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary?”

      “What?”

      “I’m asking you. You want it?” He isn’t smiling.

      “I don’t understand.”

      “Do you want to be here someday? Run the department, head the committees? When I was your age, I wanted to be me so bad I was on fire.” He gazes out of a massive window at the best view in the city. From his vantage point, you can see all the way to the Delaware River and the snaky black border it makes between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. An occasional tourist ferry travels in slow motion under the Ben Franklin Bridge. We ain’t the port of call we used to be.

      “I would have killed to be me,” Berkowitz says absently. Suddenly he snatches a pack of Marlboros from his desk and lights one up, belching out a puff of smoke so thick it looks like the Industrial Revolution took place in his office. I pretend the smoke doesn’t bother me, which it does, mightily. I try not to breathe.

      “But you’re not interested in this shit and neither am I. You’re wondering why I called you up here.” He takes a slow drag on the cigarette and squints at me through the smoke.

      I nod, yes.

      “Two reasons. One: That was a helluva result you got on the motion before Bitterman. I saw him at the Rules Committee meeting”—at this he winces—”and he told me you had great potential.”

      “Uh … thank you.”

      “He’s an ugly bastard, isn’t he?”

      I laugh.

      “Two: Harbison’s GC is sending me a new case. You know how they like to spread their business around, get all the firms competing with each other. They sent the case to Masterson originally, but the GC thinks we can do a better job. We can, right?”

      “Right.” So we stole a case from Masterson, Moss & Dunbar, the firm at the apex of the holy trinity. We must have snaked them with

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