New York Dead (Stone Barrington 1)

“I did. The LA office is mostly into entertainment work, so I did the dog work while they fronted for me in court. Don’t worry about the lady; she’s doing very well out of this, but she’s not getting the thirty million that community property division would have given her. She’s pissed off now, but she’ll get used to living on the income from six million.”

“You do a lot of divorce work?”

“I’m sort of the firm general practitioner. I have a lot of clients whose personal legal work I handle, and that often leads to divorce work. It’s nasty sometimes, but, if you can keep a certain detachment, you can live with it.”

“Must be lucrative.”

“Not all that much. We only do divorce work for the firm’s existing clients, and we don’t charge them the earth. In the case of the men, when they see what the wife’s lawyer is demanding, they’re grateful to us for not taking them to the cleaners; in the case of the women, they’re grateful to us for not demanding high fees. That builds client loyalty.”

“I should think so.”

They ordered their food, and Eggers chose what Stone thought must be the most expensive bottle of wine on a very expensive list. If Stone had been interested before in what Bill Eggers had to say, now he was really interested.

Eggers tasted the wine and nodded to the sommelier. When the man had gone, he turned to Stone. “What do you know about Woodman amp; Weld?”

“Not very much,” Stone admitted. “I get the impression that it’s a prestigious firm, from what I read in the papers, but I’m not very clear on why it might be so.”

“Good. That’s pretty much the impression we like to convey. We see that the people who might need us know a lot more, but we keep a fairly low public profile.”

Stone sipped the wine; he thought he had never tasted anything so good. “It’s a lovely burgundy,” he said to Eggers. “Thank you.”

Eggers nodded, pleased that his largess had been noted. “Let me give you the scoop on us. We’ve got eighteen partners at the moment, and thirty-six associates. That’s certainly not big by Manhattan standards, but it’s big enough for us to be able to cover a lot of bases. There are seven corporate specialists – we tend to attract companies somewhat below the Fortune Five Hundred level, outfits that don’t have huge legal departments; we have four estate planners – that’s very important to wealthy individuals – and, just as important, four tax specialists, all Jewish. Nobody seems to take a tax lawyer seriously who isn’t Jewish. We’re something of a polyglot firm – blacks, women, Irish, Jews, Italians – not unlike the New York Police Department, I expect. That’s important to us, because the firm is active in liberal Democratic causes – you’d be surprised how much business comes in that way. Finally, there are three generalists – two of them Woodman and me.”

“I liked Woodman when I met him.”

“Woodman is a genius, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a client man, first and last; he inspires trust. Also, he has a facility for going into a meeting – corporate, tax, whatever – and immediately grasping the issues involved. Clients think he knows everything, which isn’t exactly true, but he can give that impression effortlessly. I’d be willing to bet that he could engage you in conversation about a homicide investigation and make you think he was an ex-cop.”

Their first course arrived, and they dug in.

“You didn’t mention any criminal lawyers,” Stone said between bites.

“We don’t have a criminal lawyer as such, although you’d be surprised at how much criminal work comes our way. Nowadays, it’s the corporate executive or stockbroker who’s stepped over the line; also, our clients’ kids get into trouble – drugs, rape, sometimes even murder.”

“How do you handle that?”

“In different ways. If it’s something big, we refer to a hotshot mouthpiece; more often, we bring in a consultant and handle it internally. A client likes it when his own lawyer seems to be in charge. Of course, there’s a fine line there; we have to make the judgment on when an outsider best serves the client’s needs. We can’t afford to make a mistake and underrepresent a client. We’re very, very careful in the matter of malpractice, and we’ve never had a suit against us.”

“That seems a good area to be careful in.”

“In short, Stone, we’re a class act. Every single partner is as good as any lawyer in town at what he does and better than ninety-nine percent of the field. We’re low profile, highly ethical, and extremely profitable. I will tell you, in confidence, that no partner in our firm is taking home less than half a million a year, and that’s the low end. I made a million two last year, and it wasn’t my best year.”

Stone sucked in a breath at the thought of so much money and what he could do with it.

“Now that I’ve stunned you,” Eggers said, noting Stone’s expression, “let me tell you why we’re interested in you.”

Somehow, Stone didn’t think that he was here to be offered a partnership and half a million dollars a year.

“As I’ve said, we’re taking on more and more criminal and domestic work, without even trying. We’ve handled some ourselves, farmed out some, and brought in consultants on others, but we’re still spread thin. Sometimes we need investigative work done, and we’re troubled by the quality of the people available to do that sort of thing. There are some high-class people around, but they charge more than a good lawyer gets; generally, what we see in the investigative area is sleaze – the worst sort of ex-cop, the ones who got the boot.”

“You might say I got the boot,” Stone said.

“But for all the right reasons,” Eggers replied. “We have a pretty good idea of why you were pensioned off.” He took a deep breath. “Another thing about investigators, they have a tendency to look wrong for some of the work we give them. They dress badly, drink too much, and sprinkle a lot of ’dems, deezes, and dozes’ around their conversation. You, on the other hand, look right and sound right.”

Stone shrugged. Eggers was looking for a private d

etective, and the thought didn’t interest him much.

Eggers must have read his mind. “Don’t get me wrong, we’re not looking for somebody to just kick down bedroom doors, although I wouldn’t rule that out. What’s interesting about you is a combination of things: you understand how the police department and the DA’s office work; you have a fine grasp of criminal justice procedure; you are a highly experienced investigator; and, unusually with all that, you have the background, education, demeanor, and the language skills that will let you fit easily into any upper-level social situation. In short, a client would be perfectly comfortable explaining his problem to you.”