Final Option

arrest.”
    “What is Mrs. Hexter like?” asked Elkin, of the client he had not yet met.
    “I don’t know. She’s like my mother’s friends. You know, beautiful manners, beautiful clothes. She and Bart were married for thirty-six years. By all accounts it was a marriage that worked. They have three grown children. They worked together to raise money for a number of worthy causes. I guess I really don’t know her at all.”
    “I, too, have been aware of them as a public couple. This is one of those cases that will try itself in the press ten times before we ever see the inside of a courtroom. Image will be very important. Does Mrs. Hexter have any history of alcoholism or mental instability?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “Good. And the family is supportive? They are behind their mother?”
    “I’ve talked only to Barton. He thinks there must be a terrible mistake. He can’t believe that his mother is guilty.”
    “Of course,” said Elkin, for whom issues of guilt or innocence were by necessity of less importance than those of conviction and acquittal. “Now, I believe, it is time for me to meet my client.”
     
    The next morning my own face stared at me from the front page of the Tribune as I walked past the newsstand in the lobby of my office building.
    “So his old lady shot him,” remarked the man behind the counter as I passed him a quarter for my copy. “Too bad they didn’t get your good side.”
    I unfolded the paper. It was a full quarter-page shot of Barton Jr. and me looking stricken and harassed. They must have snapped it while we were fighting our way through the pack on the way to the police station the night before. Mother, I thought silently to myself, is going to really love this.
    The real abuse, of course, began as soon as I walked through the doors at Callahan Ross.
    “I see you’re making headlines,” remarked Lillian, the receptionist, wryly, as she handed me the messages that had come through the switchboard for me. Stopping to fill my coffee cup, I saw that some wit had already cut out my picture and put it up on the wall above the photocopier. It was displayed next to a photo of Cindy Crawford with the hand-lettered caption: American Lawyer Beauty Makeover. Cindy Crawford’s picture was labeled “before.” My picture was “after.”
    “Morning, Kate,” called Howard Ackerman, my office neighbor, lounging in his doorway. “Now that you’re a partner, do you think you’ll be able to afford to buy up all the copies of today’s Trib and destroy them?”
    “I’m going to my desk to count my pennies right now,” I replied.
    I turned the corner into my office to find Cheryl lying in wait and looking grave.
    “Skip Tillman has been down here looking for you twice, and he didn’t look happy,” she said. “You’re supposed to go to see him as soon as you get in.”
    “Wonderful,” I said. “I just love starting the day with a trip to the woodshed with the managing partner of the firm.”
    “I’ll be waiting here for you with coffee and bandages,” replied my faithful secretary.
    Skip’s secretary ushered me into the great man's office like a nurse escorting a patient for whom she knows the prognosis is not good. Skip looked up at me from the file he was reading, peering over the top of his half glasses. His white hair was thinning on top, and with the passing years his face had regained a babylike pinkness. Skip was an old friend of my family’s. His wife, Bitsy, played bridge with my mother. Ever since I’d joined the firm he’d treated me alternatively as a beloved niece or a wayward daughter. I couldn’t help but feel affection toward Skip, but that didn’t change the fact that he was such a big WASP he probably had a stinger on his ass.
    “You wanted to see me?” I asked, trying to push down the unpleasant sensation of being called into the headmaster’s office.
    “I take it you’ve had an opportunity to see this morning’s newspaper?” he demanded.
    “It was rather hard to miss,” I confessed.
    “Did you also catch yourself on the news?”
    “No,” I replied, wincing inwardly. “I never watch TV.”
    “I have it on good authority that you made all three networks. Both the eleven o’clock news and the morning broadcasts.”
    “You know what Andy Warhol said—everyone is famous for fifteen minutes,” I ventured.
    “And you know very well the policy of this firm regarding this kind of publicity. It is an axiom of this partnership