Chapter 1

     "I said, who’s Marc Reesoner?"

     The tone of the man’s voice made me glance up from my computer screen mid-revision. Nobody shouted in our law offices. I didn’t even hear sharp noises because they’d wall-to-wall carpeted everything.

     "I said, who the fuck is Marc Reesoner?"

     I stopped working, locking my eyes onto the shouter, some freshfaced lawyer getting fresh with my supervisor, Betty. My co-workers also ceased typing.

     "Don’t use the ‘f ’ word with me, Mr. Dalrymple," Betty said.

     "Don’t tell me what I can and cannot say," he replied.

     Betty stood and faced the man across the same counter that the attorneys use to submit their documents to our department.

     "You haven’t been here very long, have you?" she asked him. He didn’t answer, but I could tell he wanted to. "You need to read your employee handbook again, and get to that fine-print section about using the ‘f ’ word on the job."

     "All right," he said. Then he made this sweeping gesture with his hand toward all of us sitting in our cubicles in the word processing department. "Which one of those dimwits is Marc Reesoner?"

     Betty wouldn’t answer. She might have had a narrow set of shoulders, but she wouldn’t budge. She was usually very effective at protecting us from the animals in the suits.

     "Well?" Dalrymple persisted.

     "Don’t worry," Betty said. "I’ll take care of Marc."

     "I don’t intend to worry." Then he did what we dreaded; he stepped past the counter into our sacrosanct world. None of us liked to have a confrontation with an angry, nitpicking attorney.

     "Which one of you ‘effing a-holes’ is Marc Reesoner?"

     When he said it, he made imaginary quotations marks around "effing a-holes" with his fingers, finding a loophole in Bradshaw Bradshaw & Quine’s language policy. He also lowered his voice in deference to Betty, but just a little.

     Only three of us were men out of a pool of twelve in our department. I sat closest to the front and had no means of escape unless I jumped out the 58th floor window.

     Betty followed a step behind him. I thought she might grab him by the collar. Instead, she used her softest, most motherly, voice: "Mr. Dalrymple, why don’t you calm down, take a deep breath, go get a cup of coffee, and come back when you can talk like a human being?" I wasn’t sure if that was a faux pas or an intentional dig, but never suggest to a lawyer that he might be less than human. Not to his face anyway.

     "You," he said, pointing to me. "Did you fuck up my document and send it by mistake to Bradshaw?"

     I don’t know why I always had a gut reaction to attorneys. Maybe resentment at their privileged position? Or because they had the education I couldn’t afford? I don’t know, and I know I shouldn’t judge; but this guy especially pissed me off because of the perfect set of teeth, the protruding chin, and the pinstriped suit with the red power tie—none of which I will ever have.

     "I’m not Marc," I said.

     "Then who is?"

     I just shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t about to give Marc away, even if he was a lousy word processor who didn’t know his asterisks from his ampersands. Cops have their thin blue line, and so do we word processors.

     However, all eyes turned to Marc, sitting in the cubicle adjacent to mine. Usually ramrod erect, head up, hands on the wrist rest; he now slumped head down, eyes averted.

     "I’m going to have to call security," Betty said.

     Dalrymple whipped around and looked at Betty, his face breathing distance from hers. "Security? Go ahead. And I’m going to have you—and whoever this idiot is—fired. You’re not just messing with me, you’re messing with Lawrence T. Bradshaw, one of the founding partners. You want to test that out?" When he turned to face Marc, Betty casually wiped his spittle from her cheek and stepped back to the counter to make the call.

     "Did you work on my document?"

     "Betty, please do something about this guy," Marc whined. "He’s making it sound like I did something wrong, and all I’m doing is my job."

     That’s all Dalrymple’s analytical, well-trained mind needed to figure out he’d found the perpetrator. He lunged at Marc, grabbing him out of his chair with one hand and pushing him against a glass wall. "Are you deliberately trying to get me fired?" The papers he had rolled in his other hand like a baseball bat I presumed to be the document in question.

     "No."

     "I’m going to kill you if your numbskull mistake causes me problems. Do you hear me?"

     Marc shook his head, yes, which looked absurd because he had at least a foot on the attorney. But Marc was reed thin, while Dalrymple’s muscles looked ready to burst out of his suit.

     "I’m serious," Dalrymple repeated. "If this causes me grief, I’m going to kill you." He punctuated the threat by pulling more of Marc’s shirtfront into his fist.

     "What did I do?"

     "You screwed up big time."

     "Leave him alone," Betty yelled, giving equal weight, strength and pitch to each word. All heads peering over cubicle partitions turned toward Betty. In my five months at the firm, I’d never heard her yell before. Apparently, the others hadn’t either.

     "Get bent," he said to her.

     "Get your hands off him right now," Betty continued.

     "What are you going to do if I don’t?"

     "I’ve already done it."

     "Done what?"

     "Called security."

     "I’m so scared," Dalrymple said with mock fear.

     "I’m also looking forward to testifying against you in a court of law on assault charges," Betty added.

     "I’m quivering."

     "What did I do?" Marc asked again.

     "I said, let go!" I had to give Betty credit, graying hair and all, for standing up to Dalrymple. That’s something I should have done—stood up and pulled Dalrymple off Marc and punched his lights out. But that’s easy to say.

     He finally let go of Marc’s shirt and showed him the draft document he’d apparently f ’d up. Dalrymple pointed to it as if he were arguing a case. "See this? Just because it’s a memo addressed to Lawrence T. Bradshaw doesn’t mean you’re supposed to e-mail it to him. My directions on the cover sheet clearly stated that the operator was supposed to e-mail the document to me." Dalrymple had the cover sheet as well, a pink form attorneys fill out when submitting a document. "See?" He held it close to Marc’s face for his perusal. Marc tried to read it, but Dalrymple pulled it away before he could finish.

     Is that all? I thought. What a hot head. He’s making a big deal out of nothing. If Marc made a mistake why should Dalrymple have to suffer for it? Is it really so competitive among first-year associates vying for those precious few partner spots that they have to threaten people with bodily injury?

     "I’m sorry," Marc said. "I made a mistake."

     "A mistake?"

     "Yes, an honest mistake."

     One of the building’s security guards, a stocky Filipino, arrived. He pushed past Betty and came up behind Dalrymple.

     "Let’s go," the guard said with a thick accent.

     "I’m not going anyplace."

     "I’m telling you, let’s go," he repeated.

     "Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?"

     "Either you go, and go now, and go quietly, or we bring in the cops. Think about it." The guard sounded like he’d studied systematics at law school. He sure knew how to talk to a lawyer anyway. Who knows, perhaps he’d been a lawyer back in the Philippines.

     "All right," Dalrymple said. "I’ll go." I could tell he didn’t like to be bested, especially in front of a bunch of lowly word processors. And, by the screwed-up look on his face, I knew he was trying to come up with a parting shot.

     Lawyers use words like weapons and maybe outside of a court of law they ought to face restrictions on their use of certain rhetorical devices, just like a black belt in karate has his hands declared lethal weapons.

     He let loose. "I’ll bet none of you is going to be employed here on Monday." He cast his menacing glare around the room before turning it on Betty. "Especially you, you skanky old bat."

     "OK, show’s over," Betty said, after he’d left; but my fellow paraprofessionals had other ideas and decided to take an unplanned 20-minute break. Some of them floated around the room or talked over cubicle partitions or made personal phone calls. Some drifted out of the center for coffee.

     Betty padded over to tend to Marc, who’d laid his head on the desk and was taking loud, shallow breaths.

     "Sorry about that," Betty said. "I tried to stop him."

     "Oh boy, oh boy."

     "Are you all right?"

     "I don’t know," he said. "My heart is beating so fast."

     "Should I call an ambulance?" I thought Betty was being patronizing, but Marc took her question seriously.

     "No, no. I’ll be OK."

     I studied Marc’s performance. What an actor, I thought. He had an expressive hatchet face, thin if looked at straight on, but wide in profile—the view I saw of him most often. Betty turned to me eavesdropping on their conversation.

     "Don’t you have something to do?"

     "Yeah, like everybody else," I said.

     "Never mind about everybody else. Your document has a 5 pm deadline."

     I swiveled back to the computer screen.

     "You’re sure you’re all right?" she asked him again.