"You like bean curd?" asked Simon Woo, with mixed surprise and admiration, leaning on an empty chair at my table. Simon had been taking an interest in me lately. A middle-aged woman in a tailored suit, arriving alone after the lunch rush ended, always ordering the same thing.
Politely, I explained that I do, indeed, genuinely like tofu. "Especially the way you cook it here, Simon," I said. "This is the best Szechuan bean curd I've had outside of China."
That was no way to get back to my magazine. Boyishly thin with a little cap of fine, perfectly straight black hair, all that betrayed the years behind Simon's success with Hunan Wok was a faint hatchwork of lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes, giving him the perpetual shadow of a smile. Surrendering to fate, I politely asked about his business.
"Very good, very good," Simon said quickly with a practiced smile and nod, and I wondered which few people ever heard anything different. After a short pause he asked, "Hey, you a lawyer, right?"
I nodded. "Business law. No divorces, accidents, criminal stuff." I usually said this as fast as I could to avoid learning things I really didn't want to know about people's private lives.
My own personal life was largely irrelevant to my work and the people involved with it, and sheer lack of interest kept most clients from learning much about me. I liked this to be reciprocal.
"What do you do, then?" Simon asked, his eyebrows knitted.
"You know?" I put my chopsticks down and wiped my mouth. "Breach of contract, fraud, unfair competition. The kind of thing one business sues another for. Like if you got a shipment of fortune cookies that all said, 'Try another fortune cookie.' You might get a lawyer to—"
Simon interrupted my analogy, which is about my second least favorite thing to have interrupted.
"Fraud?" he said, jabbing a finger toward the middle of my table. "You do fraud?"
"Well," I said carefully, unsure how well we were communicating, "I represent businesses who think someone's defrauded them. Or who've been accused of fraud."
"Like, insurance fraud?" He looked as excited as when he talked about his daughter's soccer team, whose pictures crowded the wall behind the bar.
"Sometimes I work for insurance companies, but most of my clients are small businesses, like yours."
Simon regarded me with wide eyes and sat back slowly. "Maybe you can help me," he said. "I got big problems." He shook his head. "Try to help my workers, get us all good health insurance. Best way to go, people tell me, get together with other restaurants, get group insurance."
I nodded noncommittally. From the eight or nine cases I'd had that involved insurance of various sorts, I knew that what Simon was saying was generally true. "So you did?" I prompted.
He shook his head. "Oh, tried to get a good deal. Found a smart man, put it all together, no problem." He gave this English phrase known round the world an odd emphasis. "No problem," he repeated. "Low rates, good policy. Everybody makes their payments, months go by, my dishwasher, he gets real sick. Real sick. Sends in the bills, nothing happens."
After a few moments of silence I prompted again, "You mean, they were slow paying the claim?"
Simon shook his head. "Not slow. They never pay. I call the man, write to him, everything. Talk to other restaurants having same problem. Finally found out: there's no insurance company. My dishwasher, he has sixty thousand dollars in medical bills, no insurance company." Simon struck his palm against the side of his head. "What am I going to do?"
It sounded like a lawsuit to me, but as a new partner at my firm, I'm cautious about jumping to conclusions. "Well first," I asked him, going for the obvious, "why do you have to do anything?"
Simon spread his hands like he was pleading for mercy. "I set it up."
"For your dishwasher?"
"Everyone," he said. "I got the restaurant owners together, introduce them to this man, got the ball bouncing."
I sighed with that feeling new cases always give me sooner or later, a sense that there's just too much trouble in the world and somebody ought to stop it. I get this feeling right about the time I realize it's become my job to stop it. "Has anyone threatened to sue you, Simon?"
"Sue me?" he asked in alarm at a thought that had obviously not occurred to him yet. "Sue Bryant! That's the guy who did the fraud! I just try to help these people. Why would anyone sue me?"
"I'm just asking," I hurried to assure him. "Just trying to figure out what's going on. It sounds as though you ought to talk to a lawyer about this." That was the ethically correct thing to say. Tell someone if you thought they had legal rights being threatened, but don't use high-pressure tactics to drum up your own business. Besides, at that point I already had more work on my plate than I could shake a chopstick at.
Simon just looked at me blankly. "That's what I'm doing."
I fished in my purse and handed him my card. Margaret Stryker, Attorney at Law. Have complaint, will sue. "Give me a call, and we can set up an appointment to talk this over. If I can't help you, I'll try to refer you to someone who can."
I left Hunan Wok that day in the innocent belief that I was returning to my ordinary life, totally unaware that my civil litigation practice was about to turn lethally un-civil.
Through the still-pungent odors of garlic and caramelized soy sauce, I walked past litter and buildings cracked and scarred with graffiti toward my own office building, in the high-rise thicket that adorned the northeast shore of Lake Merritt. Downtown Oakland isn't as bad as some people say, if you just use selective perception. Looking around from the street corner where I worked, I could see a tidy, modern, even stylish urban area with a nicely landscaped park, on a lake ringed with trees and wrought iron lamp posts. Really quite lovely.
Then I ascended the 21 flights to my firm's floor. and all thoughts of the real world vanished from my mind.
The deposition I had to attend that afternoon featured one of those cowboy lawyers who thought he had to shoot his way out of every encounter with opposing counsel. After hundreds of pointless arguments over objections I raised only because his questions made virtually no sense, I had a pounding headache. I had just asked myself, 'Why, Megster, did you ever decide to go to law school?' when Kevin strolled into my office. He was humming a ragged line from an old Rolling Stones song, something he often did after five o'clock when the office staff turned into pumpkins and rolled out the door.
"Tell me," I asked, before my senior partner could plant our conversation firmly on his own turf, "how you can take a noun as static as 'lawyer' and turn it into a verb as active as 'lawyering'? Didn't that take someone a whole lot of nerve?"
"Ah, you're reveling in your chosen walk of life again, I see," he said and dropped himself like a load of laundry into one of my client chairs.
Kevin was one of the main reasons I was there in the offices of McLaughton and Keeton, and the main reason why I hadn't run screaming from the law after my first six years of practice. My grades at a good enough law school had been just good enough to get me a job with one of San Francisco's biggest law firms. There I worked my brains out for three years, juggling this demanding new career with mothering two grade school kids. When I finally found time to get another job, it was with a firm only slightly smaller than the first.
Another three years later, I was bordering on a breakdown when I went to lunch with a law school classmate. I'd complained for most of an hour when she casually remarked that I ought to call the small Oakland firm where she had clerked for a summer as a student. "They're really nice," she said in amazement, "even though they're all trial lawyers. I would have worked there after graduating, but litigation never appealed to me." She looked at me quizzically. "You know, I bet you'd like them."
Kevin was the first person I talked with at McLaughton and Keeton, and I fell in love with him at once. As friends, I mean. He's a devoted family man who never blinked when he learned my children had two mommies. He was a rock for me to lean on when Melissa and I split up after the kids went off to college. Suddenly I went from Model Lesbian Mom to Single Lady Lawyer. I'm sure I would have gotten emotional whiplash if Kevin hadn't been there, humming his Dylan tunes and gently snapping me back to day-to-day reality. I'd taken a major pay cut to cross the bay and work with a smaller firm, but I'd increased my quality of life incalculably. Now Kevin sat in the chair rarely occupied by clients, because I always met them in a conference room, and gave me a devilish grin. "How many intents does it take to screw a business's opportunities?"
"One," I shot back, "but you really have to know what you're doing. God," I complained, "but I hate law jokes."
"No, I mean it," he said. "I've got this new case but I forget the rule. Can I sue for interference with business opportunity if the other guys were just out to make a buck?"
"Sure you can sue," I said with theatrical overconfidence. "You can sue for anything. How do you know what their motives were till you ask them under oath? And of course, until you've read every document and talked to every person you can think of? You just can't win unless you prove their hearts were full of malice, and not simply lust for the honest buck."
"You mean," he said with a mock gasp, "a lawyer could file suit just to harass the other side? Isn't that unethical?"
"I sure wish I'd never told you that Legal Ethics was my highest grade in law school. Speaking of new cases," I continued before he could pursue the subject any further, "I seem to have one, too. It followed me home from lunch. Group health insurance for a restaurant association—only no insurance company. Think we've got a case?"
Kevin whistled. "Against someone. Who left town with the money? Who's your client?"
"You ask good questions," I told him solemnly, then remembered our last few minutes of conversation and added, "Sometimes." I rapped my fingers on the desk in a drumroll. "All this remains to be seen. Simon Woo of Hunan Wok over on Franklin Street had a chat with me at lunch. He's coming in tomorrow to tell me the sad tale. I'll fill you in once I get a better idea what happened."
"Can't wait," Kevin said as he got to his feet, our five o'clock reversion to childhood over and the most productive hours of our day about to begin. He left my office strumming an imaginary guitar and squealing, "I can't...get no...health insurance. I can't get no..."