Hostile Witness

“You can’t know how difficult it’s been for me since the divorce.”

“Florida. The Sunshine State.”

His head dropped slightly. “My daughter insisted I go with her.”

“Where is your Duesenberg, Mr. Osbourne?”

“It’s not worth anything anymore. It’s too old, I haven’t been able to keep it in repair. For your own good, Victor, take my offer.”

“Turn your car over to the sheriff, Mr. Osbourne, and we’ll talk.”

I walked away from him, toward the door of the building, when I heard him shout, “By God, man. I just want to be able to open a damn bank account like a human being.”

I couldn’t erase the image of Winston Osbourne and his fingernails from my mind for the whole of that season. There was a time in his life when the wealthy, handsome, socially prominent, socially registered, socially social Winston Osbourne was everything I ever wanted to be. Now, as I struggled with the frustrations in my life, he was everything I feared I would become. The case we had been waiting for, the slam-bam-in-your-face case, had never come, and we too now had bills we couldn’t meet, du

I see now that I was suffering a profound weariness that autumn. The disappointments of my life had worn me down, not to mention that I was alone and lonely and had been both for far too long. Whatever optimism I had once held had been supplanted by a deep and gnawing resentment of everyone and everything. Then in that sad gray fall there finally arrived the chance for which I had been waiting. It was an opportunity rooted in murder, premised on betrayal, an opportunity that required the suspension of all I once held sacrosanct, but still there it was. And the only question was whether I was man enough to pay its price.

When I think back upon that season I see its inauguration in the apparitional appearance of the ruined Winston Osbourne, but from there it spun furiously out of control. It was the season of my opportunity, yes, but also a season of corruption, of treachery, a calamitous season of self-delusion and abnegation. Most of all it was a season of love, a sweat-soaked love that still leaves me gasping when I awake with a start in the middle of the night and remember. It was a season that promised my most desperate dreams and stroked my deepest fears.

It was fall in Philadelphia.

2

ONE LIBERTY PLACE was a huge granite and glass rocket that blasted beyond the staid and squared-off Philadelphia skyline until it lost itself in smoky autumnal skies, the highest, grandest, most prestigious building in the reviving City of Brotherly Love. Which explained why the law firm of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase had leased the fifty-fourth, fifty-fifth, and fifty-sixth floors for its offices even before construction was completed. Talbott, Kittredge and Chase was the city’s most entrenched law firm. It was the home of congressmen and mayors; it had yielded six judges to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and one to the Supreme Court. It was the dream of every law student who sought the brightest of the golden rings the law had to offer. Only the best was good enough for Talbott, Kittredge and Chase.

I applied for a position at Talbott, Kittredge as a second-year law student. I wrote a spiffy letter and goosed my resume until I didn’t recognize myself on its crisp ivory paper. I was not law review and my grade point average was merely mediocre, but still I sent my application off with a queer confidence, sure that my true quality would shine through the flat black type, and for all I know it did. But only the best was good enough for Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. I didn’t even rate an interview.

I wasn’t consciously thinking of this rejection as I walked through the great stone lobby of One Liberty Place and stepped onto the marble-walled elevator seven years after sending off that letter, but as I rose to the fifty-fourth floor my resentment rose with me, and not just a resentment of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. There was Dechert Price & Rhoads, there was Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, there was Rawle & Henderson, White & Williams, there was Drinker, Biddle, and Reath. There was even Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. Out of law school I applied to the top twenty-five firms in the city and they all passed on my offer to slave in their libraries and work outrageous hours so their partners could become obscenely rich. Cut adrift, I was forced to stoop lower than I could ever have imagined and work for myself.

By the fall of my visit to Talbott, Kittredge and Chase there were only two of us left in our sad little firm, we were now merely Derringer and Carl. Our third partner, Guthrie, had fled. Seeing the inevitability of our failure, Guthrie had found himself a rich girl with family co

The elevator opened on a broad and open lobby, tastefully floored with a rich wood parquet and furnished with antique couches. TALBOTT, KITTREDGE & CHASE read the glossy brass letters tacked above the receptionist’s desk. Two of the walls were of glass, offering killer views of the city south and east into New Jersey, with the blue sweep of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge spa

“Victor Carl to see William Prescott,” I said to the receptionist.

“Fine, Mr. Carl. Take a seat and I’ll tell him you’re here.”

I stepped toward one of the couches and then turned back to the receptionist, who was already on the phone. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, this receptionist. The kind of woman who should only exist in perfume ads or on car show platforms. Her hair was pale and windswept, as if even while I stood in the enormous calm of that lobby, she was perched on the deck of an ocean yacht.

“Do I know you?” I asked. That was my line at the time, though it has since been discarded, like all the others, due to continued and unmitigated failure.