Free The Associate by John Grisham Page A

New Haven train station, Kyle boarded the 7:22 for Grand Central. He wore the better of his two suits, a plain white shirt with an utterly boring tie, and black wing tips, and he carried a handsome leather attaché case his father had given him last Christmas. He also carried the morning’s editions of the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
, and he was indistinguishable from the other sleepy-eyed executives hustling off to the office.
    As the frozen countryside blurred by, he ignored the papers and let his mind wander. He asked himself if he would one day live in the suburbs and be forced to ride a train three hours a day so his children could attend fine schools and ride their bikes down leafy streets. At the age of twenty-five, that was not very appealing. But now most of his thoughts about the future were complicated and dreary. He’d be lucky if he didn’t get himself indicted and/or disbarred. Life in the big firms was brutal enough, and now he would have the impossible chore of grinding through thefirst years while stealing confidential information and praying daily that he didn’t get caught.
    Maybe commuting wasn’t such a bad deal after all.
    After three days and many hours of talking, haggling, bitching, and threatening, Bennie Wright had finally left town. He had receded into the shadows but, of course, would soon materialize again. Kyle hated his voice, his face, his mannerisms, his calm hairy hands, his slick head, his confident, pressing manner. He hated everything about Bennie Wright and his company or firm or whatever it was, and many times during the past week he had changed his mind in the middle of the night and told them all to go to hell.
    Then, in the darkness, as always, he could feel the handcuffs, see his mug shot in the newspapers, see the looks on the faces of his parents, and worst of all he could see himself afraid to glance at the jurors when the video was played to a hushed courtroom.
    “Is she awake?” Joey Bernardo asks while Baxter Tate has Elaine down on the sofa.
    Is she awake? The words echo around the courtroom.
    The countryside vanished as the train sped through suburbs and towns, then it went underground, at some point dipped under the East River and entered Manhattan. Kyle strolled through Grand Central and hailed a cab at the corner of Lex and Forty-fourth. Not once had he looked over his shoulder.
    Scully & Pershing leased the top half of a building named 110 Broad, a sleek glass edifice with forty-four floors, in the heart of the financial district. Kyle had spent ten weeks there the previous summer as an intern—the typical big-firm seduction routine ofsocializing, lunching, barhopping, watching the Yankees, and putting in a few light hours of work. It was a joke of a job and everybody involved knew it. If the wining and dining worked, and it almost always did, the interns became associates upon graduation and their lives were basically over.
    It was almost 10:00 a.m., and the elevator was empty. The lawyers had been at their desks for hours. He stopped at the thirtieth floor, the firm’s main lobby, and paused for a second to admire the massive bronze lettering that informed all visitors that they were now on the hallowed turf of Scully & Pershing. Attorneys-at-law, all twenty-one hundred of them, the largest law firm the world had ever known. The first and still the only firm to boast of more than two thousand lawyers. Counsel to more Fortune 500 companies than any other firm in the history of American law. Offices in ten U.S. cities and twenty foreign ones. A hundred and thirty years of hidebound tradition. Magnet to the best legal talent money can buy. Power, money, prestige.
    He already felt like a trespasser.
    The walls were covered with abstract art, the furniture was rich and contemporary. Some Asian whiz had done the decorating, magazine quality, and there was a brochure on a table that went into details. As if anyone who worked there had the time to stop