Free Ground Truth by Rob Sangster

I haven’t seen you since law school. So this must be a business meeting—but Boulevard is not exactly a conference room. So what’s up?”
    “It is business, but I’d like to hold off on that and talk about something more pleasant first. Like about your personal background.”
    That was clumsy. He’d just asked the equivalent of what her zodiac sign was.
    “You mean my family?”
    He nodded.
    She sipped her wine and gave him an amused expression. “Okay. My mother was Balinese, a painter. Father, an anesthesiologist. He’s Dutch, the reason I’m tall. We lived in Amsterdam until he brought the family to San Francisco. Mother wanted me to be a dancer, but at sixteen I switched from ballet lessons to tai chi and karate. That about sums up my childhood.”
    “How did you wind up in law school?”
    “In Holland, the law is almost sacred. In the U.S.—oh, don’t get me started. Anyway, in high school I wrote a paper called ‘Balancing the Scales of Justice.’ I thought being a lawyer would help me do that. So that was my first step toward Stanford Law.”
    “Is your dream coming true at S & S?”
    Her quick frown said she didn’t like his comment, but she blew it off. “Of course not. This isn’t a lifetime gig. After graduation, despite my scholarships, I owed $70,000 in loans. S & S offered me a lot of money, so I’m using this firm to get what I need. Sort of like you. There must be some reason you chose this sausage factory.”
    “Sore subject right now,” he said.
    The bantering expression left her face. Her dark eyes looked steadily at him. “Fair enough, but can we talk about the gorilla in the room?” She sipped her Bordeaux without breaking eye contact. “You lost your father a couple of weeks ago. Now there’s all that awful stuff about him in the Chronicle . Are you okay?”
    His defenses rose like a shield. “Our relationship was complex, but, yeah, the way he died will be raw for me for a long time. And stories in the paper pretty much knocked the wind out of me. At least my friends on the faculty have been very supportive.”
    He wouldn’t tell her about the call from the wife of a man who was infected with HIV by a girl Peck had smuggled in. Or the message left by Anita asking questions he could never answer.
    “Of course your colleagues are supportive,” she said. “They know who you really are. But there is one guy who isn’t a fan. My secretary overheard Stan Simms in the elevator talking to another senior partner. It seems Simms has a real hard on, his words, about getting you out of the firm. He said the bad publicity about your father makes the firm look sleazy. Simms is a real bastard.”
    Fortunately, Simms’ opinion of him was irrelevant. But if he didn’t hit a home run in Mexico City, he could be out of the fast track law business for good. “Sinclair hired me, so I don’t have to worry about Simms.”
    “Good. Now satisfy my curiosity about something else. I heard you spent half the afternoon with guys who make their living sending poison and jobs to Mexico. That surprised me. At Stanford, you had a reputation as an environmental white knight. Has something changed?”
    “No, but it’s true that Sinclair and I met with the Palmers.”
    “That must have been fun.”
    “Let’s just say I didn’t see eye to eye with Arthur Palmer. By the end of the meeting, I sort of had my tail caught in a ringer.”
    “I love a good tail-in-a-ringer story.”
    “This stays between the two of us.”
    “Done.”
    Since she’d already made clear how she felt about Palmer Industries, he told her about the toxic waste violations, Arthur Palmer’s orders to keep away from Montana, and Sinclair’s laissez faire attitude.
    “I said we have a duty to advise the client not to break the law, especially when what they’re doing may wind up poisoning some unknown number of people.”
    “What did our fearless leader say?”
    “He pushed back, told me to leave it alone.”
    “We