First Citizen (13 page)

I lost by a 4,000-vote margin—and ended up with $35,000 in campaign debts. Anne just curled her lip, then went into the bathroom and locked the door for a while.

The Beyer case eventually went to the Supreme Court; of course, it was long out of my hands by then. They overturned everything on the specious grounds that chain-of-command decisions were not subject to challenge in the civil courts. Piffle!

Did I hate Donald Beyer? Not at all. He was a sad man, balding, pot-bellied, hesitating on the edge of growing old. A staff man with twenty-five years, more a bureaucrat than a soldier. I remember thinking once that this was a man who somewhere had a good woman who loved him, children who honored him, grandchildren perhaps who searched his pockets for candies when he came to visit. Hardly a butcher who, for the love of mayhem, would poison a thousand square miles of lake and massacre a city of half a million people. But that was our story, supported by accounts that we or anyone could recover from eyewitness sources and public documents. So we went after him full throttle. And all for nothing.

That spring of 1996, while I was minding my cases and eating my way through the municipal campaign, we had an unfortunate accident in the firm. It happened on April first, which used to be known as April Fool’s Day.

I had gone down to the mail cubby for the ten o’clock delivery, expecting an express package. The mail clerk, Hubie, told me that all the “non-mail” items were in a bin under the table. He was a loose-jawed kid with zits and bad posture. What Hubie was really telling me was, if I wanted to get my package before the regular delivery, I could root around under his knees. His infuriating insolence probably saved my eyesight, if not my life.

While I was hunkered down, with Hubie bumping packages around and slapping papers on the tabletop over my head, a thin
bang!
thumped up there like a cherry bomb going off. My head jerked up and hit the underside of the table. Something hit the small of my back and bounced away—turned out to be Hubie’s left hand. Still on my knees with my head down, I caught a glimpse under my elbow of Hubie backing up fast to the far wall of the cubby. The wall was one of those fabric-covered “office system” partitions and it held him up for half a second, then crashed over into the next cubicle, where one of the word processors worked. In the instant before he went over, I could see two bloody stumps and a mask of blood. Then just his sneakers kicking among the fallen panels.

It was a letter bomb, of course.

People were running up. Someone brought over a fire extinguisher and began shooting cold clouds of carbon dioxide around, although nothing was visibly burning. From the way their jaws were working, everyone seemed to be shouting, but the sounds came out dim and far away like a riot at street level heard from the thirtieth floor. The honk of the CO
₂
nozzle seemed to me only a soothing
whoosh.
So my ears were partly deafened by the blast. I sat there, watching it all, trying to tune in my hearing like a weak radio signal.

Hughes, one of the for-real senior partners, tried to get the FBI to come in that same day and comb the area for clues. What he got was the SFPD bomb squad, dressed in canvas smocks over steel-mesh body armor. When they found out that the bomb was
post facto
instead of
ante,
they drank our coffee and scarfed down a dozen pastries from the hospitality center, flirted with the receptionists, and left taking as souvenirs every Xeroxed postal reg and personal notice from the partitions around the mail cubby. So they made sure any surface which might harbor traces of bomb packaging or wire shavings was effectively cleaned.

In the meantime, someone had thoughtfully scrubbed the soot-blackened table top where the bomb had gone off. So, if the FBI ever did come, all they had to go on was an interview with the receptionist, a heavily hormoned lady who “remembered this really weird thing, you know, about the guy who delivered the morning mail.”

“What weird thing, Miss?”

“Well, he wasn’t the regular guy. He was a lot better looking.”

“Better looking in what way?”

“Well, he wore his uniform sort of, tighter. With these good pecs and, like, nice buns hanging out of his jacket. It was to drool.”

“Right, Miss. Could you describe his face?”

“Yeah. … He had one.”

“Thank you, Miss.”

It is not unusual for a prestigious San Francisco law firm to attract a certain amount of hostile, possibly radical-fringe attention. This may not have been the first letter bomb that Knox, Schnock, Hughes & Thayer had ever received. Except that same morning two of our junior partners, Hills and Pettigrew, were carpooling to work as usual when their BMW 775si was boxed at an intersection in the classic wishbone formation. Between a garbage truck and a Muni bus, the soft-sided sedan didn’t stand a chance. One dead on the scene, the other three days in a coma and expiring in intensive care. Later the traffic report alleged negligence on the part of the truck driver.

No big thing. Happens all the time.

On that April l’s lunch hour, one of our paralegals was leaving the building and got mugged in broad daylight. Except “mugging” is when some villain sticks a lethal implement, a knife or a gun, in your face and asks for money. This incident was along the lines of a Victorian-era “bug picking”: Someone sandbagged the girl from behind, ripped the purse from her limp arm, and ran down the street. For dessert that evening, the elevator in our building parted a cable at the third floor, sending it to the basement fast and putting five people in the hospital with three broken legs and a mass of bruises.

Lawyer Day. It was never an officially declared holiday. How could it be, considering the number of lawyers who controlled Congress and the State legislatures? It was never sanctioned, never even mentioned by the American Bar Association. Lawyer Day did not even start as a folk tradition, although it quickly became one. It started as a statistical glitch. One so minor that not even the media or the hottest trendalizers spotted it in the presumptive first year. I was getting inklings, however.

The next year, 1997, Lawyer Day was still just a statistical thing, like having all your bad luck in a single day. One of our junior partners involved in a minor fender-bender ended up with a .38 slug in his brain. Two associates eating in the local taco palace went home early with stomach cramps and succumbed before morning. Four letter bombs. Five unrelated muggings.

On April 1, 1998, the media casters were beginning to comment on the incidents, noting that almost every news story that day involved someone related to the law—a justice, judge, counselor, or clerk. For myself, I recall graffiti spray-painted on a brick wall three weeks before the date:

LAWYER DAY—

FRAG EM, SCRAG EM

AND BAG EM.

However, I had resigned from Knox, Schnock, Hughes & Thayer by May of ’97, the year before that. I didn’t need a bazooka shell through my picture window to tell me that the legal business had suddenly become life threatening. Somewhere, someone—probably a whole lot of someones—was fingering lawyers. Maybe it
was
only one day a year, but the odds seemed to be stacked against surviving it. And anyway, by that time I had seen a chance to make a bundle on the deal of a lifetime.

“You’re going to what!?”

I could see Anne wasn’t happy with the idea, but I tried to explain anyway: “Put solar cells on roofing tiles. Sell them, along with power converters and battery sets, to homeowners who need a new roof.”

“Why?”

I couldn’t believe how dense the girl could be. “Ever hear of the energy crisis?” I asked facetiously. By that time the Power Gap was into its second year. We had brownouts coming every other day and our district in San Francisco was on rolling outages. “Each one of these tiles generates about a watt of power,” I went on. “A patch twenty feet by fifty would put out a kilowatt, which is about as much as the average household uses at any one time. And on foggy days or at night you run off the batteries or take a trickle from the electric company. Otherwise, you’re free of them. Nobody owns the sun.”

Anne’s face clouded up. “Did you think of this yourself or is someone selling you on the idea?”

“It’s ninety percent mine. Ten percent from this fellow, Michael Braden, who came into the law firm today trying to get out from under a shipment of amorphous silicon cells Nippon Kagai sent him two months early, by mistake, with 120-day delayed billing. By the time his invoices come in, what with the current inflation rate, the cells will have cost him more than twice what he’d agreed to pay. If we can divert them to this roofing tile project, we can keep them in bond for that time and dodge the price rise.”

“Is this just some sort of import scam, then?”

“No, no. It’s legitimate, Anne. We incorporated Solar Tile, Inc., this afternoon, right after lunch.”

“Who’s going to supply the roofing tiles, the electrical equipment, the crews to do installation?”

“We’re working out the details. I’ve already talked to Birdsong about organizing the crews. He’s good with the men.”

“Who’s going to supply the
money?”

“We’ll issue our first stock Friday under the Security and Exchange Commission’s new XPD guidelines. As for working capital, I thought that … um … ah …”

“Ye-ya-esss?” she drawled.

“Money’s not a problem,” I protested.

But really, it was
the
problem—or so I thought right then. The Fed was squeezing the capital markets from one side, while Treasury double-dipped to keep the deficit going. Braden and I would be lucky to raise our working funds at thirty-nine percent, through legitimate channels. That didn’t scare us, of course, because 285-percent inflation would eat up the interest costs in three and a half months’ time. The problem would be attracting venture capitalists under any circumstances. And then getting the business running fast enough; otherwise that same inflation would turn our capital into chickenfeed before we could even get it spent. That’s what XPDs were all about.

“I thought we could use our savings. …”

That money wasn’t cash in a savings account, of course. The inflation rate was miles ahead of any bank’s passbook rate. No, we had about $300,000 in money market instruments, mostly overnight certificates, that were managed by the SAFENET Fund and guaranteed us an annual percentage rate equal to at least 299 percent. That kept our nest egg just ahead of the gobble machine, but we were not exactly liquid: The fund wanted thirty days’ notice on any withdrawals.

“Think again, buster,” Anne snapped. “I’m not about to live under a bridge with you after you’ve blown those bucks on some freaking solar power scheme.”

“Well, maybe something else will turn up. …”

In those days, I found it prudent to retreat before Anne’s dedicated stare.

Braden and I did find a source of capital, five hundred thousand worth, but it had a long string. The venturists wanted us to “protect their liability,” which meant submitting our plans to formal risk analysis and arbitrage before the Insurance Commission. Which meant we had to put together all the details I had so airily dismissed to Anne—source of materials, electrical equipment, roofing crews, power system sizing, tile substrate designs, marketing plans, accounting systems, contractor licenses and bonding, et blinding cetera—before we were cleared to see one penny.

“Oh, you’re not done by a long shot,” said Elton Weems, the risk analyst the commission had assigned to our filing. “What about an environmental impact report?”

Braden and I looked at each other. Michael was a big man, with shoulders fairly bursting out of the lapels of his suit jacket. When he shifted uncomfortably in his chair, its legs creaked.

“Why would we need one?” I asked.

“Weh-yell now, you
are
proposing a major modification in the way people do roofing, aren’t you? We’d have to consider how that might impact on the atmosphere. For instance, is the new roof more or less reflective than existing systems? Do you use any special chemicals in applying the roofs? Will the material deteriorate and deposit any chemicals into the atmosphere? All these things have to be studied.”

“Can you tell me where in the Code of Federal Regulations or statutes of the State of California this is required?” I asked politely.

“Now, Counselor,” Weems smiled. It was like a nervous tic with him. “You know risk analysis doesn’t work that way. We must presume that if there shall have been a failure or litigable damages, the test of law will be those investigations or other protective measures which you
might
have undertaken, not merely those you were required by law to undertake.”

“But you’re talking about materials tests needing
years
to complete. Perhaps if we showed that similar substances—terra-cotta tiles and silicon cells, to be exact—have long been used in building and in power systems with no ill effects?”

“Used together?”

“Sometimes.”

“And with what glue or bonding agent?”

“Ummm …”

“You see?” Weems put up his hands—and smiled. “There are imponderables here.”

Braden leaned forward. “Roofing mastic!” he barked in exasperation.

“Have you tested it in your particular application?” Weems simpered.

I thought Mike was going to hit him.

“No, we haven’t,” I cut across.

“Well, then your filing can hardly be said to be complete, can it? I’m afraid it will be impossible to make an accurate assessment until you provide more complete data.” Weems sat back. Clearly, with the way inflation was going, by the time we complied with the Insurance Commission’s testing and reports, that half a mill in financing wouldn’t buy us a photocopier to make the necessary submittals in sextuplicate.

Braden and I parted company in the lobby of the commission’s building in Sacramento. I never found out what he eventually did with that shipment of solar cells. Ate them, I guess.

“Your problem,” Birdsong told me, when I explained why the deal fell through, “is trying to start a legit business just before the tide turns.”