The She-Hulk Diaries (12 page)

Cabbed it to QUIRC. I arrived at the reception desk at precisely 8:20, ten minutes early, but the offices were already busy.

The receptionist said, “Good morning, Ms. Walters,” and politely reminded me of her name (Penelope). “Your paralegal, Donna, is already here and will help you with anything you need.”

I thanked her and went down the hall, glancing into open doors. Outside my office, a fortyish man who looked like a 1940s accountant
was sitting at the assistant’s desk with an old-fashioned typewriter on it. I introduced myself and asked him to point me to Donna.

“Donner. I’m Donner. Pleased to meet you…”

I said, “Call me Jennifer.”

He stood to shake hands and I towered over him. He had dark brown skin, horn-rimmed glasses that made his hazel eyes look huge, and very short waved hair, and wore a bow tie and a herringbone tweed jacket.

He saw me peek at the typewriter and pointed to a screen behind it. He said, “It’s wired to the system. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not as long as the work gets done.”

“The joke is that everyone at QUIRC has quirks.” His hand went to his chest. “I didn’t mean to imply that you have any!”

Rather than say, “It’s okay,” I smiled neutrally. As I always tell my clients, “A response may be seen as tacit agreement and used against you in litigation. If you are in doubt, simply look pleasant and remain silent.”

A large arrangement of flowers was on my desk with a welcome note from Quinty and the senior partners. Donner brought me a frothy cappuccino and ran through basic company protocol. He asked me about my likes and dislikes. (Likes long evenings by a crackling fire reading case histories! Dislikes mean people delivering injunctions!)

“Got it,” he said. “Any business contacts or special friends or family you’d like routed through quickly?”

“Client calls are my top priority. Everyone else knows to call me on my private line.”

He smiled. “I know you did superhuman law for GLKH. I bet you have some stories.”

“More than a few! But the truth is that New York State law is even more complex than superhuman law, because superhumans understand legal shortcuts like crashing a chair on someone’s head to make your argument.”

“We’re a little quieter here. Guess it’s time for you to meet the General.”

I tried to recall anyone on the QUIRC roster with a military background
as I followed Donner down the hall to an office with a handwritten sign hanging from a string that said,
THE GENERAL IS IN!

Donner knocked and opened the door without waiting for a response.

We walked into a huge room that was filled from top to bottom and side to side with tables, books, file cabinets, and computers. Colored three-by-five cards covered a standing bulletin board. It took me a moment to see the pudgy middle-aged woman peering at us around a stack of legal texts.

“Morning, General,” Donner said. “This is Jennifer Walters. She’ll be lead on ReplaceMax.”

I went forward to say hello, and the woman looked up at me with small, sharp gray eyes so light they were almost silver. She had freckled cheeks and a pretty rosebud mouth, which didn’t smile. I held out my hand. “Good morning, General.”

She puffed at a wisp of russet hair that was loose from a crooked ponytail and reached out to shake my hand. In a calm, sweet voice, she said, “That’s not my real name. It’s a joke. My name’s Genoa Lewes, and I’m the associate assigned exclusively to your case.”

“Pleased to meet you, Genoa,” I said, as I noticed the numerous action figures posed on her desk and shelves. I automatically searched for Shulky or any of my friends, but all she had were dolls in Regency dress. “Who is this?” I said, picking up a brown-haired doll and using it to point to a yellow-headed one.

Her mouth set defensively. “You’re holding Elinor Dashwood and the other one is her sister, Marianne, of
Sense and Sensibility
. I know most people follow the superheroes, but I prefer characters with rich emotional lives, even if they are fictional.”

“You don’t think Tony Stark has a rich emotional life?” Donner asked. “Wouldn’t he look dashing in a cravat!”

Genoa blushed all the way to her forehead and reached for the Elinor doll.

I thought it was unusual for a paralegal to tease an associate, or
maybe he was
pretending
to tease her in order to introduce the subject of Tony. I had managed to drag him to a few lawyer parties when we dated and everyone was all, “Tony Stark! May I kiss your fabulously firm and amazingly wealthy ass!”

I said, “Tony Stark’s a genius. I wish I could invent something, but all I can do is admire how brilliant he is.” He’s extremely brilliant for a horse’s ass.

Genoa gave me a grateful look and began talking about one of Tony’s latest projects. She quickly got to a level of technical detail that I couldn’t follow. “Oh, you’ve lost me! I think even a patent attorney would have trouble understanding that.”

Donner smiled and said, “Now you know why we call her the General. She has a wider and deeper range of information than anyone else at QUIRC. She’s the best.”

“Glad to have you on my team, Genoa. You’ll need to get me up to speed on organ-cloning technology, but in layman’s terms. These high-tech cases are confusing enough to juries, and ReplaceMax will try to baffle them with science.”

Genoa grabbed a thick binder from a stack nearby and handed it to me. “I’ve prepared preliminary information about the ReplaceMax process, and I can bring in experts to give you seminars.”

“Thanks, General. Or do you prefer Genoa?”

“I like both,” she said and ducked her head again.

I was taken to lunch by one of the junior partners, Fritz Durning, an intense man with a close-cropped brush of sandy hair, blue-gray eyes, and a hard, sleek physique. He was a typical type A, talking a mile a minute and ordering boneless, skinless chicken with a wedge of lemon and steamed veggies. He was attractive, but I suspected he’d had his teeth capped, and his nose was a little too perfect.

He tried to pry GLKH intel from me and became annoyed when I wouldn’t tell him any backroom gossip. Before we were done with our first course, he was treating me like a prom date he wanted to dump so he could meet up with his cool friends.

And that’s when I realized that I should have been scoping him out as a PFLOML just in case my budding relationship with Claude didn’t work out. So I smiled and said, “Of course, Fritz, there are things I can tell you about GLKH that wouldn’t violate confidentiality, but let’s save that for another occasion when we have time to relax and talk!”

He looked pleased. And then I finally noticed the gold band on his ring finger, which was a bad omen for our future love life.

Another bad omen was my relief to get away from Fritz and spend the rest of the afternoon reading up on ReplaceMax and finding out:

• Our client, Dr. Sven Morigi, had approached ReplaceMax with a formulation for rapidly growing entire organs in a laboratory. Until then, they’d specialized in skin and bone grafts.
  
• When Dr. Morigi had reported problems with the lab-grown organs, he’d been shown the door despite holding the patent for the process.
  
• In addition to a higher than average rate of mortality for ReplaceMax transplant cases, there were nearly two dozen of their patients in serious condition, all with malfunctioning replacement organs. The youngest was an eight-year-old girl who’d had four months of health before organ deterioration.
  
• Dr. Morigi still owned shares in the company, and he wanted the usual fines, the president’s resignation, and to buy out the company.
  

I took the General’s binder home, changed into my jammies, and spent the evening studying it and making notes. Before I knew it, the hours had flown by and I hadn’t even checked my aPhone for chatter from Shulky’s friends.

I wonder what Ellis is doing tonight. I am not going to revisit all his songs to look for clues about us. If there had ever been an opportunity, it was long gone and by his choice.

Moving on to the present and reality, I found out basic biographical
info on Dr. Sven Morigi online, including his impressive credentials. Then I logged into the Mansion’s network, which was not much good for celebrity gossip, but excellent for fact-checking. I found the same info, but no photos, which wasn’t that odd. Scientists were often self-conscious about being in the public eye.

Not that I have any intention of dating him, even though he’s single and successful. Sven Morigi. His name sounds like someone who holds his glasses together with a paper clip. Which I no longer do since Dahlia gave me an eyeglass repair kit with little screws. I would be more than willing to offer a screw to Dr. Morigi if he needed one.

Dahlia called and I told her about my first day at QUIRC, and she asked, “Did you have to face Amber Hammerhead?”

“That’s tomorrow. I am kind of, sort of, totally dreading it.”

“She probably knows you’re the inspiration for ‘Gin Spins Me Equatorially.’ ”

“I don’t remember that one. You’re making it up.”

“It was only performed live on their final tour, Miss Gravity-rhymes-with-carnal-depravity.”

“Oh, gawd! Don’t say any more. Uh, I went to lunch with a buff hotshot attorney named Fritz today.”

“Tell me all!” she said, and I was glad I’d successfully diverted her.

Spent the morning panicking and drinking too many cappuccinos, so I was jittery and needed an intestinal sponge to soak up the caffeine. I ate one of the gourmet donuts (bacon, apple, cinnamon) that was in the breakroom. It was so good, I ate another (banana and pecan with maple glaze), and then another, the most scrumptious of them all, a peanut butter and blackberry jelly donut. As I bit into it, the jelly spurted out and onto the collar of my jacket.

I hurried to clean up the mess with paper towels, but the lint glommed onto the jam, making the smear worse. I glanced at the clock on the wall, and somehow it was time for my meeting with Amber. I rushed back to my office, planning to change into one of my extra jackets, but I was too late—the blond hammerhead was right ahead of me.

Donner’s eyebrows went up behind his glasses and he said, “Ms. Walters, there’s—”

As I went by him, I whispered, “I know! I saw her. Thanks!”

I yanked off my ponytail holder and shook out my hair so that it covered the splotch, and then I stepped into my office.

Amber was sitting at the round glass table by the window. I joined her and said the usual stuff, but I kept getting seriously eeped out thinking of the things Ellis could have told her about me. I remembered all the details because it had been a singular occasion for me.

Amber and I reviewed strategies for our case, but I could sense the hostility beneath her cool manner. Meanwhile, the donuts had kicked in, and I was fighting both a sugar and caffeine high and my ookometer was swinging wildly from side to side. My voice had a quaver in it, and every time I looked at Amber I thought of Ellis doing
those
things to her. It made me feel nauseated. Or it could have been the lethal breakfast combo of caffeine, sugar, and grease.

“I attended the initial meetings with Dr. Sven Morigi,” she said, in a voice that was richer and sweeter than the delectable donuts. “Breach of contract is a given.”

“What about wrongful termination?” I asked.

“He wasn’t an employee of the company,” she said, looking irked.

“I realize that, but his contract is structured more like an employment agreement than a consultant’s, so let’s look into it. I’ll also go for patent infringement.”

“
Obviously
,” she said snippily, as if I was a clueless newbie. “Is there anything else?”

The fact that she routinely did the nasty with my fantasy man had thrown me off my game, but I said, “Yes, there is. Have you contacted anyone else involved in the case, even socially?”

“Do you mean, have I revealed anything to Ellis’s colleagues at ReplaceMax? No.”

“That’s not what I was implying,” I said. “I wondered if there was anything that hasn’t been included in the preliminary report because it was assumed to be a known factor.”

She put her left hand to her throat to show off her engagement ring. “Jennifer, it would be a waste of my time guessing what you might not know, but if you have any further questions, send an email. Your primary responsibility may be this case, but I have other clients.”

I felt my shoulders creeping up with tension. “I’ll do that and I would appreciate immediate responses. Mr. Quintal impressed upon me that we’ve got to get the case to trial before one of our witnesses dies.”

Amber Hammerhead stood up and smoothed her skirt, which was already smooth. “I don’t see what the rush is. There’s nothing like a dead child to wring sympathy from the jury.”

I stared at her appalled. Of all the women in the world, why was Ellis marrying this vile and heinous she-demon? What did that say about him as a human being?

“Now, if we’re done…”

I knew I had to deal with the issue, so I said, “There is one final thing. I wanted you to know that my initial encounter with Ellis was an isolated, anomalous incident. He didn’t even know my name properly, nor was there any subsequent contact.”