Chapter 4 - The Law of Broken Things
The office of Hail, Sterling & Cruz smelled of high-grade toner, treated leather, and the ionized chill of commercial air conditioning that had never known an open window.
Monica Hail was forty-eight years old, five feet two inches tall, with iron-gray hair cut into a blunt, asymmetrical bob that made her look like a Bauhaus architect who had decided to practice law out of spite. She wore a charcoal pinstripe suit that looked as if it could deflect small-arms fire, and rimless glasses that magnified her dark, slate-colored eyes.
She didn't offer me coffee. She didn't ask how I was doing.
She pointed to a black leather chair opposite her mahogany desk, waited until I sat down, and then picked up a digital SLR camera from her blotter.
“Look at the lens,” she said.
*Click.*
The flash was blinding. The welt on my cheekbone throbbed in response.
“Turn thirty degrees to the left. Chin down.”
*Click.*
“Hold up the right palm. Don't unwrap the cloth yet. Let me get the blood on the linen.”
*Click.*
“Now unwrap it.”
I pulled the stiffened tea towel away from the skin. The cut was an inch and a half long, jagged at the edges where the yellow ceramic had torn through the adipose layer, the margins angry and pink with early infection.
Monica Hail took three macro shots from six inches away, then lowered the camera and set it on the desk with a heavy *thud*.
“The urgent care clinic on Tenth and Lovejoy is expecting you at four-fifteen,” she said, her voice completely devoid of emotional fluctuation. “You will tell the physician that you were assaulted by an acquaintance who shoved an object off a table and then struck you with an open hand. You will obtain a full radiologic workup of the zygomatic arch and the mandible. You will ask for a tetanus booster and a course of prophylactic antibiotics. Do you understand?”
“Who paid you?” I asked, my voice trembling.
Monica Hail opened a manila folder.
Inside was a single check, drawn on a private trust account at U.S. Bank. The signature at the bottom was written in a spidery, copperplate hand that I had seen on birthday cards every August since I was four years old—cards that had contained five-dollar bills when I was small, and nothing at all after Diane arrived.
*Eleanor Vance Pierce.*
Fifty thousand dollars.
The memo line was blank.
I stared at the name until the letters began to swim together into a blue blur. “She was there,” I whispered. “She watched Diane do it. She turned her back.”
“Mrs. Pierce is eighty-one years old,” Monica said, leaning forward and resting her forearms on the desk. Her nails were trimmed short and unvarnished. “If she had shouted, your father would have called the private ambulance service that Lake Oswego uses for wealthy seniors with cognitive decline. By sunrise, she would have been under forty-eight-hour observation at an assisted living facility in Beaverton, and Diane would have had temporary power of attorney over her estate by Monday afternoon.”
I looked up. “What?”
“Your stepmother has been trying to establish Eleanor’s testamentary incapacity for three years,” Monica said, her voice dropping into that chilling, clinical clarity that only high-priced litigators achieve. “She has hired two separate geriatric specialists to review Eleanor’s correspondence. She has attempted to redirect the distributions from the Pierce Timber Trust into an LLC controlled by your half-brother Evan. Eleanor is old, Miss Pierce. She is not stupid.”
“She didn't say a word to me,” I said, the bitterness rising in my throat like bile. “She let me think I was completely alone.”
“Eleanor Pierce understands leverage,” Monica replied. “She knows that emotion without evidence is simply an invitation to be destroyed. She waited until she had the instrument she needed.”
Monica reached into her lower drawer and pulled out a fresh legal pad.
“Now,” she said, clicking the top of a black rollerball pen. “Let’s discuss the damages.”
“I don't care about the money,” I said.
Monica stopped. She looked at me over the tops of her rimless glasses, her expression one of mild, professional disappointment—the way a master carpenter might look at a client who suggested using drywall screws to build a grand piano.
“Do not say that in this room,” she said softly. “Never say that. The law does not heal broken hearts, Miss Pierce. The law does not make your father love you. The law does not retroactively give you a childhood where you weren't treated like a scullery maid. The law has exactly one currency: the transfer of capital from the wrongdoer to the injured party. If you don't care about the money, then Diane Pierce has already won, because the money is the only thing she understands.”
She tapped the legal pad with her pen.
“Defamation per se,” Monica said, her words dropping like lead weights onto the blotter. “They have imputed to you a loathsome disease—in this jurisdiction, severe mental illness of an incapacitating nature fits the common law definition—and they have published statements directly disparaging your fitness to practice your trade or profession. That is actionable without proof of special damages.”
“They posted it on social media,” I murmured. “Everyone does that.”
“They tagged your employer’s affiliates,” Monica said. “They forwarded an altered, nineteen-year-old student communication to members of your professional circle. That is not family gossip. That is a targeted, intentional campaign to destroy your economic viability.”
She flipped a page.
“Tortious interference with prospective economic advantage. We will subpoena the personnel records from the University of Washington. If your application for the directorship was flagged or delayed because of Diane’s publication, we will attach every dollar of that salary differential to the judgment.”
She flipped another page.
“Battery. Simple, clear, and witnessed. But that’s the small piece. The battery is a misdemeanor on the criminal side; the Multnomah County DA wouldn't spend forty minutes on it. In this room, however, the battery is the anchor for the intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
Monica closed the pad and looked at me.
“We have one problem,” she said.
“What?”
“It is your word against three people who have more social capital than you do. Your father is a prominent architect who sits on the Portland Planning Commission. Diane is on the board of the Japanese Garden and the symphony. Evan is an associate vice president at an investment bank. If we go to court with only your testimony and these photographs, their lawyer—who will be Arthur Skelton, because Skelton handles all the Pierce family dirt—will paint you as an unstable, estranged daughter who tripped over her own feet, smashed her own pie in a fit of narcissistic rage, and then blamed her saintly stepmother.”
“Grandma Eleanor saw it,” I said.
“Eleanor is eighty-one,” Monica replied. “Skelton will have her deposed for six hours until she forgets what month it is, and then he will move to disqualify her testimony on the grounds of senile dementia.”
My chest caved in. The room seemed to shrink, the gray light from the window turning the color of lead.
“Then why did she give you fifty thousand dollars?” I asked.
The phone on Monica’s desk buzzed.
She didn't pick up the receiver; she tapped the speaker button.
“Yes, Sarah?”
“Mrs. Pierce called from a payphone in Goose Hollow,” her secretary’s voice said. “She said to tell Rachel that the tea at the Roasted Bean is forty cents cheaper if you bring your own mug, but she bought two anyway.”
Monica looked at her watch. It was one-fifteen.
May you like
“Drink your tea, Miss Pierce,” she said, reaching for her coat. “And let the old woman do what she has been planning to do since the day your mother died.”
***
