The Tenth Justice - Brad Meltzer [45]
“That’s very funny,” Ben said, heading for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I have a stupid lunch meeting with the firm I worked at two summers ago.”
“A recruitment lunch?”
“I imagine.”
“Why are you going?” Lisa asked. “If you want to be a prosecutor, you don’t have to go to a firm. You should just go to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
“I wish. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office won’t help me pay off all the debt I have from law school.”
“You still have law school debt? I thought your parents were wealthy executives?”
“My mom’s an executive, but my family doesn’t have that kind of money. Anyway, I wanted to pay my own way.”
“You did?”
“It’s my responsibility. I’m the one who went to law school, I’m the one who gets the benefit. Why should they pay the bill?”
“So how much debt do you have?”
“From law school, about ninety-two thousand dollars.” Lisa’s mouth fell open. “And that’s not including the eight thousand that I paid off in the past two years.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of financial aid?”
“Absolutely,” Ben said. “That’s how I got the loans.”
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t let your parents—”
“It’s a long story,” Ben said. “In the end, they couldn’t afford to do much, and I wanted to make it easier on them. That’s it.” Looking down at his watch, he said, “I really have to go. I’m late.”
Ben jumped into a cab outside the courthouse and headed to Gray’s, home of Washington’s premier power lunches. Although many of the city’s most important meetings were still held in dimly lit restaurants that smelled of cigar smoke, brandy, and barely cooked steak, Gray’s attracted executives and congressional leaders who actually wanted to be seen at lunch. Of course, it still had four private rooms in the back for patrons who wanted to be more discreet. With oversized glass tables balanced on geometrical steel bases, and chairs draped with white slipcovers, the main dining room was arranged in a large circle, to facilitate celebrity spotting. The restaurant was decorated in stark black and white, giving it a minimalist look that was almost too ultramodern for downtown D.C.
Once inside, Ben tightened his tie and looked for Adrian Alcott. Alcott was the hiring partner for Wayne & Portnoy, one of the city’s most established firms, and the place where Ben had worked during the summer after his second year of law school. As a summer associate at Wayne, he was taken by the recruiting committee to baseball games at Camden Yards, concerts at the Kennedy Center, and lunches and dinners at the best eateries on K Street. The summer was capped by a yachting excursion for the entire firm—more than four hundred people sailed away on two magnificent yachts. Knowing that they had attracted the best and the brightest from America’s top law schools, the firm tried to make sure they kept them. For the summer associates who were still choosing between competing firms, the evening at sea was the ultimate hard sell.
All eighteen summer associates had gone on to yearlong judicial clerkships after they graduated from law school. The firm expected its associates to clerk for a year, knowing that they would gain invaluable experience that could be used when they eventually joined the firm. And to make sure the recruits did not forget Wayne & Portnoy during their clerkship year, the firm made bimonthly phone calls to each would-be associate to see how his or her year was going. Eventually, seventeen clerks returned to the firm. Ben went to the Supreme Court. When the firm found out their eighteenth summer associate had been offered a Supreme Court clerkship, the phone calls tripled and the free lunches began. To the city’s most prestigious law firms, Supreme Court clerks were human badges of honor. Of Wayne & Portnoy’s four hundred fifty-seven lawyers, ten were former Supreme Court clerks. Today, Adrian Alcott was hoping to make it eleven.
“Hello, Mr. Addison,” Alcott said with a warm smile as Ben approached the table in one of the back rooms of