Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [7]
“You all right?” I asked.
“Oh …” She waggled an outstretched hand from side to side.
“Another fight with Willie?”
“Look, I can’t talk about him, I’d just start crying again. What’s with you?”
I’d come here for diversion, so I wasn’t about to explain the Hy situation. “I’ve been summoned to the partners’ meeting.”
“Uh-oh. How come?”
“Don’t know, but Hank acted mighty shifty when he asked me to be there.”
“Weird.” She screwed up her freckled face in thought. “I’ve been hearing a word around here lately—‘reorganization.’ ”
“Yes, Hank said that’s what they want to talk about.”
“Well, it sounds to me like a euphemism for demotions or layoffs. This place is getting too corporate, if you know what I mean.”
“I do. And I hate to sound like I’m wallowing in nostalgia, but I miss the good old days.” In the old days All Souls had possessed a certain laid-back ambience as well as an excitement about the challenge we were presenting to the legal establishment. Now we were establishment. We’d incorporated; we’d bought the Victorian and spiffed it up with its first paint job in decades; we’d rented two additional houses across the park out front for our support staff; we had an 800-number hotline for clients; we had marketing people to sell the membership plan to large northern California employers.
But those were only surface changes. Others went much deeper, and the fact that I was currently sweating over attending a meeting of the partners told me just how deep. The partners: my friends.
Hank Zahn, senior partner and sole remaining co-founder of All Souls, was my oldest and closest male friend. He was one of several people I’d shared a house with in Berkeley while getting my degree in sociology. His wife, Anne-Marie Altman, another founder of the co-op, had left to become head counsel for a coalition of environmental organizations—including the foundation Hy ran—but she remained my closest woman friend.
Jack Stuart, our criminal specialist, wouldn’t be at today’s meeting because he’d left town this morning to sort through some painful feelings about the case he and I had just concluded. But Larry Koslowski, our corporate specialist, would be present. Larry, our resident health nut whose good intentions and peculiar culinary concoctions had nearly poisoned me on any number of occasions. And then there was Pam Ogata, the tax attorney who had filled Anne-Marie’s shoes—a Japanese-Hawaiian whose exquisitely decorated quarters on the second floor spoke of her homesickness for the islands. Pam, with whom I’d shared many an expedition to flea markets, thrift stores, and antique shops.
How on earth could I shrink from a meeting with such friends? Of course, there were two relatively unknown quantitie.…
Rae asked, “Shar, what do you think of Mike Tobias?”
It was as if she’d overheard my thoughts. Mike Tobias was one of the unknowns—a newish partner. His background—a childhood spent in the drug- and crime-plagued Sunnydale projects and a stint as a social worker before attending Hastings College of the Law—had made him a tireless crusader and perfectly suited him for working with our needier, less empowered clients.
“I’m not sure,” I told Rae. “I like him, and I certainly admire him, but I don’t really know him.”
“The reason I ask is that this corporate stuff became more pronounced about the time Mike made partner.”
“Well, the incorporation and the new partners all happened at the same time. That was when Gloria came on board, too.” Gloria Escobar devoted her attention to equal-opportunity and civil-rights