An after-dinner speaker once noted that Arthur K. Halliwell was not 'a citizen of the United States, he is a citizen of Chicago.' The audience, knowing exactly what he meant, broke into both laughter and applause.
While other firms had opened branches in Washington, DC to take advantage of the national political set, and others still wanted New York with its international flavor, Halliwell had been content to rule Chicago. Though a patrician from a long line of patricians the Wrigleys, the Palmers and the McCormicks had attended many of his birthday parties Halliwell had always found the vulgarity of Chicago history heady and exhilarating.
And for this reason, many of the city's most powerful players trusted him in the way one would a father confessor. There was no problem Arthur K. Halliwell could not solve; no secret Arthur K. Halliwell would not keep. When a recent Mayor of this city found himself in trouble with a pregnant nineteen-year-old campaign worker who was thinking about going to the press, Arthur sent the young woman a copy of her father's police records on a morals charge (exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl in 1967) on which he scrawled an anonymous note: 'Would you like to see this in the press?' The young woman came to her senses. She aborted the child.
While the Arthur K. Halliwell law firm, which overlooked the city from its sixty-seventh-floor eyrie, ostensibly handled business and corporate matters for its clients, it was really a Big Brother program for the city's elite. Uncle Walter, as some chose to call him, was never more than a phone call away. As for Uncle Walter himself, he rather enjoyed playing God. He just wished that he were a little more powerful, as powerful as many of his clients imagined him to be but that was probably a normal divine failing, wasn't it? Even gods wanted things a little nicer for themselves.
The offices reflected the firm's status of dignified wealth, with furnishings that lent the air of a sumptuous and elegant home. Beautiful as the secretaries were Walter knew that both men and women appreciated beautiful, elegant women they took care to dress as conservatively as the lawyers themselves, usually in corporate gray or blue. And as for the lawyers no associate ever worked harder than at Uncle Walter's firm. The associate period generally lasted five years, and less than thirty per cent passed muster. Many simply collapsed from the exhaustion of constant eighteen-hour days and enough rules to make Marine boot camp look like Easy Street. If you complained, you always got the same time-honed anecdote about how Arthur K. Halliwell himself, who'd begun life as a trial lawyer, had lost his first fourteen cases and was dismissed by all the legal wags in the city as a lightweight. But he stayed the course and went on to win more than 1,100 cases in a row. Imagine the hours he'd put in. Imagine the sacrifices he'd made to family and frivolity. How could an associate demand any less of himself? In forty-three years, no associate had ever found a way to argue with that.
Halliwell thought of all this as he sat in his office that day. He did not usually engage in this kind of nostalgia recalling his rise to prominence but on mornings when his arthritis was acting up, he had no choice but to recall better days in order to get through the bad ones.
He paced the office now everything cherry wood with leather, brass-studded furnishings that had clawed ball feet and carved legs hobbled slightly by the arthritis that had lately inhibited his left knee, trying to appreciate his new framed map of the Old World (his taste in art came from his wife, to whom he had been unutterably faithful for fifty-one years), and his view of Lake Michigan. On a sunny day such as this one, he always wanted to start his life over, live it not in the hushed mahogany reverence of boardrooms but aboard the tramp steamers and dogsleds of the Jack London stories he'd enjoyed so much as a boy. So many years gone by so quickly…
As he paced, he also kept glancing at the phone.
What the hell had happened to Adam Morrow, anyway?
For the first time since losing those initial fourteen trials, Arthur K. Halliwell had the terrible feeling that he had perhaps gotten himself involved in something that was, in equal parts, foolish and self-destructive…
Had Uncle Walter at last come up against a problem he couldn't solve? Worse a problem that had been of his own making.
He limped to the phone, arthritic fingers touching arthritic knee, a lion of an old man, silver-haired and handsome in a jowly, somewhat angry way and dialed.
Dialed as he had every half hour for the past four days.
Just where in the hell was Adam Morrow?
The last Halliwell had heard from him was that frantic, furtive call a few days ago when he'd whispered that Rick Corday 'might be on' to them.
The phone rang several times. He waited for the answering machine to pick up, for Adam's deep voice to invite the caller to leave name and number and date of call.
But the phone machine didn't pick up.
Instead, somebody human did.
'Hello?' Arthur K. Halliwell said.
But the person who'd picked up said nothing. Simply listened.
'Hello?' Arthur K. Halliwell said again.
Breathing now.
'Adam, is that you?'
Breathing.
'Adam, are you all right?'
Breathing.
'This is Arthur K. Halliwell. I demand to speak to Adam Morrow.'
Now not even breathing. Just… silence.
'Damn you, I am Arthur K. Halliwell and I do not brook this kind of treatment!'
He laughed.
The bastard laughed.
Uncle Walter composed himself. 'Is this you, Rick?'
Silence again.
'Rick?'
The breathing.
'Rick?'
And then the person on the other phone hung up.
Uncle Walter slammed the receiver down.
Where the hell was Adam Morrow, anyway?