Book I
It was May, 26, 1980, the first business day after Susanna Patrick graduated from law school. She sat at a desk in an almost-empty office at Simpson, Craddock, and McGuire, the premier law firm in Amarillo, Texas. Her eyes searched the face of a young man who sat on the opposite side of the desk. His barely controlled panic alarmed her. Two hours before he had forced his way onto the elevator she was taking to the top floor of the building that housed both the law firm and the Bank of Commerce. He had gotten off on the floor below and turned back as if he wanted to get back on, but he delayed and lost the opportunity.
The elevator let Susanna off inside the law firm’s lobby. After telling the receptionist she was there to see Tom Dawson, she walked over to look down into the atrium that formed the building’s core. Except for the firm’s lobby, which opened onto the atrium, a balcony with tall, stately glass doors evenly spaced around the perimeter ringed the rest of the floor where she stood. Below that the floors were fully exposed. She could see the hustle and bustle of banking activities throughout the building, and she could see the indecisive young man get back on the elevator where he had gotten off.
“Are you Mrs. Patrick?”
Susanna turned to face a tall, thin, elderly woman. “Yes.”
“I’m the office manager.” She didn’t offer to shake hands.
The elevator bell sounded, and the young man got off, but his business wasn’t any of this lady’s business. She ignored him and addressed Susanna. “Mr. Dawson, your supervising attorney, isn’t in, but I’ve been instructed to show you to your office. Please come this way.”
They cut across the lobby and walked behind the young man who was telling the receptionist he too was reporting to work for the first time. Susanna followed the office manager down an interior hall lined on both sides with offices guarded by secretarial stations. They turned into one near the end of the hall. Across from it was a workroom. Susanna glanced inside. A secretary had loaded a five-inch stack of magnetically encoded cards into a mag-card reader the size of a top-loading deep freezer. She waited while three printed copies of a forty-page legal document churned through the machine and collated into bins on its side.
The manager flipped on the lights as they entered a windowless room. “This will be your office,” she said. “Mr. Dawson will call you when he arrives. If you need something before then, you can call me at this extension.”
The lady jotted a number on a slip of paper and handed it to Susanna. A file, a stack of yellow legal pads, two unsharpened pencils, and a pen sat on the desk’s corner.
With nothing else to do, Susanna read and reread the file, but she learned very little. The apprehension from unfulfilled expectations impaired her comprehension. Dawson didn’t call, and none of the lawyers she had met when she interviewed for the job stopped by.
“Have you met Mr. Simpson?” The young man from the elevator demanded her attention.
Susanna shook her head.
William T. Simpson, known to everyone as Bill, was the partner whose name came first in the law firm’s name. When she had interviewed for the job, she didn’t meet him or the other named partners. She only saw their portraits. The paintings were hung inside antique frames on the wall of a conference room where she had been lodged before the interview process began. Contrasting with the room’s modern decor, the flat visages of the firm’s founders conveyed a sense of integrity and continuity that she liked.