The Hearing by John Lescroart Page B

Raney was a teenager—she was desperately going to need her mother from time to time in the next couple of years, just as Treya had needed her own mom. And thank God Raney—like Treya had been—was the kind of child who would ask.
    Certainly she wasn’t going to waste any of those precious sick days on herself —she hadn’t missed a day of work for anything related to herself in six years. They paid her to be here and contribute and she wasn’t going to let her employers down. They counted on her.
    But the eyes were going to betray the fact that this morning at least she was a functional zombie, and she hated to have anyone, much less Clarence Jackman, the firm’s managing partner, see that. When she’d gotten the summons that Jackman wanted to see her in his office, she’d been sobbing quietly in her little cubicle.
    And why not? How could somebody have killed Elaine? It had wrenched her heart when she’d first learned of it, and the pain hadn’t let up much since. Elaine had been a friend and confidante; they often joked that they were sisters separated at birth. She and her boss had been the same age—thirty-three. Both were smart, neither of them entirely black or white. Intuitively, they both understood that the sometimes vast differences between their social standing, their jobs and their prospects were merely the products of background, education and—that greatest of all variables—luck.
    She threw a last splash of cold water over her eyes, blinked hard and patted them dry with a paper towel. She’d kept Mr. Jackman waiting long enough, too long really. Staring at herself in the mirror for one last second, she willed a tiny spark of life into her tired eyes, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin. “Okay, girl,” she whispered firmly to herself. “No whining.”
     
    Sixty-three-year-old Clarence Jackman was a power player. The company he’d founded with Aaron Rand thirty years ago was the most successful majority-black law firm west of Chicago. Though Rand & Jackman represented perhaps fifteen percent of the Bay Area’s minority-owned businesses, the rest of their receivables came from a mix of premier entities without any reference to ethnicity. The firm’s client roster included banks, hotels, construction firms, HMOs, several Silicon Valley companies, dozens of sports and entertainment celebrities, and hundreds of other lower-profile but high-income individuals and corporations.
    Imposing nearly to the point of intimidation, Jackman had been a star fullback at USC in the sixties. He carried nearly 250 pounds of muscle on his six-foot-three-inch frame. He favored Italian suits, double-breasted in browns and greens, white shirts, conservative ties. Intensely black-hued, with an oversized head capped now in tightly trimmed gray knots, just two months ago he’d had a middle-aged applicant for the firm’s CFO position walk out of the job interview before a word had been spoken while Jackman looked him over to see if he could take it.
    Understandably, Jackman had not risen to his current eminence by having a soft heart. The law business was competitive enough if you weren’t black. If you were, it could be startlingly brutal. Rand & Jackman had known this at the start. They’d felt that they had had to build their firm on the assumption that if things ever went wrong with a client or a case, they would never under any circumstances get the benefit of the doubt. They could afford no mistakes. They had to be the best. Not just the best black—the best, period.
    And so, perhaps ironically, the firm was much more a meritocracy than most of its competitors. The younger associates worked endless hours like—well—slaves, so that they could become partners and keep working even harder. Mental or physical weakness, excuses, moral lapses, failure—all were grounds for termination.
    Jackman, unhampered by any laws mandating sensitivity to race issues, ran what he thought was a good, old-fashioned