The Testament by John Grisham Page B

always followed by an even harder fall. Now, at the age of forty-eight, he was broke, twice divorced, and freshly indicted for income tax evasion. His future was anything but bright.
    “He used to be an outdoor type, didn’t he?” Tip asked.
    “Oh yeah. Scuba diving, rock climbing, all that crazy stuff. Then the slide began and he did nothing but work.”
    The slide had begun in his mid-thirties, at about the time he put together an impressive string of large verdicts against negligent doctors. Nate O’Riley became a star in the medical malpractice game, and also began drinking heavily and using coke. He neglected his family and became obsessive about his addictions—big verdicts, booze, and drugs. He somehow balanced all three, but was always on the edge of disaster. Then he lost a case, and fell off the cliff for the first time. The firm hid him in a designer spa until he was sufficiently dried out, and he made an impressive comeback. The first of several.
    “When does he get out?” Tip asked, no longer surprised by the idea and liking it more and more.
    “Soon.”
    But Nate had become a serious addict. He could stay clean for months, even years, but he always crashed. The chemicalsravaged his mind and body. His behavior became quite bizarre, and the rumors of his craziness crept through the firm and ultimately spread through the lawyers’ network of gossip.
    Almost four months earlier, he had locked himself in a motel room with a bottle of rum and a sack of pills in what many of his colleagues viewed as a suicide attempt.
    Josh committed him for the fourth time in ten years.
    “It might be good for him,” Tip said. “You know, to get away for a while.”

SEVEN
_____________
    O n the third day after Mr. Phelan’s suicide, Hark Gettys arrived at his office before dawn, already tired but anxious for the day to begin. He’d had a late dinner with Rex Phelan, followed by a couple of hours in a bar, where they fretted over the will and plotted strategy. So his eyes were red and puffy and his head ached, but he was nonetheless moving quickly around the coffeepot.
    Hark’s hourly rates varied. In the past year, he’d handled a nasty divorce for as little as two hundred dollars an hour. He quoted three-fifty to every prospective client, which was a bit low for such an ambitious D.C. lawyer, but if he got them in the door at three-fifty, he could certainly pad the billing and earn what he deserved. An Indonesian cement company had paid him four hundred and fifty an hour for a small matter, then tried to stiff him when the bill came. He had settled a wrongful death case in which he earned a third of three hundred and fifty thousand. So he was all over the board when it came to fees.
    Hark was a litigator in a forty-lawyer firm, a second-tier outfit with a history of infighting and bickering which had hampered its growth, and he longed to open his own shop. Almost half of his annual billings went for the overhead; the way he figured it, the money belonged in his pocket.
    At some point during the sleepless night, he’d made the decision to raise his rate to five hundred an hour, and to make it retroactive a week. He’d worked on nothing but the Phelan matter for the past six days, and now that the old man was dead his crazy family was a lawyer’s dream.
    What Hark desperately wanted was a will contest—a long vicious fight with packs of lawyers filing tons of legal crap. A trial would be wonderful, a high-profile battle over one of the largest estates in America, with Hark in the center. Winning it would be nice, but winning wasn’t crucial. He’d make a fortune, and he’d become famous, and that’s what modern lawyering was all about.
    At five hundred dollars an hour, sixty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, Hark’s gross annual billings would be one and a half million. The overhead for a new office—rent, secretaries, paralegals—would be half a million at most, and so Hark could clear a million bucks if he