"How the hell do you lose when everyone else is making money?" asked Rizzuto. He offered to get Schwartz a drink. Schwartz declined with a motion of his hand, the Rolex hand. He put his eight-hundred dollar Bazitti loafers on the long polished rosewood table and leaned back. Palmer could see the designer imprint on the bottom of the shoes. He was glad there was no such thing as expensive designer underwear; otherwise he would be in danger of being mooned by his partner.
Nathan Palmer did not like his partners. In fact, if he had met them in an elevator he would have gotten off at the wrong floor just to get away from them. But these were the men who had schemed with him to make Palmer, Rizzuto and he never had any thought of going off alone. He might despise them personally, but professionally he respected their legal cunning.
"We have here the end of Palmer, Rizzuto In Darien, Connecticut, we have secured a death-by-negligence case against a construction firm."
"It's insured, isn't it? We didn't go after something that wasn't insured," said Schwartz; who was an expert at freezing assets in danger of disappearing, a common occurrence when companies faced large judgments against them.
"Oh, it's insured," said Palmer.
"Then what's the problem?"
"The problem is the victims of this heinous crime of negligence they were both smothered in concrete-were two common laborers, Joe somebody and Jim watchamacallit. "
"So?" asked Schwartz.
"That's a three-hundred-thousand-dollar cap on their lives," Schwartz said. "That was the auditorium-roof construction, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Worked brilliantly," said Palmer.
"Who else was injured? Any engineers? A doctor, hopefully?" asked Rizzuto.
"Only the two laborers. Palmer, Rizzuto s share, gentlemen, should come to roughly three hundred thousand dollars."
"What's that after expenses?" asked Schwartz.
"A two-hundred-thousand-dollar loss. And Darien isn't all, there were the baby bottles. A perfect litigation against the company that produced the plastic wrong so it would shatter in the babies' mouths."
"That was a natural for any jury," said Rizzuto, who loved the gamble of facing a jury and wished the firm hadn't become so big that they never sent him out to plead a case anymore. "Babies with bleeding mouths. Hysterical mothers. Rich corporations."
"Except the life of a baby is never a seven-figure affair," said Schwartz. "And they suffered only minor disfiguring scars. We couldn't even get a lifelong-embarrassment factor into that case, what with plastic surgery and so forth."
"Another loss," said Palmer.
"What about the planes? Planes are always good," said Schwartz. "We've done well with our planes. It's our basic. And don't tell me we're dealing with babies or laborers in first-class cabins. Those are usually the first ones to go. We've had industrialists in those cabins. We've had good litigation."
"The problem with a plane," said Palmer, annoyed that Schwartz was missing the obvious, "is that you get one plane at most from any provable negligence. When you're dealing with aircraft and airlines, whenever a flaw is discovered, it's changed. Engines are always being redesigned. So are tails and wings, and anything that might remotely cause an accident."
Nathan Palmer rose in trembling indignation. "The terrible fact is that if you prove a flaw in one kind of airplane, that's the safest kind to fly next because they always fix it. We've never gotten more than one suit from any plane disaster. Not one."
"The cars were good," said Schwartz.
"Cars are another thing. But how many manufacturers would now consider mounting the gas tank in the rear bumper?" asked Palmer.
"The gas tank in the bumper was the best. Went up like bombs. We had hundreds of bombs on American highways and the best part of it was some idiot at the auto company had figured out it was cheaper to pay a judgment than to take the gas tank out of the bumper," said Rizzuto.
"We did do well on the gas tanks in the bumpers," sighed Schwartz.
"We made them change that policy," said Rizzuto.
"Fifteen years ago," said Schwartz. "What have we had since? Break-even airplanes, construction-company losses, and baby bottles that were at best a nuisance value to the company."
"If we could do surgeons, those big-income guys who do the fancy operations, then we would have something," said Schwartz.
"What would we get? Three surgeons at most? And what would we have to pay for it? The problem, gentlemen, is that paying for these accidents is breaking us."
"Makes you want to go back to honest law," said Schwartz.
"No such thing," said Rizzuto. "You remember what they taught us at law school? There are two things in law. Winning and losing."
"Yes, but what about the ethics they taught?" asked Schwartz. He had a problem he shared with the others. They hated to lose arguments even if winning got them nowhere. Perhaps that was why they had all entered law, Schwartz had often thought. It was competitive. There were winners and there were losers and when one applied his mind day in and day out to the angles of winning, other considerations tended to dissolve.
Like ethics. All three felt they had all the legal ethics they needed. They had studied enough to pass the California bar, and after that there was no need to follow their oaths. If they got into any trouble with an ethics committee, they could always bring it to court and probably win.
Besides, the way they operated, no one ever found out what they did. That was the genius of their method or, as Palmer had once said, the method of their genius.
"Our problem is we have been using our genius the wrong way," said Palmer.
"He's never gotten us into a bit of trouble," said Schwartz.
"That's because he knows how everything works," said Rizzuto.
"I have called you here today to tell you that if we continue to use our genius in the manner we have been, we will all be bankrupt within a year."
"God help us," said Schwartz.
"My bookie is going to carve my liver," said Rizzuto.
"I've got seven ex-wives, and I'm getting married again," said Palmer.
"Really? Congratulations. What's she like?" asked Rizzuto. He liked Palmer's taste in wives. He had made love to half of them, give or take. Which meant he'd come out even on his bets with himself. The gambling on which ones would and which wouldn't had been the best part.
"Like the other seven, of course," said Palmer.
"Nice," said Rizzuto, who thought it proper to wait until after the wedding before asking when Palmer would be taking another business trip.
"All of which is neither here nor there," said Palmer. "None of us is going to be able to support our human failings unless we change our ways."
"What failings?" asked Rizzuto. "I had a half-million dollars' worth of action going, and it was going to turn. It had to turn. You called me away. You cost me a half-million cool ones."
"I hardly consider a stock market that reacts in peculiar fashion a failing of my mathematical formulas."
"Yes," said Palmer, the most realistic of the three. "And I have at last found my own true love in number eight."
"Okay. You win. What are we going to do?" asked Rizzuto.
"You must have a plan of some sort," Schwartz said. "You never do anything you don't know the outcome of, unless it's marriage. Of course, you do know the outcome of that, don't you?"