Read Online Executive Privilege by Phillip Margolin - Free Book Online

receptionist who sat behind a magnificent polished wood dais that displayed the firm name in shiny metal letters. Behind the receptionist were several glass-walled conference rooms with magnificent views of three snowcapped mountains and the river. While they waited, the clients sat on soft leather sofas and thumbed through copies of U.S. News & World Report or The Wall Street Journal . It was on this floor that the partners made big deals for important people in huge offices furnished by interior decorators.
    Brad did not take the elevator to the thirtieth floor. Junior associates entered Reed, Briggs’s hallowed halls on twenty-seven and walked down a dull, windowless corridor to a plain door, where they tapped in an entry code on a keypad affixed to the wall. Inside, the support staff sat in cubicles that filled the center of the floor, surrounded by the unimpressive offices occupied by the firm’s newest members.
    Brad filled a mug with coffee in the lunchroom and carried it to his tiny office. A narrow window above his credenza looked down on the roof of a hotel parking lot. The rest of the office was filled to capacity by a desk, two client chairs, a gunmetal gray filing cabinet, and a bookcase stuffed with a set of the Oregon Revised Statutes and the tax code. Brad’s only decorations were framed copies of his college and law school diplomas.
    Brad’s desk was usually stacked high with assignments from the partners, but when he’d left his office the night before he’d had fewer files than usual to work on. This was because the partner he’d been assisting had just settled the lawsuit that had taken up a good part of Brad’s time since he’d joined the firm. When Brad walked into the office he stopped short and groaned. Three new files covered his blotter. A quick look at the memo on top of the center file let him know that he was in for a late night.
    Brad took a sip of coffee while his computer booted up. After checking his e-mail, he started going through a forty-page contract between a subcontractor and a construction company that was building condominiums on the coast near Lincoln City. He was on page seven when his intercom buzzed and the receptionist told him that Susan Tuchman wanted to see him. Brad sighed, placed a yellow Post-it on the paragraph he was reading, and headed for the stairs that would take him up to the thirtieth floor.
    The associates had nicknamed Tuchman the “Dragon Lady” and the aerie where the Gods of Reed, Briggs ruled, “Heaven.” Brad could have ascended there on the elevator but walking up stairs was one of the few types of exercise he was getting since he started working fourteen-hour days. Some of the other associates jogged or exercised in a gym before work, but Brad was not a morning person. He did play an occasional game of tennis at the Pettygrove Athletic Club, where all the partners and associates had memberships, and he did get in a run or two on the weekend, but he’d noticed that the numbers on his bathroom scale had been inching up and he was finding it harder and harder to run down cross-court forehands. By the time he opened the door to the thirtieth floor he had made a vow to watch his diet and get in at least four hours of exercise each week.
    Susan Tuchman’s corner office was an homage to minimalism. Two large windows met at one corner giving her a wraparound view of Portland. A black leather sofa stood against a third wall under an all-white painting. The senior partner’s desk was a large sheet of glass supported by aluminum tubes and the only items on it were an in-box and out-box made of polished metal and a thick file. The only cluttered space was a wall decorated with awards Tuchman had won from the Inns of Court, the American Bar Association, and other legal groups, and photographs of Tuchman with celebrities from the worlds of politics, business, and entertainment.
    Tuchman was five four and rail thin. Her blond hair was free of gray thanks to