“That’s good to hear, Stu. Just make sure the rest of us are okay.”
（19）
By five each afternoon, the bar of the Ritz-Carlton was usually bustling with a well-heeled crowd of business travelers happy to pay twenty dollars a drink and hide it somewhere on their generous expense accounts. For this reason, attractive young women who worked in the downtown offices frequented the bar and its sweeping lounge. And because it had a reputation for attracting upscale local women, it also attracted upscale local professionals in need of a drink.
Rusty loved the place and was there at least once a week. Usually, he met other lawyers and judges to knock back a few before heading for the suburbs. Because he was single, he hung around after his pals headed home, and began hitting on women. That was his customary routine.
However, tonight he was at the bar alone, nursing his third Scotch and cursing another jury. He had been foolish to ask for so much money. He knew St. Louis as well as anyone, and he knew it was a conservative town with no history of jaw-dropping verdicts. Some cities were known for their freewheeling style of tort litigation and stunning awards. Miami, Houston, Boston, and San Francisco came to mind. But not St. Louis. He should have throttled back and asked for only $10 million. He had a $5 million and a $6.4 million under his belt, in years past, and ten would have made more sense. The problem, though, and he admitted this as he drank, was that his ego wanted more, much more. He wanted to single-handedly bring St. Louis into the modern era of staggering verdicts. He, Rusty Malloy, would be the King of Torts in town and smile as the lesser lawyers ran to him with their cases. He would pick and choose.
Three young women made a noisy entrance and Rusty looked them over. One he’d seen before, maybe even bought her a drink. They were about thirty, probably married and looking for some fun before heading home. Short skirts, heels, no sleeves, a lot of flesh on display. They sat in a corner and surveyed the bar scene. One glanced at Rusty, and when a second one did too, he nodded at Jose, the bartender, and nodded at the women. Jose knew what to do for Mr. Malloy—keep the tab open.
They were giggling when he walked up and said, “I’m buying the first round. What’ll it be?”
If they were expecting their husbands or boyfriends, they would have waved him off. They did not. The two on the couch moved a few inches apart and one patted the cushion. He fell in between them and quickly admired their legs. A waiter appeared and took their orders.
He had tried marriage three times and simply wasn’t cut out for it. He had never been faithful to any woman and it was too late, at the age of forty-six, to change his ways.
（20）
Diantha left the city at dawn and for once enjoyed the drive, for the first few minutes anyway. It was a pleasant change to zip along in no traffic and see it all over there on the other side headed inbound. She busied herself by sipping coffee and listening to the BBC on Sirius.
Saliba Correctional Center was two hours away and off the main highways. The roads got narrower until she approached the town of Kerrville, a deserted outpost in the heart of Missouri’s farm country. Large signs pointed this way and that, and it became obvious that the prison was vital to the community. There was little else in Kerrville. It was called a medium-security facility, designed to house 900 inmates. According to the internet, it currently housed almost twice that number. It was built in the 1980s when the War on Drugs was launched by tough politicians and all fifty states joined the prison construction boom as incarceration rates soared. To keep the softer inmates away from the drug traffickers, a minimum-security wing was added in 1995, and somewhere deep in its bowels resided the once Honorable N. Bolton Malloy.
Diantha parked in a vast lot and inspected her face in the mirror. No makeup, no jewelry, nothing to attract attention. Slacks, flat-sole shoes, a jacket, no skin showing from the neck down, as per the website. For a stylish woman who loved fashion and took plenty of time each morning putting herself together, she was surprised at how plain she looked.
Back in the early days when she was fresh out of law school and the first female associate at Malloy & Malloy, she had always made the effort to dress up for the office. The men appreciated it and Bolton especially enjoyed her company. The clerical staff was all young women and Bolton paid them well. He was a demanding boss who favored linen suits, silk ties, French cuffs, and Italian shoes. The unwritten dress code around Malloy & Malloy was that to succeed you’d better look good.
She left her cell phone and briefcase in the car and locked it. At the entrance of the administration building she paused for a second to look at the cheap bronze plaque the state had screwed into a cinderblock wall. It commemorated the distinguished career of an old warden who’d been dead for forty years. Winston Saliba.