Ford County by John Grisham Page B

winter day, with a slight chance of snow in the air, the call finally arrived.
    A male voice with a different accent, from somewhere up north, replied, “Yes, Mr. Mack Stafford, please.”
    The voice was too polished and too far away to worry him, so he replied, “This is Mack.”
    “Mr. Mack Stafford, the attorney?”
    “Correct. Who’s calling?”
    “My name is Marty Rosenberg, and I’m with the Durban & Lang firm in New York.”
    “New York City?” Mack asked, and much too quickly. Of course it was New York City. Though his practice had never taken him anywhere near the big city, he certainly knew of Durban & Lang. Every lawyer in America had at least heard of the firm.
    “That’s correct. May I call you Mack?” The voice was quick but polite, and Mack suddenly had a visual of Mr. Rosenberg sitting in a splendid office with art on the walls and associates and secretaries scurrying about tending to his needs. Yet in the midst of such power he wanted to be friendly. A wave of insecurity swept over Mack as he looked around his dingy little room and wondered if Mr. Rosenberg had already decided he was just another small-town loser because he answered his own phone.
    “Sure. And I’ll just call you Marty.”
    “Great.”
    “Sorry, Marty, to grab the phone, but my secretary stepped out for lunch.” It was important for Mack to clear the air and let this guy know that he was a real lawyer with a real secretary.
    “Yes, well, I forgot that you’re an hour behind us,” Marty said with a trace of contempt, the first hint that perhaps they were separated by far more than just a simple hour.
    “What can I do for you?” Mack said, seizing control of the conversation. Enough of the small talk. Both were busy, important attorneys. His mind was in overdrive as he tried to think of any case, any file, any legal matter that could conceivably merit interest from such a large and prestigious law firm.
    “Well, we represent a Swiss company that recently purchased most of the Tinzo group out of South Korea. You’re familiar with Tinzo?”
    “Of course,” Mack replied quickly, while his mind racked its memory for some recollection of Tinzo. It did indeed ring a bell, though a very distant one.
    “And according to some old Tinzo records, you at one time represented some loggers who claimed to have been injured by defective chain-saws manufactured by a Tinzo division in the Philippines.”
    Oh, that Tinzo! Now Mack was in the game. Now he remembered, though the details were still not at his fingertips. The cases were old, stale, and almost forgotten because Mack had tried his best to forget them.
    “Terrible injuries,” he said anyway. Terrible as they might have been, they had never been so grievous as to prompt Mack to actually file suit. He’d signed them up years earlier but lost interest when he couldn’t bluff a quick settlement. His theory of liability was shaky at best. The Tinzo chain-saws in question actually had an impressive safety record. And, most important, product liability litigation was complicated, expensive, way over his head, and usually involved jury trials, which Mack had always tried to avoid. There was comfort in filing divorces and personal bankruptcies and doing an occasional will or deed. Little in the way of fees, but he and most of the other lawyers in Clanton could eke out a living while avoiding almost all risk.
    “We have no record of any lawsuits being filed down there,” Marty was saying.
    “Not yet,” Mack said with as much bluster as he could manage.
    “How many of these cases do you have, Mack?”
    “Four,” he said, though he wasn’t certain of the exact number.
    “Yes, that’s what our records show. We have the four letters you sent to the company sometime back. However, there doesn’t seem to have been much activity since the original correspondence.”
    “The cases are active,” Mack said, and for the most part it was a lie. The office files were still open,