Blazing Addles

"Marlene!" Paul barked into her office. "Conference room. Now!"

"Hostile takeover?" Marlene asked. "Fine. That's one of my fortes. Just give me a minute to fix my lipstick." The best lawyers know that appearance matters. A lot.

"No, worse—better—I don't know. Denny Crane's been shot!" Paul hurried down the hall.

"About time," muttered Marlene, when the door had latched behind him. She closed her computer and began punching furiously into her Blackberry as she walked, stopping only long enough to lock her office door behind her. Just as she reached the elevator, she pressed 'send.'

***

"Shirley!" Paul leaned in to her doorway.

She looked up and over her purple plastic frames and braced herself. This would not be good.

"Denny's been shot." Paul saw her face crumble and kicked himself for his thoughtlessness. "He's all right," he hastened to add. "He's at Mass General. Apparently the wound is very minor. As we speak, he's in surgery to extract the bullet. "

"They told you specifically that he would recover in full?" Shirley pressed.

"Yes. In fact, they had planned to do the surgery outpatient and send him home this afternoon, but he refused. He said that he had bought and paid for a wing there, and same as with a woman, he should be able to spend the night."

Shirley rolled her eyes, but her color and composure were returning. "At least with the wing, he might be able to last the entire night."

That was better. Paul started again. "I'm assembling the partners in the conference room to work through the situation."

Shirley looked at her watch. "I'll notify the other offices. Terry in Chicago should be up by now, and Hong Kong never sleeps. I'll wait a bit for L.A. Barry's not a morning person. At least, not according to the memos on the women's room stalls."

She picked up the phone and pressed the button for the London office. "Thank you, Paul." As she listened to London ring, she peered up over the top of her glasses, prepared to ask more, but Paul was already gone.

***


Brad was the last to arrive in the conference room. He looked harried and smelt of Denise's shampoo. "Sorry. I came as fast as I could."

Marlene made a little sound that might have been a cough but wasn't. She rubbed her throat. "Sorry." She directed the word at Brad, but 'smug' would have been a better descriptor of her demeanor than 'sorry.'

Paul waved to a chair. "Brad. Come in. We have a situation. Denny's been shot."

"I heard. He'll be all right?"

"Certainly not! Unfortunately, he'll be exactly the same as he was before, but there'll be no permanent damage from the hit."

"Do we know who did it?" Brad crossed his legs.

"Denny Crane."

"No, who shot him?"

"Denny Crane."

"No, the guy who shot Denny." Patience waning, Brad's words accelerated even more. "Have they found him?"

"Denny. Crane." Paul annunciated deliberately.

Marlene punched keys on her Blackberry. Perhaps Denny was more of a team player than she had realized.

"Denny tried to kill himself?" Brad shot bolt upright. "That doesn't make any sense! That man loves himself more than life itself!" Brad stopped and squirmed. Maybe he shouldn't talk so fast. He tried again. "You know what I mean. And anyway, he's a much better shot than that."

"Denny shot…himself?" Shirley leaned across the table, frank incredulity on her face as well.

"There is a certain…concordance to that." Hands in pockets, Alan strolled through the door. "It would be not unlike him to insist upon securing such an honor all for himself." Alan oozed into a chair and lounged back.

"Mr. Shore, you have not been invited here." Paul used his principal's office voice. "This meeting is for partners at Crane, Poole and Schmidt and not for friends of Denny's."

Brad coughed. Shirley considered her pencil. Marlene sat, squidlike, unblinking, eyes upon Paul.

Alan picked up a plum from the fruit bowl and fondled it. "Thank you, Paul, for articulating my case more succinctly than I ever could. I cannot for the life of me understand why you don't take more trial cases. Is it the travel time that puts you off?"

Discretion is often the better part of valor, and while valor might not be Paul's strong suit, discretion certainly was. Pretending he'd heard nothing, he reviewed his hastily jotted notes.

He cleared his throat. "There is no suspicion of suicide. Apparently Denny shot himself accidentally with a gun which he keeps under his pillow."

"Kirk." Alan smirked.

"Pardon me?" Paul whipped off his glasses.

"Kirk Douglas takes the other pillow."

"Denny's sleeping with…Kirk Douglas?" Paul's words came out in a perplexed staccato.

"Kirk Douglas is a .38 special. Part of Denny's Gunslingers of the Silver Screen collection. He was one of a matched set. As are Wyatt Earp an Doc Holliday: a pair of single shot Colt .45s. While Wyatt and Doc are able to exist side by side in perpetuity on Denny's living room gun wall, Burt and Kirk are not to have such a happily ever after. Burt Lancaster, of course had to be summarily disposed of, leaving Kirk Douglas alone and ruining the display set. Denny chose to mitigate the damage by choosing to sleep with Kirk. It seems to work out well. He says that anyone who could take down the Roman Empire can assuredly handle the odd Bostonian intruder."

"I don't recall Spartacus utilizing firearms in his revolt," said Paul.

"You'll have to take that up with Denny. His version may be different."

"Isn't it always?" Shirley said.

"I would have expected Denny to be sleeping with Charlton Heston, if anyone." Brad mused aloud. "President, spokesman,…'cold, dead fingers.' I could see the appeal."

Alan wrung his hands. "Ah, I believe he is, in a manner of speaking. That esteemed appellation was especially reserved for a darling, if perhaps somewhat antiquated, little shooter somewhat dearer and nearer to Denny's—"

All faces turned in expectant horror.

Alan dropped his right hand below the table and jiggled his arm in an ambiguous motion. "—heart," he finished, with conviction.

Paul cleared his throat. "In any event, while he was in bed, it went off unexpectedly—"

"Par for the course," Shirley said.

"It was a single shot—"

"No doubt."

"—impacting no one but himself."

"Three for three. That would be Denny," Shirley finished.

"But he's not seriously hurt?" Brad asked.

"No. According to the doctors, it's only a flesh wound. They say that he was extremely lucky. The wound just happened to land in his most expendable part."

"Leg." Brad nodded. Statistically most likely, and exactly where the Marines had taught him to aim to disable with non-lethal force.

Brain, thought Marlene. With as little as he was running on, a few cubic inches of cerebrum more or less couldn't possibly matter.

Johnson, thought Shirley. Grudgingly, she raised her opinion of Denny's marksmanship to be able to be able to bulls-eye such a target.

"Buttocks!" Alan ejaculated. It was always nice when the conversation came 'round to a topic on which he had some not inconsiderable expertise.

"Yes," said Paul, referring to his notes. "Apparently so— Mr. Shore, what are you doing?" Paul removed the offending reading glasses once again.

Now Alan squatted between the table and chair with his right hand stretched between his legs. "How precisely, I wonder, does a man shoot himself in his own buttocks?"

"That's easy; shooting himself in the ass has recently become one of Denny's pet hobbies." Shirley tapped her pencil against the table.

Paul continued, "Of more acute interest is: how do we keep this fiasco out of the public eye?"

Marlene thumbed her Blackberry. "My niece does Pilates with an editor at Reuters. She can find out what's coming over the wires. She'll have us tied in to every split infinitive and comma splice."

"Don't email—call!" Paul said. "Every second counts."

"On it." Marlene typed a frenetic pace out the door.

Brad stood. "I'll go to his house, meet with…Kirk Douglas and whoever else is in Denny's bed. See if there's any damage control to be done."

"Good." Paul nodded. "Go. Brad—"

Brad turned.

"I suggest you take latex gloves."

"Prints. Right. Could be more investigation. I'll be careful."

"I'd meant social diseases, but regardless, do be. And now for the issues direct from the horse's ass—"

"Mouth," corrected Alan.

"No. Someone must to go to the hospital to prevent Denny from saying anything stupid." Paul rolled his face and retracted the superfluous modifier. "—prevent Denny from saying anything." He raised his gaze to Alan and waited.

Alan straightened and tipped his nose back in quiet contemplation. "Hospitals. A ménage of sick individuals stewing in a broth of pathology, pain and assorted bodily fluids stirred in with a soupcon of stainless steel instruments designed by sadists to fit uncomfortably into assorted seemingly improbably bodily orifices." He slid his chair in towards the table.

"Yes, I'll go. I expect I should feel right at home." Flipping his plum in the air and back to his palm again, he headed down the hall.


***

"I'll update the other offices." Shirley rose from the table. "If this leaks, we need to be sure we're all presenting the same story—regardless of how much Denny would love to be on the front page of The Sun."

"Shirley." Paul caught her wrist. "One moment. Before you make those calls, you and I need to review the partnership agreement."

"Pardon?" Shirley blinked in her 'Because I'm a lady, I'll give you one chance to rephrase your mistake' tone.

Paul steamed on, apparently oblivious. "There is a clause permitting involuntary buy-out of a senior partner in the event of gross negligent or reckless behavior. While much of Denny's past behavior has stopped solely at gross, this new development meets both of the relevant cited criteria, and I am not going to sit by and permit it to continue any longer. He has endangered this firm time and time again and now his very life. How many more warning signs do we need? How many more cover-ups are we going to perpetrate? When did Crane, Poole and Schmidt become a firm that operates under the table? Do we want that kind of name?

"Shirley, we need him gone."

"No."

"No?"

"No. As you say, this concerns Crane, Poole, and Schmidt. I'm Schmidt. And as the only named partner still allowed to handle sharp objects unsupervised, it's safe to assume that no one cares about that name more than I do. But that name wouldn't have the significance it does were it not for Denny. He built this firm up from the ground—and you and me along with it. His charisma, his creativity, his drive, and yes, his mind allowed us to rise with him to a place that neither of us could have reached by ourselves. He's given his life to this firm; it is his life, and after forty years of dedication, I won't be a part of ripping it from him when he needs it to support him for a while instead."

Paul's furrows deepened. "I am not pulling this out of thin air, Shirley. It is not a whim or a caprice. It is a contractual term of the agreement we all signed—you, me, Edwin, Barry, all of us. We all agreed, even Denny—when he was fully in possession of his faculties, I might add. It's plain as black and white."

"Yes, agreed. And when you find in that contract the clause that states that the partnership must always be smooth and easy, I will consider the validity of your position. However until then, we are partners. That is a partnership agreement—not a lack of partnership agreement—and I will not be enjoined to re-interpret it otherwise."

"The buy-out arrangements outlined are very generous. We would hardly be throwing him out on the streets—"

"Wouldn't we be? This firm is Denny's his yardstick. You know how Alzheimer's works. If we pull his environment out from under his feet, how long do you think he'll last? What do you think will become of his mind deprived of the context for what he has left of his higher reasoning? Throwing him out on the streets would be kinder. But send him home to do nothing? Just what do you think become of him then?" Shirley set her face.

"I won't do it, Paul. And neither will you."

Paul turned his back to her and paced to the glass wall. He watched the associates and employees scurry about in the halls. His halls. Their halls. "Are you sure that the history of your relationship with Denny puts you in the best position to be objective enough to spearhead this decision?"

Shirley made an incredulous sound and gathered herself. "All right, Paul, number one: presuming that by history you mean 'sex,' you should know that if I were to offer a sinecure partnership to everyone whom I have bedded, we would have to rent two more floors and treble the size of the kitchenette. Number two: without spoiling for you any by-products of your imagination—which, knowing nothing more, I can promise you are far more interesting than anything that actually occurred— I can say that nothing occurred between us in that…history, as you so genteelly term for the sake of my delicate sensibilities, that would justify my endorsing his annual seven figure take home—unless I were to allot $100 for every time I asked him to put more weight on his elbows. And number three: we had no relationship in that 'history.' We had sex—not good sex, albeit, but sex. We do have a relationship now, and while that might well be coloring my decision, I do not apologize for it; I am grateful for it. Had I had that perspective earlier in life, and looked to do right and not just be right, I might have caused a good deal less hurt."

There was a reason that Paul had chosen to pursue his career agenda working with papers and not people. "If word leaks out, it will be a catastrophe," he tried.

"No. It will be awkward, but it will be manageable. Crane, Poole and Schmidt is one of the fifty most powerful law firms in the US. We have offices on three continents; I think that we can survive one slug in the behind. Denny's in trouble. Handling trouble is what lawyers do. That is what we're here for. That is why we exist."

Paul leaned over the table toward her. "The Denny Crane I knew and respected would never have asked anyone to jeopardize this firm because of his own personal weaknesses."

"The Denny Crane you know and respected is lying in the hospital because of his own personal weaknesses. I do not recall him asking anyone for anything. Is it just possible, Paul, that in the sudden excitement, you have…jumped the gun—so to speak—a bit?"

Paul sighed. "He's losing it, Shirley, rapidly. You—of all people—must be able to see that."

Shirley scoffed. "Of course I do. And it scares me too. Seeing someone you love being disappearing bit by bit in the grip of an impassible, insuperable force is one of the most horrible things any of us can face. We all want to regain control—or at least to not have to face the sad deterioration day by day by day.

"But sending him away is not the way to accomplish that. I wouldn't do that to any one of us just because it made my life easier. I wouldn't let anyone do it to you—not even someone softhearted acting only out of distress and difficulty facing such a painful truth. I wouldn't let anyone do it to you, to anyone who has edified this firm, or to anyone I whom love. And I won't do it to Denny.

"And neither will you." Despite the conclusion, Shirley's face conferred far more sympathy than triumph.

Of course she was right. She was Schmidt.

A good attorney knows when to let go his losses and make the best deal available from his current position.

Paul cleared his throat. "Jack Holan in the Chicago office is… close with the Chicago A.P. bureau chief. Need be, he might be able to help quash media attention."

"He'll be my first call." Shirley picked up her pad. She paused. "Thank you, Paul. We both know that under contract law, your analysis was quite correct and would have prevailed."

"No, Shirley. Thank you. As you say, had I made the argument, it might well have prevailed. And that would not be correct." He offered her what he could of a smile

Shirley nodded to him and turned for the door.

Paul sank into a chair, forehead pressed tight into his hand.