"Charles L. Harness-George Washington Slept Here" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

I can just make it." He bounded from his chair, grabbed his attach├й case, and dashed for the door. He
called over his shoulder to Miss Catlin (who was standing there shaking her head): "Phone the printouts in
to the plane... Sena v. Bridge Authority... Judge Roule... g'bye!"
***


Oliver Potts graduated tenth from the bottom in a law class of one hundred and forty-seven. He
accepted his low estate philosophically. When he started his practice he assumed that rich clients with
sure winners were not going to flock to his door. In this he was quite right. How then, he asked himself,
shall I pay the rent, a secretary's salary, and sometimes eat? It was then that he made a remarkable
discovery: for every winning litigant there is a loser. Fifty percent of all those anxious faces are losers.
They are your clients! The field is white unto the harvest! Go get them, Oliver!
And so he did. Losers, sensing a kindred spirit, brought their cases to him in droves. Incredibly, some
of them had money, and paid his fees. And so he acquired a certain reputation, absolutely unique in his
county: during his entire professional career, spanning nearly two decades, he had never won a case.
Since he entered each individual contest expecting to lose, the foreseen result rarely surprised or
disappointed him. But there was more to it. Opposition counsel dreaded taking the winning side versus
Potts. Examples abounded. A prestigious law firm with a sure-win medical malpractice suit, after
spending ninety thousand dollars in desk time, won a judgment of three dollars, of which they kept
one-third. In another instance Potts lost a famous product liability case because of a local
statute-of-limitations, but the notoriety stimulated a dozen additional cases where the statute had not run
out.
In a case of alleged failure to pay for a newspaper, he successfully counterclaimed for false arrest,
libel, kidnaping, and assault. But his client was still required to pay five cents for the paper.
Perhaps the closest Potts ever came to not losing was his famous hound-dog case. His client, serving a
ten-year sentence, had been put in charge of the bloodhound kennels at the prison farm. Soon thereafter
he walked out. Since he took all the dogs with him, there was no easy way to track him. Ten years later
he was recaptured. Potts, his court-appointed lawyer, argued that the warden was criminally negligent
and guilty of entrapment for putting his client in charge of the dogs. Potts argued further that the ten-year
sentence must now be considered served, in that his client had cared for the dogs for a full ten years and
indeed had set up a nationally known breeding farm based on the original prison nucleus. The care and
feeding came to twenty thousand dollars, plus interest. His client went free, the state paid a large sum in
settlement; yet Potts felt that he had lost, since his client had to return an equivalent number of dogs to the
prison kennels. The warden and D.A. both took early retirement. They went partners on a chicken farm
in eastern Maryland and were never heard from again.
The current curse at bar smokers: "May you win against Oliver Potts."
Potts accepted their opprobrium with rancorless resignation.
***


An hour after Potts left his office he was looking down out of the plane window. Below him,
meandering off to the right, was the big river. From up here, though, it didn't look too impressive. And
there were the twin cantilever towers, one on each side of the river, nicknamed George and Martha by
the irreverent. Toys at this height, but soon they'd hold a span between them, and the whole thing would
be transformed into the great George Washington Bridge. Not intended to rival the famous George
Washington suspension bridge in New York City, of course, but named rather in memory of
Washington's early surveying trips into the wilderness. He had crossed the river on a raft when he was
eighteen, and on the western side had carved his initials on Sena Rock: "G. W. 1750." The scratches
were now covered by steel and concrete of the growing cantilever, but Potts had read that plaster casts
of the legend had first been made, and that miniatures (made in Taiwan) could be bought at local souvenir