He had filed reluctantly, against a fine young surgeon and the University of California Hospital. The doctor was well trained and the hospital notoriously scrupulous in its records. The patient’s tragedy was real enough: she had gone in for a hysterectomy and come out in a basket. The trouble was that no one knew for sure what had happened, or even that it had happened under the knife.

Mitch had hesitated, almost too long. He had never taken a malpractice case. The lanky ghost of his father, who after all the wartime heroics had died years later of a tumor in bed, still hovered, sardonic in his views of lawyers who sued doctors.

But the patient’s husband had, after all, come to Mitch: there was no taint of ambulance-chasing, and the woman’s plight was awful. Even her husband was part of the problem. He was an alcoholic, unable to cope. When Mitch visited his potential client in their jumbled Mission flat, she was in a leased iron lung. She was a dumpy, cheerful schoolteacher with a little-girl smile. She had been supporting the whole family. She would make a marvelous plaintiff.

Her eighteen-year-old son, radiating hostility, and a spaced-out daughter of sixteen, pricked his sympathy even more.

Still uncommitted, Mitch drove to the hospital. He got nothing there, of course, except a hint that his prospective client’s paralysis might be psychosomatic. Psychosomatic or not, everyone conceded that it was genuine.

Puzzled by his own hang-up, he agonized for weeks. Lindy begged him to drop the whole thing if it bothered him. His partner Bernie, smelling blood, grew restless. One afternoon the husband called. He was thinking of going to Melvin Belli.

The next day Mitch filed. The hospital and insurance company wanted to settle: the doctor, only half-covered, refused. This made Mitch feel better. The surgeon was asking for it. In two years, when he came to trial, he would probably learn to trust his lawyer to do lawyers’ work.

In the meantime, Gordon-Bertelli continued to prosper, as they had for twenty years. Mitch won a PI suit against United Airlines and Bernie won another against Municipal Railway. Life stumbled along. Mitch’s son graduated from high school and oozed into Berkeley, where he lasted one semester and flunked. Mitch sent him to Humboldt, up the coast.

The trial date was set. Lindy grew more beautiful and took over a class of retarded children. Mitch navigated his third Honolulu Race in her father’s sloop, had to skipper it, really, because this year the old man seemed too tired and crotchety to make decisions. They placed third on corrected time. Mitch was bored the whole passage. He felt as if he were running on biannual rails between San Pedro and Diamond Head, and his whole life was grooved and pegged. On previous years he had called a Navy nurse. This time he forewent the nurse and the awards banquet and went Scuba-diving at Maui instead.