Blood Royal by Harold Robbins Read Free Book Online Page B

incident.
    Hall shoved the paper back inside. “Sorry, but we really need to keep up on all the news, don’t we?”
    “I was just thinking of the way trial lawyers in California would harangue the other side’s expert witnesses. They call them hired gunfighters who have come to town just to viciously destroy the poor victim’s case. Then there would be snide inferences that the expert was a member of the world’s oldest profession.”
    Hall raised his eyebrows. “Very undignified, isn’t it?”
    “Very effective. If you want to leave a negative impression in the mind of jurors, branding someone as a hired killer is rather a good way to do it.”
    *   *   *
    M ARLOWE J AMES SURPRISED H ALL —her appearance, voice, and body language were not what he had been expecting. He had had very definite ideas about what the American lawyer would look like. Around Trent’s chambers it was assumed that she would be a “ball-breaker,” a woman who “castrates the men around her to make sure that they pay for ten thousand years of feminine servitude,” Norton, a junior clerk, had hypothesized.
    Hall didn’t think in those terms, but the TV shows and movies cranked out by Hollywood featuring women lawyers had made him expect her to be excessively aggressive and assertive. At the least, he thought she would be so brisk and efficient, one would have the inclination to stand up and salute when she walked into the room, her stride quick and sure, the steel of her spiked heels ricocheting off marble walls. One had to consider who she was, after all. You wouldn’t expect a woman who had been tried for murdering her own husband to act like an ordinary person.
    It was an erroneous assumption, he knew, because the husband-killer Marlowe came to represent was not anything like that—the princess was known to be charming rather than assertive.
    Still, Marlowe James was a lawyer in the tough big-city American arenas and one would expect her to be, well, different from the refined princess.
    For certain, she wasn’t the proverbial ball-breaker, he thought. Not that there was anything soft about her. She left no doubt that she was a woman who knew her own mind, but she hadn’t displayed a tendency to flex her muscles with him. Rather, she came across as very professional, very businesslike, though perhaps a bit more of a mover and shaker than he personally felt comfortable with. She had a bit of that annoying bluntness Americans tend to display, but none of her dynamic traits made him feel any less that she was woman. He had become overly sensitive about female lawyers after he had been verbally chastised by one, a dynamic London barrister who offended his sense of dignity by referring to his private body parts, calling him a “prick” outside the courtroom during an argument over a case.
    Another factor in the good impression Marlowe made upon him was the fact she was appropriately dressed for a flight. He hated men and women who flew across oceans and continents in jogging outfits. He never boarded a plane dressed less formally than how he would show up at the office, and that meant a proper suit and tie. Marlowe was wearing a pants suit with comfortable shoes. Rather wisely she had a very small purse because she also carried a briefcase. He had seen female lawyers whose purses were almost as big as their briefcases and he wondered what they carried in them. He was not married and there were parts of womanhood that were as inexplicable as Stonehenge to him.
    Good tone to her body, he thought, not buffed like a telly star Trent represented, but a woman who kept her body in decent shape. He personally hated all forms of exercise, especially anything that would require him to go outdoors, and he kept his body trim by pushing away from the dinner table, grateful that his mother had raised him to stop eating before he got that full feeling.
    There was a tiny scar on her lip, on the right side, giving her lip a little bit of an