“Certainly. I mean, what position did you take regarding the payment of damages?”
“I thought a preliminary payment of fifty thousand dollars should be made at once. Even if Mion’s voice was soon all right he had already lost that and more. His South American tour had been canceled, and he had been unable to make a lot of records on contract, and then radio offers—”
“Nothing like fifty thousand dollars,” Judge Arnold asserted aggressively. There was nothing wrong with his larynx, small as he was. “I showed figures—”
“To hell with your figures! Anybody can—”
“Please!” Wolfe rapped on his desk with a knuckle. “What was Mr. Mion’s position?”
“The same as mine, of course.” Grove was scowling at Arnold as he spoke to Wolfe. “We had discussed it.”
“Naturally.” Wolfe’s eyes went left. “How did you feel about it, Mr. James?”
“I think,” Arnold broke in, “that I should speak for my client. You agree, Gif?”
“Go ahead,” the baritone muttered.
Arnold did, and took most of one of the three hours. I was surprised that Wolfe didn’t stop him, and finally decided that he let him ramble on just to get additional support for his long-standing opinion of lawyers. If so, he got it. Arnold covered everything. He had a lot to say about tort-feasors, going back a couple of centuries, with emphasis on the mental state of a tort-feasor. Another item he covered at length was proximate cause. He got really worked up about proximate cause, but it was so involved that I lost track and passed.