The Letter of the Law [antikvár]

X am sitting in a canvas deck chair, bathed in the afternoon sun, watching a red and yellow spinnaker fill with the rising breeze and race across Long Island Sound. What a delight these leisure-class pleasures are for me. At this time of day six months ago I might have been struggling to clear a paper jam in an obsolete duplicating machine, or delivering a pep talk on phone manners to a burnt-out receptionist. All this-my tan, morning swims, long naps on the terrace-stems from those three weeks early last spring when I was a bewildered participant in Ely Sneed's second scandal. None of the papers got the story right. The Post chose to plow the fertile fields of naked attorneys and over-the-hill strippers and, for reasons unknown to me, saw fit to include my photograph twice. The Times caught the facts, but the essence escaped them. Now that the dust has settled on Ely Sneed, et aL, I would like to put the record straight. What follows is simply the truth-no more and no less. As for my prose, I apologize. It suffers from too many years on the lunatic fringe of law firms like Ely Sneed. I was able to curb a regrettable tendency to begin paragraphs with now, therefore, and to wit. My editor's blue pencil took care of the "notwithstandings" and "albeits." An "inasmuch as" may have slipped through, though. You can only do so much. Bonnié Indermill