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Grateful Dead concert. And most of all I remembered curling up in the back seat with my sister Ann, both of us in elementary school, as my father tried to refold the road map in the front seat, somewhere in Kansas on the drive back from a vacation in Estes Park, Colorado.
    The house was dark and quiet when I arrived at 1:30 a.m. I snuck upstairs to the guest bedroom, where the sheets were turned down and a fresh towel was folded on the pillow. On top of the pillow was a crayon drawing of a baseball Cardinal by my nephew, Cory; underneath the ballplayer he had written: “Hi, Aunt Rachel. Love, Cory.” I carefully placed the drawing on the nightstand.
    I took the Stoddard Anderson news clippings file to bed. My day would start early, and I still didn’t have a real sense of the dead attorney who had been married to my newest client.
    Even a cursory browse through the clippings showed that Melvin Needlebaum was right. Anderson had been well connected, locally and nationally. His national connections within the Republican Party were evidenced by a front-page article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from last December. The article described a visit to St. Louis by President George Bush. The visit included a dinner for local GOP bigwigs hosted by Stoddard Anderson at the St. Louis Country Club.
    Abbott & Windsor’s arrival in St. Louis last summer merited a front-page story in the St. Louis Business Journal beneath the following headline:
    MAJOR CHICAGO LAW FIRM INVADES ST LOUIS;
STODDARD ANDERSON TO HEAD
ABBOTT & WINDSOR BRANCH
    The article mentioned Anderson three times in the first four paragraphs. He was a “legal powerhouse” with “annual billings reputed to be in the seven figures” whose “counsel was valued in the boardrooms of St. Louis corporations, the backrooms of City Hall, and the dining room of the Governor’s mansion.”
    Next in the pile of clippings was a stapled collection of Jerry Berger columns. Berger writes a society and gossip column for the Post-Dispatch . Over the past year alone, he had mentioned Anderson a half-dozen times—spotted at Cardwell’s Restaurant “huddled in conversation with Apex Oil topper Tony Novelly,” at Busch’s Grove “hosting a pouring with the glitterati” for a retiring in-house attorney (“mouthpiece,” in Bergerese) at Emerson Electric, in the “Monsanto skybox cheering on the Redbirds and sipping the host’s brew with Mayor Vince and Parks Commish Barney Miniver,” spotted on “the 18th green at Norwood Hills C.C.” with “General Dynamics top veep Mitchell Shales and real estate sage Larry Lammert,” and playing tennis at “the Lah-de-due hacienda of Northwestern Hospital topper Eugene Reese and a gaggle of medicos.”
    Another stapled set of news clippings opened with a surprising pair of op-ed pieces that had appeared in the St. Louis Sun . Surprising, that is, considering the source. Most corporate lawyers don’t disclose any controversial political or moral views they may hold. Stoddard Anderson, however, had apparently been a veritable exhibitionist on the subject. The first op-ed column was an exhortation for support of the latest anti-abortion statute pending before the Missouri legislature. The second column was a lengthy diatribe against a recent court decision prohibiting the expulsion of a homosexual from the Navy band.
    The latter op-ed piece stirred up precisely the sort of controversy that the Sun fed on during its brief existence. Two days after the article appeared, a gay rights organization staged a demonstration in front of Anderson’s home in Clayton. The Sun was there to cover the event, and reported that Anderson had confronted the demonstrators on his front lawn, denouncing them as “Un-American deviants.”
    I was repulsed by Anderson’s actions and beliefs. But I knew I had come to St. Louis neither to praise nor to bury him.