The Letter Of The Law

by Tim Green

  "There are some questions I do need answers to," Casey declared.

  "And there are some I'll answer," Lipton replied curtly. "Others I won't. I'm not your usual client, my dear. I am your teacher. You are my pupil. Don't expect to enjoy the usual prerogatives you have with a sniveling criminal. I am neither sniveling nor a criminal."

  "Why did you try to escape?" she asked, refusing to be baited.

  "I wasn't trying to escape," he told her sternly. "I was there that day. I saw her body. It was horrible. I wanted to get away from everything… I loved her."

  "She was your…"

  "We were lovers," he said with a cryptic smile.

  Was he suggesting that he was a prize Casey had wanted as well? She felt vaguely disturbed. When she was a student, she had certainly admired him, but many of her classmates had felt the same way. He was considered one of the preeminent authorities on criminal law. His book The Letter of the Law had been such a smashing success that he traveled the country giving seminars.

  And in the last fifteen years, there were very few attorneys who had ambitions of becoming trial lawyers who hadn't been exposed to either one of his seminars or his book. Essentially, it was a practical guide to winning. After a preamble that described the nobility of criminal defense work, the book went on to describe the most effective tactics for winning a case. Its disregard of moral considerations was stunning and had made the book every bit as controversial as it was popular. Like many great ideas it was simple, and therein lay its brilliance. So there she had been, a young law student awed not only by the notoriety but also by the overwhelming intellect and charisma of the man.

  Lipton's strange, almost knowing smile struck a nerve with Casey, but it quickly disappeared and he got back to business.

  "I was upset," he continued, his words almost lifeless. "Anyone would have been. I wanted to get away. I had no idea anyone saw me leaving her apartment."

  "You ran into another car," Casey pointed out.

  Lipton shrugged. "Most people are mindless. For someone to have the perspicacity to see my license plate was an unusual coincidence. Otherwise, I would have taken my leave without arousing suspicion."

  "Her father thinks you did it," Casey said.

  "The father is mad," Lipton said, flaring up for the first time. "He was behind the attack on me, if it wasn't him who actually shot me." Lipton's hand instinctively sought out and caressed the healing wound not three inches above his heart. "It happened so fast, I don't know.

  "He was the one who killed her, you know," he continued, narrowing his eyes malevolently. "He was jealous of what I had with his daughter."

  "Did you tell this to anyone?" Casey said, incredulous. She vaguely recalled the father from the newspaper accounts, but nowhere had she heard or read of him as a suspect.

  "Of course not!" Lipton scoffed. "I was their suspect. Once the police machine sets its sights on a person, that's it. They're like dumb animals. Beyond a very brief initial interview, I've said nothing to the police. I know better than that. But all this is in the files. You're wasting my time."

  Casey thought about asking what other important things he had to do, but didn't.

  "What about the underwear?" she asked, averting her eyes from his cold gaze.

  "A sexual proclivity," he told her. His voice was quiet, almost syrupy. "A trophy of sorts."

  "And the blood?" she asked.

  "Old," he said. "Marcia liked to be tied up. She was what I call a dominant woman. Young, but still dominant. She was smart and headstrong and ambitious as well as very beautiful. I find that dominant women often like to be tied up… to restore the natural order if you will…"

  Casey looked up. Lipton's eyes were gleaming now. He was playing with her, staying just barely within the bounds of decency.

  "That doesn't explain"-Casey stopped, cleared her throat, and continued-"that doesn't explain the blood."

  "Part of the bondage she craved was to have her panties stuffed into her mouth," Lipton responded in a clinical tone. "She bit her tongue. It's that simple."

  "And speaking of sexual proclivities," he continued, "Michael Dove has my computer and I want you to get it from him immediately, and by that I mean today. The police took it when they arrested me. After they went through it, along with everything else I own, and found nothing, he was able to get it back. There are some very personal files that I've hidden on the hard drive that could be very damning if they were to get into the wrong hands. Their sexual content is irrelevant. That's my private business. But if a prosecutor got them in front of a jury… well, not everyone has our enlightened view when it comes to the First Amendment, especially when it comes to sex."

  Lipton was leering at her now, and Casey's skin began to crawl. The air vent hummed. A fly came down from the ceiling and conducted a haphazard march across the tabletop between them before retreating to the glass panel on the door. More than anything, Casey wanted to get out of the room.

  "I'm sure I'll have more questions after I read these," she said, rising and gathering the files. "I'll be back tomorrow."

  "I'm looking forward to seeing you, Casey, on a daily basis, I mean. It's been quite a while," he said, rising himself and extending his hand. Casey took it, and her old professor pressed his long, cool fingers into her flesh until she twisted free.

  ***

  "Then don't take the case," Tony told her. He was standing next to her Stairmaster machine in a royal blue suit with a crisp white shirt and a bold orange tie. Casey dabbed her sweaty face with a fresh white hand towel and stared hard at him. Her hair, pulled back from her face with a black cloth band, had gone from wavy to curly in the heat of her workout.

  "Right, Tony," she huffed sarcastically. It was six-thirty in the morning and she was almost finished with her workout. The small exercise room was adjacent to her office. It came complete with a shower and a small set of free weights. Casey was obsessed with being mistaken at the beach for a twenty-one-year-old. Working out every morning kept her that way. She claimed it also gave her time to think about the coming day. It wasn't unusual at all for Tony to wander in about this time with his second double cappuccino of the morning. His idea of starting the day off right was to have his shoes shined while he drank his first double and scanned the morning paper.

  Casey presumed he wasn't serious when he said she should drop the case. When Lipton had first been arrested over a year ago, Tony had implored her to contact him.

  "Let him know you're available," Tony had said. She refused, and then when she lamented Michael Dove's being hired by Lipton, Tony only made it worse by saying that if she'd taken that first step of contacting him, she could have had the case.

  "The first step is every bit as important as trying the case," Tony was always saying. "Without the first step, there is no case."

  "That's your job," she'd responded.

  "He wasn't my law professor," Tony had countered. "He was yours. You could have had the case. All you had to do was ask. I tell you that all the time, Casey. You have to ask."

  Now that she had the case, she certainly wasn't going to give it up.

  "I'm not saying I don't want it. It would be great," Tony said, stepping aside as she got down off the machine. "The media will be like bums on a bologna sandwich for this one. It might even get some play nationally. And the guy can pay our top rate. He's loaded. Those are all good reasons to take it, but I really mean it when I say don't take it if you're not comfortable."

  Casey studied his face.

  "Do you really think I'm that mercenary?" he asked. "I don't want you working with a client if it disturbs you. Besides, one week to prepare is almost unheard of. I don't know if you could do it."

  His last words were spoken with an ingenuous expression. Whether they were actually intended to challenge her or not, Casey responded that way.

  "I can do it," she said with a snort, hoisting a pair of dumbbells and beginning to crank out a set of curls as if to accentuate her confidence. "I co
uld walk in on a case in a day if I had to."

  "What about the fact that it looks like he did it?" he asked, sitting down on the padded bench and bracing his elbow against one thick knee.

  "Innocent until proven guilty," she said. "Remember?"

  "But tell me you don't think he did it," Tony said. As he continued to speak, he counted off on his fingers. "Come on. The guy was seen leaving the scene. He lied about it to the police. He had her bloody underwear in his bag, for God's sake! And they caught him heading for the airport with a reservation to Toronto. Oh, that's good, Casey. That's overzealous. Tell me how you explain the guy out of all that."

  "You're talking like a prosecutor," she said.

  "Hey, I started there, too, you know," he reminded her.

  "You're so far from the DA's office that you… I don't know. You're just far."

  "Okay," he said, "so we're back to representing defendants until they're proven guilty? That's good. I thought we were going to have to start chasing ambulances."

  "Funny," she said, switching her dumbbells to an overhead press. "But Lipton didn't say he did it. That's the difference and you damn well know it. If a client tells me he did it, I won't represent him. I don't care if it's the pope. But Lipton says he's innocent, and he deserves to have someone plead his case."

  "Hey, go easy on the pope. This guy's no pope."

  CHAPTER 8

  A troop of towering white thunderclouds was pressing down from the north, threatening to ruin Bolinger's day off. He'd rented a pontoon boat for the day, and he sat now waiting by himself in the morning sun while the boat bumped steadily against the marina's aluminum dock. His brother, Kurt, was bringing his family. Only last night, Bolinger had been informed that that would also include Kurt's wife's sister from Atlanta and her new husband, whom Bolinger had never met before. He wasn't thrilled.

  "Hey, he's a good guy," Kurt had told him. "You'll like him. He's a cop."

  "Great," Bolinger had replied, "we can talk about bad guys, like the mailman going for a walk on his day off."

  "You'll like him."

  Bolinger shook his head at the thought. He didn't like anybody. Kurt, on the other hand, thought everyone was swell. He lived in a nice suburb, had a nice wife, a little on the heavy side but she could cook, two kids, one boy and one girl, and a job as an accountant at a telemarketing company with a great 401(k) plan. Although Kurt was younger and taller and had thinning blond hair, the two of them looked like brothers. But it was almost comical how different they were. When they were children Bolinger had teased Kurt by telling him that he was adopted.

  With both their parents dead, they were all each other had in the way of family, and as they got older that seemed to mysteriously transcend any differences. When the silver Volvo wagon pulled into the gravel lot, the kids piled out like excited puppies. Their joy was infectious. Even Bolinger had to smile. Renting a pontoon boat was something beyond Kurt's scope. Too much wind, too much sun, too many things that could go wrong with the outboard motor with no way to fix it. So it was with great pride that Uncle Bob came up with schemes that his niece and nephew would look back on as memorable.

  Bolinger got up from the captain's chair to catch the kids as they shot off the dock and into his arms. He kissed his sister-in-law, Luanne, as she stepped boldly onto the bow and shook hands with her sister, Eileen, a pretty little dish with bleached blond hair that was pulled back tightly into a ponytail. The last time Bolinger had seen her, at Kurt's wedding, she had been a skinny little kid with freckles and teeth too big for her head. Time went fast. The cop husband was bringing up the rear with Kurt, lugging more than his half of a big, shiny blue cooler. He was short like Bolinger, but much younger and pumped up like a gym rat. His hair was like Bolinger's, too, cut really short, only black instead of gray.

  "I told you I had everything taken care of," Bolinger said without disguising his surly nature. He took the cooler from the two men and set it down disgustedly on the deck beside his own rusty green Coleman model. He didn't like people cutting in on his territory when he was the host.

  "It's gonna rain, Bob," Kurt fretted, casting a baleful eye at the sky.

  "Maybe not," the young cop put in, gazing northward himself. "Maybe it'll pass right over."

  Bolinger nearly smiled, and held out his hand. "Bob Bolinger," he said.

  "Vince Cubbins," the young man said. "But call me Cubby."

  "How about a beer, Cubby?"

  "I've got wine coolers," Kurt offered, dramatically zipping his Polo windbreaker against a gust.

  "Beer sounds good," Cubby said.

  Bolinger reached into the green Coleman and pulled out two cans of Foster's from under a stack of cellophane-wrapped bologna sandwiches. He opened them with a satisfying hiss, took a long swig, and began unmooring the boat.

  He eased the boat away from the dock and made his way through the chop to a secret spot in the lee side of a cove where he had had some luck before. By the time they got there, everyone was spray-soaked. The sudden calm allowed the sun to warm them, but that only lasted long enough for Bolinger to set up the kids with some battered old fishing rods. The tall clouds blotted out the sun and rain sprayed down from above in warm, heavy sheets. The kids were gleefully drenched, while their dad was tucked in a dry corner of the boat under the roof next to his wife. Kurt had that I-told-you-so look on his face, and Bolinger thought he heard him mutter something about the whole thing being ridiculous. He was relieved when Cubby suggested another beer and Eileen got right in there with them. Whenever the call for alcohol came from a guest, it got Bolinger off the hook for looking like he had a problem.

  For nearly an hour, it rained as hard as they drank. The downpour drummed the boat's flat tin roof like a thousand tap dancers, forcing them to raise their voices to be heard above the din. Bolstered by the children's glee, the beer, and his newfound ally, Bolinger ignored his brother's whining pleas to head back to shore. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the clouds stormed south and the sun shone brightly. The fish stopped biting, but the beers tasted better and better, and the laughter of Cubby's wife, Eileen, rang out clear across the cove, echoing off the rocky hillside. Even Kurt joined in by telling a funny story about how he'd tried to return a cordless phone he'd had for over a year.

  Soon the whole crew was hungry, and while Kurt and his wife spooned yogurt from plastic cups, the rest of them threw down Bolinger's sandwiches, a simple selection of bologna on white bread sloppily dressed with either brown mustard or ketchup. By mid-afternoon it became unexpectedly warm, warm enough for a dip. Eileen stripped to her underwear and went in. Cubby followed in his shorts, while the kids tittered and pinched each other until the boy, who was ten, threw his older sister in. Bolinger sat in his own sweat smoking and smiling and forgetting about everything until Eileen thrust herself out of the water and onto the bow, where she stood soaking in the sun, a dripping-wet goddess.

  "You're livin' right," he said later to Cubby. The two of them were sitting by themselves on Kurt's patio, trying to outlast the night.

  Cubby only nodded. Everyone else had gone to bed long ago, and the conversation had finally begun to wane. A shooting star streaked across the vast dark sky, briefly outshining the mosaic of constellations.

  "What's the worst you ever saw?" Cubby asked pensively.

  "What do you mean?" Bolinger said, drawing on his Winston hard enough to make his face briefly glow in the orange light. His eyes were dark like empty pits.

  "I mean, what's the worst thing you ever seen on a job?" Cubby asked, staggering out of his chair and over to the bushes where he could pee. Over his shoulder he said, "I mean you been at it a long time. You must have seen some bad shit."

  Bolinger nodded. "Yup."

  Cubby shook himself, zipped up, and began to pace back and forth. "I guess I'm wondering if you ever get used to it, or if there's things, some things, that you just never forget."

  Bolinger considered. He hated to see the day end like this, but the ki
d really wanted to know, and Bolinger already had an affection for him. "I guess it depends on you. Some guys just start to laugh about it. They get hard on the inside. Hard and cold, but they seem pretty cheerful 'cause they're always looking for the humor in it, the dark humor. But me? I guess there's a couple things I'll never forget. Yeah, that's how I am. I just carry it around. I'm not saying it's a good way to be, probably not…"

  Cubby nodded and was silent for a moment before he blurted out, "I saw a woman who was taped up and strangled and she was cut open like one of those frogs you dissect in high school biology class. Her guts were all over the place."

  His voice was on the edge of hysteria and he spoke fast. "It was like a doctor or something operated on her. I can't get it out of my head. We heard the call, and I wanted to go on break, you know, get a coffee, we were due. But my partner, he was into that kind of stuff. He said we should go check it out." Cubby's voice broke off here like an adolescent's. "Everyone was there, but we got to the scene before the lab closed it down, and I go in there and saw it. I… I… Do you have something like that that you just can't let go of? Goddamn, it was almost two years ago, and it's affected everything for me, even my marriage. I used to be… you saw Eileen. You know what I'm saying? I think about it when I see her naked. It just comes into my mind and it… it affects me…"

  Cubby was standing now in front of Bolinger, swaying drunkenly, with tears running down his face.

  "I'm sorry, man," he said, suddenly coming to himself. He sat back down beside Bolinger and quietly opened another beer. They sat for quite some time. Bolinger began to think Cubby might have fallen asleep. Then he suddenly took a swig from his beer, and Bolinger said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper, "You don't know, do you, if her gall bladder was missing?"

  "How'd you know that?" Cubby said, staring suspiciously at him.

  "Did she have anything to do with the law, not police work, but lawyering?"

  "She was in her third year at Emory Law School," Cubby said, after a shocked pause.