The Letter Of The Law

by Tim Green

  ***

  Dean Wentworth was the special agent in charge in the Austin FBI office. He was glad to hear from Bolinger and wanted to set up a game of golf, but when it came to tracking down evidence against Lipton, he politely declined.

  "I just can't," Wentworth explained. "The one guy I had to spare was working on some local stuff up in Stratford on a deal where some salesman disappeared from a hotel. The killer didn't leave anything behind but a blood-soaked pillow. The dead guy's brother is Ron Tanner, the number three guy over at Treasury, and I got a request from up top to look into it. But now, even that's by the board, and if I do anything at all, I have to put someone back on that case. Really, Bob, I can't take on anything that's not priority one."

  "But this is big," Bolinger argued. "Really big."

  "Hell, Bob, I got a call from Washington on Tuesday," Wentworth said. "The goddamn vice president was watching CNN the night before he had a meeting with the director, and he asked specifically about these goddamn bank robberies. I can't spare a single man. Fact is, they're sending me six goddamn guys from D.C. to help out."

  Bolinger thought for a moment, then broke the silence by saying, "Dean, I need this… as a favor I've never asked you a favor before."

  Bolinger knew Dean knew what he was talking about. The FBI agent's wife had been dragged in one night for DUI, and Bob had quietly taken care of it. It was a big marker.

  Wentworth emitted a bitter sigh into the phone and said, "You're right. I owe you. But I can't go chasing goddamn phantoms when every goddamn agent between here and Washington is wondering why I don't have these bank bandits locked up. Do you know what'll happen to me if those goddamn Texas Rangers get them before me? Can you say early retirement? Those big-hatted bastards are everywhere. They found that boxcar killer before me, and I had to go through hell with my back broke just to keep my goddamn job. I can't, Bob…"

  Bolinger silently waited.

  "Okay, listen," Wentworth said, "this is what I can do. You said you had a body with the same MO in Atlanta, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay, I know Vittarelli, the number two guy in Atlanta. I'll call him and do everything I can to get him to put someone on it from Atlanta. Is that good?"

  "That sounds good," Bolinger said. "I don't care where they're from. I'll help them out, too, calling around to the other cities where this guy's been doing his seminars. I know we'll find something, but I need a Fed to open the case and keep it alive. I appreciate it, Dean, I really do. I wouldn't ask you like this if it wasn't important."

  "Yeah, well, if I can get them to do it, we're even, okay?"

  "Okay," Bolinger said. "We're even."

  ***

  Casey knew the letdown on the day after a big trial was as certain as a hangover the morning after a hard night of drinking. What she wasn't prepared for was the severity of the malaise. It began the moment her mind was sprung from an uncomfortable dream. She bolted upright in bed with a gasp. Taylor was tying his tie in the antique full-length mirror in the corner of the room. He looked her way only briefly before finishing the job and proceeding to his bureau, where he unloaded a stack of underwear and socks into a suitcase that lay across the arms of a high-backed chair.

  "What are you doing?" she asked after she'd caught her breath.

  "Getting dressed," he said indifferently.

  Casey looked at the clock. It was early, just light. She remembered him coming in sometime late, very late. She'd been sleeping.

  "You're packing," she said.

  "That, too," he told her.

  Casey felt a bolt of energy dance up her spine.

  "Why?" she said, unable to hide the note of panic.

  "Business."

  "Where?" she asked, relieved and now angry with herself for the way she felt. If he was leaving her, why should she care? She'd come home after a grueling but successful trial, only to spend her evening with a book. He wasn't a real part of her life. If it wasn't evident before this trial, it certainly should be now.

  " San Francisco," he answered.

  Casey ran through the possibilities in her mind. There was an old flame of his in San Francisco, a society girl who fancied herself an artist. Taylor also owned a small ball-bearing factory outside the city. Why should she care what the trip was for?

  "How long will you be gone?" she asked. She got out of bed and made her way toward the bathroom as if she didn't care.

  "I'll be back Sunday night," he told her as she passed him.

  "Business on the weekend?" she said.

  He shrugged. "Some bankers from Hong Kong want to golf in Carmel."

  Casey brushed her teeth, secretly watching him in the mirror. In her mind she knew it didn't matter. But a great fear had seized hold of her heart. She couldn't help it. If it didn't work, it would be a failure. She despised failures. She lived to win. She'd won him, and although in her mind she knew he wasn't worth winning, a sick but powerful part of her couldn't let go. Casey spit the paste into her sink and rinsed her mouth. She disappeared into her closet.

  When she came out, Taylor was closing the suitcase. He looked up and saw her standing with one hand high on the wall and the other resting firmly on her milky-white hip. Her hair spilled down around her small, muscular shoulders in tangles of red. She wore nothing but white lace and heels, a spicy little setup he'd given her one Valentine's Day. It was something she rarely wore, maybe after some champagne and an evening of rubbing her foot up and down his leg underneath a particularly formal table.

  Taylor looked at her hungrily and stopped right where he was. Without a word he undid the tie and began unbuttoning his shirt. He crossed the room and met her lips with his own. Without breaking the voracious kiss, he stripped himself naked and moved her hands toward his waist. When she found him, he emitted a guttural groan and began to grope her with adolescent desperation, finally lifting her off her feet and taking her across the room to their bed.

  Ten minutes later, Taylor was back at the mirror adjusting his dark blue windowpane suit. Casey lay sprawled out on her back, watching him from the bed. When he was dressed, he picked up his suitcase and kissed her on the lips.

  "That was good," he said.

  "It was," she said, trying to believe. "We need to talk."

  "Everything is fine." He flashed that million-dollar smile. "I'll be back before you know, but I've got to go now."

  "All right."

  "I'll call you," he said. "I've got to go or I'll miss my plane. I love you."

  "I love you," she said.

  Then he was gone. Casey lay alone for a long while, feeling worse about herself than she had the night before. Now, on top of feeling confused about the trial and her entire career, she felt cheap and suddenly helpless. Her life had been all about taking action, knowing what she wanted and getting it. She had gotten the husband she wanted. She won the cases she wanted. What was the saying?

  "Be careful what you ask for," she whispered out loud, staring at a wedding picture that sat in a silver frame on the mantelpiece above the marble fireplace. "You might get it." Did she want him or didn't she? One thing she had to admit to herself as she dressed for work was that she didn't want to be cast aside. If it wasn't going to work between them, she'd be the one to pull the plug.

  ***

  The garage underneath her office building was still nearly empty, but that was nothing unusual. Casey was usually one of the first people in the entire building to arrive. She parked in her spot, and as her heels clicked along on the concrete floor, echoing through the silence, she had an eerie feeling that someone else was in the garage. She spun around and blinked her eyes. Had she seen something move in the shadows behind an empty van? Or was it something within the van itself? She took two backward steps toward the elevator.

  The van was tucked up near the bottom of the ramp on the opposite side of the garage. Casey looked around for someone else, but there was no one. Slowly, she edged toward the elevator without taking her eyes off the van. When sh
e reached the elevator and the door opened with a quiet ding, she turned and entered the building, disgusted with her own squeamishness.

  The day didn't get any better for her upstairs. The coffee wasn't made, Patti was late, and the first call of the morning was from Simon Huff. His voice was as loud as it was crass.

  "Where the hell is my client's computer?" he demanded.

  "What are you talking about?" Casey asked venomously.

  "You know just what I'm talking about, lady!" Huff bellowed. "My next call is to the bar association. That computer is privileged material. This is more than unethical. It's criminal. What is this? Some kind of fucking shakedown?"

  Casey was seething. "Don't you accuse me of being unethical!"

  "If the shoe fits, wear it, hotshot," Huff remarked. "I want my client's computer back, and I want it back today! You got that?"

  Casey slammed down the phone. When it rang back, she told Gina to say she wasn't available.

  "Get Patti in here," she added.

  Two minutes later her associate came in with an apprehensive frown.

  "Did you deliver Professor Lipton's computer to Simon Huff 's office?" Casey demanded.

  "I…" Patti began hesitantly.

  "My God, Patti," Casey growled. "How the hell could you? You think being a lawyer is cross-examining a witness? It goes a lot deeper than that, my friend. It's details! Attention to details! That means when you have something you have to do, something you said you were going to do, you do it. Is that so hard?" she demanded, her voice one note below a shriek.

  "No," Patti said, keeping her chin high but visibly fighting back a wave of emotions. "I'll get it over there right away. I-"

  "No you won't!" Casey cried. "You won't take it over there. I will. Your chance to do the job is by the board. That's all."

  Patti stared back just as fiercely before walking out the door. Tony Cronic passed her in the hall and wondered at her unresponsiveness to his cheery hello.

  "I wouldn't go in there if I were you," Gina warned him.

  "Hey," Tony said to Gina with his easy, disarming smile, "it's me." He opened the door and greeted Casey with more of the same.

  "Hey," he said, dropping casually into a chair opposite her desk, "congratulations on the win."

  Casey scowled at him. "I don't need your sarcasm today, Tony."

  "What?" he said, opening his hands and raising both eyebrows in a gesture of peace. "I meant what I said. You won. Right? Or did they get it wrong on the news?"

  Tears filmed Casey's eyes, and her mouth turned down. If Tony hadn't known her better he would have thought she was going to cry.

  "Yes, I won the case," she said bitterly. "But I think I may have been wrong about him."

  "Lipton?"

  She bit her lower lip and nodded.

  "You don't mean you think he did it?" Tony asked with a flippant laugh.

  "He told me he did."

  "What?" Tony was incredulous. "When?"

  "Just before the jury read the verdict."

  "You're kidding."

  "I wish I were."

  Tony looked at her in disbelief, then turned his eyes to the floor.

  "I'm sick about it," Casey said.

  "Maybe he was kidding," Tony suggested hopefully. "You said yourself that he was difficult the whole time you were getting ready for trial. Maybe it's just some kind of bizarre mind game."

  "I hope that's what it was," she told him, "that he was kidding. He could do that. You're right. But I just don't know. What you said to me about tearing apart the father just sticks in my mind. I mean, Tony… I suggested he had an incestuous relationship with his dead daughter."

  "You did your job," Tony reminded her. "Don't go soft on me now."

  "I never had my client confess to the crime two seconds before the jury acquitted him," she said.

  "But he might not have really done it," Tony pointed out. "Don't think about it, Casey. You never have before."

  She looked wounded.

  "I didn't mean it like that," he said quickly. "Come on, Casey. This is the reason you and I are defense lawyers. It's the process. Everyone needs an advocate and you gave him one. The state has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and if they can't, then the accused goes free. Our system would rather have ten guilty men go free than one innocent one be punished."

  "I know that's what we both say." She nodded. "I know. That's what I keep telling myself, but it isn't helping. And to make it worse, I got a call from Simon Huff this morning accusing me of withholding Lipton's computer to blackmail him."

  "Simon Huff?" Tony asked.

  "He's representing Lipton in his tort action against the county for when he got shot," she told him. "The weekend before the trial ended, he asked me to have the computer delivered to Huff's office. I told Patti to do it, but she forgot. So Huff called me this morning and made some nasty accusations."

  "What's on the computer anyway?" Tony asked, sitting up and forward in his chair.

  "I have no idea," she said. "He said there were some embarrassing things on there, some hidden files with sexually explicit things or something like that."

  "What were you doing with it?"

  "First Michael Dove had it, and Lipton asked me to get it from him. He didn't want it to get into Hopewood's hands, and as we all know, the safest place for something like that is with your attorney. I didn't get into it with him, really. It was the last thing on my mind."

  "Where is it?"

  "The computer? It's right here," she said, reaching into a drawer and setting an IBM notebook on top of her desk.

  Tony eyed it silently for a few moments.

  "What?" Casey asked. "What are you thinking?"

  "Nothing," he said. "I was just wondering what's in there."

  "Whatever it is," she said coolly, "it's privileged information."

  "I know," Tony said. "I know that. That doesn't mean we can't look at it. We're attorneys. It's not unethical to look…"

  Casey stared at him for a moment, then looked down at the flat black rectangular machine.

  "It's just that it might be something we'd regret letting go of," Tony said in a low, gentle tone.

  Casey heard him, but she wondered if Tony wasn't simply looking for an edge the way he did with everything else, stocking away something that could later help him in his drive for fame and fortune. Her phone buzzed. She stabbed at a button and shut it off. Tony raised his eyebrows inquisitively.

  "You're a character, Tony. You're a model of inconsistency. One minute you're for defending the rights of the accused, the next you're ready to violate a client's privacy."

  "That's why you love me," he said, grinning as impishly as a man of his girth could. "Look, I just want to do the right thing."

  "The right thing?" Casey asked dubiously. She stared intently at the computer.

  After a while Tony said, "There was an attorney in upstate New York I read about in law school who represented a guy accused of killing several young girls. They pegged him for one particular murder and put him on trial even though they hadn't found the body. Everyone was pretty sure he did it…"

  He looked at Casey's passive expression.

  "Of course the guy was a defense lawyer, so he took the case. But during the trial the defendant told him the body was lying under a pile of leaves in some woods behind a cemetery. The lawyer went there and found the body. Now of course he never told anyone that he'd found the body, because the information was privileged."

  Casey nodded that she understood.

  "Wait," Tony said, raising his thick hand. "I'm not finished. A few days later there was an anonymous call to the police. They found the body, and the guy was convicted."

  "Anonymous," Casey said, knowing the truth.

  "Anonymous," he said with a shrug. "I'm not suggesting that you're going to turn what's on this computer over to the police. But you're done representing Lipton, and once it's gone, it's gone. You know, Casey, sometimes… sometimes you just ha
ve to do what you have to do."

  Tony pressed his hands between his knees and said, "I could just, uh… just take a CD and do a disk image of the whole hard drive… so we have it if we ever need it. We don't even have to look at it."

  "I don't know," she said with a sour look on her face. She got up and looked at her watch, effectively ending the conversation.

  Then, with a duplicitous look on her face, she said, "I've got a meeting with a woman who wants us to support her run for the assembly. I'll be back in an hour or so, and then I'm going to take the computer over to Huff's office."

  "Okay," Tony said, but he remained seated as Casey reached for the door. "I'll see you later."

  When Casey was gone, Tony took the computer from her desk, and whistling quietly, he headed for his own office.

  CHAPTER 16

  Two days after Dean Wentworth made the call to the Atlanta offices of the FBI, James Unger landed in Austin. Bolinger was waiting for him outside airport security. Bolinger had described himself over the phone as a short, middle-aged guy with a gray crew cut, then added that he also had a fairly athletic build. He stood there in his tweed jacket, scanning the passengers as they flowed past. When a dumpy-looking man with steel-rimmed glasses and longish hair approached him, Bolinger was sure it was for directions to the john. He was wrong.

  "I'm Agent Unger," the man mumbled. "You must be Detective Bolinger."

  Bolinger could see now that Unger's greasy dark hair was shot through with long gray strands. He was about thirty pounds overweight. At five feet ten, that was just enough to look bad without having anyone call him fat. His suit was a charcoal pinstripe, and he wore a black-and-gold herringbone tie. But as nice as the suit material was, it couldn't make up for the poor fit. Unger wore the sour look of a man who'd been mostly disappointed by life, and while he was only thirty-nine, he looked to be in his mid-forties.

  "Thanks for coming," Bolinger said, shaking his hand and trying not to sound disappointed. "Luggage is this way."

  "Thanks for picking me up like this," Unger said, but the words were without enthusiasm. He presumed his trip to Austin was nothing more than an opportunity to visit with an old college roommate who now owned a small car dealership. He hadn't been sent out on an important assignment in over ten years.