The Neon Lawyer

by Victor Methos

  “Got something else, too,” Tommy said. “Your promotion.” From the floor behind his desk, he lifted up a box with several files and shoved it across to Brigham. There was also a padded envelope in there with at least twenty CDs.

  “What is it?” Brigham asked.

  “Your new case,” Tommy said, lighting a cigar. “Amanda Pierce. I have a public defender contract with the county, and they send us things every now and then. Ten thousand for the case and fifteen hundred a day for the trial, plus you get all the experts and investigators that you need, all paid for by the state.”

  Brigham looked up at him, not sure what to say. Some quick math told him that was $2500 for the case and $375 a day for the trial: more money than he’d ever earned at one time.

  “What’s she charged with?”

  “Murder, my friend. Aggravated murder, actually—part of the code says if you create a great risk of death to a person other than the victim and the actor, they bump murder up to aggravated murder. She’s lookin’ at the death penalty.”

  Brigham became aware of the dryness of his mouth; his tongue was stuck to his teeth, and he tried to swallow, but it felt like his throat had closed up. He finally managed to work his tongue loose and said, “I don’t think I can do this, Tommy.”

  “Sure ya can.”

  “The only case I’ve ever handled by myself was that speeding ticket yesterday, and I lost.”

  Tommy shook his head. “It’s all elements. Criminal Law 101: every crime has elements the prosecutor must prove, whether it’s speeding or murder. You pick the element you got the best shot at beatin’, and you attack it like a pit bull. Don’t matter what the underlying charge is.”

  “Can I . . . think about it, at least?”

  “Do this for me—go visit her. Right now. You can’t be at the jail during mealtime, but you should be able to make it before then. Go visit her, and then tell me what you want to do.”

  Brigham nodded absently, staring at the thick file in front of him. “Go visit her?”

  “Yup.”

  He rose, slipping out the first page in the file covering the charges and a summary of the allegation. “All right, I’ll visit her.”

  Tommy took a puff of his cigar. “Come see me after.”

  Brigham left the office and googled the Salt Lake Metro Jail. It was a good distance away. At times like these, he wished he could afford a car. He got on his bike and turned onto State Street anyway.

  The distance gave him time to think. This was ludicrous. He wasn’t prepared for a murder case, and certainly not one in which the client was looking at the death penalty. He would have a quick meeting with this lady, hear her story, and then assure her that Tommy would take care of everything. Then he would ask Tommy for more speeding cases.

  The jail was on the corner of an intersection. He could see nothing but dirt fields and empty parking lots farther down the road. As Brigham rode up, he saw there was no place to lock up his bike. He took it inside and leaned it against the wall.

  A row of jail staff in uniform sat behind a counter. He went to the farthest one on the right, designated for professional visits. Taking out his Bar ID card, he watched the woman behind the counter. She wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to him.

  “Um, excuse me? I need to visit one of my firm’s clients—Amanda Pierce.”

  “What cell block is she in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The woman sneered. “Hold on.”

  She ran through a few queries on a computer before speaking into a microphone and asking someone to bring out Amanda Pierce for a professional visit. She examined his ID card, then handed it back and pointed to the metal detectors. “Through there. Cell block D One.”

  Brigham was shown one of the small lockers that were available to everyone visiting an inmate. He placed his keys, wallet, and phone inside, and then went through the metal detectors, got wanded a good half a minute, and then continued on. He turned toward the D cell block and continued down a concrete corridor.

  The corridor was painted gray and yellow. The only decorations up in the hallways were the artwork that the inmates made themselves: drawings of nude women riding stallions, of Aztec kings, vanquishing conquistadors, of death and sex.

  Brigham came to a cul-de-sac. The doors were lettered and numbered, and he pressed the buzzer for D-1. The door clicked open and he went in.

  Metal stools stood before glass partitions. On the other side of the first one sat a woman. Her hair was down to her shoulders and she looked frail, as though she could collapse from exhaustion or malnutrition at any moment. The woman glanced at him and then looked down. He thought she had been crying recently.

  Brigham sat down across from her. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said shyly, not looking up.

  She looked nothing like what Brigham had pictured. He had been imagining tattoos and needle marks from meth. What he got was a frightened housewife in a world she couldn’t possibly belong in. She had a cast on her left wrist and the fingers of that hand looked swollen and red.

  “Um, my name is Brigham Theodore. I’m with the law offices of Tommy . . . well, TTB Law Offices. We’ve been assigned your case as part of the public defender contract.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “I read the information and it alleged that you shot and killed a Tyler J. Moore.”

  She nodded. Brigham waited for her to say something else, but she just sat there quietly. When she finally did look up, her eyes held a palpable pain and sadness that got to him.

  “Um, do you deny that, Ms. Pierce?”

  “No,” she said.

  Brigham skimmed the file, which consisted of two sheets of paper. “The report said that you didn’t confess, which is good, but I did read that, at the time, Mr. Moore had been facing charges of child abduction, forcible sodomy, and murder for the death of—”

  Brigham stopped when he heard her make a sound. He looked up from the file. Her hand covered her face, and her slumped shoulders jolted with each sob. He read the rest of the report quietly. It stated that the victim in Tyler Moore’s case was an underage relative of Amanda Pierce with the initials TP.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She shook her head and wiped the tears away. Brushing her hair aside, she raised her eyes to his. “She was my daughter. Tabitha.”

  Brigham nodded. The entire thing came into focus now. He had pictured a jilted lover or a bingeing meth addict killing someone who had wronged her . . . but he hadn’t made the connection that Tyler Moore had been killed because of the victim he had chosen. Brigham guessed the information only had initials because the victim was a juvenile. “How old was she?”

  “Six. Almost seven.”

  Brigham glanced through the rest of the charges that Tyler Moore had faced. Aggravated sexual abuse of a child: five counts; forcible sodomy: two counts; rape of a child: three counts; aggravated kidnapping of a child: one count; aggravated mayhem: four counts; aggravated murder: one count.

  As the last moments of Tabitha Pierce’s life became clear, cold revulsion swept through him. He tried desperately to push the images away, to think of something else, but he couldn’t. He looked at her mother. Her eyes were focused on his.

  “I . . .” Brigham wanted to say something comforting, something that would reassure her. But no words came. Instead, he just said, “I’ll be defending you. I’ll come back tomorrow with my laptop to take notes, and we can go through what happened in detail. I just wanted to meet you.”

  She nodded, still wiping away the tears on her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said softly. She rose, and Brigham saw the missing leg, the crutch leaned against the wall that Amanda placed under one arm as she pounded on the steel door with the other. The door slid open and a guard came and got her.

  Brigham sat in the room, sta
ring at the glass divider that had separated him from her. He read the list of charges in front of him, charges that represented a nightmare for a little girl, and felt the warmth of a tear down his cheek. He wiped it away and rose, leaving the jail and heading back to the office for the file.

  Ten

  Brigham sat in his office with his feet up on the desk, balancing the folder on his lap.

  Amanda Pierce was only twenty-eight years old, and the state was looking to put her to death: she would be the first woman ever executed in Utah.

  She had worked at a Walmart part time as a cashier, and her file said she had received disability payments from the government. She had been a private in the army medical supply line. She had been injured during her first three months stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and she had lost her left leg below the knee. She wore a prosthetic, but seemed to be having trouble adjusting to it.

  She had an ex-husband, Tabitha’s father, who was currently living in California. He had been convicted of domestic violence and violation of a protective order. Brigham saw on a court docket that he had served ninety days in jail and then moved to Los Angeles. Tommy’s investigator had tried to contact him, but he said, and the investigator made sure to quote this: “I don’t give a shit ’bout either o’ them whores.” Amanda had no other living relatives.

  The police reports in the case were only five pages in total. Brigham couldn’t tell if that was normal or not, but thought that a homicide might require more, given that the speeding ticket had been one page. The case, according to the detective on scene, was open and shut. Five rounds into the victim, one round missing him and found embedded in a tree behind him while another round ricocheted off the curb. Amanda then dropped the weapon before the deputies transporting the prisoner tackled her. One of them dislocated Amanda’s wrist, which explained the cast.

  The detectives had taken her back to the station and interrogated her, but she didn’t say anything. Didn’t even ask for a lawyer. She just sat at the table and wept. The file included a DVD of the interrogation, and Brigham pulled it out. He pushed it into his laptop and watched as the detective strolled into the room and sat across from a trembling Amanda Pierce.

  “Ms. Pierce, you need to talk to me. I can understand why you did what you did. I woulda put a bullet in him myself. But you need to tell me why, so I can help you with the DA. Do you understand? I’m here to help. Just tell me you did it and why, and we can talk about getting the DA down here to talk about deals. What do you say?”

  Amanda stared at the floor. Even on the grainy video, Brigham could see her hands shake and the tears that flowed down her cheeks. At one point, she put her head down on the table and sobbed. The detective closed his binder and left the room.

  Brigham looked at the autopsy photos. The only dead people he’d ever seen were in movies. And none of them had been through an autopsy. The man was rough looking and the one thing that struck him was how dirty Tyler Moore’s socks were before the autopsy. For some reason, that disgusted him more than the autopsy.

  The pathologist had cut him open, peeled his face off, removed his brain, and all manner of other horrible things that Brigham did not understand the reason for. He could only stomach a few photos before flipping through the rest of the file, which was mostly supplemental narratives of the follow-up investigation that the detectives had done, CAD call logs to dispatch, and criminal histories and court dockets for Tyler and Amanda.

  Brigham went to the small library the Law Offices of TTB maintained in a room no bigger than his bedroom. He then took out the Utah Rules of Criminal Procedure, sat at a table, and began reading.

  He read the rules and then the cases associated with the rules in the annotations. He read an entire transcript of a homicide trial similar to his that he found on Xchange, the Utah court case information system. He read motions filed by attorneys in that case and several others, and he read several blog entries written by defense attorneys relating to capital cases.

  Then he dug into Mangrum and Benson on Utah Evidence, and read every relevant rule and the associated cases out of Utah.

  By the time he was done, he looked out the window and it was pitch-black outside. The clock on his phone said it was nearly midnight. He stood up, stretched, and went home.

  June didn’t open her door when he went in. She was dating a couple of guys. Once, she had introduced Brigham to one of them and it was awkward for both of them. After that, she didn’t introduce him anymore.

  Brigham went down to his room and collapsed onto the bed without even bothering to slip out of his clothes. Then he remembered that he was supposed to inform Tommy whether or not he was taking the case. He felt his pockets for his cell phone and then just sent a single text: I’ll do it.

  The next couple of days were a blur of research and coffee-fueled all-nighters. He read a treatise by someone named Judge Boyce about how the rules of privilege related to capital cases and several other treatises on how capital cases were different in scope from homicide cases in which the death penalty wasn’t on the table.

  And then he came across a book by a law professor out of Berkley on mental health defenses in capital cases. The book was less than three hundred pages and Brigham read it twice in four days. The only breaks he took were to eat, use the bathroom, and speak briefly with Scotty, who was a nice guy, but even the most basic legal concepts confused him. Scotty quickly found that he could ask Brigham about any issues he had and save himself hours of research.

  Tommy had been gone for the past three days. Scotty said he disappeared sometimes, probably on trips to visit some of the clients he had overseas. One night, Scotty brought a bottle of bourbon and two glasses into the library and poured one for Brigham. They sat and drank and talked about the firm.

  “What kind of clients does Tommy go and check on overseas?” Brigham asked.

  “The kind you shouldn’t know about for plausible deniability.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I ask you something, Scotty? Why does he go by the nickname Tommy Two-Balls?”

  Scotty’s face turned serious and he leaned close. “I have to invoke attorney-client privilege on this. Assuming you’re my attorney.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Scotty glanced out the door and listened quietly a few moments. “He’s Russian, you know. Tommy’s not his real name. It’s Taras. Taras Fokin. Supposedly, he was in the mob before he moved to America, but he left it when he went to law school—left the whole thing, and no one just decides to leave them. It’s bad for their reputation. So one night, some guys broke into his house and cut off one of his balls. They didn’t kill him ’cause he’d earned a lot of respect, but they couldn’t let him off, either.”

  “So why two balls, then?”

  “You didn’t let me finish. So he, again, supposedly, found the guy that had done it. And Tommy ripped his ball off and had a surgeon put it inside him.”

  Brigham was quiet a moment. “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  He shrugged. “It’s what they say.”

  “Did Tommy tell you that?”

  “No. He doesn’t talk about it. Ever. So don’t ask.”

  Once Scotty had left, Brigham went back to studying. It was amazing to him how little he had actually learned in law school. Even simple things, like what the different court hearings in a criminal case were called, or where to file different motions.

  It was morning by the time he finished. He went home and managed to sleep for four hours before showering and heading back to the office.

  Eleven

  Brigham sat in his office and read through the Amanda Pierce file again. He read every word in the detective’s reports until he knew them by heart. He watched the interview over and over until he felt he knew Amanda. And then he realized he hadn’t visited her in jail like he said he would. He p
ut a reminder in his calendar to visit her the next day.

  He closed the file and looked out his window to the parking lot. A tree was swaying with the wind. A few clouds dotted the sky but didn’t completely block out the sun. The temperature was warm and it almost lulled him to sleep.

  “Murder? Seriously?”

  He looked over and saw Molly Becker leaning against his doorframe. “I know.”

  “You’re not ready for that.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you tell him you couldn’t do it?”

  He shook his head. “No, I said I would.”

  She was quiet a moment. “This isn’t a game, Brigham. Someone’s life is in your hands.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what makes you think you can go up against a prosecutor that has twenty years’ experience on you? I know Vince Dale. He’s an attack dog. Why do you think you’re ready?”

  He shrugged, looking back out the window. “I don’t know.”

  She scoffed. “That’s not an answer. I’m talking to Tommy about taking you off this.”

  She disappeared, leaving him alone. He flipped through the file again, and then decided he needed to go for a walk.

  The temperature outside was warmer than it had been inside, so he took off his jacket and carried it, heading for a nearby coffee shop. He passed the library, the groups of homeless youths lounging on the green lawn, and construction sites on a new public-safety building.

  The coffee shop was two floors and quiet, with photos of native coffee farmers from South America on the walls. It was the type of place that tried to make you feel guilty if you bought your coffee anywhere else, even though they probably didn’t do anything different than Starbucks.