MERCY
A Neon Lawyer Novel
VICTOR METHOS
Copyright 2016 Victor Methos
Kindle Edition
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Please note that this is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All events in this work are purely from the imagination of the author and are not intended to signify, represent, or reenact any event in actual fact.
1
Brigham Theodore sat next to his client at the defense table but was so revolted by what he’d done that he couldn’t look at him.
The man had an odd body type: no muscle, arms and legs like sticks, just skin and bones… except his belly. Plump and round, it actually protruded onto the table. He’d waxed his mustache, but he kept sticking his fingers in his nose—he’d done it at least twenty times in front of the jury.
The trial had been going for an hour. The officer on the stand, a uniformed rookie who’d been in the Salt Lake Police Department for only four months, was testifying. Brigham tried to concentrate, but he was so nauseated by his client that it was difficult to think about anything else. The image of the poor victim and what he must be going through after an ordeal like this was a pain he didn’t want to think about.
The prosecutor was at the lectern, flipping through a few notes before beginning the direct examination of the officer. Marissa Newly, the prosecutor, was a slim woman with raven hair. Several of the male jurors were unable to look anywhere else when she stood up to speak.
“Please state your name for the record,” Marissa said.
“Officer Cameron Ray Boyd.”
“And where do you work, Officer Boyd?”
“I’ve been with the Salt Lake PD now for four months.”
“And what do you do?”
“I’m a police officer on bike patrol in the downtown area.”
Marissa moved a strand of hair behind her ear. “And were you on patrol on the morning of March the second of this year?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember engaging with a member of the public at around nine in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Tell us about it.”
The officer cleared his throat. He glanced over at the defense table and then continued. “Um, my partner and I were riding in the area of about 1300 East and Second South when we passed a wooden fence with gaps in it, and holes. Came up about six feet.” He cleared his throat again, a slight blush in his cheeks. “As we were passing, I looked through the gaps in the fence and saw what appeared to be a man who was… um, nude.”
“Was the man doing anything?”
The officer’s brow furrowed and then smoothed. “Yes. I couldn’t make it out at first, so I stopped the bike and peered in through one of the cracks.” The officer stopped and took a sip of water from a paper cup on the stand in front of him. “I saw a Caucasian male who was nude from the waist down. He was squatting on his porch and he had a… he had a hat underneath him.”
“What kind of hat?”
“Stetson. A cowboy hat.”
“What, if anything, was he doing to the hat?”
The officer took another sip of water. “He was defecating into it.”
“Define ‘defecating’ for the jury, please.”
The officer’s slight blush went to a deep red that ran from just below the eyes to the jaw. “He was pooping into the hat. I don’t know how else to put it.”
“What did you do?”
“I went around to the gate, and it wasn’t locked, so we—”
Someone in the audience shouted, “You son of a bitch! My daddy gave me that hat! You knew it was my favorite.”
The judge said, “Sit down, sir. Right now.”
The defendant turned around, and Brigham could tell what was about to happen. He moved to stop it, but his client shook him off. The emotions in this case ran too high, and he’d lost control.
“That’s what you get,” the defendant shouted back. “You gave me them tools back and the drill didn’t work. I shit in your hat now but I’m a shit in your bed next time.”
The man in the audience rushed forward, and the defendant was on his feet. Brigham grabbed him, trying to pull him back down, but it was too late. The men collided and rolled over the defense table. They hit the floor, already exchanging blows.
The bailiffs in the courtroom waded in to pull them apart. The judge was yelling and slamming his gavel on its sound block, people in the audience—family members on both sides—were screeching at each other, and one of the bailiffs pulled out a Taser.
“No!” Brigham shouted. “He has a pacemaker!”
The bailiff fired and Brigham tried to pull his client out of the way, but the Taser caught the man in the shoulder and he convulsed so violently that he struck Brigham in the jaw and knocked him down.
Brigham lay on the courtroom floor as people shouted and swore, and the gavel kept pounding. He tried to sit up but decided he’d done all he could do. He’d lie there until the dust settled.
When order had been restored, the defendant and his neighbor had been put in the holding cells of the courthouse. Brigham collapsed into the defense chair, rubbing his jaw. He looked over to Marissa, who had turned a ghostly white. She was new, and this was one of her first trials. He figured she was probably asking herself what she’d gotten into.
“Hey. This is a mistrial, and we’re gonna have to do it again. How about no jail and community service with Parks and Rec? You pick the number of hours.”
She thought a moment. “Okay,” she said. “A hundred hours of community service and one year of probation with a mental health evaluation and counseling. But no service at Parks and Rec. He should do it at the animal shelter to clean up messes like he made.”
Brigham nodded. That was probably a good call.
“I’ll make him take that.” He moved his jaw from side to side. “Can we call the judge back in? My jaw hurts.”
2
Brigham sauntered into the Riley Building and stood in the lobby a moment. His jaw, luckily, wasn’t broken. The ER had given him an ice pack and ibuprofen and sent him on his way. It seemed like a waste of time, but Brigham had never had health insurance before, and now that he had the money for it, he made certain he used it.
A father and his son waited for the elevator. When the elevator arrived, the father gently pushed the son in. The boy was holding a green balloon and lost his grip on the string. The balloon shot to the ceiling—about twenty feet above them.
“My balloon!”
“We don’t have time for that, Spencer.”
“Daddy, no!”
Brigham waited and watched the red numbers above the elevators. They had stopped on the third floor. Maintenance was in a room off to the side of the lobby, and Brigham poked his head into their break room. One of the janitors, Ali, was there. A little over a year ago, Brigham himself had been a janitor before he passed the Bar exam.
“Ali, how’s it hanging?” Brigham knew he loved that expression, and it always made him smile widely.
“I saw you on TV,” Ali said. “How can a man do that to his friend’s hat?”
“Revenge makes people do sick things, I guess. Hey, do you have a ladder?”
Brigham held the ladder while Ali retrieved the balloon. He
handed it to Brigham and said, “How’s it hanging?”
“No, you only say it as a greeting, not as a goodbye.”
“Oh. I still like it.”
Brigham rode the elevator up to the accounting firm on the third floor. The secretary was busy on the phone, so he just walked past her and saw the boy and his father in a large glass-walled conference room with three other people. Brigham entered, and they all stared at him. He sheepishly handed the balloon to the boy.
“My balloon!”
“Have a good one,” Brigham said as he left. He glanced over his shoulder, and they were still staring at him as he returned to the elevator.
The offices of Theodore, Becker & Sheffield occupied a nice corner on the seventh floor overlooking Main Street and the Zions Bank across the street. Brigham walked in to the sound of people speaking on phones, faxes coming through, and clients talking in the waiting room. He had to stop a moment and just enjoy it. This was a real firm. A real law firm that they had built with nothing.
After passing the Bar a year and a half ago, he’d worked for a man called Tommy Two-Balls, who was killed. Brigham never knew why. When he, Molly, and Scotty decided to open their own firm, none of them knew what was going to happen. The unknown was one of the most frightening things to face. But it had worked. He’d won his first real case, which had been a black mark for Vince Dale, the senior trial prosecutor, now the Salt Lake County district attorney. They advertised a little on the internet and had done a couple of radio spots on the hard rock and rap stations, but word of mouth had been the amazing advertising tool everyone had told him it could be.
As he rounded the corner from the waiting room, Scotty accosted him. His broad shoulders would have looked better if he’d had the height to go with them, but instead, he was short and round. A Scottish accent had stuck with him, though he tried desperately to shed it.
“Brigham, we need to talk about hiring more people,” he said, following him through the hall.
“We will.”
“I’m swamped. I’ve got over eighty cases on my plate. I need help.”
“I know, we’re all swamped. I promise, Scotty, we’ll hire a couple of people.”
“Well, I’m hiring a new paralegal right now—a girl at the coffee shop who always gives me a free pastry.”
“Fine, done.”
As Scotty left, one of the paralegals, Lexi, ran up to him with a stack of documents. She shoved a pen into his hand and held them as he scribbled his name on them. “And don’t forget you have a consult at seven,” she said.
“Why so late?”
“That’s the only time they could make it.”
Another one of his paralegals saw him and made a beeline for him before he ducked into Molly’s office. He shut the door behind him and took a breath. Molly stopped typing and looked up at him.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“No jail.”
“Really? I thought they wouldn’t offer that.”
“He was attacked by the hat’s owner and the prosecutor didn’t want a mistrial.”
“Well, good job. That case got some press.”
He shrugged and went over to kiss her lightly on the lips before sitting down across from her. “Dinner tonight?”
“You name the place,” she said, turning back to her computer.
“What’s going on with the chi mo?”
“Our client accused of child molestation will be going to trial in a week. You don’t use the words ‘accused’ or ‘allegedly’ enough.”
“I’m joking.”
“Well, joke somewhere else, please. I’ve got work to do.”
Brigham rose and kissed her again before leaving and shutting the door. In his office, he found a skinny man with a puff of white hair on his head sitting in the chair in front of his desk: his accountant, Martin.
“Don’t you guys ever make appointments?” Brigham said, sitting down.
“I have access to all your money. You sure you want to be givin’ me lip?”
“I’m sorry, dear sweet Martin. To what do I owe the wonderful pleasure of your company?”
He grinned. “Smart-ass.” Martin opened a file and set it on the desk. “Your balance sheet. You guys are doing well and everything’s stable right now, but it won’t last. Word of mouth only gets you so far. You’ve got to advertise more.”
“Advertise where?”
“I represent several law firms, and the others are all doing everything. Billboards, radio, TV, internet—there’s a ton of places to go. Invest in advertising as much as you can so we keep these numbers up. I’d also expand into other areas, like small claims or bankruptcy.”
“I hate that stuff,” Brigham said, flipping through the papers in the file.
“So hire someone else to do it. The more diversity you have, the more stable you’ll be if one particular field dries up. And for crap’s sake, you’re the hot young lawyer in town right now, so get yourself some better suits.”
“What’s wrong with my suits?”
“You bought them secondhand and they don’t fit. My tailor’s up the street, Roberto. He’ll take good care of you.”
Martin rose, gazing out the windows. “You know, I was Tommy’s accountant for twelve years. Bastard never missed a birthday or anniversary. There was always a gift in the mail, usually cash. A joke, because he was always trying to keep money off the books by being paid in cash, and I would always argue with him about it. I miss him.”
Brigham nodded. “I do, too.”
“Well, keep up the good fight.”
Martin left, and Brigham was alone with a stack of files. He had more than seventy active criminal cases right now, about half of them drug or alcohol related. It amazed him that the government spent so much time and money fighting things as innocuous as steroids and marijuana. He had always thought that prosecuting innocuous things degraded the whole justice system. People knew marijuana wasn’t that harmful—nowhere near as dangerous as cigarettes or alcohol. And because the government prosecuted marijuana cases so aggressively, people—particularly the younger generations—began to wonder whether all the laws weren’t ridiculous. How could you respect the rule of law when it was so wrong about something?
Brigham began going through the files, making notes in the margins of police reports. Most were run of the mill. Reasonable suspicion—the reason for police contact with the defendant—and probable cause—the reason the police arrested and searched the defendant—were the two standard challenges in any drug or alcohol case, particularly DUIs. He separated his DUI files and found that he had twenty active DUIs, meaning cases that weren’t going to settle, and almost all of them needed motions drafted. Scotty was right; he would need to hire somebody. He went online and began writing an ad.
After five minutes, all he had was, “Downtown Salt Lake City law firm seeks associate attorney. Must be comfortable in court.”
He couldn’t really think of anything else that was important to him. Attention to detail didn’t matter, since the paralegals were the ones keeping track of deadlines and court dates. Neither did punctuality, or grades, or any of the other things new lawyers thought were important. Criminal defense attorneys nationwide lost three quarters of their trials. The prosecution had all the evidence and offered good deals or dismissed their bad cases, which meant the ones going to trial were usually the worst cases for the defense. The only thing he wanted in an associate was someone who could talk to a jury in a way that made them see the defendant as a human being.
The door opened, and Scotty wandered in. He sat down and didn’t look at Brigham right away. Instead, he had his face buried in his iPad. “I need you to do something for me,” he said eventually.
“What?”
“Go to the Salt Lake Justice Court on a DUI.”
“Why? What’s going on with it?”
“Nathaniel’s the prosecutor. He never gives me anything. I don’t think he respects me.”
“Maybe it’s a d
og case.”
He shook his head. “No, we have something. Bad stop. They said she was weaving between lanes. The cop didn’t actually see her cross the white lines. He heard it from a third-party witness, who they didn’t get any information on. But Nathaniel’s just not giving me a deal.”
“I’m sure he has a reason.”
Scotty looked up, his eyes widening and narrowing again in a tic Brigham had seen before. “People decide things based on their guts and then look for reasons to justify it. So his guts told him not to give me a deal, and he’s found some bullshit reason for it. I need you to go. He likes you.”
Brigham posted the ad on several sites and then stood up. He would rather be in a courtroom than the office any day. “Get me the file.”
3
Every city in Utah had a justice court. The city kept the fines collected from defendants whose cases were handled by the justice court rather than losing the money to the county or the state. But the trade-off was that justice courts could only handle low-level misdemeanors. The most serious cases they handled were minor domestic violence cases and DUIs. Also, anything from the justice court could be appealed to the higher, county-wide district court, which meant defense attorneys got two tries for an acquittal.
The Salt Lake City Justice Court sat between a run-down apartment building and a mechanic’s shop. As Brigham went through the metal detectors, he realized nothing that happened here really mattered. Every decision made here could be appealed to the district court, and the case started over again. In a way, it was liberating. Lawyers could try things here they would never dream of trying in front of a district court.
Brigham was pulled aside to be wanded by one of the bailiffs. He knew the day they stopped doing that, the day they actually recognized that he was here at least once a week, was the day he would truly have made it as a lawyer.
He ran up the stairs to the second level and flipped through the file one more time. Jessica Padilla was accused of DUI and possession of marijuana. Scotty had been correct; the stop wasn’t good. The cop claimed there had been an anonymous tipster but took no information from him. By the time the DUI investigation was done, the tipster was gone. A video, according to Scotty, showed she hadn’t been weaving between the lanes and no one other than the cop had seen or talked to the tipster.
Mercy (A Neon Lawyer Novel Book 2) Page 1