Final Exam: A Legal Thriller

by Terry Huebner

  The eyes of the two men moved quickly from the floor to the side wall, to the back wall, to the ceiling, to the desk and back and forth. They said nothing. The head and body of the outline prepared by the medical examiner stuck out from behind the desk. A large circular bloodstain extended out from beneath the head of the outline and blood splatters covered the credenza, back wall, side wall and file cabinet. Ben stepped forward to get a better look behind the desk, where he found more unmistakable evidence of blood splattering.

  After a long moment, he turned to his right and looked at Nelson. “Bludgeoned?” he asked softly.

  Nelson nodded. “A baseball bat, an autographed Sammy Sosa model in fact,” he said finally. “Left at the scene.”

  Ben turned his attention back to the area behind the desk. “He was a huge Cub fan,” he said to no one in particular. The men surveyed the office for a few more minutes in complete silence. The scene took on a somber, almost reverential tone. No one spoke for a time. Over the years, each of them had been involved on one side or another in society’s evaluation of violent death committed by one human being upon another, and witnessing a scene such as this invariably took something from each of them that they probably couldn’t even put into words.

  Ben stood for a moment looking out the window at the street below, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his overcoat. Then he turned on his heel and looked down at the outline of Greenfield’s body lying on the floor. He studied it for a moment and looked back up at Nelson. “So,” he said, “I take it that you believe you can tie Megan Rand to this?”

  Nelson nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  Ben fixed his gaze directly on Detective Nelson, who felt the heat and intensity he had witnessed previously during the two trials the men had been involved with years before when Ben was a prosecutor. Sensing the moment, Mark stepped in and said, “I think we’ve seen all we need to see for today. Why don’t we go back outside.” His words seemed to break the tension, and the two men looked at him and nodded. Nelson led them from the room.

  No one said a word until they reached the elevator and were sure they were alone. Ben looked around. Seeing no one, he asked, “You have physical evidence?”

  “Yes. Physical and otherwise.”

  Ben looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t say right now, but you should know soon enough, I suppose. We hope to have some tests done fairly soon. That should help us with the investigation.”

  “Do you anticipate anything happening soon?” Ben asked.

  “Quite possibly.”

  Ben nodded thoughtfully and the elevator doors opened. The men stepped inside and the doors closed behind them. “You’re aware, I’m sure, that Megan Rand has a young son?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would prefer, if at all possible, that we not traumatize him needlessly.”

  “I agree.”

  “So, if it comes to that, if you feel like you need to do something, and you’re ready to do something, please call me and I’ll be ready to make the necessary arrangements. I’d rather bring her in myself than deal with some sort of a media circus.”

  “Why don’t you let me know where I can get in touch with you,” Nelson said.

  Ben reached into his pocket and removed one of his business cards. He took a pen from his briefcase and scrawled two phone numbers on the back of the card, handing it to Nelson. “If you need to get in touch with me, my office phone is on the front and my home phone and cell phone numbers are on the back.”

  The men got off at the third floor and headed for the main landing. Extending his hand, Nelson shook hands with both Ben and Mark. “Mark, it was nice to meet you.” Mark nodded. “Say, Ben,” Nelson continued, “you never said how you like it on the other side.”

  Ben smiled. “It’s different. I’ll definitely say that. Now I’m on the side of the angels.”

  Nelson laughed softly as he turned and headed for the stairs. “So they say, so they say. I’ll be in touch.”

  Ben and Mark stood at the railing and watched the Detective descend the stairway down to the first floor, then out the main entrance and down the sidewalk out of sight. Mark turned and looked in the windows of the school cafeteria. “Hey, let’s go in here and get something to drink.” He noticed the sign, “Makrateria” over the door. “What’s this ‘Makrateria’ thing?”

  Ben replied, “Professor Makra allegedly donated the money to upgrade the cafeteria so they call it the ‘Makrateria’”.

  Mark laughed. “Isn’t Makra that funny bald guy with the glasses that does a lot of the bar review lectures?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. He’s pretty funny and he’s actually a pretty good professor too.”

  They each grabbed a drink from the fountain, went through the cashier line and found a deserted table in the back corner of the room.

  “So, what’d you think?” Ben asked as they sat down.

  Mark shook his head in a study of contemplation. “Well, given that we didn’t know anything to start with other than the victim died in his office, we at least learned how he died, better said, how the police think he died.”

  “True enough,” Ben agreed, “but it’s probably also how he did in fact die. It would seem implausible that somebody would bash his brains in after killing him another way. They can certainly figure that out quickly enough.”

  “True, if they’re looking for it. Given the nature of the scene though, did that really seem like something that a woman would do to you? I mean, can you really see our client committing an act like this? From what you’ve told me about her, this doesn’t seem to fit.”

  Ben shook his head, “No, it doesn’t. I can’t imagine her doing something like this at all. It would be completely out of character for the person I know.”

  “We have to ask ourselves,” Mark said, “what this crime tells us. In my view, bludgeoning someone to death with a baseball bat strikes me, no pun intended, as a very personal act. This isn’t like poisoning someone or shooting someone even. To hit somebody over the head with a baseball bat, you have to get right in there and do it. That doesn’t sound much like a woman to me, but I may be wrong. I’m sure there are women out there who could do it. My wife probably could have done it. Also, if the bat was there in the office already, that probably means that it wasn’t a planned murder. That would seem to indicate that something happened that caused the murder to take place.”

  “More of a spontaneous act,” Ben said.

  “I think so. It seems a little bit farfetched to me, although I didn’t know the victim, that someone would come there planning to kill him and count on the baseball bat being there and having the opportunity to use it. Unless, of course, it was a fairly well-known trophy.”

  “You would almost think that he must have been taken by surprise, although we don’t know the extent to which there were other wounds, you know, defensive wounds on his hands, arms, whatever.”

  “Let’s face it,” Mark said with a shrug. “We don’t know a hell of a lot more than we did before we got here. We’re really just speculating here. They cleaned that office out pretty good. We don’t know what may have been in there, what documents may have been in there, what he may have been working on at the time, or even whether or not the killer might have taken something from the office. All this really tells us is that we have a lot more questions than we did before.”

  “We do know one thing though,” Ben said in a low voice, leaning in close so only Mark could possibly hear. “We know that they think they can tie Megan Rand to this killing. What did he say, ‘physical and other evidence’, something like that? That means they either found something at the scene they could link to her or found something at her house that they can link to the scene. Maybe they have other stuff too. Who knows what that could be? But they’re not just fucking around. They think they know who did it and when some of these tests come back and confirm what they think they already know, they’re going to move pretty fast.”

>   Mark gave a resigned nod. “You are undoubtedly correct about that.”

  10

  “Which way?” said Casey Gardner. They were all piled into his Acura on the way out for lunch. Gardner was driving, Ben was in the front seat, and Brian Davenport, Dan Conlon and Brad Funk were jammed into the Acura’s too small back seat. Gardner was just pulling out of the parking lot and he stopped at Schiller Street, which veered off to the left. If he turned here, they would eventually head down Irving Park Road toward Wood Dale. If they continued up to the corner, they could also turn right and head through downtown Ithaca in the opposite direction.

  The inevitable response came from Davenport. “Go up to the corner.” Essentially, they postponed the lunch decision another thirty seconds. This happened virtually every day.

  “Hey,” Funk complained from the backseat, “you guys told me we were going to ‘Smoky Mexican’.”

  “We lied,” Gardner said with a laugh.

  On most days, Funk brought his lunch from home, a cornucopia of healthy selections, usually including a salad made by his wife, Sue. He had taken to eating healthy in an effort to reduce his chronically high cholesterol level. All those days of eating rabbit food for lunch had only reduced his cholesterol by about one point. Nevertheless, he soldiered on. Not that he didn’t have weaknesses. Funk would occasionally join the guys for lunch if they were going out for either Chinese or Mexican food, or, of course, if Phil was going along.

  Gardner pulled the Acura to the corner and turned left into traffic. “Where’re we going?” Ben asked.

  “I guess I could do Mexican,” Gardner said.

  After the grumbling in the backseat subsided, they agreed they would indeed go to “Smoky Mexican”. It was one of three Mexican restaurants they regularly visited, all more or less fast food places with small sit down areas inside for those so inclined. “Smoky Mexican” got its name because it was always hazy and smoky inside and was located about ten minutes from the office in a small strip mall that didn’t have enough parking. After waiting for five minutes, Gardner pulled the Acura into a vacated space at the end of a row and the five of them piled out. They placed their orders and Gardner and Ben stepped out of the interior fog and into the fresh, cold air, while Conlon walked over to the 7-Eleven three doors down to pick up a Big Gulp.

  “Hey,” Gardner said with a nudge suddenly remembering something, “did you see the thing on the internet on that Professor’s murder? I tried buzzing you earlier, but you were on the phone and then I forgot about it.”

  “No, I didn’t see it. What was it?”

  “Well, I was on the Tribune website and the police or somebody must have released a statement indicating that an unidentified former student at the law school was being questioned as a person of interest in the case. I’m assuming that’s our client, right?”

  “Fuck,” Ben said, “so much for keeping this under wraps. They didn’t mention her name, did they?”

  “No, just an unidentified former law student, that’s all they said.”

  “I better call her. If she finds out about this before I get in touch with her, she’ll probably freak.”

  “Good idea.”

  A few minutes later, Funk was the last to emerge from the restaurant and Conlon stepped out to let Funk climb back into the middle of the backseat. “Why do I always have to sit in the middle?” he complained.

  “Because you’re the one with the twenty-five inch inseam,” Conlon quickly retorted.

  There’s always a guy in every office that takes a lot of shit from all the other guys. At Schulte & Luckenbill, Brad Funk was that guy. A feisty man in his mid-thirties, Brad Funk stood five-foot-seven with heels, had short brown hair and wore glasses. Born and raised in central Indiana, Funk was also a bit of a redneck and a longtime member of the NRA. He liked to go target shooting and hunting in his spare time, for which he received immeasurable grief from the rest of the guys in the office. His political views were wholly consistent with his status as a gun owner and NRA member. And he always seemed to have at least a couple of running feuds going on with opposing counsel on his files.

  His combative nature was one of the two things you just had to know about Funk. The other was that he had a pathological need to be important. Some felt this Napoleon complex stemmed from his obvious lack of height, while others figured he was just trying to keep his wife happy. In any event, his cases were always the biggest and most important, and he always absolutely, positively had to see Phil right away. Phil knew this, of course, and avoided Funk whenever possible, even going so far as to move Funk’s office to the opposite end of the building so as to provide himself with a larger buffer zone and more opportunities to come and go unnoticed. This often left a frustrated Funk with little choice but to pepper Phil with voicemail messages, e-mails and bothersome calls to his cell phone.

  Despite these seemingly negative traits, Ben actually liked Funk. They would spar over who was better, Ben’s Packers or Funk’s Bears, and Ben thought that Funk had a pretty good sense of humor and was a good sport most of the time. He also worked hard and was a pretty decent lawyer on top of it all. Nevertheless, you couldn’t help but give him shit.

  Halfway through lunch, Dan Conlon looked up from the Sun-Times and said, “Hey Funk, I see in the paper that some guy in Congress wants to regulate how much money groups like the NRA can spend on political advertising.”

  “Fucking Commies,” Funk said with a laugh. “They just don’t understand all the good things the NRA does for society.”

  “Yeah, like make sure nuts like you have weapons,” Casey Gardner said.

  “You just don’t realize and fully understand the benefits of a well-informed, well-armed society,” Funk replied not altogether joking. “You know, they’ve done studies. Places where they allow concealed weapons have lower incidences of crime.”

  “That’s because self-defense shootings probably don’t count in the statistics,” Ben interjected, “and everything, I’m sure, is considered self-defense. Oops, a guy knocked on my door. I better shoot him. Self-defense.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” Funk said. “One day you’ll find yourself in a situation where you’ll wish you had a gun on you.”

  “Shit,” Ben answered, “that happens pretty much every time I run into you in the hallway.” People continued to pick on Funk for the rest of lunch.

  Half an hour later, Ben was back at his desk reviewing some cases Conlon had pulled regarding bail issues. He recognized some of the cases from back in his prosecutor days; others were simply new takes on familiar themes. These were little more than general recitations on the current state of bail law. What Ben really wanted, and didn’t have yet, was fresh research on the appropriateness of bail under Meg’s specific circumstances, an upper class woman with no history of crime and a young son to care for. He reasoned that something was going to happen sooner or later, probably sooner, and he wanted to have something ready to go when the time came.

  He was in the middle of reading one of the cases when Dianne Reynolds stuck her head in the door. “I’ve got Joseph Cavallaro on the phone for you,” she said.

  Ben looked up, hesitated for only an instant and said, “Tell him I’m in a meeting.”

  “He seemed pretty insistent.”

  “Good. Tell him I’m in a meeting.”

  “You must really not want to talk to him.”

  “I’ll talk to him eventually, just not now.”

  Although it was always possible that Cavallaro had something significant to convey, Ben didn’t really believe it and didn’t regret putting him off. He waited until a quarter to seven, just before he went home, to call Cavallaro back. He knew Cavallaro wouldn’t be there. As expected, he got the firm’s answering machine and left a brief message. He hung up the phone, flicked off the table lamp and headed for the door.

  11

  Nothing happened over the following weekend. Ben kept his cell phone handy and jumped every time either that or his ho
me phone rang. He didn’t hear from anyone. He tried to keep himself busy to keep his mind off things. It didn’t work. Meg’s pending arrest and the connection between her and Professor Greenfield gnawed at him the entire time. It kept turning up unwanted like his least favorite cousin - when he shoveled snow, when he folded some laundry and when he vacantly watched a movie with his wife on Saturday night. He just couldn’t drive it out of his head.

  He didn’t have Court on Monday so he stopped at Jiffy Lube on the way into the office for an oil change. It snowed overnight and traffic moved much slower than usual. He didn’t hit the office parking lot until almost ten. In deference to the weather and the forecast for more snow later that afternoon, Ben wore jeans, a black sweater, brown suede casual slip-on shoes and his brown bomber jacket. He ran into Nancy on her way to the bathroom as he kicked the snow off his shoes just inside the back door. “Where have you been?” she asked, pausing when she noticed his clothing. “Whoa, casual day today, huh?”

  Ben nodded. “Yeah, well, it’s shitty out there.”

  “It’s shitty in here too,” she said. “That husband’s been calling non-stop. He’s probably called four or five times already. You’re right. He is an asshole.”

  “Why? What did he say?”

  “It wasn’t so much what he said. He was just rude and obnoxious to both me and Dianne. I don’t know who he thinks he is.”

  “Oh, I can tell you who he thinks he is,” Ben said, “and I can also tell you who he actually is. Did he leave any messages?”