Final Exam: A Legal Thriller

by Terry Huebner

“What makes the authorities think she did it?”

  “I’m not sure. We don’t have all of the evidence yet. In fact, we’re supposed to be getting some of that tomorrow.”

  She extended her hand. “Well, I wish you the best of luck with your defense, I really do. It’s hard for me to imagine a woman bludgeoning someone to death and you seem awfully convinced that your client didn’t do it. I hope it works out for you.”

  “Thank you. You’ve never heard of my client, have you?”

  “No, never.”

  “You never heard Professor Greenfield mention her?”

  “No. I’ve never heard of her and don’t know anything about her. What’s her connection to Daniel?”

  “Don’t know that either other than we both had him for Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure. That hardly seems enough, now does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Well,” Ben said, “I’ll let you get back home now. I’m sure your husband is standing by the door waiting.”

  She threw her head back in a relaxed laugh, perhaps the first truly unguarded moment of the entire evening. “That’s probably the truest thing you’ve said.”

  “Please,” Ben said, “do me a favor and think about this a little and if anything pops into your head, anything at all, please give me a call even if it doesn’t seem significant or important. You never know. I would greatly appreciate it.”

  “Sure. I’ll do that.” She put her hand on his forearm. “Have a safe trip home.”

  Ben walked back to his car parked in the front of the lot. As he reached his car, he turned and saw her pull slowly out of the parking lot and up to the corner before turning right on College Road, her tail lights disappearing into the night.

  27

  Ben took the morning flight from Orlando to Chicago. The plane was surprisingly crowded, but a safe touchdown at Midway made it a successful flight. The limo took him directly home, where he dumped his bags in the front hall before heading for the garage. After a couple of days in Florida, it seemed that much colder in Chicago and the heat in his car didn’t seem to kick in until he was halfway to the office. He got there just about the time the guys were heading out to lunch. Casey Gardner originally intended to stay back at the office, but Ben enticed him along with the promise of an interesting story. Casey drove and Ben, Brian and Dan Conlon went along. Mark hadn’t come in yet and Funk stayed back at the office eating rabbit food. They took the long drive to Friendly Mexican, another of their regular lunch joints, and Ben told them the story of looking for the Scott’s house and winding up in the middle of nowhere as the sun went down. After they sat down and started eating chips and salsa at a table in the front window, Ben told them the story of the roommates in hushed low tones.

  “Oh, this was your chance,” Casey moaned. “Too bad it happened when you were married.”

  Back in college, Casey had a roommate who turned down a threesome offer because he didn’t want to cheat on a girl he had just started dating. The girlfriend didn’t last long and Casey’s roommate regretted turning down the once-in-a-lifetime offer ever since. Casey had told the guys at the office about it at lunch a couple of years earlier and they had been periodically debating it ever since. Now the tables were turned.

  “I don’t think it’s the same thing,” Ben insisted.

  “What do you mean it’s not the same thing?” Conlon said. “It’s exactly the same thing.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ben disputed. “First of all, I’m married and he was just dating someone. In fact, he’d just started dating her. So that’s one big difference right there. Second, and most important, it’s not the same now.”

  “What do you mean?” Brian asked.

  “I think back twenty years ago it was a bigger deal. Now everybody’s doing it, except us, that is. I’m not sure it’s even that hard to scare up a threesome anymore. It’s kind of like steroids and baseball. It used to be that hitting fifty home runs was a big deal. Now everybody hits fifty home runs. According to Oprah, everybody’s getting threesomes and random sex, especially teenagers and college students. I really think to have the same effect now, you have to be involved in a full-fledged orgy.”

  They sat around and contemplated that over chips and salsa the way medical ethicists would discuss the vagaries of stem cell research. When they got back to the office after lunch, they saw Mark through the window of the garage pulling documents out of a banker’s box. Ben knocked on the outside barbershop entrance and Mark let him in.

  “Hey, how was your flight?” Mark asked.

  “Not bad. Did we get something in?”

  “Yeah, a couple of boxes worth of shit.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Not sure yet. I’m just starting to go through it. I’m not sure what it all means yet.”

  “Okay,” Ben said, “well, take a look at it and I’ll be down in a little while.”

  Ben went upstairs and checked his messages. Then he decided to call Meg and fill her in on his trip to Florida. He also wanted to talk to her before he knew too many details about the stuff they got from the State, so he wouldn’t be in a position of keeping anything from her. He didn’t call her every day. He didn’t want her devoting every waking hour to the next update from her lawyer. He hoped that her day-to-day life would take on a greater sense of normalcy instead. He found her in pretty good spirits, in marked contrast to several other times they had spoken recently. She seemed particularly interested in the details of his trip to Florida. He left out the stuff about the roommates at the bar.

  He went back downstairs and found Mark with his head buried in a banker’s box. Documents were arranged in loosely organized piles all over the conference room table and several of the chairs. Ben entered the room and took a deep breath at the sight. Organization had never been Mark’s strong suit and Ben could envision this whole document review process spiraling out of control in a hurry.

  “You do know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mark said. “I’m on top of it. Everything’s under control.”

  “Yeah, right,” Ben said. “It sure looks like it. So what have we got? Bad news first.”

  “Why don’t you sit down.”

  “That bad?”

  “Don’t know yet. I’m not through everything.”

  Ben picked his way through the piles of paper and took a seat in the barber chair. “So,” he said, “let’s have it.”

  “Well,” Mark said with a sigh, his eyes looking from one pile to another. He took another stack of documents off his lap and placed it on the table. “Keeping in mind that I haven’t reviewed everything, not completely. What we have so far, and I’m sure this isn’t everything, for example, we don’t have any of the toxicology reports or even the autopsy report yet.”

  “Get on with it,” Ben said.

  “So far, I’d say there are three main pieces of evidence that are problematic. Namely, the State says they have hair consistent with the client’s hair inside Greenfield’ office.”

  “You can’t match hair exactly,” Ben said.

  “No, but you can say it’s consistent with a sample of the hair of the accused which is what they’re going to do. But there’s more. They have a thumb print and other partial prints near the label of the murder weapon. And they have the victim’s blood, two drops to be exact, on a scarf allegedly belonging to the client, which I believe was taken from the Astor Street residence.”

  Ben laughed a humorless laugh and looked out the window. “What? Is that all? Just blood and fingerprints?”

  “Yeah,” Mark said, “just enough to put her on death row.”

  28

  “Right this way,” Dean Freeman’s secretary said as she led Ben and Mark down the corridor to a small classroom that she unlocked with a key. Ben recognized it as one of the small rooms used for meetings or seminars of ten to fifteen students or so. She opened the door and groped around in the dark for a light switch. She flicked it on and th
en turned and handed the key to Ben. “Dean Freeman told me to give this key to you.” Ben took the key from her. “You aren’t to leave this room unlocked unless one of you is inside. When you leave, you’re to return the key to me. I leave at five so you need to get it to me before then. Any questions?”

  Ben shrugged and shook his head. He felt like he was back in junior high. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Thanks for your help.”

  She nodded and left, leaving them alone. Ben turned and looked at the documents on the table. There was enough paper there to fill maybe one or one and a half banker’s boxes. “Not very much is there?” he said.

  “No,” Mark agreed. “They probably shredded the rest already.”

  Ben nodded, not sure if Mark was kidding. “It wouldn’t surprise me. I’ll tell you what,” he said, “why don’t you get started. I want to go look for Dorlund.” He gave Mark the key. “Don’t lose it,” he said.

  Ben found Dorlund in his office reading the sports section of the Tribune. “Come on in and have a seat, Mr. Lohmeier,” he said waving to a chair. “Just finishing up some heavy reading.”

  “I can see that,” Ben said, “but you can probably find something in there that will fit into one of your tort lectures.”

  Dorlund laughed. “That’s about all sports is nowadays - torts and breach of contract.” He folded up the paper and tossed it on his desk. “So, what can I do for you?”

  “Well, we haven’t really had much of a chance to talk about Professor Greenfield’s death.”

  “No, but from what I gather, you certainly have been talking to other people around here. You’re creating quite a little stink.”

  “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Ben said.

  Dorlund nodded and ran a hand through his thinning curly hair. He wore a copper colored sweater with dark brown pants and well-worn leather shoes. He put his feet up on the desk and clasped both hands behind his head. The perfect picture of relaxation.

  Dorlund didn’t have a whole lot to offer. He insisted that he didn’t know any reason why his friend would have been killed, although he had heard about the confrontation with Jason Hahn, the student identified by Professor Makra, he seemed to dismiss it. “That kind of stuff happens more than you’d think. There’s a lot of pressure on these kids and sometimes they need to come in and vent when they don’t do as well as they’d hoped. I’m not sure you can read anything else into it.” Ben wasn’t sure he agreed.

  Dorlund also confirmed that there had been some friction among the faculty over recent changes in the curriculum, but downplayed those as being little more than routine office politics. Nevertheless, he did agree that Professor Greenfield never got along very well with Professor Harper. Dorlund suggested that Harper had problems with any man who didn’t agree with her radical feminist approach to the workplace

  Dorlund’s open, easy-going manner surprised Ben, who always thought that Dorlund could be kind of an asshole. Perhaps he was misinformed. They talked for a few more minutes before Dorlund looked at his watch and said, “Look, I’ve got a class in about five minutes so I’ve got to get going, but we can talk again.”

  “Before I go,” Ben said. “Do you know anything about my client, Megan Rand, that I need to know about?”

  Dorlund rose from his seat and began gathering his books for class. He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I ever had her as a student. All I really know about her is what I’ve seen on TV or the newspapers. Sorry.”

  “No problem. We’ll talk again,” Ben said. “Thanks for your time.”

  “My pleasure,” Dorlund said as he slapped Ben on the shoulder on his way by. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Ben stood in the doorway of Dorlund’s office and watched him make his way down the hall and around the corner. He seemed too willing to please, too happy-go-lucky. On his way back downstairs, Ben stopped off at Dean Freeman’s office and got Jason Hahn’s schedule and locker number from the Dean’s secretary. She also gave him a piece of paper and an envelope so he could write Hahn a note and tape it to his locker, located up on the third floor.

  ***

  Ben found Mark in roughly the same state as the previous afternoon in the garage. Papers were all over the place and Mark didn’t seem to know which way was up. Ben stood in the doorway with a disapproving look on his face until Mark looked up and met his gaze with a sheepish grin of his own. “What?” he said.

  “I see you’re organizing things again.”

  Mark let out a guttural laugh. “It’s what I’m good at.”

  “Found anything?” Ben asked.

  “No, not really, not yet. It’s a lot like looking through other people’s mail.”

  “Isn’t that what our job is?” Ben said. “Looking through other people’s mail?”

  “Pretty much. Did you find Dorlund?”

  “Yeah, that was a bit on the strange side.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He acted like he was my long lost uncle come back to the country to give me a check for a million dollars. The whole thing was kind of weird, to tell you the truth.”

  “What do you think his deal is?”

  “No idea. Maybe he just doesn’t want us looking in his direction? Who knows? I’m going to have to think about it a little more before I make up my mind. I also left a note for our friend, Jason Hahn. I told him to meet us down here. I think I’ll let you give him the third degree.”

  “Love to,” Mark said. “Always nice to knock a smart ass punk down a few pegs.”

  The room was set up in two levels of desks, arranged in semi-circles. Mark sat in the lowest level. Ben walked to the upper level and took a seat. “Are you doing this in any kind of order?”

  “I was trying to look through it first to see what we’ve got. They just more or less dumped a load of shit on us.”

  “Did you expect anything less?”

  “No. I’ve got a copy of Greenfield’s personnel file.” Mark said and let out a whistle. “He was making pretty good bucks for a guy who didn’t work very hard and went to a lot of Cubs games.”

  “Hey,” Ben said, “they don’t sign up for this gig because they work you to death and don’t pay you anything. Let me see that file.”

  Mark handed it over and Ben spent the next fifteen minutes or so looking at it in relative silence. Every once in a while, he let out a “Hmmm” or “I wouldn’t have expected that.” When he finished, he looked up and found Mark watching him.

  “What’d you think?” Mark asked.

  “Not much here. In fact, I’d say a surprisingly little amount. Do you think maybe the State has it?” Mark shrugged. Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. We hear all about relationships with students and it’s barely in here. A couple of women make accusations, they dig up a third and then he gets a slap on the wrist for the appearance of impropriety. It’s got to be a big cover-up. I mean, come on, who would accept a reprimand when it’s clear based on this that they didn’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing in the first place. And what was the phrase in here? ‘Insufficient evidence of actual relationships with students.’ That sounds like a load of bullshit too.”

  Mark laughed again. “That’s the way I was looking at it too. My view on this is that everybody knew what was going on and for public relations purposes they figured they had to do something. Since none of the students he actually boinked were probably willing to complain because they got good grades and didn’t want to get their reputations dragged through the mud, the school or somebody came up with this appearance of impropriety bullshit so they could slap him on the wrist and then slip the whole thing under the rug and hope everybody forgot about it.”

  “Sounds about right,” Ben agreed.

  At that point, a knock came at the door and a student in his early-twenties pushed inside, a blue backpack slung over his shoulder. He had shaggy brown hair and wore a black Public Enemy tee-shirt and dirty khaki pants worn low on his hips exposing the tops of his boxer sh
orts. “I’m looking for a guy named Lohmeier,” he grunted with as much attitude as he could muster.

  “That’s me,” Ben said. “You must be Jason Hahn.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why don’t you come in and sit down.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We’d like to talk to you about Professor Greenfield.”

  “What for? They found the person that killed him.”

  Ben leaned forward in his chair. “Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t,” he said. “Either way, we have a few things we’d like to talk to you about.”

  Hahn looked from Ben to Mark and then back again. He shook his head. “I don’t have to talk to you guys.”

  Ben nodded. “Perhaps not, but we could always serve you with a subpoena and drag you into Court to talk about it. Hey Mark, that would look pretty good on his bar exam application, don’t you think?”

  “Sure would,” Mark said.

  Hahn thought about that for a minute and then took a couple of steps further into the room. “Okay, I’ll give you a few minutes.”

  “Good,” Ben said, “why don’t you have a seat. No use standing. Mark, why don’t you go ahead?”

  Mark began slowly, using his “aw shucks I’m just a big boob” persona to lead Hahn from relatively meaningless anecdotes regarding Greenfield’s first year Criminal Law class to Hahn’s performance on the final exam, which he insisted should have earned him a good grade, perhaps even an A. Hahn appeared bored and disinterested through much of the twenty minutes or so it took Mark to get to the point, occasionally looking over at Ben, who sat and watched while saying nothing. Hahn said his grade on the final exam, a C+, shocked him because he knew the material inside and out and had been one of the best students in class from day one. He just knew that it had to be a mistake from the moment he accessed his grade from the computer.

  At the Chicago College of Law, grades are posted on the computer as they are submitted by the professors so students can access their grades before the final grades are sent out. Hahn told them that he had made an appointment to see Greenfield shortly before Christmas and that things got heated when Greenfield insisted that his evaluation of Hahn’s exam was accurate and that he saw no rationale for raising his grade.