Final Exam: A Legal Thriller

by Terry Huebner

  “Look,” Hahn said, “I thought he was full of shit, but I finally realized that it wasn’t doing me any good to argue with him, so I decided to give it up and leave. I lost my cool a little bit, I admit that, and I shouldn’t have yelled at him, but he was kind of an arrogant fuck about it, to tell you the truth, and it pissed me off. You know, this is my life. A C+ is a big deal.”

  Ben finally spoke up. “Not to interrupt, but I read your exam. You’re lucky you got a C+. You didn’t know what the fuck you were talking about.”

  Mark turned and looked at Ben and gave him a look that said, “What are you talking about? We haven’t seen any exams yet.” From where he was sitting, Hahn couldn’t see the expression on Mark’s face.

  “Look,” Ben continued, “you’re not the first guy to come in here thinking you were hot shit only to discover that his class was filled with students just as smart or smarter than he is. You’re just going to have to work harder, that’s all.”

  Hahn’s eyes blazed. “Fuck you,” he finally blurted out. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I did well on that exam. He fucked me over.”

  “You’re just going to have to work a little harder next time,” Ben said.

  “Is that what you think?” Hahn said. He was now on his feet. Ben shrugged. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I was one of the best students in that class, if not the best student.”

  “So you say,” Ben said, “but you can’t prove that by your exam.”

  “What makes you think you know what you’re talking about?”

  “You forget, Mr. Hahn, this is my business. I practice criminal law. I don’t just watch it on TV.”

  Hahn took a step in Ben’s direction. “Fuck you,” he said again. “I don’t have to put up with this bullshit from you or anybody else.” He picked his backpack up off the table, turned and headed for the door.

  “One more question for you, Mr. Hahn, before you leave,” Ben said. “How’d you do on your other finals?”

  As Hahn reached the door and yanked the handle he said, “Fuck you.” Then he stormed from the room. The door closed slowly behind him and made a loud clicking sound as it latched.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” Ben said at the closed door.

  Mark looked back at Ben and raised his eyebrows.

  “That wasn’t even very hard,” Ben said.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “If I could do that in here six or eight weeks after the fact,” Ben said, “think how easy it would’ve been for Greenfield to push his buttons a couple of days after he got his exam results.”

  The two men spent most of the afternoon reviewing grade reports. Dean Freeman had given them summaries dating back to 1989, when Ben was a student in Greenfield’s first year Criminal Law class. Mainly, they just compiled lists of students who could have an axe to grind against Greenfield, either because they did poorly in his class, or because they did significantly worse in Greenfield’s class than they did in others. They also tried to identify students who may have been particularly damaged by a Greenfield grade. For example, students close to some particular class honor or award could have taken a bad grade personally.

  Painstaking and laborious work, document reviews rarely seemed to bear any fruit right up until the moment they did. After a couple of hours, Ben and Mark concluded that this work might be best performed by one of the younger guys in the office, leaving them more significant duties on which to focus. Nevertheless, they agreed to stick it out for the rest of the afternoon and make the trip as worthwhile as possible. At ten minutes past four, Ben got up and went down the hall to use the restroom. When he got back, he found Mark at the back of the room stretching his legs.

  Hearing Ben come through the door, Mark turned and said, “I was just thinking, with this being Valentine’s Day and all, you probably want to get going pretty soon.”

  Ben looked stunned. He looked down at his watch hoping the date would change, but it didn’t. “Fuck,” he said. “I forgot all about it.”

  “Damn. Even a total slug like me knows you can’t blow off Valentine’s Day,” Mark said.

  Ben shook his head. “What am I going to do?”

  “Only one thing you can do - dinner and flowers. Did you get anything for her in Florida?”

  “No, nothing. I got a little something for the kids, but nothing for her.”

  “That means nice dinner and nice flowers.”

  “Where am I going to go to dinner now? Every place is going to be booked?”

  “You’ve gotta try man, you’ve gotta try.”

  Within five minutes, they had locked the door, dropped the key off and were heading to the parking lot. As they hurried across Adams Street, Ben said over his shoulder, “What am I going to do with the kids even if I can find a place?”

  “Send them to the in-laws. That’s what in-laws are for.”

  29

  Traffic outbound on the Eisenhower Expressway couldn’t have been much worse and Ben and Mark didn’t arrive back at the office in Ithaca until five-forty-five. Fortunately, he managed to get a reservation at Les Deux Gros for the eight-thirty seating due to a last-minute cancellation. He got a hold of Libby’s mother, who agreed to come over and watch the kids since Ben and Libby wouldn’t be back from the restaurant until long after the kids should have been in bed.

  As they drove out to the restaurant, Libby leaned over and said, “This should be nice. I figured you were so busy you’d probably just forget about Valentine’s Day.”

  Ben flushed refusing to admit that she was correct. “Forget Valentine’s Day? Never. I probably would’ve preferred earlier, but with the hours I’ve been working lately, I figured a little bit later was probably better than a little bit earlier.”

  She gave him a knowing smile. “The roses were also very lovely,” she said. Ben stopped at the grocery store on the way home and bought Libby two dozen pink roses. “I hope the kids will be all right with Mother,” she said.

  “I hope your mother will be all right with the kids,” Ben replied.

  Dinner was very nice, just what they hoped for, and it even took Ben’s mind off of the case for a little while. All in all, they enjoyed the restaurant very much and vowed to return on another occasion. While Libby would enjoy a meal like this perhaps once a month, Ben probably wouldn’t be in the mood again for another year, or until he forgot about Valentine’s Day again.

  They returned home to find Libby’s mother sitting on the couch watching Emeril on the Food Network. She gave them a good report on the kids. They watched a little television and had gone to bed early. Probably bored to death, Ben figured. By now, it was almost midnight and Ben wanted to get Libby up to bed before she got too sleepy. The only problems with their sex life were getting enough privacy and having the energy when they had the opportunity. After they finished, they lay in bed and talked for a few minutes before Libby drifted off to sleep first, which was her custom. A light sleeper himself, Ben got used to lying in bed and listening to the rhythms of his wife’s breathing as she slept. Tonight was no exception.

  Ben tossed and turned for a long time without falling asleep. He couldn’t get the Greenfield case out of his head and now that more information had drifted in, his brain seemed to be working overtime processing it all. Ben lay in bed and looked at the ceiling before sitting up and leaning over Libby to check the clock on the nightstand – twenty-five after one. He groaned and flopped back down on his pillow. Then he got up and went to the bathroom. He decided to get dressed and go for a walk. Back when he was younger, long before he got married, Ben would take frequent walks, often in the middle of the night. He pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and grabbed a pair of socks out of the drawer before heading downstairs. He took his leather bomber jacket off the hook in the front hall, found his gloves in the bin by the back door and stepped into a pair of suede Lands End moccasins.

  He slipped out the back door, across the deck and down the step
s to the driveway. He reached the end of his driveway and looked up into the now cloudless sky, stars twinkling brightly above him. He exhaled and his smoky breath disappeared into the darkness. Ben looked in both directions and turned toward town. Although cold outside - the temperature had probably dipped into the mid-twenties - the air felt crisp and clean and Ben found the fresh air invigorating. He had no particular sense of where he was heading even though town was only a couple of blocks away. He strolled along while the recent developments in the Greenfield murder tumbled over in his mind. Fingerprints, blood, hair, fingerprints, blood, hair. What did that mean? Did that mean she did it? Did that mean she killed him? Or did it just mean that she was in his office at some point? Could there be an innocent explanation to these facts, even if true? And what is the link between Meg and Greenfield? There has to be a link, some link, any link. Sure, she insists that there isn’t one, but that can’t be right. He didn’t want to think about that link right now. It could only mean trouble. Eventually, he would know what the link was and then he could factor that into the equation. Until then, he had to look at it as just another unknown and push it from his mind. “Focus on what you know to be true and see where it takes you,” he said aloud.

  As he thought about all of this, Ben walked more or less aimlessly not focusing at all on where he was going. He looked up a few minutes later to discover that he stood in front of the Starbucks in downtown Clarendon Hills, now shuttered for the night. Ben scowled. He hated coffee and hadn’t tasted so much as a drop in probably twenty years. He never understood how a place like Starbucks could succeed; three or four bucks for a cup of coffee. Who would pay that? Ben heard a noise and turned. A police car turned and moved away from him across the railroad tracks that bisected downtown.

  He stood at the far south end of Clarendon Hills’ small downtown and gazed up at the railroad tracks two blocks to the north. Those two blocks, with shops on either side, encompassed the entire central business district of this small bedroom community in the western suburbs of Chicago. They had a Domino’s Pizza, an Ace Hardware, an ice cream shop, a barber shop, a small restaurant and, of course, the Starbucks. As the tail lights of the police car disappeared from view, Ben saw no signs of life anywhere. Ben liked downtown Clarendon Hills. In the winter, with snow on the ground like tonight, it sort of reminded him of Bedford Falls in It’s A Wonderful Life. Maybe not that idyllic; neighboring Hinsdale probably came closer to Bedford Falls, but still a nice, quaint little village.

  Ben walked across the street to a small pavilion, really nothing more than a tiny wedge-shaped piece of land where Prospect Avenue cuts through downtown Clarendon Hills and then forms a fork. The remaining triangle of land contained a couple of benches and provided Ben with a ready vantage point from which to assess his surroundings and contemplate the puzzle that lay before him. He found an iron bench bare of snow, brushed free by a previous visitor, and sat down. He thought of Greenfield lying on the floor of his office, his skull in pieces, the mystery of his death still intact. What did he know about Greenfield? A womanizer who seemingly took advantage of every opportunity to bed students at the law school, so willing was he to score that he risked the break-up of his marriage to do so.

  What of the scorned wife, the unfulfilled girlfriend and her current husband? What of the female professors at the law school or their spouses? What about Angela Harper? Could it be just a coincidence that the murder occurred at probably the one time during the year when the killer could conceivably come and go and not be discovered on the security cameras? Then there was the drug use. Did he have a problem or didn’t he? Opinions appeared to conflict. Then we have Jason Hahn. What about him? Cocky and hot-tempered, could Jason Hahn or some other student flip out and kill a professor over the outrage and disappointment of a bad final exam grade? “Questions, questions,” Ben said to his solitude, “I’ve got questions and no answers.”

  Ben sat in almost a trance-like state, his legs crossed, elbow on the armrest of the bench and his hand on his chin, looking sightlessly out into the stillness of downtown. After awhile, he couldn’t say how long, he heard a noise behind him and turned to see a police car coast slowly to a stop alongside him. The driver’s window came down and an officer who couldn’t have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five said, “Can I help you?”

  “No,” Ben said, “couldn’t sleep. I live over on Walker. Quiet night?”

  The officer nodded. “Just the way we like them. Well, okay then, take it easy.” The window slid back up and the officer pulled away.

  Ben watched him drive to the end of the block and turn the corner. He rose to his feet and sighed. Still not sleepy.

  30

  Ben sat at his desk and yawned. The lack of sleep the night before took its toll the following morning. He looked at the clock on his desk, only ten-thirty and it felt like six at night. He went downstairs to the kitchen and took a Coke out of the office refrigerator and poured it over ice. Casey Gardner sat at the table sipping a cup of coffee and leafing through the sports section of the Sun-Times. He looked up when Ben came in. “Hey,” he said, “what’s up? Any luck?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m getting more pieces, but I don’t know what the puzzle’s supposed to look like.”

  “What’s with the Coke?” Ben was known for his affinity for root beer. He even kept frosted mugs in his freezer at home.

  “Late night. I need the caffeine.”

  Casey nodded. “So you really think the whole threesome thing has been devalued?” he said in a whisper.

  “Yeah, I think it has. I think it was probably getting worse and then Clinton started arguing that a hummer didn’t count as sex and now pretty much everything goes. I’ve heard that girls in high schools give blow jobs at the drop of a hat and don’t even think twice about it.”

  “Fuck,” Casey said, “where were girls like that when I went to high school?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, “but we both have daughters now and that puts a completely different spin on it for me.”

  “Agreed.”

  Ben heard someone come through the front door and stuck his head out of the kitchen to see Stan Disko shaking off the cold. “Hey Stan, come on in.”

  Disko walked into the kitchen. “Hey Case,” he said, “how’s it going?”

  “Good,” Gardner said without looking up. “Catch any cheating husbands lately?”

  “No, not enough. I could use a few more like that. That’s easy money.”

  “What do you have for me?” Ben asked.

  “Not a whole lot actually,” Disko said sitting down. “Have you talked to Portalski about the drug thing?”

  “Yeah, I have. He says that his sources tell him that Greenfield was a recreational user who stuck mostly to pot and periodically splurged for some coke, but not that often.”

  “I kind of heard the same thing even though I wasn’t looking into it really,” Disko said. “I got a couple of things on some of the students though.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have anything?”

  “Well, I’ve got a little, but nothing jumps right out at you. Nothing on Hinkle. She’s one of the girls who filed a complaint against Greenfield about sexual harassment. She seems like a nice girl from the suburbs. Not much going on there. She is a looker though. Wexler’s father is a rich orthopedic guy from the North Shore.” Disko paged through some notes he had scrawled on a four by six-inch spiral notepad taken from his coat pocket. “Yeah,” he said, “the father’s an orthopedic surgeon up in Glencoe, pulls down some pretty big coin. She’s Daddy’s little girl. Only daughter after three sons, that kind of thing. People tell me that she’s always bitching and complaining about something. She sounds like a spoiled rich brat. She was friends with Hinkle at law school. She may have pulled Hinkle into this thing against Greenfield. Hard to imagine her being behind something like the murder though. I don’t think she has the gumption to actually get her hands dirty, if you know what I mean. This was a pretty
personal crime from what you’re telling me and it doesn’t seem to fit her.”

  Ben nodded. “What about the Thompkins woman … what was her name, Marjorie Thompkins?”

  “Yeah, I was getting to her. She’s worth looking into, I think. She has a long history of making noise, complaining about being wronged, not getting her fair share, being discriminated against, that whole line of BS. She filed complaints against a couple of other professors, either unfair grading or not treating her properly in class. She really works the system.”

  “Not treating her properly in class?” Casey said as he looked up from his newspaper. “This is law school, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “but we don’t want to hurt anybody’s self esteem.”

  Disko got up from his seat and went over and grabbed a mug off of a tray on the counter, filled it three-quarters full with coffee and then dropped in some Coffeemate powder. He stirred it with a spoon found in the drawer and took a sip.

  “Go ahead, Stan, make yourself at home,” Casey said.

  “What?”

  “I’m just blowing you shit.”

  “What about Hahn?” Ben asked, “Did you find out anything about him?”

  “Yeah, I did.” Disko set his cup down on the counter. “That Hahn is a real pistol. He’s a smart kid and a pretty good student when he’s in the mood, but he’s a constant troublemaker.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Ben asked.

  “Temper-related stuff mostly. A few fights in school, loud arguments, belligerent attitude - stuff like that. He’s way too cocky for his own good.”

  “Hmmm,” Ben said taking a sip of his Coke. “I saw that yesterday myself. I started pushing a few buttons on him and next thing you know, he completely blows his cool and storms out.” Ben stood and scratched his head. “Well, I’ve got an appointment with Hinkle and Wexler this afternoon. They work together at some insurance defense shop downtown. Thompkins, on the other hand, won’t take my calls and has basically been blowing me off. She works at Kenner & Black downtown. I’m thinking of showing up down there this afternoon and squeezing her a little. Try and make a point.”