An Equal Justice

by Chad Zunker

  David got a surprise call around eleven that night. Per usual, he was still at his office desk. The H&K hallways were quiet. Even Tidmore had already gone home. His rival had seemed defeated of late and was no longer seriously challenging David about who was going to leave the office first each night. The phone call was from Benny, of all people. He said he was inside the lobby of his building—could he come up to see him? David called down to building security and asked them to allow the old man up the elevator.

  David met Benny in the firm’s lobby. “You okay?”

  Benny nodded, seemed just fine. He wore his usual trench coat, black knit cap, and work boots, although he was carrying a small black duffel bag with him. “Yes, I’m fine. Sorry to just show up at your office like this, Shep, but I was downtown tonight handling another matter. I thought you might still be working based off what you’ve told me about this place. You sure it’s okay for me to be here? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “Of course!” David replied, although he knew it was only okay because no one else was in the office tonight. That thought was discouraging. Benny would probably never make it past the receptionist—she’d have security up there so fast, it would make Benny’s head spin. Although he hated to admit it, David was glad the old man hadn’t come knocking during normal work hours and put him in the same awkward position that Larue had on the sidewalk the other day. He still had not had the opportunity to tell the kid he was sorry.

  “Let’s go back to my office, Benny.”

  He led Benny down the pristine hallways. The old man seemed to be taking in everything, his eyes bouncing from office to office. When they got to his office, David cleared a stack of binders from one of his leather guest chairs and invited Benny to make himself comfortable. As the old man sat and placed his duffel bag on the carpet by the chair, Benny seemed a tad uneasy. David wondered if he was uncomfortable being at the firm. He didn’t figure the old man had been inside too many high-dollar offices like this one over the past ten years. Or maybe ever.

  Sitting in his chair, David said, “So what brings you downtown this late?”

  “My friend Willy. He’s been having health issues. I think he might have pneumonia, so I dragged him over to Saint David’s a few hours ago. Willy is so stubborn. If not for me, he’d probably lay there in the park all night, hacking up a lung, until he damn near coughed himself to death.”

  “You’re a good man,” David said.

  “We’ve got to look after each other out there.”

  “I agree. You want something to eat? We still have leftover Chinese food in the kitchen from a catered dinner earlier tonight. I could warm you up a plate, if you want. It’d be no trouble at all. What do you say?”

  “If it’s no trouble, that’d be real nice of you, thanks.”

  “Sure thing!” David hopped up, welcoming an opportunity to show Benny some hospitality. “You just sit here and relax, okay? Make yourself at home. If you want, you can even finish up that legal brief sitting there on my desk.”

  David winked at Benny, who laughed.

  “I haven’t gone back to law school just yet, Shep,” Benny said.

  Leaving his office, David crisscrossed the quiet hallways until he entered the firm’s spacious kitchen. There were two circular tables in a corner surrounded by chairs. A flat-screen TV on the wall showed a local news station. He stepped over to the two stainless-steel refrigerators, which were always stuffed full of extra food, so no associate ever felt the need to venture outside the walls of the firm. Opening the first one, David found several large plastic containers of Chinese food. From a cabinet, he grabbed a plate and began loading it to the edges with chicken fried rice, shrimp chow mein, sweet and sour pork, and sesame chicken.

  Placing the plate in the microwave, he warmed it up for a few minutes. While he was waiting, he turned back to the TV and casually watched. The news station cut away to a series of local commercials. The first was a car dealer wearing a leotard who was engaged in an outlandish wrestling match with a muscle-bound guy. The car dealer was talking about putting a headlock on car prices, or something really dumb like that. David did a quick double take at the TV screen. There was something familiar about the other guy in the commercial. When the microwave dinged, David grabbed the plate, snagged a cold bottle of water from the fridge, and headed back to his office.

  Returning, he found Benny standing inside Marty Lyons’s corner office next door. The office lights were on, and Benny was staring over toward the expansive windows that looked out over the vast city. “That’s one incredible view, Shep.”

  “Yeah, the best view on the entire floor,” David agreed, before quickly ushering Benny out. He didn’t think Lyons would be too happy to know that a homeless man had been in his office tonight. David didn’t need another reason to have Lyons yell at him.

  Returning to his office, David handed Benny the plate of food and the water bottle.

  “Man, Shep, this looks good. Thank you.”

  Benny sat in the guest chair again while David returned to his executive chair.

  “You got a real nice view, too,” Benny mentioned.

  “I guess,” David replied, spinning around to look out the window. The view from his new office peered right over the top of the Texas Capitol. “Believe it or not, Benny, I don’t get to spend much time looking out this window. My face is always buried in paperwork.”

  “Too bad. Life is short. You need to stop and smell the roses.”

  David smiled. First, Thomas. Now, Benny. Why was everyone ganging up on him lately? As Benny devoured the Chinese food, they made some small talk about the other guys at the Camp. David began to get some background info on each of his new friends: Doc, Curly, Elvis, Shifty, and Larue. Jen was right in that each of the guys had faced a serious loss of family connection at some point that had pushed him to the streets. For a few of them, like Benny, this loss had happened a long time ago, and they never had fully recovered.

  “You mind if I ask about your family?” David said to Benny.

  The old man had never openly mentioned anything, so David was hesitant to ask him directly about it. He figured there might be a lot of pain there somewhere. Chewing, Benny considered the question for a long moment.

  “I had a wife,” he said. “I lost her to cancer a long time ago.”

  “I’m real sorry to hear that.”

  He nodded, stuffed his mouth with fried rice. “She was a good woman. Took real good care of me, even though I wasn’t much of a husband to her all those years. I regret that now.” He sighed, stared at his food, added, “I regret a lot of things.”

  “Any children?” David asked.

  Benny slowly nodded. “One. A daughter.”

  Benny didn’t expound on that, so David didn’t push him. Instead, he tried to balance the conversation by talking about his own family. “I lost my father when I was a kid. Car wreck.”

  Benny shook his head. “Tough for a boy to lose his father so young.”

  “Yeah, then I lost my mother to heart failure when I was seventeen.”

  Benny looked up at him with sad eyes. “Damn, son, I’m real sorry. That’s a shame. Amazing you turned out to be such a good man after something like that.”

  “I’m not a good man, Benny. I’m not sure what I am anymore.”

  Benny immediately waved that off. “Nonsense! There is a lot of good inside you. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The boys all see it. Even Jen Cantwell sees it.”

  Benny gave him a sly wink. David smiled.

  “She’s a real sweet gal, that Jen,” Benny added. “She’s helped a lot of hurting people.”

  “She lost her brother on the streets a couple of years ago.”

  Benny nodded. “I tried to help Jack. But the demons were too much for him. He was a good kid. A veteran, like so many of us. That was a real tragedy.”

  “Based off what I saw at the memorial service the other day, it sounds like these streets are filled with tragedy all ye
ar long.”

  “Yes, they are.” Benny put his plate over to the side. “That’s actually one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you tonight. I could use your help.”

  “Of course, Benny. What do you need?”

  The old man pulled a couple of sheets of folded paper out of his trench coat pocket. Smoothing them out, he placed them on top of the desk for David to view more easily. The first was an online printout from a Craigslist ad about a local piece of property that was currently for sale. Twenty acres of undeveloped land out near the airport. The current price tag for the property was $120,000. David wondered why Benny had the listing.

  “I’m interested in this property,” Benny said, placing a crooked finger on the paper. “Do you know much about real estate acquisition?”

  “A little,” David said, curious. “What do you mean by interested?”

  “I want to purchase the land.”

  David looked up at his new friend. He expected to see a funny smile form on the man’s weathered face, as if he were telling a joke, but Benny just sat there looking intently at the paper on the desk. Was he serious? He couldn’t be—this was crazy. David recalled discovering the thousands of dollars in cash in Benny’s dirty old sock, which he still had a lot of questions about, but this was on a different level altogether. A hundred and twenty thousand dollars? Still, he didn’t want to come right out and potentially embarrass the old man.

  “What’re you going to do with twenty acres?”

  This time, a smile did form on the man’s face. “I’m going to build a village on it. Let me show you.” He smoothed out a second sheet of paper, where he’d drawn a meticulous diagram that looked a lot like a community map of sorts. Benny stood, hovered over the paper, and started pointing out different things on the map. “It’ll have a place here for camping tents, but it will also have a section over here for real homes, like all those tiny homes you see on TV these days. Nothing fancy. But real homes with four walls, floors, and ceilings, where a man can lock up his possessions and sleep in a real bed at night. I plan to build dozens of these tiny homes. Over here, I want to build a bathhouse with real plumbing that has several private showers and toilets.” He then pointed to the middle of the page. “Right here, I want this to be a community center. A place where everyone can gather, where we can hold church and have fellowship, with a real kitchen installed, where we can cook up a lot of good food. This here is the centerpiece of the village.”

  It dawned on David that the drawing was a glorified version of the Camp. Benny’s wrinkled eyes lit up like fireworks as he described in detail his vision for the community. David found it sweet—if not ludicrous. With the proposed purchase of the twenty-acre property, the development of the land, and all the complex construction costs involved, Benny’s little dream village would probably cost several million dollars. Still, sitting there staring at the old man, David had never seen Benny look more excited. David could tell this was somehow very real to him. He didn’t have the heart to tell Benny he couldn’t imagine how he’d pull this off.

  Benny looked up at him. “Can you help me, Shep? I realize there’ll be a lot to this, with the purchasing of the property, the city permits, all the meetings with different land developers and construction companies. I figure I’m going to need a really sharp lawyer wearing a nice suit to help me pull this all together. Otherwise, no one will take me seriously.”

  “Sure, Benny. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  Benny seemed overjoyed to hear him say that. “See, you are a good man.”

  “I’m trying.” David introduced a new topic just to see what the old man had to say about it. “Let’s talk about funding for your village.”

  Benny nodded, a pensive look crossing his face. “Yes, it’s going to cost a lot of money.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I need your help with that, too,” Benny admitted.

  David figured the old man was about to ask if David could help raise the money among all his rich lawyer friends and their clients. He dreaded having to tell Benny that his lawyer friends—if he could even call them that—probably couldn’t care less. He’d be lucky to raise $100 around the office. Hell, if he even tried, Lyons would likely tear into him.

  Benny didn’t ask him to raise any money. Instead, he asked, “What do you know about offshore numbered accounts?”

  David tilted his head. “Well, I know wealthy people sometimes use them to be discreet with money and with their direct connection to it.”

  “Are they illegal?”

  “Not necessarily. Why do you ask?”

  “I need your help getting one set up.”

  David sighed. A secret numbered account? How far was he supposed to go with this conversation? At some point, he didn’t feel like he was doing Benny any favors by entertaining all this nonsense. He again thought about the cash stuffed in Benny’s sock. “Well, Benny, we’d have to be talking about a lot of money to pursue opening a bank account like that. And I don’t mean a couple thousand dollars.”

  “Right, right,” Benny agreed. “Would a million dollars do the trick?”

  “Well, certainly.”

  Benny again didn’t flinch. “So, can you help me set up a numbered account? It would really mean a lot to me and the boys.”

  David stared at the old man. Every part of his face was pleading with him. Even if it was a fantasy, David just couldn’t say no to him right now. “Sure. I’ll help.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Two days later, a private plane touched down in Austin in the dark. The sun wouldn’t be up for a few more hours. The pilot shuttled the plane over to a private hangar, where a black Suburban with heavily tinted windows sat idly waiting. Grabbing his travel bag, Frank Hodges stepped off the plane, stretched, looked around, and descended the short stairs. He’d slept well during the flight. The plane had picked him up late last night in Sao Paolo, where Frank had been enjoying beach time with Maria, his curvy young girlfriend, who still had family in Brazil. His client had called with an all-out emergency. They needed him back right now.

  Annoyed, because his client had been sloppy the first time around by choosing to dismiss him before the job was complete, Frank gave him a hefty price tag. Four times what he’d normally ask to drop everything and jump on a plane. His client immediately agreed to wire the full amount to his account. It was hard to turn down a desperate client with such deep pockets. Maria wasn’t pleased. He’d already promised her he’d take the whole month off. She’d pouted the whole time he’d packed his bag. So he’d upped his next offer to her. When he finished this job, he’d give her two uninterrupted months and a trip to Greece. She seemed happy with that.

  Climbing into the back of the Suburban, Frank found his client waiting for him in the black leather seats. Even at four in the morning, the man wore a suit and tie and was all business. There were no cordial greetings. As the driver of the Suburban eased the vehicle out of the hangar, his client opened his briefcase and handed him a copy of an anonymous email they’d apparently received the day before—the source of their sudden panic.

  “One million?” Frank whistled, reading the brief email. As he’d expected, the $10,000 cash drop six weeks ago was simply a test—whoever was behind all this was now going for the full amount.

  “Do you think it could be Benjamin Dugan?” his client asked.

  Frank shrugged. “We’ll have to check everything out.”

  “It has to be him,” his client said, sighing. Staring out the SUV window, he added, “He’s the only one left.”

  Frank grimaced at those words. He knew what that meant. It didn’t sit well. But with enough money wired to his account to take up to a full year off, he decided he would finish the job and then have nothing else to do with this client. “I’ll need full access to everything to track this guy down. You understand? I can’t be handcuffed.”

  “You’ll have it. We need this finished.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  That whole week,
David began secretly researching everything that Nick Carlson had been working on right before his suicide, trying to figure out the mysterious “client” who may have been at the center of his tense text exchange with Lyons—and the one he’d mentioned in passing to his girlfriend regarding potential blackmail. Nick’s client list was long, as he’d been actively involved in more than thirty open matters. David went through the clients one by one, looking for hints of something odd. He found nothing.

  He called the police department and asked to speak with the detective who had handled Nick’s suicide case. He gave the detective a false name, said he was an attorney handling Nick’s estate, and he began poking around to see if there was any suspicion of foul play. The detective assured him that the suicide was open-and-shut. Nick had taken an extension cord from his garage, roped it around a hanging beam in his living room, tied the cord around his neck, stood on a kitchen stool, and then finished himself off. Estimated time of death was between ten p.m. and midnight. The girlfriend found him the next day around noon and called the police. She’d told the detective that Nick had been under a tremendous amount of work stress, which confirmed the basics of what they’d found in Nick’s suicide note. The detective said Nick was really drunk when he killed himself. The coroner tested his blood alcohol concentration at .18. When David questioned the detective on a man’s ability to concoct a hanging system of this sort while being so intoxicated, the detective began to get defensive and irritated. At that point, David quickly thanked him for the information and hung up.

  By the end of the week, David was questioning everything. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he hadn’t really seen the white-haired man outside Nick’s house. Maybe it had been someone else.

  Maybe there really was nothing more to Nick’s suicide.

  That sure would make David’s life easier.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The buzzing on his nightstand startled David awake. He stared bleary-eyed at the digital clock. Two in the morning? Who the hell was calling him right now? He’d only been asleep for maybe an hour after pulling another late night at the office. He reached over, somehow found his cell phone in the dark of the bedroom. Holding it up, he didn’t recognize the number. He cursed whoever was on the other end, hit “Ignore,” and then tried to curl back up under the warm bedcovers. A new round of buzzing started almost immediately. David grabbed the phone again. Same damn number. Come on!