“That’s it, Ms. Justice. As of tomorrow, no as of tonight, you’re not going to have a job. I’m going to go to your boss, and I’m going to tell him that if he doesn’t fire you, I’m not only going to fire your entire firm, but I’m going to make sure that all of my friends also fire your firm. Your firm will lose millions of dollars in business if they keep you on staff. Do you hear me, Ms. Justice? You better be looking for a new job today, because you’re going to be out on your ass tomorrow.”
I didn’t say a word. I just kept walking.
Yet, when I got to my car, I couldn’t help it. I put my head against the steering wheel, and the tears just started to flow. I knew that Matthew Buchanan was going to get me fired for sure. Not that Grey was going to want to do it. I knew that he wasn’t going to want that. He knew that I was one of the best attorneys on the staff. My win-loss record was unmatched by anybody there. I was well-liked around the firm, and I was one of the firm’s hardest workers. I routinely put in 70 hours a week, not just in the office, but I often took work home. I hadn’t had a vacation in years. I always went above and beyond anything they asked me to do. I graduated as a Stanford magna, serving as an editor on my Law Review.
While I knew that I was very valuable to the firm, I also knew that the prospect of losing millions of dollars from Matthew and his friends was going to win out. As unjust as it was, I had a feeling that I was going to be fired the next day. If not in five minutes.
Yet, I also knew that I was going to go ahead and see Carter Dixon. As of now, he was a client of the firm, so he probably wasn’t going to be my client anymore. But I still wanted to see him and get his story.
So I went to the jail and that’s exactly what I was going to do.
Get his story.
Chapter 5
I got to the jail and waited for the guards to bring out my new client. I hadn’t yet received a text message from Grey, firing me, although I knew that that was probably coming. I didn’t quite know what I was going to do if he fired me. What I did know was that I had a condo to upkeep, a mother, and, now, two young girls I was going to have to care for. I had savings and a retirement account, so I was going to be fine for at least little while.
However, I had to wonder about how badly I was going to be blackballed by Matthew Buchanan. He was the kind of small, petty man who took great pleasure in ruining people. He would’ve liked nothing more than to see me back in the kitchen, where I “belonged.” Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. I was going to have to work, no matter what. I just didn’t know exactly where it was I was going to be working. Somehow, I had a feeling that all the big firms were going to be closed off to me, because Matthew was going to go around and poison the well wherever I went. He was just that kind of guy – everybody, to him, were pawns on a chessboard, and he apparently saw himself as being the King.
It always amused me a little bit, just how much more powerful the Queen was on a chessboard than the King. Queens could go anywhere, and Kings could only move one space in every direction. I was just going to have to prove that, in the end, I was the Queen on a chessboard. I was going to have to show to myself, and the world, that I was just as powerful as that goddamned Michael Buchanan.
But first, I was going to have to get through the intake interview with this kid.
I had read through his file a little bit while I waited for him to be brought out. I saw that he was a member of an online community of men that was part of a larger movement known as Incel. I knew that this was a community of men who were involuntarily celibate and often angry at the world, and that the men in this community often shared their grievances online. They were rejected by women and they internalized that rejection, which often caused them to lash out at females in general.
I had done a little research on the community on my phone while I waited for Carter to come out, and I realized that these men often wrote about violent acts that they wanted to take against women. Apparently, this kid was arrested because he not only had made threatening statements about Addison Wentworth, but also because his DNA was found at the crime scene. They found a hair that had belonged to him, and the hair was matched up with his DNA that was apparently on file because he had to give it when he was 15 and arrested for drunk driving. The police taking Carter’s DNA during a routine drunk driving arrest was something that I found to be extremely intrusive. As a lawyer, I always advised my clients not to give the police anything more than what they had to, and that did not include the arrestee’s DNA.
Carter’s DNA wasn’t the only DNA that was found at the scene. There were other DNA samples that were processed at the scene that, thus far, hadn’t been matched up. I knew that the scene was probably contaminated beyond belief, with different people’s DNAs. That was generally the way it was in a typical bedroom – people came in and out, leaving skin cells, hair, and other remnants of their DNA anywhere they went. If people knew that, they would be a lot more careful if they were going to commit a crime.
I had to admit that things weren’t necessarily looking good for this kid. Granted, there seemed to be only one piece of his DNA found at the scene, and that was just a hair. A single hair. Yet, I knew that a single hair was often enough evidence to convict somebody.
I wondered how this kid, who apparently came from a very poor background, could manage to get onto Addison Wentworth’s fancy grounds. I hadn’t yet visited the crime scene, but I knew what kind of a house that she lived in. I read In Touch magazine, as my form of relaxation, and they often had spreads about the opulence inside celebrity homes. They had done a spread on Addison’s house, and it was one of the most magnificent I’d ever seen. It was sprawled out on 10 acres of land, which was extremely difficult to find in LA proper. Her property had a stable of horses on it, tennis courts, even a golf course. The house itself was easily 15,000 square feet. According to the magazine spread, she had everything inside that house, including a wellness spa and fitness center, three movie screening rooms, and at least nine bedrooms. She also had an indoor pool, and, of course, an enormous outdoor infinity pool complete with cabanas and a small house that served as a guest house.
I didn’t know for sure, but I knew that these movie stars were notoriously private, and it would’ve surprised me immensely to find that she didn’t have some kind of a high-tech security system to keep people out. So I wondered how it would be that this kid Carter would’ve been able to get onto the property, let alone get into her room.
No doubt about it, this case was intriguing me. I felt depressed that I probably wasn’t going to be able to finish it. The only way that I would possibly be able to get this case would be if this kid decided to go ahead and fire the firm and hire me on privately. Even then, I would probably face some kind of a lawsuit for poaching him as a client. Grey had brought him in, so if I became Carter’s attorney, it was going to cause a lot of problems.
I couldn’t help but hope that that would be the case – that he would like me right away, and decide that I was going to be his attorney, no matter who I worked for. It was early enough in the case that him hiring me could possibly be done without too much drama.
I knew that Grey had been salivating at the prospect of his firm being behind this case, however. It was just too big of a case for him to let go of without a fight. I closed my eyes, envisioning a lawsuit for breaking my non-compete clause, on top of everything else.
Plus, I had a feeling that this kid didn’t have the money to pay my fee. I knew that O’Donnell and Laurie as a firm had more than enough money to take a case like this pro bono. Me, on my own, might not have that kind of money. Truth be told, I had never tried to go out on my own, hang out a shingle and pay for everything myself. I knew that trying cases was prohibitively expensive, especially if the case involved the hiring of a lot of expert witnesses, such as in a personal injury or medical malpractice case. I knew that everything costed money when you were preparing for trial – depositions, investigation, experts, everything.
&nbs
p; I was cash-light, relatively speaking, as I had invested most of my money into buying my condo. I also was nervous about taking on a huge case like this one on my own, just because I didn’t know if I could get enough clients on my own to pay my bills. That was the problem with being a solo practitioner - you don’t have a guaranteed income and it could mean lean times. I didn’t want to dip into my savings or retirement to get the money to try this case.
I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, I thought to myself. I not only had no clue whether I was going to actually be fired by Grey’s firm, although I thought that I probably would be, but I also had no clue whether this guy was going to go ahead and hire me as his attorney, as opposed to staying with Grey’s firm.
I finally saw Carter come out to greet me. He was a tall and gangly kid, only 16 years old. He had a mop of dark hair, piercing green eyes, and a kind face. He had a smattering of freckles across his nose, and I could tell that underneath the orange jumpsuit, he was fairly skinny. He was an attractive young man.
His appearance slightly confused me. I knew something about the guys who were involved in the Incel community, and a lot of them weren’t appealing to women because they weren’t attractive. Granted, quite a few of them probably weren’t attractive to the opposite sex for other reasons, such as a shady personality, or latent misogyny. Perhaps that was the case with this guy. Maybe his personality was a turnoff.
He bowed his head. “Hello, Ms. Justice.” He nodded his head. “I was told that you were going to be my attorney. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you all day. I’m really glad that you could come and see me this afternoon.”
He certainly was striking me as somebody who wasn’t a total douche bag, so maybe there was something more to it.
“Hi, Mr. Dixon,” I said, shaking his hand. I always chose to call my clients by their surname, as opposed to calling them by their first name, at least until I felt that we were more on equal footing. I felt that this was a sign of respect.
He barely nodded his head. “Thanks for coming to see me,” he repeated. “You don’t know how much it means to me to see a friendly face.”
I found myself feeling slightly charmed by this fresh-faced young guy. I felt something almost maternal stirring within me, and I felt a sense of hope that I might, just might, have enough of a motherly gene that I could take two young girls into my home.
“It’s not a problem, Mr. Dixon,” I said to him. I got out a pad of paper and a tape recorder, which I always carried with me for just these occasions. I liked to record my clients, and I was old-school in how I did it. I didn’t like to use my cell-phone for the purposes of recording my clients, because I was always wary that it might get hacked and fall into the wrong hands.
He looked at me, his eyes registering a sense of hope and black fear. I was well-aware of this particular expression, and it always broke my heart to see it. The truth was, with most of my clients, at least the ones that I used to represent before I started lawyering the white-collar rich bastards that my current firm specialized in taking, I saw this look often. It was the look that some of the softer guys had in their eyes when they met me. The young guys who were often the patsies for the more domineering ones - the guys who got roped into robbing a liquor store or jacking a car because they were pressured by an older sibling or “friend.” They were always terrified, always near tears or in the process of all-out bawling, yet always strangely hopeful. I knew that, for most of their cases, it was a lost cause. They were going to go to prison, often for a long time, and it was always the worst part of my job when I had to break that fact to them.
Looking at this kid, I was thrown back into the old feelings that I had about my clients. I realized that taking the cases of nothing but greedy rich guys for the past few years had jaded me, and had detached me from my emotions about the practice of law. It had been paint-by-numbers for me ever since I landed this big-firm gig, and I realized that, if I was fired because of the woman-hating jerk Michael Buchanan, it just might be a blessing in disguise.
I cleared my throat, realizing that I was holding back tears. Not just for this kid’s situation, but I was choking up just looking at his hopeful and fearful green eyes. I was also near tears because of the stress that had burdened me earlier that day. I was a professional, though, so I didn’t want this kid to see how I felt about his situation.
I cleared my throat and doodled on my yellow pad with my pen, trying to compose myself. “Okay,” I finally said after what had seemed like a million years of me staring down at the pad in front of me. “Mr. Dixon. I’m here to do the initial intake and answer any questions you might have, so go ahead and tell me what it is that you need to tell me. Then we’ll go over what the initial evidence shows about this case, and hopefully you’ll have a good answer for me for everything I ask of you. That’s my goal, anyhow.”
He barely nodded his head, and he looked down at the table. He blinked rapidly several times, and I realized that he, too, was holding back a well of tears. He looked over at the guard station as he stalled. “They listening to us?” he asked me anxiously.
I shook my head. “No. They’re not listening to us. They can’t listen to us. Anything that you say to me has to stay between us. Attorney-client confidentiality. It’s absolute, which means that what is said in here stays in here.” I smiled. “Kinda like Vegas - whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, and whatever happens in this room stays in this room. So, go ahead and tell me anything that you need to tell me.”
I took a deep breath, wondering if it was the right thing for me to tell this kid that he could unload on me if he wanted to. I was essentially telling him that if he was guilty, he could tell me. Truth be told, I never actually wanted to know for sure that a criminal client was guilty. If I knew that for sure, I wouldn’t be able to put him on the stand, if putting him on the stand meant that he was going to try to lie about his innocence. It was always better to engender a sense of plausible deniability, I found, then to find out for sure that my client committed the crime for which he was charged.
I finally just shook my head. “No, I’m so sorry. Tell me the facts of the case, but I don’t want to know whether or not you committed the crime.” I looked at his confused face, and I knew that I was going to have to explain myself. “You see, here’s the thing. If you tell me that you’re guilty of the crime, then it limits our defense greatly. I wouldn’t be able to put you on the stand, because you would have to admit on the stand that you did it. That is, if you tell me right now that you did. However, if I have any kind of inkling that you might not be guilty, then I can go ahead and put you on the stand, even if you really did do it.”
The kid nodded his head. “I know. I’ve seen episodes of Law and Order. I know all about suborning perjury. That’s what it’s called, right?”
“Yes, that’s what it’s called. Suborning perjury. Very good.” I knew that I sounded condescending, like the layperson couldn’t possibly understand about perjury subordination, when I knew that a lot of people watch procedural television shows and that they probably knew as much as I did about the criminal justice system. “So I need for you to tell me in your own words what happened, and we can go from there. Just don’t tell me if you did it.”
He smiled ruefully. “Don’t worry, Ms. Justice, I won’t tell you that I did it. Because I didn’t do it. I have no clue how it was that I managed to get roped into this. When the cops arrested me, they told me that my DNA was found at the crime scene. They told me that they found a hair in Ms. Wentworth’s bedroom. My hair.” He shook his head. “I have no idea how it is that my hair got in her bedroom. You have to believe me. I know about those movie stars. I know that they live behind a gate that’s impossible to get behind. I know that they have very top-of-the-line security systems. I just don’t know how it is that I’m supposed to be able to get past all that. I’m not that smart, and I don’t know so much about computers that I’d be able to bypass a security system. If I would’ve gone up to
that lady’s home, I would’ve been stopped at the gate, and if I would’ve tried to climb over the gate, the police would’ve gotten me right then and there. I just wouldn’t know how to do any of that.”
“So you didn’t know her? You never met her?”
He shook his head. “You’ve read my file. You know what kind of a background I have. I live in a two-bedroom apartment with my mom, in the Skid Row neighborhood. My mom’s a drunk, my dad’s not around. I mean my dad died. My mom lives off of his Social Security, but she drinks it all down. I can’t count the number of times that we’ve been evicted from places, or the number of times we’ve been threatened with eviction. Some people around my apartment building have warned me that we’re going to have to move out of this place soon, because it’s gonna either be condemned or the owner’s going to torch it. That’s what they say. The owner’s going to burn our building down, to get the insurance money. That’s how bad our building is.” He leaned back in his chair. “So I ask you, do you think that I’m the kind of guy you would know a hot movie star like Addison Wentworth?”
I sighed. “Then I guess that I need to try to figure out how your hair ended up at the scene. That’s what I can’t figure out.” That was one of the things I wrote down on my yellow pad of paper. “Obviously, somebody was trying to frame you for this crime. At least, if what you’re saying is true about your not knowing her, and your not being able to get onto her grounds, then your hair could have only gotten in her bedroom by somebody placing it there.”
“I guess.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Everything about this case is confusing the hell out of me. I mean, the cops, when they brought me in for questioning, they showed me some of my online rants. Some of the rants that I made specifically about Addison Wentworth, about how I wanted to meet her, and how I had fantasies about raping and killing her. He showed me about 10 messages that I posted on the Incel site.” He shook his head. “Only one problem with that. I didn’t write any of them. None of them. You have to believe me, Ms. Justice, I don’t write things like that. I’m a part of that community, yes. But I’ve never gotten in with the crowd that talks about their dark fantasies. In fact, I try to lecture them some when I read their postings online. There’s just no call for that. No call at all. I don’t hate women. I just feel that I’m ugly, and I’ve always been rejected by them. But that doesn’t mean that I have fantasies about hurting them.
Dark Justice Page 5