Tell No Lies (35 page)

"Jim Wolfe."

"Mr. Wolfe. You're aware that I'm a lawyer."

"Yes, sir, of course, but you're not Ms. Dodson's lawyer. There's no privilege attached to your communication."

"Thank you for that little legal lesson. I'm well aware there's no privilege in a court of law, but in the court of media, it's the privilege between friends not to have their discussions plastered on the front page of tomorrow's paper." He turned and started walking again.

"Was Ms. Dodson aware that authorities searched her home late last night?"

He kept walking, trying not to let Wolfe see his surprise. The cats. The gun.
There's no law against having a gun
. He wondered if she had it properly registered. Strike number two. One more, would she be out?
 

"Has anyone informed her that the authorities think they found the murder weapon?"

The murder weapon? Her gun?
He struggled to maintain his composure.
 

"Sir?" Wolfe persisted.

"Mr. Wolfe, as I'm sure you're aware, my office has disqualified itself from this case. I don't think it would be proper to comment on it." He had to get away from this guy and call Earl.

"Do you know whether they're going to seek the death penalty? After all, it was you who said it would be enforced in appropriate cases."

Jesus, she hadn't even been arraigned, and they were already out for blood. He suppressed the urge to turn and slug the guy. "Yes, but I'm not handling this case, am I? So I'm not making the decision. Now, as I said, I won't be commenting. You'll need to speak to Mr. Sterling."

He climbed the steps of the courthouse, Wolfe still shadowing him. Just inside, he nodded to the guard as he bypassed the metal detector. "I think Mr. Wolfe has something on him that might set it off," he said to the guard. "It's probably the belt."

"Damn it, Hilliard," the reporter muttered as he began to unbuckle.

Glancing back to make sure his ploy worked, Jack ducked into the men's room. He pulled out his phone and called Earl.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

JACK HAD BEEN to Clark & Cavanaugh's offices before, but not since Earl joined the firm. He'd assumed his first visit would be of a more celebratory nature.

Earl's office was on the twenty-eighth floor of a twenty-eight-story building. As Jack rode the elevator, he considered whether to tell him the whole truth, despite his promise to Jenny. But he recognized that part of his desire to confess had more to do with unburdening himself than with advancing Jenny's defense.

His old boss greeted him when he stepped off the elevator. "Do you feel like the top banana yet?" Earl asked as they shook hands. They hadn't seen each other since just after the election.

"Not since this case broke." He followed Earl past the receptionist's desk and down a long hall of partitioned secretarial cubicles. He lowered his voice to avoid being heard. "They picked her up on Sunday night, and I just got in to see her today."

"What was the problem?" Earl stopped at the end of the hall and waved Jack on into the corner office without waiting for an answer to the question. Jack heard him request coffee as he wandered into the large room. His eyes were immediately drawn to the walls of glass and the pink reflection of the late afternoon sun on the towering legs of the Arch. He edged closer to the windows and looked down at the river.
 

"They even gave you a corner office, huh?" he commented when Earl joined him.

"I don't have many clients yet, but I've got a name. That's worth just as much if not more."

Jack felt himself blush, but if Earl noticed, he ignored it. "So why'd you have trouble getting in to see her?" he asked. He sat on a leather couch in front of the south-facing window and motioned for Jack to take a seat.

"I'm not sure, exactly. That asshole from Franklin County kept jerking me around. Claimed he wasn't sure if I could see her, even though the whole office has disqualified itself."

"That's bullshit."

"Tell me about it."

Earl loosened his tie and undid his top button. "Can I give you some advice?"

"Don't you always? Why should it be any different now that you're here?"

"I'm serious, Jack."

"So am I."

"If you don't act like the boss, they're not going to treat you like the boss. I don't care if you're new to the job. No more Mr. Nice Guy. You need to assert yourself. Raise your voice if you have to. It's a different game now."

Indignation crept through Jack's body. It was as if Earl was accusing him of acting. "I am who I am, Earl."

"That's true. And I respect that, obviously. Just don't worry too much about making friends."

Jack nodded.

"So what's going on?"

"I don't know. I just know she didn't do it."

Earl cleared his throat. He leaned back into the couch with his hands behind his head and frowned. "Well, despite your friendship with her, I beg to differ about what you 'know.'  As a prosecutor, you're well aware that stranger things have happened."

Jack tensed. "I said, I know she didn't do it. I don't want you representing her unless you believe that."

Silence filled the room. Jack's insistence that Earl accept Jenny's innocence without question was unwarranted, and they both knew it. It wasn't what he was paid to do. The challenge remained unanswered when a knock at the door announced the arrival of their coffee.

"Okay," Earl said when the secretary had left. "We'll just skip the topic of guilt or innocence for now. You're too close. Why don't you tell me about your visit to the jail?"

Jack considered repeating his demand but thought better of it. He
was
too close, but not in the way Earl thought. He feared that if he pushed the issue, he'd be tempted to reveal his involvement just to convince him.
 

"She told me some stuff that leads me to believe she's been set up."

"Go on. I can tell you already have a suspect."

"You'll think this sounds crazy, but I've got a feeling that Newman's involved."

"Well, there's obviously some connection. They claim they've been investigating her."

Earl's lack of shock at Jack's suggestion reassured him. "Right, right.
Mendelsohn
claims so. I'll get to that in a sec." Jack was eager to tell Earl everything at once; he tried to slow down.
 

"Listen, she was brought in Sunday night, right? She told me she called Rob Kollman, but no one's been over to talk to her yet. And get this: she told me she thought her arraignment was scheduled for sometime next week."

"What's that prove, except they're inept." He waved away Jack's concern. "I'll have her out by tomorrow."

Jack knew Earl never really respected the big firms that practiced only civil law. To Earl, if it wasn't criminal law, it wasn't real law. Everything else represented nothing more than a means of transferring wealth.

"No. Today. I promised her you'd get her out
today
."
 

"Christ, Jack! I'm not a miracle worker."

"She's scared. I have to get her out of there. You must have some favors you can call in."

"What else?"

"I find out from a reporter who snagged me leaving the jail that they've already searched her house. Jenny didn't mention it, so I don't think she knows."

"Merely more ineptitude." Earl was unimpressed. "Let's hope they didn't find anything incriminating."

"She's got a gun," Jack blurted.

Earl shrugged. "And I'm sure it's being tested right now. Unless it's the same gun used to kill Maxine Shepard, it doesn't matter. You know that."

"The reporter said they think they found the murder weapon."

"Bullshit. He's just trying to get a rise out of you. Until they've tested it, he has no basis for saying anything like that." He got up and repositioned himself on the arm of the couch so that he could look outside. "Come on, Jack, nothing you've told me points to Newman. I'm right. You are too close to this, in more ways than one."
 

"I'm not done. I've saved the best for last."

"I'm waiting."

"Look, I'm not alleging a conspiracy. But there are those at the firm who I believe would do anything to protect their butts."

Earl's lips tightened. He was obviously waiting for the evidence to back up Jack's claims.

"You know, Earl, you never asked why they fired me."

"It didn't matter. I'd heard enough good things about you, and I never give much credence to the reasons a big firm gives for letting someone go. It happens too often, for political reasons."

"What'd they tell you?"

"I never called them."

"What?" Jack was incredulous.

"I told you. It wouldn't have mattered to me." He tilted his head and searched Jack's face. "Okay, so why'd they fire you?"

Jack thought back to the night Mendelsohn called him into his office, one just as big as Earl's but much more opulent. Jack had known, even before he reached the door, that when he left that night he wouldn't be coming back. He knew that after talking to Mendelsohn he'd return to his office to find a guard and a few empty boxes for his personal things. He'd be watched as he packed, and then they'd escort him from the building.

He remembered sitting on the other side of Mendelsohn's large glass-top desk, listening to him claim that Jack really didn't fit the firm's culture, that he really wasn't a team player, that he didn't share the same goals and probably would never be happy there, and that they were doing him a favor by letting him go. And all the while they both knew it was doublespeak for,
You disobeyed me, you crossed me, and you must pay
. And they both knew, without it being said, that if Jack protested, tried to go public with what had really happened, Mendelsohn would deny it. As the older, more well-known and respected attorney, he would be the one whom everyone believed. Back then, he had the power to ruin Jack's career.
 

"I'd worked on a product liability case with Mendelsohn. It was pretty obvious our client was going to lose, that they were negligent, but of course Mendelsohn insisted on fighting, on papering the plaintiff to death so they'd settle more quickly and, hopefully, for less money. But the plaintiff's attorney was smart, and tough, and he knew they had a strong case, so he papered us right back. I ended up doing massive amounts of document review at the client's manufacturing plant to respond to the endless document requests. I came across a very damaging intercompany memo. The minute I read it, I knew the case was no longer about negligence, but intentional tort. It wasn't what our client 'should have known,' but what they did know and didn't do anything about."

Earl was riveted. "The client showed you this memo?"

Jack shook his head. "No. You have to understand, I reviewed a lot of documents. A lot. This was a copy. I don't think they realized it existed. We never found the original. They had probably destroyed it, without telling us."

"What'd you do?"

"I went to Mendelsohn, of course, thinking we could brainstorm, figure out some privilege to hold it back or somehow justify to ourselves why it wasn't within the scope of the requests."

Jack stopped and thought of his statement to Jenny:
Evidence can be twisted
. At the time, he thought he'd done the right thing. That's what lawyers did, wasn't it? That's what they were paid for, to use the rules and bend them in their client's favor. Now, for the first time, he wondered if he was only slightly above Mendelsohn on the low end of the ethics scale.
 

"Jack?"

"He told me to destroy it. Pretend like it never existed, that I'd never seen it."

Earl immediately understood the implications of Jack's accusation. "And?"

"And I didn't, of course. I spent a lot of unbillable time in the library researching how I might be able to legitimately withhold it, but, not surprisingly, I couldn't come up with anything. I agonized over what to do." He laughed bitterly. "You know me, Earl. Mr. Nice Guy."

"You produced it."

"Yes. Although I did bury it in the middle of a bunch of irrelevant junk. I figured I'd at least buy some time. I hoped the case might settle before they found it. I felt guilty just for doing that."

"Mendelsohn found out and fired you over it?"

Jack nodded. "But not right away. It took a while. Mendelsohn was furious. He assumed that I'd done what he instructed, so he never even discussed the memo with the client, or what could happen to the case if the plaintiff knew about it. Had he done so, he could have encouraged them to settle for what the plaintiff was demanding at the time. Which, needless to say, was a lot less than what the case eventually settled for."

"Or
you
could have."
 

"What?"

"You could have discussed it with the client."

Jack shook his head vehemently. "It wasn't like that. I wasn't at that level. The most I ever interacted with the client was at the plant, talking to the secretaries." He knew the point Earl was trying to make: Jack wasn't completely blameless. "But, yeah, you're right. After I was no longer in the middle of it, I realized I could have done things differently. Had I been thinking straight, I would have told Mendelsohn right away that I produced it, so that he could counsel the client. I still would have endured his wrath, but at least the client would have had the chance to settle before they came across it. If it had settled early, no one would ever have bothered to look in that pile of documents we produced.

"He waited a few months before getting rid of me, so it would look unrelated. But he made it clear to me, in his own cryptic way, what my firing was about."

"But he still contributed to your campaign." Earl spoke matter-of-factly, not as if he doubted Jack.

Jack smiled, again feeling the small sense of satisfaction he'd felt when Mendelsohn's check arrived. "Oh, yeah. Given the recent stuff that's been going on with him, he probably thought he'd buy himself some extra insurance to maintain my silence. He doesn't need any more problems."