Against the Wind (49 page)

He listens for another moment.

“I will, and thank you.”

He hangs up, looks at us.

“The governor thinks they deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

“If there was one,” Robertson replies, hanging tough. “The governor’s entitled to his opinion, but the law’s the law.”

Stubborn bastard. You’ve got to hand it to him.

Martinez looks at him coolly. “I’m aware of the law,” he responds without emotion.

There’s a letter of commendation from the warden. Also a strong plea from the eight guards and the three women. The bikers, especially Lone Wolf, saved their lives.

“While in chambers, I received a telephone call from the governor,” Martinez states. We’re back in open court. “He asked that I give whatever consideration I can to the plight of these men who helped avert what could have been a major tragedy.” He pauses, looks off above our heads. Then he’s back to business. “I thanked him for his advice and support, but I reminded him that I have to base my decision on the law. And nothing else. He understood.” He bends down to our brief, looks up again.

“Please understand that I am casting no aspersions whatsoever on you or anyone in your department or on the police,” Judge Martinez now says, staring intently at Robertson.

“In fact, in looking at the present evidence, I believe that a second jury, in a second trial, will come to the same conclusion that the first jury came to. But under the circumstances, I feel it is proper, and will serve the cause of justice, that these men be allowed the chance to have another trial, because even if there is only a one percent chance that there was perjured testimony at the first trial, fairness compels us to examine the case once again.

“Therefore, we are granting defendants’ motion for an evidentiary hearing for retrial on the original charges.”

Robertson accosts me in the hallway.

“I guess you’re feeling pretty good,” he says. He’s surprisingly calm for having lost one he wanted so badly.

“Better,” I reply.

“This was politics,” he says, his voice under control. “Pure and simple. You were a hero, you helped the state out of a mess, we threw you a bone. Now we’re even. They’re still guilty and they’re still going to pay for what they did, Will. And I’m going to personally escort that little old lady in the wheelchair to the execution when it happens.”

I watch him walk away, ramrod-straight. It isn’t a case with him anymore; it’s a cause, a vendetta. Let him rain on our parade. We won today. We’re alive.

P
ATRICIA WAS FIRED. SHE
calls, naturally, while I’m in a closed-door meeting. An important meeting, with an important client and his wife. A client who, if I do my job right and well, is going to make me a lot of money.

Susan tip-toes in, apologizing profusely for disturbing us, of course she wouldn’t have if Patricia hadn’t told her it was urgent. She whispers this message in my ear, that my former wife needs my counsel immediately; then quickly, before my blood-pressure starts elevating dangerously, she assures me that Patricia wanted me to know it isn’t about Claudia, Claudia isn’t hurt or anything like that. It isn’t about her at all. Just so I don’t panic.

“If it isn’t about Claudia, then whatever else it is doesn’t matter,” I quietly tell Susan. I turn, smile reassuringly at the clients. “My daughter lives with her mother, in Seattle. My former wife … the first one,” I add, needlessly modifying. Shut up already, man, they don’t want to know your entire history. They’ve got their own problems.

They smile back understandingly; they have children of their own. They smile back because they want me to like them. Because they need me, or think they do.

“I’ll have to call Patricia back. Don’t bother us again,” I instruct her, “unless it’s the Supreme Court or the governor. On the murder appeal.”

Susan apologizes to my clients and leaves. They smile back understandingly; smiling’s about all these unfortunate people have right now.

This man I’m with is the first potential new major-money client I’ve had since the firm and I parted company. His name is Clinton Hodges and he’s permanently paralyzed from the chest down with a spinal-cord injury. He can move his head and neck freely, talk and swallow, and he’s got limited hand and arm mobility, but not much. Not enough to hand-push his new Everest & Jennings wheelchair. He had to get the motorized version, the one that lets you do all the work even if you can only move one finger. If you can’t move even one finger, sometimes you can learn to drive the chair by blowing into a tube. Clinton’s not that bad off; he can move his fingers. People like Clinton learn, over time, to count their blessings in tiny increments.

He’s learning how to drive the wheelchair; some days he does better than other days. Some days he drives the machine into the wall and can’t turn it around. His wife or the technician will find him spinning his wheels like a stuck wind-up toy, pinned up against a corner.

Forget his functioning normally again; this poor fellow won’t even have the ability to have a regular bowel movement. He’ll need constant attendance and monitoring for the rest of his life. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to feed himself—if someone hooks the food tray onto his chair, places the utensil in his hand, and folds the hand closed.

He’s thirty-three years old. When he was able to stand on his own two feet he was six-three, 215 pounds. His wife is terrific-looking, a statuesque brunette. Their oldest kid is eight, and the baby is just a year old.

Before the accident last year, Clinton coached his son’s T-ball team to a league championship. He’s one of those extremely physically-oriented guys—owns his own construction company, with sixteen full-time employees, which he built from scratch. Last year they netted over a million dollars, and he’d still be out at a site on the weekend, personally pouring concrete. His company’s built up so much business all over the Four Corners he had to get a pilot’s license and buy his own airplane. It was delivered less than six months ago, while he was in intensive care, being fitted for a halo brace.

Now he’s strapped into a wheelchair, straining every muscle that still responds, just to try to scratch an itch on his nose. Sometimes the itch goes unscratched.

Personal-injury cases are how lawyers get rich. Lawyers like me, who don’t have clients like Mobil or IBM. A $3 million liability judgment, which isn’t so outlandish these days, can net the lawyer for the plaintiff a million bucks or more. A couple cases like that and the bills take care of themselves.

What happened with Clinton was, he’s out riding his bike one bright, sunny morning. A Sunday, it’s the one day he allows himself personal recreation, while the wife and kids are at church—they’re Mormons, pretty devout, but not smug assholes about it. He’s out there with a bunch of his hard-core biking buddies, all strong athletes, they’re racing a hard 50K, he’s somewhere in the middle of the pack, trying to catch another group ahead of him, so he’s about twenty-five yards behind one group and the same distance ahead of another, momentarily separated from a bunch of riders. He’s a good rider but some of these guys ride six days a week, plus they’re five to fifteen years younger, still he’s holding his own, as he’s crossing a thoroughfare the light’s about to turn from green to yellow to red, he’s barreling through on the yellow, he’s clearly got the right-of-way, several witnesses will attest that the light had barely hit yellow when he started through the intersection at thirty-five miles an hour or so on his new boron-graphite racing bike, customized for him at a cost of over two thousand dollars. As he’s pumping through, head down, intent on catching the leaders, a lady trucker who’s hauling a load of drilling equipment is driving in the opposite direction, on the other side of the road. Now this lady truck-driver just had a fight with her husband, who told her to go fuck herself and the horse she rode in on, if she doesn’t like it she can lump it, which means he’s out of there for a couple-three days, he’s done that before, lammed on her and the kids, drunk up his paycheck on Jim Beam boilermakers, the usual domestic grief. So she’s out there on the highway, she’s late on her delivery and when you’re late for her boss you hear about it all afternoon, she doesn’t need anyone else bitching at her, she’s had it up to here, thank you, she’s trying to light a Virginia Slims, drink a cup of take-out coffee, and she’s wrestling through the gears of her twenty-five-year-old Mack, the old-fashioned kind of tugboat no one manufactures anymore. And she’s not doing a good job at any of it, the clutch is almost shot, the brakes are metal on metal. She’s halfway through the intersection before she realizes it’s her turnoff, it’s two miles to the next place she can turn around, she sees that the light is changing, no cars coming from the opposite direction, so she does a fast spin of the steering wheel, down-shifting like her arm’s on a piston, fishtailing a sharp left across the divider, and there’s Clinton. And it flashes through her mind if I stand on the brakes I spill coffee on my new stone-washed jeans and scald the shit out of myself. So she kind of half-brakes, half-swerves, and slides sideways into Clinton, who never saw it coming.

Now he’s a quadriplegic the rest of his life, the insurance company won’t pay more than the $250,000 policy limit, which won’t even cover his rehab, much less take care of him and his family for the rest of his life, and the driver’s company is balking at paying anything above the benefit. Why? Because they’re claiming he ran the light, citing the traffic regulation that a left hand turn can be made on the yellow-to-red configuration but that a vehicle coming straight through, after the light hits yellow, is at risk, and they’re claiming it was yellow long before he hit the intersection, that he had ample time to brake, but chose not to. Which is a lie, and they know it. It’s a bullshit reason, a cover for the real reason. The real reason is that Clinton is a rich white Mormon and the lady trucker who hit him is Hispanic. And in this neck of the woods rich white Mormons are not well thought of. Even if they’re good family men, hard-working, industrious, and have the right-of-way at a traffic light.

The company won’t pay because they figure a jury will vote the issue on race, and around here the race not to be in this kind of trial is white. Reverse discrimination at its ugliest.

But what they’re forgetting, which they do all the time because they’re not only rich and arrogant, but stupid as well, is that I won’t be trying my case against Izela Munoz, Hispanic mother of four. I’m trying my case against a ten-billion-dollar energy company. If there’s one thing juries around here hate worse than rich Anglos, it’s rich energy companies. I’m going to show that jury that it’s not Izela’s money they’re taking, it’s a billion-dollar conglomerate’s.

I’m with the Hodgeses for a couple hours, going over details. Preparation for a trial such as this costs money, a lot of it. By the time you’re finished with the models and investigators and background and everything, all the hours, it’ll be over $50,000. I pay for all of it, out of my own pocket because I don’t bill them hourly, like in a normal case. I’ll take a percentage. Thirty-three percent. Some lawyers take fifty percent. It’s money well-earned, because you’re working without a net, essentially. You can make a fortune, but if you lose it’s all flushed. High risk, high reward. Up on the high wire—my kind of case. If I win, I’m solid again, triple-A rating. I can hold my head up anywhere, including the watering holes frequented by my former partners.

It’s after lunch before I get back to Patricia. She picks up her private line on the first ring. I get the feeling she’s been waiting for my call all this time.

“Will,” she says. She’s been crying. She isn’t now, but I hear the tears that she’s shed.

“What is it?”

It better not be about Claudia, that’s all I ask. I know she reassured Susan, but it could have been a con to get me to talk. She knows I don’t like to talk about her personal life any more. I’m finally over that, and I don’t want to get sucked back in.

“I’ve been fired.”

“What?”

The tears start. I can hear them, hear her trying to stop me from hearing them. She doesn’t pull it off.

“Fired. I’ve been fired from my job.”

“Why?” I’m surprised; stunned, actually. If there’s one thing I know about Patricia it’s that she’s a good, conscientious worker. And smart. Who fires a smart woman six months after she’s been hired and relocated at company expense?

“Because … oh shit, I’m so embarrassed.” More tears. She blows her nose right into my ear, a good healthy honk.

I know, then. Exactly why. She’s been looking for love in all the wrong places.

“I’ve … oh God!” She cries again. “I feel like such a jerk,” she says, talking and crying at the same time. “I’m sorry, this is stupid. I’ll call back later when I’m … when I’m …”; and she cries.

“Don’t be silly,” I counsel her, “and don’t hang up,” I add quickly, before she can. “I’m not going to judge you no matter what happened, so don’t worry, okay?”

“Okay.” Sniffle sniffle. Honk! I jerk the phone from my ear before I lose an eardrum. This woman is not demure and lady-like when it comes to emptying her sinuses.

“So … are you going to tell me?” I could fill in the blanks for her, leaving out only the specific names and places. I know this road like the back of my hand. But I wait for her to be forthcoming; that’s why she called: to tell me, not to be told by me.

She calms down. I picture her in her office, taking a deep breath, getting under control, sitting up straighter. She allowed herself a good cry, now she’s going to be an adult.

“I’ve been having an affair,” she informs me.

“I see,” I reply neutrally. The ‘I see’ you use in trial when you’re coaxing information from a reluctant witness. The ‘I see’ that helps lubricate the tongue.

“With one of the senior partners,” she continues. “Joby Breckenridge.”

“He’s the one that hired you,” I say, remembering.

“You’ve got a good memory,” she says.

I know Joby. He’s a straight shooter. Affairs aren’t his style. Certainly not casual ones. But there are always exceptions.