Noah's Law (22 page)

‘Yeah, okay.'

‘The letter strengthens the plaintiff 's case even further. I'm just not sure if we can use this evidence.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know where it's come from so I have no way to determine whether it's genuine or a fabrication.'

The fax came through ten minutes after I ended the call. It was a copy of a purchase order on the defendant's letterhead with a handwritten note scrawled on it.

PURCHASE ORDER

Jenkis Storage World

Record of Purchase

Date: 9 May 2008

 

I left the fax on Casey's desk with a post-it note telling her to call Carlos Banks. The evidence against Jenkins Storage World was piling up and the hearing was in five days.

Aunt Nirvine asked me to get Ameena's filing in order because it was piling up in her filing trays and she wanted Ameena concentrating on her billable work. When I asked Aunt Nirvine what that meant she said, ‘Lawyers should only be doing work that can be charged to a client. If they're busy doing admin work they're not doing billable work. That's why we have secretaries – and boys who are being punished by their fathers!'

They were all obsessed with their ‘hours'. In the staffroom I'd hear Branko and Ameena comparing how many hours they'd billed last week. John would complain to Casey that he was short on his six and a half hours for the day. Casey would scoff and respond that she'd recorded eight billable hours.

‘Thanks for helping out,' Ameena said as she sat at her desk typing while I cleared her filing tray, allocating each document to the file it belonged to in the bookshelf along her wall. ‘Your aunt's been on our backs to stop doing admin work so I can increase my billables. Oh well, at least it's not as bad as my top-tier firm days.'

‘Why'd you go from a big firm to a small one?'

‘The hours were horrific. I lasted a year.'

‘What work did you do? Family?'

‘No. I started in personal injury law. Not that I was practising the law much. I was mainly summarising documents and medical reports. Tedious stuff. Trust me, messy divorces are much more thrilling.'

She went back to typing and I continued filing in silence. After a while, I said: ‘Can a person fake a back injury?'

‘I didn't know you hated this place that much,' she said with a laugh. ‘Planning on slipping in the kitchen and getting your aunt to pay you out?'

I grinned. ‘Nah, nothing like that. Just wondering about a case I'm helping out with. The guy's been complaining that his pain and suffering is getting worse and the doctors believe him. But it's probably a lie.'

‘Well, soft-tissue injuries, especially to the back, can't always be proven. You can get terrible back pain but have no diagnostic evidence to support the patient's complaint. In those cases, you generally have to take the patient's word for it.'

I considered what she'd said as I continued with her filing. It explained a lot. Why Bernie had been able to continue getting his workers' compensation benefits. Why he'd been off work for so long. And probably why Maureen hadn't known he was lying about how bad his injuries were.

 

Paul Valopolous of counsel was as ridiculous as you could get.

It was Thursday afternoon, four days before the hearing was due to start, and I was with Casey in his office. Casey and Valopolous were running through their trial strategy. I was there to take notes and hand Valopolous documents because opening a folder and getting it for himself was too small a task for someone as superior as him. He had an awful comb-over and his gut pressed up against his desk. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the four walls of his office. A photo of two cute, toothless kids was perched next to his keyboard. His wife smiled at him from another frame. She was also fat and a comb-over would have probably been a more flattering option than her electric-shock perm.

When the barrister spoke, time stood still. I wanted to hit him with a hot poker. I found myself silently punctuating his sentences. They were filled with commas and semicolons. A full stop was rare. He just kept going on and on in a slow, steady, mind-numbingly flat tone.

‘I will argue that the defendants, known as Jenkins Storage World, one, owed a duty of care to the deceased, two, breached that duty and, three, that the said breach caused or contributed to the deceased's death . . .'

A full stop now,
please
.

‘. . . although we must bear in mind that the defendant is mounting a contributory negligence defence which . . .'

Kill me now, I thought to myself. I glanced at Casey. If she was suffering, I couldn't tell. She always had a harassed expression on her face.

Counsel took a sip of coffee, slurping loudly. Everything about this man irritated me.

‘Okay,' Casey interrupted, ‘so they have their contributory negligence defence, which is essentially a question of fact, based on Webb's statement. But the evidence against them is as damning as one could hope for. We have the minutes from the staff meeting which prove that these safety issues were known to the defendant before Maureen's death. Then there is this purchase order, which proves that a faulty security camera was purchased but that nothing was done to fix it prior to Maureen's death. The manager's handwritten note shows that.'

Counsel tapped his surprisingly slender fingers together; his fat elbows were perched on the desk.

‘But you said that you acquired the purchase order from an anonymous source?'

‘Yes. But we should still be able to put it to Rodney Marks when he's on the stand. I have no reason to doubt its authenticity.'

‘Very well. It seems to me that the prospects of success are considerably high and we may probably be settling at the doors of the court. You will note, I hope, that I say
probably
as distinct from
possibly
as there is a palpable difference between the two as discussed in
obiter dictum
by His Honour Judge Madon in the High Court case of . . .'

OH MY GOD, put me out of my misery. This was torture. It was like they were competing to see who could use more words in a sentence. And was it just me or were they both overlooking the obvious? Why did two of the best pieces of evidence against the defendant both suddenly surface out of the blue? Putting aside the fact that I knew Rodney and Bernie were in on the case together, Casey and Valopolous were ignoring two really important facts. The meeting minutes had suddenly appeared after Webb's damaging statement came forward, and months after the lawyers were supposed to have swapped all their documents. You didn't need a law degree to smell the dodginess there. Then the purchase order miraculously appeared and helped us sink Jenkins even further. I didn't buy it. For it to be genuine would be a bigger miracle than curing lepers.

And here were Valopolous and Casey ignoring the smoke alarm. Worse, they were swinging the broom at the alarm to shut it up.

The hearing would start on Monday. Casey and Valopolous were convinced that the case was a winner and I was no closer to exposing Bernie.

I'd been drawing up an evidence chart, recording all the pieces of information I'd gathered about the case. But I wanted a new notebook for the hearing.

It was Thursday night and the shops were open late. After dinner, I decided to walk to the local plaza. Nadine and Mary insisted on joining me. Nadine was bored and Mary, hearing that I was going to the newsagent, decided that she needed a new notebook too.

‘So what happened with that stingy miser?' Nadine asked on our way.

‘What stingy miser?' Mary asked.

‘None of your business,' Nadine snapped.

‘Good point,' I said.

Nadine pulled on my sleeve. ‘Come on. Tell me. I'm entitled to know.'

‘It's complicated.'

‘Try me.'

‘You're too young.'

‘
Hello
. We were born thirteen months apart!'

I grinned and she gave me a shove. ‘You are
such
a stuck-up pig.'

‘Takes one to know one.'

‘Oh, how original.'

‘Guys, shut up,' Mary pleaded. ‘You're hurting my head.'

‘He's genetically incapable of shutting up,' Nadine said.

‘Noah, slow down,' Mary whined. ‘You're walking too fast!'

We bickered the whole way there. I'm pretty sure Nadine was enjoying it as much as I was given that this kind of freestyle arguing would have met with legal consequences at home – the kind that involved a meat tenderiser, a disciplinary hearing and another lecture.

Nadine and Mary followed me into the newsagent. Nadine went straight to the magazines and Mary tagged behind me as I headed to the shelves stocking a huge range of notebooks. I chose an A4 notebook and stood waiting for Mary. She was muttering under her breath, flipping through all the notebooks.

She was taking ages and I was getting frustrated. ‘What are you looking for? It's not a dress. It's bound paper. How hard can it be to choose?'

She gave me a condescending look, as if to say that I didn't understand the higher order of notebooks.

‘In case you haven't noticed, I use the exact same kind of notebook for all our disciplinary hearings.'

‘No, I hadn't,' I said drily.

‘It's tradition, and Dad says tradition is important.'

‘Yeah, well, Dad says a lot of things. Can you just pick one, please?'

‘The one I get isn't here. Just let me ask them.'

I stopped myself from swearing and went to pay for my notebook.

‘Excuse me,' Mary said to the girl serving me. ‘I'm after the red and black Collins notebook.'

‘All our notebooks are along the back shelves.'

‘I've looked but the brand I want isn't there.'

‘Then we don't stock it.'

‘Yes you do. I always buy my notebooks from here.' Mary opened her bag and pulled out a notebook. ‘This is the one. And I bought it from here.'

The girl at the counter sighed, not bothering to mask her grumpiness. ‘We've got a huge range of stock.'

I quickly jumped in. We didn't want Mary worked up about her notebook-purchasing habits. ‘She needs this one for school. They're not allowed any other brand.'

‘Oh, okay,' the girl said. ‘What fascists. Hey, Jay, come over and serve this other customer. We've got a crisis here.'

Mary didn't appreciate her sarcasm so I gave Mary a reassuring smile. The girl dived under the counter and came back up with a large folder. ‘This is all our stock. Pass your notebook to me.'

The girl turned the notebook over and read the numbers on the barcode. Then she flipped through the pages in the folder. After a couple of moments she handed the notebook back to Mary.