The Simple Truth (23 page)

“You think it was related to something at the Court?”

“Michael didn’t have much of a life outside the Court.”

“Other than you?”

She glanced at him sharply but said nothing.

“Any big controversial cases pending?”
he asked.

“Every case is big and controversial.”

“But he never mentioned specifics to you?”

Sara stared ahead but again chose not to answer.

“Whatever you can tell me will help, Sara.”

She slowed the car slightly.
“Your brother was funny. Do you know that he would go down to the clerks’mail room at the crack of dawn to get an early jump on any interesting cases?”

“I’m not surprised. He never did things halfway. How are the appeals normally processed?”

“The clerks’ mail room is where the filings are opened and processed. Each filing goes to a case analyst to make sure that it complies with the requirements of the rules of the Court, and so forth. If it’s handwritten, like a lot of the
in forma pauperis
appeals are, they even make sure the handwriting is legible. Then the information goes into a database under the last name of the party filing the appeal. Lastly, the filing is copied and sent to all the justices’ chambers.”

“Mike once told me how many appeals the Court gets. The justices can’t possibly read all of them.”

“They don’t. The petitions are divided up among the justices’ chambers, and the clerks are assigned to do certorari pool memos on them. For example, we might get in a hundred or so appeals in a week’s time. There are nine justices, so each chamber gets roughly a dozen appeals. Of the dozen appeals sent to Justice Knight’s chambers, I might write a memo on three. That memo is circulated to all the chambers. Then the other justices’ clerks look over my memo and make a recommendation to their justice on whether the Court should grant cert or not.”

“You clerks have a lot of power.”

“In some areas, but not really with the opinions. A clerk’s draft of an opinion is mostly a recap of the facts of the case and then stringing together cites. The justices just use the clerks to get the grunt work done, the paper pulp. We have the greatest impact in the screening of the appeals.”

Fiske looked thoughtful.
“So a justice may not even see the actual documents filed with the Court before deciding whether to hear the case or not? He’d just read the pool memo and the clerk’s recommendation.”

“Maybe not even the memo, perhaps just the clerk’s recommendation. The justices hold discussion conferences usually twice a week. That’s when all the petitions screened by the clerks are discussed and voted upon to see if there are at least four votes, the minimum you need, to hear the case.”

“So the first person to actually see an appeal filed with the Court would be someone in the clerks’mail room?”

“That’s normally the case.”

“What do you mean, ‘normally’?”

“I mean there’s no guarantee that things will always be done by the rules.”

Fiske thought about this for a moment.
“Are you suggesting that my brother might have taken an appeal before the clerks’mail room could process it?”

Sara let out a muffled groan but quickly composed herself.
“I can only tell you this in confidence, John.”

He shook his head.
“I’m not going to promise you something I can’t deliver.”

Sara sighed and in concise sentences told Fiske about finding the papers in his brother’s briefcase.
“I didn’t really mean to snoop. But he had been acting strangely, and I was worried about him. I ran into him one morning coming from the clerks’mail room. He looked really distraught. I think he had just taken the appeal I found in his briefcase.”

“The filing you saw, was it the original or a copy?”

“Original. One of the pages was handwritten, the other typewritten.”

“Are originals normally circulated?”

“No. Only copies. And the copied files certainly don’t have the original envelope the filing came in.”

“I remember Mike telling me that clerks sometimes take home files, even originals sometimes.”

“That’s true.”

“So maybe that was the case here.”

She shook her head.
“It wasn’t set up like a normal case file. There was no return address on the envelope, and the typewritten page had no signature at the bottom. The handwritten page made me think it was an
in forma pauperis
petition, but there was no motion or affidavit of indigency that I could see.”

“Did you see any name on the papers, anything that could identify who was involved?”

“I did. That’s why I knew Michael had taken a filing.”

“How?”

“I managed to glance at the first sentence of the typewritten page. The person identified as the party filing the appeal was named there. As soon as I left Michael’s office I checked the Court’s filing database. There was no one by that name listed.”

“What was the name?”

“The last name was Harms.”

“First name?”

“I didn’t see it.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“No.”

Fiske eased back in his seat.
“The thing is, if Mike took the appeal, he had to be sure that no one would call up about the disappearance of the file. Like the attorney who filed it, if an attorney did.”

“Well, the envelope had a return receipt requested label. The sending party would’ve gotten notice that it was delivered to the Court.”

“Okay. And why one handwritten page and one typewritten page?”

“Two different people. Maybe the person didn’t want to be recognized, but still wanted to help Harms.”

“From all the appeals the Court gets, Mike takes this one. Why?”

She glanced at him nervously.
“Oh God, if it turns out that this had anything to do with Michael’s death. I never thought …”
She suddenly looked as though she would burst into tears.

“I’m not going to tell anyone about this. For now. You took a risk for Mike. I appreciate that.”
There was a lengthy silence until Fiske said,
“It’s getting late.”

As they drove along, Fiske finally said,
“We’ve been able to ascertain that Mike put eight hundred or so miles on his car in the last couple of days. Any idea where he might have gone?”

“No. I don’t think he liked driving. He rode his bike to work.”

“How was he perceived by the other clerks?”

“Highly respected. He was incredibly motivated. I guess all Supreme Court clerks are, but Michael seemed incapable of turning it off. I consider myself a hard worker too, but I think a balance in life is good.”

“Mike was always that way,”
Fiske said a little wearily.
“He started at perfection and moved up from there.”

“Must run in the family. Michael told me that, growing up, you worked two and three jobs almost all the time.”

“I like to have spending money.”

The money had not remained long in Fiske’s pocket. It had gone to his father, who had never earned more than fifteen lousy grand a year in over forty years of working his ass off. Now it went to his mother and her massive health bills.

“You also went to college while working as a cop.”

Fiske impatiently tapped his fingers against the car window.
“Good old Virginia Commonwealth University, the Stanford of the next century.”

“And you read for the law.”
Fiske looked at her angrily.
“Please don’t get upset, John. I’m just curious.”

Fiske sighed.
“I apprenticed to a Richmond criminal defense attorney. Learned a lot. Got my certificate and passed the bar.”
He added dryly,
“It’s the only way to become a lawyer if you’re too dumb to score high enough on the LSATs.”

“You’re not dumb.”

“Thanks, but how would you know?”

“We watched you do a trial.”

He turned to look at her.
“Excuse me?”

“Over the summer, Michael and I came down to Richmond and watched you do a trial in circuit court.”
She was not going to mention her second trip to watch him in court.
“Why didn’t you let me know you were there?”

Sara shrugged.
“Michael thought you’d be upset.”

“Why would I be upset at seeing my brother?”

“Why are you asking me? He was your brother.”
When Fiske said nothing, Sara continued,
“I was really impressed. I think you might have motivated me to become a criminal defense lawyer someday. At least for a while, try it out, see what it’s really like.”

“Oh, you think you’d like to do that?”

“Why not? The law can still be a noble calling. Defending the rights of others. The poor. I’d love to hear about some of your cases.”

“Would you really?”

“Absolutely,”
she said enthusiastically.

He settled down, pretended to think hard. “Let’s see, there was Ronald James. That was his real name, but he preferred to be called Backdoor Daddy. That referred to his sexual position of choice with the six women he brutally raped. I plea-bargained that one, even though all six women identified him from a police lineup. I had some leverage, though. Four of the women couldn’t face Backdoor in court. That’s what terror will do for you. Or
to
you. The fifth victim had a few nasties in her past that maybe we could’ve used to attack her credibility. The last woman wanted nothing less than to crucify him. But one good witness isn’t the same as a half dozen. Bottom line: The prosecutor got cold feet and Backdoor got twenty years with a shot at parole.

“Then there was Jenny, a nice kid who put a cleaver into her grandmother’s skull because, as she tearfully explained to me, the old, dumb bitch wouldn’t let her go to the mall with her friends. Jenny’s mother, the daughter of the woman little Jenny butchered, is paying my legal bill in installments of two bucks a month.”

“I think I get the point,”
Sara said tersely.

“Now, I don’t want to disillusion you. The guy I just got off for burglary paid my bill in full, probably with the cash he got from fencing the property he stole. I’ve learned not to ask. So my rent’s paid for the month, and I haven’t had to pull a gun on one of my clients in a long time. And tomorrow’s always a new day.”
Fiske leaned back.
“Go get ’em, Ms. Evans.”

“You really enjoy shocking people, don’t you?”

“You asked.”

“So why the hell do you do it, then?”

“Someone has to.”

“That wasn’t exactly the answer I was expecting, but let’s just drop it,”
she said harshly.
“Thanks for bursting my balloon, though, I really appreciate it.”

“If I burst your little balloon, you should thank me,”
he said angrily. Then he added more calmly,
“Look, Sara, I’m no white knight. Most of my clients are guilty. I know that, they know that, everybody knows that. Ninety percent of my cases are plea-bargained for that very reason. If somebody actually came to me proclaiming their innocence, I’d probably die of a heart attack. I’m not a defender of anybody, I’m a negotiator of sentencing. My job is to make sure that the prison time is fair relative to what everybody else gets. On the rare occasion I do go to trial, the trick there is to blow enough smoke around that a jury just loses the energy to figure it all out and gives up. Like they really want to sit around debating the fate of somebody they don’t even know, and could give a shit about.”

“Gee, whatever happened to the truth?”

“Sometimes the truth is a lawyer’s biggest enemy. You can’t spin it. Nine times out of ten, with the truth I lose. Now, I’m not paid to lose, but I try to be fair. So we all do our little shuffle during the day, the tuna nets go out at night and catch a batch of fresh meat, and we all come back and do the dance again. And on and on it goes.”

“Your version of real life?”
she asked.

“Don’t worry, you’re never going to see it. You’ll be teaching at Harvard, or working at some gold-plated New York law firm. If I’m ever up there, I’ll be sure to wave to you from the Dumpster.”

“Can you please stop?”
Sara exclaimed.

They drove on in silence until something occurred to Fiske.

“If you had already seen me at the trial, why did you make a show of not knowing who I was back at the Court when Perkins introduced us?”

Sara took a short breath.
“I don’t know. I guess because in front of Perkins, I couldn’t think of a clever way to tell you how I had already seen you.”

“Why did it have to be clever?”

“You know what they say about first impressions.”
She shook her head at the thought now.
Christ!

As Fiske watched her, the last of his hostility faded.
“Don’t let my cynical ass dampen your enthusiasm, Sara.”
He added quietly,
“Nobody has that right. I’m sorry.”

Sara looked over at him.
“I think you care more than you let on.”
She hesitated for a moment, debating whether to tell him or not.
“You know a little boy named Enis, don’t you?”
Fiske stared over at her.
“I saw you talking to him.”

It finally hit Fiske.
“The bar. I knew I had seen you before. What were you doing, following me?”

“Yes.”

Her frankness caught Fiske off guard.
“Why?”
he asked quietly.

She spoke slowly.
“That’s a little difficult to explain. I don’t think I’m up to it right now. I wasn’t spying on you. I could see how difficult it was for you, talking to Enis and his family.”

“Best thing that ever happened to them. Next time the old man might have killed them.”

“Still, to lose your father like that…”

“He wasn’t Enis’s father.”

“I’m sorry, I thought he was.”