The Mayor of Lexington Avenue jt-1

by James Sheehan

  “Her main office is in Vero Beach,” Austin told her. “You have to go there if you want to see her on Tuesday.”

  “That will work out fine, Austin. Thank you so much for setting this up.”

  “No problem, Elena. I was happy to do it for you.” And for myself, of course.

  Elena didn’t mind the drive at all. Rudy was under investigation for murder. If she had been asked to walk to Vero Beach to clear his name, she would gladly have done it.

  Tracey James’s headquarters was an ostentatious three-story building northwest of Vero. It originally had been built as a nursing home, but when the financing for the project fell through, the building lay empty until Tracey discovered it and purchased it for a song. There had been relatively little needed in the way of renovation. The second and third floors were all patient rooms except for the cafeteria, and Tracey filled those rooms with her adjusters. It was the downstairs and the outside that needed to be fixed. Outside, she had installed a circular driveway with a fountain in the middle. On both sides of the entrance to the grounds she had placed huge identical stones with the words “The James Law Firm” and “Let the James gang fight for you!” carved in the center. Columns were placed at the grandiose entrance. Inside, she had built a marvelous marble-floored foyer and waiting room. The receptionist’s desk, an antique mahogany table with a phone, anchored the middle of the waiting room, which was always empty.

  Tracey scheduled her clients hours apart, a technique designed to make each one feel special. At the appointed hour, the chosen one was brought through a narrow hallway to Tracey’s office, which took up a full third of the downstairs and was bordered on the entire west side by a picture window that looked out on a magnificent multi-flowered garden, a garden that Tracey had never set foot in. Nor could she name one flower that sprung from its rich soil. The garden was designed to soothe the client. The magnificent Persian rug, the plaques, the white mahogany desk, the soft blue leather couch and matching chairs-all of it was there to impress on each of them that they were in the presence of a great lawyer.

  Elena was born in Puerto Rico in a run-down shack on a farm where her father was a sharecropper. When she was five, her family moved to New York City and she grew up on the tough streets of Spanish Harlem. At twenty-two, when she realized her husband was a hopeless alcoholic, she took her son and two hundred dollars and moved to Florida to start a new life. She had lived in squalor without heat and running water. She had worked for the worst people imaginable. She was a hard person to impress and, as she sat in the soft leather chair looking out at the garden waiting for the queen to make her grand entrance, she had this uneasy feeling, like she was on the subway at rush hour and somebody was about to grab her purse. At that moment, Tracey entered the room from a door located behind her desk, a too-sweet smile pasted on her face. Elena instinctively pulled her handbag close to her body.

  Tracey rarely noticed her clients. Of course, she looked directly into their eyes when the time came to be sincere, but it was all part of an elaborate dog and pony show. She schmoozed them and after they hired her and left, she couldn’t remember the first thing about them until the next time she needed to see them. For some reason, Elena was different. Tracey swept in the room with her usual smile, prepared to spit out the same old spiel, but Elena stopped her dead in her tracks. Tracey wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was her natural beauty and the stark contrast between them: Elena was dark, her skin creamy caramel, her silky hair jet-black. Even sitting, Tracey could tell that she was long and lean but with the ample curves of a woman. It was more than that, however. Perhaps it was the way Elena looked at her, like she was looking right into her soul.

  Tracey didn’t realize that Elena and her son were about to become the greatest challenge of her career and that how she handled this woman and this case would become one of the defining moments of her life.

  Tracey had been a marketing major in college, following in her father’s footsteps. Her mother had died giving birth to her and it had been she and her father ever since. Dad had been a businessman and Tracey had planned to be one too.

  “Go to work for yourself,” Dad had advised. “You’ll never get rich working for somebody else.”

  Tracey took the old man’s advice to heart. She decided to make the law her business. She could start her own firm, be her own boss. Before she ever set foot in her first law school class, she had a preliminary marketing plan in place, identifying and anticipating the pitfalls of the practice.

  She traversed the state checking out the small, very successful firms. Personal injury was where the big money was for the small practitioner, and advertising was the means to getting the best personal injury cases.

  “Experience is the only teacher,” Daddy had told her, over and over again. The last conversation on that subject was just a month before his death. “Don’t set your feet in stone until you know the lay of the land. Look into each nook and cranny. You never eliminate the risks but you can minimize them.”

  Again Tracey followed the sage advice of her father. After graduation, she started slow, spending two years at the state attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale, doing misdemeanors and minor felonies. That experience made her somewhat comfortable in a courtroom, although she didn’t intend to be there too often in private practice. It also taught her there were too many attorneys in the big cities, all gnawing on the same bone. The path to success had to be outside the major metropolitan areas, but that was the enigma: How do you make money outside the centers of money?

  There were many small towns in the interior of the state in need of good legal services. It was an untapped market but a risky one. You couldn’t just pick one town and try to make it there. You’d starve. You had to have a base of operations large enough to sustain yourself while at the same time reaching out to the small towns.

  That became Tracey’s plan. She chose Vero Beach as her headquarters, a sleepy town on the east coast populated by retirees but large enough to sustain a practice on its own. She took out a substantial bank loan and started advertising in the Yellow Pages, then radio, then billboards. Television was too expensive at first. Although personal injury clients were her target, she threw in criminal law as well. It was all part of the plan.

  There were other parts of the package that had to be massaged. Tracey was fairly attractive but she needed work if she was going to stand out. It was her own assessment, an honest marketing evaluation not based on any insecurity-at least that’s what she told herself. She was tall and she stayed in shape through daily workouts and a stingy diet, but her nose was too big and her breasts were minimal. So part of the money was spent on a nose job and implants, her dingy brown hair went platinum, and Tracey came up with a catchy slogan-Let the James gang fight for you! Now wherever Tracey’s ads appeared, her full-length picture accompanied them. She definitely had separated herself from the boys in the blue suits.

  Immediately, the calls started coming in. Tracey instructed the two girls who answered the phones to screen each potential client using a detailed questionnaire that she had “borrowed” from another firm. Later, she reviewed every answer to determine who was worth seeing and who wasn’t. Her research after law school had told her to aim for the middle: not the small soft-tissue cases or the high-end million-dollar cases, but the fifty to a hundred thousand dollar cases that proliferated between them. If liability was clear (that could be established through the questionnaire) and insurance coverage was good, those cases could be settled without ever stepping into the courtroom or filing suit. They might be settled for less than they were worth, but the focus was volume not people.

  Based on the number of calls she was getting, Tracey hired two retired insurance adjusters to interview the selected clients, obtain medical records and insurance information and, eventually, make a settlement demand. She allotted herself ten minutes with each person. Within a month, she had twenty-five good cases. Within a year, it was three hundred and there were six adjusters handli
ng the claims.

  The adjusters were an idea she had also “borrowed,” from an attorney in Tampa she’d never met. When she toured the offices of Mr. Dale Willingworth, she spoke only with the office manager. There wasn’t an attorney in sight but the place was teeming with insurance adjusters. She learned that adjusters knew the claims process inside and out; knew what a case was worth; knew how to work it up; and knew how to get the most money. Theoretically, if the selection process was good enough and the case was in the target range, a lawyer was superfluous.

  As she drove out of Tampa that day marveling at the huge billboards on the highway advertising the Willingworth law firm (“Need a Lawyer?”), Tracey wondered if Mr. Willingworth even existed. She laughed out loud to herself, almost veering into the outer lane of traffic, imagining a law firm without any lawyers.

  Two years after law school, she was the most successful personal injury lawyer in Vero Beach even though she had never filed a civil complaint, never argued a motion, and never appeared before a judge. What she did do to maintain her credibility was take some criminal cases. Criminal cases, unlike civil cases, needed to be handled at all stages by an attorney because there was so much courtroom involvement. As she did with the civil cases, however, Tracey cherry-picked her criminal clientele. She never did felonies unless the client was wealthy and willing to pay. The retainer was fifteen thousand dollars, payable up front, and twenty-five thousand for a capital case. When the balance in the account hit five thousand, the retainer had to be replenished. If it wasn’t, when the money was gone so was the James gang. There were no exceptions, no lost causes. She had every client sign a document saying they understood the rules. Tracey’s motto was the same as Abraham Lincoln’s: “A lawyer’s time is his stock in trade.” Unlike Honest Abe, however, she intended to be paid for every second.

  Daddy would have been proud.

  The James Law Firm had been in operation for five years when Elena made her first visit. Things had changed dramatically since the not-so-humble beginnings. The firm had expanded into the small communities in the interior of the state. Tracey had offices in ten cities from Arcadia to Okeechobee. Offices without lawyers-at least without lawyers paid by her. She negotiated with a local lawyer in each community to provide office space for her when she needed it; established a local telephone line and an 800 number. Her picture went on the back of the local telephone book and on several full pages throughout and she was on billboards heading into and out of town: a full body shot, artfully done. Tracey was standing in a tight navy blue business suit, her silky blond hair resting on her shoulders, a smile breaking from her ruby red lips. The caption was always the same-Let the James gang fight for you! — in large, bold print always level with Tracey’s breasts. You had to read the small print at the bottom of the ad to know that Tracey was advertising her legal services.

  If somebody called the local office, the local attorney’s secretary would use the same questionnaire that the receptionists used in Vero. The questionnaire would then be faxed to the main office. If the James firm decided to take the case, the local attorney would receive twenty-five percent of the settlement as a referral fee in a personal injury case and twenty-five percent of the retainer in a criminal case. Of course, to satisfy any bar inquiry, local counsel would have his or her own file complete with copies of everything that ever happened in the case.

  Tracey’s local attorney in Bass Creek was none other than Austin Reaves.

  The established practice at headquarters was to try and get criminal clients in right away because of speedy trial considerations and also because they paid cash-the more severe and expensive the case, the quicker the appointment. Even a lawyer as successful as Tracey James was concerned about cash flow.

  “Elena, is that correct?” Tracey held out her hand. Elena hesitated for a second but finally extended her own.

  “Yes, that’s correct.” Tracey sat in the soft leather chair facing Elena rather than behind her desk. It was the intimate touch.

  “I’ve read your file, Elena. Has your son been arrested yet?”

  “Yes. They arrested him yesterday.”

  “And the charge?” It wasn’t the question so much as the fact that she had to answer that caused Elena so much turmoil. She almost couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

  “First-degree murder,” she said, fighting back the tears.

  Tracey almost licked her chops like a lioness about to feast on a helpless gazelle. Murder was the big one, the twenty-five thousand dollar retainer. She rarely got the big ones and she didn’t know why. Perhaps the money cases were all in Miami. Perhaps the people in the small cities who were charged with murder couldn’t afford to pay for their own attorney. Not once did Tracey consider the possibility that she didn’t get the capital cases because she had never tried one in her life. She wasn’t thinking about that now. Now she was focused on sliding that money out of Elena’s purse. She didn’t notice how tightly Elena was holding on.

  Tracey stood up and walked around the room pretending to be deep in thought:

  For her part, Elena was not impressed at all. The nose job was too obvious and the tits too big, although the sight of them made her remember the lump she’d found in her own breast a few weeks earlier. It seemed like so long ago, but she couldn’t do anything about that now. Her focus now was this plastic personality prancing around the room. Elena wasn’t trusting Rudy’s life to this woman!

  Tracey knew it wasn’t working, that her rhythm was off. She changed tactics, something she never did, sitting down and for a moment just shutting up. She picked up Rudy’s file, which had been placed on the desk by her secretary. She’d already read it. Suddenly, from the recesses of her brain, a small picture of a dark-haired woman popped up. It was the only picture of her mother she’d ever seen; it had sat on top of her father’s dresser. From that picture, as a little girl, she had created her mother in her dreams: beautiful, with long flowing black hair and the brightest smile. Elena had a striking resemblance to that woman. For the first time, she saw one of her clients in a different light. This was a mother trying to save her son from a lifetime of prison, possibly death.

  “I have no idea what kind of a case they have, Elena. Can you tell me a little about it?”

  It was hard but Elena took her through everything she knew: from the first day when the front page screamed that a young woman’s throat had been cut to her conversation with Rudy when he told her of being there and drinking and falling down and cutting himself. Tracey listened carefully, asking questions from time to time. She could now see where the state was coming from. She could also see that it was going to be a difficult case to win. Her first inclination was to bail out. Difficult cases ruined her unblemished record of success. Hers was not a reputation built on brilliant courtroom tactics. But she could see Elena-so strong, so focused-a beautiful, powerful mother. Tracey just couldn’t walk away from her. Not yet.

  “Somebody had to be in that house after Rudy left, Elena. If we can find that person, Rudy will walk. My investigative team is the best. My chief investigator, Dick Radek, was a detective for twenty years at the Miami police department, ten of those in homicide. We will leave no stone unturned. Before we’re through, we’ll know everybody in that neighborhood by their first name.”

  She was so sincere when she said it, Elena started to believe her and with good reason: It was the truth. Tracey had the best investigative team north of Miami and south of Jacksonville. Almost all of her cases were won at the investigative level, by turning over stones the police just tripped on. But Elena still wasn’t convinced.

  “The police have already done an investigation — ”

  “I’m sure they have,” Tracey cut her off. “But the police in these small towns are notoriously lazy. Once they found your son’s blood in the trailer, their investigation stopped. They only need one suspect to look good.”

  That made sense to Elena. She was sure it was true. Those words and something else, somet
hing that had changed in Tracey since she initially sauntered into the room, convinced her that Tracey was the right person for the job. Elena felt her sincerity. She also felt something else, something that Tracey was so successful at hiding from the world-vulnerability. Not necessarily what she was looking for from the lawyer representing her son, but maybe from the person.

  Now that she was sold, it was Elena’s turn to press her case.

  “I don’t have much money.” It was a line Tracey had heard a thousand times before and usually, based upon their appearance, the car they were driving, what they did for a living, it was Tracey’s cue to walk them to the door, apologetically telling them that she couldn’t help them. She couldn’t do that to Elena.

  “Listen,” Tracey cut in again. “I usually require a twenty-five thousand dollar retainer for capital cases like your son’s. I’ve never reduced that retainer before,” another absolute truth, “but I believe in your son’s innocence. I believe we can find the evidence to exonerate him. I’ll agree to reduce my retainer to fifteen thousand dollars, but when that money is gone you must replenish it. I can’t make any exceptions to that rule.”

  “I have five with me,” Elena answered.

  “I can’t accept that. Go home. Talk to your relatives, your friends. See if you can raise the money. But do it quickly. Time is your enemy.”

  Sentiment only went so far with Tracey James.

  Ten

  Rudy had spent the whole weekend on the river-fishing, lying around, thinking. There was an old two-story houseboat down one of his narrow trails that had sunk but was still lingering half out of the water like an old ship before it turns keel up for the final dive. Rudy loved to anchor his boat there and make up stories about how it had got that way. One time it was a brothel. Two men fighting over the same woman pulled out their guns and started shooting. One of the bullets put a hole in the side of the boat that nobody noticed until the next morning when it was too late. Another time it was a hideout for members of the Dillinger gang who shot it out with the FBI. Some of the dead bodies might still be inside. That’s why the gator was always hanging around. It was trying to figure out a way to get at those bodies without getting trapped inside.