Her Kind of Case

by Jeanne Winer

  “Makes perfect sense,” Peggy said, handing Lee the white card she’d tried to slide under the door.

  “Thanks.” Lee pocketed the card, then pulled a slim black book out of her briefcase and began scanning the day’s appointments. She was booked solid until six that evening, not even an hour for lunch. She’d have to run over to Alfalfas and order a sandwich to go. “I’ll get to the jail this evening and call you afterward. If it’s a fit, we can discuss a retainer. It’ll be expensive.”

  “Yes, I know. The other lawyers warned me. Jeremy’s my only heir, so I guess it’ll be an early inheritance.” She picked her handbag off the floor and stood up. “Oh, one more thing. The police wouldn’t tell me much, but one of the detectives I spoke with hinted that it was a pretty gruesome death. I’m not trying to dissuade you. To the contrary, but I think it’s only fair—”

  “Thank you,” Lee said, trying to stifle a smile. “I’ve handled dozens of murders and every one of them was gruesome. It doesn’t upset me.” Except when I lose, she thought.

  “Well, I don’t know how you do it.”

  Lee didn’t know how she couldn’t do it. After her first homicide case, a routine stabbing outside a bar in Longmont, she was hooked. Handling it took everything she had: her wits, her skills, her experience all coming together in service of her client. As soon as it was over, she couldn’t wait till the next one. In between, she got by through representing clients on the usual thefts, assaults, and burglaries. Nothing wrong with garden-variety felonies; they paid the bills and often challenged her. But not enough. She couldn’t live on them. For as long as she could remember, Lee had always thrived on fierce competition. When she was twelve, she considered becoming a professional downhill ski racer, but then came the sixties, and the idea of her life’s work consisting of getting down a mountain as fast as possible without killing herself seemed a bit shallow. Finally, during her third year of college, after watching a Perry Mason rerun where Perry trounced the DA for the millionth time and saved his client, Lee decided to become a criminal defense attorney.

  “In any event,” Peggy was saying, “it was a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Likewise.” Lee stood up and reached out a hand.

  “You’re not a hugger, are you?”

  “A hugger?” Lee took a small step backward.

  “No, I didn’t think so. Well then, I’ll take a handshake and wait to hear from you.”

  As soon as Peggy left, Lee slumped back into her chair. A hugger? She shook her head and picked up the phone. Paul was a hugger; he hugged people he hardly knew, people he met in line at the movies, or at the bank. And he never minded that she wasn’t. Superficially, they were very different, but deep down where it mattered, they were as close as identical twins. Sometimes when he read her mind, she pretended he was wrong, but he never was.

  Lee frowned. Why all this reminiscing? Paul had died five years ago. She was fine now. Content. Except for this aging crap, which she would fight against and refuse to acknowledge for as long as possible. Jack Benny’s older sister, forever fifty-nine.

  Finally, she straightened up and dialed the public defender’s office whose number, mirabile dictu, hadn’t changed in the twenty-four years since she’d left.

  “Boulder-public-defender’s-office-can-you-hold?”

  The greeting, as always, sounded like a long single word followed by a click. Lee simply waited. Carol, the receptionist, fielded over two hundred calls a day. After a few minutes, when the pain in her neck got bad enough, Lee remembered the loudspeaker button on the side of her phone, pressed it, and dropped the receiver onto her desk. Two or three minutes later, Carol’s voice came on again.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Hey Carol, it’s me, Lee Isaacs.”

  “Oh hi, Lee. How are you?”

  “I’m great. Listen, could you find out who represents a juvenile named Jeremy Mathews? He’s charged with murder.”

  “Sure hon, just give me a second. It’s only eight-thirty and it’s already a madhouse. Are you going to make one of my lawyers happy?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  A public defender’s caseload was ridiculously high. Because she was a perfectionist, it had taken Lee more than seventy hours a week to handle so many cases. After ten years of it, she’d had enough and quit. But when she was young and juggling over a hundred active felonies, it was always good news when one of her clients managed to hire someone from the private bar.

  “Okay Lee, I’ve got it. It’s Phil Hartman’s case.”

  “Is he there?”

  “For you he is. Hold on.”

  It took another few minutes, but eventually Phil picked up.

  “Hey Lee, are you going to make my day?”

  “Maybe.” She leaned back in her chair and placed her feet carefully on her desk. She was wearing a pair of black leather boots with a silver chain around the ankle. The boots were at least fifteen years old but like most of Lee’s possessions, they looked brand new—the upside of being a perfectionist.

  “Oh happy day,” he sang.

  “I said maybe.”

  “Come on, Lee. I’ve got five ugly sex assaults, a three-time loser cooking meth next door to an elementary school, and a burglar caught in the victim’s backyard carrying the victim’s forty-two inch TV who says it’s all just a big mistake and wants the charges dismissed.”

  The image made her smile. Like all criminal defense attorneys, she loved hearing about other people’s hopeless cases. It was a lawyer thing. The more pathetic the case, the more terrible the facts, the funnier it was. An outsider listening in might think the stories were being exaggerated for effect, but in fact they weren’t. Luckily for the DA, the vast majority of criminal cases were obvious and utter losers.

  “But wait,” Phil said. “Matthews is a street kid. Who’s paying?”

  “His aunt.”

  “Great, you’d be the perfect advocate for him. He’s exactly your kind of client.”

  “That bad?”

  She could hear Phil opening his file drawer, rummaging through it, and pulling out Jeremy’s case.

  “Okay,” he said. “For starters, he’s an asshole.”

  “Ooh.”

  “Yeah, and not only that, he confessed.”

  “He confessed? Shit. His aunt didn’t know that.” She slid to a sitting position and grabbed her notepad. “All right, read me what he said.”

  “Christ, why do juvies always confess? It’s no fun. Wait, I’m still looking. Okay, here it is: ‘After being advised, Mr. Matthews told us he acted as the lookout while the others kicked Mr. Donnelly to death. According to Mr. Matthews, the victim was quote just a faggot who deserved to die unquote. Mr. Matthews also admitted kicking the victim a few times, but wasn’t sure whether the victim was already dead. After these admissions, Mr. Matthews refused to answer any more questions and told us he needed to lie down and go to sleep. Detective Armstrong then escorted him to the juvenile detention center. On the ride over, Mr. Matthews became belligerent when he learned he was being separated from his co-defendants and demanded that he be housed at the Boulder County Jail. Because of his age and other security issues, his request was denied.’ ” Phil paused. “So, there you go. Not so bad really.”

  “Not so bad?”

  “Well, I mean it could be worse. Let’s see, they could have pushed the victim off a cliff.”

  Lee stared at her purple horse, which was almost but not quite faceless.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, still trying after twenty years to make out the horse’s expression, “but personally, I’d rather be pushed off a cliff and be done with it than be kicked to death which would have taken much longer.”

  “You know what? You’re absolutely right. I’d pick the quick death off a cliff too. No question about it. So, yeah, your client’s an asshole.”

  “My client?”

  “Oh come on, Lee. I know you’re going to take it. You’re dying on the vine
. I haven’t seen your name in the papers for months. You need something to keep you up at night.”

  “I have my cat,” she muttered, drumming her fingers on her desk. He was right, though. She was dying on the vine. But was she ready to risk losing something big again? She was still licking her wounds from the last one, a self-defense case the jury didn’t buy. Was it time? She’d been careful not to promise Peggy anything, had left open the possibility that she and the kid might not make a good team. But that wasn’t really it, the reason for her hesitation—it was fear. Fear that she might no longer be at the very top of her game. And anything less than the top was below it and therefore unacceptable.

  “Hello? Lee? You haven’t hung up on me, have you?”

  “Is there anything else particularly terrible besides the confession?”

  “You mean besides the way the victim died?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much time do you have?”

  She glanced at the clock on her desk. It was a quarter to nine.

  “Not much. How did they get caught?”

  “Let’s see. The report says that the three older skinheads were bragging about a ‘boot party’ a few nights later at a place called The Sapphire Lounge in Denver—”

  “The Sapphire Lounge on Colfax?” Lee asked. “I used to eat Mexican food there. Probably thirty years ago.”

  “When you were ten?”

  “You must be truly desperate to resort to flattery.”

  “It’s not flattery,” Phil protested. “You look great. I’ve had a crush on you for years. I’d ask you out in a second if I thought you’d say yes.”

  “Cut it out, Phil. It’s one thing to beg, but now you’re groveling.”

  “Ah Lee, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a public defender. Groveling is one of the most important skills we practice on behalf of our clients. But FYI, I meant it about asking you out.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t, but FYI, I never date men who are more than five years younger than me.” As a matter of fact, since Paul’s death, she hadn’t dated anyone, but it would certainly be true if she ever started. “Did any of the co-defendants talk to the police?”

  “No, ma’am, just your client. The others are much older, in their mid to late twenties. And they all have prior felonies.”

  “What about Mr. Matthews?”

  “Nope. He’s squeaky clean. This is his first boot party.”

  “All right. Thanks for your time, Phil. I’ll let you know.”

  “Oh happy—”

  She hung up the phone.

  Lee finished her last appointment at six-thirty. Of the five people she interviewed, she’d agreed to represent two of them. The others clearly couldn’t afford her, but she took the time to answer their questions and advise them how to convince the court they were eligible for representation by the public defender. She also told them to request Phil Hartman as their attorney.

  The two cases she ended up taking weren’t particularly serious or complicated: a run-of-the-mill domestic violence charge where the client, who’d just been fired, shoved his wife and then pitched her cell phone into the neighbor’s yard, and a second-degree assault where the client, who’d taken too much Ecstasy, attacked a stranger on the Pearl Street Mall for staring at him. She could easily resolve the first case with a deferred judgment and counseling. The assault would be a bit more difficult, but eventually she would wrangle it down to a misdemeanor with a couple of months in the Boulder County jail.

  As she turned off the lights in her office and locked the door, Lee still hadn’t decided whether she’d take the Matthews case. Earlier in the day, she’d called the juvenile detention center and set up an interview with her prospective client for seven-fifteen. Outside her building, the evening was warm and surprisingly quiet, the traffic on Ninth Street almost nonexistent. The leaves on the trees were just beginning to turn, the only sign it was the beginning of October. It was a few minutes past seven. Most commuters were home now, eating dinner and doing all the things that regular people did.

  Lee had never been regular. Nor had Paul. The only time they ate together was by accident or when they were on vacation, usually in the fall, which was their favorite season. Most years around Halloween, they drove to Glenwood Springs, where they spent four or five days hiking from dawn to dusk and then swimming in the enormous hot springs pool the town was famous for. Afterward, they ate dinner at one of the local restaurants and then strolled back to their room, where they made love until their hands lost their grip on each other and they drifted off to sleep. There was an unspoken rule that neither of them could bring any work on vacation, an agreement that made Lee cranky at the beginning of a trip and grateful toward the end.

  Time to get moving. Lee took off her suit jacket, folded it carefully over her arm, and started walking. As she headed down Ninth, she saw a small red fox dart into the bushes next to the bike path. A black dog, off its leash, was following close behind. A second or two later, she heard someone on the path, presumably the owner, shouting at the dog.

  “Gussie! Gussie, get back here!”

  We’re all being chased by something, Lee thought. At the corner, she turned left onto Canyon Boulevard, heading west. In front of her, the foothills at the mouth of Boulder Canyon looked beautiful and imposing against the evening sky. The detention facility was in the back of the Justice Center located at Sixth and Canyon.

  Unless her destination was more than an hour away or she was in a hurry, Lee never drove. It had nothing to do with exercise; she got more than enough from her martial arts, which she practiced as often as possible. And it wasn’t because she was so committed to reducing her carbon footprint, although of course she recycled and, at her friends’ rather shrill insistence, reused her plastic bags. No, she walked for the same reason Paul might have meditated: to slow the movie down, to see how one thought followed another. It was how she recognized and cleared up fallacies in her thinking. How she refined her legal arguments.

  But no matter how many times she considered her last major trial, where she’d defended a client named Lenny Hall for murder, she’d come to the same conclusion: Her formerly rock-solid instincts had failed her. It didn’t matter why. It only mattered whether it was an aberration or the beginning of a trend. If it was the latter, she was through. And even if it was the former, she still had Lenny’s ghost tagging along behind her. Not haunting her exactly, more like stepping on the backs of her shoes, breathing on her hair, falling down and reaching for her ankles.

  Before his arrest, Lenny was a forty-year old bartender, a father of three, and an occasional drug dealer when his family needed additional funds. A few days before Christmas, he brought a gun to a meeting with a customer he didn’t trust. Things got out of hand—the universal felon’s lament—and the gun went off, killing the customer. In a panic, Lenny fled to his brother’s home in Arizona. Two months later, at the urging of his family, he turned himself in and was charged with first-degree murder. After waiving his rights, Lenny told the police he’d pulled the gun in self-defense and that during a struggle with the customer, the gun accidentally went off. It might have even been the truth.

  Toward the end of Lenny’s trial, Lee had to make a tough decision. Did she put her client on the stand or simply rely on his statement? Her instincts told her to put the client on, that you don’t win a self-defense case without the defendant’s testimony. Anticipating this, she’d spent hours preparing Lenny, cautioning him not to let the DA make him angry, that if he lost his temper, he would lose the trial. Eventually, she called him to the stand, her last witness, confident he would hold his own. But he didn’t.

  Halfway through the cross, Lenny started shouting when the DA insinuated he was a lousy father. After deliberating less than three hours, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder. Did Lenny have himself to blame? Of course, but he also had Lee; she was the lawyer, the professional fortune-teller, the one who should have known.

  When she reac
hed the Justice Center, Lee walked around to the back and pressed the buzzer to be let in. The detention center was a small locked facility built to house a maximum of twenty kids. It was used to hold only the most serious juvenile offenders until their charges were resolved.

  A few seconds later, the door unlocked and Lee walked down a corridor toward another, thicker door. Eventually, she was led into a windowless room and told to make herself at home. The room was furnished with a sad-looking purple couch, two metal chairs, a dying plant (thank God for silk) and a cheap floor lamp. A male employee in street clothes who looked like a bodybuilder promised to bring Jeremy in as soon as he could.

  Lee tried the couch first and then moved to one of the metal chairs. She placed her briefcase on the floor with no intention of opening it or taking any notes. The only thing she held was her card, which she might or might not give to Jeremy.

  Ten minutes later, the same guard reappeared with her prospective client.

  “You can have him for as long as you want,” he told her, backing out of the room. “He won’t give you any trouble. When you’re done, just knock.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Who are you?” Jeremy asked as soon as the door closed. His tone was hostile and suspicious.

  “Hi Jeremy. My name is Lee Isaacs. I’m a private defense attorney in Boulder.” She smiled pleasantly and motioned to the other metal chair. “Have a seat. The chairs are a lot more comfortable than the couch. Your aunt Peggy would like to hire me to represent you.”