Abe paused and looked directly at Mike Black—who had published a column that morning, saying that if Abe Ringel really believed in his client’s innocence, why didn’t he put his own credibility on the line, rather than hiding behind Campbell’s boilerplate assertion of innocence? “I will stake my professional reputation on the prediction that Joe Campbell will be acquitted, if this case even goes to trial. No responsible prosecutor should be willing to go forward with this kind of case.”
As soon as he finished his statement, questions began.
“Mr. Ringel, I noticed that in the police report you gave out, you didn’t white out the name of the victim. Was that inadvertent?”
“No, I gave you the entire report with no omissions. Jennifer Dowling is not presumed to be a victim. She’s an accuser, and we intend to prove that she’s a false accuser.”
“Do you want us to publish her name?”
“That’s your decision. I certainly hope you will. And I urge anyone out there with information about Jennifer Dowling to call my office. That is why we decided to release her name. We are hoping that people who know her will come forward with factual information that might be relevant to the case.”
More questions followed.
“Why are you attacking an alleged rape victim?”
“Isn’t putting the victim on trial a discredited tactic?”
“Can we interview Campbell?”
Abe responded to the last question first. “Why don’t you try to interview Ms. Dowling? She is the accuser. My client has a presumption of innocence. An accuser is always on trial under the American system. And rape should be no exception.”
Abe took a few more questions, gave a few more answers, and ended the press conference.
Justin quickly ushered Abe into a conference room. “You really put yourself out on a limb—staking your professional reputation. That’s on videotape. Forever! If Campbell loses, the TV stations will play that clip all day and all night. Why did you do it?”
“Because this guy is not only innocent. He’s gonna be found innocent. Not like Charlie O. He has everything going for him—and for us. Let’s make the most of it. I know what I’m doing. Give me a break, huh?”
“You’re the boss. And it’s your reputation on the line. I could always say I never heard of you,” Justin joked.
“What do you hear from Charlie Odell? Has he stopped taking his pills?”
“I spoke to him an hour ago. He’s stopped. The psycho-pharmacologist I consulted said it could take a few days before they can see any difference.”
“Does the prison know he’s stopped?”
“I don’t know for sure, but when they do find out, they’re certainly going to try to force him to take the medicine.”
“What a world we live in,” Abe mused. “A lawyer has to literally drive his client crazy in order to save his life. No wonder they tell so many nasty lawyer jokes.”
On Monday night Abe was invited by Larry King to debate Gloria McDermot, the feminist attorney who specialized in representing rape victims. King hardly got a word in as McDermot and Ringel argued whether the usual rules of evidence—including the presumption of innocence—should apply in rape cases.
Gloria began, “Abe, you know that rape is the most under-reported serious crime in America. And the major reason rape victims don’t prosecute their rapists is lawyers like you, who drag them through the mud, disclosing their names, cross-examining them as if they were the criminals.”
“You’re right, Gloria. Rape is underreported, and that’s a serious problem which we all recognize. However, there’s an equally serious problem that you insist on ignoring.”
“What’s that?”
“Rape is also the most falsely reported crime, especially acquaintance rape. There are more fabricated date rape accusations than any other serious crime, and that’s precisely why we need lawyers who challenge every alleged victim’s story.”
“See, you’re doing it right now, Abe. You’re accusing rape victims of lying.”
“Not all, not even most, certainly some. That’s why we need rigorous rules of evidence, especially in rape cases.”
The debate continued for half an hour, with most of the callers supporting McDermot. Nonetheless, Abe felt that he got his point across.
The morning after the Larry King show, Rendi burst into Abe’s office. “I got all you need on the Dowling harassment case.”
Abe stopped his dictation to Gayle in midsentence. “I’m sorry to have interrupted the beginning of your sentence with the middle of mine,” he quipped.
Ignoring the put-down, Rendi launched into her findings. “I got the details of why Dowling’s case was dismissed.”
“Give.”
“Ms. Dowling sued her boss, Nick Armstrong, after he promised her a promotion if she had oral sex with him.”
“Where the heck did you come up with that? The records are sealed.”
“An anonymous call—from a guy who used to work with Dowling. He heard your press conference. NBC disclosed her name. The others didn’t.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Lots of rumors and gossip, most of which we can’t use. But the stuff about Nick Armstrong I was able to confirm with a good source.”
“Who?”
“Armstrong’s lawyer. I’ve done some work for him. He likes you. Hopes you might refer him some cases.”
“So what else did he tell you?”
“She came through and he didn’t.”
“I wonder what made her stoop so low?”
“I got the answer to that from a former colleague of Jennifer’s. It seems the company had lost its major client, Drexel Burnham, when they went into bankruptcy. The PR business, as you well know, is definitely not great right now. Jennifer was desperate and needed Armstrong’s influence to keep her job.”
“So she gave him a blow job?”
“It gets worse.”
Justin joined them after finishing up a phone call. “Did I miss anything good?’
“So far the false harassment case is confirmed. Okay, Rendi, go on,” Abe urged her.
To Rendi, who knew him so well, Abe’s contained excitement was apparent. “Okay. Not only did Armstrong ‘renege,’ if that is an appropriate term, he did something even worse. I’m telling you, this guy is a real slime bucket. This Armstrong character recommended her to another vice president of the company as, and I quote, ‘giving the best head in New York.’ Jennifer, mortified, sued both men.”
“Who told you this?” Justin had missed the early part of the conversation.
“Her colleague, who still works at the company. This is the same colleague who finally broke down under pressure from the company and disclosed that Jennifer had told her everything.”
“Which is how the company got the case dismissed—yes?” Abe was ahead of everybody, as usual.
“Right you are. Jennifer lied in her deposition, claiming that she had turned down both men, when, in fact, of course, she hadn’t refused Mr. Armstrong. It destroyed her credibility. All she got out of this nightmare was a deal—a crummy one, if you ask me—that her deposition would be sealed and the reason for her dismissal kept secret if she agreed to have the charges dropped as unfounded.”
“Case, as they say, dismissed,” Justin said.
“I feel sorry for her,” Rendi said.
“Well, I understand that. It just happens to be a bonanza for our client. Can you get me a witness who knows the circumstances and will testify—maybe this colleague?”
“No, she won’t testify, but I’ll try to find someone who will.”
And there was more. The limo driver had confirmed that there was necking in the car and that Jennifer had willingly invited Campbell back to her room.
Even the one bit of physical corroboration—a small abrasion on her vagina, which an expert said was “consistent with rape”—turned out to be, at best, ambiguous. The leading authority on vaginal abrasions, Dr. Joshua Weisburger o
f the Massachusetts General Hospital, had confirmed that although Jennifer’s abrasion was indeed consistent with rape, it was also consistent with consensual sex, especially if the man’s penis was unusually large and the woman had not borne children.
In Abe’s view there was nothing left to the prosecution’s case except the word of an alleged victim who had falsely accused her previous boss of sexual harassment—or, at least, the formal record so showed. If this were any other crime or any other defendant, Abe thought, the prosecution would fold. Yet Puccio wasn’t folding. She wasn’t even offering a deal—not that Abe would accept a deal at this point. This case had high-visibility trial written all over it.
Things looked good. Abe’s losing streak was about to end. Though he was confident he had thought of every realistic possibility, he decided to have Justin and Rendi review every piece of evidence again, more out of habit than necessity. Nothing could go wrong.
Chapter Eight
CAMBRIDGE—THURSDAY, MARCH 23
“They’re forcing the pills into his stomach!” Justin announced, coming into Abe’s office. “The judge has scheduled a hearing for Odell an hour from now. Our local guy is handling it. “He’s on his way to court. The shit has really hit the fan. The prosecutor is blaming it all on you. Says you’re grandstanding at your client’s expense.”
“Are we ready to appeal if the judge approves the force-feeding?”
“Poised for action.”
“Abe, it’s CNN on the phone for you,” Gayle said. “About the force-feeding. It’s all over the wires.”
“Hi, Abe Ringel here. What can I do for you?”
The reporter wanted to know if it was true that Abe had advised his client to stop taking drugs.
“I never discuss what advice I give my client,” Abe said. Then he posed a rhetorical question to the reporter. “What advice would you give a friend who would be killed unless he stopped taking his sanity pills?”
Justin listened to Abe’s side of the interview.
“No, I’m not confirming that I gave him the advice, but I’m not denying it, either. I’m letting you draw your own inference…. Of course I understand the risks. Do you understand the risks of doing nothing?… No, I don’t want to be interviewed live on television.” An interview would not help his client, Abe knew. The public would never agree with what he was doing.
More calls: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, The New York Times, the Post. It was a hot story, and it could get hotter, regardless of which way the judge ruled.
“Abe, the judge has ruled.” Gayle appeared in the doorway. “Stein is on the phone.”
“Hey, Max, up or down?” Abe asked his old law school classmate Max Stein, who was handling the case for him locally.
“In the middle,” Max replied. “Judge Cox granted the temporary restraining order. No force for now. He wants you and Odell in court next Monday. The restraining order stays in effect only till then. It’s anyone’s guess what he’ll do. But he had some not-so-nice words to say about you.”
“What’s his gripe?”
“You should have done it more directly, by bringing a lawsuit to stop the medicine instead of advising him to throw the pills down the drain.”
“Now he’s telling me how to practice law. He knows damn well we have a better shot if the state has to force him.”
“That’s what he doesn’t like.”
“All right, we’ll be ready for Monday. We have a great expert on psychopharmacology.”
“See if you can find a great expert on legal ethics. You may need one.”
Abe and Justin planned to spend the next couple of days preparing for the Odell hearing and the Campbell trial. Abe loved this part of the practice. No clients around, no billing problems, no judges. Just legal strategy. It was like a surgeon planning a complicated operation or a general planning a major battle. In this kind of chess game, Abe was at his very best in anticipating his opponents’ tactics and countering them.
Everything was falling into place for both cases, when suddenly, out of the blue, Justin noticed something curious he might have seen a dozen times but never focused on before. While thumbing through the file folder containing the computer printouts that Joe Campbell had given Abe, he caught sight of the last page of Abe’s won-and-lost record, on the very bottom of which were printed the numbers 08:43. Justin then looked at Campbell’s printout of the Jennifer Dowling case to see what the comparable numbers were.
There were no numbers at the bottom of that page.
Justin’s first instinct was to ignore this apparently insignificant detail and turn to more promising leads, since the most likely explanation for this minor difference in formatting was probably of no relevance to the Campbell case. But he remembered what Abe had told him on his first day at work: “Always look for clues in places that aren’t obvious.” Abe had illustrated his lesson by relating how he had won a civil case several years earlier by noticing something at the top of a faxed page that had been turned over to him as part of the “discovery” process. The contents of that fax, Abe told Justin, were not particularly significant, but the digits at the top were the telephone number from which the fax had originally been sent to the defendant. That number proved to be extraordinarily significant, since it pointed to a source that no one previously had suspected of complicity in the conspiracy to destroy the plaintiff’s business.
Justin thought about this story as he peered at the bottom of both printouts. Was there something significant here? Or would it turn out to be a dead end, as most leads did? Sure, Abe loved to tell the fax story, but he never told the hundreds of other stories where the lead took him down a dark alley to nowhere. No harm checking it out, though, even if it meant wasted steps, Justin thought as he dialed the number of the database company.
The recorded message for the database’s customer support system was frustratingly long, offering menus within menus, but finally Justin received an actual human being on the line.
“Thank you for calling CompuLaw Customer Support Systems, this is John Tierney, how can I help you?”
“I have a question about some numbers at the bottom of a printout from your reference system.”
“I’ll see if I can help you, sir.”
“What does ‘08:43’ mean?”
“That means the subscriber was interfacing with the database for eight minutes and forty-three seconds.”
“Well, I have another printout without that notation. This one made a few days earlier. What could that mean?”
“I’m not sure. But it may have something to do with the change of format we instituted recently.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re certain that it’s the entire printout you have in front of you, then it may mean that the printout without the numbers was generated before we changed the format to include the time logged. We had gotten a lot of complaints from law firms that they need the time for their billing records. So we changed it.”
Justin’s interest was piqued by this information. “And when was it that you changed the format?”
“I’ll check the exact date for you, sir.”
The technician came back on the line after a brief time-out. “That would be March first of this year.”
“Thanks.”
“Will there be anything else we can help you with today?”
“No, that’ll do it.”
“Have a good one.”
After he hung up Justin sat back, put his feet on his desk, and meditated on the information. Just then Abe wandered into the computer room.
“Anything new?”
“Yes, in fact, there is.” Justin placed his feet back on the floor and handed Abe the printout with the numbers circled. “See this?”
“Yes.”
Next Justin handed him the sexual harassment print. “See this—no numbers.”
“Yes, so?”
Abe didn’t know anything about computer retrieval systems. He didn’t use them, and he didn’t believe
in them. He hated them. “I like to write on long yellow pads. That’s the way I think.” Still, he did insist that the office have a complete and up-to-date system and that everyone else, especially his young associates, master them. “So that I don’t have to,” was his constant refrain. Justin loved to tell his computer age buddies about the first time Abe got a fax over the wireless portable that Gayle had ordered. “There’s paper coming out of this infernal machine!” Abe had marveled. “And there aren’t even any wires.”
“The fax paper doesn’t travel through wires,” Justin had explained, “even when there are wires. It’s all electronic.”
“I know that,” Abe had said defensively. “But at least when there are wires, I can see that it’s connected to something.”
Today’s episode proved it worthwhile for Abe’s office to be high tech—without Abe ever having to touch a machine.
“I don’t even understand what it is I don’t understand.” Puzzled, Abe looked down at Justin. “Why is it significant that one printout has time figures at the end and the other doesn’t?”
“That’s not what’s significant, Abe. What’s significant is that the formatting was changed on March first.”
“So?”
“So, Joe told us that he first met Jennifer in New York on March 10. But if her printouts were generated before March 1—as the technician seems to be saying—then Joe would have had to meet her at least ten days before he told us he met her.”
“But why would he lie about that?”
“I don’t know, Abe. But what I do know is that he may have had some justification for his first lie, but two lies are harder to explain away. I’m beginning to get worried about this guy.”
“Is it possible,” Abe asked, “that you could be wrong about this formatting stuff?”
“It is possible,” Justin acknowledged. “But only if the printout without the numbers was somehow incomplete.”
“Okay, hang on a minute,” Abe said, shuffling through the unfamiliar computer printouts. “Show me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”
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