Against the Law

by Jay Brandon

  ‘We’ve all had innocent clients, Amy,’ Edward said, whilst thinking they are giant pains in the ass. There was nothing worse for a lawyer than believing in your client’s innocence. Because Amy was right, the system was going to treat them all the same way; the very rare, irregular-shaped pebble of an innocent person rolled right along the conveyor belt with the other peas, heading for the can.

  Amy continued as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘They all think I’m guilty because they only know me as a client. We didn’t meet before. We didn’t go to school together. They only know me as a woman accused of murdering her husband. And charges like that are nearly always true, so that’s what they think. They only know me in relation to this crime. I need a lawyer who knows me, Edward. I need one who really believes, who knows in his heart, that I’m innocent.’ A crease appeared between her eyes as she continued to look at his face. ‘You do, don’t you?’

  Of course he did. Didn’t he? Sweet little Amy, his baby sister, she couldn’t kill a man, could she? Well, no, not a generic man. But her estranged husband, who might have done who knows what to unhinge her?

  Edward had known such cases.

  But this wasn’t a case. This was his sister.

  Edward’s roommate, Mike, came home late in the afternoon to find Edward lying face down on the sofa. It was something Edward had done since law school. Face down on the sofa, arms at his sides, his face resting on a little pillow that only covered his eyes, not his mouth. It was a way of blotting out the world while he concentrated on something. Edward did it to put himself and a problem alone together in a dark, dark room, with no door out.

  It wasn’t the least bit restful.

  But it did allow him to focus. When he had the toughest problems of all, he’d add a pillow that he’d hold around the back of his head, covering up his ears as well. In the cave of his thoughts, he nearly always came up with a solution. He’d missed this in prison, where you couldn’t afford to let go of your senses or show the world your back.

  Edward hadn’t covered up his ears today, because he wanted to hear Mike come in. But he didn’t stir as he heard the back door open and close.

  ‘You OK?’ Mike asked the inanimate lump on the couch.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ came Edward’s muffled voice.

  Mike laughed. A minute later Edward sat up to see Mike sitting across the room watching him, beer bottle in hand. Mike was thin, edging into middle age, and if someone didn’t notice his wrists or forearms, or his knotted hands, he could take Mike for being slight. He had a face for blending into the woodwork, with hooded brown eyes and no particularly prominent features. But he could hold a stare better than anyone Edward had ever known. Mike had a way of looking at someone without moving and with no expression, patient and non-judgmental. During Mike’s twenty years as a cop – the last twelve as a homicide detective – he had extracted many a confession from a sullen inmate with that unmoving, neutral stare.

  Edward said, ‘Amy wants me to represent her.’

  ‘Hmm.’ A sound that didn’t require Mike to move his tongue or his eyes.

  ‘I took her to three damned good lawyers, but apparently they failed to impress. She wants me.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Mike said again, but this time added, ‘She must have bought your shit over the years about being the best lawyer in Texas.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  Mike just looked at him.

  ‘Hell, I don’t even think that. Well …’

  Mike chuckled.

  ‘That’s not her reason, though. She says other lawyers all think she’s guilty and I don’t. She wants someone representing her who believes her.’

  ‘And do you?’

  That was one of the things Edward had been asking himself as he lay face down on the sofa. He hadn’t seen Amy and Paul together enough to have any insight about their relationship. The drama of their separation had happened during his gap time. So the only way to judge the question was to decide what he thought his sister was capable of doing. He still thought of her as the little sister, coming to him with her problems. But Amy had not only gotten through the tough years of medical school and graduated near the top of her class; she seemed able to live with the burden of a famous father in her own chosen profession. Edward couldn’t imagine her pointing a gun at a person, let alone pulling the trigger. But anyone is capable of anything under the right – or wrong – circumstances. And no one can drive someone to murder like a spouse.

  ‘Of course,’ Edward said.

  Mike gave him a skeptical look. ‘Well, you could certainly do it. You always did take pride in your trial skills.’

  ‘It’s not about that. It’s not completely about that. There’s something else, but Amy thinks I believe in her more than any other lawyer would.’

  ‘And what value does that have in trial? You’d still be committing a crime, right?’

  ‘Oh yes, no question of that.’

  Edward would be screwed. At some point the parole board would find out he’d been practicing law without a license and his parole would be revoked. He’d probably be prosecuted for the new offense and his chance of actually ever being licensed to practice law again would decline to: Are you kidding?

  But his sister was charged with murder. If he could save her, he would.

  ‘So you want to help?’ Edward asked his roommate.

  ‘Help put you back in prison? Sure. That’s what I did for twenty years, put felons back in the pen. Sure, Edward, I’ll help. Just tell me one thing.’

  In retirement from the police force, Mike had been a private investigator for three years now. Though he was still getting used to the idea of working on behalf of someone charged with a crime instead of against them, he was good at it.

  ‘What?’ Edward asked.

  ‘What’s your real reason for wanting to represent your sister?’

  ‘I already told you.’ And Edward gave his roommate a stare as level and unemotional as his own. Mike seemed to accept it, shrugging again before getting up and heading back to his bedroom.

  The honest stare was completely false. In the cave of his thoughts, Edward had realized why he should represent Amy, the advantage he had over every other lawyer – every real lawyer – in the world. That’s what had convinced him to do such an idiotic thing.

  He thought he was off to a good start in his re-entry into the legal world, getting away with a lie like that stare.

  FOUR

  A lawyer only ever has one real client: himself. Even while doing your best to take care of your clients, in every case you have to take care of yourself too. Some of those clients are going to turn on you later, say you were incompetent or drunk or gave away their secrets. You do things for the client, but you document what you did for yourself. Write down your time spent; make notes on what you told the client. Have him sign a letter saying he’s rejecting certain advice. That’s not for the client’s benefit. It’s for you.

  Because of those conflicting interests, there’s always at least a slight distance between the lawyer and the client. Except in those few cases of that crazed, true-believer lawyer, who knows he and the client are one and everything the lawyer does and thinks and breathes and eats is for the client. Those are the ones most likely to have the clients throw them under the bus later.

  Edward wouldn’t be able to keep that careful distance in this case. Even signing onto it would be throwing away his own future for his sister. And what if he lost, as criminal defense lawyers nearly always do? He would be destroying his relationship with the sister he’d tried to save. How could he go and see her in prison, knowing he’d helped put her there? How could she ever forgive him? Nor would the rest of the family ever understand or forgive him.

  But, he asked himself, would walking away be any better? If another lawyer took the case and lost – the most probable outcome – Amy would always think her big brother could have saved her but wouldn’t.

  So Edward had good reasons for taking up this insane task.
But those weren’t the decisive ones. He had two advantages that no licensed attorney, no other person he knew, could have. First was the fact that he was unlicensed. If he lost the trial and then revealed his undocumented status, it would be a potential ground for reversal on appeal.

  But the primary reason, the one that drove him running the next day until he was exhausted, was his secret shared past with the judge. He and Cynthia had known each other slightly when they were both in the D.A.’s office; she a new baby prosecutor, he already feeling like a veteran trial lawyer after three years in the office. They had tried one of her first jury trials together, when he was supervising her, teaching her and evaluating her skills. Cynthia was very tightly buttoned-up, always carefully dressed in a suit even on non-trial days, when some prosecutors would come to work in jeans. She was fresh-faced, very pretty and obviously determined to be a killer prosecutor. She never talked about her personal life, never went for a drink after work with the others. Cynthia got to work early, did her job and left promptly at five o’clock, as if her real life was waiting for her impatiently.

  But in that trial, Edward had noticed a reckless streak in her. At first he thought she didn’t know the rules of evidence or procedure, but that wasn’t it. Cynthia seemed to know the rules – she could look them up quickly and quote them to the judge when the occasion called for it – but she tried to skirt them. She would force the opposing lawyer to object or she would inject inadmissible evidence into the trial if he didn’t. It must have been exhausting for the defense lawyer, who not only had to be alert with every question Cynthia asked, but had to make the split-second decision whether to object at all. The defense lawyer had known that, by making repeated objections, he’d make the jury think he was trying to keep something from them and by extension that he knew his client was guilty.

  Edward had watched her performance with fascination. Cynthia remained tightly controlled, her face emotionless as she asked increasingly outrageous questions. She tried to elicit hearsay, irrelevant emotional information, even privileged information. ‘Objection,’ the defense lawyer said again and again, with increasing weariness. Within an hour he didn’t even have to say the basis for his objection, as old Judge Morrison repeatedly sustained them, instructing the jury to ignore what they had just heard.

  Edward almost told her to tone it down, but then decided to give the baby prosecutor her head, sitting back and marveling. After all, it was only a DWI, a misdemeanor, so the stakes weren’t very high. He stayed in his seat as the defense lawyer asked to approach the bench. He and Cynthia went up there and inclined their heads toward the judge, who obviously then instructed her to knock it off. Cynthia didn’t even give him the courtesy of nodding before she resumed her seat and went right back to it.

  This performance culminated when the defendant took the stand as the last witness. His lawyer kept questioning him on increasingly irrelevant details, obviously reluctant to hand him over to the shark-like prosecutor, but he finally had no choice.

  Her first question on cross-examination to the defendant was, ‘How did your lawyer instruct you to behave in trial? Did he tell you to sit up straight, look at the jury, even stutter a little when you—?’

  ‘Objection!’ the defense lawyer almost screamed. It had taken him a couple of seconds to leap to his feet; he was so taken aback by her questions. Quivering, he said, ‘These questions invade the attorney-client privilege, Your Honor. They’re also irrelevant. They have nothing to do with whether my client is guilty or innocent.’

  ‘I sustain both objections,’ the judge said, his ponderous stare on Cynthia Miles. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you are to disregard those questions. The prosecutor is not allowed to inquire into what has been said between the defendant and his lawyer. The defense’s relevancy objection is also well taken. A good lawyer will instruct his client how to behave in trial whatever he thinks of the client’s guilt or innocence. Young lady …’ He turned back to Cynthia, with the cold stare of a lion trying to decide if he’s hungry enough to go after that little gazelle. ‘… watch yourself.’

  ‘Thank you for those instructions, Your Honor,’ defense counsel said. ‘But I must also ask for a mistrial now. I believe the prosecutor’s questions through the entire trial have so tainted this jury that my client can no longer receive a fair trial.’

  ‘That will be denied,’ Judge Morrison said, then beckoned all the lawyers up to him, pointedly including Edward. He leaned toward them and in a barely lowered voice said, ‘The next such request will very likely be granted. Mr Hall, are you just here as a spectator?’

  ‘No, Your Honor. Thank you, sir. I will instruct my colleague.’

  Cynthia said nothing, no apology, no explanation. As they walked back to their table Edward said quietly, ‘You heard the man. You can knock it off now. I’m sufficiently impressed.’

  She said nothing. With her back very straight, she lowered herself into her seat and did not ask another objectionable question for the rest of the trial. But, by that time, Cynthia had both the defendant and his lawyer so flustered that the red-faced defendant couldn’t answer a simple question without stammering. Edward had seldom seen a defendant look so guilty. And Cynthia gently guided him right off the cliff, into admissions of his guilt he didn’t know he was making. For example, that he was driving because he thought his friend was too drunk to do so and that they’d been out celebrating a recent promotion. (When one is out celebrating with a drunken friend, one tends to be drunk too.) By the end, all that mattered was the way Cynthia had made him look, not only like a liar, but with his red face and incoherent replies, like a drunk.

  ‘That was impressive,’ Edward had said to Cynthia after her guilty verdict. ‘But I think you should apologize to the judge.’

  Cynthia had turned to him with genuine curiosity. Edward was struck again by how pretty she was, with her eyes wide and her head held high.

  ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘I was just doing my job and he was doing his.’

  ‘OK.’ Edward had shrugged. ‘But Judge Morrison might have it in for you for a long time after today.’

  ‘What could he possibly do to me?’ Cynthia asked calmly, then reassembled her file and walked away, while Edward stared.

  But that wasn’t his last or most memorable encounter with Cynthia Miles, prosecutor.

  Edward and Cynthia never again tried a case together, but they did oppose each other several years later, when he was a defense lawyer and Cynthia had risen rapidly to become a first chair felony prosecutor. She shook hands with him before the potential jurors came in, but gave no hint they’d ever known each other in any other roles.

  Edward was a high-flying defense lawyer by then, having won a couple of well-publicized trials, so his fee had gone up and he had a steady stream of clients. His suit was Armani, his shoes Ferragamo, his hair cut to precisely the most flattering length.

  He flew high in other ways, too. Edward no longer represented shoplifters or thugs. He had developed a clientele used to the finer things in life, including the best lawyers. Some of them liked to share: expensive dinners, women, habits. Edward enjoyed – that was the word – the lifestyle of a successful, single trial attorney.

  But that didn’t affect his trial performance. His client today was a man in his late twenties, on the verge of moving into middle management in his organization, but who had made the blunder of becoming personally involved in one more sale. Unfortunately, it was to an undercover police officer. Fortunately, Edward’s client hadn’t personally handed anything over to the officer or accepted anything from him. He had just been in the room. Also good for Edward’s case, the undercover officer had some problems of his own, some in his personnel file, some Edward’s investigator had discovered, that even the cop’s supervisors and the prosecutors didn’t know about. It was going to be fun.

  It was a hard and well-fought trial, not just with aggressive lawyers, but thoughtful ones. Cynthia had greatly tempered her earlier fierceness. She seld
om asked an objectionable question now, so sometimes she could slip one by, because the defense counsel wasn’t poised to hear it. She’d learned it was more effective to be a sniper than a shotgunner. She knew the weakness of her case was the undercover detective, who had cleaned up for the trial in a suit and tie, but still had a scruffy look about him. And red, tired eyes, Edward was happy to note. He looked dissipated, as if coming off a binge.

  But Cynthia was waiting for Edward whenever he got close to devastating her witness, objecting to hearsay or making an objection that would be denied, but in the process told her witness what his answer should be. Before that, in her own questioning of the witness, she’d gone into some of his indiscretions herself, such as his three-day suspension for claiming to be on the job, when he was really elsewhere. The detective testified that he’d been taking care of a sick parent. Edward had other information, which he would bring out in his own turn.

  So it was satisfying work, trying a case against Cynthia. As usual, shortly into the trial, Edward forgot the client sitting by his side. This was a dance with his opponent.

  Toward the end of the detective’s testimony, Cynthia handed the witness a paper bag and asked him to identify it.

  ‘This is the substance the defendant’s partner sold me,’ the officer said. Edward objected that there was no evidence his client was partners with the actual salesperson and was sustained. But in the next moment he forgot that, as the detective opened the bag and took out a smaller plastic bag; a gallon-size storage bag almost filled with white powder.

  Everyone in the courtroom had seen this in movies and TV shows, this Gold Medal flour size batch of supposed cocaine. But very few of them had seen it in real life, up close. It had a texture Edward recognized, a weight composed of more than the grams it weighed. He knew what it could do. Edward’s nostrils flared from twenty feet away. He could swear he could smell it. Taste it.

  Afraid of giving himself away, he tore his eyes from the bag and they fastened on the prosecutor, standing there because she had handed the evidence to the detective. So she was much closer to the coke. Edward saw that she had paused too, staring at the white powder. Cynthia’s nostrils were flared too.