by Jay Brandon
Praise for Jay Brandon and
LOCAL. RULES
“Jay Brandon knows how to put together a tight, believable courtroom melodrama.”
—Gene Lyons, Entertainment Weekly
“A crisp new story Brandon’s readers have come to expect ... thoughtful storytelling with appealing and credible characters. Local Rules continues in this tradition.”
—Ronald Scott, Houston Chronicle
“Local Rules is a great story and a terrific mystery with a surprise ending that will knock you out”
—James Wensits, South Bend Tribune
“Thoroughly entertaining.... excellent on all counts ”
—Mary Kate Tripp, Sunday Nem-dobe (Amarillo, TX)
“In swiftly moving prose and with an affectionately rendered, credible cast, Brandon delivers a solid string of riveting, detailed courtroom dramas—and some moving bedroom scenes as welL”
—Publishers Weekly
“Readers who place Grisham and Turow at the top of their courtroom suspense list will be forced to revise the rankings. Excellent..
—Wes Lukowsky, Booklist
A Literary Guild Selection A Reader’s Digest Condensed Book
LOCAL RULES
by Jay Brandon
© 1995
This edition published by Elesambeth House Publishing 2012
Author’s Introduction © Jay Brandon 2012
cover design by Rico Valdez
Author's Introduction, LOCAL RULES
This is my favorite of my early novels, maybe even my favorite ever. I also wrote it faster than any other novel, even though my daughter Elizabeth was born right in the middle of writing LOCAL RULES, and I took off about a month. Even with that month off, I finished the novel in only six months from the day I started writing, about two-thirds of the usual times.
By the time I wrote LOCAL, I'd written three novels set in my home town of San Antonio, and I wanted to get out of town. It was nice that people recognized locales in S.A., but they would also tell me if I got something wrong, even by a block. I wanted to write something set in a town I owned, because I had made it up. So Green Hills was born, somewhere along the 150-mile stretch of highway between S.A. and Corpus Christi. Nevertheless, people thought they knew where the book was set. People would tell me, "You know that book you wrote that takes place in Boerne?" Or Pleasanton, or Fredericksburg, none of which is anywhere near the correct location. I also got letters from around the country after the novel was published, saying Green Hills was obviously the town in which the letter-writer had grown up, from Mississippi to Oregon. So apparently I captured the reality of small-town life, which was a relief, because the smallest town I've ever lived in is Austin.
Incidentally, as to the name of the town: I originally called it Sweet Valley. Then came the scene where Jordan visits the local high school, which I naturally called Sweet Valley High. Wait a minute, that rings a bell. After I pointed this out to my editor, he was especially embarrassed, because my publisher, Pocket Books, was the publisher of the hugely popular Sweet Valley High series. So the town became Green Hills, an equally mythical name for a town along that stretch of highway in south Texas. No hills, no valleys.
So I loved having that town in my grasp, able to create all the details. But it was the characters who brought the book alive for me, especially Laura Stefone. (I wish now I'd given her a better last name. That was unkind. It was a weird name period for me. I mean, Fecklewhite? I was trying to be Dickensian.) I could picture Laura so well, and feel her background, much of which was unknown to Jordan for most of the book. Her dialogue just popped up on the page, without conscious effort on my part. For most of the writing of this novel, I was writing so quickly it was as if I was typing, or describing a scene I was seeing rather than making one up. At one point one character says to another, "Your hand is shaking," and just as I finished writing it I realized my hand was shaking. I have never felt so much a part of a story.
LOCAL RULES was a first for me in many ways. It was the first time an idea had so quickly become a finished novel. It began with just a scene: a lawyer is in a courtroom in an unfamiliar town, where he doesn't know the local rules, and everyone in the room knows something he doesn't. I had very little more than that to go on. Then one night I was sitting by myself thinking about the story, and I realized one tiny thing: everyone in the courtroom who thinks he knows a secret the lawyer doesn't is wrong. That one little change gave me the whole plot. I outlined it quickly and wrote it almost as quickly. (In those days I outlined extensively.)
This was also the first time I wrote a love story. (Which led to the great quote from a review by David Delman in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has appeared on many of my covers ever since: "Brandon does courtroom drama as well as John Grisham or Scott Turow. And he does love stories better.") This added such a strong element to the story that I thought at the time, I'm never again going to write a novel that doesn't include a love story. Later much of the Chris Sinclair/Anne Greenwald series sprang from that premise.
I did something at the end that I'd never done before, either, which I'm not going to explain now. If you want to know, go to my website and send me an email after you read the novel and I'll explain. jaybrandon.com But I've used this technique more than once since LOCAL RULES. It felt like a breathrough for endings. One reviewer did say, "with a surprise ending that will knock you out."
In rereading LOCAL RULES to proof it for this edition, I also realized that this story is about a young man's becoming a real lawyer. At the beginning of the story Jordan has just left the D.A.'s office, where he started his career (as did I, sort of). Prosecutors, frankly, don't really know what the practice of criminal law is like. First of all, prosecutors win nearly all their trials, which is just unrealistic and doesn't prepare one for private practice. Prosecutors also don't have to deal with civilians very much. Maybe a meeting or two with a victim or a victim's family, but there's never the kind of ongoing relationship a defense lawyer sometimes has with a client and the client's family. The case is never just academic for the defendant, and sometimes that begins to infect the defense lawyer as well. Some become true believers, sure every client is innocent. Some grown a hard shell of indifference. It's very hard to be the in-between kind of guy Jordan is. He starts the book with that D.A.'s office attitude that everyone is guilty, including presumably his own client, so he just wants to get a reasonable plea bargain offer and get out of town as quickly as possible.
But as the case progresses Jordan begins to change. He starts to grow empathy, damn it. He starts to care about his client, just a little. He starts hating the idea of seeing him get screwed, even if that's what the client seems to want. A turning-point scene is when mopey Wayne says he'll take the terrible deal the D.A. is offering and Jordan finishes his own snarling response to the D.A. only to turn to his own client and say, "And you shut up! When you want to say something in court, it's my voice you'll hear." Jordan has just learned the most basic premise of criminal defense work, or of any kind of lawyering: being in court the voice of the client.
Which is much harder than just doing his job competently and getting away.
Jordan also begins to care about the victim, Jenny Fecklewhite, which was hard to pull off, because she's dead before the first page of the story, and isn't going to reappear in some fictional trick. But Jenny is very real and still alive in the memories of the people of Green Hills who knew her. I had to try to bring her alive for the reader, and that meant bringing her alive for Jordan. Those scenes of investigating the lives of Jenny and of Kevin, the other victim, are few but very important. If the victims aren't real to Jordan, and to the reader, then none of the story has any significance. That's another trick lawyers in the courtroom share with w
riters on the page: trying to bring the past to life.
Before LOCAL RULES, I'd started to get a little bored by writing legal thrillers, started to feel confined. After all, that's not what I'd started out to do as a writer. But while writing LR, I realized that in the framework of a legal thriller, I could write about whatever interested me: love, death, small town life, sex, family, race. I no longer felt confined, and I haven't since.
Afterlife: A couple of good things happened with LR just before and after its publication. When I was growing up, my parents had a lot of books in the house, but most of them were Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I thought this was a bargain, because each volume held at least four novels. During summers when I was bored, or when I had nothing else to read, I read at least one novel out of many of them. At least one I read again and again, Don Quixote, U.S.A., until I finally got the uncondensed original out of the library and read it only to decide I liked the condensed version better.
From the time my first novel was published, my parents kept asking me, "When are you going to have one in Reader's Digest Condensed Books?" Finally I looked up the statistics, how many novels are published each year and how many appear in RD, and told them that the odds were about 10,000 to 1 (I'm making up that figure now; I think the odds were actually worse than that), so they shouldn't expect it. But with LOCAL RULES, I broke through. It was bought by Reader's Digest and appeared in one of their volumes. I even found the editing and condensing painless. One part I found funny. There is a scene between Jordan and Laura (spoiler alert) in which they are in the kitchen together, having a conversation and eating. This is after a night spent together, and they are naked. RD left in most of the scene, but cut one sentence: "They were both naked." Cutting four words changed the whole texture of the scene, so to speak.
RD volumes have lives of their own, so I still come across that one from time to time, in an antique shop or a furniture store, where they use volumes of RD to make a bookcase look filled. I always look at it very fondly, remembering how proud my parents were.
The other afterlife LOCAL RULES had was that a producer bought a movie option. He kept it for years and had a screenplay written, but never got it made. But early on it was nice to have it optioned. The producer would talk to me about the eventualities. "Who would you like as the court reporter?" he'd ask. I said, "Michelle Pfeiffer."
"Really? That's how you picture that character?"
"No. I just think every movie should star Michelle Pfeiffer."
After that conversation I read a tiny gossip item that said before she broke into acting, Ms. Pfeiffer worked as a court reporter. I passed this on to the producer, who was elated. And she was married to David E. Kelley, the TV producer and writer – and a lawyer. How perfect was that? He could produce it, she could star. So the producer sent the book to them, but nothing came of it it. Maybe they both wanted to forget their legal-themed pasts. I sympathize.
The other interesting aspect of the movie option is that Tommy Lee Jones happened to live a few blocks from me, San Antonio's only movie star. I even knew his father-in-law, Judge (later mayor) Phil Hardberger. Mr. Jones had recently directed a TV-movie, so this was another perfect combo. He could direct the movie and play the judge, which would be perfect casting. It drove the producer crazy that I knew where he lived and it was within walking distance of my house. "Can't you just kind of go and leave it on his front porch?" he'd ask. I finally asked Judge Hardberger about this possibility, and he told me one had to go through official channels to get to Mr. Jones. "I could pass it to him across the dinner table and he wouldn't read it."
So the producer did it the right way, sent the novel to Mr. Jones' agent. But while he may have been intrigued, he wasn't hooked. Some time after that I met Tommy Lee Jones at a reading he gave as a benefit for the San Antonio Library Foundation, of which I was a board member. When we were introduced he said, "You wrote that book about the lawyer who gets stopped speeding through the little town." I said yes I did. At which point he stopped making eye contact with me. Very careful man, Mr. Jones. He didn't want anything he said to be construed as a commitment. "I read that book," he said slowly. Long pause. "And I liked it very much." End of conversation. End of subject.
But at least he gave me an assessment I can use now: Enjoy LOCAL RULES. Tommy Lee Jones liked it very much.
for Sam and Elizabeth with love
I listened to some great music while writing this book. I’d like to thank particularly Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Chris Isaak, James McMurtry, and Rosanne Cash.
LOCAL RULES
1
It was a long, boring highway with home at one end and water at the other, and nothing to slow down for in between. Flat, scrubby land that didn’t snag the eye. The only sight was the horizon, and a man’s foot tended to get heavy on the accelerator. Jordan had the Bonneville on cruise control, set on seventy-two, but half the time he kept his foot on the gas pedal and helped it out a little when that horizon didn’t seem to be approaching fast enough. He must have been daydreaming, too, because he didn’t even notice passing the patrol car. The first time he saw it was in his rearview mirror. He muttered a curse, didn’t hit his brakes—that would have been too obvious—but turned off the cruise control and let the car ease down to the speed limit and below. The only effect that had was that the patrol car caught up to him faster. Its overhead lights came on as it did.
“Oh, hell,” Jordan said again.
As he coasted to a stop in the gravel of the highway’s shoulder, he struggled with his conscience, which, since he was a lawyer, meant he tried to decide what he could get away with. In the good old days—up to a few months ago— he had kept his driver’s license inside the little black flip-open case that held his district attorney’s office ID, so that when he handed over the license the law officer would see that Jordan was a prosecutor. In eight years he hadn’t gotten one ticket
But he didn’t have the ID any more. They hadn’t let him keep it even as a souvenir.
Nah, I won’t try to take advantage, he decided. Just be a common good citizen. In the mirror he saw that the officer was out of his patrol car. Jordan quickly jumped out to meet him, which he thought was the polite thing to do, but this officer didn’t seem to like having him spring out of the car. He stopped jerkily and one hand dropped to his hip. Jordan held his own hands out away from his body and tried to look harmless, which was easy, since he was wearing shorts and a knit shirt and tennis shoes without socks and couldn’t have been concealing anything more threatening than a key ring. The officer scowled as if Jordan had said something caustic and hurried forward, ticket book in hand. He wasn’t highway patrol, he was a sheriff’s deputy, Jordan saw, wondering what county he was in. The deputy wore a brown uniform and his arms were just as brown, except for a pale band on each arm just where the short shirtsleeve ended. There wasn’t much to be seen of his face beneath his straw cowboy hat and mirrored sunglasses except a black, rather severely trimmed moustache. The lips beneath the moustache were tightly sealed.
“Hello, Officer. I hope there’s not a problem.” Jordan politely removed his own dark glasses. When he took them off, the heat hit him all at once. It was south Texas, it was July, the sun was intent on reducing the asphalt of the highway back to melted tar.
“Would you step back here behind the car, sir, and let me see your operator’s license, please?”
Jordan complied. “It wasn’t one of my brake lights, was it? I just had the car inspected.”
“No, sir. You were exceeding the posted speed limit.”
“Really? This isn’t a speed zone, is it? The speed limit is sixty-five, isn’t it? I don’t believe I was going faster than that.”
The deputy didn’t respond. He looked as if he were trying to memorize the driver’s license, then he looked at Jordan’s face, comparing it. Jordan felt as stupid as anyone who’s been caught for speeding. A car zoomed past, making his clothes ripple, the car’s occupants no doubt enjoying a goo
d laugh.
Satisfied, the officer flipped up the cover on his ticket book, tucked it under the clamp of his clipboard, and clicked his ballpoint pen. As soon as the deputy touched pen to paper, Jordan knew, hope of mercy was gone. After the ticket was begun, the deputy couldn’t tear it up; he’d have to explain the missing ticket to his superiors.
“I’ve seen a lot of cases that started out like this,” Jordan said suddenly.
The deputy stopped, pen poised, its writing tip appearing to flicker in the heat like a snake’s tongue. “Sir?”
“I’ve prosecuted a lot of cases that started out as traffic stops,” Jordan said, enunciating distinctly on the second word.
“You’re a prosecutor?” the deputy said. He folded his arms, removing the pen from the ticket. “Where?”
“Bexar County,” Jordan said. His voice had deepened, as if he and the deputy were already chatting about the bad guys they’d put away. Jordan felt a little bad about the deception. A little.
“San Antonio,” the deputy said with almost human feeling. “You know Nora Brown?”
“Sure.”
“I testified for her once. She’s something, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yes.” Nora was no longer in the office, but then neither was Jordan, but why get technical?
“Hmp. Well.” The deputy was thinking it over, Jordan could tell from the way the officer’s lip lifted as he sucked on a tooth. “Need to slow down a little,” the deputy said.
“I definitely will.” Departing tension dropped Jordan’s shoulders.
