by Aime Austin
After having Jenny search through the aged computer system and dredging up a case number, Casey made the big ask. “Can you fax me all the documents in the case?”
There was a long pause as Jenny no doubt saw her morning, cleared by Casey taking a handful of cases, suddenly filled with the task of battling an ancient fax. Casey held her breath. “That would take too long,” she said. Casey knew it. But before she could go on a self-pitying rant, Jenny spoke again. “I’ll make a copy. Come pick it up in twenty minutes.”
The sun was smiling for Casey, both literally and figuratively. She wouldn’t have to badger the prosecutor any longer. Case information she should have had was in her hot little hands thanks to Jenny. She took the witness list to her car and planned out her day.
The list was typical. It included nearly everyone who’d ever stepped a foot in Cuyahoga County. After a cursory glance, she scrutinized the list more carefully. All the social workers who’d come into contact with Olivia were there of course, as well as someone from child support, and a few doctors who were practically on the county’s payroll. But there were a few surprises. The first was Alison Feingold with a far east Shaker Heights address.
She pulled her Cleveland map from the glove compartment and flipped to the east side. Sliding her index finger along the thin line of Shaker Boulevard, she was able to guess that the address likely belonged to the middle school. A quick call on her cell revealed that Feingold was a new school counselor. Casey made an appointment to see her in an hour.
Walking into any school always took her back. Even in school districts with a lot of money, there was a certain sameness to schools—generic sea foam green paint, cinderblock walls, linoleum floors. Shaker Heights Middle was no different. The warm air coupled with the smell of fried food and chlorine made her a little nauseous. She was happy to check in at the administration area where potpourri from nearly every desk was a godsend.
“Good morning. Are you Casey Cort?” Alison asked.
“Yes,” she said, following the woman to her office. Without invitation, Casey sat in one of the counselor’s chairs, and cleared off a space on the desk for her legal pad. Looking unsettled at Casey’s boldness, Alison nonetheless closed the office door and sat in her chair.
“Can I call you Casey?” When Casey nodded, she continued. “And you can call me Alison. From your call, I wasn’t really sure what you wanted from me.”
Casey considered the counselor, dressed like she was fresh from an episode of Ally McBeal. Weren’t her legs cold in that skirt? Casey’s own skirt reached nearly to her ankles. “I’m an attorney. I usually serve as a guardian ad Litem. Today, though, I’m here on Olivia Grant’s case. I’m representing—”
“Oh, my goodness. I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been trying to reach Olivia’s social worker, but I keep getting voicemail and the runaround. I’m really worried about Olivia. How is she?”
Casey set her pen down for a second and caught the young woman’s eye. Had she mistaken her for Olivia’s attorney? Rather than correct the apparent misunderstanding, she let Alison go on.
“I want to tell you about myself. I’ve only started here this year. I graduated from Baldwin Wallace last year. The principal here has let me be pretty innovative. I started this after-school club, you know?” Alison went on to describe how she’d felt marginalized as a junior high and high school girl. Casey had a hard time believing that, with her blond hair and model slim body, but didn’t interrupt.
The counselor had wanted to create a group where girls from different cliques could get to know each other. If the kids discussed school and family problems in a nurturing environment, she’d hoped to eliminate some of the bullying and mean girl behavior that was so prevalent nowadays. So she’d put the subject of her graduate thesis in action.
“And I was so glad when Olivia Grant moved here,” she continued. “She added needed diversity to the group, you know. Most of the girls here come from comfortable backgrounds. I knew Olivia could really mix it up, being from Cleveland. But she needed a lot of help. She was so down all the time, you know. It’s sad about her mom drinking all the time at home. So many of the minority students I’ve counseled have substance abuse issues in the home. Such a shame.” Alison shook her pretty head.
“First, let me give you my card,” Casey said. “If you have any questions or think of anything after I leave, give me a call.”
Alison looked at the card. “Oh, it says here you work downtown. You’re not with the county?”
“Many private attorneys work at Juvenile court. Some parents are represented by the public defender, but the rest of the gap is filled by private attorneys.” Alison nodded. Casey picked up her pad, clicked her pen. “I’d like to ask a few questions.”
Olivia had started in Shaker at the end of last year, March to be exact. She’d fared well in standardized testing. The girl had a higher than average IQ, and had always scored above the ninety-five percentile.
“What made you think something was wrong at home?”
“It started with her grades,” Alison said. “Her team teachers said she wasn’t engaged in class. In college, we learned that was a sure sign something wasn’t right at home. Then when I got her involved in the club, I saw that she was afraid of her mother. She submitted this note.” Alison took the creased sticky note from her file and handed it to Casey.
“Did you confront Olivia about this?”
“That’s when she told me about her mother’s drinking. All the pieces clicked. Poor school performance, depression, no friends. I called the hotline right away.” Casey gave her as hard a stare as she could muster. “I’m a statutory reporter. I had to follow the law.”
Casey asked a few more questions, got a copy of Olivia’s file, and left the school. Checking her map, she realized she was close to the home of Lyn Byers, another name on the witness list. A quick call to Grant revealed Byers to be a mother of one of Olivia’s friends. Her client had said she wasn’t sure she’d ever met the woman, and if so, it had only been in passing. Intrigued, Casey drove the short distance to the Byers’ home. It was an intimidating three story Tudor set far back on tree lined Kingsley Road.
Casey called the mother from her cell and introduced herself as Judge Grant’s attorney.
“Casey? This isn’t a really good time—”
It was nine-thirty, a time Casey thought of as a golden mommy hour. Done with morning drop off, there were at least three hours, maybe five before pickup. “I’m here at your front door. I only need a few minutes.” The curtains twitched. She turned off her Honda, which sputtered to a stop. She gathered her briefcase and made the long walk to the front door. Life on this side of the river was a far cry from where she’d grown up.
Before she could knock, the front door opened. A tall thin woman stood, with watery blue eyes and dishwater blond hair not much different from her own. She extended her hand. Byers’ grip was reluctant. She stepped back and allowed Casey into a large oak paneled entryway. Despite her reticence at her guest, her manners didn’t fail. Casey was asked for and handed over her coat. Following Byers to a sunny kitchen in the back of the house, she took a seat at the granite island.
“Would you like some coffee?” Byers asked, refilling her own mug.
While Casey would have loved a cup, this wasn’t a social call. She got down to business. “Children and Family Services has taken custody of Olivia Grant—for neglect—based upon allegations of alcohol problems. You’ve been identified as a witness by the county.”
“I’m supposed to testify?” Byers looked taken aback. This is what Casey hated about Juvenile. Everyone loved to get down and dirty when it came to talking about other people’s parenting, but they didn’t want to go public. “No one said anything about this to me.”
“Who have you talked to about the case?”
Byers set her mug on the granite counter. “A couple of weeks ago I got a call from Alison Feingold, the girls—Cate and Olivia’s counselor. She was c
oncerned about Olivia. Asked if I knew anything.”
“And did you?”
“I only told her what I knew. That Olivia and Cate haven’t been friends very long. The girl’s new to Shaker. Two times Olivia’s mom Sheila was supposed to pick her up. And she didn’t. I mean it’s no big deal, but among moms it’s a common courtesy. Olivia always seemed nervous when I asked about her mom or having some girls over to her house. Sheila never reciprocated. And on the night of my daughter’s birthday, I saw her break into her own house. So when Alison called me, I put two and two together.”
And came up with five, Casey thought.
“When I put together what Alison told me about the drinking and Olivia breaking in, what else could I think? Sheila must have passed out. How else could she forget to pick up her daughter, and not hear the doorbell that night?”
Byers’ phone rang and she talked briefly to the caller, making no attempt to put him or her on hold. Placing her hand over the receiver, she said, “Can you show yourself out?”
Casey gathered her things, got the London Fog from the closet and walked to the car. Byers would be easy to destroy on cross. Speculation was not evidence. She sat in her car a while, puzzling out the case and knew where she needed to go next. Fortunately, Vera Rhinehardt, Sheila’s landlord and neighbor, was home.
After accepting a glass of water and taking a seat on the couch in the small but beautifully restored apartment, Casey got down to it. What exactly, she asked Rhinehardt, had she seen?
“I thought there was a burglar,” Rhinehardt started. “Glass broke and I woke my husband Josh. He took a bat from the closet and went to investigate. When he came back, he said the girl from upstairs had broken in.”
Casey slipped into interrogator mode. “What happened next?”
“I got some cardboard from the basement, fit it to the pane, and swept up the shattered glass.”
“Did you confront Olivia or Judge Grant?”
“Not that night, it was late. But the next morning when Sheila was leaving, I asked her about it. She was obviously embarrassed, and promised to drop a check in the mail.”
“Did she say why it had happened?”
“Olivia had forgotten her key and Sheila, thinking it was going to be a late night teen party, didn’t wait up for her.”
Casey was unimpressed with the prosecutor’s case so far. There must be something else, she surmised. She pushed on.
“Anything else happen upstairs that got your attention?”
“Maybe a couple of weeks after that, I heard yelling.” Vera looked a little sheepish. Casey guessed she was more than a casual observer of her tenant’s lives.
“Could you make out what was being said or was it just yelling in general?”
“Nothing distinct, but it wasn’t the first time.”
“Did it worry you enough to call the authorities?”
“No,” Rhinehardt laughed, a little uncomfortable. “I was a teenager once. I got on the wrong side of my mother a lot. If we’d been renters, the landlord would have heard me being chewed out a time or twelve.”
“Anything else?”
Rhinehardt was quiet a long time. “I haven’t told anyone, not even Josh, but sometimes the yelling was accompanied by bumping, like the girl was being hit or had fallen. And once, this summer when the window was open, Sheila called Olivia names I thought were bad.”
“Like what?”
“Like the girl was fat, and lazy. But it was a holiday weekend, and everyone in America had probably been drinking, so I put it out of my mind.”
“Have you told any of this to a social worker or prosecutor?”
“No. Should I?”
Casey wasn’t going to answer that one. She deflected. “I’m trying to get Olivia home.”
“Where is she, with her dad or something?”
“In foster care.”
Rhinehardt gasped, her hand covering her mouth in surprise. “Why?”
“There’s smoke here, but no fire. The school counselor is new, a little zealous. I’m trying to bring her home.” Casey said.
The witness list looked like a shot in the dark, but the prosecutor neither had the time nor resources to investigate. She’d have a hard enough time winning the case without speculation and innuendo muddying the waters.
Thirty-Three
Washington Murmurs
November 16, 2001
Senator Tommy Franklin sat in his small Capitol Hill studio sipping his third—make that fourth brandy of the night. He pulled stacks of papers from his briefcase and laid them on the small wooden side table. Although he’d been in Washington for over a decade, he hadn’t made it his permanent residence like so many of the other senators. Still a bachelor at the ripe old age of forty-eight, many colleagues assumed he was gay.
Lonely, was more like it. His career, first as an attorney with the Justice Department, then as the junior senator from Ohio, had kept him from seriously pursuing any one woman. So here he was approaching fifty, a warm drink and endless position papers his only company.
None of the papers would keep him from inevitable slumber. He sat back in his leather club chair and debated which would accompany him to bed, the latest research from a lobbyist, or a pending legislation. Then he came across a thick folder—the file of one Sheila Harrison Grant.
As he leaned forward in the leather chair, he quickly paged through the folder, found Grant’s grades from law school, her publications, the results of her FBI investigation, the same they did for all judicial candidates, and information about her time of Bennett Friehof. It was mildly interesting reading. This one didn’t look like she’d be a judicial activist.
He pulled out the background information. That was the kind of thing you could make a lengthy speech about during hearings. And her background was the stuff of gold. Working class background would resonate with his constituents and voters around the country. Her father had been a shipyard worker, her mother a part-time domestic. Grant had been the first in her family to go to college. An unfortunate marriage and divorce from a neighborhood guy who turned her into a single mom. The media would eat this up. Black single mom makes partner at white shoe firm. A variation of that headline would play out across dozens of different newspapers.
When Tommy went to put down the file, a thin sheaf of unstapled pages slipped out. They appeared to be an update to the FBI investigation. Some credit card summaries and bank statements slipped through his fingers. He flipped through the pages, not noticing anything at first. Grant lived pretty close to the edge of her budget, but with a secure job, that wasn’t too risky a move. Her new car and Shaker Heights rent put a pretty big dent in her earnings. Then Tommy looked at the credit card summaries. Her yearly spending was broken out in several categories, travel, dining, and others. It was the expenditures under the government category which caught his eye.
The beverage control approved store on Chagrin Boulevard had gotten seventeen hundred dollars of her hard earned money. Liquor laws in Ohio required potent alcoholic beverages be sold in licensed, pre-approved locations. Some beers and wines were sold at supermarkets, but anything stronger was heavily regulated.
Tommy closed the file, removed his reading glasses and rubbed at his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He downed the contents of his own drink. The last thing the Democratic Party needed was some alcoholic fucking up the confirmation process. It was difficult enough as it was, getting the flawless candidates confirmed.
He retrieved his cordless phone from the kitchenette wall. Looked down at his watch, ten o’clock. It was too damn late to call anyone, but he pushed common courtesy aside. He wanted answers now. Clicking through his Palm Pilot, he pulled up the phone number he wanted.
“Peyton Bennett,” the disembodied voice answered.
“Tommy Franklin.” Without preamble, he continued, “What’s going on with Sheila Harrison Grant?” He heard Bennett murmuring to someone, then walking to another room. “You said she didn’t have any skele
tons. I don’t need Dale Hodges up my ass. Finished her dossier and she reads like an alcoholic. Either that or she’s one hell of a hostess. Tell me she hosts weekly neighborhood progressives.” Tommy knew his voice was impatient.
Bennett hesitated.
“Tell me. Now.”
“I have some bad news,” Bennett said. “The county’s taken Sheila’s kid. The girl revealed her mom’s drinking to a school counselor. The counselor took her role a little seriously. She seems a little overzealous.”
“Bottom line this.” Tommy didn’t need details. Big pictures were his thing.
“The kid’s in foster care and Mom’s fighting in juvenile court to get her back. I’ve set her up with a lawyer who’s got the inside track.”
“Shit. A call would have been nice, Bennett.” Tommy hoped his yelling didn’t rouse his neighbors. They could be a persnickety bunch about noise.
“Juvenile hearings are completely secret. The files are sealed. Sheila should be out of this before anything could leak out.”
“Bullshit and you know it. Dale Hodges collects information from every person he’s ever gotten a job. That man’s more connected than a mobster. The minute the papers were filed, a clerk whispered something in his ear. Now I’m a step behind. Is she going to step aside, tend to her family issues?”
“She can’t.” Bennett said no more. There was something more, but his dad’s firm would likely keep that secret. Firms were better at confidentiality than courts.
Tommy’s head spun. “We need a solid minority appointment to liven up the base. The first black district judge and all that. It would get the black community out to vote. The Democrats are losing Ohio. I thought Grant was our ticket. Shit, shit, shit. I’ll look into whether or not this can be saved.”
