by Rene Fomby
“Not so tiny by the time you were done with it, though. Congratulations, junior partner. Now what do you do for an encore?”
“Well, I’ve got my old law school buddy breathing down my neck about the allergy drug case, the one involving some biotech named Labarum out in California. His mother was one of the ones who didn’t make it, so it’s a matter of principle to him. In other words, don’t spend the money yet. And then, of course, I’ve got the rapist case. Big money there.”
“Okay, yeah, about that, I guess you should follow your own conscience on whether you should take that one on. I mean, I’m not one to talk—I jumped in head over heels on the triple murder case, and that one looked even worse for us at the outset. But I don’t think you can count on me getting heavily involved in the rape case. Let’s just say I’ve got some old baggage on that subject that should stay tucked away in the attic for now.”
“Sure, no problem,” Harry agreed, not wanting to pry, but still privately curious about whatever had happened in Sam’s past that had her so touchy. And, knowing Sam, it had to be something pretty bad, something very personal. He considered the nature of the case, and decided this was one topic best left gathering dust on the shelf.
Sam sucked in a deep breath and let it out. “Oh, and Harry, I think I don’t need to give you the speech about saving your money for later on down the road. As poorly as criminal law pays, civil litigation can be even worse, at least in the early years. Today notwithstanding, cases can take years to pay off. Even decades, sometimes, depending upon appeals. It’s not a game for the eager beaver.”
“I hear ya, Sam. I’m just glad to notch a win so soon. And still almost a week away from taking the bar. Gotta be some kind of record.”
“Only because we kinda skated a little fast and loose with the rules,” Sam reminded him. “So, any celebration plans?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d take Annie out to this fancy new restaurant down in Montrose. I know I don’t have the cash in the bank yet—that will take at least a week or so—but what the heck? Celebrating two weeks after the fact loses a little of the luster, you know?”
“I can relate, Harry,” Sam agreed. “But, speaking of Annabelle, what are you going to tell her about the—”
“The fact that I pulled in well over one hundred thousand today? Not a damned thing. That’s a law firm thing—just between us. Nobody else’s business. And half of that money is yours. At least. After all, it’s your name on the door. I’m not even a lawyer yet.”
“Seeing as how all I did was sit in on a speaker phone for less than an hour doing my nails, I’m not laying claim to any of it. It’s all yours, Harry. But, seriously, if you and Annabelle are really going to have a future together, are you sure now is really the time to start keeping things from each other? And she’s going to ask, you can be sure of that. So you need to have a good answer, and that comes in one of two flavors—the truth, or a lie.”
“Good advice,” he admitted. “As always. Okay, the truth it is. I guess I’m just a little skittish about how she’ll respond.”
“And, again Harry, that’s something you need to work out right now in the relationship, and not just keep sweeping these kinds of things under the rug. They have a habit of building up, and before you know it—”
“Yeah. They explode. Right you are. Well, at any rate, I’ve got the bar exam nipping at my heels, so I’d better get back to studying.”
“And then it’s the long wait until the results come back in October.”
“No, hopefully that won’t be the case,” he said. “They’re trying something new this year. They run a quick computer screen for people who clearly either passed or failed the exam, even ignoring the written portion. Then they do another quick review of the remaining applicants, filtering out the ones that are on the edge. That lets the State Bar give most of the applicants a quick thumbs up or thumbs down. You can start practicing right away, even though the final test results won’t be released until late September.”
Sam took in that news with a short little laugh. “So if you’re one of the people who doesn’t get a quick answer, that means you’re left hanging on to the very edge. Either just barely passing or just barely failing. That’s got to be a gut wrencher.”
“Yeah, but it’s better than waiting several months to get any kind of answer at all. This way only a handful of people wind up with ulcers.”
“I know all about that,” Sam remembered. “I think I gained five pounds just from tossing back the Rolaids. But Harry, you’ll be fine. Just focus on studying this week for the bar, and ignore the rest of your cases until after next weekend. In fact, shoot me a link to where you’ve stashed the case files for that Labarum case, and I’ll give it a look-see this week while I’m traveling. It’ll help to keep my mind off the banker thing. Off what’s going to happen to the trust if I don’t nail down financing for the tractor company.”
“I’ll do that, Sam. And hey, you’ll do great with that. When you’re on your ‘A’ game, nobody has a ghost of a chance against you.”
“The problem is, Harry, I’ve got a nagging suspicion that I really am fighting a ghost with this one. That there’s some kind of secret agenda running along in the background. The preliminary workups from the bankers in Ankara just don’t make any sense. And it doesn’t help that I can’t make the numbers line up. Historical earnings just don’t justify the price we’ve got on the table. So I gotta sell them on the management change making a huge impact on future growth.”
“You’ll do just fine.” Harry heard the door open behind him in the small conference room. The receptionist was back, indicating it was lunch time. Time to go. “Look, Sammie, I gotta run. I’ll send you those links right away. I look forward to seeing what you think, particularly about the allergy case. I have a gut feeling that one’s a loser, and I just have to face the music with my law buddy.”
“Been there, done that,” Sam assured him. “I’m pretty booked over the next few days, but I promise to dig into all that by the end of the week. In the meantime, good luck with your test. And have fun tonight. Wish I could be there.”
“I wish you could, too, Sammie. These calls are great, but I miss seeing you and Maddie in person.”
“Me, too, Harry.” Most definitely, me, too.
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Houston
Annabelle took the news even better than Sam. “Forty percent of three hundred? I don’t need a calculator to figure that one out. That’s a lot of moolah!”
“It is, but you gotta remember, over thirty percent goes to taxes, and I have to stretch the rest out over the next year while I build up my caseload. And that’s even assuming I pass the bar.”
“Oh, you won’t have to worry about that. You’ll do great. The bar’s a piece of cake for us Baylor grads.” Annabelle reached across the kitchen table to grab his hands. “But I guess now you can drop that silly rape case and focus on the real money-makers. And maybe now we can start planning a little for the future …”
Harry looked down at their hands. “I think it’s a bit too soon to give up on a criminal practice, Annie, but yeah, now that I have some money in the bank—”
“We can go shopping for a ring!” she suggested, pulling back her hands and jumping up, clapping with excitement.
Harry caught his breath. “Ring? No, I was just thinking—”
“We can go to the mall tonight. The Galleria. Grab something at the food court for dinner, then hit the jewelry stores. It’ll be fun!”
“Look, Annie, I don’t even have the money in the bank yet. And—aren’t we kind of rushing into things? I mean, a ring. That’s pretty big. We haven’t even discussed the idea of getting married, and I’ll need to have that little talk with your father—”
“Who is totally on board with it, Harry! He’s been pretty supportive of us so far, looking the other way as far as us living together and all, but you know …” She ran to the entryway and grabbed her purse. “
Come on. We can get to the mall before the after-work crowd shows up. Besides, I’m famished. I skipped lunch to get my nails done.”
“But—but—the money—” Harry protested.
“We don’t have to pay for it all today, silly. If we find something we like, I can just put down a deposit on one of my credit cards. But there’s no harm in looking. Come on, slowpoke. Last one to the Lexus has to drive!” She stopped for a moment to fish the keys out of her purse. “On second thought, I’ll drive. You can take the time to call that lawyer with the Mexican rapist to tell him you won’t be taking the case, after all.”
“Wha—” Harry started to say.
“Now, now, no arguments on that one, honey. Now that we’re getting married, we can’t afford to take on any more of those freebie cases. We need to start saving up for the children.”
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Houston
The next day, Harry decided to take a break from cramming for the bar exam to check in on his cases.
Desperate for a better solution to his study routine, something that might actually move the needle on his final score, a week ago he had searched on the Internet and found, for fifty dollars, a 71-page outline of “Everything You Need to Know to Pass the Texas Bar.” He had already read through the outline six times, and had it close to memorized. And the darned thing was, it seemed to work! His Barbri practice scores had already climbed up well into the eighties after only a few days with the outline. Which wasn’t all that surprising, actually—he had always done much better in school when he had a tight, well-organized study guide to help keep him on track.
With the knots in his stomach caused by the looming bar exam finally starting to settle down, he picked up the Herrera case file again and dug in. He knew the gist of the case already from talking to Alfredo’s wife, Elena. But the legal devils were always in the details, so he grabbed a fresh yellow pad and pen and settled into a comfortable easy chair, eager to spend an hour or so making sure he wasn’t stirring up a tempest with Annabelle over nothing.
The meat of the case centered on its so-called victim, Gina Clark, fifteen years old at the time. Apparently, Gina had been to her orthodontist that morning with her father and had her braces removed. Daddy then dropped her off at the local mall to window shop while he headed off to work for the day. They saw each other again briefly for lunch at the mall’s food court, then Daddy returned to work, leaving her to wander the mall unsupervised.
At some point, Gina was sitting on a bench in the middle of the mall, just outside Macy’s, when a young Hispanic man approached and waved to her. She spoke no Spanish and he spoke no English, but before long they were both deeply engaged in the universal language of young teens—making out flagrantly on a mall bench, heedless of the opinions of any of the other mall patrons walking by.
After an unspecified amount of time locking lips, they took a break to get soft drinks from the food court, then proceeded outside to his car to listen to music. It was there, inside the car, that Gina claims he grabbed her, threw her over the front seat into the back, then left the driver’s seat and entered the back seat from the left side. With the door still open, he pulled off her pants, then her underwear, and climbed on top. Somewhere along the way his pants came off, as well, and he started thrusting inside of her, violently, over and over again until she thought she was going to pass out. Finally, she thought to beg him to stop, and he did. Immediately. Rising off her, zipping his pants up and helping her to crawl back into her pants and underwear. Now fully dressed, she stepped out of the car on the right, passenger side. He walked around and tried for another kiss, which she politely refused. He then asked if they could see each other again at the same bench the next day, and she said she agreed to it, just to get him to go away. With him standing next to his car—which she couldn’t identify, but thought it was maybe a sedan, and either blue or brown—she proceeded to walk to the front entrance of the Dillard’s store, less than thirty feet away.
Several hours later, her father arrived to pick her up, and she asked him to take her straight away to see the youth counselor at her Catholic church. Which he did, noting that she seemed disturbed about something but not prying further into why. At the Church, she confessed to the counselor what had happened, and the counselor ran to find the priest, who then advised Gina to go immediately to the nearest hospital for treatment.
Arriving at the hospital, Gina was treated with a rape kit, as well as more counseling and a full examination. The results of the rape kit and examination were not included in the case file Harry had received from the Harris County DA’s office, but he knew it had to exist somewhere, if nowhere else then at the hospital. So a subpoena would eventually tell him everything he needed to know, even if it did take several more months to get his hands on the report.
Turning the page, Harry saw that several days after the alleged assault, Gina and her father were interviewed by a detective, but the girl proved unable to provide any identifying information other than the fact that the young man was Hispanic, medium-toned, five-eight to six-one, normal build, dark haired and somewhere between 18 and 22 years old. More or less. Just like thousands of other young Hispanic men in the Houston area. With nothing left to go on, the police closed the case and assigned it to the cold case graveyard, where it sat until a DNA match came back on a small swatch of male DNA the hospital had found on the girl’s abdomen, no other specifics on the DNA provided.
Harry sat back in his chair, thinking. The DNA match was pretty damning, and almost impossible to beat. Otherwise, they had nothing that could tie his client to the assault. And the nature of that assault, the repeated, violent penetrations of a fifteen-year-old virgin girl—if indeed she was a virgin at the time, which would be impossible to prove one way or another after the assault—would almost certainly earn his client the gallows even if he was white and an official, otherwise law-abiding citizen of the good old U-S-of-A. So, the key to the case was in finding out more about the DNA, and getting his hands on those hospital records. He looked down at his legal pad, which was covered with scribbles, none of them particularly helpful. He circled ‘hospital records’ and ‘DNA,’ then tossed it on the coffee table in front of him. There was some hope for Fredo, he knew, but at this point it looked mighty slim. Even the famous Dick DeGuerin might very likely take a pass on this one. And for some reason she wouldn’t discuss, Sam seemed to be avoiding this case, as well.
So maybe, just maybe, Annabelle was right. He’d make a couple of calls the next day, and get a sense of just how much work he was facing in chasing down the missing records, but he knew in his heart that the odds were already close to one hundred percent that tomorrow or the next day he’d be making another call. This one to Elena Herrera, recommending her husband just take the plea deal after all.
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The woman Harry finally reached at the DA’s office acted like he was asking for a personal check to cover his law school student loans. “Look, I don’t have time to go chasing around, sending off extra copies of our files to just anyone who wants one. That’s why our policy says we make one copy, and it goes to whoever the computer says is representing the defendant. The bottom line is, if you’re missing something, you need to get it from them. For that matter, they have to have signed off on our department policy that says those records are completely confidential. So they should never have sent you the first set of documents in the first place, if you haven’t gotten the judge to officially substitute you in.”
“I hear ya.” Harry tried to keep his tone friendly, even though he was about to boil over inside. “But if I heard you right, you said there are multiple sets of documents in this case, and I only got the one. And as far as your records policy goes, I think the U.S. and Texas constitutions trump your policy any day of the week. They both say Alfredo Herrera has a right to effective assistance of counsel. If his court appointed can’t even keep track of the files, how the hell are they going to give him the
kind of legal representation he deserves?” He paused to catch his breath and calm down. “Look, from what I’ve seen of the case, he has just about two chances of going free on this. Slim, and none. So just shoot me the file. It’ll take you less time than we’ve already spent wrangling over all this. If it turns out the hospital records show he raped her, then fine, I’ll advise his wife they should take any deal your guys offer, and we’re done here. Fair?”
The woman on the line still sounded pretty put out, and it was probably a good thing she couldn’t see that she was dealing with a newly minted attorney, or she would have hung up on him a long while back. But in the end, sending him the file would take just a few quick clicks of her mouse—and it would get him off her back—so she finally caved in with a big sigh. “Just this once, mind you. You get one favor, so don’t come crawling back asking me for more.”
“You have my word that I will do everything in my power to avoid you from this day forward,” Harry promised her, checking his email and seeing that the file had already arrived. Two files, actually. “Okay, I got ‘em. Thanks for all your help. And have a blessed day.”
He could hear her snarl something under her breath at that as he closed the call. Must be something in the coffee they serve up there, he thought. Everywhere he turned in the Harris County Courthouse, every single person he encountered seemed to have a rock in their boot or a stick up their ass. And they always chose to kick up some dust when a smooth trot would do them better. But hey, that’s the big city for you, I guess. Kinda hoped it would be a nice upgrade from small town justice. From all those really friendly folks back in Blair County.
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