Punitive Damages

by Charlotte Byrd

  “Edward, if you guys are done, I’d like to talk with Cora about what she can expect this summer.”

  “Of course, of course. Cora, you are in good hands. Listen and watch. Asher is a very good attorney.”

  Chapter 4 - Cora

  He ushered me out the door and I was left standing in the glass-walled hallway with Asher. He turned without a word and walked down the hallway. I followed behind. Despite the fact that I was a bit put off by his intensity, I couldn’t resist admiring how his pants snugged around his ass, tapering more than was common in a regular suit pant.

  He didn’t say a word as we walked down the hall and into another office, this one facing straight west with a view of Hollywood, Century City, and Santa Monica in the distance. He didn’t say a word as he sat down behind his desk, a sleek, modern piece with narrow steel legs supporting a thick slab of wood. There were no filing cabinets, no drawers, no scrap of paper anywhere. It didn’t look like the kind of office someone did any actual work in.

  I took a seat across the table from him and folded my hands in my lap. Asher just sat there, resting his chin on his hand, and looked at me. I was determined not to fidget, not to give any sign of how uncomfortable he made me feel. I wasn’t used to feeling this way around guys. Not that I hadn’t had crushes, guys I obsessed about but couldn’t bring myself to talk to, but that was when I was younger. By the time I was in college, I was the one making boys stammer incoherently. And even when I traveled abroad after graduating, I found talking with guys to be the easiest part of learning a new culture. But this guy was different.

  “Tell me what you think about criminal defense.” When he finally spoke, it came as such a surprise that I almost didn’t pay attention to what he was saying. Thankfully, law school had instilled in me an ability to catalogue whatever someone said, even if I wasn’t paying close attention. It was a useful skill when professors indulged in long digressions about irrelevancies, only to double back and ask some question about a case once you had stopped listening. I could just play back the last thing they said in my head.

  “Umm, well, I believe in the adversarial system. I think that everyone has a right to a fair trial and that criminal defense attorneys serve as an important check on the prosecutors.” I grew in confidence as I wound out my answer. I knew I was basically spouting a company line, an answer that defense attorneys told outsiders and themselves when asked how they slept at night after defending some rapist or murderer. It was a good argument, I thought. One that rested on playing one’s role within a system that was basically fair and just. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed it, but it seemed like the right thing to say to a defense attorney.

  It, apparently, was not.

  Asher’s face twisted and he let out a derisive snort.

  “Do they have you practice that line in law school now? Faith in the system, check on the power of the state, equal justice under the law, and all that? Let me tell you. If you based your decision to go into the law on a belief in a system of justice, you are going to last about a month before you break down in tears and quit.”

  I sat there, stunned. This guy was who my uncle picked to be my mentor? He was a complete ass.

  I stayed silent for a few moments. It took me a bit to collect myself. I was entirely unprepared for this guy’s tone, but then again, it wasn’t something I hadn’t encountered before. That sense of superiority, of arrogance, it was common among attorneys. I decided that I wasn’t going to be intimidated.

  While I was composing myself, Asher continued lecturing.

  “Look, criminal law is not about principle, it’s not about justice, it’s about winning. It’s about making sure that your client doesn’t have to pay for his actions. No matter what.”

  I was shocked by how open he was about his cynicism. Most lawyers were able to convince themselves they were doing the right thing, whatever that happened to be at the time. It was a function of the education. When you are taught to argue a position, regardless of your own personal convictions or beliefs, it became a lot easier to argue yourself into changing those convictions, or convincing yourself they didn’t matter. Most attorneys could wrap themselves up in knots in order to prove the case, to themselves as much as anyone else, that they were doing the right thing.

  But Asher didn’t seem to be concerned about that. He didn’t act like he was interested in playing the part of the righteous seeker of justice. It was incongruous in someone who looked like he was barely thirty. It intrigued me as much as it put me off.

  “So, you don’t care if your clients are guilty?”

  He gave a short, sarcastic laugh.

  “Cora, right?”

  I nodded, annoyed at his pedantic tone and the fact that he either had forgotten my name or was trying to make me feel insecure by pretending that he forgot it, a subtle indication that I was of minimal interest or importance to him.

  “Look around you. Do you have any idea what the rent on this office is?”

  I shook my head. I resolved to provide only the bare minimum of responses. I didn’t want to be drawn out into something that would end up making me look a fool.

  “Go down to the garage and look at the cars everyone in this office drives. Look at their clothes, go to their houses. Do you think that any of that gets paid for by defending innocent people?”

  I gave no response. He didn’t seem to need one. He sighed.

  “When do you finish your exams?”

  “May twentieth.”

  He pulled out his phone.

  “Ok. You will be here the next Monday, the twenty-third. Nine a.m. I will have a case file and instructions ready for you. In the meantime, you need to forget everything you think you know about criminal law and about being a lawyer. Because the truth is, you don’t know anything.”

  Chapter 5 - Cora

  The last few weeks before exams were a blur. Tasha and I stayed up late, studying, reviewing our outlines, and re-reading the Nutshell series for our subjects. Outlines were the key to law school success. In an exam, the professor would set out a fact pattern, just a narrative describing a series of events, and then you had to analyze the legal implications. The best responses, or at least the ones that scored the highest, were the ones that spotted the most potential issues. Once you had the issue spotted, you had to I.R.A.C. It stood for Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion. The ‘I’ was the most important part, because it allowed you to get to the rest of the process. You couldn’t analyze an issue you didn’t see. What the outline did was to get all of the various rules you learned during the semester into a couple of pages. Organized into broad categories and then sub-categories and sub-sub-categories. That way, when you were looking at a fact pattern, you could go through the outline in your head and look for facts that might fit a rule.

  It was a strange experience and one that took me a while to get used to. Thankfully, the classes were graded on a curve and everyone else had the same adjustment issues. These days, I could knock out a two-thousand-word answer with full analysis in under an hour. I even cited the major cases we had read in class.

  But this Evidence exam had me shook. For some reason, I kept forgetting one of the four Daubert factors for the reliability of expert witnesses. I looked over at Tasha, who was sitting so still she may have been asleep, her hand propping up her forehead. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. They were dry from the air conditioning in the library.

  “I’m going to go get some coffee, you want some?”

  Tasha’s head dropped down out of her hand. She caught herself just before it banged against the desk. She had been asleep.

  “Um, yeah, I guess. A double non-fat latte. Thanks.”

  I hopped down the stairs toward the café on the main floor of the law school building. It felt good to get blood flowing in my limbs again after hours of sitting bent over my books. I had been more focused during this exam period than I could remember. The reason was simple. I wanted to focus entirely on the present and not think a
bout what I was going to do after exams were over.

  When I had come home from my introduction to Asher, I was sure that I would tell my uncle ‘thank you for the offer, but I will find another internship.’ The idea of working with that guy for a whole summer was deeply unsettling. I could handle arrogance. I could handle his superior attitude. But I was unsure I wanted to be around someone with such contempt for their own profession. How could you be motivated to work hard if you were so cynical?

  When I talked to Tasha about it, she was singularly unhelpful.

  “So, what did he look like?” was her first and most persistent line of questioning. I didn’t understand her. Who cared if he was good looking if he was such a jerk? I had no desire to subject myself to being around him for a whole summer. Even if he was an effective attorney and even if there were a lot I could learn from him, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I didn’t think I wanted to learn anything he had to teach me, because if what he knew made him into such a sour and cynical person at such a young age, those were lessons I could go without.

  But, like any good law student, I forced myself to argue the other side. It was already late in the year to look for another internship. I had relied upon working at my uncle’s firm and hadn’t attended any of the internship fairs that came to campus periodically. I hadn’t done the networking and relationship building that would have been necessary to get a position at a good firm. And say what you will about Cramer, Williams, and Bryant, but it was a firm with a stellar reputation for what they did. It was hard to pass up having that as a line on my resume, especially when the other choices that were left to me were significantly less impressive.

  Besides, if I was going to work as an attorney, especially if I wanted to work to protect people who have been oppressed, victimized, and exploited, I was going to have to come up against unpleasant people. As a lawyer, I couldn’t just avoid assholes, and I couldn’t just scream and yell at them. I had to find a way to work with them. I had to be professional, distant, and composed. Working with Asher would be good practice.

  I had thoroughly convinced myself that working as an intern with Asher was going to be a great experience. That all of the negative elements, the annoyances, the hostility, the aggravation, were actually positive. They were a part of the learning process. And if I learned some tricks about criminal law in the meantime, that was a bonus. In my rational mind, I had won the argument and decided to follow through with the internship.

  But in my gut, I still felt uneasy.

  The Evidence exam came and went. After I finished, I went straight to my outline and found that I had completely forgotten to discuss a major issue. I hoped that I had done enough to at least get a decent grade, but I was disappointed. Luckily, Evidence was my last exam, so I could go out and forget about it.

  “Hey, you ready to drink your problems away?”

  Tasha approached alongside Emma and Kyle. Kyle looked like he had started his end of semester celebration already.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I was thinking rooftop at The Standard?”

  I nodded my assent and we headed toward Figueroa to grab an Uber. It was a lot cheaper to take a ride the few minutes up to downtown than it was to pay for parking. It was safer, too, since I think everyone planned on getting pretty heavily intoxicated.

  The Standard was a hotel in downtown LA with a retro vibe and a great rooftop bar serving fourteen-dollar cocktails next to a heated pool. The view from the rooftop was amazing, a panorama of the skyline and the mountains to the north. I hadn’t been there since my first year. There were so many different bars and clubs in LA that you could go to a new place every week. But I was glad we chose this spot. The open air, the view, the intimate setting, it was a relaxing atmosphere. The perfect antidote to weeks of studying and exams.

  I ordered a drink with vodka and elderflower liqueur and grabbed a spot at a table near the edge. The railings were glass, giving a great view down to the street below. Being Southern California, there were heat lamps at every table to ensure that nobody had to sacrifice comfort or fashion to have a drink outside. Not that I was dressed very fashionably. I had stopped by my apartment to get a quick change of clothes, a comfortable but trendy jacket I’d gotten at H&M over a t-shirt and a skirt. Nothing fancy, but put together enough to avoid looking as disheveled as I felt. I didn’t even bother to do anything to my hair, keeping it in the same ponytail that I’d worn to take my exam. I had done barely anything with my makeup.

  None of that mattered, though. I wasn’t at the bar to pick up a guy or to feel good because some guy hit on me. I wanted to relax with my friends and decompress for a night before the reality of my upcoming internship landed. I needed a night to forget everything, all the stress, all the effort, the constant feeling of not knowing enough. As I sat with my back against the glass railing, resting my elbow on the table, and feeling the warmth of the heat lamp radiate into my skin, I felt truly at ease for the first time in months.

  And then I saw him.

  Chapter 6 - Cora

  I felt my muscles tighten and a flock of butterflies took up residence in my stomach. What was he doing here? He was supposed to stay locked away, relegated to the internship part of my life that didn’t begin until Monday. I was supposed to have a respite. But there he was.

  He was on the other side of the rooftop, leaning casually over the railing with a glass of some amber colored liquid in his hand. Probably scotch. What a cliché. He stood there, motionless, gazing out into the city lights. His only movement was to raise the glass to his lips and down again. He appeared to be alone. Not a surprise, given his personality. He just kept looking out into the distance, apparently, in deep contemplation, not paying any attention to the merry-making going on behind him. He seemed incongruous; he would have fit better in some wood-paneled basement bar. The kind with alcoves and quiet corners where you could drink alone in peace. I wondered why he had chosen to come to this place.

  He hadn’t noticed me, thank goodness. I stayed where I was, against the railing with Tasha between him and me. But even if he didn’t notice me, my friends saw me looking at him.

  “Do you know that guy?” Emma asked.

  “No, I mean, sort of. He works with my uncle. I’m doing my internship with him.”

  “Oh my god. That’s Asher?” Tasha said far too loudly. Alcohol had a way of making it impossible to modulate your volume. “He is cute.”

  “Asher? Asher Dean?” Kyle asked.

  “Yeah. Why? Do you know him?” said Emma.

  “Do you not? There was an article about him…where did I see it? Whatever. I read this article about him. He is rich, like super rich, I mean, his family is, anyway. But he became a lawyer anyway. He apparently is a really good defense attorney. The article said he had come in as assistant counsel on that Lamar Broderick case and totally saved it. He is an absolute badass.”

  “Sounds like you have a crush on him. Why don’t you go over there and buy him a drink?” I asked sarcastically. Unfortunately, Kyle didn’t pick up on my tone. He hopped off his chair and crossed the rooftop toward Asher. “No, Kyle, stop!” I said in as loud a hushed voice as I could, but he didn’t hear me.

  I watched in horror as Kyle approached Asher. I could just imagine him awkwardly chatting Asher up, pointing over to our table. Asher would see me there and then be overcome with smugness. He would saunter over and join us for a drink, basking in Kyle’s admiration, filled with the noblesse oblige of successful lawyer deigning to speak with mere law students. I couldn’t handle it. I watched Kyle getting ever closer with growing dread.

  But just before Kyle had gotten his attention, another figure reached Asher.

  Kyle stopped in his tracks as Asher turned away from him to greet a gorgeous, tall, long-legged woman in a tight-fitting cocktail dress. The black and gold dress clung to her statuesque form, shining against her light-mocha skin. She was elegant, stunning. Asher greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and slipped h
is arm around her waist, ushering her toward the bar. Kyle hesitated for a moment and then turned on his heel, walking back toward us with a chagrined expression. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Asher had disappeared. Probably off to some other trendy spot or elegant restaurant. I relaxed and settled back into my night out with my friends.

  I had downed at least one too many cocktails. Not that I was overly intoxicated, they were just really expensive. I was feeling a bit relaxed and expansive. Our table had grown loud. Everyone was increasing their volume in order to drown out the others to whom they were paying no attention. If, as the saying went, alcohol revealed one’s true self, this table of budding lawyers’ true selves were loud, obnoxious, and loved to hear the sound of their own voices. If I had been sober enough for self-reflection, I would have found it either amusing or disheartening.

  I got up to go to the bathroom for the fifth time. Something about drinking made me have to pee constantly. The ladies’ room was down a narrow corridor. I ran my hand along the wall as I walked, feeling the imperfect texture. The sounds of merry-making outside were still audible, but muffled. It was probably time to start heading home. I knew, in the back of my head, that I was going to have a nasty hangover when I woke up in the morning.

  I stepped out of the bathroom and straight into someone. I mumbled an apology as I backed away and looked up.

  It was Asher.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. As the words left my mouth, I knew that my tone was far too accusatory than the situation required. He arched an eyebrow in response, indicating that he felt the same way.

  “I was having a drink. Are you going to apologize for walking into me?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was messing with me or if he was asking for a real apology. Buoyed by the drinks under my belt, I spread my arms wide and gave him a little bow.