Unlucky in Law (4 page)

“Not yet.” She glanced at her watch. “Our firm meeting's in a few minutes. He's late, ferrying Anna somewhere in that car he loves so much.”

“Klaus and Anna are one of those couples where you can't imagine half being left behind.” He knocked his hip against hers. “Kind of like us.”

“We are all alone. Togetherness is illusion,” she said. “All the poets say so.”

“Which is why my bedtime reading is John D. MacDonald.” Paul impatiently flipped the page he was holding and looked at both sides. “Who wrote this damn thing, anyway?”

Nina looked around. The front page had fallen under her desk. She picked it up and handed it over.

He read the sheet. He put it on top, then he took the few pages, inserted them into the blue file folder, straightened the edges carefully, tapping them on the desk. He tossed the folder into the trash.

“Deano.” The name came out as if forcing its way past rough terrain in his throat.

She reached down to extricate the file from the plastic canister and read the top sheet. “You know Dean Trumbo?”

“Yeah.” A peculiar half-smile lit Paul's face. “You know, I'm surprised I didn't recognize his special touch right away.”

“He's done work for you?”

“He's done work on me.”

“You don't like him?”

“Actually—I kind of look forward to running into the guy again.”

Nina said, “Let's make a list, then.” They outlined a sped-up course of action for the investigation.

“We seem to have some blood evidence,” Paul said. “Are you bringing Ginger in?”

“Sandy called her already. Ginger's driving in from Sacramento. She's due here at two-thirty.”

“Rush, rush, rush,” Paul said.

“Klaus hasn't—I don't see any independent defense analysis of the blood yet.” Nina put her hand on his arm. “Paul, Klaus doesn't seem to have done much work at all.”

“You've worked with him in the past. Does he usually prepare more thoroughly?”

“I don't know. I never worked this closely with him before.”

“Well, he did one thing right. He brought you in, honey,” Paul said. “Let's start filling in the holes.”

4

Monday 9/1

B
ECAUSE HE COULD NEVER SIT STILL,
B
EAR
C
UNNINGHAM SPRANG UP
and shook hands with Nina at the door. He hadn't changed at all over the years. He would be a thousand times happier jumping up and down in a hallway than being in a meeting. This was a real problem for an attorney who spent much of every day impaled in a chair dealing with people and their troubles, taking meetings, attending hearings. She could almost see his muscles fighting to escape his skin.

If you wanted to talk to Bear, you walked with him, or you ran with him at noon, or you biked ten miles home with him. You caught him on the fly. He handled the personal injury cases and the business matters. Bear was a smart, cheerful, happily married man, the backbone of the firm by now, she guessed, with Klaus getting older.

The meeting must have started without her, maybe because she wasn't a full-fledged member of the firm and didn't need to know about other cases. Seated in the leather chair by the fireplace which had never, to Nina's knowledge, held a fire, was Sean Eubanks. Nina shook hands with him. “Nice to meet you.”

“Delighted.” Sean had been with the firm only a year and had the harried look of the one who usually gets the last-minute court appearances. Klaus had told Nina that he was a Yale Law grad who shared Klaus's passion for the underdog. The youngest lawyer in the office, he was barely thirty and often said he would rather be surfing. His style was classic California lawyer-casual chic, windblown and tanned, friendly on the surface, with the requisite killer instinct lurking below like that big mean fish all lawyers got tired of hearing about. With a special interest in fathers' rights and gay rights in custody cases, he handled family law cases for the firm.

Nina found a spot on the ancient couch along the window. Adjusting his specs from behind his desk, Klaus said, “I realize that I have not reported on the status of this case for some time, so I am kicking two dogs with one foot. The trial date is September fifteenth.”

“That's only two weeks away,” Alan Turk said. “Even if you're fully prepared, Klaus, Nina will have a hard time catching up.” Alan sat next to Nina on the couch, holding his coffee, one leg hooked over the other, slightly cross-eyed behind his glasses and blue tie. His hair had thinned badly, and his back seemed to have bowed as he moved through his fifties. He had given her his usual nod, as if she hadn't been away eight years, and Nina had nodded back.

During her time as a law clerk, she had enjoyed working with Alan. He was methodical, organized, and never lost his temper. “Anal Alan,” Bear had once called him in a conversation with Nina, showing the litigator's distaste for the lawyer who sits back at the office generating and responding to the details of law practice.

But as the trusts, wills, and estates man, with a certification in tax law, Alan had always brought in a steady high flow of income to the firm. Without it, Bear couldn't fly his more risky PI's and Klaus couldn't pursue his endless appeals. Alan was currently a bachelor who owned a 2001 metallic blue Ferrari, which, word had it, had cost almost two hundred thousand dollars. The firm building, in line with the rustic ambience of Carmel, had only a one-car garage on the street. Alan kept the Ferrari there under security far superior to the systems for the rest of the building. He also owned two other rare automobiles. Nina didn't keep track of what kind.

Klaus, Bear, and Alan had all helped Nina get started in law. Even now, she sometimes dreamed of this office with its lamps and photos and books, and the old man sitting behind his desk with the little smile. To be here again, her eyes falling upon Klaus's favorite Meissen figurine on the mantel, was disconcerting, yet felt as comfortable as a trip back to the old homestead.

“Of course we're fully prepared.” Bear continued to champion Klaus, as he always had. “Nina, have you had a chance to review the files?”

“I'm doing that today. I met the client this morning.”

“How'd that go?”

“He told me his story. Really, there wasn't enough time to form an opinion of his chances.” Bear, Alan, and Sean shot smiles around that landed eventually on her. They seemed to know a few things she didn't. Perfectly natural. “I have the general outline,” she went on. “I'm sure I can take the second chair, help with the cross-exams and—”

“Do brilliant work,” Klaus said.

“Work hard, anyway,” Nina said. She sat up straight, trying to look like the kind of person who wouldn't let anything get by her.

Klaus smiled and nodded, his white goatee jabbing the air. Seeing him the previous week for the first time in years, Nina had been amazed at how little he had changed. Perhaps after seventy there is a long, placid evening for some people during which they finally take on their real form and stick with it. He still had the twinkly eyes, sparse white hair on his head—which, as he didn't like the cold ocean air, was often covered with an archaic homburg—a black suit, a red tie, and on court days a flower in the buttonhole, tucked in no doubt by his devoted wife, Anna. The only difference Nina saw was that he seemed to be a couple of inches shorter now that he had reached his early eighties.

Klaus had always taken the criminal cases and the appeals. His national reputation dated back from his noisy, contentious teaching days at the University of Chicago and at UC Berkeley. He and his wife, Anna, had come to the United States just before the Second World War from somewhere they refused to talk about in Europe, somewhere German-speaking, Austria, maybe. That one of them was Jewish was all Klaus would ever say, and it had given Nina enough to reconstruct a basic history. Klaus had helped defend Angela Davis and had been a friend of Henry Miller and Linus Pauling in their Big Sur days.

“Our client,” Klaus said, “as you will remember, is Stefan Wyatt, a young man in a hell of a pickle. He has not been able to make the high bail and has therefore been in jail for four months. Though I tried to talk him out of it, he was adamant. He wanted a quick court date. He wants out of jail.”

“Short amount of time to prepare for a murder case,” Sean said.

“An innocent young man is in jail,” Klaus said. “Technically, he has a right to a trial within sixty days.”

Nina listened, more interested than the others. Any new details to come today were helpful to her. Klaus had told her that he required her assistance and that he assumed she would fly to his side, which she had. He blew off her objections like dandelions. She would play a small role as backup. He had everything worked out, he had assured her.

Klaus had always kept his cases close, maybe because he was the only criminal lawyer at the firm and nobody else could give him much help with strategy. Bear appeared for him now and then in Law and Motion hearings, but he didn't like criminal defense.

“Why was he arrested?” Sean asked. “There was something strange about that.” He furrowed his brows, then snapped his fingers. “Bones tucked into the back seat of his car, right?”

“Precisely.” Klaus nodded. “And those bones will be key to helping us explain Mr. Wyatt's presence in the graveyard that night. But what concerns us most is the second body the police found in the grave Mr. Wyatt is accused of robbing, the body of a woman, Christina Zhukovsky.”

Sean's blond head bobbed up and down. “I remember now, he was stopped because he had a taillight out. And then the cop saw a skeleton flopping around in the back seat. Wyatt sounds like one of those guys who can't jaywalk without stepping in front of a patrol car.”

“At least he didn't talk to the police,” Alan said. He tapped his fingers on the leather. His nails were manicured to soft pink curves, perfect as shells shaped by a century's tides. Obsessiveness was a good trait in a tax lawyer, Nina reflected. Alan was well known locally as an exacting collector of very rare, small fine-arts objects and sculpture. His office, which displayed only a small but spectacular grouping of jade netsuke, had the organizational rigor of a military locker room.

Years before, Nina had gone to Alan's house for an office celebration and marveled at the elegance of the decor. He pressed a tiny bronze sculpture of a dancer into her hands to appreciate, and told her everything about it for the next twenty minutes. His love of beauty spilled over into the kind of women he married, another form of collecting, Nina thought, but you didn't get to keep all the women.

“Stefan Wyatt has had experience with law enforcement,” Klaus said. “He doesn't trust the police, and was wise enough to say nothing and to call us immediately.”

“Do we admit the grave robbery?” Sean asked. He didn't ask whether the client had confessed to Klaus. That would be bad form, since they were closing in on a trial at which they would claim the client was innocent no matter what he had told his lawyer in the cloister of their confidential relationship.

“Yes. There is a complication, however. Mr. Wyatt found a medal in the grave and put it in his pocket. The value of the medal makes the charge grand theft, a felony.”

“Sounds pretty minor, in the context of the murder charge.”

“Ah, but it is not minor, Mr. Eubanks. The young man has a record. Two previous felony convictions. Violent felonies, and he did time for both. The first was for throwing a brick at a police officer at a demonstration. He was convicted of assault and served four months in the county jail. He had just turned eighteen.”

“That was bad luck,” Bear said. “The birthday, I mean. If he'd been seventeen . . .”

Klaus went on, “While still on probation, at the age of nineteen, he struck another young man with his fist at a neighborhood party. Both young men had been drinking. Unfortunately, the boy he struck fell against the curb and suffered a skull fracture. Mr. Wyatt pled guilty to assault again and was sent back to jail, for eight months this time.”

“This is one bad-luck kid,” Sean said.

“His victims were the ones with the bad luck,” Alan said. “Let's not forget them. Sounds like you've got a client that deserves to go down.”

Klaus found the comment unworthy of a reply. “Mr. Wyatt was released after five years' probation and he has kept himself employed and clean,” he concluded. Nina made a note to herself to go into those priors in more detail with Stefan.

“Which makes a conviction for the medal a third-strike conviction, even if he's acquitted of the murder,” Bear said. “Mandatory twenty-five years to life, under California law.”

“Do we have the resources to handle a murder trial with a Three Strikes complication?” Sean asked. Bear frowned at him, which Nina interpreted to mean, Don't question the old man's judgment, you barking young pup.

“Nina and I will handle it,” Klaus said dismissively. You could view Klaus as laudably confident or you could view him, as Sean probably did at that moment, as arrogant.

“We are being paid—how?” Alan reverted to his usual motif, money, using a finger and thumb to neaten the crease in his trouser leg.

“We accepted a ten-thousand-dollar retainer and five thousand dollars as an advance against expenses. We are taking payments from Mr. Wyatt's mother as further fees are incurred. It's hard for her. She had to get a loan. His brother, Gabriel Wyatt, is helping. He was Mr. Turk's client at one point and remembered us fondly enough to refer his brother to us when he was arrested,” Klaus said.

“I was called over to the jail right after Wyatt's arrest,” Alan explained to the rest of them, apparently not pleased at the memory. “Klaus was down with the flu and you were in depositions in L.A., remember, Bear, and Sean had a trial the next day. I lined things up for Klaus to see him. I only had a consult with his brother, Gabe, so I was surprised when the family called me, but I guess I was the only lawyer they knew. Gabe has a job, but I'm also guessing that you're not charging him full freight. Am I right, Klaus?”

“You are right, Mr. Turk,” Klaus said, unperturbed. “We are charging fifty percent of our usual hourly rate, plus actual expenses.”

“Just so everybody's straight on this. At the moment overhead's running sixty-five percent.” Alan glanced at Nina.

Kachung
. Overhead. Negative balance sheet.

“Is the D.A. offering any kind of plea bargain? Do we really have to try this one?” Sean asked.

“Any felony conviction runs a risk of a Three Strikes enhancement, so we cannot bargain,” Klaus said. “The trial will take no more than a month by my estimate. We have had a good year, gentlemen. You all received ample year-end bonuses. Now we give back by helping this young man.”

Alan said in ungentlemanly fashion, “I referred him to you because I felt obligated, but I never understood why you took this case in the first place, Klaus. We're mixed up in something—unsavory. There's no new law to be made, no real money in it for the firm, no noble point to his crimes.”

Klaus stared at Alan, lips turned down, as if generally unhappy with his attitude toward their client. “Alleged crimes,” he corrected softly. “Yes, Mr. Turk, your objections from the start have been noted. However, I did not found this law firm forty years ago to make money. I founded it to seek justice and make law.”

“Oh, please,” Alan said, rolling his eyes. “The jails are full of guys just like him, probably a hell of a lot more worthy.”

“I am shocked at you, Mr. Turk,” Klaus said. “Mr. Wyatt's brother was your client, and he needs help.”

Silence fell.

Bear said, “Give it a rest, Alan. You have enough money for a thousand years from your parents. The client's family is paying most of the freight. Let's get on with practicing law.”

“Somebody has to pay the secretaries,” Alan said, but without heat. He had decided not to take Bear on.

“It's good to have you on board,” Sean told Nina.

“Thanks. I'm sure we'll do fine,” Nina said briskly. “You'll be seeing a couple of new faces around the office besides me. Sandy Whitefeather, my secretary from Tahoe, has come down to assist me. You'll pass her in the hall. You might want to take the initiative with her and introduce yourself. She's a very capable person but, uh, a little shy.”