Question of Trust. Laura Caldwell

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СКАЧАТЬ I glanced at Johnny Hemphill, Maggie’s cousin’s kid, who tried to conceal a laugh. He’d told me when we first met that he couldn’t help it. He found the term public urination funny. It hadn’t helped when Johnny’s father, sitting next to him, also guffawed.

      Johnny shot me an apology shrug.

      I tried to muster a glare, but these kinds of cases didn’t inspire me enough to do so.

      Since we’d started working together, Maggie insisted that handling criminal defense matters that were small and mundane was good for me. She said I had to learn the ropes of Chicago’s criminal legal world, and the only way to do that was to start from the ground floor. So when her neighbor’s brother’s boss got a speeding ticket or Maggie’s grandfather’s dry cleaner was accused of stealing a pearl button from someone’s coat, Maggie assigned me as the go-to girl. Maggie said that criminal defense warriors like her had to take a lot of these little cases because your brilliant handling of them put you on people’s speed dial. Then the dry cleaner would call you from jail after a hit-and-run accident and the boss might give you a quick jingle when he was arrested for sexual harassment or when some other large-ticket, moneymaking, cunning-intelligence-required case emerged.

      I understood the marketing aspect. And I also knew lawyers had to be available for their clients on matters both great and gratuitous. Even more, I needed busy-ness to distract me from thinking about Theo—Theo and HeadFirst, and more important, Theo and me.

      Now, I scrounged up a stern look for Johnny Hemphill, then squared my shoulders back to the judge. Raising my right index finger, I made my impassioned plea for one more round of supervision for this kid who simply thought it was funny to pee behind the movie theater on Roosevelt Avenue.

      Thankfully, I won. This is the last time, the judge had intoned, looking at me and not Mr. Hemphill.

      I thanked him, did a geisha-esque bow and hustled out of the courtroom before he could change his mind, leaving Johnny with his guffawing father.

      I took the elevator to the first floor of the courthouse at 26th and California Avenue and ran to the big bulletin board that hung on the wall. There, sheets of paper in rows were tacked, each listing a courtroom and the cases to be called that day. Next to each case number was a description—armed robbery, murder, assault, drug trafficking, etc.—the sight of which made me remember I was far, far away from the civil courthouse where I used to spend all my professional time.

      I elbowed and jostled my way toward the front of the small crowd huddled there, everyone craning their necks. Maggie had assigned me four cases to handle that morning, but I’d forgotten to find out what courtrooms they were in. Frantically, I searched the multitude of papers. The 26th Street Shuffle, I’d heard other criminal lawyers call days like this.

      As I ran toward the elevator, I paused for a brief second, as I always did, in the old vestibule of the courthouse. And maybe it was that pause that allowed me to feel the faint vibration from my shoulder bag. I glanced at my watch. I had more time than I thought—at least five minutes until I had to be in Judge Johnson’s courtroom. I pulled the phone from my bag.

      My father. I hadn’t been able to call him back since he called yesterday while I was at brunch. I hadn’t seen my dad in almost a week, and I knew he had no one in this town. He’d been here only a few months. He’d been in our lives only a few months. And it had occurred to me that when I’d seen him at the diner last week, he had said something to me—You can tell me if you ever want help. If anything isn’t all right. I’d been wondering if he might have been referring to himself, subconsciously or not.

      On the far side of the vestibule were marble stairs, each worn sufficiently in the middle from the hundreds who had climbed them in the hopes of justice.

      I sat on the first one and was about to answer the phone when a security guard started toward me. “Miss,” he said, “you can’t …”

      I knew what he was about to say. The stairs were closed now, part of the old glory of the building, the glory that had mostly given way to ruin.

      I gave the guy a pleading smile.

      He raised his hand and gave me the you’ve-got-one-minute gesture, then respectfully turned his back.

      “Hi,” I said to my dad. “So sorry I haven’t called you back yet, I’ve been running from one thing to another.” And trying to figure out what’s going on with my boyfriend and worrying even more now that I confessed I’d been with Sam. And didn’t exactly tell him the whole story of that night, which had come very, very close to being sex-filled.

      “Boo, I’ve got some bad news.”

      “Bad news …” My stomach clenched.

      “It’s about Theo.”

      “Oh.” I hadn’t expected that. My father had met Theo only once, only briefly.

      My dad paused. And it was a weighty silence.

      “What?” I said.

      “Something’s going on with him.”

      True. “How do you know that?”

      He sighed. “Izzy …” There was a slight layer of irritation in his voice.

      “I know. I should stop asking how you know these things. But it’s just—” what was the word? “—off-putting.” My father had disappeared from our lives decades ago. But he had watched us during that time. (I suppose I would say “watched over us,” except that would make him sound angelic, which wasn’t exactly right.)

      “It’s not good, Izzy,” my father said.

      I’d gotten better over the past year at taking bad news. And things were easier, I learned, if such news was simply laid out flat.

      True to form, my father gave it to me. “Theo is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

      15

      Bristol & Associates was on LaSalle Street near Monroe in an old high-rise, home to a host of criminal defense firms. Like 26th and Cal, you could tell the lobby was once impressive, but now the marble was yellowed and the lighting spotty.

      On the tenth floor, Bristol & Associates wasn’t much better. Maggie and her grandfather made more than enough money to afford a sleek office overlooking the Chicago River, but like many criminal defense firms, they didn’t care about image. They cared about the work, the clients and the cash. Q had already started a campaign to get them to move. So far, Maggie and Martin had been impervious.

      I walked in and blew by the receptionist, Leslie. Usually, I stopped and talked to her, or at least waved. She called out to me. “You okay?”

      “Yeah, thanks,” I lied. I was still replaying the conversation with my father in my mind.

      “He’s what?“ I had blurted after my dad said those words—Theo is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

      I knew Theo had financial issues. Or his company did. But how did any of that rise to the level of a federal/criminal investigation? I tried to muster all I’d learned from Maggie over the past few months as I shifted from civil to criminal work, but there were too many layers СКАЧАТЬ