Breach of Trust

10

I stomped my shoes outside the door of my office to shake off some accumulated snow. The frosted glass on the door read, in the appropriate order, SHAUNA L. TASKER, ESQ. and JASON KOLARICH, ESQ. “Hey,” I said as I passed the administrative assistant whom we share, Marie, who has put her archaeology degree to fine use.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked. I didn’t feel the need to respond to her commentary on my attendance record. If this law office were a school, I’d have been expelled long ago for truancy. It’s not that I don’t like practicing law; I just don’t like clients very much. They are needy and ungrateful.

“Why don’t you go dig under your desk for some Incan deposition transcript or something,” I suggested.

After I had spent a few months in a funk, Shauna basically dragged me to this firm and demanded that I rekindle my romance with the legal profession. I have no idea how to be a solo practitioner. Since law school, I’d been a prosecutor-where the cases come to you, thanks to a reliable slew of criminal activity in our fair city-and then a junior partner at Shaker, Riley, where partners like Paul Riley reeled in the clientele and I just did the work. The pattern here is I got to focus on the work without having to stroke some idiot for business and tell him how honored I was to represent him.

Shauna, bless her heart, has thrown a few cases my way, and I have benefited from a few cases courtesy of our upset victory in United States v. Hector Almundo. Most of them are criminal cases, which is fine as long as you get the retainer up front, but few of them are particularly interesting. The heaters-murders or white-collar cases-typically go to larger firms where the lawyer has gray hair.

“Hey,” I said, popping my head into Shauna’s office. She had her feet up on her desk, reviewing some transactional document. She does courtroom work like me, but she has wisely broadened her practice to handle basically anything else-real estate transactions, start-ups, trusts and wills, any number of commercial transactions. I refuse to do any of that. Put me in a courtroom, in the battle, or leave me alone. She is also active in three different bar associations, which allows her to “network,” meaning she has to socialize with other attorneys, which is something else I detest with an intensity I normally reserve for brutal world dictators, or the Dixie Chicks.

So, to summarize: I don’t like clients. I don’t like transactional work. I don’t like small-caliber criminal cases. And I don’t like talking to other lawyers. I’m hoping to create a niche in the market for people under indictment for serious felonies who don’t require that I converse with them.

“Twice in one week,” Shauna observed upon my arrival. “Wow.”

“I’m looking to set a personal best,” I explained.

“That’s the spirit. Just don’t overextend yourself.”

The attitudes on these women. I started back to my office but then popped back in, wondering what was different about Shauna today. It was the glasses, black horn-rims instead of her usual contacts, and her blond hair was pulled back. “The naughty-librarian look,” I noted.

Shauna paused, to show her disapproval, then glared at me over her glasses. “Charming. Very mature.” Shauna was easy on the eyes, as they say, more for the sum of her parts than any particular detail-smartly dressed, fit, intelligent-but like most professional women, she didn’t like to be thought of as a slab of meat by the knuckle-dragging males in the profession. The reason she’d left her former law firm, in fact, was because the senior partner had certain ideas about the employer-employee relationship that were, let’s say, inconsistent with Title VII.

Shauna and I had a few go-rounds in college ourselves, but we quickly recognized that animal sex and compatibility were two different things, and we managed to stay buds afterward. We really didn’t have much of a choice back then, because there was a whole gaggle of us packed into a house off-campus, forcing people to double up on rooms, and somehow Shauna had drawn the short straw and gotten me as a roommate. That was after I got kicked off the football team for punching out the team captain, and I was lucky not to have been expelled from the university altogether. Had the team captain pressed charges, I would have been toast, but I think he found the whole thing embarrassing, considering he was an all-conference offensive lineman who was flattened by someone a hundred pounds and four inches his lesser.

My office would appear, to the untrained eye, to be abandoned. I had a couch that my brother had spotted me in one corner, shelving with law books, and a desk with nothing on it but a computer. I didn’t like coming here, because it reminded me that someday soon, I was going to run out of money from my days at the silk-stocking law firm, and I’d have to get off my ass and restart my career. It was hard to imagine doing it here, but I didn’t have a better idea. For several months after the bottom fell out, I’d received weekly calls from Paul Riley or someone else from the firm, asking me back when I was ready. But I couldn’t go back there. And I couldn’t stomach the idea, at this point, of answering to anyone else. As surprising as it may seem, given my overall sunny outlook on life, I don’t like being told what to do, and I don’t like having to be nice to people.

To summarize: I don’t want to work for anyone else, or for myself.

My intercom buzzed at about ten o’clock. “Someone to see you,” said Marie.

I hadn’t expected anyone. “Do you want to give me a hint?” I asked. “We could play twenty questions.”

“No, I’m happy to tell you, if you’d like.”

Always the attitude.

Marie said, “Her name is Esmeralda Ramirez.”