The Letter Of The Law

CHAPTER 6

Casey's appointment with Judge Rawlins was for ten. It was nearly twelve. If she were working for a paying client, it would have been nearly a thousand dollars wasted. But because it was for Catalina Enos, Casey was eating it.

Finally, she was admitted through the towering dark doors into Rawlins's chambers. As she entered the room, she averted her eyes, momentarily blinded by a beam of sunlight emanating from the high, arched window. Her nose was filled with the smell of warm, musty books.

The judge, his back lit by the sun, cut a ghoulish figure. The harsh combination of too much sun and too much coloring had left his stringy hair an odd burnt orange, and the greasy shock that lay across his forehead gave his dark eyes a strange cast. His wizened face, mottled with liver spots, sat like a shrunken head amid the splendor of his flowing robes. The nails on his bony fingers were stained from years of smoke and bourbon.

Rawlins was smiling absurdly at Casey's frazzled state. His eyes, like the extensive gold dental work that filled the back of his mouth, sparkled with malicious delight.

"How can I help you, Ms. Jordan?" he drawled. His accent, like his political connections, was old Texas.

"You can commute Catalina Enos's sentence," she said flatly, taking a seat in the shadow of the wall even though none had been offered.

"Please, sit down," Rawlins said sarcastically. "Now why would I want to do that, Ms. Jordan?"

"Because if you do, you won't have to go through the embarrassment of having a mistrial declared at the appellate level," Casey said without bothering to hide her disdain. Rawlins was an age-old enemy and each of them knew where the other stood.

"I don't believe that's a concern of mine," he said complacently. "Oliver Wendell Holmes himself was turned over on appeal several times, and I don't believe it damaged his credibility very much."

Casey snorted at the mention of the great justice's name in the chambers of someone as tawdry as Van Rawlins.

"I believe Chief Justice Holmes was overturned in his younger days only on points of law," Casey said. "I believe it would have done him a great deal of discredit to be overturned for a procedural error."

"And what procedural error would we be talking about?" Rawlins asked, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise, goading her.

"I had a legitimate reason for not being at the conclusion of that trial and you know it. The precedent is clear. A defendant cannot be put at a disadvantage if her lawyer missed part of the trial because of an ice storm."

"Oh, I think the substance of the trial was quite over by that time," Rawlins replied. "The closing argument wasn't much more than a wart on a toad's ass. Justice was served in my mind, Ms. Jordan. And if you were so damned concerned with your client, I think you would have made it a priority to be there.

"But then," Rawlins added with a nasty grin, "we all know how important your life is. You're a celebrity after all…"

The barb hit its mark. Inwardly Casey fumed, but still she maintained control.

"What I do is irrelevant here, Van-"

"I am a judge!" Rawlins bellowed, slapping his palm against his desk's leather blotter. With an imperious finger pointed her way, Rawlins boiled. "You will address me as such, young lady."

"Your Honor," she said firmly, "what I do is of no import. We're talking about a woman's life here, an innocent woman's life!"

"Ms. Jordan," Rawlins said quietly, "Catalina Enos was found guilty in a court of law. She is a convicted felon…"

"Judge Rawlins, I know how you feel about me," Casey said. She could feel her emotions mounting behind her hard-set visage and hoped she could go on without embarrassing herself. "But you know, you know that this will be overturned. I'll get another trial. It will take me a year of work. It'll cost me ten thousand dollars in copying and filing fees. I know that's what you want here. You want to punish me. But in the meantime, Catalina Enos will be in jail.

"Now please listen. I've been embarrassed by this whole thing. I've lost the case. It's been in the papers and on the news. You've done what you wanted to do. If you'll commute her sentence, and you have that latitude, then I won't appeal, you won't be overturned, and I will donate the money it would cost me in time to process this appeal-I figure about fifty thousand dollars-to any charity of your choice…"

Rawlins's face was stone. The brass pendulum of an old wall clock tick-tocked, but otherwise the chambers were quiet. Outside a police siren wailed three blocks away. Then a small smirk tugged at the corner of Rawlins's mouth.

"Are you trying to bribe me, Ms. Jordan?" he whispered.

Casey's face fell. It was a game to him. She was beaten.

"Not only will I not commute Ms. Enos's sentence," Rawlins continued, balancing a pair of reading glasses on the end of his nose and frowning at the record he had removed from his desk, "but I see that she has a prior felony…"

"Possession of a forged instrument, for God's sake," Casey moaned, knowing what was next.

"A felony nonetheless," Rawlins said perkily. "And so she will receive the maximum sentence. A shame for a girl so young, but like my momma always said, Ms. Jordan, you can't have a fricassee without killing a few chickens…"

Casey was up on her feet now. She was shaking all over. Rawlins knew from testimony at the trial that Catalina's abusive husband and his family had probably forced her into the bad-check business. As a judge, Rawlins knew that multiple-felony sentencing guidelines were intended for dangerous criminals. Catalina was hardly dangerous. To treat her as such was outrageous. "Goddamn you! Goddamn you to hell!" she cried, finally losing her control.

Rawlins was on his feet, too. "You're in contempt! Goddamn it, I'll have you arrested for contempt! Get back here, young lady! I'll lock you up, too!"

Casey answered him with the resonating blast of a well-slammed door. She stormed through the clerk's office. On her way into the hallway, she bumped squarely into a gray-suited lawyer. His files and the papers in them flew into the air like a flock of gulls. He was a tall, thin man with a large nose and a receding head of blond hair. As he stooped to pick up his papers, his glasses clattered to the granite floor as well.

"I'm so sorry," Casey said, bending to help him. When she realized whom she'd run into, she said, "Oh, Michael, I'm sorry. I didn't even recognize you."

Michael Dove was a fellow attorney. In fact, although several years older than she, he was a classmate of Casey's at UT. Dove was the closest thing Casey had to competition when it came to her reputation of being the best trial lawyer in the city. His pale skin was flushed, and Casey noticed that a rash had crept up from the inside of his collar to the back of his neck. Dove, Casey knew, was a solid individual, a good attorney with fierce religious convictions. In Casey's opinion, it was only those convictions that kept him from being her equal. She knew, as most people in the legal community did, that Michael Dove's zealous notions of morality sometimes caused him to commit tactical errors. When he spoke to her now, it was obvious to Casey from his quavering voice that he was upset about more than spilled files.

"No, no, that's all right. I'm fine. I'll just, I just, I'll just get these files. I need these files. Were you in with Rawlins?"

"Yes," she said, handing him a stack. "I'm afraid I didn't leave him in a good mood."

Dove forced a nervous chuckle. "It wouldn't matter. He wouldn't like what I'm going to say to him if it was Christmas morning."

Casey looked at her counterpart's face to see if he was going to tell her what that was. When it didn't come, she didn't ask. Part of being a lawyer meant silence when it came to legal issues that could affect a client.

To diffuse the tension, Casey casually inquired about Dove's latest high-profile case. "How's Professor Lipton's case coming along, Michael? I heard about what happened. You've got to be about ready for trial. Has the attack delayed anything?"

The effect of Casey's words proved to be worse than an unfriendly snub. Dove gave her an anxious, bewildered look, shrugged, and pushed past her into Rawlins's chambers with barely a good-bye.

Casey was still shrouded in melancholy when she returned to her office. There she sat, alone, in her high-backed leather chair with her back to the closed door. Only an occasional tuft of cloud interfered with the bright sun burning down on the city of Austin, the brilliant green Colorado River that snaked through it, and the western hills that loomed beyond.

When she was upset, it typically made Casey feel better to look out her window. Hers was a spacious top-floor corner office, prime real estate. But the reason she had such an affinity for the view wasn't that it cost a mint to lease, but because of the perspective it gave her. It put the world in order. She was in a tower, a tower she had created for herself. She was safely above the fray. Down below was the courthouse. The people who lived as far as the eye could see came there to have justice meted out. And it would be. Even Catalina Enos would get justice. Casey would help set her free. In the meantime, she reasoned, the girl's plight in jail would be no worse than the life she had led before her husband's death.

Despite her contemplation and its positive affect on her attitude, Casey still brooded through the following weeks. It wasn't that she didn't have a lot to keep her busy. She did depositions and took lunches, went to the symphony with Taylor and their friends, and played tennis at the club. But she needed something to put her back on track. For a long time she'd been on a roll, representing bigger and bigger clients, negotiating her way through the legal world to their advantage, steadily climbing the ladder of her career. Copping a plea for a senator's nephew accused of statutory rape, for example, seemed tawdry. She wanted something spectacular, something that could distract her from all that had gone wrong with the Enos case.

"Preferably," she mused aloud, "a paying client."

That would take some of the pressure off her for the hours and the resources she would have to devote to proceeding with Catalina's appeal. Casey never considered her husband's personal wealth a financial safety net. She wanted her practice to be a successful entity in its own right. She liked having her own bank account and credit cards that had nothing to do with the hundred-year-old Jordan money.

With a sigh, she looked at her watch and resigned herself to business as usual. That meant she was back to billable hours. There was a stack of uninspiring files on her desk that ranged from the shoplifting wife of a NASCAR driver to a bank vice president's assault on his groundskeeper. Still, it was work, and when her stout, dark-haired secretary, Gina, said that Casey's sister was on the line, Casey only thought wistfully about how long it had been since they'd caught up before she told Gina to take a message.

Now was not the time, not when she was sensing the beginnings of a slump. Hearing about her sister's uninspiring relationship with her farmer husband or the latest on their parents' trials and tribulations in their attempt to collect their fair share of FEMA money from last year's tornado were issues she wanted to avoid. Although Casey loved her sister dearly, she still reeked of Odessa. Casey had never been happier than when she learned that she'd been accepted at UT and even gotten some scholarship money.

From the beginning, Casey had wanted out. She'd spent even her early life being ashamed of the way they lived. Although they lived outside Odessa, the school Casey went to was shared by an outlying suburb. The girls from the suburb lived in new houses that didn't leak. Casey associated a hard rain with a living room floor that was cluttered with pots and pans. Casey would visit the other little girls after school and silently marvel at their nice trim homes. It made her ashamed of her own way of life, the linoleum that covered their floors, the old furniture layered in paint, and the discarded farm implements that littered the high grass surrounding the faded house.

She sighed, glad that she hadn't accepted the call. She had work to do. She began to go through her files the way a bricklayer might begin a massive wall, with skill and efficiency but devoid of any real passion.

She was on her way out the door to have lunch with a judge whom she considered the antithesis of Van Rawlins when Gina raced up to her at the elevator.

"There's a call I think you'll want," she said, out of breath.

Casey raised one eyebrow. "Who?"

"It's your old professor, Lipton. The one who killed his student."