Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unlucky in Law

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.