Tim Green: The Letter Of The Law

The boy howled and grabbed her in a headlock, wrestling her to the ground. Before she knew it, the banker himself was upon them, and Casey quivered at the sight of his big, red face and the strong, musty smell of his expensive shaving lotion. He pulled the two of them apart with an expression of disdain and ordered, "You get back to your daddies and don't let me see you around this house again!"

As the limousine rolled through the front gates, Casey fingered her Cartier watch and wondered how it was that the shame of such a small moment could last so long.

"Nice place," she said, feigning complacency.

The rock star made them wait in his study for nearly an hour before he wandered in wearing a baggy pair of pants and a scruffy T-shirt. In less than a minute, Casey sensed that what Tony thought was a done deal was far from done. It wasn't even close. In fact, after a couple of probing questions, she was nearly certain that Culpepper had decided to go with a different attorney.

"Can I ask you a simple question?" she said.

The rock star shrugged. "Sure."

"Why are we here?"

"I don't know," Culpepper said, looking to his brother, a younger, scrawnier version of himself who sat in a big chair in the corner with his feet dangling over the arm.

"I told Tony," the brother said defensively, "nothing was guaranteed. I just said that if you wanted to represent Pierce that you'd better come up here and see him in person."

"My brother likes to jerk people around," Culpepper said in disgust and walked out of the room, absolving himself of the entire situation.

"Hey," the brother said somewhat belligerently after staring blankly for a few moments at the door. "I told you, Tony, Pierce has the final say…"

Casey was going to rip into the brother, then she decided to rip into Tony before giving it up completely. It would be a waste of effort. Tony did things like this from time to time, and she didn't want to hear his rationalization about how hard it was to sell their services. It made her feel cheap because deep down she knew it was true. Not that she was a hard act to sell, but beyond Austin, Texas, there was a whole battalion of good trial lawyers trying to represent the big-name stars. She was one of the many, and that was something she would have to live with until the day she became the biggest name in the legal profession. That was her goal, and she believed that one day it would happen. In the meantime, she had to get home. With a look of complete irritation, she made for the door.

Tony wanted to defend himself, and he trailed Casey down the hall and through the house, patiently calling her name. Outside, everything was glazed in ice. Even in the gloom of the storm, the trees shone like glass. The thin layer of freshly fallen snow was also sheathed in ice. On the front steps, Casey slipped but saved herself a broken leg with a desperate grasp at the railing. Tony carefully helped her regain her balance, and they both shuffled tentatively to the car.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I had no idea, really."

"I know you didn't, Tony," she muttered. "Let's just get out of here."

As soon as they were in the backseat, their driver began to fret out loud about the ice.

"It's not good at all," he said, driving with pitiful slowness.

Casey implored him to hurry. "I can't miss this flight."

"I doubt there's going to be a flight," the driver said with an uncomfortable glance in the rearview mirror. "It's real bad, ma'am, and getting worse."

The driver was right. By the time they got to the airport, the flights that weren't being delayed by several hours were being canceled outright. Rain and ice continued to fall from above. Casey plaintively watched the ever-darkening sky from a seat by the window at their gate. At the rate things were going, she wouldn't be home until well after midnight, and she wanted to be fresh for the trial. By seven, a good night's sleep was the last thing on her mind. The airport had closed down completely.

"Come on!" Casey barked after hearing the news. She grabbed Tony by the sleeve and jerked him toward the main terminal. "We can drive."

"Casey," Tony complained as he jogged along beside her, "you can't drive in this. Even if you could, we couldn't make it back if we drove all night."

"I've got to do something," she said in distress.

The rental counters were abandoned anyway.

Casey approached a young skycap who was sitting on a bench with his face in his hands. "Is there any way I can get a car?" she asked him.

The skycap shook his head sadly and said, "Nobody's getting out of here now. Everyone who had the chance got out about two hours ago. I got caught up helping a guy with his stuff. He promised me he'd drop me off in town, but by the time we got his bags in the car, we couldn't even get out of the lot. Everyone here now is here for the night…"

"Catalina," Casey whispered to herself at the finality of the news. "I've got to get to a phone," she said to Tony, frantically searching the terminal with her eyes. "I've got to tell Patti. She'll have to do the closing argument…"

Patti Dunleavy was Casey's understudy, a capable, vivacious attorney. The problem was that while Patti was the only other lawyer intimately familiar with the nuances of the Enos trial, she was only recently out of school and had never tried a real case before.

"The judge will delay the closing arguments," Tony said, forgetting for a moment the bad blood between Casey and Rawlins.

"He can and he should," Casey replied, grinding her teeth. "It would be wrong to proceed. It would be unethical. But we're talking about Van Rawlins. He hates me, Tony… That girl could go to jail. Of course he should delay the closing arguments. But he won't. Goddamn him to hell, he won't!"

Donald Sales held his wife's hand mirror as far away from himself as he could and critically assessed his mangy blond wig, thick plastic glasses, and the makeup he had applied to lighten his complexion. He was wearing a dark suit. It seemed that until recently, the only time he ever wore a suit was for a funeral. No one would recognize him now. He smiled grimly at himself and returned the silver mirror to the top of the bureau. This would be a funeral of sorts.

In the top drawer he fished among his socks for a clip, popped it into his Browning 9mm, and slapped a shell into the chamber. On the neatly made bed was a fake leather briefcase he'd purchased at Wal-Mart. Using a handkerchief, he wiped the pistol as well as a can of Mace free of fingerprints before placing them both in the case.

In the tiny room, an iron bed sat on a plank floor, bare except for a small handwoven Navajo rug. Once a brilliant red, it was now faded nearly pink. On the walls were stark black-and-white landscape photographs in barn-board frames. A fragile antique chair sat wedged into the corner, its seat covered with a delicate lace doily. Sales took pride in the fact that, except for the color of the rug, the room hadn't changed in twenty years. When his wife died, he had made a pact with her spirit that their bedroom would remain sacrosanct, that it would always be their place, and so he had never shared it with another woman.

A hall ran through the middle of the cabin, and Sales stopped at the door to his daughter's bedroom. With his hand on the knob, he hesitated, then kept going, past the kitchen and on into the great room. The walls rose all the way to the pitched roof. They were crowded with trophy fish and the heads of wild animals. A walnut gun cabinet stood against the wall. Over the stone fireplace was a Comanche war ax.

The weapon had been given to him by his mother. It had belonged to the men in her family as far back as anyone could remember. She'd given it to him the day he enlisted for the war in Southeast Asia. Before that war, the Sales family had had great hopes for him. He would be the first to go to college. He would become a doctor or a lawyer; no one knew which, they just knew it would be one or the other. But then the army came to the high school and whipped up the young men about the need for patriotism, for saving their country. They would be drafted anyway, one officer forewarned. No one in Sales's family knew of or even talked about exemptions.