Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

On Dar’s side of the table, besides Lawrence and Trudy and their lawyer, W.D.D. Du Bois, was a motley assortment of bureaucrats and attorneys, most of them wrinkled, rumpled, jowled, and slouched, all in sad contrast to the starched, silent, stern-jawed crispness of the cops on the other side. Most of the attorneys and bureaucrats just accepted coffee.

Dar took his Styrofoam cup with thanks, received an “Oh, you’re welcome, you’re welcome” and a pat on the back from the deputy DA’s assistant’s assistant, and sat back to wait for whatever came next.

A black man dressed in a bailiff’s uniform stepped into the room and announced, “We’re almost ready to start. Dickweed’s on his way and Sid’s just leaving the ladies’ room.”

The previous afternoon, still handcuffed, Dar had been driven to the county jail in downtown Riverside. In the car, the older of the state troopers had literally read him his rights from a frayed three-by-five card. Dar had the right to remain silent, anything he said could and would be used against him in a court of law, he had the right to an attorney, if he could not afford an attorney, one would be appointed for him. Did he understand?

“You’re reading it?” Dar asked. “You must repeat it ten thousand times a year.”

“Shut the fuck up,” explained the trooper.

Dar nodded and remained silent. He had been Mirandized. And a perfectly good adjective had been made into a verb.

At the Riverside County jail, a low, ugly structure right next to the tall, ugly Riverside city hall complex, the young CHP officers reclaimed their cuffs and officially handed him over to the Riverside sheriff, who gave him to a young deputy to book. Dar had never been arrested before. Still, all of the procedures—emptying the pockets of personal possessions, fingerprinting, and mug shot—were familiar from TV and the movies, of course, and it all combined to give him a strange sense of disembodied déjà vu that added to the unreal quality of the last hour or so.

He was put in a holding cell, alone but for the company of a few sullen cockroaches. About fifteen minutes later, the deputy returned and said, “You got a call coming. Want to call your lawyer?”

“I don’t have a lawyer,” Dar said truthfully. “Can I call my therapist?”

The deputy was not amused.

Dar called Trudy, who had dealt with so many legal issues that she could have passed the bar exam with half her brain tied behind her back. Instead of handling legal issues herself, however, she and Lawrence kept one of the best lawyers in California on retainer. It was necessary given that Stewart Investigations occasionally got dragged into one of the broad lawsuit nets cast out by hopeful litigants plying the fraudulent-insurance-claim waters as diligently and daily and doggedly as New England fishermen.

“Trudy, I—” began Dar when she picked up the phone.

“Yes, I know,” she interrupted. “I didn’t catch it live, but Linda taped it for me. The commentators are going on about road rage.”

“Road rage!” shouted Dar. “Those bastards tried to kill me and then I—”

“You’re at Riverside, right?” interrupted Trudy again.

“Right.”

“I’ve got one of W.D.D’s associates on the way. You’ll give a deposition there at Riverside with the associate present and he’ll have you out in an hour.”

Dar stood and blinked at the phone. “Trudy, bail’s going to be about a billion dollars. Two men are dead. Dead live on Channel Five. Riverside County’s not going to let me out of here without—”

“There’s more to this than meets the Insta-Cam,” said Trudy. “I’ve been on the phone. I know who the two guys were and why the CHP and county mounties aren’t releasing your name to the media. And why W.D.D. will be able to—”

“Who were they?” said Dar, realizing that he was shouting again. “Did they say on TV?”

“No, it wasn’t on TV and we’re all going to be further enlightened tomorrow morning at the San Diego deputy district attorney’s office,” said Trudy. “Nine A.M. You’ll be out on bail…the San Diego County DA already has a writ from one of his judges asking the Riverside County judge to be lenient. Don’t worry about media following you home…Your name isn’t going to be leaked until at least tomorrow.”

“But…” Dar said, and realized he did not know what else to say.

“Wait for W.D.D.’s associate,” said Trudy. “Go home and take a hot shower. Lawrence just called in and I let him know what’s going on. We’ll give you a call tonight and then you’ll get a good night’s sleep. It looks like we’ll all need it for tomorrow.”

W.D.D. Du Bois, pronounced “du-boyz,” was short, black, and brilliant, with a Martin Luther King mustache and a Danny De Vito personality. Lawrence had once said that in the courtroom W.D.D. could suggest more with his mustache than most people could with their eyebrows.

Du Bois was not the attorney’s real name. Or, rather, it had not been at birth. Christened Willard Darren Dirks in Greenville, Alabama, W.D.D. had been born in the early 1940s with everything working against him—his race, his family’s rural poverty, the state he was born in, the IQ and attitude of most of the state’s white inhabitants, his parents’ illiteracy, the lousy segregated schools he attended—everything except his IQ, which was higher than most professional bowlers’ average score. When he was nine, young Willie Dirks discovered the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois (pronounced “du-boyz”) and had his own name legally changed by the time he was twenty. By that time he had gotten himself out of Alabama and through the University of Southern California and into UCLA’s law school. He was only the third Negro to graduate from that esteemed institution and he was the first to run a major law firm in Los Angeles consisting only of other black lawyers, associates, and staff.

The fact that this coincided perfectly with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a blizzard of new government-backed civil rights legislation, and Lyndon Johnson’s legislative steps toward a Great Society that required no-holds-barred legal battles on all fronts, helped W.D.D.’s practice but did not define it. His firm handled mostly civil cases, but W.D.D.’s first love was criminal law, and these were the few cases he still argued personally in court—the stranger the case, the more the appeal to Attorney Du Bois. It was well known—at least in legal circles—that Attorney Robert Shapiro had tried to bring Du Bois into the O. J. Simpson case before Johnny Cochran got involved, but that W.D.D.’s only comment to Shapiro had been, “Are you kidding? That brother’s guilty as Abel’s brother Cain. I only represent innocent killers.” Stewart Investigations had offered him some deliciously weird cases over the years, and Du Bois showed his appreciation for that by representing Trudy’s company when things got complicated. This appeared to be just such a moment.

The deputy district attorney entered and took the chair at the head of the table. The politically ambitious Richard Allen Weid was sensitive about his last name, which was pronounced “weed.” His father had been a famous judge, so Richard could not just change his name, but he told people not to call him “Dick” even more frequently than Lawrence objected to “Larry.” Which guaranteed that—at least out of earshot—everyone in the DA’s office, in the downtown San Diego Justice Center, and in Southern California called him “Dick,” and more commonly, “Dickweed.”

“Sid” was a bigger surprise to Dar. The woman was attractive, in her late thirties, a little overweight in a nice way, professionally groomed but with an expression that seemed to suggest high intelligence filtered through restrained amusement at life. She reminded Dar of some character actress he really liked, but he could not for the life of him recall the actress’s name. Dar guessed this woman spelled her name “Sydney” with two y ’s, and since she took the only other “power seat” at the table—the empty chair at the opposite end of the table from Dick Weid’s—she was obviously someone with serious clout.