Джон Гришэм - A Time for Mercy

“The kid needs a lawyer now, Jake. As I understand things, he has no father and his mother is in the hospital with injuries. There’s no other family in the area. He’s already admitted to the killing, so he needs to shut up. Yes, we both trust Ozzie but I’m sure there are some hotheads around the jail who cannot be trusted. Discuss it with your wife and call me back in a couple of hours.”

There was a loud click and the line was dead. His Honor had just given an order and hung up.

—

THE MARCH WINDS picked up late in the afternoon and the temperature dropped. With his girls lost in an old movie in the den, Jake left his house and went for a long walk through the quiet streets of Clanton. He often spent an hour or two alone in his office late on Sundays, reviewing the files he had not managed to close the previous week and deciding which ones to postpone next. At the moment he had eighty open files, but only a handful were decent cases. Such was the practice of law in a small, poor town.

These days his world was consumed with Smallwood, and most other matters were being ignored.

The facts were as simple as they were complicated. Taylor Smallwood, his wife Sarah, and two of their three children were killed instantly when their small import collided with a train at a dangerous crossing near the Polk County line. The accident happened around ten-thirty on a Friday night. A witness in a pickup truck a hundred yards behind the family said the red flashing crossing lights were not working at the time of the collision. The train’s engineer and brakeman swore that they were. The crossing was at the foot of a hill that dropped fifty degrees from a crest half a mile up.

Two months earlier, Sarah had given birth to their third child, Grace. At the time of the accident, Grace was being kept by Taylor’s sister who lived in Clanton.

Typically, such a sensational accident sent the local bar into a frenzy as every lawyer in town searched for an angle to land the case. Jake had never heard of the family and struck out immediately. Harry Rex, though, had handled a divorce for Sarah’s sister and she was pleased with the results. As the vultures were circling, he struck quick and got a contract signed by various family members. He then dashed to the courthouse, set up a guardianship for Grace, the sole heir and plaintiff, and filed a $10 million lawsuit against the railroad, Central & Southern.

Harry Rex knew his limitations and realized that he might not connect with jurors. He had a much better plan. He offered Jake half the fee if he would step in as lead counsel, do the heavy lifting, and push hard for a trial. Harry Rex had seen the magic with the Hailey jury. He had sat mesmerized like everyone else as Jake pleaded for his client’s life, and he knew that his younger friend had a way with jurors. If Jake could just land the right cases, he would someday make a lot of money in the courtroom.

They shook hands on the deal. Jake would take an aggressive role and lean on Judge Noose to speed things along. Harry Rex would work in the shadows, plowing through discovery, hiring experts, intimidating insurance lawyers, and, most important, picking the jury. They worked well together, primarily because they gave each other plenty of room.

The railroad tried to remove the case to federal court, a less friendly jurisdiction, but Jake blocked the move with a series of motions that Noose granted. So far, their judge had shown little patience with the defense lawyers and their usual stalling tactics.

The strategy was straightforward: just prove the crossing was dangerous, badly designed, not properly maintained, well known as a place of near misses, and that the warning lights had failed that night. The defense was just as simple: Taylor Smallwood hit the fourteenth boxcar without ever touching his brakes. How do you not see, whether at night or in clear daylight, a railroad boxcar that is fifteen feet tall, forty feet long, and covered with bright yellow reflective warning stickers?

The plaintiff had a strong case because the damages were enormous. The defense had a strong case because of the obvious facts.

For almost a year, the railroad’s insurance lawyers had refused to discuss settlement. However, now that the judge was setting a trial date, Harry Rex believed some money might be on the table. One of the defense lawyers was an acquaintance from law school and they had been drinking together.

—

JAKE PREFERRED HIS office when it was empty, which was rare these days. His current secretary was Portia Lang, a twenty-six-year-old army veteran who would be leaving in six months to start law school at Ole Miss. Portia’s mother, Lettie, had inherited a small fortune in a will dispute two years earlier, and Jake had battled an entire squad of lawyers to uphold the will. Portia had been so inspired by the case that she decided to go to law school. Her dream was to become the first black female lawyer in Ford County, and she was well on her way. Far more than a secretary, Portia not only answered the phone and ran interference with the clients and foot traffic, she was also learning legal research and wrote clearly. They were negotiating a deal in which she would continue to work part-time while in school, but both knew it would be nearly impossible the first year.

To complicate their lives, Lucien Wilbanks, the owner of the building and former owner of the law firm, was now in the habit of arriving for work at least three mornings each week and generally making a nuisance of himself. Disbarred years earlier, Lucien could not take cases or represent clients, so he spent too much of his time sticking his nose into Jake’s business and unloading unsolicited advice. He often claimed to be studying for the bar exam, a monumental challenge for an old man with much of his mental strength sapped by years of heavy drinking. Lucien claimed that by keeping hours at the office he stayed away from the whiskey cabinet at home, but before long he was sipping at his desk. He had assumed ownership of a small downstairs conference room, far away from Jake but too close to Portia, and usually spent the afternoons snoring off his liquid lunches with his feet on his desk.

Lucien had made one crude comment of a sexual nature to Portia, after which she threatened to break his neck. They had been civil ever since, though she was happier when he was absent.

To round out the firm’s lineup, most of the typing was being done by a twenty-hour-a-week former client named Beverly, a perfectly nice lady of middle age whose entire existence revolved around smoking cigarettes. She chain-smoked, knew the habit was killing her, and had tried every gimmick on the market to quit. The addiction prevented her from keeping a full-time job, and a husband. Jake fixed her an office behind the kitchen where all windows and doors could be left open and she could peck away in a blue haze. Even then, everything she touched reeked of stale smoke and Jake was worried about how long she would last. He quietly speculated to Portia that lung cancer might get her before he was forced to terminate her employment. But Portia did not complain, nor did Lucien, who still smoked cigars on his porch and often smelled of old fumes himself.

Jake eased upstairs to his grand office and did not turn on the lights because he did not want to attract attention. Even on Sunday afternoons, he had heard people knocking on his door. Not often, though. Not often enough. Some days he wondered where the next clients were coming from. Others, he wanted to get rid of all of them.

In the semidarkness, he stretched out on the old leather sofa purchased by the Wilbanks brothers decades earlier, and he stared at the dusty fan hanging from the ceiling and wondered how long it had been there. How much of the practice of law had changed over the years? What were the ethical dilemmas faced by those lawyers back then? Did they worry about taking unpopular cases? Were they afraid of a backlash if they represented murderers?