Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

Control? she thought. Her life had spun out of control and all because of that night in Chicago. And that second drink. One slip , she thought. One mistake. Nobody got points for walking a tightrope with a little detour into thin air.

Maybe he was right; maybe she was trying to control Jake because she couldn’t control what was happening to her and she didn’t know what to do about it.

“You okay, Jules?” Duncan said. “You seem really distracted. Anything wrong?”

“Me? No, I’m fine. Just... worried about Jakie.” She stood up. “Okay, I have some reading to do. Enjoy the decapitation.”

While Duncan was downstairs watching TV, Juliana went to the bedroom to read more of the Wheelz chats. She’d closed the door so she couldn’t hear the TV. She needed to be in her own head.

She had a pile of the documents on her lap, and at first she just skimmed through the chats, dipping in here and there in no particular order. But soon she found herself in the zone, focused, and she started reading them in chronological order. She was following Rachel Meyers’s short career at Wheelz.

She was surprised to see that barely two weeks or so after starting at Wheelz, Rachel was already in conversation with the CEO. Their first exchange began with an invitation by Allerdyce.

ALLERDYCE: rachel it’s devin a.

MEYERS: oh hi!

ALLERDYCE: settling in OK?

MEYERS: Yes, thanks!

ALLERDYCE: we’re different from most companies — don’t worry if it takes you a while to get up to speed

MEYERS: OK, good to know.

ALLERDYCE: i’m here to help, whatever you need. why don’t you come by my office sometime and we can talk about the carras lawsuit

MEYERS: sure

ALLERDYCE: come by at 5 today

MEYERS: great, see you at 5!

No surprise that the CEO wanted to talk with his new general counsel. But a couple of hours later Allerdyce contacted her again to change the plan.

ALLERDYCE: OK if we meet at madrigal at 7 instead?

MEYERS: OK, cool.

Madrigal was famous, the most expensive restaurant in Boston. Juliana had been there once and remembered their copper menus and the superpricey wine list. Madrigal was a major change in venue — from a meeting in his office to a meeting over dinner at an over-the-top restaurant. That altered the dynamic of the meeting quite a bit, and Rachel must have known it.

An hour later he messaged her to change the time.

ALLERDYCE: moved our rez to 8pm — busy till then

MEYERS: Fine, see you then.

The next exchange between Allerdyce and Rachel came the next morning. Clearly something had happened between the two of them, something awkward.

ALLERDYCE: hey sorry if we got our signals crossed

MEYERS: No problem.

ALLERDYCE: ok cool

Whatever had transpired between the two of them, it was never mentioned again, as far as she could see in the chats. “No problem,” she’d told him, after whatever had happened the night before. Words that would no doubt come back to haunt her if they went to trial. Though she probably had said “no problem” because she was talking to the CEO of the company, no matter how she really felt.

Then she found a chat between Rachel Meyers and someone in the company named Karen Heraty, who was probably a friend.

MEYERS: Devin hit on me again

HERATY: Another dinner at Madrigal?

MEYERS: No, we were at the 4 Seasons in Palo Alto last night — road trip to meet with Silver Lake and Elevation. he asked me to come to his room for a meeting and when i got there he was in his bathrobe!

HERATY:!!!!! what did you do???

MEYERS: told him I wasn’t comfortable meeting with him in that situation and left.

HERATY: this the 2d time he hit on you?

MEYERS: basically he hasn’t stopped.

HERATY: you gotta do something. Report to HR?

MEYERS: not going to help

HERATY: who’s your boss? Andy Westerfield?

MEYERS: right. But Andy was in Devin’s frat! — he’s not going to stand up to DA

HERATY: maybe. but worth a try I think.

She thought about the powerlessness that Rachel Meyers must have felt, the relentlessness of her boss’s boss. The arrogance of the guy, the sense of privilege, assuming his beautiful new general counsel would be interested in him sexually — or would at least relent — because he was the founder, the boss.

Well, that sure as hell wasn’t new. She’d had to deal with all kinds of crap when she started working as a lawyer. She would never be sure why, for instance, she didn’t get that associate job at the law firm where she interned one summer, where Spence Murchison, a senior partner, kept hitting on her until he gave up, embittered. “My boyfriend wouldn’t like it,” she’d deflected with a fake smile. But her heart was pounding, and her face was hot. She didn’t have a boyfriend.

The firm didn’t hire her, and she’d never know why. Were the other applicants just stronger? Maybe. Or did Spence Murchison decide it would be too uncomfortable to have her around?

She just took it for granted that you had to deal with all that crap. Her male colleagues never had to.

Juliana put down the stack of documents. So far nothing she’d read gave her any indication of who might be blackmailing her, who it was who so badly wanted to keep the chats from being made public.

She switched off her bedside lamp, and the bedroom went black. I’m in the dark , she thought. I’m still in the dark .

No matter what stresses had intruded into her life — the struggles with Jake, the terror of the impostor janitor threatening her, the blackmail threat from Matías Sanchez — visitors to her courtroom would have thought everything was going on as normal. The parties in Meyers v. Wheelz were off doing depositions, which freed some afternoons to write. The malpractice trial was coming to an end, and Juliana had to write instructions for the jury.

She’d woken up that morning feeling as though the incident with the janitor was a terrible dream. It wasn’t as if things were returning to normal. Maybe they never would. But the terror she’d felt, that awful sense of powerlessness: that had dwindled. In its place was a low-level buzz of anxiety that wouldn’t go away.

She pulled up a set of jury instructions and began to edit, make changes.

By the time she finished revising, her jury charge began:

Members of the Jury, you are about to begin your final duty, which is to decide the fact issues in this case. Before you do that, I will instruct you on the law. These instructions are in three parts...

Some of it was basic stuff, Jury 101. You must follow the law as I give it to you whether you agree with it or not. That’s not just because I’m the judge. It’s because every person who comes before the court for trial is equal and is subject to the same law.

She even threw in some country music. Don’t outsmart your common sense . (Lee Brice.) And she was done.

At two thirty there was a knock on the door.

“Come on in.”

Kaitlyn Hemming entered. “There’s a call for you on line two — it’s both counsel on the Meyers case.”

“What’s it about?”

“They’re in the middle of deposing the defendant and they have a dispute. They need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“The plaintiff’s lawyer is asking the CEO — Allerdyce? — if he’s ever settled any sexual harassment claims before—”

Juliana nodded. “And the guy is refusing to answer because he says any such settlements, if there are any, are confidential.”

“You got it.”

She told herself to focus. Part of her mind was cycling again, obsessing over what was happening to her. Uselessly rehearsing the nightmarish situation she’d found herself in. She closed her eyes for a moment.