Chapter 2 Eddie

2

Eddie

We don't get many whales as clients.

Flynn and Brooks, Attorneys at Law, does not have the kind of office that normally attracts high-earning clientele. We're not based on Wall Street. We don't have glass-walled partitions and five-hundred-dollar chairs. We don't have little branded titanium cases full of breath mints in reception, we don't have a logo on free umbrellas, or even a website.

Our law practice is situated in Tribeca, not far from the homeless shelter. We have the upper floor of the building. Below us is a tattoo parlor called Stinkin Ink. Jocko runs the parlor and takes in our mail when we're out of the office. It's not a bad arrangement. The only drawback is having a client conference when Jocko is tattooing someone's ass. It's an old building and, no matter how tough you are, when you're getting your ass inked there's going to be some screaming.

I dumped my bag in my office and allowed myself a moment to take in the scene in our new conference room, which had a long table in the center of the room, with three chairs on each side. Kate Brooks had a yellow legal pad in front of her, a Muji fine liner in her hand and was scrawling notes across the page. She wore a sober black business suit and her hair was up, with another pen lodged in the knot. Harry Ford, former senior judge and now a consultant at the firm, sat beside her. He wore a charcoal tweed jacket over a red wool cardigan with a blue shirt beneath it. The leather patches over his elbows were doing their job this morning. When Harry was thinking, his fingers had a tendency to move. Even when he laced them tight together over his stomach – those thumbs of his would turn over and over like two tombola barrels. Now, his elbows were on the table, fingers steepled together, the pads of each one of them lightly tapping the other. He was my mentor and my best friend. The gray had now consumed his hair and he was more reliant on his glasses. Two pairs were suspended over his chest on fine gold chains: one for reading, one for driving.

I couldn't see the client's face, nor the face of the man who sat beside him. Only the backs of their necks were visible. Both wore dark suits. Dark hair.

I pushed open the conference-room door.

Clarence, Harry's dog, sat by his feet. Like always. He got up as I entered and nuzzled my legs. I bent down to stroke him.

‘Eddie, good to have you,' said Kate. ‘This is John Jackson and his lawyer, Al Parish.'

I'd heard of Al Parish. Never met him. His face was lined here and there, defiant against the swelling that was evident from Botox injections around the cheeks and lower forehead. The hair color was a dye job. He wore a navy suit with a thick silk tie that probably cost more than the refit of our conference room. Aging senior partners in old Wall Street firms all looked the same. Too many hours on the golf course. Too much plastic surgery. Too much money and no inclination to do anything but earn more. Three ex-wives hadn't managed to put a dent in his fortune.

‘Eddie,' said Parish, and held out a tanned hand with a one-hundred-dollar manicure.

‘Pleased to meet you,' I said. He squeezed my hand hard, the way small men do.

‘This is my client, John Jackson,' he said.

The man beside him had all the trappings of wealth that Parish had on display. The suit. The shirt. The haircut. And yet none of that seemed to matter to him. He wore the rich clothes lightly. I put him at around thirty-five. Slim. Smelled clean with some hint of chemical alcohol behind the odor. His hand was soft, but his grip was firm. Unlike Parish, he didn't put the effort into the handshake – he just had powerful hands. I couldn't recall meeting someone who worked with their hands and didn't have a single callus.

A familiar look haunted his face. The look of the accused. It's hard to describe. It's not terror. It's not exactly fear – although there would be plenty of that coming down his road. Harry once said being accused of a crime is like having a ghost follow you. You can't see it. Somehow it remains behind you, or just out of your peripheral vision, but you know it's there. And it's always coming for you.

‘Kate and Harry have been looking after us very well,' said Parish.

‘Well, they're much better at that than me,' I said, and took a seat at the end of the table – Harry and Kate on my right, Parish and Jackson on my left.

‘Mr. Jackson has been charged with first-degree murder,' said Kate. ‘NYPD picked him up two days ago. Mr. Parish—'

‘Please, it's Al,' said Parish, brandishing a smile that displayed the bleach job on his teeth that made them look like they would glow in the dark.

‘Al sat in on the police interview and got Mr. Jackson bail,' said Kate.

‘Bail for murder one is no easy thing,' I said.

‘It gets easier when you can lay down a two-million-dollar bond,' said Al, and shot Jackson an admiring look.

Kate continued to bring me up to speed.

‘Victim was a Margaret Blakemore, fifty-nine years old. She lived on the same street as Mr. Jackson. They were neighbors, but they'd never formally met. Mrs. Blakemore was shot dead in her home two weeks ago. Her husband was out of state, solid alibi. The cops ruled him out early. Police did a house-to-house. There was a street party that night and most of the residents were in attendance. The others were all accounted for with alibis. No one heard anything and no one saw anything. Police spoke to Mr. Jackson. On the night of the murder, the rest of the family was away visiting relatives. It was just Mr. Jackson home alone. All night. So no alibi. Things stepped up a gear a couple of days ago. The cops got an anonymous tip that Mr. Jackson was the shooter.'

‘An anonymous tip?' I asked.

‘They traced the call to a payphone in Midtown. No other information. Whatever was in that tip became enough for a search warrant. Police found a handgun in Mr. Jackson's home. They took that away for testing together with some clothes. No results have been released, but he's been charged,' said Kate with a look.

I knew the look. The cops weren't going to play their hand just yet. Either they had four aces with forensic evidence linking that gun to the murder or they had Jack high and the murder charge was a bluff to get the press off their backs.

‘I remember hearing about this on the news,' I said.

Harry nodded, said, ‘First murder in a long time on this part of 74 th Street.'

‘Doesn't the DA live a block away?' I asked.

Harry nodded.

‘Cops would've been under pressure to make an arrest. Could be they're bluffing. This charge might go away on its own,' I said.

Soon as I said that, I saw John Jackson's head roll back on his shoulders, his eyes widened and his mouth opened. Like I had just floated the prospect of taking a boulder the size of a Volkswagen off of his chest.

‘Could that really happen?' he asked excitedly.

‘This is a murder charge,' said Harry. ‘Anything is possible.'

Jackson looked at Kate. She nodded, said, ‘Harry and Eddie are right. When something bad happens in a good neighborhood, the NYPD makes arrests and ask questions later. There's just one thing. Neither Al, nor you, have told us about the gun the police found in your home.'

‘It's not mine. I don't own a gun. Never touched one in my life,' said Jackson. ‘When I was a young resident in Saint Luke's, I saw what guns can do to people. I must've dealt with fifty gunshot wounds. No way in hell I would ever pick up a gun.'

‘John is now a brain surgeon at NYU Hospital,' said Al.

That explained the hands.

‘So where did the gun come from?' asked Harry.

It was the question I wanted to ask, but it sounded much better coming from Harry. He had a soft tone that made hard questions land like raindrops on a feather pillow.

‘I have no idea where it came from. All I know is it's not mine and I have never even seen it before, never mind touched it,' said Jackson.

‘This is where you come in, Eddie,' said Al. ‘We have a criminal division in our firm, but as you know, I'm a civil litigator and no one in our team has ever tried a murder case. John here deserves the best, so we came to you. No disrespect, but you're a small outfit. John would also like you to make use of our considerable resources. With you and your team leading, of course.'

‘And you driving from the back seat?' I asked.

Al raised his palms, said, ‘No fear of that, I promise. This is your show, and we've got the manpower to back your every play – that's what we bring to the table. Also, we're going to handle the lawsuit against the city for wrongful arrest. We're just getting ready to file.'

‘Don't you think that's a little too soon?' asked Kate. ‘We haven't cleared Mr. Jackson yet.'

‘Never too soon to start a lawsuit,' said Al, and winked at Kate.

I didn't like it.

I used to practice alone. I had a partner a long time ago, but that was always destined to fail. In recent years, I've loved working with Kate and Harry. She is an incredible lawyer, but more than that, she's utterly fearless. Harry, well, I just like having him around. He keeps me on the straight and narrow both in and out of the law. And there's no one alive who knows more about trial law than Harry Ford, one of the first African American senior judges to grace the benches of Manhattan's courts.

There was one other thing I did like.

John Jackson.

I can usually tell when I see a guilty client. And an innocent one.

‘There's one question before we go any further,' I said. ‘Mr. Jackson, John, did you kill Margaret Blakemore?'

The question hit him like a bucket of cold water. That's the way it is at the beginning. Those who are accused of a crime they didn't commit, look like they're drowning. Every accusation is another freezing wave that causes them panic, makes them fight to get to the surface. Until their name is cleared, they spend their lives kicking to get their head above water.

‘I have never killed anyone in my life,' he said. ‘And I never could.'

Al piped up at this point.

‘Eddie, a week before Margaret Blakemore was killed, this guy spent forty-two hours in the operating theatre taking a tumor the size of an avocado stone out of a fourteen-year-old kid's brain. He's a goddamn hero.'

Jackson hung his head, hiding the tears on his face. Fighting down the panic and confusion that overwhelms people in his situation.

I looked at Kate and Harry. They nodded.

We don't take cases if we don't believe the client is innocent.

‘Well, John,' I said, ‘looks like you got yourself some more lawyers. We'll need to do some digging around the case.'

I turned, glanced through the glass window on the back wall of the conference room. I only saw Denise at her desk.

‘Where's Bloch?' I asked.

Kate addressed her answer to the room. ‘Our investigator, Bloch, is currently assisting another private investigator in the search for Dyani Sandoval.'

‘The little girl who was snatched in Saratoga Springs?' asked Al.

‘Yes, Bloch texted me this morning. She's been up there all weekend. She thinks they're close to finding her,' said Kate.

‘Who is the PI?' I asked.

‘Our friend, Gabriel Lake, freshly returned from a trip to London. He said he wanted Bloch for a matter of diplomacy.'

‘Diplomacy? Bloch? Our Bloch?' I asked.

Kate nodded, said, ‘I think his definition of diplomacy is a bit different from ours.'