The Advocate's Devil (12 page)

“Are we ready to appeal if the judge approves the force-feeding?”

“Poised for action.”

“Abe, it’s CNN on the phone for you,” Gayle said. “About the force-feeding. It’s all over the wires.”

“Hi, Abe Ringel here. What can I do for you?”

The reporter wanted to know if it was true that Abe had advised his client to stop taking drugs.

“I never discuss what advice I give my client,” Abe said. Then he posed a rhetorical question to the reporter. “What advice
would you give a friend who would be killed unless he stopped taking his sanity pills?”

Justin listened to Abe’s side of the interview.

“No, I’m not confirming that I gave him the advice, but I’m not denying it, either. I’m letting you draw your own inference….
Of course I understand the risks. Do you understand the risks of doing nothing?… No, I don’t want to be interviewed live on
television.” An interview would not help his client, Abe knew. The public would never agree with what he was doing.

More calls: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS,
The New York Times
, the
Post
. It was a hot story, and it could get hotter, regardless of which way the judge ruled.

“Abe, the judge has ruled.” Gayle appeared in the doorway. “Stein is on the phone.”

“Hey, Max, up or down?” Abe asked his old law school classmate Max Stein, who was handling the case for him locally.

“In the middle,” Max replied. “Judge Cox granted the temporary restraining order. No force for now. He wants you and Odell
in court next Monday. The restraining order stays in effect only till then. It’s anyone’s guess what he’ll do. But he had
some not-so-nice words to say about you.”

“What’s his gripe?”

“You should have done it more directly, by bringing a lawsuit to stop the medicine instead of advising him to throw the pills
down the drain.”

“Now he’s telling me how to practice law. He knows damn well we have a better shot if the state has to force him.”

“That’s what he doesn’t like.”

“All right, we’ll be ready for Monday. We have a great expert on psychopharmacology.”

“See if you can find a great expert on legal ethics. You may need one.”

Abe and Justin planned to spend the next couple of days preparing for the Odell hearing and the Campbell trial. Abe loved
this part of the practice. No clients around, no billing problems, no judges. Just legal strategy. It was like a surgeon planning
a complicated operation or a general planning a major battle. In this kind of chess game, Abe was at his very best in anticipating
his opponents’ tactics and countering them.

Everything was falling into place for both cases, when suddenly, out of the blue, Justin noticed something curious he might
have seen a dozen times but never focused on before. While thumbing through the file folder containing the computer printouts
that Joe Campbell had given Abe, he caught sight of the last page of Abe’s won-and-lost record, on the very bottom of which
were printed the numbers
08:43
. Justin then looked at Campbell’s printout of the Jennifer Dowling case to see what the comparable numbers were.

There were no numbers at the bottom of that page.

Justin’s first instinct was to ignore this apparently insignificant detail and turn to more promising leads, since the most
likely explanation for this minor difference in formatting was probably of no relevance to the Campbell case. But he remembered
what Abe had told him on his first day at work: “Always look for clues in places that aren’t obvious.” Abe had illustrated
his lesson by relating how he had won a civil case several years earlier by noticing something at the top of a faxed page
that had been turned over to him as part of the “discovery” process. The
contents
of that fax, Abe told Justin, were not particularly significant, but the digits at the top were the telephone number from
which the fax had originally been sent to the defendant.
That
number proved to be extraordinarily significant, since it pointed to a source that no one previously had suspected of complicity
in the conspiracy to destroy the plaintiff’s business.

Justin thought about this story as he peered at the bottom of both printouts. Was there something significant here? Or would
it turn out to be a dead end, as most leads did? Sure, Abe loved to tell the fax story, but he never told the hundreds of
other stories where the lead took him down a dark alley to nowhere. No harm checking it out, though, even if it meant wasted
steps, Justin thought as he dialed the number of the database company.

The recorded message for the database’s customer support system was frustratingly long, offering menus within menus, but finally
Justin received an actual human being on the line.

“Thank you for calling CompuLaw Customer Support Systems, this is John Tierney, how can I help you?”

“I have a question about some numbers at the bottom of a printout from your reference system.”

“I’ll see if I can help you, sir.”

“What does ‘08:43’ mean?”

“That means the subscriber was interfacing with the database for eight minutes and forty-three seconds.”

“Well, I have another printout without that notation. This one made a few days earlier. What could that mean?”

“I’m not sure. But it may have something to do with the change of format we instituted recently.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re certain that it’s the entire printout you have in front of you, then it may mean that the printout without the
numbers was generated before we changed the format to include the time logged. We had gotten a lot of complaints from law
firms that they need the time for their billing records. So we changed it.”

Justin’s interest was piqued by this information. “And when was it that you changed the format?”

“I’ll check the exact date for you, sir.”

The technician came back on the line after a brief time-out. “That would be March first of this year.”

“Thanks.”

“Will there be anything else we can help you with today?”

“No, that’ll do it.”

“Have a good one.”

After he hung up Justin sat back, put his feet on his desk, and meditated on the information. Just then Abe wandered into
the computer room.

“Anything new?”

“Yes, in fact, there is.” Justin placed his feet back on the floor and handed Abe the printout with the numbers circled. “See
this?”

“Yes.”

Next Justin handed him the sexual harassment print. “See this—no numbers.”

“Yes, so?”

Abe didn’t know anything about computer retrieval systems. He didn’t use them, and he didn’t believe in them. He hated them.
“I like to write on long yellow pads. That’s the way I think.” Still, he did insist that the office have a complete and up-to-date
system and that everyone else, especially his young associates, master them. “So that I don’t have to,” was his constant refrain.
Justin loved to tell his computer age buddies about the first time Abe got a fax over the wireless portable that Gayle had
ordered. “There’s paper coming out of this infernal machine!” Abe had marveled. “And there aren’t even any wires.”

“The fax paper doesn’t travel through wires,” Justin had explained, “even when there are wires. It’s all electronic.”

“I know that,” Abe had said defensively. “But at least when there are wires, I can see that it’s connected to something.”

Today’s episode proved it worthwhile for Abe’s office to be high tech—without Abe ever having to touch a machine.

“I don’t even understand what it is I don’t understand.” Puzzled, Abe looked down at Justin. “Why is it significant that one
printout has time figures at the end and the other doesn’t?”

“That’s
not what’s significant, Abe. What’s significant is that the formatting was changed on March first.”

“So?”

“So, Joe told us that he first met Jennifer in New York on March 10. But if her printouts were generated
before
March 1—as the technician seems to be saying—then Joe would have
had
to meet her at least ten days before he told us he met her.”

“But why would he lie about
that?
”

“I don’t know, Abe. But what I do know is that he may have had some justification for his first lie, but two lies are harder
to explain away. I’m beginning to get worried about this guy.”

“Is it possible,” Abe asked, “that you could be wrong about this formatting stuff?”

“It is possible,” Justin acknowledged. “But only if the printout without the numbers was somehow incomplete.”

“Okay, hang on a minute,” Abe said, shuffling through the unfamiliar computer printouts. “Show me what I’m supposed to be
looking for.”

Justin stood and pointed to the time notation on the bottom of Abe’s won-and-lost record and then to the end of the Dowling
cases, where there was no comparable notation. Abe looked closely at the blank space following the end of the last Dowling
case. His eyes fixed on what appeared to be some ink marks at the very bottom of the page. This is what he saw:

“What the heck are these?” he asked Justin.

“I don’t know. They look like the very tops of some numbers or letters, but there are too many to be a time notation.”

“Where do you suppose these things came from?” Abe insisted, looking at the indecipherable marks.

“Maybe from the next case,” Justin surmised.

“But if there
is
a next case,” Abe said, beaming, “doesn’t that mean there was more material generated by Campbell’s request?”

“Could be,” Justin admitted.

“And if that’s true,” Abe continued, “then it follows that
this
is not the end of the search request, and that there may well be a time notation at the end of the entire search. And if
that’s true, then this search could have been requested
after
March 10, as Campbell said it was.”

“Maybe,” Justin acknowledged sheepishly.

“Maybe you jumped the gun, Justin. Maybe Joe didn’t lie to us a second time. Please let’s not presume our client guilty of
lying again without proof. We’ve got nothing to go on.”

“Nothing except that he lied once already, and we now know that he may not have given us the whole printout. Why would he
hold something back if he is as innocent as he claims?”

“I don’t know. Innocent people lie all the time, especially to their lawyers. Still, I am curious about what these notations
mean. Maybe you can figure that out if you decipher those little marks at the bottom of the page.”

“I’ll try, but it won’t be easy,” Justin said, retrieving the pages from Abe and heading back around the computer room desk.

As Justin stared at the obscure marks over and over again, they began to make some sense to him. They could be the very tops
of a group of words or letters that covered an entire line of print. But they were too fragmentary for him to reconstruct
into the letters that would form the underlying words.

Suddenly Justin got a brainstorm. He photocopied a page from the printout and cut out enough words to form an entire alphabet
on one very long line. Then he covered his “decoder” line with an index card so that only the very tops of the letters were
visible. He could now compare what he was able to see in his “decoder” alphabet with the top parts of the letters that appeared
at the bottom of the Dowling printout.

Instantly he was able to recognize most of the capital letters, which appeared to be “T,” “P,” “S,” “N,” “Y,” “M,” and “P,”
as well as the tops of several high noncapital letters, such as “i,” “k,” and “t.” Now his job was to fill in the blanks to
form a coherent series of words. It was like playing the old game of hangman or the new
Wheel of Fortune
. He spent about fifteen minutes puzzling over the possibilities, comparing the tops of letters, then came up with the following:

“Th_ P___1_ __ _____ St_t_ __ N__ Y____ __ M__k P_t____.” After several attempts at filling in these blanks, he deduced a logical
combination of words and names: “The People of the State of New York v. Mark Peters.”

It wasn’t the only possibility, but it seemed to fit, both literally and contextually. It appeared to be the title of a New
York criminal case. Justin plugged the case name into his CompuLaw search program and waited anxiously to see whether the
computer would come up with a case by that name.

After several minutes words began to appear on Justin’s flickering screen. Sure enough, there was such a case. It involved
a criminal prosecution back in 1987 against a man charged with playing three-card monte—a variation of the shell game—in downtown
Brooklyn.

Now Justin was really baffled. What did Mark Peters have to do with Jennifer Dowling—or Joe Campbell? Why would a three-card-monte
case be included in a search that produced Jennifer Dowling’s sexual harassment cases?

Justin brought his little decoder kit and the Peters case into Abe’s office. “I think I decoded the marks, Abe, but it looks
like another dead end.” He showed Abe how he had filled in the blanks.

Abe was enormously impressed with Justin’s resourcefulness. “How in hell did you figure that out?”