The Deposit Slip (2 page)

Back in his office, Jared sat leaning back, looking through a bar journal, when the door swung open. It was his assistant, Jessie Dickerson, her eyes lively.

“You snuck in while I was at lunch. Justice served today?”

“Clarence Darrow would have been proud.”

“Come on. Win, lose, or draw?”

Jared explained the outcome, leaving out returning the check.

“Awesome. Olney seemed all right to me.”

“Yeah, he is.” Jared couldn’t keep the pleasure entirely off of his face. He was always pleased to beat the pompous thousand-dollar-suit crowd. But Desmond wouldn’t miss a meal: knowing how the Tigers worked, he showed up in court today fully paid for his service—in advance.

It wasn’t that simple in a younger practice like Jared’s. You had to take chances with clients, like he did with Phil, hoping they weren’t deadbeats before he got too deep into their cases. He still got stung once in awhile, but that wasn’t the issue that landed his practice in the hole it was now. That happened because he’d rolled the dice on a big case—his “breakthrough case.” The Wheeler trial.

The breakthrough case: the one that catapulted your career to a new level. If you were an associate at a big firm, it generated the huge fees that made partnership a certainty. Out on your own, it was the case that made the rest of your career a choice. Some lawyers never saw one; others didn’t have the guts to seize one and hang on when it came along. Because, as Jared had just proved this past summer, the flip side of winning a breakthrough case was losing one—for him, eighteen months of work without fees and a dry well for a bank account.

There was a cough. Jared looked up to Jessie, holding out a pair of pink slips. “Phone calls for you.”

The first slip said Clay Strong. “What’s it about?”

“Don’t know. But he said it was urgent.”

The second slip was Sandra Wheeler.

“Are you going to call Mrs. Wheeler back?” Jessie asked, raising her eyebrows.

“No. Not now. I’ve already told her we won’t know anything on the appeal for months yet.”

Jessie brushed back some strands of hair from her eyes and nodded in agreement, but Jared could see she wanted to speak.

“What is it?”

“You told me there’s almost no chance of overturning the jury verdict in her case.”

“So?”

“So why not drop the appeal? Tell her it’s over.”

That would be the simplest; just surrender and move on. It was something he’d never done. One of Clay Strong’s first lessons as Jared’s mentor was that taking on a case, like marriage, was “for better or for worse.”

“No,” he answered, “I don’t think so.”

There was worry in Jessie’s eyes, but she shrugged noncommittally and left the room.

The late-afternoon sun had dipped below his window when Jared set aside the last folder on his desk and looked wearily around the office. Shadows from the building next door left the room’s light soft and gray.

His eyes stopped on a small stack of files on the sofa. There was some work there, but not a case among them had more than a thousand dollars of legal work.

Things were different before he took Sandra Wheeler as a client. Back then, his practice had momentum—steady litigation referrals from other attorneys, regular clients coming back for follow-up work. Then he took the Wheeler case. For over a year and a half, his regular clients’ work got stretched out. Calls got put off.

With too few exceptions, his clients found lawyers elsewhere—attorneys who returned their messages the same day, instead of later in the week or not at all. If not for a few loyal clients he’d brought over from Paisley—like Stanhope Printing, a company he’d represented since it was a startup—Jared wondered if he could have kept the office open.

When he got things built back up again, Jared promised himself, he wouldn’t touch another Wheeler case. Too much risk. Too much pain.

Speaking of which—Jared rotated his neck to loosen a kink tightening toward a headache. Jared just wanted to go home and lie down. He reached for his coat on the client chair next to his desk, when something pink caught his eye. He bent and picked it up. It was the slip from Clay Strong, the urgent one. When had they spoken last? At least six months.

He couldn’t afford to miss a possible referral from his old mentor. Jared sat back down in his chair and dialed the number.

F
ootfalls passed in the hall outside Clay’s office door. Jared’s watch showed it was after eight in the evening. The gunners, he thought: young associates making sure Clay knew they were still around. Courtiers to the king. He’d bet the keys to his car that they’d be here until Clay drove away.

Jared felt his fatigue settling into his bones. He looked at Clay, seated behind his enormous desk, feet resting on a side chair. A box of Cuban Montecristos perched at the desk edge. A single cigar nested in the corner of the man’s mouth. The world was upside down. Clay, finishing the final touches on a brief, was twenty-five years older and brimming with energy Jared could not imagine just now.

Cigar lit, Clay puffed shredded smoke rings toward the ceiling as he worked. When you own the building, who was going to complain?

Jared’s gaze swept Clay’s office, seeing the oil paintings and custom-made mahogany bookcases. It had the self-conscious appearance of a southern study. It looked out of place in the Minneapolis suburbs—until Clay opened his mouth. After decades in the snowy north, he still floated the long adjectives of a native Georgian drawl. How often had he watched Clay’s southern cadence grab a tired Minnesota jury and hold their focus—long after his opponents had left them exhausted and wanting to go home.

The hair was a shade grayer, but the smile had not changed; the one that made you feel the sun shining on your shoulders alone. If it was a trial lawyer’s trick, it was an excellent one.

After a few more moments, Clay picked up his phone and called a young attorney, who hustled in to retrieve the brief. As the door closed, Clay turned his full attention to Jared.

“My favorite lawyer, all grown up and practicing solo. Things going well? Jessie still with you?”

“Yeah. On both counts.”

“I would have paid her double if she’d come here with me.”

“And would have worked her twice as hard.”

The smile returned, with a gentle laugh.

“How long’s it been since we waltzed out of Paisley?”

“Two years this month, Clay.”

“Ever regret it?”

“Nope,” Jared lied.

Clay shook his head and grinned.

They spoke for nearly an hour, catching up. How large had Clay’s firm grown? Nine associates, he answered, none partners yet. Clay asked if he’d kept in touch with people from Paisley—to which Jared answered no.

He did not ask the same of Clay. Clay’s best friends, even people he’d graduated from law school with, had once been his Paisley partners. Jared wondered how many Clay had even spoken to in the twenty-four months since they’d asked him to leave the firm.

Jared did not rush it. Clay always circled before approaching his point, and they had not seen one another much since Paisley. At last, Clay crushed the stub of his cigar into an ashtray on the credenza behind him.

“I read about the Wheeler case in the
Minnesota Bar Journal
,” he said.

“Yeah. That was disappointing.”

“If you’re tiring of the rigors of a solo career, you know my offer still stands.”

The words were a courtesy, a preamble; Clay’s eyes showed it. He hadn’t brought Jared over tonight for another offer to join him in his practice.

“Thanks, but no. You couldn’t afford me.”

Clay laughed again, then reached for another cigar. “Been back to your hometown lately?”

Jared was jarred by this change in tack. “No. I haven’t been up to Ashley for a while.”

Clay sliced the cigar tip with a gold cutter, placing it unlit in his mouth.

“I have a case I want to refer to you.” He lit the cigar with a match from the desk and puffed another ragged ring. “It happens to involve some characters from around your old hometown.”

“What kind of case?”

“A significant case. A difficult case. Maybe another one of those ‘breakthrough’ cases you and all the associates at Paisley used to talk about.”

Immediately Jared wondered at the cost—and the problem with a big-ticket case Clay would be willing to refer away. As much as he liked the old man, Clay wasn’t the type to part with a decent lawsuit out of professional charity.

Clay cocked his head, as though reading Jared’s mind. He was good at it—seeing through the eyes into the heart. When a juror or client needed winning over, his accent would deepen and soften, taking on a gentle hint of intimacy—vowels washing over consonants like warm honey. Jared had heard it dozens of times in the courtroom. He heard it now.

“Maybe you’re feeling reluctant about getting
back on the horse,
” he drawled, “so soon after your experience in the Wheeler matter. I am also sure there is the issue of the cost of another venture such as the Wheeler case. Set you back a bit?”

“Yes.” Over forty thousand dollars. Jared felt that familiar pang of discouragement that had been his daily companion lately. He didn’t leave Paisley with thirty major clients in tow. Or own a building. Or have nine associates staying at the office till midnight to impress him. That money was all he had—and a bit more.

Clay leaned back in his chair, his eyes shadows of the concern in his voice. “I know it’s got to be tough. I’ve been there. Makes you want to crawl into a deep hole for a while. But when Mort Goering called me about taking over this case from his office, I thought of you. Immediately. That is what you need, you know. Turn things around.”

“I appreciate the thought,” Jared said, then added, in a voice he worked to salve with sincerity, “good case, you say. Why aren’t you keeping it?”

“Well, there is the matter of a complicated non-competition agreement I signed at Paisley.”

“Are you saying Paisley’s on the other side?”

Clay shook his head slowly. “That
conclusion
would be correct.”

“Which attorney is handling it?”

“Two, actually. Frank and Marcus.”

Franklin Whittier III and Marcus Stanford. The litigation would be bruising.

“The agreement I signed was broad,” Clay went on. “Paisley intended it to prevent the kind of
client unhappiness
that might
ensue
from a former senior partner of the Paisley firm appearing against them.” He shook his head. “By the time I signed it, I just wanted out. But here I sit, and the agreement—well, it’s still got some time on it.”

Jared felt stirred at the prospect of a new case, a turnaround case. Then he remembered the limited stack of files on his couch back in the office and the struggle to meet Jessie’s payroll last month. Plus the fact that he was still fighting three months of sleep deprivation. And he still couldn’t imagine the case that could force him back to Ashley.

“This isn’t charity,” Clay said, interrupting his thoughts. “I’ll expect a referral fee. I might be willing to loan you some money against the case—you know, help defray the costs. Because I’m hoping you’ll take this chance to get your feet back under you. It’s a
good
case. A
worthy
client. And, your connection to Ashley could help you on it. Give you a leg up.”

Connection? Jared tried to remember the last time he’d been to Ashley. He shook his head. “Clay, I don’t know—”

“Of course you don’t.” Clay cut him off. “You haven’t even heard what the case is about.” Clay reached into a drawer and pulled out a thin, bound briefing book, sliding it across the desk.

Jared did not reach for the book. “You said this was urgent,” he said.

Clay shook his head in acknowledgment. “That is correct. There
is
some urgency. Mort Goering was first counsel in the case. He handled it for a few months before he withdrew, rather abruptly. The Mission Falls judge on the matter has, in his wisdom, placed the client on a
very
short leash to find new counsel.”

“How short.”

“Next week.”

Jared glanced involuntarily at the door.

“Listen, Jared,” Clay pushed on. “You take the book home. Maybe take a trip back to your old stomping grounds and meet the client. Then, if you still don’t want the case, no hard feelings. I just ask that you make a decision in the next few days so we can try to place it somewhere else if you decline.”

If he had wax, Jared thought he would stuff it in his ears and race for the parking lot. But his hands were empty, and this was Clay. He’d never let Jared reach the door with a no on his lips.

“All right,” Jared said at last. He stood and reached for the book. “Thanks. I’ll look at it.”

They walked together down the hall to the dark reception area. As they shook hands at the door, Jared saw two associates pass hurriedly by in the hallway. A portent, he thought darkly, of long days ahead if he took the case.

His hand on the doorknob, Jared faced Clay once more.

“What’s the client’s name? In case I know him.”

“
Actually
, it’s a she. Erin Larson. Familiar?”

Jared thought for a moment, then shook his head in the negative.

As he stepped out into the mid-September night, Jared turned up his collar. The air had an unexpected bite of cold.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Larson. I’m afraid we’re going to have to pass on your case.”

Erin looked across the desk at the balding attorney—the third lawyer she’d visited this week. They all looked the same. The dark jackets, flecked or paisley ties, serious eyes, sympathetic smiles. Like suited mannequins.

“Why aren’t you interested in the case?” she asked mechanically.

The man’s smile faltered for an instant and Erin thought, He’s wondering whether to tell me the truth. “We’re just very busy,” the lawyer said at last, and Erin knew, as she shook his hand and gathered her coat, that he’d decided a lie was easiest. It didn’t matter. She was past feeling even the solace of disappointment.

As she got in her Hyundai and started the engine, Erin felt her exhaustion like a suit of lead. Every lawyer she’d seen these past few weeks had turned her down. Only one had acknowledged the reason. That one, a twitchy mass of nerves past his prime as a courtroom lawyer, had admitted that when he’d called the Paisley lawyers on the other side for background information, they’d threatened him with bone-crushing sanctions if he came near the case. Erin imagined every attorney she’d seen had received the same threat.

Erin returned to Ashley in the silence of her car—not even bothering to turn on the radio. Forty minutes later, she drove up the quiet Main Street of her home town and pulled in front of the Mayfair Drug Store. The store was open late on Thursdays, and there was still time to get her prescription filled.

She was about to get out of the car when she realized that she didn’t want to park here. On top of her inability to find new counsel, the harassment had been increasing week after week. These past few months since the lawsuit started, the incidents had grown from prank calls to worse—until she’d disconnected the answering machine and usually came to town only during the day. She just couldn’t face another night of returning to the car with a note on the windshield—or another slashed tire. How did they spot her anyway? And who were “they”? No one in town had yet said a word to her face. Could there be more than a handful of people in town so angry over her claim?

She started the car once again, drove around the corner, and parked half a block from Main Street, away from any overhead lights and sheltered under the rustling branches of a tall maple. She locked her doors and made her way on foot back to the drugstore.

The store was warm after the cold outside. Erin stopped near the entrance and rooted in her purse until she found it. “Xanax for mild anxiety,” the doctor’s scribbled note read. After a lifetime of avoiding all medication beyond her asthma inhaler, it’d come to this. For several minutes she stood grasping the note, staring down the empty aisle toward the prescription counter in the back.

“May I help you?”

Erin started at the words. She turned to the smile of a gray-haired woman wearing a blue store frock.

“No,” Erin answered abruptly and turned to leave the store.

A chill wind struck her face as Erin stepped out onto the sidewalk. What was happening to her? How could her life have changed so quickly? The police report of her father’s death was less than eight months ago, but it felt like ten years.