Her Kind of Case Read online

  HER

  KIND

  OF CASE

  A Lee Isaacs, Esq. Novel

  JEANNE WINER

  Copyright: Jeanne Winer, 2018. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events,

  people, or institutions is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by electronic means,

  including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from

  the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote passages in a review.

  Interior design: Tracy Copes

  Cover: J.L. Herchenroeder

  Author Photo: Joanna B Pinneo

  HC: 978-1-61088-228-6

  PB: 978-1-61088-229-3

  Kindle/Mobi: 978-1-61088-230-9

  Ebook: 978-1-61088-238-5

  Audio: 978-1-61088-232-3

  Published by Bancroft Press “Books that Enlighten”

  410-358-0658

  P.O. Box 65360, Baltimore, MD 21209

  www.bancroftpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  For my parents

  Milton Winer (August 27, 1920 – February 20, 2009) and

  Bernice Winer (October 15, 1923 – June 6, 2012)

  And my friend

  Jean Thompson (January 19, 1951 – November 4, 2015)

  I couldn’t have loved you all more

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  Someone was knocking on her office door, but Lee didn’t move or call out. It was much too early to deal with other people’s problems. Her first appointment wasn’t scheduled until nine, an hour and a half away, so whoever was knocking so insistently wasn’t one of her regular, semi-normal clients.

  Her regular clients may have broken the law, perhaps even a very serious law, but they knew about etiquette. You called, made an appointment, and waited downstairs in the beautifully appointed lobby until the receptionist phoned the lawyer and she came down to meet you. So, more likely than not, it was her new court appointment, a client suffering from borderline personality disorder in the first phase of her relationship with Lee: I love you; you’re my savior; I have to spend all my time at your feet. Later, in about a month, the second phase would begin: I hate you; you’re about to fuck me over; I want a new lawyer.

  The knocking stopped and Lee could hear footsteps retreating across the tiled hallway. Good. Although she was often grumpy, today was worse than usual. Partly it was the new pain in her neck—she tilted her head sideways and immediately regretted it—but mostly it was the fact that in exactly eight months she would turn sixty.

  Sixty?

  How distant and improbable it once sounded. The age when people were officially on the downhill side of their lives. They might still live another twenty or even thirty years, but never with the same physical ease and belief, whether true or not, that any disability could be overcome, that every trauma would eventually heal. When they were young, the Rolling Stones sang, “Time is on My Side.” Well, not anymore.

  Lee had woken up at home a few hours earlier with the new ache in the upper left side of her neck. When she’d pressed her finger on the exact spot where it hurt the most, she could hear a slight cracking sound. She’d made it crack about fifteen times and then given up. The ache was here to stay. She could tell. It had that certain quality she’d come to recognize: Hi, I’m your latest physical discomfort and I’ll be with you for the rest of your life; get used to me.

  She would try. In the meantime, she got dressed, ate breakfast and drove here, stopping on the way for a cappuccino, which briefly consoled her.

  Now, instead of working, she was staring at the fake silk tree that took up a corner of the office. She’d bought the tree twenty-four years ago when she’d quit the Public Defender and gone into private practice. After looking at more than a dozen spaces, she’d picked this expensive one in the Highland building and been here ever since. The office was large and she’d needed to fill it up fast with appropriately classy furnishings so that her future clients, defendants in various criminal actions brought by the District Attorney in counties all over Colorado, would feel relaxed and reassured that they were hiring someone substantial, someone who wouldn’t take their money under false pretenses and leave town in the middle of the night. Like they would.

  Lee didn’t think of herself as a fake-tree kind of woman, but the reality of watering and maintaining a real tree that would eventually lose its leaves or catch some kind of incurable disease convinced her. As she continued studying it, the tree struck her as a kind of minor miracle. After twenty-four years of benign neglect, it still looked good. No, it looked great. Real. Almost everyone who entered her office commented on how lovely it was and how did she keep it so healthy et cetera. She never responded, merely shrugged. Unless you actually walked over and fingered one of the perfect green leaves, you’d never know they were silk.

  Maybe when her cat Charlie finally died—he had to be at least seventeen—she’d replace him with a fake silk cat, and position it near his favorite red ceramic food bowl. No more brushing, no more feeding, no more contemplating his eventual demise. She shook her head and frowned. Morbid reflections on a fake potted plant that was only doing what it was supposed to: look real, stay lovely, never age.

  Her enormous oak desk was covered with stacks of paper, each one clamoring for attention. The number of them was reassuring. Unlike many of the lawyers that had been practicing as long as Lee, thirty-four years, she wasn’t at all tired of the work, wasn’t longing for the day she could shut her office door, hand in her keys, and pursue a lifelong dream of sailing around the world, volunteering at an orphanage in Mumbai, or whatever it was people thought they had to do before they got too old. Lee was doing it right now. She’d had two stable passions since law school: lawyering and karate, defending people and kicking them.

  After years of practice, she’d become one of the preeminent criminal defense attorneys in the Boulder–Denver area and had attained the rank of a master in Tae Kwon Do when she was awarded her fifth-degree black belt. There was nothing more she aspired to do, except to keep on doing what she loved. Which meant doing it well or not at all, and no matter how much it cost, concealing any signs of effort. Someday her mind or body might betray her, but for now she was the consummate professional flashing that easy, what-me-worry smile as the sweat dripped or poured down the sides of her expensive silk blouse. Look real, stay lovely, never age.

  For no good reason—it was 7:36—the wooden clock on her desk emitted one of its gentle gong-like sounds that miraculously failed to annoy her. A present from Paul who somehow always knew what she’d like and what she’d dump into the nearest wastebasket. The sound was supposed to wake her up to the present moment. Mostly it just reminded her of Paul and the past. Like half the people in Boulder (well, maybe not half), Paul had been a Buddhist. When he meditated, it was quiet and peaceful so Lee could get lots of work done and they could still be in the same room—unless he was gone for a few months on one of his high-altitude mountaineering trips, wh
ich was also fine.

  Unlike most couples, there had been a profound lack of noise in their relationship. Neither of them was afraid of fighting. There simply wasn’t much to fight about. When she missed Paul, it was often just that silent harmony, the unexpected happiness of two self-contained people living together and doing exactly as they pleased. Had she taken that happiness for granted? No, she thought, never. Then caught herself and blew out an exasperated breath. The myriad ways a self-employed professional could procrastinate.

  Time to get serious or she’d end up working till midnight. With the barest of sighs, she picked up a new yellow highlighter, grabbed a sheaf of papers from the top of the nearest stack and settled into reviewing the contents: a warrant signed by a district court judge to search her client’s home computer for evidence of child pornography. The client, a real estate broker, had been busted a few weeks ago after arranging to meet an undercover officer whom he believed was a twelve-year old girl named Candy.

  Candy? The name alone screamed, “I am a trap and you are the stupidest mark on the planet if you actually think I’m real.”

  As was often the case, the client had a sweet clueless wife who, at least so far, was standing by her man. When Lee mentioned the possibility of probation, his wife cried, “But that’s for guilty people!” Which is why you ought to ditch him, Lee thought, but of course kept her mouth shut, her face impassive. Dissemble or find another profession.

  But it was impossible to concentrate. Her usual self-discipline had gone rogue. She rubbed her eyes and pushed the papers away from her. Too many distractions: the new pain in her neck, her upcoming sixtieth birthday, inconvenient memories, the fact that the police were using smaller and smaller fonts in their arrest reports.

  She heard footsteps outside her door again and decided to chance it. If it was the new borderline, she could always pretend she was late, that she was on her way to the airport for a last-minute vacation in Patagonia—sorry for the earlier-than-expected betrayal. As she rose from her chair, Lee could see a white business card slide under the door. A salesperson, she guessed, wanting her to switch malpractice carriers or add some new eye-catching links to her admittedly barebones website.

  “Can I help you?” Lee asked, yanking the door open.

  “Oh, you’re there.”

  An attractive middle-aged woman with auburn hair stood up looking appropriately embarrassed. She was wearing a simple but expensive pantsuit, much like Lee’s in fact, and carried an elegant green leather handbag on her arm. Her smile was warm and open. Not a potential client unless she had a secret addiction to painkillers or was one of those lonely affluent women who couldn’t stop stealing things they didn’t need.

  “I know it’s early,” the woman said, still embarrassed, “but I have to be at work at nine and so I thought I’d just pop over and see if perhaps you were an early bird like me.”

  Lee nodded in the polite noncommittal way she’d perfected for meetings such as this. Only fools rush in. Lee never rushed, and she rarely misjudged.

  “May I come in?” the woman asked, peeking over Lee’s shoulder in case someone else, an even earlier bird, was already there. “You’re Lee Isaacs, aren’t you?”

  “That’s me. What can I do for you?”

  “You look exactly the way I imagined, except you’re taller. And your silver hair is gorgeous. Lucky you. I started dyeing mine a year ago and I’m already sick of it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “God, listen to me. I sound like a housewife at the gym. In fact, I have an MBA and I’m the head of human resources at The Boulder Tea Company. People fear me.” She grinned. “That was a joke, the fear part.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m going to start again. Hi, my name is Peggy O’Neill and I think I want to hire you.”

  Within the wide acceptable range of normal, Lee decided, and finally smiled.

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. O’Neill. Why might you want to hire me?”

  “Please call me Peggy. And forgive me. I rarely say the first thing that pops into my head. Well, sometimes I do but only when I’m nervous or upset, which isn’t often. My nephew is in trouble. Big trouble.”

  “Sounds serious.” Lee stepped aside and pointed to a large oak chair that faced her desk. “Come on in and let’s see if I can help him.”

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  As Lee sat down, she brushed the pile of papers to the side and grabbed a blank legal pad off the small credenza behind her.

  “So right now,” Peggy was saying, “he has a public defender, a young man who seems quite competent but very busy. I have only one nephew. I want to help him and I want him to have the best.” She blushed a little, which made her even more likeable. “Anyway, I’ve called around and the lawyers I spoke to thought this was your kind of case.”

  Lee knew what they meant: difficult, seemingly hopeless, emotionally draining cases that turn your hair silver. A paranoid schizophrenic stalking the same frightened woman for more than twenty years, a distraught mother suffocating her newborn while her husband was out of town on business, an abused runaway stabbing a social worker who threatened to call her parents—just a few of the many cases where she’d managed to pull the proverbial rabbit out of a hat.

  “What’s your nephew charged with?”

  “Murder,” Peggy said, as if she still couldn’t quite believe it. “His name’s Jeremiah Matthews, but everyone except his parents call him Jeremy. He’ll be seventeen in a couple of months, on December 25th actually, which never seemed fair to me. When he was younger and my sister Mary still let me see him, I would always buy him two sets of presents, one for his birthday and one for the holiday.” She sat back and glanced around the room. “This is very nice.” She pointed at Lee’s favorite picture, a print of an odd, curiously compelling purple horse, hanging near the door. “That’s a Fritz Scholder, isn’t it? I love his paintings.”

  “I do too,” Lee said. “What did you mean by ‘still let you see him’?”

  “Okay, before she met Leonard, my sister Mary was a smart independent woman who made her living as a graphic designer. She was her own person, a feminist like me. I don’t know what happened to her, but I think she was lonelier than she let on. Leonard was this good-looking charismatic man who talked like he had all the answers. He was a serious Christian but not yet a zealot.” She shuddered with distaste. “From the moment I met him, I thought he was a creep. I couldn’t understand why Mary went for him. Married him! But I love my sister, so I tried as hard as I could to get along with him, never argued when he pontificated about religion or politics.” She rolled her eyes, reached into her pocket and pulled out a stick of sugar-free gum. “Would you like one? It’s a pathetic substitute for Marlboros.”

  “No, and thanks for not smoking.”

  “You’re welcome. Anyway, when Jeremy was eight or nine, they moved to Colorado Springs and joined some kind of fundamentalist Christian group that was against everything. No singing, no dancing, no socializing with anyone who doesn’t accept Jesus as their savior …” Her face clouded over. “I can’t believe my sister went along with it. But she did. After that, I was lucky if I got to see them once a year.”

  “That must have been tough,” Lee said, scribbling down the information. Over the years, her notes had become illegible to everyone but her. After the first thirty or forty trials, she’d learned never to write anything that some curious bystander could easily decipher.

  “Tell me about it. Mary and Jeremy are my only living relatives. I was married once, for just a couple of years in my thirties. And I thought he was a chauvinist pig. Compared to Leonard, he was a doll. Anyway, I never got pregnant. When Jeremy was little, I did a lot of babysitting and we got very close. I always figured I’d be his Auntie Mame, show him the world.” She shook her head and sighed. “Instead, I’m hiring him a lawyer.”

  “Well, a trip to Marrakech would be fun, but you’re getting him what he needs.”

  “Exactly.
Too bad about Marrakech though.”

  “So, whom did your nephew allegedly murder?”

  Peggy grunted as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus, a pain no martial artist ever got used to.

  “Some poor guy named Sam Donnelly. That’s all I know. According to the Daily Camera, he was killed by a group of skinheads and somehow or another Jeremy was with them. He must have met them in Denver after his parents threw him out. I can’t imagine—”

  “Whoa, hold on,” Lee interrupted. “When did his parents throw him out?”

  “About eight months ago, around the beginning of February. Jeremy came to see me a few days later and he was so cold he was shivering. I begged him to stay, told him he could live with me and go to school in Boulder. He thanked me but said he couldn’t, that he had to make his own way. I gave him a down sleeping bag, all the cash I had, which was about four hundred dollars, and a check for another thousand that he either lost or threw away. I told him he was always welcome. He slept on the couch that night and was gone by the time I woke up.” She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what else I could have done. He was sixteen. I didn’t want to call the police. Finally, I phoned my sister but she refused to discuss it. I think Leonard was standing next to her, like he always does. Anyway, all she said was that Jeremy wouldn’t follow their rules anymore.”

  “Any ideas what those rules were?”

  “Oh God,” Peggy snorted. “Leonard had a million stupid rules. Let’s see, no alcohol of course, no swearing, no card playing, no television except for Christian shows, no dating girls outside the church, that kind of thing. Last time I was there, they were dragging him to services almost every night.”

  “So Jeremy finally had enough.”

  “I guess so. But I can’t imagine how he ended up associating with skinheads. He wasn’t like that. Leonard was full of hate, but Jeremy wasn’t.”

  “That’s easy. He was on the street. Kids on the street need protection. They need a ‘family.’ If they’re desperate, they can’t afford to be choosy.” Suddenly, the clock on Lee’s desk gonged again, reminding her—as if she didn’t know—that time was passing. She closed her notepad, set it down, and then placed her pen beside it. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a number of appointments this morning, and you’ll be late for work if you don’t leave soon.” She drummed her fingers while she thought. “I have to meet your nephew before deciding whether to take his case. Sometimes there isn’t a fit, and with a murder case, there has to be. Ultimately, Jeremy has to trust me enough to do what I tell him.”