Final Exam: A Legal Thriller (34 page)

***

Ben found Mark in roughly the same state as the previous afternoon in the garage.
 
Papers were all over the place and Mark didn’t seem to know which way was up.
 
Ben stood in the doorway with a disapproving look on his face until Mark looked up and met his gaze with a sheepish grin of his own.
 
“What?” he said.

“I see you’re organizing things again.”

Mark let out a guttural laugh.
 
“It’s what I’m good at.”

“Found anything?” Ben asked.

“No, not really, not yet.
 
It’s a lot like looking through other people’s mail.”

“Isn’t that what our job is?” Ben said.
 
“Looking through other people’s mail?”

“Pretty much.
 
Did you find
Dorlund
?”

“Yeah, that was a bit on the strange side.”

“Why’s that?”

“He acted like he was my long lost uncle come back to the country to give me a check for a million dollars.
 
The whole thing was kind of weird, to tell you the truth.”

“What do you think his deal is?”

“No idea.
 
Maybe he just doesn’t want us looking in his direction?
 
Who knows?
 
I’m going to have to think about it a little more before I make up my mind.
 
I also left a note for our friend, Jason Hahn.
 
I told him to meet us down here.
 
I think I’ll let you give him the third degree.”

“Love to,” Mark said.
 
“Always nice to knock a smart ass punk down a few pegs.”

The room was set up in two levels of desks, arranged in semi-circles.
 
Mark sat in the lowest level.
 
Ben walked to the upper level and took a seat.
 
“Are you doing this in any kind of order?”

“I was trying to look through it first to see what we’ve got.
 
They just more or less dumped a load of shit on us.”

“Did you expect anything less?”

“No.
 
I’ve got a copy of Greenfield’s personnel file.”
 
Mark said and let out a whistle.
 
“He was making pretty good bucks for a guy who didn’t work very hard and went to a lot of Cubs games.”

“Hey,” Ben said, “they don’t sign up for this gig because they work you to death and don’t pay you anything.
 
Let me see that file.”

Mark handed it over and Ben spent the next fifteen minutes or so looking at it in relative silence.
 
Every once in a while, he let out
a
“Hmmm” or “I wouldn’t have expected that.”
 
When he finished, he looked up and found Mark watching him.
 

“What’d you think?” Mark asked.
 

“Not much here.
 
In fact, I’d say a surprisingly little amount.
 
Do you think maybe the State has it?”
 
Mark shrugged.
 
Ben shook his head.
 
“I don’t know.
 
We hear all about relationships with students and it’s barely in here.
 
A couple of women make accusations, they dig up a third and then he gets a slap on the wrist for the appearance of impropriety.
 
It’s got to be a big cover-up.
 
I mean, come on, who would accept a reprimand when it’s clear based on this
that
they didn’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing in the first place.
 
And what was the phrase in here?
 
‘Insufficient evidence of actual relationships with students.’
 
That sounds like a load of bullshit too.”

Mark laughed again.
 
“That’s the way I was looking at it too.
 
My view on this is that everybody knew what was going on and for public relations purposes they figured they had to do something.
 
Since none of the students he actually
boinked
were probably willing to complain because they got good grades and didn’t want to get their reputations dragged through the mud, the school or somebody came up with this appearance of impropriety bullshit so they could slap him on the wrist and then slip the whole thing under the rug and hope everybody forgot about it.”

“Sounds about right,” Ben agreed.
 

At that point, a knock came at the door and a student in his early-twenties pushed inside, a blue backpack slung over his shoulder.
 
He had shaggy brown hair and wore a black Public Enemy tee-shirt and dirty khaki pants worn low on his hips exposing the tops of his boxer shorts.
 
“I’m looking for a guy named
Lohmeier
,” he grunted with as much attitude as he could muster.
 

“That’s me,” Ben said.
 
“You must be Jason Hahn.”

“That’s right.”

“Why don’t you come in and sit down.”

“What do you want?”

“We’d like to talk to you about Professor Greenfield.”

“What for?
 
They found the person that killed him.”

Ben leaned forward in his chair.
 
“Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t,” he said.
 
“Either way, we have a few things we’d like to talk to you about.”
 

Hahn looked from Ben to Mark and then back again.
 
He shook his head.
  
“I don’t have to talk to you guys.”

Ben nodded.
 
“Perhaps not, but we could always serve you with a subpoena and drag you into Court to talk about it.
 
Hey Mark, that would look pretty good on his bar exam application, don’t you think?”

“Sure would,” Mark said.
 

Hahn thought about that for a minute and then took a couple of steps further into the room.
 
“Okay, I’ll give you a few minutes.”

“Good,” Ben said, “why don’t you have a seat.
 
No use standing.
 
Mark, why don’t you go ahead?”

Mark began slowly, using his “aw shucks I’m just a big boob” persona to lead Hahn from relatively meaningless anecdotes regarding Greenfield’s first year Criminal Law class to Hahn’s performance on the final exam, which he insisted should have earned him a good grade, perhaps even an A.
 
Hahn appeared bored and disinterested through much of the twenty minutes or so it took Mark to get to the point, occasionally looking over at Ben, who sat and watched while saying nothing.
 
Hahn said his grade on the final exam, a C+, shocked him because he knew the material inside and out and had been one of the best students in class from day one.
 
He just knew that it had to be a mistake from the moment he accessed his grade from the computer.
 

At the Chicago College of Law, grades are posted on the computer as they are submitted by the professors so students can access their grades before the final grades are sent out.
 
Hahn told them that he had made an appointment to see Greenfield shortly before Christmas and
that things
got heated when Greenfield insisted that his evaluation of Hahn’s exam was accurate and that he saw no rationale for raising his grade.

“Look,” Hahn said, “I thought he was full of shit, but I finally realized that it wasn’t doing me any good to argue with him, so I decided to give it up and leave.
 
I lost my cool a little bit, I admit that, and I shouldn’t have yelled at him, but he was kind of an arrogant fuck about it, to tell you the truth, and it pissed me off.
 
You know, this is my life.
 
A C+ is a big deal.”
 

Ben finally spoke up.
 
“Not to interrupt, but I read your exam.
 
You’re lucky you got a C+.
 
You didn’t know what the fuck you were talking about.”
 

Mark turned and looked at Ben and gave him a look that said, “What are you talking about?
 
We haven’t seen any exams yet.”
 
From where he was sitting, Hahn couldn’t see the expression on Mark’s face.
 

“Look,” Ben continued, “you’re not the first guy to come in here thinking you were hot shit only to discover that his class was filled with students just as smart or smarter than he is.
 
You’re just going to have to work harder, that’s all.”
 

Hahn’s eyes blazed.
 
“Fuck you,” he finally blurted out.
 
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
 
I did well on that exam.
 
He fucked me over.”

“You’re just going to have to work a little harder next time,” Ben said.
 

“Is that what you think?” Hahn said.
 
He was now on his feet.
 
Ben shrugged.
 
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.
 
I was one of the best students in that class, if not
the
best student.”

“So you say,” Ben said, “but you can’t prove that by your exam.”

“What makes you think you know what you’re talking about?”

“You forget, Mr. Hahn, this is my business.
 
I practice criminal law.
 
I don’t just watch it on TV.”
 

Hahn took a step in Ben’s direction.
 
“Fuck you,” he said again.
 
“I don’t have to put up with this bullshit from you or anybody else.”
 
He picked his backpack up off the table, turned and headed for the door.
 

“One more question for you, Mr. Hahn, before you leave,” Ben said.
 
“How’d you do on your other finals?”
 

As Hahn reached the door and yanked the handle he said, “Fuck you.”
 
Then he stormed from the room.
 
The door closed slowly behind him and made a loud clicking sound as it latched.
 

“Thanks for stopping by,” Ben said at the closed door.

Mark looked back at Ben and raised his eyebrows.

“That wasn’t even very hard,” Ben said.
 

“No, it wasn’t.”
  

“If I could do that in here six or eight weeks after the fact,” Ben said, “think how easy it would’ve been for Greenfield to push his buttons a couple of days after he got his exam results.”
 

The two men spent most of the afternoon reviewing grade reports.
 
Dean Freeman had given
them
summaries dating back to 1989, when Ben was a student in Greenfield’s first year Criminal Law class.
 
Mainly, they just compiled lists of students who could have an axe to grind against Greenfield, either because they did poorly in his class, or because they did significantly worse in Greenfield’s class than they did in others.
 
They also tried to identify students who may have been particularly damaged by a Greenfield grade.
 
For example, students close to some particular class honor or award could have taken a bad grade personally.
 

Painstaking and laborious work, document reviews rarely seemed to bear any fruit right up until the moment they did.
 
After a couple of hours, Ben and Mark concluded that this work might be best performed by one of the younger guys in the office, leaving them more significant duties on which to focus.
 
Nevertheless, they agreed to stick it out for the rest of the afternoon and make the trip as worthwhile as possible.
 
At ten minutes past four, Ben got up and went down the hall to use the restroom.
 
When he got back, he found Mark at the back of the room stretching his legs.
 

Hearing Ben come through the door, Mark turned and said, “I was just thinking, with this being Valentine’s Day and all, you probably want to get going pretty soon.”
 

Ben looked stunned.
  
He looked down at his watch hoping the date would change, but it didn’t.
 
“Fuck,” he said.
 
“I forgot all about it.”

“Damn.
 
Even a total slug like me knows you can’t blow off Valentine’s Day,” Mark said.
 

Ben shook his head.
 
“What am I going to do?”

“Only one thing you can do - dinner and flowers.
 
Did you get anything for her in Florida?”

“No, nothing.
 
I got a little something for the kids, but nothing for her.”
“That means nice dinner and nice flowers.”

“Where am I going to go to dinner now?
 
Every place is going to be booked?”

“You’ve
gotta
try man, you’ve
gotta
try.”

Within five minutes, they had locked the door, dropped the key off and were heading to the parking lot.
 
As they hurried across Adams Street, Ben said over his shoulder, “What am I going to do with the kids even if I can find a place?”