Proof of Intent (9 page)

Miles put his face in his hands.

“Miles, modesty aside, I am hands down the best criminal defense attorney in this county. But I cannot give you a good defense on the cheap. It's that simple.”

Miles finally looked up at me. “How much are we talking?”

“Depends on how long it runs, how many experts I need, how much investigation . . .”

Miles suddenly looked irritated. “Just give me a number!”

“Assuming we go to trial? Absolute, utter rock bottom, seventy-five grand. If we do it right—half a million? Maybe more.”

Miles's eyes widened. “You're kidding me! I've just had my wife stolen from me in the most horrible way. And you're saying that the cost to me—a totally, totally, utterly blameless innocent bastard—just to walk away with my freedom, it could run me half a
million
dollars?”

“And that's not counting appellate work,” I said dryly.

Miles stared furiously at me. “If I wasn't so goddamn angry, I could weep. This is
wrong
.”

“Yes,” I said. “But imagine how you'd feel if you were some poor broke guy who came up on the wrong side of town.”

He looked at me for a minute, then he started to laugh. He laughed and laughed until tears started running down his face.

“What?” I said.

When he finally stopped laughing, Miles said, “Here's the funny part, Charley. I
am
some poor broke guy who came up on the wrong side of town.”

“What about all those best-sellers? All those movies?”

“That was a long, long time ago, pal. You know how much money I made on the domestic sale of my last book? After I paid my agent? Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars. I made one thousand eight hundred bucks in film residuals, and got royalty checks for six thousand and twelve dollars on old books.”

“Savings?”

“Nada
. Used up long ago.”

“House?”

“I've borrowed against the equity in the place twice already.”

“Can you go back to the well?”

His eyes widened. “Charley, that's my
housel
You're asking me to hock the title to my house when I know with absolute dead certainty I'll never be able to make enough money again in my life to get out from under the note.”

I sat silently.

“Diana and I have been living beyond our means for a long time,” Miles said finally. “I've been slowly selling off assets, tightening the belt. Diana's been a good sport about it, but I've finally cut to the bone. I put those two mortgages on the house without telling Diana. I didn't want her to know how bad it had gotten.” Tears began trailing out of Miles Dane's eyes.

Finally, Lisa spoke. She was sounding a little choked up, too. “This is about the most depressing and cruel thing I've ever heard in my life, Mr. Dane. But the reality is that if you don't put another mortgage on whatever equity is left in your home, you will get represented by the public defender. My father knows all of them. I'm sure they're nice young people, well-meaning, hardworking. But they have no resources and nowhere near the experience or talent of Charley Sloan, Attorney at Law.”

Miles let out a long, slow breath.

Lisa's dark eyes were wet and glowing. “Mr. Dane, this guy may not look like much. He doesn't blow-dry his hair, and his suit could fit better. But make no mistake, sometimes a man ends up at a place in life where Charley Sloan is their last, best hope.” Her eyes gleamed. “Mr. Dane? This is that place. And you are that man.”

Miles studied her for a minute. Finally, he said, “I got the house appraised a year ago. There's a bunch of repairs and maintenance that I've let slide that have actually caused the place to depreciate. I mean, I've got barely any equity left.” He turned to me with a look of awful resignation on his face.

“What about your collection?” I said. “The weapons. You told me that shotgun alone was worth, what, eighty grand?”

Miles stared disconsolately at his fingers. Finally, he blew out a long breath. “What do I have to do?” he said.

I opened my briefcase, took out a power of attorney form, set it in front of him. “Sign right there. I'll do the rest.”

After the meeting was over, Lisa and I walked silently down the corridor. When we reached the elevator, my daughter said to me, “Well, that was just about the worst thing I've had to do in a long time.”

“Welcome to the criminal bar,” I said.

She took out a cigarette, put it in her mouth without lighting it. There was an odd light in her eyes. “You know what, though?” she said. “I'm kind of jazzed.”

As I mentioned earlier, in a way, Lisa and I barely knew each other. Other than the summer she'd worked for me a few years earlier, I had spent very little time with her since she was three years old. But still there are things, I guess, that you'll only say to someone who shares the bond of kinship, things too intimate to be spoken outside the circle of one's own blood.

“Yeah,” I said softly. “So am I.”

She gave me a strange smile—half-regretful, but half-fierce and feral, too.

Mark Evola—the judge who was handling the arraignment—smiled brightly at me as Miles pleaded innocent, and he continued to smile as I made my long and emotional bail pitch about Miles Dane's deep roots in the community and his constitutional rights and the sweet breath of justice and a lot of other high-sounding stuff. Evola's smile hadn't dimmed by one single watt as he said, “Bail denied.”

“Your Honor,” I thundered, “the state has proferred not one shred of evidence!”

“As you are well aware, that's what probable cause hearings are for, Mr. Sloan. This is not a probable cause hearing.”

“Well, I must put you on notice, Your Honor,” I added in the same outraged tones, “that I intend to appeal this injustice, if necessary, to the very highest authorities in the land!” It was all bluster of course. I was trying to give Stash Olesky the impression that Miles Dane was willing to spill vast amounts of treasure on this case in order to clear his name. But the truth was, Mrs. Fenton would print out a canned appeal, I'd sign it, and then I'd quietly let the issue die. When you're on a budget—and ultimately every defense lawyer is—you pick your battles. The bail issue was a loser.

“Knock yourself out, Mr. Sloan,” Judge Evola said. “I'm setting your client's probable cause hearing for Monday.”

I came back to my office and found my new client Leon Prouty in the reception area having a conversation with Lisa. Leon Prouty looked up and grinned, showing off several missing and rotted teeth. “So, the stripper lawyer is your daughter, huh, Chuck?”

“First,” I said frostily, “my friends call me Charley, not Chuck. Young man, you are not my friend. You may call me Mr. Sloan. Second, my daughter is neither a lawyer nor a stripper.”

Leon Prouty's snaggle-toothed smile faded. He shrugged sullenly. “Whatever.”

“Come into my office. Let's talk about your future. Lisa, feel free to join us.” One of the most important things a criminal lawyer has to do with his clients is establish who is the top dog. When a person of criminal disposition thinks they have their attorney on a string—well, God help that poor bastard.

I sat down and waited for Leon and Lisa to come in and make themselves comfortable. “Alright, Mr. Prouty,” I said. “While I was over at the police department on another matter, I picked up a copy of your police report. Let me tell you what the police say happened. They say that they received a call from a neighbor regarding a prowler on a recently built spec home out in the Cornish Pointe subdivision. That's quite a high-rent district. The police say they rolled up and found you and what they described as ‘three Latino males' on the property. The alleged three Latino males ran away and were never captured. You, on the other hand, were sitting in the cab of a rented Ryder truck. In the back of the truck . . .” I put on my reading glasses. “According to the inventory, the police discovered four ornamental trees, thirty-nine bushes, four cases of tulip bulbs, and approximately half an acre of sod. According to the report, this property had been recently landscaped, and you and these three Latino males were believed to have stripped the entire property and stuck all of this stuff in your rental truck. They valued the materials at roughly five thousand dollars. Does this accord, more or less, with what happened?”

Leon laughed. “Obviously that cop ain't landscaped his yard recently.”

“Meaning what?”

“The sod alone's worth five grand, retail. Them big-ass Japanese maples? Eleven hundred a pop, easy. There was ligustrums, roses, a boatload of real nice Cheyenne privets and shit. You're talking twenty-five grand worth of stuff easy. Of course I couldn't of got more than six or seven out of it on the, ah, used landscaping market.” He smiled at me as though I would find this as amusing as he apparently did.

“What kind of outcome would make you happy here, Leon?”

Leon Prouty blinked. “Huh? I want you to get me off!”

It was my turn to be amused. “What you just did, Mr. Prouty, was virtually admit to me that you and three confederates attempted to steal twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of property. You were caught red-handed. In your police file, I note that you have been convicted three times already on various property offenses. And you're only twenty-two years old. What this means is that, barring a miracle, the only question here is how much jail time you serve.”

Leon Prouty looked over at Lisa, confused. “But she said—”

“Lisa has been my employee for about twenty-four hours. She is not a lawyer. She has virtually no experience with criminal law. If you're looking for legal opinions, ask me.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“If you're willing to roll over on the Mexicans—”

“Shoot, them boys is back in Tijuana by now.”

“Then it's a question of pleading it down to something you can live with.”

Leon's eyes hardened slightly. “Mr. Sloan, I didn't come to you because I was looking to plead. I want a trial. Expert witnesses, the whole bit.”

“Judging by the condition of your teeth, son, I'd guess you can't afford a trial.”

Leon looked over at Lisa. “Man, we was getting along real good till the old guy come in. I want
you
to be my lawyer.”

Lisa glanced at the floor.

“Mr. Prouty,” I said, “how many times do I have to tell you?
I'm
the lawyer. You cannot retain a nonlawyer to represent you in a court of law. And speaking of which, where's that five hundred dollars you said you'd pick up at the ATM?”

“Uh. Well, see, I thought I had it in there, but I come up a little light.”

I rolled my eyes. “Get the money or get a new lawyer.”

He didn't seem especially concerned about this turn of events. He turned to Lisa. “You want to tell him?”

“Tell me what?” I said sharply.

Lisa looked uneasy. “He claims he knows some things. Some things about Miles. He says if we ease up on his bill, he'll tell us what he knows.”

I laughed. “Oh, that's a good one. The old I-know-something-about-your-other-client trick.”

Leon sucked some air through the gap where one of his teeth had rotted away. “Go ahead. Yuck it up, man.”

I crossed my arms. “You want me to stop laughing? Impress me with what you know.”

“I want a free ride, man. Right through trial. And none of this pleading guilty crap.” Leon Prouty looked at me with a pleased expression on his face.

What if?
The kid was probably blowing smoke, but even if he wasn't . . . This was one of those times where the two-hour legal ethics class you snooze through in law school comes slamming into the brick wall of real life. Theoretically a lawyer should keep each client and each case in a magical box, with no point of contact between. Any point of contact is called a conflict of interest and demands that the lawyer trot down to a judge and recuse himself from representing one of the clients. Again—theoretically—I probably should have instructed Leon about the conflict of interest rules that govern my performance before the bar, then explained that I couldn't in good conscience listen to what he had to say.

Theory and practice, of course, are sometimes two different animals. And to split legal hairs, I couldn't actually
know
there was a conflict of interest unless I heard what he knew. “Tell me what you know or get out of my office,” I said.

Leon sucked on his bad teeth, then finally said, “Well, without admitting to nothing, it's possible I might have been doing a little midnight landscaping over in the vicinity of Riverside Boulevard about a week ago.”

I waited skeptically.

“Again, without getting bogged down in the specifics as to how come I was there, I seen a guy come out of that house.”

“Which house? Be specific.”

“Miles Dane's house! The hell you think I'm talking about, man?”

“A guy. You saw a ‘guy.' ”

He nodded significantly.

“Can you describe this man?”

“White.”

I raised my eyebrows at Lisa. “Hey, it was a
white
man! That rules out all of the two dozen Chinese people that live in Kerry County. Several hundred African-Americans, too.”

Leon scowled. “He was wearing a black leather jacket. And he drove a black Lincoln. An old one, maybe '63,'64 somewhere in there. The kind with the suicide doors.”

“Suicide doors?”

“You know, where the rear doors open backwards. So if the car rolls forward while you're getting out, it kills you.”

“Ah. And when did he leave?”

“Late.”

“Like midnight? Like 3
A.M.
?”

Leon shrugged. “What, you think I was sitting around checking my watch all night? I was busy.”