“But you didn’t shoot him?”
“No, sir, Mr. Fenney.”
“You’re innocent?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Fenney. And I ain’t coppin’ no plea.”
“But, Ms. Jones-”
“Miz Jones my mama. You call me Shawanda. And I ain’t pleading out. And what about bail? When I get outta here? I’m in bad need of some-”
“Dope?”
“Mr. Fenney, you looking at me like I ain’t nothing but worthless dirt, but you ain’t never been where I been.”
Scott sighed. This wasn’t going as planned.
“I’ll check on the bail hearing, but don’t count on getting out on a murder charge. And if the court grants bail, it’ll be high. Do you have any assets?”
She slapped her butt. “This here Shawanda’s only asset.”
“A nice ass won’t get you out of jail.”
“It will in some counties.” He thought she was joking, but she didn’t smile. “So I be locked up till the trial? Mr. Fenney, I gotta see my baby!”
“You have a child?”
“Name Pajamae, she nine.”
Scott put the pen to the pad. “How do you spell that?”
“P-a-j-a-m-a-e. Pa — shu — may. It’s French.”
“Where is she?”
“Our place down in the projects. We been through this before, but only couple days. I tell her, ‘Don’t even open that door, girl.’”
“Does this Kiki take care of her?”
“No, sir, Mr. Fenney. Kiki, she live with a man. I don’t let no man in my place might hurt my Pajamae. Louis, he watch out for her, take her groceries, make sure she okay. He like her uncle but he ain’t.”
Scott pushed the pad and pen across the table.
“Write down your address…and Louis’s phone number.”
Shawanda stopped her pacing, sat, took the pen in her left hand, and began writing, but her hand was shaking like an old person with tremors. Scott realized the awkwardness of the moment.
“My daughter’s left-handed, too.”
She stopped and stared at her hand. After a moment, she stopped writing, put the pen down, and looked back up at Scott with wet eyes.
“Mr. Fenney, the smack, it just own me.”
Then she doubled over and vomited.
Dan Ford was on the phone when Scott arrived at his senior partner’s office and dropped his body onto the sofa like a load of cement.
Dan was saying into the phone: “Of course we support your reelection, Governor. Your fine leadership gave the business community everything we asked for from the legislature-no new taxes, tort reform…Yes…Yes…All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Dan hung up the phone and shook his head in amazement.
“That boy couldn’t find oil at an Exxon station.” A long sigh. “But he is the governor.” Finally, he focused his attention on Scott. “Did she go for it?”
“No. She won’t cop a plea.”
A knowing nod. “Figured she might not.”
Scott had braced himself for one of Dan Ford’s profanity-laced tirades, but his senior partner didn’t seem all that upset.
“What should I do?”
“Hire her out,” Dan said.
“Hire her out?”
“Yeah, hire a criminal defense attorney to take your place. It’s a simple mathematical calculation, Scotty.”
“Dan, what the hell are you talking about?”
Dan stood and stepped over to the grease board mounted on the wall under the head of an elk, opened the wood doors, and picked up a marker. Writing as he spoke, he said, “Say the case takes a thousand lawyer-hours, worst-case scenario. We pay a defense lawyer-now I’m not talking a summa cum laude graduate; I’m talking anyone with a license-fifty dollars an hour-”
“ Fifty an hour? We charge a hundred an hour for our summer clerks’ time.”
“They’re top of their class. I’m talking a bottom-of-the-class lawyer, Scott, someone who needs fifty bucks an hour. So a thousand hours at fifty an hour, that’s a fifty-thousand-dollar expense to the firm.”
Scott knew his senior partner had thought this through because Dan Ford didn’t part with fifty cents easily much less fifty grand. He was a lawyer who calculated the profit the firm generated on each copy machine-forty cents per page-and made damn sure the copiers ran around the clock, spitting out paper and adding almost a million dollars to the firm’s annual bottom line. Ford Stevens marked up the cost of everything in its offices, animate and inanimate, turning a profit on every associate, paralegal, secretary, typist, courier, copy, fax, and phone call. And Dan Ford kept tabs on everyone and everything.
He was saying, “But that frees up those thousand lawyer-hours for you to work for our paying clients at three-fifty an hour. That’s three hundred fifty thousand dollars in revenues for the firm. Deduct the fifty thousand we pay the defense lawyer, and the firm still nets three hundred thousand, versus losing the entire three hundred fifty thousand if you have to work the case.”
Scott’s spirits started to lift. “Will Buford go for that?”
“Sure. Before the federal court had a public defender’s office, we got appointed all the time. Hiring them out was standard operating procedure for the big firms.” Dan shrugged. “And besides, it’s a win-win situation: she gets a lawyer who knows more about criminal defense than you do, and you get rid of her.”
Dan closed the doors to the grease board and said, “You know a cheap criminal defense attorney?”
RO ERT HERR N, ATT NEY-AT-L W, the sign out front read because the landlord was too damn cheap to replace the letters that had been shot off. Didn’t matter, it was the only sign printed in English, and most people in this part of town couldn’t read it anyway. This attorney’s office was not in the best part of town; it was in a piece- of-shit strip center in East Dallas. He was a street lawyer; hence his office was at street level. He would often arrive to find someone sleeping on the stoop. He never kicked them awake as the other business owners in the strip did: hell, the guy might be his next best client. And he never called the police, which would be a monumental waste of a phone call; the police only kept the peace in the parts of town that mattered. He simply stepped over them and entered the law offices of Robert Herrin, Esq.
His professional address was a thirty- by twenty-foot space, one room and a tiny john, lodged between a Mexican bar and a Korean donut shop; he ate donuts for breakfast and drank beer for dinner. The roof leaked, the ceiling tiles were discolored, and the scent of mold permeated the place. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and curling at the corners like elves’ shoes. His desk was metal, as was his chair, but it swiveled and had a nice seat cushion. Fortunately, he was a pretty fair typist because he couldn’t afford a secretary. And here Robert Herrin, Attorney-at-Law, had eked out a legal living for the last eleven years, representing those members of society who wouldn’t get past the security guards at a downtown law firm.
He was a fixture in this East Dallas neighborhood-he was the lawyer — same as the bar and donut shop were fixtures. The thin walls of his office afforded him the opportunity to pick up several foreign languages, although his Spanish skills far exceeded his Korean, probably because when he wasn’t here he was usually next door in the bar shooting pool. As a general rule, Anglos were not welcome in a Mexican beer joint. But Senor Herrin, el abogado, was always welcome because the owner, the bartender, the waitresses, and most of the bar’s customers were his clients. Which had the added benefit of keeping his plateglass window free of bullet holes. He was the go-to lawyer when spouses, offspring, or siblings were busted, either because he showed them respect or because he offered a convenient payment plan. Often he would open the door (after stepping over the aforementioned drunk sleeping it
