Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause Read Online Free PDF

summer. I wince at the price: $3.25 a can. At Wal-Mart a can costs $1.84. Given my prospective bank balance, running is looking attractive again. I find the phone booth next to the elevator and look up Chapman’s address: number 5 Clearwater Apartments. Damn! The guy lives in the whitest singles apartment complex in Blackwell County. What is he trying to prove? I have thought about moving into a singles building when Sarah goes to college, but then I look in the mirror and think I’m losing my mind.
    The women in these buildings are young enough to be my daughters.
    Out of the corner of my eye I notice a grizzled old black lady with a chinful of hair wistfully studying the phone in my hand and give her a thumbs-up sign that I’m almost through. In my new office we have to be generous about sharing the phone. I flip through the Yellow Pages, looking in the realty section, and remember an old friend in solo practice in the Layman Building almost directly across the street.
    I give the old-goat lady a wink as I hand her the phone.
    She responds to my rudeness with a “don’t-you-be-botherin’-me-white-man” stare, and I fairly prance out of Beaumont’s, relieved to have somewhere to go. As I find Clan Bailey’s name on the board in the Layman Building lobby, I begin to feel depressed again. I could write a book about what I still don’t know about general practice. I am going to have to find a floor full of lawyers who will take turns holding my hand and lending me their forms. I can handle a criminal case and have learned more than I want to know from the plaintiff’s side about personal injury litigation, but I can’t draw up a simple deed without wanting to check my malpractice coverage.
    I realize suddenly that I am no longer covered by the firm. I’ll just have to fly without it for a while. One crash though, and I’ll be doing a forced feeding on bankruptcy law, another area I managed to avoid in school. What the hell did I learn? Confidence I do not have in abundance at the moment. As I head up to the sixteenth floor, I wonder how Clan is doing. Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that he must be eating steroids for breakfast. Each time I’ve seen him lately, he looks as if he’s gained another fifty pounds.
    The anxieties of solo practice, I fear. He had been in a firm after leaving the PD’s Office but went out on his own six months ago. He can give me a reasonably unbiased account of the virtues (but more likely the defects) of the Layman Building.
    “Is Clan Bailey in?” I ask the receptionist, a strange young woman who is slowly threading a plastic soda straw into a mouth so small her effort seems as if it might be causing her some pain.
    Considering my question, she noisily slurps the remains of a Diet Coke.
    “Yeah, Dan’s in,” she says after a final gurgling sound bubbles up from the bottom of the container.
    Hey, we’re really moving now.
    “Could you tell him Gideon Page is here to see him?”
    She purses her chicken lips in more thought.
    “Why don’cha go on back? He doesn’t seem too busy.” She smiles pleasantly as if she is doing us both a big favor.
    This woman, her hair a rat’s nest, is dressed more like a circus clown than a secretary. She is wearing green balloon pants and an aqua top. With her tiny mouth and pop eyes, she resembles some kind of prehistoric fish. Truly a receptionist from the depths. I flee down the hall until I get to 1613 and find Clan as promised, leaning back in his chair and gazing at his wall.
    I walk through the open door.
    “Your receptionist doesn’t seem particularly in awe of you,” I say, taking a seat in the only other chair in the office.
    He grins, his now fat cheeks billowing outward like toy sails.
    “It’s a mutual-non admiration society. Thank God she’s a temp. You should see the regular one—a Carol Doda look-alike.” He spreads both hands under his rib cage in the now time-dishonored manner.
    I shake my head in wonder at my