Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause Read Online Free PDF Page B

friend’s perpetual time warp. Carol Doda was, or is (for all I know), a stripper in San Francisco who surely would admit she was in her prime a quarter of a century ago, when, with all the protest marches and riots in the big cities, it seemed the country was on the verge of revolution. But Dan’s most precious memory of the period is a mental postcard of two giant breasts. Yet I must have drooled over the same issues of Playboy.
    “You’re looking larger than life,” I say un diplomatically
    “Jeez,” he complains, “if I get any fatter I’ll have to be driven to work on a forklift.”
    I laugh, knowing I like him because I doubt he has censored a single thought since the day he got married. An hour before his wedding (a humongous affair with a catered outdoor reception at the Arts Center), he knew he was making a horrible mistake.
    “Brenda could handle the fact that her husband-to-be had an emotional age of fifteen,” he told me once after work over a couple of beers, “but when she discovered afterward I really was only two, it freaked her. I should have called it off, but I didn’t have (he balls.” I put my feet up on his desk and selectively rehash my year at Mays & Burton. Clan loves gossip the way my kid loves grease disguised as food.
    “Shitfire!” he exclaims.
    “They really fucked you, didn’t they?” I nod, marveling at how high Dan’s voice gets when he becomes indignant. At the PD’s Office we joked that if he could make his voice sound that shrill for a few more seconds he could market it as a dog whistle.
    “I escaped with a client, though,” I say, feeling a need not to sound too pathetic and tell him about Andrew Chapman.
    His Razorback red tie choking his bulging neck, Clan loosens his collar as if my story sticks in his craw.
    “Aren’t you a little worried,” he mumbles, “that when this case hits the newspapers they might come after the fee?”
    Feeling heat rising to my face, I practically shout, “He hadn’t signed their retainer agreement, damn it. Besides, it was me he wanted, not Mays & Burton. The odds were almost certain they wouldn’t have let me take it.”
    Like a teenager wearing his first tie on a dinner date, Clan inspects it for stains. He says loyally, “You’re right. They wouldn’t get anywhere.”
    I fight down a new wave of panic. The employment agreement I signed was three pages long and covered every loophole imaginable. The assholes. I slump in the chair, feeling exhausted. “I hope the hell not.”
    Over a snack in the break room, Clan fills me in on the deal he has with the Layman Building. Feeling broke, I have a cup of water while he demolishes two packs of Twinkles and a Mars bar. The Secretary of Agriculture, he now calls himself, boasting that he could solve the need for subsidies to farmers all by himself.
    I listen carefully and decide the price is right: I can rent a decent office and the use of a secretary for little more than three hundred a month (depending on how much typing I have). That doesn’t include a phone or furniture, but Clan assures me there is a good group of lawyers on the floor who are more than willing to help each other out.
    “Hell, you know that by myself I’m a card-carrying incompetent,” he says, now daintily sipping a cup of coffee, “but there are five other attorneys within moaning distance of my office. Our collective IQ is probably 105, but that’s more than enough to get by with the kind of nickel-and-dime crap we mostly get. You know Southerland and D’Angelo, don’t you?”
    I nod, sucking on a piece of ice, knowing that I might possibly find something even cheaper but probably more isolated.
    Not only does misery love company, in the legal business misery demands it unless you’ve been around forever and remember at least half of what you’ve learned or can lay your hands on it. Besides, I know a couple of the guys and they are pretty good, much better than Clan admits.
    “Tunkie”