Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel Read Online Free PDF

too far out on a limb for me without glancing over his back to see if anyone was firing up a chain saw.
    The next step was to convince either Steinberg, who oversaw our office, or D.A. Whitaker that prosecuting Hitchins in criminal court was a good idea. I decided to focus on Whitaker. What would make our golf-playing D.A. want to charge Hitchins with a felony?
    The answer seemed obvious. Whitaker was a publicity hound. That was the key. There was nothing especially newsworthy about the Hitchins case. I suspected there were plenty of men who slapped around women in Westchester. But the political and social climate in our country was clearly shifting. While it was not illegal in New York for a husband to hit his wife, there was a movement afoot to draft legislation that would make spouse abuse a crime. Women were gaining more political power. More and more unmarried couples were living together. And the legal system was being dragged into the social fray. A few years earlier, Michelle Triola had filed a lawsuit against actor Lee Marvin claiming that she was entitled to “palimony” because they had lived together even though they weren’t married. The media seemed fascinated by the changes in traditional male and female roles. If I could convince Whitaker that prosecuting Hitchins as a criminal could get him on the front page of the White Plains Daily and help him politically with women voters, he might sign on.
    I had an idea. Not long after I’d been hired, Will Harris, a reporter at the White Plains Daily , had telephoned me. He’d wanted to write a feature story about me since I was the first female assistant D.A.
    I’d turned him down because I already knew that I was going to face resentment from male prosecutors and I didn’t need the additional grief. I hadn’t even bothered to mention it to Whitaker or Steinberg.
    If I could get an appointment directly with Whitaker, I could tell him that Harris was interested in writing a story about women and the legal system. I could tell him that having me prosecute Hitchins as a criminal would give reporter Harris a terrific news angle. D.A. Whitaker could tell the public on page one how concerned he was about battered women in our county and that message would surely help him win the female vote in his upcoming reelection in November this year.
    The trick was getting to Whitaker. And that meant I had to find a way to get around Steinberg. Our office was all about chain of command.
    I picked up my phone and called Steinberg’s office. His secretary, Patti DeVries, answered. Our office had a strict policy when it came to addressing fellow employees. Everyone was required to call secretaries by their last name. The same was true about the male lawyers. But for some reason, which no one had ever bothered to explain, the secretaries and male attorneys usually called me by my first name and didn’t think anything of it.
    “Hi, Mrs. DeVries,” I said. “This is Dani.”
    I liked Patti DeVries. She had been a real pal when I was hired. I’d been shunned at noontime by my male counterparts. Not one of them had invited me to lunch—not even now. It might sound trivial, but their fraternity-brat tactics hurt my feelings. Of course, I’d refused to show it. Instead, I’d begun brown-bagging it, pretending I was too busy at work to take a break. And then one afternoon Patti DeVries had waltzed into our office and she’d spotted me eating a tuna sandwich at my desk. She’d invited me to join her and the other women for lunch.
    The male attorneys thought it was hilarious that I had been relegated to eat with secretaries. But what their testosterone-drenched brains hadn’t realized was that my lunches with the secretaries quickly paid off. Any jealousy that the women felt toward me because I outranked them had vanished. I got to know them as peers and they got to know me. I asked them for advice about things that they talked about—mostly men, but also where to shop, office