Suzy's Case: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

runs the perimeter, stocked with hot-chocolate powders and coffee beans from around the world and hundreds of one-pound purple coffee bags containing their traditional blend.
    Everything is the same except for one thing—an oversized purple-and-orange lounge chair in the center of the place occupied by none other than Henry Benson.
    That chair was never there and it’s placed, or should I say displaced, in a highly visual location. It screams, Look at me, so I’m not surprised Henry has claimed it as his purple-and-orange throne, drawing the attention due a king.
    So much for the corner table.
    Henry Benson is a high-profile New York City criminal attorney who was forced to give up his injury practice by his professional insurance carrier because of a civil litigation “misadventure.” He committed malpractice in open court in front of his client. He still defends penal prosecutions, but now Henry refers his injured criminals seeking money damages to me.
    He chose me—a complete stranger—to take over his civil practice because his bigwig best friend, Dominic Keller, the self-proclaimed “king of all injury attorneys,” innocently told him he thought I was a phenom in the courtroom. The nonnegotiable deal was that I take all or none of Benson’s twenty-one injured criminals, based solely on his short verbal description of each case. And we split the fees fifty-fifty. Oh yeah, the other reason he chose me to handle his injured criminals was so he could tell his best friend, Dominic, to go fuck off, without actually telling him. It’s the case of Ego v. Ego .
    Forrest Gump would say a Henry Benson case is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get. Each Benson case never really is what Benson’s verbal describes it to be or even what it appears to be after review of the file. Each comes with some built-in wrinkle and unapparent twist that offers the prior warning of a land mine you just stepped on.
    That said, the thing you do know about a box of chocolates is that each piece of candy comes with a chocolate-coated covering. And, the thing you know with Henry’s injured criminals—or HICs, as I’ve affectionately termed them—is that each HIC is a bona fide criminal who has been tried, convicted, and jailed for his felonious conduct.
    Before Benson singled me out to take over his HICs, I was making a good clean living. My maxim was, No one case is worth losing your license, your career, your self-respect, and the respect of others.
    My own clients had relatively pure and straightforward injury cases with none of the potential for blowing up in my face, and none were convicted felons. I was gaining recognition in the legal community as an up-and-coming plaintiff’s lawyer, and attorneys from all over the city were sending me their medical malpractice and general negligence cases. My practice was moving forward steadily, but unfortunately, my expenses were growing and my efforts weren’t exactly yielding retirement dough.
    So, despite hating anything to do with moral turpitude—which includes persons of perpetual criminal disposition with injury claims—I accepted Henry’s deal for the money, the whole money, and nothing but the money, so help me God. On the first case alone,just weeks after receiving all the HIC files, I made a bundle with very little effort.
    Since taking over Henry’s injury clients I’ve identified four fake cases. That makes nearly 25 percent of the whole. For those, I moved to be relieved as counsel, basing my application on attorney-client irreconcilable differences, because it’s an ethical violation to come straight-out and tell the judge that your client’s a fraud. You go figure that ethics code out. The Rules, yeah, right.
    On two of these four cases, relief was granted by the judge. On the other two, permission was denied, and I had to continue representing two plaintiffs I knew to be attempting fraud. For one, I have an offer of settlement to the tune