Unlucky in Law Read Online Free PDF Page A

dumped me. She only came to see me once, to tell me she dropped my stuff at my mom's.”
    “That's rough,” Nina said.
    “Her parents were already iffy on me because of me being in jail a couple of times before.”
    Nina nodded sympathetically.
    “That's the worst part, losing Erin. But here's what I'm thinking. I go on the stand—whatever you call it when you get up in court to testify—and I tell the jury what happened, the whole thing, spit it out. What do you think are the chances that they'll believe me? Because if they do, she has to. I know she's hurting, too.”
    “It's an interesting story.” He did tell a good story, but then many of her clients did. They all had such excellent motivation for lying, and months in jail to perfect their yarns. If a lie bought you freedom, and telling the truth bought you imprisonment, well, the choice was a no-brainer for most of them. “I'm going to go back to it in a minute to ask you some questions. But I ought to say right now, Stefan—you won't be telling any of this to the court.”
    “Why not?”
    “It's very unusual for a criminal defendant to testify. You have the right not to testify, and a jury isn't allowed to draw any negative conclusions if you don't. If you do, all kinds of havoc can break out. In your case, you have two prior convictions. The prosecutor will make a very big deal out of them if you testify, which automatically makes you look very bad to the jury. Sometimes that's fatal.”
    “Yes, but how will the jury know what happened if I—”
    “The witnesses and the hard evidence have to do the job for you.”
    Then Nina took him through the whole thing again.

3
    Monday 9/1
    N INA PARKED A BLOCK AWAY AND WALKED PAST THE FLOWERS AND art galleries of the quaint tourist mecca of Carmel to the offices of Pohlmann, Cunningham, Turk. She arrived at the white wood-frame office on the corner of Lincoln and Eighth by eleven-thirty, buoyed by her talk with Stefan Wyatt. The early morning fog had burned off and she had made good time from Salinas, consolidating her thoughts all the way.
    Innocent or guilty, at least she liked the client. Some clients were so angry, so distant, or so disturbed that they were an ordeal to sit next to at all. Stefan was a cooperator. The jury wouldn't dislike him on sight. She reminded herself to try to get some young women on it.
    Walking up the white-brick stairway to the law offices, she remembered herself in her thick-soled athletic shoes bounding up these same stairs during her law clerk days. Somehow she had managed to take care of Bob as a single mom, work at the Pohlmann firm, and go to the Monterey College of Law at night. None of her subsequent incarnations, as an appellate lawyer in San Francisco and as a sole practitioner at Tahoe, had been as harried, yet she remembered those days, when she had been deeply immersed in learning new things and raising a little boy, as happy and rewarding.
    Back then she had assumed that the financial need, her single life, and her direction in law would all be resolved by now. Well, marrying would be a resolution of sorts, but she had lived enough to know that a good life didn't resolve. It offered satisfying moments, new beginnings, and more irresolution.
    Nina wasn't completely lacking in self-consciousness, but she found thinking about her own life confusing. Other people's lives never bored her, though—their lies, their capitulations, their bad luck, their fates. Other people's situations made her skin vibrate, her heart beat louder, her blood pump harder. She could do practical things, applying her intelligence and rationality to their lives in ways she never could for her own. She could make a difference, and what else was there to live for before you ended up moldering in a coffin, bones, like the poor man in this case?
    Love? She held up her left hand and looked at the glittering diamond on her finger. It had a sharp, definite look about it.
    Near the top of the stairs,