False Witness (20 page)

She usually got along fine with Isaiah, but she had seen a different side of him today. Mean-spirited. Arrogant. Okay, so maybe she had seen him arrogant a time or two before. Still, his comments had been way over-the-top this morning.

At least he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut as she stalked away and took the stairs.

33

Friday, March 21

Jamie showed up at the legal aid clinic fifteen minutes late for her 1:00 p.m. shift. It was the first time all semester she had not been on time, and she had her reasons. Primary among them was the self-absorbed Isaiah Haywood, whose shift, along with a few others', was supposed to end at one. Surely he would be gone by now.

She climbed the steps of the legal aid clinic, a converted brick house located in the run-down Techwood area of Atlanta, a stone's throw from Georgia Tech. She twisted the large doorknob and yanked hard on the door, a habit she had developed because the door tended to swell and stick after a hard rain.

She stepped into the entry hall with its worn wooden floors and took a left into the former dining room that now served as an office. It had two metal desks with cracked pleather high-back chairs, a few plastic chairs for clients, and expanding folders full of client files that occupied every square inch of shelf space on the interior wall and a good portion of the floor. There was an old desktop unit and monitor on each of the desks, but the students all brought their own laptops. Jamie had never even seen the desktops turned on.

One of the desks was occupied by a third-year student named Lars Schrader, who shared the Friday afternoon shift with Jamie. Lars was a blond Swede who practically lived in the gym and had the grades to prove it. He gave Jamie his patented “Whazup?” and she muttered some lame excuse for being late. When she didn't see Isaiah still hanging around, she felt her neck muscles relax. She didn't need another confrontation.

She had been second-guessing her decision to call him out yesterday in the hallway, alternating between increased anger at the way Isaiah had acted and a nagging feeling that she should have just kept her nose out of it. She wanted to put the whole affair behind her, but that wasn't going to be easy. She, Isaiah, and Wellington had become the talk of the school. Along with Professor Snead, of course, whose name was always on the tips of the chatty students' tongues, generally preceded by a curse word.

The phone interrupted her thoughts, and Lars let it ring four times. Both he and Jamie knew the phone call would probably mean another client file, and they both already had enough to keep them busy through graduation. Snead, as a relatively new faculty member, had been assigned oversight of the legal aid clinic. Jamie couldn't imagine that there was another legal aid clinic in the entire country whose faculty sponsor had less enthusiasm for the job.

“I'll get it,” Lars announced loudly, shooting Jamie a perturbed look. He talked to the client for a few minutes about some kind of landlord-tenant problem while Jamie settled in and fired up her laptop. She checked the legal aid calendar. Her first appointment wasn't until two. She pulled out her Uniform Commercial Code book and hunkered down for forty-five minutes of studying.

Lars hit the Mute button and turned to Jamie. “It's an eviction case,” he said. “Your specialty. Should I transfer the call?”

Jamie already had five eviction files and, by her estimation, at least ten more active cases than Lars. “You ought to learn how to handle them too,” she said.

“Why? I'm going to be a personal-injury lawyer. I'll never handle another eviction case in my life. Besides, she should pay her rent if she wants to stay in the apartment.”

“Maybe she can't pay her rent,” Isaiah Haywood said. He had slipped into the room and leaned against the entry door. Jamie stiffened, then buried her nose in her book. But Isaiah was undeterred. “Maybe she's a single working mom with three little kids. Maybe her employer just outsourced her job. Maybe her mother just got diagnosed with cancer and doesn't have medical insurance.”

Lars took the phone off mute. “Somebody will be right with you,” he said. Without waiting for an answer, he hit Mute again. “Maybe she's a single young female who hasn't worked a day in her life and still receives an allowance from Dad at age twenty-one,” Lars said, checking his notes. “Maybe she can't pay the rent because all of her hard-earned allowance money goes up her nose every Friday night.”

“Everybody's entitled to a defense,” Isaiah retorted.

“Good; you take her case,” Lars grunted.

“Everybody's entitled to a defense,” Isaiah said. “But not everybody's entitled to a defense from
me
. Only the lucky ones.”

Jamie rolled her eyes and resisted the urge to take the bait.

Lars cussed and picked up the phone, making no effort to sound interested as he garnered more details about the case. Isaiah pulled a plastic chair in front of Jamie's desk.

“Are we cool?” he asked. Jamie could tell that the charm was in full throttle—concern pooling deep in the brown eyes, a serious tone in his voice. This was Isaiah Haywood, the former University of Georgia starting cornerback. Class cutup. Ladies' man. Defender of society's underdogs in every case they ever dissected in law school.

By halfway through his first semester, Isaiah had already hit on almost every decent-looking girl in his class, including Jamie. “Might as well start at the top,” he told her, though she knew he had already flirted with at least three of her classmates. She gracefully rebuffed him, but they later became friends. Jamie, the would-be prosecutor. Isaiah, the heir apparent to Johnnie Cochran.

“We're cool,” Jamie replied. “But I still think you owe Farnsworth an apology.”

Isaiah scrunched his face as only he could do. “You can't be serious. Maybe I overreacted a little, but
an apology
?” Isaiah shifted in his seat, dramatizing how uncomfortable he was just thinking about it. “I mean, if Casper wants to listen to his own drummer, that's cool. But he should have told me he was going to do that
before
class, and I would have called the whole thing off. Once he lets the rest of us hang out there like that, dangling in the wind, just so he can get another book award—”

“That's not fair and you know it,” Jamie interrupted. Isaiah gave her a wounded look, but she wasn't buying it. “Maybe he felt a sense of responsibility. And you, more than anyone, ought to appreciate a person who takes a stand against the crowd.”

“The man scares me,” Isaiah said.

“Wellington?”

“Yeah. That mentality. Abide by the rules. Placate the system. Defend the status quo. Card-carrying member of the Republican Taliban.”

It was a diversionary tactic, Jamie knew. Isaiah could argue endlessly about political issues. Two years ago, during con law class, a debate between Isaiah and Jamie on the issue of capital punishment had established her reputation as a budding prosecutor. And a person not to be messed with.

Isaiah had waxed eloquent about the discriminatory nature of the procedures and the mechanics of death. “Modern-day lynchings,” he called them, citing statistics about the disproportionate number of black men on death row. “All we've done is trade a rope for a needle.”

The class was quiet as Jamie raised her hand to respond. Slowly, in hushed tones, she told the story of her own mother's murder. The night she came home as a sixteen-year-old girl to find her mother dead, her father bleeding from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. She painted the scene in graphic detail, then quietly ticked off a list of the intruder's prior convictions. “Don't tell me that man deserves to live,” she said. The class sat in stunned silence. Not even Isaiah challenged her statement.

After class, he sought her out. “I'm against the death penalty because I think it's discriminatory,” he said. “But I'm sorry if I sounded insensitive toward the victims.”

She had not seen that side of her classmate before. “We're okay,” she said. “Just don't change the law until we put this scum away.”

They shook on it—a touching of closed fists that was as good as a notarized contract. He walked away with her respect.

Which was why she wanted to at least be honest with him now. “I would have done the same thing Wellington did,” she said. “Snead just didn't get that far.”

This seemed to rock Isaiah back. The king of quick comebacks actually took a minute to process it. “Serious?”

Jamie nodded.

“Yeah, but you're hot. Any woman with legs like yours is entitled to hang the rest of us out to dry.” Isaiah smiled, flashing the pearly whites that had melted the hearts of so many female members of the Bulldog Nation. He had apparently decided the Wellington issue wasn't worth losing a friendship over.

With anyone else Jamie might have been appalled at such sexist comments. But two years ago she had learned that Isaiah would be Isaiah no matter what. “Sounds chauvinistic to me,” she said.

“Not really. I would have been just as mad if an ugly
female
student dissed my plan. I discriminate based on ugliness, not whether somebody is a man or a woman.”

“Mature.”

“But the two of us. Are we okay?”

“We're okay.”

“Great. Then let's make it my place tonight. We could hang out in Buckhead for a while first, just so everybody knows we signed a truce.”

“Not that okay.”

34

Jamie's 2:00 p.m. appointment, a gentleman named David Hoffman, came strolling in nearly twenty minutes late and settled on one of the plastic seats in front of Jamie's desk. Despite Jamie's hints, he offered no apologies or excuses for his tardiness.

She handed him a clipboard with a long form designed to see if he qualified for legal aid. The rest of the world had digitized, but legal aid still believed in hard copies with real signatures. Jamie had to help half the clients fill it out.

Hoffman frowned at the paperwork. The man was slender, perhaps late thirties, with thin blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a ruggedly handsome face that looked like it had seen a barroom brawl or two. He had a small crook at the bridge of his nose and a slight scar above the right eye.

His demeanor was not what Jamie had come to expect from her legal aid clients. Nor did he dress the part. Jeans, yes. But the polo shirt betrayed a more prosperous lifestyle. Plus, how many of her clients carried the latest version of a BlackBerry on their hip?

He smiled at her—dimples and all. Quite a flirt for a guy wearing a wedding ring. “Do I really need to fill this out?” he asked.

“I'm afraid so.”

“You don't have, like, a short version? An EZ form?”

“No.”

He sighed, apparently surprised that the dimples hadn't worked their magic. He spent another few seconds surveying the form. “What's the right answer?”

“Excuse me?”

“How much can I say that I make and still have you guys represent me for free?”

Jamie frowned at him. She had enough legitimate clients—folks who truly needed her help. The last thing she needed was a scam artist. “Why don't you just answer the questions honestly, and we'll take it from there?”

“By the book,” he said. “Good to see you people do things the right way around here. I need a lawyer who handles things by the book.”

Finally, David Hoffman stopped talking and started filling out the form.

Hoffman claimed only twelve thousand dollars in income the previous year, safely within the legal aid qualifications, and Jamie asked if he could bring his tax returns to their next meeting. Legal aid wasn't supposed to be used by middle-class Americans trying to save money on legal bills.

At Hoffman's request, they moved across the hall to the conference room. His legal matter was apparently too confidential for the prying ears of Lars Schrader. Jamie moved some boxes from the seats to the floor and pushed papers and files away from a small part of the conference room table.

She opened Hoffman's new file—a manila folder containing Hoffman's form and little else—and jotted a few headers on a legal pad.

“Now, Mr. Hoffman, what kind of legal problem do you have?”

Hoffman pulled a few folded pieces of paper from his back pocket and handed them to Jamie. She read the summons carefully and decided that she might not need those income tax returns after all.

The summons required Hoffman to attend Fulton County Court the following Friday to answer charges of impersonating a police officer and breach of the peace. Class 5 felonies—far more interesting than the typical misdemeanor diet of legal aid students. Under the rules of the clinic, Jamie could handle Class 5 felonies only if she had the approval of the clinic's supervisor—Professor Snead. As for Snead, Jamie knew he wouldn't care. He would sign off on anything; he just didn't want to be bothered with actually having to appear in court.