By six thirty Jack was on his way. He didn’t need to be in the office until after eight A.M., which meant that he had time to pedal over the bridge, onto the mainland, and into Coconut Grove for breakfast. He was a regular at Greenstreet’s, a corner cafe on Main Street where an hour or so at an outdoor table beneath a shade umbrella could feel like a visit to the Left Bank. Jack made the mistake of checking his e-mails over coffee, and his quick breakfast turned into an hour of thumb exercises. It was after nine o’clock by the time he got back on the bicycle and reached his office. Central Grove had the canopy of a rain forest, and tucked behind a stand of oaks and royal poinciana trees that lined Main Highway was an eighty-year-old house with yellow siding and bright blue shutters. It didn’t look like a law office, and that was what Jack liked about it. He carried the bike inside, along with his helmet and trusty air horn. His assistant was already at her desk and on the phone.
“Morning, Bonnie.”
She hung up the telephone and glared in his direction. From the tense expression on her face, Jack might have guessed she’d been negotiating a hostage release.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“What’s wrong? You want to know what’s wrong?”
The phone rang. Bonnie didn’t flinch.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” he asked.
“No. You answer it.”
Jack didn’t know what was up, but he’d worked with Bonnie long enough to know that tone. He got it himself: “Swyteck and Associates.”
“And associates?” the caller said. “Who in their right mind would associate with you, scumbag? Scumbag, scumbag, you are a scum-”
Jack hung up. Immediately, the phone rang again. He glanced at Bonnie, who breathed out through her nose with the force of a charging bull.
“Go right ahead,” she said. “Answer it again.”
He did. “Swyteck and-”
“How do you live with yourself, you disgusting piece of-”
Jack slammed down the phone.
Bonnie shot him a look of desperation. “This has been going on all morning,” she said. “It’s even worse than when the verdict was announced.”
A third call. Jack answered and braced himself.
“This is blood money of the worst kind, you repulsive-”
Jack held the phone away, put the air horn to the mouthpiece, and gave it a five-second blast. Then he checked the line. The caller was gone.
“Here,” he said, handing Bonnie the horn. “This ought to take care of it.”
Bonnie took it and smiled. Jack wheeled his bicycle down the hall toward the back bedroom, then stopped when he heard Bonnie’s phone ring in the other room-followed by a blast from the stadium air horn.
“It works!” she shouted.
She was actually using it, which made him chuckle. He checked the closet to make sure he had a business suit-charcoal gray would do-and then headed to the bathroom for a shower. Bonnie headed him off in the hallway, telephone in hand.
“It’s Andie,” she said, wincing apologetically. “She might be a little perturbed. I blasted her by accident.”
“Oh, boy,” said Jack. He stepped away and took the call in his office.
“Has Bonnie lost her mind?” said Andie. “She nearly busted my eardrum.”
“Sorry,” said Jack. “I really gotta get her to lay off the breakfast burritos.”
“What?”
“Nothing. What’s up?”
“Just-please tell me it’s not true,” said Andie.
Jack wadded up a stray Post-it and pitched it into the trash can. “Tell you what’s not true?”
“I’ve heard this from a half dozen people already. Faith Corso was on one of the morning talk shows. Her latest ‘exclusive’ is that you went to Jackson last night and tried to talk the Laramore family into filing a lawsuit with you as the lead attorney.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Is it? On our car ride home, you were awfully vague about what you and Mr. Laramore talked about.”
“That’s because an attorney’s conversation with a prospective client is no less confidential than a conversation with an existing client.”
“So it is true? You’re going to be their lawyer?”
“No. I don’t know. All I can tell you is that it didn’t go down the way Corso is reporting it.”
“Oh, my God. Jack, you can’t be serious. You are actually trying to convince these poor people that they should sue BNN?”
“What?”
“That’s what Corso’s sources are saying-that you are cooking up a lawsuit against BNN for getting the crowd so whipped up that someone attacked a Sydney Bennett look-alike.”
“Wait a second,” said Jack. “First of all, I’m smart enough to know that no one has ever succeeded in suing the media for inciting some nut-job TV junkie to commit a violent act. Second, I could get disbarred for going to a hospital and trying to talk the victim’s family into filing a lawsuit. I’m not an idiot.”
“Faith Corso says you are an idiot and that you will be disbarred.”
Jack gripped the phone, amazed that just ten hours earlier he had been trying to convince Ben Laramore that Corso had a good heart. “Very odd to me that Corso is the first journalist in the country to find out that I went to the hospital last night. And even more interesting that she presumes to know what Ben Laramore and I talked about.”
“Are you saying the invitation from Mr. Laramore was a setup?”
“I’d hate to think so.”
There was a blast of the horn from the other room. Bonnie was fighting off another attack on line two.
“But stranger things have happened,” he said, as he got up to close the door.
Chapter Ten
Jack wanted to blow his brains out, which, generally speaking, is a predictable reaction to defending a client for seven hours in a deposition taken by the newest member of the Florida Bar.
At five o’clock he grabbed a cab back to the office to catch up on other work, hopefully something that would remind him why he had become a lawyer in the first place. Monday-evening traffic was even worse than usual, and it could have pushed him over the edge, had he let it get to him. Instead, he savored a random “Miami moment,” finding amusement in the company name on the stalled landscaping truck that was blocking the road: Jesus amp; Sons. Jack wondered if the proprietor had ever read The Da Vinci Code.
Bonnie was still at the reception desk when Jack stepped through the door.
“Phone calls stopped yet?” Jack asked.
“What does this tell you?” she asked, then pressed the button on the air horn. It peeped, as spent and exhausted as she was.
“Maybe we should just stop answering the phone for the next day or so.”
Bonnie reached all the way down to her New Jersey roots and shot him some attitude. “Brilliant, Jack. And if that doesn’t work, we can put up the hurricane shutters, fly out to Vegas, and see if we win enough money to pay next month’s rent. You can’t run a law office that way. And if I ignore the landline, they’ll call your cell.”
Jack removed his tie and laid it aside. “That’s already started. It was vibrating all day in the deposition from hell. Not sure how these people got my cell number.”
“From the Web site.”
“The BNN Web site?” asked Jack.
“Not directly,” she said, “but it’s kind of linked to it-‘no-blood-money.com.’”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Take a look.”
Jack watched over her shoulder as Bonnie brought up the site on her screen. He was of course aware that blogging and other online chatter about the Sydney Bennett trial had been rampant. It was news to him, however, that in a matter of days the no-blood-money campaign had organized to the point of developing an official Web site.
Bonnie dragged her cursor to the About Us button. “The site manager is the same woman who started the Justice-for-Emma Web site when trial started.”