Lipton was leering at her now, and Casey's skin began to crawl. The air vent hummed. A fly came down from the ceiling and conducted a haphazard march across the tabletop between them before retreating to the glass panel on the door. More than anything, Casey wanted to get out of the room.
"I'm sure I'll have more questions after I read these," she said, rising and gathering the files. "I'll be back tomorrow."
"I'm looking forward to seeing you, Casey, on a daily basis, I mean. It's been quite a while," he said, rising himself and extending his hand. Casey took it, and her old professor pressed his long, cool fingers into her flesh until she twisted free.
"Then don't take the case," Tony told her. He was standing next to her Stairmaster machine in a royal blue suit with a crisp white shirt and a bold orange tie. Casey dabbed her sweaty face with a fresh white hand towel and stared hard at him. Her hair, pulled back from her face with a black cloth band, had gone from wavy to curly in the heat of her workout.
"Right, Tony," she huffed sarcastically. It was six-thirty in the morning and she was almost finished with her workout. The small exercise room was adjacent to her office. It came complete with a shower and a small set of free weights. Casey was obsessed with being mistaken at the beach for a twenty-one-year-old. Working out every morning kept her that way. She claimed it also gave her time to think about the coming day. It wasn't unusual at all for Tony to wander in about this time with his second double cappuccino of the morning. His idea of starting the day off right was to have his shoes shined while he drank his first double and scanned the morning paper.
Casey presumed he wasn't serious when he said she should drop the case. When Lipton had first been arrested over a year ago, Tony had implored her to contact him.
"Let him know you're available," Tony had said. She refused, and then when she lamented Michael Dove's being hired by Lipton, Tony only made it worse by saying that if she'd taken that first step of contacting him, she could have had the case.
"The first step is every bit as important as trying the case," Tony was always saying. "Without the first step, there is no case."
"That's your job," she'd responded.
"He wasn't my law professor," Tony had countered. "He was yours. You could have had the case. All you had to do was ask. I tell you that all the time, Casey. You have to ask."
Now that she had the case, she certainly wasn't going to give it up.
"I'm not saying I don't want it. It would be great," Tony said, stepping aside as she got down off the machine. "The media will be like bums on a bologna sandwich for this one. It might even get some play nationally. And the guy can pay our top rate. He's loaded. Those are all good reasons to take it, but I really mean it when I say don't take it if you're not comfortable."
Casey studied his face.
"Do you really think I'm that mercenary?" he asked. "I don't want you working with a client if it disturbs you. Besides, one week to prepare is almost unheard of. I don't know if you could do it."
His last words were spoken with an ingenuous expression. Whether they were actually intended to challenge her or not, Casey responded that way.
"I can do it," she said with a snort, hoisting a pair of dumbbells and beginning to crank out a set of curls as if to accentuate her confidence. "I could walk in on a case in a day if I had to."
"What about the fact that it looks like he did it?" he asked, sitting down on the padded bench and bracing his elbow against one thick knee.
"Innocent until proven guilty," she said. "Remember?"
"But tell me you don't think he did it," Tony said. As he continued to speak, he counted off on his fingers. "Come on. The guy was seen leaving the scene. He lied about it to the police. He had her bloody underwear in his bag, for God's sake! And they caught him heading for the airport with a reservation to Toronto. Oh, that's good, Casey. That's overzealous. Tell me how you explain the guy out of all that."
"You're talking like a prosecutor," she said.
"Hey, I started there, too, you know," he reminded her.
"You're so far from the DA's office that you… I don't know. You're just far."
"Okay," he said, "so we're back to representing defendants until they're proven guilty? That's good. I thought we were going to have to start chasing ambulances."
"Funny," she said, switching her dumbbells to an overhead press. "But Lipton didn't say he did it. That's the difference and you damn well know it. If a client tells me he did it, I won't represent him. I don't care if it's the pope. But Lipton says he's innocent, and he deserves to have someone plead his case."
"Hey, go easy on the pope. This guy's no pope."
CHAPTER 8
A troop of towering white thunderclouds was pressing down from the north, threatening to ruin Bolinger's day off. He'd rented a pontoon boat for the day, and he sat now waiting by himself in the morning sun while the boat bumped steadily against the marina's aluminum dock. His brother, Kurt, was bringing his family. Only last night, Bolinger had been informed that that would also include Kurt's wife's sister from Atlanta and her new husband, whom Bolinger had never met before. He wasn't thrilled.
"Hey, he's a good guy," Kurt had told him. "You'll like him. He's a cop."
"Great," Bolinger had replied, "we can talk about bad guys, like the mailman going for a walk on his day off."
"You'll like him."
Bolinger shook his head at the thought. He didn't like anybody. Kurt, on the other hand, thought everyone was swell. He lived in a nice suburb, had a nice wife, a little on the heavy side but she could cook, two kids, one boy and one girl, and a job as an accountant at a telemarketing company with a great 401(k) plan. Although Kurt was younger and taller and had thinning blond hair, the two of them looked like brothers. But it was almost comical how different they were. When they were children Bolinger had teased Kurt by telling him that he was adopted.
With both their parents dead, they were all each other had in the way of family, and as they got older that seemed to mysteriously transcend any differences. When the silver Volvo wagon pulled into the gravel lot, the kids piled out like excited puppies. Their joy was infectious. Even Bolinger had to smile. Renting a pontoon boat was something beyond Kurt's scope. Too much wind, too much sun, too many things that could go wrong with the outboard motor with no way to fix it. So it was with great pride that Uncle Bob came up with schemes that his niece and nephew would look back on as memorable.
Bolinger got up from the captain's chair to catch the kids as they shot off the dock and into his arms. He kissed his sister-in-law, Luanne, as she stepped boldly onto the bow and shook hands with her sister, Eileen, a pretty little dish with bleached blond hair that was pulled back tightly into a ponytail. The last time Bolinger had seen her, at Kurt's wedding, she had been a skinny little kid with freckles and teeth too big for her head. Time went fast. The cop husband was bringing up the rear with Kurt, lugging more than his half of a big, shiny blue cooler. He was short like Bolinger, but much younger and pumped up like a gym rat. His hair was like Bolinger's, too, cut really short, only black instead of gray.
"I told you I had everything taken care of," Bolinger said without disguising his surly nature. He took the cooler from the two men and set it down disgustedly on the deck beside his own rusty green Coleman model. He didn't like people cutting in on his territory when he was the host.