Rawlins's face was stone. The brass pendulum of an old wall clock tick-tocked, but otherwise the chambers were quiet. Outside a police siren wailed three blocks away. Then a small smirk tugged at the corner of Rawlins's mouth.
"Are you trying to bribe me, Ms. Jordan?" he whispered.
Casey's face fell. It was a game to him. She was beaten.
"Not only will I not commute Ms. Enos's sentence," Rawlins continued, balancing a pair of reading glasses on the end of his nose and frowning at the record he had removed from his desk, "but I see that she has a prior felony…"
"Possession of a forged instrument, for God's sake," Casey moaned, knowing what was next.
"A felony nonetheless," Rawlins said perkily. "And so she will receive the maximum sentence. A shame for a girl so young, but like my momma always said, Ms. Jordan, you can't have a fricassee without killing a few chickens…"
Casey was up on her feet now. She was shaking all over. Rawlins knew from testimony at the trial that Catalina's abusive husband and his family had probably forced her into the bad-check business. As a judge, Rawlins knew that multiple-felony sentencing guidelines were intended for dangerous criminals. Catalina was hardly dangerous. To treat her as such was outrageous. "Goddamn you! Goddamn you to hell!" she cried, finally losing her control.
Rawlins was on his feet, too. "You're in contempt! Goddamn it, I'll have you arrested for contempt! Get back here, young lady! I'll lock you up, too!"
Casey answered him with the resonating blast of a well-slammed door. She stormed through the clerk's office. On her way into the hallway, she bumped squarely into a gray-suited lawyer. His files and the papers in them flew into the air like a flock of gulls. He was a tall, thin man with a large nose and a receding head of blond hair. As he stooped to pick up his papers, his glasses clattered to the granite floor as well.
"I'm so sorry," Casey said, bending to help him. When she realized whom she'd run into, she said, "Oh, Michael, I'm sorry. I didn't even recognize you."
Michael Dove was a fellow attorney. In fact, although several years older than she, he was a classmate of Casey's at UT. Dove was the closest thing Casey had to competition when it came to her reputation of being the best trial lawyer in the city. His pale skin was flushed, and Casey noticed that a rash had crept up from the inside of his collar to the back of his neck. Dove, Casey knew, was a solid individual, a good attorney with fierce religious convictions. In Casey's opinion, it was only those convictions that kept him from being her equal. She knew, as most people in the legal community did, that Michael Dove's zealous notions of morality sometimes caused him to commit tactical errors. When he spoke to her now, it was obvious to Casey from his quavering voice that he was upset about more than spilled files.
"No, no, that's all right. I'm fine. I'll just, I just, I'll just get these files. I need these files. Were you in with Rawlins?"
"Yes," she said, handing him a stack. "I'm afraid I didn't leave him in a good mood."
Dove forced a nervous chuckle. "It wouldn't matter. He wouldn't like what I'm going to say to him if it was Christmas morning."
Casey looked at her counterpart's face to see if he was going to tell her what that was. When it didn't come, she didn't ask. Part of being a lawyer meant silence when it came to legal issues that could affect a client.
To diffuse the tension, Casey casually inquired about Dove's latest high-profile case. "How's Professor Lipton's case coming along, Michael? I heard about what happened. You've got to be about ready for trial. Has the attack delayed anything?"
The effect of Casey's words proved to be worse than an unfriendly snub. Dove gave her an anxious, bewildered look, shrugged, and pushed past her into Rawlins's chambers with barely a good-bye.
Casey was still shrouded in melancholy when she returned to her office. There she sat, alone, in her high-backed leather chair with her back to the closed door. Only an occasional tuft of cloud interfered with the bright sun burning down on the city of Austin, the brilliant green Colorado River that snaked through it, and the western hills that loomed beyond.
When she was upset, it typically made Casey feel better to look out her window. Hers was a spacious top-floor corner office, prime real estate. But the reason she had such an affinity for the view wasn't that it cost a mint to lease, but because of the perspective it gave her. It put the world in order. She was in a tower, a tower she had created for herself. She was safely above the fray. Down below was the courthouse. The people who lived as far as the eye could see came there to have justice meted out. And it would be. Even Catalina Enos would get justice. Casey would help set her free. In the meantime, she reasoned, the girl's plight in jail would be no worse than the life she had led before her husband's death.
Despite her contemplation and its positive affect on her attitude, Casey still brooded through the following weeks. It wasn't that she didn't have a lot to keep her busy. She did depositions and took lunches, went to the symphony with Taylor and their friends, and played tennis at the club. But she needed something to put her back on track. For a long time she'd been on a roll, representing bigger and bigger clients, negotiating her way through the legal world to their advantage, steadily climbing the ladder of her career. Copping a plea for a senator's nephew accused of statutory rape, for example, seemed tawdry. She wanted something spectacular, something that could distract her from all that had gone wrong with the Enos case.
"Preferably," she mused aloud, "a paying client."
That would take some of the pressure off her for the hours and the resources she would have to devote to proceeding with Catalina's appeal. Casey never considered her husband's personal wealth a financial safety net. She wanted her practice to be a successful entity in its own right. She liked having her own bank account and credit cards that had nothing to do with the hundred-year-old Jordan money.
With a sigh, she looked at her watch and resigned herself to business as usual. That meant she was back to billable hours. There was a stack of uninspiring files on her desk that ranged from the shoplifting wife of a NASCAR driver to a bank vice president's assault on his groundskeeper. Still, it was work, and when her stout, dark-haired secretary, Gina, said that Casey's sister was on the line, Casey only thought wistfully about how long it had been since they'd caught up before she told Gina to take a message.
Now was not the time, not when she was sensing the beginnings of a slump. Hearing about her sister's uninspiring relationship with her farmer husband or the latest on their parents' trials and tribulations in their attempt to collect their fair share of FEMA money from last year's tornado were issues she wanted to avoid. Although Casey loved her sister dearly, she still reeked of Odessa. Casey had never been happier than when she learned that she'd been accepted at UT and even gotten some scholarship money.
From the beginning, Casey had wanted out. She'd spent even her early life being ashamed of the way they lived. Although they lived outside Odessa, the school Casey went to was shared by an outlying suburb. The girls from the suburb lived in new houses that didn't leak. Casey associated a hard rain with a living room floor that was cluttered with pots and pans. Casey would visit the other little girls after school and silently marvel at their nice trim homes. It made her ashamed of her own way of life, the linoleum that covered their floors, the old furniture layered in paint, and the discarded farm implements that littered the high grass surrounding the faded house.