"You know just what I'm talking about, lady!" Huff bellowed. "My next call is to the bar association. That computer is privileged material. This is more than unethical. It's criminal. What is this? Some kind of fucking shakedown?"
Casey was seething. "Don't you accuse me of being unethical!"
"If the shoe fits, wear it, hotshot," Huff remarked. "I want my client's computer back, and I want it back today! You got that?"
Casey slammed down the phone. When it rang back, she told Gina to say she wasn't available.
"Get Patti in here," she added.
Two minutes later her associate came in with an apprehensive frown.
"Did you deliver Professor Lipton's computer to Simon Huff 's office?" Casey demanded.
"I…" Patti began hesitantly.
"My God, Patti," Casey growled. "How the hell could you? You think being a lawyer is cross-examining a witness? It goes a lot deeper than that, my friend. It's details! Attention to details! That means when you have something you have to do, something you said you were going to do, you do it. Is that so hard?" she demanded, her voice one note below a shriek.
"No," Patti said, keeping her chin high but visibly fighting back a wave of emotions. "I'll get it over there right away. I-"
"No you won't!" Casey cried. "You won't take it over there. I will. Your chance to do the job is by the board. That's all."
Patti stared back just as fiercely before walking out the door. Tony Cronic passed her in the hall and wondered at her unresponsiveness to his cheery hello.
"I wouldn't go in there if I were you," Gina warned him.
"Hey," Tony said to Gina with his easy, disarming smile, "it's me." He opened the door and greeted Casey with more of the same.
"Hey," he said, dropping casually into a chair opposite her desk, "congratulations on the win."
Casey scowled at him. "I don't need your sarcasm today, Tony."
"What?" he said, opening his hands and raising both eyebrows in a gesture of peace. "I meant what I said. You won. Right? Or did they get it wrong on the news?"
Tears filmed Casey's eyes, and her mouth turned down. If Tony hadn't known her better he would have thought she was going to cry.
"Yes, I won the case," she said bitterly. "But I think I may have been wrong about him."
"Lipton?"
She bit her lower lip and nodded.
"You don't mean you think he did it?" Tony asked with a flippant laugh.
"He told me he did."
"What?" Tony was incredulous. "When?"
"Just before the jury read the verdict."
"You're kidding."
"I wish I were."
Tony looked at her in disbelief, then turned his eyes to the floor.
"I'm sick about it," Casey said.
"Maybe he was kidding," Tony suggested hopefully. "You said yourself that he was difficult the whole time you were getting ready for trial. Maybe it's just some kind of bizarre mind game."
"I hope that's what it was," she told him, "that he was kidding. He could do that. You're right. But I just don't know. What you said to me about tearing apart the father just sticks in my mind. I mean, Tony… I suggested he had an incestuous relationship with his dead daughter."
"You did your job," Tony reminded her. "Don't go soft on me now."
"I never had my client confess to the crime two seconds before the jury acquitted him," she said.
"But he might not have really done it," Tony pointed out. "Don't think about it, Casey. You never have before."
She looked wounded.
"I didn't mean it like that," he said quickly. "Come on, Casey. This is the reason you and I are defense lawyers. It's the process. Everyone needs an advocate and you gave him one. The state has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and if they can't, then the accused goes free. Our system would rather have ten guilty men go free than one innocent one be punished."
"I know that's what we both say." She nodded. "I know. That's what I keep telling myself, but it isn't helping. And to make it worse, I got a call from Simon Huff this morning accusing me of withholding Lipton's computer to blackmail him."
"Simon Huff?" Tony asked.
"He's representing Lipton in his tort action against the county for when he got shot," she told him. "The weekend before the trial ended, he asked me to have the computer delivered to Huff's office. I told Patti to do it, but she forgot. So Huff called me this morning and made some nasty accusations."
"What's on the computer anyway?" Tony asked, sitting up and forward in his chair.
"I have no idea," she said. "He said there were some embarrassing things on there, some hidden files with sexually explicit things or something like that."
"What were you doing with it?"
"First Michael Dove had it, and Lipton asked me to get it from him. He didn't want it to get into Hopewood's hands, and as we all know, the safest place for something like that is with your attorney. I didn't get into it with him, really. It was the last thing on my mind."
"Where is it?"
"The computer? It's right here," she said, reaching into a drawer and setting an IBM notebook on top of her desk.
Tony eyed it silently for a few moments.
"What?" Casey asked. "What are you thinking?"
"Nothing," he said. "I was just wondering what's in there."
"Whatever it is," she said coolly, "it's privileged information."
"I know," Tony said. "I know that. That doesn't mean we can't look at it. We're attorneys. It's not unethical to look…"
Casey stared at him for a moment, then looked down at the flat black rectangular machine.
"It's just that it might be something we'd regret letting go of," Tony said in a low, gentle tone.
Casey heard him, but she wondered if Tony wasn't simply looking for an edge the way he did with everything else, stocking away something that could later help him in his drive for fame and fortune. Her phone buzzed. She stabbed at a button and shut it off. Tony raised his eyebrows inquisitively.
"You're a character, Tony. You're a model of inconsistency. One minute you're for defending the rights of the accused, the next you're ready to violate a client's privacy."
"That's why you love me," he said, grinning as impishly as a man of his girth could. "Look, I just want to do the right thing."
"The right thing?" Casey asked dubiously. She stared intently at the computer.
After a while Tony said, "There was an attorney in upstate New York I read about in law school who represented a guy accused of killing several young girls. They pegged him for one particular murder and put him on trial even though they hadn't found the body. Everyone was pretty sure he did it…"
He looked at Casey's passive expression.
"Of course the guy was a defense lawyer, so he took the case. But during the trial the defendant told him the body was lying under a pile of leaves in some woods behind a cemetery. The lawyer went there and found the body. Now of course he never told anyone that he'd found the body, because the information was privileged."
Casey nodded that she understood.
"Wait," Tony said, raising his thick hand. "I'm not finished. A few days later there was an anonymous call to the police. They found the body, and the guy was convicted."
"Anonymous," Casey said, knowing the truth.
"Anonymous," he said with a shrug. "I'm not suggesting that you're going to turn what's on this computer over to the police. But you're done representing Lipton, and once it's gone, it's gone. You know, Casey, sometimes… sometimes you just have to do what you have to do."