“Put him in for noon. I’ll eat at my desk.”
Seven days into her new job, Lu is still trying to get a handle on all the bureaucracy that comes with it. She gets up at four and answers e-mail for an hour, but it’s like fighting a hydra: for every reply she manages, another three crop up. Meetings, memos, memos about meetings. In the modern age, access cannot be curtailed. Back in the ’70s, her father had an office with six lines and no answering machine. No mobile phone, not even when the big clunky models became available in the ’80s. Maybe a beeper, she thinks, by his final term. A beeper. She feels like some futuristic creature whose every cell is available for sensory input. And it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that his/her message, call, memo is one of many, that what is urgent to them can be of a lower priority to her. To the sender or caller, that message is the only one, the crucial one. Lu worked all weekend to justify a long lunch away from the office and now she’s lost that reward.
When Fred arrives, he looks much more cheerful than the man who visited Lu only a week ago. More pampered, too. His gray suit is sharp, expensive looking, his graying hair recently trimmed, not that he has a lot of it. New glasses, tortoiseshell frames with a glint of gold at the temples. He’s actually whistling, although the first thing he says is: “Whoa-trigger warning. I swear I got a little PTSD walking in here.”
“Really? Your step is so springy. And that suit. Are you on someone’s payroll?”
“I am. Do you know Howard & Howard?”
“Of course I do, Fred. I was an assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore. With you. Remember? Howard & Howard is only one of the biggest law firms in the city.”
“Right. Of course. Anyway, I’m going to be doing criminal defense work for them. And I thought you should hear it from me: I’m defending Rudy Drysdale. Defending him-and invoking Hicks.”
“You want to go to trial within a hundred eighty days?”
“Yes. Jail is hard on Rudy. Every day he’s inside is an eternity for him. By the way, I also want a hearing on bond reduction. Rudy’s original counsel was, uh, somewhat over her head. I don’t know how your office got him locked up with no bail.”
“Because he’s a homeless man with no fixed address. But, hey, go for it. Even if you can get him bail, it’s going to be pretty high. Who’s paying for all this? Did you take this on pro bono?”
Fred laughs. “No, Howard & Howard made it quite clear that hiring me as a potential partner did not mean I was free from the burden of contributing to the bottom line, not yet. Maybe down the road I’ll have the luxury of cases that don’t pay. Rudy Drysdale is paying full freight.”
“How?” Lu asks. “He’s on SSI, and he can’t even stretch his check for a month. That’s why he broke into Mary McNally’s apartment, right?”
Fred lets that pass. “Arrangements have been made, don’t worry.”
“Aren’t you going to request a competency hearing?”
“I brought it up, but you know and I know he’s not going to meet the standard, so it’s a waste of time. My client’s only concern is that whatever happens needs to happen as soon as possible. Jail is physically painful to him and erodes his mental state. He needs to be outdoors. Do you know he walks, every day, all day, in all kinds of weather?”
Lu has no intention of telling Fred what she knows about Rudy Drysdale. Fred has some kind of ace in the hole. She needs to flush it out.
“Absent a new development,” she says, “I don’t see a deal on this one. So how fast do you want to go?”
“I can go as fast as you can. This will be the only thing on my plate for a while.”
So it’s a grudge match, pure and simple. Fred is going to try and show Lu that it wasn’t his fault that he pulled away from trials, that the state’s attorney has too much other stuff to do and can’t focus effectively on trial work. And it’s not a bad case for a good defense attorney. She wonders if he will argue that Rudy was in the apartment pre- or postmortem. Which would she argue, as a defense attorney? She runs through the possible scenarios. Premortem. He breaks in, then leaves, never even sees Mary McNally. Then why does he touch the thermostat upon departing? No, he’s going to stick to the postmortem discovery. Fred’s going to argue that Rudy didn’t adjust the thermostat, only that he touched it for some bullshit reason. He’s going to introduce a phantom third party, one who didn’t leave prints. He can spin whatever fairy tales he wants to spin. That’s the advantage of being a defense attorney.
“Fine,” she says. “My secretary will be in touch with the schedule. I’m really glad you landed on your feet, Fred. It’s nice to see you enthusiastic about a case. How did Rudy’s parents even know to contact you?”
“I didn’t say it was Rudy’s parents who contacted me,” he says.
“Who else would it be?” Lu asks.
He’s determined to have the last word: “By the way, even though I’m not challenging his competency, I am considering a ‘not criminally responsible’ plea.”
“He’ll still do time. He might do it at Patuxent”-Maryland’s facility with a unit for offenders with psychiatric problems-“but he’ll still be inside.”
“True. And in the end, I have to do what he wants to do. Rudy says he’s innocent. That’s good enough for me.”
As soon as Fred leaves, Lu goes to her computer and searches the county property database, then finds a reliable website for current real estate values. Rudy’s parents live on Rain Dream Hill, less than a mile from the Brants. Their house would have been among the earliest Columbia homes-modern then, stodgy now, with the best on the street valued at less than $500,000. The Drysdale house has no mortgage on it, not as of last week, but it’s valued at $375,000, and Google Street View indicates that’s a generous assessment. Another reason to invoke Hicks, then. A good defense will run more than $375,000, much more. Howard & Howard will assemble experts, jury selection coaches. They have a big timeline to play with-a lot can happen in a week. Lu has fingerprints and a witness who picked Rudy out of a lineup. She also has a man who has no history of violence, accused of beating a strange woman. Was she a stranger to him? Obliterating someone’s face is damn personal. They need to lean harder on that. Maybe Mary McNally volunteered somewhere or gave him a ride one day. Heck, she could even be the kind of softie who tried to give a homeless guy some task to do in her house. Lu’s going to lean on Mike and her own staff investigator to do more legwork on the victim.
She feels a surge of adrenaline. Lu has always been competitive. All the Brants are. Her father tried to curb this tendency in her, probably because he found it distinctly unfeminine. But this only made Lu more competitive. Fred wants to go all Montague and Capulet, avenge his honor? She won’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s personal, even if it is for him. She’ll win this case because she’s right, because a nice middle-aged lady walked into her apartment one night, probably still thinking dreamy thoughts about the leading man in The Theory of Everything, only to be strangled and then beaten.
She checks her calendar. She could reschedule her lunch for tomorrow or Wednesday. She calls out to Della, asks if she’s right about having that time free.
“It can work,” Della says, as she walks into Lu’s office and places a phone message slip on her desk. “I’ll make it work. Meanwhile, while you were with Fred, that woman who called the other day, Mrs. Schumann, asked that you call her back.”
“About what?”
“She still insists you would recognize her name.”