False Witness Page 20

  Jamie knew it was none of her business, but she had this thing about justice and getting stuff right. She ambled over as the group moved on to the next point. “Actually,” she said, standing just behind one of the chairs, “last clear chance only applies to defendants. It’s a doctrine used to take the sting out of contributory negligence.”

  The first-years fell quiet as Jamie continued. “In some states, if the defendant is negligent but the plaintiff is also contributorily negligent, even in the slightest degree, the plaintiff’s negligence completely bars her from recovering anything. To make that doctrine a little less harsh, the law says that the plaintiff might still be able to recover if the defendant had the last clear chance to avoid the accident.”

  “Thanks,” said the soft-spoken student whom Jamie had bailed out.

  “Yeah. That helps a lot,” the other said. “Though Sullivan said it wasn’t really used that much. I doubt it will be on the test.”

  Her good deed complete, Jamie slipped back to her own Persian rug and returned to the drudgeries of tax law. But she couldn’t keep her mind on the intricacies of the Internal Revenue Code. Instead, she thought about her gun.

  Even though she carried it around with the safety on, she worried about it constantly. What if it discharged accidentally? What if she thought somebody was going to assault her and shot in self-defense, only to find out later it was a mistake? What if she tried to shoot an assailant and ended up hitting a friend?

  The talk of last clear chance gave her an idea.

  Maybe she should remove the cartridge from the chamber. According to Jacobsen, her gun held seven additional rounds in the attached magazine. It was a single-action trigger, and Jamie already knew she could pull it quickly. An empty chamber might be an additional fail-safe, and it might give her a chance to bluff somebody by actually pulling the trigger once before the bullets started flying. It would give her target a last clear chance to stop. And how likely was it that she would end up in a situation where she could squeeze off only one shot?

  She decided that she would empty the chamber later. She checked her watch: 6:45. She called Isaiah’s cell for the second time. Voice mail. She was on pins and needles, anxious to hear how his meeting with Parcelli went. It had been Isaiah’s idea to meet in person. He didn’t trust cell phones or the Internet. But if he didn’t show up soon, she might just use her first bullet on him.

  She turned her attention back to her federal tax book. What could she think about next?

  At seven, with Isaiah still a no-show, Jamie found herself on the fence between anger and worry. If something had happened to him, she would feel terrible. If not, she might make something happen. She called his cell one more time and left another message.

  She packed up her books and decided to check around the library. Maybe he had slipped by her. After ten minutes of searching, she came back to the lobby and discovered her seat was taken. She walked out in front of the building to wait for Isaiah there.

  That’s when she saw him.

  The founders of the law school had had enough foresight to buy a large piece of property that was part of an old rail yard in downtown Atlanta scheduled for redevelopment. When the redevelopment took place, and the area became Atlanta’s newest hot spot to live, the law school found itself in one of the city’s most desirable locations with sufficient acreage to surround the building with trees, a walking path complete with marble park benches, a huge asphalt parking lot, and a large grassy quad area directly in front of the school. That large and flat piece of grass saw constant use—school picnics, students lying in the sun to study, ultimate Frisbee, and on nights like tonight, pickup football games.

  Isaiah faded back to pass, smiling as he evaded a rusher and darted left, the ball held casually out to his side in a way that would give any coach a heart attack. He had stripped down to a pair of baggy khaki shorts and sneakers, and his upper body gleamed with sweat. He stopped suddenly and heaved the ball three-quarters of the length of the quad in a perfect spiral—outdistancing his receiver by at least five yards.

  “I thought you were faster than that!” Isaiah yelled.

  “Reggie Bush ain’t that fast.”

  Jamie folded her arms across her chest. She felt the heat of anger coloring her face. She couldn’t believe how rude this guy was.

  He spotted her as his ragamuffin team was huddling up.

  “Jamie!” He acted surprised.

  She scowled at her watch. She scowled at Isaiah. She scowled at his teammates, just for good measure.

  “You wanna play?” asked a clueless second-year who didn’t understand scowl language.

  “No thanks. Isaiah and I were supposed to be meeting together forty minutes ago.”

  “Gotta run, guys,” Isaiah said.

  “Next score wins,” somebody suggested.

  But Jamie’s ice-cold stare ended that idea.

  Isaiah toweled off with his shirt as they entered the building. “I was waiting out front for you,” he said. He pulled his torn T-shirt on over his head. “Figured I’d see you when you arrived.”

  “What time did you get there?”

  “You know, six thirty or so.”

  “Or so?”

  That pretty much quelled the conversation until they got inside the small study room. With Isaiah still glistening with sweat, the cramped quarters smelled like a locker room. Jamie gave him a few seconds to apologize but quickly realized it was a lost cause. She knew that she should probably drop it, but she had always believed if you had something eating at you, it’s best to get it out in the open.

  “We were supposed to meet at six thirty,” she said. Even to her, it sounded pretty chiding.

  “I was here at six thirty . . . African American time.”

  She gave him a skeptical look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m a victim of the way I was raised.” Even Isaiah couldn’t fight off a smirk with this lame excuse. “When our church was supposed to start at eleven, it would start at eleven thirty. We called it African American time.”

  “Yeah, but courts don’t run on African American time.”

  “Au contraire,” Isaiah said. “Perhaps you didn’t attend the panel presentation featuring accomplished trial lawyers earlier in the semester. Our dear Professor Snead made an excellent point about showing up late.”

  “You’re quoting Snead?”

  “Just because he can’t teach doesn’t mean he couldn’t try cases.”

  Jamie sighed. “I thought you said he lost most of his criminal cases.”

  “Yeah, but he won big verdicts in his tort cases,” Isaiah said. “And that’s where the money is. Anyway, on this panel, Snead the accomplished trial lawyer—as opposed to Snead the pitiful law school professor—said he always arrived in court a few minutes late. He said that only one person could be in charge of the courtroom—either one of the lawyers or the judge. By arriving late, he showed the judge that he wasn’t going to abide by the court’s picayune rules on things as trivial as starting time.”

  “And you bought that?”

  “I arrived late in Snead’s class for three straight weeks afterward.”

  “Maybe someday you can be just like him.”

  Isaiah wiped some sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his T-shirt. “You’re good,” he said. “You ought to be a prosecutor.”

  Having avoided an apology, Isaiah told Jamie about his meeting with Parcelli. “This dude was clinical, Jamie, like a robot.” He told her that Parcelli claimed the Hoffmans violated their memorandum of understanding by trying to sell Professor Kumari’s algorithm to the mob. Parcelli wasn’t willing to even talk about new identities or additional protection unless Hoffman gave up the algorithm.

  Jamie wanted to take the problem to Snead. “We’re just students, Isaiah. You shouldn’t have even met with Parcelli in the first place. We don’t even know if Hoffman has this algorithm. And if he does, why did he offer it to the mob?”

  But Isaia
h reminded her that the clients didn’t want Snead involved. “We should at least get the entire story from Stacie Hoffman first,” he argued. “Our first duty is to our clients. If the Hoffmans have the algorithm, maybe they’ll trade it for protection. Maybe the Hoffmans didn’t contact Johnny Chin like Parcelli claimed. Maybe somebody in the federal government set them up.” Isaiah paused and leaned forward. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, Jamie. Before we decide what to do, I owe it to my client to meet with her and find out the entire story.”

  “I thought she wasn’t actually a client,” Jamie said.

  “Whatever she is, I still owe it to her to meet with her first.”

  “And then we’ll go to Snead,” Jamie said.

  “We’ll see,” Isaiah said with a wink.

  “And then we’ll go to Snead,” Jamie repeated, more firmly than before.

  The next day, after Stacie confirmed that she and her husband had the algorithm but still refused to give it to the government, Isaiah himself called Snead and scheduled the appointment for first thing Thursday morning.

  46

  Thursday, April 3

  Snead’s office was the disastrous result of trying to cram all the paraphernalia from a trial lawyer’s plush corner office into the smaller, cubicle-size space of a law school professor. The monuments to Snead’s ego that seemed a natural part of a spacious office overlooking downtown Los Angeles felt claustrophobic here. The walls were cluttered with diplomas, pictures of Snead with important friends, bar admission certificates for a half-dozen states, an artist’s sketch of Snead arguing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, a framed cover story from Lawyers Weekly naming Snead as one of the highest paid lawyers in 2001, and the obligatory handwritten letter from a client singing Snead’s praises. It made Jamie wonder what her own wall might look like at the end of her legal career.

  The office was also cluttered with piles of paper that had fanned out like snowdrifts across the floor and desk, shelves full of law books, and scattered trinkets and memorabilia from Snead’s trials. Blue books from past exams were everywhere. The place smelled like a combination of cigarette smoke and air freshener, the way hotel rooms smell right after they’ve been sprayed, topped off by a generous whiff of men’s cologne.

  The meeting got off to a rocky start when Isaiah showed up fifteen minutes late. From there, it went downhill.

  “You did what?” Snead snapped when Isaiah told him about the meeting with Parcelli. “If I told the state bar about that, they probably wouldn’t even let you sit for the exam this summer.”

  Isaiah ignored the dig as he and Jamie tag-teamed the story, a strategy they had planned in advance. By the time they finished, Snead had already turned two shades darker and snapped a pencil that he had been fingering as the students talked.

  Jamie cleared her throat and prepared to offer a solution. “We think we should file suit for specific performance of the memorandum of understanding,” she explained. “That agreement specifies that the government will provide the Hoffmans with new identities if the Hoffmans’ true identities are discovered through no fault of their own. We should petition the court to enforce that promise by providing a court-approved supervisor to ensure that only a limited and highly selective number of people in the marshals’ office are involved this time.”

  “If the Hoffmans breached the memorandum of understanding, they can’t ask for specific performance,” Snead growled. “It’s black-letter law, Ms. Brock.”

  “According to what Stacie Hoffman told us, there is no breach of the agreement,” Isaiah interjected. “Her husband didn’t receive the algorithm until forty-eight hours after Kumari died. By then, the Hoffmans had already given the police taped statements, taken a lie detector test, and signed the memorandum of understanding. The statements they made about not having the algorithm were truthful at the time. Later on, during their grand jury and trial testimony, nobody asked them if they possessed the algorithm. From the government’s perspective, the less said about the algorithm at that point, the better.”

  Snead did a quick little head shake, and the jowls jiggled. Up close, Jamie was struck by the dark and baggy circles under the man’s reddened eyes—the toll of a life under constant pressure. “Even if you can prove that the Hoffmans didn’t lie about the algorithm, you’re still not out of the woods,” Snead lectured. “How can you say the Hoffmans aren’t at fault when the entire reason they were discovered was because they tried to sell the algorithm on the black market?”

  Jamie prepared to answer, but Isaiah jumped in again. “Because they didn’t try to sell it, Walter.” She saw Snead bristle at the use of his first name, but Isaiah just kept talking. “Stacie swears they didn’t contact Johnny Chin. Maybe there’s a mob informant inside the marshals’ office who gave the mob Hoffman’s location and then sent the letter, hoping the feds would blame Hoffman for revealing his own location. Maybe Chin heard that the mob had found Hoffman, and so Chin comes up with this brilliant idea of writing himself a letter that appears to be from Hoffman. Chin gives the letter to the authorities, hoping they’ll knock some time off his prison sentence and also believe that Hoffman caused his own downfall.”

  “Pretty far-fetched,” Snead growled. He turned to Jamie. “Who do you think sent that letter?”

  Isaiah nudged her foot, but she ignored him. “I honestly don’t know, Professor. I want to believe the Hoffmans didn’t send it, but these other scenarios that Isaiah threw out leave a lot of questions. Why would a mob informant write such a letter? Why not just tell the mob where Hoffman is living and be done with it? And how would Johnny Chin know that the Hoffmans had the algorithm?”

  “Why are we working so hard to talk ourselves out of this?” Isaiah interjected. “Right now, David Hoffman is a client of the legal aid clinic. It’s our job to defend him and his wife, not second-guess what they’re telling us. You’ve called it the red-faced test, Professor. Make every argument possible in favor of your client unless you turn red from embarrassment while making it. And in case you hadn’t noticed, that test can take me a long way.”

  Snead thought about this for a moment, looking past the students, over their shoulders, as if trying to discern what to do by looking at his own picture on the office wall. What would Walter Snead, Supreme Court advocate, do?

  Eventually he turned back to Isaiah. “I’m impressed with your passion for this client,” he said. His voice was a low rumble emanating from a cigarette-damaged voice box. “Something I wish you had more of in my class. And I’m impressed with Ms. Brock’s candor. . . .”

  Jamie winced at the backhanded dig intended for Isaiah.

  “But I can’t let you risk your careers on a case like this. We’re not dealing with a hypothetical moot court case here. This client has the feds frustrated with him and the mob after him. Ms. Brock has already been threatened. You both have promising legal careers. I won’t allow you to jeopardize them this way.”

  Snead pushed back from his desk a little—a sign the meeting was over. “Ms. Brock, prepare a motion for state court withdrawing from the representation of Mr. Hoffman.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jamie could see the storm clouds on Isaiah’s face.

  “Good day,” Snead said.

  The students stood. “That letter,” Isaiah said, pointing to the handwritten note framed on Snead’s wall, “is that from one of your first tobacco clients?”

  “Yes.” Snead gave it the look of a proud papa. “She lost her husband to cancer at age thirty-eight. She was left alone to raise twins—three-year-olds—and a baby. We didn’t bring him back, but we got the widow 5.8 million.”

  “I wonder how many people tried to talk you out of that one,” Isaiah said. “Nobody beat big tobacco back then.”

  Snead hesitated for a moment, taking in the point. “That didn’t involve the mob, Mr. Haywood. This case is different.”

  In the hallway outside the office, Isaiah sarcastically thanked Jamie for her help. “I thought you w
anted to take this case, too,” he said.

  “I did. But not if I had to mislead my own supervising attorney in order to get permission. Everything I said in there, Snead would have eventually figured out. I didn’t want him pulling the plug on this thing just before we went to court or something. It’s better to put everything on the table now.”

  Isaiah frowned, shook his head, and walked away. His silence hurt Jamie more than any argument would have. Still, she felt she had done the right thing.

  Ten minutes later, the same woman who couldn’t tell a lie to her law school professor was doing a pretty good job misleading her brother. “I’m into kind of a complicated situation with the condo right now,” she said. “I’m getting it all straightened out and should be able to have a pet again soon. Could you possibly keep Snowball for a few more days?”

  “No problem,” Chris said.

  It wasn’t a total lie. She was having some complicated problems. What bothered her most was the feeling that she couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys in this endeavor. Jamie viewed the law in simple terms. Black-and-white. Crime and punishment. But in the witness protection program, especially with a client who seemed like a con artist, all the world could be painted in shades of gray.

  Why should she put her life on the line for that?

  47

  Snead was in another foul mood for Thursday’s class—as berating and hostile as Jamie had ever seen him. As class began, Jamie thought that either she or Isaiah would be first on the chopping block since they had both passed when called on in class the last two weeks. Despite her chaotic life, this time Jamie was ready.

  But Snead ignored them both, even when Jamie twice raised her hand to help out the stumbling student who had been chosen. It was as if Jamie didn’t exist. It dawned on her that Snead might not call on her for the rest of the semester, thereby ensuring that she could never make up for the bad class participation grade she had earned on Tuesday.

  When class ended, Jamie could feel the hypercharged tension seeping from the room like air out of a punctured tire. Jamie’s own neck and back muscles began to relax. How could a teacher she didn’t even respect have that much effect on her? Most of the students quickly packed their books and computers, anxious to leave this class behind, but a few of the usual brownnosing suspects made their way to the front so they could ask Snead a few impressive questions.