Chapter Four
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Pound the Table
Chapter Four
My alarm clock went off at five in the morning. It was an absolutely miserable hour, an hour earlier than I was used to waking up, but today was going to be so busy that I needed the extra time.
I slapped the top of my alarm clock to shut the damn thing up, then pulled the blankets off. A simple motion shucked my nightgown, and I padded into the bathroom to turn on and step into the shower. (I barely remembered my shower cap—I'd washed my hair yesterday, I did not want to go through the hassle of drying it today too!)
While in the shower, I let my mind wander, thinking over the agenda for the day. I'd need to pick up Matthew at the firm, and get one of the firm's company cars. Much as I hated driving in New York City, there was enough to acquire that carrying it was not an option. My Polaroid and any replacement film I'd need to carry was bulky enough, and that was before we got to the possibility of acquiring actual, physical evidence. I wanted a few things from that alleyway if they were still there, just to demonstrate the level of control St. John had over his powers. So flammable materials that were barely burnt, for example.
I'd also need to get his hospital records, and would need to bring my tape recorder and a few blank tapes for interviewing the ER attending physician and any nurses… actually I may need the tape recorder for my conversation with the parents too. That wasn't anything that needed turning over to the other side, but it would still be good to have so I can refer back to it.
I shut the shower off, letting the water run down my body before reaching for a towel and continuing my morning routine.
What about safety? I asked myself. I'd be on the streets of Brooklyn with nobody other than a blind man (an admittedly well-trained one) for company, in a location that likely had some measure of criminal activity. I was small, not even five feet tall; it wouldn't take more than one hit to completely incapacitate me, and that's even if I saw it coming.
My thoughts drifted to the tools I had available to me: pepper spray, my powers — my magic. The magic I couldn't use properly without a focus.
A focus, of which I had four, all sitting on a shelf in my closet, collecting dust. And this because I'd been told that if I kept using them the way I had been, I would forever be limiting my capacity to shape and focus my abilities in the mystic arts.
There were times I wanted to slap the man who gave me that advice. But the point was that he was correct: my skill with magic had grown by leaps and bounds, even though my strength had stalled out, and progressed at a glacial pace. It was a trade off, to be sure.
But right now, it was a choice to make: carry a rolling pin-sized object in my briefcase, or just hope I didn't run into a situation such that I'd need to spend twenty seconds gathering magic, then refracting and guiding light into a laser?
There was, of course, another option.
I was a small, fragile, relatively-wealthy white woman, accompanied by a young, disabled white man. If anything happened to us, anything at all, the police would be on top of it in… well, a New York minute. Just the possibility of that kind of disproportionate police response should discourage criminal attention.
I could trust that if something happened to me, law enforcement would rush to my defense.
Hmm…
Well, actually?
As my current case had already shown, this was only true for as long as they didn't know I was a mutant. Because if there was one thing that galvanized police against you more than being a "dangerous" minority, it was being a dangerous minority.
And yes. There was a difference.
"Remind me to never get into a car with you behind the wheel," Matt said as he exited the car, letting his feet rest flat on the pavement as he gripped his cane like a lifeline. "Stop and go and stop and go, thought I was gonna be sick."
"Don't be such a drama queen," I said, stepping around the front of the car.
Have you ever tried to drive in New York City? Because believe me, there are better purgatories to suffer through on your way to better things. Every time you think you can move forward – a cab swerves into the lane, honking all the while. You're crossing the street? No you're not, the pedestrian is. And don't even think about trying to take a left turn, just suffer through three rights. It's easier on your blood pressure.
But don't forget about the last part of the trip: finding parking. It was a minor miracle that I managed to find a parking spot as close to our destination as I did. Though even that was debatable, because I'd been circling the block for fifteen minutes, and still had a meter to pay.
And all of this before we think about the car itself: a too-big, too-boxy sedan more than twice the size of my own car.
"I'm sorry you didn't like the ride over, but this car wasn't made for people as short as I am. Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the butt it is to try and reach the pedals in these Lincolns?"
"No," Matt said with a knowing smile. I rolled my eyes and led on, knowing he could follow my footsteps, and not wanting to linger on the humorous oops I'd made. Instead, the two of us walked two blocks, and arrived at our destination.
The alleyway we needed was between two old apartment buildings, which I instantly placed as primarily Section 8 housing by the scarcity of window AC units and the poor quality of what few remained. The alley between them was utterly disgusting, littered with cigarette butts, discarded fast food containers, empty bottles and cans, and more soiled diapers than I was comfortable smelling in one place. It was wide enough for three people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder, and that was after you accounted for the dumpsters lined up along the wall.
Most striking, though, was the identical pair of deep black scorch marks on either side of the alley, starting at roughly a third of the way in and flaring back towards the center. The way that you could draw an almost perfect straight line up at one spot was telling me things, but I'd need to know more before I drew any conclusions.
"Smell anything burnt?" I asked Matt. "I know it's been a week, but if we can find anything scorched during the initial altercation, it could help." In the meanwhile I took out my Polaroid and started taking pictures of the alley from every angle, and was especially careful to get good pictures of the scorch marks on the walls.
"All I'm getting from this is diaper, mold, and cigarette," Matt admitted, one hand up over his nose and mouth. I reached into my bag and pulled out a handkerchief, which I handed to him. "Thank you – God, it smells rancid here."
"Welcome to New York in May," I said. It had been raining every single day last week, for at least thirty minutes at a time. It was pretty regular for the month, but it also made our lives significantly more difficult.
Once I had the pictures I wanted, I pulled and put on a pair of latex gloves, followed by an umbrella and trash bag. The trash bag went over the umbrella before I used it to poke at the contents of the dumpsters, searching for whatever was a little lower in the bins. Mildew, mold, and other muck was most of what awaited… but I did find something. With the hand that wasn't holding an umbrella, I held up my Polaroid to get a picture. Then, the Polaroid hanging by a strap around my neck, I reached in to grab what I saw.
It was a magazine with just its cover burnt black, and save for a bit of darkening on the first page, the rest of it was completely untouched. Moreover, it had been underneath several pizza takeout boxes that had, themselves, been filled with used napkins, which all soaked up enough of the rain from the past week that the magazine was almost completely dry.
Once I had the magazine out from the dumpster, I took another few pictures of it with my Polaroid, then retrieved a ziploc bag (thank goodness those were already around, I don't know what I would have done without them) and stored it away inside. A quick label went on the bag so I could write in what it was, where and when it was found, and by whom, then I put it away into my bag.
"Anything on your end?" I asked Matt.
"Nothing," he said. "Rain washed away most of the blood I could've smelled, and everything else here is just making it worse."
"Hmm…"
I turned around to look from the alleyway to the street, the one that the hooligans had followed St. John from, and then ran back out into after his display of pyrotechnics. Specifically, I looked across to the construction site, covered up by tarps, and still drying out from the past week.
"John said that the four thugs who attacked him ran back out this street," I said, walking out of the alley. Matt, smart cookie that he was, took the hint and followed me. "What do you wager that if they had anything, they tossed it in the construction site over here? Like, say, a bloody beer bottle?"
"Good odds," he said.
The two of us walked across the street to the construction site, eyeing it. There was a relatively short fence set fifteen feet back from the street. It stood about six and a half feet high, separating the general public from the pit dug for the building's foundations. The fence was a flimsy thing though, just chain-link supported by a measly three posts. If somebody came careening into this thing, they'd probably knock it over in a heartbeat and… fall in.
I frowned. Neither the prosecution nor the judge had offered any indications about the nature of the injuries St. John's 'victim' had suffered.
Matt walked up and ran his cane along the fencepost, listening to something I couldn't quite pick up.
"There's a whole bunch of stuff down there," he said. "Lots of metal and plastic, but… there's only one thing made of glass. You don't think...?" He didn't finish the question, instead letting it hang in the air.
"It's worth a shot," I said. I found a payphone on the street and called the number listed on the sign in front of the lot, the construction company's number. Thirty minutes later the contractor arrived, let us in, and we found exactly what we were looking for, which I photographed, bagged, and tagged.
After which, I found myself on the payphone again, calling my boss.
"Prosecution made their disclosure," Lieberman told me once his secretary transferred the call. "Please tell me you found something you can use out there."
"Maybe, but I won't know for sure until I can get it looked at," I told him. "Can you have Antonia make a few copies of the prosecution's records, two for me, one for a box I can take to the printer's to get in braille?"
Even as I spoke into the payphone, I kept my eyes squarely along the street in front of me. A few people were milling along the street, staring at the two of us. That wasn't altogether surprising; people in suits didn't tend to wander down Brooklyn alleyways, let alone walk out with Polaroids, or carrying bloodstained beer bottles in plastic bags.
"What else do you have to do today?" Lieberman asked, his voice tinny on the payphone's speaker.
"Uh… I need to talk to the parents, bring them with me to the hospital so I can get the client's ER records. Talk to the ER doc and any nurses." I sighed, rubbing a hand over my forehead. "I need to see the alleged victims' medical records after this. Also when I say I found something, I mean I found some evidence that was hopefully missed, but most likely never looked for it beyond the alleyway. Took a Polaroid, signed and dated it, bagged the evidence."
"Given it was raining all last week? Probably didn't look very far. Regardless, get that down to the courthouse for disclosure as soon as you've gotten it worked up, along with any report you get," Lieberman told me, his tone growing firm and commanding. "Trust me, if that isn't there by the end of the week, Young will try to get you infracted for a Rule 16 violation. In the meantime, I'll get those documents to the printer for a copy for Murdock, get those and a photocopy in your office. I also called ahead to your building's doorman, he'll bring another set up to your condo."
"That's... wow," I said, for lack of anything else to really add. I had to wonder how much work he was putting off on his own cases just to help me out… and how long he'd hold this over my head afterwards. "Thank you, sir."
"You owe me for this one, Schaefer, and believe me when I say I will eventually be calling this favor due. Now get to it."
The phone clicked.
"Well that answers that," I said to myself, then nudged Matt with a shoulder. "Come on. The Allerdyces live a few blocks away."
"I'm not looking forward to this talk," Matt said, but fell into step beside me anyway.
"This isn't even the long talk," I told him. "This is just a preliminary follow-up. Outlining what we're doing, what we need from them, and bringing them with us so we can get our clients records with fewer hoops to jump through. Patients and parents of minor patients can request their records and get them a lot more quickly than if we'd filed a record request."
"How much slower are they normally?" Matt asked.
"Hang a left here." I took the inside track of the turn, though I had to skip around a step to avoid a smushed, half-eaten pizza slice on the sidewalk. Days like these, when I had to go on-site while building a case? They made me glad I kept a pair of flats handy. "As for how much slower? Procedure gives them two weeks to produce the records on their own with just a faxed request form. But if they don't send them to you, and most don't, then you need the judge to subpoena the records, and then wait up to another two weeks."
"And we can't spare four weeks on this, can we?"
"No, we cannot." And I was already outlining my official complaint to the state judiciary for that scheduling choice.
"Take a form and fill out your info then bring it back up here, and we'll see you as soon as possible," the nurse at the ER desk, a middle-aged hispanic woman, said, not even bothering to look up from her paperwork.
I looked to my side and offered both Matt and the Allerdyces a knowing look, then pulled a folder out of my briefcase and slid it in front of the orderly.
"My clients are here to retrieve copies of their son's medical records in connection with an ongoing court case," I told the nurse, who finally deigned to look up from her own paperwork. "All appropriate release and request forms are in the folder. Additionally, I need to speak to the on-call or attending who saw my client on the date listed on the form."
Once the nurse flipped open the folder to reveal legal-length paper, I knew she would do what I'd asked of her with no complaints. A lot of people get intimidated when the paper put before them isn't a regular 8.5x11, even more so when it has legal letterhead with an address on Central Park West. Sure enough, she stood up from her chair and went into the back, at which point I started a mental countdown. I estimated… five minutes.
"So what happens now?" Jonathan Allerdyce asked. I turned to look up at him, and had to suppress a frown at the deep bags that sat under his eyes. Yesterday's events clearly weighed heavily upon both him and Linda, but at least she had cosmetics to help hide it. He had no such recourse, and his exhaustion lined his face with heavy crevasses.
"A little bit of divide and conquer. Mr. Murdock will accompany the two of you to the hospital administration, who will furnish you with a copy of your son's records. At the same time, I'll be interviewing the doctor who stitched up your son."
"Are we not supposed to be there?" Linda Allerdyce asked, the Australian in her accent heavier than it had been yesterday.
"Not for a first interview, no," I responded. "I want to talk to the doctor when he's just speaking to another professional, somebody without a personal connection to the patient."
"But what about—"
"Mr. and Mrs. Allerdyce?" The nurse came out from the back. She wasn't alone though: a caucasian man in his 40's, wearing a doctor's white coat over scrubs, followed her out.
"Yes?" Jonathan asked.
"This is Dr. Harry Michaelson, he was the attending who saw to your son the other day."
"Dr. Michaelson," I said, taking the initiative while the opportunity presented itself. "My name is Noa Schaefer, an attorney representing your patient St. John Allerdyce. Would you mind if we retreated to an office for a brief interview, while the nurse accompanies my colleague and client's parents to retrieve a copy of his records?"
There was a brief moment of silence as everybody looked at each other. Once again, I was treated to the reality that nobody expects the petite blonde waif to speak as though she's in charge, but the way I spoke brooked no argument.
"O-of course," the doctor said, recovering first. "Nurse Mendoza, could you take these three to the records room?" His eyes flicked down to my left hand, and frowned when he saw no ring. "If you could follow me, Miss?"
"Meet back up just outside afterwards," I told Matt and the Allerdyces. I very deliberately did not say anything about the doctor's mode of address for me, and instead followed him through the hospital. He moved quite a bit faster than he should have been with somebody following him, holding a pace more akin to if he was doing his rounds than leading somebody, and there were a few times where I had to break into a light jog to keep up.
And unfortunately, because I was presenting myself to the public, I'd had to switch my flats back out for a pair of heels.
When we arrived at the office, my feet hurt, and I probably had a new blister or two. But I ruthlessly suppressed any indignation, instead keeping my expression carefully neutral as the doctor closed the door behind me and sat down.
"So, how does this work?" Dr. Michaelson asked, browsing a file cabinet beside his desk. "Allerdyce, Allerdyce… Allerdyce, St. John, there it is." He pulled out his copy of my client's chart, and set it on the desk in front of him.
"If you would give me a moment…" I pulled out one of the two chairs opposite his desk, and set my briefcase down on the other. From my briefcase I retrieved a tape recorder, a legal pad, and several pens. "The way this works is that I interview you about when you saw my client, you describe for me the nature of his wounds, and answer any questions I need. Keep in mind opposing counsel may contact you as well in the coming weeks, and you will be subpoena'd to appear in court on…" I checked my planner. "Make sure you're not busy the week of July 17, you will likely be called to testify."
"What if I can't come into court that day?"
I just gave the doctor a look.
"You could have been elbow deep in a patient's abdominal cavity for twenty hours prior to the trial, and the judge, especially this judge, would still put you in jail for contempt of court," I told him.
"... oh." Seeing a forty-year-old man look almost exactly like a chastised grade schooler would likely be the highlight of my entire month.
I offered him a small smile, then pressed the record button.
"This is Noa Schaefer, defense counsel for St. John Allerdyce, conducting an interview with Dr. Harry Michaelson, at the Brooklyn Hospital Center Emergency Room."
I rattled off a few more perfunctory bits of information: date, time, date of the incident in question, and then got to business.
"Dr. Michaelson, in what condition did Mr. Allerdyce arrive at the emergency room?"
Immediately after I asked the question, Dr. Michaelson's bearing shifted: he sat up straight, shoulders back, head looking straight to the chart on his desk. He flipped to the front of the chart, read it for fifteen seconds or so, then began to speak.
"St. John Allerdyce presented with a moderately large laceration to the left temple. The wound was bleeding severely, and he was brought back immediately. Given the location of the wound, I assessed whether or not he'd received a concussion. Pupillary reflex was normal, he was able to follow my finger, and patient was awake, aware, and alert. I determined the likelihood of a concussion was minimal, but told his parents to keep him home from school for the next two days, and bring him back immediately if anything changed."
"What course of treatment did you follow?" I asked.
"We applied pressure to staunch the bleeding, then cleaned the area with sterile water. Afterwards, I applied topical anesthetic, followed by local anesthetic, and sutured the wound shut before applying gauze and bandages. We have a photograph of how his wound looked immediately after cleaning in his chart, you should be receiving a copy of it with his other records," Dr. Michaelson explained.
"How many stitches did his wound need?" I wrote a note to myself on my legal pad; a picture of the wound when it happened would go well with the one I took in the courthouse yesterday.
"Mr. Allerdyce's wound could have been closed with anywhere between nine and twelve sutures," the doctor said. "Given that the patient is a young teenage male, I erred on the side of caution and used twelve sutures."
"Was there anything else that comes to mind with regards to the hospital visit itself?" I asked.
"Nothing in particular, no," he told me. "Mr. Allerdyce had a follow-up with me three days later, at which point I noted that the wound was healing up well, and the sutures would dissolve on their own in two weeks' time."
I blinked at that; I didn't think self-dissolving sutures were a thing yet, but I was rather glad to be mistaken. It meant that I didn't have to worry about a particular shoddy juvie doctor botching the removal of St. John's stitches, at the very least.
"Very well then." I reached into my bag again. "At this point, I would like to ask you some questions that are more speculative in nature, Dr. Michaelson."
"Of course," he said, though he kept the chart flipped open. "Fire away."
"Regarding the positioning of the wound, could you comment on what kind of blow would be needed to cause that kind of damage?"
"From what I've seen here in the ER, you'd need a relatively hard object, swung directly at the head." He flipped through the chart to show me the initial picture of St. John's injury. "You can look at the edges of the wound to tell that this was caused by a rounded object, as opposed to a sharp one, so the skin was torn more than cut. For a wound this size, I would say that Mr. Allerdyce is actually quite lucky."
"How so?" I asked.
"The location of the wound tells me he was struck approximately an inch and a half above the outside of his left eye, and so the blow landed, essentially, on the far outside of his forehead. If whatever struck him had hit an inch and a half further back, it would have struck him in the temple, which is a much thinner part of the skull." Dr. Michaelson brought up a finger to his own face, and used that to demonstrate the positions he was talking about.
"What kind of injury would have resulted if that had been the case?"
Dr. Michaelson exhaled sharply, his hands coming up before he let them flop on the desk. "Kid would probably have never left that alleyway," he said. "You said you're a defense attorney?" he asked.
"That's correct," I said, arching an eyebrow at him.
"So I'm guessing you're defending him cause he fought back, and hurt his attacker." I nodded. "If this had landed on his temple, you wouldn't be working for him, because he'd either be dead, braindead, or beaten black and blue by whoever hit him in the first place."
"One last thing for this interview." I reached into my bag and produced a Polaroid photo of the glass bottle Matt and I found in the construction site, the one that still had traces of a dried, crusty, red-brown substance on it. "Would this have been sufficient for causing the wound you saw on Mr. Allerdyce?"
"Let me see that?" I handed him the photo, and Dr. Michaelson flipped back through the chart, comparing the image I handed him with the one in St. John's chart. "I can't be one hundred percent certain, but I would be willing to say that yes, this could cause an injury of that scope."
"Understood." I reached over and stopped the recording. "Dr. Michaelson, thank you very much for your time. And I do apologize in advance that I will have to call you away from your work at least three times in the next two months."
"I may not like it, but you're just doing your job," he said with a shrug, closing the chart on his desk. "I have to ask though, how did the kid manage to defend himself? He never told me that part."
Uh-oh.
"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to divulge that information at this point in time," I said, working my way around the issue. "Not until I've had the time to review the prosecutor's interviews and compare what they say with what Mr. Allerdyce said.
"You think your client's lying?" Dr. Michaelson frowned and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Doctor, until we get them under oath, and sometimes even then, somebody is always lying," I told him as I gathered my things and stood, smoothing out my skirt. "The hard part is finding out who, and why."
By the time Matt and I got done at the hospital and made it back into Manhattan, it was already past noon. I treated him to lunch, retrieved his braille copy of the documents the prosecution handed over to us (bound into a pair of large binders, which thankfully fit into his backpack), and had him take them home.
"I want you to form what conclusions you can on your own time," I told him. "If I'm in the room when you review this, you're going to ask me my opinion, or what I'm getting from this. I want you to read over the interviews, compare that with what we have and what we know, and form a theory of the case. Put together a series of events, determine who is at fault, and then I want you to think about how you prove that your series of events is correct."
Then I sent him home. I gave him thirty dollars to treat himself to both dinner and breakfast on the firm's dime, deliberately ignoring his protests that this was too much, called a limousine company that the firm used daily, and had them drop him off back at his apartment in Hell's Kitchen.
And then I was alone in my office. I locked the door, pulled a cassette player from my bottom desk drawer, put a Rolling Stones cassette in, and pressed play.
Then I rewound the tape a bit, because you don't start in the middle of Paint it Black.
Once I had some background music, I opened up the box on my desk, and got to work.
The first thing I went for was the interviews with the four thugs that jumped St. John. All of them were… remarkably consistent: all four of them claimed they saw him go into the convenience store, take a soda, and leave without paying. Their testimony went on to say they chose to confront St. John because of this, and when they stopped him in the alleyway, he used his powers to throw fire at them like a flamethrower.
The four say they ran, and one of them, a Mick Samuelson, allegedly got tagged by a gout of flame and tried to shuck off his now-on-fire… shoes? Shorts? Mick himself just said clothes, but he was the one allegedly on fire; it was the other three who only now decided that they couldn't agree on anything.
It was while the alleged victim was removing these clothes, he claimed, that he fell into the construction site, landed badly, and broke his leg in three places.
I compared the photographs taken, both the ones I had with my little Polaroid and the copies the prosecution sent over. I looked over the medical records of the assailants. I checked what was described with what I knew of the area, and rebuilt the alleyway and street as best I could with just my office and some Polaroid photos.
I played out the events, both in my mind and in pantomime, trying to determine what this meant for my approach – a plea deal was off the table for the moment, but maybe during the course of the trial…
I stood in St. John Allerdyce's shoes. I cast my mind back to the alleyway – his anxiety and fear, then pain, then the need to fight. I considered the outburst he had, the control he'd displayed, how he must have been feeling. I let myself take Mick Samuelson's testimony at face value, allowed him the benefit of the doubt, and played out the events again, this time from the opposite angle. I compared the two, trying to see which one made more sense, which one had more proof behind it, then tried to see how I'd go about showing that.
And through it all, I came to one inescapable conclusion.
By the time I was done, my office was in a state of disarray. A run down to the supply room yielded yarn, post-its, paper, and a white board, all of which I'd managed to spread around the space in a haphazard arrangement that only really made sense to me. Six more cassette tapes had joined the first, an array of Beatles, Duran Duran, Van Halen, and Metallica, all of which spoke to what I was thinking at the time, how I'd been thinking. Reaching under my desk to swap my flats out with my heels, I groused at just how long it would take to get my office presentable again. But that was something for later.
I gathered up only what I needed, went up the elevator, and walked straight into Sam Lieberman's office.
"Well?" he asked.
I didn't actually have to say anything. I just slid my notepad and the documents I received from the prosecution across the desk, spreading them out the way I knew he liked to arrange his own case documents. Then I just pulled a chair out from his desk, crossed one leg over the other, and waited.
Thirty minutes passed. For thirty minutes, I was treated to my boss taking in the facts, putting them together, identifying inconsistencies, and building a narrative. All of this played out in the furrow of his brow, the tension of his jaw and neck, the pitch of his breathing, and the pressure of his fingers on the page.
After those thirty minutes, Lieberman stood up from his chair and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window behind his desk, staring out over Central Park.
"You think you can win."
It wasn't a question. My boss was making a statement. He'd been my boss for most of a decade now; he knew exactly how confident I must have been to bring this information upstairs.
"This is the most open-and-shut self-defense case I have seen in a very long time," I told him, standing and walking around the desk to rest beside him. "I've never seen an easier source of reasonable doubt. We have detailed information about the scene of the crime. We know exactly what was done, and by whom. We know who went where. We have both the victim's and our client's medical records. We even found an improvised weapon at the scene with dried blood on it. And I would bet good money that we find the alleged victim's fingerprints on it."
"What about witnesses?" Lieberman asked.
"I'm already drawing up a motion in limine against two of the alleged victims under rule 403," I told him. "The ER doctor has already agreed to testify on behalf of the client, so I should only need the subpoena to make the hospital play ball on his schedule. The parents also suggested several candidates for character witnesses, friends of the client who already know about his power, and can attest to how he uses his power in ordinary circumstances; that said, I'll have to get a similar list from the client, and look into any discrepancies. I'll interview them to decide which and how many I want, but past experience tells me one, maybe two at most." A flock of birds flew out of the trees in Central Park, turning to wing their way off the island of Manhattan. "It's going to depend on how hard Lou Young and Judge Andrews make getting the testimony across."
"And the jury," he reminded me.
"And the jury," I agreed with a sigh.
Chapter Four
My alarm clock went off at five in the morning. It was an absolutely miserable hour, an hour earlier than I was used to waking up, but today was going to be so busy that I needed the extra time.
I slapped the top of my alarm clock to shut the damn thing up, then pulled the blankets off. A simple motion shucked my nightgown, and I padded into the bathroom to turn on and step into the shower. (I barely remembered my shower cap—I'd washed my hair yesterday, I did not want to go through the hassle of drying it today too!)
While in the shower, I let my mind wander, thinking over the agenda for the day. I'd need to pick up Matthew at the firm, and get one of the firm's company cars. Much as I hated driving in New York City, there was enough to acquire that carrying it was not an option. My Polaroid and any replacement film I'd need to carry was bulky enough, and that was before we got to the possibility of acquiring actual, physical evidence. I wanted a few things from that alleyway if they were still there, just to demonstrate the level of control St. John had over his powers. So flammable materials that were barely burnt, for example.
I'd also need to get his hospital records, and would need to bring my tape recorder and a few blank tapes for interviewing the ER attending physician and any nurses… actually I may need the tape recorder for my conversation with the parents too. That wasn't anything that needed turning over to the other side, but it would still be good to have so I can refer back to it.
I shut the shower off, letting the water run down my body before reaching for a towel and continuing my morning routine.
What about safety? I asked myself. I'd be on the streets of Brooklyn with nobody other than a blind man (an admittedly well-trained one) for company, in a location that likely had some measure of criminal activity. I was small, not even five feet tall; it wouldn't take more than one hit to completely incapacitate me, and that's even if I saw it coming.
My thoughts drifted to the tools I had available to me: pepper spray, my powers — my magic. The magic I couldn't use properly without a focus.
A focus, of which I had four, all sitting on a shelf in my closet, collecting dust. And this because I'd been told that if I kept using them the way I had been, I would forever be limiting my capacity to shape and focus my abilities in the mystic arts.
There were times I wanted to slap the man who gave me that advice. But the point was that he was correct: my skill with magic had grown by leaps and bounds, even though my strength had stalled out, and progressed at a glacial pace. It was a trade off, to be sure.
But right now, it was a choice to make: carry a rolling pin-sized object in my briefcase, or just hope I didn't run into a situation such that I'd need to spend twenty seconds gathering magic, then refracting and guiding light into a laser?
There was, of course, another option.
I was a small, fragile, relatively-wealthy white woman, accompanied by a young, disabled white man. If anything happened to us, anything at all, the police would be on top of it in… well, a New York minute. Just the possibility of that kind of disproportionate police response should discourage criminal attention.
I could trust that if something happened to me, law enforcement would rush to my defense.
Hmm…
Well, actually?
As my current case had already shown, this was only true for as long as they didn't know I was a mutant. Because if there was one thing that galvanized police against you more than being a "dangerous" minority, it was being a dangerous minority.
And yes. There was a difference.
"Remind me to never get into a car with you behind the wheel," Matt said as he exited the car, letting his feet rest flat on the pavement as he gripped his cane like a lifeline. "Stop and go and stop and go, thought I was gonna be sick."
"Don't be such a drama queen," I said, stepping around the front of the car.
Have you ever tried to drive in New York City? Because believe me, there are better purgatories to suffer through on your way to better things. Every time you think you can move forward – a cab swerves into the lane, honking all the while. You're crossing the street? No you're not, the pedestrian is. And don't even think about trying to take a left turn, just suffer through three rights. It's easier on your blood pressure.
But don't forget about the last part of the trip: finding parking. It was a minor miracle that I managed to find a parking spot as close to our destination as I did. Though even that was debatable, because I'd been circling the block for fifteen minutes, and still had a meter to pay.
And all of this before we think about the car itself: a too-big, too-boxy sedan more than twice the size of my own car.
"I'm sorry you didn't like the ride over, but this car wasn't made for people as short as I am. Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the butt it is to try and reach the pedals in these Lincolns?"
"No," Matt said with a knowing smile. I rolled my eyes and led on, knowing he could follow my footsteps, and not wanting to linger on the humorous oops I'd made. Instead, the two of us walked two blocks, and arrived at our destination.
The alleyway we needed was between two old apartment buildings, which I instantly placed as primarily Section 8 housing by the scarcity of window AC units and the poor quality of what few remained. The alley between them was utterly disgusting, littered with cigarette butts, discarded fast food containers, empty bottles and cans, and more soiled diapers than I was comfortable smelling in one place. It was wide enough for three people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder, and that was after you accounted for the dumpsters lined up along the wall.
Most striking, though, was the identical pair of deep black scorch marks on either side of the alley, starting at roughly a third of the way in and flaring back towards the center. The way that you could draw an almost perfect straight line up at one spot was telling me things, but I'd need to know more before I drew any conclusions.
"Smell anything burnt?" I asked Matt. "I know it's been a week, but if we can find anything scorched during the initial altercation, it could help." In the meanwhile I took out my Polaroid and started taking pictures of the alley from every angle, and was especially careful to get good pictures of the scorch marks on the walls.
"All I'm getting from this is diaper, mold, and cigarette," Matt admitted, one hand up over his nose and mouth. I reached into my bag and pulled out a handkerchief, which I handed to him. "Thank you – God, it smells rancid here."
"Welcome to New York in May," I said. It had been raining every single day last week, for at least thirty minutes at a time. It was pretty regular for the month, but it also made our lives significantly more difficult.
Once I had the pictures I wanted, I pulled and put on a pair of latex gloves, followed by an umbrella and trash bag. The trash bag went over the umbrella before I used it to poke at the contents of the dumpsters, searching for whatever was a little lower in the bins. Mildew, mold, and other muck was most of what awaited… but I did find something. With the hand that wasn't holding an umbrella, I held up my Polaroid to get a picture. Then, the Polaroid hanging by a strap around my neck, I reached in to grab what I saw.
It was a magazine with just its cover burnt black, and save for a bit of darkening on the first page, the rest of it was completely untouched. Moreover, it had been underneath several pizza takeout boxes that had, themselves, been filled with used napkins, which all soaked up enough of the rain from the past week that the magazine was almost completely dry.
Once I had the magazine out from the dumpster, I took another few pictures of it with my Polaroid, then retrieved a ziploc bag (thank goodness those were already around, I don't know what I would have done without them) and stored it away inside. A quick label went on the bag so I could write in what it was, where and when it was found, and by whom, then I put it away into my bag.
"Anything on your end?" I asked Matt.
"Nothing," he said. "Rain washed away most of the blood I could've smelled, and everything else here is just making it worse."
"Hmm…"
I turned around to look from the alleyway to the street, the one that the hooligans had followed St. John from, and then ran back out into after his display of pyrotechnics. Specifically, I looked across to the construction site, covered up by tarps, and still drying out from the past week.
"John said that the four thugs who attacked him ran back out this street," I said, walking out of the alley. Matt, smart cookie that he was, took the hint and followed me. "What do you wager that if they had anything, they tossed it in the construction site over here? Like, say, a bloody beer bottle?"
"Good odds," he said.
The two of us walked across the street to the construction site, eyeing it. There was a relatively short fence set fifteen feet back from the street. It stood about six and a half feet high, separating the general public from the pit dug for the building's foundations. The fence was a flimsy thing though, just chain-link supported by a measly three posts. If somebody came careening into this thing, they'd probably knock it over in a heartbeat and… fall in.
I frowned. Neither the prosecution nor the judge had offered any indications about the nature of the injuries St. John's 'victim' had suffered.
Matt walked up and ran his cane along the fencepost, listening to something I couldn't quite pick up.
"There's a whole bunch of stuff down there," he said. "Lots of metal and plastic, but… there's only one thing made of glass. You don't think...?" He didn't finish the question, instead letting it hang in the air.
"It's worth a shot," I said. I found a payphone on the street and called the number listed on the sign in front of the lot, the construction company's number. Thirty minutes later the contractor arrived, let us in, and we found exactly what we were looking for, which I photographed, bagged, and tagged.
After which, I found myself on the payphone again, calling my boss.
"Prosecution made their disclosure," Lieberman told me once his secretary transferred the call. "Please tell me you found something you can use out there."
"Maybe, but I won't know for sure until I can get it looked at," I told him. "Can you have Antonia make a few copies of the prosecution's records, two for me, one for a box I can take to the printer's to get in braille?"
Even as I spoke into the payphone, I kept my eyes squarely along the street in front of me. A few people were milling along the street, staring at the two of us. That wasn't altogether surprising; people in suits didn't tend to wander down Brooklyn alleyways, let alone walk out with Polaroids, or carrying bloodstained beer bottles in plastic bags.
"What else do you have to do today?" Lieberman asked, his voice tinny on the payphone's speaker.
"Uh… I need to talk to the parents, bring them with me to the hospital so I can get the client's ER records. Talk to the ER doc and any nurses." I sighed, rubbing a hand over my forehead. "I need to see the alleged victims' medical records after this. Also when I say I found something, I mean I found some evidence that was hopefully missed, but most likely never looked for it beyond the alleyway. Took a Polaroid, signed and dated it, bagged the evidence."
"Given it was raining all last week? Probably didn't look very far. Regardless, get that down to the courthouse for disclosure as soon as you've gotten it worked up, along with any report you get," Lieberman told me, his tone growing firm and commanding. "Trust me, if that isn't there by the end of the week, Young will try to get you infracted for a Rule 16 violation. In the meantime, I'll get those documents to the printer for a copy for Murdock, get those and a photocopy in your office. I also called ahead to your building's doorman, he'll bring another set up to your condo."
"That's... wow," I said, for lack of anything else to really add. I had to wonder how much work he was putting off on his own cases just to help me out… and how long he'd hold this over my head afterwards. "Thank you, sir."
"You owe me for this one, Schaefer, and believe me when I say I will eventually be calling this favor due. Now get to it."
The phone clicked.
"Well that answers that," I said to myself, then nudged Matt with a shoulder. "Come on. The Allerdyces live a few blocks away."
"I'm not looking forward to this talk," Matt said, but fell into step beside me anyway.
"This isn't even the long talk," I told him. "This is just a preliminary follow-up. Outlining what we're doing, what we need from them, and bringing them with us so we can get our clients records with fewer hoops to jump through. Patients and parents of minor patients can request their records and get them a lot more quickly than if we'd filed a record request."
"How much slower are they normally?" Matt asked.
"Hang a left here." I took the inside track of the turn, though I had to skip around a step to avoid a smushed, half-eaten pizza slice on the sidewalk. Days like these, when I had to go on-site while building a case? They made me glad I kept a pair of flats handy. "As for how much slower? Procedure gives them two weeks to produce the records on their own with just a faxed request form. But if they don't send them to you, and most don't, then you need the judge to subpoena the records, and then wait up to another two weeks."
"And we can't spare four weeks on this, can we?"
"No, we cannot." And I was already outlining my official complaint to the state judiciary for that scheduling choice.
"Take a form and fill out your info then bring it back up here, and we'll see you as soon as possible," the nurse at the ER desk, a middle-aged hispanic woman, said, not even bothering to look up from her paperwork.
I looked to my side and offered both Matt and the Allerdyces a knowing look, then pulled a folder out of my briefcase and slid it in front of the orderly.
"My clients are here to retrieve copies of their son's medical records in connection with an ongoing court case," I told the nurse, who finally deigned to look up from her own paperwork. "All appropriate release and request forms are in the folder. Additionally, I need to speak to the on-call or attending who saw my client on the date listed on the form."
Once the nurse flipped open the folder to reveal legal-length paper, I knew she would do what I'd asked of her with no complaints. A lot of people get intimidated when the paper put before them isn't a regular 8.5x11, even more so when it has legal letterhead with an address on Central Park West. Sure enough, she stood up from her chair and went into the back, at which point I started a mental countdown. I estimated… five minutes.
"So what happens now?" Jonathan Allerdyce asked. I turned to look up at him, and had to suppress a frown at the deep bags that sat under his eyes. Yesterday's events clearly weighed heavily upon both him and Linda, but at least she had cosmetics to help hide it. He had no such recourse, and his exhaustion lined his face with heavy crevasses.
"A little bit of divide and conquer. Mr. Murdock will accompany the two of you to the hospital administration, who will furnish you with a copy of your son's records. At the same time, I'll be interviewing the doctor who stitched up your son."
"Are we not supposed to be there?" Linda Allerdyce asked, the Australian in her accent heavier than it had been yesterday.
"Not for a first interview, no," I responded. "I want to talk to the doctor when he's just speaking to another professional, somebody without a personal connection to the patient."
"But what about—"
"Mr. and Mrs. Allerdyce?" The nurse came out from the back. She wasn't alone though: a caucasian man in his 40's, wearing a doctor's white coat over scrubs, followed her out.
"Yes?" Jonathan asked.
"This is Dr. Harry Michaelson, he was the attending who saw to your son the other day."
"Dr. Michaelson," I said, taking the initiative while the opportunity presented itself. "My name is Noa Schaefer, an attorney representing your patient St. John Allerdyce. Would you mind if we retreated to an office for a brief interview, while the nurse accompanies my colleague and client's parents to retrieve a copy of his records?"
There was a brief moment of silence as everybody looked at each other. Once again, I was treated to the reality that nobody expects the petite blonde waif to speak as though she's in charge, but the way I spoke brooked no argument.
"O-of course," the doctor said, recovering first. "Nurse Mendoza, could you take these three to the records room?" His eyes flicked down to my left hand, and frowned when he saw no ring. "If you could follow me, Miss?"
"Meet back up just outside afterwards," I told Matt and the Allerdyces. I very deliberately did not say anything about the doctor's mode of address for me, and instead followed him through the hospital. He moved quite a bit faster than he should have been with somebody following him, holding a pace more akin to if he was doing his rounds than leading somebody, and there were a few times where I had to break into a light jog to keep up.
And unfortunately, because I was presenting myself to the public, I'd had to switch my flats back out for a pair of heels.
When we arrived at the office, my feet hurt, and I probably had a new blister or two. But I ruthlessly suppressed any indignation, instead keeping my expression carefully neutral as the doctor closed the door behind me and sat down.
"So, how does this work?" Dr. Michaelson asked, browsing a file cabinet beside his desk. "Allerdyce, Allerdyce… Allerdyce, St. John, there it is." He pulled out his copy of my client's chart, and set it on the desk in front of him.
"If you would give me a moment…" I pulled out one of the two chairs opposite his desk, and set my briefcase down on the other. From my briefcase I retrieved a tape recorder, a legal pad, and several pens. "The way this works is that I interview you about when you saw my client, you describe for me the nature of his wounds, and answer any questions I need. Keep in mind opposing counsel may contact you as well in the coming weeks, and you will be subpoena'd to appear in court on…" I checked my planner. "Make sure you're not busy the week of July 17, you will likely be called to testify."
"What if I can't come into court that day?"
I just gave the doctor a look.
"You could have been elbow deep in a patient's abdominal cavity for twenty hours prior to the trial, and the judge, especially this judge, would still put you in jail for contempt of court," I told him.
"... oh." Seeing a forty-year-old man look almost exactly like a chastised grade schooler would likely be the highlight of my entire month.
I offered him a small smile, then pressed the record button.
"This is Noa Schaefer, defense counsel for St. John Allerdyce, conducting an interview with Dr. Harry Michaelson, at the Brooklyn Hospital Center Emergency Room."
I rattled off a few more perfunctory bits of information: date, time, date of the incident in question, and then got to business.
"Dr. Michaelson, in what condition did Mr. Allerdyce arrive at the emergency room?"
Immediately after I asked the question, Dr. Michaelson's bearing shifted: he sat up straight, shoulders back, head looking straight to the chart on his desk. He flipped to the front of the chart, read it for fifteen seconds or so, then began to speak.
"St. John Allerdyce presented with a moderately large laceration to the left temple. The wound was bleeding severely, and he was brought back immediately. Given the location of the wound, I assessed whether or not he'd received a concussion. Pupillary reflex was normal, he was able to follow my finger, and patient was awake, aware, and alert. I determined the likelihood of a concussion was minimal, but told his parents to keep him home from school for the next two days, and bring him back immediately if anything changed."
"What course of treatment did you follow?" I asked.
"We applied pressure to staunch the bleeding, then cleaned the area with sterile water. Afterwards, I applied topical anesthetic, followed by local anesthetic, and sutured the wound shut before applying gauze and bandages. We have a photograph of how his wound looked immediately after cleaning in his chart, you should be receiving a copy of it with his other records," Dr. Michaelson explained.
"How many stitches did his wound need?" I wrote a note to myself on my legal pad; a picture of the wound when it happened would go well with the one I took in the courthouse yesterday.
"Mr. Allerdyce's wound could have been closed with anywhere between nine and twelve sutures," the doctor said. "Given that the patient is a young teenage male, I erred on the side of caution and used twelve sutures."
"Was there anything else that comes to mind with regards to the hospital visit itself?" I asked.
"Nothing in particular, no," he told me. "Mr. Allerdyce had a follow-up with me three days later, at which point I noted that the wound was healing up well, and the sutures would dissolve on their own in two weeks' time."
I blinked at that; I didn't think self-dissolving sutures were a thing yet, but I was rather glad to be mistaken. It meant that I didn't have to worry about a particular shoddy juvie doctor botching the removal of St. John's stitches, at the very least.
"Very well then." I reached into my bag again. "At this point, I would like to ask you some questions that are more speculative in nature, Dr. Michaelson."
"Of course," he said, though he kept the chart flipped open. "Fire away."
"Regarding the positioning of the wound, could you comment on what kind of blow would be needed to cause that kind of damage?"
"From what I've seen here in the ER, you'd need a relatively hard object, swung directly at the head." He flipped through the chart to show me the initial picture of St. John's injury. "You can look at the edges of the wound to tell that this was caused by a rounded object, as opposed to a sharp one, so the skin was torn more than cut. For a wound this size, I would say that Mr. Allerdyce is actually quite lucky."
"How so?" I asked.
"The location of the wound tells me he was struck approximately an inch and a half above the outside of his left eye, and so the blow landed, essentially, on the far outside of his forehead. If whatever struck him had hit an inch and a half further back, it would have struck him in the temple, which is a much thinner part of the skull." Dr. Michaelson brought up a finger to his own face, and used that to demonstrate the positions he was talking about.
"What kind of injury would have resulted if that had been the case?"
Dr. Michaelson exhaled sharply, his hands coming up before he let them flop on the desk. "Kid would probably have never left that alleyway," he said. "You said you're a defense attorney?" he asked.
"That's correct," I said, arching an eyebrow at him.
"So I'm guessing you're defending him cause he fought back, and hurt his attacker." I nodded. "If this had landed on his temple, you wouldn't be working for him, because he'd either be dead, braindead, or beaten black and blue by whoever hit him in the first place."
"One last thing for this interview." I reached into my bag and produced a Polaroid photo of the glass bottle Matt and I found in the construction site, the one that still had traces of a dried, crusty, red-brown substance on it. "Would this have been sufficient for causing the wound you saw on Mr. Allerdyce?"
"Let me see that?" I handed him the photo, and Dr. Michaelson flipped back through the chart, comparing the image I handed him with the one in St. John's chart. "I can't be one hundred percent certain, but I would be willing to say that yes, this could cause an injury of that scope."
"Understood." I reached over and stopped the recording. "Dr. Michaelson, thank you very much for your time. And I do apologize in advance that I will have to call you away from your work at least three times in the next two months."
"I may not like it, but you're just doing your job," he said with a shrug, closing the chart on his desk. "I have to ask though, how did the kid manage to defend himself? He never told me that part."
Uh-oh.
"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to divulge that information at this point in time," I said, working my way around the issue. "Not until I've had the time to review the prosecutor's interviews and compare what they say with what Mr. Allerdyce said.
"You think your client's lying?" Dr. Michaelson frowned and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Doctor, until we get them under oath, and sometimes even then, somebody is always lying," I told him as I gathered my things and stood, smoothing out my skirt. "The hard part is finding out who, and why."
By the time Matt and I got done at the hospital and made it back into Manhattan, it was already past noon. I treated him to lunch, retrieved his braille copy of the documents the prosecution handed over to us (bound into a pair of large binders, which thankfully fit into his backpack), and had him take them home.
"I want you to form what conclusions you can on your own time," I told him. "If I'm in the room when you review this, you're going to ask me my opinion, or what I'm getting from this. I want you to read over the interviews, compare that with what we have and what we know, and form a theory of the case. Put together a series of events, determine who is at fault, and then I want you to think about how you prove that your series of events is correct."
Then I sent him home. I gave him thirty dollars to treat himself to both dinner and breakfast on the firm's dime, deliberately ignoring his protests that this was too much, called a limousine company that the firm used daily, and had them drop him off back at his apartment in Hell's Kitchen.
And then I was alone in my office. I locked the door, pulled a cassette player from my bottom desk drawer, put a Rolling Stones cassette in, and pressed play.
Then I rewound the tape a bit, because you don't start in the middle of Paint it Black.
Once I had some background music, I opened up the box on my desk, and got to work.
The first thing I went for was the interviews with the four thugs that jumped St. John. All of them were… remarkably consistent: all four of them claimed they saw him go into the convenience store, take a soda, and leave without paying. Their testimony went on to say they chose to confront St. John because of this, and when they stopped him in the alleyway, he used his powers to throw fire at them like a flamethrower.
The four say they ran, and one of them, a Mick Samuelson, allegedly got tagged by a gout of flame and tried to shuck off his now-on-fire… shoes? Shorts? Mick himself just said clothes, but he was the one allegedly on fire; it was the other three who only now decided that they couldn't agree on anything.
It was while the alleged victim was removing these clothes, he claimed, that he fell into the construction site, landed badly, and broke his leg in three places.
I compared the photographs taken, both the ones I had with my little Polaroid and the copies the prosecution sent over. I looked over the medical records of the assailants. I checked what was described with what I knew of the area, and rebuilt the alleyway and street as best I could with just my office and some Polaroid photos.
I played out the events, both in my mind and in pantomime, trying to determine what this meant for my approach – a plea deal was off the table for the moment, but maybe during the course of the trial…
I stood in St. John Allerdyce's shoes. I cast my mind back to the alleyway – his anxiety and fear, then pain, then the need to fight. I considered the outburst he had, the control he'd displayed, how he must have been feeling. I let myself take Mick Samuelson's testimony at face value, allowed him the benefit of the doubt, and played out the events again, this time from the opposite angle. I compared the two, trying to see which one made more sense, which one had more proof behind it, then tried to see how I'd go about showing that.
And through it all, I came to one inescapable conclusion.
By the time I was done, my office was in a state of disarray. A run down to the supply room yielded yarn, post-its, paper, and a white board, all of which I'd managed to spread around the space in a haphazard arrangement that only really made sense to me. Six more cassette tapes had joined the first, an array of Beatles, Duran Duran, Van Halen, and Metallica, all of which spoke to what I was thinking at the time, how I'd been thinking. Reaching under my desk to swap my flats out with my heels, I groused at just how long it would take to get my office presentable again. But that was something for later.
I gathered up only what I needed, went up the elevator, and walked straight into Sam Lieberman's office.
"Well?" he asked.
I didn't actually have to say anything. I just slid my notepad and the documents I received from the prosecution across the desk, spreading them out the way I knew he liked to arrange his own case documents. Then I just pulled a chair out from his desk, crossed one leg over the other, and waited.
Thirty minutes passed. For thirty minutes, I was treated to my boss taking in the facts, putting them together, identifying inconsistencies, and building a narrative. All of this played out in the furrow of his brow, the tension of his jaw and neck, the pitch of his breathing, and the pressure of his fingers on the page.
After those thirty minutes, Lieberman stood up from his chair and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window behind his desk, staring out over Central Park.
"You think you can win."
It wasn't a question. My boss was making a statement. He'd been my boss for most of a decade now; he knew exactly how confident I must have been to bring this information upstairs.
"This is the most open-and-shut self-defense case I have seen in a very long time," I told him, standing and walking around the desk to rest beside him. "I've never seen an easier source of reasonable doubt. We have detailed information about the scene of the crime. We know exactly what was done, and by whom. We know who went where. We have both the victim's and our client's medical records. We even found an improvised weapon at the scene with dried blood on it. And I would bet good money that we find the alleged victim's fingerprints on it."
"What about witnesses?" Lieberman asked.
"I'm already drawing up a motion in limine against two of the alleged victims under rule 403," I told him. "The ER doctor has already agreed to testify on behalf of the client, so I should only need the subpoena to make the hospital play ball on his schedule. The parents also suggested several candidates for character witnesses, friends of the client who already know about his power, and can attest to how he uses his power in ordinary circumstances; that said, I'll have to get a similar list from the client, and look into any discrepancies. I'll interview them to decide which and how many I want, but past experience tells me one, maybe two at most." A flock of birds flew out of the trees in Central Park, turning to wing their way off the island of Manhattan. "It's going to depend on how hard Lou Young and Judge Andrews make getting the testimony across."
"And the jury," he reminded me.
"And the jury," I agreed with a sigh.
This chapter was mostly a plot vehicle. Next chapter should have a few more interesting events, and character beats, I promise.
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