“I don’t know why I asked either,” he said. “You?”
Ezra nodded. “Later,” he said.
Vera glanced between them. “Good call. That sounds like something I don’t need to know about,” she said. “And look, a lot of lawyers would have folded with a judge putting that pressure on them. It’s not right, but no one wants to make an enemy out of a judge. That’ll put your career in the crapper faster than banging your client. Ledger, though, wasn’t a brilliant lawyer or even a particularly good lawyer, but she was a stubborn bitch. So she just slogged on, and the jury liked her. They didn’t like Grannick.”
“What went wrong?” Ezra asked.
“Scandal,” Vera said, spreading her hands palm up. “Like I said, Ledger was a workhorse. That meant a lot of mid-level slam-dunk cases, the bread and butter of the court system. Two-thirds of her cases, the opposing counsel cut a deal for their client because… they were fucking guilty, and it would be embarrassing to try and say otherwise. Only now, all of a sudden, a bunch of those clients had lawyered up with a real high-powered civil rights lawyer and alleged prosecutorial misconduct due to the use of jailhouse snitches.”
“So she got pulled from the Grannick case,” Ezra said.
“That she did,” Vera said. “Her replacement offered Grannick a slap on the wrist deal right out the gate.”
“Ledger got fired and blamed Charity for, what, dropping the lawyer the nod about her snitch problem?”
Vera shook her head. She hopped up off the desk and walked over to the briefcase she’d left propped up on the office’s other chair. The brass latches clicked as she thumbed them open. She pulled out a sheaf of photocopied pages.
“Juicer than that,” she said. “Ledger claimed she’dneverused a jailhouse informant, but when the DA’s office opened a review, they found dozens of them in her files. Most of them from a professional snitch who agreed to testify against her. At that point, I’d have accepted my guilt, and I know I didn’t do it, but Ledger, the stubborn bitch, wouldn’t back down. She accused the judge—Charity Parker—of setting her up and alleged Charity had some personal connection to Grannick. Which is when the shit really hit the fan for her because Charity took that very personally. Ledger wasn’t just fired from the DA’s office, she was effectively blackballed. Admittedly this is gossip, but a couple of the people I called backed it up. Between the scandal and Judge Parker’s influence, she couldn’t get hired anywhere. It wasn’t worth the risk. This is a complete record of all the complaints that Ledger… ah… lodged at the clerk’s office about Parker. She was convinced that an investigation would uncover significant judicial corruption. But she had no evidence, and we were in the middle of a pandemic, so they got filed and ignored. That did not stop Ledger. I should not have these, by the way.”
She dropped the file on the table in front of Ezra. He picked it up and flicked through the pages briefly before he turned his attention back to Vera.
“So, Judge Parker wouldn’t be pleased to see her at a big fundraiser?” he asked.
“From what I’ve heard, the only place Judge Parker would be happy to see Melanie Ledger is in hell,” Vera said. “She was all set to move up in the judicial world two years ago, but all this made the powers that be hit pause. From what I’ve heard, she’s set for a second bite at the cherry. The last thing she’d need is for anything to get in the way of that. Lucky enough, that won’t be a problem anymore. Well, lucky for her. Not so much for Melanie, I guess.”
She closed her briefcase and picked it up. It dangled from her hand as she looked between Clay and Ezra and raised a peppered gray eyebrow.
“I don’t want to know why you asked, do I?”
“Probably not,” Ezra said. “Bill us for your hours.”
Vera gave him alook. “Well, I don’t do this for love, dear. So obviously,” she said, “my office will send it over. I really hope you didn’t kill that poor girl. I think I would have liked her.”
She turned and strode out of the office, her heels clicking against the floor.
“We didn’t,” Clay said. She looked back, and he shrugged. “Call it mommy issues. I don’t want to disappoint unless I’ve earned it on my own merits.”
She pointed a finger at him, the nail painted gray and pink. “You’re a strange little man, Clay,” she said.
“See?” Clay said as he swung his legs back up onto the desk. “That disappointment feels like it’s worth something.”
She shook her head and pulled the door open.
“One last thing,” Ezra said. He held up the papers. “Did you come across the name Collymore in any of this?”
Vera tilted her head to the side and thought about it. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t ring any bells. Why?”
Ezra shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Thanks for this, Vera.”
She waved her hand over her shoulder and left. The door swung shut behind her, and Clay waited for the click of heels to recede before he raised his eyebrows at Ezra.
“I gotta tell you, I figured Charity was fucking Collymore,” he said. “All that overkill looked like a crime of passion.”
“Or panic?” Ezra said. “Someone like Charity, they’re either in control or out of control. No in-between. Look at me. There were a dozen different ways that Charity could have handled her laptop problem. Instead, she spiraled and put out a hit.”
“Why now, though?” Clay asked. He leaned over the table and grabbed the stack of complaints to flick through them. “Two years and a couple of months, Ledger was yelling from the rooftops that Charity was crooked. No one listened. What changed?”
Ezra shrugged.
