Page 71 of The Devil's Advocate

‘Yes, you must be Bloch,’ said the lady. She smelled of fine oils. Sweet and rich. Bloch imagined Jane spending her evenings eating vegan food, while listening to classical jazz and catching up on this week’sNew Yorker. Jane had money. Enough that she didn’t need a real job and was content to devote her time to a number of charities. One of which was a charity campaigning for convicts on death row. Jane was the vice-chair.

Bloch nodded in greeting.

‘Well, this is where it happened,’ said Jane. ‘Like I said, there’s not much to see. The car dealership closed after Mr. Sequentes was murdered. It lay vacant for a long time, then as the businesses came to this side of town, they needed more parking and this lot opened up. It’s quite cheap, for the area. Four dollars an hour.’

Bloch wasn’t interested in how much it cost to park.

‘Did you bring the file?’ asked Bloch.

Jane folded her arms, shifted her weight onto one hip, angled her head.

‘Can you tell me your interest in all of this? I didn’t see your name mentioned anywhere in the file.’

‘I work for a law firm,’ said Bloch.

Jane didn’t move. Didn’t ask anything else. She was trying to let Bloch know this wasn’t enough. Not even close.

‘We represent Andy Dubois,’ said Bloch.

‘Oh, I heard about that case. That starts tomorrow, right? So why are you asking me about Darius Robinson?’

‘I’m not interested in Darius Robinson. I’m interested in the district attorney.’

‘Look, don’t waste your time. Randal Korn is well protected. There’s nothing on him that we could use in Darius’s case. He covers his tracks. Darius had a shit lawyer for his trial, but a damn good one on appeal, and Cody Warren couldn’t find anything to use against Korn. Sorry,’ said Jane.

She let her arms fall to her sides, took a step back. She was going to leave.

‘Cody Warren is dead,’ said Bloch.

‘Dead?’

‘His office manager too. Executed and left in Cody’s car outside Andy Dubois’ house.’

‘Oh my God, that’s … just awful. Those poor people. Oh my God, do you think the district attorney had something to do with it?’

Bloch raised a single eyebrow.

Jane was dumbstruck for a time, and Bloch didn’t have that kind of time to waste.

‘Let me look at the file, please.’

‘What’s the point? If there was something there, Cody would have seen it.’

Bloch sighed. She didn’t like to talk. Conversation wasn’t her thing. But she needed to get a look at that file.

‘If there’s nothing in that file that’s useful to me, you haven’t lost anything. Just the half hour it will take me to read it. If I find something, you can apply to have Darius Robinson pardoned, posthumously.’

Jane stopped. Looked Bloch up and down. Said, ‘And what makes you think you can spot something that one of the best attorneys in this state missed?’

Bloch toed the gravel with her boot, said, ‘It’s what I do.’

Jane fell quiet then said, ‘Oh my God, how are you going to read the file in half an hour? There’s like two boxes filled with documents in my trunk.’

There goes Bloch’s eyebrow again.

‘Come on then,’ said Jane.

It had taken Bloch a few days to look through the last twenty death penalty cases prosecuted by Korn. Maybe two of them would have been taken as capital-murder cases by other district attorneys, but Korn had prosecuted them all to the fullest extent the law allowed, seeking the death penalty each time. Of those twenty, ten of the defendants were evidently guilty. Not that they deserved to die, thought Bloch, but they wouldn’t gain a lot of public sympathy if she managed to find wrongdoing on the part of Korn. Of the other ten cases, nine were young men who were either intellectually or psychologically challenged. They had workable defenses, but nothing that caught Bloch’s attention.