Page 26 of Witness 8

I shook hands and he flashed me a smile from a toothpaste commercial.

‘And you?’ I said, to the young lady beside him.

‘Veronica Colville-North,’ she said. ‘Junior associate.’

‘Eric Fong,’ said another one.

‘Porsche Bloomingdale . . .’

‘Harrison Washington the Third . . .’

I stopped faking interest when I got to Harrison Washington III. They were all rich kids. Harvard Law grads. Top of the class. The very best young legal minds in the entire country.

Which made them completely useless to me and our client.

Nobody knows less about winning a murder trial than a young, highly educated lawyer. They may as well have majored in plumbing. The trouble is some of them think they know everything and the rest just think they know something – which might be even worse.

Still, at least I had an idea on how to blow up Castro’s press conference.

‘Al, I need to borrow these fine associates of yours,’ I said.

‘Be my guest. They’ve already prepared motions on discovery and have provided briefs on all the relevant case law. Was there something specific you had in mind?’

‘Sure, I need them to go home and change.’

Parish looked at me strangely. I turned to the assembled associates, said, ‘I need you all to go home and change your clothes. Wear baggy, ripped jeans. Sweatpants. T-shirts. Beanie hats. Whatever is the worst clothing you have in your wardrobe. Put it on and meet me in Foley Square in an hour.’

I turned back to Parish.

‘Al, I assume John has paid you a retainer. I need some of it. For legal expenses.’

‘Expenses?’ asked Parish.

‘Sure, expenses. Murder trials cost money. I need twenty-five grand in cash.’

‘What on earth for?’ asked Al.

Jackson looked puzzled too.

‘John, my colleague Kate is going to talk you through the trial. Trust her. Trust me. The money you gave to Al’s firm is for your defense. I need twenty-five thousand for part of that defense.’

‘What part?’ asked John.

‘The part that’s going to keep your face off the six o’clock news.’

9

Kate

For some lawyers, there are no bad cases. There are only bad clients.

Kate didn’t feel that way.

Most of her practice was concerned with carving large, bloody and expensive pounds of flesh from the torsos of men who as CEOs, executives and directors, decided to use their power to harass and manipulate their female junior members of staff into bed. Or worse. And she was very good at it. In the short time she’d been Eddie’s partner, Kate had gutted eighteen companies – resulting in five directors fired, seven resigned and three senior executives demoted. She even did such a good job on annihilating one particularly nasty director that his wife instructed Kate to handle her divorce the week after the asshole got canned.

Kate was great at those cases because she didn’t need to work to understand her clients. There was no leap of imaginative empathy required. Kate had been one of those women. Leered at. Pawed at. Marginalized. Ridiculed. Powerless. In her old firm, as a junior associate, she was at the bottom rung. Who could she complain to? Who would fight for her? It took Kate time to realize she had to fight for herself. She got out of that firm almost two years ago. Now she was the person women would come to. She’d become the person she wished had existed when she was getting asked about her stockings, whereshe bought her underwear, whether she found her supervising partner attractive and the unspoken promise that if she slept with certain people that her career would take off.

Well, she took off alright. With a shitload of their money and a criminal conviction against the partner who had viciously harassed her.