CHAPTER 15

On little sleep, I’m at the office early the next morning, my head heavy, vision blurry, the lids of my eyes already threatening to close up shop and call it a day. But we received Luke Maddox’s motion to have me taken off the case yesterday, so I’m at my desk with the papers in front of me, sucking down my second Red Bull.

I swivel my chair, pull up a WordPerfect document on my desktop, and fill in the caption for State versus Simms. Ten minutes later my fingers are hovering impotently over the wireless keyboard, my face washed in the glow of the kaleidoscopic screensaver, while I stare down yet another silver-blue can of energy drink.

“Hell with it,” I say, reaching for the phone.

It’s ten after six A.M. here in Honolulu, which means it’s just after noon in New York. Not that time matters much to the legendary Milt Cashman.

Milt’s always working, even when he’s not.

“Speak,” Milt barks when he answers his cell.

“Hey Milt, it’s Kevin.” I still feel a pang of loss when I phone my former mentor, even though on a personal level we were never particularly close.

“What gives?” Milt says. “I’m seeing your mug all over the news again. You representing that hot piece of trim that burned down that hotel in Hawaii?”

“Allegedly.”

“What do you need?”

One thing I love about Milt Cashman, there’s never any beating around the bush. No pretext. Friend or adversary, you need a favor you just come right out and ask and he’ll respect you for it. Fuck the niceties, the quid pro quo, the tit for tat. Lawyers help lawyers whenever they can, and whoever doesn’t want to play ball, well, fuck ’em. A lawyer refuses to extend Milt Cashman a professional courtesy and Milt will remember that slight forever. Because Milt will face that lawyer in another case sooner or later. And then he’ll break the son of a bitch in open court.

“This prosecutor, some L.A. pretty boy, wants me off the case.”

“Why?” Milt teases. “’Cause you’re so fucking good?”

“That’s my bet. Anyway, he filed a motion to have me removed on the grounds of conflict of interest.”

“Sounds like what happened to me,” he says, “on the Brandon Glenn case.”

A lump forms in my throat, as I’m transported back to the day Milt asked me to take on the People versus Brandon Glenn matter. “It’s a big fish,” he’d said. “Sure you can handle it?” I had grinned like a schoolboy about to get his first hand job and nodded. He handed me the file and said, “Then go have some fun. And be sure to smile for the cameras.”

Were it not for the Brandon Glenn case, were it not for his conviction, for his subsequent rape and murder on Rikers Island only days before he was vindicated, I’d still be in Manhattan sharing office space with my mentor Milt Cashman. Or, as the media refers to him, Not-Guilty Milty.

“It’s a little different,” I tell him. “The prosecutor says he intends to call me as a material witness. I was there at the resort on the night of the fire.”

Milt chuckles. “Thought you said the prosecutors were human out there in Shangri-la.”

“More human, I told you. This one’s different. He plans on making a name for himself on this case.”

“Hold on a sec, Kev.” Milt hollers out to his secretary. “Candi, pull up the Sigler file, case where the DA tried to have me removed based on conflict and we buried him.” He pauses, mumbles something to himself. “Better yet, Candi, fuck the Sigler file. Grab me People versus Tagliarini, 1998. The whole file.”

“Tagliarini?” I say. A mob case in which our client was tried for murder and racketeering under the federal RICO statutes.

“Remember, Kev? When you first came on board, the fucking guinnea prosecutor tried to accuse me, a harmless Jew, of being a member of the mob. Said I was too close to Vito Tagliarini to try the case, had relevant information, blah, blah, blah. Same shit they pulled on Bruce Cutler in the John Gotti case.”

It all comes rushing back. My first year of law school, my first days with the Cashman Law Firm in New York. I arrived after the motion had already been decided, but I remember leafing through the papers with a smile.

“Use this, Kev, and you’ll toss the fucker on his head. Before we’re done, they’ll pull the bastard’s law license. Let him open a tiki bar on the beach or some such shit. Better yet, send him the hell back to L.A.”

The great thing about practicing law is that everything’s already been done. Every argument’s been made, every issue decided. You just have to find out where and when and by whom. Then you make the connections, no matter how tenuous, to cases within your own jurisdiction. You caution the judge that a ruling contrary to your position will result in her ruling being overturned. You persuade the Court not so much with your own tongue, but with the words of great lawyers and jurists past. That’s where a connection the likes of Milt Cashman really comes in handy.

“Listen, Kev,” Milt says now. “Bottom line: You convince the judge you cannot, under any circumstances whatsoever, be called as a witness in this case.”

“And how do I do that?”

“Easy,” he says. “You demonstrate that you don’t satisfy one of the basic criteria for serving as a witness.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re fucking incompetent.”

*   *   *

Red Bull pumping through my veins, I jump out of my chair and head down the hall to wait for the fax from Milt Cashman’s secretary, Candi.

“Another rough night?” I say when I see Jake heading up the hallway. He looks like hell and smells like the men’s room at the Bleu Sharq ten minutes after a cruise ship full of twentysomethings pulls out of port.

“Think I got the swine flu,” he says.

I keep walking. With three cans of Red Bull jolting my brain, it’s no time to get pulled into a verbal headlock by Jake. “How many bottles of Jack Daniels does it take to get you infected?” I mutter under my breath as we pass each other.

Jake grabs my left arm and spins me around. Suddenly I see what thousands of people must have seen in Houston bars and courthouses over his decades-long career: the anger, the hatred, the pushing away of life’s defeats. Mad at the world and unafraid to show it.

“Listen, Kevin,” he growls, “I made my first court appearance before you could take a piss standing up. I won my first acquittal in a capital case, saved an innocent man’s life, before you saw the inside of a schoolroom. So don’t you presume to tell me how to spend my days or my nights.”

“Easy, cowboy,” I say, my palms out in case he makes a move. I figure the situation with his girlfriend Alison Kelly has come to a head. “I just—”

“You just what?” Suddenly he’s in my face, the odor of stale coffee so pungent I have to breathe through the mouth. “If you think I’m bringing this practice down, then draw up the dissolution papers. We’ll go our separate ways. ’Cause if I hear you mumble something under your breath again, you and I are going to go round and round. And I don’t care if you kick the hell out of me, ’cause life’s been kicking the hell out of me for near sixty years, and I’m still fucking standing.”

I stand still and silent, even lower my eyes to let him have his ground. “Is this about Erin Simms and the bail assignment?” I say quietly.

Jake turns without another word, pivots, and disappears into his office. He slams the door, knocking from the hallway wall my own twelve-hundred-dollar oil painting by that artist I slept with whose name I still can’t quite remember. Lilly something? The bottom of the large frame hits the floor and the painting falls forward, landing at my feet.

Mandy? I turn and resume course to the fax machine. Come to think of it, the artist’s signature must be on the front of the artwork. I’ll have to take a look once Hoshi comes by to hang the painting back up.