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Vengeance, A Legal Thriller

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PROLOGUE

Monday, January 8, 2018, Georgetown, District of Columbia

Someone was trying to kill her. But Charlotte Estes had no idea who. Or why.

For months there had been footsteps behind her in the Metro at night. Yet when she’d glanced back, no one had been there. When the footsteps had stopped, there had been the car that had almost run her down in the crosswalk in front of her office at lunchtime. The witnesses had all said it looked deliberate. Detective Merrill of the D.C. police had warned her to be careful.

It was freezing outside when she closed the door of her townhouse on O Street at four o’clock, ready to do her favorite neighborhood run for the last time. The ink had been dry on the merger agreement with Goldstein, Miller for months. The Estes Law Firm’s offices on K Street had long been emptied, and the firm’s sixty-five attorneys had been disbursed throughout Goldstein, Miller’s web of national and international offices. She, alone, had remained behind to oversee the final arrangements for the end of the criminal defense firm that she and Matt had built together. Now The Estes Firm and Matt were dead, and the bits and pieces of her life with her husband were boxed and ready for the moving van in the morning. She was headed back to San Diego where she had been born.

She began to run slowly to warm up, but also so that she could savor the quaint, European atmosphere of her neighborhood for the last time. When she reached M Street, she passed the red brick townhouse, sandwiched between the antique store and the Thai takeout joint, where she and Matt had started their firm in 1985. Her eyes misted over as she pictured her husband as he’d been in those days. Dark hair, gentle gray eyes. A trim five feet, eight, with a ready smile, a generous disposition, and a keen intelligence. She had never imagined her life without him. Yet here she was, running from their shared past, looking for the comfort of oblivion a continent away.

When she reached Wisconsin, she turned left and headed for the path along the C & O Canal. The late afternoon light was thinning, and she knew for security reasons she shouldn’t go far because sunset was imminent. But she wanted to say goodby to one of her favorite places, a place where she and Matt had often run together in the days when she’d never imagined anyone or anything coming between them.

She increased her pace when she reached the canal path. Her father, the track coach, had taught her how to maximize her endurance. Obviously she hadn’t the speed or the mileage she’d had at UCLA all those years ago when her track scholarship had paid for her undergraduate degree. But if her father were still alive, he’d have been proud of the distance she still covered every week at age fifty-eight.

Overhead, the trees were bare and brown. It was hard to believe that in twenty-four hours she’d be in the lush, eternal sunshine of Southern California. She had mixed feelings about leaving her home of more than thirty years. But Matt had been gone since mid-November, and she wasn’t making any progress with moving on with her life. Every street corner, every restaurant, every nook and cranny of their house on O Street was full of memories that haunted and tormented her because she could not understand why Matt, the one person she had trusted without question for over thirty years, had died in another woman’s bed.

There had been no sign that anything was amiss in their marriage, she thought as she ran. Or had she been too quick to overlook the nights he’d stayed late at the office in the months leading up to his death?

The sunlight was dissipating rapidly. The D.C. detectives had warned her about what she was doing at that very minute. Another reason to leave town. Surely whichever disgruntled, but unidentified client, had tried to run her down on K Street in early December wouldn’t bother to follow her all the way to San Diego. Today was her anonymous assassin’s last chance. Death threats came with the territory of criminal defense work. But actual attempts were rare. Charlotte turned back toward home, suddenly aware that she’d pushed the envelope farther than she’d intended. She quickened her pace yet again. And then she heard the crack of the rifle shot coming from the trees behind her.

Coming soon! For more information, check out https://deborahhawkinsfiction.com

Why A Good Lawyer is Like A Car Mechanic Or WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

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Back in the day when newspapers arrived on the doorstep in the morning instead of on iPads, Nooks, and Kindles, people had careers as newspaper columnists. Anne Landers, who died recently, was one. Erma Bombeck was another. Depending on whether the column was published daily or weekly, the writer labored on a regular basis to produce copy audiences wanted to read.
Now I fully understood that a serious blogger has the same responsibility when I opened my little word shop on WordPress some months ago. I figured the Christmas holidays would be my temptation to backslide. Wrong. I sailed through Christmas with flying blogger colors.
No, it was January that derailed my weekly posts, and work that snuck up on me on little cat feet like the fog in Carl Sandburg’s poem. My job involves three things: reading, writing, and staying sane reading about crime for a living. I am the appellate version of the public defender, and I tell the stories of guilty people who have made some pretty bad mistakes. I tell their stores to the mid-level courts of appeal here in California and to the California Supreme Court and write lots of legal reasons why they should get new trials. (That doesn’t happen, much, as you’ve guessed.) You lose in the trial, court I’m your next step in the food chain.
How do you represent guilty people, most people gasp at this point. It’s not hard. Here’s why: a good lawyer is like a car mechanic. Think about it. Your mechanic does not get emotionally upset when you and the tow truck arrive at his shop. (Well, truth to tell, they do get kind of emotional about MiniCoopers, but that’s another story and an exception to the rule. Every lawyer knows there is an exception to every rule and probably more than one. But that’s another story, too.)
Your friendly car mechanic does not give you a lecture or cite scripture or otherwise have an opinion about fault and broken machinery as your car exits the tow truck. No, the mechanic looks at the problem, gives you an estimate, and goes about the job of fixing what he can.
His blood pressure never rises.
And that’s what I do. I read what happened at the trial and write the story for the court according to a prescribed set of legal rules. I do not judge. That is not my job. The jury judges. I just write.
The other way to look at what I do is to consider baseball. I’m the pitcher. My job is to throw the balls across the plate. The umpire (the court of appeal) calls the balls and strikes and says when the batter is out.
Anyway, although I am paid by the state, I am a subcontractor, which means I am self-employed. I had no background in self-employment until I began this job. My father was a government employee, and I had always had salaried jobs, too. The downside to salaried work is you work according to hours your boss sets, on projects your boss dictates, and according to rules your boss makes. In exchange for giving up these freedoms, you get a paycheck at promised intervals from your boss. But self-employed people only get paychecks when they have completed the work they have contracted to do. Sometimes that means a lot of paychecks, and sometimes it means not so much. Work flow is uneven. The perks are you have more control over your time and the projects you agree to do. You set your own hours and work in you jammies if you want to. (Me the fashion plate does not often want to. But that’s another story, too.)
There are advantages and disadvantages to both forms of employment, and everyone is different; so it is not a one-size-fits-all world. It took me a long time to learn how to manage my little business, but I’ve done a good job, and I’m very proud of my achievement. I’m rainmaker, CEO, chief partner in the firm of one, accountant, secretary, and gopher.
To my great delight, January rolled around with a bumper crop of good projects for me. Smile! But that meant giving up a lot of my own time to read and get ready to write the briefs that will be due over the next few months. Sigh! So I’ve not forgotten my responsibility as a serious blogger. I’ve just had it temporarily derailed by a sudden influx of work. Instead of blogging at night, I’ve been reading about murder. And not murder as in Agatha Cristie or Inspector Morse.
I’ve missed blogging, but self-employed people must never, never look a gift horse in the mouth. It is very bad luck. Always, always be grateful when you have too much work to do. Beating the bushes looking for work is not fun. This is the first and the greatest law of self-employment.
I suppose I could make up for my lapse by posting in rapid-fire succession all the posts that have been on my mind over the last few weeks. But I kind of dislike being bombarded. I respect my fellow bloggers who, like me, have fallow times. Four posts a week from the same source, as entertaining as they can be, sometimes overwhelm me. I want to take in everyone’s info and express my gratitude, but there’s only so much of me to go around.
Anyway, I am back. I intend to adhere to one a week, and I am grateful for the New Year, for my readers, and for all the pages and pages of murder trials that are hanging around my office waiting to be spun one by one into unbrief briefs. (Only a lawyer would call 25,500 words a “brief”!)
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