The Hearing

'For a moment there, I had this awful feeling that you were going to tell me I looked lovely too.'

She laughed. 'Actually…'

He wagged a finger. 'I don't think we want to go there. Come, sit down, coffee's hot.'

He poured for her, then for himself. When they were settled, Freeman took his first sip, nodded approvingly, and put down his spoon. 'All right,' he said, 'if you still want to talk about it, I suppose I'm as ready as I'll ever be.' The previous night during their dinner, in one of their law discussions, Gina was talking about one of her cases, and suddenly – atypically – Freeman had stopped her, saying he'd prefer not to ruin such a fine evening by talking about Dash Logan.

Now he made a face. 'This is the second time he's come up in the past two weeks. Or maybe I should say crawled out from under his rock or wherever it is that he lives. I'm taking this as a bad sign for our profession.' He sighed. 'So what's the case again? Last night my mind was on other things.'

She smiled at the compliment, then briefly sketched in to the point where he'd stopped her last night on the Oberlin proceeding. The District Attorney was bringing criminal charges against Gina's client, Abby, who had taken care of her mother for the past several years, and who had inherited the vast percentage of an eight million dollar estate. It was obvious, Gina said, that Jim the no-good brother was behind the charges, and simply was extorting his sister for a portion of the take.

Freeman listened, chewing absent-mindedly on a crust of baguette. 'So let me get this straight – the DA is filing charges. What are they alleging?'

'I gather elder abuse all the way to manslaughter. They haven't filed them yet.'

This brought a frown. 'Why not, if they've built the case?'

'I don't know for sure. I think Gabe Torrey might just be dragging his feet.' Her tone conveyed some skepticism. 'He said he didn't want to try this case, although elderly abuse is high on Pratt's agenda. Apparently he didn't like Jim, the brother.'

Freeman nodded impatiently. He'd heard the name once and of course didn't need to be reminded. 'So what's like got to do with it? Your client committed a crime, or she didn't.'

'She didn't, David.'

He held up his bread hand. 'I'm not saying she did, Gina. I'm saying that's got to be Torrey's position.'

But she was shaking her head. 'And evidently it will be. He will green light the investigation and get to the charges pretty soon, but he wanted to give me a chance to settle, maybe save Abby some grief.'

Freeman had stopped chewing, stopped all movement. His eyes bored into emptiness somewhere between himself and Gina. 'My Lord,' he said.

'What?'

He answered her with another question. 'And if memory serves, this humanitarian brother Jim is our connection to Dash Logan?'

'He's his lawyer.'

A nod. 'Right, and already on board, n'est-ce pas? You see anything wrong with this picture, Gina?'

She stalled, sipping some coffee, finally shook her head. 'To this point, not really.' She leaned forward. 'Except it felt funny somehow. It's why I brought it up to you.'

'I'll tell you why it felt funny. Because the DA doesn't do that.'

But she didn't agree. 'I think Gabe did it on his own. My take was that Gabe was trying to do the right thing off the record.'

'The right thing?'

'It does happen.'

'Not as often as you think, Gina. Not as often as you think.'

'Well, maybe this time, though.'

But he kept at it. 'And this right thing, this time, would be to make your client give away a million of her dollars?'

'That wasn't exactly the spin he put on it. He was talking about saving her half a million, a couple of years of hassle, and a lot of trouble.'

'And he just happened to find this particular case out of the blue, out of the hundreds the DA is prosecuting? And felt sorry for your client, whom his office is about to charge?'

Gina fidgeted with the crumbs on her plate. 'Maybe that's why it made me uncomfortable.'

'Because you have good instincts, that's why.' Freeman stood up, walked over to the window, looked down onto the street. 'So the next step is Gabe tells you to call this guy's lawyer, is that it?'

'Essentially.' She saw his reaction. 'What? That seemed to make sense. It still does.'

'How's that?'

'I'm a lawyer. I'm not going to talk to the brother. I'm going to go through channels, through his counsel.'

'How do you know he has one? How does Torrey know he has one?'

'He's talked to the guy, remember? That's how. He probably mentioned it.'

Freeman had paced back to the stove. He leaned back against it, arms crossed. 'OK, ask yourself this. A guy thinks a crime has been committed, he goes to the police, right? Right. Then the crime gets charged, and he's working exclusively with the DA's office, with the prosecutors. Are you with me here?'

Catching on, Gina nodded. 'He's already got an office-full of lawyers working for him, who also happen to work for the DA.'

'Exactly,' Freeman said. 'The DA's office. So what does he need his own lawyer for? I mean, handling the same case. He's not a defendant so he doesn't need a defense attorney. Hell, he's not even a plaintiff in a civil case. He's just a guy reporting a crime. He goes to the DA. He doesn't need his own attorney.'

'Well.' The light was coming on, but Gina still couldn't quite see. 'People have lawyers, David. Abby – my client – she told me they'd been fighting over the will.'

'She and her brother, or you and her brother's lawyer?'

'Well, no. The first.'

'But now dear old Jim's got a lawyer who's ready to settle.' Freeman had switched into his justly-famous flamboyant courtroom mode. He took a couple of steps forward, toward the table. His voice took on a note of urgency. 'And then Torrey says old Jim will withdraw the accusation he made. Torrey tells you he knows this. He holds it out to you as pretty much guaranteed, a done deal. Well, answer me this: how can he possibly know that unless he's talked to Jim's lawyer, who – I might add – shouldn't even be in the picture around these criminal charges? And who happens to be the most unsavory person practicing law in the great state of California?'

Freeman grabbed his breakfast napkin and wiped it across his forehead, leaving a couple of damp crumbs in its wake. Then he sat down with a satisfied expression, returned to his normal voice, spoke as though to himself. 'God, I wish just once he'd try something like this on me.' He looked across the table. 'Do me one favor, please?'

'Of course, if I can. What?'

'Don't settle. Don't talk to Logan. See what Torrey does next.'

She thought about this for a long moment. 'But what if he files the charges? He's holding all the cards here, David. If the investigation even begins, my client loses.'

'Did she do what they're alleging? Did she commit this crime?'

'No.'

He leaned back in his chair, pulled at his bushy eyebrows, scratched the corner of his mouth. 'Well, people hate me for saying this…'

'I won't hate you.'

He touched her hand. 'If I were you, what I'd do is trust in the wisdom and fairness of the law.'

She studied his face, saw he was completely sincere. 'A person could get to like you a lot,' she said. Then, a cloud crossing her visage, 'About settling… I'll try to hold out.'

Just after eight in the morning, she stopped him as he was crossing the lobby on his way to the staircase and his own office. 'Mr Hardy.'

He stopped on a dime, turned ninety degrees to his left, marched across to her station and looked her in the eyes. 'Phyllis, my love. How are we this fine morning?'

'Very well, thank you. If you're free, Mr Freeman would like to see you in his office right away.'

'Well, that makes this both of our lucky days. I wanted to see him, too, but I didn't know if you'd let me.'