The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

treadmill, bringing in new cases to keep money flowing and paying for existing cases. Walter Elliot must have been the get-well client. As soon as his hundred thousand cleared, Vincent would have been able to turn the treadmill off and catch his breath — for a while, at least. But he never got the chance.
    “How many clients with payment plans?” I asked.
    Lorna once again referred to the records on her lap.
    “He’s got two on pretrial payments. Both are well behind.”
    “What are the names?”
    It took her a moment to answer as she looked through the records.
    “Uh, Samuels is one and Henson is the other. They’re both about five thousand behind.”
    “And that’s why we take credit cards and don’t put out paper.”
    I was talking about my own business routine. I had long ago stopped providing credit services. I took nonrefundable cash payments. I also took plastic, but not until Lorna had run the card and gotten purchase approval.
    I looked down at the notes I had kept while conducting a quick review of the calendar and the active files. Both Samuels and Henson were on a sub list I had drawn up while reviewing the actives. It was a list of cases I was going to cut loose if I could. This was based on my quick review of the charges and facts of the cases. If there was something I didn’t like about a case — for any reason — then it went on the sub list.
    “No problem,” I said. “We’ll cut ’em loose.”
    Samuels was a manslaughter DUI case and Henson was a felony grand theft and drug possession. Henson momentarily held my interest because Vincent was going to build a defense around the client’s addiction to prescription painkillers. He was going to roll sympathy and deflection defenses into one. He would lay out a case in which the doctor who overprescribed the drugs to Henson was the one most responsible for the consequences of the addiction he created. Patrick Henson, Vincent would argue, was a victim, not a criminal.
    I was intimately familiar with this defense because I had employed it repeatedly over the past two years to try to absolve myself of the many infractions I had committed in my roles as father, ex-husband and friend to people in my life. But I put Henson into what I called the dog pile because I knew at heart the defense didn’t hold up — at least not for me. And I wasn’t ready to go into court with it for him either.
    Lorna nodded and made notes about the two cases on a pad of paper.
    “So what is the score on that?” she asked. “How many cases are you putting in the dog pile?”
    “We came up with thirty-one active cases,” I said. “Of those, I’m thinking only seven look like dogs. So that means we’ve got a lot of cases where there’s no money in the till. I’ll either have to get new money or they’ll go in the dog pile, too.”
    I wasn’t worried about having to go and get money out of the clients. Skill number one in criminal defense is getting the money. I was good at it and Lorna was even better. It was getting paying clients in the first place that was the trick, and we’d just had two dozen of them dropped into our laps.
    “You think the judge is just going to let you drop some of these?” she asked.
    “Nope. But I’ll figure something out on that. Maybe I could claim conflict of interest. The conflict being that I like to be paid for my work and the clients don’t like to pay.”
    No one laughed. No one even cracked a smile. I moved on.
    “Anything else on the money?” I asked.
    Lorna shook her head.
    “That’s about it. When you’re in court, I’m going to call the bank and get that started. You want us both to be signers on the accounts?”
    “Yeah, just like with my accounts.”
    I hadn’t considered the potential difficulty of getting my hands on the money that was in the Vincent accounts. That was what I had Lorna for. She was good on the business end in ways I wasn’t. Some days she was so good I wished we had either never gotten