The King of Torts by John Grisham

disliked her parents so much that everything they did irked him. That was his problem, wasn’t it? They had the right tobe worried about their daughter’s future mate, the father of their grandchildren.
    And, Clay grudgingly admitted, who wouldn’t be worried about him as a son-in-law?
    “I’d like to go,” she said.
    “Sure.”
    He followed her out of the club and watched her from the rear, almost suggesting that he had time to run by her apartment for a quick session. But her mood said no, and, given the tone of the evening, she would thoroughly enjoy a flat rejection. Then he would feel like a fool who couldn’t control himself, which was exactly what he was at these times. So he dug deep, clenched his jaws together, and let the moment pass.
    As he helped her into her BMW, she whispered, “Why don’t you stop by for a few minutes?”
    Clay sprinted to his car.

    C HAPTER 6   
    He felt somewhat safer with Rodney, plus 9 A.M. was too early for the dangerous types on Lamont Street. They were still sleeping off whatever poison they had consumed the night before. The merchants were slowly coming to life. Clay parked near the alley.
    Rodney was a career paralegal with OPD. He’d been enrolled in night law school off and on for a decade and still talked of one day getting his degree and passing the bar. But with four teenagers at home both money and time were scarce. Because he came from the streets of D.C. he knew them well. Part of his daily routine was a request from an OPD lawyer, usually one who was white and frightened and not very experienced, to accompany him or her into the war zones to investigate some heinous crime. He was a paralegal, not an investigator, and he declined as often as he said yes.
    But he never said no to Clay. The two had workedclosely together on many cases. They found the spot in the alley where Ramón had fallen and inspected the surrounding area carefully, with full knowledge that the police had already combed the place several times. They shot a roll of film, then went looking for witnesses.
    There were none, and this was not surprising. By the time Clay and Rodney had been on the scene for fifteen minutes, word had spread. Strangers were on-site, prying into the latest killing, so lock the doors and say nothing. The liquor store–milk crate witnesses, both men who spent many hours every day in the same spot sipping cheap wine and missing nothing, were long gone and no one had ever known them. The merchants seemed surprised that there had been a shooting at all. “Around here?” one asked, as if crime had yet to reach his ghetto.
    After an hour, they left and headed for D Camp. As Clay drove, Rodney sipped cold coffee from a tall paper cup. Bad coffee, from the look on his face. “Jermaine got a similar case a few days ago,” he said. “Kid in rehab, locked down for a few months, got out somehow, don’t know if he escaped or was released, but within twenty-four hours he’d picked up a gun and shot two people, one died.”
    “At random?”
    “What’s random around here? Two guys in cars with no insurance have a fender bender and they start shooting at each other. Is that random, or is it justified?”
    “Was it drugs, robbery, self-defense?”
    “Random, I think.”
    “Where was the rehab place?” Clay asked.
    “It wasn’t D Camp. Some joint near Howard, I think. I haven’t seen the file. You know how slow Jermaine is.”
    “So you’re not working the file?”
    “No. Heard it through the grapevine.”
    Rodney controlled the grapevine rumors and gossip and knew more about OPD lawyers and their caseloads than Glenda, the Director. As they turned on W Street, Clay said, “You been to D Camp before?”
    “Once or twice. It’s for the hard cases, the last stop before the cemetery. Tough place, run by tough guys.”
    “You know a gentleman by the name of Talmadge X?”
    “No.”
    There was no sidewalk circus to wade through. Clay parked in front of the