The Professor by Robert Bailey

every time he looked at it. Along with “You’re a hothead, Drake. A liability in the courtroom.” Rick glared at the gray eyes of the Professor, which seemed to mock him from inside the frame.
    Rick shook his head and tried to think about the day ahead, which, as usual, was not that busy. The workers’ comp walk-through was at 11:00 a.m. in front of Judge Baird. Rick’s client was Myra Wilson, who had fallen off a forklift at the Mercedes plant in Vance and broken her hip. She was set to arrive at 10:30 to review the settlement documents.
    Rick retrieved the Wilson file from his desk and walked back into the reception area, where he paced and read, wanting to make sure that everything was right. Every so often he looked at Frankie’s desk, expecting her to be there, but then reminded himself that she was off today. A forty-two-year-old mother of two whose husband, Butch, was a self-employed bricklayer, Frankie had worked out all right. She typed eighty-five words a minute, was usually in a cheerful mood, and worked steady hours without many complaints. Other than today, the only time she had taken off since being hired was the Friday before Labor Day when Butch had taken her and the kids to Panama City for a long weekend.
    As he noticed a mistake in the Wilson papers, a paragraph inserted on page 2 closing future medical benefits —The bastards always try that trick— Rick was jarred by the sound he craved more than any other. The most wonderful sound in the world. The all-powerful phone. Ringing. In his office. And it wasn’t even 9:00 a.m. Be a client and not Powell ,he thought as he answered on the second ring, knowing that this could be the one. The one he knocked over the fence, turning Richard Drake into a household name.
    “Richard Drake,” Rick said in his most lawyerly voice.
    “Dude, you’ll never guess where I am.” Powell. Son of a bitch , Rick thought, smiling in spite of himself as the elusive chase of the home run was put on hold until the next call. The life of the plaintiff’s lawyer.

12
     
    Tom watched his team from the jury box in the trial advocacy room—or, as his teams liked to call it, the “war room.” He focused in particular on their eyes. Were they listening to the opposition’s words, or were they trying to remember what they were going to say when they got up there? Tom taught the former, but from the look in their eyes he could tell they were doing the latter. This team will be lucky to make it through regionals.
    At the bench sat Judge Art Hancock—venerable old Judge Cock as he was known by most of the Birmingham bar. Judge Hancock had been a judge since the midsixties. His rulings were always quick, precise, and usually right on point. He put up with no grandstanding by lawyers and each year routinely called at least one young lawyer down on the carpet for “acting a fool” in his courtroom. As a young lawyer, Tom had tried his very first case in front of Judge Hancock, and Tom felt that he had earned the judge’s respect for knowing the basics and not going overboard with theatrics in front of the jury like so many inexperienced lawyers tended to do.
    Now seventy-seven years old and showing it, Judge Hancock sat at the bench stroking one of his thick, bushy eyebrows. Tom and the judge had struck an agreement back in the early eighties where Judge Hancock agreed to come to Tuscaloosa and preside over a mock trial between Tom’s A and B teams one day each year. It was great experience for the team, exposing them to a real judge whom they would see again in the future.
    However, that wasn’t the team’s only treat today.
    Sitting next to Tom in the jury box was without question the most dominant trial lawyer in the state of Alabama. Jameson Randall Tyler. “The Big Cat”as the Birmingham trial bar referred to him with both admiration and fear.
    “They’ll come around,” Jameson whispered, nudging Tom’s elbow and seeming to sense his mood. “There’s a lot of