A Fool for a Client by Parnell Hall

Author:Parnell Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

30

“I yelled at Thurman.”

Alice stared at me. “Are you kidding?”

“I couldn’t help it. He had it coming.”

“What did he do?”

“He tried to throw me into a car engine. Without opening the hood.”

“What?”

“He almost did it too. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Apparently, it has to do with the amount of thrust.”

“So you yelled at him?”

“What’d you expect me to do, congratulate him?”

“You yell at Thurman, he’ll beat you up.”

“He was beating me up. So I yelled.”

“What did you say?”

“I said he was blowing the case.”

“Great.”

“I also called him an asshole and told him to go fuck himself.”

“Though not in those words.”

“In exactly those words.”

“Stanley.”

“I was on a roll.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I gave Alice a rundown of the situation, without dwelling on the attributes of juror twelve.

“You were questioning juror four?”

“Everyone seemed to want me to. Well, except Thurman. At least at the time. What he wants now is open to interpretation.”

“So you didn’t get anything.”

Kill me now.

I thought I had done fairly well. As usual, Alice’s assessment of the situation brought me back to Earth.

“I got a lot of leads, a lot of negatives. I got Thurman to lay off and let me do my thing. You want to call that nothing, I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

Alice smiled. “Don’t take offense. Most detective work is unproductive. You stake out all day long and nothing happens. No one blames you for it.”

You could have fooled me. Alice has a way of implying blame with just an inflection. She would tell you that’s just how I hear it, but that’s how I hear it.

“So, what do you do now?” Alice said, cutting through the bullshit and getting to the gist of the situation.

“I go back to court, try to repair the damage Thurman did, see if I can mend the fence with juror four.”

“That seems like a fruitless endeavor.”

“You just said most detective work doesn’t pay off.”

“That doesn’t mean you keep doing it.”

“And it’s not like I got nothing. Jeannie was abnormally interested in the jurors. I’m trying to find out who and why.”

“How’s it going?”

Is the desire to strangle your wife a universal impulse? I choked down my indignant response, said as calmly as possible, “What would you suggest I do?”

“Get help.”

“What?”

“You’re obviously not equipped to handle the situation. Richard’s in trouble, serious trouble, you’re counting on yourself to get him out. Nothing is working, and for all the good relationship–bad relationship you’re having with Sergeant Thurman, the bottom line is he thinks Richard did it. And if you talked to him, you’d find out so does the ADA.”

“How do you know that?”

“Can you imagine Sergeant Thurman having a theory contradicting the ADA? His head would explode. This crap with the jurors is all well and good, but it doesn’t look very promising. Why’d you wash out juror twelve?”

“She didn’t know Jeannie.”

“Who told you that?”

“She did.”

“And you believed her? Tell me, does she have big tits?”

“Alice.”

“She’s wearing something low-cut, and she leans over earnestly to tell you she didn’t know her? Well, that settles it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.