Reasonable Doubts by Gianrico Carofiglio

Author:Gianrico Carofiglio [Carofiglio, Gianrico]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Suspense
ISBN: 9781904738244
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2007-08-14T22:00:00+00:00

23

I didn’t have to be in court the next day. I sent Maria Teresa to the courthouse to get some things sorted out at the clerk of the court’s office. Not that any of them were urgent, but I needed to be alone.

I had a few things to think over. Quite a few things.

In the first place, I felt like a shit for what had happened last night. It wasn’t that I’d been taken by surprise, or that I hadn’t had a pretty good idea what might happen. If I’d had a modicum of moral sense, I told myself, I wouldn’t have taken Natsu home with me.

I wondered what I would have said if someone had told me a story like that and asked me what I thought. I mean: what I thought about a lawyer who fucked the wife of one of his clients while that client was in prison.

I would have said that lawyer was a piece of shit.

Part of me was looking for excuses for what had happened, and even finding a few. But overall, my inner prosecutor was winning this case hands down. He was so far out in front that I felt like asking him where the hell he’d been last night when I needed him.

I remembered an after-dinner conversation with some colleagues, some years earlier. We’d had a lot to eat and drink. Some of us were little more than boys, others older, people we’d trained with.

I don’t know who told the story. It was a true story, he said, which had happened a few years earlier.

There was this guy in prison, accused of murder. An almost hopeless case. He needed a lawyer. A very good one, considering the situation he was in.

But he didn’t have the money to pay for a good one. In fact he didn’t even have money to pay for a bad one. What he did have was a beautiful wife. One evening she went to see an old, famous and very good lawyer, who was also a notorious womanizer. She told him she wanted him to defend her husband but didn’t have the money to pay him. So she suggested payment in kind. He accepted, fucked her - repeatedly, in the office and outside - defended the guy and managed to get him acquitted.

End of story, start of discussion.

“What would you have done?”

Various answers. There were some who thought it hadn’t been very good form to do it in the office. Good manners mattered, damn it, whatever the situation. It would have been better to go to a hotel or somewhere else. Others, though, considered that fucking her on the desk was consistent with the nature of the contract they’d entered into. A few timidly expressed ethical qualms, and were howled down.

The young Guerrieri said he would have defended the prisoner for free, without payment in kind, and someone told him he was an idiot and would sing a different tune if something like that ever happened.

Whoever said that was right.

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