Without Prejudice by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Group Limited
Published: 2009-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

2

She had first telephoned Charlie Gehringer, several times, but had not had a reply. She wasn’t surprised; he would have literally dozens of calls each day, most of which went unanswered, or he would never get the job done.

So she’d taken the bull by the horns and gone down to 26th and California. The place was a zoo: there were lawyers and cops and people who looked like defendants, all milling around the hallways, which had a bewildering number of rooms leading off them behind closed doors – offices and of course the courts themselves.

Eventually she’d stopped a lawyer, who told her what floor the public defenders’ offices were on, but she’d found her way there barred by a security guard. She’d told him she had an appointment with Gehringer, and though she wasn’t listed on the duty sheet, he had let her through – she was dressed like a lawyer, after all, not like some former client with a grudge.

‘That was sneaky,’ said Robert, leaning back against the sofa in the living room while Anna commandeered the rocker near the window. Sophie was upstairs, watching a DVD of Anne of Green Gables.

Anna gave him a come off it look and continued the story. She’d found Gehringer in his office, an enclosed cubicle at one end of a large open plan. He was seated at his desk, talking to a middle-aged black woman, perhaps the mother of a client. He was a trim man, and looked more like an insurance salesman than the defender of lost causes she was expecting. He had light, sandy-coloured hair, carefully combed, and was neatly dressed in a suit and tie – ‘Not perhaps a suit our friend Mr Rycroft would choose to wear, but presentable.’ She could see his office was neat as a pin, with a bank of filing cabinets against one wall, and a clean desktop.

She’d found a spare chair and waited, completely ignored in the hustle and bustle of the room – phones kept ringing, people laughed and shouted; it was a scene out of one of those hard-edged TV shows – Homicide or Law and Order. At last the black woman left Gehringer’s cubicle, and then Anna stood up and tapped on his door, just as he started to pick up the phone.

She’d been nervous as she began to speak, unsettled by the man’s clear-eyed gaze. As she’d told him why she was there, her words sounded terribly lame even to herself – explaining that a former client of his was a friend of her husband’s, that he’d recently been released from prison (she didn’t want to say how many years he’d been there, it just made the whole thing sound even more bizarre), and that he was still protesting his innocence. As she’d stumbled her way through this small speech, Gehringer didn’t say a word, but his expression became increasingly sceptical, especially when she said that she had offered to look into the case, just to see if there was any way of reopening it.

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