Face of Murder

“I have been busy lately.” It was only partly true. Yes, Zoe had been busy with caseloads, paperwork, court cases. But she was always busy with those things. She had been busy when she was talking to him on the dating site in the first place. It was her own personal doubt that had led her to avoid his messages.

“I know the feeling.” John smiled briefly. His lips curved higher on the right than on the left. Oh, yes, that was right: he was a lawyer. “Anything you can talk about? I know these cases are often pretty hush-hush before they get to court.”

Zoe inclined her head, grateful for the out. “Sadly, they are all awaiting trial.” It wasn’t quite true. Her and Shelley’s last big case, the Golden Ratio killer, had been dead even before they prevented his final crime. There was never going to be any trial for him. They had proven beyond a doubt that he was guilty, and that was enough.

But Zoe didn’t want to talk about that. Not now, when she had something bigger on her mind. Besides, it was done and buried. There wasn’t a lot of point in retracing the past.

She sipped her martini, feeling the unfamiliar burn of alcohol down her throat. She saw the size in inches of the olive before she closed her eyes briefly, to shut it out, and put the offending object in her mouth. No numbers tonight, please, she thought. If only she could turn them off. Stop them from flashing up everywhere she looked.

When she opened her eyes again, John was looking at her with an odd expression. “Bad day?” he asked.

Ah. That expression was sympathy. “Difficult case,” Zoe said, and shrugged. “I do not want to talk about it.”

John paused, then nodded. His hair, a light brown cropped short, gleamed with the sheen of good conditioning in the light as his head moved. “All right. Well, this will cheer you up. A funny story about a client of mine. So, we were there in the courtroom, waiting for the judge, and everyone started getting restless. This judge, he’s usually punctual. I mean, they all are as a rule.”

Zoe lost herself in John’s story, trying to listen just to his words, look just at his face. If she focused really hard, she could block everything else out. For a brief moment she felt no guilt anymore, before it slipped back in again. A moment’s relief was a start. She fought to get that control back, to exist only in the flow of John’s voice and the slide of the martini down her throat.

“So we’re wondering what the hell is going on. Time passes, another few minutes, and he bursts in. Come to find out some secretary or something had made an error in the courtroom schedule. All the cases got assigned times, but on the judge’s copy of the schedule, it was half an hour later. He was furious—absolutely raving. Not great for the defense, but for us, it was a great start,” John continued.

She wasn’t used to drinking at all, and she had forgotten how it could change her. She could feel it running through her body like a current in her veins, making her feel strange, not herself. That, in itself, was welcome.

“The defense, he’s just a public defender. Not a great court record. The guy has a hundred different files spilling out of his briefcase, stuff for the next eight or ten cases he has to appear in. He’s worked like a dog. Barely has any idea where he is. So the first thing he does is he gets the defendant’s name wrong. Then he calls the judge by the wrong name. I lean over in a quiet moment and I say to him, maybe we’d better ask for adjournment? You know, let him get up to speed a bit better.

“But he’s cocky, arrogant type. I don’t think he wants to have to come back to this client, either. The guy is practically foaming at the mouth, and so is the judge. Soon enough we start hearing evidence and the defendant is shouting out—screaming every few minutes. Refuting things, calling people names. Judge keeps on warning him. I’m looking at the public defender like, come on, buddy. Let’s call it a day, huh? Let me give you a lifeline. But he’s adamant. He wants to press on.

“Next up the defendant suddenly stands up and says this is all bullcrap and he’s not standing for it anymore, and he wants to see a real judge. The judge gets mad—like you’ve never seen mad before. Steam coming out of his ears. And he asks the defendant if he has the receipt—the receipt to say that his purchase on the land went through, you see. Proof that he paid it out of his bank account or that my client ever received it, anything to show he had ownership. And the guy stands there and splutters and says no, he didn’t bring it.

“And so the judge ended up throwing the case out. Can you believe that?”

Zoe laughed at the appropriate moment, not because it was what normal people did but because the story had actually been funny. “I cannot believe that the public defender did not follow your advice. He must have been some idiot, after all that.”