Lawyer, Lawyer Pt. 01

CHAPTER ONE

"Daddy, Daddy!"

Danny -- Danielle to my mother and the people in the Registry of Births office, but Danny to everybody else -- yelled as she leaped off the last step of the bus and tore across the lawn, home from another day of kindergarten. Molly Benton, also five, had jumped off at almost the same time, nearly knocking Danny to the ground as she ran around the front of the bus and across the road. Danny's older sister Elizabeth, meanwhile, followed the two more sedately, as befit a girl in the fourth grade. Kindergarteners! They were so childish. Anna Benton descended the steps with even more casual indifference, probably looking forward to next year, when she'd be on the junior high and high school bus with her three older siblings.

As I hustled the girls up the long driveway, I looked back over my shoulder and saw the bus pull away. Across the street, Melissa Benton was putting her girls into her idling pickup. I found myself wishing that I too had thought to bring a vehicle down to the end of our driveway. The leaves on the trees along the Brandywine River had just started falling in earnest in our part of Delaware, and this change in the weather was likely to be the last one before winter. The winters had actually gotten a little warmer since we moved here eight years ago, in 2013, but not so much that I ever really looked forward to them.

"So," I asked when my little women were all settled in the living room with their snacks, "what did you do today in school?"

Danny crawled into my lap and launched into a stream-of-consciousness story about what had happened to Jane in the morning, and then what Bobby did to her a little later, and then how Mrs. Williams made Bobby apologize and put him in timeout, and then how she and Kate and Denise did their art class together, and on and on. I was exhausted by the time she was done. I turned to Beth for relief.

"So Tuesday morning's okay, right?" Beth asked.

"Okay for what, sweetie?" I gave her a hesitant smile.

"You said you'd come, daddy." She was starting to tear up. "You said you would."

"Of course I will, Beth," I said, slowly putting together the pieces. All of the kids in Beth's class had been asked to have one parent put in an appearance at some point during the semester for a "career day" kind of thing. This -- reminding me on Friday that it was my turn on Tuesday -- was Beth's idea of advance notice. On Monday, she'd probably tell me we needed to bring cookies. Well, on Monday her mother would be home, and she could bake the cookies.

"I'll be there," I promised. "Nine o'clock on Tuesday morning."

"Why are you going to her school, Daddy?" Danny asked with a pout. "Why not my school?"

I looked over to see Beth rolling her eyes.

"I'll come to your school some time, too, sweetie. Beth's class is having mommies and daddies come in to explain what they do for a living."

"What do you do, Daddy?" Danny asked. "Daddy's a writer," I told her.

"What does Mommy do?" she asked.

We all looked up at the sound of the door opening.

"Aunt Julie!" Danny cried, squirming down off of my lap and running to greet the woman who was closing the door behind her. Setting down her computer case before she was bowled over, Julie bent down and hoisted little Danny in the air for a hug and a kiss. Julie was not really a relative, but she was Danny's godmother. And anyone who knows my family knows that that relationship is one we take very seriously. Particularly since Julie is the only person we know who ever actually goes to church. Beth collected her hug and kiss as well, by which time Danny had returned to my lap with an expectant look.

"So what does Mommy do?" Danny repeated her question.

"Mommy's a lawyer, just like Aunt Julie," I explained.

A look of horror spread over Danny's face as she shifted her gaze from me to Julie and back to me again.

"What's wrong, sweetie?" Julie asked her. Danny looked like she was about to cry.

"Mrs. Stockbridge said that Billy McGoldrick was a horrible little lawyer," she blurted out, "and she put him in timeout for the whole afternoon."

I just stared at my little girl, my mouth twitching.

"Aunt Julie, are you okay?" Beth asked. I looked over to see Julie lying on the floor, desperately trying to suck in air as tears started to run down her face. She waved us off.

"Aunt Julie will be fine," I said. I couldn't resist another quick look at the attractive brunette writhing on the floor in her fancy lawyer suit. Particularly since the fancy lawyer suit was showing an awful lot of her stunningly beautiful legs. No, no, back to my daughters.

"I think that Mrs. Stockbridge meant that Bobby was a liar, honey," I told Danny. "Not a lawyer. It's very unlikely that Bobby McGoldrick has been to lawyer school. Plus your mommy is a very good lawyer. So is your Aunt Julie."

"Not as good as your mommy is, honey," Julie said. "Your mommy is the best trial lawyer on the East Coast, Danny. I'm just a small-town lawyer trying to make a living . . ."

Her voice trailed off and Beth, whose empathy went way beyond any gene contributed by either her mother or her father, walked over and sat down next to her.

"Since Uncle Go-Go died," Beth finished Julie's sentence as she looked into Julie's eyes and reached for her hand. "We miss him, too, Aunt Julie."

"Thanks, dear," Julie hugged Beth to her. It had been almost a year and a half since her husband, Danny's godfather, had died at the obscenely young age of 30 after a two-year battle with cancer. Only in the past few months had Julie's eyes started to look free of the pain that she'd endured for the last four years.

"So are you a good writer, Daddy?" Danny demanded from my lap.

"Pretty good." I returned my attention to her. "I still have to ask Mommy to correct my grammar and proofread my books before I send them off to the publisher."

"You can do that with Spellcheck," my smartass ten-year-old said.

"Some of it," I said. "Mommy finds all of Daddy's typonyms, though.

"What's a typernym?" Danny demanded.

"Typonym," I corrected her. "It's when you type one word, but you mean another word. But they're both words, so Spellcheck doesn't tell you that the word you typed is the wrong one."

"Like what?" Beth was a skeptic about everything - except the omniscient computer in her room.

"Like if you type b -- o -- a -- r -- d when you meant b -- o -- r -- e -- d," I said, keeping my smile to myself. It still wasn't the right time to tell them about the time that their mother had asked, while reviewing my first novel, if I had meant to imply that one of my characters was frigid.

"No," I'd answered, a little annoyed. "I meant to imply only that she was bored with sex. Why?"

"Because you spelled it b -- o -- a -- r -- d," she'd told me. "Board with sex."

She'd managed to read for another page before my laughter proved too much for her and she joined me on the bed in our small New Haven apartment. Nine months later, more or less to the day, Elizabeth entered the world. We still referred to her as our little board game, usually in private but occasionally in front of her. According to the current explanation, we meant that she was lots of fun, but sometimes she was tricky and hard to figure out.

"Your daddy's a wonderful writer." Julie was not about to let my self-deprecation go unchallenged. "Three Edgars and a genius award? 'For reinventing and reinvigorating the comic detective novel?'"

"I want to be a writer, too," Danny said fiercely. "Do you have to go to writer school?"

"Well, not writer school," I said. "But probably you'll have to do well in high school and college."

"And then," Julie teased me, "right before you take your CPA exam, you find you have this novel inside that's exploding to get out. And while your wife is in law school, you write it, and it becomes a bestseller. And then you write three more of them. All about Joe Average."

Her eyes twinkled as my eyebrows shot up.

"You didn't think anybody got that yet, did you?" She chuckled.

"Actually, no," I said. The character of Joseph Anthony Verage had appeared in all of my books, and at least once in each book I took pains to have him sign his name as "Joe A. Verage." But before now nobody had remarked on my private little joke, my little elbow in the side of my fellow mystery writers. It wasn't that I completely disliked detective fiction. My problem was with the novels about the psychiatrist or college professor or, God forbid, lawyer who solves mysteries on the side. Once? Sure. A whole series? Give me a break.

As Julie had pointed out, it was while I was studying for my CPA exam after college that I finally gave vent to this frustration and created Joseph Verage, by day a substitute English teacher, by night a substitute bartender. A man who, despite his best efforts to fill his free time by coaching youth soccer and having his friends arrange memorably disastrous blind dates, finds himself sucked into a murder mystery that he'd just as soon ignore, with clues swirling about him like a tornado. It was a lark, and I was stunned not only when it was published, but when my publisher claimed the public was clamoring for a sequel.

But that, I pointed out, would violate the whole point of the satire in the first place. You didn't see a sequel to "A Modest Proposal," did you? Satire, shmatire, they'd said; look at the sales. Finally they simply offered me an advance so large that I couldn't turn it down. So what had become a satire quickly became a series of farces, with the situations growing more and more outlandish, and the outcomes more and more unlikely. Outlandish and unlikely to the point that I was now working on the first book of a new four-book contract.

And yet, after having read each and every one of those books, and correcting my grammar before they were sent out, even my wife had never divined the significance of Mr. Verage's name. Or had never mentioned it to me if she did. It was entirely possible, I now realized, that she just didn't think it was that funny. Julie was the first that I knew of to "get it," and I happily admitted it.

She smiled triumphantly.

"When will Mommy be home?" Danny interrupted our little compliment festival to ask.

"Tomorrow morning," I told her. "Mommy had to fly to California."

"More zitions?"

"More depositions," I agreed as Julie giggled.

Both girls soon lost interest in the world of writing in favor of the world of television. I hated using the boob tube as a babysitter, but since I was alone tonight, I needed a little time to get dinner ready. I would read to both of them after dinner, or, if I could get Julie to stay that long, she could read to Danny while I kept Beth informed of the most recent doings, at least to her, of the wizard Harry Potter. We were still on the second book in the series, written way back in the 1990s. It would be a good while before we got to the most recent, Harry Potter and the Assisted Living Community of Forgenroth.

Julie sneaked in with me to help with dinner, and I asked her what was new in her life. She stepped back to make sure she couldn't be overheard.

"My porn king died yesterday," she said matter-of-factly.

"I'm sorry." I started to cough. "Did I know you had a porn king?"

"My porn king client, of course. I brought you some to look at."

"Porn?" I smiled. "I don't need no stinkin' porn."

"That's probably true," she said. "If most guys had married a woman as beautiful and horny as your wife they wouldn't need no stinkin' porn, either. But I want you to take a look at it. I'm kind of at a dead end, and I need someone with a little imagination to give me some ideas about where it might have come from. So I thought I'd run it by you."

"Can you do that? I mean with the, uh, king being a, uh, client of yours and all?"

"Ethically? I need to put you on retainer first."

"Can you do that?" I repeated, talking to her back as she left the room.

"Sure," she said as she returned. "Here, sign this. Now here's your dollar. You are now a private investigator."

"So what's the deal, sweetheart?" I gave her my best Bogie. After a withering stare, she continued.

You remember that picture that Owen Wilson won the Oscar for?"

"The one about ten years ago?" I asked. "About Albert Schweitzer?"

"No, the one after that, about the retarded kid."

I nodded.

"Well, you remember the woman who played his older girlfriend?"

"Yeah. I liked her. Anderson, Jill Anderson."

"Gillian Anderson," Julie corrected me. "It's her."

"She's a little old for porn now, isn't she? Besides, she must be doing pretty well. All those X-Men movies."

"X-Files," Julie corrected me again. "Yeah. Two more and they'll be on X-Files X."

"That's right." I remembered now. I'd given up after X-Files IV, when they investigated the baffling continued popularity of Paris Hilton, even after the release of the tape with her and the llama. "So why's she doing porn?"

"She's not, she says," Julie explained. "But my client was peddling parts of a video tape with a woman that looks just like her, although about twenty years younger, playing an FBI agent named Dana Scully, the same as her character on the X-Files. So she sued my guy for misappropriating her image."

"I'm confused," I confessed. "I thought you said it wasn't her."

"Exactly," Julie said. "That's how I got the trial court to dismiss it. If it wasn't her, I argued, it couldn't have been her image. But it just came back from appeal, where they said hey, it looks exactly like her, I mean down to a mole she has on her ass. They said that a reasonable jury could find that my guy was trading on her image."

"Well?" I shrugged. "Couldn't they?

"Oh, I know," Julie said with a laugh. "I never thought I'd win it at the trial court. So anyway, our only hope now -- his company's only hope, I should say -- is to convince this theoretical reasonable jury that he had no intention of benefiting from Ms. Anderson's persona."

"So what's my role?"

"I'm hoping you can come up with some idea of how he could have done this," she said. "Because he's not gonna be a big help anymore."

"Being dead and all."

"I do know that it's not his video," she continued. "After the court's decision came out, I called him up to tell him, and he comes into see me and admits he bought it off the internet. Then he decided to sell little pieces of it to make some of his money back. And then he gets shot in the head. And I did hire an investigator, but all he could find was that my guy had paid ten thousand dollars to some company he couldn't trace any farther, and this video was downloaded on to his hard drive three weeks later."

A noise from the other room caught her attention.

"Is it dinner time, Daddy?" Danny yelled as she careened into the room. "'Cause our show is over. Is it done yet?"

"Almost, honey. Why don't you and Beth wash your hands and come back and I'll get it set out? Staying for dinner, I assume?"

"Sure," Julie said. "Thought you'd never ask."

After dinner, after we'd gotten the kids to bed, she pulled her laptop out and was about to set it up on the dining room table.

"Tell you what," I said. "Let's do this in the study. That way if one of the girls gets up, she won't find us out here watching porn."

We put it on my desk and she first pulled up a photo of the real Gillian Anderson on her laptop.

"You know, they've been working on this kind of thing out in Hollywood for years," I suggested, as I finished hooking the computer up to the high-def holograph I'd just finished paying for. It was worth it, though; the 72-inch plasmascreen had simply taken up too much space on the wall. "Creating actors with computers, you know?"

"Yeah, maybe," Julie said. "Now hush up and watch."

The video didn't have really high production values; it looked it had been shot from a camera on top of a guy's head in one long take. Although with the technology of the 2020s, even a cheapo camera gave you a damn good image. It really was almost like you were the guy when you were watching. So when you heard a knock on the door, you got up to answer it, and you found "FBI agent Dana Scully" on your doorstep in a black pantsuit and a big "FBI" badge pinned to her lapel. The woman was a dead ringer.

"You are Mr. Warren, Gerald Warren?" she asks, her voice suggesting that she is merely going through the motions.

"That's right," a voice says, presumably that of the man with the camera on his head, "you can call me Gerry. Come on in."

"My client actually was named Gerry Warren," Julie whispered to me as the woman on screen took a seat opposite "Gerry" and looked through her briefcase. "Dana" extracted a list of questions.

"And I swear that guy sounds just like him," Julie added.

"Mr. Warren, you are the owner of a web site that specializes in pornography?" Dana asks as she sits down on the couch that Gerry points to and demurely crosses her legs.

"For the sake of argument, let's say that's right, too."

"And some of the women posing on that site come from out of state."

"And the problem?" the guy says.

"Mr. Warren, we've had some complaints about the methods you use to coerce women into posing for your site."

"Complaints from the women?" His feigned hurt tone does nothing to hide his amusement.

"Well, no." Dana is uncomfortable. "From their husbands and boyfriends."

"So you've also talked to the women."

"Yes, I have," she answers, unwilling to look him in the eye.

"And they have no complaints, do they?"

"Frankly, Mr. Warren, their stories are a little, shall we say, unusual."

"Why is that, Agent Scully?"

"They consistently attribute their willingness to pose to your, er, equipment."

"My cameras?" he asks with mock innocence.

"Your genital equipment." She finally raises her head from the paper to look directly at him.

"Aaah, and you don't believe them."

"No, Mr. Warren, we do not," she says firmly. "And we want to know just what you're doing to these women."

"Just this, Miss Scully." He stands up and pushes his sweatpants and shorts to the floor.

Julie and I watched as Dana's eyes locked onto the guy's groin and she squeezed her legs tightly together. Dana did. Well, Julie probably did, too. You could see when he pushed down his pants that he was a very well-endowed guy.

"Although I doubt that's my client," Julie pointed out.

I gave her a look, which she returned with raised eyebrows. Maybe Julie was healing. I returned my attention to the screen.

"Well, Dana?"

"Ms. Scully," she corrects him hesitantly. "So you're saying that women see your, um, extraordinarily large penis and they --"

"My big cock, Dana."

"Your, um -- uh."

"Say it, Dana. My big cock."

"Your big cock."

"What about my big cock?"

"I -- um -- I . . ."

"Are you getting wet looking at my big cock?"

She begins squirming on the couch.

"Well, Dana?"

"Yes."

"Aren't you getting hot, Dana?"

"Hot, yes."

Dana slowly peels off her jacket, and then the shirt underneath it.

"Nice bra, Dana. Leave it on. You could do without the slacks, though."

Dana stands and pushes her slacks to the floor to reveal a matching pair of black panties.

"Very nice. Come on in the bedroom."

"So what do you think?" Julie asked.

"I think it's very amateurish. Very crude."

"And?"

"And very, very hot," I admitted.

"I can tell." Julie was looking at the bulge in my pants.

She reached for it with a grin. And I let her. As far as I knew, the poor woman hadn't had sex for at least the last 18 months, since her husband had died, and probably for longer than that, while he was in and out of the hospital. If she needed my help in the healing process, I was more than happy to play doctor. Or maybe she was already healed. Either way.