They Framed the Wrong Lawyer

Chapter 1

The guy at the end of my bar was wearing a four-thousand-dollar suit and drinking like he wanted witnesses.

"Another," Ryan Cole said, and slid his glass at me the way you slide things at staff. "And make it the good stuff this time. If you remember what that is."

I remembered. I remembered everything. It was my gift and my diagnosis. Ryan Cole, twenty-nine, rising star at Sterling & Vance, face of the firm's recruitment brochure, and, as of last Tuesday, the loser of the Calloway deposition, which he was in my bar drinking to forget.

He was telling the room about it, his version, where the judge was an i***t and the accountant was a ghost and nobody breathing could have seen it coming. He told it loud, with his hands, doing both sides of it. The couple at the corner table had stopped eating to watch. Sam kept his eyes on his beer. Ryan liked an audience. He had been raised on one.

"You know what your problem is, Jack?" he said, loud enough for the room. "Karma. You were arrogant. You thought the rules didn't apply to you. And now look." He gestured at the bottles, at me, at the towel over my shoulder. "The great Jack Sullivan. Disbarred. Polishing glasses in a bar that smells like a mop."

Behind him, the couple looked down at their plates. Sam turned one degree further away on his stool.

"Tuesday," I said.

"What?"

"Your problem wasn't arrogance either, Ryan. It was Tuesday. You deposed Calloway's accountant on Tuesday and never asked him about the second ledger. You spent six hours on the first one, the one his lawyers gave you. The second ledger is the one with your client's money in it. Their whole case is built on you never finding it." I set the good bottle down in front of him. "You still have nine days to reopen it. If you can find a judge who doesn't read the papers."

The bar had gone very quiet.

Ryan stared at me. The color moved up his neck. "You don't know anything about that case."

"I know you just lost it twice," I said. "Once in the deposition room and once explaining it to me. Drink up. This one's on you."

He left money on the bar, too much, which is how rich men apologize without apologizing, and he left. The door swung. The couple at the corner table started breathing again.

Sam, my only regular who matters, turned on his stool. "One of these days you're gonna do that to the wrong man, Jack."

"Already did," I said. "Five years ago. That's how I got the towel."

The door banged open before the bell over it had finished ringing.

She came in wet from the rain, with a file box hugged to her chest like a flotation device, and the look of a woman who had been told no by eleven people today and had decided the twelfth was going to be different.

"I'm looking for Jack Sullivan." She was young, twenty-six, twenty-seven, with a legal-aid lanyard and a tear in her coat sleeve she hadn't noticed. "My name is Lily Chen. I was told he drinks here."

"He works here," I said. "Which is worse. What do you want?"

"You're him." She set the box on the bar. Case files. Court seals. A pink eviction notice, the color they use so landlords can enjoy it. "Maria Lopez. Single mother, hospital cleaner, eleven years in the same apartment. She reported a safety violation at work, and three days later her landlord started eviction proceedings. No cause, no warning, just out. Hearing's in nine days. Legal aid has forty cases per attorney. I'm number forty-one." She took a breath. "Everyone says there's one man in this city who could win it. Everyone also says he'd have to be insane to try."

"Everyone's right both times." I pushed the box back toward her, gently. "I don't do that anymore."

"You don't get to do it anymore," she said. "I know. I read the file. I'm not asking you to walk into a courtroom, Mr. Sullivan. I'm asking you to tell me how."

Above the register, the mute TV was running the evening news, and I watched it over her shoulder while she waited: a local segment, a woman standing on a sidewalk in the rain with a little girl and two garbage bags of belongings, a locksmith changing the lock of an apartment door behind her while a man in a suit held an umbrella over the paperwork.

The caption read: DISPUTE TURNS UGLY IN RIVERSIDE HEIGHTS.

And there, at the edge of the frame, on the umbrella, navy, discreet, the firm's umbrella, was the logo I would know under water.

Sterling & Vance.

The same Sterling & Vance that had employed me for nine years. The same Sterling & Vance whose executive partner, David Mercer, had been my best friend right up until the morning the ethics board received an anonymous package of evidence proving I had fabricated a witness statement, evidence I had never seen, in a case I had been winning.

It cost me my license, my name, and five years of my life.

"Mr. Sullivan?" Lily said.

I pulled the file box back across the bar.

"Give me the complaint," I said.

She found it fast. She had tabbed everything, God bless her. I flipped to the last page, to the landlord's attorney's signature block, and stopped.

I know handwriting the way other men know faces. For five years I had stared at one signature in the discovery copies of my own destruction: the looped, arrogant S on the certification page of the fabricated evidence, the page that proved the document had passed through my office.

The signature on Maria Lopez's eviction complaint had been written by the same hand. The name typed under the line belonged to some junior associate. The hand did not.

Not similar. Not reminiscent. The same.

Five years, a bar towel, a new life, and the man who had framed me had just put his pen to the eviction of a hospital cleaner with a little girl and two garbage bags.

"Mr. Sullivan," Lily said carefully, "you've gone a very strange color."

"Get her somewhere dry," I said. "And get me everything. Every page. I don't care if it's a parking ticket. Everything."

Lily nodded once and already had her phone out, calling Maria. I picked up my towel and went back to the glasses, because my hands needed work that wasn't shaking.