Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3 Read online

  Tammy put her hand on mine. “I’ll be there for you,” she said. “If you need me to go with you to the funeral.”

  I shook my head. “No. I think that it’s something that I need to do by myself. But thank you, though.” I swallowed hard. “I wonder if the vultures are lying in wait for me, to ambush me as I leave my office tonight. Maybe I should just stay here.” I had a couch in my office, as well as a chest of drawers in my closet that held pajamas, a change of underwear and a toothbrush. I also had two fresh suits hanging up. I spent the night in my office on occasion, whenever I was working a big case, so those things were necessary.

  “Just stay here,” Tammy said. “I’d stay here with you, but I have Buttercup at home,” she said, referring to her 100 lb pit bull.

  “No, that’s okay. I need to be alone tonight, anyhow.” I took a deep breath and shuddered as I realized that, more than anything, I needed a companion. His name was Jack Daniels, and he stood about a foot tall and was kinda bronzed. He was my lover and friend for about twenty years of my life – from about the age of 14, when I used to break into my parent’s liquor cabinet, until last year, when I finally decided that I had had enough. I was destroying my liver and I had finally come to the conclusion that Jack was a substitute for any real relationship with a real guy. Plus, I was having just a few too many blackouts on the weekend. During the week, when I dealt with clients and my day to day life, I was a functioning alcoholic. That meant that I would take a shot in the morning, a shot during the afternoon and waited until the evening to get totally blasted. That way, I was perfectly fine to show up to hearings and depositions and meet with clients. At night, though, I pretty much…drank until I passed out on the couch.

  I went to rehab after a family intervention. I just received my one-year chip last week from AA, and all I could think about was drowning myself. I was responsible for two little girls being essentially orphaned, and I simply couldn’t handle it.

  Tammy finally got up out of her chair. “Well, I really should be getting out of here. Got an early depo in Harrisonville tomorrow,” she said, referring to the bedroom community about 40 miles outside of Kansas City. “And I gotta prepare for it.” She put her hand on mine again. “You going to be okay?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. “I’ll be fine.”

  Tammy left and I pulled out my couch and laid down. I fell asleep in my suit while I listened to the late-December rain pelt on my window.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Six Months Later

  I dragged myself into the bar, which was where I had spent just about every day for the last month. Ever since I had been refused by the goddamn court to adopt Gina’s two little girls, I had come to this place in despair. That was the last tendril of hope that I had that my life might amount to something, that maybe something good was going to come out of that whole Gina Caldwell mess, and that blew up right in my face. Something about my working too much and not having the time to care for these kids. Something about finding a home that had both a mother and father at home, where the mother preferably had all the time in the world to help the two with their grieving. Something about putting these kids back in the system until a suitable home could be found.

  Yeah, right. That home study didn’t say as much, but I knew better. Those girls didn’t come to me not because I worked too much. That was bullshit. Yes, I worked long hours, but I also made sure that there was a child care worker there in the home, and I always made sure that I came home every evening by 8 so that I could see the girls got to bed early, and we occasionally had a very late dinner. Most evenings, I tried to actually be home by 6:30, 7 at the latest, because I was trying hard to make sure that we ate together and I could help them with their homework and hear about their day. Maybe I didn’t have a ton of time to care for them, but I tried to make the best of what little time I had.

  And I bonded with them, and they with me. They would never forget their mother, of course, but I tried my hardest to help them through their grieving. I even asked my therapist about what to do to try to help them, and I did everything that she told me to do. I got them their own grief therapist as well, and took them there twice a week.

  I knew the truth about why the guardian ad litem on the case, Alexis Winters, and the social worker, Brianna Ellison, recommended against my adopting Rina and Abby Caldwell. I was a recovering alcoholic and I hadn’t been on the wagon long enough. I guessed that the social worker assigned to their case figured that I was right on the verge of going Defcon 1 again, and it was up to the worker to try to make sure that these girls weren’t exposed to that.

  So, the girls were taken out of the home, literally kicking and screaming, and, even though I filed desperate motion after desperate motion, the judge sided with the social worker and disapproved the adoption.

  On the day of the last hearing, I finally broke down. My old haunt, back in my drinking days, was this bar called Charlie Hooper’s. It was within walking distance to my home. That was the one and only thing that I was looking for in a bar, and I found it at Charlie’s.

  I looked at my watch and sat down at the bar. “A vodka tonic,” I said. “Make it a double.”

  The bartender, whose name was Sally, and who had become my best friend over this past month, shook her head. “You’re coming in here earlier and earlier,” she said disapprovingly. “We just opened. It’s only 11.”

  I smiled and raised an eyebrow. “You know what they say – it’s five o’clock somewhere. In fact, in jolly old England, I do believe it’s about 5 o’clock on the dot, so God Save the Queen. Now, please make me my double vodka tonic and keep ‘em coming.”

  Sally saluted and got out her liquor and tonic water and then shot it down to me. “Any particular reason why you’re not at work today?”

  “My day off,” I said, taking a gulp of the drink. Sally made these good – she blended them so well that I could barely taste the alcohol. I couldn’t taste it, but I certainly could feel it, and that was what I was craving – the feeling, the wonderful feeling, that the world wasn’t such a shitty place. For just awhile, I could have that gossamer pulled over my eyes, like a film that filtered out the harsh light and the even more harsh reality. I could obliterate my feelings and pretend that I wasn’t responsible for the plight of those two little girls.

  I could make believe that I was a decent person.

  “Your day off?” She asked skeptically. This was a game that we played. I would come into the bar three days a week, she would ask why I wasn’t at work, and I would reply that it was my day off. I was taking a lot of days off, days off that I literally couldn’t afford, and, while I knew that I was screwing Tammy over by making the bulk of our work fall on her shoulders, I just didn’t care at that point.

  “Yes,” I said, finishing off my drink. “My day off.” I rattled the ice in my glass, trying to signal to Sally that I needed another one, but she studiously ignored me. That was another game that we played – she always slowed me down, because she knew that if she didn’t, I would drink one after another after another, until I was passed out at the bar by 2 in the afternoon. Since she didn’t want that, she intentionally paced me.

  Somebody had to, because I was terrible at pacing myself.

  “Where is your law partner?”

  “I would imagine she’s at the office. Or in court. Covering for me.” I chuckled. “Oh, God, I’m such a horrible person. She hates me, I’m sure of it. And if she doesn’t, she should. I would hate me if I were her.”

  Sally polished her glasses as more people filed in the door. She was the only one working the bar at the moment, so she had to attend to the other guys.

  So be it. I would be patient and wait my turn. No need to butt in line.

  I brought out my phone and mindlessly surfed the ‘net while I waited for Sally to come back with another drink. Truth be told, although I was a bit annoyed that she didn’t give me my drinks right when I asked for them, I also knew that she had my best interest in mind, so, deep down
, I thought she was doing the right thing.

  Sally finally came back to me about a half hour later. “You ready to close out your tab?” she asked.

  “No. I asked for a vodka tonic back about a half hour ago, and I’m still waiting for that.”

  I sighed. There was a part of me that just didn’t want to deal with Sally and her attitude. After all, I had a perfectly wonderful home with a well-stocked liquor cabinet. I could just go home and make myself a drink or three and watch old Cary Grant movies or cooking shows on my huge television. There was something about Gordon Ramsay that was comforting to me, so I binged on his various cooking shows, as well as those of Jamie Oliver. They were like old friends to me, just like this Sally was. I didn’t need her and her attitude.

  Then I realized that I really did need her and her attitude. I needed it because I knew that I couldn’t drink alone. If I did drink alone, then people might think that I was an alcoholic. That was the number one sign of alcoholism – drinking alone.

  Sally leaned down. “Tell me what’s going on with that drug case,” she said. “The one that you were talking about when you first started coming in here.”

  She was referring to a case that I managed to pick up that was consumed by a larger class-action suit. It was happenstance that I found this woman while I was in the hospital waiting on the doctor to diagnose my mother, who was having trouble breathing and heart palpitations.

  “The class fell apart,” I said. I looked at the maraschino cherries that were sitting on the bar, and reached over to grab one before Sally could slap my hand. “And, well…” I hung my head. I knew where this was going. Where I was going. I couldn’t handle my job, because I had finally hit a wall with burnout. John killing Gina was only the final straw. It wasn’t the whole reason why I felt that I couldn’t go any further. It was just the last straw. The tipping point. It was like one of those buckets of water that you fill and fill and fill until finally the bucket tips over and all the water comes pouring down to the ground.

  My bucket was officially empty, and there wasn’t any way that I could imagine going back to the office. No way that I was going to entertain another scum client. And I really didn’t have an interest in going into other areas of law, either. Estate planning involved too much tax law, and I not only hated tax law, but I didn’t take any tax classes in school, so I was completely out of my depth even thinking about estate planning. Family law was…no. Just no. I couldn’t imagine putting myself into the middle of a child custody or divorce mess if my life depended on it. Personal injury was an okay line of work, but extremely saturated and the cases were getting harder and harder to come by and even harder to win. Besides, anybody who had a really decent PI case would go with one of the larger firms that handled that sort of thing. That meant that tiny two-woman operations, like Ross and Warner, which was the name of mine and Tammy’s firm, would get the scraps in that particular line of law.

  I was a criminal defense attorney, through and through. I had to admit to that. It was what I was born to do, in a way. It was what I did straight out of law school, when I started taking my first cases with the Public Defender’s Office. It was what I knew, it was really all that I knew, and I was good at it.

  Too good at it, as it turns out.

  Sally continued to shine her glasses with a bar towel while she studied me. “Listen,” she finally said. “I’ve been around people who come to bars at all hours of the day or night for most of my life. I was literally raised in a bar – my mother brought me to the local watering hole every single day when I was growing up. We’d come in when the bar would open, because there wouldn’t be much chance of a cop hanging around and telling my mom that I couldn’t be in there, and we’d have to leave by the time the place started to fill up. My mom was running from life – we came home every single day to my father, who was also an addict, but his addiction was rage. He beat on my mother and me every day, and, of course, the fact that mom didn’t keep house because she was too busy drinking with me in tow didn’t help matters much.” Sally shrugged. “My mother was running from my father, was running from responsibility, was running from her past. Always running.”

  I nodded my head, knowing what Sally was getting at, but trying hard to pretend that what she was saying was way over my head. “Oh, I’m very sorry to hear all that,” I said, hoping that I wasn’t sounding insincere. In the back of my mind, I did care about Sally, as she had become my friend, but all that the front of my mind was thinking was that I really needed my next vodka tonic, and it was slow in coming. “I guess it’s for the best that Rina and Abby didn’t come live with me full time, because I’d be dragging them in here just like your mother did you.”

  Even as I said the words, however, I knew they weren’t true. Having those girls in my house made me happy, and, when I was happy, I had a much easier time staying sober. They gave me a sense of purpose. Right now, I felt that I had no sense of purpose. I felt burned by my law practice, and fantasized about giving it up completely and doing anything else. Anything else at all. Selling my body, working in a slaughterhouse, digging ditches along the side of the road…anything seemed preferable to me to going back to my office and facing one more criminal case.

  The problem was, I was running out of money. I spent my life savings on my home. Turns out buying a 100-year-old home came with some 100-year-old problems – the plumbing, the electrical wiring and the floors all had to be replaced. That cost me a mint, and the house did as well. The Brookside area was one of the most desirable in Kansas City, and houses didn’t necessarily come cheap, even the fixer-uppers, like I bought. The median price for a home in the area was $350,000. While some areas of the country would laugh at that price – like in San Francisco, where $350,000 would only buy you a shack in the worst part of town, if anything at all - in Kansas City, $350,000 bought you a very nice home. My home was less than that, but I had to put so much into it that I was just tapped out.

  I had hoped that a drug case might bear some fruit for the lawyer I referred it to, in return for a 10% finder’s fee. But that one fell through, even though the case was won, because it was overturned on appeal.

  All of this meant that I had to eventually return to the salt mines or face losing my home. And, since in the back of my mind, I was still going to try to get custody of those little girls, I couldn’t do that. I had to figure something out.

  Right at that moment, however, the only thing that I wanted to figure out was where the hell was my vodka tonic? I rattled the glass again, desperate for Sally to take the hint, but she studiously ignored me.

  I sighed. “If you won’t give me another drink, can you at least help a sister out here? Throw some water on the floor so that somebody can slip and fall. I’ll give them my card, they’ll win a lawsuit against the bar, your insurance will pay the damages, and I’ll give you a cut. How does that sound?” I smiled and winked at Sally to show that I wasn’t serious, although that did sound like quite a decent plan. Sally and I could work together to scam up some personal injury cases. Just like a team. A regular Butch and Sundance. Or something like that.

  “Ha ha,” she said. “I’d be fired if that happened, and you know it. Your little measly cut wouldn’t offset my lost wages and tips if that happened.”

  “It would if it were an old lady and she broke her hip.” I laughed at my own gallows humor. “I’m teasing, of course.” I rattled my ice in my drink again and Sally finally took the hint and took my glass away and brought me a fresh drink.

  “Try to nurse that one a bit more,” she said. “I need to pace you because you’re incapable of pacing yourself.”

  Just then, I looked around and Tammy was in the bar. I groaned and rolled my eyes. I couldn’t believe that she tracked me down. Then again, I probably should have believed it, considering the fact that I did have several minor court appearances scheduled for that day, all of which were probably covered by Tammy. It was time to pay the piper. I knew that, and I was ready for whatever it
was that she wanted to dish out.

  “Hello mother,” I said under my breath.

  She took a seat next to me at the bar, crossing her arms in front of her. Her glare penetrated the side of my face that was turned studiously away from her. I refused to look her in the eyes, because I didn’t want to see the accusations in those blue eyes of hers.

  “Harper,” she said, putting one hand on my arm. “You have to get out of this bar and back into life.”

  I shook my head and took another swig of my drink. “Like life is so damned wonderful. Life is overrated. So is reality. I would much rather live in a world where men don’t beat women to death for no reason at all. Where girls are not orphaned and thrown into a foster care system that couldn’t care one damn for them. Where fraternity men don’t-“

  I caught myself. I had never told Tammy what had happened that night in the Sigma Chi fraternity house. I had never told anybody about what had happened that night. I always felt that, if I didn’t say it out loud, it never really happened. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, after all.

  “You want some cheese with that wine?” Tammy looked at me skeptically. “Listen, you have to stop dwelling on what happened, Harper, and come back. All the alcohol and pity pot parties in the world won’t bring Gina back. Nor will it bring those two little girls back into your home. In the meantime, you’ve become an absolute waste who’s no good to nobody.” She stood up and put her hands on her hips.

  “I’ll dwell if I want to.” I was going to be stubborn about this, because I didn't want to face up to facts. I wanted to push the world away and keep it there. Safe in a cocoon of my own making.