By Reason of Insanity Page 8

  So I was going to have to do as much of an investigation as I possibly could in the next three weeks to determine whether or not I wanted to go forward with the insanity plea.

  Chapter 13

  That night, Regina finally agreed to have dinner with me. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She agreed to come over for dinner. Avery was fixing steaks on the grill, and a baked potato with all the fixings, plus she had a bottle of Bordeaux chilling in the ice bucket on the patio.

  Regina showed up that evening, looking as gorgeous as ever. She said that she had some news for me about what was going on with my case. She then proceeded to tell me about Brock, and how strange she found him.

  "I mean, I just don't know about that guy. He says that he was involved with the two of them. And I guess he was. But why? And how? He would never explain it to me, but somehow I think that he has some kind of information about the two of them he's just not divulging."

  Avery poured the wine, and I took a sip of it while looking right at Regina.

  "So, what are you thinking about that? Do you think that…"

  "Well, I’d like to know it how he even knew her. And I have a hunch that he’s on her side, not his. I just got that feeling from the way that he talked."

  "Is there anybody else that you're going be talking to this week?" I asked Regina.

  "Yes. As matter fact there is." She raised an eyebrow at me.

  Avery looked at Regina, with an expectant look on her face. “Go ahead, tell us who you’re going to be talking to."

  "Well, here's the thing. You know how Pegasus is involved in research. They're trying to clone a human being and all that. Well, I spoke with a few people over at Pegasus, people who were not in management or anything like that, but are receptionists, secretaries, people like that who have their ears the ground, and aren’t too snobby to talk to me. They know the secrets of the organization. They’ve told me that Pegasus has already started working with some woman by the name of Helena Maxwell. Helena had a daughter, whose name was Genevieve. Genevieve was only seven years old when she was killed in a car accident, and Helena cannot accept the fact that her daughter was killed. So, she found the Pegasus company and she found out about them and what they were doing, and she volunteered to be their first human test subject. She basically wants to bring Genevieve back to life. I know, I know, this is all science fiction, and I think it's bull crap. But Pegasus is getting close to cloning a human being, and, from what the secretaries tell me, this person was going to be re-created. In a lab."

  "Okay. So, what are you thinking?"

  “Here's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that somebody got wind about what's happening with this Genevieve person. Somebody found out that Pegasus had moved onto a human trial, and they killed Lawrence to stop him. That's what I think might have happened.”

  "And why would they want to frame my client?" I asked her. I admit, I was thinking along these lines myself. When a company is involved in a controversial line of research such as human cloning, there was bound to be some nut-case who gets pissed and tries to stop it.

  "Who says they were framing your client? Listen, it's entirely possible that it was just bad luck that she had some kind of dissociative state at the time the husband died. Let's just say that somebody came upon what was happening, freaked out about it, went to his house, and shot him. And, all the while, your client was having a dissociative state, like she has from time to time. So the guy shoots Lawrence, and leaves. And in the meantime, your client is walking around the house, not really sure about what's going on, and the cops come and arrest her for it. She doesn’t know if she did it or not. Anyhow, I need to find out if there's anybody who knew about what was going on with this Genevieve issue."

  "That's an interesting way of looking at it. But what are you finding out with all the sexual partners?"

  "Well I just talked to the one. And it turns out that he was not even one of the ones that they were fooling around with. I still don't know what his deal is. I’d like to figure that one out myself. I'm going to keep talking to some of the people that they were hooking up with on alt.com."

  “Well, find out about the general situation, and get back with me. Also try to find out if he had any other kind of enemies. He might have. You never know."

  "Right, you never know. Don't worry, I'm doing my investigations. I'm going to try to figure something out. In the meantime, you just decide what you need to do with Marina."

  Just then, the doorbell rang.

  Avery went to answer it, and then, a second later, I heard the familiar voice of Marina as she was coming through the door. "Hello, I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

  I looked over at her. She was dressed in a very low cut blouse and tight jeans, which accentuated the curve of her perfect butt. The blouse clung to her perky breasts. Unlike the other day, she wasn’t wearing a lot of makeup, just some eyeshadow, some mascara, and some light lipstick, and her hair was natural - flowing around her shoulders in auburn ringlets. The way she looked at that moment, with her fresh face, she was even sexier then she was at her house.

  Of course, I had to not think of her as sexy in any way, shape or form. If I did, I was going to get in trouble with her. There was no way that I could ever get involved with a woman like this, not just because she was my client, but also because if I got involved with her, she would cause a lot of problems for me.

  Her words from earlier echoed in my ears. If you don't do what I say, you could use your license. What did she mean by that? Did she mean that she would report me to the bar for something I didn't do? She was just the kind of person would do something like that. I had to step lightly with her. To say the very least.

  "Marina," I said to her. "Come in. We were just talking about your case."

  She nodded her head, then looked over at everyone, and then at me. "Aidan, I'd like to talk to you alone. Please."

  “Okay."

  We went outside on the balcony, and I lit the fire ring that was in between us. The coals came to life, lighting up the small balcony, and giving me the warmth that was welcomed, as it was unseasonably cool that evening. “June Gloom,” which referred to the constant overcast days that San Diego experienced during June, was in full force on that day, so the evening was very chilly.

  "Okay, what did you need to say to me?"

  She took a deep breath. "I just wanted to say that I don't want you to take this wrong way, but I don't think that Regina should be on this case. I know that the two of you are sleeping together. I’ve had too many experiences in the past where I had lawyers who were distracted by the people in their lives, either their wives, girlfriends, or investigators, and they don't tend to give my case their all."

  I thought about how Regina had been treating me ever since that morning that she was waking up in my bed next to me, and I knew that, unfortunately for me, Marina really had nothing to worry about. Regina had no interest in me, outside the professional realm.

  "You're right. At least you were right the first time I saw you in the jail. Regina and I were sleeping together. But we're not anymore. We haven't been ever since that night. It was a one-night thing, not an on-going business. In fact, it was just that we were drinking that night, and that was that. So, in other words, you don't really have to worry about that."

  She raised her eyebrows. "I don't think you understand. I just want you to be on my case. You and maybe your friend, that George guy, or whatever his name was. The one that you chose to be your second chair. I don't mind him. I don't want a woman on this case." Then she cocked her head at me coquettishly, while her fingers lightly grazed my arm.

  “Well, I don't think that you have a say in this –"

  “Oh, but I do. I do. I talked to James. I talked to James about this case, and he agrees with me. He agrees that you should not have a woman helping you. He’s the one paying the bills. He's the one paying you for this case. I know that you need that job, and I just have to go to James and say the word, and you'll n
ot only be off my case, you'll be out of the firm completely."

  I couldn't believe what what I was hearing from her. She was threatening me again. I was just going to have to talk to James, and find out exactly why it was that he was being so led around by the nose by this woman. Because it didn't make much sense to me.

  "With all due respect –"

  “What did the judge say today, about me being competent for trial?"

  "Just what I thought he would say. He said that the case law was clear that just because you can't remember a crime doesn't mean that you’re incompetent for trial and she was also concerned that if she said that you weren’t competent to stand trial now that you could never stand trial. She didn't know what to do with you. Because it's not like you could be brought back to competency in this case. Obviously.”

  She smiled a little bit and nodded her head. “You see. I told you.”

  "No, I don't really see what you're saying. Maybe I just don't want to see what you're saying." I was getting irritated with her. I didn't know why, but I just knew that she was trying to mess with me somehow.

  Just then, she closed her eyes and looked at me, and, just like earlier that day, her face changed. Changed from the soft, feminine, pretty face to one that was hard, mean, ugly.

  She stood up, and she punched me hard in the face. Then she leaned close to me, and I shoved her off of me. She leaned closer me again, and she said something to me, in a voice that sounded like it was coming from another dimension. It was guttural, low, growling. "I know you were trying to say that you were not going to do the things I asked you to do, but you're going to. You're going to. I don't want Regina on this case. She's not going to be on this case, and you're not going to defy me. If you do, you’ll see what happens."

  At that, she went into the condo, and stormed out the door.

  "What's going on out here?" Regina said.

  "You tell me. All that I know is that I’m going to have to talk to James tomorrow, and I'm going to have to get off this case. I can't handle this woman. She's just too volatile. And she doesn't want you on the case. She doesn’t want any woman on the case."

  Chapter 14

  I went to see James the next day, because I was going to tell him that he needed to reassign Marina's case to somebody else.

  "I'm afraid I can't do that," James said to me.

  “What do you mean, you can’t do that?” I asked him.

  "Listen, here's the thing." He went to the door of this office and shut it. "Now listen, you can't say a word of this to anybody. You can't breathe a word. If you do, I'll just deny everything, and you'll be out of a job. I can fire you for any reason. Or no reason at all. Just remember that."

  I closed my eyes as I thought about whether or not I really wanted to work at this place. But then again, jobs were not exactly easy to come by. I wasn’t top of my class, unlike my sister. I didn’t graduate from Harvard Law like she did - I graduated from the University of San Diego. This was a good job. I was lucky to get it. I knew far too many of my law school chums who were currently working at Starbucks, trying to pay off their student loans on a $15 an hour salary. Making cappuccinos for the same yuppies who were at the law firms where they were coveting a position.

  No, I needed this job. If I didn’t want to become a complete and total wipeout in my life, I needed this job.

  "Okay, go on."

  “This firm is not exactly, shall we say, solvent,” he continued on in a low voice. “We have a lot of expenses here. And, I just found out that the managing partner, Bart, he left before you got here, was embezzling from the company. Millions of dollars. He went to prison for it last month, and has been ordered to pay restitution to the firm, but he doesn't have the money anymore. He gambled a lot of it away at the casinos, but he also lost a lot of it in the stock market. Turns out he was not a very good investor. Not very smart in that way.

  So, what I'm trying to tell you is that if we want to stay afloat, we need Marina's business. We need her millions. We're billing her at $500 an hour for your services. Hopefully by the end of this, we will have billed her $1 million or more. Now, that’s not going to necessarily make a dent in what Bart did to us, but it will certainly go a long ways towards making sure that we can buy some time. So, basically, if she says jump, we say how high. And that's that."

  That was still the strangest thing to me. Why did she want me so badly that she was going to pay $500 an hour for my services? Granted, I was only getting paid my usual associate salary, $50,000 a year, but she was paying this firm a lot of money. Why?

  “Okay, I see. So I can't get off of her case. Why don’t you try to assign it to somebody else in the firm?"

  “I won’t, because she wants you. And that's all there is to it." He put his hands up as if to say I don't know what her deal is either. "So, I'm very sorry, but you have to go ahead and do what she says. You cannot withdraw from her case. If she doesn't want Regina on the case, then she doesn’t want Regina on the case. It looks like you’re going to have to do your own investigations. I know you can do it. And, if you want, of course, George will help you. He’s your second chair, use him."

  "You don't understand. She's not listening to me. She keeps telling me that she doesn’t want me to plead her not guilty by reason of insanity, and that's exactly what I’m going to try to do." Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Sometimes she was just fine with me pleading her NGRI. Other times, she hit me and screamed at me like a Banshee when I told her my plans for her case. Which was another reason why I desperately needed to withdraw.

  "Listen, you have to go with what she wants,” James said. “Now, I agree, she probably isn’t in her right mind. I don't dispute that at all. I’ve met her, and while she is incredibly physically beautiful, to say the very least, she isn't right. And that's all I can really say about that. But, if she says that she doesn’t want an insanity plea, then don't do it. That's all I can say."

  "But isn’t that malpractice?” I asked. “If I truly think that she didn’t have the mens rea to have killed her husband that night, and she did in fact kill her husband, and the jury finds her guilty, and not clinically insane according to the M'Naghten rule, then what am I even doing in the practice of law? If she belongs in a mental institution for the rest of her life, not prison, then it’s my job to make sure that a mental institution is where she ends up.”

  “I don't know what to tell you. All that I can say is that you need to tread lightly with this one. We need her money. And, as I said, she wants only you. I asked her if she'll take another attorney for this firm. Because, as I told her, you don't know what you're doing. But, she wants you. And that's that. So whatever it is that she wants, you’re going to give it to her, and that's that."

  I was frustrated. I felt trapped, like I was going to be heading down the path I didn’t want to go down. Was she setting me up? Was she going to sue me for malpractice after everything was said and done? Was she going to appeal the case, on the basis of ineffective assistance of counsel? Was I going to be humiliated after all of this?

  Maybe that was her deal all along. Maybe she wanted to humiliate me. Maybe she hated me. Maybe she wanted me to stew in my own juices.

  I didn't really know. All that I knew was that I was stuck with this case. I was going to have to follow her lead, against my better judgment.

  And there was nothing that I could do about it.

  Chapter 15

  Marina

  Marina sat in her mansion, putting powder on her elbows and on her face. She got closer to the mirror. It was a magnifying mirror, one that showed all of her tiny flaws. Most of the time when she looked in that mirror, she loved what she saw. She knew she was gorgeous. She knew that she had beautiful creamy skin, clear blue eyes, a very symmetrical, oval face, cheekbones that could cut glass, and a very light and delicate nose. She knew that her body was perfect. Her waist was tiny, her breasts were small but perky, her butt was rounded and her legs firm.

  But other times she l
ooked in the mirror and saw nothing but a mass of wrinkles. She would see a monster staring at her, one with a gaping maw of teeth that looked like it could come out of the mirror and eat her alive. When she was in the state where she would see a hag in the mirror, she tried not to look at herself.

  She wished that she could get herself under control, but she just couldn't. What her husband did to her was unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable.

  But what she was doing to Aidan was just as unforgivable. He didn't deserve her as a client. And in certain states of mind, she knew it. He was just an innocent kid. A newbie, a greeny, a guy just out of law school, and trying to do the best he could on her case, and she was not making it easy for him.

  But it had to be him. That's all she knew. It had to be him because she really didn't care if she lived or died.

  And the person who did it did care. She did care if she lived or died.

  And Marina wanted her to live.

  When she was a young girl, growing up in the orphanage in Russia, she learned how to take the abuse that was given to her. She learned that she could leave her body at any given time. She practiced it for many years. When the men would be doing to her what they did to her, when she was only three years old, and four years old, and five years old, and six years old, and seven years old, she learned to just leave. Go someplace else. She would do what her psychotherapist said was disassociate. And, over the years, it saved her. Whenever she would have stressful periods in her life, she would leave. She would go someplace else.

  All that she could think about when she was over in Russia, in that orphanage, was that she desperately wanted somebody to save her. And she always thought that she had a sister somewhere. It was just something that was in her brain. She almost could remember when she was a very little girl, less than one-year-old, before her parents died in an accident. Actually, it wasn't necessarily an accident, they were disappeared by the Russian government. They were both dissidents. At least that's what she was told about her parents, when she got to be an adult. But she could almost remember that there was somebody who was with her when she was a baby. The memory was hazy, obviously, because she was extremely young. But she remembered being with somebody, somebody laying next to her in her crib.