Reuben Origin and Cause

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9662868-4-7
Verlag: Bernard Street Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 293 Seiten

Cable-TV mogul Stanfield Standish wrote the book and broke the rules in the news and entertainment industry. When his charred body is found inside the burnt-out remains of his classic 1930 Duesenberg sedan, his family files a $52 million damage suit. They blame the fatal 'accident' on Courtland Motor Company, the firm that restored the antique. That's when Courtland's attorney, Max Bramble, takes over, suspicions sharp and asking questions. His first move: Hire private detective and ace arson investigator, Wylie Nolan. If there's a flame, Nolan will discover the source. As Nolan brilliantly dissects the fascinating anatomy of a fire, Bramble digs deep into the Standish empire, and discovers that the media tycoon scalded many on his way up the ladder. It's just possible that one of them paid him back with hot-blooded murder, cleverly plotted and fiery in its execution.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reuben, Shelly

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1 Bang. You’re dead. When I was a boy, a homicide was a homicide. Call the cops. Get forensic to the scene. Take photographs. Get fingerprints. Do plaster casts of tire treads. Analyze cigarette ash. Send semen or blood samples to the lab. Arrest. Don’t arrest. Prosecute. Don’t prosecute. Jury trial. Convict. Set free. I watched cops and robbers on television and wanted to grow up and be a policeman. Max Bramble: Homicide Detective. That’s how I saw myself. The way other boys felt about the World Series … that’s how I felt about justice. Good. Bad. Right. Wrong. It was better than baseball cards. Justice was a high-contrast morality play. A black-and-white movie. No fuzzy lines. No smears. No obfuscations. No obliterations of boundaries. Then the Supreme Court got busy. It threw away its fine-line black ink pens, took out its pastel chalks, and proceeded to draw an impressionistic clown’s mask on the face of justice. So I didn’t grow up to be a cop; instead I became a lawyer. I defend individuals or corporations who are being sued in a civil court of law. And the Supreme Court ruling that affected me and my old friend Justice the most involved a case called Dole versus Dow. Before that landmark ruling, a plaintiff (the person doing the suing) had to prove total negligence on the part of the defendant (the person being sued). Even one percent negligence on the plaintiff’s part meant that he couldn’t recover any damages. After Dole v. Dow, though, the plaintiff only had to prove comparative negligence. This meant that if the jury found in his favor, a percentage of his own negligence would be factored in when awarding damages, and the financial award would be reduced accordingly. Or, to translate that into English, when Timmy was growing up, if he climbed a cyclone fence, broke into a schoolyard, shimmied up a drainpipe, scampered along the roof, and then crashed through the skylight over the gym and broke his back, he would have been arrested in the hospital, injury or not, for criminal trespassing. Now, with comparative negligence as a criterion, Timmy can flick the glass off his broken bones and tell Mom to call his attorney. Then he can sue the school for six million dollars (factoring in his pain and suffering and loss of future earnings), claiming that the school’s Risk Managers should have planned for the possibility of trespassers and put security bars over the skylight to protect Timmy (and them) from his actions. If the jury finds in his favor (they usually do), Timmy’s six million dollar award might be reduced by one or two million because of his comparative negligence in having been up on the roof in the first place. So, he’d get only four million dollars for violating the law and destroying school property, instead of six. Woe is Timmy. I’m getting rich on Dole v. Dow. And, no, not because I represent the trespassers of the world. And I don’t practice criminal law, either. My idea of justice isn’t getting a thug off on a technicality. What I do, though, and what I’m pretty good at, is defending my clients in civil-liability lawsuits. Meaning that if I had been the defense attorney for the school with the skylights, by the time I was through with Timmy, his parents would not only have lost the case, they’d even have had to pay the school’s court costs—after we’d won. I switched to product-liability law after the Catholic Church got involved in a homicide in the little town of Burgess, New York—a homicide that, because of the church’s intervention, rapidly became a “celebrated case.” Don’t ask me why they got involved. It was a big mistake in terms of public relations. Crazy. Seems Hugh James was an altar boy (they all are), and his mother, devout, decent, long-suffering (they all are), was inextricably involved in the church’s Good Works. So when Hugh raped, killed, and carved his initials on the breast of a schoolteacher he abducted on Eversham Road, the Catholic Church, at the request of Hugh’s parish priest, undertook his defense after his arrest. They hired Golan, Hipkiss, Ferrara, Stern & McGee; and Mr. Golan himself assigned me to be Hugh James’ attorney. I was supposed to meet Hugh and Mrs. James in the booking room at the County Sheriff’s Office on the third floor. I had just gotten off the elevator and pushed open the door, so I saw what Hugh did. I didn’t read about it later in a law journal or see it watered down, spiked up, or reenacted on the six o’clock news. What happened was the little psychopath elbowed Deputy Ringwall in the gut, slammed a knee into Dianne Singer, who had the bad fortune to be walking between the water cooler and Ringwall’s desk at the time, and knocked over the assistant district attorney, whose name I forget but who fell down and busted his nose. Then Hugh (the altar boy) leaped over a shoulder-high barrier, dashed past a row of file cabinets, and crashed through the half-moon window that ran along the south wall of the Sheriff’s office. Hugh fell three stories, landed on his ankle, which broke, scampered to his feet, limped into the street, and got sideswiped by a fire department Battalion Chief’s car as it was racing out of the firehouse to respond to a five-alarm fire. After Hugh James was re-apprehended, my law office instructed me to sue the Morton County Sheriff’s Office for negligence (the window should have been barred so that Hugh couldn’t jump out); to sue Deputy Sheriff Ringwall (he should have prevented the escape); the fire department (it ought to have been prepared for perpetrators plummeting from the sky); the Battalion Chief’s driver; and of course the Battalion Chief himself for good measure. I had already worked at Golan, Hipkiss, Ferrara, Stem & McGee for five years and had been promised a full partnership by the end of that July. I was making good money and was in line to make even better than an attorney who never went to an Ivy League college had any right to expect. But money isn’t a pat on your back from the part of yourself that wants to polish its own ego; and let’s face it, there are certain things a man can’t do if he ever wants to have a son that will dress up as a lawyer on Halloween. Or, to rephrase all that, I don’t sue heroes. So, I said thanks but no thanks to Golan and Hipkiss (Ferrara, Stem & McGee were dead), and I opened my own office on Wall Street, a short walk from the South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan. Since a few of my best accounts came along with me, I never expected to be gnawing on my fingernails for lunch. I also didn’t expect to have to hire twelve more associate attorneys within eleven months, or to have to expand to two floors, or to have to open up a branch office in Albany. And I didn’t expect the Courtland Motors Corporation account to follow me to my new firm, or to be doing all of the East Coast product-liability work for Davis Consolidated Industries. The name on my letterhead reads: Bramble, Harris & Associates. I’m Bramble. The “Harris,” after the comma and before the ampersand, doesn’t exist. He did a long time ago, when he published the booklet Letters to a Young Lawyer, in 1912. This booklet consists of a series of letters written by Arthur M. Harris, a lawyer, to his son (Dear Boy) upon the latter’s graduation from law school. They offered advice and encouraged the fledgling attorney to be “wise without guilt” and “with fine inward calm to look unshrinkingly into the searching eye of tomorrow.” My father, who is also an attorney, used to include admirable bits of wisdom from Arthur M. Harris’s book in the letters he wrote me in college. Such as, “Don’t try to carry on a strenuous love affair and build up a law practice at the same time. It would kill Hercules.” And my personal favorite, “In your dress be moderate and modest. Do not dress like a racetrack tout.” I was also adjured to “Demonstrate to the world that an honest lawyer is a possibility even if it puts you on a cracker-and-cheese diet for ten years.” Fortunately, I’ve escaped a diet of crackers and cheese, even if I have not managed to escape a steady diet of Arthur M. Harris. As he said in his booklet, “A good law partner is like a good wife—pretty hard to find, but a great help.” So I made Arthur M. Harris my good and very silent partner; he never argues with me, never interferes, is a big help when I read and reread his “Letters,” and has been dead for over sixty years. Our partnership is doing very well, thank you. Arthur M. Harris and me. We’ve become successful enough to turn down cases; my calendar has trial dates set five years into the future; and even though I never became a cop, that’s okay, because I love product liability law. And after all these years, I still think that justice is more fun than baseball. Of course, a lot of that has to do with Wylie Nolan. Until he came along, I was making the same mistakes on fire cases that most lawyers still make. If I had a fire that was supposed to have started in a microwave oven, I would have hired a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a metallurgist, and a chemist to analyze what was left of the product. (Usually, the plaintiff keeps only the mechanical part with the alleged defect and throws out everything that would be of use to the defense.) Then I’d have prepared our case based on product integrity alone: i.e., that the fire couldn’t have started the way...