on her own recognizance.
“I graduated from high school in 1939,” Mrs. Lewis had told me in the courthouse hallway. “My senior year, I won a statewide competition for typing. Ninety-seven words per minute without a mistake. And that was on an old manual machine. Some of the girls were a bit faster, but if you made a mistake, they deducted it from your score. After graduation, I started to work for these three men. Mr. Goldenstein was the man who actually hired me. He was an older man, although I assume now that he probably wasn’t much older than fifty. There was another man who was older still, a Mr. . . . I don’t remember his name right now, but it’ll come to me. And Mr. Harris. He was the youngest of the three by far, but still older than me, of course. The three of them weren’t partners, but I worked for all three. On Fridays, I’d go to them one at a time, and each would give me four dollars. They didn’t even just hand me an envelope with the twelve dollars. I actually had to go into their offices separately. Each one would reach into his pocket to pay me for the week. Sometimes, one of them didn’t have the cash. When that happened, I’d have to go back to his office on Monday and ask again.
“Anyway, Mr. Harris left that office a few years later and asked me to come with him. After another move or two, we ended up at BBDO, which back then was the biggest advertising agency in the world. Mr. Harris had a corner office high above Madison Avenue. He used to say to me, ‘Remember when we were in that dump on Seventh Avenue with those old codgers?’ A few years after that, he left BBDO to go out on his own, and I followed him again.”
She had the wistful sound of someone recounting her first love. Of course, if she was in love with him, it was unrequited, as Mr. Harris had filed a criminal complaint accusing her of embezzlement.
“I’m telling you this,” she continued, “so you’ll understand that Mr. Harris was family to me. I would never steal from him. Not in a million years. I swear on my life.”
I told her that I believed her. Then I sent the copies of the allegedly forged checks to an expert for a handwriting analysis. He confirmed the checks were definitely not signed by Mr. Harris. He also told me that the forgeries were good—very good, in fact. “Someone took a lot of time practicing,” was the way he put it.
My modus operandi, then and now, was to lay out the facts for the client. Then I’d say that it was my job to explain how the prosecutor would view those facts and, if it came to that, the conclusion a jury would reach if asked to render a verdict. That way, I could stay in the client’s good graces by claiming that I believed in their innocence, but my advice was based on the likelihood that others might not. I maintained that position right up until the moment they confessed their guilt.
It was my hope that Mrs. Lewis would reach that point in the next five minutes.
She sat in my office, her hands knitted together, resting atop the purse that sat on her lap. She declined my offer of water, coffee, or tea. From the look on her face, she seemed to be expecting me to share good news.
“I have some hard facts we need to discuss,” I said. “As you know, the prosecution has a handwriting expert who will testify that Mr. Harris did not write the checks made out to cash. To rebut that, I needed to get an expert who would testify that he did. Unfortunately, my expert also told me that there’s no way Mr. Harris wrote those checks. That’s just science. Which means we have to accept as a fact that someone was forging his name.”
If Mrs. Lewis sensed that the walls were closing in on her, she didn’t show it. In fact, she displayed no expression whatsoever.
“Our expert also told me that whoever forged Mr. Harris’s signature had seen it enough times to be able to make a pretty convincing copy. On top of which, it had to be someone who had ready access to his checkbook. In light of the fact that Mr. Harris is unmarried and without family, and you had