A Time for Mercy (Jake Brigance #3) - John Grisham Page 0,57

no older than the other boys. Mrs. Golden had gone to the high school and talked to the principal about Drew’s academic quandary. Obviously, he couldn’t take classes from the jail, nor did the school have a tutor on its payroll. Any efforts to intervene would take a court order. They decided to let the lawyers worry about that. Mrs. Golden did notice the principal’s reluctance in doing anything that might help the defendant.

As they were leaving the church, Charles and Meg promised to pick up Josie and Kiera at nine the following morning for the trip to town. They needed to fetch their car, and they were desperate to see Drew.

Josie and Kiera thanked everyone profusely and said goodbye. They walked to a picnic table next to the cemetery and sat on it. Once again their little family was separated and one step away from being homeless. But for the goodness of others, they would be hungry and sleeping in the car.

* * *

—

JAKE WAS SITTING at his desk, staring at a stack of pink phone messages that Portia and Bev had taken that morning. So far that week he had spent about eighteen hours working on behalf of Drew Gamble. He rarely billed by the hour because his clients were working people and indigent defendants who couldn’t pay, whatever the bill, but he, like almost all lawyers, had learned the necessity of tracking his time.

Not long after Jake began to work for Lucien, a lawyer across the square, a likable guy named Mack Stafford, represented a teenager who’d been injured in an auto accident. The case wasn’t complicated and Mack didn’t bother recording his hours since his contract gave him a contingency of one-third. The insurance company agreed to settle for $120,000, and Mack was all set to walk off with a fee of $40,000, a rarity not only in Ford County but anywhere throughout the rural South. However, since the client was a minor the settlement had to be approved by the chancery court. Chancellor Reuben Atlee asked Mack in open court to justify such a generous fee for a rather straightforward case. Mack did not have a record of his hours and failed miserably in convincing the judge that he deserved the money. They haggled for a while and Atlee finally gave Mack a week to reconstruct his time sheets and submit them. By then, though, he was suspicious of the lawyer. Mack claimed he charged clients $100 an hour and that he had invested four hundred hours in the case. Both numbers were on the high side. Atlee cut them both in half and awarded Mack $20,000. He was so incensed he appealed to the state supreme court and lost 9–0 because the court had ruled for decades that sitting chancellors have unfettered discretion in just about everything. Mack finally took the money and never spoke to Judge Atlee again.

Five years later, in perhaps the most legendary act of criminal and ethical misconduct by a member of the local bar, Mack stole half a million dollars from four clients and skipped town. To Jake’s knowledge, not a single person, including Mack’s ex-wife and two daughters, had ever heard a word from him. On really bad days, Jake, as well as most lawyers in town, dreamed of being Mack and roasting on a beach somewhere with a cold drink.

At any rate, the local bar swallowed the lesson whole and most lawyers kept up with their hours. In the Smallwood lawsuit, Jake had worked over a thousand hours in the fourteen months since Harry Rex landed the case and associated him. That was almost half his time and he anticipated being well compensated for it. Drew’s case, though, could possibly eat up huge chunks of time with little in the way of fees. Another reason to get rid of it.

The phone rang again and Jake waited for someone else to answer it. It was almost 5:00 p.m., and for a moment he thought of joining Lucien downstairs for a drink, but let it pass. Carla frowned on drinking, especially on weekdays. So his thoughts moved from hard alcohol back to Mack Stafford sipping rum drinks, studying bikinis, far away from bitching clients and cranky judges and, oh well, there you go again.

Through the intercom, Portia said, “Hey, Jake, it’s Dr. Rooker in Tupelo.”

“Thanks.” Jake tossed the phone slips onto his desk and picked up the receiver. “Hello, Dr. Rooker. Thanks again for seeing Drew today.”

“It’s