Ignoring the looks and waves of some of the people at the party who wondered why one of the paid models was walking away without an explanation, I followed Syd and the girl. I had to work my way through the crowd, my smile going from professional to forced as I went. There was something that spoke in my head, something that I just couldn’t dismiss.
It took me nearly seven minutes to find them in a bedroom. The mansion, unique to California in that it seemed to follow no particular architecture style, was one of those big places with a seemingly endless collection of hallways, rooms, and corridors, and I seemed to keep getting stopped by people who were either in my way or just wanted to chat me up. Sydney and the girl were upstairs, his pants around his ankles with her head between his legs, him leaning against a nightstand with most of his back to me. I had seen all I could take.
“You son of a bitch,” I said, my voice surprisingly dead and lifeless as I watched. “How could you?”
Syd’s head whipped around and he stared at me in open shock. The girl, who’d paused her cock-sucking long enough to at least see who was speaking, smiled and said something in Portuguese that I didn’t have the mental focus to translate from the little bit I had picked up. Instead, my eyes were locked on Syd, who stammered an excuse I didn’t care to listen to. Ignoring his lies, I turned on my heel and stalked my way back downstairs, ducking into a bathroom to let the tears flow before dabbing at my eyes. I had a job to finish, regardless of what this asshole had just done to me.
Chapter 2
Kade
“So as you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is quite clear. My client entered into a business relationship with Mr. Talmadge under totally false understandings. Imagine if you were in my client’s shoes. You trust your best friend, the guy you’ve known since high school, on a business deal, and he lies to you. He lies to you, and you end up losing all of your retirement funds and more. Your house is now mortgaged, your kids are facing college without the funds you’ve been setting aside since before they were born. Now, how would you feel?”
“I know that some of you are saying to yourselves, ‘Who cares? That’s Greg Maxwell, the guy’s got a contract that gets him millions of dollars a year. He’s got shoe deals and more.’ And, you’d be right. My client is Greg Maxwell. And yes, he makes a lot of money for his ability to play basketball. But that doesn’t mean what Mr. Talmadge did to him is right. Mr. Maxwell isn’t trying to be vindictive. Notice that all he’s asking for is for Mr. Talmadge to pay him back the money he invested under false pretenses. That’s all. Thank you.”
I sat down next to my client and watched the jury. These civil cases are the riskiest part of my job, but also the part I looked forward to the most. First off, if anyone can afford to hire a lawyer of my caliber, it means that they’ve already got a lot of money. I don’t come cheap, and that right off the bat loses you a lot of sympathy points with any jury.
You must understand that nowadays, most juries are made up of people who fall into one of three categories. You have the people who are too broke, either retirees or unemployed people, that are more interested in getting the pitiful jury duty stipend along with the fact that the court will pay for lunch if the trial goes on long enough. The second group are the ones who are too lazy, as in they can’t even bother to come up with a decent enough excuse to get out of jury duty. The final group are the ones deemed too unimportant by the court to be dismissed. Let’s face it, if your job is running the register down at the local supermarket, the court isn’t going to buy an argument that you are so indispensable to your job as to make jury duty onerous.
In a case like Greg Maxwell vs. Bryan Talmadge, I’d have loved to have a trial filled with female millionaire entrepreneurs who also happened to love basketball and were all mothers with kids in college. Instead, I had three retirees, two stay-at-home moms whose kids were in elementary school, four men whose jobs meant they couldn’t even pay my client’s income taxes, and three unemployed people. Eight men, four women. Men were harder to convince in these cases than women, who tend to have a greater sense of fairness than their testicle-bearing counterparts. And, not to put too fine a point on it, my looks helped me sway female jurors to my side more often than not.