Page 65 of The Proving Ground

When he answered, I said, “Bruce, I’ll make this short and sweet. We’re going to trial. Brenda has turned down Tidalwaiv’s offer.”

There was only silence.

“Bruce, are you there?” I asked.

“You convinced her to go to trial, didn’t you?” he said.

“Actually, no. I read her the email like I did with you and she said no. That’s it.”

“Then all I can say is that you better not fuck this up, Haller. And you better get us more than fifty million dollars.”

“I can’t make you any promises, Bruce. Like I’ve told you many times, anything can happen in a trial and usually does.”

“Fuck that. It was a big mistake bringing this to you in the first place. Last time I ever listen to my wife.”

I was surprised to hear that he had ever listened to his wife.

“We’ll see,” I said. “I’m going to hang up now, Bruce. I’ve got a lot to get done by Monday. Have a good weekend and I’ll see you in court.”

I disconnected before he could hit me with another verbal threat. It wasn’t what I needed to hear. I already knew how high the stakes were in this case.

I set an alarm on my phone for 4:59 p.m. and went to work sketching out what I would say to the jury in my opening statement Monday. While the opener was not evidence and the judge would instruct the jury to that effect, to me it was one of the most important moments of a trial. It was when I would stand before the jury and sell myself and my clients to them. It would be my first chance to draw their sympathy to my clients. And it would be when I laid the foundation I would build my case on. I would make this stand directly in front of the jury, and that was why they called that spot where there was nothing between you and the jurors theproving ground. It was where you put up or shut up.

In the last hour before five o’clock, I got two calls from Marcus Mason that I let go to voicemail.

“What’s it going to be, Haller?” he said in the first message. “You got an hour and then fifty million goes away.”

His voice was a couple of octaves higher in the second message.

“Haller, what the fuck, your time is running out,” he said.

The increased tone of desperation in the second message told me that Tidalwaiv was seriously concerned about what would come out at trial and how it would affect the prospects of an acquisition or merger.

At 4:59 my phone alarm buzzed. I put down my pen and sent Mason a text.

See you Monday at the courthouse, Marcus.

Get some rest. You’re gonna need it.

Then I sent him a second text.

And by the way, stay the fuck away

from my witnesses.

These messages brought another call from Mason, but once again I let it go to voicemail. I wasn’t interested in talking to him.

PART THREE

THE FIRST LAW

25

IN THE TWOyears since I left criminal defense behind, I had handled a variety of civil matters ranging from mounting challenges to immigration detentions to fighting unlawful evictions to representing a successful class-action lawsuit against a state prison for women in Chowchilla that resulted in an abusive gynecologist being fired and a midrange payout to my sixteen incarcerated clients. It was a solid victory, but the gynecologist who had submitted prisoners to painful and unneeded examinations was not prosecuted criminally or disciplined by the state medical board. He just went into private practice.

In some cases, I felt that I was using the law to do what law enforcement wasn’t doing. I filed a claim on behalf of a nineteen-year-old woman against a motel in the Valley, alleging that its operators did nothing to stop the use of its rooms by sex traffickers, thus exploiting and profiting from the victims of this endemic crime. The motel responded by shutting down and going out of business. The litigation was stalled, and the rooms of the abandoned motel were now inhabited by homeless people.

I stayed away from personal injury and medical malpractice lawsuits, turning down many cases and even avoiding Lorna’s plea to refer the cases to other lawyers and thus earn a minor fee from each. There was big money in those kinds of cases, even when chipping off referral fees, but to me they were hollow victories, and it wasn’t where I saw my career going. I wanted something bigger, something more important, something that I could be proud of at the end of the day.