Page 4 of Two Kinds of Stranger (Eddie Flynn #9)

Eddie

I know two things about civil litigation.

You can win a case in the parking lot.

Civil litigation is anything but civilized.

Give me criminal law any day. With a prosecutor, you know exactly where you stand.

They are going to try to bury you and your client.

There’s no subterfuge. It’s two armies standing on opposite hills.

They charge at each other and meet in the valley.

There’s a victor and a loser and a lot of blood left on the ground.

With civil law, your opponent can behave like your best friend, your worst enemy, or they simply hide in the long grass with a rifle aimed at your head.

The only thing you can be sure of is that when your opposing counsel opens their mouth, what comes out is anything but the truth.

The high-roller civil defense attorneys who represent Fortune 500 companies, insurance conglomerates and pharmaceutical giants, wear five-thousand-dollar hand-cut Italian suits like plate-steel armor.

They’ve all been in the wars. They’ve seen things. They don’t shake easily.

I’ve got a reputation as a trial lawyer, and before that as a con artist, but I’m still small-time compared to these guys. Oh, and by the way, they are nearly all guys. There’s more testosterone in a Wall Street civil litigation department than the locker room at the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Yeah, civil law ain’t civilized in the least.

Then there’s the real battleground. If you can win a case without stepping into the courtroom, so much the better.

I liked parking lots for all major battles.

In every case ever tried, people make the decisions. Judges, or juries. You have to play the people and not the law or the facts.

All good lawyers know that you need a working knowledge of every judge’s personality.

Judges are like violins – if you don’t know how to play them properly, they can make one hell of a racket.

Great lawyers – they know a lot more. Like the best parking lot close to the courthouse.

That’s where the real knowledge pays off.

It was a cold, sunny Monday morning and I was on my way to Kings County civil court for a case discussion with the plaintiff’s lawyers and the judge.

My client was Morrie Sirico. He owns an Italian deli in Queens, passed on to him by his father, and his grandfather before him.

The place opened in the fifties selling Italian cold cuts, cannolis, tiramisu, coffee and cakes.

A sense of community grew around the deli.

Old timers can be found there most mornings, blowing steam off their espressos and risking a dollar on the dominoes.

Six months ago, the plaintiff, Neville Carmichael, is in the neighborhood and he happens to visit Morrie’s.

He buys some good cheese and is on his way out the door when he slips on some prosciutto, which somehow found its way onto the floor, and he lands on his back, injuring himself.

The paramedics are called to Morrie’s, and shortly after Neville goes to see a lawyer.

The lawyer sends a letter to Morrie claiming personal injuries for his client and seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

A week later, Morrie lands in hot water with the insurance investigator. They’re not happy with Morrie’s paperwork, or his face, so they refuse to indemnify. Now Morrie was facing a lawsuit for half a million dollars in damages for personal injury and he doesn’t have insurance cover.

Civil cases settle. The vast majority of them anyway. That’s not to say the settlement is fair or that justice has been done, but money has been handed over to someone who was wronged or injured. In civil law, it’s all about the money.

How do you get the most money for your client? Or, if you’re a defense attorney, how do you pay the least amount?

You play the game.

Sometimes that’s down to being a good attorney.

Sometimes that’s down to cheating.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Sometimes it comes down to where you play the game.

Like I said, I prefer parking lots.

Before I was a trial lawyer, I had a moderately successful run as a con artist hustling insurance companies, criminals and casinos. Grifting is not so different from filing lawsuits, persuading juries, or winning more clients. The big difference in the con game – the hours are better.

Still, the experience I had in my former profession sure helped when it came to the justice game. Like now.

The closest lot to the courthouse is just across Adams Street. This is where the defendants and their families park, corrections officers, bail bondsmen, probation officers, court staff, witnesses, those called to jury service and even the judges.

Just as it’s important to know your judges, knowing where to park can save a lot of time and billable hours.

Only I didn’t use the Adams Street lot. I parked further away, in the Pierrepoint mall, just across the street from Brooklyn Park. It’s further away from the courthouse and it’s more expensive. Seems a bad choice, but it was perfect for me.

There were two reasons to park in the Pierrepoint mall.

The first is the view.

The second is that prosecutors park here. They don’t want to run into the family of a defendant they’ve just successfully convicted in a dark parking lot. So they avoid the lot closest to the courthouse in favor of a quieter place, further away.

I pulled into the Pierrepoint car lot via the underground ramp, but there were no spaces on the first three levels. I needed an elevated view anyway.

I parked on the fourth floor, killed the engine, and retrieved my case files from the trunk of the Mustang.

The upper levels were open to the elements, no windows.

Open sides to let in air, or let out the smells that accumulate in parking lots.

I had made sure to park on the west side of the lot, with a view of Livingstone Street beneath me.

I leaned over the concrete barrier and checked my watch.

Anytime now.

There was a federal building down the street, but most of the real estate in this part of Livingstone was occupied by small businesses.

Only three kinds.

Bail bonds.

Orthopedic medical practices.

Personal-injury lawyers. A lot of personal-injury lawyers.

And not all of them the best kind. Someone once joked that if an ambulance drove down Livingstone with its sirens on, before it got to the end of the street there would be fifty lawyers in suits chasing after it.

A brown SUV pulled up on the street outside the law offices of January Jeffers, Esq.

Attorney at Law. Jan was one of those guys who would chase the paramedics.

Not that there was anything wrong with that, and not that there would be any danger of him catching them.

Jan Jeffers looked eighty years old when I passed the bar exam.

Now, he looked like he was being held up with coffee, a thousand volts of electricity, and very thin strings.

A small man in an offensively bright orange button-down shirt and black pants got out of the SUV and made his way to the gap between the parked cars outside Jan’s office. Before he could make the four feet between the SUV and the parked cars, his head turned sharply.

A food courier on a bicycle, wearing a green helmet, was almost on top of him.

The guy in the orange shirt must’ve heard the screech of brakes from the bike.

But the cyclist was going too fast, or the box on his back must’ve weighed too much because he wasn’t slowing down fast enough.

He put his feet on the blacktop and they skidded as the brakes on his bike whined.

The man in the orange shirt jumped out of the way of the bike, leaping in between the parked cars, and the bike just missed him.

He then quickly scrambled back up onto his feet to hurl abuse at the courier, who had managed to come to a stop just a few feet away.

They were too far away to hear what they were saying, but judging by the hand gestures and the hollering, I’d say there was a fair and frank exchange of views.

The cyclist pedaled away and the man in the orange shirt was still cursing and waving his arms, and even taking a small run at the cyclist as he left the scene.

The guy in the orange shirt went into Jan’s office. I took a few moments to turn and check the parking lot. No BMW M series in midnight blue. Not yet.

I turned back to the street in time to see Jan leading his client in his orange shirt back out the front door.

They didn’t go far. Next door was an orthopedic medical practice.

I thought the words medical and practice were doing a lot of heavy lifting on that sign.

It might have been more efficient for Jan to just install an internal door in his law office, so clients could walk straight into the orthopod’s office without venturing onto the street.

They were a team, Jan and the doc. Jan brought in the clients, the doc wrote up whatever kind of medical report Jan needed after a thorough examination of the client’s wallet.

They were in there for maybe five minutes and hadn’t come out yet.

I heard the sound of a BMW engine. Turned.

M series. Blue. But not the midnight blue Beamer I was looking for.

I swung around just in time to see Jan holding open the doctor’s office door while his client in the orange shirt, now with crutches on each arm, managed to maneuver himself out onto the street.

He walked stiffly now, throwing one crutch forward with his weight, then swinging his body, and then the other crutch.

He was also wearing a back support, kind of like a girdle around his waist, except the thick part was on his lower back.

I didn’t know how effective it would be at supporting his back, but it at least helped hide some of his offensive orange shirt.

I looked up the street, saw the bicycle courier crouching behind a parked car. He got back on his bike and cycled away.