Read Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause for Free Online

Southerland is probably one of the better lawyers I know, but like me, he is so disorganized he spends half a morning looking for his files. He writes beautifully, though, and ghosts appellate briefs for a number of lawyers in Blackwell County.
    Frank D’Angelo, a transplanted Yankee who couldn’t get into law school up North, knows a lot of bankruptcy, so he will come in handy, too.
    “If you need some furniture,” Clan says, choking back a belch, “the building manager has a basement full of odds and ends that she’ll rent dirt cheap.”
    It all seems too easy, but by 7 p.m. I’m the newest tenant of the Layman Building, and with the help of a janitor I possess some temporary office furniture. And by this time tomorrow I’ll have a telephone and my name on the directory.
    Now, if I can just acquire more than one client….
    Granted, my office looks like Goodwill South, but it will keep until I can drive around this weekend to some secondhand furniture stores. I know I can get some halfway decent stuff if I’ll take the time to look. In the meantime, if I have any clients I can interview them in the conference room, which is only two doors from my office. Clan has told me to call the federal district court clerk’s office and put my name on the list for criminal appointments for indigent defendants.
    The feds pay forty an hour, which is forty more than I’m getting on anything else except Chapman. I decide I will call when the phone is installed. I glance around the bare walls and realize my diplomas and other junk are at Mays & Burton, assuming they haven’t dumped them into the trash. I can pick them up first thing in the morning. I’ve had enough of the free-enterprise system today.
     
    i do not pull into my driveway until almost eight o’clock.
    It is just as well. My daughter is at Arkansas Governor’s School, a summer camp for the gifted and talented. Without Sarah, my house will be a tomb—just me and a presumably hungry dog. It is not until I have to push myself out of the Blazer that I realize I am exhausted; however, there won’t be many times that I will be fired, enter private practice, and pick up a well-to-do client all in the same afternoon.
    I walk across tall, scrufiy grass to the house, mulling over the fact that Andrew Chapman is a behavioral psychologist, not a psychiatrist, as I previously assumed. Shrinks work with the mentally ill. I have no idea if the girl carried a dual diagnosis of mental retardation and mental illness. Wouldn’t she have to be insane to mutilate herself? It is an area I know nothing about. Chapman can start my education tomorrow.
    Seldom has a lawyer known so little about his client. Despite my ignorance, I do know one thing, and that is this case ought to be great for business. If I can’t pick up some clients from the kind of publicity this case will generate, I’m not long for private practice.
    In the mailbox is the usual junk mail (Amnesty International—if they had spelled my name right I’d have given them more money—now I’m glad I didn’t) and, much more pleasing, a letter from Sarah. I am thrilled she was selected to attend Governor’s School but have privately wondered if her unusual racial background didn’t make the difference.
    Granted, she is unusually bright and a hard worker, but she is hardly a genius, having inherited my defective math genes.
    The selection committee arguably (and probably only theoretically, since she identifies herself as white) could count her as Hispanic, Indian, and black—a cornucopia of unmentioned but undoubtedly very real racial requirements.
    I can hear Woogie screeching on the other side of the door.
    I usually make it home before seven. I won’t open my letter from Sarah until I have taken Woogie for a walk. He acts so obnoxious and hyper until he’s eaten and gone out, it isn’t worth even opening a beer first. Tonight is no exception. As soon as I open the door, my dog, a perverse mixture of beagle