Read Gideon - 04 - Illegal Motion for Free Online

imitation black leather skirt that barely covers her crotch. Not a woman to let the weather dictate her wardrobe, she seems to outdo herself each day. Her hips should sweat off a couple of pounds before lunch, and she won’t even have to stand up.
    “Oh sure!” she says.
    “And the Tooth Fairy’s gonna place it under your pillow.”
    I resist the temptation to tell her why I took this case. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll never hear the end of it.
    “What’s my new client’s name again?” I ask, bending my head so the woman won’t read my lips. From a distance of twenty feet, she looks as fresh and wholesome as the proverbial farmer’s daughter. With thick brown hair framing a face as round as a globe, her greatest asset is her youth.
    “Jeez!” Julia huffs.
    “When are you getting tested for Alzheimer’s?” She prints a name on her pad. I try to focus without my reading glasses. Gina Whitehall, I make out, squinting at Julia’s grandiose but nearly illegible handwriting.
    “Before long you’re gonna need a map just to get to work.”
    “You’ll be old one day, too,” I mutter, about to pass out from Julia’s overly sweet cologne. For the better part of every morning she will give off an odor that suggests she has spent the previous night swimming in a vat of artificially flavored fruit juices whose bottom is pure NutraSweet.
    “You’re not trying to look down my blouse, are you?”
    she asks suspiciously, as I straighten up.
    “Not for all the tea in China,” I assure her, dutifully smiling at my new client. About once every couple of months Julia wears a see-through blouse with a purple bra underneath and then threatens to sue for sexual harassment if any of the lawyers lose eye contact with her for even an instant.
    As I escort Gina Whitehall back to my office, Julia, apparently through for the day, frowns at me as she picks up one of the innumerable women’s fashion magazines she brings to the office. My friend Clan Bailey, whose office is around the corner from mine, has remarked that as Julia’s skirts get shorter and her blouses sheerer, the reception area is taking on the atmosphere of a cheap escort service. As little money as Clan and I make from practicing law, maybe we should consider starting one.
    “Mr. Page,” Gina Whitehall says in a shy voice as she sits down across from me, “I can’t pay you very much.”
    What else is new? I stare at this slightly plump, buxom girl, who looks as if she ought to be studying for a geometry quiz instead of sitting in a lawyer’s office. She is wearing the uniform of the young: jeans, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes without socks. She is fair-skinned and has bright Kewpie-doll blue eyes that will forever make her appear younger than her chronological age.
    “Well, don’t worry,” I lie boldly, making a virtue out of necessity, “you can’t be old enough to be in too much trouble.”
    Red splotches of color appear on both cheeks like warning lights on a dashboard; and as quickly as the most tormented of my female divorce clients, she bursts into tears. I push the box of tissue toward her, wishing I had canceled her appointment.
    “They want to take my baby!” she gasps between sobs.
    There is no mascara or makeup to smear, and the tissue comes away clean from her face. Though I am reconciled to the firestorm of raw sensations my female clients often bring to my office, I continually marvel at the differences between the sexes. Popular culture now teaches men we should be crying, too—”getting in touch with our feelings”—as if they were physical objects that could be aroused as easily as an adolescent penis. Yet, somehow, I doubt if women (despite what they say) would be quite as attracted to us if we, too, went around sobbing.
    “Your parents?” I guess. Though she seems on first glance more intelligent than this, she has probably dropped out of school and married a boy whose idea of success is fixing flats the rest of his life. Not