Blood Royal by Harold Robbins Read Free Book Online Page A

are a barrister’s office. A meeting’s been set up with members of the defense team.”
    “I hope the papers aren’t calling it a ‘dream team.’”
    Hall smiled. “Not yet, but I suppose they will turn to that phrase when there are less monumental details to report. The hiring of you by the princess is the current feeding frenzy.”
    Hall blushed a little at his comment. A very nice young man, she thought, and at the same time feeling old at thinking of a man only a few years younger than her as “young.”
    “Philip, are you a solicitor or a barrister?”
    He smiled. “American lawyers are always so curious about the distinction. Your attorneys are licensed in all matters.”
    “True, but other than small-town lawyers who tend to do everything, American lawyers separate somewhat along the same lines. We have lawyers who do transactional-type work, contracts, wills, that sort of thing, and trial attorneys whose arena is the courtroom.”
    “I am a barrister. Trent, of course, as lead counsel, is also a barrister. As you probably know, he’s one of the most respected attorneys in Britain.”
    She had never spoken to Trent, nor heard of him until the story about the killing hit the news and stayed there. That the princess had hired one of the leading attorneys in her own country wasn’t a surprise. Marlowe had been hired directly by the princess, though an American friend of the princess made all of the arrangements. Other than a telephone conversation in which the princess confirmed that she wished to employ her as part of the defense team, Marlowe had not spoken to anyone directly connected to the case.
    It was strange that she was hired by the princess when the woman already had attorneys working for her—but that was just one card in a crazy deck. The fact that the princess reached across the Atlantic to hire an American lawyer when Britain had outstanding attorneys, and had chosen one who had some notoriety in her own right, were also wild cards.
    “Our office is taking care of the arrangements to have you appear ad hoc in the matter,” Hall said.
    Ad hoc was a legal principle that gave judges the right to permit attorneys not licensed in their jurisdiction to appear before their courts. Thus a California judge could permit a New York attorney to practice before a California court for the limited purpose of representing a particular client. Usually, the out-of-state lawyer had to associate a local attorney in the matter. In this case, an attorney licensed in one country was requesting the right to appear as trial counsel in an entirely different country.
    “It’s a bit unusual,” Hall said, “but since you are an attorney from a common-law country with similar procedures and rules of evidence, we believe no serious obstacle will be raised. The fact that Anthony Trent will be lead counsel will clinch it, of course.”
    Marlowe let the “lead counsel” remark pass. She intended to cooperate fully with Trent and the princess’s other British lawyers, but she had made it clear in her brief conversation with the princess that she would only come aboard if she had the last say on the defense. Marlowe was not a team player. Teams were committees and her feeling about committees was summed up by someone’s observation that a giraffe was a horse designed by a committee—or was it a camel?
    She would cooperate with Hall, Trent, and whoever, that was a necessity, but when it came down to making a major decision on defense strategy, she would follow her own lead.
    A newspaper from a stack that sat on the bottom shelf of a liquor cabinet wiggled out enough from the motion of the car so she could read the screaming headline: NEW GUNFIGHTER IN TOWN.
    The subheading was Slow Trigger James Rides In.
    “Slow Trigger” referred to the fact that she had convinced juries that the reasonable provocation needed for a heat-of-passion defense could be abuse stretched out over a period of years rather than a sudden