Kill All the Lawyers by Paul Levine Read Free Book Online

the status quo ante?"
    "Aw, c'mon, Vic. I didn't mean it that way. More like, you weren't around to influence me, so I did some things I wouldn't do now."
    "Nice recovery, Slick. But what you did was still unethical and illegal."
    "Okay, already. I've gotten over it. You should, too."
    "Just like that! Could you give me a few minutes first?"
    One of the students at the dig site, a young woman in khaki shorts, stood and yelled. She held something in her hand and waved to the others. From this distance it was impossible to make out the item. A shard of pottery, an arrowhead, some artifact of the Tequesta Indians? Scratching away to learn secrets of the past.
    Victoria went into her lawyer mode. Speaking softly, as if thinking out loud, she said: "Kreeger probably can't sue you because the statute of limitations has run. But there's no limitations period on ethical violations. He could have you disbarred."
    "Or hit me with a marlin gaff."
    He told her then about the gaff delivered to the office. "The marlin on the door. The gaff. Kreeger's way of saying he knows I torpedoed his case."
    "But why tell you?"
    "To let me know he can do the same thing to me he did to Beshears and Lamm."
    "So selling out your client wasn't just blatantly illegal," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. "It was also unbelievably stupid."
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    Her anger surprised him. What happened to that warm and comfy nurturing he'd expected?
    What happened to clinging to her warm bosom?
    Steve thought back to the day he'd discovered Kreeger's secret. He'd been looking for helpful witnesses, not damning ones. Kreeger had become a bit of a celebrity. The psychiatrist had done work with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit and gained some credibility as an expert on serial killers. Turn on CNN or Court TV, and he'd pop up every time some freak was loose. Then he moved into personal relationships, which Steve figured wasn't all that different than homicide. Relaxed in front of the camera, Kreeger got his daytime TV show, dispensing wisdom to women fed up with their men, an inexhaustible and ever-growing audience.
    Steve traveled to the med school in Gainesville, trying to find character witnesses. He spoke to a professor who remembered Kreeger and told a murky story about a fishing trip gone bad. A few more calls turned up the former girlfriend of the late Jim Beshears. The girlfriend told Steve that Kreeger had been enraged by Beshears' charges of academic fraud. The two men had argued, and from her vantage point in the cockpit of the boat, she thought Kreeger might have pushed Beshears overboard, then intentionally hit him with the gaff. But everything had happened so fast and she'd been so shaken, she couldn't be sure. Officially, the death was declared an accident without a full criminal investigation.
    Then Steve read Kreeger's bestselling book: Looking Out for Numero Uno. The man's views of human nature were downright macabre. In chapter one, "Screw Thy Neighbor," Kreeger posited that greed, hedonism, and selfishness are good. Altruism, charity, and sacrifice are stupid. Self-interest is the only interest. Be the screwer, not the screwee. The more he read, the more concerned Steve became.
    He went back to Gainesville and puttered around in the Shands Hospital library. He found Kreeger's monograph, Murder Through the Eons: Homicide as an Essential Element of Evolutionary Biology. While a hospital resident on the psychiatry staff, Kreeger had argued that human beings were bred to be murderers. Homicidal instincts, he wrote, are survival tactics dating from prehistoric times. By historical practice, it is rational and sane to kill anyone who threatens your cave, your mate, or your dinner. Our DNA carries those instincts today.
    "Murder should not be considered a perversion of human values. Murder is the essential human value."
    Then Kreeger went even further. To kill rationally, he declared, does not require one to be engaged in self-defense. Setting