Shadow of Power by Steve Martini Read Free Book Online

write you a check.”
    “Listen, we’ll talk about it later,” I tell him. “I’ve got another meeting, and I’m running late.”
    “Sorry. I shouldn’t be taking up so much of your time.”
    “If not you, then who?” I walk him to the door.
    He turns, squeezes my arm at the shoulder. “Thanks.”
    “Try not to worry.”
    He nods and is out the door. Gone.
    I close the door behind him. I have no appointment. But I couldn’t think of any graceful way to stop Sam from talking about money. The fees and costs in a case like this will bankrupt even an upper-income family. Welcome to the justice system.

TWO
    I t is an axiom of criminal defense that a good lawyer must know his victim at least as well as he knows his own client. To that end, Harry and I are huddled this morning in the conference room at our law office on Coronado Island near San Diego.
    Even before the picture appears on the screen, I can visualize his image and facial expressions. Terrance Scarborough is sufficiently familiar to anyone who has ever heard the word “law” that you could say he has the kind of recognition that Washington has on the dollar bill. Scarborough has been the ultimate media monger for more than a decade, on constant call as a legal expert for any network or cable channel that would have him. Set up a camera with a red light and Scarborough would cut a swath through humanity to get to it.
    It is rumored that instead of legal briefs he carried only a clean shirt, a tie, and some Pan-Cake makeup in his briefcase. He had racked enough frequent-flier miles on trips between the networks in New York and CNN in Atlanta that he could fly to the moon for free.
    Although he was an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown, I have yet to find anyone who took a class from Scarborough. While technically on faculty, he spent his time writing treatises on radical social theories. Like Mao, he seemed to be working on his own Little Red Book, anything to inspire discontent and class strife.
    He garnered enough traction to generate a fair amount of socialheat, and along the way he made himself a staple of television’s cable age. Without question, Scarborough had a messianic need to be the constant center of attention. According to Harry, he has now achieved that ultimate goal, posthumously, and, if I am reading my partner correctly, deservedly. So meager is Harry’s sympathy for Scarborough that I have been left to wonder a few times whether Harry’s hammer is missing from his own toolbox.
    Scarborough’s motives, like most things in life, are a question of perception. It was Benjamin Franklin who is reputed to have said that “revolution in the first person is never illegal, as in ‘our revolution.’ It is only in the second person, ‘their revolution,’ that it becomes illegal.” Perspective, being a fine line, involves walking in the shoes of another. Yesterday’s demagogue is tomorrow’s committed leader when his message begins to resonate with the public—and so becomes elevated to today’s political martyr when he is murdered.
    We have gathered a number of recent news video clips from an online clipping service and had them burned onto a DVD.
    As Scarborough’s image flickers on the screen, it is impossible to deny that he possessed a certain charisma. Six-one and slender, so that dark power suits hung well from his body. Everything about him lent an edge of authority to his argument, from his emerald eyes and sculpted cheekbones to the dapper cleft in his chin. If you turned down the sound and just looked, you might see vestiges of Cary Grant, until you listened to the words.
    “What is so insidious, so sinister, is the way in which the nation’s Founding Fathers, people like Madison, Franklin, and Adams, concealed the words of slavery from the public and from history. They slipped the offending language into the Constitution, where it slithered like a hidden serpent through their grand experiment in Democracy,” says