The Case Against William by Mark Gimenez Read Free Book Online

sat in his leather chair next to the lamp. Becky lay sprawled out on the
couch. William was watching the Cowboys play; his dad was working on his
closing argument; his sister was reading about wizards. Dad had to drive back
to Austin after the game. Closing arguments in the senator's trial were
tomorrow morning. The game went to commercial, so William went back to the
sports pages.
    "Roger
Clemens won his three hundredth game."
    Dad
grunted.
    "Sammy
Sosa hit his six hundredth home run."
    Another
grunt.
    "Oh,
shit—Kobe got arrested!"
    That
got Dad's attention. Kobe Bryant was a huge star in the NBA.
    "Language,
William. For what?"
    William
read the story.
    "Rape."
    William
knew generally what rape was—a man forcing himself on a woman—because he had
asked his dad, but he wasn't entirely sure what "forcing himself"
meant. He had started to ask his dad—Dad's rule was, "If you ask a
question about stuff like that, I'll tell you the truth. Just make sure you
want to know the truth"—but he wasn't sure he wanted to know that truth.
Not yet.
    "They
say he raped a girl at a hotel in Colorado. Desk clerk."
    "Where?"
    "His
room."
    "Witnesses?"
    "Nope."
    "He
said, she said."
    "Huh?"
    "Her
word against his."
    "He'll
win."
    "Why
do you say that, William?"
    "Because Kobe's special. He's a star athlete. No jury will
convict him."
    "He
might be special on a basketball court, son, but that doesn't make him any more
special as a human being than that girl."
    Hid
dad always said stuff like that—"Innocent until proven guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt" … "No man is above the law" …
"Every person is equal under the law"—same as William's social
studies teacher. But even kids his age knew adults didn't really believe all
that stuff. They just said it because they were supposed to. Except maybe his
dad. Sometimes William thought maybe his dad really did believe it.
    "We're
all God's children?" William said.
    He
remembered the priest's sermon from that morning.
    "That's
right."
    "Well,
maybe so, Dad, but God must've liked His son Kobe a heck of a lot more than he
liked His daughter the desk clerk."
    "Why?"
    "Because
He made Kobe six-six and gave him a killer jump shot. So he's a rich and
famous basketball star. He didn't give that girl shit. So she's a desk
clerk."
    Dad
grunted. Which made William proud. Because when Dad grunted, that meant
William had said something that made him think.
    "Language,
William."
    A
thought struck him.
    "Hey,
Dad, maybe Kobe will hire you to be his lawyer. I bet he could pay you millions.
You'd be really famous if you were his lawyer."
    "He
doesn't represent clients accused of rape," Becky said.
    Frank
Tucker represented wrongly accused defendants in white-collar criminal cases.
Corporate executives and politicians. Corporate executives charged with
various kinds of criminal fraud—Houston was home to thousands of multinational
corporations; consequently, the white-collar criminal defense business was
booming—and politicians charged with violations of state and federal ethics and
campaign finance laws and official misconduct—this was Texas, so that business
was always booming.
    White-collar
criminal defense attorneys seldom became famous like the defense lawyers who
represented accused murderers. Everyone knew who Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee
Bailey were after they had represented O. J. Simpson in his murder trial. But
white-collar cases generally weren't as sexy as murder cases. Consequently,
Frank Tucker had been well known only to other lawyers who referred their
indicted clients to him. But he had made the leap to the front page the year
before when he had represented an Enron defendant. Enron Corporation had been
a high-flying energy trading company headquartered in Houston in the nineties.
It had gross revenues of $100 billion. It had assets of $60 billion. It had a
stock price of $90. It had engaged in pervasive criminal fraud. After the
company collapsed in 2001, corporate executives, including