Nursery Crimes Read Online Free Page B

elevator that showed up hadn’t been bulging with blue-suited prosecutors, I might have gone home that day, and avoided all the stress and fear of the next few weeks. But, as luck would have it, there was no roomfor a pregnant woman and no suit feeling chivalrous enough to give me his spot. The door closed and instead of hitting the down button again, I walked back into the federal defender’s office and headed to the lair of the investigators. I’ve never been very good either at resisting temptation or minding my own business. That’s what made me such a good lawyer.
    No criminal defense lawyer could function without the assistance of an able investigator. These are often retired cops who see nothing strange in their decision to spend their golden years keeping people out of prison after having spent their youth putting people in. My favorite investigator was a man named Al Hockey, an ex-LAPD detective who took a bullet to the gut in his twenty-fifth year on the force. Al had tried to play golf for a year or so after leaving his job, but at a mere fifty was too young to spend his days chasing a little white ball around a green lawn. He’d been with the federal defender’s office going on ten years, and during my time as an attorney there we were a terrific team. The first time we’d worked together, he’d managed to drum up fifteen bikers, each of whom claimed to have slept in my client’s camper and most of whom surprised the heck out of the prosecutor, judge, and jury by acknowledging more than a passing acquaintance with methamphetamine. It didn’t take the jury long to decide that any one of them could have left the packet of crank in my client’s glove compartment. That was my first not-guilty verdict.
    I walked into Al’s office, plopped myself into a beat-up vinyl armchair, and put my feet up on the desk.
    “Hey, old man. Miss me?”
    Al knocked my feet to the floor and flashed me a huge grin.
    “I was wondering if you were going to grace me with your presence. I heard you were around today.”
    “Wow, you must be using your keen detective skills again, Al.”
    “You know it, fat girl.”
    “I am not fat,” I sputtered. “I’m pregnant.”
    “Whatever. All I know is that it’s been a mighty long time since I’ve seen you in your leathers.”
    I’d earned the eternal devotion of the sexists in the investigator’s office by showing up on my third day of work in a black leather miniskirt coupled with a conservative black blazer. I liked to pretend that I was making a statement, but the truth was I had spilled coffee that morning on the skirt that matched the blazer and, since I had eaten French fries and pie at every truck stop between New York and California, my mother’s old leather mini (circa 1960) was the only thing in my closet that fit. I’ve never regretted my fashion
faux pas.
It can be next to impossible for an aggressive woman to earn the respect and cooperation of her colleagues, particularly if those colleagues are a bunch of beer-bellied, bellicose ex-cops. For some reason, my willingness to seem decidedly female, even sexy, made the guys feel better about accepting me as an equal. I wasn’t someone they had to watch themselves around for fear of being reported for sexual harassment. Perversely, wearing a leather miniskirt made me one of the guys.
    “Peter’s keeping you barefoot and pregnant, Juliet.” Al laughed.
    I lifted a sneaker-shod foot. “Well, pregnant anyway,” I said.
    “What exactly is it that you do all day?”
    “Oh, you know, bake cookies. Drive car pool. Run the PTA.”
    He looked at me seriously. “And that’s enough for you?”
    I had no ready answer. No, it wasn’t enough.
    “It’s enough for now.” I said and then changed the subject. “So Al, I have a favor to ask.”
    “A favor?” Al asked, his eyebrows raised.
    “Yeah. Nothing big. Well, not too big. Well, maybe kind of big. Will you run someone through NCIC for me?”
    NCIC stands for