The Divine Appointment (8 page)

The law offices of Elijah J. Faulkner, Jackson, Tennessee

Eli arrived at his office on Tuesday morning, the last week of May, just before 8:00 a.m. central time. As he exited his car, he noticed that the spring weather was quite pleasant. The rain and clouds that had draped Jackson overnight were gone, and the morning sun warmed his face as he walked toward the rear entrance of his office building. The brisk, wintry days were in the distant past, and the oppressive, humid days of summer were still two months away.

On days like this Eli wished he could abandon his law practice and spend a few hours on one of the local golf courses. One round of golf every two months wasn’t nearly enough. But there was too much to be done at his office. There were too many clients who needed his services. Too many wrongs that needed to be righted. He was passionate about his occupation. Many people despised what they did for a living, but not Eli.

Certainly there were times when the stress and pressure weighed heavily on him, when the countless hours of work kept him away from his lovely wife or precluded him from taking up a hobby or two. But it was his lifelong desire to help people that kept him going. Drove him, really. In brief minutes of frustration, he’d remind himself of the time he’d helped a young couple adopt a child. He’d remember representing the family who had lost their husband and father to a drunk driver. And he’d recall the times he had simply provided guidance and counseling to a husband and wife who were facing a financial crisis. Countless others had come to him in need, and he had been able to help.

Eli traversed his usual route into the office, up the back stairs, through the little kitchen, and down the hall to his private office in the rear of the building. Barbara delivered a cup of coffee as he settled in behind his desk for the ritual of sorting through the morning mail.

“Don’t forget about your meeting at nine a.m. with Ms. Grissom,” she reminded him.

“I saw it on my calendar. Do you know why she’s coming to see me?”

“I’m not sure I asked her. She called yesterday, and said she needed to see you as soon as possible. She said George Thornton told her to call. I worked her in this morning but told her you had only an hour before you had to finish preparing for this afternoon’s deposition.”

He nodded. “Let me know when she gets here.”

After Barbara left the room, Eli meticulously opened each article of mail and organized the contents into three separate stacks: one for items he needed to respond to; one for items that needed to be filed away; and one for items that Barbara could discard.

It wasn’t long before Barbara escorted Anna Grissom to Eli’s office. She was a petite lady in her early thirties. She had chestnut hair, was stylishly dressed, and was attractive. But what struck Eli most were her eyes. It wasn’t really even the color, a deep, dark brown. It was something else. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. After a couple of seconds it came to him. They were kind. Anna Grissom had kind eyes.

Despite her engaging appearance, Eli recognized that Anna was troubled. After Barbara introduced them, she gathered the mail from Eli’s desk and excused herself from the office. Anna sat, legs crossed at the ankles, in a leather wingback chair across the desk from him. She and Eli exchanged small talk for a couple of minutes before Eli directed the conversation to the purpose for her consultation.

“What can I help you with, Ms. Grissom?”

Eli removed the top of his Mont Blanc pen. He found a clean notepad in the top-right-hand drawer of his desk.

“Please, call me Anna.”

“All right, Anna. What can I help you with?”

Anna wrung her hands in her lap. “My uncle, George Thornton, tells me you’re the best lawyer in the whole state, Mr. Faulkner.”

What made her so nervous? Eli wondered. Aloud he said, “George is too kind. I hope I can live up to my reputation. And call me Eli.”

“Okay, Eli. I hope Uncle George is right because my husband is in a terrible mess.”

“What’s your husband’s name, Anna?”

“Tag,” she replied through a forced smile. “We call him Tag, but his given name is Todd Allen Grissom.”

After her first comments, Eli anticipated that Anna wanted to pursue a divorce from her husband, and for that, Eli would politely refer her to another attorney. “Tag Grissom,” he said as he wrote the name on the yellow notepad on his desk. “What kind of mess has Tag gotten himself into?” Eli continued to look at his notepad, prepared to write the response.

Two seconds elapsed without any noise from Anna.

Puzzled, he looked up.

Anna Grissom was no longer wringing her hands. She appeared to be barely breathing, and despair was etched across her face. She stared past Eli to some location beyond the walls of his office.

Two additional seconds passed before she apparently noticed that Eli was staring at her. When their eyes met, Eli saw the horror leaping from hers. Eyes that had once appeared kind now looked completely terrified.

“He murdered someone,” Anna finally replied. Her voice was unemotional.

It wasn’t often that Eli found himself speechless. It wasn’t a good trait for a lawyer to possess. But this was such an occasion. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He could only repeat the phrase back to Anna, but formulated into a question. “Murdered someone?”

“Well, not exactly,” she explained. “The police say he murdered her, but I know he didn’t do it.”

Eli regained his composure from the shock that the husband of this polite, attractive woman was accused of murder. The only thing that might have shocked him even more would have been if Anna herself had been accused of murder. He replaced his pen in the pocket of his heavily starched shirt and focused his attention completely on Anna.

“You said ‘her,’ Anna. Who exactly is Tag accused of murdering?”

“A lawyer in Nashville named Jessica Caldwell.”

Eli thought briefly as he processed the name of the decedent to see if it meant anything to him. He couldn’t place it, so he continued his inquiry. “Why do the police think that he murdered her?”

The hand-wringing resumed as Anna told Eli as much as she knew. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to her if Tag was having an affair with Jessica Caldwell, she explained. It wouldn’t be Tag’s first affair. She didn’t question that Tag might have been in Jessica’s town house the night of the murder. Eli sat on the edge of his chair as he listened to Anna recite the story of Tag’s arrest at his office in front of a waiting room full of patients.

“But I know he didn’t kill her,” she stated adamantly and shook her head defiantly. She shifted in her seat, uncrossed her legs, and recrossed them with her knees pointing in the opposite direction from where they had been. “I know he didn’t.”

She sounded authoritative, as if she knew the truth and no one should question her about it. But Eli wasn’t sure whether she was trying to convince him or herself of Tag’s innocence.

“How can you be so certain that your husband is innocent?”

“I know my husband, Mr. Faulkner.” She caught herself. “I’m sorry—Eli,” she corrected. “I know he’s a terrible husband and has been unfaithful to our marriage. But that’s all he’s guilty of.” Anna removed a tissue from her purse and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.

“Was he with you the night of the murder?” Eli asked. He hoped that a credible alibi existed.

When Anna hesitated before responding, Eli knew the answer to his question.

“Would it help if I said that he was?” she pleaded. “It wouldn’t be a complete lie. He
was
with me part of the night. I was by myself the other part. So no one could say otherwise.”

“We can’t do that, Anna,” Eli responded delicately. He raised his hands slightly above the top of the desk, palms toward Anna. “We’ll have to prove that Tag is innocent by using some evidence other than your testimony.”

“I know,” Anna admitted. She looked away from Eli and sighed. “I wouldn’t make a good liar anyway. But I’ll do just about anything to keep my husband out of jail.”

A simple one-word question rose to his mind. It was a question that lawyers were taught in law school never to ask, and particularly never to ask unless you already knew the answer. But it escaped innocently from Eli’s mouth before he could stop it. “Why?”

Anna’s head snapped back to where her eyes met Eli’s eyes again. The question caught her off guard. “Why what?”

“Why do you want your husband back?” Eli gestured with his hands as he talked. “You’ve already told me that he’s an adulterer, and now he’s accused of murder. It may turn out that he is, in fact, guilty of murder.”

Genuine compassion was growing inside him for this woman he’d only known for a few minutes. He gazed sympathetically at her and softened his tone. “Why do you want him back?” he asked again.

Anna dabbed at the corners of her eyes again. “Because he’s the father of my unborn child,” she responded through her tears.

Eli sat silently as Anna released several days of anger, sorrow, hatred, and confusion. The tissue Anna clutched in her hand was insufficient to capture all the tears that now streamed down her face, so Eli handed her a package of tissues he kept in the top drawer of his desk.

“I’m sorry,” Anna said as she regained her composure.

“Don’t be. I don’t know how I would act if I were in your place.”

“I didn’t come here to bore you with our marital problems.” She pressed a fresh tissue underneath her eyes, trying to remove the moisture that welled up. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “It’s just that we’ve tried for so long to conceive, and I’m not about to let my child grow up without a father.”

Eli saw the determination on her face and heard it in her tone. His earlier feeling of compassion evolved into admiration. Anna’s fragile appearance was giving way to an inner strength that Eli suspected few people had ever seen. Any apprehension that he may have had about helping Anna and her ingrate of a husband subsided. He would represent Tag Grissom—but not because he thought Tag was innocent. He would do it because of Anna and her unborn child.

“Anna,” he began, “I’ll represent Tag, but on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to be present at every court hearing, regardless of what it’s for or what it’s about. I want the judge and jury to see you there, but more important, I want you to have full knowledge of everything that Tag has done. He’ll have no way to hide from the truth in the courtroom, and I want you to hear every word of it, no matter how painful it may be.”

Without hesitation she responded, “You’ve got yourself a deal, Eli.” She smiled.

Eli and Anna spent the better part of an hour together as he gathered the necessary details regarding Tag’s arrest and the charges against him. He decided that the final preparation for the afternoon deposition could wait awhile longer.

When he and Anna finished talking, Eli escorted her to the elevator in the lobby and stopped by Barbara’s workstation on his return to his office.

“Will you see if Jill is in the building? If so, ask her to come to my office, please.”

“She’s here,” Barbara replied. “I saw her a few minutes ago. I’ll see if I can find her.”

While Barbara went to get Jill, Eli retrieved a putter and four golf balls from the closet in his office. He could think better that way. He began putting at a plastic cup lying on the floor, across the room.

Five minutes later Jill Baker appeared in the doorway to Eli’s office. Jill was four years removed from law school. After she had worked a year as a law clerk for Judge David Sawyer, senior judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, Eli had hired her as his associate. He had only employed one other associate over the years, and that employment relationship had ended less than amicably. Eli admitted he was demanding, and almost anyone would have a difficult time working for him. But he liked Jill. She was intelligent, quick on her feet, and deceptively demure. She was unmarried, unattached, and worked long hours for him with no complaints. Many who met her for the first time made the mistake of underestimating her. When Eli had interviewed her, he’d seen what he was looking for in an associate. Beneath her soft black hair and behind those hazel eyes was an intelligent, resourceful, and zealous lawyer. Another quality that he found enduring was that she liked the Atlanta Braves baseball team.

“Did you summon me?” Jill asked.

Eli tapped one of the balls toward the plastic cup and chuckled at the bad pun. He glanced up at Jill and back down at the floor. Using the head of the putter, he rolled another ball into his stance.

“
Summon
isn’t exactly the right word,” he replied. “But I do need you. Come in and sit down.”

Jill obeyed and sat on the sofa against the back wall of Eli’s office. She was safely off the makeshift putting green.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I just agreed to represent a doctor accused of murder over in Nashville, and I need your help on the file.”

“Murder? I thought you weren’t taking any more criminal cases.”

Eli retrieved the golf balls again. All four had missed the cup, to the left. He walked and talked.

“I know, but I couldn’t turn this one down. His wife is related to an old client of mine,” Eli replied, masking the real reason he’d decided to take the case. “Anyway, I’ve decided to take the case, and you’ll need to do a lot of the legwork on this file.”