Free Blind Man's Alley by Justin Peacock

just some bullshit.”
    That the victim was Sean Fowler was not good news, Duncan thought. Rafael had an obvious motive for killing the man who was directly responsible for the fact that he and his grandmother were facing eviction.
    “You got to get me out of here,” Rafael continued. “They’ve had me here since last night. I haven’t been to sleep.”
    While Duncan wasn’t sure what all might happen next, he was confident that Rafael’s just getting to go home was not among the possibilities. “We’ll see if the judge agrees to set bail at the arraignment. But even if he does, it’s likely to be a lot of money—I don’t think you should assume you’ll be going home today.”
    “They’re just making all this shit up,” Rafael protested. “How they gonna have somebody say they saw me do something I didn’t do? How they gonna say they found gunpowder on my hand when I didn’t shoot a gun?”
    Duncan was not keeping up, but was getting a sinking feeling nevertheless: any hope that the police had picked up Rafael only because he had a motive for shooting Fowler was out the window. This looked like a real case, with solid evidence. “You’ve got to back up for me here,” he said. “Tell me everything that happened.”
    Rafael nodded and took a deep breath, his eyes wet, trying to collect himself. He ran Duncan through the police coming to his apartment and arresting him, telling him they had an eyewitness, their finding gunshot residue on his hand.
    “This doesn’t sound good,” Duncan said when his client was finished. He saw no reason to sugarcoat the obvious: Rafael was sunk deep into serious trouble, and it wasn’t going to just go away.
    “You really think I popped Fowler? I got you working on keeping my abuela in her home. You just won in court. We’re fighting it the right way.”
    “I know you are, Rafael.”
    “So what do we do now?”
    By training and personality, lawyers rarely admit when they don’t know what to do. Duncan didn’t feel particularly tempted to tell Rafael how little he understood about how a murder case would play out. He was also virtually certain he wouldn’t be around to find out: his firm had signed up for a straightforward eviction case, something that would presumably take up less than one hundred hours of Duncan’s time. Defending a murder was a different level of commitment by an order of magnitude. Plus it wasn’t exactly what the firm had in mind when launching a pro bono initiative. And even putting firm politics aside, defending a murder fell outside of Duncan’s skill set. “I can represent you at arraignment, see about bail. But I think it’s unlikely I’m going to be able to keep your case past today.”
    Rafael looked like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What do you mean? You’re my lawyer.”
    “I’m your lawyer on the eviction. But this now is a murder charge. I’d be way over my head, Rafael.”
    “I’m not taking no public defender. That’s how come all this got so fucked up in the first place.”
    Perhaps because he needed to believe that his grandmother wouldn’t be evicted, Rafael had clearly put his full confidence in Duncan’s abilities from the first time they’d met. Duncan suspected that Rafael assumed that having a rich person’s lawyer would get him a rich person’s justice. There was some kernel of truth to that, Duncan supposed, but it didn’t mean he’d really be able to stop the eviction, let alone the murder charge. People often viewed a legal case in the same way they viewed a football game: there could be the occasional bad call or stroke of luck, but generally speaking the best team won. But Duncan knew the analogy didn’t really hold: the underlying facts and the relevant law were determined before the lawyers ever took the field, and often a case was virtually unwinnable or unloseable from the start. While a bad lawyer could always find a way to screw up, and a good lawyer could make it more