Free The Last Plea Bargain by Randy Singer Page A

to stop them.
    After I showered, I put on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and one of my dad’s sweatshirts, then curled up on the couch. I had agreed to meet Chris at the funeral home at five. We had a memorial service to plan and burial details to discuss and an obituary to write, but I also knew that everything would get done with or without me.
    The house seemed more lifeless than ever, and I struggled with the thought of having to clean out my dad’s stuff and put the house on the market.
    â€œIt was his time,” Chris had said at the hospital. “But nobody can take the memories.”
    On that point, Chris was right. So I went into my dad’s study and pulled out the book that he had read to me as a little girl. I snuggled with it on the couch, and Justice looked up at me with pleading eyes. I patted the cushion beside me, and he jumped up and curled next to my legs.
    For the next two hours, I was my daddy’s girl again. He was Aslan, and I was Lucy, and whenever he would try to put the book down and tell me it was time to go to bed, I would beg him to read just one more chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe .

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    I spent the next few days in a fog of grief and disbelief. In the South, we have lots of traditions that occupy our hands and minds in the days following a death that allow us to push the real mourning back by at least a week. On the day my dad died, Chris and I finalized the obituary and made plans for the funeral. The next day, Chris and Amanda helped clean the house so we could have a proper reception for family, friends, and well-wishers. Food arrived in massive quantities, as if the house were a staging area for disaster relief rather than the home of a family who had just lost a loved one.
    The greatest torture was the two hours I spent in the receiving line at the viewing. The line snaked out the door of the funeral home and seemed interminable. When people finally got to the head of the line to shake my hand and hug Chris, Amanda, and their two girls, they would speak in hushed voices and tell me how sorry they were, as if they might have somehow caused my dad’s death themselves. Everybody was ill at ease, and you could tell there were a million places they would rather be.
    Well, not everybody. The few exceptions brightened my night. One was an old law school classmate of mine named Isaiah Haywood. He had always been irreverent, loud, and obnoxious, and he obviously saw no reason to make an exception just because my father had died.
    â€œThanks for coming,” I told Isaiah. As usual, he had decided to be the best-dressed man at the occasion. He was now working as the in-house attorney for a sports agency and was apparently making enough money to afford five-hundred-dollar suits.
    â€œI would have crawled here across broken glass just to see you in that black dress again,” he said. The comment made me blush. Isaiah had made similar remarks all through law school. I had rebuffed him every time, but that didn’t seem to bother him.
    â€œI really am sorry for your loss,” Isaiah said. “He must have been a great man to raise such a wonderful daughter.”
    I leaned in to give him a hug. It was one of the few that I judiciously parceled out that night.
    Two days later, we staged a funeral that was attended by a large part of the Atlanta legal community. My dad had been a minor legend. Chris did an amazing job eulogizing him and somehow kept his composure throughout. We tried to make it a celebration of my father’s life, and we generally succeeded. I cried only once, and that was when I saw Chris’s girls, ten-year-old Lola and eight-year-old Sophie, each put a rose on their granddaddy’s casket.
    I was touched by the showing from the DA’s office. Bill Masterson was there and had apparently decreed that every person not in trial should show up as well. They occupied two full rows, and it was heartwarming to see the prosecutors