Free Hangman by Michael Slade

at UBC Law School. I think it was preordained that Ethan and I would end up back here on the skids. Our wallets are joined at the hip. Like Siamese twins.
    Don’t harbor any illusions about Kline & Shaw. I don’t want you thinking our law firm is two noble men who forsook uptown riches to return to their roots, preferring to run a rundown storefront office serving the under-funded needs of poor, disenfranchised wretches. Believe me, I can relate. I was one of them for too many years. But I didn’t fight my way up from the East End to end up a legal-aid lawyer serving the skids. I fought my way out of that cockroach-infested slum to become the best goddamn criminal lawyer there is, a man living on the West Side in a mansion of cedar and glass, with a client base of the richest and heaviest bad guys around.
    If your life is on the line,
    Time to call for Jeffrey Kline …
    So what happened?
    Why am I still here?
    The first thing you’ve got to understand is that law is about connections. If your parents live on the West Side and you’re a silver spoon, you’re connected in some way through them. You go into Mommy’s firm or bill Daddy’s business friends. Or you capitalize on a client base of other silver spoons like you. West Siders go mostly into civil law. That’s where the real money is, and they follow it. East Enders have always been left with criminal law. Criminals, for the most part, make up our connections. Small-time hoods and grifters are our client base. Big-time bad guys will always go for flash, so they get cherry-picked by mavericks working white-collar crime and the stock exchange, leaving us with the dregs funded by legal aid.
    The East End bar.
    Lawyers like Kline & Shaw.
    When we went into law school, Ethan and I, legal aid was a springboard to the West Side. Graduate with debts up to here from student loans, without a single connection to launch your practice, and your best bet was a call to legal aid to say there was a new gun in town, so start sending cases. Elect for a jury trial whenever you had the option, and thanks to that new milk cow, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, you could squirt an endless stream of money from the bottomless public purse. Work, work, work until you paid off your debts, and soon you could afford a move up the food chain. It was only a matter of time until you struck gold, since the law of averages was with you. Pan enough dreck and you were sure to get a Big Case, a small-time punk who hit the big time, and if you were good and got him off scot-free, you could use the win to hook clients flush with cash.
    Law is about connections.
    Law is about hooks.
    When we came out of law school, Ethan and I, the milk from the milk cow was dribbling dry. Politicians here had made a big mistake when they gambled that the Pacific Rim was where the future lay, so when Asia took a dive in the global marketplace, we—unlike the rest of North America—went into recession. Penny-pinchers grabbed hold of the public purse, and the first to suffer the stinginess of politics in the nineties were those who didn’t vote: our client base.
    The legal-aid system crumbled.
    And took us with it.
    Son of a bitch!
    Just my luck.
    The net effect of that crumbling was the scene in Kline & Shaw last November 1. Ethan had disappeared into his office right of Suzy’s desk, and there would while away the day at cheap paperwork. Everything from landlord and tenant to immigration to divorce to real estate to wills and estates to creditors’ remedies to motor-vehicle claims. Meanwhile, our admin was on strike. I sat at Suzy’s desk, surrounded by a mess of bills we could ill afford to pay, not a single client referral from legal aid in the mail, daydreaming that I was retained to act for the Hangman down south, and hoping that across the street in the courthouse cells the Salvation Army was filling out a referral form in my name: the Big Case that somehow would catapult me away from all this.
    Jesus