When You Practice to Deceive

By Richard Kerger

The story traces the growth of a young lawyer and a successful practitioner in Columbus, Ohio. Then he makes the decision that puts him in a position to be indebted to a manipulative criminal. His success ebbs and flows, and his criminal mentor keeps returning to frustrate his progress. Only a miracle can save him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781973646051

Book preview

Chapter 1

Odd, Roger thought. Lying in his lap, its blue metal seemed to almost glow in the dawn. A new day but not a better day. At least not yet.

But within a few hours it will be, the day that ends with Krieger dead or Roger dead, or perhaps both. Roger had never killed anyone. Indeed until a few weeks ago he had never fired a pistol. A rifle at the local carnivals, sure, but never anything like the .38 caliber Colt automatic that lay in his lap.

The gun certainly seemed up to the task. It had a crack that sounded lethal. The owner of the shop had grinned when Roger winced at the noise, then quickly changed his expression, it occurring to him that laughing at a customer about to part with $550 was not a good idea. After emptying the clip that had been loaded by the dealer, Roger announced that he was ready to make his purchase. After handing over $650 in cash (Roger wanted no credit card trail) he walked out with the gun along with several boxes of bullets. His life as a trial lawyer told him that preparation was the key to every task and so while he anticipated only one bullet for Kreiger, he wanted to make sure he could hit him and so practice was in order.

Murder was the way out for Roger. No longer would he be owned by some thug from Cleveland. Roger Schloss, a lawyer, could not continue that life.

So on several early mornings he had gotten up before daybreak and driven to an abandoned quarry north of Columbus. He had fired 90 rounds, ten full clips, each time. He chose a distance of about 15 feet. He assumed he would be closer than that but certainly if he could hit the target at 15 feet, he could manage it at less than that. The previous morning he had put all his shots in the chest of the target he had bought. Mechanically he was ready. Was he mentally ready? That was the bigger question.

During the nights he had thought often about the fact that Krieger no doubt had far more experience in these matters than he did. It struck Roger that Krieger would object to being killed and might shoot back. Krieger might even kill him.

As he drove north, Roger began to think about simply shooting himself. With the barrel of the pistol stuck in his mouth, as he had read about in books, he certainly could not miss. He would undoubtedly be dead. But then Krieger would have won and that was not right. The Kriegers of the world should not be allowed to win their games. Krieger deserved to die. He was the one who put Roger in this fix.

It had to be soon. He wanted to sleep. No more days to rethink things.

Chapter 2

The elevator doors hissed open and Roger stepped onto the marble floor. He turned to his right and clicked briskly down the hall, headed for the teak door bearing, in brass thank you, the name of his firm – Law Offices of Roger J. Schloss. Roger felt content. Very content.

The muted lighting from sconces set on the walnut paneling in the hall gave the place a reverential feeling. Roger liked it.

He turned the handle and stepped into his domain. His ageless secretary looked up and smiled a Good morning, Mr. Schloss.

Good morning Gladys. Things quiet?

Yes, sir, they are, came the answer.

This was not surprising since it was only 7:15 and most of the people in Columbus were still getting ready to go to work. But not Roger, or the rest of his firm for that matter. Roger came early and worked late, as did his five associates. Each of them was expected to bill over 2,200 hours a year. With hourly rates ranging from $250 to $500 an hour, he assured that they more than paid for their salary and overhead.

That is, provided Roger picked the right cases. Because while each of them kept track of their hours and had hourly rates, most of Roger’s clients were on contingency fees. The typical rate was one-third of what he collected for his client. He worked exclusively for plaintiffs and recovered a fee only if he won.

It was not a sore back and traffic accident sort of practice. From the time he started 15 years ago, Roger had been involved in unusual cases. Sure, he had handled routine criminal and traffic cases as a fledgling lawyer. He had been able to afford this training. His grandfather had left a trust fund that paid for his education with enough left over to take him through the first couple of years after he hung out his shingle. He was sure, however, that his grandfather, who died a federal judge, would have rolled over in his tomb if he had known his grandson had attended the University of Michigan’s Law School. Grandpa had been graduated from The Ohio State University, a dyed-in-the-wool Buckeye and the fact that his progeny was a Wolverine would have gone down sideways at best.

At any rate, the trust fund had made its final disbursement to Roger three months after he left Michigan – a total of $900,000 paid on his 25th birthday. That had carried Roger for the first several years of his practice. Things got a little dicey by year three but Roger managed to successfully resolve an unusual case, one he brought on behalf of inmates injured during a prison riot. The Judge handling the case had approved $550,000 in legal fees as part of the settlement.

It had been unusual to say the least. The inmates at the prison had been dissatisfied over the racial policies of the administration. The Warden felt that race should not be a factor in assigning prisoners to the two-man cells featured at the prison and accordingly it was not. Noble it may have been, but this policy left a lot to be desired from the standpoint of common sense. Placing a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in a 9 x 11 cell with a member of the Black Gangster Disciples may have looked good on paper but in practice it was horrible. Tensions escalated rapidly.

A riot soon ensued. No one was killed but many inmates were severely injured when the guards retaliated after the riot was over. Those injured were the ones who had been represented by Roger. He was asked to help the inmates after a few of them filed a suit themselves. The judge handling the case had been a friend of his grandfather and he asked Roger to step in and he had. After he got his arms around the issues, he had filed a motion for summary judgment, one that asked the court to decide as a matter of law, that he and his clients were right. It was rare that a plaintiff ever moved for summary judgment, much less obtained one. Summary judgment meant no trial, just a decision by the Judge on the materials Roger filed, that Roger’s client was going to win because the facts were not really in dispute and the law supported Roger. Roger had been able to point to the wrong-headed policy that had led to the problem in the first place. The evidence of retaliation had been strong and soon after he filed the motion, the assistant attorney general handling the case had called to see if a resolution was possible. And of course it was. While he felt good about the merits of the case, he was representing convicted felons and there was not likely to be a mothers’ march on the court house to be sure justice was done on their behalf. With some modest pushing from the judge, an agreement was reached that caused significant improvement in the conditions at the prison where the riot had occurred, the transfer of certain guards and very substantial increases in the commissary accounts of Roger’s clients, and of course the $500,000 attorney fee award to himself.

From that point, Roger never looked back. Referrals came in steadily from a variety of sources. He filed a lawsuit on behalf of sellers of pornographic books attacking the ordinance in a small Methodist college town which had closed their doors. He won. There was the lawsuit he filed for some undercover drug police officers challenging the policy of the city in making their personnel files available for review by all, including several drug dealers the undercover cops had helped put on trial. He won that case as well, establishing a right to privacy in that jurisdiction for the first time. In each case, a federal judge had approved a substantial award of attorney fees for Roger.

Occasional personal injury clients came, but even there he only took cases which were different. He had brought one challenging the amount of coverage afforded by insurance companies under Ohio’s financial responsibility act. His client had been seriously injured by a driver who had the state-required minimum liability insurance coverage - $12,500. Roger had taken the case on a referral from an out-of-town lawyer notwithstanding the seeming impossibility of earning a decent fee even if he did prevail. The available insurance was only $12,500 and the driver, like almost everyone, was without sufficient assets to make efforts at collection from him personally of an appropriate damage award a bit like the Children’s Crusade. Roger had felt establishing that the defendant was at fault would be a snap and he was right. But when the carrier offered to pay its limit of $12,500 to settle the case, Roger refused. He had a plan.

The lawyer representing the driver had been hired by the insurance company. This was routine regardless of the amount of insurance provided. But that lawyer’s ethical obligation was to his client, although the insurance company was paying his fee. Since Roger’s client had very substantial injuries, far more than $12,500 worth, the insured had his own bank account at risk. Before the trial began, Roger proposed that if the defendant driver gave Roger’s client the defendant’s right to sue his own insurance carrier for not living up to its fiduciary duty, Roger would agree not to try to collect the damages from him personally.

It had been finally agreed that the defendant would admit she had injured Roger’s client while driving negligently and that the fair value of compensation for the pain and suffering for of Roger’s client was $2 million.

Roger then sued the insurance company, asserting the claim he had taken from its insured. The theory was that insurance carriers had a fiduciary relationship to their insureds and that they had to deal with them in utmost good faith. For an insurance company to let its insured feel secure in driving on Ohio’s highways in the 2000’s with only $12,500 of coverage was a violation of that fiduciary duty, or so his argument had gone.

The insurance carrier had laughed at the claim. The fact it was complying with the regulations governing insurance companies in Ohio was a complete defense the company’s lawyers said. But two weeks before trial, the carrier paid Roger $900,000 to settle the case. While the state insurance commission approved the limits of $12,500 presented by the insurer, Roger argued that the commission did not have a fiduciary duty to the insured. The insurance company did. It could not avoid its responsibility to its insured by pointing to a government regulation. Originally Roger had been offered $100,000 but he turned it down. It’s too little and it is not divisible by three, Roger had told the defense lawyer. His contingency fee agreement called for him to receive one-third of any recovery. The final figure was much larger and was divisible by three.

As a result of these cases and others like them, Roger was taking home between $500,000 and $1,000,000 a year. His associates were paid base salaries ranging from $150,000 to $450,000 and were eligible for substantial bonuses depending on how their cases turned out. Roger worked everyone hard but he believed in sharing the wealth. Gladys probably made more money than the associates in some of the biggest firms in town, but she was also worth more and he wanted to keep her.

He had never had an affair with her, which itself was a bit unusual because Roger seemingly had had an affair with almost every woman he met. This tendency had grated on his wife and she had departed several years earlier with a large property settlement and $10,000 a month in alimony. Even with Roger’s success, that hurt. She even got the time share in St. Thomas and the house in Bexley.

As a result, Roger was living in more modest digs in German Village, a cluster of brick homes on the near south side of Columbus. German Village had been the place where the workers at Columbus’s several old breweries had resided, along with the owners of those same breweries and assorted members of the German merchant class. After the breweries closed, the area became run down and generally unsafe. Then in the 1960’s, the gentry had begun redeveloping the area. Now it consisted of restored homes, good restaurants and a park at its southern edge. Roger’s new home was across from the park and had cost him nearly $800,000. It needed some work, but Roger was confident that one of the several cases he had pending would more than take care of that problem.

He walked down the hall glancing into the offices that lined the hallway. He could see the tops of five heads as his associates worked diligently at their computer terminals. He passed Clayton Walrod’s office and thought how much he hated the fact that Clayton smoked. It was not that Clayton smelled up the office through his habit. Smoking inside the office was forbidden by both state law and Roger’s own edict. Nor was it any concern for Clayton’s health. It was the fact that three or four times a day, Clayton would leave the office to go down to the street to smoke. Roger figured each trip took 12 minutes, or two-tenths of an hour. That’s nearly an hour a day or five hour a week seven if you counted the weekends, and Roger did. That amounted to nearly $90,000 a year. Roger was sure that the state and federal officials had not bothered to do an economic impact statement before enacting the anti-smoking laws. If they had been so concerned about the impact on business of various environmental rules, it seemed to him that they could at least be a little concerned about businesses like his.

Clayton’s redeeming virtue was that he was smart. Very smart. His limited personality meant Clayton would never try a lawsuit, but his research and writing made him a key asset. For that reason, Roger tolerated him, and his smoking.

Roger was not much of a fan of anything except practicing law and making money. In fact one advantage of the divorce was that he did not have to worry about anybody else and that had made him even more productive. He dated but had no entangling relationships. He liked that. It simplified things.

He had noticed the previous day that there was now a street preacher on the southwest corner of the block in which his office building was located. This guy did not need an amplifier. His voice carried his message several blocks. Something about Christ being the answer. Roger did not really see or hear him though. Roger was a busy man and he had walked rapidly past the preacher on his way to something important.

Chapter 3

Roger had a big office. No, to be accurate, Roger had a huge office. People talk about offices where you could practice putting. You could have practiced wedge shots in Roger’s. It was in the corner, naturally, and over- looked the Scioto River and Columbus’s south and west side. His desk was a slab of mahogany standing on four brass legs. There were no drawers.

Three walls were covered with pictures of Roger with various famous people, mostly politicians and judges. Not that Roger was into celebrities as such. Rather, Roger was into people who could affect his career and make him