Greenfield sighed.  He had been reading the discussion over at Simple Justice about the attorney's ethical role in discussing taking a plea, mainly as a way to avoid getting back to thinking about what he was going to say to his own client about the plea offer; the guy was due in the office at the top of the hour.

Damn.  Double damn. 

Damn.  It didn't look good, mind you, but, then again, how often did it?  He flipped through the file again, as though he hadn't committed it to memory.  He hated this.

He sat back in his chair and took another sip of coffee, hoping that it would clarify things for him.  It didn't. 

He had about two hours to figure it out; his guy was not exactly a demon for punctuality.  If he had been, well, he wouldn't have been in this trouble, in the first place -- he would have caught the train on time, and not just missed and, and while he was waiting for the next one, struck up a conversation with what he'd thought was a hooker, but turned out to be an undercover cop.  Turns out the difference was kind of important.  

Trying to arrange a commerical quickie while carrying a backpack containing three pounds of barely-stepped-on cocaine wasn't a bright thing to do in the first place, of course, but as a wise man once said, the prisons weren't exactly filled with Lex Luthors.

Not that it mattered much. Oh, if it went to trial, he'd give it all he had, but it didn't look --

That's when the genie appeared, in a puff of smoke.

As usual.  The nosmoking ordinances didn't apply to genies, apparently; he was, again as usual, puffing on a preposterously large Monte Cristo.

"Hello, Scott," the genie said, as usual.

"Mark."  You'd think a genie could at least remember first names.  "I'm Mark Greenfield. Scott Greenfield's a different guy. You could look it up."

The genie shrugged.  "Sorry; I always get the Jewish lawyers confused.  You get yourself locked in a lamp for a couple of thousand years, and if you come out only having a little trouble with names, consider yourself lucky."

"Fair enough."  Greenfield tapped at the file folder in front of him.  "I guess I know what this is about."

"Yup."  The genie nodded.  "It's the usual thing, just like the last five times.  I'm going to tell you how it all turns out."

"Okay," Greenfield said.  "How bad?  Or how good?"

"Bad?  You've got the plea offer in front of you.  Five years isn't anything to sneeze at, given the weight.  Good?  If your guy goes to trial, you win.  Turns out that between now and the trial, some crooked cop is going to substitute corn starch for the coke.  Which gets your guy off of everything except the solicitation charge.  Time served."

He could suck that up.

"So to speak," the genie said, his annoying habit of mindreading still intact.  "Possession of a condiment isn't a felony, and -- "

"And my guy wasn't even trying to sell it."

"Yeah."  His mind was already racing.  All he had to do --

"Not so fast, Mark."  The genie shook his head.  "The coke's still in the evidence locker; it hasn't gotten substituted yet.  It happens, well, just in time.  But you know the rules."

Yeah.  He knew the rules.  Not that it mattered much.  What was he going to tell the client?  That a genie had appeared in a puff of smoke and told him that if they went to trial, the guy would get off?  That this had happened five times before, and that of that, the two times that he had gone to trial, the genie had been right?  And that the three times that he hadn't, he'd later learned that they would have won? 

Didn't matter.  He couldn't say it.  He couldn't write it down; he couldn't sing it.

The genie grinned.  "Nope.  That's part of the deal.  You can tell him whatever you want, except the truth:  that a genie came and told you that if he goes to trial a minor miracle happens, and he walks."

Shit. 

There were times when it would have been easy to throw ethics out the window.  Too bad today wasn't the day he'd decided to do it.  As a practical matter, it would have been child's play to persuade the client to go for the trial. 

Hell, he wouldn't even have to lie.  Just tell the truth, or any of a number of truths:  that the prosecution never, ever got a nasty surprise at trial -- one that could shatter their entire case -- if the defendant pleaded out; that witnesses had been known to screw up on the stand, that cops about to testify had been indicted on other matters just before a trial opened, destroying their credibility; that evidence had been lost or --

"Easy there," the genie said.  "You can't go much further than that."

"Shh."

There were times when ethics sucked, and this was one of them.  Dammit, he didn't have the right to make the decision for the guy, even though he knew what decision his client would make, if he knew everything that Greenfield did, and that was the problem now, every bit as much as it would have been if the damn genie --

"Hey!"

"Sorry, but not much."

The genie sniffed. "Well, I guess that's my own fault.  Take care, Scott."

"Mark."

"Whatever.  See you next time around."  The genie disappeared in a puff of smoke.  Monte Cristo smoke.

Greenfield sat back and thought about it.  His own interests didn't matter, but that didn't mean that he could pretend he wasn't aware of them.  Winning cases in court not only felt better than getting a good plea, it was better for him than getting a good plea, and not just because of the trial fee.  Best thing for a practice was winning, after all; word got around.

Okay; he'd come clean with himself, so now he could put that aside.  The clear benefit, in this case, was for the client to go to trial.  Walking out of the court was better for him than five years in prison, after all.

But . . . but, dammit, it was still the client's decision, not his, and he had little more right to push him this time than he usually did. 

After all, dammit, some of the time -- much of the time -- he was close to this sure how it would all turn out.  Sure, you couldn't win by pleading guilty, but one hell of a lot of the time, you couldn't win at trial.  A lot of the time -- hell, most of it -- the evidence didn't fall apart; and even when it did, the jury often didn't care, as all they really needed to know is that the guy was the defendant; the witnesses would lie their heads off, but they were believed anyway; a bogus ID would somehow solidify when the witness only had to point to the person sitting next to defense counsel, and there were all the other zillion ways that a trial could go inexorably to a sentence, with the finding of guilty just a stop along the way . . .

And . . .

Okay.  Screw it.  This time, he wouldn't play it down the middle.  Fair, but not down the middle.  He'd tell his guy all the way things could go wrong, but he'd let himself show some excitement when he talked about all the ways that things could go right. 

Because they could, and this time he knew that they would.

#

Greenfield was eyeing the level in the bottle of Old Grouse when the genie appeared, again in a puff of smoke.

"You son of a bitch," he said.

The genie smiled.  "You mean, that the coke turned out to be, well, coke?  Not like all the other times, when I didn't mislead you?"

"Yeah.  Fucker."

The genie just smiled.  "Aren't you a little old to be believing in genies?"