This is Part Four of a four-part story.
She had less experience than he'd hoped – actually, no experience at all with this particular type of case. On the other hand, when Charley recommended her, he hadn't mentioned her best qualifications, so he was unprepared to have met such a pretty lawyer.
His brain told him to ignore that. Beauty, he'd come to believe, was a Siren's song that too often portended disaster, and after his humiliating experience with Caroline, part of him had sworn off romance entirely. He hadn't touched a woman since his unceremonious departure from her mansion five months earlier.
He was only 51 years old, but his mind had resigned itself to the bleak prospect of spending the rest of his life alone. One part of him was certain that no good could come from trusting another woman, especially if she was beautiful. Of course, another part of him completely disagreed.
And there was no denying it – she certainly was stunning. That made him wonder why Charley hadn't mentioned that salient fact. Then again, Charley's reticence made sense, since they were first-cousins, so Charley obviously didn't think of her in the same way that he and, he presumed, most other warm-blooded males did. His first thought when she introduced herself to him in the lobby of her firm's San Jose law offices was that, though he might not win his case, with her by his side, he would surely go down with a smile on his face.
He didn't really know much about civil litigation. He had taken two law classes in graduate school – both in Education Law – but the case law and precedent he'd studied didn't have any relevance at all to intellectual property theft.
Grad school was a long time ago, but he remembered discussing
Plessy v. Ferguson
and
Brown v. Board of Education
, and several other notable cases, and he'd written papers on
Tinker v. Des Moines
and
Everson v. Board of Education
.
But all of those cases, even the ones that weren't ostensibly about education, essentially dealt with civil rights issues that had implications for schools, but had nothing whatsoever to do with plagiarism. In his experiences working in high schools, plagiarism usually involved a not-too-bright, sophomore English student copying his entire
Julius Caesar
essay word-for-word from
SparkNotes
!
Still, as he stared at the young attorney seated across the desk from him, none of that mattered. Besides her sultry blonde looks and spectacular curves, he was also encouraged by what Paige Jordan, Esq. was saying. Even without having read his story, she felt his was an open and shut case. She said that she couldn't see how either a judge or a jury wouldn't find for him, since the entire case would revolve around that email. She also felt that, based upon the facts, Caroline and her publishing company would likely settle long before the case went to trial.
But he didn't have a copyright, he pointed out. Didn't that mean he was screwed? "No, contrary to what you might think, that may not matter all that much", she answered. "I would, however, encourage you to consider copyrighting in the future as a way to protect yourself, but as long as you've created something yourself out of whole cloth, you have the property rights to that creation. The only issue is whether you can prove you are the creator, not someone else."
And that was what made his case so strong, she said. Not only was there was an electronic record of him sending Caroline the story, but he had read somewhere once that if he emailed himself a copy of a story, that would help to establish the date when he was claiming the rights to it, so he had taken the precaution of emailing all of his stories to himself once they were finished.
His own computer could be examined to verify that he had sent those emails, and his files could be analyzed to prove that they had been created
before
that email to Caroline. If Caroline could not produce any evidence of files that pre-dated his, he would essentially have proven his case.
On top of that, if there was a strong resemblance between the writing style in some of his other stories and
The Awful Grace of God
and no real similarities between that story and the rest of Caroline's work, Paige felt that he could prove by a preponderance of evidence that he was its author and Caroline was not.
It was certainly true that Caroline had changed some things – mostly trimming his more explicit scenes – but as near as he could tell that had been done to conform to the commercial strictures of romance writing and to hew the story slightly more closely to her own clearly established style.
But she'd lifted the entire plot, characters, and about 70 percent of his text, and when it came to that text, there was little doubt about it – it didn't really sound anything at all like Caroline's work. And so, the first sentence of that review in
The Los Angeles Times
helped his case – "Nothing in Caroline Cole's past work could have prepared readers for the quantum leap forward she has taken with
The Awful Grace of God
."
While she spoke, he tried to listen attentively – she was talking about Caroline's publishing company, and how the first step was to file a preliminary injunction against it to stop the book's publication – but the truth was he was more consumed by the lilting rise and fall of her voice than her words, and even more by the lovely mouthpiece from which those words sprang.
Paige Jordan was 32 years old and held a law degree from
Princeton
