Anonymous Tip: Details, Details, Details

A review series of Anonymous Tip, by Michael Farris

p. 84-87

Most of this section is rather boring and mundane. After having supper with Gwen at the hospital at 7:00, Peter returns to the Paulsen Building. He uses “his pass key” to get in and goes to the law library “located two floors below his office.” Notice all the details? We’re told that “lawyers aren’t expected to have the law completely memorized, but they are expected to know how to find it,” and we then follow Peter as he looks up various legal statutes and copies them.

Legal statutes in hand, Peter jogs up two the two flights of stairs to his office and flips on his computer—his 1996 computer must have still had a switch—to look at the list of must-do items compiled by Joe and Sally. Farris then tells us, with detail, each thing on Peter’s must-do list (remember that he had asked Joe and Sally to clear his schedule for the week as much as possible).

A mandatory settlement conference on Friday at two with Judge Goodlate—a real estate fraud trial that Peter and filed thirteen months earlier and was on the August trial ticket. That would take an hour to an hour-and-a-half—but the preparation was all complete. And there was a deposition Monday at three. His client was bien sued for breach of a covenant not to complete. It had been continued twice before and shouldn’t be continued again. Fortunately, he had his line of questions for his client’s former employer all prepared from the prior occasions on which it had been scheduled. An hour’s review would bring him fully up to speed and ready to do battle.

You see what I mean about all of the extraneous detail?

Anyway, Farris tells us that Peter was “proud of Joe and Sally” for the excellent work they did clearing his schedule, and that he knew that “most of the work had fallen on them” rather than just being put off.

Peter opens his word processor and begins to type the motion for an independent psychological evaluation, to be given to Gail the prosecutor by noon the next day.

“Two can play the psychological game,” Peter said aloud as he finished the third document—the proposed order for Judge Romer to sign. It had taken him less than fifteen minutes, but Sally would need another half-hour in the morning to put in the finishing touches and clean up his mistake.

With this finished, Peter takes the elevator down and heads outside to his car, which we learn “was parked right in front of the building.”

As he began the drive out to Liberty Lake in the far eastern edge of the valley to his home, he picked up his car phone and punched the number for his friend Aaron Roberts.

Aaron was forty and was an elder in Peter’s church. He had been discipling Peter for five years. As brothers in the Lord, they had developed a deep love and appreciation for each other. Aaron was one of the top computer programmers in the Northwest and was on demand as a consultant all over Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana, Occasionally, he would venture into norther California and British Columbia. Aaron’s wife, Lynn, was homeschooling their four children.

And there we have it, Farris found a place to insert homeschooling into his story!

And then we have yet another strange conversation.The award for the strangest conversation would go to the conversation in which Peter informed Gwen that he could not marry her because she was divorced, you know, right after he met her, but this one has its weird moments. It also introduces a new character.

“Aaron, I’m glad you’re home,” Peter said when he answered.

“Me too. Doesn’t happen often. What’s up?” Aaron asked.

“I got a new case today that I would like you to pray about. A mother lost custody of her four-year-old daughter this morning. Probably was mishandled by another lawyer. After the hearing he had the wild notion that this lady would be willing to trade sexual favors so that he could continue on the case for free.”

“Good grief! Who are they?”

“You know I can’t tell you the names of clients, but I’ll be happy to tell you the name of the lawyer as soon as I’m off this cellular phone,” Peter said. “This lady has been accused of bruising her child and I think it’s a phony deal.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, for one thing, she’s a nurse at Sacred Heart and obviously knows bruises. And something in my spirit just tells me she’s innocent.”

“You know better than to rely on hunches. Our intuition is not always the Holy Spirit. Have you prayed about all this?”

“Not really. I need to do that. But anyway, this lady is really upset and needs prayer. She’s probably not a believer either. And we can certainly pray along those lines too.”

“Sure Peter, I’ll pray,” Aaron said. “How’s everything else?”

“Well, this week everything else will probably be set aside so I can do her case. There’s a critical hearing on Tuesday.”

“Don’t forget our time Friday morning at seven. You aren’t planning on being to busy for that, are you?”

“No way,” said Peter. “See ya then.”

There are so many things to comment here!

First, Aaron is portrayed as being constantly away from his family, but also as godly mentor and church elder. You better believe that a mother who is constantly away from her young children would catch flack from Farris. Second, Peter says he’ll tell Aaron the lawyer’s name once he’s “off this cellular phone”—is he worried he’s being listened in on? And is handing the Bill Walinksi’s name off to yet another layperson when Peter still hasn’t contacted the ethics board really a good idea?

Actually, it seems like Peter is overly eager in general to tell people about Bill Walinski sexually harassing Gwen. Sure, he’s not giving Gwen’s name here, but given how long Peter is going to spend on this case the woman’s identity is going to become obvious. I mean he even tells Aaron that the woman is a nurse at Sacred Heart, and that she has been accused of bruising her child! I guess I feel like if I ever had need of a lawyer I’d want that lawyer to be a bit more judicious about who they tell what. Peter doesn’t appear to be very scrupulous on that front.

Now I will say that I am really impressed that Aaron pushes back against Peter’s insistence that Gwen is innocent. I wasn’t expecting that, especially given that Aaron is a homeschooling dad—i.e. I assumed he would presume a parent accused of abuse to be innocent, barring some sort of egregious evidence otherwise. Of course, Aaron’s solution to Peter’s relying on a hunch is for him to . . . rely on a hunch. After all, he tells him to pray about it rather than, say, to do some more investigation into the case to try to determine whether or not Gwen really is innocent of the charges.

By the way, I’m getting really annoyed by the insistence that Gwen’s employment as a nurse points to her innocence. Over the past year, I have heard stories of a school bus driver and a county social services supervisor who were discovered to be severely abusing their children. Being a nurse does not prevent someone from being an abuser. This really isn’t that complicated!

Finally, note the mention of a weekly meeting. While Farris has established Aaron as a mentor to Peter (who is eight years his junior), this sounds much like the common evangelical emphasis on having an accountability partner. My dad used to meet with another homeschooling dad each week in this fashion—they were accountability partners. The other father would come over early, and they’d sit outside as the sun rose talking about their lives, their joys, and their struggles.

I predict that Aaron’s role in this story is going to be to keep Peter on the straight and narrow. Joe has also been introduced as a good Christian man, but he is younger than Peter and is junior to him in his firm. When I was a kid, my dad used to say that everyone in an evangelical community should have people they mentor, and people who mentor them. I think that’s what we’re seeing here—Peter can mentor Joe, but he also needs someone to mentor him, and Aaron fills that slot. I also predict that at some point Gwen will be introduced to Aaron, his so-far unnamed wife, and his four homeschooled children.

I’ll conclude this section by stating that I’m no longer surprised the book is 470 pages long, given that Farris padded it with all of this extraneous detail. Next week we will return to Gwen to see how she is faring without Casey.