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Londregan agreed, satisfied that he had just secured one of the finest appellate lawyers in the Northeast.

Susette started questioning herself. Caring for LeBlanc was proving to be a lot more complicated than she had expected. His physical and mental handicaps were one thing. But as his wife, she also assumed a series of legal obligations that were eating her alive. He owned a house that needed to be sold. It was too far from her work to consider living there. It fell to her to list his house with a real-estate agent. But first she had to repair the place and remove all of LeBlanc’s personal property.

Unable to afford construction contractors or professional movers, both tasks fell on her shoulders. It didn’t help that LeBlanc was a stonemason and had stored tons of rocks on his property. Worse still, the place was nearly an hour from her house. When she wasn’t working one of her two jobs or caring for LeBlanc, she went back and forth between the two houses. The days were all starting to run together.

Despite being physically exhausted, she couldn’t sleep. Her anxieties about losing her house kept her mind racing. She felt she had been stupid to think that she could take on City Hall. Where did it get me? she thought. Penniless and soon to be homeless.

Both the decision to assume responsibility for Tim and the decision to fight the City of New London had been made on impulse. Emotion had won out over reason, reflex over caution.

But her hair-trigger tendency was guided by an instinctive sense of right and wrong. Caring for Tim was simply the right thing to do. Taking people’s homes was simply the wrong thing to do. And it would have been wrong to just let the NLDC do it. No matter how much she beat herself up for ending up in such a mess, she couldn’t change the way she saw the world.

38

A BEGINNING AND AN END

Once they made the decision to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bullock and Berliner now had to convince the Connecticut Supreme Court to grant the homeowners permission to remain in their homes during the appeal process. And once they cleared that hurdle, they then had to deal with the city’s desire to collect occupancy fees dating back to 2000. The court prevented this. But by the time Bullock and Berliner got that issue resolved, they didn’t have much time until the ninety-day deadline arrived for filing petitions with the Supreme Court.

June 21, 2004

Governor John Rowland wasn’t used to being squeezed. But federal prosecutors were ramping up to indict him and his chief of staff, Peter Ellef, on corruption charges. At the same time, state senators were calling for his impeachment and the legislature had subpoenaed him to testify before a committee conducting an inquiry into allegations of graft. If Rowland took the Fifth and refused to testify before the legislature, he’d surely be impeached. On the other hand, if he testified, anything he said could be used against him in the criminal case. Suddenly, fighting for his freedom was more important than fighting for his job.

At 6 p.m., Rowland stepped onto a terrace outside the governor’s residence and formally announced his resignation. A year and a half earlier, he had been elected to an unprecedented third term and there had been whispers that he was under consideration for a cabinet position in the Bush administration.

His wife stood beside him as he spoke to the press assembled outside his residence. “I acknowledge that my poor judgment has brought us here,” he said. “Tonight is both a beginning and an end for me.”

Over a period of years, the Rowland administration had traded favors with construction contractors doing business with the state. Now it was all coming to a head. Connecticut’s lieutenant governor, Jodi Rell, would be sworn in as the new governor on July 1..

For most of June, Bullock and Berliner set aside everything but the Fort Trumbull situation—other clients and cases, personal commitments, even sleeping and eating. The legal research they performed for the petition convinced