You Have Been Defended [EN]: Chapter 362

You Have Been Defended

After having dinner with Kang Min-jae and briefly briefing Kim Chan-young, who couldn’t attend the trial, on how it went, it was already night.

I parked the car in the parking lot and was about to go home when I remembered I was out of canned beer, so I stopped by the convenience store.

“That’ll be 15,900 won.”

As I handed over my card, I glanced at the door across from me, and the wide array of parasols caught my eye.

*It’s a nice day, maybe I should have a can outside before going in.*

I had just overcome a major hurdle, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to enjoy the leisure I could afford today.

So, I put the beer and cigarettes in a plastic bag and went outside, sitting down at a table under a parasol.

“Are you Attorney Cha Ju-han?”

A familiar voice came from across the table.

Since I’d been on TV frequently, people had started recognizing me outside, so I figured he was one of those people.

Annoyed, I looked up to see Choi Jong-hyun and Jo Bong-joon sitting across from me, grinning from ear to ear.

“……What brings you here?”

I was annoyed that my relaxation was being interrupted so unexpectedly, and I must have sounded sulky without realizing it.

Choi Jong-hyun exclaimed, “Ha!” and said to Jo Bong-joon.

“Bong-joon, did Cha just say he finds us annoying?”

“Seems like it.”

“We should sentence the sinner to the punishment of taking us home.”

……And so, they dragged me, before I could even open a can of beer, up and into my house.

“It’s been so long since we’ve been to Cha’s place.”

“Of course. You never contact us. You took on such a big case and abandoned us like we were tough squid [a Korean snack] you’d already chewed!”

“Ah, you didn’t even tell us about the Wooshin-related case. We’ve just been abandoned, right? Cha’s just too good for us now, so he doesn’t want to hang out with us, right?”

“I think so. Ah, it’s so sad. Is this the pain of being abandoned by your wife?”

They sat on my couch, glaring at me and chattering non-stop.

“What do you mean ‘too good for you’ and ‘the pain of being abandoned by my wife’? The situation was like that.”

“What situation? You could have just made a phone call, taken a day to tell us! No, it wouldn’t even have taken a day. You could have just told us after work in the evening!”

“That’s right! I know you were busy going to trial a week after the lawyer was changed, but be honest. You had more time to prepare, didn’t you? There’s no way Cha would have gone to trial in such a critical situation without any preparation and without asking for a postponement.”

They knew me too well.

In fact, they were right.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have time to tell Choi Jong-hyun and Jo Bong-joon about the case.

However, when I told Kim Hwa-young that it would be better to get a lawyer from Tae-kwang, I was wary of divulging Kim Hwa-young and Kim Chan-young’s secrets to others.

If there had been any information I could have gotten from them, I might have considered telling them, but in this case, it wasn’t a situation where I could ask them for help.

If it had already been known that Kim Hwa-young was Ko Sang-jun’s mistress, we could have considered blowing up the case by raising suspicions through broadcasting, as we always had, but that wasn’t the case either.

“I’m going to change and take a shower, so wait while drinking beer.”

I said, pointing to the bag of beer on the table.

“Do you think we’ll let you off the hook with just a can of beer?”

They said sulkily, but each grabbed a can of beer anyway.

When I finished showering and came out to the living room, Choi Jong-hyun and Jo Bong-joon were watching the news on TV.

Unfortunately, the part where I was briefly interviewed as I came out of the courthouse was playing.

“You don’t photograph well, do you?”

“Right. People will just think Cha is handsome. He’s *fucking* handsome.”

I thought they were going to stick with the sulky act, but why were they suddenly complimenting me?

I sat awkwardly on the one-person sofa and picked up the remaining can of beer.

“Cha, now that you’re ready, we’re going to say what we have to say.”

“Yes.”

“How could you not say a word to us when you took on such a case! How! Huh?!”

“How could you not tell us when you took on the Kim Hwa-young case! This person is very, very bad, very.”

Choi Jong-hyun, who would jump at anything related to Wooshin Group, seemed to feel an especially great sense of betrayal.

I sighed and replied.

“It wasn’t a case worth using on the air.”

“Even if it’s not on the air, we might be able to help.”

Jo Bong-joon added, sounding disappointed.

No matter how much Choi Jong-hyun had dug into Wooshin, he wouldn’t know anything about Kim Hwa-young because the affair wasn’t his area of expertise.

That’s why I didn’t contact them on purpose.

But now that the criminal facts of Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok have been revealed, it’s time to start investigating them.

We found out that Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok killed the butler, but we don’t know why.

Other than that they wanted something from the butler and he wouldn’t give it to them.

If I had to guess, I’d say that what they could get from the butler was information about Kim Hwa-young, but that’s just a guess.

I think they buried the butler’s body at the Jo Yeon-dong villa that day.

You can tell just by looking at the contents of the phone call Jung Na-jin recorded.

Then, when they heard that Ko Sang-jun was searching the house, they dug it up again because they couldn’t pin the blame on Kim Hwa-young if the body was found in the house at that time.

And they put it back just before the police search warrant came out.

But I don’t know the reason why they tried to frame Kim Hwa-young so much, that is, the motive for the crime.

“Hmm…….”

I crossed my arms and made a noise.

Still, Choi Jong-hyun is known as the Wooshin expert.

Maybe there’s something he knows that I don’t, something that could be connected.

“Are you really not going to tell us anything?”

“Aren’t you going to use it on the air?”

“I’m not using it. Do you think we’re people without any business ethics?”

“Haa…….”

“He’s cracking. He’s cracking. Is there anything that’s not quite right?”

“Hyung [older brother or male friend] Jong-hyun might know. Hyung Jong-hyun knows a lot about Wooshin.”

The two began to coax me in earnest.

I hesitated for a moment and began to speak.

“…….”

“…….”

After hearing the story, the two stared at each other, frozen.

They seemed to doubt whether what they had heard was real.

“Really, really… Kim Hwa-young is having an affair with Ko Sang-jun?”

“If you’re going to consume it as gossip, I’ll stop talking.”

“I’m not consuming it as gossip. I remember an entertainment reporter I know telling me that there were rumors that Kim Hwa-young was someone’s mistress *before* the Kim Hwa-young case broke, so that’s why.”

The first rumor that circulates when a celebrity who is doing well starts to disappear is that.

In Kim Hwa-young’s case, it was unfortunately true, but typically, I don’t think it’s a rumor worth responding to.

But unfortunately, this time it’s a problem because it’s true.

“If the phone recording file contains all the words referring to Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok, and even the part where their voices say they’re going to frame Kim Hwa-young, then there’s no way to deny it.”

“That’s right.”

“Then isn’t everything out? It’s obvious that Kim Hwa-young will be found innocent on the sentencing date.”

“That’s right.”

“Then there’s no problem. Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok killed him, and Kim Hwa-young was unfairly framed. Just because she’s the owner of the house, and because she didn’t get along with the butler.”

“Yes. But there’s one thing I haven’t figured out yet. Even if other things haven’t been clearly revealed, I can guess to some extent, but I can’t figure this out at all.”

“What is it?”

“The motive for the crime.”

At my words, the two nodded.

In a situation where it’s important that Kim Hwa-young is released innocently, the motive for the crime may not be very relevant to me, but it’s hard not to pay attention to it.

Unless I know what motivated the two to frame Kim Hwa-young and assault the butler, and unless I prevent it, there’s no guarantee that Kim Hwa-young won’t face the same threat again.

Above all, I need to know the motive for the crime so that I can corner Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok so they can’t escape.

“That’s right. Even if she’s a mistress, they’ve been having an affair for almost 30 years, so it’s strange that they’re suddenly doing this now, as if they didn’t know about it.”

“Hmm.”

Choi Jong-hyun rested his chin on his hand, then turned on the notepad on his phone and started looking for something for a long time.

Jo Bong-joon leaned toward Choi Jong-hyun and checked his notepad with him.

“Wow, you have so many notes.”

“They’re all treasures. Worth 500 billion [Korean won, approximately $380 million USD].”

“Yeah, right.”

“……Ah!”

Choi Jong-hyun, who had been thinking for a long time, raised his head as if he had remembered something.

“Recently, there’s that cultural foundation, you know. The one with the gallery, the one Yoon Seong-hee is in charge of.”

“Umi Foundation? Yoon Seong-hee and her daughter are running it now.”

“Wooshin was investing a lot in it, but they drastically reduced the scale. Umi Foundation is a corporation. It owns a lot of Wooshin Corporation’s shares, right? But Wooshin Life bought almost half of it. So there were a lot of rumors that they were trying to separate the Umi Foundation. That they were preparing for a divorce. Because that foundation itself was built by Yoon Seong-hee, they have to give it to her, that’s the idea.”

“So there’s a rumor going around that Ko Sang-jun is divorcing Yoon Seong-hee?”

“That’s right. But well, they’re both old enough to eat [idiom for being old enough to take care of themselves], so why would they get divorced? But the movement is unusual, so I’m keeping an eye on it. I’m wondering why they’re doing this. But when I think about why they’re doing this, the only thing that comes to mind is divorce.”

Divorce?

I remember that there were occasional rumors that Ko Sang-jun and Yoon Seong-hee would divorce in my previous life.

Of course, at the time, Choi Jong-hyun dismissed the rumors as unfounded, saying, ‘I’ll cut off my hand if they actually get divorced.’

I didn’t think they would get divorced either, so I didn’t bother to remember it.

But this time, if it’s their divorce, there are things that come to my mind as well.

“Ko Sang-jun once told Kim Hwa-young that he would divorce Yoon Seong-hee and live with Kim Hwa-young. Of course, I think it was a lie.”

“……Then did Yoon Seong-hee know about this? There were also rumors that they had broken up and were living separately.”

“Since it seems like they’re trying to make the foundation independent at the same time, she thought it was real and grabbed Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok and cried, right? That her father was preparing to divorce.”

In my previous life, the rumors surrounding Ko Sang-jun and Yoon Seong-hee were just a fun story for the public, and I thought the two would think it was absurd.

It was no different in this life.

It’s not that the two have a solid belief in each other, but because their interests are intertwined.

But what if Yoon Seong-hee was also suspicious of Ko Sang-jun?

Yoon Seong-hee complained to her sons, and Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok, who already had a dislike for Kim Hwa-young, thought that they wouldn’t divorce if Kim Hwa-young wasn’t there.

But even so, they couldn’t kill Kim Hwa-young, so they judged that if they at least made Kim Hwa-young a criminal, Ko Sang-jun would never transfer [assets/power] to Kim Hwa-young.

Even if all of that was Yoon Seong-hee’s delusion, she thought that if she made it impossible for Kim Hwa-young to make a comeback, Ko Sang-jun would realize something.

I don’t know why Ko Yoon-ho and Ko Yoon-seok came to the butler that day, but at least it’s a sufficient reason to blame Kim Hwa-young for the butler’s death.

The motive for the crime.