Compelling Evidence Read online

  Ben lifts himself off the edge of the desk. Our meeting is over. I rise, and we meet in the center of the room. His expression brightens like a lantern. He reaches out with his arm like a swinging gate and slaps a huge hand around the nape of my neck, a little male bonding, like a father cuffing his son for some errant but minor mischief. And as we head for me door, drinks in hand, my concerns turn to matters more economic—to Harry Hinds and my open bar tab.

  CHAPTER

  3

  TO get to my office I use an elevator from before the time of Moses, a contraption with a flexing metal gate that slams, emitting the fury of a sonic boom. It’s like hell’s portal closing on its new arrivals. Clients who’ve done time always take the stairs.

  This lift empties its cargo into a small lobby on the second floor, the first being occupied by a bank with roots in the Gold Rush. The building itself dates to the last century, but has been well maintained. It has touches of elegance in the moldings and fixtures. The pressed-tin tiles set into the ceiling, original with my office, are again in demand, used to authenticate the metal-fabricated, high-toned restaurants of Fashion Square.

  I share a two-room suite down a common hall with Dee, my secretary and receptionist, a hire I made on the recommendation of a friend to whom I no longer speak.

  I have learned in my time with Dee to become master of all things electronic: answering machines, copiers, the fax, Mr. Coffee—and most of all the small personal computer which I moved from her desk to my office when I found her using its dark screen like some mystic high-tech looking glass, to comb her hair and apply makeup. I spend my evenings, before the usual rounds with Harry, typing my own correspondence and dreaming of some blameless way to fire Dee.

  My secretary is not unattractive, in her early twenties, assertive, bright-eyed, and eager. But on an intellectual plane she is heavily into hairstyles and panty hose. She excels at clerical foreplay. All of the typing paper is stacked in neat piles. The plastic cylinders holding various sizes of paper clips are perpetually fondled like Buddhist prayer wheels, and the desk is endlessly combed for any object that might be out of place. I have learned by painful experience that anything beyond sealing an envelope or licking a stamp severely taxes her secretarial skills. She sports acrylic fingernails longer than claws on a saber-tooth tiger; from one of them dangles a minuscule gold chain stretching from the tip to a tiny star embedded in the half-moon, above the cuticle—almost as attractive as a bone through the nose. She wears these like a declaration of independence—it reads: “You really don’t expect me to type.”

  As I enter the office she greets me enthusiastically. “Good morning, boss”—this latter to ensure that we both know who’s in charge. The tasks we each perform during the day have tended to muddy these distinctions. In the inner reaches of my brain, I issue a psychic growl like some snarling hound.

  I respond with a flat, indifferent “Hello.” In recent days I’ve become increasingly abrupt in my manner toward her, a sort of cryptic message that she might look elsewhere for employment. But each day when I arrive for work she’s there, panting by the door like some warm puppy, to greet me. The thought that I must pull the trigger myself on this coup de grace is not pleasant, and so it waits.

  “Do me a favor,” I say.

  “Sure.”

  “Call Susan Hawley and remind her we have a court appearance tomorrow.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out the Hawley file. “Then find the points and authorities that I did the other day and put them in the file. When you’re done,” I say, “put it in my briefcase.” I drop the file onto the center of her desk like some ponderous plane belly-flopping on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Before it can bounce she has it in her hands and is turning to place it in one of the file drawers behind her chair.

  “Done,” she says.

  “Sure,” I say as I watch the thing disappear into the dark hole of Calcutta. I make a mental note to retrieve it when she leaves for lunch.

  As I enter my office I’m surprised at this hour to see Harry, comfortably reclining in my swivel chair with his feet propped on my desk, reading a newspaper. Harry is bow ties and pinstripes, silk gauze socks and wing tips, a bulbous nose and broad grin. At sixty, his career behind him and no signs of retirement on the horizon, he has a give-a-damn attitude that one in my circumstances can find refreshing. It is perhaps that since my fall from grace, when I look at Harry I see myself in twenty years.

  “Lost?” I ask.

  He looks at me over the top of the paper. “Clients needed a little privacy to talk; figured you wouldn’t mind.” He starts to get up.

  “Stay there,” I say.

  Harry and I have become increasingly close in the months following my banishment from Potter, Skarpellos. Hopelessly out of date, a different bow tie for each day of the week, we seem to tread the same route to court each morning.

  Twenty years ago Harry was one of the foremost criminal defense attorneys in town. Tried no more than four cases a year, all front-page felonies. That was before he found courage and stamina in a bottle. Now his days are filled trying to keep other drunks from the clutches of the DA and the angry machinations of MADD. For variety, his life is punctuated by the occasional assault-and-battery.

  I hang up my coat and open my briefcase on the couch, then sort through a couple of files I took home.

  “Fuckin’ Congress,” says Harry. He’s finished reading the article. “First they allow their friends to steal all me money from the S&Ls, then they want us to pay it all back.” He follows this with a deep sigh as if conceding mat it is something over which Harry has no control.

  “Every time I vote, I have the same feeling,” he says. “Like somebody put a bag of dogshit on my doorstep and set it on fire. I don’t know whether to just stand there and hold my nose, or try to stamp it out.”

  The mental picture drawn by this little vignette leads me to conclude that Harry has probably seen these images, up close and personal, at some youthful point in his life from behind a wicked snicker at the edge of some poor soul’s front porch.

  “Can’t trust government,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. “I used to work for “em.”

  Harry’s office is half the size of my own. He’s taken to camping here when clients and family need a private conference—a hit to get the money for his fees, or to square the details of an alibi before the story is locked in stone with their lawyer. They don’t know how flexible and creative Harry can be.

  Silhouetted by the soles of his shoes, the surface of my desk is organized confusion. I’ve taken to hoarding the most important case files in my own office, a defense against Dee-saster.

  There are a score of files piled here, marshaled in a system that only its maker can fathom—two approaching trials, cases that may settle, but only on the courthouse steps; and a criminal appeal with seven volumes of transcripts, referred to me by the district court as part of the indigent-appellate panel—an economic hedge I’d taken before clients became thick. Propagating like the poor is a stack of files requiring motions and correspondence, a chore that would involve a good afternoon’s work dictating to a competent secretary, but which I will no doubt spend endless evenings stroking out on my own keyboard.

  I paw through my mail, which Dee has stacked on the edge of my desk—a few bills, letters in a couple of cases, a probation report in a sentencing matter, and an announcement that Jerome Feinberg will speak at the next meeting of the Capitol City Lawyers Association: “Probate and You—The Lawyer’s Tollgate to the Hereafter.”

  I flip the announcement to Harry.

  “Tasteful,” he says, “You and I said it, we’d be disbarred.”

  “Half the judges in the county will be there to laugh. I’ll be there to take notes,” I add.

  “What for?”

  I tap a thick file that sits looming on the center of my desk, alone, solitary, like some ancient tome written in Sanskrit that waits to be deciphered.

  “Probate fil
e,” I say. “Only one I have. Only one I’ll ever take.”

  Harry looks at the tab on the file jacket and then says but a single word: “Oh.”

  With all of his warts, Harry Hinds at times displays the tact of a French diplomat. He has heard about Sharon Cooper.

  This file is one of those objects in life, the sight of which churns acid in my stomach. Sharon’s probate produces in me sensations of creeping, escalating uneasiness. I have moved the file a dozen times, to the credenza, the floor, and back to the desk again. It lies there, a testament to my ignorance of probate and my inability to say no to a friend, in this case George Cooper.

  I have spent hours poring through the loose-leaf binders of lawyers’ self-help books, that forest of publications with perennial subscriptions and annual pocket parts, each with its own transactional checklist of things to be done. It is, I have concluded, unfathomable. The probate lawyers have found the magic pellet that kills competition. They have constructed processes and crafted terminology that can be translated only by the high priests of their own cloistered sect. I read Dee’s secretarial handbook, which, like the computer I’ve bought for her, she has never used. I held hopes that maybe this would be my Rosetta stone, the key to the mysteries of probate. It was not. The probate secretaries, it seems, have their own guild. As might be expected, Dee is without a union card.

  What had begun with a simple one-page petition a year ago is now a morass to inspire Dickens’s most Draconian tale of lawyers and judges, of a court system constipated by endless and unintelligible forms. Probate reform, it seems, has gone the way of tax simplification.

  I am beaten. Defeated. I concede. I am ready to consult, and if necessary to take a ride, to pay the freight on the Feinberg express to the la-la land of the surrogate courts. I stare at the file and the announcement in Harry’s hands. The ultimate cop-out—I will hire another lawyer to service my client.

  “How’d it go last night?” he asks.

  Tight as a choirboy’s bum. That was Harry last night after my meeting with Ben. With him in his snockered condition, I didn’t waste my time giving him the details. Now he’s catching up on dirt.

  “Good. Friendly. It was,” I say, “cordial.”

  “Which was it?” he says. “Friendly or cordial? With the one it merely means he isn’t gonna kill ya. The other means you may get to go back for more nooky.”

  I ignore him.

  “I’m surprised,” he says. Harry talks about fire and dragons. The fact that I was porkin’ another man’s wife and Ben didn’t even give me a lecture on alienation of affections. “The man’s very civilized,” he says. “Times have changed since my day.”

  “I’m surprised you can remember back that far.”

  He looks at me from the corner of his eye.

  “Going back, are you?” he asks.

  “No,” I say sarcastically. “Ben and I discussed the matter, but we decided it wouldn’t be a good idea—for me to go back for seconds.”

  “No, asshole.” There’s irritation in his tone. “Are you goin’ back to the firm?”

  “It wasn’t that friendly,” I say.

  “Ah. The wife’s one thing; a partnership’s somethin’ else.” He laughs.

  I ignore him, though with Ben I know there’s some truth to what Harry says.

  “Why would I want to go back?”

  “Money, prestige,” he hesitates for a second. “A good secretary.”

  Dee has become an item of conversation between us marked by a good deal of profanity and laughter—my profanity and Harry’s laughter.

  “I’m not going back.”

  “Good,” he says. “I’m proud of you.” Harry appears relieved, like he’s been considering this scenario, my return to the firm, for some time. “You know I’d miss you,” he says. There’s just a hint of sentiment to his tone.

  “You make it sound like going to Potter, Skarpellos is the same as dying,” I say.

  He raises a hand, rotating it back and forth at the wrist, as if it’s one of those pendulous points in life that could go either way.

  “Tell me, Harry, why do you do it? Why do you do criminal law?”

  He makes a face. Like he’s never considered this before.

  “The money’s good,” he says.

  I laugh. “Sure. I’ve seen the palatial digs you call home. No, really, why do you do it?”

  “It’s in the blood, I guess. Besides, I like the people.”

  What Harry means is, he has a taste for “felonious voyeurism.” It happens. Lawyers, judges, cops, and jurors all find themselves titillated from time to time by the stories of violence, drugs, and sex. The criminal side of the law provides a window on the dark side of life that exists nowhere else.

  But there is, in my mind, something more than this to Harry’s quest. Harry Hinds, I think, is a closet guardian of the underdog. There’s a compelling psychic identification with the losers of society here, gratification in squaring off against the state to save some poor fool from a long stretch in the joint. To Harry, this is sweet music. Whether or not one agrees with his work, Harry’s motives have social redemption. He’s a man moved by the view that prisons are filled with those who are the victims of their environment, child abusers who were themselves abused, druggies weened on the stuff by parents caught in their own chemical cycle.

  As Harry rises to leave, to rejoin his clients, I realize that even with all of his foibles I am a little envious of this man. Harry Hinds has a clear vision of purpose to his life, a focus that at this moment, in the vortex of forces pulling upon me, I do not possess.

  CHAPTER

  4

  I am early for my meeting with Ben. The Broiler is more subdued than Wong’s. The decor is Early Naugahyde, but it is quiet, a good place for talking, to discuss Sharon’s trust and Ben’s future. I belly to the bar and order a drink.

  “Paul—Paul Madriani.” My only recognition of this voice is that it is someone unpleasant. Someone I would rather not be seen with, not here, not now.

  I turn from the bar just in time to receive a back-slapping hand on my shoulder. Eli Walker is dean of the outcast press. Bellicose, usually three sheets to the wind, in his late sixties, Walker regularly traverses that nether-land between what he calls journalism, and political flackery for paying clients.

  “Haven’t seen ya in here in a while.” He licks his lips as if he’s just stepped from the parched sands of the Sahara.

  “Haven’t been around,” I say. The bartender returns with my drink and I swallow a quick shot. I offer nothing that Walker can latch onto, turn into conversation. He’s one of those clinging souls who as a result of some fleeting commercial contact fancy themselves your friends. In my case I had the misfortune of writing a single letter to unravel a title problem on his house, a favor I did at the request of one of the partners while I was with the firm.

  He’s not moving on. Seconds pass in light banter, Eli doing most of the talking, the two of us weaving in the light traffic around the bar. Walker’s eyeing me like a thirsty dog. In between assignments and clients, he’s drooling for a drink. His hand is still on my shoulder, tugging on it like a ship trying to berth.

  “How’s the solo practice goin’?” An odoriferous blast of alcohol is emitted with each spoken word. In the lore of the courthouse it has been said of Eli Walker that any cremation after death will result in the ultimate perpetual flame.

  “Fine, keeps me busy.”

  I begin to turn back toward the bar, a not so subtle signal that this conversation is at an end. I finally break his grip.

  Walker doesn’t take the hint. He muscles his way in alongside me. The woman on the stool beside me gives Walker a dirty look, then scoots her stool a few inches away, giving him room to square his body to the bar.

  Standing next to Walker I feel like a man in the company of a leper. I sense that I have suddenly declined in the esteem of a dozen drunks surrounding the bar.

  “I’ll have what he’s having.”
Walker looks at the bartender, who in turn looks at me. Reluctantly I nod. In his own inimitable way Eli Walker has found his way onto my bar tab. It is in moments like this that I regret lacking the sand to muster overt rudeness.

  “Why’d ya leave Potter’s firm?” The question is asked with breathtaking subtlety.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Guess it was time to strike out on my own.”

  “Sorta like Custer against all them fuckin’ Indians, huh?” He chuckles to himself.

  The least he could do if he’s going to hustle drinks from me, I think, is quietly accept my bullshit. He drops the subject of my career and launches into a lecture on his latest journalistic coup, a scandal featuring pork-barrel politics and the state water project. I tune him out.

  I check my watch. Ben’s running late. I consider ways to dump Walker. I think about the restroom, but somehow I know he’ll just follow me—stand at the urinal and check my bladder. The bar is mostly empty and Walker is desperate, in search of a drinking companion.

  The bartender has spied my empty glass. “Another?” he asks. I nod and notice that I’m now one drink up on Walker. I’ve got to slow my pace. I’ll smell like Eli by the time Ben arrives.

  There’s the sound of sirens outside on the street, a fast-moving patrol car followed seconds later by the lumbering echo and diesel drone—a fire pumper. An emergency medical team headed to the scene of some fire or accident.

  Eli tilts his glass toward the sound in the street, a salute, then downs the last gulp.

  ‘Too bad,” he says. “A tragedy,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?” I wait for the latest bit of unconfirmed gossip. The stuff of which most of Walker’s columns are composed.

  “Ben Potter,” he says.

  Walker, I suspect, is brokering information on the high court nomination. Probably third-hand hearsay, which he’s spreading faster than typhoid from a cesspool.

  “He passed on,” says Walker.

  “What are you talking about?”