Unfit to Practice

at a little theater, Sartre’s No Exit, a black place presumably surrounded by the Void. Purgatory, timeless and eternal.

But this wasn’t Tahoe. The mountains outside beyond the gray were tall buildings. The dreamlike element, the clash between the bland courtroom and the often terrible events that brought people there, gripped her. What am I doing here? she thought. Who has done this to me?

Jack reached over and ran his hand along her arm.

“Okay?” he whispered.

“Totally freaked out,” Nina whispered back.

“How you can feel that way and still look so Darth Vader-tough I’ll never understand.” Jack fingered an empty Styrofoam cup, a scraping, ghastly wakeup. Gayle Nolan got up, ignoring them, and wheeled in a cart marked Chief Trial Counsel weighted down with thick notebooks, folders in file boxes, and code books. So many papers. Nina tried to enjoy the sight of her struggling with the load. No eager law clerks helping here. Light gleamed off Nolan’s specs as she stacked the paperwork onto her table. Finally, she sat back down.

“Hey, Gayle,” Jack said. “And how are you on this fine morning?”

“Hello, Jack.”

“You can still back out.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“This whole thing is a laugh.”

“Yeah? I notice she’s not laughing.”

“She wants the last laugh.”

The judge entered from one of three doors at the front of the room behind the podium. They all stood. Extra tall, with a full head of gray hair he had brushed back, he sported a small, neat mustache, not bushy like the one Jack used to wear. He didn’t look at them. The file engaged his attention as he sat down, allowing them to sit, too.

A placard at the front of his desk read JUDGE HUGO BROCK. “We’ll go on the record,” he said. Sitting on his left with headphones over her ears, the clerk clicked on a keyboard. The digital clock at the front flashed to brilliant red life. It was the brightest spot in the courtroom, and they all stared at it as if the day had exploded.

“ California State Bar Proceeding SB 76356. In the matter of Reilly,” said the judge.

Book One

September

The Grove, Nina’s mother called her school, and whenever she thought of that name later on she naturally thought of rows of ripe apples and oranges, as though when she was six years old she had lived a country idyll. But it was only a hilly neighborhood in California, and the elementary school was really called Pacific Grove Elementary, a functional name without romance. Nina had gone to first grade there.

On the playground, little girls swung around a long metal bar about three feet off the ground. Little boys were not allowed to do this exquisitely exciting thing. One leg pushed off from the ground, the other draped over the bar, hands holding the bar, over and upside down she went, at every recess and after school when she could swing all alone. When she got her rhythm right she could somersault ten or twelve times continuously, and get dizzy and watch the hills and trees turn upside down, becoming other forms in an ever-changing world.

The first important thing in her life happened at The Grove. One day, all alone after school, she swung around and around on the bar, and after a while a thought swung into her head: I am me.

She had never had this thought before. As a matter of fact, she had never been aware of her thoughts before. I am me. My name is Nina and I live down the street. I swing on the bar. I am me! Wildly excited, she turned furiously upside down. The hills were the same hills now, just upside down.

Once this thought entered her head, she was never the same. She became aware of things she had never noticed and that was a loss, because she had been mindlessly free before, but there was also the joy of seeing how things fit together. She made discoveries about where she fit into this new orderly world, into her family especially, Mommy and Daddy and baby brother Matty.

And at school her teacher taught her rules. Follow the rules to keep away confusion. Follow them to keep things in order. Line up when the bell rings. Raise your hand to go to the bathroom. Little girl bathroom, little boy bathroom.

The second important thing happened toward the end of the year, after school again. Nina should have been heading home, a block away, but the heat made her thirsty, so first she had a long drink of water from the girls’ water fountain. Little girls’ fountain, little boys’ fountain over by their bathroom, that rule was clear.

While Nina watched, a mother and a little boy came up to the little girls’ water fountain.

And to her horror, the little boy started to take a drink from the little girls’ fountain. Nina ran right up to tell him he couldn’t do that and tried to explain. But the mother, ignorant and uncaring, brushed her aside and told him to go ahead. And he, who must have felt confused, decided to do what his mother said, but Nina now blocked the way, arms out, defending the fountain. It’s the rule! she said, but the tall grown-up bent down and told the boy to drink up, and he gave Nina a little push to get her out of the way.

So Nina slugged him. That stopped him. He sat down on the concrete and cried, holding his hand over his eye. Nina breathed a sigh of relief and satisfaction, but then along came a big teacher with the mother and made her go into the office and called Mommy and said she did a bad thing! And no one got it, that her defense had saved the fountain and the rules and maybe the orderly world itself, that she was a champion of the girls’ fountain. She had done the right thing and was punished for it.

To be so completely sure, and then have the system go topsy-turvy on her! She decided, and this was the most significant decision of her life, that from what she knew, she was right to defend the fountain and they were wrong because rules had meaning and purpose. What meaning and purpose, she didn’t know yet. But rules made sense out of her blurry world.

In high school about ten years later, Nina went to Monterey with her class to watch a trial. The scruffy-looking, confused man on trial had done something very bad, maybe. Everybody was against him. But one person stood up for him and held them all off, making sure the rules were followed. And as she watched, she understood. This champion was not just defending that poor underdog but a system that kept the world sane.

How do people with different values, religions, economic status, and hopes coexist in peace?

Law provided a method.

And so at age sixteen she decided to become a lawyer.

1

T HAT THURSDAY IN early September billowed up blue and white, as breezy and innocent as a picnic, the air filtering through shimmering sunlit leaves. But during the afternoon, the true Sierra atmosphere showed its face in a ferocious summer storm, ruthless, unpredictable, and dangerous.

And because the storm dislocated all sorts of human arrangements that night, or because life is a mist of error, or perhaps just because she had been working too hard and couldn’t deal with one more thing that day, Nina Reilly made a small, critical mistake that changed everything.

The day began at eight-thirty sharp with the Cruz custody hearing, now in its second day and going fine, if anything could be fine about a family splitting up. Lisa Cruz, Kevin’s wife, took the stand, and she loved their two kids, no doubt about that, but she had some very strange ideas, too.

“I’m a full-time mom and a professional with a deep spiritual side,” she said from the witness box, gazing at Jeffrey Riesner with large, earnest, liquid eyes that seemed to beg for further help. “I depend on the great philosophers for guidance.”

Kevin began an astringent, whispered commentary. “Moving right along from Jim Beam, to pills, to marathons, and onward into religion,” he muttered.

Lisa had a pale, heart-shaped face and a tentative, breathy voice. She wore a structured jacket and creased slacks and looked fragile, but Kevin had told Nina that Lisa could run five miles without breaking a sweat; had no compunctions about kicking him when he was down; had an extensive, X-rated vocabulary; and bore unswerving allegiance to nothing and no one except their kids.

Lisa adjusted her body, as she had frequently during Riesner’s questions, raising one leg over another, then deciding against it. She was not a woman who enjoyed sitting still. “I studied philosophy at the community college,” she said.

“She took one course, and quit before the final,” Kevin whispered to Nina.

“I consider myself a truth-seeker and scholar. Of course, I work hard to impart the right values to my children: hard work, healthy diet, goal-setting.” She had a lot to say about vitamins.

More whispering. “She’d use a cattle prod if she thought she could get away with it. She’s fanatic about physical fitness. Those kids don’t get a moment’s peace, between the death marches up and down mountains and the bogus mind crap she feeds them.” Kevin had arrived at court very emotional, as always. Nina had to watch out for him when she should have been giving all her energies to watching Jeffrey Riesner, the attorney representing Lisa. She shook her head sharply, her eyes closed, and Kevin understood and stopped.

Nina and Riesner went way back, but not to good places. They had a long history of conflict, which had begun almost the day she had arrived in the town of South Lake Tahoe and set up an office as a sole practitioner. A partner in Tahoe’s most prestigious law firm, Caplan, Stamp, Powell, and Riesner, Riesner viewed her as an out-of-town upstart who had barged into his territory and seduced away several good felony defendants. Nina saw him as a relentless greedhead who held grudges and hated women, her in particular.

She watched him playing Lisa now, playing the judge, playing the court, as homey in a courtroom as you could be without moving in a couch and pillows. How he warmed their hearts with little stories of Lisa’s generosity and kindness. The smallest smile was calculated, a warm nod to the judge, practiced. She could never understand his reputation for success in the courtroom. Apparently, judges and juries could not see through the tall, smooth-talking, Armani-clad exterior to his squirming, wormy insides.

Under Riesner’s careful handling, Lisa went on for quite some time, modestly recounting her achievements as a parent and a volunteer firefighter with several exciting stories to tell. Slowly, Riesner built up his Wonder Woman. Her mother, who lived nearby, watched the children for her during fire emergencies, when volunteers were called out. She attended church, raised money for good causes, met with teachers for conferences, and loved her children.

What interested Nina most was not what she said, though, but how, whenever Lisa started to show real emotion by raising her voice or letting a little vehemence enter, Riesner gently steered her back to calm, like a fairy-tale hero sparing her the scary, dark woods. After several minutes, having wrung all the good he could from his client, he turned back to his table and sat down, but not without first casting a victorious sneer Nina’s way.