client from a vegetable or the fact that he used an axe handle to bludgeon his elderly parents to death. A series of coroner’s photographs passed through my mind. Pained by the recollection, I touched my fingers to my forehead. She caught the gesture and tactfully looked away.
“The circumstances were of no interest to the jury,” I said. “They sent him to Death Row.”
“That’s on appeal.”
“And I was farmed out here, to rusticate.”
“You object to my company?” She expelled a gust of cigarette smoke that passed through the sunlight like a cloud.
“But seriously,” I replied.
“To rest,” she said, “from the pressures of trial court. I could see the burn-out on your face when you first got here.”
“Send me back,” I said. “I’ve done nothing but interview clients for other lawyers and sit in arraignment court haggling with the D.A. over public nuisance cases.”
“Whether you go back is not my call.”
“Whether?” I demanded. “Not when? Call San Jose and tell them that I didn’t crack up, after all. Tell them I’m burned out from the other end. I mean, you all think I’m demoralized or exhausted from my work, but I m not. It’s the rest of my life I’m burned out on. This job keeps me going.” I heard the tremor in my voice so I cut myself short.
“I’m not proposing to take your job away,” she replied. “Everyone in the office knows you’re one of the best lawyers we have.” She put out her cigarette in an onyx ashtray and lit another. “The office has just hired a dozen new lawyers, most fresh out of law school. They’re looking for someone to train them. The job is yours if you want it.”
“That’s the second-best offer I’ve had this morning,” I said. She looked puzzled. “It’s nothing. I don’t see myself as a teacher.”
“You have so much to pass along.”
“I’m thirty-three, Frances, not sixty-three. I’m not ready to sit on the veranda and tell war stories.”
Think about it,” she said. She noticed me looking at the rose and she plucked it from the vase and handed it to me.
“And if I don’t take the job, my exile continues.”
“The rose is from my garden,” she replied.
“My favorite flower,” I said, standing.
In my office, I dropped the rose into the trash can and sat down. There was a pile of cases to be reviewed before I went down to arraignment court that afternoon. There was also a list of clients to be interviewed and advised, and cases to be assigned to other lawyers. I opened the first file and thought, immediately, of Hugh Paris sitting in his cell downstairs, And here, I told myself, I sit in my cell upstairs. I dismissed the thought as self-pity compounded with a pang of lust. But the little room was too warm, suddenly, and I could not concentrate on the papers before me.
I got up and went into the bathroom where I washed my face in cold water. Looking at the mirror, I studied that face carefully. I pressed my fingers, lightly, at the comers of my eyes, smoothing out the wrinkles and I looked, almost, twenty-five again. I could quit and start over, I told the reflection in the mirror. My eyes answered, start what over? What is there?
Another lawyer came in, and I turned from the mirror, said hello to him and went back to my office.
The morning dragged on as I shuffled files from one side of my desk to the other. Outside my office, I heard the babble of voices as the other lawyers interviewed clients and witnesses or hurried off to court shouting last minute questions about a legal issue or a particular judge’s temperament. I felt the excitement but did not share it.
There comes a point in the career of every criminal defense lawyer when he realizes that what keeps him in practice are his prejudices not his principles. Suspicion of authority and contempt for the platitudes with which injustice too often cloaks itself can take you a long way but, ultimately, they are no substitute for the simple faith that what you are doing is right. It came to me, as I sat there buried in papers, that I had lost that faith.
I left a message with Frances’s secretary that I wanted to see her after lunch, then went off to a nearby bar and had a couple of drinks. As I sat on the bar stool cracking peanuts and sipping my bourbon, my thoughts veered back to Hugh Paris.
It was nothing as trivial as lust. Seeing him had precipitated this crisis because I had not been able to help him, though I wanted to. And, after all, what did my help amount to? Getting someone less time in jail than otherwise or even getting him off were often temporary respites in long-term downward slides. That was the extent of the assistance I could offer — dispensing placebos to the terminally ill.
Frances was in her office when I knocked at the door. She beckoned me in and I sat down, swallowing the mint I’d been chewing to mask the bourbon on my breath. It was important that she not know I had been drinking.
“Frances, I’ve made a decision.”
“You’ll teach the class?”
“No.” I gripped my hands together in my lap. “I’m quitting.”
“What?” She stared at me.
“I called San Jose and told them. I wanted to tell you, too. I wanted to thank you for your many kindnesses-” I stopped. The air between us buzzed with inarticulate feeling.
“Henry, you can’t mean this. Take a few days off, a few weeks if you want. Travel.”
I shook my head. “I hate traveling. I have no hobbies. I’m thirty-three years old and all I know about life is what I learned in law school or the inside of a courtroom. And it’s pathetically little, Frances.” She reached for a cigarette. “I know I’m a little old for it, but I believe I’m having an identity crisis.”
“That’s no reason to quit your job,” she replied.
“This is more than my job, it’s my life. And it’s not enough.” I rose. “Do you understand?”
“No. Do you?”
“Not very clearly.” I sat down again. “I met a man in the jail this morning, an inmate. I wanted to help him, to offer him some kind of comfort, something human. But all I knew how to do was deliver speeches.”
“We offer people what no one else can give them,” Frances said, “a possible way out of their trouble. Is that so insignificant?”
“Of course not, when it works. But so often it doesn’t, and anyway,” I laid my hands on her desk, “what does that give me?”
She sighed. “Well that’s the key, isn’t it? If you’ve reached the point of asking that question then whatever you’re getting from it is obviously not enough.”
“Wish me luck.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll wish you’ll change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
“All right,” she said, “then good luck.”
I went back to my office and cleaned out my desk. Some of the other lawyers drifted in, stood around nervously, said a few well-intended words. By three o’clock I’d done nearly everything I needed to do to extricate myself from my job. Just before I left I called down to the jail. Hugh Paris had been bailed out by someone who signed the bail receipt as John Smith. I gathered up the last of my papers and left.
2
I was awake the second I heard the movement in the shrubs outside the bedroom window. I glanced at the clock on the bed stand; it was a little after three a.m. The soft but distinctive shuffle of footsteps echoed outside and then I heard a quick rap at the front door. I got out of bed, pulled on a pair of pants and went into the living room. I stood near the door and listened. The last time I had been awakened at that hour was by a disgruntled,
