Texas, twice in his heyday, the same years he won Texas Prosecutor of the Year and had a near perfect conviction record. And now, as a defense attorney, he’s in the peculiar (and rather lucrative) position of being on friendly terms with nearly every prosecutor and judge in the county. Jay watches the two men, their heads pressed together at the judge’s bench, both doughy about the jowls and pink with summer heat, as if they each spent the weekend playing golf—together, for all Jay knows. The two men are whispering, sharing words he can’t hear.
The hooker tugs on his jacket sleeve. “What’s that all about?”
Jay ignores her.
A few seconds later, Charlie walks back to the defense table, smiling.
The judge intertwines his fingers, pressing his palms together. “Mr. Porter, I don’t suppose I need to remind you that Mr. Cum mings is an important member of our community. If this is some sort of extortion attempt —”
“No, Your Honor.”
“And if I let this go to trial, put a man like Mr. Cummings on the stand, you better come to the table with more than you walked in here with today.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not interested in wasting the court’s time or Mr. Cum mings’s.”
The judge looks down at the cop’s affidavit again and the police report. He looks up at the hooker sitting next to Jay. “It’s her word against his.”
“The basis of every trial I’ve ever come across, Your Honor. Somebody’s word against somebody else’s.”
The judge stares at Jay for what seems like an hour.
Then he nods, deciding it. “I’m gon’ let it stand.”
At the defense table, Charlie Luckman clears his throat rather loudly.
The judge, rising from his seat, pretends not to hear him.
The court reporter stretches her arms. The bailiff makes a quick phone call. The hooker asks for a ride home. Jay glances at his watch. He hasn’t been to the office all day, but he agrees to the ride anyway. He doesn’t need her walking and possibly picking up another notch on her rap sheet before they even get to trial.
On his way out of the courtroom, he feels a hand on his back.
“I admire your fortitude, Porter,” Charlie says, throwing charm on top of any hard feelings. “Maybe we can work some thing out on this deal after all.”
“Talk to your client,” Jay says. “Let me know.”
He arrives at his office already behind for the day. His head is throbbing, and there’s nothing in his desk but an old bottle of Pepto and a tin of Sucrets lozenges. For lunch, he has a couple of bags of Fritos out of the vending machine in the strip mall where he works. He eats them alone at his desk.
Eddie Mae, his secretary, is MIA, today leaving a note about her grandbaby’s dentist appointment. He’s on his own with the phones.
He interviews two potential clients.
The first is a woman in her seventies who slipped on a black grape in the produce section of a Safeway mart. He’s pretty excited about this one, until he asks the woman about her legal history. It turns out that in the last sixteen months, the woman slipped on a cantaloupe at Kroger, depilatory cream at Walgreens, and soapy water at a car wash on Griggs. When he tells her he won’t be taking her case, she calls him a fool. “I won them cases, sugar, every last one.”
He wishes he could say the rejection was some great act of legal integrity. The truth is, the case would cost him more than he would make, Safeway being a national corporation with deep pockets and a bevy of in-house attorneys, one for every day of the week if they want. They would assuredly do their best to tie up the case with court hearings and brief filings and depositions for everybody from the store’s manager to his client’s high school boyfriend. Jay, a one-man operation, doesn’t have that kind of time for anything but a sure thing.
The second prospect he interviews is more promising.
The man actually comes into the office, says please and thank you when Jay offers him coffee. He’s got a good story about a motel out near Katy. His little girl is holed up in a local hospital down that way. She got cut up pretty bad by some broken beer bottles left by the side of the motel’s pool. The manager offered to cover their room, but balked at the notion of paying their medical bills, and now the man’s got a hospital tab that’s growing by the minute and no money to pay it. He left his daughter at the hospital with his wife because he didn’t know what else to do. “I got a good case, I know I do,” he says. “But right now, I’m just trying to get my little girl home.”
Jay sets his pen across his desk. By now, he’s onto the hustle.
“If I could just get a little money,” the guy starts. “I’ll pay you back, I swear. Or you can just take it off my bill, soon as we win this.”
Jay stands and shows him to the door.
The hooker is the only bright spot on the horizon.
He tries a couple of phone numbers Ms. Moreland scratched on the back of a gas station receipt, looking for the girlfriend who set up the date between his client and J. T. Cummings, the only person Dana can think of who can corroborate her story. The first number is disconnected. The other is the home of a Mexi can woman who sounds to be about eighty. She’s never heard of Dana Moreland. Jay leaves a note on Eddie Mae’s desk: they’ve got to find the witness. He gets home late, after eight o’clock. Bernie is already in bed, snoring.
She left a plate for him on the stove. Jay takes off his tie and eats in silence at the kitchen table. Afterward, he washes his plate and fork and leaves them in the rack to dry. He tries to clean up some, make himself feel useful around the house, but Ber nie has already cleared and washed the pots and pans and wiped down the counter. He cleans out the refrigerator instead, pull ing out leftovers from Bernie’s birthday two days ago: barbecued meat, dried and rubbery by now, old potato salad, and beer, a can of which he drinks standing up, holding open the door to the fridge. He burps and reaches for another to kill his lingering headache. He finishes the second beer standing over his stereo, flipping through his LPs, trying to find just the right one. He picks out an Otis record, his favorite, and sets the needle down on track number five.
