“Doubtless, but they wouldn’t stoop to the services of a public defender.”
“Actually,” he said, “that brings me to the subject of this meeting, your future.”
“It’s secure as long as there’s crime in the streets.”
“There’s crime in the boardrooms, too, Henry. My firm is interested in hiring an associate with a criminal law background. I’ve circulated your name. People are impressed.”
“Why would your firm dirty its hands in criminal practice?”
Gold put his coffee cup down and said, “Corporations consist of people, some of whom are remarkably venal. Others still are just plain stupid. Anyway, they’ve come to us often enough needing a criminal defense lawyer to make it worth our while to hire one. We’d start you as a third-year associate, at sixty thousand a year.”
I answered quickly, “Well, thanks for thinking of me, but I’m not interested.”
Gold said, “Look, if it’s the money, I know you deserve more, but that’s just starting pay.”
“You know it’s not the money, Aaron,” I said, reflecting that the sum he named was almost double my present wage.
He sighed and said, “Henry, don’t tell me it’s the principle.” I said nothing. “You’re wasting yourself in the public defender’s office. You knock yourself out for some little creep and what you get in return is a shoebox of an office and less money than a first-year associate at my firm makes.”
“So I should exchange it for a bigger office and more money and the opportunity to defend some rising young executive who gets busted for drunk driving?”
“Why not? Aren’t the rich entitled to as decent a defense as the poor?”
“You never hear much public outcry over the quality of legal representation of the rich.”
“What is it you want?” he asked, his voice rising. “The rosy warm glow that comes from doing good? You’re not dealing with political prisoners, you’re dealing with crooks and murderers.”
“It’s true they don’t recruit criminals from country clubs, but if they’re outsiders, so am I.”
“Because you’re gay,” he said, flatly, dropping his voice. “If you’re gay.”
“That’s settled.”
“I won’t argue the point now,” he said, “but you let it run your life, closing doors for you. If you really were gay and accepted it, you would make your choices on other grounds than whether someone would object.”
“I can think of plenty of reasons for not joining your firm,” I replied, “none of them related to being gay.”
“They aren’t why you’ll turn me down,” he said.
I laid my fork aside and glanced out the window. It was luminous with summer light. Gold and I had a variation of this conversation nearly every time we talked. Since each of our positions was set in stone, the only thing our talking accomplished was to get us angry at each other.
“Every choice closes doors,” I said, “and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they’re surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did. I don’t invite unhappiness, Aaron. Avoiding conflict may not be the noblest principle, but it works for me.”
“Can you say you’re happy?”
“No, can you?”
“No, but there are substitutes.”
I didn’t need to ask him what his substitutes were, I knew. Work was at the top of the list. In fact, work was the whole of his list. It had been mine, too, but recently I’d lost a big case and word had it I was burned out. Maybe I was, but if so, what was my alternative to work? I had never thought to cultivate any. The waitress came around and I offered her my cup for coffee, promising myself I would sit down later and think about the future, hoping it would creep up on me before I had the chance. I told Aaron about my jailhouse interviews.
“Hugh Paris,” Gold said, “that name is familiar.”
“Think he trades stock on insider information?”
“Maybe he’s rich.” I shook my head. “You’d be surprised,” Gold continued, “at the number of the rich in our little town. They may not control their money, or know exactly where it comes from, but it dribbles in, from trusts, stocks, annuities.”
“Whether or not he was rich,” I said, “I wish he’d talked to me. He looked like he was carrying a secret he needed badly to unload.”
“Another missed possibility?” Gold asked as he reached for the check. I let him take it.
It was a little after eight when I got to my office on the fourth floor of the courthouse. There were already people waiting in the reception room, thumbing through the inevitable packets of official looking papers that criminal defendants seem to generate as they go through the system. The receptionist had not yet come in, so they stopped me as I walked through and I tried to answer their questions. Finally, I made it to the door that separated us from our clients. I walked down the narrow corridor, made narrower by the presence of file cabinets, for which there was no other space, pushed against the walls. I passed my small, sunless office and headed toward the lounge.
Frances Kelly, the supervising attorney, sat at a table with the daily legal journal spread out in front of her. She let a cigarette burn between her fingers, lifting it to her lips just as the ash fell, dropping on the lapel of her jacket.
She looked up at me as I poured myself some coffee. “Did you know Roger Chaney?” she asked.
“Not well,” I answered. “He left the office just as I was coming in.”
“Excellent lawyer,” she said. “He and I trained together, shared an office. He helped me prepare for my first trial.”
“Is there something about him in the journal?” I asked, sitting across from her as she lit another cigarette.
“He’s being arraigned today in federal court in San Francisco,” she said, “on a conspiracy to distribute cocaine charge.”
“Roger Chaney?” I asked, incredulously. “I thought you were going to tell me he’d been elevated to the bench.”
“With Roger,” she replied, “it could’ve gone either way.”
“Are the charges true, then?”
“I know he had a very successful practice defending some big dealers, and he was making a lot of money, but that was never the lure of the law for him.”
“No? Then what?”
She rose heavily, an elegant fat woman in a linen suit with black hair and beautiful, clear eyes, and ambled to the coffee urn. “He was an intellectual virtuoso,” she said, “convinced he could talk circles around any other lawyer or judge, and he was right. But the courtroom isn’t the real world.”
“He thought he could get away with something?”
“We must presume him innocent,” she said, piously, “but he had that kind of vanity.” After a second she added, “So do you.”
She headed for the door and motioned for me to follow. We went into her office, the only one with a window. Outside, a thin layer of smog rose in the direction of San Jose, but the view to the brown hills surrounding the university was clear as they rolled beyond the palm trees and red tile roofs.
Frances was saying, “I sometimes think really brilliant people shouldn’t be permitted to practice law. They get bored too easily and cause trouble.”
“Are you about to pass along some advice?”
She laughed. “I just wanted to know how you are, Henry. You’ve been with us three months and we haven’t had much chance to talk.” She referred to my forced transfer from the main office in San Jose to this branch office. The topic of conversation, my mental health, now came into focus as sharply as the yellow rose in the vase at the edge of Frances’ desk. I was annoyed by both.
“Considering that my transfer was against my will, I’m fine.”
“I had nothing to do with the transfer,” she said. “You’re not being put out to pasture, just given a rest after your last trial.”
“Which I lost,” I said. “That was the real reason I got kicked down from felony trials to arraignments.”
“The jury convicted him,” she said, “and no one faults your work which, considering the circumstances, was excellent.” I didn’t know whether by circumstances she referred to the fact that only a few I.Q. points separated my
