His small eyes narrowed. “I said I wasn’t the enemy.” “Because you’re not actually malicious?”
“Do you want me to testify or not?” he snapped.
“No, I don’t think so.”
He looked at me, then shrugged. “I still have to bill you for this time.”
“Sure.” I got up to leave.
“Mr. Rios,” he said, as I reached the door. “You’re making a mistake, you know. I’m the best there is.”
“So,” I said, “am I.”
6
The sheriffs brought Jim into the conference room and seated him across from me at a table divided by a low partition. The walls were painted a grimy pastel blue that made the room look like a soiled Easter egg. The lights were turned up to interrogation intensity and I got my first good look at Jim Pears.
His fingernails were bitten down to ragged stubs. His face was white to the point of transparency and a blue vein pounded at his temple as if trying to tear through the skin. Splotches of yellow stubble spotted his chin and cheek. His hair, unwashed and bad-smelling, was matted to his head. The whites of his eyes were streaked with red but the irises were vivid blue — the only part of his face that showed life.
His eyes were judging me. It was as if I was the last of a long line of grown-ups who would fail him. It annoyed me. His glance slipped away.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to talk to you this morning,” I said. “Do you understand what happened in court?’’
In a soft voice he answered, “You’re my lawyer now.”
“That’s right. We have to be ready to go to trial in six weeks.”
He shrugged and stared at the partition between us. After a moment his silence became hostile.
“Is anything wrong, Jim?”
“I don’t like lawyers,” he announced.
“You’ve got lots of company.’’
His face remained expressionless. “She didn’t believe me,” he said. “Do you?”
“That you didn’t kill Brian Fox?”
He nodded.
I make it a point not to lie to my clients, but this can involve something short of the truth. I said, “I’m willing to start from that assumption.”
His face was suspicious. “What do you mean?”
“What matters is convincing a jury that you’re innocent,” I explained.
Now he understood. “You don’t believe me, either.”
“I have an open mind,” I replied.
He withdrew again into a sulky silence. I decided to wait him out and we sat there as the minutes passed.
“I can’t sleep at night,” he said abruptly.
“Why?” I wondered if he was going to confess.
“They leave the lights on. It hurts my eyes.”
“It’s just so the guards can keep an eye on things.” “Nothing happens in there.” He looked at me. “I’m with the queens. That’s what they call them.”
“You’re safer there than in the general population.” “They’re like women,” he continued, ignoring me. “They say things that make me sick.” He shuddered. “I’m not like that.” “Not like what, Jim?”
“Gay.” He spat out the word. Once again, his eyes drifted away. He seemed unable to look directly at anything for longer than a few seconds.
“Whether you’re gay doesn’t make any difference in jail,” I said. “There are guys here who would claw through the walls to get at you.”
His face shut down. “You’re gay,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Gay lawyer,” he said, mockingly. “Do you wear a dress to court?”
The taunt was so crude that at first I thought I’d misheard him. It was something that a six-year-old might say.
“I don’t give a damn whether you think you’re gay or not, Jim. That’s the least of your worries.”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “You made me mad,” he added. “I didn’t kill Brian.”
“Then who did?” I demanded.
His shoulders stiffened. “Someone else.”
“Someone else is not going to be on trial. You are. And you are also the only witness to what happened in the cellar. So unless you cooperate with me, I’d say your chances of getting out of here are pretty damn slim.”
“I don’t remember,” he whined.
“Then you might as well fire me and plead guilty,” I replied.
His face began to disintegrate into a series of jerks and twitches. At that moment, his father’s theory of demonic possession seemed almost plausible.
“My head hurts,” he whimpered. “I want to go back to my cell.”
“All right. We’re not getting off to a very good start but I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll be back every day until you remember what happened that night.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
I sat in my car in the parking lot beneath the jail surprised at the violence of my dislike of Jim Pears. I didn’t usually speak to a client the way I had spoken to Jim. Part of my anger was a response to his childish insult which would have been comical except for what it revealed about the state of his self-awareness. He told me he wasn’t gay with the desperation of someone who could not allow himself to believe anything else. His panic had calcified and become brittle. He was on the verge of shattering. But instead of sympathy for him I felt impatience. With his life at stake there was no time to waste while he sorted himself out.
Then I thought of how he had been unable to even look at me, and my impatience thawed a little. He had been alone in the dark for a long time and now, abruptly, he’d been yanked into the light. All he wanted was to cover his face as if he could make the harsh world disappear simply by closing his eyes to it. Perhaps he could be reached by a simplicity equal to his own. But simplicity was not among my bag of tricks.
Larry’s Jaguar was already in the garage when I pulled in. I found him in the kitchen watching a portable tv as he chopped boiled potatoes into cubes.
“You’re a star,” he said.
I watched myself on the tv. A reporter explained that Jim’s trial had been continued because he changed lawyers. Larry washed lettuce in the sink, drowning out the set. I turned it up.
“… accused of the brutal slaying of Brian Fox. Today, prosecutors moved to seek the death penalty.’’
Larry shut off the water. “The death penalty?”
“Wait. I want to hear this.”
“The D.A. also questioned the motives behind the change of attorneys. Pears’s new lawyer is Henry Rios, a prominent Bay Area attorney who is also openly gay. The D.A. suggested that pressure from the gay community to have a gay lawyer try the case led to today’s hearing.’’
“Asshole,” Larry said.
“Meanwhile,” the reporter continued, “there was a dramatic confrontation outside the courtroom between Rios and the victim’s mother, Lillian Fox.”
We watched Mrs. Fox spit at me. I shut the television off.
“You’ve had quite a day,” Larry said, arranging lettuce leaves in a big wooden bowl.
“I’m thinking that it was a mistake for me to have taken the case,” I said.
He opened a can of tuna fish, drained and chopped it and added it to the salad. “Because the D.A. called you
