“Can’t I wait a few years?”
” At the mention of sex, Clan snickers, his sophomoric humor always waiting for the opportunity to surface.
“As long as you possibly can, but if you lose too much more hair, you’re gonna be playing in the minor leagues the rest of your life.”
I pat my bald spot. Is it my imagination, or has it expanded another finger’s width since I got up this morning?
“You know anything about Kim Keogh?” I ask.
Clan wipes the grease from his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Do dreams count? What a fox! If they’ diet her anchor the ten o’clock news, I’d have a reason to make it past nine-thirty. Jesus Christ, isn’t middle age the pits?”
The odor of popcorn before lunch is starting to make me nauseous. The grease, I suppose. I brag, “She interviewed me this morning. She’s not married, is she?” I say, knowing she’s not. I didn’t see a ring.
A gleam of envy comes into Dan’s sparkling blue eyes, his only good feature now that he’s hidden the others.
“Damn!
This time last year you were about to get nailed by that social worker at the state hospital, weren’t you?”
I think of Rainey and smile.
“We’re just friends.”
Clan drops the empty bag into my trash.
“Kim Keogh, huh?” Clan muses.
“You look at these women on TV and wonder what they’re like once they’ve washed their faces.
Did you see Postcards from the Edge7 I lost all my illusions about Shirley MacLaine.”
So did I. Those old broads will do anything to stay in front of the camera. I can imagine Mike Nichols coaxing her, “Come on, it’s for art’s sake.” Shit. Maybe it is. But I hope she won’t start taking her clothes off.
“That was the point,” I acknowledge.
“It’s all fake, but nobody said the male species had any brains.”
His face red, Clan chuckles as he struggles to his feet. I can imagine his heart exploding through his chest someday.
“You about ready for lunch?” he asks.
I look at my watch. It’s only a quarter after eleven. Clan would get more work done if he moved his office down to the cafeteria.
“I got a call to make,” I tell him.
“I’ll see you down there in a few minutes. Don’t forget your files,” I add, shoving the two folders at him.
He wags his head.
“I need you to take a couple of cases for me. One’s a DWI and the other’s an adoption. I got the money, but I haven’t done anything with them. A check’s in there for them. I’m kind of stacked up right now. I’ll talk to the clients. They’ll be excited they’re getting a star.”
Bullshit. He’s giving them to me because he knows I need the money. It’s not much, but it’s more than I brought with me, if I don’t count what I stole.
“Thanks,” I say softly.
“I appreciate this.”
In a gesture of dismissal, Dan’s hands twitch outward.
“You’re doing me favor.”
Sure I am. I holler after him, “If you want to do me a favor, get rid of Princess Fishmouth out front.”
He comes back to the door, and shows me his dimples.
“You need to kiss and make up. We just heard our Miss Twin Peaks called in and said she’s taking a job at a health spa. The good news”-Dan leers-”is that she said all the lawyers on our floor can get a free workout if we come when she’s on duty.”
“From the way you describe her,” I say, playing to Dan’s fourteen-year-old side, “that wouldn’t be hard.”
“At our age,” he dead pans “it doesn’t get very hard.”
I laugh obligingly.
“Speak for yourself.” As if on command, Clan opens his mouth and closes it.
“This I can do,” he says and, turning to leave again, repeats solemnly, “this I can do.”
While I wait nervously for Oscar Mays to come to the phone, I reflect on my friendship with Clan. In part, perhaps the major part, of our affinity for each other is that if given the opportunity, we’d just as soon be back in junior high.
Oscar Mays sounds as if he had just buried his wife.
“Gideon,” he says sorrowfully after the most perfunctory of greetings, “I’m really disappointed in you. I thought you had more integrity than to steal a client from us.”
I say nothing, uncertain how to respond. My desire to lash out at him for firing me is balanced by the need to take whatever action I can to limit any potential repercussion. The pause becomes too long, and I say weakly, “I wouldn’t call it stealing under the circumstances. He didn’t want the firm of Mays amp; Burton; he wanted me.”
An angry tremor comes into Oscar’s voice for the first time since I’ve known him.
“You signed an agreement! When you give your word on something, doesn’t it mean anything to you?”
Lawyers! We hide behind pieces of paper like cockroaches.
He can treat me like a used sheet of toilet paper, and I’m supposed to feel guilty because I was coerced into signing a document that at the time meant nothing to me. I was so eager to leave the Public Defender’s Office when I came to Mays amp; Burton that I would have signed my name in blood. Why? The memory burns my face as I listen to Oscar pontificate on the sanctity of a contract. I was terrified that Carol Anderson would tell my boss I had slept with her.
I would have been fired on the spot for getting involved with a woman, who, had the case gone to trial, would have, in effect, testified as an expert witness for my client, who was accused of murdering her husband. Our way of life, Oscar preaches, depends on human beings’ keeping their agreements.
My experience is that if the bastards can squeeze you by the balls, they will not hesitate to do so when it is in their self-interest. In our society lawyers are brought in to do the heavy-duty squeezing. I recall my own righteous indignation from a case earlier this year in which I collected a debt for a client for Mays amp; Burton. I was about to take almost every last stick of furniture the defendant owned when he finally filed bankruptcy. The nerve of him! My realization that if I were in Oscar’s situation I wouldn’t be acting any differently tempers my tone but does not prevent me from slamming down the phone after I mutter, “So sue me!” Fuming over this conversation, I lean back in my chair and try to relax. I won’t be sued. It would embarrass them too much, and, anyway, I might win. As much as the law reveres a contract, it favors competition.
After lunch with Clan and two other lawyers in the building, I walk the four short blocks to the courthouse to look at the prosecutor’s file on Chapman. When I ask for Kerr Bowman, I am told that Jill Marymount would like to see me.
The Queen Bee herself. This is awfully early in the case to be having
tea with the prosecutor, but not all work the same y way. Some are like generals and won’t get their hands dirty until the actual battle, relying on subordinates to do the work;
others, like Jill, have a reputation for interviewing their potential witnesses from the very beginning. An ironclad argument can be made that a prosecutor in as large an office as Blackwell County doesn’t have the time to do her own pretrial investigation. Basically an administrator, she is being paid to exercise her professional judgment, not run up mileage on her car for her expense account. We’ve had prosecutors in Blackwell County who almost never tried cases once they were elected. But Jill’s approach allows you to get a feel for a case you wouldn’t have unless you got your hands dirty. You get ideas about motivation you’d otherwise miss, and you obtain a real sense about credibility of witnesses.
