17
“You looked shellshocked this afternoon.” Rainey giggles sympathetically into my ear on the telephone.
“You see these attorneys who smile into the camera as if their clients were announcing to run for President instead of having been charged with murder, but your teeth were clenched so tight I could barely understand you.”
Standing in the doorway of my kitchen as the ten o’clock news on Channel 4 ends, I hear the bathroom door shut, signaling the beginning of my daughter’s shower.
“Sarah told me I looked like a ventriloquist whose dummy just died,” I admit. After half a six-pack I can laugh at my performance-a little.
“Do you think Andy’s guilty?” I ask plaintively.
There is a short but pregnant pause. On the TV is a commercial for a douche. Damn. The way things are going on TV it won’t be long before they show a woman using it.
“Are you asking me?” Rainey asks, her voice almost high enough to shatter glass.
“I have no idea. People will do anything for money.”
“That’s for sure.” I nod, staring at the model’s face. She is so gorgeous I almost forget what the ad is all about. I wonder what she got paid.
“Are you watching Channel 4?” “Isn’t she a knockout?” Rainey says. I imagine her feet tucked under her on her couch, the way I have seen her dozens of times.
“Would you still think so,” I ask, “if she said, “I usually stink like hell, but this stuff works even on my worst days!”?
I mean, sometimes there are situations when it’s hard to open your mouth. I guess it’s no secret that I wasn’t prepared for Andy to be charged with murder. It’s hard to be objective.”
Rainey laughs, used to my nonsense.
“You’re his lawyer.
You’re not supposed to be.”
I carry the phone, whose cord could practically extend around the outside of the house, into the living room and bend down to turn off the TV. It’s been a long day.
“Of course I am,” I protest, ‘but my clients are always duping me.”
Whimsical as ever, Rainey sings to a tune from my youth, “
“Dupe! .. . Dupe! .. . Dupe of Earl’…. So you really think he’s been lying to you? He’s such a nice guy.”
“The “Duke of Earl,”
” I say, surprised she’s old enough to remember. What in the hell was that song all about? I like the Dupe of Earl better, too.
“Obviously, they think the mother is in on it, but they don’t have …” The phone beeps, indicating a call is waiting. I hate being interrupted, but Sarah pleaded and agreed to pay the extra amount from her job. Naturally, I haven’t collected since the first month.
“Just a second, okay?” I tell Rainey and push the button.
“Hello?”
“Gideon,” a female voice gushes, “you were just wonderful on TV tonight!”
I rack my brain and then realize. God forbid, it is my rat-burner divorce client, Mona Moneyhart. It seems as if she has tried to call me almost every day since she was in the office the first time, but this is the first call at home.
“Mona,” I say, my teeth on edge, “do you realize how late it is?”
“You weren’t asleep, were you?” she coos.
“I just had to tell you how proud I was when I saw you tonight. My son asked if you had false teeth and were ashamed of them, but I told him you talk like that when you’re trying to be firm with me.” She giggles at the very idea.
I open my mouth as wide as I can and still speak: “I…
am … on … another… line … I … have … to . hang … up … now….”
“That’s okay,” she says cheerfully.
“I’ll talk to you to morrow. ” I click Rainey back in. Why can’t I just tell her that if she calls me again I’ll put out a contract on her? Julia, no easy customer herself, now screens my calls, but Mona has be come a woman of a thousand voices and usually manages to get through.
“That was a client,” I tell Rainey.
“At ten-thirty at night?” she says.
“Sure.”
I sigh. I wouldn’t believe it either.
In bed that night I toss and turn and it dawns on me how little I have really thought about what happened in Andy’s case. At the Public Defender’s, we assumed that over 95 percent of our clients were guilty, and invariably they were.
The job consisted of seeing how much off the maximum sentence we could get for them, usually in a plea bargain.
From the beginning, I have assumed Andy was guilty of professional negligence but deliberate murder? Not in my wildest dreams. My brain shut down after that. If I’m going to survive in private practice, I won’t be able to afford the luxury of my assumptions. What have I done wrong here? I saw a nice guy in trouble, one who, I thought, reminds me a little of myself, in that he had fallen in love with a woman outside his race. Is that even true, or is that part of the plot, as well? Part of my problem, I realize belatedly, is perhaps my own latent racism in this case. Andy is a nice black man.
Well dressed, well spoken, he has been especially easy to like. How could a guy (especially a black one this sharp, my racist mind runs) be part of something so evil? I never let myself entertain the thought for five minutes. Yet the possibility has been there all along, and I have ignored it. Actu ally, it is not that I mind defending someone who is guilty (I accepted the game at the PD’s of figuring out what was the lie and what was the truth of my client’s story); what do I mind? (a), being taken for a fool, or (b), acting like a fool?
Probably (a), but to be charitable to myself, I’ll choose (b).
Well, no more Mr. Nice Guy. I yawn, finally sleepy, knowing I’ve been sleepwalking through this case. And yet Andy, as I’ve thought all along, may be not guilty of anything more than bad judgment. Tomorrow, I think, my head finally still on the pillow, I’ll get to work.
“Dad,” calls Sarah, who has been back from Camp Anytown for two weeks, “there’s someone to see you.”
I put down my coffee and the section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette with a front-page article about Andy and hurry into the living room. Surely not even a reporter would come to the house this time of day. Woogie’s furious barking at seven-thirty in the morning is particularly obnoxious. “Hush,” I holler at him as I come around the corner and see Mona Moneyhart standing inside the screen.
“I just brought you and your daughter some fresh blueberry muffins for your breakfast,” she says, handing Sarah a plastic bowl with a paper towel over it.
“Your dad’s my lawyer in my divorce,” she says smiling sweetly at Sarah, “and after I saw him on TV last night I was so proud of him I just had to get up early and whip these up.”
My eyes begin to tear as I smell the warm, slightly acidic odor of ripe blueberries hidden in the plastic. I think I’m going to throw up. Mona is dressed in almost nothing. In red running shorts cut high on the sides and a gray threadbare T-shirt labeled, as I feared, “Let Being Be!” she is braless and apparently pantyless as well. My stomach flips as I think of her oven. I feel sweat popping out on my forehead. I expect to see a rat’s tail dangling over the side of the bright blue bowl. When I do nothing except swallow, Sarah, who looks a little stunned herself, says brightly, “How nice of you to do this! They smell delicious.”
My mouth thick with the saliva that accompanies nausea, I finally manage weakly, “Sarah, this is Mrs. Moneyhart.”
