“They can’t take her from me if it wasn’t my fault, can they?”
Almost everyone will lie under stress. The more pressure, the more lies. Yet, for some reason I change my mind and believe this girl is telling the truth. She has looked me straight in the eye and has stuck to her story.
So why didn’t the child climb out of the tub? What about the pattern of the burns? I don’t know how to explain these questions any better than my client right now.
“Not if it wasn’t your fault,” I respond carefully. If her kid dies, she won’t have to worry about a juvenile court proceeding.
“Keep visiting her every day,” I advise, “and try not to piss off the nurses and social workers at the hospital.
Just remember they’re writing down everything you’re doing and not doing and will continue to do so until you go to court.”
Her blue eyes darkening, Gina gives me a fierce look.
“I don’t want you to be my lawyer,” she says stubbornly, “if you think I meant to hurt Glenetta deliberately. I can find somebody else if I have to.”
What a bluffer! I’ve always been a sucker for this line.
Though it seldom happens, lawyers want to believe they are representing an innocent person. As I look at her, I realize that if she had a more oval face, she would be almost pretty.
“I do believe you,” I say. Though she is surely a novice in her profession, she is quite an actress.
She knows two hundred dollars won’t buy her much of a lawyer for a trial that will determine custody of her child and avoid a possible criminal charge. Perhaps she is telling the truth. I look at my watch again and stand up.
“I’ve got to drive to Fayetteville this morning, so I need to get on the road. Did you get a trial date?”
“November seventh,” Gina says as she pushes herself out of the chair. She is tall, perhaps five feet eight. If she owns a decent dress, she will look better than the average parent who comes into juvenile court.
“That’s not far off,” I say, having forgotten how quickly adjudicatory hearings are set in juvenile court. I walk her out to the reception area.
“I’ll call early next week. I’m going to want to see the tub and for you to show me how it happened.”
She gives me a wan smile.
“Just give me a call.”
I watch her exit through the glass double doors to the elevators and remember I didn’t give her a receipt.
“How much is this client paying you?” Julia sneers.
“A couple hundred?”
My face burns with embarrassment at the accuracy of her guess.
“Why didn’t you tell me she had been Dan’s client?” I bluster, long having subscribed to the belief that offense is more fun than defense.
Seated, Julia cocks her head at me.
“Go bellyache to him if you got a beef. I’m not paid to gossip with you guys.”
“I think I will,” I say, eager to escape. Gina doesn’t seem the type to worry about receipts anyway.
Dan’s door is rarely shut, and today is no exception. I enter to find him happily eating a bag of peanuts, his latest diet food.
“I know what you’re going to say,” he says grinning, offering me a handful of goobers.
“So let me explain.”
I look at Clan and shake my head. Incorrigible is too kind a description. Instead of diplomas on the walls, Clan has tacked up cartoons. But rather than caricatures of national figures or Arkansas politicians, bizarrely displayed around him are blown-up strips of hoary, unfunny soap operas like Rex Morgan, M.D.” Mary Worth, and Apartment 3-G. Handling mainly minor criminal offenses and a steady diet of domestic relations cases, my closest friend justifies his choice of artwork as offering cautionary tales to the dozens of tormented women who frequent his office. If his clients think they have been unlucky in love, Margo, a bitchy, but glamorous executive secretary in New York’s Apartment 3-G, has been regularly duped by the opposite sex for many years. Long-suffering and underappreciated nurse June Gale will never get that lunkhead of a doctor Rex Morgan to the altar; Mary Worth, a widow obviously celibate now for decades, fills her time by incessantly interfering in the problem-filled lives of her friends and acquaintances. The message is clear to the female visitor: if things are still this bad for women in the funny pages after all this time, they shouldn’t expect too much out of real life.
“If I had just told you about Gina’s case,” Clan says, cracking open a peanut with his left thumb, “you would have turned it down on the spot.”
I reach across the desk and take a peanut.
“You’re damn right I would have,” I complain.
“Even Legal Services turned her down on the basis of merit.”
Clan expertly skins the reddish, papery husk from the meat with his thumbnail and pops the nut into his mouth.
“Who would be better than an expert like yourself to represent her?” he says glibly.
“She’s a good kid, and I kind of believe she didn’t do it.”
One of the goobers inside the shell falls to the floor before I can extract it. I look down at the carpet and see peanuts everywhere. This must be how the diet works. It takes forever to shell the damn things, and then you lose half of what you try to eat.
“Mother of the Year material, no doubt about it,” I crack, eating the remaining nut before it disappears.
“She’s a whore dog, Clan. Not a lifestyle guaranteed to warm a juvenile judge’s heart.”
“Never convicted,” Clan says modestly.
“The Department of Human Services won’t know a thing.”
I study the cartoons behind Dan’s head. Unlike Clan and myself, the characters, despite their problems, never age.
“Two hundred dollars,” I bitch, “is all she gave me.”
Clan smiles benignly as his right hand catches in the almost empty bag.
“See, she’s just like us-just a little whore.”
Before I walk out the door to get on the road to Fayetteville, I call Amy.
“Gilchrist,” I say when she comes on the line, “I was gonna try to play it cool, but I couldn’t wait.” I don’t tell her that I’ve just interviewed a prostitute and started thinking of her.
“Men are so stupid,” Amy says cheerfully.
“I practically invite you to move in with me, and you have to think about it.”
I laugh, trying to picture her in her office. She is in the Kincaid Building two blocks west of the courthouse.
Mostly a domestic law practice. Women attorneys seem to settle into it, though she knows as much, if not more, criminal law than I do.
“Can we eat first?” I ask.
“Are you busy Saturday?”
“I have to warn you that I’m on a ten-thousand-calorie a day diet,” she says.
“You might want to check the limits on your Visa card.”
I think of her trim, compact body. Maybe she’s really fat, and it’s all being held in by a giant safety pin. I don’t think so. She didn’t have that much on last night, and what I saw looked firm.
“Where do you put it?” I ask admiringly. If I eat a single cookie, I can see the outline of it in my stomach for days.
“In my mouth,” she says.
“I’m busy right now. Call me Saturday, okay?”
“Sure,” I say and hang up, a little disappointed. I had wanted to brag that I was going to Fayetteville to represent Dade Cunningham, but maybe it will impress her more when she reads it in the papers. I stand up and retrieve my briefcase from the top of the filing cabinet, realizing I am abnormally pleased. It’s time to quit thinking Rainey and I will get back together. A part of me is still in love with her, but some things aren’t meant to be. Amy sounds like she’ll be fun. Why have I avoided younger women so religiously since Rosa died? Fear of looking
