The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  To an employment lawyer who specialized in employee discrimination cases, Maddie railed against Boston’s hidebound legal community for discriminating against her for being Irish, female, and divorced, not the profile of the type of women attorneys these firms preferred to display. When she demanded the employment lawyer file a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming discrimination based on gender and national origin, the lawyer had advised her it would be impossible to prove a case even with the lower burden of proof required in civil law suits. The evidence is too circumstantial, the lawyer explained. There’s no smoking gun. Maddie knew the lawyer was right.

  “The power of visualization is the key to success,” advised a mentor and visualize Maddie did. First, her case on the front-page of The New York Times; then on the network news. She visualized herself surrounded by a horde of cameras, mobs of reporters competing for her every word. She saw herself in a corner office on a high floor in one of Boston’s office towers earning a high-six-figure salary, picking and choosing clients, the way she picked and chose a pearl necklace or diamond choker during one of her many imaginary shopping sprees at Tiffany and Company. She visualized while waiting in court for her cases to be called, while working out, while on the subway when she tired of the book she was reading, at home waiting for her dinner to heat or in a restaurant waiting for it to be served, while stuck on the Central Artery during rush hour, in the theater, at the ballet, on dates with men for whom she was one or two rungs higher on society’s ladder, in the bleachers of Fenway Park or the nosebleed seats at Boston Garden, whenever, wherever, her mind drifted; but for all her visualizations she still wallowed in the depths of her private sinkhole defending people whose names she banished from her memory before the court-room door closed behind her.

  Instead, she numbed her pain by transferring it to the victims of her clients, people she also quickly forgot. The shopkeeper whose store was robbed was a blank face in a white apron. The rape victim was a statistic, a rape kit, a lab test, a woman who should have known better than to be where she was when she was with whom she was. Widows were women dressed in black, widowers men in black suits. Winning cases, freeing the guilty, salved her conscience, her dark secret never talked about. To anyone who asked why she did not become a prosecutor after her ex-husband’s acquittal of homicide in connection with the death of their daughter, Elizabeth, she offered well-rehearsed cant about Powell v. Alabama and Gideon v. Wainwright and the right to legal counsel. She wore her nobility the way a leper wore his skin and felt equally isolated, quarantined, diseased.

  To assuage her guilt and to honor her daughter’s memory, Maddie devoted herself to the Elizabeth Fund. She personally visited every church and synagogue in greater Boston soliciting either donations or for them to sponsor fund-raisers. One of the mental health professionals she occasionally used as an expert witness in her criminal cases designed a short one-session course to educate the law enforcement community. With George Harriman’s help, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, over Mayor Charlie’s opposition, forced Chief Ugolino to mandate it as part of its neighborhood policing program. This created a cascading effect as more and more police departments in the greater Boston area included it as part of their training. A law school classmate whose father was president of the Massachusetts Bar Association arranged for the MBA to add the seminar to its continuing legal education curriculum. At the urging of the Chief Justice of the Boston Municipal Court who presided over child abuse cases with a depressing regularity, the Massachusetts Judicial Conference offered the seminar as part of its training program for new judges. For sitting judges, it was optional. After several visits and much nagging, the United Fund of Boston added the Elizabeth Fund to its list of approved charities and provided small annual grants.

  Yet, for all the personal satisfaction the Elizabeth Fund provided her, for all the contacts she made, for all the praise she received, for reasons Maddie did not understand, she could not escape Suffolk County Legal Services. Once a leper, she told herself, always a leper.

  She led a bifurcated life, defending the scum of the earth in court, defending the most vulnerable victims of that scum outside of court. She had little time for a social life. Her occasional dates provided no emotional satisfaction and little physical gratification. When she needed to relax, to unwind, she drank a Guinness and used a vibrator she had mail-ordered from a store in New York City that specialized in sex toys. It was a life, not the worst of all possible lives, but also not the life she had anticipated. She did not have a Panglossian view of the world.

  Now, the office door had not closed behind her when Carmelita Delgado, receptionist and fetcher of Frohling’s daily prune Danish and coffee, told her the boss had been screaming for her all morning and she better have a damn good explanation for being so late. Maddie barged into Frohling’s office.

  “Remind me, Maddie, what a closed door means.”

  “I just did.”

  “I need you to cover an arraignment. Judge Spodapoulos. Third Session. Two fifteen.”

  “One of the third-years can handle it.”

  “Avram Levy. His rabbi came to see me this morning.”

  “It’s a frame. The skull-cap’s a plant.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s the only logical explanation for Ugolino’s TV special.”

  “If he’s innocent, defending him won’t violate your golden rule.” Frohling tapped his watch. “Spodapoulos won’t wait. He’ll appoint someone else. Maybe that piece of shit Ed Hornstein.” Frohling shifted his attention to a file on his desk, thumbing through the papers with the interest of a schoolboy being forced to conjugate Latin verbs. He knew mentioning that name, Hornstein, would keep Maddie under his thumb.

  “Drink after work?” Frohling asked.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Your place or mine?”

  Running to the Old Court-House, Maddie dodged cabs, busses, bike couriers, and the tourist trolley. Pedestrians she ran over. Frohling being Frohling, she thought. He acted that way toward everyone in the office, men and women alike; but his pathetic efforts at seduction were laughed at, spit upon, too comical, too inane, to warrant a sexual harassment complaint. As she crossed Tremont Street and jumped the steps two at a time between One Beacon and Center Plaza, half-moons of sweat accumulated under her arms and stained the front of her blouse. Hotter than hell, someone complained, and she laughed. Hell, the nuns had preached, was a dry heat.

  -5-

  The lobby of the Old Court-House in Boston’s Pemberton Square ascended four stories from a ground-level floor littered with cigarette butts, candy wrappers, cardboard coffee cups, half-eaten sandwiches whose bread was as stale as the excuses offered by defendants to judges who had heard it all already, and tissues soggy with the tears of mothers, wives, or children as their sons, husbands, fathers were led away in handcuffs to the Charles Street Jail or one of the many houses of correction or state prisons maintained by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the betterment of its misbehaving citizens. Arching over the lobby floor at a height of four stories was a domed ceiling caked with more than one hundred years of the blighted hopes and betrayed illusions of people having business before the courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. At one time, when the wall between Church and State was neither high nor solid, domes had been a popular architectural feature of court-houses, a feature borrowed from churches in the expectation the resemblance between church and court-house would lead people to believe when they stood before the judge they were standing before God. Experienced trial attorneys knew better.

  Cavernous and dimly lit, the lobby was like the central chamber of an uncharted cave inhabited by creatures of the dark: attorneys, shape-shifters camouflaged into invisibility nodding with feigned sincerity, and clients, creeping and crawling across its floor like moles searching for grubs, the luciferous glow of their anger lighting the way, clients squat with
hairy faces, lupine eyes, and venomous voices snarling with bravado.

  Waiting for an elevator, Attorney Maddie Devlin sipped grapefruit juice purchased at the food concession operated by the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. Its acidic tartness matched her mood. She centered herself between the four elevators, two on each side of the lobby, so she could run to the first that arrived. According to court-house myth, the elderly operators came with the elevators as an accessory installed by the manufacturer. Maddie respected court-house myths no matter how silly and greeted the operators upon entry, thanked them upon exiting. They, in turn, never closed the door in her face. In obeisance to another myth, she always skipped over the brass engravings set in the brick plaza outside the building as if they were cracks in the sidewalk, one plaque commemorating each of the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. According to the myth, an attorney who trampled the Bill of Rights would lose his case. Someday she’d put it to scientific proof.

  “May your Irish eyes always smile, Maddie.”

  “Top of the afternoon to you, C. J.”

  Claudius J. Antenor, Esq., C. J. Ant to bar and bench alike, chewed on an unlit cigar that accented the roundness of his face the way a curlicue turns an O into a Q. He had a fisherman’s face, sun dark and lined with an ocean of wrinkles; yet his hands were smooth and soft like the hands of a male model who appeared in magazine ads for Swiss watches or Italian leather gloves.

  Maddie had interned for C. J. Ant the summer after her second year of law school, attracted by the opportunity of hands-on legal experience and the chance to see how the law functioned outside the classroom. During that internship, she had plea-bargained Jim Ed Wallaca–one of the few out of the scores of names, the scores of cases, she remembered because he was the first case C. J. Ant allowed her to present to the court herself–out of a prison sentence and into the Marines and Vietnam; yet what had become of him she neither knew nor cared. Without this obdurate armor she would be as vulnerable as a crustacean without its shell.

  C. J. Ant specialized in defending snatch-and-grabbers, street hookers, bookies and their runners, low-level mob enforcers who were not “made” men, drunks, disorderlies, and petty criminals picked up at the arraignment session or assigned to him by judges he knew from law school. At summer’s end, C. J. Ant put Maddie on the payroll paying her enough to cover her third-year tuition and retire some of her student loans. When she graduated, C. J. Ant offered her a job; but she declined, accepting a position with legal aid because she naively believed it would provide a better chance for professional growth. Now, years later, ensnared at legal aid, cancerous was the way she described that growth.

  “What brings you to paradise?” Maddie asked.

  “To watch my favorite protégé in action.”

  C. J. Ant stepped aside to let Maddie enter the elevator. She smiled at Lorenzo, the elderly operator, who usually replied with a cheery buon giorno but this time lowered his eyes as if he was avoiding looking at something so sinful to see it would turn him to stone. Maddie opened her mouth, but closed it when C. J. Ant shook his head. The elevator lurched upward. The cable groaned. The fluorescent fixture buzzed. Residue from the stink of C. J. Ant’s cigars scented the air. Lorenzo stared at his hands.

  “Someone tipped Hornstein,” C. J. Ant said. “He tipped the world.”

  “Fucking Frohling.”

  Maddie leaned against the back wall of the elevator. If she were superstitious, she would consider Hornstein an omen, but she didn’t believe in omens. No, Hornstein wasn’t a sign from God or the work of Satan. He was a pain in the ass, insincere, greedy, so self-righteous he sputtered outrage at attorney jokes. If he were a car, he’d be a VW bug with a Rolls-Royce grill, a Chevrolet Corvair with a rear spoiler, a Ford Pinto with a Mustang scoop in the hood; but he wasn’t a car, he was an asshole who bartered her ex-husband’s legal fees for race track tips and maintained his active status as a lawyer only to preserve the prestige of being an esquire.

  “For shame, Maddie. For shame.” Joe Daley, the court officer assigned to the court-room of Judge Alexander Spodapoulos, held the door for her. A veteran of the Korean War, he was slim enough to wear his Marine uniform on Veterans Day and fit enough to still answer his country’s call. He was always kinder to her than he had to be and she reciprocated with a small gift at Christmas–a tin of his favorite pipe tobacco–until the Commission on Judicial Corruption promulgated a rule banning attorneys from giving gifts to judges, court officers, and employees in the offices of the Clerks of Court. Now, Daley looked at her with the eyes of a person mourning the death of a close friend.

  Maddie sank into a chair at the defense counsel table. C. J. Ant sat directly behind her on the first bench outside the bar enclosure. She had outgrown her mentor, but his presence comforted her. She jotted the date and name of the judge on the top line of her legal pad, the name of the case and docket number on the second line. She had handled so many arraignments she could do them in her sleep: Waive the reading of the charges. Enter a plea of not guilty. Request Suffolk County Legal Services be appointed. The judge would ask if she wanted to schedule a bail hearing and she would select a date which allowed sufficient time to prepare. Five minutes, maybe fewer, and her client would not have to say a word. She scribbled some numbers on her legal pad. For those few minutes, she would accrue fifteen cents of her weekly salary. Private counsel would charge $100.00 and not handle it as well. She ripped the page off her pad and crushed it into a ball.

  Four court officers, double the usual complement, positioned themselves on either side of the door. They wore their guns outside their jackets. As people entered single file, one searched their brief-cases and handbags while a second frisked them. The other two were as attentive to their surroundings as Secret Service agents guarding the president. The level of security surprised Maddie. Since the court-house bombings a few years earlier, a metal detector had been installed at the entrance to the building. Everyone emptied their pockets and passed through it. She had herself. An X-ray machine more sensitive than those used at airports scanned bags, pocket books, and brief-cases.

  The hands of the court officers rested lightly on the butts of their guns. Their fingers twitched. Maddie sensed they would rather administer justice themselves than leave it in the hands of the judicial system and attorneys like her. She nodded greetings to members of the defense bar as well as prosecutors she had tried cases against. Some nodded back; most looked away. A few mouthed obscenities. To her dismay, Levy’s arraignment had become a busman’s holiday. Hornstein cleared security and sat beside C. J. Ant. She smelled his lunch on his breath, a tuna fish sandwich and dill pickle. She squared her shoulders and straightened her back and pressed her knees together, posture that would have made the nuns of her childhood proud.

  The door to the holding cell opened and Levy entered flanked by court officers. He looked soft and pudgy as if he had not shed his baby fat. At Walpole he’d be another bitch to be fought over by the gangs who controlled the cell blocks. His hands were cuffed and anchored by chains to a steel belt which girded his waist. Ankle cuffs connected his feet, the chain so short he could not climb into the prisoner’s dock without leaning on someone as he stepped up. Across the court-room, Maddie could not read his mood, perhaps equal parts fear and fascination, the reaction of most first-timers, her preference to the icy contempt of recidivists. She searched his body language, the slumping head, the sagging shoulders, the fidgeting fingers, for clues of guilt or innocence; but she saw neither. Ciphers made the worst clients.

  The session clerk, Vilda Mikus, entered from the judge’s chambers followed by the judge. Weeks from mandatory retirement on his 70th birthday, Spodapoulos was marking time in the arraignment session. His eyes twinkled with the light at the end of the tunnel. Soon, the only judging he would be doing was the amount of break on his putts or which fly to cast. After Mikus entreated God to save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the arraignment proceeded like every other until the ques
tion of appointing legal counsel. Spodapoulos accepted Probation’s determination of Levy’s indigence, then said, “I assume, Attorney Devlin, Suffolk County Legal Services will appear for him.”

  “We will, Your Honor.”

  “May I be heard?” Ed Hornstein stepped inside the bar. Sweat moistened the back of his neck and darkened the collar of his shirt. A moustache of sweat glazed the skin above his upper lip. “Edward Hornstein, Judge. My firm Hornstein and Shapiro will represent Mr. Levy pro bono. Ms. Devlin has a conflict of interest. She’s Beatrice Sullivan’s cousin.”

  “We are second cousins, Your Honor. Our grandfathers were brothers.” Over the whispers that sissed through the court-room, Maddie continued, “It is well known in the Irish community that there is an ongoing civil war between Mrs. Sullivan’s side of the Devlin family and my side which goes back two generations to certain events that occurred in Dublin in connection with the Easter Rising against the British. If you were to ask Mrs. Sullivan, I am confident she would say my involvement in this case is only the latest battle in this war and that I would work twice as hard on Mr. Levy’s behalf than if the victim were not her son.”

  “So, Ms. Devlin,” Judge Spodapoulos said, “your aver there is no conflict of interest.”

  “Correct, Your Honor. I would add that Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben, who is the rabbi at Mr. Levy’s synagogue, requested SCLS represent Mr. Levy. If Rabbi ben Reuben feels Mr. Levy’s interests are not being served, he can engage private counsel and SCLS will withdraw. As for Mr. Hornstein, he’s not one-tenth the attorney I am.”