by Lia Matera
Lovers and Lawyers
Twelve Stories
Lia Matera
Contents
Dead Drunk
Snow Job
The Children
Champawat
The River Mouth
Destroying Angel
Do Not Resuscitate
Dream Lawyer
Performance Crime
Easy Go
If It Can’t Be True
Counsel for the Defense
Dead Drunk
“Dead Drunk” was first published in Guilty As Charged, ed. Scott Turow, Pocket Books 1996.
It was reprinted in The Year’s Twenty-Five Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, ed. Joan Hess, Carroll & Graf 1997; The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories, ed. Ed Gorman, Forge 2000; A Century of Noir, ed. Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, New American Library 2002; and Shamus Winners, Volume II: 1996 - 2009, ed. Robert J. Randisi, Perfect Crime 2012.
It won the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for Best Short Story of 1996.
My secretary Jan asked if I’d seen the newspaper: another homeless man had frozen to death. I frowned up at her from my desk. Her tone said, And you think you’ve got problems?
My secretary is a paragon. I would not have a law practice without her. I would have something resembling my apartment, which looks like a college crash pad. But I have to cut Jan a lot of slack. She’s got a big personality.
Not that she actually says anything. She doesn’t have to, any more than earthquakes bother saying “shake shake.”
“Froze?” I shoved documents around the desk, knowing she wouldn’t take the hint.
“Froze to death. This is the fourth one. They find them in the parks, frozen.”
“It has been cold,” I agreed.
“You really haven’t been reading the papers.” Her eyes went on high-beam. “They’re wet, that’s why they freeze.” She sounded mad at me. Line forms on the right, behind my creditors.
“Must be the tule fog?” I’d never been sure what tule fog was. I didn’t know if it required actual tules.
“You have been in your own little world lately. They’ve all been passed out drunk. Someone pours water on them while they lie there. It’s been so cold they end up frozen to death.”
I wondered if I could get away with, How terrible. Not that I didn’t think it was terrible. But Jan picks at what I say, looking for hidden sarcasm.
She leaned closer, as titillated as I’d ever seen her. “And here’s the kicker. They went and analyzed the water on the clothes. It’s got no chlorine in it—it’s not tap water. It’s bottled water! Perrier or Evian or something. Can you imagine? Somebody going out with expensive bottled water on purpose to pour it over passed-out homeless men.” Her long hair fell over her shoulders. With her big glasses and serious expression, she looked like the bread-baking natural foods mom that she was. “You know, it probably takes three or four bottles.”
“What a murder weapon.”
“It is murder.” She sounded defensive. “Being wet drops the body temperature so low it kills them. In this cold, within hours.”
“That’s what I said.”
“But you were … Anyway, it is murder.”
“I wonder if it has to do with the ordinance.”
Our town had passed a no-camping ordinance that was supposed to chase the homeless out. If they couldn’t sleep here, the theory went, they couldn’t live here. But the city had too many parks to enforce the ban. What were cops supposed to do? Wake up everyone they encountered? Take them to jail and give them a warmer place to sleep?
“Of course it has to do with the ordinance. This is someone’s way of saying, if you sleep here, you die here.”
“Maybe it’s a temperance thing. You know, don’t drink.”
“I know what temperance means.” Jan could be touchy. She could be a lot of things, including a fast typist willing to work cheap. “I just don’t believe the heartlessness of it, do you?”
I had to be careful; I did believe the heartlessness of it. “It’s uncondonable,” I agreed.
Still she stooped over my desk. There was something else.
“The guy last night,” Jan said, “was laid off by Hinder. Years ago, but even so.”
Hinder was the corporation Jan had been fired from before I hired her.
She straightened. “I’m going to go give money to the guys outside.”
“Who’s outside?” Not my creditors?
“You are so oblivious, Linda. Homeless people, right downstairs. Regulars.”
She was staring at me like I should know their names. I tried to look apologetic.
Ten minutes later, she buzzed me to say there was someone in the reception area. “He wants to know if you can fit him in.”
That was our code for, He looks legit. We were not in the best neighborhood. We got our share of walk-ins with generalized grievances and a desire to vent at length and for free. For them, our code was, I’ve told him you’re busy.
“Okay.”
A moment later, a kid—well, maybe young man, maybe even twenty-five or so—walked in. He was good-looking, well dressed but too trendy, which is why he looked so young. He had the latest hairstyle, razored in places and long in others. He had shoes that looked like inflatable pools.
He said, “I think I need a good lawyer.”
My glance strayed to my walls, where my diploma announced I’d gone to a night school. I had two years’ experience, some of it with no caseload. I resisted the urge to say, Let me refer you to one.
Instead, I asked, “What’s the nature of your problem?”
He sat on my client chair, checking it first. I guess it was clean enough.
“I think I’m going to be arrested.” He glanced at me a little sheepishly, a little boastfully. “I said something kind of stupid last night.”
If that were grounds, they’d arrest me, too.
“I was at the Club,” a fancy bar downtown. “I got a little tanked. A little loose.” He waggled his shoulders.
I waited. He sat forward. “Okay, I’ve got issues.” His face said, Who wouldn’t? “I work my butt off.”
I waited some more.
“Well, it burns me. I have to work for my money. I don’t get welfare, I don’t get free meals and free medicine and a free place to live.” He shifted on the chair. “I’m not saying kill them. But it’s unfair I have to pay for them.”
“For who?”
“The trolls, the bums.”
I was beginning to get it. “What did you say in the bar?”
“That I bought out Costco’s Perrier.” He flushed to the roots of his chi-chi hair. “That I wish I’d thought of using it.”
“On the four men?”
“I was high, okay?” He continued in a rush. “But then this morning, the cops come over.” Tears sprang to his eyes. “They scared my mom. She took them to see the water in the garage.”
“You really did buy a lot of Perrier?”
“Just to drink. The police said they got a tip on their hot line. Someone at the bar told them about me. That’s got to be it.”
I nodded like I knew about the hot line.
“Now”—his voice quavered—“they’ve started talking to people where I work. Watch me get fired.”
Gee, buddy, then you’ll qualify for free medical. “What would you like me to do for you, Mr.…?”
“Kyle Kelly.” He didn’t stick out his hand. “Are they going to arrest me or what? I think I need a lawyer.”
My private inve
stigator was pissed off at me. My last two clients hadn’t paid me enough to cover his fees. It was my fault. I hadn’t asked for enough in advance. Afterward, they’d stiffed me.
Now the PI was taking a hard line. He wouldn’t work on this case until he got paid for the last two.
So I made a deal. I’d get his retainer from Kelly up front. I’d pay him for the investigation, but I’d do most of it myself. For every hour I investigated and he got paid, he’d knock an hour off what I owed him. I wouldn’t want the state bar to hear about the arrangement. But the parts that were on paper would look okay.
It meant I had a lot of work to do.
I started by driving to a park where two of the dead men were found. It was a chilly afternoon with the wind whipping off the plains, blowing dead leaves over footpaths.
I wandered, looking for the spots described in police reports. The trouble was, every half-bare bush near lawn and benches looked the same. And many were decorated with detritus: paper bags, liquor bottles, discarded clothing.
As I was leaving the park, I spotted two paramedics squatting beside an addled-looking man. His clothes were stiff with dirt, his face covered in thick gray stubble. He didn’t look wet. If anything, I was shivering more than he was.
I watched the younger of the two paramedics shake his head, scowling, while the older talked at some length to the man. The man nodded, kept on nodding. The older medic showed him a piece of paper. The man nodded some more. The younger one strode to an ambulance parked on a nearby fire trail. It was red on white with “4-12” stenciled on the side.
I knew from police reports that paramedics had been called to pick up the frozen homeless men. Were they conducting an investigation of their own?
A minute later, the older medic joined his partner in the ambulance. It drove off.
The homeless man lay down, curling into a fetal position on the grass, collar turned up against the wind.
I walked up to him. “Hi,” I said. “Are you sick?”
“No!” He sat up again. “What’s every damn body want to know if I’m sick for? ‘Man down.’ So what? What’s a man got to be up about?”
He looked bleary-eyed. He reeked of alcohol and urine and musk. He was so potent, I almost lost my breakfast.
“I saw medics here talking to you. I thought you might be sick.”
“Hassle, hassle.” He waved me away. When I didn’t leave, he rose. “Wake us up, make us sign papers.”
“What kind of papers?”
“Don’t want to go to the hospital.” His teeth were in terrible condition. I tried not to smell his breath. “Like I want yelling from the nurses, too.”
“What do they yell at you about?”
“Cost them money, I’m costing everybody money. Yeah, well, maybe they should have thought of that before they put my-Johnny-self in the helicopter. Maybe they should have left me with the rest of the platoon.”
He lurched away from me. I could see that one leg was shorter than the other.
I went back to my car. I was driving past a nearby sandwich shop when I saw ambulance 4-12 parked there. I pulled into the space next to it.
I went into the shop. The medics were sitting at a small table, looking bored. They were hard to miss in their cop-blue uniforms and utility belts hung with flashlights, scissors, tape, stethoscopes.
“Hi,” I said to them. “Do you mind if I talk to you for a minute?”
The younger one looked through me. No one’s ever accused me of being pretty.
The older one said, “What about?”
“I’m representing a suspect in the …” I hated to repeat what the papers were now calling it, but it was good shorthand. “The Perrier murders. Of homeless men.”
That got the younger man’s attention. “We knew those guys,” he said.
“My client didn’t do it. But he could get arrested. Do you mind helping me out? Telling me a little about them?”
They glanced at each other. The younger man shrugged. “We saw them all the time. Every time someone spotted them passed out and phoned in a ‘man down’ call, we’d code-three it out to the park or the tracks or wherever.”
The older paramedic gestured for me to sit. “Hard times out there. We’ve got a lot more regulars than we used to.”
I sat down. The men, I noticed, were lingering over coffee. “I just saw you in the park.”
“Lucky for everybody, my-Johnny-self was sober enough to AMA.” The younger man looked irritated. “‘Against medical advice.’ We get these calls all the time. Here we are a city’s got gang wars going on, knifings, drive-bys, especially late at night. And we’re diddling around with passed-out drunks who want to be left alone anyway.”
The older man observed, “Ben’s new, still a hot dog, wants every call to be the real deal.”
“Yeah, well, what a waste of effort, Dirk,” the younger man, Ben, shot back. “We get what? Two, three, four man-down calls a day? We have to respond to every one. It could be some poor diabetic, right, or a guy’s had a heart attack. But you get out there, and it’s another alcoholic. If he’s too out of it to tell us he’s just drunk, we have to transport and work him up. Which he doesn’t want—he wakes up pissed off at having to hoof it back to the park. Or worse, with the new ordinance, he gets arrested.”
“Ridiculous ordinance,” the older medic interjected.
“And it’s what, maybe six or seven hundred dollars the company’s out of pocket?” his partner continued. “Not to mention that everybody’s time gets totally wasted, and maybe somebody with a real emergency’s out there waiting for us. Your grandmother could be dying of a heart attack while we play taxi. It’s bullshit.”
“All in a night’s work, Bennie.” Dirk looked at me. “You start this job, you want every call to be for reals. But you do it a few years, you get to know your regulars. Clusters of them near the liquor stores—you could draw concentric circles around each store and chart the man-down calls. But what are you going to do? Somebody sees a man lying in the street or in the park, they’ve got to phone nine-one-one, right? And if the poor bastard’s too drunk to tell us he’s fine, we can’t just leave him. It’s our license if we’re wrong.”
“They should change the protocols,” Ben insisted. “If we know who they are, if we’ve run them in three, four, even ten times, we should be able to leave them to sleep it off.”
Dirk said, “You’d get lawsuits.”
“So these guys either stiff the company or welfare picks up the tab, meaning you and me pay the six hundred bucks. It offends logic.”
“So you knew the men who froze?” I tried to get back on track. “Did you pick them up when they died?”
“I went on one of the calls,” Ben said defensively. “Worked him up.”
“Sometimes with hypothermia,” Dirk added, “body functions slow down so you can’t really tell if they’re dead till they warm up. So we’ll spend, oh God, an hour or more doing CPR. Till they’re warm and dead.”
“While people wait for an ambulance somewhere else,” Ben repeated.
“You’ll mellow out,” Dirk promised. “For one thing, you see them year in, year out, you stop being such a hard-ass. Another thing, you get older, you feel more sympathy for how hard the street’s got to be on the poor bones.”
Ben’s beeper went off. He immediately lifted it out of his utility belt, pressing a button and filling the air with static. A voice cut through: “Unit four-twelve, we have a possible shooting at Kins and Booten streets.”
The paramedics jumped up, saying “Bye” and “Gotta go” as they strode past me and out the door. Ben, I noticed, was smiling.
My next stop was just a few blocks away. It was a rundown stucco building that had recently been a garage, a factory, a cult church, a rehab center, a magic shop. Now it was one of the few homeless shelters in town. I thought the workers
there might have known some of the dead men.
I was ushered in to see the director, a big woman with a bad complexion. When I handed her my card and told her my business, she looked annoyed.
“Pardon me, but your client sounds like a real shit.”
“I don’t know him well enough to judge,” I said. “But he denies doing it, and I believe him. And if he didn’t do it, he shouldn’t get blamed. You’d agree with that?”
“Some days,” she conceded. She motioned me to sit in a scarred chair opposite a folding-table desk. “Other days, tell the truth, I’d round up all the holier-than-thou jerks bitching about the cost of a place like this, and I’d shoot ‘em. Christ, they act like we’re running a luxury hotel here. Did you get a look around?”
I’d seen women and children and a few old men on folding chairs or duck-cloth cots. I hadn’t seen any food.
“It’s enough to get your goat,” the director continued. “The smugness, the condemnation. And ironically, how many paychecks away from the street do you think most people are? One? Two?”
“Is that mostly who you see here? People who got laid off?”
She shrugged. “Maybe half. We get a lot of people who are frankly just too tweaked-out to work. What can you do? You can’t take a screwdriver and fix them. No use blaming them for it.”
“Did you know any of the men who got killed?”
She shook her head. “No, no. We don’t take drinkers, we don’t take anybody under the influence. We can’t. Nobody would get any sleep, nobody would feel safe. Alcohol’s a nasty drug, lowers inhibitions—you get too much attitude, too much noise. We can’t deal with it here. We don’t let in anybody we think’s had a drink, and if we find alcohol, we kick the person out. It’s that simple.”
“What recourse do they have? Drinkers, I mean.”
“Sleep outside. They want to sleep inside, they have to stay sober; no ifs, ands or buts.”
“The camping ban makes that illegal.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s not illegal to stay sober.”
“You don’t view it as an addiction?”
“There’s AA meetings five times a night at three locations.” She ran a hand through her already-disheveled hair. “I’m sorry, but it’s a struggle scraping together money to take care of displaced families in this town. Then you’ve got to contend with people thinking you’re running some kind of flophouse for drunks. Nobody’s going to donate money for that.”
