by Lia Matera
The offices of the State Bar of California are just a few blocks from the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. And the Tenderloin does have a heart: for the thousands of teenage prostitutes of both sexes, for the rummies and runaways and addicts at peep shows, there is at least a soup kitchen, at least a church with gaudily uplifting angels. But try to find the State Bar’s heart. It doesn’t have one, just a ledger.
I climbed the steps. I should have been glad to climb them. I’d waited three years to do it. Three years plus one day since they’d cut off my buttons and epaulets. Three years of paying an “inactive status” fee (and galling it had been, believe me). Now, for an additional four hundred and thirty dollars and proof I’d retaken the professional responsibility exam, I would once again receive the wallet-sized card. Frances Valentine, it would read, Active Member, State Bar of California.
After my disciplinary proceeding, a tragic-faced girl stopped me in the hall to say the State Bar was hiring. “You don’t need anything but a law degree to work here.” It didn’t matter that my license had been suspended. I’d bitten my lip to refrain from telling her I’d rather empty bedpans. She didn’t deserve the splash of acid that had grown to replace pleasantries in my conversational style.
I didn’t empty bedpans. I took a bus to a hot griddle of a town with too many Burger Kings. I bought a newspaper and found a job in a title company with a tiled roof. That was the first of six white collar jobs I took in different valley towns, most of them with a Denny’s and a Woolworth’s and not much else.
I could have done it differently. I could have gone to some little gem of a seacoast town, maybe worked as a paralegal, maybe taught in some small college. I could have done myself and my résumé that favor.
But I wanted Bradley Allen Palmer to know he’d ruined me. I wasn’t sure he cared, but I wanted him to know.
My Persian carpet was soiled and stained after three years of rough treatment by the woman to whom I’d sublet my apartment. The afternoon light showed water spots and gouges on the dusty oak desk and table. Fleas hopped on the sofa, searching frantically for the cat I’d evicted.
I opened the bay windows, grateful that my Chinese neighbors still cultivated small flowering trees, still hung vegetables to dry like laundry, still maintained their tiny fish pond. The twin spires of St. Ignatius, blurry with fog, hovered over distant rooftops. Damp wind rustled the want ads spread out on my desk, want ads from San Francisco and Oakland papers, from the Advocate Journal, from California Lawyer.
I’d circled, then crossed out, a few ads: sole practitioners who couldn’t afford to be fussy, couldn’t afford to worry about a little moral turpitude in their employees’ past—maybe even had a little in their own. Men paying less than half the salary considered low here. But they all knew my story. They let me know they’d rather choose from thousands of virgin lawyers out there. One expressed amazement that I hadn’t been disbarred. A distinction without a difference, if no one would hire me.
I’d had my résumé redone. Three-quarters of the page listed my honors in painful detail: top five percent, law review, student article published, clerk for the Honorable Steven K. Dresge, another article published, teacher of legal writing at a downtown law school, associate with Winship McAuliffe Potter & Tsieh, one of the better criminal law firms. Then a paragraph headed “Subsequent Employment” condensed the last three years of my life into categories: escrow clerk, loan officer’s assistant, registrar’s aide, junior budget analyst. At the bottom of the page, because honesty required it, I had written, “License to practice before the California Bar reinstated” and the date.
I felt a wrench of nausea—rent due soon and not much money in the bank. I remembered the hurry-up anxiety of a waiting time clock, deadening days of shuffling preprinted forms. Maybe the new résumé was an exercise in false hope. All recredentialed and no place to go.
Brad Palmer had made partner by now, pulling down a salary of at least $350,000 and a partnership share of that much or more. He’d taken me to Chez Panisse the night Millet Wray & Weissel hired him, a five-hundred-dollar dinner for two, six years ago.
The last time I’d made love to Brad, it had been a foregone conclusion that we’d marry. We’d been in my apartment. This room had smelled of blossoms from the Chinese couple’s trees. Now there was a faint zoo smell from cat puddles sunbaked into the carpet.
Brad had prospered while I sweltered in secretarial-beige cubicles, spurning consolation. It wasn’t his nose I’d cut off to spite my face.
If I closed my eyes, I could see him on top of me, his chest damp and hirsute, his arms tensed to support his weight, his wide-set eyes half closed, a vein standing out on his broad forehead, sweat beading on his flat cheeks, his thin lips parted, honey-colored hair damp at the hairline, stiffly combed back by my own fingers.
But then, I could also see him sitting in the State Bar hearing room, straight and handsome in his banker’s blue suit, testifying against me.
I rode the elevator to the twenty-first floor of the financial district monolith. I walked into the offices of Millet Wray & Weissel and handed their aristocratic, carefully painted receptionist my résumé.
The woman took it, thanking me dismissively. “Will you make sure Bradley Palmer gets it?”
It was halfway to the “in” basket. Sighing, she diverted it to the blotter and scribbled “Attn: BAP” in the top corner. Then she glanced at the typeset name beneath her scrawl. Pencil arrested, she looked at me with startled interest. “Frances Valentine?”
I fought an impulse to deny it. “Yes.”
“If you’ll be seated a moment.” She pressed a buzzer on her space-age telephone, mumbling something to someone. Two minutes later, Brad stepped into the reception area. He wore navy pin-striped wool, a white shirt, a silver-gray tie. His hairline had receded slightly. He’d shaved the coppery mustache that once disguised the thinness of his lips, the chill behind his reserve. His eyes were brighter blue than I remembered, his brows thicker, nose straighter, face bigger, shoulders wider. He even seemed taller.
I’d had three years to think about him. I’d experienced every shade of emotion, from crazy fury to tender regret, thinking about him. But I hadn’t quite realized until yesterday, crying over want ads, that I didn’t love him anymore. There was nothing left to fuel the rage.
There seemed to be several of me rising simultaneously to greet him. I shook his hand because the receptionist seemed to expect it of me.
She handed Brad my résumé.
It took me a minute to find my voice. Three years is a long silence to break. “Do you need a law clerk? Or a paralegal?”
His eyes strayed to the bottom of the page to see how I’d handled my disgrace. A bit of color crept into his cheeks.
He murmured, “This way.” As he led me down the corridor, he kept glancing back, making sure (or maybe fearing) that I followed.
He preceded me into his office.
I walked around the room, looking at the plush wheat carpeting, the natural suede walls, the golden oak desk, the sienna leather chairs, the unglazed pottery, the Georgia O’Keeffe on a pine easel.
Brad watched me, a vein standing out on his forehead, his eyes bright.
“I need some kind of transition on my résumé, Brad. I want to practice law again.”
“Why here?”
“No one else will hire me.” And maybe you think you owe me a favor.
“Frannie, it would be a hard sell. To say the least.”
I visualized him in front of the hiring committee. How would he explain what I’d done? Baldly perhaps: You see, colleagues, Ms. Valentine was convinced her client would be killed in prison. So she tried to buy him a forged passport. She contacted the passport forger herself. Then she told her fiancé (maybe Brad would let the word hang in the air) what she’d done. Her fiancé was sure she’d get caught if she followed through. Her fi
ancé thought she’d gone a little crazy, maybe even thought she was a little in love with her handsome client. With characteristic paternalism, her fiancé contacted the State Bar to keep her out of worse trouble. (Or maybe he’d been jealous and angry. Who could tell, with his lawyer face wiped clean of emotion?) Her fiancé didn’t care if her client was blinded and carved up with sharpened spoons. Didn’t care if he lay in a pool of blood for hours while the prison guard ignored him. Didn’t care if it took him four slow days to die. Said she was lucky he’d died, in fact. Lucky because the government was too embarrassed to indict her. Lucky because it remained a State Bar matter.
Lucky. Even Brad’s facial flaws, the tired lines and receding hairline, were signs of success.
“Plus …” Brad remained poker-faced, straight-spined. “I don’t want to be a target of recriminations. If I go to bat for you, I’ll want some assurance that you don’t blame me, that you’ve accepted the consequences of your actions.”
I turned to the wall of windows on my right, stood there feeling like Kirk at the helm of the Enterprise. The detail was magnificent: furbelows and banners and awnings, Peter Max colors in plate-glass reflections, churches and Victorians hoisted to eye level by distant hills, buckets of cut flowers polka-dotting corners, bobbing streams of pedestrians, a brick plaza and its windblown fountain, the slow, noisy jerk of traffic. More to see in Brad’s window than in entire inland valleys.
“The thing is, Brad, Raúl Alegría accepted the consequences of your actions.”
“You’d have been prosecuted if you’d gone any further.” His voice seemed a dead and distant thing, the sentence three years stale.
“That was my risk to take. Or it should have been.”
I heard the sigh of leather cushions, the creak of a swivel chair. “What do you want from me, Fran? I don’t hear from you for three years. Like I’m the fucking bad guy. For keeping you out of jail. So? What do you want from me now?”
I considered leaving. But I’d already thrown away three years. Three years of flat horizon, static air, cloudless blue-white sky, like being trapped in a vast stoppered jar. What the hell had I proved? That I could make myself suffer?
I turned to face him. His arms were folded across his chest, his chin tucked down. Guarded.
I didn’t love him anymore. Such a relief.
“No one will hire me,” I said carefully. “You know how I feel about my work.”
“Come on—how good’s it going to look, a year or two here as a glorified law clerk?”
“Look where I am now. Look at my résumé.”
He scowled at his desktop. He was motionless at first, then he nodded slightly.
“Most places, I can’t even get interviews. Even fly-by-night lawyers won’t touch me.” And nobody in town owes me a favor, nobody but you.
“Okay, Frannie.” His mustache used to hide the pained twitch at the corner of his mouth. I always noticed it anyway. I knew his face so well. “I’ll square it somehow. Come in Monday.”
I told myself it was the smartest thing I’d done in a long time. I told myself I was nothing but a whore. Probably both were true.
It was law clerk’s work, writing up the results of my research so someone else could go into court and argue the actual motions. But that was okay.
The job wasn’t as exciting as my old job at Winship McAuliffe. But after three years of invisibility, that’s not what I compared it with.
At the end of the second week, John V. Cusinich, a senior partner with coke-bottle glasses, a thin, pinch-lipped face, and slicked-back hair, came into my office. I was surprised. Cusinich was being considered for a federal court judgeship, adding much to his already considerable consequence. Until that morning, he’d barely deigned to nod to me. “You did this memo?” His magnified eyes examined the small, unadorned room with distaste.
“Yes. Is there some problem with it?”
“No. It’s excellent. I didn’t think we had any basis for our claim, but this is a very clever argument.” He very nearly smiled, I think. “Good use of case law. I understand you have more experience than our other—than our clerks.”
“I passed the bar six years ago. Clerked for the Northern District—Judge Dresge—and then spent two years at Winship McAuliffe Potter and Tsieh.”
“Bradley mentioned that. Criminal law background. Actually …” He brushed imaginary lint from his sleeve. “I talked to Roland Tsieh about you this morning. We’ve been asked to take on a criminal matter as a favor to a corporate client. You should look at the file. See what you think.”
I already knew what I thought. The firm should take the case and let me handle it.
Watching Cusinich inspect my undecorated burlap walls, I felt light-headed, realized I was holding my breath.
That afternoon, a large abstract oil painting was removed from above the Xerox machine and brought to my office. A man identifying himself as “maintenance” asked me where I wanted it. I didn’t particularly like the splashes of ocher, tan, and pink, but I knew a vote of confidence when I saw it. I had the man hang it above my desk so it was visible from the door.
The next day, Brad brought me a file folder. He glanced at the painting. “John Cusinich suggested I assign you this case.”
“Is it the criminal matter he mentioned?”
“Yes.”
I flipped the file open. A few notes on a phone conversation: client busted for growing marijuana in the Santa Cruz Mountains. No mention of when or how much. I’d need details, and I’d need them soon. “This office doesn’t usually handle criminal cases, does it?”
“This is the only one. The defendant’s father owns a brussels sprouts farm down the coast. We handle all his business affairs. That’s why the son thought of us. We did tell him a criminal law firm might do a better job. But I guess he really wanted us. Asked John if we had anybody here with criminal defense experience. So I told John about you.”
“I’ll want the arrest report, indictment, all that stuff. Meet the client. Check out the scene.”
A hesitant shuffle.
“I’m sure you know”—trying not to take the hesitation personally—“that it’s a quick deadline for motions to suppress. Most of these cases are won or lost on that motion. I’m not trying to shirk my other work, but I need to move—”
“I’m just wondering …”
I looked up at him. “I remember how, Brad. Believe me.”
“Okay.”
With a parting glance at the oil painting, he left me to my first case in over three years.
When the client phoned back, Cusinich had him put through to me. His file was significantly thicker by then. I had an arrest report from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s office, an indictment from the DA, and the Motion to Suppress Evidence well under way.
The client gave me directions to the mountain property from which police had seized twenty-six marijuana plants.
I drove down the coast, trying to enjoy the scenery. It was a clear breezy day, the sky streaked with clouds, the air fresh and salty. Men in straw cowboy hats bent over rows of greenery between the highway and the ocean cliffs. Some of the farmworkers were gathered around a pickup truck just off the road. Most were Hispanic men, short with broad chests and dusty clothes.
When I’d heard about Raúl Alegría, I’d driven to a coastal farm and found Raúl’s mother in the middle of a field, sobbing and being comforted by men who looked like these men. I’d driven her to Folsom Prison, to the infirmary there. The drive had taken four hours, more or less, and Martina Alegría, a strong-looking woman with rough hands, had spent most of that time telling me what a good baby Raúl had been, how he’d wanted to nurse all the time and been bigger than the other farmworkers’ children.
I’d seen Martina Alegría again when I’d moved to Fairfield. She’d been picking lettuce and had a raw-looking pesticide rash on bot
h arms. She’d come to the title company to bring me a plate of fried cookies and an icon of the Madonna. She’d cried a little and promised to buy a Mass for me next time she burned a candle for Raúl. I hope she remembered.
About three-quarters of the way down to Santa Cruz, I turned left, heading up Ben Lomond Mountain. Half an hour later, I approached a rustic, plank-sided A-frame.
A man paced the road beside the driveway, running his hand over a mane of black hair. He motioned me to pull over, then helped me out of the car. “Jerry Reiner,” he said. “Hi.”
He might have been six four if he’d stood straight. He had puffy-lidded eyes and a square, stubbled jaw. He looked pale, maybe sick, maybe hung over. In top form, he’d have been male-model handsome, but he was far from top form. He wore a quilted jacket, patched and stained, shiny jeans and muddy boots.
For a second, he gaped at me in my city-slicker clothes. Then he said, “Oh man, I hope you can keep me out of jail. They’ll kill me in there.”
I felt sick. Something Brad had coached him to say? “Why would they do that—whoever ‘they’ are?”
He reeled slightly, as if my scorn had physical mass. “Don’t you know what I used to do for a living?”
“No.” I’d assumed his income came from the business represented by our firm.
Reiner’s eyes narrowed. Suspicion? Displeasure?
I waited for him to say more. It was sunless and gloomy under the canopy of pines and redwoods. The air smelled musty and fungusy, like damp roots and rotting leaves.
“Mind a short hike?” he said at last. “I’ll take you where they harvested the pot.”
We crossed the road, heading away from the house. The woods ended almost immediately, and we walked uphill onto acres of tumbling meadowland, knee-high in swaying grasses. Miles away, at the foot of the mountain, the sea glimmered, flecked with whitecaps.
