The Attorney

by Steve Martini

  “And?”

  “Claiming that you molested Amanda.”

  He’s looking straight at me as I say it. No flinching. “It’s a lie. I swear.” He raises his right hand as if taking an oath. “Should I burn in the fires of hell for eternity if I’m not telling the truth. My daughter is lying. She had friends in prison telling her to do this. I know it. I guess they give you a lot of time to think up bitter lies in a place like that. No doubt she was inspired by other inmates.”

  “Do you have evidence that they talked about this?”

  “No. But I can see her now sitting at a table or in a cell getting pointers from some other loser on how to incriminate her old man. Well, the cops didn’t buy it. Neither did the court.”

  “She made the charge in the custody proceedings?”

  “Through her lawyer,” he says. “The court said there was no evidence and cut him off. Wanted to know why she didn’t file formal charges. They came up with that same old lame crap,” says Jonah. “Most women don’t report it. The humiliation is too much. She was young. The court didn’t believe her or her lawyer.”

  “Suade does. Or at least that’s what she’s getting ready to tell the world. That’s what the press release says.”

  He thinks for a moment. Darting eyes. Looking everywhere, and then back to me. “The press won’t believe her.”

  I laugh. “Believe her! When you win eighty million bucks and somebody levels these kinds of charges, it’s national news. Talk-show heaven on the tube,” I tell him. “Belief has nothing to do with it. Where have you been for the last decade? You must be the only man in America who’s never heard of tabloid television.”

  “I don’t watch it,” he says.

  “You should. Your name’s about to be spattered all over it like roadkill. ‘Big bucks lotto winner accused in child rape.’”

  The dour expression on Jonah’s face tells me that even in his darkest dreams, he has never considered this.

  “Why would she do it?”

  “Suade?”

  “I can understand Jessica,” he says. “But Suade. What’s in it for her? There’s no evidence.”

  “It justifies her cause, validates what she does. And besides, the best defense is a good offense. She had to assume you had the resources to come after her. Of all the people she’s screwed over in the past few years you’ve got one of the bigger bankrolls. She’s guessing you’d be hip deep in lawyers. What the rich do when they have a problem.”

  “Damn right,” he says.

  “Your greatest strength is your biggest weakness. Now she has the offensive. It puts us back on our heels trying to fend off charges. How do we prove you didn’t rape someone or molest a child.”

  “I don’t have to prove anything. I’m not on trial.”

  “You will be if you sue Suade for defamation.”

  “You’re the only lawyer I’ve talked to, except for the custody guy. And he wouldn’t get involved.”

  “Because he knows Suade. That’s what you told me.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe the man’s smarter than you thought. Suade is betting that she can destroy your reputation before you can get her to court. And once you get in court, she’s gambling that you have more to lose than she does. It gives her a chance to argue that the only reason you’re pursuing her is because she speaks the truth. She’s not afraid of you. It’s the kind of image Suade craves. Joan of Arc slaying evil.”

  A somber look falls on his face. He never saw the battle being waged in quite this way. Jonah’s sense of justice pictured lawyers arguing the law and the facts in a courtroom before an evenhanded judge, not a propaganda machine spinning lies and pumping poison before he got there.

  “We need to go to my office and talk.”

  “Of course,” he says. “When?”

  “Right now.”

  He looks down at his clothes, soiled with the aftermath of the huge fish.

  “Don’t worry about it. My digs aren’t that formal.”

  He looks at the mob on the dock. Bottles of beer and cameras. Blood all over and under the fish.

  “What do I tell them?”

  “Nothing. Tell ’em you’ve got a meeting. You’ve got to leave right now.”

  “Sure. Now,” he says. Jonah sounds like an echo. Man in a daze.

  One of his buddies who’s been hanging on the fringe just out of earshot seizes the moment and edges in closer.

  He puts a hand on Jonah’s shoulder, face of wisdom flushed by booze. “Hey, buddy, I gotta get one more picture,” he says. “You and that monster fish.” The man’s jingling ice in a tumbler with something harder than beer. “Except that’s no fish. That’s a damned whale,” he says. “Jonah and the whale.” He laughs at his own joke. The kind of friends you get when you have eighty million on account.

  He pulls Jonah by the arm, hauls him away. Jonah’s still lost in inner thoughts, his face like a death mask.

  “Come on, man. Take holda the lead and gimme a smile for crysake.” A drunk’s impression of photo composition. The man with the iced tumbler is giving directions while his buddies try to hold their cameras still.

  Jonah hunkers down, on his haunches, takes the shank of the large steel hook that protrudes through the fish’s gill and grips it in one hand so that the phosphorescent lure can be seen dangling just out of the marlin’s mouth. At the moment he is looking past all the cameras at me, blood running across his arm and onto his shirt and pants. He doesn’t even notice. Instead, he offers up a queasy smile as shutters click, and a couple of strobes in the shadows flicker like stars from the tiny thirty-five-millimeter point-and-shoots.

  As Jonah starts to rise he stumbles and falls toward the fish. He grabs the marlin in a death grip around the gills to avoid going flat on the dock.

  “Be careful there, big guy.” The man with the tumbler staggers out of the crowd to offer assistance—only one hand because the other is full. “Give that man another beer.” He laughs. Jonah’s front is covered with blood and whatever else is expelled in the after-death of the deep. He steps away from the huge fish, and wipes his hands on the seat of his pants.

  For a moment I watch Jonah poised next to the giant marlin with the barbed steel hook lancing its gill, and wonder which one of them looks more dead.

  SIX

  * * *

  Within ten minutes I’ve talked myself out, covered the options, few as they are.

  Harry thinks the best thing we can do is ignore it. Don’t give Suade the satisfaction. Bring suit afterward if Jonah still has the desire.

  “It’s a damn joke.” Jonah’s face is flushed. His blood is up. He’s had time to think on the way over to the office, and now he wants answers.

  “You’re telling me there’s nothing you can do? What you’re telling me is that I’ve wasted my time and money hiring myself a lawyer.”

  “What I’m telling you is there is no way we can stop her from going public.”

  “Not even with malicious lies?”

  “Why don’t you sit down.” I gesture toward one of the client chairs.

  “I don’t want to sit down. Besides, I’ll get your furniture dirty.” He’s covered in muck from the docks, dried blood and whatever else. The office is beginning to reek.

  “Can’t we sue her now? Get an injunction?”

  “No.” Harry is looking professorial, with his arms folded as he leans against my credenza. “Doctrine called prior restraint,” says Harry. “Welcome to the First Amendment. Until she publishes, we can’t do a thing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘publishes’?”

  “I mean, until she formally relays the information. . . .”

  “Vicious lies,” says Jonah.

  “I know,” says Harry. “Calm down. It’s not gonna do any good if
you pop a vessel. Until she communicates it to some third party, in this case the press, we can’t touch her. After that, we can sue her for slander, libel, invasion of privacy, assuming you have a right to any.”

  “Lotta good that does.” Jonah turns on Harry.

  “Could be worse,” says Harry. “You could be a public figure.”

  “What do you mean, ‘public figure’?”

  “Let’s not get into all that,” I tell Harry.

  “No. I wanna know,” says Jonah. “What’s this ‘public figure’? What’s he talking about?”

  “He has a right to know,” says Harry. “You won the lottery, accepted the money. Courts could find that this makes you a public figure. If you voluntarily put yourself in the public eye, people are allowed to make fair comment about your character.”

  Jonah’s eyes light up like somebody’s fired a Roman candle into his pants. “What are you saying, ‘fair comment’? False charges that I raped my daughter, molested my granddaughter. How can that be fair comment?” Jonah looks at me, then back to Harry.

  “It’s not,” says Harry. “I know that. So does Paul. The problem is that if a court should find that you’re a public figure, it makes the case more difficult. We would have to prove certain elements before we could sustain a lawsuit against Suade.”

  I remind Harry that false charges of criminal wrongdoing are defamatory per se. “Besides,” I tell him, “winning the lottery doesn’t make you a public figure. So she can’t claim fair comment.”

  “Could be,” says Harry. “There’s no case law on the subject. I checked.” Harry gives me one of those looks he does so well, the kind he offers up just before I step into some pit.

  “Of course we could end up making case law,” he says. “Three or four years on appeal.” He arches an eyebrow in my direction as if to say: “Do you really want to get into that?”

  I’m convinced that Suade has no evidence. That makes her charges either knowingly false, or at very least made with reckless disregard for the truth. Either way they’re defamatory, and actionable. Whether it would be worth suing her is another question. We’re back to where we started.

  “What difference does it make?” says Jonah. “I didn’t come here for money. I don’t care about damages. I care about getting my granddaughter back.”

  “Any leads on that front?” says Harry. “Did Suade give you any hint?”

  I shake my head.

  “I just thought maybe somebody could do something.”

  Harry and I look at each other. Jonah wants the one thing we can’t give him, and now he’s about to be keelhauled through Zolanda Suade’s private cesspool.

  During all this we have a silent audience, his head swiveling toward Harry, Jonah, and back to me like the net judge at Wimbledon. John Brower is one of Susan’s investigators, bald and beady-eyed, he sits in a client chair across from my desk, a leather folder closed, resting in his lap, ready to take notes should lightning strike.

  As for Susan, she is pacing slowly in the open area of my office, running her eyes over a copy of Suade’s press release as if an answer to our problems will rise like vapor off the page.

  She hasn’t said a word since I handed her the press release, though I have seen signs, the kind of body language I have come to read from the woman I know—a subtle shrug of the shoulders, wag of the head—as if it is all Greek to her. These are not aimed at me but lofted telepathically, like encrypted code, to Brower.

  Apparently Susan thought better than to come alone. I take this as a sign that she views Suade’s threats as serious, even if not credible.

  Finally, she turns and looks at me. Bolt of lightning. “The press release only nibbles at the edges of the department,” she says. “No details.”

  “I know.”

  “She didn’t tell you anything more?”

  “Apparently she’s saving that for the press conference. She wants us to twist in the wind for a few days. Get a few sleepless nights. I have the feeling that inflicting pain is one of her private pleasures.”

  “She didn’t give a hint what she’s talking about? What exactly did she say?”

  “She went into a rage about Jonah. . . .”

  “No, I mean about the department?” It’s clear that Susan wouldn’t be here except for the threat that Suade is about to kick up dirt, and that some of it may land on Children’s Protective Services. Susan is a woman who defends her own with the tenacity of a cougar protecting its young.

  “What did she say exactly, about the department?”

  “I wasn’t taking notes,” I tell her. “She said she had documents.”

  “What kind of documents?” says Susan.

  “I asked her. She wouldn’t say. She said the documents would prove everything.”

  I look at Jonah. “There wasn’t anything that you wrote to your daughter when she was in prison that could be misconstrued? Used against you?”

  He thinks for a second. Shakes his head. “No.”

  “Did we help Mr. Hale get custody of the child?” Susan’s question is for Brower. “That’s what Suade seems to be saying here in the press release. The innuendo is that we did something wrong.”

  Brower opens his notebook and looks at something inside. I can’t see what it is. The leather folder is tilted up away from me.

  “Lemme see. We filed a report with the family law court. We did make a recommendation—for the grandfather.” He looks over at his boss and senses that this is not helpful. “But it wasn’t based on anything we did.” Brower makes it sound as if he’s apologizing.

  “Did we initiate the findings?”

  “No. No. We based our recommendation on a probation report,” he says. “The mother had an extensive record.” He’s reading whatever it is in the folder with a finger on the page. “Drug use. There was evidence that the child had been abandoned. Pretty routine. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t see how we could have recommended anything else.”

  “Would our recommendation be in the court files?”

  Brower nods.

  “So Suade would have been able to see it, if she went down to the courthouse and pulled the case file?”

  “Probably.”

  “Did we investigate the case?”

  Brower flips a few pages in the folder, then slowly shakes his head. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “So we had no contact with Mr. Hale?”

  Brower is still reading. “Not that I can see.”

  “Did you ever come to our department?” Susan is now directing questions to Jonah.

  “Hold on a second. You weren’t asked to come down here so that you could interrogate our client.” Harry interrupts her.

  “Am I on trial?” says Jonah. “Did I do something wrong?” He looks at me.

  “I don’t know. Did you?” says Susan.

  “No, you didn’t.” Harry answers before I can.

  “All I want is to find out what Suade has,” says Susan. “Your client may be the only one who knows.” She makes this appeal to me.

  “This isn’t gonna happen,” says Harry. “Not on my watch. You don’t come into the office and question a client.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” says Jonah.

  “I don’t care. Don’t say a damn thing,” says Harry.

  “I think it’s safe to assume,” says Susan, “that we, the department, and your client are being victimized by Suade’s lies. She’s got some plan. What it is I don’t know. But we need to find out.”

  Harry gives her an expression like maybe yes, maybe no.

  “Suade may have nothing to base these charges on. But it would help if we knew whatever details there were. Such as whether your client ever had contact with my department?” Susan’s back to what she wants.

  “I never
came to your department,” says Jonah. “We’ve never met.”

  “You wouldn’t have dealt with me,” she tells him. “One of my investigators? A caseworker, perhaps?”

  Jonah shakes his head. “We went to court. I had a lawyer. He took care of everything.”

  “What was your lawyer’s name?”

  “You gonna let her do this?” Harry asks me.

  I nod. “For the moment.”

  Jonah gives her the name. Susan looks at Brower, who peruses his folder one more time and shakes his head. “No contact with the lawyer.”

  “So we didn’t even have communication with the petitioner,” says Susan. “I’d like to see her make a scandal out of that.”

  “I’m glad you’re satisfied,” says Jonah. “Meanwhile, my granddaughter has been ripped from the only family she’s known, held hostage by a drug-dealing mother. I’d like to know what you’re going to do about it?”

  Susan shakes her head, shrugs her shoulders. No answers here. “If she’s in the county we’ll make every effort,” she says.

  “Not good enough,” says Jonah. “And what if she’s in another state? What if she’s in Mexico?”

  “We’ll do what we can.”

  Jonah sees this for what it is, the government tango, you lead, we’ll follow.

  “Do you have any idea how many children are snatched by disgruntled parents every year in this country?” Before Jonah can answer: “More than a hundred and sixty thousand,” she says. “Most of them used like battering rams for revenge against a spouse. And sometimes an occasional grandparent. And the numbers are exploding.”

  “Do you ever get any of them back?” he asks.

  “Sometimes.” A statistic Susan would rather not offer, even if she had it on the tip of her tongue.

  “Sometimes?” He turns around, palms up, looking at the ceiling. “Sometimes? That’s as good as it gets? You’ll do what you can? Sometimes you get them back? I thought I had custody. I thought the law was worth something. I took the time. Went to court. I could have just as easily taken the child. Disappeared. I guess I should have. Knowing what I know now. I could have taken Amanda to the back side of the moon. Where Jessica and this—this Zolanda Suade would never have found us. But I didn’t.”