by John Decure
Terrence’s suit was a boardroom special too stiff for a sporting event, but he was up and jamming good with Trey and Chase and the best celebrity shrink in town, joining in the celebration.
“I can’t believe this is preseason!” Trey exclaimed. I had no idea what he meant.
“You like basketball?” Terrence asked.
“Hell no. But I’m on the verge of hosting another show and this is a celebrity town. Face time is the lifeblood of success.”
From across the court, Andy Garcia—yes, Andy Garcia, in ‘preseason’—seemed to look right at me as he pumped his fist in the air. Like the swashbuckling counselor to my left, the Godfather Junior was sporting some custom, very eclectic shades with these small, reddish lenses. Oh, the meta-theatrical genius of it all: a genuine movie star taking in the kaleidoscopic unreality of the star-studded downtown hoop scene through rose-colored glasses! Good God. Some bastards have just got life completely by the balls.
“Yeah, baby!” I screamed in Andy’s direction. Or something insipid like that.
No matter the vacant message, it felt good to be a part of something bigger than the both of us—and I mean Andy and me. Greater than the puny sum and substance of myself, beyond the facade, even if my participation was coldly, utterly fraudulent. I pumped my fist in solidarity.
Heidegger? Mildly appalled by my display, I’d say, and he poked me in the ribs with his program, pointing skyward. Above us, an electric scoreboard hovered above the court like a mother ship from outer space.
“You might want to save some for later,” he said. “It’s not even halftime.”
23
RAUL MENDIBLES
Ten minutes after he’d somberly accepted my substitution in on the case, Shelby Drummond, the long-legged judge with the dusty gray beard and crinkled, nice-guy pink face, used that implacably pleasant demeanor of his to toy with me—no, make that screw with me—betraying no indication of how he might rule on my motion to continue the trial. He did sigh and make teepees of his fingers, expressing an appropriate level of concern for Bradlee Aames’s outlook for recovery, which I couldn’t discuss on the record anyway, not without violating her privacy rights at least. Good cause—the requirement for a continuance—was in abundance, am I right? Who knows? But why discuss it further? Why! Dammit, I was not at all prepared for the sharp-edged questions he zipped at me like flinty daggers and my responses, delivered like the dizzy pleas of a trusting assistant pinned to a spinning wheel, fell short.
To try a case, you’ve got to enter what I call The Zone—to live with that particular dispute every waking moment of your days and nights, to immerse yourself in every subtlety and detail of facts, law, and evidence. You brush your teeth anticipating defense objections and countering them with new offers of proof; you drive the highway reading in every road sign the script of likely and expected testimony of the next witness; you see the judge’s face in the assessment the girl at the coffee bar makes of you as she hands your change to you. I hadn’t been in court, on the record, since I’d been promoted to supervisor and the more the judge bore down on his purpose, which apparently was to get this trial over and done with here and now, the farther out of The Zone I found myself.
“Counsel, Ms. Aames very capably put on her entire case and rested. You have no other witnesses or evidence to present now, correct?”
A-bu-buh-bu-buh-
A curious spectator wandering in at this juncture might have thought I was channeling Porky Pig, for God’s sake. I looked dumbly at the boxes of documents still under the counsel table, right where Bradlee had left them. I may as well have been staring up at a noontime sky, trying to guess the weight of the sun.
A la verga!
“Uh, technically that’s correct, Your Honor, but—”
“‘Technically?’ Drummond barked. “The question calls for a yes-or-no answer. So, which is it?”
My managerial bullshit couldn’t quite take flight in this guy’s atmosphere. “Uh, yes, the board did rest its case. But Ms. Aames is the ‘captain of the ship,’ here, and in such cases, if that lead attorney is unavailable, it’s pretty much a prima facie showing of good cause to—”
“Counsel, I’ve read that case and it has nothing to do with good cause or continuances, it has to do with the attorney’s ability to decide who to call as witnesses, even over the client’s objection.”
Okay—it was an odious attempt to bamboozle him, I admit it, but I was desperate. The judge shook his head drearily, eyeballing me like he was examining a cheap watch I was desperate to unload.
“Sorry, Judge Drummond, I just haven’t had time to prepare. Not in twenty-four hours. How could I?”
“You’ve heard Mr. Heidegger tell me he’s ready to present his client’s defense.”
“Yes, I know that, but we thought—I thought, uh, that further discussions regarding settlement may be productive, and—”
“But, Counsel, my understanding is that your client contact for the board is unavailable.”
“Uh, technically that’s correct. However—”
“Please, not that again. Just give me straight talk.”
Ay, Dios mio! I’d never been further off my game than right now. Management had made me soft—in the gut and in the head. What the hell made me think for a nanosecond that I could ever step in and competently finish this case?
“Counsel, you heard Mr. Heidegger when he just told me he was ready to proceed.”
Looking sideways, I glanced at the defense table and caught the edge of Heidegger’s smirk, a ripple of self-satisfied nods passing back and forth at the defense table. They knew where they had me and they were savoring it.
“Yes, Your Honor. I was hoping you might give the board more time—”
“I’ve heard this already, Counsel,” the judge said as he constructed another finger-teepee. “Hope may spring eternal, but it doesn’t amount to good cause for a continuance.”
Heidegger dropped his chin and gave a tiny fist pump below the table’s edge, where the judge couldn’t see him. But I did.
A la verga!
I’d come in early this morning just to talk deal after a two-hour phone marathon last night with the Major during which, after calling me a painted lady with a briefcase, I’d received the repeated directive to make this case go away. I could tell that the Major had been back on his VO rocks regimen again for the first time since the near-DUI that had brought us together, hitting it hard—so hard I could hear the ice cubes clinking in the glass as he rambled on. I’d replayed for him from memory our previous conversation about the public menace that was Dr. Don. Unused to being impeached by his own words, the major got ugly—nasty in a way only a drunk can achieve, clawing a finger right into any open wounds within reach. Bradlee Aames was getting it done, and the defense knew it. That was yesterday, in the past. Now, with her out of the picture, I was back to being his water boy.
Ray-ool. Fool Raw-ool. Tool Raw-ool.
And man, was I ever sick of his shit. I should’ve left your ass in the gutter, where I found you, I’d shouted at one point in the argument, I think right after he’d accused me of being a self-important fraud. Well, you didn’t, he’d growled back. Which says it all about you, now doesn’t it, Raw-ool?
Very unproductive. Not that any of this tit-for-tat mattered a damn because when water-boy Raw-ool made the offer outside the courtroom first thing this morning, it was scoffed at with impunity. They knew about Bradlee’s unavailability, knew I was in this jam, well outside of The Zone. Now I would pay for letting this proceed to trial.
As if I didn’t have enough on my mind another complication reared up to block my path.
Hey, Lobo? You ask yourself yet how those dirtbags knew so quickly Bradlee Aames couldn’t go? Mendibles! Pay attention! Look at the space on the table in front of Heidegger! See the blue-backed document? That’s a typed opposition! Only it’s sitting there, not submitted to the judge because you’re crashing and burning so badly here—Heidegger does
n’t even need it.
That can’t be right. I called him last night. Left a message.
That she’d been shot? That she couldn’t go?
No, I just said… call me back, we need to talk, there’s been a new development and—
Right, you idiot! Standard Mendibles double-talk: heavy on the verbiage, light on the content.
“Mr. Mendibles,” the judge continued.
Was I this bereft of conscience? They knew.
Which meant that in some clandestine, unsavory way, they were involved.
I think the judge was talking but I didn’t hear the words as I turned, stood, and stepped aside to counsel table. Grabbed one of Heidegger’s blue-backed documents before he could pull it away—
“Your Honor!” he shrieked. “Counsel is invading—”
Or some such nonsense; I can’t recall for sure. I was too livid. It was an opposition all right, to the motion I’d launched ten minutes ago.
“Counsel, sit back down and do not make me—” The judge was jabbering, but I didn’t care. I flipped the document back at Heidegger.
“Odious.”
Heidegger brimmed with phony indignation. “You have no call to—”
“Reprehensible.” One-word sentences were all I could muster, such was my level of disdain.
“—traipse over here and start lunging at my—”
“She could’ve died.”
“Your Honor, I—”
“She could’ve died.”
“—demand an apology! Counsel—”
I didn’t hear the rest, but I can say for sure that I had no regrets.
It took the judge a few minutes to calm things down. “If you two should reach some kind of resolution,” he said, “you’re free to submit that to the court at any time. But that’s not good cause for me to hold up the proceedings.”
When I didn’t respond—technically or otherwise—his cheeks twinkled.
“Motion denied.”
Fine. If this was the price I’d pay for my ignoble deeds, so be it.
Not so fast, water boy. You won’t get off that easily.
Don’t I know it.
* * *
The defense wasted no time in calling Dr. Don to the witness stand. Heidegger was a weasel, but he was a smart weasel; he had his client decked out today not in the kind of bland gray business suit Dr. Don had worn since the start of trial, but in a classic charcoal slacks and navy blazer combo with a soft blue button-down shirt and repp tie. The impression was warmer and more casual, and the tortoise-shell glasses balanced on Dr. Don’s smallish nose gave his thin-lipped, tightly wound face a softer, more professorial look. I still didn’t like anything about him, and he couldn’t hide, from me at least, the calculation that was always brewing behind those merciless eyes.
I nearly slept through the preliminary questions detailing his illustrious education and professional career. Why is it that major universities always seem to fall all over themselves for the biggest self-serving pricks? I, for one, cannot tell you. I mean, it’s not enough that he did a PhD at UCLA, but they had to give him grants and awards and ass-kissing accolades along the way, as if a class-A education in and of itself wasn’t enough of an ego boost. And how anyone could’ve stuck this get-happy sniveler on TV (albeit the late-night wasteland) was beyond my comprehension. By the time he started explaining away the supposed care and treatment he’d provided to an overly demanding, entirely fucked-up Rue Loberg, I was queasy.
Not the proper mind-set for a prosecutor who must remain cool and objective and strategic, I know, but I was way out of practice. The Zone eluded me.
Hey, Mendibles? Hello? Welcome back to the human race and all, but please, don’t spoil the reclamation of your sorry soul with performance anxiety, eh?
Okay, okay, I’ll find a way to deal.
How Bradlee Aames could handle this kind of pressure, the multiple witnesses, all the problems that crop up during trial, the attempted hijackings by the defense—how she could contend with all this and excel, with her messed-up head guiding the way? Well, I truly had no concept.
Dr. Don went on and on while carefully saying nothing. My thoughts drifted back to Bradlee’s blank face, the placid closed-eyed ceiling stare she’d met me with last night, a stack of monitoring equipment blinking beside her hospital bed and tubes shooting out of her arms like translucent snakes feeding happily on a corpse. It slew me. Five minutes, maybe ten, was all I could manage. She was resting post-op, and the lights were dimmed. The floor nurse, a six-footer with ugly glasses and a faint brown cookie duster mustache, had made an exception, letting me in this way, but she stuck around—Nurse Ratched, hovering by the door, jaded eyes latching on to my every movement from the dark shiny-tiled hallway, encroaching on to the fringes of my dream state. Oh, Bradlee! She needed me, but there was nothing I could do. I needed her worse—practically, as a lawyer with a case to handle; shamefully, as a married man adrift—but there was nothing to be done either. I floated over her, impotent. Leaned close to say good night, heard her breathing so softly, each wisp seeming to catch the air, like a butterfly’s transparent wings fighting for liftoff. And I’d wanted to say a prayer for the next breath, and the next, to come.
No, I was nowhere near my best self, not last night. The nurse, hovering nearby in her creaking shoes and crinkling starched polyester, she saw my knees wobble, I think, and the indignity of the situation made me shudder. I all but ran by her for the elevator.
A massive yawning attack struck me and I buried my face in my fist. Between my hospital visit and the phone call with Major Coughlin, I’d never even gone to bed. Might have slept a few hours before dawn on the family room couch, but it was fitful, dream-filled sleep at best. Great: the judge was going forward and I was shot to hell.
According to Dr. Don’s predictably blameless viewpoint, it was his former patient, Rue Loberg, who threw herself at him and he did all he could to resist her.
Don’t tell me what’s coming next, I thought as I stared at the scuffed toes of my dress shoes. Practicing law has a million ways to make you cynical. One way is having to listen to a lot of lying, self-serving bullshit.
“But I was just a man,” he said, his chin drooping like a little boy whose puppy had just been squashed by a Sherman tank, its brains squeezed out of its eye-sockets like toothpaste from a tube. Okay—my tired mind was blowing everything up into cartoonish dimensions. But still, my first impulse was to projectile vomit in the direction of the witness stand; my second was to shout something rude at the esteemed psychiatrist who’d so bravely revealed his human frailty. Yet I did neither. The import of his lying words was too great for any of that.
You see, by admitting to at least some sexual contact in the form of Rue Loberg’s overtures, Dr. Donald Fallon had just moved the state’s case a lot closer to being proven.
It was a complicated, delicate strategy by the defense, to portray the shrink as the victim. It was he, the professional, who’d needed to be in control at all times, to always act in the patient’s best interest. He was now admitting that he hadn’t done so when she’d made inappropriate advances. Fallon was almost admitting to negligence, but not quite.
Holy shit, Mendibles! You just might redeem yourself here.
Dr. Don’s team of legal geniuses saw fit to make him concede a huge admission, because they felt he had to.
Which meant that Bradlee Aames had done an excellent job putting on her case.
The trial crawled along. Sitting alone at counsel table, reading her tightly looped, handwritten notes on a legal pad I’d found inside her file, stifling one gaping yawn after another, I began to miss her terribly. Yes, yes, I cop freely to my lust, my unprofessional, animal desire for Bradlee, which I know is a violation of the promise I made to God when I wed Myrna. But I’m in the company of a lot of men on that count, and for what little mitigation it may be worth, my thoughts have never translated into deeds. Or, at least I’ve never tried anything with her.
&nbs
p; What overwhelmed me now, more than the weight of the cross this dishonorable husband and public servant must carry up his own Calvary every day, was a sense of awe for the power of a brilliant, troubled mind. She’d faced down their manipulations, string-pulling, and lies, and managed to establish a solid narrative as to what really happened. Like it or not, the defense was stuck with Bradlee’s vision of the case and had to respond in kind by putting a gentle spin on the details.
This realization led to a terrible thought: Jesus Christ, this case is winnable—and it’s all on me.
What I’ve been trying to tell you, Lobo!
I couldn’t just show up and fill a seat for the state, yawning and mumbling passively through the rest of the proceedings. I’d truly have to perform.
My head felt light and my scuffed shoes seemed to swerve right up at me. Once again, projectile vomiting seemed in order. When Dr. Don had finished on direct, the judge asked me if I was ready to cross-examine. Heidegger interrupted quickly.
“May we take a short break first, Your Honor? I’m sure opposing counsel wouldn’t mind having a few extra moments to prepare his questions.”
Wouldn’t mind, my ass. That Heidegger had some juevos, man, but there was another, well-hidden side of me he’d not yet seen. Raw-ool was about to get raw.
Really raw, brother!
Maybe it was the grace of God shining down upon my sinner’s soul, or maybe I’d just been thinking, as I read her notes, about what Bradlee would do if she were here. But I was no longer in a conceding, conciliatory mood; now I had atonement on my mind. Whatever I did from here on out, I would do for her.
I thought of last night, way after the major and I had broken off, sitting on the couch, totally exhausted but my mind too occupied to think of sleep. I’d turned on the TV, keeping the volume low so Myrna and the kids wouldn’t be disturbed. Not much on—must-buy deals on overpriced costume jewelry that looked like the real thing; a conspiracy show claiming that Fort Knox had no gold; a movie with French subtitles in which the actors, attending a masquerade party at some mansion, all seemed to be talking backward. Then I found it: that old surfer classic, The Endless Summer, with its aw-shucks narration and water-bound thrills and spills. Instantly I fell into its easygoing rhythm, and suddenly, I was nodding off. Before I lost consciousness… there was a segment on Malibu beach playing, the “best surfer ever,” Mickey something or other, just slipping and sliding his way through an obstacle course of other surfers who kept popping up in front of him as he tore along this wave, as smooth and poised as Fred Astaire. The way he navigated through the masses, so calm and confident—the guy’s approach, the simple take-what-comes brilliance of it… the style. So classical, but so modern, and to think, he had it all worked out fifty years ago. I don’t know… it had an effect on me. Put me at ease enough to sleep.
