Her Kind of Case

by Jeanne Winer

  “I already have a lawyer.” Jeremy was probably six feet tall, the same as Lee, but his posture was so bad it was hard to tell. His head was shaved and he was much too thin, as if he hadn’t eaten well for a long time.

  “I know. Phil Hartman. I spoke with him this morning. He’s an excellent lawyer but, like all public defenders, he’s very busy. I’m an excellent lawyer too, but since I’m private, I have much more time than he does. I also have an investigator who can work full time on your case.” She paused. “If you don’t feel like sitting down, I guess we could both stand.” She started to get up, but he shook his head and then sank into the other metal chair. “Great,” she said. “So, I need to know what you think before deciding whether or not to work for you.”

  “I don’t care.” He shrugged and crossed his arms, which were covered with various tattoos: a skull and crossbones on his left bicep, an iron cross on his right, a small homemade swastika on one forearm, and the words—in case anyone missed his drift—“born to hate” across the other.

  Lee nodded but didn’t respond. It was a stock lawyer trick. Most people couldn’t stand more than a few seconds of silence.

  “Actually,” he said, “I think it’s a waste of money.”

  “Probably not. I’m very good at what I do.”

  Jeremy stared at her. His eyes looked feral. Don’t come any closer, they warned, or I’ll bite you.

  “I don’t need a good lawyer.”

  “Everyone charged with a crime needs a good lawyer.”

  He continued to stare at her, as if she might lunge at any moment.

  “I-I won’t take a deal if it means testifying against my brothers. We’re all standing together.” He took a ragged breath. “I mean it.”

  “Okay,” she said, resisting the urge to put her hands in the air. “I hear you.”

  She tried silence again, but guessed it wouldn’t work a second time. It didn’t. The kid just kept staring at her, his body language warning her to stay put, that he would fight to the death if he had to. She countered by dropping her shoulders and sinking into the chair. After a long moment, he relaxed a notch. Which meant he knew nothing about physical combat. Good thing she meant him no harm; he’d be a pushover in a real brawl, and the breakfast of champions in prison.

  “Can I ask you a couple of questions, Jeremy? I know almost nothing about your case except that you made certain statements to the police.”

  “So?”

  “So they seem to indicate you were a willing participant. Is that true? By the way, anything you tell me is strictly confidential. I’m sure Mr. Hartman has already explained that.” She’d stopped looking directly at him. Any further eye contact was useless, maybe even counterproductive.

  Jeremy shrugged again, shifting his gaze to his feet. He was wearing black high-top sneakers with no laces.

  “Whatever I told the police is true. Can I go now? I’m kind of tired.”

  “Hey, you can go whenever you want, Jeremy. I don’t have any power over you. I’m not your jailer. I’m not your father. I’m not even one of your so-called brothers.”

  His head jerked up and his knees began bouncing up and down.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Addressing the space above his head, she said, “It means that if I decide to represent you, I would work only for you. That I wouldn’t take into account anyone else’s interests but yours. And I would never make you do anything you didn’t want to.”

  His anger subsided almost immediately. With a pleasant expression and some hair, he’d actually be nice-looking.

  “Okay, fine. Whatever.”

  “Great,” Lee said. “Can we go back to your statements?”

  “Why? I-I already said they were true.”

  “Jeremy, I don’t have much time. I need to know what I might be getting myself into.” She thought for a moment. “Tell me about the victim, the man who was killed.”

  “What difference does it make? He’s dead.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Sam? Yeah, we all knew him. Anything else?”

  It was late and the kid was impossible. Why bother?

  But still, she heard herself asking, “Do you realize how much trouble you’re in, what you’re facing?”

  He nodded and then began picking at a small hole in his T-shirt.

  “I’m cool with it.”

  “You’re cool with spending the rest of your life in prison?”

  “Sure.”

  “Jeremy, you’re not even seventeen yet. Do you have any idea what it’ll be like in prison? I can’t help you if you won’t let me.”

  “So don’t.”

  All right then, she wouldn’t. She slid her business card into her pocket, stood up and grabbed her briefcase.

  “Well, if I don’t see you again, good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  She walked to the door, and was about to knock, when she turned around to face him.

  “In your statement to the police, you said that Sam was ‘just a faggot who deserved to die.’ Did you really mean that?” She’d already made up her mind. She was just curious. Her best—really only—friends were two gay men, and Paul had been actively bisexual before he met and married her.

  “Yeah, I did.” He was leaning down, adjusting the back of his sneakers.

  For the hell of it, she said, “I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “So what?”

  He was right. She turned her back to him and began knocking. Within a minute, the guard unlocked the door and she left without another word.

  Lee walked quickly north on Ninth and then turned left on Maxwell. A few minutes later, she arrived at her house, a sweet two-story Victorian she and Paul had renovated during their first year of living together. Before meeting her husband, Lee had never successfully cohabited with anyone, unless you counted Charlie, whom she found as a kitten hiding under a parked car during a snowstorm. When she reached for him, he scratched her face before settling down against her wool sweater. Love at first sight. Likewise with Paul, except it was the other way around.

  They never planned to marry, but one day they just did. Why? It was hard to remember. Was Paul heading off to Pakistan to climb K2? Yes, that was it. And he’d wanted to make sure, if he didn’t return, she’d inherit everything: a trunk full of climbing gear, four or five cameras, a thousand books, his photographs, and not much else.

  As Lee searched for her house key, she figured she’d phone Peggy first and tell her to save her money, that Phil was more than competent enough to defend her nephew. And then she’d call her father, who lived alone in a condo in Braintree, Massachusetts. Most weeks, she called him every evening, usually around ten, midnight on the east coast. After playing his usual four hours of cutthroat duplicate bridge, her father always napped in the late afternoon and was wide-awake at night, happy for the company.

  She dropped her briefcase in the foyer and then walked into the kitchen. Charlie hopped down from his hiding place on top of the cabinet and began crying for some wet cat food. After forking some Fancy Feast into Charlie’s bowl, she stopped and considered what she was about to do: turn down a perfectly good murder case.

  So that was that. She was done. No more class-one felonies where the potential sentence, if she screwed up, would be life in prison. The Lennys and Jeremys of the world would have to find some other lawyer to represent them.

  So be it. Maybe she would finally slow down a little, stop fighting nature, and actually enjoy her golden years. Maybe, like Paul, she’d learn to meditate. Get up to the high country more often. Go trekking with her friends Mark and Bobby; they were always trying to convince her to leave town. Why not? After a while, she wandered back into the foyer, opened her briefcase and fished out Peggy’s business card.

  Peggy picked up on the first ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s Lee Isaacs.”

  “Oh, Lee, I’m so glad you called. I’ve been waiting. Did you get to s
ee Jeremy?”

  “Yes, I just got back.”

  “Will you represent him?”

  Lee glanced out the window at the cedar fence she and Paul had built the summer before his death. The fence was almost ten feet high, affording Paul the privacy to wander around naked without offending the neighbors. Declining the case would be the end of an era, the end of a good long run. Was she ready for a kinder, gentler life where she took only easy cases, the type almost any mediocre lawyer could handle? She made a face. Not really. At least not yet.

  “Yes,” she heard herself saying, “I’ll represent him.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful. So it was a fit?”

  Lee smiled, remembering one of her father’s favorite jokes about an old woman in a nursing home who goes into the day room and announces to a group of elderly men, “If anyone can guess what I’m holding in my fist, he can have sex with me.”

  After a long silence, one of the men finally says, “An elephant?”

  The woman thinks for a moment and then nods.

  “Close enough,” she replies.

  No matter how many times her father told it, Lee always thought it was funny. Today, galloping toward sixty, it didn’t seem quite as amusing, but the punch line fit.

  “Close enough,” she told Peggy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was a tall, dark man in Lee’s life who regularly attempted to harm her. Today would be no exception. First, however, the rules required a deep respectful bow. In return, Lee grinned through her mouth guard and bowed back. While bowing, neither took their eyes off the other. In Tae Kwon Do, often translated as Hand Foot Way, only novices dropped their eyes when bowing to an opponent before sparring. Dropping your gaze revealed weakness and inexperience before the fight even started.

  Michael Anderson, Lee’s favorite sparring partner, had been practicing the martial arts almost as long as Lee. They’d been training at the same dojo in Boulder for two decades. Both were fifth-degree black belts and each taught one or two classes a week. They knew little about each other outside the dojo, but everything about what mattered inside it. For instance, Lee knew that Michael backed up a step whenever she threw an ax kick, and he knew that Lee was often vulnerable to his jump-turning back kicks. Those kinds of things.

  For the past couple of years, they’d managed to arrange their schedules to accommodate an intensive workout every Saturday morning. It was one of the two social highlights of Lee’s week. The other was dinner every Saturday night at Mark and Bobby’s.

  The workout always started with at least forty minutes of stretching followed by forms, combinations and, unless one of them was too injured, sparring. Michael was a few years younger than Lee. Both had had their share of broken bones, torn ligaments, and pulled muscles, although lately it seemed as if Lee’s ribs were getting more and more brittle, breaking like sticks of wood with relatively little force. It was maddening because cracked or broken ribs took about two months to heal. Michael kept suggesting she wear a padded rib protector, but thus far she’d refused. They already wore hand, feet, and shin protection when they sparred, as well as mouth guards. Enough was enough. Besides, rib protectors were for sissies.

  But the truth was, even worse than making her look like a sissy, the added protection would make her feel old. And vulnerable. Not a good way to feel when you were facing off against someone as skilled as Michael. Ask any aging martial artist: Youth was not overrated.

  Today, they started circling each other slowly because Michael’s hamstring was acting up again. They had thirty minutes left for what both considered the real point of the workout, the reason for the other hour and a half—the chance to pummel another human being, albeit in an elegant, socially acceptable way. For Lee, sparring required exactly the same qualities that made her an excellent trial attorney: speed, timing, technique and, above all, the ability to think on her feet. Sparring full out, like defending a murder case, demanded complete confidence and the heart of a warrior. Which meant not only courage and compassion, but a willingness to dive off a cliff and not worry about the landing.

  Janis Joplin, Lee once told Michael, had the heart of a warrior but landed way too hard. Michael disagreed. Warriors aren’t always admirable, she argued. Sometimes they’re wild and intemperate. Okay, he conceded, Janis had been a warrior.

  Every now and then, when Lee and Michael fought, when they were both at their best and the universe was aligned just right, it felt as if they were creating a gorgeous one-of-a kind work of art, like a Tibetan Buddhist sand painting, which, according to Paul, was always destroyed after its completion as a metaphor for impermanence.

  But they were moving faster now and she needed to concentrate. After blocking a punch to her solar plexus, she threw a double spin kick followed by a turning back kick that slipped past Michael’s guard, tagging him. In retaliation, he started throwing more jabs and hooks, forcing her to be more defensive. Inevitably, his hamstring loosened up and his jump-turning back kicks started working. Now, Lee had to scramble to avoid them.

  “Nice kick,” she told him when a fast one finally broke through and shoved her backward. Mouth guards made you sound as if you had a bad lisp, so it sounded like, “Nith gick.”

  “Thanks.”

  They were loose now and dancing, exchanging kicks and punches smoothly and efficiently. A few of the lower belts who had been practicing in the other room wandered in to watch. Lee was pleased to see that half of them were women. When she’d started in 1977, she’d been the only female. And it stayed that way for the next two years. Now, on the first Friday of the month, she taught an advanced women’s class in which three of the students would be good enough to kick her ass someday. But not, she hoped, before she was seventy.

  Lee jabbed twice to Michael’s head, stepped back and threw a turning heel kick, which struck him in the chest.

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  Lee nodded, grinning. They were fighting full out now, pulling their techniques a little, but mostly counting on each other to block or get out of the way. Michael’s step-up spin kicks were barely missing her temples. Lee kept him back with a combination of side kicks and occasional reverse punches to his solar plexus. Although the room was cool, they were both sweating.

  “Ouch,” Michael said, after blocking one of Lee’s kicks with his forearm. “Why did I bother? I’m going to have a knot the size of a golf ball tomorrow.”

  “You see this?” She pointed to her left elbow. “It’s still purple from blocking your damn turning back kick last week.” As she spoke, she faked high with a back fist to his face, then stepped up and nailed him with another side kick. Michael countered with a turning heel kick that missed her nose by an inch.

  “Yikes,” Lee said, backing up to catch her breath. They were both breathing heavily. Lee’s gi, a traditional karate uniform made from heavy cotton canvas, was soaking wet and her hair, like Michael’s, was plastered to her head.

  “Should we call it?” Michael asked. His face was flushed.

  “Sure. Two more minutes and we’ll—”

  Michael stepped up fast and hit her with a deceptively simple flip kick to the groin.

  “No fair,” she laughed, throwing an ax kick that caught him on the shoulder.

  “I never even saw that coming.”

  A few seconds later, Michael threw a hard snap kick toward her chin, which she blocked with her left hand. It had come so fast, she hadn’t had time to close her fist. The pain was immediate and sickening.

  “Ugh,” she said.

  “Was that your thumb?”

  Lee nodded, tried to shake it out, but knew it was a real injury. Shit. At the very least, it was sprained. Maybe a torn ligament.

  “How bad?” Michael asked, spitting his mouth guard onto the floor. “Let me see.”

  “It’s fine, Michael. Really.” Thank God it was her left hand. She could still write and maneuver without anyone noticing. And she could still sleep on her thirty-year old waterbed, which she
couldn’t do with a cracked or broken rib. Each broken rib always required a month on the floor while Charlie got the whole wobbly bed to himself. “I’ll put some ice on it as soon as I get to my office.”

  They bowed and then clapped each other on the back. As they walked to their respective dressing rooms on opposite sides of the dojo, Michael called out to her.

  “Great dance as usual. Sorry about your thumb.”

  “Goes with the territory. See you next week.”

  She kept her head up, her back straight until she closed the door to the dressing room. No one else was in there. Good. She stripped off her gi and underwear, and then sat down naked on one of the long wooden benches that lined the room. She’d take a hot shower in a few minutes but wanted to catch her breath first. After a moment, she closed her eyes and let her head lean back against the wall. The room smelled reassuringly of sweat, deodorant, and Chinese herbal liniment.

  With her eyes still closed, she began massaging the pad between her thumb and index finger, just a little and then she’d let it be. Most injuries, unless they were life threatening or needed to be cast, wanted to be left alone. She had no intention of going to her doctor, who would only shake his head, advise Lee to find a gentler sport like yoga, and tell her to ice it.

  Ice is nice, she thought, but liquor is quicker. Where had that come from? Which was what her father always said when something odd or ridiculous popped out of his mouth. The aging brain. But for the record, Lee had never resorted to drugs or alcohol to alleviate pain; unlike many of the wild intemperate singers she’d admired as a youth, she wasn’t that kind of warrior. Tonight, though, she’d allow Mark to make her one of his famous margaritas using his best Don Julio Tequila.

  Finally, she opened her eyes and stared at a large bloodstain on the wall, a leftover from last week’s grueling brown belt test. One of the students had broken her nose fending off three opponents. None of the judges, including Lee, had interfered. The rule was clear: If you were injured during a belt test, you kept on going. If you stopped, you flunked. Period. No exceptions.