Question of Consent: A Novel

by Seymour Wishman

  I pulled open the bottom drawer of my desk and took out the bottle of brandy I always kept there. I removed a glass from my top drawer and poured myself a drink. If I’d heeded my father’s wishes and become a surgeon, at least I wouldn’t have had people skulking around my house.

  Sylvia hadn’t been wrong to get rid of the old files. The clients who walked through the door of my office were unconnected, without pattern or logic. There was no progression in the sequence of the cases, none leading inevitably to another. It simply didn’t make any difference where the old files were buried. The clients seemed a random collection of characters, events, war stories, funny stories, exciting “wins” or depressing “losses.” My skills had increased with experience, but William Betz could have been my first client or he could have been my last.

  Chapter 8

  THE NEXT DAY I pulled into the courthouse-jailhouse complex and parked my BMW at the western end of the lot beside the jail. A light drizzle fell slowly from dark clouds, making lower Manhattan seem grimmer than usual. The small, asphalt playground down the hill on the edge of Chinatown was deserted.

  I walked toward the area between the courthouse and the jail, two equally tall brick buildings facing each other, twenty yards apart, separated by a marble terrace. Carrying my worn, leather briefcase, I climbed the steps to the terrace.

  Usually when a case was over I stopped thinking about it, but that wasn’t happening with the Betz trial, and it certainly wasn’t happening in connection with my cross-examination of Lisa Altman. I couldn’t seem to get out of my mind the image of that beautiful woman sitting vulnerably, helplessly in the witness chair.

  I had other cases to distract me. My law practice was filled with clients who needed my attention. I knew I would have to move on.

  “Lawyah Roehmah! Lawyah Roehmah!” a voice from inside the jail called out.

  I looked up the face of the twelve-story jail. The building had the same narrow openings for windows as the courthouse, but instead of windows the openings of the jail were dark, wire-mesh screens. It was impossible to make out the black faces of inmates behind them.

  “Lawyah Roehmer! I’m a trapestry of justice!” another voice from inside the jail called.

  “Yo. Lawyah Roehmer! Hey Jewboy, ged me outta heah,” still another voice yelled.

  I made my way to the entrance of the jail. “Ah, prick me, do I not bleed?” I muttered under my breath.

  I pulled hard on the heavy, blue-tinted, bulletproof glass door. Bright fluorescent lights lit up every corner of the lobby. I had been to dozens of prisons. Even the modern ones stored the inmates like animals in a kennel, a kennel where the inmates were regularly serviced with all their basic needs except hetero-sex. I hated prisons.

  I stepped up to the next set of glass doors. I opened them, walked in, and exchanged nods with a guard I knew seated behind a desk in the lobby.

  “How’s it going, Tim?” I asked.

  “It’s a jungle out there, Mike. At least we’re safe here.”

  We both smiled, and I walked over to the large control booth. Inside three guards were engaged in an animated conversation that I couldn’t hear because of the thick glass that were the enclosure’s walls. I took a three-by-five card from the pile on the metal shelf extending out from the booth. I wrote the name of the inmate on the card, dropped it in a metal drawer, and pushed the drawer until it extended inside.

  A guard retrieved the card. He flipped through a black spiral book and walked over to an intricate intercom. Although I couldn’t hear him, I knew he was calling to have my client brought down. He dropped the card back in the metal drawer and pushed it toward me. The guard cupped his ear with his hand and pointed to the six-inch, perforated silver disk implanted in the glass separating me from him.

  I leaned toward the silver disk.

  “You’re lucky. The inmates just finished feeding,” the guard said. “So it should only take a couple of minutes.”

  I nodded and picked up the card. After walking several feet to my left to a solid metal door, I waited for the guard to turn the switch. Finally he did. Small red bulbs flashed on the panel. A lock clanked loudly, and the metal door in front of me began to slide open, rasping loudly. I slipped sideways past the door as soon as the space was large enough, then marched forward fifteen feet to face a barred door. When the metal door behind me clanked shut, the barred door opened wide enough for me to slip through.

  I walked another ten feet to confront a guard standing behind another barred door, and passed the three-by-five card through the bars to him. Without reading the card, he took a large heavy key and opened the door. I placed my briefcase on the floor next to a small table and signed my name into a guest book on the table. The guard used another large key to open a solid door. I entered the lawyers’ conference room. The guard closed the door behind me.

  In the beginning of my career, when I had first started going to prisons, I used to feel an excitement hearing the doors lock behind me as I entered the holding areas to interview clients. I had known, of course, that being locked up as an inmate was completely different from the temporary sense of constraint experienced by a lawyer making a brief visit. I had enjoyed meeting my clients, learning about the awful things they had done. In the beginning I had even been thrilled by the ugly prisons themselves.

  My excitement about being in them, however, had quickly faded. Prison life was not something I had learned about in law school. But what I soon learned from spending so much time in prisons was terribly depressing. That’s what was so upsetting about sentencings… like the sentencing the day before when Judge Fazio had sent my client, Sherry Parruco, away for years.

  The airless, windowless conference room was about half the size of an average courtroom, made bright by the harsh fluorescent bulbs beaming down. Five-foot-high dividers formed a series of small cubicles on each side of the room. A narrow corridor separated the two rows of cubicles. Each cubicle contained a couple of unmatched chairs and an old desk.

  I walked down the corridor. The first three cubicles were empty. In the fourth, a large black man with three tattooed teardrops running down the corner of one eye was looking earnestly at a young man sitting across from him, diligently writing on a yellow legal pad. The prisoner noticed me immediately. Prisoners get good at noticing even the flick of a finger from across a room. The young lawyer kept on writing as I passed.

  I entered the last cubicle. I took off my jacket and placed it over a chair behind the desk and sat down. The desk was scratched and gouged.

  “I swear it on my baby’s eyes,” I could hear the prisoner say.

  “It had better be true. I’m going all out for you,” the young lawyer said.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” the prisoner said.

  “Okay. We’ll go to trial. I’ll let the prosecutor know. Let’s get out of here.”

  The young man and his client made their way to the door. I could hear a knock, and a moment later the guard opened the door to let them out. He relocked the door. I sat in my chair waiting for Jack Larsen and began to ruminate.

  At the start of my practice, I used to speak to my clients just the way the young lawyer was speaking. I couldn’t remember when it had begun to feel foolish to ask a client if he was innocent. I learned pretty quickly in my career that nearly every client lied to me. Most of the time it didn’t matter what the client told me. If that guy in the cubicle was guilty—and most people in jail were—he probably was right to be lying. Young lawyers often worked harder for their clients if they thought they were preventing a miscarriage of justice.

  William Betz had probably lied to me. Why would he have been any different from most of my other clients? He might not have lied completely, but it was very likely that at least some of his testimony had been false. Did he rape Lisa? Who knew? I certainly didn’t. I had never asked him if he had done it—I only asked him what he had told the police he had done.

  A criminal lawyer was surrounded by a swamp of
lies. Clients, witnesses, cops, prosecutors, even judges—everybody lied or could be lying. I tried to be an exception. I assuaged my conscience by “merely” shaving the truth, slanting the truth, avoiding the truth, which for a long time was enough of a nuance of a difference to convince myself that while I might be living in that swamp of lies, I still had my integrity, and had only used other people’s lies to do my job.

  For many years I simply ignored the fact that defendants lied, or, if I could not ignore it, I somehow forgave them for it. In a perverse way, I didn’t feel their lying was as outrageous as other people in the criminal justice system doing it. Defendants, after all, were desperately trying to stay out of prison, and after having spent so much time as a visitor in prisons myself, I could sympathize with that desire.

  If only Lisa weren’t so attractive, I thought. “Those long, lovely legs should have carried her out of harm’s way. And why am I starting to talk to myself in this godforsaken place?”

  I had always seen the defendants as victims; that was my problem. For psychological reasons I didn’t understand, I didn’t hold my clients accountable for their behavior in the same way I would others. Their helplessness and dependence on me generated protective feelings, regardless of the crimes they might have committed. I needed to shield them from anyone who wanted to harm them—from the prosecutor, for example, and his array of cops and detectives and experts. And if a client was hostile toward me, my first reaction, on some level, had been to suspect he might be right to see me as part of an oppressive society, and I would even feel a vague guilt.

  Now, as I waited in my cubicle for my client, I felt only impatience.

  I wondered what the Altman woman—what Lisa—wanted from me. How long would she continue to follow me? I didn’t feel threatened, at least not physically, but I knew I was going to call the police if I saw her around my house again. She had better stay the hell away from Molly, I said to myself. And what the hell was she doing in court?

  But, although I had to admit it had been unnerving to see her when I’d looked over my shoulder, I’d somehow known I’d see her again.

  I had always hoped that victims, or witnesses, or judges to whom I had done terrible things would understand that there was nothing personal in my behavior. I was just doing my job. I also knew that that was a bit too much to ask of most people. I was sure that Lisa didn’t have the kind of detachment to appreciate that our system of jurisprudence required vigorous advocates.

  I looked at my watch. How long, I wondered, would I have to wait for my criminal? I stood and walked up and down the narrow corridor.

  A few minutes later I was waiting by the desk when the metal door clanked, then yawned open. I heard a shuffle of footsteps. A few moments later Jack Larsen, a handsome, muscular black man in his midthirties, arrived at the entrance of my cubicle. He was wearing bedroom slippers, dungarees, and an orange shirt.

  I nodded at my client.

  “Hi, Mr. Roehmer.”

  “Have a seat,” I said.

  My man sat down.

  “Can you get my bail reduced, Mr. Roehmer? I want to get out of here. That’s what I want.”

  “Jack, your bail is a hundred grand.”

  “But that’s crazy. Can’t you get it reduced?”

  “How much can you afford?”

  “Nothing. I gave you all the money I could get my hands on.”

  “There’s no way you can get released without bail.”

  “This is my first charge.”

  “And it’s for attempted murder.”

  “Without Perry,” Larsen said, “all they got is Bruce’s word against mine.”

  “That and a twelve-inch bread knife and eighty sutures in Bruce’s stomach,” I responded.

  “But they ain’t gonna find Perry.”

  “Careful, I don’t trust these rooms.”

  “And you’re gonna destroy that faggot, Bruce, right?” Larsen asked.

  “I’ll go as far as the judge lets me.”

  “But you’re gonna destroy that faggot, right?”

  “I’m going to try, but there’s no guarantee I’ll succeed.”

  “This place is going to make me crazy.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack. Your case should be coming up for trial in another month or two.”

  My client nodded.

  “Anyway, I wanted to remind you not to talk to anybody about the case. And that goes for other inmates, guards, anybody. You haven’t done that, have you?”

  “No, sir. That’s what you told me last time you saw me.”

  “Well, the main reason I wanted to see you today was to talk to you about a plea. Are you willing to consider it?”

  “No. It’s out of the question. That faggot had it coming.”

  “Do you understand that I might be able to get you a deal where you serve a year or two?”

  “No deals. Bruce has friends down there. They’ll kill me down there. No deals. You got to get me off.”

  “Okay. It’s your decision. I’m required to ask you. I’ll see you before we go to trial,” I said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Roehmer.”

  “If you change your mind about a plea, get in touch with me.”

  “I understand.”

  I stood, and Larsen stood up after me. We walked to the metal door. I tapped on it with a coin and waited. It seemed to take forever for the guard to come. My client was standing next to me, waiting for the same door to be unlocked, so that he could go back to his cell. I didn’t look at him. In the past I had worked harder to do well for a client like Larsen than I had for other, less violent clients. It was another way of demonstrating my distance from the horror of the crime and the criminal. Now I just wanted to get out of there. Finally, the guard opened the door.

  Chapter 9

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I was in my office trying to move some paper off my desk when the intercom buzzed.

  “Yes, Sylvia?” I asked.

  “There’s a Mr. Lanza on the phone. He says he’s a client of yours.”

  “He’s telling the truth. Armed robbery,” I said.

  “How come I don’t know he’s your client?”

  “How come you’re not Delia Street?” I asked. “Could you please tell him I’ll call him back, and I’d like not to take any calls right now. I got weeks of paperwork to catch up on. Thank you.”

  A moment later the intercom buzzed again.

  “Yes, Sylvia?” I said with a sigh.

  “There’s a woman here who says she wants you to represent her.”

  I looked at my watch, looked at the mound of papers on my desk, and shook my head. “Please show her in.”

  A moment later the door opened and Lisa Altman entered.

  I tried not to show any surprise.

  “I was hoping I could speak to you,” Lisa said.

  I hesitated for a moment. Lisa Altman was about the last person I’d have expected as a visitor in my office—apparently wanting me to represent her. I gestured with my hand for her to sit down in the chair across from me.

  “This is just the way I thought your office would look. Is that your daughter?” she asked, pointing to a photograph on top of a bookcase near my desk, taken two years ago, of Molly in a bathing suit, standing on a beach, and holding a bucket.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Altman?”

  “Don’t you think after all we’ve been through you could call me Lisa?”

  I nodded and waited.

  “I want you to represent me,” she said.

  I smiled. “Oh, really? What’s the charge?”

  “I assume they will accuse me of murder.”

  I became serious. “Why would you want me to represent you?”

  “I know what you’re capable of.”

  “Why do you think you’ll be charged with murder?”

  “I love the fact that you don’t ask me if I committed the murder. That’s very courtly of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Because I shot someone last
night,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Who?”

  “An ex-client of yours.”

  “Yes?”

  “William Betz.”

  I studied Lisa for a moment. “Have you told the police?” I asked.

  “You’re the only one I’ve told.”

  “Where did this shooting take place?”

  “At his apartment. I imagine the body is still there.”

  “Why did you go to his apartment?”

  “He forced me to go there. He told me he’d rape me again if I didn’t go to his apartment.”

  “I have no intention of getting involved.” I didn’t even want to hear the details.

  “You are involved.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have killed him.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If you hadn’t gotten him off…” She paused for a moment. “He told me I didn’t have a prayer that anyone would believe me a second time. He said you would destroy me again in court.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I shot him. Michael, he was right: you would have destroyed me again.”

  “You flatter me. You should see another lawyer.”

  “I want you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “After what you did to me in that courtroom, you owe it to me.”

  “I don’t owe you anything. I won’t take your case.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Where did you get the gun?” I finally asked.

  “I’ve been carrying it since the end of the trial. I knew he was going to come after me again.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “The same way I knew he was following me the first time, before I even saw him.”

  I hesitated a moment. “I’ll arrange to take you in. I’ll try to get you a low bail. But that’s it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll have to get another lawyer. Okay?”