“A young gentleman is here to see you,” Sylvia’s voice said. “A Peter Brown. He’s a couple of minutes early for his appointment, but he says it’s important.”
I had completely forgotten that Peter Brown had called the week before. He had told me he desperately needed to see me, but had refused to tell me what it was about. I had little interest in new cases, having become totally preoccupied with preparing for Lisa’s trial. But practicing law was a business, among other things, and if I wanted to stay in business, I had to take on more clients. Lisa had said she had no money for bail, so I had assumed that she didn’t have the money to pay me a fee, and I had never asked her for one. Maybe, if and when I won her case, I would give her a bill. In the meantime, I knew I had better speak to new clients.
“Okay. Okay. Ask him to come in,” I said.
“It would be my pleasure,” Sylvia’s voice said.
“Sylvia, please see if you can locate Lisa Altman and get her on the phone. I’ve got to talk to her.”
A moment later a man looking to be in his late thirties entered. He was wearing a navy blue suit that was a bit tight on him, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a crew cut that needed a trim. I shook hands with Peter Brown and gestured with my hand for him to have a seat.
The man sat down in the chair across from me.
“So?” I said, weary over the prospect of hearing about new problems. Everyone in the world had problems, and recently there’d been times when I felt that if I stayed any longer in this business I would hear all of them. But I didn’t want to hear all of them.
“So?” the man answered.
“So what brings you here?” I picked up a pencil and prepared to take notes. Already I didn’t like the guy.
“You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“I try not to,” I said. The research to be done in Lisa’s case was spread out on my desk, and I felt anxious to get back to it.
“I want you to know that I come from a family of great wealth.”
“Good for you,” I said, trying to sound earnest.
“And I’m prepared to pay you handsomely, up front, in cash.”
“Good for me,” I said.
“I read about you in the newspapers when you defended that man accused of raping that ballet star.”
“That was months ago. What can I do for you?”
“I’m being harassed by the police. It’s part of a terrible conspiracy. I want you to put an end to it.”
“How do you know that it’s part of a conspiracy?” I asked.
“I hear them talking to each other. I have like a transmitter in my mouth.”
“In your mouth?”
“About two years ago I had some bridgework done. Ever since then I’ve been able to pick up messages,” he said.
Without showing any reaction, I studied Peter Brown. “How old are you?” I asked.
“Forty-five.”
“You look younger. So for the last couple of years you’ve been intercepting messages in your bridge-work. And just what have you heard people say?”
“Not people. Cops!”
“Okay, cops. What have you heard them say?”
“I’ve heard them plan different ways they were going to get me. I’ve heard them talk to my previous lawyers.”
“What have they said to your previous lawyers?”
“They’ve threatened them, talked them out of representing me.”
I stared at the man across from me. I wondered if this was the kind of client who would have generated much sympathy from Jenny. He probably would have. I hadn’t talked to Jenny in weeks, it occurred to me. I really should call her, I thought. I was sure she was aware that I hadn’t been spending as much time with Molly as I should have been. I wondered if she suspected that I was seeing another woman. I wondered if she would have cared. I thought she probably would.
The intercom buzzed.
“There’s a Dr. Agroponte on the phone,” Sylvia announced. “He says he’s the medical examiner.”
“He is the medical examiner, Sylvia,” I said. “Excuse me,” I said to Peter, “I have to take this.”
I picked up the phone. “Yes, Doctor.”
“I completed the re-examination of the body,” the doctor said.
“And?”
“There definitely was skin under the nails. What can I say?”
“Then I take it you won’t have a problem testifying to that effect?”
“Well, I’m not going to lie about it.”
“You’ll amend your original autopsy report?”
“Yes, of course. I simply missed it the first time.”
“Right.”
“There’s nothing improper about having my attention called to an oversight by a defense lawyer,” the doctor said.
“Right.”
“After all, we all make mistakes.”
“Of course, Doctor, and I wouldn’t want to embarrass you in court about something like that. So you’ll be able to say that the skin came from scratches which would indicate a fight?” I was glad I had shown the doctor the color photographs I had insisted Lisa take of the scratches on her stomach. The doctor knew I would have savaged him in court if he denied the connection between the skin under Betz’s nails and those scratches.
“Yes, of course.”
“You’re a man of integrity,” I said. I thought he was incompetent, but at least he was willing to admit it, unlike many other expert witnesses who would make every effort to cover up or at least justify their mistakes.
“Thank you,” the doctor said.
“Then I’ll see you in court. Thank you, Doctor.”
I hung up and turned back to Peter. “Okay, Mr. Brown, you hear the cops plotting against you. Have they actually done anything to you?”
“They follow me constantly. They give me tickets for no good reason. They’re just trying to wear me down.”
“What kind of tickets?”
“They accused me of having a goat in my trunk.”
“In your trunk?” I asked, wondering if I was being played with. “In the trunk of your car?”
“You think they open everybody’s trunk? They planned to get me.”
“Are you saying that they actually found a goat in your trunk?”
“Cops have no morals.”
“You’re answering a question I didn’t ask,” I said, surprised to hear myself sound so impatient. It wasn’t simply my eagerness to get back to preparing Lisa’s case. This guy was serious, and I was sick of clients like him who drew me into their insane worlds. I used to be intrigued by bizarre stories like this, but now I preferred to sit quietly with Lisa in her apartment and watch videotapes of ballet.
“They don’t care about people’s rights. I don’t know why they should act surprised when someone defends himself.”
“Defends himself?” I asked. “How did you defend yourself, Mr. Brown?”
“I shot at them.”
“You shot at them? Are you telling me that you shot at the cops after they found a goat in the trunk of your car?”
“You got it.”
“Judges usually take shooting at a cop very seriously,” I said.
“I know. They were really angry.”
“Then how come you’re not in jail?”
“I told you. I come from great wealth. My father put up half a million dollars in bail.”
“What about these other lawyers? You said that you had other lawyers who are no longer representing you, is that correct, Mr. Brown?”
“I’m not crazy. What would be crazy would be for me to use insanity as a defense and wind up in a mental institution. I’d spend the rest of my life being fed numbing dosages of Thorazine.”
“You’re right about that,” I said. I looked at the wall behind where my new client was sitting. Bear had sent me a letter just before he retired from the bench, and I had framed it and hung it on my wall. The letter contained an excerpt from a speech Oliver Wendell Holmes had given at a dinner
in his honor. Bear had read that speech to me on several occasions when I was clerking for him.
“They were nuts to talk to me about an insanity defense,” Peter Brown said.
I got up from my desk and walked over to the framed letter. Peter Brown sat in his chair watching me as I silently read:
I have to ask myself, what is there to show for this half lifetime that has passed? I look into my book in which I keep a docket of the decisions of the full court which fall to me to write, and find about a thousand cases. A thousand cases, many of them trifling or transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime!
Alas, gentlemen, that is life. I often imagine Shakespeare summing himself up and thinking: “Yes, I have written five thousand lines of gold and a good deal of padding—I would have covered the Milky Way with words that outshone the stars!” We cannot live our dreams. We are lucky if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts we can feel that it has been nobly done.
I wondered if Bear had sent me Holmes’s words to read when I was dealing with clients like Peter Brown.
I returned to my desk and focused on my new client. “Well, it’s clear you’re in a pickle, Mr. Brown. I’m in the middle of preparing for a murder case,” I said.
“I know. I want you to take my case, Mr. Roehmer. I know you wouldn’t let them push me around. I can’t believe all this is happening to me. I’m starting to think of myself as a victim,” he said. “All of a sudden I feel like people are treating me like I’m an outsider and they have normal lives.”
I felt a flash of irony as I recalled how, three months before, I had been whining to Jenny about how tired I was of feeling like an outsider. It was only recently, since I’d been with Lisa, that I had stopped seeing myself as an observer for the first time. Our love was passionate, with an immediacy and spontaneity that I had never experienced before.
I was staring at the man across from me when the intercom buzzed again, bringing me out of my trance.
“Miss Altman is on the line,” Sylvia said.
I picked up the phone. “Lisa?”
“Yes, Michael?”
“I have to talk to you. I’m supposed to be starting a trial tomorrow, though there’s a remote chance of a plea. If there’s a plea, I’ll call you in the morning. Otherwise, can you meet me in Judge Taylor’s courtroom in the old courthouse at around two?” I wanted Lisa to see my cross-examination in that case so she could be prepared for that kind of attack, which would be different from what I had subjected her to when I had been defending Betz. And I also just wanted to see her.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
I hung up.
“Aren’t we busy,” Peter said.
“I’ve been busier.”
“Do you get off on hearing stories like mine?”
“Would you ask a proctologist what drew him to his work?”
“I might, but I was always more curious about criminal lawyers.”
I nodded. At the moment I wasn’t curious about anything.
“I heard that criminal lawyers were voyeurs. What do you think?” he asked.
“I think I need a few days to decide if this is the kind of case I want to take on,” I said, not wanting to prolong the repartee. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Why do you seem so testy?”
I stood. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m tired.”
“When I came here, I was afraid you would have prejudices against me.”
“Listen, I don’t give a damn if you hear voices or shoot at cops. I’m just preoccupied with a murder case I’m working on. Call it a midlife crisis. Understand?”
Peter nodded.
“I’m sorry. I’m sure you’ve gone through a difficult time. I’ll call you,” I said.
An image flashed through my mind of my father. He had worked hard all his life to bring up a son and provide him with an education so that he could use his skills to protect people’s rights. Something was wrong. I imagined my father telling me, with that sly smile evident only in his eyes, that his efforts had been intended for a different kind of case than Peter Brown’s.
“If I take your case, I will require a retainer of five thousand dollars, payable in advance, before I will start working on it. I will bill you on an hourly basis. My rate is three hundred dollars an hour. If my time uses up your retainer, I will bill you for the difference. If I haven’t used up the retainer, I’ll return the difference. Understand?”
“That’s pretty steep,” he said.
“I’m afraid so,” I said, and stood up from my desk. “Okay. I’ll be speaking to you one way or another in the next few days.” Peter got up from his chair and left my office.
I shook my head as I returned to my desk. It had been a long time since I’d found the bizarre world of my clients fascinating.
Maybe Peter Brown was onto something, with his overheard description of lawyers as voyeurs. I had to confess I had sometimes felt thrilled by the exploits of these people who were so unfettered by the normal restraints. They were living dangerously, or crazily, and that was exciting. But I didn’t think I was as titillated by the stories as I used to be.
As I sat at my desk I decided then and there that my time handling criminal cases was drawing to a close. I had thought that my decision to turn down Williams, the child-killer, had meant that I would no longer take on monsters as clients. But there was a new problem. This nut that had just been sitting across from me was no monster, just a pathetic victim himself, a mother’s son like the rest of humanity. And I still didn’t want to have anything to do with him—or his goat.
The difference in my attitudes toward Peter Brown and Lisa stemmed from the fact that I simply didn’t have the emotional concern to find out more about Peter. Still, I felt that the way I had treated this mental case had not been professional. Perhaps, I thought, a person eventually loses interest in understanding.
Maybe Lisa’s trial would be my last, but before I could get to that I would have to dispose of my gay client’s charge of attempted murder. I knew what I had to do there, and I dreaded it. I wondered what Lisa would think of my performance the next day.
Chapter 16
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I was at the kitchen table having coffee while Judith served breakfast to Molly.
Judith was a handsome woman in her early thirties. She kept her coarse black hair cut short and parted mannishly on one side. Her dark eyes were set deep in their sockets and her square chin gave her a determined look. Jenny had interviewed her months before Molly was born, and Judith had become part of our family on the day I brought Jenny and Molly home from the hospital.
“How come Daddy doesn’t have to eat lumpy oatmeal?” Molly asked, pointing her spoon at me.
Judith shook her head. “Because daddies have some privileges.”
“I wish that were true,” I said.
“And don’t point your spoon at your father,” Judith said.
“Daddy, what does it mean to have a judge of one’s pears?” Molly asked.
“I think you mean ‘peers,’ sweetheart,” I said.
“Is it true that even bad people don’t have to go to jail if they have a good lawyer?” Molly asked, ignoring my answer.
“Where did you hear that, Molly?”
“Elliot said that.”
“Who’s Elliot?”
“Elliot’s in my play group.”
“Elliot may be right,” I said. “You know, sweetheart, I miss reading to you at night.” I didn’t think it appropriate to ask Molly for extra credit for rushing home many mornings from Lisa’s apartment at six, as I had done this morning, in order to have a few moments of breakfast with her.
“That’s okay. Judith has been reading to me.”
“I know. That’s fine for you, but I miss it. This case that I’ve been working on has been taking up most of my time. I have to look up a lot of things in books.”
“That’s okay, Daddy.”
“The trial’s coming up soon, and onc
e that’s over I’ll be able to spend more time with you.”
A moment later Molly announced that she was sick of oatmeal, and left the table to go to her room to finish the jigsaw puzzle she had started the night before.
“I miss my reading time with Molly,” I said to Judith, who was cleaning up the table.
“I’m sure you do. I imagine it’s a question of priorities, isn’t it?” Judith said, trying, I’m sure, to sound sincere, although I detected a bit of criticism in her voice.
Later that morning I made my way to the courthouse. I pulled hard on the heavy glass door. A crowd of jurors was waiting for the elevators halfway down the main corridor. But just inside the building, a few steps into the corridor on the right, was an unmarked green door of solid steel. I had been behind that door many times, and I knew only too well what to expect.
I opened the door and walked twenty feet down a narrow, windowless, well-lighted hallway to the end, where another green steel door faced me, this one with a perforated, eight-inch in diameter, silver disk in the center. On the wall to the right of the door was a small speaker, and below that a button.
I had waited at that door many times to visit clients who had been unable to come up with enough bail money and were brought over from the jail to start their trials. The last time I had been there was to see Marcus Johnson, my last client before William Betz. Some client! Johnson had poked out the eyes of his rape/robbery victim when he had finished with her to keep her from identifying him. And I had succeeded in getting the case thrown out. Some lawyer!
I sighed and pushed the button, setting off a loud ring, like the fire alarm at my grammar school, only much louder. I released the button and the irritating noise stopped.
“Yeah,” a gravelly voice said through the speaker above the button.
“I’m here to see my client.”
“Who’s your client?” the voice asked.
“Jack Larsen.”
“Who are you?”
“Michael Roehmer.”
“Hold on.” After a pause the voice asked, “Attempted murder? Who’s it before?”
“Taylor.”
“Taylor?”
“You got it,” I said.
“Give me a minute,” the voice said.
Question of Consent: A Novel Page 11
