A tear formed in Abe’s eye as he thought about his father. Harry Ringel had been a real barber, Abe recalled with tender pride—not a hairdresser. He cut and shaved, never coifed or layered. He was proud of having been the first white barber in the Boston area to cut the hair of Negroes, as he insisted on calling them till his dying day. “I’ve got plenty of Jewish customers with curly hair. I know how to cut curly hair. I’m in the hair business, not the skin business.” He drew the line, however, at women. “I’m a man’s barber,” he would insist. Harry was not only a man’s barber, he was a man’s man. He loved his customers. He loved his three sons. And he respected his wife, Sylvia, in whose presence he rarely uttered a word.
Sylvia, who had moved to Florida following Harry’s death, had written “the book” on Jewish mothers. Less than five feet tall and under a hundred pounds, she was a benevolent despot. She insisted on being addressed as “Mrs. Ringel” by anyone other than her immediate family and a few close friends. When Abe had briefly dated a southern woman, it had created a minor confrontation when the woman had once used the term you-all to Sylvia’s face. Sylvia was an absolute master of the put-down, capable of humiliating the strongest man or woman with a well-chosen word or phrase. She was also capable of seeing the dark cloud in any silver lining. When her sons and grandchildren had gotten together and bought her a beautiful diamond watch for her seventy-fifth birthday, her response had been, “Oy, now I have to decide which one of you I should leave it to in my will.” Abe loved his mother, but his personality was closer to his father’s.
Emma quickly brought Abe back to the moment. “Tonight in our group, the topic is ‘Taking Control of Your Own Sexuality.’”
“Enough, my darling daughter. Can we please not talk about your sexual comings and goings anymore? You really have to try to understand. I was brought up in a different world. We never talked about those kinds of things. I’m not good at it. If you have to talk to someone, could you talk to Rendi?”
“Dad, that’s the whole point. I don’t want to talk to Rendi. I mean, I love Rendi and I’m glad you two are, you know, well, whatever it is you two are, but I need a parent to talk to.” Emma paused. “You don’t know how it feels to grow up without Mom.”
Oh, yes, I do, little one, Abe said to himself. He had hardly been a grown-up himself when Hannah had died. At least that’s what he thought looking back on it now. These were not emotions he could share with Emma. Or anyone. Abe had worked hard to keep himself one step removed from the rest of the world. It was part of the advocate’s territory. And perhaps more to the point, it served to remove him from the never-ending pain over losing Hannah. Seeing his daughter’s face, her eyes like Hannah’s, suddenly glinting with the tears that came so quickly in adolescence, he realized that he couldn’t use his distancing tactic with her.
Abe glanced at the old-fashioned watch his father had given him as a Bar Mitzvah gift. “You have only so much time on this earth,” his father had said. “Always make the most of it. Don’t waste a precious minute. You’ll never get it back.”
Abe had lived by those words. He was one of those people who was always doing something productive. He squeezed a tennis ball to strengthen his hands as he read a good novel, listened to classical music while enjoying his art. Abe was something of an overachiever, a man who tried hard to do the right thing, even though he sometimes had difficulty figuring out what the right thing was these days. He yearned for the black-and-white simplicity of his youth and even his young adulthood. During the late 1960s and early 1970s he really thought he was at peace with himself about the moral issues of the day. Then along came the feminists, the radicals, the black separatists, the gay activists. Part of him resented these young upstarts for complicating his life, for making new and sometimes incomprehensible demands on his moral bank account. Even his own daughter confused him. “Isn’t it time for you to be off to school?”
“Yeah, I guess….” Emma was small-boned, and when her thoughts grew cloudy, her whole face seemed to close down. These were the times Abe would have lain down and died for her, if only she would smile. “Come on, kid, what’s bugging you?
Without a word, Emma came over and hugged her father. Not knowing if Jon still liked her was what was eating her—not knowing why he hadn’t telephoned last night and feeling too proud to call any of her friends to talk about it, not wanting the hurt to show. That was bothering her. And her difficulty with calculus was really bothering her. And her painful period. Everything was bothering her, and she didn’t know how to get started. If she did get started, would her father even listen? That’s the way it always was. He’d give her attention for a minute and then he’d be off, to the office, to the phone, to his briefs, to wherever he went when he wasn’t being her father.
Over the years Emma had learned the secret passageways to Abe’s soul. Either she had to provoke him, as she was doing this morning, or she had to engage his lawyer’s mind, as she had done several months earlier while Abe was totally focused on a murder trial.
The case involved a businessman named Hamilton who had taken out a life insurance policy on his partner ten days before the partner was gunned down by a professional hit man. The DA was finding it easy to persuade the jury that the timing could not possibly be coincidental, and Abe had been racking his mind for an answer. Emma, finding that she simply couldn’t get his attention, had decided to try to help him figure out a commonsense rebuttal to the DA’s circumstantial case.
And she had.
“Daddy,” she said, popping into his home office late one night, “the answer is Chekhov.”
“Why Chekhov?” Abe asked, his head still buried in the books.
“Because Chekhov once told an aspiring dramatist that if you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, you had better use it by the third act. We read it in lit class.”
“So what does that have to do with the Hamilton case, my bright young daughter?”
“Everything, Daddy. Don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t see; show me,” Abe said, finally lifting his head to look at her.
“Your jurors see Chekhov’s theory on TV and in the movies every day. Don’t you get it, Daddy? On TV, when they show a businessman or a wife buying life insurance on someone, every viewer knows there’s going to be a murder, and they know who the murderer will be. It’s a setup.”
“You’ve got a point. Sure, on TV, when a character coughs or has a chest pain, you know he’s dying. There’s no such thing as a cold or indigestion. Everything has to be relevant to the drama.”
“But in real life, Daddy, the world is full of irrelevant actions and coincidences. People take out insurance policies all the time, and then the person lives till Willard Scott can put him on the Today show.”
“You’ve really got something there, Emma. I think I may use it.”
And Abe had used it. He’d convinced the jury not to look at the Hamilton case as if it were a made-for-TV movie, but rather as a slice of real life, full of irrelevant actions and coincidences. He’d asked the jurors how many of them had taken out life insurance on a loved one and what their neighbors would have thought if that loved one had died shortly thereafter.
After he’d won, several jurors had told him that his TV argument had turned them around.
Abe had taken Emma to Olives, her favorite restaurant, and charged the meal to the appreciative Hamilton. Over dinner Emma had informed Abe that coming up with the Chekhov idea had convinced her to become a criminal lawyer. Abe had smiled proudly but said nothing, afraid that if he were too encouraging, it might provoke her rebellious streak. Every time he told the story of the Hamilton case, he credited Emma with the victory.
Sometimes Emma couldn’t use her precocious intelligence to get her father’s attention. Sometimes she just wanted to be his little girl. Like now. This was the part he really loved—being the protective father. It took him back to a simpler time, when his role was much easier, to remove a splinter, to tell a story. Now i
t was so much harder, watching her make her own mistakes and knowing that he could not protect her very much.
Emma pulled herself from her father’s arms. Abe knew that for all his daughter’s apparent emotionality, she was most definitely his daughter. So he allowed her to move the conversation back into the comfort zone.
“So, Daddy, tell me how you would defend Campbell if you were asked to take the case.”
“I should be so lucky. This case is lose proof.”
“So you’ve already decided the victim is guilty.”
“Wait a minute, Emma dear. Who is the victim? All we know so far is that there is an accuser and an accused, and the accused is presumed innocent. That means the accuser is not presumed to be a victim—at least not yet.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know that. Do you think after all these years of being your daughter I don’t know that? What I want to know is: Would you do the sleaze thing and try to put the victim on trial? You know, go into her sexual history, what she was wearing, stuff like that?”
“Sure I would. If the court would let me. Because when I defend someone, I can only think about one thing: winning.”
“Even when the defendant is guilty of rape?”
“Look, Emma, not everyone accused of rape is guilty. Did I ever tell you about the ninety-nine-pound MIT nerd who was accused of raping the one-hundred-forty-five-pound woman rugby player?”
Emma interrupted: “Only about a hundred times. I even brought it up in my women’s group when we were discussing William Kennedy Smith. To defend you. Everyone gave me such a hard time about your stand on that Oprah show where you came down on the side of Smith and Tyson that I had to do something to protect our family reputation. After all, you’re my father, even if you are a dinosaur.”
“And did the girls buy the notion that the defendant just might be innocent?”
“Women, Dad, women! All right? My group believes that rape is the most heinous crime, even more heinous than murder, because it continues to hurt the victim for the rest of her life and because a rape victim who complains gets raped again on the witness stand.”
“I’m sure there are some in your group who believe that rape is so heinous an offense that even innocence shouldn’t be recognized as a defense,” Abe remarked, hoping to lighten the conversation. Emma gave another groan.
“Do you believe me when I tell you that the MIT kid was innocent?”
“I guess so. It depends what you mean by innocent. He certainly took advantage of her by threatening to stop studying with her the night before the final exam unless she slept with him.”
“That’s not rape,” Abe insisted.
“Not in a legal sense,” Emma agreed. “But a lot of feminists would regard it as moral rape to blackmail a woman by threatening to cut off an important relationship unless you ‘agree’ to do it.”
“Well, I’ll leave the moral distinctions to you and your friends. You leave the legal distinctions to me and to the law,” Abe said, aware that his haughty tone sounded somewhat hollow in his daughter’s court.
“As for Campbell,” he continued, “it sounds like an easy case to defend. Most athletes, particularly popular white athletes, tend to be acquitted of those kinds of charges. I don’t remember anything about Campbell’s background to suggest that he’s been in this kind of trouble before.”
“Unlike Mike Tyson.” Emma was familiar with her father’s perspective on the boxer’s case.
“That was a real tough one for Tyson’s lawyers, because Tyson came into the case with a reputation. And then his own trial lawyer portrayed him as an out-of-control animal. I would have handled it entirely differently, emphasizing his positive qualities. I remember reading that one of the jurors said after the conviction that it seemed as if his own trial lawyer thought he was probably guilty.”
“Well, he probably was.”
“I don’t believe it. From what I’ve read, Tyson was known as a pretty direct guy. The woman knew what he wanted from her before she went to his hotel room at two A.M.”
“See, Daddy, now you’re talking just like Tyson’s lawyer. He was a direct guy, and everyone knew he was only interested in sex. Not a great jury argument, Daddy.”
“You’re not a jury, my dear, bright daughter. I was making that argument to you.”
“Well, it didn’t work. And it wouldn’t work if you made that argument about Joe Campbell, either.”
“Look, Emma, you can’t generalize about athletes. They’re all different. Campbell has to be judged on his own merits and demerits.”
“Daddy, why do you always side with the men in these cases? You do have a daughter, you know. I would think that might make it easier to see the woman’s point of view.”
“It does. And I don’t side with the men. I side with the defendants.”
“Who just always happen to be men. Next you’ll be telling me that O. J. Simpson is innocent.”
“He is innocent, unless and until he were to be found guilty and the conviction affirmed on appeal. He’s presumed innocent.”
“Unfortunately his victims aren’t presumed dead. They’re really dead.”
“The question remains, who killed them. And in the Campbell case, the question is who is telling the truth.”
“All I know about Campbell is he’s soo cute. Some of my friends at school think he’s the sexiest player in the NBA. If you do get to represent him, can I get to meet him? Maybe even get into the Knicks locker room next time they play the Celts?”
“You’re not going into any locker room, little girl, unless you become a sportswriter, and then I’ll bring a lawsuit to make the guys cover up before I get you in.”
Emma got up from the table, placed her dish in the sink, and gave her father a kiss good-bye.
“What time are you going to be home from school?”
“Late, after our feminist group meeting. It’s about how all women are part lesbian and how to bring that part of you out of the closet.” Emma smiled to let him know she was teasing. She made a quick check of her hair and a glance at her body, using the full-length mirror kept expressly for this purpose in the foyer. Then she was out the door, leaving the smoky scent of her patchouli oil behind her.
As Abe packed his briefcase for the short walk to his office, his mind turned from Emma to Charlie Odell—the last and most painful in a series of recent losses that had begun to tarnish his golden touch. All tough ones, but the media didn’t understand. How could they know that his “loss” in the Johnny Brill case was really a victory? Sure, Brill had been wrongly convicted of insurance fraud for torching his own bankrupt bar. What the media didn’t know was that the bar was actually turning a profit that Brill was hiding by keeping two sets of books. Abe could easily have proved that Brill was making so much money that he had no motive to burn down his cash cow for insurance, but then he’d have exposed Brill’s long history of tax fraud, which carried a much longer sentence. What a mess that had turned out to be, along with several other of Abe’s recent cases.
At least Abe still had a chance to undo the mess in the Charlie Odell case. Today would be devoted to planning the next battle in the legal war to save Charlie O.’s life.
Chapter Two
Abe walked briskly to his office atop a three-floor walk-up on Mt. Auburn Street. The building had once been an old-fashioned boardinghouse. Now it was an old-fashioned office building, housing a psychiatrist, a nutritionist, a private investigator, and a mysterious outfit called Resources Limited.
As he opened the front door, Abe heard a breathless voice calling from the stairs on the landing below: “Abie baby.” Without even turning, he knew it was his old friend from Dorchester, Alex O’Donnell, who was obviously on his way up to Abe’s office. Since hearing about Campbell’s arrest, Abe had hoped Alex might get in touch. For a moment he had even thought about calling him. In the end he’d decided not to because he didn’t want to become the kind of lawyer who solicits business.
O’Donnell had grown up down
the block from Abe in what was then, and still remained, Boston’s largest working-class community. The Dorchester of Abe’s childhood was an economically poor but culturally rich amalgam of “first generation” Irish, Italian, and Jewish offspring of parents who had left Europe in the proverbial quest of “a better life for their children.” As Abe’s life showed, the long journey from the working class to Harvard could occur in a single generation—it just required, as his father had always counseled him, “an equal measure of brains and breaks.” Abe, fortunately, had gotten plenty of both.
In the neighborhood where Abe and Alex grew up, the confluence of immigrant families, in the same tightly packed neighborhoods—often in triple-decker houses with three identical apartments—led to bonds of trust and tolerance that, sadly, were all too rare in the larger society. In childhood the parental mistrusts of the “stranger” or the “other” were diluted for Abe, Alex, and their friends because daily they were each other’s best evidence that “the mick,” “the wop,” or “the kike” could be your confidant, your ally, your most trusted friend. The commonality of a working-class childhood forged their bond: in adulthood Abe had come to understand what a gift that special upbringing had bestowed upon him.
These childhood memories had been transformed into friendships Abe measured in decades. The one shared with Alex O’Donnell ranked among the longest. They had played punch-ball, stickball, basketball, and Scrabble together. Alex had been a great athlete as a kid, a short playmaker and shooting guard who had gotten a scholarship to play basketball at Boston College. But he’d hurt his knee during freshman year and become the team manager. After college he’d become an agent, specializing in basketball players. Though they had drifted apart over the years, O’Donnell always sent Abe a Jewish New Year’s card—the only one he usually got—as well as news clips about his famous clients.
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