by John Decure
Next to the Persian restaurant stood an abandoned old revival hall, its bricks painted a faded, frosty green. High up, a triangular sign hung over the side, a neon cross and fat block lettering speaking a message of hope: PRAYER CHANGES THINGS.
“Prayer changes things, huh?” Dale Bleeker said, reading the sign aloud.
I shrugged. “I’d like to think so.” I mean, why not?
He looked away. “Nice closing argument by the little lady, huh.”
“Peachy.” I caught his smirk in the reflection. “I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine.” He seemed unsure of himself, and I could almost hear the gears grinding inside his head. “So why am I here?” he said a minute later.
I gestured toward a chair but he stayed at the window. “I told you, I’m your monitor. I’m going to help you get in compliance and stay there until your probation is up.”
The rain had gone for now and we both watched the checkers of light. The sparrows were fluttering back to their spot on the gray metal ledge outside my windows. Bleeker rubbed at his beard, which sounded like sandpaper. “Right. You state bar guys are all the same, just looking out for the brethren.”
The attitude was tiresome, a cliché, something you had to learn to endure if your business, like mine, was disciplining bad lawyers. “Good thing you called Probation when you did, Mr. Bleeker.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
“You’re already four weeks late for your intake interview. Apparently you aren’t getting the mail the Probation Unit has been—”
“Apparently.”
“I looked up your membership-records address. It’s a residence. Is there a problem with your mail delivery?”
“Problem is, it’s none of your damn business.” He turned his back on the view and his eyelids narrowed. I figured he was working up the sack to make for the door. “Look, I’ve made a decision,” he said.
I rested a hand on the back of one of the chairs facing my desk. “Good. Sit down.” I wanted him to stay.
Bleeker stayed put by the window. “No offense, but I’ve decided I don’t want a state bar prosecutor as my probation monitor. It was bad enough getting dinged by you guys following the conviction.” He shook his head. “But I’m not letting you set me up for another fall. No way.” Licking his lips as if his throat was dry.
My objective had been to ease into the past with him so as not to cause him undue embarrassment about his ragged present state of affairs. But this wasn’t going according to plan. I had to tell him. “All right, but wait …”
“All I’ve been doing my whole life is waiting.” He sounded defeated when he said it.
“I know you,” I said. He stared back, befuddled. “I mean, I knew you. From a while back.”
He absently gnawed at a fingernail, then rubbed the side of his neck, which was red and chafed like a bad sunburn. I could hear those gears grinding again. “You do look a little familiar,” he said, squinting a little. “Hair used to be longer?”
I nodded. “Let me make it easy for you. Does the name Thelma Ruffo jog your memory?”
He smiled for the first time since I’d seen him perusing the rack of how-not-to-get-shafted-by-your-attorney brochures the bar displays down in reception, a little while before my trial with Renaldo was to resume this afternoon. I hadn’t recognized him at all as I’d brushed past his shoulder then, not two hours ago, the old Dale Bleeker still alive and thriving in my memory. It’s funny how the better part of a man can outlive the reality of who and what he has become. Still, I wasn’t ready to abandon my belief in the man, and standing there, trying to jockey him into a chair in my little government lawyer’s office, I figured that this would be the shape of our dichotomy.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, “juror number four, am I right?” I nodded. “You were the big blond kid, college student.” He sized up my upper body. “Still got those guns, that barrel chest. You lift?”
“I surf,” I said. I got this way from paddling a board through lines of white water for the last twenty-five years or so. “That is, when I can find the time.” It hadn’t been easy lately.
Dale Bleeker looked tickled to have made the connection. “You were a tough nut. Gave me zero visual feedback, didn’t crack a smile. Youngest foreman I’d seen in a lotta years, too.”
“That was what you call leadership by default,” I said. “No one else wanted it.”
Dale kept grinning. “Hell, I thought I’d lost you before I even rested my case.”
He was right. Thelma Ruffo, a dowdy baby-sitter with a big black purse and these round, sad eyes, really had the Aunt Bea aura going for her. She sat there, hands folded, looking like she’d just finished baking a pie from scratch, and I couldn’t see it. The woman just didn’t look capable of heisting six pieces of fine jewelry from the well-to-do family she’d worked for, and in all honesty, my fellow jurors and I were straining for a way to believe her. The pawnbroker could only say he was reasonably certain it was she, the receipt had another name on it, and her prints weren’t on the stones. She denied it all indignantly, invoking God as her witness more than a few times. But Dale Bleeker took his time, his crossexamination so low-key it seemed more like a friendly chat. Thelma Ruffo did the rest. We deliberated for forty minutes, convicting her on every count.
“She almost had me,” I said.
“Burned you but good, didn’t she? I could see it in your face when the verdict was read.”
“You were very good. It was like you understood something no one else did.”
He shrugged. “Not really. I knew the evidence. Knew the truth. That can be a powerful weapon.”
“It made a difference, the whole experience.” I stopped, mulling my next words. “I mean, it made a difference for me. Made me want to be a lawyer.”
He’d lost the grin as if a raft of bad memories had come calling for him. “Yeah, well, whatever.” Then he read the nameplate on my desk, the one my fiancée, Carmen, had surprised me with when the state bar hired me a few years back: “J. Shepard.”
From where he stood he couldn’t see the photo of Carmen on my desk, her straight black hair that, when it swishes, reveals a fine layer of rust-colored strands that twinkle in the sun like the strings on a harp. Her eyes in the photo appear to be black, but they are actually a rich cocoa brown that can either pull a man in or turn him away, depending upon her mood, and they are many. The beauty mark above her mouth adds an imperfection to the marvelous symmetry of her face that I can describe only as perfect, and her smile is so natural, it makes you believe she is humble about her physical gifts—which in fact, she is. I keep that shot at an angle only I can see from my chair. You could say I’m hoarding Carmen’s smile for myself alone.
I’d offered my probationer a perfunctory handshake downstairs, which he’d rejected. I tried him again.
“My pleasure, Mr. Bleeker.”
“Never mind that, call me Dale.” We shook. He was apparently through with the bar bashing for now, and he slowly took a seat in that hunched-over way, guiding the creaking frame in for a landing. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
I went behind my desk, a huge L-shaped cherry job that looks a tad elaborate for a government lawyer’s digs. Where to begin? I was still a little jarred by Dale Bleeker’s general state of decline—but curious, too. His lewd and lascivious conviction certainly didn’t fit the picture I’d preserved in my memory through law school and five years of practice. I wanted to ask him what had happened, but it seemed too soon.
He crossed his legs and waited. I wasn’t quite ready yet for a dry discussion of terms and conditions of probation, either, but I found his file and opened it.
Someone rolled a set of knuckles across my office door. Eloise Horton, my manager, poked her head in. “Excuse me,” she said, nodding toward Dale Bleeker as if he were the one who needed an excuse for being here. Eloise is not too keen on good manners, and she doesn’t mind letting you know they aren’t a
priority. “J., you didn’t turn in your F-due report yet for this month.” Ever the bureaucrat, Eloise is passionately in love with all manner and form of state bar reportage.
F-due stands for filings due, which means cases assigned to a trial attorney that have not yet been filed. The idea is the fewer F-dues on your report, the better—that is, if you don’t mind filing a lot of cases that aren’t yet ready for prosecution, and a few more that will never be. Management also constantly squeezes our investigators to keep their numbers up and backlog down, which means that a lot of half-baked cases get forwarded for filing. If you slow down to prep the cases that need prepping, you’ll have cases busting out of your credenza in no time.
I haven’t even got a credenza, just a floor-to-ceiling wall of file boxes.
“You know me, boss, I’m the Paul Masson of F-dues—I’ll file no case before its time,” I said in an attempt at levity, which Eloise deflected with a glacial stare.
Eyeing Dale, she leaned against the door frame and sighed. “Do it now, if you don’t mind, J.”
Eloise is about my height, a few inches over six feet. She wears her hair in a short Afro and always wears these flats that look like slippers because she’s got legs like a gazelle’s and I suppose she doesn’t want to look any taller. I’ve heard some bar people say she was once a track star, a sprinter. Apparently she won a medal once in an international meet and caused a big controversy by slouching her way through the national anthem, her right hand balled into a fist over her heart. She later claimed she wasn’t making any kind of black power statement, her feet were just tired. Sure, whatever. That sounded about right for the Eloise I knew. A complex, headstrong pain in the ass.
I found my half-finished report. “Is handwriting okay?” I asked Eloise.
“Not a problem.” She looked at her watch. “Reggie’s meeting with the board of governors tomorrow morning. He’ll need our unit’s numbers.”
“Right,” I said, scribbling the names of a half dozen case files I’d not yet even opened. Describing their status took only three words: reviewing for filing.
Eloise was talking about our chief trial counsel, Reginald Hewitt, the only other African-American manager in the bar’s discipline operation and the man who’d brought Eloise in as an assistant chief, sans job interview. They were reputedly close, had to be for her to get hired the way she did, but then, I’d never seen them get together for anything but management meetings. A lot of my colleagues don’t think much of Eloise, because she had little trial experience when the chief hired her, yet here she was managing a unit of trial lawyers. I didn’t much care; she’d watched me do a few trials, decided I knew what I was doing, and had the good sense to leave me alone. Except, that is, for the constant numbers game she forced on me weekly.
But in fairness to management, I know what the numbers are intended for. They keep us in business.
The State Bar of California is a strange political being, a pseudo— state agency that’s actually a private organization financed solely by the mandatory dues it charges the lawyers of this state for the privilege of practicing law. Although the bar is essentially in the consumer-protection business, it taps not a single taxpayer dollar. Yet, because the bar was created by the state in its constitution, its yearly dues rate and overall operations budget must be approved by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor. This means that any politician in Sacramento who is less than enthralled with the concept of regulating the legal profession can stand in the way of the dues budget, disparage the bar for sloth and wastefulness, howl for reform, even call for its abolition. This he can do every time that bill comes around again for a vote. Most politicians are lawyers, so you can imagine how popular bar bashing is with the capitol crew—it has become something of a blood sport. The numbers we crank out are to show both our supporters and our detractors that we’re winning the game.
I finished up my report. Dale Bleeker shifted in his chair as if he could feel the bad vibe between my boss and me and wanted to shake it off. I handed the F-due to her and waited.
“You’re still behind,” Eloise said, “but a good month will cure that.”
She looked at me as if that were my call to kiss some managerial ass, but I knew that was not going to happen, the way I knew the sun would be setting tonight and rising again tomorrow. She was out of line to be talking productivity with me in mixed company.
“You know I’ve got complex cases,” I said, which was true. Most of my caseload involved white-collar fraud, major misappropriations, forgery, and embezzlement. Lots of tricky paper trails to uncover. These cases take a bit longer to prepare than your common one-count failure-to-perform case, where some poor boob misread his calendar and filed suit after the statute of limitations had expired. But when it comes to F-due reports, a case is a case. This makes no sense, yet around here the management is not exactly clamoring for my opinion on how to produce more meaningful statistics.
“Just make an effort,” she said, her lips tight.
I was tired of her pissy mood. “I’m in a meeting,” I said. “I will have to speak with you later.”
Her high forehead wrinkled the way it does when she gets peeved, which is frequent when she’s around me. “Looking forward to it already.” Eloise turned and walked out, perusing my report with a tiny shake of her head.
“My,” Dale Bleeker said, cracking a smile. “Lotta love floating around this place.”
“Who was it that said bosses are like diapers?”
“Full of shit and always on your ass? I don’t know. A very wise person.”
“Amen.” His teeth were discolored but straight. Despite his broken-down appearance, I rather liked Dale Bleeker’s company.
The sun was making a move on the clouds outside my window, and the room brightened. At the moment I was glad I’d taken a chance and volunteered to be Bleeker’s probation monitor. He’d obviously been through hard times of late, fired from his job because of his conviction, professionally humiliated and forced to start over. His other problems I could only guess at, but the man had been an example of good lawyering to me once, exploding my own studied indifference to matters of serious long-term employment. Dale Bleeker had inspired me at just the right time, and it had always seemed a most unexpected gift in my life. I was still hoping to somehow return the favor.
“How about yourself, you working right now?” I asked.
He got a funny look in his eyes, the kind of look a witness gets when you catch him in a lie. “Well, yeah. I am.”
“So, what are you doing?”
He drew a tired breath and stared at the loose papers on my desk. “Good question,” he said. “I’ve had the job three weeks now.” Then he stood, straightened his back like he was testing a rusty hinge that needed oiling, went back to the window and resumed his gaze at the streets below. “Thing is, I still don’t know when the work part gets under way. I keep waiting for a phone call but nothing’s happened, haven’t heard a word since I got hired. Got my first paycheck, though. Last week.”
I didn’t get it. Here was a disgraced criminal prosecutor with no real job prospects—except, perhaps, a shot at starting a solo criminal-defense practice, which took time, patience, and a little capital to establish. But Dale Bleeker hadn’t started his own office; apparently he didn’t even have enough change in his pocket to get his shoes shined. You could almost smell the desperation on his clothes.
“How’s the pay?” I asked.
“Pretty good.” He blushed. “Actually, darned good.”
“What are we talking about?”
“Sixty-five hundred a month.”
“Nice. And you haven’t done a thing?”
“Like I said, I’m still waiting.” But Dale seemed more concerned now. “Funny, isn’t it?”
“You haven’t met a single client yet?”
“Nope.”
“Haven’t actually been to court, or filed anything?”
“No, I haven’t.”
> This was starting to sound familiar, and I didn’t like it. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I think they might be using your license, Mr. Bleeker.”
His face seemed to tighten, as if he was taking on a new level of pain. “Oh, that’s just great. And please, you can call me Dale.”
“If they are, it’s illegal, for them and for you. They could wreck your career in a hurry.”
“You mean what’s left of it.”
I was glad my windows didn’t open to a balcony, because Dale Bleeker probably would’ve been tuning up for a swan dive by now. A bank of rain clouds momentarily blocked the sun, their shadows riding up the downtown high-rises like a rolling blackout.
“Shoulda known,” he said. “Never been out of work before … I mean, not until lately. It just felt … felt so good to get employed. Damn! What was I even … Ah, damn it to hell!”
Damn right he should have known. Dale Bleeker had been a prosecutor for over twenty years. Hadn’t he ever heard of the unauthorized practice of law? It is a crime. Or maybe he knew what kind of job he was taking and just didn’t care anymore. Maybe he was jerking my chain just now. I thought of Trixie Podette doing her Sound of Music routine on Judge Renaldo a little while ago. Careful, I told myself. Don’t let this thing get out of hand.
His hazel eyes searched my face for a reaction. “So, what do we do now?”
“We may have to get you unemployed. Fast.”
“What if it’s too late already? They could have used my name on a hundred cases by now.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. “We’ll go out there, see how deeply you’re …” That didn’t sound so good, so I started over. “We’ll check it out.”
