Bluebird Rising

by John Decure

  Dale stared at his feet. “Yeah, sure. When?”

  I checked my wristwatch: almost 3 P.M. “We go now, we’ll beat the rush hour.”

  He stood very still before the glass. “Hell of a streak I’m on right now. Sometimes I wonder, what is it going to take?”

  We watched the sparrows hop and flutter in a window-ledge puddle, Dale silent, probably mulling his regrets. Shadows ghosted across the sluggish street scene on Hill Street. I was mulling a few things myself, hoping I’d done the right thing by taking on the problems of Dale Bleeker, hoping a plan of action would begin to take shape—posthaste. Hoping the preacher who commissioned the PRAYER CHANGES THINGS sign knew what he was talking about, if it came to that.

  Two

  We walked outside to the crosswalk at Twelfth and Olive, squinting into a field of golden glare on wet asphalt. Dale was looking pretty freaked.

  “Been out of work going on a year,” he mumbled. “You don’t know what that’ll do to you.”

  “Must have been rough.”

  “How could I have missed this one?”

  I avoided eye contact. “Don’t worry about it. They say hindsight’s twenty-twenty.”

  Dale snorted. “Not if you’re blind.”

  He had once been a gifted trial lawyer. During the years I was sweating through law school I followed his career through newspaper clippings that often read like movie scripts. I remembered a socialite’s double murder of her husband and his lover, and Dale shredding the woman’s self-defense motive with testimony from a shooting-range employee who’d seen her taking target practice the day before the killings. He’d handled a city hall bribery scandal involving rigged contract-bidding, and sent the mayor to prison when he linked the politician’s down payment on a new yacht dollar for dollar to a hefty “consulting fee” simultaneously noted in a local contractor’s books. There was the prominent surgeon who killed his student intern—and his own unborn child whom the intern was carrying—by staging her accidental death by drowning; Dale nailed the pompous ass by bringing in the best forensic expert in the nation to testify that, based on his examination of the fetus, the intern had been strangled first. Just now, I could not recall ever reading about Dale Bleeker losing a case.

  Appearances aside, this was a lawyer of significant experience and savvy—perhaps too smart to play the well-paid dupe in a UPL scheme. UPL means the unauthorized practice of law, a confidence game that involves nonattorneys doing routine legal work at cut-rate prices, often using an absentee lawyer’s bar identification number to give their dealings legitimacy. UPL predictably leads to late filings and blown deadlines, nonappearances at scheduled hearings, disappearing retainer fees, and worse. People who run the scam typically stick around just long enough to burn a lot of unwitting clients before disappearing—only to pop up later, in some other community, under a snappy new name that promises some form of shortcut or another. UPL is a criminal misdemeanor, a felony if fraud can be proven, and DA’s offices do prosecute UPL cases, which meant that Dale Bleeker, a former prosecutor of criminals, should at least have been aware enough to pick up the signs. Then again, the man appeared to have taken the news I’d given him like a rib shot. He’d endured a run of bad luck, made some faulty decisions, maybe hit a patch of alcoholic excess that further blurred his perspective. Enough distraction to explain his latest professional misstep. Perhaps.

  The signal changed a few feet ahead of us, but Dale headed into the crosswalk as if he didn’t see the commuter bus roaring up Olive and through the red. I clamped a hand on his shoulder a second before the bus tore past and shot a wave of chocolate-colored gutter water up over the curb.

  “Jesus!” Dale yelped. His big hands were held open like Moses demanding that Nature provide an explanation. “That light was red! You see that?” A particle cloud swept through behind the bus, the scent of diesel and dust settling into our lungs. I let go of his shoulder and let him straighten his jacket. His hazel eyes had gone dark and were rattling in his skull as if the hardwiring behind them had frayed. “Jesus, doesn’t anyone obey the law anymore?”

  I looked away, for his remark had brought the wienie-wagging conviction to mind. I could taste my disappointment, as bitter as the exhaust fumes stinging the edge of my nostrils. Dale Bleeker had been a senior prosecutor who made a living putting criminals away, an ace trial lawyer, a role model—my fucking role model. I wanted to say one thing to him now: What happened? Don’t you realize that I used to want to be like you, to control a courtroom like you did? One true voice, one clear-eyed vision. To coolly reason my way through anything, reducing, deducing, analogizing, hypothesizing, trusting my instincts and intellect. Jesus, doesn’t anyone obey the law anymore, indeed.

  But the probation monitoring had been my idea, not his, and now he was probably in some form of trouble. I decided this wasn’t the time to voice my personal disappointment.

  “You’re driving,” I told him. “Where’s your ride?”

  He pointed across the street to the only machine at the far curb, a faded gold Buick Regal the size of a Rose Parade float. A wirewheel hubcap was missing from the left rear tire. Bird shit riddled the hood and roof, a thousand little bull’s-eyes that instantly got me thinking about the last-stand shoot-out in Bonnie and Clyde. The front end had minor damage, the chrome bumper rippled on one side like aluminum foil, streaks of candy-apple green paint from the other car mingling with fresh rust at the point of impact.

  We headed over. “Why am I driving?” Dale said as we left the crosswalk.

  “I’m having car trouble.”

  Dale slowed a bit on his final approach to the Buick. “Not too regal anymore, I guess.” Embarrassed. I suppose he saw me checking the crapped-up roof, because he said, “Damn birds. Public menace.

  “So, how’s it run?”

  My question sounded like pleasant conversation, but I was already calculating survival odds, picturing myself trapped in this ratty yacht on the freeway. I envisioned the motor sputtering and stalling at an inopportune moment, Dale frozen behind the wheel, a speeding big rig roaring forth to wipe all traces of my sorry ass from the planet.

  “Strong. It’s an eighty-one, but low miles, fifty-three-K original. I never had much of a commute.”

  “You live in Long Beach, up in Belmont Heights,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “I’m nearby, in Christianitos.”

  He smiled. “Nice little town. Like the Beach Boys said, if everybody had an ocean …”

  I thought of the body jam that tramples my tiny hometown every summer, the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Main, the cars illegally parked across the back of my garage in the alley, the fast-food wrappers blowing down the street like tumbleweeds in the afternoon sea breeze.

  “Sometimes I wish they had their own ocean,” I said. “That way they could just stay home.” I know it’s a crappy attitude, but when you live at a place as nice as the beach, there are times when it’s hard to remember to share.

  He fished for his car keys, frowning as if he was turning something over in his mind. Fast-moving clouds skirted over our heads and took the sun, sending a chill through me. “Got ’em,” Dale said. His empty pants pocket flapped open like a dirty tongue, a cigarette butt stuck to the tip. “So how’d you get to work?”

  “Blue Line.” The Blue Line is one of the tiny handful of commuter trains that constitute L.A.’s pathetic mass-transit system. It goes from the downtown financial district through the industrial blight of Vernon, making stops in such South Central garden spots as Watts, Lynwood, and Compton, neighborhoods that blond white boys like me would never, ever visit alone after hours without an absolute death wish. But the train keeps chugging south, eventually running out of tracks a half hour later just shy of Ocean Boulevard and the Queen Mary in seaside Long Beach.

  “That must be interesting,” Dale said.

  “I had no choice. My car wouldn’t go this morning.”

  Dale stuck a key in the passenger door and jerk
ed it open; when he did, an empty Coors can fell into the gutter. “Whoops.” Acting surprised. “What have we here?”

  I stuck out my hand. “An open container. Here, I’ll find a trash can.”

  Christ, what a shame if he was just another drunk. A good many low-level bar cases involving otherwise fine lawyers in trouble for the first time are rooted in drugs and booze.

  “It’s not what you might be thinking, J.” Dale said it as if he’d read my thoughts. “I recycle.” He popped open the rear trunk and pulled out a huge clear plastic bag stuffed with smashed aluminum beer cans. “See?”

  I was unconvinced. Dale stuffed the bag back into the trunk and slammed the top. We both stood straight and still behind his boat of a car, without a twitch, like gunmen in a standoff.

  “Just trust me, okay?” he said. “I’m trusting you.”

  I said to myself, Shit, he’s right. This was my idea. You take on a probationer, really intend to see him through his term, well, you do it together.

  “Fifty-three-K original,” I said, sliding up to the passenger door. “Bet you’ve never even had it in the fast lane.”

  Dale shook his head and grinned. “What you don’t know.”

  I got in, dead set on locating a working seat belt before we swung into traffic.

  We drove north on the Harbor Freeway toward Interstate 5 and the city of Glendale, the lines of rain-spotted cars before us slowing to a stop-and-start, lane-jumping turtle race as we curved past Dodger Stadium and into the Elysian Park tunnels. Dale told me about the help-wanted ad he’d spotted in the Around- Town News, a free rag that always sports a front-page piece or two on some new restaurant or art exhibit but does its real business with the legal-notice listings in the back.

  It seemed like an odd place to find a help-wanted ad. Before coming to the state bar, I’d spent a few years working in juvenile dependency court, representing parents who abused or neglected their children using every method imaginable—and a few more ways you would not care to imagine. Some cases took years to resolve, and sometimes my clients would lose interest and drift outside the county’s viewfinder before reclaiming custody of their kids. The Department of Child Welfare used to send those wanderers statutory Dear John letters in the Around-Town News, giving sufficient legal notice in small print by announcing the imminent termination of so-and-so’s parental rights at an upcoming hearing. In three years not a single parent I represented had ever even heard of the Around-Town News, let alone responded to a notice in time to do something about it. This made the little fish-wrap a pretty effective tool for notice-giving county prosecutors. No appearance, no contest—no problem.

  But most people wouldn’t go looking for a professional position using the Around-Town News classifieds. I wondered if Dale knew this. Maybe he actually was as desperate as he looked.

  We crawled through the freeway tunnels, our windows down to keep them from fogging, the damp air pungent with the scent of wet rubber and carbon monoxide, impatient drivers leaning on their horns as if that would part the sea of vehicles before them. Dale told me an answering service had patched him through to a guy on a cell phone on the Ventura Freeway, a hollow voice yammering at Dale like he was using a tin can and string. Mr. Julian, the guy called himself, withholding his first name as if he were a man of the world.

  “Sounds like a hairdresser,” I said.

  “Looked more like a wealthy goombah, except he was a kid.”

  Dale had summed up his work experience in a phrase: twenty-two years and five hundred—plus jury trials. Julian’s response was equally terse: That’ll do. Then he gave Dale directions to a place on Broadway down in Chinatown, leaning on his horn at some truck that had swerved into his lane, bitching about the traffic as if no one else in L.A. had noticed it before. Dale knew he didn’t like the guy, but he needed the work.

  They met the next afternoon, Julian in an Italian suit, black shirt, and gold jewelry, the tin-can-and-string cell glued to his ear, looking like a Hollywood wannabe.

  “An employment interview in a Chinese dim sum palace—the hell is that?” Dale said.

  “You have to wonder.”

  “Potstickers, the guy whispering how they’re simply otherworldly, man, chin dripping with that sweet ginger sauce, barely even glancing at my resume. He was too busy stuffing his face with potstickers.”

  “Must have been rough. I mean, for a professional of your experience.”

  “It was, but I was thinking a job is a job, that’s all.”

  I could respect that. “So how was the food, anyway?”

  He glared at me. “When those steel carts wheeled up to our table, I didn’t even look.”

  Over lunch, Julian told Dale he ran a small law office in Glendale purportedly staffed by a cadre of crack paralegals who handled both the client contacts and the paperwork. Simple, low-cost stuff: Chapter 13 bankruptcy filings, wills, living trusts, burial instructions, name changes. Applications for green cards, amnesty, political asylum. Services that could be performed more economically by nonlawyers—that was the angle. A volume business, and those numbers piled up quick.

  “‘Filthy lucre, pal’—that was the term Julian used,” Dale said. “The opportunity of a lifetime.”

  Dale’s job—if you could call it that—was to review and sign off on an occasional document or two that required an attorney for filing with a court, nothing more. For this he would collect $6,500 a month.

  “Knew it sounded too good to be true,” Dale told me, those hangdog eyes of his radiating grief, his shoulders hunched over as if he was already doing penance. “Too good to be true, no doubt.”

  But his employment prospects were a joke that wasn’t funny anymore.

  “You figured you couldn’t afford to say no,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And in your three weeks on the job thus far, you haven’t been asked to review a single case, meet a client, peruse a file.”

  “Nope.” A red Ford Mustang cut into our lane without signaling and Dale leaned on his horn. Then he waited, and said, “This is bad, isn’t it?”

  It was classic UPL, I thought. No doubt about it.

  “We’ll see.”

  We finally caught the Interstate 5 northbound and a little relief from the commuter derby. The hills behind Glendale were dark and grainy from the rain, like giant piles of used-up coffee grounds. I leaned my head out the window, a rush of clean air shooting up my nose. A storm drain running parallel to the freeway frothed and bubbled like a real live river, which around here qualified as a spectacle of nature. Somewhere along these concrete banks right now, a street kid from a run-down inner-city neighborhood without a single swimming pool was spellbound by the same view, goofing and tossing rocks at a tattooed buddy, his pant legs rolled up as he waded in knee-deep to snag a bobbing TV set for some target practice. A half hour later he’d be floating eight miles downriver, gulping muddy water, hypothermia setting in, his eyes blinded by the white light coming as a rescue crew tried to save his life by casting ropes from an overpass. For a supposedly laid-back city, L.A. has its unforgiving moments. Thousands of them.

  “Hell,” Dale said, “they didn’t even invite me to the office, not once. I called the number a week ago—concerned, you know. Julian phoned me back, discouraged the idea, saying you wouldn’t want to get in the way of a smooth operation for no good reason, would you?”

  “We’ve got good reason,” I said. “Considering the fee you’re getting monthly for services not actually performed.”

  Dale’s cheeks had lost their color. “Think so?”

  “They probably have a stamp of your signature in heavy use, since a lot of those filings require an attorney.”

  We drove on, Dale death-gripping the wheel of the big Buick, the blood returning to his face now, filling in beneath the shadow of beard. The color of rage, I suppose.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I told him. “A city this size, so many people moving around all the time, coming and g
oing, UPL is a pretty common game.”

  “UPL,” he said. Then he sped up for no apparent reason, changing lanes without signaling.

  I waited, figuring he should know what it was. “The unauthorized practice of law,” I finally said. Could a former DA be this obtuse? Or was he playing dumb? We were approaching the Los Feliz off-ramp. “Get off here,” I told him.

  “So how’s it work?” His apparent earnestness made me puzzle even harder.

  “Easy. You take a nonlawyer, a Mr. Julian type looking for a quick buck. Hire a paralegal or two to do the grunt work, a downand-out lawyer to lend his bar number—” I realized what I’d said. “Sorry. I didn’t—”

  Dale waved a hand. “No offense taken. Continue.”

  “Then you spread the word. Let me tell you, it’s quite a hook.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  We got off on Los Feliz, turning right just across from a threepar pitch-and-putt course sprinkled with retirees.

  “You tell people you can deliver low-cost legal services without the lawyer,” I explained, “because who needs the greedy bastards anyway, am I right? See, you’re working the average Joe’s mistrust of lawyers against him.”

  “Then what?”

  “That’s it. You sit back and watch the line stretch around the block.”

  I briefly considered telling him about how hardcore certain UPL practitioners can be about making money and how quickly they will destroy a lawyer’s professional standing in the process. How, just last summer, an unwitting lawyer hired into a San Jose UPL operation had turned himself in to the bar and exposed his employer when he realized what was going on. The next morning he was shot twice in the head, execution-style, in a supermarket parking lot. But I said no more. Dale knew all he needed to about UPL for now. I didn’t want him falling apart on me before the situation even unfolded.

  We came to Brand Boulevard, one of the major drags in Glendale, made a left, and quickly spotted the place a few signals up. A white Glendale Lo-Cost Law Center sign that looked new was settled in among a block-long row of businesses, a nail salon to one side and a Cuban bakery on the other, slanted parking spaces along the curb. Dale swung across the double yellow and glided into an open spot in front of the bakery. My window was down, and I could smell the pork sandwiches through the open door.