by John Decure
The law center looked sleepy—no line around the block today. A girl in skintight fake leopard pants and a low-cut copper halter top was standing on the sidewalk not far from the law center’s entrance, conducting a major search through the contents of her purse.
“We might want to talk to her,” I said, “see if she was a client.”
The girl finally found a stick of gum, popped it into her mouth, and strolled to a vintage cherry red Porsche roadster parked next to us. She caught me checking her out through my open window but didn’t seem to mind.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m J.”
“Gina.”
“How you doing?” I privately winced. How unoriginal can you get?
“All right, considering I’m heading in to work.” She leaned against her roadster. “Bummer on a nice afternoon like this, but oh well.”
“What are you doing here?”
She laughed as if to say Wouldn’t you like to know? Then she said “Leaving” with a perfectly straight face.
So much for my skills as an investigator. But when she gunned her motor, Gina handed me a business card through her window before she zoomed off, the Porsche sustaining a low roar that was a pure triumph of German engineering, all the way down the block. I gave the card to Dale for inspection.
He smiled. “Our Cups Runneth Over,” he announced. It was a topless juice bar on Ventura Boulevard, apparently specializing in busty help and wheat grass shooters. He handed the card back to me. “What’ll they think of next, huh?”
“I’m all for good health.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, grinning like a wolf. I thought of my fiancée, Carmen, how gratified she’d be if she knew I was following up on a “lead” that wore leopard-skin pants. Better to focus on what we could ascertain inside the center, for now.
We got out and stepped onto the wide sidewalk. Through the front windows I could see a short row of desks and an Asian-looking man in armpit-stained short sleeves typing at a computer terminal, a cigarette dangling from his lips—the center’s lone paralegal for today.
“High-class operation,” Dale observed. I glanced at the towering glass bank buildings up the road a quarter mile, the place where people bought and sold investments over the phone and real attorneys charged real-attorney prices for their services. Another world.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said.
Dale tried to straighten up, cinching up the knot in his tie and sliding his thumbs along his collar to smooth out the wrinkles. He seemed to be suffering from a case of nerves, his breathing labored. I tried to be patient, watched him pull a state bar visitor badge out of his jacket pocket and inspect it.
“When we left your office, we went a different way than when we came up,” he said.
“I’ll take care of it tomorrow.” I reached for the badge and pocketed it.
“That was the back elevator we used, wasn’t it?” His observation was correct but I said nothing. “I was wondering … are you embarrassed to be seen with me? Because …” His voice was wavering. “If you are, just … let’s just end this probation monitoring arrangement right here and now.”
I stared into the law center, not knowing what to tell Dale. Inside, cigarette smoke floated in a fluorescent haze. A paint-bynumbers seascape hung on the wall above the lone paralegal, two-dimensional breakers battering a cardboard-brown beach, a cartoon rendering. The place was cut-rate all the way and didn’t appear to be inhabited by an attorney—a bad indicator for a business calling itself a law center, what I had expected. If UPL was involved, I had to investigate; I could tell Dale as much and leave it at that. But I would be lying. He had inspired me once, stoked my ambition at exactly the right time. Now he was on a slide, and I wanted to stop it. I was reasonably certain Eloise Horton would say I was wasting my time—time better spent filing new cases—if she knew. Well fuck it, I decided, there’s more to being a lawyer than filing cases. She didn’t have to know, at least for now.
“I was trying to avoid my boss,” I told him.
“How come?”
I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the bakery window. In my dark blue suit, brittle sunlight flooding the sidewalk behind me, I looked as thick as a bodyguard and not very tan anymore. My blond hair used to glow with youthful streaks, but it looked flat and thick with dark roots. This winter the surf hadn’t been much, and the crowds at the pier were worse than ever. I’d been passing on surfing a lot this season.
“I wasn’t really supposed to be your monitor,” I said. “It’s generally not done. You screw up probation, your monitor can wind up testifying against you about the violation. It wouldn’t look so hot to have a bar prosecutor doing that.” I looked away. “But I didn’t think it would come to that. I felt like I knew you, from before. I wanted to help you, give you an inside track.”
Dale seemed to soften with that bit of information. “I’m not concerned about your being a prosecutor,” he said. “That was my gig too. If there’s a problem, I believe you’ll be fair.”
I thought of Eloise Horton, whose general distaste for “respondent rabble” no doubt informed her opinion that probation—and the overriding goal of rehabilitation—was mostly a waste of time and bar resources. She’d write me up, or worse, if Dale got in trouble and I was involved.
“Something bugging you?” he asked.
“My manager’s pretty tight-assed.”
“Certainly looked that way. She doesn’t know about our arrangement?”
“No.”
I glanced through the window into the center again, but saw no movement. Still, I felt like we’d been standing out here too long. Sooner or later someone would spy two men in suits and see trouble coming.
“Look,” I said, “you’re in a spot, and probably I am too if we can’t extract you from it. Let’s go in, see what we can do.”
“I’m game,” he said, but not too gamely.
The northern sky was dense with gathering storm clouds. Rain in the high desert, I thought. The prairie meth labs and skinhead kids and tacky chain discount warehouses east of the mountains are probably getting a soaking—a cleansing, actually. Damn straight. Whatever was in store for us, it felt good to be out of the office for a change, away from the wall of file boxes in my office, beyond Eloise’s scrutiny. We always needed more rain in L.A. I suddenly felt thirsty—not for a shot of wheat grass, but for what, I wasn’t sure. It was the same thirst I’d had the first time I’d met Dale Bleeker, when he stood at a podium and chatted with me about the information on my juror’s questionnaire. A thirst for direction, or change, or maybe answers to why no change seemed imminent, or why true changes of the personal kind seemed so damned difficult to come by.
The northern storm hung there beyond the law center’s roofline like an omen. I found myself buttoning my suit coat, which by some miracle always helps me feel a tiny bit more like a lawyer. How silly that is, but what the hell; as I get older and more set in my ways, I find that I don’t really question some things anymore, not the little things, at least.
You do whatever works.
The man at the computer looked Filipino, and when his wrinkled face broke into a smile, I saw chunks of gold and silver in his mouth. Behind him was an identical desk and terminal that looked dusty and unused. The place was pretty much four walls, the back one wood paneled with an open door to a rear space full of file boxes. No attorney’s name on the door, no private office—just as I had suspected. Coffee-shop artwork of the same caliber as the cartoon beach scene assaulted the eyeballs from all angles.
“Help you?” the man at the computer said with a quick grin, catching us temporarily speechless.
We’d stepped into a postage-stamp-sized reception area consisting of a mismatched chair and orange vinyl love seat, a tilting plastic plant, and a coffee table laden with dog-eared magazines.
Dale nodded at me. “Your call,” he said.
“Hi there, gentlemen, come on in,” a small brunette of ab
out twenty called to us as she emerged from the back room, an empty glass coffeepot in hand. She glided up past the smoker and smiled as if she thought we were customers. Her black skirt was a size too small, and the paralegal had quit his typing to take in the view.
“Is Mr. Julian in?” I said.
She stared at us. “Mr. Julian?” As if no one had ever come calling for him before.
Dale introduced himself, to further mild puzzlement from the girl. “Mr. Julian hired me three weeks ago,” he explained.
“Oh, right, right,” she said, the empty coffeepot stuck like a bowling ball to her hand. “Thought I recognized your name. I’m Nichelle.”
“So where’s Mr. Julian?” I asked her, but before she could answer, the glass door opened behind us. A black-haired girl about Nichelle’s age who looked Chinese walked in, gripping the hand of a happy-looking old man as if she was afraid he might wander off. A thick young Hispanic guy in his twenties with a black beret pushed in behind the old man, blocking the door.
“You the lawyer?” the Chinese girl asked me.
“I don’t work here,” I said.
“I do,” Dale blurted, “and I’m a lawyer.” Nichelle the receptionist looked like she wasn’t expecting this, not at all. But she said nothing.
“Cool,” the Chinese girl said. “Julian said you’d know what to do. I’m Angie, this is my husband, Rudy.” She ignored the thick who came in behind them. “We’re kinda in a hurry. We need, um, a powerful attorney.” She checked her watch, a neon pink plastic job. “Like right this minute, you don’t mind.”
The old gent was breathing a little hard beneath a Glendale Rotary Club ball cap that was pulled down so far I had to strain to see his face. Husband Rudy, my ass, I was thinking, Angie had to be fifty years the man’s junior. The glaring young dude with the beret watched Dale and me now as we took in Angie’s plump lips, the perfectly round little mole dotting her right cheek, her tight curves, tanned tummy, and pierced, diamond-studded navel. I’d seen that proprietary stare in a hundred nightclubs, the one worn by the leering, antisocial guy who doesn’t dance but came along for the ride with his heat-seeking lady. The tough guy had to be Angie’s boyfriend.
“A powerful attorney?” Dale said.
Angie shrugged. “That’s what Mr. Julian said we needed. Right, honey-bunny?” she said to the old man, snuggling at his neck. The old man giggled as if she was tickling him. The spectacle struck me as both strange and pathetic, and instantly, I felt sorry for the guy. Somehow he seemed like a more dignified sort than to keep this kind of company.
Nichelle introduced herself as the office manager, and by now she looked none too pleased to have Dale and me taking up space. “Uh, I don’t really think this gentleman,” she said, gesturing toward Dale, “is not, um, he’s not—”
Dale appeared to take instant offense. “Not what? I’m a lawyer, and I work here.” That seemed to temporarily stump Nichelle. Then he asked Angie what he could do for her.
“You mind?” Angie said to me. “This is confidential.”
“Not at all.”
I went back outside, took a few steps toward the battered Regal, but thought better of waiting in that old boat. Waves of gorgeous bakery smells rippled over the empty sidewalk. Aah, that tender Cuban-style pork. My stomach tightened at the thought of some real food. The pea soup and limp salad I’d lunched on in the cafeteria had barely registered. A medianoche sandwich would make a nice snack while I waited for Dale. I was still picturing those thinsliced pickles, the hot white bread lathered in spicy mustard, when another line of thought took over. We’d come here to look around, have Dale review any files with his name and bar number committed to them, do any necessary follow-through, tender his resignation from the center. Then in walked Angie and Rudy, the happy couple looking for a powerful attorney, Angie’s boyfriend in tow. Asking for a “powerful attorney”—that’s what she’d said—an invitation a man in Dale’s straits, with his proud background, couldn’t pass on. But an invite to what kind of trouble? This looked like a bogus marriage between an old man lacking capacity and a girl probably fifty years his junior, her real man hovering like hired muscle. I turned toward the law center’s door and almost started back, but caught myself. Dale was a long-time prosecutor, he knew the lowdown on UPL—at least from what I’d told him. I decided that he could assess the situation on his own.
I strolled to the bakery door and stepped through just as a tubby old bald man inside fed himself half a guava pastry in a single bite.
Powerful attorney.
The words suddenly made sense to me. I let go of the door, watched the bald guy disappear as he inhaled the rest of his pastry. Damn, the Cuban sandwich would have to wait.
They were ripping off the old man Rudy, and I knew what they’d come for.
I started back just as a mud-splashed black Cadillac Fleetwood swung into an open spot next to the law center. A bulb-nosed, potbellied man in funky brown slacks, a sky blue dress shirt, and a string tie bounded onto the sidewalk, pulling on his suit jacket as he went. I felt sure I’d seen him somewhere before but couldn’t quite process the memory. He stared back at me like he knew me too, then seemed to decide he didn’t and powered into the law center. My first thought was of Julian, but the man didn’t fit Dale’s description at all—nothing Hollywood wannabe about this guy. I followed him, trying to place the W C. Fields nose. Something to do with a state bar case, maybe, but not one of mine.
I know all my cases, all the lawyers currently in my sights. They’re not easy to forget. I recently prosecuted a bankruptcy attorney who secretly put himself at the front of the creditor line by taking a deed in trust on his client’s vacation home as his “fee,” then quietly forced a sale and collected his money, ruining the client’s hope of reorganizing. Last fall I pursued a tanned, handsome estate planner from Palm Springs who wrote himself into the wills of ten deathbed “clients” in a six-month span, working on tips from his girlfriend, an ER nurse at the region’s finest hospital. Just before Christmas I clipped the wings of a high-dollar attorney and TV executive who siphoned a half million to a partner in crime by paying out “finder” fees to a fictitious company, then kiting checks at the end of each month to keep the depleted account falsely balanced. Every one of these lawyers was a virtuosic rationalizer; all were innocent, of course, their well-funded defense counsels decrying the state bar’s investigative zeal and intrusive reach whenever the bald facts betrayed them. No one seemingly hampered by a conscience or sullied by a whiff of doubt during trial, everybody leaping onto the religious bandwagon during the discipline phases. Hallelujah, what’s it to ya?
Inside the law center Dale’s voice was already raised in argument with the man who’d just arrived, Angie cursing loudly over them both. I thought about what I would say to lend support, but before I even got there the glass door burst open and out spilled the potbellied man in the funky suit, pulling Angie and Rudy with him, hand in hand like a human daisy chain.
“Never mind that idiot, let’s roll,” the funky-suited man said over his shoulder. I was right in their path, and I had an instinct about the man who’d just arrived.
“Afternoon, Counselor,” I said.
He stopped dead, as if he’d been called out by a ghost from his past.
“Don’t you go gettin’ in my way.” Sounding southern, maybe from Texas. “You guys got no business followin’ me around.”
You guys. I did know him from the bar, though I still couldn’t place him.
“Free country,” I said.
Angie’s boyfriend stepped into view. “Move aside, asshole.”
I didn’t flinch, but I had no cause to stop him. He brushed past me, smiling as if he owned me before he hopped into the backseat with Rudy and Angie. The southern lawyer backed the Caddy out hard, and a delivery truck coming down Brand had to swerve into another lane, the driver honking and shouting. Just before they roared off, Rudy raised a palm from the backseat and waved at me like a child going out
for ice cream.
Dale was on the sidewalk with me and I asked him for a run-down.
“Christ if I know,” he said. “The southern guy just burst in, took a look around, and realized the girl had been consulting with me. I tried to introduce myself and he started shouting at me, threatening me with a lawsuit for stealing his client. I said like hell, then bam! Out the door.” He massaged his temple, breathing hard. “I think they’re up to something, J. Powerful attorney? I don’t think so.”
“Exactly. It’s not powerful attorney, it’s power of attorney.”
We jumped into the Regal and Dale threw it into reverse, the engine chugging in halfhearted compliance. “They want the old man’s assets,” he said.
I nodded. “Whatever he’s got. The wife Angie must want the full access that being his legal representative would bring her.” I pointed through the windshield. “There they are.” The Caddy had swung a U-turn and was headed back up Brand, toward us.
Dale faded toward the curb and cut it hard across the double yellow as they passed.
“Where you think they’re headed?”
The glass high-rises loomed ahead like a shining Emerald City.
“My guess, to get the money straightaway.”
The light ahead had turned yellow and I thought we weren’t going to make it, but Dale jammed on the gas and shot us by a grimacing bus driver waiting to make a left. “What do we do next?” he asked.
For the second time in an hour I had no plan, but whatever I did have that had gotten me here, I wanted to keep it moving forward.
Three
The big Caddy glided to a stop in a red zone in front of a two-story brick structure that housed a savings and loan. From down the block we watched the girl named Angie pop out and rush inside, tugging the old man’s arm like a dog on a leash past the Colonial pillars and phony white shutters. Dale and I drove past the bank to the next street, found parking in a liquor store lot, and hoofed it back without speaking. Not too long ago, he had been a great observer, as all fine trial attorneys must be. He must also have known by now that I was improvising heavily, this probation-monitoring thing heading south on both of us. As the matter stood, he could already have violated probation with what he had done, and I could be presently witnessing the event. But he hustled to match my stride without further comment or inquiry, and I welcomed the silence.
