Probable Cause g-2

by Grif Stockley

  Do you hear me?”

  I stare at him, wondering how he got to this planet. A black Don Quixote. Logically, he doesn’t even make sense, but a part of me sees what he’s getting at, and I begin to feel a grudging admiration for him. Though I think he’s dead wrong, the stubborn son of a bitch has the ridiculous idea that he can help make this a color-blind society by pretending it is one. I shrug. This is absurd. If all blacks were like him, maybe I could see his point, but they’re not. Yet, as I think about it, I realize I have been let off the hook. Though I would have done it, I wasn’t looking forward to arguing that he was being singled out because he is black. Arkansas juries, like everyone else, resent being told they’re racists.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “I can live with that if you can.”

  “Good,” Chapman says simply. Abruptly changing the subject, he volunteers, “I’ll get you some material on the theory of punishment, if you want.”

  I give him an absent nod.

  “Including whatever you used.” An involuntary sigh escapes me. Isn’t “Do no harm” the first rule? But maybe I can argue to a jury that what Andy did is no different from the invasive procedures doctors inflict upon critically ill patients to keep them alive. Aren’t those people often comatose and without a meaningful choice? The motive is no different-it is all for their benefit-to keep them alive. God, we fear death in this country. I look up at him and see a crack in his usually stoic face.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “It must have broken your heart to go through this.”

  For an answer, he raises his head and looks through the blinds at the sky. He does not tell me that the heart is merely an organ that pumps blood to the rest of the body. He says, “You have no idea.”

  The truth is, I don’t. And I’m afraid no juror will either.

  I decide not to try to find out more today. When I was first starting out at the Public Defender’s Office, I used to try to wring every detail out of my clients in the first interview. It took me a while to admit this meat-ax approach was often a mistake. People talk when they’re good and ready. He has more to tell me, but perhaps not today.

  There are interviewing techniques they try to teach you in the clinical course in law school to deal with client reluctance.

  He and I have come a long way since yesterday, but we’re not through yet. I say, “I’ve got some other things I have to do this morning. Do you want to continue now or talk later?”

  He pushes back from the table.

  “I’m more tired than I realized.”

  Who wouldn’t be in his position? Regardless of what I can do for him, his career may never recover from the charge. I look up from my worthless notes.

  “Andy,” I say, feeling weary even though I haven’t lived with the story I’ve just heard for more than an hour, “I can’t imagine sleeping a minute in the jail.”

  He gives me a sad smile, his brown eyes as mournful as a clown’s.

  After Andy leaves, Clan waddles into my office, as if on cue, munching on a bag of popcorn and carrying under his left armpit a couple of manila folders spotted with grease.

  “At least I have a client,” I say, thinking I may not be able to do much more than plead him out to negligent homicide.

  Clan collapses into the cheap chair across from my desk.

  Ten more pounds of pressure on the back of it and I can sell the chair for firewood. “What a shitty way to make a living,” he complains mildly.

  “People think lawyers are all rich. I wouldn’t know a corporate client if one grabbed me by the balls.”

  As gross as Clan is, I can’t imagine it either. “The business is out there,” I say hopefully.

  “The trick is to get a reputation.”

  Clan drops the files on my desk.

  “There’re all kinds of reputations,” he reminds me.

  “In twenty years, when I’m in for my third bypass, I don’t want the nurses sitting around figuring out ways to torture me because they heard I’m a scumbag lawyer.”

  I wonder if I’m a scumbag for walking off with Andy Chapman. By the plain black phone that obviously had been hooked up while I was in court this morning, a wadded-up pink message slip with Oscar Mays’s name on it is staring me in the face. I’ve got to return the man’s call and get it over with. Surely Andy Chapman isn’t worth trying to sue me over. I’m not normally the philosophical type, but I can’t help remarking, “We didn’t invent the free enterprise system;

  we’re just paid to defend it.”

  “Bullshit,” says Clan amiably, hitching up his pants to keep them from binding him.

  “Lawyers like you and me fight over the crumbs. With the kind of clients we get, we don’t really make money practicing law; if you can’t get ahead enough to invest what little windfall occasionally comes your way, you’re gonna end up like old man Sievers.”

  I feel a shiver sweep the back of my neck thinking of Cash Sievers, who was still trying to represent clients until his death earlier this month, although he was senile. With no investments, no Social Security, he was the Blackwell County bar’s oldest and most visible legal disaster. The story was that nobody had the heart to blow the whistle on Cash, and lawyers spent entire days cleaning up his messes. Though ancient and stooped, even toward the end he still attracted clients, but rumor has it that he represented most for nothing, presumably on the hope that they would give him something at the end of their case. Judging by his office and the clothes he wore, they didn’t give him much.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I tell Clan, who is missing his mouth with the popcorn as often as he is hitting it.

  “Find a rich widow or divorcee-there’s so many women looking for men out there you can almost advertise for ‘em,” he advises, “and then bird-dog her till she drops. You’re just the right age.”

  I laugh, but with Clan you never know. His wife’s family has money. I have no doubt that Dan’s home near the Pinetree Country Club wasn’t paid for by him. The thought of marrying for money is sickening, but my usual thoughts about women aren’t all that noble either.

  “To paraphrase St. Augustine when told he had to give up sex for the church,” I tell Clan, repeating a story I heard told by a Catholic priest when I was in boarding school at Subiaco after my father’s death, “

  “Can’t I wait a few years?”

  ” At the mention of sex, Clan snickers, his sophomoric humor always waiting for the opportunity to surface.

  “As long as you possibly can, but if you lose too much more hair, you’re gonna be playing in the minor leagues the rest of your life.”

  I pat my bald spot. Is it my imagination, or has it expanded another finger’s width since I got up this morning?

  “You know anything about Kim Keogh?” I ask.

  Clan wipes the grease from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Do dreams count? What a fox! If they’ diet her anchor the ten o’clock news, I’d have a reason to make it past nine-thirty. Jesus Christ, isn’t middle age the pits?”

  The odor of popcorn before lunch is starting to make me nauseous. The grease, I suppose. I brag, “She interviewed me this morning. She’s not married, is she?” I say, knowing she’s not. I didn’t see a ring.

  A gleam of envy comes into Dan’s sparkling blue eyes, his only good feature now that he’s hidden the others.

  “Damn!

  This time last year you were about to get nailed by that social worker at the state hospital, weren’t you?”

  I think of Rainey and smile.

  “We’re just friends.”

  Clan drops the empty bag into my trash.

  “Kim Keogh, huh?” Clan muses.

  “You look at these women on TV and wonder what they’re like once they’ve washed their faces.

  Did you see Postcards from the Edge7 I lost all my illusions about Shirley MacLaine.”

  So did I. Those old broads will do anything to stay in front of the camera. I
can imagine Mike Nichols coaxing her, “Come on, it’s for art’s sake.” Shit. Maybe it is. But I hope she won’t start taking her clothes off.

  “That was the point,” I acknowledge.

  “It’s all fake, but nobody said the male species had any brains.”

  His face red, Clan chuckles as he struggles to his feet. I can imagine his heart exploding through his chest someday.

  “You about ready for lunch?” he asks.

  I look at my watch. It’s only a quarter after eleven. Clan would get more work done if he moved his office down to the cafeteria.

  “I got a call to make,” I tell him.

  “I’ll see you down there in a few minutes. Don’t forget your files,” I add, shoving the two folders at him.

  He wags his head.

  “I need you to take a couple of cases for me. One’s a DWI and the other’s an adoption. I got the money, but I haven’t done anything with them. A check’s in there for them. I’m kind of stacked up right now. I’ll talk to the clients. They’ll be excited they’re getting a star.”

  Bullshit. He’s giving them to me because he knows I need the money. It’s not much, but it’s more than I brought with me, if I don’t count what I stole.

  “Thanks,” I say softly.

  “I appreciate this.”

  In a gesture of dismissal, Dan’s hands twitch outward.

  “You’re doing me favor.”

  Sure I am. I holler after him, “If you want to do me a favor, get rid of Princess Fishmouth out front.”

  He comes back to the door, and shows me his dimples.

  “You need to kiss and make up. We just heard our Miss Twin Peaks called in and said she’s taking a job at a health spa. The good news”-Dan leers-”is that she said all the lawyers on our floor can get a free workout if we come when she’s on duty.”

  “From the way you describe her,” I say, playing to Dan’s fourteen-year-old side, “that wouldn’t be hard.”

  “At our age,” he dead pans “it doesn’t get very hard.”

  I laugh obligingly.

  “Speak for yourself.” As if on command, Clan opens his mouth and closes it.

  “This I can do,” he says and, turning to leave again, repeats solemnly, “this I can do.”

  While I wait nervously for Oscar Mays to come to the phone, I reflect on my friendship with Clan. In part, perhaps the major part, of our affinity for each other is that if given the opportunity, we’d just as soon be back in junior high.

  Oscar Mays sounds as if he had just buried his wife.

  “Gideon,” he says sorrowfully after the most perfunctory of greetings, “I’m really disappointed in you. I thought you had more integrity than to steal a client from us.”

  I say nothing, uncertain how to respond. My desire to lash out at him for firing me is balanced by the need to take whatever action I can to limit any potential repercussion. The pause becomes too long, and I say weakly, “I wouldn’t call it stealing under the circumstances. He didn’t want the firm of Mays amp; Burton; he wanted me.”

  An angry tremor comes into Oscar’s voice for the first time since I’ve known him.

  “You signed an agreement! When you give your word on something, doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

  Lawyers! We hide behind pieces of paper like cockroaches.

  He can treat me like a used sheet of toilet paper, and I’m supposed to feel guilty because I was coerced into signing a document that at the time meant nothing to me. I was so eager to leave the Public Defender’s Office when I came to Mays amp; Burton that I would have signed my name in blood. Why? The memory burns my face as I listen to Oscar pontificate on the sanctity of a contract. I was terrified that Carol Anderson would tell my boss I had slept with her.

  I would have been fired on the spot for getting involved with a woman, who, had the case gone to trial, would have, in effect, testified as an expert witness for my client, who was accused of murdering her husband. Our way of life, Oscar preaches, depends on human beings’ keeping their agreements.

  My experience is that if the bastards can squeeze you by the balls, they will not hesitate to do so when it is in their self-interest. In our society lawyers are brought in to do the heavy-duty squeezing. I recall my own righteous indignation from a case earlier this year in which I collected a debt for a client for Mays amp; Burton. I was about to take almost every last stick of furniture the defendant owned when he finally filed bankruptcy. The nerve of him! My realization that if I were in Oscar’s situation I wouldn’t be acting any differently tempers my tone but does not prevent me from slamming down the phone after I mutter, “So sue me!” Fuming over this conversation, I lean back in my chair and try to relax. I won’t be sued. It would embarrass them too much, and, anyway, I might win. As much as the law reveres a contract, it favors competition.

  After lunch with Clan and two other lawyers in the building, I walk the four short blocks to the courthouse to look at the prosecutor’s file on Chapman. When I ask for Kerr Bowman, I am told that Jill Marymount would like to see me.

  The Queen Bee herself. This is awfully early in the case to be having

  tea with the prosecutor, but not all work the same y way. Some are like generals and won’t get their hands dirty until the actual battle, relying on subordinates to do the work;

  others, like Jill, have a reputation for interviewing their potential witnesses from the very beginning. An ironclad argument can be made that a prosecutor in as large an office as Blackwell County doesn’t have the time to do her own pretrial investigation. Basically an administrator, she is being paid to exercise her professional judgment, not run up mileage on her car for her expense account. We’ve had prosecutors in Blackwell County who almost never tried cases once they were elected. But Jill’s approach allows you to get a feel for a case you wouldn’t have unless you got your hands dirty. You get ideas about motivation you’d otherwise miss, and you obtain a real sense about credibility of witnesses.

  After a moment Jill comes for me herself, even though I could have found her office. She is dressed more informally than I expected. She is wearing a light blue plaid skirt and could be headed for a barbecue after work. Her simple red top is sleeveless, and she is wearing flats. I realize I was expecting full battle armor. Bare-armed she looks more feminine than usual.

  She smiles as if we’re old enemies, though we’ve never tried a case against one another.

  “Gideon, I hear you’re in solo practice,” she says, letting me know she’s aware I was fired. She offers fingers and a palm that are cool and dry.

  As we walk side by side to her office, I say, “Thanks for the help on the bond. I was about to ensure that my client stay locked up for the duration of the trial.”

  As we turn into her office, she demurs, “Your client isn’t a martyr, and I didn’t see any point in making him one.”

  If you only knew, I think. The last time I was in the Blackwell County prosecuting attorney’s office the walls were covered with diplomas and awards. Today, children’s themes provide the most unusual motif I ‘we ever seen in a lawyer’s quarters. It is as if I have wandered into a museum of child poverty. There are literally dozens of black-and-white photographs of children in extreme conditions:

  reproductions of Walter Evans photographs, sallow beanpole kids standing in front of Appalachian shacks; children from the Delta, black toddlers playing in front of a housing project; pictures of modern urban teenagers receiving some kind of group drug therapy; a white girl who can’t be more than junior high age but is surely in her last month of pregnancy; Down’s Syndrome children smiling into the camera, perhaps taken at the Blackwell Human Development Center, for all I know; a Native American teenager, his long black hair silken and shiny even behind the metal bars of what must be an adult jail; Third World nightmares, all manner of starving children with enormous eyes and distended stomachs. On an adjacent wall are pictures of children of affluence. American, Japanese, and European teenagers in designer
clothes simply facing the camera, the girls carefully made up, their arms and hands gleaming with jewelry; some of them, mostly the boys, are seated behind the wheel of sports cars, mounted on snow skis, driving boats the size of tanks. The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty is effective. I cut my eyes back and forth between the walls. From behind her desk Jill watches patiently as I take these in. The wall opposite her desk is her constituency, the pictures shriek. I think about what Amy said. Kids can’t vote.

  “Great photographs,” I say sincerely, noticing the expensive matting behind one picture that shows a child with AIDS or perhaps simply starving.

  “These ought to be in a museum.”

  She goes to the wall with the rich kids and adjusts a frame that has begun to tilt to the left.

  “Some of them were. When people learn of my interest in children, they send them to me.”

  There is a knock at the door, and Kerr Bowman enters, carrying a file. Men working for women. It is still a rare sight in the South-especially in the law business. Kerr smiles at me as if I were best man at his wedding.

  “Hi, Gideon,” he says and pumps my hand for the second time in twenty-four hours.

  “Nice to see you again!” Maybe he is running for something, too. All this friendliness is beginning to make me want to gag.

  “Would you like to sit down at my workbench?” Jill says, ignoring Kerr’s glad-handing. Kerr, her expression implies, is like a gorgeous but brainless secretary, nice to look at but not to be taken seriously.

  For the first time I notice her desk. A “workbench” it isn’t. I sit down at one of the loveliest pieces of furniture I ‘we ever seen. Most lawyers’ desks are as functional and ugly as the floor of a public men’s room. This looks like a French antique from the seventeenth century. The ornamentation on the sides is so delicate I can’t imagine how she got it in here without breaking it. This is a desk a king’s mistress would bend over when writing her lover. As I sit down across from her, I run my fingers over the surface. I’m not much on decorating, but I love wood.