The Trials of Kate Hope

by Wick Downing

  Two weeks later, Mrs. Bartram was the subject of a feature story in the Denver Post. HOMELESS WOMAN VICTIMIZED BY SYSTEM, shouted the headline, DIES ON DENVER’S STREETS.

  Chapter Three

  Summer 1973

  IF I’M EVER FAMOUS and someone writes the story of my life, they’ll highlight this very day. “On Monday morning, June 11, 1973,” the story would say, “with Mount Evans looming on the horizon west of Denver, fourteen-year-old Kate Hope put in her first full day as a lawyer.”

  Unfortunately for the course of human history, Mom stood in the driveway and had me blocked. “How am I supposed to get to work?” I asked her as I straddled my ten-speed.

  “The bus,” she said. “Or let me take you, even though you can’t stand doing anything the easy way.”

  “There’s nothing very hard about riding a bicycle.”

  “Honey, won’t you just let me drop you off on my way to work? I hate it when you’re out there dodging cars!”

  “I don’t dodge them.” I stuffed my foot into the toe clip of the bike pedal and pulled the strap down. “They dodge me.” I have Grandmother Hope’s genes, everyone says. Like her, I’m only five feet tall, and like her, I have attitude.

  “Kate, you scare me to death,” she said, inhaling deeply on a cigarette. My own mother smokes! She started smoking again exactly when all her friends quit.

  “I’d rather get crushed by a bus than die of lung cancer,” I told her, guiding my bike around her and pushing off down the slope of the driveway. I rolled into Hudson Street and banked a hard right, then bent down and tightened the strap over my other toe. “See you tonight!” I was halfway to Sixth Avenue Parkway before she could react.

  “Call me when you get to the office?” she yelled after me.

  What is it about my mother that makes me grit my teeth? I asked myself as I pumped my bike down Hale Parkway. I loved her, and she loved me, but she still hung on to me way too tightly. She wouldn’t let me grow up! She saw me in the world she’d grown up in, but that world didn’t exist anymore. Mine had body bags, and Vietnam, and Ms. magazine. I had no desire to be the nicey-nice girl who grew up next door, like Judy Garland in Easter Parade. That may have been Mom’s model for life, but it didn’t work for me.

  A man was riding a bike in front of me, and without thinking I cranked up to pass him. An old guy in his forties, he had a stomach that hung over his belt and he rode with his elbows locked. Would he be willing to take lessons from a fourteen-year-old girl? I could show him how to ride so that it wouldn’t rattle his brains, and could introduce him to Mom. She might take him on as a project to manage, instead of me. “Hi,” I said, pulling up next to him. “Beautiful morning.”

  He glared at me. “What are you doing on a boy’s bike, sweetie?”

  Not Mom’s type, I decided. Instantly. “Is there a law?” I asked.

  “Don’t get smart with me,” he gasped, his chest heaving with exertion as he tried to keep up.

  I didn’t want him to have a heart attack, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, either. “You know something, mister?” I asked him as I pulled away. “I hope you don’t have any daughters!”

  Grandfather’s new law office was not like the one he’d had with my dad. That one was on the ninth floor of the Equitable Building, with a fantastic view of the Front Range. This one was a brick bungalow on Thirteenth Avenue, next to a bail bondsman. It had been built for a so-called bad woman in the 1890s, who—according to Grandfather—hadn’t been a bad woman at all. She’d been a prostitute, but that didn’t make her bad. She supported a home for unwed mothers, he said, and “most people thought she was nice.” But she had to leave town in 1921 when the police started enforcing the law against prostitution, something they hadn’t done for at least ten years. “That was a bad day for Denver,” he said. “The home for girls closed down in four months.”

  The house Grandfather used as an office had been built in 1886, which was the year he was born. Both were eighty-seven in 1973, but the old house was in better condition. Even so, it needed some fixing up. Summers in Denver get hot enough to fry the ants on the sidewalk, and our “air conditioner” was a fan in the window.

  I pushed my ten-speed up the steps of the porch and locked it to the brass ring planted in the floor. It had been used to tie up horses in the old days. Saddlebags on the back rack of my bike bulged with clothes and lunch. I unhooked them, hung them over my shoulder, and walked inside.

  The parlor had been converted into a reception room, with a desk and low counter on the right side, and ancient chairs around a coffee table on the left. The table was covered with magazines. President Nixon glowered at me from the cover of Time, his mouth snarling like a bulldog and a finger pointed right at my throat. NIXON FIGHTS BACK, the words on the cover shouted.

  Mrs. Roulette, who started working for Grandfather in the 1930s and had been his secretary ever since, needed a hearing aid. She sat at the desk behind the counter with her hands poised over the keyboard of her new electric typewriter like a concert pianist. She hadn’t heard me come in. “Hi, Mrs. Roulette!” I said, loud enough to get through.

  “Oh!” Her hands jumped off the keys and her bifocals flew off her face. “You startled me.”

  I dropped my saddlebags on the floor, angry at myself for scaring her, and scurried over to pick up her glasses. They had come to rest by a file cabinet. “I’m sorry,” I said, giving them to her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, dear.” She polished them with a hankie that she dragged out of her sleeve. “I may not be as tough as you, Kate. But I’m a pretty tough old bird.”

  She was, too . . . although when she’d realized Judge Hope wasn’t going back to the Equitable Building to resurrect a nice, respectable law practice, it really upset her. How could she work in a house with a history? she’d asked my mom. Next to a bail bondsman? An awful place for a distinguished and reputable lawyer to have his office! But Grandfather told her he had no intention of ever being a reputable lawyer again. “I’m going to be a real lawyer, Virginia,” he told her. “For people who deserve some justice but can’t afford respectability.”

  “I was not thrilled,” she told Mom a few months later. “But so many of our clients are remarkably decent, and they need us—even though some of them haven’t bathed in ages. The Judge gives the worst offenders a bar of soap and tells them not to come back until I can stand being in the same room with them.” She’d smiled. “They have to pass my sniff test.”

  She’d even started reading Ms. in her spare time, and now, after putting her glasses back on, she found me in them. “Your young man called,” she said.

  I blushed. “Mike is not my young man!” He may have attached himself to me in grade school, but that didn’t make him mine.

  “Nevertheless, he’d like you to call him. And your mother . . .”

  “Wants to make sure no one ran over me.”

  “Yes. Your grandfather called too.” Her hands returned to her keyboard. “He’s not feeling well and won’t be in. He wants you to take his place today.”

  “I’m sorry—what does he want?”

  “Just until he’s feeling better,” she said, starting to peck away. “Two or three days, perhaps.”

  “Mrs. Roulette, I can’t take his place,” I said. “No one can. He yells at people, you know, lawyers and judges and anyone who disagrees with him. I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can’t, dear. But—”

  “I’m comfortable looking up cases and writing briefs and walking him to the courthouse and filing complaints and things like that. But I can’t handle anything. The real lawyers would laugh at me.”

  “You’re a real lawyer, aren’t you, dear?”

  “I don’t exactly feel like one. I mean . . .”

  “You are one, though. You do far more around here than you realize.”

  “Alvarez,” I said, suddenly remembering the motion I’d worked on last week. “It has to be filed this morning, and he has t
o sign it!”

  “It’s in the machine now. You can run it over to him when it’s typed.” Her fingers began to find their rhythm, picking up speed. “While I finish it, perhaps you’d talk to Miss Willow?”

  The face of an old woman who must have been hiding in one of the big, overstuffed chairs peeked out at me. She had silver-white hair and blue skin, thin enough to see through. “Hi,” I said, instantly drawn to her. Whatever her problem was, I had this huge urge to fix it. “Give me a minute or two?” I asked her.

  “Yes, dear,” she said.

  I rushed down the hall to the bathroom and stripped off my bike shorts and shirt. Why do boys think girls don’t sweat? I needed a shower but didn’t have time for one, so I splashed water all over myself and dried off, then applied a deodorant, sprinkled myself with powder, and slipped into a cotton dress and sandals.

  I hate being fourteen. My calves are huge, my ankles are thick, my chest is a cavity, and my right elbow is larger than the left one. I frowned at my face in the mirror and fluffed my hair, hoping to bring up a curl, stuck my tongue out at myself, then wiped off the sink and floor and picked up the mess. I trotted to my office.

  Grandfather had the large room on one side of the hallway, with a telephone and a wonderful old roll-top desk. My office was one of three small rooms on the other side. In the old days, mine had been called a “crib,” and it was barely big enough for a bed. I’d brightened it up with pictures and nice curtains for the window, even though my view was not great. No clouds, blue sky, or mountains out there: just a brick wall, five feet away.

  After hanging my bike shorts and saddlebags on hooks in a tiny closet, I zipped across the hall to the Judge’s office and picked up the telephone and dialed. “Hi, Mom,” I said. “I made it.”

  “Thanks for calling, dear,” she said. I heard the buzz of the newsroom in the background. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  Mike would have to wait, I decided, heading down the hall to meet my client.

  Miss Willow may have been two inches taller than me, but she was such a frail little thing in her frilly yellow dress! As I guided her into my office, I wanted to take her hands in mine and tell her not to worry. I tried to look capable, even though the furnishings in my office didn’t send that kind of message. “Thank you, dear,” she said as I offered her the chair in front of my “desk.” It was an old wooden table that had looked much nicer on the lawn at the garage sale where I bought it. Now it stood in the corner with a chair behind it, as a bookcase kind of crouched under the window.

  My “law library” was in the bookcase: a set of the Annotated Codes of Colorado, the Municipal Ordinances of Denver, the State of Colorado Ethics Opinions, and the Judge’s Bench Book.

  “Dear, do you think you can help me?” she asked as I sat down. She spoke as though she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. “Mrs. Roulette said you were a lawyer, but how can that be? You’re so young. And you’re a girl.”

  Instant bristle on my part. Girls shouldn’t be lawyers, she obviously thought—as did a lot of people, especially other lawyers. But I smiled at her. “It’s a long story, Miss Willow,” I said, pointing to my license to practice law. It hung behind my desk in an expensive cherrywood frame. “If you’d rather wait for my grandfather, or find someone else, that’s up to you. But I am a lawyer,” I told her, trying to feel like one. “Just ask Mrs. Roulette.”

  “I can’t wait for your grandfather,” she said. “I need someone today. Do you think you can help me?”

  “I don’t know. You need to tell me what your problem is.”

  “It’s my dog . . . ,” and she started to cry. “They’re going to destroy him!” Her delicate frame shook with sobs and she covered her face as though hiding from some unspeakable horror.

  “It’s okay, Miss Willow,” I said, rushing around my desk and taking her shoulders in my hands. “Really.” I sat on the edge of the table and smiled into her poor, sad face. “Need a tissue?”

  “No thank you, dear.” She dragged a hankie out of her dress pocket. “I’ve never had a lawyer be so nice to me.”

  “Not even my grandfather?” I asked her.

  “Oh my no, dear,” she said. “Everyone loves him. But no one thinks he’s very nice.” Her hand flew to her mouth as if she wished she could keep it closed. “Please don’t tell him I said that.”

  “He isn’t very nice,” I said, “but he’s kind of cute.” She smiled at that and dabbed off her face. “Who wants to destroy your dog?”

  For the next half-hour, words and sobs and tears gushed out of her as I pieced her story together.

  She was born in Denver sixty-three years ago, then lived her whole life with her father. “My mother passed away when I was born, you see, which was quite common in those days.” She earned a degree in education at Denver University, then taught first grade at Montclair Elementary, but when her dad was diagnosed with cancer, she retired to take care of him. Three years ago he passed away, and—as if by magic—a stray dog attached himself to her. He was a big German shepherd, and she named him Herman. “He’s my family now, you see. He’s all I have.”

  He was “big enough for children to ride” and made a wonderful guard dog, which she needed because her neighborhood had “changed so over the years.” He was very protective of her and would snarl and bristle at the least hint of danger, but otherwise was quite sweet and gentle.

  But two Sundays ago, right around noon, she took him to City Park and spread a picnic blanket near the lake. She tethered him near her picnic basket by jamming a spike in the ground and clipping his leash to it with a thin chain. Then she started to walk to the concession stand to get popcorn for the ducks, but she didn’t make it. Two boys, on bicycles with seats that looked like large bananas, ran into her and knocked her down. A nice man made her lie still while someone else hurried to a telephone and called the paramedics.

  A huge ambulance with flashing lights arrived, and a man and a woman jumped out and poked her with instruments, then asked her to get up and take a few steps. Everything appeared to be normal, but they wanted her to go to the hospital for x-rays. She refused. Herman had been alone far too long. They made her sign something, and then they drove away.

  After hurrying to her picnic spot, she found her basket—still on the blanket—and could see the hole in the ground where she’d pushed in the spike. But Herman was gone! A hungry-looking waif of a thing told her he’d seen a large crowd of people by the lake. A dogcatcher’s truck with a big cage in back had driven up, and a big dog had been dragged out of the crowd and put in the cage!

  She drove quickly to the animal shelter. It was an awful old house way out on Columbine Street, where the smell of slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants stuck to everything. But it was Sunday and the place was closed. Early the next day, when she went back, a woman behind the counter told her that Herman had been locked up with the dogs who were vicious and would bite. “She told me Herman had bitten a baby!”

  Then an animal-control officer came up to her and started asking her questions. He wanted to know all about Herman: how long she had had him, and who else he had bitten! “He was an awful man,” she told me. “Of course Herman had never done anything like that in all of his life.” She asked him why she couldn’t take Herman home, and he told her the dog would be quarantined to see if he had rabies, and “if I didn’t like it, I should get a lawyer. He seemed to blame me, but I had no idea what I’d done wrong.”

  When he was gone, the woman behind the counter, Maria, let her into the room where the dogs were kept. “I hardly recognized my poor baby,” Miss Willow said. “He’d been beaten, and his coat was a bloody mess. And he was cooped up in this tiny cage, in a room full of tiny cages with dogs that barked and snapped. Maria let me stay with him, although I wasn’t supposed to touch or pet him, but when no one was looking, of course I did.”

  For the rest of the week, she took food out to Herman and baked cookies for her new friend Maria, wh
o always found a room where she and Herman could sit together. At least he was out of that awful cage. She stayed with him every day, from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, as he licked himself clean and allowed those horrible wounds to heal.

  “Then Friday morning when I arrived, Maria said there’d be a hearing or something at the courthouse, that afternoon, at two,” Miss Willow told me. “I tried to see your grandfather, but he was so busy! Just before two, I hurried to the courthouse but didn’t know where to go, and when I found the right room, it was after three and the door was locked. I drove back to the animal shelter, and Maria told me they’d decided Herman was a dangerous dog! Today, the animal-control people will get a court order and have him destroyed!”

  The poor woman was crying again and clinging to my hand as though she’d fall off a cliff if she let go.

  “You won’t let them destroy Herman, will you, dear?”

  “No,” I said, even though I had no idea how to stop them. “No way!”

  Chapter Four

  WHEN I’M IN A FUNKY MOOD and way down in the bottom of a pit, sometimes I can lift my way out by staring at this old photograph of my grandfather. It was taken in 1887, on his first birthday. He’s sitting up and reaching for something with a look of total focus on his face. His tiny body supports a head that is way too big, with masses of curly hair churning and rippling around it, covering his ears. The cutest little dimple is pasted on his chin.

  The dimple is still there, as well as something about him that makes you want to call him “sir.” That’s the reason most people call him “Judge,” even though he’s never been one. A lot of lawyers don’t see him that way, though. To them, he’s just old, and very eccentric. “I don’t care what anybody thinks,” he says, and he means it. “I have a perspective on the law that comes with experience, and I don’t care a whit for appearance. If I’m eccentric, so be it.”