by Lia Matera
“Only partly.” I had, in fact. But it wouldn’t do to admit it. I wasn’t sure why, but I could see it in Gretchen’s stiff posture. “I spent yesterday morning and the day before on Mike Hover’s island. I suppose I’m wondering what you get out of your association with him.”
“Yes, I knew you’d been up there.” She watched me, her expression guarded. “I don’t quite understand what you’re asking.”
I was off-kilter, disturbed about something that had—or maybe something that hadn’t—been said about Margaret. I was flailingly blunt. “Every organization out there, every religion, every crackpot has an answer. I guess what I’m asking is: Why does this person’s answer satisfy you? Did you get tired of questioning?”
“Of course I got tired of questioning.” Her facial flush was at odds with the frost in her tone. “That doesn’t make me dumb enough to settle for any old answer. You know what I find offensive? The way people become wed to their stereotypes of anyone outside the mainstream, including sex workers and devotees of any kind. They believe the stupid clichés television feeds them.”
“I agree with you. But I guess I don’t see the difference between taking your views from mass-culture television and taking them from a guy with an island.” I could see my candor offended her. I added, “To the extent you can sell Hover’s philosophy to me, you give me ammunition. After Jim Jones, San Francisco juries are wary of devotion.” These issues might never reach a jury. We both knew I was the one in need of reassurance.
“Jim Jones.” She waved an exasperated hand. “And Rajneesh and Sun Myung Moon and Maraj Ji. Yes, a lot of people set out to enlighten others and get seduced by capitalism and screwed up by power. But I’m not going to dismiss the possibility of finding a good teacher because I know there’ve been bad ones out there. That’s stupid. I didn’t drop out of law school just because I had Grosset and Philipson my first year.”
I smiled. “Grosset and Philipson were certainly as bad as teachers could get. On the other hand, I can’t imagine anyone drinking poisoned Kool-Aid at their request.”
“Our media spotlight the negative.” She shook her moussed strawberry hair. “People end up with a deep-down fear of any religion that isn’t traditional. To them it sounds like paganism, devil worship—bad, go-to-hell stuff.” She slapped her hand down on the desktop. “And in the process, a lot of quote-unquote sinners become expendable. Have you noticed how often sex workers are killed in movies? Because they don’t matter. They’re not ‘us’ in the conventional sense.”
I was startled by her hot-faced anger. “You heard about the women at The Back Door?”
“Yes. I didn’t know the women personally. And I have mixed feelings about that club and others like it. But here’s my point: I’ve heard dozens of conversations about the killings, and I have yet to hear one person speak those women’s names. Everyone calls them the dancers or the girls or whatever. Because we’re trained to consider sex workers garbage. Half the movies made in this country, prostitutes are killed just to convey a sense of danger. They’re not real characters, they don’t count. Only the all-American hero matters. Only Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
We looked at each other a moment. I wasn’t sure if an apology was in order. Because I so rarely have the impulse, I heeded it.
“I didn’t mean to disparage your beliefs.”
“Well.” She looked down at the hand she’d slapped onto her desktop. “You can see I’ve taken my share of crap about them. From family especially. Friends, too. Lawyers are about as nonspiritual a group as you can find.”
“There seems to be a fair number of lawyers in Brother Mike’s group.”
“There are probably two or three dozen of us here in the city. Reacting against the usual drill: wine tastings and the Bay Club and a bunch of cheerful bullshit instead of conversation.”
“What about the other devotees? Do you know anything about the group’s demographics? Professions? Income level? Age? Any of that.”
She smiled wanly. “Mike’s the nerd. He’s probably run his mailing list through a computer-demographics program. You met Roy?”
“Yes. Look, Gretchen, you know the organization. You also know what might be legally relevant. What can you tell me? Where are the land mines?”
She leaned back in her chair, the steel suddenly out of her spine. “The video reimaging.” The color bled slowly out of her cheeks. “I don’t think, frankly, that Mike’s heart is in the sessions anymore. Not that they aren’t useful to his devotees—they truly are. And he’s more than just intuitive. I believe he’s a genuine avatar. But for himself … I think increasingly he’s in it for the video manipulation. For the technology.” She ran a shaky hand over her short hair.
“And it doesn’t bother you, when he asks you to do those things on camera, that his motives are … mixed?”
“No. And I don’t think it’s legally relevant, either. I bring it up because I think it might be part of Arabella’s claim. The important thing from my perspective—from any devotee’s perspective—is that he pushes us in the direction we need to move.”
“I still haven’t seen the videos he made for the devotees.”
Her expression brightened. “They’re remarkable. For instance, there’s one where a woman—Margaret, in fact—is watching Arabella elaborately seduce another woman. You see Margaret sitting there looking surfacely interested, like it’s no big deal. At the same time you see two creations of Mike’s, colored auras shaped like Margaret, come out of her heart. One of them’s a deep, sad shade of blue. It wraps its arms around Margaret and starts consoling her—it even gives her its thumb to suck. The other one, this big red-purple thing, flies over and tries to pull the other woman away from Arabella.”
“The point being that Margaret was jealous?” It sounded pretty, but not especially insightful.
“And hurt. Babying herself on the one hand and blasting out hostility on the other.” Gretchen stared through me, watching the video on an imaginary screen. “Arabella’s colors flashed like a sparkler, never more than a few inches from her skin. Because for her, sensuality is in the body, in the skin. It doesn’t have the cerebral and emotional content Margaret’s does. The woman she was seducing, who was not a lesbian, had this little creature dancing out of her. It kept running over to the men in the group as if to say, ‘Am I turning you on?’“
“That sounds a lot more interesting than what he distributed to video rental stores.”
“Oh, I agree.” She met my eye. “Absolutely. I think removing the animation was a mistake. But that’s not what the accountants thought.”
“What accountants?”
“Mike makes no secret of his reason for distributing the videos. It’s a money-making endeavor. Most of his income derives from gifts and isn’t taxable to him. Which means it doesn’t show up on his returns, which means he has trouble establishing credit.” She looked comfortable now. A lawyer discussing money. “And he has his eye on some very expensive equipment. With it, he aims to develop a level of virtual reality that incorporates holography. He’s on a rampage to collect moving images to digitize. He must have talked to you about it.” Her tone said, He talks to everyone about it.
“He said something about making the imaginary real so that people begin to wonder about reality.”
“Blurring the line between the so-called physical and the psycho-physical, yes. It’s a first step toward a new understanding of the nature of consciousness and the universe.”
“And the pornography videos bring him enough money to buy the computer things he needs.”
Her brows pinched into a slight frown. “The accountants did some market research—talked to the owners of The Back Door, interviewed adult-video distributors and rental-store owners. Everyone agreed: no auras. So Mike took them out. But it’s important to remember he was already making the films. He didn’t begin with the idea of entering the porn m
arket. His primary motivation was to show interior aspects of our sexuality.”
“But he decided to cash in on his self-awareness tool.”
Gretchen’s glance was sharp with irritation. “He was honest about it. His devotees understand and approve of what he’s doing with the proceeds.”
“When did he begin the reimaging?”
“When he arranged to market the videos. It took him and Roy and some of the other computer people months to accomplish.”
“Do you think his love of technology has eclipsed his concern for devotees?” I tried to keep my tone nonjudgmental. Hadn’t she, in essence, voiced that worry?
If so, she’d shored her defenses. “No, I never said that. We believe in Mike and what he’s doing.”
But it sounded like a question.
I considered asking her again about Margaret. I considered asking her about the women at The Back Door. (God, it was true—I didn’t remember their names.) But I could think of no pretext for my curiosity.
And I didn’t want to push it. It might not be safe. Assuming Margaret hadn’t lied, where was Gretchen when Margaret called her?
24
I stopped at Margaret’s apartment on my way to work. I punched her doorbell a dozen times without reply. I also stopped at Graystone Federal to open a trust account with Mike Hover’s retainer. I double-checked while I was there: Margaret had phoned in sick.
When I reached my office at about eleven, I had a number of telephone messages waiting. Most were from potential clients referred by other attorneys. I’d sent out engraved announcements. The expense was beginning to pay off.
I returned the calls, setting up two appointments for Monday afternoon and one for late that morning. The former involved corporate bankruptcies—the lucrative drudgery I’d left behind last year. But the latter sounded interesting. I brewed some strong coffee.
At eleven-forty, a woman introducing herself as Simone Steinem entered my office, glancing at my leased furniture with the distracted lack of interest it deserved. She was small and slender, possibly in her mid-forties, wearing a high-collared blue suit with a pastel scarf at the throat. Her brown hair was short, brushed straight back, accentuating a long neck and delicate facial structure. She carried an oversized canvas bag not nearly nice enough for her outfit.
She began by saying, “I’m told you’re a kind of superlawyer. That you’re very good and highly visible.”
“I don’t know about superlawyer. The rest is true, to some degree.” She’d told me on the phone her case involved “criminal” group libel. I liked the sound of it, hoped it didn’t turn out to be some kind of mild commercial slander.
“You are famous,” she said. “Everyone seems to have heard of you. Would you mind if I asked you about that?”
I hesitated. Until I knew the bare bones of her problem, I risked wasting her time and mine. On the other hand, saying “No, you go first” seemed churlish. Either way, we might be wasting the morning.
“Six years ago I defended Wallace Bean.” I watched for some sign she’d heard of the case. I didn’t usually have to say much about Bean. Like Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, he was in the history books. “Bean shot Senators Dzhura and Hansen. You probably remember the incident.”
She had a faraway look. She shook herself out of her sudden reverie. “Yes. But I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember how it worked out. Only that someone shot them, some Vietnam veteran?”
“No.” I heard myself sigh. Wally Bean had fancied himself a righteous, Ramboesque pacifist. He’d equated assassinating the country’s two most hawkish senators with purging our postwar demons. “Bean was insane, that’s what it amounts to. That was the basis of my defense, and the jury believed that also.”
“Was it you who did the television defense?”
“Bean had been inundated with television images of lone-wolf, take-the-law-in-their-own-hands good guys. But the jury didn’t rely on that. They didn’t use it as the basis of their verdict. They believed the psychiatric testimony that Bean was insane, independent of his television-based morality.”
“But there was some flap about it, wasn’t there?”
To say the least. My fall-back defense had subsequently been outlawed. “Some law-and-order politicians misstated the basis of the verdict. They used it to sell their criminal law reform package. And the press didn’t distinguish between that defense and the insanity plea. News stories blended the two. So people believed the worst. It plugged into their preconceived notions about the system. That’s politics. It had nothing to do with the jury’s decision.”
“It made you very famous.”
She was beginning to make me nervous. I’d been badgered relentlessly after that verdict, almost exclusively by people who refused to understand the basis for it. I’d gotten a lot of hate mail, a lot of death threats; the ultra-conservative senators had been redneck icons. And Wallace Bean had been mercilessly gunned down within weeks of his release from the mental hospital.
“From my perspective as Bean’s lawyer, the important thing was to do right by him.” I had a catalog of bland, uninflammatory responses on the subject. I hoped she didn’t make me run through more of them.
“And then you handled the Daniel Crosetti case?”
“Some years later, yes. But my primary areas of specialty are bankruptcy and corporate litigation.”
“Crosetti killed an FBI agent, didn’t he?”
“He never went to trial. He died first.” After the government had done just about everything it could to harass and impoverish him.
“How did that case make you famous?”
I wished to god it hadn’t. It had proved useless, going public to explain the government’s complicity. I’d tilted at establishment windmills, and all I’d gained was the weight of Crosetti’s despair. I’d spent the last ten months crawling out from under it, in fact.
“The crime got a lot of press. I was Crosetti’s spokesperson, that’s all.” She would have to be satisfied with that.
“Well, I guess the other thing I need to ask you is if you have a case like that now. Something you’ll be getting attention for.”
“I don’t discuss my clients’ cases with other people. I’m sorry.”
“But if you’re going to be getting a lot of press … Don’t you feel it’s a fair question? You’ll be associated in the public mind with your client, won’t you? You have been before.”
I leaned back in my cheap cloth chair and looked at her. What the hell kind of case was she about to offer me that made it important to know if I’d continue being famous and visible?
“I’m sorry. I don’t discuss my clients. There’s always the possibility that one of my cases will become news. I think that’s probably true of any lawyer you hire.”
She slid her hand into the canvas bag on her lap. I watched, expecting her to pull out a file folder or a stack of memos. Instead she hesitated, scowling at me.
“You’ll understand in a minute. It’s because I know …” She’d grown pale. The pastel of her scarf looked almost bright against her white throat. “Isn’t it true you represent a sex guru who sells films of women getting raped?”
I blinked at her. What was going on? Putting aside her crazy characterization of the case, how did she know I represented Brother Mike? There were no court filings yet. I wasn’t on record anywhere as his attorney. All I’d done so far was open a trust account with his check.
“I’ve told you I don’t discuss my clients.”
“It must get addictive, defending famous criminals and being on television and giving out interviews.”
“No, it doesn’t. Where did you hear about—”
“Don’t you care what your client has done? Have you ever been raped yourself?”
I felt myself shut down. How many crazy people had I met since I’d taken the Bean case? They
might seem normal, in their tailored suits. They might even be elected officials. But they revealed themselves in their paranoid phrases, in their refusal to see the system as an impersonal framework and not a shield against the particular evils plaguing them.
“You don’t really have a case for me, do you?” A group libel case, I’d have loved that.
“I do have this for you.”
She began extracting something from her bag. “From raped women,” she was saying.
I’d seen the film of Senators Dzhura and Hansen a hundred times. They stood on the steps of a small chartered plane waving hello. Bean burst through the crowd like some fat, panting Bruce Willis and gunned them down.
I watched Simone Steinem’s hand come out of the bag. In my mind’s eye I saw Hansen stagger into Dzhura, Dzhura lurch and cling to the stair rail.
Her hand moved slowly compared to my inner newsreel. Slowly enough for me to see the senators get shot, to hear Bean cry, “For everyone who died in Vietnam.”
Her hand moved slowly enough for me to hear a shout from the crowd surrounding Bean: “He’s got a gun!”
I surged to my feet, the words on my tongue but not quite out of my mouth: Got a gun!
Her hand jerked forward, arm straightening. She definitely held something. I knocked my flimsy chair over, scurrying back, away from her, not sure what she held, only that it wasn’t a file, it wasn’t a memo, it was an object, and it was being brandished or cast at me.
I screamed when it hit me. I watched it mark my pale jacket and shirt, I watched a dark splotch begin high and taper low. I watched it, but I felt no impact, I felt no bullet. I felt nothing hit me. I watched it and tried to listen for it. Had I heard a shot? Had I heard anything except her high-pitched repetition of the phrase “From raped women?”
Still moving backward, I stumbled over the chair. I was looking down at my jacket, making small grunts of horror. It was stained red. My hands went to the stain, didn’t protect me from the chair arms as I went down. They caught my back, my shoulder, my ribs.
