“Some people learn to live without company,” Joey said. “Or family. Like you.”
“It does help keep it all simple,” Frank said, looking back at her, resting the beer on the edge of the table. “Things can get complicated real fast, pretty much for no reason, the second you let other people cross your radar.”
“It doesn’t bother you living the way you do?” Joey asked.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “How is it you think I live?”
“You travel from city to city and from job to job,” Joey said with an air of confidence. “The work pays pretty well, judging by the clothes you’re wearing and the first-class ticket in your shirt pocket.”
“If you’re going to bother to put in the time on anything,” Frank said, “make sure it at least pays you for the trouble.”
“But yours is not a job for anyone,” Joey said. “At least that’s my guess.”
“Few are,” Frank said.
“But it must have its rewards,” Joey said. “All good jobs do.”
“What are yours?” Frank asked. “What is it about being a lawyer that makes you want to leave your bed in the morning?”
“That I can make it stop,” Joey said. “If only just for a lucky lew.
“Make what stop?”
“The evil at the other end of the table,” Joey said. “And the pain felt by the innocent ones who sit behind me in the courtroom every day on every case. Their faces change with every trial, but they all look the same to me. I don’t even need to see them to know what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking, all their regrets, all their wasted tears.”
“Putting a guy in a cell makes them feel all better?” Frank asked.
“Not really,” Joey said. “But I think it doesn’t make the hurt they feel at losing someone they love get any worse to live with. A crime committed against one is always a memory shared by many.”
“Spoken more like a victim than a lawyer,” Frank said.
“Sometimes you can be both,” Joey said.
“Do you ever think about the guy at that other end of the table?” Frank asked. “The one you seem so eager to put away?”
“Every day,” Joey said. “The ones I helped convict and the ones that I couldn’t and the one I never had a chance to bring to trial.”
“What do you see when you look over there?” he asked. “Do you ever take the time to look beyond the hard eyes, the prison gym body and the hands resting flat on the wood table?”
“And if I did?” Joey said. “What is it I’d see?”
“Depends on who it is and what you’re looking for,” Frank said. “If you go in looking for pity, you’ll get that soon enough. Every guy in an orange jumpsuit has a sad story he’s eager to tell or sell. But if you go in search of the reasons a guy ends up sitting next to a lawyer he can’t afford, then you might find something more than a sad story at the other end.”
“Will it be enough to make me forget the victim?” Joey asked. “Or forgive what was done?”
“Not if you don’t want to,” Frank said.
“Aren’t all those stories pretty much the same?” Joey asked. “Abusive childhood, parents not around, or on drugs if they are, crime the only door left open to them. Have I left anything out?”
“That’s true nine out of ten times,” Frank said.
“What is it that one other time?”
“It’s a good cover for a guy who came from a solid home and a family that cared,” Frank said. “He went to the best school in his area, played Little League baseball and flag football and sat next to his mother every Sunday at church service. He had good grades and a part-time job after school that kept him in comic books and trading cards.”
“Sounds ideal,” Joey said, holding her drink close to her face, elbow on the side of the table.
“It’s the American way of life,” Frank said. “But only if you judge it by what you see on the surface. You don’t want to take it any lower than that.”
“And if you do?” Joey asked. “What happens then?”
“Then you might see a set of pictures you won’t like,” Frank said. “You see a mother wearing too much makeup to a PTA meeting to cover the heavy drinking from the night before. You see a father who keeps odd hours and travels long distances on business trips that no one talks about. You see three loaded handguns kept in the middle drawer of his bedroom bureau and bags filled with neatly folded bills hidden in the attic under a small mountain of winter quilts.”
“And how does any of that lead you to where you take someone else’s life and not care about it?” Joey asked.
“That kind of living makes you hard,” Frank said. “Teaches you to keep buried anything that would even come close to where you’d care about anybody. Before your skin has a chance lo clear up, you’ve already learned that people are never who they say they are and that even the most innocent person walking around is hiding some level of guilt underneath. In plain English, it makes it very easy not to care. About anything or about anybody.”
“That include the victims that are left behind?” Joey asked.
“Especially them,” Frank said. “They have to stay the way they were always meant to stay. Invisible. In fact, if you’re really on your game, they disappear the second the job’s done and they’re outta your line of sight. And their name becomes as easy for you to forget as yesterday’s weather. They become, out there on those streets, what the defendant becomes to somebody like you inside a courtroom. A face you try to put away and forget.”
Joey drank down half the bourbon in one hard gulp, her right hand twitching slightly, unnerved for the first time since she sat down. It was so much easier for her to keep her emotions in check inside the courtroom. There, she was the one who held the controls, or at least she felt enough like she did. She asked the questions and expected to get the answers she wanted and needed to hear. But it was so much different inside the confines of a warm and stuffy bar, miles removed from any halls of justice. The hard-edged man across the table from her was a better-equipped foe than any that she had come across in all her years as a trial lawyer. He was quick to sense her raw points and even quicker to pounce on them. And more than anything else, he took pleasure from their give and take, fearless in the face of the questions and the answers they required.
Joey took another sip from her drink, rested the glass back on the table and rubbed the strain at the base of her neck. She looked up at Frank and caught him staring at her. “I guess this is what happens when you get snowed in,” she said, looking to bring the mood up a notch, eager to once again wrest control of the conversation.
“Bad weather and cold beer,” Frank said, holding up his close-to-empty bottle. “A lethal combination.”
“You would have made a good lawyer,” Joey told him.
“You couldn’t have figured that from the way I dress,” he said. “I must have done something foolish to give you that idea.”
“You argue your case well,” she said. “Make your points, but steer clear of any emotion. You keep it all in check. It’s often the only way to walk away with a win.”
“That’s not true just of lawyers,” Frank said. “It pretty much fits about any profession I can think of, good ones and bad. There are some lines of work where showing your emotions, letting your heart beat your brain to your mouth, can kill you faster than a stray bullet.”
“But only the best can function at that high a level,” Joey said, feeling like she was back on her offensive game, one leg crossed casually over the other. “And even the best lose that edge, even for just a minute. And that’s when the price that’s paid is always a steep one.”
“If you’re the best, I mean really are the best, not just think it or say it, then no matter what else you do you can’t ever afford to lose,” Frank said. “Not ever. In some lines of work, one loss is all you get.”
“But it happens,” Joey said. “No matter how much we plan, how much we prepare, no matter how ready we think we are, no matter how good we may be. It happens.”