Across the street, waiting for the light to change, Martha Birford waves at me and yells, “Gideon, wait a minute!”
Nonplussed by this effusiveness after our last meeting at the Hardhat Cafe, I stand above a steaming gutter, wondering if another snotty remark is on the way.
“I got a job!” she says gleefully, pounding across the pavement toward me.
Good for you, I think, meaning it. Dressed in a red suit I’ve seen half a dozen times, Martha looks as happy as a woman who’s been told she doesn’t have ovarian cancer.
Instantly, I forgive her for her remark at the Hardhat about me landing on my feet. We may talk about sex as if we can’t live without it, but it is our work that defines both men and women these days.
“Great!” I say, touching her arm as if for luck.
“Who’s the lucky firm?” “Verser and Jeffcoat,” she says, naming a partnership that has come together in only the last year.
“Actually, I’m only kind of a glorified paralegal, but it’s a start.”
A paralegal! I maintain my grin, hoping it has not become a grimace, but inwardly I feel embarrassment for her. True, at Mays amp; Burton we got the shit cases, but at least we got to see the inside of a courtroom. Poor Martha. Those idiots at Verser and Jeffcoat will probably never discover how much money she could be making for them. A few more bromides about our mutual good luck, and I head off in the opposite direction, once again glad I’m not a woman or black. As sloppy as my performance was today, I realize I’m one of the primary beneficiaries of discrimination. I may be a capitalist now, but damn if I like competition.
On my floor in the Layman Building, Julia, seeing my scowling face, greets me cheerfully, “Lose another one, Giddy baby?”
I check my box for messages.
“Not quite,” I say, noting her outfit. This is sex week, I decide. Everything so far has been skintight or see-through. Today, underneath a sheer white blouse she has on a purple bra, which matches her eyeshadow. The effect is that she appears to have two badly rotted grapefruits under her blouse. I have a message to call David Spath, administrator at the Human Development Center who keeps playing telephone tag with me.
“Actually,” I say, my eyes drawn like a bomber pilot’s to her chest, “the judge ruled mostly in my client’s favor.” I am careful not to say that I did anything to win the case. Gossip from the courthouse spreads like poison gas, and if Julia gets wind of the hearing, she will throw back in my face anything I say.
She nods sourly.
“Don’t you lawyers have a saying that even a blind hog can find a few nuts?”
In more ways than one, I think, looking at Julia, but I do not say anything. I have found it is crucial to let her have the last word. Once some people think they have the better of you, they treat you better, and Julia, who turns out to be the niece of the owner of the building, will be here long after I am gone. I go to my office and surprise myself by getting David Spath on the phone. In a British-sounding voice, he tells me that an appointment has canceled for the afternoon, and he will see me if I have the time. Since I had scheduled Mrs. Gentry’s trial for all day, I am free and I agree to meet at two in his office.
It is close to twelve, and I take the elevator down to the cafeteria to put my own spin on Mrs. Gentry’s abbreviated trial. I find Tunkie Southerland and Frank D’Angelo seated at a table against a window overlooking the Arkansas River.
Tunkie, who avoids even nonjury trials whenever he can, preferring the written word to the spoken, chews on the lemon in his glass of tea.
“She got what she paid for,” he comments defending my laziness. I have not spared myself in my telling of the morning’s events, though I have made Ferd Machen sound even more cruel and venal than he probably is.
“Every lawyer screws up,” Frank says, folding his napkin on his plate, “it’s just a question of who catches you and what they try to do about it.”
Truly, misery loves company, but so does incompetency, I realize. Yet, in their own areas, they are not incompetent.
Along with Clan, these men are becoming my friends. There is not a soul at Mays amp; Burton I miss. Why? These guys aren’t so rapacious, but maybe they just don’t have the drive to make it. I wonder if I do either.
Tunkie belches into the back of his hand.
“At any rate, Clan will be delighted, .. he begins.
“… That you took him off the hook.” Frank finishes, grinning at me.
On the drive out to the Blackwell County Human Development Center, my mind returns again and again to Mrs.
Gentry’s hearing. I decide I have a real talent for overlooking the obvious. This case must have stuck out like a sore thumb, because most judges wouldn’t have gotten past the fact that Mrs. Gentry is eighty-four years old and had undergone an operation that required her to enter a nursing home. But Judge Fogarty took the “purposes” clause of the guardianship statute seriously, as almost no one ever does. Is the prosecutor’s case against Andy this crystal clear and I can’t see it? Maybe the real lesson is that the law be damned, what judges (and juries) do is justice. If the judge’s mother has a right to hum in her own house, then Mrs. Gentry should have that right or the judge’s mother will give him hell when he goes for his Sunday visit. Is Andy’s case really about what people can identify with? Isn’t it similar to a situation in which a mother authorizes a doctor to use experimental cancer drugs to save her child’s life? The problem is that Pain’s life wasn’t in danger as long as she was in restraints. Yet what Olivia feared was that sooner or later Pam was going to end up like those men I saw-tied to their beds. No mother should ever have to accept that. Maybe that is the argument I should make to the jury: the choice Pam faced was being kept under virtual lock and key until she died. Because shock is currently (an unwitting pun I’ll have to avoid) out of fashion, her doctor felt he had no choice but to keep quiet about it until he could present proof it worked. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, you should think of Dr. Chapman }s a kind of a brave pioneer . maybe that’s a little thick.
Unexpectedly, David Spath is a bit of a dandy. With a mustache so trim it looks as if it has been stitched into place and an English accent straight out of World War II movies about the RAP (he surely possesses the stifiest upper lip in the state), Spath seems a foreign visitor instead of a man who has spent a career climbing a bureaucratic ladder. No wonder he hired Andy-he likes the way he dresses. Spath is wearing a striped blue chambray long-sleeved shirt that looks so smooth and neat it seems made of silk. Against the blue of his shirt, he has on a gold tie dotted with small, black, castle-like designs. His pants are Yorkshire cords that I recognize out of a Lands’ End catalogue my boss used to keep in her office at the Public Defender’s. Though it seems entirely useless information, I immediately assume this man is gay. There is an overrefined quality to his sensibility (I can’t put my finger on it-suffice it to say he is like my best friend. Skip, who just last month pitched a promising commercial art business and moved to Miami with his lover) that connotes a sexual orientation different from my own.
Given his lip, I expect a bone-crusher handshake, but his hand is as soft as that of an English gentleman visiting his country estate on the weekend. Instead of tea, he gives me a cup of coffee, and I sit across from him, wondering how this man got to be here. Even his office is decorated with English themes. Instead of pastoral scenes with hunting dogs and men in red coats on horseback, the pictures are of Dickens’ England-harsh industrial cityscapes done in gray, brown, and black. Gently, I try to bring up the subject of Andy by asking how long Spath has known him. Spath sips at his cup of coffee, obviously studying me, “I first met Andy,” he finally says, “when he was working for the state hospital.