Probable Cause g-2 Read online

  Since the same thought had crossed my mind, it is difficult for me to protest her vagueness. I risk asking, “Would it be fair to say that at one point you might have appreciated it if Andy had shown a little interest in you?”

  Yettie brings her hands to her face as if the indignity of this question is too much for her to bear. Finally, she answers, her voice trembling a bit, “How many black professional men do you think I know?”

  Her honesty is stunning. She probably doesn’t know personally twenty black men close to her age with even a master’s degree.

  “Not many, I guess,” I say stupidly, feeling I should say something.

  “Look,” she says, her voice suddenly weary, “I know I sound like a black bitch from hell. All I’m telling you is that you don’t want me as a witness, because I’ll tell everything I’masked.”

  I sit for a few more moments, but there is nothing else to say.

  “Pair enough,” I mutter and stand.

  “Thanks for your time.”

  She doesn’t reply.

  11

  Clan Bailey stands in the middle of my doorway looking as mournful as a man beginning a diet the day before Thanksgiving.

  He pleads, “I know it sounds hideous, but it’s right down your alley.”

  I rock back in my chair and roll my eyes in mock horror.

  “An eighty-four-year-old woman caught having sex in a closet in a nursing home, who wants to dissolve her guardianship?

  Thanks a lot.”

  Now that he has me talking, Clan tries to hide a manila folder behind him and edges through the door like an uninvited insurance agent.

  “You were the best attorney at that mental health garbage at the state hospital when we were at the PD’s Office. Come on, if I could get another continuance, I would.”

  I put my feet up on my desk as I watch Clan ease into the chair across from me. He is as inevitable as a mud slide

  Obviously, he was hoping his client would die before he had to try the case.

  “You know how to natter a guy, Clan.”

  Clan balances the dog-eared folder, which looks as if he has been snacking on it, between his knees.

  “She was a friend of my mother’s, and before Mama would die, I had to sign a pledge in blood I’d try to help Mrs. Gentry if she ever wanted out.”

  I smile, remembering the list of chores Rosa gave me before she died. Polish the table, water the tomatoes. It was as if she were going on a weekend trip. I haven’t missed a week with the table.

  “When’s the hearing?” I ask. Hell, I owe Clan. He has given me outright four legitimate cases in the two weeks I’ve been in solo practice and referred me two others. The trouble is that this is the kind of case where you lose credibility. Not only does it waste the judge’s time but it also runs the risk of a Rule 11 motion for an attorney’s fee from the other side.

  “Next Tuesday,” Clan mumbles, daring to edge the folder onto the corner of my desk.

  “Our plane is supposed to leave at eleven. Brenda and I ‘ll never make it even if she’s my only witness. The nursing home would leave half their patients sitting on bedpans to have their witnesses in court to testify in order to keep somebody from busting out.”

  I look down at my desk calendar. It has a big hole in it next Tuesday, but it would be nice to fill it up with some clients who pay their bills. If it weren’t for Andy and my rat-burner case (and she is beginning to call too frequently), I’d be running a one-man Legal Services program. Besides those cases, I’ve got fifteen clients (mostly women who want divorces) and have managed to collect a grand total of nine hundred dollars from them since I moved into the Layman Building.

  “Go ahead and hand me the nicker,” I say irritably, “and quit trying to slide it up my pants leg.”

  Clan snickers and hands me the folder, which is sticky as well as ragged. If I licked it, I could probably get a sugar high from all the candy Clan handles between meals.

  I open it, and a single sheet of paper falls out. On a half-sheet of yellow legal paper Clan has written the words “Wants out.” I pick up the folder by my fingertips.

  “Impressive amount of research,” I say and drop it into the wastepaper basket.

  Clan, now that I’ve taken this turkey, props his own feet on my desk. “I got it all in my head,” he says, pointing with his finger at his thinning brown hair, now speckled with gray.

  “Besides, you’re getting a nice fee.”

  I get out a pad in the vain hope he will at least tell me how to get to the nursing home.

  “Forgive me for being so cynical,” I say, looking for my pen, “but somehow I doubt if Mrs. Gentry’s got control over her assets.”

  Clan, grunting from the effort, reaches across to the corner of my desk to where my red Flair pen has rolled and flips it to me.

  “I was about to add,” he grins, “if you get her sprung.”

  For the next fifteen minutes Clan tells me the story of his mother’s friendship with Mrs. Gentry, which has nothing to do with her case. Finally, since it is nearly the time the cafeteria opens, he gets to the point. A year ago, with the aid of the family doctor, Mrs. Gentry’s son hustled his widowed mother through a guardianship proceeding (she was slowly recovering from surgery), and had her transferred to a nursing home, where Dan’s mother met her. Instead of shriveling up and dying, as she was supposed to, she has made a full recovery, according to Clan.

  “Have you ever seen her?” I ask, totally skeptical at this point. With my family history, I can’t imagine even living to sixty-five, much less thinking I’d be able to get it up in my eighties.

  ” She’s looks just like Dr. Ruth!” Clan cackles. ” And talks about sex ninety to nothing.”

  I rub my head. I can believe the first part but not the second. Clan will hype any story, anytime.

  “Is she really eighty-four?” I ask.

  His face benign as a cherub’s, Clan beams at me.

  “If she’s a day,” he says, struggling to his feet.

  “That I can swear to.”

  I nod. Meaning the rest is bullshit. I write on my calendar, “Dr. Ruth” and, determined to get something out of this, get up to go downstairs and eat lunch with Clan. I will go out this afternoon to the nursing home to get this travesty under way. As we pass the receptionist’s desk, Julia nods, and picks up a pencil and taps her teeth with it.

  “Tweedledee and Tweedledum off to the chow hall again. Maybe we can get a direct phone line installed down there.”

  There is no doubt in my mind who is Tweedledum. About the second week I started getting used to Julia’s malevolent comments and have come to accept them for the truths about myself they contain.

  “Would you see about that, sweetie?” Clan coos at her.

  Julia pushes her cheeks out at Clan and pats her poochy stomach. She is dressed today in mauve pants and a lavender silk shirt, reminding me of a big grape.

  “Whatever you say, Porky,” she says, smiling at Clan.

  “By the way,” she says to me, “while you were in the crapper earlier Mona Moneyhart called again. Should we be installing a direct line for her too?”

  I roll my eyes at Clan. I’d like to trade him Mona. Somehow, I’ve got to learn to charge divorce clients by the hour if I’m going to earn any money. I say to Julia, “I’ll call her back after lunch.”

  Julia pitches the pink message slip in the wastepaper basket by her desk. “It’d save time if we got a little cot for her and put it in the corner of your office.”

  I nod at Clan, who is grinning now that Julia has shifted targets.

  “Let’s go eat.”

  In the cafeteria we are joined by Frank D’Angelo and “Ibnkie Southerland, attorneys from our floor. Frank, who is as wiry as Clan is fat, puts his salad down on the far edge of the table across from Clan.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Clan,” he says, watching Clan spoon in a mouthful of cherry cobbler, “it’s just that I haven’t eaten since last nig
ht, and it doesn’t look like you’re slowing down.”

  Clan moves his hand toward Frank as if to grab his plate of mostly lettuce and cucumbers and then waves it away.

  “It’s not worth fighting you for, D’Angelo.” He turns to Prank’s companion. ‘“Hinkie,” he says loudly, “how was your AIDS test?”

  Tunkie Southerland is said to be so shy it’s rumored he doesn’t know whether or not he has been circumcised. A tall, clumsy man who wears bifocals even though he is at least a decade younger than the rest of us, he pulls his neck inside his collar like a turtle.

  “Lay off the Tunk,” I tell Clan, who is looking around to see if anyone is laughing, “or he won’t write your next brief for you.” Tunkie (God only knows how he got his nickname-he won’t say) is the only lawyer I know personally who has had a case at the United States Supreme Court. At least he ghosted the brief. He writes beautifully, but watching him greet a client in the lobby is painful. If the client is a woman, Tunkie’s eyes actually begin to water. Why some people feel they have to become lawyers I’ll never understand.

  “How’s your big case going?” he asks, changing the subject as he sits down next to me. Despite his timid demeanor, Tunkie dresses well. He is wearing a blue banker’s-stripe broadcloth shirt and a burgundy tie. If he is as timid as he seems, I wonder how he can bear to look in the mirror long enough to get his knot so straight.

  Clan, who is gulping his lunch down with coffee still too hot for me to do more than sip, answers for me.

  “Which one? He’s got two now.”

  I let Clan explain and watch Tunkie’s face go crimson as Clan announces my newest client is eighty-four and was caught having sex in a closet.

  “If I can get it up when I’m that age,” Clan finishes loudly, “I’ll go down to the middle of Main Street and let Tunkie sell tickets to it.” We all laugh, and even Tunkie smiles at such a ludicrous thought.

  “How’s your murder case coming?” Prank asks, after Clan quits hooting at himself.

  “Accidental death,” I say, wincing at my memories of my conversation with Yettie Lindsey yesterday. Instead of immediately confronting Andy with what she told me, I called Rainey at the state hospital and asked her to plug herself into the social-worker gossip line. She knows Yettie only on sight, but the state is too small not to find mutual friends or enemies in common.

  “Sure it was,” Tunkie says, carefully spreading the cloth napkin that held his silverware onto his lap.

  “The mother probably wanted her kid put out of her misery and paid this black dude to electrocute her.”

  Improbably, Frank tries to rescue me.

  “It’d be a lot easier just to forget you ever had a child like that.”

  Clan wags his finger at all of us.

  “A man might try to forget,” he says, “but a mother can’t. Too much guilt. At the age of seventy, my mother still called every week to tell me what to do.”

  I say, laughing, “For good reason.” We talk generally about why people do things and decide no one has a clue.

  Maybe it is as simple as, the principle of behavior modification:

  we do what reinforces us. But if that’s true, what was the stimulus that led a black social worker to spill her guts to a white lawyer she didn’t know from a hole in the ground?

  Unrequited love? A bad evaluation? If anybody can find out, Rainey can. Odd how she is willing to do anything for me except make love. A lot of the women I’ve known since Rosa’s death have been just the opposite.

  Rosewood Convalescent Center is like other nursing homes I’ve visited-a prison disguised as a rest home for the elderly and infirm. While they think they are being watched, the employees, who are in mufti, wear cheery expressions, at least until they find out who I am. Still, there is no hiding the guard post-the nurse’s station that sits strategically at the midway point of the entrance to the building. Two wings form forty-five-degree angles from this central point, and I would bet the lunch Clan graciously paid for that it takes a key to get out the back door.

  After being required to show my Blackwell County Bar Association card to the assistant administrator, an anxious young woman who seems to regard my card as a confession that I am a convicted rapist (“This man claims to be her attorney”), and to the administrator, a man, whom I mentally dub Smiling Jack because of the frozen sneer he wears during our conversation, I am silently led by an aide to Room 142, which we reach after a series of turns that leave me completely lost. It must be nap time or perhaps time for their favorite soap, because we come upon only one resident, a trembling old man in bathrobe and slippers pushing a walker who seems as much at sea about where he is going as I am.

  The aide, who appears to be a high school kid, knocks as she opens the door, and if my client is again having sex, we will be sure to catch her at it. Instead, we come upon two people, one woman curled up in a fetal position in the far bed nearer the window, and another woman sitting at a desk next to a dresser. It will be just my luck if Mrs. Gentry is the old lady who looks as if she is in a coma, but the aide points out my client in the metal folding chair as if she is identifying her in a police lineup.

  “That’s her.”

  The aide leaves, and I awkwardly introduce myself. Mrs.

  Gentry turns in her chair, and I am pleasantly surprised by her healthy appearance. Though her skin is somewhat discolored by liver spots, she has a strong, masculine face that reminds me of an aunt who is now dead. Her hair, more gray than white, is thinning, but it is combed and pulled neatly into a bun at the back of her head. She is wearing turquoise trousers and a beige smock that covers a heavy but not obese body. Holding a pen in her left hand, she waits patiently until I am finished with my lie that Clan has to be out of town, and then asks if her hearing has been canceled for Tuesday. Her voice, I note, has an old woman’s cracked quality, but is strong. I tell her that so far as I know it is still set, and that I need to talk to her in private.

  With a right hand almost as big as my own, Mrs. Gentry gestures dismissively toward her roommate, and says dryly, “We can’t get much more private than this. Eloise can’t hear.”

  I glance at Eloise, who doesn’t even appear to be breathing and then back at Mrs. Gentry and smile. Though I get into trouble occasionally, I tend to make snap judgments about my clients, and I decide I like this old, mannish-looking woman. I may not be able to help her, but I’ve got a little time to give it a shot. I need to stop obsessing about Andy’s case for a while and get some perspective. After all, it is still more than a month off.

  “The judge will want to know why you want out,” I say, as I drag over the other chair in the room.

  “What will you tell him?”

  Mrs. Gentry stares at me as if she hasn’t made up her mind whether I have any sense or not. I begin to be aware that she hums constantly under her breath when she is not speaking. Finally, she begins, sending forth her words in a torrent.

  “I never wanted to be in here in the first place. For six months, I was horribly sick and almost died. Gall-bladder problem they probably didn’t diagnose right at first and lots of infection.

  They had to take it out, and most of my pancreas, too.

  I’m on oral insulin, but that’s all except vitamins. I’m still a little weak but I don’t need to be in here. My son got tired of waiting for me to die, and by now he’s probably wasted half of my money. Tbmmy thinks he’s a businessman-wants to sell Arkansas rice to the Japanese. Who doesn’t? Now I can’t even get a drink of water without having to ask six people if it’s okay. Would you want to live like this?” she asks and immediately begins to hum again.

  “No, ma’am,” I say, and scan the room. The walls are a dull mustard color, and there is a smell of urine and disinfectant coming from her roommate’s bed. What in the world could be more depressing?

  “Can you take care of yourself?”

  She folds her arms across her chest and clears her throat.

  “I don’t want to take care
of myself. I was in one of those retirement places-decent food, alcohol, somebody to play bridge with, my own apartment, even some privacy, dam it.” Suddenly, tears come to her eyes.

  “Obviously, I’m not going to live forever, but I don’t want to die in here if I can help it. Would you?”

  I decide not to ask her about the sex-in-a-box business right now. It is irrelevant and of only prurient interest.

  Though Clan will be disappointed if I don’t come back with details, surely he can survive without knowing the sex life of an eighty-four-year-old woman who looks a bit like the pictures I’ve seen of Gertrude Stein. I get her to sign a couple of releases so I can look at her records and talk to her doctor.

  Since she has no control over her money and can’t hire her own doctor to examine her, we are at the mercy of the nursing-home physician, who, if he knows anything, surely is aware which side his bread is buttered on, but it can’t hurt to talk to him. I visit with her for another thirty minutes, and as I am picking up my briefcase to leave she clears her throat and says, dropping her voice, “There’s something else you ought to know.”

  As I cram my notes into my briefcase, she begins to hum.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Gentry looks over at her comatose roommate and says, with great dignity, “I’m still sexually active.”

  I nod, unable to bring myself to tell her that I am aware of this remarkable fact.

  She says,”

  “They discourage that sort of thing here. In fact, they treat you like a child and make you feel dirty. You have to sneak around.” Her voice has become a whisper.

  “I have a friend here whom I’ve known ever since my son admitted me. He and I were caught in kind of a compromising position a couple of weeks ago in the food pantry. I would die if that comes out in court.”

  Mrs. Gentry’s spotted, wrinkled face has turned a bright red.

  “I think it’s totally irrelevant,” I assure her, “and I’ll object if your son’s attorney tries to bring it up.”

  Mrs. Gentry sighs, apparently relieved, but it occurs to me that the incident would be wonderful evidence that she shouldn’t be here. As I try to suggest this, however, the humming grows louder until it seems to fill the room. It sounds like “Sentimental Journey,” but I couldn’t swear to it.