Probable Cause g-2 Read online

  I come forward while the judge is lecturing the parties.

  Since it is now routine, the sight of a black man in central Arkansas shaking his finger at two white males as he warns them to stay clear of each other has lost its wonder (in certain parts of the state a two-headed calf presiding on the bench wouldn’t draw as big a crowd) so that I can perhaps squeeze in a bond hearing before he quits for the day. After he finishes, I grab Bobba, who shrugs noncommittally at my request and accompanies me to the bench to speak to Judge Bell. I explain what I want to the judge, who listens while he is writing in the docket book his female clerk has handed him. When I tell him the name of the defendant. Judge Bell, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Sammy Davis, Jr.” in the period of Sammy’s life when he was photographed joyously embracing Richard Nixon, shakes his head and says, “You’ll have to ask Judge Bruton. I have to recuse. Your client was the best man at my wedding.”

  Bobba grins slyly as if to say “Gotcha!” A story is told about Judge Bruton, an old man who generally hears only traffic cases, that he once said at a reception for a colleague that the country had begun an irreversible decline the day Lincoln freed the slaves. This remark must be many years old, because within the so-called “civilized center,” as the Arkansas Gazette once referred to central Arkansas, racist remarks made in public have long been regarded as a breach of etiquette. In private, a different code governs. Five minutes later I am told by Judge Bruton’s clerk that the judge, approaching seventy, has gone home for the day. My bond hearing will be no sooner than tomorrow, and I walk down stairs to tell Andrew Chapman that he will have to spend the night in jail, for no other reason than one judge likes him too much and the other one has gone home to doze in front of the afternoon soaps.

  Downstairs I can detect relief by the spring in Chapman’s step as he is led toward me. Damn, I haven’t been on this case an hour, and I already feel guilty. Why? I think it’s because I already like Chapman, even though I’ve just met him. Some people (not many criminal defendants) I like instinctively and he is one of them. There is a dignity about the man that is appealing. I extend my hand formally, knowing at the moment I have nothing better to offer him. He crushes my fingers as if to reprimand me silently for allowing him to be degraded in this way. I explain his dilemma, and he listens intently. Fortunately, I didn’t promise him his re lease this afternoon. Still, guilt, like prickly heat, jabs my conscience while I explain that tomorrow morning he will appear before the judge for a bond hearing. This man should not be in jail even overnight. If he were white, given the nature of the alleged crime, he would most likely be released on his own recognizance. He may spend one night in jail, but I’ll be damned if he is going to spend another one.

  “It’s okay,” Chapman says, consoling me.

  “I know you did all you could.”

  I shrug, not so sure. Hell, I should have called Bruton, the old bastard, at home and told him to get back down here and put in a day’s work.

  “I’m sorry. Dr. Chapman.”

  He gives me a wan smile.”

  “My friends call me Andy.

  “Dr. Chapman’ seems a little formal in a place like this.”

  I look around the human zoo surrounding me and have to agree.

  “Andy,” I say, “my parents. God forgive them, named me “Gideon,” and my friends don’t call me “Giddy.”

  ” His smile broadens.

  “Gideon it is.”

  I leave, glad I could give him something to smile about.

  3

  I stand out in front of the jail like some derelict who has just been released from the drunk tank. The afternoon sun feels about five feet from my face. What now? So far my debut in private practice has been less than impressive. I can’t even get my first and only client bonded out of jail. If I don’t get out of the heat soon, I’ll spend my first night in a hospital as a stroke victim. To give myself time to think, I wander back over in the direction of the Blair Building, wondering if they have had to pry Martha off the bathroom fixtures. It is beginning to sink in how desperate my situation is. If I can ever get Chapman released, the first thing I’ll need to work out with him is a retainer. As if I’ve got something important to do, I walk against the light at the corner of Vance and Darrow. Unless you have a job, there’s not much to do except window-shop-not that there’s anything to buy downtown since developers figured out they could make a fortune accommodating whites who wanted to escape from blacks by moving to the western part of the county. The central business district is a checkerboard of urban blight.

  The closest thing to a first-rate, high-quality retail store on Darrow is a black wig shop. Actually, there is a decent-looking men’s clothing store down the street, but I’ve never seen a white person in it. The assumption is that the stuff must be junk. And we say we’re no longer racists.

  I jaywalk across the street to Beaumont Drugs, which has something for everybody, even unemployed lawyers. I make the sporting-goods section my temporary office and pretend I am pondering the eternal question: Wilson or Penn tennis balls? Bored with jogging and sick of racquetball, I have taken up tennis this summer. I wince at the price: $3.25 a can. At Wal-Mart a can costs $1.84. Given my prospective bank balance, running is looking attractive again. I find the phone booth next to the elevator and look up Chapman’s address: number 5 Clearwater Apartments. Damn! The guy lives in the whitest singles apartment complex in Blackwell County. What is he trying to prove? I have thought about moving into a singles building when Sarah goes to college, but then I look in the mirror and think I’m losing my mind.

  The women in these buildings are young enough to be my daughters.

  Out of the corner of my eye I notice a grizzled old black lady with a chinful of hair wistfully studying the phone in my hand and give her a thumbs-up sign that I’m almost through. In my new office we have to be generous about sharing the phone. I flip through the Yellow Pages, looking in the realty section, and remember an old friend in solo practice in the Layman Building almost directly across the street.

  I give the old-goat lady a wink as I hand her the phone.

  She responds to my rudeness with a “don’t-you-be-botherin’-me-white-man” stare, and I fairly prance out of Beaumont’s, relieved to have somewhere to go. As I find Clan Bailey’s name on the board in the Layman Building lobby, I begin to feel depressed again. I could write a book about what I still don’t know about general practice. I am going to have to find a floor full of lawyers who will take turns holding my hand and lending me their forms. I can handle a criminal case and have learned more than I want to know from the plaintiff’s side about personal injury litigation, but I can’t draw up a simple deed without wanting to check my malpractice coverage.

  I realize suddenly that I am no longer covered by the firm. I’ll just have to fly without it for a while. One crash though, and I’ll be doing a forced feeding on bankruptcy law, another area I managed to avoid in school. What the hell did I learn? Confidence I do not have in abundance at the moment. As I head up to the sixteenth floor, I wonder how Clan is doing. Recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that he must be eating steroids for breakfast. Each time I’ve seen him lately, he looks as if he’s gained another fifty pounds.

  The anxieties of solo practice, I fear. He had been in a firm after leaving the PD’s Office but went out on his own six months ago. He can give me a reasonably unbiased account of the virtues (but more likely the defects) of the Layman Building.

  “Is Clan Bailey in?” I ask the receptionist, a strange young woman who is slowly threading a plastic soda straw into a mouth so small her effort seems as if it might be causing her some pain.

  Considering my question, she noisily slurps the remains of a Diet Coke.

  “Yeah, Dan’s in,” she says after a final gurgling sound bubbles up from the bottom of the container.

  Hey, we’re really moving now.

  “Could you tell him Gideon Page is here to see him?”

  S
he purses her chicken lips in more thought.

  “Why don’cha go on back? He doesn’t seem too busy.” She smiles pleasantly as if she is doing us both a big favor.

  This woman, her hair a rat’s nest, is dressed more like a circus clown than a secretary. She is wearing green balloon pants and an aqua top. With her tiny mouth and pop eyes, she resembles some kind of prehistoric fish. Truly a receptionist from the depths. I flee down the hall until I get to 1613 and find Clan as promised, leaning back in his chair and gazing at his wall.

  I walk through the open door.

  “Your receptionist doesn’t seem particularly in awe of you,” I say, taking a seat in the only other chair in the office.

  He grins, his now fat cheeks billowing outward like toy sails.

  “It’s a mutual-non admiration society. Thank God she’s a temp. You should see the regular one-a Carol Doda look-alike.” He spreads both hands under his rib cage in the now time-dishonored manner.

  I shake my head in wonder at my friend’s perpetual time warp. Carol Doda was, or is (for all I know), a stripper in San Francisco who surely would admit she was in her prime a quarter of a century ago, when, with all the protest marches and riots in the big cities, it seemed the country was on the verge of revolution. But Dan’s most precious memory of the period is a mental postcard of two giant breasts. Yet I must have drooled over the same issues of Playboy.

  “You’re looking larger than life,” I say un diplomatically

  “Jeez,” he complains, “if I get any fatter I’ll have to be driven to work on a forklift.”

  I laugh, knowing I like him because I doubt he has censored a single thought since the day he got married. An hour before his wedding (a humongous affair with a catered outdoor reception at the Arts Center), he knew he was making a horrible mistake.

  “Brenda could handle the fact that her husband-to-be had an emotional age of fifteen,” he told me once after work over a couple of beers, “but when she discovered afterward I really was only two, it freaked her. I should have called it off, but I didn’t have (he balls.” I put my feet up on his desk and selectively rehash my year at Mays amp; Burton. Clan loves gossip the way my kid loves grease disguised as food.

  “Shitfire!” he exclaims.

  “They really fucked you, didn’t they?” I nod, marveling at how high Dan’s voice gets when he becomes indignant. At the PD’s Office we joked that if he could make his voice sound that shrill for a few more seconds he could market it as a dog whistle.

  “I escaped with a client, though,” I say, feeling a need not to sound too pathetic and tell him about Andrew Chapman.

  His Razorback red tie choking his bulging neck, Clan loosens his collar as if my story sticks in his craw.

  “Aren’t you a little worried,” he mumbles, “that when this case hits the newspapers they might come after the fee?”

  Feeling heat rising to my face, I practically shout, “He hadn’t signed their retainer agreement, damn it. Besides, it was me he wanted, not Mays amp; Burton. The odds were almost certain they wouldn’t have let me take it.”

  Like a teenager wearing his first tie on a dinner date, Clan inspects it for stains. He says loyally, “You’re right. They wouldn’t get anywhere.”

  I fight down a new wave of panic. The employment agreement I signed was three pages long and covered every loophole imaginable. The assholes. I slump in the chair, feeling exhausted. “I hope the hell not.”

  Over a snack in the break room, Clan fills me in on the deal he has with the Layman Building. Feeling broke, I have a cup of water while he demolishes two packs of Twinkles and a Mars bar. The Secretary of Agriculture, he now calls himself, boasting that he could solve the need for subsidies to farmers all by himself.

  I listen carefully and decide the price is right: I can rent a decent office and the use of a secretary for little more than three hundred a month (depending on how much typing I have). That doesn’t include a phone or furniture, but Clan assures me there is a good group of lawyers on the floor who are more than willing to help each other out.

  “Hell, you know that by myself I’m a card-carrying incompetent,” he says, now daintily sipping a cup of coffee, “but there are five other attorneys within moaning distance of my office. Our collective IQ is probably 105, but that’s more than enough to get by with the kind of nickel-and-dime crap we mostly get. You know Southerland and D’Angelo, don’t you?”

  I nod, sucking on a piece of ice, knowing that I might possibly find something even cheaper but probably more isolated.

  Not only does misery love company, in the legal business misery demands it unless you’ve been around forever and remember at least half of what you’ve learned or can lay your hands on it. Besides, I know a couple of the guys and they are pretty good, much better than Clan admits.

  “Tunkie” Southerland is probably one of the better lawyers I know, but like me, he is so disorganized he spends half a morning looking for his files. He writes beautifully, though, and ghosts appellate briefs for a number of lawyers in Blackwell County.

  Frank D’Angelo, a transplanted Yankee who couldn’t get into law school up North, knows a lot of bankruptcy, so he will come in handy, too.

  “If you need some furniture,” Clan says, choking back a belch, “the building manager has a basement full of odds and ends that she’ll rent dirt cheap.”

  It all seems too easy, but by 7 p.m. I’m the newest tenant of the Layman Building, and with the help of a janitor I possess some temporary office furniture. And by this time tomorrow I’ll have a telephone and my name on the directory.

  Now, if I can just acquire more than one client….

  Granted, my office looks like Goodwill South, but it will keep until I can drive around this weekend to some secondhand furniture stores. I know I can get some halfway decent stuff if I’ll take the time to look. In the meantime, if I have any clients I can interview them in the conference room, which is only two doors from my office. Clan has told me to call the federal district court clerk’s office and put my name on the list for criminal appointments for indigent defendants.

  The feds pay forty an hour, which is forty more than I’m getting on anything else except Chapman. I decide I will call when the phone is installed. I glance around the bare walls and realize my diplomas and other junk are at Mays amp; Burton, assuming they haven’t dumped them into the trash. I can pick them up first thing in the morning. I’ve had enough of the free-enterprise system today.

  4

  I do not pull into my driveway until almost eight o’clock.

  It is just as well. My daughter is at Arkansas Governor’s School, a summer camp for the gifted and talented. Without Sarah, my house will be a tomb-just me and a presumably hungry dog. It is not until I have to push myself out of the Blazer that I realize I am exhausted; however, there won’t be many times that I will be fired, enter private practice, and pick up a well-to-do client all in the same afternoon.

  I walk across tall, scrufiy grass to the house, mulling over the fact that Andrew Chapman is a behavioral psychologist, not a psychiatrist, as I previously assumed. Shrinks work with the mentally ill. I have no idea if the girl carried a dual diagnosis of mental retardation and mental illness. Wouldn’t she have to be insane to mutilate herself? It is an area I know nothing about. Chapman can start my education tomorrow.

  Seldom has a lawyer known so little about his client. Despite my ignorance, I do know one thing, and that is this case ought to be great for business. If I can’t pick up some clients from the kind of publicity this case will generate, I’m not long for private practice.

  In the mailbox is the usual junk mail (Amnesty International-if they had spelled my name right I’d have given them more money-now I’m glad I didn’t) and, much more pleasing, a letter from Sarah. I am thrilled she was selected to attend Governor’s School but have privately wondered if her unusual racial background didn’t make the difference.

  Granted, she is unusually bright and a har
d worker, but she is hardly a genius, having inherited my defective math genes.

  The selection committee arguably (and probably only theoretically, since she identifies herself as white) could count her as Hispanic, Indian, and black-a cornucopia of unmentioned but undoubtedly very real racial requirements.

  I can hear Woogie screeching on the other side of the door.

  I usually make it home before seven. I won’t open my letter from Sarah until I have taken Woogie for a walk. He acts so obnoxious and hyper until he’s eaten and gone out, it isn’t worth even opening a beer first. Tonight is no exception. As soon as I open the door, my dog, a perverse mixture of beagle and sometimes I think another species entirely (perhaps a giraffe, so long are his legs), is on me. First a fast suck on my shoelaces for old times’ sake-he hasn’t done that in a while-and then he backs off and makes repeated runs at me, bounding higher each time. Fortunately, beagles-even mixed breeds with long legs-can only jump so high or he would be licking my face, he is so happy to see me.

  “Hi, boy,” I say quietly, trying to calm him. Any inflection in my voice only excites him.

  “Had a big day?” I turn on some lights, flip the switch on the central air-conditioning, and head for the kitchen to fill his bowl. Rosa and I used to feed him in the mornings until he began waking us earlier and earlier to eat. While he is delightedly crunching on a bowl of what reminds me of rabbit pellets (as a boy in the Delta my father and I hunted cottontails with real beagles-it was really an excuse to get out of the house and do something together, since it never seemed to bother us when we came home empty-handed), I peel off my suit in the sweltering bedroom and slip on some shorts, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. As I pull out my change and keys and lay them on the dresser, I glance down at a picture of the three of us-Rosa, Sarah, and me-taken outside of Graceland at Elvis’s shrine in Memphis. No matter what she was wearing, Rosa always looked good. Here, just shorts, sandals, and a bright yellow T-shirt that says “Sea World” and a likeness (surely, all killer whales can be said to look alike) of Shamu, a reminder of another trip. Sarah must have been about ten at the time of the Tennessee trip, but she was already a knockout, even without her mother’s sensational figure. She has it now. Genetics. She is Rosa all over again, right down to the tip of her South American Indian nose. I’m missing Sarah a lot more this third week and resist the urge to tear open her letter and read it now. But it is something to be savored over a beer. Actually, she called two nights ago, but our conversations, especially over the phone, are often awkward and frustrating, as if she would prefer to wait until she is about thirty to answer another question about her life. However, I was pleasantly surprised by her first letter, which contained more news and opinions than a week’s worth of conversations around the house. When Rosa and I had a rare serious fight, she would write me a long letter, partly in English, partly in Spanish (though her English was excellent), that invariably expressed her feelings better than she did in person.