Defense, p.11
Defense, page 11
He paused for a moment, staring down at the floor, as if trying to remember way back to a time, years ago, before the first sentence he ever served. “You know,” he said, glancing up, “stupid ones who keep getting caught.”
I started to tell him what I had told him so often before, that things could get better, that he could start a different life. He stopped me with a single shake of his grizzled head. “No, I know what you’re going to say. But it’s too late for me. I don’t know. Maybe it was always too late for me. Maybe we all just play out the hand we get dealt. You know. Some of us are born to be doctors and lawyers and presidents and things like that. Some of us—people like me—are born to be thieves. Who knows? I don’t, that’s for sure.”
He tilted his head back and carefully blew the smoke up into the air, watching it like a soldier calculating the arc and distance of an artillery shell.
“Listen, Mr. Antonelli, you’ve always been great to me, and I thought I ought to tell you.” He stopped, and for a moment seemed to be having second thoughts.
“Look, Carmen, anything you say stays in this room. But there really isn’t anything you can tell me that is going to make any difference. It’s over.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know. Hell, I’m too damn dumb to know anything. All I know is I trust you more than any lawyer I ever had. Tell you the truth, I probably trust you more than any human being I ever knew. I know you’d never tell a soul anything I told you. I know that. And I know that asshole had his trial. I know you got him off. I know that.” There was a sudden, slight tinge of doubt in his eyes. “Did you ever think that maybe sometimes you should just dump a case?”
The night was everywhere, broken only by the single cylindrical shaft of light that fell down on the corner of my desk from beneath the parchment-shaded lamp. Mara was a few feet away, his face hidden behind a pearl-colored haze framed in the enveloping darkness. He was a ghost, come to examine my conscience.
“Yeah, I know, I know,” he said before I could say anything. “You never dumped one of my cases. And I was guilty as hell. No doubt about it. Every time, too. You were great, Mr. Antonelli,” he said, forgetting what he had come to say in a sudden flash of remembrance. “You were great. I almost used to look forward to getting caught, just so I could watch you stick it up the ass of some tight-assed prick who tried to prosecute me!”
He started to laugh, and the laughter made him start to cough. He ground the cigarette out in the ashtray and waited until I gave him another.
“But it’s not the same. I never did nothin’ bad to anyone. I’m just a thief. But what about a guy like this? A guy like Morel? He raped a girl,” he said plaintively. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
Carmen Mara had come here, to my office, to lecture me on morality!? “Look, Carmen,” I started to explain, “I can’t just represent the innocent, I have to…” I stopped, wondering if it sounded as ludicrous to him as it did to me. “What is it? What is it about Morel that bothers you so much?”
“Besides the fact that he lied to you after I told him to tell you the truth?”
Mara would have done that. “Yes, besides that. What else did he lie about?”
“Shit, man,” he cried, “the asshole lied about everything.” He stared hard at me. “Everything,” he repeated slowly. “He lied to you about the whole thing. You should have dumped the case, Mr. Antonelli. You should have just let the asshole go to prison. We’d see how long he’d last there,” he said with a vengeful grin. “Somebody would have killed him, or maybe done something worse to him than killing. He deserves it. He deserves to die for what he did to that girl. And you know what? So does that bag bitch who helped him do it!”
I sat in dumb, unresisting silence, listening to the harsh rasp that was what a lifetime of cigarettes and narcotics had left of his voice, while Mara told me a tale of pure evil. Johnny Morel had raped his stepdaughter exactly the way the girl had said. He had called her into the bedroom, thrown her down on the bed, pulled off her pajamas and had sex with her. There was no question. He had bragged about it. Mara was too old to be a threat. He could tell him anything he wanted, and he had told him everything. He had called his stepdaughter “a great little piece of ass.” He had even told Mara that he could hardly wait for the chance to teach her what happens to girls who tell. He actually felt betrayed.
I remembered what Myrna Albright with her crazy eyes and her trembling hatred told me had happened when she refused what Denise wanted her to do with Johnny Morel. I remembered the warning—or was it really a threat?—she delivered from the shadows of the courthouse hallway the night Morel was acquitted. Everything she had told me was true—about Denise, about Morel, all of it. But what she had known, what she had told me, barely scratched the surface.
Denise was a junkie, and Johnny Morel was her source. She gave herself whenever he wanted her, and she gave him her daughter whenever he wanted her. She did anything he wanted, and she made her daughter do anything he asked. Mara had even heard that the two of them, mother and stepfather, agreed to give the girl to others in exchange for whatever drugs they could get.
“Then why did she only accuse Morel of raping her once, and why didn’t she say anything about what her mother had done?”
Mara shrugged his shoulders and muttered that all he knew was that the girl really hated Johnny.
“You think she still loves her mother?” I asked, more to myself than to Mara.
“Shit, man,” Mara snarled, “I’m no goddamn shrink. All I know is she hates the asshole so much she tried to kill him once.” He smiled sardonically, and left no doubt about his disappointment. “Tried to stab him with a pair of scissors. He got ’em away from her and beat the shit out of her. Or so he said. Thinks he’s a tough guy.”
I was barely listening. It made a strange kind of sense. The girl would have blamed Morel for everything. She would have wanted to get rid of him and get back her mother, the mother she had before Morel had entered their lives and turned them both into whores. It would have been the only thing she had left to hang on to. She could not kill him. She tried that. After the police took her away, she was safe in a foster home, but who was going to save her mother? It must have eaten away at her until she finally found the way out. She told the police about Johnny Morel, but only about the one time when her mother had been away.
“Too bad she didn’t kill him,” Mara was saying. “Doesn’t matter, though. Someone will. In or out of prison. It don’t matter. Guys I know don’t care what anybody’s done. Except that. Anyone messes with a kid, gets it,” he explained darkly. “Same thing with the bag bitch. She’s almost worse than he is. Somebody will get her. You watch.”
It was the instinct of habit. I was always ready with cautious advice that followed the letter of the law. “Leave it alone, Carmen. It’s not your problem.”
Mara got up to leave. “Seems like it should be somebody’s problem, though, doesn’t it?”
He was gone. I switched off the lamp light and sat alone in the darkness, staring out at the mountain, a looming white shadow surrounded by darkness. Mara was a small-time thief, but he understood the difference between ordinary crimes and crimes against children. He was poor, practically illiterate, and had spent half his life locked up in a county jail or a state prison, but he had never lost the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. I was wealthy, successful by any common measure, and had as much formal education as anyone could want, and I was the one who refused to think it was even a problem. Johnny Morel had been acquitted, set free to corrupt and defile as many children as he could, because I had used every legal trick I knew to get him off. Myrna Albright had told me all anyone needed to know, and I had prayed she would not tell anyone else, not before the trial, not while there was still a chance to win. Johnny Morel had lied to me, Denise Morel had lied to me, and I had lied to everyone. It was what I did. I was a trial lawyer. It was the only thing I had ever wanted to be; it was the only thing I knew.
Perhaps my father had been right after all. He had wanted me to be a doctor, too, wanted it so badly that I could still see the hurt come into his eyes whenever I had been tactless enough to wonder in his presence what my life would have been like had I followed in his footsteps. He had made those footsteps plain enough. When I was barely old enough to walk, he took me with him Saturday mornings when he visited patients in the hospital. All the nurses fussed over me, and when they passed us in the hall, other doctors would smile at me and ask my father if I was the new intern. When he had something to do, he would lift me up onto the nearest chair and I would listen to the beating of my own heart with the stethoscope he draped around my neck. He loved every minute of what he did. It was, he never stopped telling me, the greatest life anyone could have.
My feet were propped up on the corner of the desk, one ankle crossed over the other. Oblivious to time, I stared out the window, remembering things my father had told me, things I had only begun to remember after he died. It would be three years on Christmas Day. A few minutes after nine, Christmas night, driving back from dinner with friends, he was killed in a head-on collision just east of town. A drunk driver weaving through traffic crossed over the center line. The drunk driver lived; my father died. It would never have happened if I had spent the holidays at home. He would have stayed with me, the way he had every year since he and my mother divorced. She lived on the other side of the country, in North Carolina, with her second husband, a cardiologist who had gone to medical school with my father. She said she was terribly sorry. She did not come to the funeral.
Maybe Mara was right: We all just play the hand we’re dealt. I stood up and went to the window. There was a full moon and the mountain, shrouded all in white, seemed close enough to touch. My father had taken me there at Christmas when I was only four or five. When we pulled into the parking lot at Mt. Hood Lodge, there in the snow, just a few feet away, leaning against a fir tree, was a shiny new wooden sled with a red ribbon wrapped around it. I turned to him, hoping it was for me. He did not say a word, he just nodded, and I remember wondering for just the half second before I jumped out of the car and bounded into the snow why his smile seemed so sad.
Memories of things long forgotten began to crowd together, clamoring for attention, like the shades in Dante’s Inferno, convinced they could be brought back to life if only they could make me remember. With a strange sense of having lost something that could never be recaptured, I turned slowly away from the window and the mountain and the eager excitement of the young boy I used to be. I picked up my coat and opened the door to let myself out.
The overhead lights in the corridor that stretched the length of the floor were still on, and a radio was blaring from somewhere off in the distance. It was late, nearly ten, and at this time of night the janitorial crew was in the habit of treating the office as its home away from home. Halfway down the hall, as I was about to make the turn that led to the elevators, I saw a light coming from within the partially opened door that led to the office of one of my partners.
Michael Ryan was slouched down in his blue leather chair, one ankle crossed over his knee, scribbling away on a yellow legal pad held in his lap. His thick glasses had slipped down to the end of his nose, but he was too busy to notice. The pencil raced across the page, darted back and started again, line after line, and then, without so much as a pause, he ripped the page from the tablet and, while he crumpled it up with his left hand, began to write at the top of the next page with his right. The floor was littered with paper remnants of a work that was always beginning.
“If you’d just use a computer,” I said from the doorway, shouting to make myself heard over the radio that sat on the credenza less than two feet from his ear, “we wouldn’t lose half the rain forest every time you draft a brief.”
“Antonelli,” he said without looking up. Ryan had never heard a word he could not abbreviate. When he said my name it came out “Aunt Nellie.” He never shortened my first name because he never used it. It was part of his perpetual rebellion against West Coast informality. The barber who cut his hair still thought his first name was Ryan because that was the only name he had given the first time he called for an appointment.
“What you doing here?” he asked, still writing feverishly. “I’m working on this thing. Thought I better get it down, before I forget it.”
“Looks like you didn’t quite remember all of it,” I remarked, glancing around at the mounting debris. I settled into a corner of the sofa from where I could watch him work, grinding his teeth and emitting strange noises that might have been keeping time with the music on the radio or the thoughts that were bouncing around in his brain.
“Have a seat,” he said. A conversation with Ryan was sometimes like being given directions after you have already passed the turn.
“Want a drink?” he asked, waving his hand in no very definite direction. I looked around. Ryan’s office was the mirror image of my own. From my corner, I looked out at the mountain; his corner looked out one side at the Columbia River and on the other at the West Hills. In daytime I could see the road I took home.
“Where is it?” I asked finally. “I don’t see it.”
“Good enough!” he proclaimed, slamming the pencil down on the desk. He sat up, pushed his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose, and stared at me. “What the hell you doing here, Antonelli? Want a drink?” He started to look around, then he reached into a drawer. “Here,” he said as he pulled out a bottle of scotch, “have one. It’s good stuff,” he added when I decided against it. “Really.” He picked up his own glass from its place on the corner of the credenza, next to the radio. Then, as if he had just realized it was on, he turned it off. “Helps me think,” he explained.
Ryan’s mouth was too small for his face. It was like a parrot’s beak—the middle part of his upper lip drooped down over the lower. His stubbled cheeks were round, and his eyes were hidden beneath soft, puffy lids. Unkempt, brown curly hair flowed back from his worried forehead. There was an almost palpable sense of dissipation about him, a sense of self-destruction, as if he were in a war with himself, a war he was losing and which he had no serious interest in winning.
“Sure?” he asked, taking another drink. “Good stuff, Antonelli. My father liked it so much he drank it every day until the day he died,” he said. “So, what the hell you doing Antonelli?” he sighed.
“Nothing. I was just leaving. Saw the light on.”
“Glad you did. Sure you don’t want…?” He waited until I had finished shaking my head. “Okay. You start working this late all the time, we could start having something brought in. Haven’t eaten since lunch.”
I realized I had not had anything either. “You want to get a hamburger? That place around the corner is always open.”
“No, not tonight. I’ve got another hour and then I’ll get out of here.”
He picked up the pencil and held it in the middle between two fingers and began to twirl it back and forth. I started to get up. “I’ll get out of here.”
“No, don’t go. Christ, Antonelli, you’re right down the hall and I never see you. Everybody’s always too goddamn busy.”
No one was as busy as Ryan. He practically lived in his office. “You’re complaining?” I laughed as I dropped back onto the sofa. “When don’t you work?”
He looked at me with the wry, crooked grin of a conspirator. “When I’m married.” Ryan had been married twice. He divorced his first wife after ten years of marriage and his second wife divorced him after only two. “You should try it sometime, Antonelli. Do you good. No, I take it back. Marriage isn’t any good, not if you’re already married to this,” he said, flailing his arm around. “I mean this just takes everything you have. Remember that old line, the one that always sounded so quaint, ‘The law is a jealous mistress?’ Turns out it’s true. You can’t just leave it at the office, not if you’re any good. With you all the time. I wake up in the middle of the night, two, three in the morning, and I’m listening to myself—the voice in my head, the voice that never sleeps—talking about something I need to know for a case I have to handle.”
He was describing the only life I knew. And he was right. There never was any end to it. “You ever think about quitting—doing something else?”
“And do what? Join the ranks of the idle rich?” he asked, a hard cynicism flickering for just a moment in his eyes. “No, that’s the one thing I never think about.” He stopped twirling the pencil and put it down on the desk. He took careful aim, like a pool hustler sizing up a shot, and flicked his finger hard against the eraser. It went spinning across until it disappeared over the edge. “‘Everyone should have at least one sport they’re good at.’ Father Donahue. Philosophy 101. Notre Dame. A hard-drinking, bleary-eyed priest if ever there was one,” he explained rather proudly, as if alcohol was the uniform badge of defiance worn by every self-respecting Irishman.
“I never think about it, because, as they say, ‘on that side lies the abyss.’ No, there’s nothing else. The law is it.” He took another drink and then searched my eyes. “You’re going through one of those times when you wonder what you’re doing, what the point of it all is, what your life is all about. It’s not something I’ve ever had to struggle with much. My father worked in the steel mill during the day and drank all night. Only reason I didn’t end up the same way was I could run fast. I think I learned it running away from him. I was fast enough that Notre Dame wanted me to come and help establish the dominance of Catholicism on college football fields all over the country. I wasn’t that fast. I got my scholarship and was a serious disappointment. I was never better than third string, but I got out of the steel mill, and I got away from him, and I got the best chance I was ever going to get. So, no, Antonelli, I don’t think too much about giving up the law. Tell you the truth, for all the bitching I do about it, I wouldn’t do anything else for all the money in the world. I like being a lawyer. I like the work. No, I love the work. I like trying to figure out ways to get things done. I like using words to build an argument, even if I do have to spend half the goddamn night trying to find the right way to use them.”
