Defense, page 12
He shook his head and held up his hands, the way a fighter does when he’s cautioned by the referee for a low blow. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to run off like that. You’re right, Antonelli. Sometimes it all gets a little overwhelming. Two years ago I took off for a month. Remember? Went to Ireland. Had a great time. Why don’t you do that? Not Ireland. Someplace. Italy? I don’t know. Just get away, out of the country. It’s easier to clear your head when you’re not around. And there’s some other things you can do. I know you’ve never wanted to, but you might think about getting active with the bar association.”
I started to object, but he talked right over it. “No, really. You could do some good things. You could help train new lawyers, new defense lawyers. Most of them can’t find their way to the courthouse. Your friend the DA does it.”
“Woolner?” I asked. I did not know about Horace, but it did not surprise me.
“Yeah, that and more. You should have been at the bar association dinner last Saturday. They gave him the award for service to the community. He does a lot of stuff with kids. Guy’s amazing,” Ryan went on. “He really had part of his legs blown off? Hard to believe. I don’t think I would have even noticed if you hadn’t told me. Walks a little stiff, but, hell, I know guys with bad backs don’t walk as good as he does.”
As I got to my feet, Ryan looked perplexed. “You leaving? Oh, hell,” he announced, “I might as well go, too. I think I’ll take you up on it.”
I did not know what he meant. “The hamburger,” he reminded me. “Sounds great.” I could not tell if he was really hungry, or just a little lonely.
“What are you going to do this weekend?” he asked as we waited for the elevator.
“Not sure. Thought I might go skiing.”
“You going down to Bend? Mt. Bachelor?”
“No. I thought I’d just drive up to Hood. I haven’t been there in a long time.”
x
Michael Ryan died in his sleep less than a year later when an aneurysm exploded somewhere inside his brain. He had been having headaches for weeks and the doctor told him to come back for more extensive tests if they got any worse. They got worse, but he never went back. He was too busy getting ready for a trial. When he did not appear on the morning of the opening day, the judge had his clerk call the office. Afraid that he might have gone off on one of his famous binges and then slept right through the alarm, his secretary called him at home. It happened to be one of the two days each week the cleaning lady came. She put down the phone and went into the bedroom where she found him, his head resting on a pillow, his eyes wide open, dead at forty-five.
The four partners were now only three, and I barely knew the other two. Fred Duncan and Alonzo Trewitt had been partners with Michael years before he persuaded me that it would be good for the firm to have a criminal defense attorney and good for me to be in a place where I could practice law and not worry about the business side of things. It had worked out better than I had expected. Michael had taken care of everything. In a few short years the firm had grown from four lawyers and a couple of paralegals to nearly thirty attorneys and more than two dozen support staff. For Michael it was only the beginning. He had already designed the system we would use to promote associates first to junior and then to full partner. When he died he was negotiating a lease for more space. Michael Ryan wanted us to become the biggest law firm in the city.
Duncan and Trewitt had been perfectly content to follow wherever Ryan chose to lead. They both had wives and children, worked as hard as any normal person should, and looked upon the law as an occupation rather than the kind of obsession that left no time for anything else. They were, so far as I knew, good husbands, good fathers, good lawyers, and two of the dullest, most narrow-minded people I had ever met. Michael Ryan had made them rich, and now that he was gone all they could think about was how to become richer still.
Halfway down the corridor between Ryan’s corner office and my own, the conference room looked north toward the confluence of the Columbia and the Willamette. Hundreds of volumes of the Oregon Reporter and the U.S. Supreme Court Reporter lined the shelves that ran from the floor to the ceiling on the long wall opposite the windows. When I walked in, right on time, Alonzo Trewitt was sitting at the head of the table, the place that had always been taken by Michael.
“I wouldn’t sit there too long, Lonzo,” I chuckled as I took a chair across from Duncan. “Ryan isn’t really dead. It’s just taking him a little longer than usual to sober up.”
They did not like me and they never had. It had not been their idea to bring me in. Ryan had convinced them I could make them money and I had. I brought in more than the two of them together, but instead of gratitude they felt only resentment. They went out of their way to show their contempt for the criminal law.
Trewitt did not waste any time. “Because of Michael’s passing, we need to consider how the firm should be organized.” He pronounced each word with the precision of a bank teller counting change.
He was tall, angular, with a habit of rotating his hands in opposite directions while he talked, a habit that lent his conversation an impression of great movement without any progress. For nearly twenty minutes he droned on, describing each of the specific changes he thought best. Each time he finished one point, he would pause, look at me with a thin, supercilious smile, while Duncan, saying nothing, would nod nervously in agreement.
There was nothing inventive in what they wanted to do. With the soul of an Irish poet, Michael Ryan dreamed of building the biggest law firm in town and never hesitated to sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow. Trewitt and Duncan had the souls of accountants who never dreamed about anything except embezzlement.
The list began with a car. “The firm has reached the point where partners should be provided transportation.”
“I already have a car,” I interjected.
“Yes, but the firm can lease new ones every year. The firm will take care of everything—gas, oil, maintenance. It only makes sense. There are significant tax advantages.”
It moved from cars to houses. Not that the firm was going to take over mortgage payments. The firm was going to buy a condominium in downtown Portland, “for out-of-town clients,” a place at a resort, either Black Butte or Sunriver, “to entertain clients,” and eventually—“perhaps”—a place in Hawaii, “for the use of the partners and their families.”
I waited until the end. “I’m against all of it. Ryan built the firm and I don’t think we should change anything. Michael had a blueprint, and I think we better keep following it.”
They disagreed and made it clear that my voice was now a minority. “There has always been a rule of unanimity,” I reminded them. “We’ve never done anything unless everyone agreed.”
“Agreed with Michael,” Duncan blurted out, eager to display his independence when it cost him nothing to do so.
“With each other,” I corrected. “Let’s get something straight. Nothing is going to change.” I got to my feet and slid the chair against the table. With both hands on top of it, I let my eyes move from Trewitt to Duncan and back again. “Michael made sure of it.”
Trewitt arched his eyebrows. “Michael did what?”
“He made sure the rule of unanimity would continue. Strictly speaking, this has never been a partnership. We acted like one because the three of you had known each other for a long time and because so long as Michael was around I didn’t care what was going on. I trusted Michael.”
Trewitt hid behind his eyes, deflecting with a blank stare the implication that he might not be quite trustworthy.
“This firm is organized as a corporation. Each of us, including Michael, owns one-fourth of the stock. According to his will, all of his stock goes into a trust.”
“Who is the beneficiary?” Duncan asked before I could finish.
“Goes into a trust with directions that this stock always be voted in the minority. In other words, gentlemen, anytime the vote is two to one, Michael’s vote evens it out and we have a standoff. The result, of course—”
“Is the rule of unanimity,” Trewitt finished, shaking his head less in anger than in admiration for the way Michael had anticipated every contingency. “Michael was a first-rate lawyer. But, you know as well as I do, this will never stand up in court.”
Trewitt knew at least as much about trusts and estates as I did about the criminal law. I had no idea if he was telling the truth or trying to bluff his way through, and I really did not care. I stepped away from the chair and leaned just far enough forward to rest the fingers of one hand on the polished mahogany table. I put my other hand on my hip and looked at him as if I were trying to bore a hole through the back of his skull.
“Then sue, you stupid son of a bitch, and see how much you have left to spend on new cars and big houses after you’ve spent the next couple of years learning what it’s really like in a courtroom. You ever been in court? No,” I went on before he could answer, “I don’t mean probate court. I mean court, with real live witnesses and mean bastards like me on the other side and a jury of twelve thoughtful and honest people who make less in a year than you make in a week.”
There was one more threat to make, and I made it. “This whole discussion is academic anyway. You can run this goddamn firm anyway you want. I’ll go back on my own!”
Like everybody else for whom money is the only thing that matters, Trewitt and Duncan were too afraid of losing to know how to win. For the time being at least, they decided they could probably get by on a half million a year, even if they did have to buy their own cars and pay for their own vacations. But that did not mean they had to like it. We had never been close and now we became distant. We nodded when we passed each other in the hall, and we observed all the formalities at each meeting we had to attend, but other than that we had nothing to do with one another.
Like an arrow still flying after the bowman has been shot dead, the firm Michael Ryan created not only continued to exist, it continued to expand. Six months later we reached the unanimous decision that the firm had become too large to run without a full-time administrator. We hired one away from another firm, and I suggested that, as part of the compensation package, the firm should lease her a car. Trewitt and Duncan agreed immediately. Neither one of them seemed to find any irony in it at all. I think they had forgotten all about it, the way young boys forget all about the toy they had to have and were never given.
The firm kept growing and with each passing year there were more wedding gifts to buy as young associates tried to have both a family and a career, more late-night drinking with the latest casualty of the divorce courts, and more funerals at which to grieve for people I had known for years, and for some I had hardly known at all. Still, despite all the changes, nothing really changed at all. My own life moved in the same circle in which it had been revolving for years, an endless cycle of amorous adventures and courtroom triumphs. After Lisa I never dated anyone for more than a month, or if I did, it was always someone I never saw more than once or twice every few weeks. I was the casual acquaintance of every woman I knew. Nothing changed and nothing ever would. I was certain of it. The years went by and the lengthening list of my cases read like the interminable chronology of the generations inscribed in the Book of Genesis. I would end up like Michael Ryan. I did what I did and I would do it until I died.
With each passing year my life seemed to take on more the aspect of a settled routine. During the week I worked straight through the day and halfway into the night, seldom stopping for lunch and often missing dinner. On Saturdays, usually dressed in faded khaki pants and tattered running shoes, I wandered into the office around ten in the morning and tried to clear my desk of everything that had built up on it while I was too busy with other things. On Saturday nights I went out, and on Sunday mornings I did next to nothing.
* * *
Though it meant nothing to me at the time, it was on a Sunday that it all began. I had spent the whole week in trial and all day Saturday trying to catch up before another week began. I woke up at seven and tried to go back to sleep. It was no use. I had to go to the bathroom. Middle age was beginning to measure itself by how early and how often I had to relieve myself.
When I finished, I threw some water on my face and stared at the unfamiliar face that was staring back at me in the bathroom mirror. Some mirrors were more generous than others; this one was unforgiving. This strange person watching me had hair sticking out in stiff clumps on one side of his head, while the other side was all matted down. Dark shadows circled his half-closed eyes, and black and gray stubble curled over his lip and covered his cheeks. He pushed his jaw as far forward as he could, pulling tight the tendons in his throat, forcing his face into a pathetic contortion. He kept doing it, over and over again, out and back, a dozen times, a bizarre regimen he followed every morning while I watched. Ignorance had argued, and vanity had believed, that it would prevent his skin from sagging too noticeably under his chin. I had my doubts. “Give it up,” I told him, as we turned away from each other.
I pulled on a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a maroon cotton shirt. In the kitchen I poured myself a cup of coffee and opened the door onto the back deck. It was a cloudless spring day, warm enough to sit outside. Sprawled on a canvas yard chair, I held the warm cup in both hands and watched the shadows pass around the periphery of the dark green fir trees as the sun passed slowly overhead.
When the cup was finally empty, I roused myself from the daydream that had drifted across my mind, and walked down the driveway to the round metal box where the paper was left. I poured myself a second cup of coffee and went back out onto the deck. It was a fixed custom, a regular habit. I would separate the voluminous Sunday paper into sections, discard those in which I had no interest, organize what was left into the exact order in which I wanted to read it, and then work my way through, page after page, until I had finished it all.
A little after eleven I showered and shaved and then cooked myself a passable breakfast of bacon and eggs. When I was done, I cleaned up the kitchen, gathered up the two or three books I wanted, and went back out onto the sunlit deck and flopped down on a wooden chaise longue with a thick, blue waterproof mattress.
I never read anything directly connected with the law. Most of the lawyers I knew—like Trewitt and Duncan—had steadily narrowed their interests through the years, limiting themselves to the specialization that earned them money until it was the only thing they knew and the only thing they cared about. Criminal law was not so confining. I kept as current as a layman could in medicine and science because it was knowledge I had to have; I would have given part of every Sunday to literature even if it had never given me an insight or a question useful at trial.
In years of Sunday reading I had gotten through all of Tolstoy, all of Dostoyevsky, Pushkin’s novels but little of his poetry, most of Dickens, nearly everything of Conrad, and all of the works of both E. M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford. I had read and reread Flaubert, and preferred without quite knowing why The Sentimental Education to Madame Bovary. I loved Balzac, admired Stendhal, found Gide depressing, and had no interest at all in the dreary existentialism of Sartre and Camus.
More than anything else I read, I was fascinated by what Americans had written in the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries. I felt more at home in the life they described than in the life I saw being lived around me. Perhaps it was just a question of age. The older I became the more I found myself seeking the relative certitude of things already settled and conclusions already drawn. There was an order, a neat inevitability, about the past. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it gave the illusion that everything somehow made sense.
For at least the third time in the last three years I began Melville’s Billy Budd. Leopold Rifkin had given it to me. I could not get enough of it. Every case I had ever tried had taught me something about the moral ambiguity that surrounded every rigid tenet of the law. Nothing was ever as clean or clear-cut as the law, especially the criminal law, presumed. The law drew a hard, fast distinction between guilt and innocence, but if I had learned nothing else in twenty years of practice, I had learned there were as many shades of innocence as there were degrees of guilt.
After a while I laid the open book on my chest and closed my eyes. I could see Billy Budd standing in the captain’s cabin, blameless as a force of nature. I could feel the wooden hull shudder as the ship, lashed by the winds of a hurricane, crashed through the heavy ocean waves. I could hear the sorrowful lament of the ship’s bell ringing out a ghostlike summons to the crew. It kept ringing, over and over again, while the ship lumbered violently through the shrouded gray mists of the sea. A moment later I realized that the sound I was listening to was the sound of my telephone.
I almost did not answer. Then it became a contest to see if I could get to it before it rang for the last time. Just as I reached for the receiver that hung on the kitchen wall, it stopped. The light on the answering machine came on. I pressed a button and listened. It was Horace Woolner.
“Horace, what are you doing?” I asked before he was three words into the message he was about to leave.
“Thought I’d missed you,” he said. “You screen all your calls before you answer?” he chuckled. “If I had your clientele, I’d probably do the same thing.”
“You call to harass me, Horace?” I picked an apple from the colander sitting on the tile countertop and took a bite.
“What the hell you doing?” Horace laughed. “Eating? I call you up and you’re going to eat?”
My mouth was full and I nearly strangled myself trying to reply. “Thought I had time. Been in court with you enough to know when you start talking could be days before I get to say something.”
