Chambermaid

  Boring someone like Brian was upsetting to begin with. Frankly, the institute was overkill. I couldn’t bear to be the law clerk failure, as Brian had insinuated. I had to get in with the instituters. Maybe I’d use my ACLU connection with Brian the next time I got his ear.

  “Are you kidding me? I can’t believe that he actually became a bigger loser after law school,” James complained. “And as for that clerk camp, I can’t think of anything lamer than summer camp for law clerks.” He downed his vodka and got another. I, on the other hand, was stuck on our horrific social status and couldn’t shake the camp thing.

  “James, I really think we’re not a hit here. This is bad. Nobody seems to have any interest in us and they all seem to be friends and maybe the camp was a bad time, but I think we’re totally effed for not having gone. Aren’t you worried at all?” I beckoned for a little camaraderie.

  “I’m only worried that Brian may have scored the only cute girl here. Present company excluded of course. And I was really hoping to get some action my first night in town.” He scanned the room. Perspective restored. James wasn’t one to get sucked into the legal caste system. For obvious reasons, caste systems were tougher for us Indians to avoid.

  The two of us vowed to make some friends. There was a group of about eight clerks who appeared to be more laid-back than the rest. We approached them. I awkwardly squeezed my way in between a redheaded girl who looked my age and a tall, brown-haired guy.

  “Hello. My name is Sheila,” I said and smiled, attempting an air of sophistication while sipping from my straw. He looked confused. “Oh, right. Right. I clerk for Judge Friedman and went to Columbia,” I clarified.

  “No j’est pauz blah blah blah franch franch franch.”

  Turned out they were Parisian college students on a field trip to Philly. While James practiced his French on a seemingly prepubescent girl (and we wondered why the French hated Americans), I plowed ahead, feeling a bit looser from the vodka.

  “Hey guys, are you clerks?” I blanketly asked one group, wincing. My pickup line horrified even me. The Frenchies scorned in my direction. Or in James’s, since he’d meekly slunk next to me after getting hosed by Le Cindy Brady. A guy in a V-neck T-shirt was kind enough to respond.

  “Uh. Yes. We’re all law clerks. Why? Are you?” he demanded, wrinkling his mouth in perplexity. I was beginning to feel like I had toilet paper coming out of my pants.

  “Yes, my name is Sheila. And this is James. We’re both clerking.” V-neck looked even more confused and gave his posse a knowing look.

  “Well, neither of you looks familiar at all.” The posse nodded in agreement.

  “We didn’t go to the Clerk Institute,” I ventured.

  “Oh. Yale really encourages us to go,” a girl in the group quickly answered and then they all turned their backs to James and me, returning to what must have been a very important conversation.

  We were zero for zero. Right as I was about to give up, I spotted a lone ranger in the corner, nursing a scotch. I dragged James over.

  “Hey. We’re clerks. Are you?” Jeez.

  “Yeah. I am. But don’t ask me where I went to law school, because it sucks and then you won’t want to talk to me.” James and I chuckled.

  “Well, it couldn’t be worse than not going to this clerk camp thing,” James offered, and I nodded in agreement. Our would-be friend smiled.

  “Hey. I’m Kevin. I didn’t go to clerk camp. I did go to Rutgers.”

  The 12-step plan for Clerks Coming Clean.

  “Hi. I’m Sheila. I didn’t go to clerk camp. I did go to Columbia.”

  “I’m James and ditto as to the rest of what Sheila said.” James bought the three of us another round. Kevin was our new best friend. Upon closer inspection, he was also gay, which was my evening’s first victory. What kind of self-respecting woman could live in the gayborhood without a gay sidekick? Not to mention, the years had taught me that unless you got fat and/or unfashionable, your gay male friends would stand by you, whereas boyfriends always left you in the lurch.

  Kevin had a boyfriend (“but we can see other people”), had gone to Chapel Hill undergrad (“but only because I was in state”), then moved to New York and tried modeling (“but only because I didn’t know what to do”), before finally heading to Rutgers Law (“but only because they gave me money”). The only thing separating a man with compulsive caveats from one with suicidal tendencies was a healthy ego. And Kevin clearly had one of those, as evidenced by his two-year attempted modeling stint (Kevin did not look like a model).

  Kevin lived near James and me. He moved there because it was the gayborhood. I moved there because it was cheap and cute. James moved there because he was lazy and I found him a place. We were a natural trio. So much so that we didn’t even broach the subject of our particular judges until two drinks later. As it turned out, Kevin was clerking for Judge Adams.

  “Yeah, Adams is pretty cool from what I can tell so far, but holy shit—my coclerk Jana is terrible. On our first day, she sauntered over to me and said, and I quote, ‘I was on the Virginia Law Review, so if you need help—you know—with anything, just ask. You know, I don’t know about Rutgers’”—Kevin imitated—“I mean, Virginia, big fuckin’ deal. You know, it’s not like she went to Stanford. Puh-leez!” I loved it. Even as he complained about the hierarchy, he reinforced it.

  “Well, at least Jana didn’t quit already. My coclerk just quit. She left a hate letter for my judge.” Admittedly it was a desperate attempt to one-up Kevin. It worked.

  “What?! I didn’t know people quit clerkships! Are you for real!” Kevin looked genuinely shocked. But I was beginning to think he always looked that way. “But I have to say, I have heard that Friedman can be pretty bitchy.”

  Before I could respond, a twiggy brunette, who appeared to have jacked the Banana Republic next door, came over.

  “Hey, Kevin. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” she said, coyly smiling at James while smoothing her tweed lapel.

  “Hey, Jana,” Kevin flatly stated, with a faint sigh of exasperation. “This is James. And this is Sheila. Sheila. James. This is Jana. My coclerk.” I smiled, about to speak, but Jana quickly turned her back to me, focusing on her prey.

  “So, James, wherever did you come from?”

  “Rochester.”

  “You mean you went to Rochester Law?” She was crestfallen.

  “No. I’m from Rochester. You asked me where I was from,” James explained matter-of-factly.

  “Oh. Well. Where did you go to law school?” she implored impatiently.

  “Columbia. I went to Columbia Law.”

  Jana looked like she was about to wet her pants with glee. “Wow. That’s great. You know, I went to Virginia”—she smiled widely—“and I was on the Law Review there.” James nodded. I looked at Kevin, who’d lost his personality.

  “That’s great. Did you like Virginia?” I cut in, attempting to insert myself. Jana turned, barely, in my direction, obviously annoyed that I was interrupting what she deemed to be a private conversation.

  “It was great. It’s Virginia. What’s not to like!” she sneered before returning to James. I returned to Kevin, hoping to resurrect him. We headed back to the bar.

  “Wow. You’ve got quite a year ahead of you with that one!” I said. “Hey, Kevin, want to share a cab back to the hood?”

  He nodded. James decided to stay, curiously engrossed in conversation with Jana. Men never ceased to amaze me in terms of what they would endure to get laid. Then again, I couldn’t really blame him. I’d probably recite the Bill of Rights to Sanjay if it meant sex in return. It’d been ages since Sanjay and I had done it. With his rotation schedule, we saw each other once a month, if that. And even then, Sanjay was often “too tired.”

  I was about to get off at my apartment building when Kevin suggested the infamous “final final.” You know, the last drink that sounds like a terrific idea at the time and a terrible one the next morning. We
parked it at Tryst, a gritty neighborhood joint with cracked maroon pleather booths.

  “So, what’s your story, Sheila? Where are you from, et cetera?” Kevin asked earnestly.

  “Well, I’m from Reston, Virginia. Went to Michigan undergrad. Worked in Miami as a television news producer before heading to New York for law school. That’s it. In a nutshell.”

  The sign of the aging twenty-something was having lived in about five cities, with about three different jobs, and being able to explain it all in about forty-five seconds. Kevin nodded.

  “So why did you leave TV? It seems so much more interesting than law.”

  Severe grass-is-greener syndrome—another sign.

  “TV news was much more entertaining than the law for sure. It’s just that it felt incredibly shallow. Leading newscasts with ‘South Florida: It’s Always Bikini Season’ somehow left me feeling dirty and depressed. And I felt like it was so reactionary. We were always chasing after something that had already happened. I actually felt pretty powerless . . . but then again, I feel pretty powerless now.”

  It was as though I hadn’t spoken in years, the quickness with which the words came spilling out. And wow, I’d never quite articulated that before. I’d left a coveted job as a news producer in Miami for this. Perhaps the law wasn’t quite as reactionary, but hell, I’d take a nuclear reaction at this point if I could trade in the loneliness and insecurity brought on by patronizing pedigree whores. At least the other journalists, including my former bosses, never sat around talking about where they went to college and what honor societies they’d been (or not been) in.

  Had I made a colossal, life-destroying mistake? Kevin had just passed out sitting up. Definitely yes, in terms of the final final.

  One meatball sub and a particularly sad Celine Dion song later, I was sound asleep on top of the covers, tomato sauce smeared on the pillow.

  Chapter Five

  Peter Nussbaum had JFK Junior’s looks, Einstein’s brains, and Mother Teresa’s spirit—a chiseled, philanthropic wunderkind. At least that’s what the commonwealth of Pennsylvania would have had you believe. The deputy attorney general (“AG”) painted such a glorious picture of the guy, you’d think that had he not been gunned down, Peter Nussbaum would probably be a senator, if not the president or the pope, by now. His death was tragic and premature, no doubt. Then again, wasn’t death always those things? I, for one, had never heard someone say: “She died not a moment too soon and it was downright joyous.”

  Maybe it was because Peter was a young, attractive, Ivy League student that his death seemed particularly tragic. Also, because he had been shot at such close range, you could imagine the terror preceding his untimely demise. Nobody deserved that. By the time his body was discovered by a little kid who’d strayed from the housing development’s playground, pigeons and rats had already feasted. I had to hand it to the deputy AG—he was a master of the macabre, inserting ghastly, gripping (and legally inconsequential) details wherever possible. It served him well, since twenty pages into the state’s brief, I experienced a visceral reaction and yearned to throw the book at the demon who’d done such a thing to poor, defenseless, gorgeous Peter Nussbaum. But the death penalty?

  As a philosophical matter, I was firmly against capital punishment. The government should never have the power to take a human being’s life. Yet as a law clerk, it was my job to advise Judge Friedman how to decide cases after interpreting the facts within the confines of the law. The Pennsylvania State Legislature had passed a statute allowing for the death penalty and therefore my philosophical views had no place.

  That said, it seemed that Dell Nelson, the defendant, had received a bum deal. It was true he was no saint. Dell was a famed drug dealer at Arch Homes, the public housing development where Peter’s body was discovered. He was the go-to guy for anything—speed, heroin, crack, cocaine. You name it, he had it. But he wasn’t the kind of drug dealer you saw in the movies. According to neighbors, he was the classic nice guy. Soft-spoken, quick to laugh, generous to a fault (“You needed to borrow a couple bucks for some diapers or somethin’, Dell was your man”). Apparently, the only thing that agitated Dell was when people messed with his sisters or grandmother (“He punched one motherfucker in the face after he called little Izzie a slut”).

  A week after Peter’s death, Dell Nelson was arrested outside of his apartment, after having returned from a trip to the grocery store. His arrest came amid a media feeding frenzy. It was a victory for the University of Pennsylvania’s president, dean, and provost, as well as for the Philadelphia police chief, the mayor, and the governor of Pennsylvania, all of whom had “vow[ed]” to catch the killer.

  A jury convicted Dell Nelson of aggravated murder and sentenced him to death. During the trial, it was revealed that Peter Nussbaum had raped Dell’s sister Izzie, a fact the district attorney used to establish motive. A clerk at the liquor store around the corner from Arch Homes testified: “When I was lockin’ up one night a week before the shootin’, I heard Dell say to that boy, ‘You touch my sister again, and I’m going to kill you.’” Blatant hearsay, but Dell’s lawyer never objected, and consequently the jury considered it to be direct evidence of guilt. It didn’t help the defense that Peter owed Dell a considerable sum of money. Even though Peter’s family owned Tartac, the country’s most profitable tar company, Peter never seemed to have enough money to subsidize his formidable crack habit.

  Dell’s murder trial lasted two days, shorter than most misdemeanor trials. Throughout much of it, Tip Evans, Dell’s middle-aged public defender, slept. He failed to deliver a closing argument, and during the sentencing phase of the trial, Tip did not present an iota of mitigation evidence. Mitigation evidence is offered in death penalty cases to spare the defendant’s life. Peter’s rape of Dell’s sister, Peter’s constant pestering of Dell for drugs, and the fact that Dell had lost his parents at the age of ten (his mother to heroin, his father to jail), forcing him to drop out of school and raise his sisters, would have served as effective mitigation. So, too, the pages and pages of glowing commentary about Dell’s character by his neighbors, family, and friends. Tip Evans didn’t mention a word of it, effectively leading Dell to the electric chair. It was this inaction that Dell was appealing now. Question presented: Was Dell Nelson deprived of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel when his lawyer, Tip Evans, failed to present mitigating evidence, failed to cross-examine a witness for the prosecution, and waived final argument during sentencing?”

  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed Dell’s conviction and sentence. So did the federal district court, finding that Tip Evans’s actions (or lack thereof) were not egregious enough to be considered ineffective for constitutional purposes.

  Dell, now thirty-six years old, appealed to the third circuit, and that’s where I came into the picture. Our panel—Judges Friedman, Adams, and Stevens—had the power to decide that, as a matter of law, Dell Nelson had been denied his constitutional rights. If so decided, he’d be granted a resentencing with his new lawyer. If not, the guy would be dead within a matter of months, maybe a year. The court of appeals was his last real hope, since the Supreme Court rarely heard death penalty cases.

  Putting down the state’s brief, I felt dizzy. This was real. A real person’s life hung in the balance. So, too, justice for a dead man. Until now, it’d never occurred to me just how difficult it was to be a judge. On TV, in the movies, and even in law school, with scant appearances of reality, such decisions seemed easy, obvious almost. That was hardly the case here. With newfound respect, I glanced over at Judge Friedman, who was sitting upright, glaring in my direction.

  I smiled. Nothing. I waved. Nothing. I couldn’t be bothered; I was actually engrossed in my work. No sooner had I reopened the state’s brief then Judge Friedman appeared in my cubicle, sunglasses gliding down her nose, bags in hand.

  “You’re rilly rilly taking a long time on this case, Sheera.” The snickering was a dead giveaway that she wasn’t referring t
o my thoroughness.

  “Um, it’s a death penalty case, Judge Friedman, and there are about a dozen briefs here, so—”

  “I am a federal judge and do not have time for you to reflect on every word of every brief. If you didn’t realize it, this is not your only case for our sitting. So, I suggest that you work on your reading skills, something I would have thought a law school graduate would have mastered.”

  “Um, OK, but—”

  “But nothing. I want that bench memo by the end of the week,” she demanded before scurrying to the elevator.

  I’d barely gotten through the two main briefs and had yet to touch any of the amicus briefs, which were written by outside groups with an interest in the case. Not to mention, I hadn’t started the copious legal research a case like this warranted.

  “Hey, don’t worry about that. You’re doing fine, I’m sure of it.”

  I spun around, shocked to hear Matthew’s voice. He was halfway out the door before I could thank him for his kind words. I grabbed three of the briefs, my purse, and headed home.

  As I turned the corner, just a block from my apartment, a tall, emaciated Asian man with pockmarks and a greasy combover sauntered over to me. He wore pinstriped denim overalls with no shirt underneath, giving the illusion that his shoulders were a hanger.

  “Want anything?” he demanded. Kind of a general question, I thought.

  “Um . . . not really. Thanks.” Nothing. Just stares. What was with all the staring in this town?! Unable to deal with the uncomfortable silence, I plodded forward. “Well, maybe I’d want to move out of Philly and back to New York.”

  “You know, Philly is the fifth-largest city in the country! Five. Number five!!” Aside from his screaming louder than the security guards, his actual words were curious considering that in the short time I’d been there, and every Tom, Dick, and John Adams had rattled off this most mediocre statistic to me. This guy was the third person to brag about it. See also: Pam from membership at the Liberty Gym and unnamed taxi driver from undetermined Eastern European country.