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Best Intentions

Page 8

by Joseph T. Klempner


  “So even when they took Penny from me and drove me to their headquarters, even when they fingerprinted me and photographed me and read me my rights and told me I had a right to a lawyer and would be going before a judge and might go to jail - even then, there was a part of me that couldn’t believe it was really happening to me. Notifying friends or family? Thinking about raising money for bail? Getting a lawyer? Those were the furthest things from my mind. I swear, if Stickley hadn’t finally mentioned it, I don’t know how long it would’ve taken me to realize I was really going to need a lawyer.”

  FLINT ADAMS, ATTORNEY AT LAW, proclaimed the shingle affixed to the door of the small, brick one-family on Main Street - Main Street being a designation that was somewhat redundant, seeing as there were no other streets to speak of in the village of South Chatham, just a tangle of interlocking offshoots, alleys, and driveways.

  If Flynt Adams typifies the current generation of the small-town lawyer - and a good case can be made that he does - we’ve come a long way since Norman Rockwell presented us his version of the balding, bespectacled barrister.

  Other than his name - which is actually a combination of his mother’s family name and his father’s, the latter traceable all the way back to John Quincy (a fact you’re unlikely to learn from Adams himself) - there is nothing pretentious about Flynt Adams. He is a trim man who carries himself like the athlete he once was and still is, if only recreationally. He looks far too young for his gray hair, but it’s a head of gray hair most men would kill for and plenty of women would die for: a mop that looks almost silver, cut short enough to reveal its owner’s conservative nature, yet long enough that it never seems quite under control.

  Unless he has a court appearance or a closing, Adams dresses casually, favoring sport jackets and slacks over suits. He prefers open collars to buttoned ones and keeps several ties in the office to pick from when the occasion arises.

  The inside of Flynt Adams’s office reflects its owner’s informal taste. The waiting room is small and well lit, the receptionist’s area tidy but typically empty (Adams cannot, or chooses to not, afford full-time help). To the rear of the office, in what Adams refers to as his work space, the visitor will find no oak or mahogany partner’s desk, no leather-covered judge’s chair, no wall full of plaques or laminated diplomas intended to impress clients. There is instead a simple pine table, which once served as a teacher’s desk and now holds a computer, four more-or-less matched wooden chairs, and a couple of wooden file cabinets that may be antiques, or simply tasteful reproductions. One wall is the original red brick of the building, rough and unadorned; another bears a single large oil painting of an ocean regatta. As a young man, Adams did a lot of sailing, and he has an attic full of trophies. These days he’s landlocked, and far too busy trying to support his family to enjoy expensive, time-consuming hobbies.

  This particular Saturday found Adams at his computer, drawing up a contract for the sale of a home over in Canaan. He represented the seller, and would make $700 for his trouble; the buyer’s lawyer was a hotshot from New York City, who was charging his client $350 an hour. At those rates, Adams had been surprised the guy didn’t want to draw up the contract himself, so he could bill for the hours; but apparently he either didn’t know how to do it, or intended to bill for it anyway.

  If it wasn’t exactly Flynt Adams’s favorite way to spend a Saturday, he had little choice in the matter. With a wife and three teenage children to support, he didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing his cases. When he’d made the decision to hang up his shingle in a small town - and South Chatham was about as small as you could get - he’d known he was going to have to do everything he could to build his practice. That meant being in his office long hours, getting to know the townspeople, joining whatever civic groups he could stomach (the local school board and the volunteer fire department were okay, but he drew the line at the Young Republicans), and being willing to handle every type of case imaginable. Wills, closings, accidents, collections, bankruptcies, speeding tickets - you name it, Flynt Adams would do it. He would have loved nothing more than to specialize in some area, say environmental law or criminal defense. But there were few environmental issues to champion in Columbia County, and (except for petty drug dealers over in Hudson) even fewer criminals. You ended up taking whatever came in.

  So on this Saturday in February, Adams sat at his computer, filling in the blanks on a form he’d devised and named “Contract. house. sel.” Not exactly the sort of work he’d dreamed of back in law school.

  the drive back up to South Chatham took the same thirty-five minutes as had the drive down to the K Troop barracks. Stephen Barrow sat alone in the backseat, handcuffed as before. The young trooper did the driving this time, with Investigator Stickley sitting alongside him. The two of them spoke to each other in muffled tones and didn’t include Stephen in their conversation. It was as though, with the processing phase now completed, they were finished with him, except for delivering him to others. Apparently, they no longer felt the need to exchange small talk with him.

  He was cargo.

  He had to interrupt a discussion of snowmobile engines to ask them a question. “Excuse me,” he said, “but can you tell me who’s looking after my daughter?”

  “We left a message on your wife’s cell phone,” said Stickley.

  “Ex-wife.”

  “Right.”

  “Did she ever return the message?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “So then,” Stephen asked, “where is my daughter? Who’s taking care of her?”

  This time the only response he got from the front seat was a matching pair of shrugs. Penny wasn’t their daughter, and despite the initial concern they’d shown for her, now she was in someone else’s hands. Police work is a terribly fragmented business, in which moving on to the next job is the rule, not the exception, and “Out of sight, out of mind” is a frequently employed defense mechanism to permit the emotional separation needed to concentrate on the next assignment. They weren’t bad people, these officers, but at this point they simply couldn’t have cared less about Penny. It was the nature of the job, that’s all.

  The sky was already beginning to get dark - it gets dark early in Columbia County in mid-February - by the time they reached South Chatham and pulled up in front of the town hall. Stephen figured he must have walked or driven by the old red brick building 100 times, but he’d never once had occasion to go inside. He sent off his taxes to the township of New Lebanon, grieved his property assessment over in Hudson, and had paid the only speeding ticket he’d gotten down in Ghent. So here he was, entering now for the first time, handcuffed behind his back and flanked on either side by state troopers. The only saving grace he could think of was that there didn’t happen to be anyone standing out in front to recognize him. A young, redheaded woman holding a notepad looked vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t quite place her.

  Theresa Mulholland had fairly rushed over to the South Chatham Town Hall after getting off the phone with Neil Witt. Not being a crime reporter, she had no idea that, before he was ready to go before the town justice, the newly arrested sex abuser would first have to spend three hours being driven around and processed. So when she’d arrived just after one o’clock, notepad in hand, she’d discovered that except for the building’s custodian (who happened to be there that Saturday because they’d been having problems with the furnace), she was the only one there, and certainly the only one there who knew anything of a new arrest.

  “C’mon in,” the custodian had told her. “Might as well stay warm while yer waitin’.”

  As things turned out, warm had been a relative term. Theresa had spent the next two hours shivering, going for coffee, cursing Tom Grady, shivering some more, cursing Neil Witt, going for lunch, and cursing Tom Grady, Neil Witt, and the entire newspaper business, all over again. Finally, a little after three, a sprinkling of other people had begun showing up, though it wouldn’t be until
later that she found out who they were - the town attorney, the town clerk, a court reporter, a couple of sheriff’s deputies, and finally the town justice himself. It was as if they’d all known there was no rush. All of them, that is, except Theresa herself.

  A while later, one of the deputies (a young man named Bill Ashworth, whom Theresa had gone to high school with) got a call on his radio. “They’re about five minutes away,” he told her. “You slip outside, you’ll be able to get a shot of them bringing him into the building. You know, a perp walk.”

  Perp walk? Shot of them? Was Theresa supposed to have brought a camera along? She couldn’t remember Neil Witt having said anything about that. Evidently she was supposed to have known that on her own, without being told. Great. So here she was, her big moment as a crime reporter coming up, and already she’d managed to screw it up.

  But she’d put her gloves on, pulled her jacket collar up, and wandered outside anyway, so she’d at least be able to say she’d been there for the perp walk, even if the Hudson Valley Herald readers would have to settle for her written description of it. For once, 1,000 words would simply have to be as powerful as a single photograph.

  So she’d been standing out on the sidewalk, shivering in the fading daylight, when the cruiser had at last pulled up and two troopers - she guessed they were both troopers, even though only one was in uniform - opened up the back door and helped their prisoner out.

  Until that moment, Theresa hadn’t quite known what to expect. She’d known that the man was supposed to have sexually abused his young daughter. She wasn’t sure if that meant he’d raped her, or what. Sodomized her, perhaps. You were always reading how defendants were charged with raping and sodomizing their victims, though it was generally left to the reader’s imagination as to just what the particulars of the sodomy were. But this much she’d already decided: You didn’t need to know too many of the details of this story to know this guy was a monster.

  Only now, looking at the bewildered, compliant man being helped out of the back of the cruiser, Theresa found herself hard-pressed to imagine him raping or sodomizing anyone, let alone his own young daughter. To her, he simply didn’t look capable of such an act. The only thing he looked, as a matter of fact, was vaguely familiar.

  To Stephen Barrow, the little bald man sitting behind the nameplate that read HOMER J. QUACKENBUSH, TOWN JUSTICE didn’t seem much like a judge. He would later learn that not only was Homer J. Quackenbush not a judge, he wasn’t even a lawyer. But neither of those facts prevented him from being the town justice for the village of South Chatham. Although New York now required that town justices be lawyers, the law that imposed that requirement had grandfathered in all those holding office at the time of the change. Homer J. Quackenbush had been holding office then, and was still holding on now at the age of eighty-two, and had no intention of letting go until the Good Lord Himself said it was time.

  At the moment, however, it was time for him to address the defendant standing before him. “Do you have counsel, young man?” To Quackenbush, anyone under sixty was young.

  Counsel? Stephen Barrow stared back at this figure straight out of Dickens and said nothing.

  “Counsel,” Quackenbush repeated. “A lawyer?”

  “Oh,” said Stephen. “No, I don’t.”

  “Can you afford a lawyer?”

  Stephen had no idea what a lawyer would cost. His divorce lawyer had charged him $150 an hour, and with the custody battle, had run up a bill of close to $10,000, just about wiping him out. He imagined that a criminal lawyer could be much more expensive. After all, they weren’t just talking about dividing up the furniture here, or drawing up a visitation schedule. “I’m not certain,” he said.

  “Do you have a job?”

  “Not really.”

  “How do you support yourself?”

  “I write.”

  “For the purpose of this appearance,” said Justice Quackenbush, “I find the defendant indigent and entitled to have counsel assigned by the court. We’ll take a recess while we find you a lawyer, young man. Off the record, somebody call Flynt Adams. I noticed the lights in his office were on when I drove by a while ago. Poor guy probably doesn’t know it’s Saturday.”

  Stephen was given a chair to sit in. While he waited, he tried to absorb what he’d just heard. For the first time, he’d heard himself referred to as the defendant, and he didn’t much like the sound of the phrase. Fragments of movie lines came drifting back to him. Mr. Foreman, how do you find the defendant? . . . We find the defendant guilty as charged, your honor. . . . Will the defendant please rise? . . . The defendant is ordered hanged by the neck until he shall be dead.

  Next, he’d been found indigent. Had the judge asked him if he was employed, he could have said yes: self-employed was employed, after all. It was that job question that had thrown him. So suddenly he found himself not only a defendant but a pauper as well. To everyone else in the room, he was already a man who’d sexually exploited his six-year-old daughter; now on top of that he was an unemployed welfare cheat, a drifter, a homeless person.

  And who was this free lawyer? Some poor slob who evidently didn’t even know what day of the week it was.

  Things were not looking up.

  Flynt Adams looked up at the first ring of the telephone. It was always an approach-avoidance thing with Adams: He wanted new business - needed new business - but at the same time, on this late Saturday afternoon in February, he wanted to be home with his family. Yet that same family - that and Flynt Adams’s strong Protestant work ethic - now forced him to reach across his desk and pick up the receiver.

  “Law office,” he said.

  “That you, Flynt?” It was a woman’s voice, but one he didn’t recognize right away.

  “Yes, it’s me,” he said.

  “This is Eleanor Smeal.” Eleanor was the town clerk; Flynt had written a new will for her, not four months ago.

  “Hi, Eleanor. What’s up?”

  “What’s up is Homer’s got a criminal appearance to do. Turns out the man doesn’t have a lawyer, or the money to hire one. Homer was wondering if you might like to take it, as eighteen-bee.”

  It was Article 18-B of the state’s County Law that authorized and governed the assignment of counsel. Flynt was no stranger to the system: You got paid $40 an hour for in-court time, and $25 for out-of-court. At rates like that, you learned to identify with your indigent clients. Still, he knew he couldn’t afford to say no.

  “What’s the charge?” he asked.

  “Some kinda sex abuse,” said Eleanor. “Something to do with his kid.”

  “Nice. When’s the appearance set for?” He’d now killed half a Saturday, and wasn’t much looking forward to working the rest of the weekend as well. Then again, if he could persuade them to schedule it for right after Sunday services, he’d already be dressed in his suit and tie.

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  To Stephen Barrow, who’d been expecting the worst, the man who walked into the courtroom and introduced himself as Flynt Adams was a pleasant surprise. It was hard to tell how old he was, the way his boyish features contrasted with his gray hair. And if his outfit was a bit unusual - the navy blazer, denim shirt, and yellow print tie were okay, but the faded jeans and sneakers struck Stephen as a bit out of place - well, it was a Saturday, after all. But by far the best part about Flynt Adams was the way he looked you in the eye when he spoke, and then continued to look you in the eye when you spoke.

  “Do you understand what they’re charging you with?” he asked Stephen. The two of them were sitting off to one side of the room, and their conversation was private, so long as they whispered.

  “Sort of.”

  “Why don’t we read this thing together?” Adams suggested, unfolding a set of papers he’d been handed a moment earlier. “It says here, according to an Investigator named Todd Stickley, that you’
ve committed a violation of section two-sixty-three point fifteen of the Penal Law, Possessing a Sexual Performance by a Child, in that you, ‘knowing the character and content thereof, had in your possession a photograph or photographs displaying a lewd exhibition of the genitals and anal area of a child less than sixteen years of age.’ Do you understand that?”

  “I guess so,” said Stephen.

  “So tell me,” said Flynt Adams. “What’s this all about?”

  So Stephen told him, as well as he could, given the constraints of time and circumstances. He described the shampoo-and-bubble-bath hairdo Penny had fashioned, his attempt to record it on film, her unexpectedly mooning him, and his recording that as well. He recounted how he’d dropped the film off at the Drug Mart on Friday, and picked it up this morning, and how they’d suddenly arrested him.

  “That’s it?” Adams asked.

  “That’s it,” Stephen assured him.

  “According to this,” said the lawyer, turning the page of what he’d been reading from, “this is your first arrest. Is that accurate?”

  Stephen hesitated for a split second, and Adams caught it. “Listen,” he said. “I’m your lawyer. I’ve got to know these things. Besides, it’s privileged. That means I can’t mention it, unless you allow me to. Right now, I just need to know.”

  “I paid a $10 fine once for urinating in public. It was down in New York City. I’d drunk a six-pack of beer, and my bladder was about to explode. So I walked down an alley, and, well, some cop spotted me.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “I was eighteen.”

  “Forget about it. Anything else?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Good,” said Adams. “Next question: Can you make any bail?”

  “Like how much?”

  “Hard to say.” For the first time, Adams seemed to avoid making eye contact. Or maybe it was just Stephen’s imagination.

  “I mean,” said Stephen, “how serious can this be?”

 

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