by D. W. Buffa
Leaning forward, I searched his tired, red-rimmed eyes. “You never told her? Not even later on?”
The single strand of smoke twisting up from the burning cigarette spread out into a slow-turning gray-marbled haze. Flynn stared into it, lost in the shapeless shifting design of something that had no plan, no purpose, nothing but the free-working forces of chance.
With one last drag, he blew what was left of it straight ahead, watching it like it was a river running into the sea.
“No,” he said finally, looking back at me. “What good would it have done?”
“Some people would tell you that things like this have to be brought out into the open; that you have to talk about things that happened to you as a child if you’re going to get on with your life.”
Pursing his dry lips, Flynn nodded thoughtfully. “Shows you what the fuck they know, doesn’t it?” A jaundiced smile crawled onto his mouth as he rolled his wrists over and opened his thick-fingered hands. “I mean, I just talked about it with you, and I hate to tell you, but I don’t feel any different about it now than I did before. Besides, you’re forgetting something. For a priest, the guy wasn’t that bad-looking.”
Shaking my head, I turned my chair until it was at a right angle to the desk. My eye caught the small clock I kept on the corner.
It was just seven-thirty.
“What are you doing here, anyway? You were supposed to come by this afternoon.”
I had known Flynn for years, and he had never once been on time. If he showed up within an hour either side of when he said, he thought you had nothing to complain about. Any later than that, he would shrug his shoulders and look at you with those ruined eyes that seemed to chronicle centuries of destruction and offer the same excuse he was giving me now.
“I’ve been in the program more than fifteen years. I do what they tell me. I take it one day at a time. But sometimes I have a little trouble keeping track of the hours.”
It did not make any sense at all, and I knew exactly what he meant.
“Tell me something,” I said, my eyes fixed on him as I tilted my head back and to the side. “How come I haven’t fired you?”
“Probably because you never hired me.”
“You sure?”
“No, not really. I started doing this kind of work sometime after they kicked me out of the law, but before I stopped drinking.”
“Well, I must have hired you then.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe I just showed up one day. Why?
You want to fire me now?”
I hesitated, as if I wanted to think it over. “No,” I said finally.
“You’d probably sue me, and the way I remember it, you were a pretty good lawyer.”
The grin faded from his face. He bent his head and slowly worked his jaw back and forth. “Not bad, I guess,” he said, looking up, and then quickly changed the subject. “I finished everything on those two cases.”
He reached down and opened the black briefcase he had set on the floor next to him. The stitching on the leather handles was frayed and one of the hinges was loose. He handed me two neatly marked file folders, containing the results of the investigations he had done on cases, both of which were still months away from trial. I was more interested in what he thought about the arrest in the Jeffries murder. He had not heard about it, and when I told him, he had no reaction. I wondered if it was because, deep down, he had hoped that whoever had killed Jeffries would not get caught.
It was a sentiment I could not entirely be sure I had not harbored myself, somewhere in the deep recesses of my soul. It was an evil, fugitive thought, the kind no one would admit, but one that would have been infinitely more excusable in Flynn’s case than in mine.
Without wanting to, Jeffries had helped make my name as a lawyer; he had made certain Flynn would never practice law again.
“You didn’t hear anything about who they were looking at?” I asked, anxious for the latest rumor. “No idea who it might be?”
He studied his hands, held in his lap, then raised his head, searched my eyes for a second, and looked away. When he looked back, there was a glint in his eye, whether of malice or amusement I could not tell.
“If I was still drinking,” he remarked with wry sarcasm, “I would have suspected myself.” With an effort, he shoved himself up and sat erect in the chair. “No, that’s not true. Well, it might have been true then. Not now,” he added, shaking his head like someone trying to free himself of a bad memory. “He did me a favor.”
“Did you a favor?” I asked, incredulous and a little irritated.
“Because he’s dead, you think you’re supposed to forgive him—
just forget about it? After what he did?”
Flynn put his arms on the edge of the desk and bent forward.
“What exactly would you suggest I do? Go out to the cemetery and kick a little dirt on his grave? It was fifteen—no, sixteen—
years ago. You weren’t there. Do you have any idea how drunk I was or what I said to him?”
He could not help himself. As the memory of what he had done, what he had said, came back, he remembered it all, and there was still a part of him that was glad he had done it.
“I got so damn tired of being put down by him, and the way he used to interrupt me to correct something I’d said, sometimes just the way I had pronounced a word. The bastard was relentless. He enjoyed it. You should have seen his eyes. You remember those eyes? The way they cut right through you. And that smug little thin-lipped smile of his. And all you could do was stand there and say: ‘Yes, your honor. No, your honor.’ It was like standing in front of your father after he had just beat the hell out of you with his belt and agreeing that you did something wrong and deserved everything you got. I couldn’t take it anymore.” He paused, clenched his teeth, and shook his head. “I couldn’t take anything anymore,” he said, a bitter look in his eyes. “Not one more thing. I tied one on. God, was I drunk! And I marched into his courtroom and called him every name in the book and then some. Hell, I don’t even remember most of what I called him.”
He laughed helplessly. “But I’ll never forget that look on his face.
‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’ he demanded. His face was all flushed. His eyes were popping right out of his head.”
Flynn thought of something. “You know how when you’re drunk—really drunk—there’s a place inside your head, the place where you watch yourself make an idiot of yourself and think it’s really kind of funny? Well, as soon as I heard Jeffries say that—
‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’—I had a whole speech ready, but the only part of it that came out was, ‘I have the privilege, your honor, to be addressing the biggest asshole in the western world.’ I think I even bowed.”
“You did bow,” I said. Flynn looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face. “That became part of the legend,” I explained.
“It was the first thing the two deputy sheriffs who dragged you out of there told everyone. ‘Called Jeffries an asshole and then he bowed.’ That’s the way the story got handed down. After that, for months, every time a lawyer had to appear in front of Jeffries, as soon as he finished, as soon as he said ‘Thank you, your honor’
and turned to leave, he’d whisper to the lawyer who was coming up next, ‘And then he bowed,’ just to see if he could make him laugh while Jeffries was watching.”
“And all this time I thought my short-lived legal career had been a failure,” Flynn drawled as he got to his feet. He stood in front of the desk, a pensive expression on his face. “The police came to see me about this.”
I could scarcely believe it. “His murder?”
“Yeah. Just routine stuff. But they knew all about what happened. They knew I’d been disbarred and that it was because of Jeffries.”
“How would they have known about that?”
“With all the pressure they were under, they must have looked at every case he ever had anything to d
o with. And besides, I was a legend, remember? As soon as they started asking around the courthouse about who might have held a grudge, who might have wanted to kill him, my name was bound to come up.”
“They never talked to me,” I objected.
“Maybe you should sue them for defamation.”
“So what did they want to know? Where you were that night?”
I asked. I was smiling because I knew where he was nearly every night.
“Yeah. I told them I was at an AA meeting. Stupid cop—he was young—asks me if I’m an alcoholic. I say no, I just go there because it’s the only place left I can still smoke.”
His eye wandered around the room, surveying the gold-sealed diplomas and the framed degrees; the hundreds of uniform cloth-covered volumes that contained thousands of appellate court decisions; the thick treatises on criminal procedure and the law of evidence and the endless updated alphabetized manuals on the criminal law; all the books every lawyer owns and seldom takes the time to read.
“I liked being a lawyer,” he said, thoughtfully. He took a deep breath and let out a long, soulful sigh. Glancing back at me, he flashed an apologetic smile. “But Jeffries was right. I had no business being one. Not like that.”
“You needed help, that’s all. You shouldn’t even have been suspended. You should have been put into a residential treatment program. That’s what anyone else would have done.”
Flynn was not convinced. “Sometimes you have to hit bottom.
I’m serious. Jeffries did me a favor. The law was all I had left, and when that was taken away …” As the thought finished itself, he remembered something else. “I once wrote him a letter of apology. It was part of the treatment. You were supposed to write to everyone that had been hurt by your drinking. I wrote to Jeffries, read the letter out loud in front of everyone in my group. I meant it, too. Every word of it. I was really sorry.”
I got up from behind the desk and walked him out to the elevator. “Did Jeffries ever write back?”
Flynn laid his hand on my shoulder. “I wrote it so I would feel bad, not so he’d feel good. I never sent it to him,” he said with a wry grin. “Screw him.”
It reminded me of the letter that was still sitting in my desk drawer, the one I had forgotten to mail.
“Why don’t you take the case,” Flynn said as the elevator arrived.
I did not know what he was talking about. “What case?” I asked as he stepped inside.
“The case of whoever they charge with killing Jeffries,” he replied, holding the door open with his hand. “Whoever did it probably had a pretty good excuse.”
A few minutes later, at precisely eight o’clock, my secretary, Helen Lundgren, hung her coat in the closet and with her usual efficiency entered my office with both hands full. “Finished with those?” she asked, nodding her forehead toward the stack of files she had left at the end of the day on Friday. Before I could answer, she dropped another manila folder in front of me. “This is the one you need for court this morning. State v. Anderson. Motion Calendar. Nine-thirty.” Her left hand now free, she placed it on my arm so I would not move while she set a steaming cup of coffee down on the desk next to the file.
She moved all around me, arranging files, issuing instructions, a bare-bones skeleton of a woman, with sharp pointed elbows and razor thin legs, a shrill high-pitched voice and dark black eyes that were always darting from one thing to another, as if she could never quite decide which emergency to handle first. I told her I needed to send a letter, and before I had finished the sentence, she was on the other side of the desk, perched on the edge of the chair, a pencil held at attention just above the steno pad open on her bony knees.
I handed her the envelope that had been entrusted to me by Elliott Winston and asked her to find the home address for Calvin Jeffries and send it on to his wife. Then I dictated a short note explaining the circumstances under which I had received it, and added at the end a few words expressing my condolences for her loss.
Helen’s blue-veined hand flew across the page. “Anything else?”
she asked as she snapped the notebook shut and rose from the chair. With the question still echoing in the air, she turned and walked rapidly back to her desk.
“No, I guess not,” I said to the vacant chair.
When it was time to leave, I found her hunched over the keyboard of her computer, peering intently at the monitor while her red-lacquered fingers added new language to an old form.
“I’m going to court,” I announced, my hand on the doorknob.
A furtive smile creased the corners of her mouth. “It’s a little chilly out. Better take your coat,” she said dryly, her eyes fixed on the screen.
I started to open the door and she stopped typing. “Would you drop this in the mail slot next to the elevator?” She handed me a large envelope. “It’s what you wanted me to send to Mrs. Jeffries.”
Television trucks were parked on both sides of the park that separated the county courthouse from the police department, waiting for any news they could get from either the police or the district attorney’s office. There had been an arrest, but nothing had been said about an indictment. Every journalist in town had a question they were dying to ask, and they were willing to ask it of anyone they could get to answer. One reporter, microphone in hand, stood on the sidewalk at the courthouse entrance and asked anyone who happened to walk past what they thought about the news that the killer of Calvin Jeffries had been arrested. He stopped a young blue-eyed blonde, so attractive that everyone around stopped to watch. Gazing down at her, he adjusted his tie and asked what she thought should happen to the killer of Judge Jeffries.
“Who?” she asked with a glittering blank smile that for a moment made him forget the question.
“Cut,” he said, shaking his head, as he let the microphone dan-gle down from the cord he held in his hands.
Inside, journalists prowled the hallways, talking to bailiffs, court clerks, anyone they knew who might know something they did not. On the second floor, as I was making my way to the courtroom at the end of the hall where the presiding circuit court judge took care of all the preliminary motions made before a case was set for trial, Harper Bryce caught up with me. Before he could ask me anything, I held up my hands.
“It’s not true, Harper. They did not arrest me; I’m not out on bail; and I don’t think I’m even a suspect.” I looked first one way, then the other. “But off the record, just between you and me, I did it. I swore I’d get even with him, and I did.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re in a strange mood. I wasn’t going to ask you about the Jeffries killing. I know who killed him. I mean, I know who they arrested,” he said, remembering the supposed sensibilities of defense lawyers to the distinction between guilt and accusation.
“You know?” I asked, just as we reached the courtroom.
“You have something in there?” he asked, nodding toward the door. My hand was already on the handle. “Is it going to take long?”
“What I’ve got won’t take more than two or three minutes. Depends on how long I have to wait.”
We went in together and sat in the back row. At the front, Quincy Griswald, who had taken Jeffries’s place as presiding circuit court judge, was trying to control his temper. Griswald had nothing like the brilliance of his predecessor, and the knowledge that he could never dominate a judicial proceeding through the sheer force of his intellect had gnawed at him like a worm that was slowly and painfully eating him alive.
“What’s your name?” he asked peremptorily, a contemptuous sneer on his haggard face.
The young assistant district attorney froze in mid-sentence, hesitated long enough to be sure he meant it, and then, with a slightly bewildered look in her eyes, replied, “Cassandra Loescher, your honor.”
“I ask that,” he remarked, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “because I thought we had better start with something you might actually know.”
She stared at him in a wa
y that made it obvious that this was not the first time she had been subject to his abuse. Dropping on the table in front of her the brief she had just begun to read, she hunched her broad shoulders, planted her feet wide apart, and put her hands on her hips. “I always look forward to the opportunity to learn,” she said with cool detachment.
Narrowing his eyes, Griswald cast a sharp glance at this self-assured show of defiance. “Then learn this,” he said in a voice full of menace. “Once I’ve made a ruling, that’s the end of it. The answer was no when you first filed this last week and it is no again today. There is not going to be a continuance. Trial begins tomorrow morning, as scheduled.”
She recognized her mistake. With a deferential smile she tried to appeal to his better nature. “But, your honor, this is an unusually complicated case, involving three different defendants, and Mrs. Hall, who has been in charge since the first arrest nearly a year ago, is still in the hospital, and—”
Griswald stopped her dead. “Prosecutors are incapacitated all the time. Some of them even practice law that way. Somebody else can take her place.” With a backward flick of his hand, he waved her off, as he looked down at his copy of the docket, ready to call the next case.
She took a deep breath and pulled herself up to her full height.
“As I was saying, your honor, the state renews its motion for a continuance on the ground and for the reason that—”
Griswald bolted forward, jabbing his finger into the air. “How many times do I have to say no? Now get out of here,” he yelled at the top of his voice, “before I have the bailiff throw you out!”
The blood rushed to her face. “Yes, your honor,” she said through tight-clenched teeth. Trembling with rage, she grabbed the brief from the table and threw him a wrathful glance. She raised her chin like a flag of battle. “Thank you, your honor,” she said, and then turned on her heel and marched out of the courtroom.
I leaned toward Harper. “What was it the governor said the other night? The law has only reason to protect it?”
While Harper rolled his eyes, I started toward the counsel table in front. Griswald had just called my case.