“I know you would,” he says, “go back and change it if you could.” He smiles. It is, at last, a measure of forgiveness.
He’s weary and showing it. “Enough,” he says. “There isn’t any sense beating it. We won’t speak of it again.”
He lifts the telephone receiver and orders a drink.
It’s over as quickly as that. My sigh is almost palpable, like the perspiration on my forehead. As Ben looks away, I use my cocktail napkin to wipe it. I cannot believe that it is over, that in the brief time in this room with him, with the few words that have passed between us, I am now back on speaking terms with this man who had been my mentor. Perhaps Ben is in a better mood than I had guessed.
He sets the receiver in the cradle and drops one cheek of his buttocks on the corner of the desk, stretching his arms over his head he sucks his lungs full of air. “Life’s a juggernaut,” he says. “No time to think. Lately, it’s like I’m caught in a time warp.”
He wants to talk, it seems, of happier thoughts.
“The nomination?” I ask.
“Uh-huh.” He furrows his forehead and smiles. It’s clearly pleasant to be fatigued in pursuit of such a cause.
He winks at me, a little secret. “I took the ‘red eye’ to Washington two nights ago,” he says. “The final cut.” He’s talking about the last round of contenders for the high court. From their ranks will come the next Supreme Court justice of the United States. He leaves me hanging, waiting for the final word, and instead regales me with descriptions of the White House, the Lincoln Study, “intimate-impressive,” he says. His gaze turns crystalline, distant. He’s using his hands to gesture now. “I found myself standing next to the desk where Lincoln freed a million slaves.” He shakes his head. “I swear,” he says, “you could feel his presence in that place, his spirit move.”
In this vignette I find that there is something that truly moves Ben Potter-the sense of occupying space once held by the Emancipator. To gravitate perceptibly closer to the circle of history, the thought that he himself may one day belong, at least in some measure, to the ages. These are notions too lofty, dream-inspired like so much pixie dust, they have never entered my own mind.
“I take it it went well?”
He makes a face, like “Read my mind.”
For me, knowing Ben as I do, it’s not hard. I know in that instant, in the twinkle of his eye, that this city is about to lose one lawyer. “Congratulations, Ben.” I raise my glass.
Struggle as he does, Potter can’t contain his smile. “Thank you.” His tone is hushed, almost reverent. “Of course, you’ll keep it to yourself.”
“Absolutely.”
‘It wouldn’t do to have it splashed all over the wires before the President can make the announcement. They didn’t want me to return home-wanted to make the announcement from Washington while I was there. I knew what would happen,” he says. ‘I’d never leave the trail of reporters behind. Senate investigators looking for dirt in the confirmation hearings, the press.” He shakes his head vigorously. “Told them I had some business to complete before telling the world. A few personal tilings. Getting out of there was like pulling teeth.”
I wonder whether this business, these “personal things,” involve Talia.
“The price of fame.” I commiserate with him.
“The world has a penchant for leaks,” he says. “They gave me forty-eight hours and swore me to a blood oath of silence. I take the “red eye’ back tomorrow night.”
As the waiter comes in with his drink, my mind is lost in thought. It’s a measure of Ben’s tolerance, his liberal spirit, that in this my hour of forgiveness he has seen fit to share the security of his future with me. The waiter leaves.
Potter makes small talk. He’s not finished. There’s something more he wants to discuss, but he’s taking his time getting there.
He jokes, about the pending senate confirmation hearings, about all the rumors-stories of a political litmus test for the court.
“It’s all crap,” he says. ‘Don’t you believe any of it. You go back there, the President shakes your hand, they give you some-tiling to drink, and while you’re standing on this chair being sized for your robe, the tailor asks you if life begins with conception.”
We laugh. Like much of Ben’s humor, I can never be certain how large the kernel of truth is in this story.
The smile fades from his face. “There is one more thing,” he says.
“What’s that?”
“A favor,” he says. “Something you can do for me.”
This is Ben at his best, wheeling and dealing, something that he wants from me at a time when he knows I cannot say no.
“It’s the law school, something that I started before all of this came up, before I went back to Washington.” There’s a lot of gesturing with his hands here, posturing and waving his drink in little circles.
“It’s nothing much,” he says. “A trust fund that requires a new administrator.”
I look at him, like ‘What does this have to do with me?’
“It’s set up in the name of Sharon Cooper,” he says.
Suddenly I understand.
Sharon Cooper was twenty-six when she died, killed in an automobile accident this summer. A second-year law student, she was working with the firm at the time, after I’d left. I had landed her a part-time job with P amp;S when I was still in favor. This was a courtesy to her father. George Cooper is the county’s medical examiner. We’ve been thick, Coop and I, since my days with the DA.
“The trust fund was something to remember Sharon,” he says. “Friends set it up at the law school and asked me if I would administer it. At the time it sounded good. But with all of this …” Ben shrugs his shoulders and I realize his dilemma. From three thousand miles away and with a full plate of cases on the high court, the last thing he needs are the minutiae of a trust fund.
Coop brought Sharon’s personal papers to my office the day after her death. He busied himself in the details of arranging her affairs, her funeral, her estate, anything that would serve to avoid the inevitable grieving. When he finally fell into that pit, George Cooper disappeared from the world of normal men for more than a month.
But on the day after Sharon died he sat across from me at my desk, entirely composed, a stack of documents carefully sorted and paper-clipped-insurance, taxes, stocks, a considerable portfolio for a young single woman. These were inherited from Sharon’s mother, who had died of cancer the year before. Within twenty-four months Coop had lost both wife and child. In his state of grief, to George Cooper a lawyer was a lawyer, equally adept in administering the property of the dead as in fending off a long term in the joint. So he came to a friend.
Unable to say no, I took Coop’s papers, opened a file, and blundered into the probate courts.
Ben looks at me from across the room in a kind of reverie now. “An endowment, a trust, has been established at the law school in Sharon’s name. A number of people who knew her have contributed,” he says. “It’s a sizable trust, but we need a trustee. I thought of you.”
This has become an avocation with Ben. A multitude of scholarships and private grants have been spawned under his guiding hand in the last few years, two for deceased partners of the firm, several others for departed wheels in the community. With Ben, it is any excuse to raise money for the law school, his favorite charity. This does not diminish Sharon Cooper, in his eyes or mine, but, his motivations are clear. He will make something positive, even out of the tragic death of this young woman.
“I’d do it myself,” he says. Ben’s talking about being trustee. “But Washington’s pretty far away. They need someone closer, to confer with the dean on expenditures, to administer the funds in a way she would have approved. You’re the natural,” he says. “Besides, I think her father would want you to do it.” The last is the linchpin of his pitch.
“What can I say?”
“You can say yes.”
I shrug a little gratitu
de toward Ben for the thought, the confidence that accompanies this offer.
“Yes.” I sense that a slight wrinkle of embarrassment has crept across my face. “Why not,” I say, like a giddy adolescent being given a prize he never expected.
“Good!” He smiles broadly. “We should talk again before I leave town, to the up some of the loose ends on this thing. Do you have plans for tomorrow night?”
“Nothing I can’t rearrange.”
“Then we’ll meet for a late dinner at The Broiler. What do you say, nine o’clock? We can talk and maybe you can give me a lift out to the airport when we’re finished.”
“Good,” I say.
Ben lifts himself off the edge of the desk. Our meeting is over. I rise, and we meet in the center of the room. His expression brightens like a lantern. He reaches out with his arm like a swinging gate and slaps a huge hand around the nape of my neck, a little male bonding, like a father cuffing his son for some errant but minor mischief. And as we head for me door, drinks in hand, my concerns turn to matters more economic-to Harry Hinds and my open bar tab.
CHAPTER 3
To get to my office I use an elevator from before the time of Moses, a contraption with a flexing metal gate that slams, emitting the fury of a sonic boom. It’s like hell’s portal closing on its new arrivals. Clients who’ve done time always take the stairs.
This lift empties its cargo into a small lobby on the second floor, the first being occupied by a bank with roots in the Gold Rush. The building itself dates to the last century, but has been well maintained. It has touches of elegance in the moldings and fixtures. The pressed-tin tiles set into the ceiling, original with my office, are again in demand, used to authenticate the metal-fabricated, high-toned restaurants of Fashion Square.
I share a two-room suite down a common hall with Dee, my secretary and receptionist, a hire I made on the recommendation of a friend to whom I no longer speak.
I have learned in my time with Dee to become master of all things electronic: answering machines, copiers, the fax, Mr. Coffee-and most of all the small personal computer which I moved from her desk to my office when I found her using its dark screen like some mystic high-tech looking glass, to comb her hair and apply makeup. I spend my evenings, before the usual rounds with Harry, typing my own correspondence and dreaming of some blameless way to fire Dee.
My secretary is not unattractive, in her early twenties, assertive, bright-eyed, and eager. But on an intellectual plane she is heavily into hairstyles and panty hose. She excels at clerical foreplay. All of the typing paper is stacked in neat piles. The plastic cylinders holding various sizes of paper clips are perpetually fondled like Buddhist prayer wheels, and the desk is endlessly combed for any object that might be out of place. I have learned by painful experience that anything beyond sealing an envelope or licking a stamp severely taxes her secretarial skills. She sports acrylic fingernails longer than claws on a saber-tooth tiger; from one of them dangles a minuscule gold chain stretching from the tip to a tiny star embedded in the half-moon, above the cuticle-almost as attractive as a bone through the nose. She wears these like a declaration of independence-it reads: “You really don’t expect me to type.”
As I enter the office she greets me enthusiastically. “Good morning, boss”-this latter to ensure that we both know who’s in charge. The tasks we each perform during the day have tended to muddy these distinctions. In the inner reaches of my brain, I issue a psychic growl like some snarling hound.
I respond with a flat, indifferent “Hello.” In recent days I’ve become increasingly abrupt in my manner toward her, a sort of cryptic message that she might look elsewhere for employment. But each day when I arrive for work she’s there, panting by the door like some warm puppy, to greet me. The thought that I must pull the trigger myself on this coup de grace is not pleasant, and so it waits.
“Do me a favor,” I say.
“Sure.”
“Call Susan Hawley and remind her we have a court appearance tomorrow.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out the Hawley file. “Then find the points and authorities that I did the other day and put them in the file. When you’re done,” I say, “put it in my briefcase.” I drop the file onto the center of her desk like some ponderous plane belly-flopping on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Before it can bounce she has it in her hands and is turning to place it in one of the file drawers behind her chair.
“Done,” she says.
“Sure,” I say as I watch the thing disappear into the dark hole of Calcutta. I make a mental note to retrieve it when she leaves for lunch.
As I enter my office I’m surprised at this hour to see Harry, comfortably reclining in my swivel chair with his feet propped on my desk, reading a newspaper. Harry is bow ties and pinstripes, silk gauze socks and wing tips, a bulbous nose and broad grin. At sixty, his career behind him and no signs of retirement on the horizon, he has a give-a-damn attitude that one in my circumstances can find refreshing. It is perhaps that since my fall from grace, when I look at Harry I see myself in twenty years.
“Lost?” I ask.
He looks at me over the top of the paper. “Clients needed a little privacy to talk; figured you wouldn’t mind.” He starts to get up.
“Stay there,” I say.
Harry and I have become increasingly close in the months following my banishment from Potter, Skarpellos. Hopelessly out of date, a different bow tie for each day of the week, we seem to tread the same route to court each morning.
Twenty years ago Harry was one of the foremost criminal defense attorneys in town. Tried no more than four cases a year, all front-page felonies. That was before he found courage and stamina in a bottle. Now his days are filled trying to keep other drunks from the clutches of the DA and the angry machinations of MADD. For variety, his life is punctuated by the occasional assault-and-battery.
I hang up my coat and open my briefcase on the couch, then sort through a couple of files I took home.
“Fuckin’ Congress,” says Harry. He’s finished reading the article. “First they allow their friends to steal all me money from the S amp;Ls, then they want us to pay it all back.” He follows this with a deep sigh as if conceding mat it is something over which Harry has no control.
“Every time I vote, I have the same feeling,” he says. “Like somebody put a bag of dogshit on my doorstep and set it on fire. I don’t know whether to just stand there and hold my nose, or try to stamp it out.”
The mental picture drawn by this little vignette leads me to conclude that Harry has probably seen these images, up close and personal, at some youthful point in his life from behind a wicked snicker at the edge of some poor soul’s front porch.
“Can’t trust government,” he says.
“I know,” I say. “I used to work for “em.”
Harry’s office is half the size of my own. He’s taken to camping here when clients and family need a private conference-a hit to get the money for his fees, or to square the details of an alibi before the story is locked in stone with their lawyer. They don’t know how flexible and creative Harry can be.
Silhouetted by the soles of his shoes, the surface of my desk is organized confusion. I’ve taken to hoarding the most important case files in my own office, a defense against Dee-saster.
There are a score of files piled here, marshaled in a system that only its maker can fathom-two approaching trials, cases that may settle, but only on the courthouse steps; and a criminal appeal with seven volumes of transcripts, referred to me by the district court as part of the indigent-appellate panel-an economic hedge I’d taken before clients became thick. Propagating like the poor is a stack of files requiring motions and correspondence, a chore that would involve a good afternoon’s work dictating to a competent secretary, but which I will no doubt spend endless evenings stroking out on my own keyboard.
I paw through my mail, which Dee has stacked on the edge of my desk-a few bills, letters in a couple of cases, a probation report
in a sentencing matter, and an announcement that Jerome Feinberg will speak at the next meeting of the Capitol City Lawyers Association: “Probate and You-The Lawyer’s Tollgate to the Hereafter.”
I flip the announcement to Harry.
“Tasteful,” he says, “You and I said it, we’d be disbarred.”
“Half the judges in the county will be there to laugh. I’ll be there to take notes,” I add.
“What for?”
I tap a thick file that sits looming on the center of my desk, alone, solitary, like some ancient tome written in Sanskrit that waits to be deciphered.
“Probate file,” I say. “Only one I have. Only one I’ll ever take.”
Harry looks at the tab on the file jacket and then says but a single word: “Oh.”
With all of his warts, Harry Hinds at times displays the tact of a French diplomat. He has heard about Sharon Cooper.
This file is one of those objects in life, the sight of which churns acid in my stomach. Sharon’s probate produces in me sensations of creeping, escalating uneasiness. I have moved the file a dozen times, to the credenza, the floor, and back to the desk again. It lies there, a testament to my ignorance of probate and my inability to say no to a friend, in this case George Cooper.
I have spent hours poring through the loose-leaf binders of lawyers’ self-help books, that forest of publications with perennial subscriptions and annual pocket parts, each with its own transactional checklist of things to be done. It is, I have concluded, unfathomable. The probate lawyers have found the magic pellet that kills competition. They have constructed processes and crafted terminology that can be translated only by the high priests of their own cloistered sect. I read Dee’s secretarial handbook, which, like the computer I’ve bought for her, she has never used. I held hopes that maybe this would be my Rosetta stone, the key to the mysteries of probate. It was not. The probate secretaries, it seems, have their own guild. As might be expected, Dee is without a union card.
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