Gods Go Begging

by Alfredo Vea

  Jesse unclenched his fists and closed his eyes to help release the anger. The Veterans’ Administration psychologists had taught him how to distract himself with unrelated thoughts whenever the pangs came.

  “Or perhaps,” said Jesse, as his thoughts returned to the circle of defense lawyers, “you want to hear about el Medico Largo, the famous Dr. Long? Remember him? He called himself ‘El Pitón,’ but his favorite alias was Felix Meterpalo.”

  Only the Spanish speakers laughed at his puns.

  “He was the phony sex therapist who was charged with about thirty counts of rape a couple of years back? He treated sexual dysfunction in older women by administering his now infamous ‘hot beef injections.’ The DA’s problem was that every one of those acts was completely consensual.”

  “I remember that one,” said Matt excitedly. “He was a dapper little Mexican guy who wore a toupee and always dressed in a shabby white tuxedo. I was there for the preliminary hearing. I swear, it looked like a goddamn beauty shop in the courtroom with all of that blue hair and rouge, and it smelled like the perfume counter at a drugstore. I seem to recall that not one single victim testified against him.”

  “Not a soul,” smiled Jesse. “They all steadfastly refused, and good Judge Moscone wasn’t about to issue a contempt citation to witnesses who looked just like his own dear mother. None of the alleged victims wanted their money back either. El Medico Largo kept saying all along that no one would press charges. After his case was dismissed, Dr. Long left with two of the victims—two widows, twin sisters, I believe. They all climbed into a white Bentley limousine and disappeared toward Daly City. I think he was driving.”

  Jesse laughed at his own private joke. In Spanish the verb “to drive,” manejar, can also mean “to screw.”

  “Why wasn’t it a hot chorizo injection?” asked Newton.

  Jesse grinned. “If he had been Chinese he would have called himself Dr. Oolong.”

  “Do you think those women loved him, Jesse? How else can you explain their refusal to prosecute him for fraud?”

  “I don’t know anything about love,” answered Jesse quietly. “Maybe it was. I suppose it could have been something close to it, a mimic of love or an isotope. You’re asking the wrong person.”

  Jesse looked away from his friends. All of them were married and most of them had children. All that Jesse had been able to manage had been a series of aimless affairs. He had been lucky in the war. He was ambulatory. His sight and hearing were intact. All that had been amputated was his ability to give or receive love.

  “But the good Dr. Largo wasn’t the most interesting of all of my cases,” continued Jesse. “I can offer up the absurd tale of one Mohammed al-Farouk, formerly known as Willie B. Shipwright of the renowned Sunnydale Project Shipwrights. His street name was Keloid.

  “Now, Keloid had four or five burglary priors and in his new case was charged with about fifteen counts of residential burglary. In other words, he was looking at forever in custody. They would be playing the Super Bowl on the moon by the time Keloid was released.

  “Here was a real pro. Keloid literally left no stone unturned. If there was a stone, my man would turn it and leave a fingerprint. Fifteen burglaries and lo and behold, there are fifteen pristine sets of fingerprints. And all in the exact same location: the flush handle of the toilet. It seems Keloid had a thing about using the toilet in every house he burglarized. I guess the one at home didn’t work.

  “Amazingly enough,” continued Jesse, “Keloid was out on bail. You know, these idiots never appreciate their dear, sweet little mothers. Mrs. Winnie B. Shipwright had to take out a second mortgage on the family home to get him back on the street. Well, on the day of the preliminary hearing, he waltzes in with his entire family in tow, and he’s dressed up like an honest-to-goodness college boy. I swear he came in wearing corduroys, a plaid shirt, a leather belt, and a pair of suede Hush Puppies.”

  “Oo-wee,” sang Matt, “my man was smokin‘!”

  “On his left wrist was a nice gold watch and he had on a pair of tinted sunglasses. ;Ay, gué guapo! It was truly a moment of sartorial splendor. I’ll never forget how proud his dear mother looked that morning before the hearing. Pobrecita.

  “Well, the district attorney came into court and offered ten years in state prison to settle the case.”

  “A gift,” said Newton.

  The others nodded their heads in agreement. Given his fingerprints and his possible exposure—six years for each current burglary charge and five years more for each prior—it was more than a gift, it was manna from heaven.

  “Of course, no one dressed like that is going to take ten years. His mother was aghast, fanning herself and screaming. ‘My dear little boy take ten years? You go tell that district attorney to forget them ten years! Lord Jesus, have mercy! Where is the justice? Where is the love?’

  “I explained to Keloid that his exposure was immense—well over a century in prison—and that he could be out in five years if he accepted the latest offer, but he gracefully declined. ‘Fuck them ten years,’ he bellowed after making sure his sweet mother and his adoring family couldn’t hear. As a precaution I asked him if he had any proceeds from any of the burglaries on his person. With a truly wounded look on his face, Keloid said, ‘You think I done this, don’t you? Mr. Lawyer, just whose side is you on?’

  “Well, the first witness to take the stand was the fingerprint expert, who placed Keloid in every one of those bathrooms and his hands on every one of those flush handles. I remember that Keloid turned to me and said, ‘It ain’t against the law to take a piss. They ain’t proved nothin’.”

  The lawyers around the table heaved a sigh of sad familiarity.

  “ ‘It’ll prove that you were there,’ I explained, ‘and each of the residents will say that you had no business being there.’ The fingerprint expert added that he had never seen so many perfect sets of latent fingerprints. ‘They lifted off that stainless steel like pancakes from a griddle.’ When I asked him questions about the actual comparison, he laughed out loud and said that he could have compared them over the telephone. He stopped at twenty points of similarity on each one, then he pointed out a crescent scar on the right index finger that was present at every lift. The expert said that Keloid might as well have signed his name.

  “When he heard this, Keloid leaned toward me and said excitedly, ‘We got ’em now! We got ‘em now! I can’t write!’ ”

  The evening’s most formidable wave of laughter washed over the table. There was the froth and foam of empathy and embarrassment tipped with the jovial sadness of people who have slowly, over time, developed an immunity to the presence of the unbelievable. It all happened; everything happened in the courtroom, and defense lawyers had to be there to absorb the blows and to attempt to explain it all away.

  “So after the fingerprint expert left the stand, the prosecutor put on the cops to explain where and how Keloid was arrested. Then came the residents.”

  Jesse Pasadoble breathed deeply. What happened next had appeared and reappeared in his minor nightmares. He leaned back in his chair and began again. Two other lawyers who had witnessed the actual events began giggling with expectation. Even those who had just heard passing references to the case over the years were filled with an unnatural anticipation. This case was some sort of weird landmark, a milestone of the absurd.

  “The first witness testified as usual as to what property was missing or moved and that no one, including Keloid, had permission to enter the premises. When he was done testifying, he stepped down from the stand to sign the witness list, but suddenly turned toward the judge. In an awkward and halting voice he addressed the court: ‘Your honor, may I please say something?’ I objected, of course, there being no question before the witness, but the judge allowed the man to speak. ‘Your honor,’ he said meekly, ‘that man has my shoes on.’ ”

  The table shook with guffaws of sympathetic derision. Chairs rocked backward and table edges were pounded wit
h closed fists. Spilled coffee rolled onto sleeves and sheaves of legal paper. The sound rolled from the dining room and out into the hallways, where it splashed onto the steel doors of four elevators and onto the swollen racks of the evidence room at the end of the hallway.

  “So the bailiff seized the shoes from my client’s feet and the witness pointed out the place inside his shoes where he had written his initials in laundry ink. When they took the shoes away, old Keloid started bawling, ‘What’s this mean, man? What’s this mean?’ The tears were streaming down his face. I think there was even some snot hanging from his upper lip. Right before my eyes old Keloid, the confident, self-assured collegiate, was rapidly reassuming his ancient courtroom persona as the helpless innocent, a poor cork bobbing on a swelling sea of unfairness.

  “Anyway, the second witness took the witness stand, then, after the same litany of evidence, ended his testimony by saying, ‘Your honor, the defendant is wearing my pants.’ ”

  Those who had never heard the story before were unable to control themselves now. Their facial muscles were aching with laughter. What they were hearing was yet another incredible incarnation of the defense lawyers’ worst fears.

  “After the pants were removed from Keloid’s body, the third witness recognized the plaid shirt as a special one his mother had sewn for him for his thirtieth birthday. I couldn’t believe it! They were stripping my boy naked right there in the courtroom. His poor mother was fainting and grabbing at her huge heaving chest and screaming, ‘Help me, Lord Jesus, help me!’ Her makeup was streaming down her face and there was one false eyelash stuck in her cleavage. The other members of his family were leaving, one by one. Seminaked Keloid was anointing the counsel table with his salt tears and snot. But it wasn’t over yet.

  “The last witness closed his eyes and recited word for word the inscription on the back of the gold watch that the bailiff had taken from my client. It had been a graduation gift from his late father. So there is my once proud client, sitting there in his underwear and his tinted shades—his entire wardrobe placed into evidence and mucus covering his entire upper lip—sobbing. ‘What’s this mean? You supposed to be my lawyer. What does this mean?’

  “You know,” said Jesse, as he removed his glasses to wipe his eyes, “I still get hate mail from that man. Even his mother sends me hate mail. She says she knew all along that she should’ve hired a white lawyer. She still calls me on the phone to tell me that I railroaded her poor child. She says her son isn’t a thief and that a real lawyer would have known that those clothes were stolen.”

  “Is this the legend of Keloid?” asked a woman’s voice, barely heard above the laughter. It was Freya Horne, a veteran public defender and a longtime member of the circle. She walked slowly around the group, looking for an empty seat. There was a look of distress and fatigue in her dark eyes as she sat down.

  “Sank heaven for leetle girls,” she sang weakly, as she removed her tweed jacket. It was her parody of Maurice Chevalier and it could only mean one thing.

  “You got another child molester?” moaned Matt Gonzalez.

  Freya nodded slowly, sadly. “Jesus, I hate these cases. More than anything on earth, I hate these cases.” She nodded her thanks as someone handed her a cup of coffee. “The mother allegedly caught Gramps molesting his own granddaughter! Well, there’s one more family down the tubes. And to top it off, the little girl is two years old.”

  A groan of deep pain and frustration rose up around the table.

  “And… there’s forensic evidence,” she added, her eyes glazed with moisture.

  The table was silent now. There it was, the tearing of the labia, the redness, the immobile sperm heads. There it was, so measurable and demonstrable: the instant when the irreversible happened, the bud that would blossom into a lifetime of suffering. There it was, the end of a childhood, the end of a relationship between a father and his daughter. No matter how the case turned out, no memory would be left untainted, unsmeared by an old man’s wayward fluids.

  “Do you want to trade, Freya?” said a voice. “I’ll take that case and you can have one that I can’t stand.” It was Chris Gauger, one of Jesse’s favorite lawyers and a close friend. Jesse noticed that Chris had two of his fingers resting on the seam of his paper coffee cup. He had once been a minor-league pitcher; a junk-baller who had spent less than a week in the majors, two or three days with the Royals, and a cup of coffee with the Athletics.

  “I have a leather murder,” said Chris, “a real kinky sadomasochism homicide with lots of handcuffs and alligator clips. There’s even some chicken wire in the evidence, an enema kit, and a jar of mayonnaise. I’m fairly sure it’ll end up being a voluntary manslaughter.”

  “No thanks,” said Freya, her face twisted into a mock expression of disgust. “I can do my own case. It’ll just take a little while to get over the initial wave of revulsion Who knows?” She shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t do it.” The defense lawyer’s reflex had begun to kick in and the others at the table breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Maybe he didn’t do it.”

  Freya sipped her coffee, her mind drifting with the steam that rose from her cup.

  “So,” said Freya as she simultaneously reached out to touch Jesse’s shoulder, “I hear you got the Flyer-Adrong murder case.” There was a look of sympathy in her eyes.

  “Which one is that?” asked Newton.

  “The Amazon Luncheonette case,” replied Chris, “that double homicide up on Potrero Hill. That was so cold-blooded. You have that one, Jesse?”

  Jesse nodded solemnly. He had just been to the medical examiner’s office. The autopsies had been done a week ago, but the coroner’s reports were still not ready. Jesse had the color blowups of the autopsies in his briefcase. His investigator had gotten them a few days before. As soon as he left the House of Toast this evening, he would be going up to meet the defendant for the first time.

  He should have gone to see his new client the day he got the case, but something made him put it off. Had it been those photographs? Had it been the photographs or the photographer that had unnerved him? Somewhere in his nightmares there was always a photographer, someone who had squinted at death to find the aesthetic vision. At first he had only glanced at the photos. The two women had been so beautiful, even in death. Jesse had seen so much power and determination in their unmoving faces. On second viewing he had found himself staring into the photos for hours, trying to imagine the two women alive and smiling. He had found himself wishing—with every ounce of his being—that he had known them both.

  Jesse hated death. He did not fear it, but he hated it with all of his heart and soul. A year and a half of incredible fear in the highlands of Vietnam had been transformed into an almost anguished love of the living, intact moment, the moment that can never be possessed. Like many men who have witnessed the best and worst in themselves, who have been given a glimpse of the end of their own lives at a very young age, he had lost the power to be lonely. That power had been replaced by something else: a soul sickness; a hunger for beauty, but only at a distance. Though he could not love his own life and the things within it, Jesse hated death.

  “That horrible case,” said Freya, “makes me happy that mine is only a puny molestation. The Good Lord knows a little child should not have to start out her life like that, but at least she has a chance to live out her allotted days without some trigger-happy, testosterone-ridden idiot putting a bullet through her head or her spine. There’s just something so eerie and unsettling about that Flyer-Adrong case.”

  “It was an execution,” said Chris. “The police described the placement of the bullets as efficient, almost professional. Were there juveniles involved? How old is the defendant?”

  “Eighteen,” answered Jesse. “Calvin Thibault is his name. The other suspect is still at large. My boy is a real sophisticate, I’m sure. The eyewitnesses are at odds over which of the two is the actual shooter. The homicide detectives all suspect that the other perpetrator is
Little Reggie Harp, but Calvin won’t cop to it.”

  “Not if he ever wants to see his family again,” said Chris. “Word on the street is that Reggie Harp is one evil dude. Everyone on the south side of Potrero Hill is scared of him.”

  “One oddball witness says there was a third guy at the scene of the murder,” continued Jesse, “some sort of daredevil bystander. But they all agree on one thing: Calvin Thibault was there when those women died. From what I’ve heard and read, everyone on Potrero Hill had an opinion about those two women. People either loved or respected them, no one disliked them. For whatever reason, their small cooking business was quickly becoming the true heart of that community. Their restaurant was due to open in less than three months. My investigator tells me that the little restaurant is beautiful.”

  The feeling of hatred flooded back once more. There would be so much hope lodged within the walls of the Amazon Luncheonette, unrequited, useless hope. The human hearts that created that hope, that held up those walls, were lumps of clay now -senseless, dumb and cold.

  “I don’t think the prosecutor will ask for the death penalty. Aside from stealing Twinkies and Kool-Aid from the corner store, the kid has absolutely no prior convictions. He’s never been arrested. Jesus, he sure as hell started right at the top. A real child prodigy. Why the hell couldn’t he have gone the traditional route? Start out by stealing tires and move up to an entire car? The DA might go for LWOP though,” said Jesse, referring to a life sentence without any possibility of parole.

  “I have to go up and visit Calvin tonight. I promised his mother. God”—he exhaled deeply—“I’m not really sure that I have the energy for another life makeover!”

  Everyone at the table understood what Jesse meant by the phrase “life makeover.” It referred to the agonizing, time-consuming process that he had developed over the years to prepare all his clients for the rigors of the courtroom and for the frightening possibility that a semiliterate, bookless, wordless, and thoughtless young man who was accused of premeditated murder would have to take the stand and explain himself to twelve people—twelve white people who would never deign to set foot in his world, who would clean their shoes if they ever did. Twelve people who would swear an oath to judge Calvin fairly, without preconceptions or prejudice, but who would also lock their car doors if they noticed him walking nearby.