Legally Wasted

by Tommy Strelka

  “I liked my job. This office . . .” Her eyes scanned the floor, the walls, and even the ceiling. She clucked her tongue.

  “It is what it is,” said Larkin.

  Charisma smirked again. “So said everyone who ever waved a little white flag in the air.”

  Larkin rolled his eyes. “I’m not giving up.”

  “You’re right about that. You done already gave up.” She stomped her foot as Larkin’s attention drifted to the window. “Do you even know where you are?” He opened his mouth but Charisma raised her finger. “Drunk, drugged and stupid. That’s where you are. You’re surrounded by fools and you done did what the Romans do.”

  “I need help.”

  Charisma shook her head so emphatically, Larkin thought one or two curls might spring loose and fly freely across the room. “You just need yourself right now.”

  A woman with red hair tinged with strands of white peeked her head in the inner office. Thick glasses obscured her eyes. She looked at Charisma questioningly and then to Larkin.

  Charisma clasped her hands. “Who’s that Larkin?”

  “That’s Professor Newton from college. I was an English minor.”

  “Why is she here?”

  Professor Newton cocked her head strangely as she regarded Charisma before returning her gaze to Larkin. With a quick shake of her head, she indicated whole-hearted disapproval.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” asked Charisma. Her words were kind, even her tone was kind, but her voice boomed.

  Professor Newton rolled her eyes, turned and left.

  “What was that, Larkin?” asked Charisma.

  Larking closed his eyes and rocked on his feet. “I remember . . . a seminar. Southern literature. The mystical minority. Something like that.”

  “Larkin this is between you and me. And after that, it’s between you and the rest of the world and God almighty. I don’t care what your critical subconscious English minor thinks of me. I earned every bit of who I am. And your conscious mind better listen up.”

  Larkin exhaled. He wanted to sigh, loudly, but the sound alone would prompt Charisma to hunt for a hard object to throw at him. He reclined in his chair.

  “Do you remember the Murray case?” Charisma asked.

  Larkin rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “Murray . . . Murray.” He shook his head. “Not ringing a bell.”

  Another cluck of the tongue. “Not surprising.” She stared at his desk for a moment before a smile appeared. “Here,” she said as she reached her hands deep into the mess of documents, “does this help?” She picked up clumps of paper off of the desk and tossed them over her shoulders. Papers flapped through the air as she threw more and more. The desk became the eye of a legal snow storm. “Charisma!” she shouted in her deepest voice, ostensibly portraying Larkin. “Put the phone on hold and get in here.” She flung a stack of documents onto Larry’s lap. “I need you to help me find this case.”

  “The Murray case,” said Larkin. “Got it.” Charisma paused and studied him, unsure of whether or not he truly remembered. “Jacob Murray,” he said. “Drug case. Fourth Amendment search and seizure issue. The seized drugs should have been suppressed by the judge. That evidence should never have seen the light of day in a courtroom.” He squinted as he attempted to recall how the matter had actually panned out.

  “Do you remember what you wanted me to help you find?”

  Larkin nodded, slowly, but he nodded. “Yes. There was a case on point. Old precedent from the Supreme Court of Virginia. It mirrored the facts of the Murray case exactly. The reasoning was spot on.”

  “Bull.”

  “Bull?”

  “Big bull. Huffing, scraping his hoof and with horns the size of bowling pins.”

  Larkin smiled.

  “You can’t even remember, Larkin.” Once more, she gave the office refrigerator a brief blast of her heat vision. “That case never existed.”

  “We never found it . . . ” said Larkin slowly.

  “Because it never happened!” Her brown eyes blazed. “That perfect case with the perfect reasoning was all in your head.”

  “Was it?” He fumbled with the knot in his tie. The memory of the entire incident was shrouded in a thick haze.

  “Yes.” Her fist pounded upon one of the few documents remaining on Larkin’s desk. “But you did argue from it, remember? You made that case up, a figment of a genius imagination. A stupid genius.” Charisma raised her arms and balled her fists. “All of those perfect arguments that your missing case stood for, all of those pitch-perfect points that you needed, came right from your own intoxicated brain. And you shouted those arguments, even if you couldn’t pass them off as your own.”

  She dropped her arms and shook her head. Larkin felt as if the two of them were in a strange fight, with both losing.

  “We tore this place apart,” Charisma continued. “We even combed the online data bases later. We never found it. Do you remember how the Murray case ended?”

  Larkin nodded. “Evidence suppressed and case dismissed.”

  “Remember why?” She did not let him answer. “It was because you knew it, not some dead judges on some old court. You. You didn’t know what the law was, you knew what the law had to be. You called it tap dancing, standing there in front of judge so-and-so without your security blanket precedent. You laid it out. It was you, just you. You needed no one else. And that drug dealing heathen went free.”

  Larkin studied the tropical flowers bursting in bright colors on her blouse. He scratched his chin. “God, I miss you, Charisma.”

  She smiled. “I miss you too.”

  Warm comforting sunlight suddenly beamed through his office window. The room glowed golden.

  “I’m in such shit right now,” said Larkin.

  “Yes. Yes you are.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Charisma, “but you do.”

  “Are you really a ghost?”

  Charisma just smiled.

  “I don’t think you are.”

  The golden light intensified.

  “I take that back,” said Charisma. “I do know what you need to do. Use your words, Larkin. You have everything you need in hand to solve this.”

  The light was blinding. Larkin shielded his eyes with his sleeve.

  140 Proof

  Water rushed down Larkin’s throat and into his lungs. He coughed, but no air came. He opened his eyes, but saw nothing but a dark swirl. He swallowed more water. He was drowning.

  A hand gripped the back of his jacket collar and gave a good yank. Air struck his face as Larkin was flung from the water. He rolled onto his back and then his side. He vomited on the ground. Half of a walnut shell fell from his hair.

  “There you go,” said Millie. “Get your poison out, Mr. Monroe. Help him up, Terry.”

  Larkin opened his eyes. The sun shone and the sky spun. Hands curled under his armpits, but he swatted them away. He coughed and spat. “What the hell is going on?” he finally managed.

  “You had a bit of a reaction,” said Terry.

  Larkin wiped the water from his eyes with his sleeve. He scooted up a bit and took his bearings. A goat ambled up to the water trough where he had nearly drowned. The goat looked at him briefly before lowering his furry face into the trough.

  “Reaction to what? What time is it? What the hell happened?” Terry reached down to help him a second time, but Larkin again swatted him away.

  “It was the poultice,” said Terry.

  “Hell no it weren’t,” said Millie. “It was Terry who done put his stash in my herbal cabinet.” She crouched down next to Larkin. Her face was a crisscross of wrinkles in the sunlight. “Terry done put his morning glory seeds in my things.”

  “Morning glories? Like the flower?” asked Larkin. “In the poultice?”

  Mille coughed before taking a drag of her pungent menthol. “He got them off the Craigheads. Natural buzz and such.”

  Larkin looked to Ter
ry. “You put magic mushrooms in that thing on my leg?”

  “No, Mr. Monroe!” shouted Terry with the same victimized look on his face that Larkin had seen at least four times in court. “I never bought that stuff. T.J. gave it to me after I gave him my old Playstation. He just thought that Millie’s shelf was where we kept that stuff. He saw her bags up there. You can ask, Mr. Monroe. Honest.”

  Larkin stared at the goat. It turned its long head toward him and stared back. Strange horizontal pupils scanned the scene. Water droplets fell from a wispy beard.

  “That’s Trinity,” said Terry. “Like from the Matrix.”

  Trinity blinked. Larkin dug his hands into the dirt. “Dear, God,” he said. “What did I ever do?” He looked to the sky.

  “What’s that?” asked Millie. “To deserve all this?” She laughed.

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s about eight thirty in the morning,” said Terry. “You talked nonsense for a while. Gave the boys a big treat. And then we let you sleep it off. You weren’t rousing though. So we brought you here. You can stay as long as you’d like, Mr. Monroe. I figured you might want to stay a while given that the law wants you.”

  Larkin spat onto the ground. For a horrifying moment, he imagined himself growing old on the mountain with Terry. His hand rubbed the thick stubble dotting his chin. “Millie? Do you have a cup of coffee to spare? And some Advil?”

  “I think we can suit you just fine,” she said.

  Larkin made his way to his feet. Terry tried to take his hand, but Larkin shoved him in the shoulder. Terry faltered, but caught himself. Larkin’s muddy handprint smeared his orange t-shirt.

  Millie led him inside the small home. She showed him to a bathroom just to the left of the mud room. The home smelled like cigarettes and bacon. “You go wash up and I’ll set you up with a plate of some breakfast.”

  Larkin did as he was told. His shame prevented him from even glimpsing his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He avoided even a peripheral glance. He cleaned his hands, washed his face and used the facilities and was careful not to step through the hole in the floor directly to the left of the toilet.

  When he left the bathroom, he headed toward a card table and chair just off from the kitchen. Millie scurried about with a can of coffee tucked under her arm while Terry quietly watched Larkin from the corner. Larkin seated himself. He took his wallet from his pants and placed it upon the tabletop. He emptied his pockets. Millie set a plate of delicious bacon down next to the judicial opinions.

  Larkin first thumbed through the contents of his wallet. He had sixty-four dollars, various credit cards, a cool leather flap that allowed him to flip out his bar card to deputies at the jail as if it were a badge, and some receipts. His cell phone had been smashed and was now a paperweight.

  A hot mug of coffee was placed on the corner of one of the opinions. “Mmm,” mumbled Larkin as he sipped it. “Wow, Millie, that’s rocket fuel.” Larkin placed his cup down and stared at each front page again. He looked at the time stamps and thumbed his finger over Justice Lloyd Bird’s name as it appeared to the right of the names of the parties. He sipped more coffee and continued to trail his finger down the page.

  “Now you eat some of that bacon, Mr. Monroe,” said Millie. She hovered behind him and studied his items. “Are them lawyer papers?”

  “They are that,” said Larkin as his finger ran further down the page. He picked up the longer version of Bedford County, et al., v. Trans-Appalachian Railways and thumbed his way through. He set it aside and picked up the shorter version. He read it again. Millie shoved a piece of bacon into his mouth as he reached the last page. “This one makes sense,” he said as he wiggled the shorter opinion in his hand.

  “That’s the right one?” asked Millie.

  “Right one what?” asked Terry. He could not bear to stand silent any longer. He bounded toward them.

  Larkin continued to hold the thinner opinion as he glared at the longer one. “This one,” said Larkin as he again shook the one in his hand, “is right. The Court nails it in this one.”

  “Nails what?” asked Terry.

  “The case,” said Larkin. “In the shorter version, the Court defines the case as turning on a single legal issue. It’s really not even a very complicated one. That’s why the opinion is so much smaller.” He sipped his coffee. “In the larger one, the author went through a dozen other things that I don’t think even really matter.”

  Terry drew closer and grabbed a piece of bacon. “Were they written by the same person?”

  Larkin stared at the documents. “No. Actually they weren’t written by the same person. One of them wrote this one,” said Larkin as he shook the opinion in his right hand, “and the other wrote the one by my wallet.”

  Terry turned and rested his backside against the table’s edge. He craned his neck and studied the papers for a moment. “One of them who?”

  “The law clerks. Each one wrote one of these, I betcha.”

  “Does that mean you can prove you didn’t do it?” asked Millie, as she noisily scraped a cast iron pan with a spatula.

  Larkin shook his head. He flipped the lighter opinion over on top of the thicker opinion and closed his eyes. His mind both ached and raced.

  “Is that the name of the guy who wrote it?” asked Terry.

  “What?” replied Larkin. He followed Terry’s finger to the back of the last page of the smaller opinion. Handwritten in deep blue ink were the words, “Trans-App Atty’s: Havish Cromwell – BIG BNS.”

  “Havish Cromwell,” muttered Larkin. He repeated the name. “Anthony…,” he said. Larkin snatched the document and studied the script. The letters were large, smooth and loopy, the kind of hand writing that a girl would have. “Oh my lord,” said Larkin.

  “What?” asked Millie. Terry ate.

  Larkin turned. “Do you have a phone?”

  “Only can do texts with mine,” said Terry. “And I’m out of minutes anyway.”

  Millie crossed to the kitchen to her handbook. She dug for a bit before withdrawing the sleekest, most expensive looking piece of hardware Larkin had ever seen. “Here ya go,” she said as she handed Larkin the phone.

  “This is your phone?” asked Larkin. He flipped the thin cool piece of dark glass over in his scratched palms. “I, don’t even know how to use it.”

  “Just speak the number after you press the green light,” said Millie.

  Larkin shook his head. He pressed the light and successfully dialed Madeline. He prayed for her to answer.

  “Hello?” her voice projected crisply.

  “Madeline, it’s me,” said Larkin. “Don’t hang up.”

  “Oh sweet Jesus, Larkin,” Madeline said with a hushed voice.

  “Just listen to me,” said Larkin. “Trevor has been arrested and it’s only a matter of time until I am too.”

  “Oh, Larkin.” She sounded defeated.

  “None of it’s true,” he said. His heart fluttered. “Well,” he said, “Trevor and I did both break into a house, but I’m not guilty of murder.”

  “Murder!” she cried.

  “I know how to fix everything,” he said. “I really do. But I need you to do something for me. Will you?”

  The line was silent. Larkin waited the requisite twelve seconds. “And your answer?”

  “What is it?”

  “I need you to go over to Carol’s and speak with Ryan, Trevor’s daughter.”

  “Okay,” said Madeline.

  “I need you to ask her if she remembers where Anthony, the man with glasses, was going to work in New York?”

  “What? Where some guy in glasses is going to work in New York?”

  “Exactly,” said Larkin. “Have her write it down.”

  “Okay. Then what?

  “That’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes. Just wait to hear from me.”

  “Oh mother of mercy,” said Madeline. She hung up the phone. He looked to Terry. “S
he’ll do it.”

  “You got the evidence now to set yourself free, Mr. Monroe?” Terry asked.

  “Nope. Not yet.”

  Millie bumped Terry out of the way with her right hip as she steered another load of bacon and some scrambled eggs onto Larkin’s plate. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “Three pieces of paper and a pen,” said Larkin. He looked at Terry. “Can you get me a ride to downtown Big Lick?”

  Terry nodded. “Are you going to Big Lick to get the evidence you need?”

  “Absolutely,” said Larkin just before chomping onto a bit of bacon.

  Terry’s truck came to a stop about a football field away from the U.S. District Courthouse, two blocks from Larkin’s own office. The brakes squealed and something made a crunching noise as Terry shifted his truck’s gears. The wheelchair in the bed of the truck rolled to a stop almost at the tailgate.

  “Will this do you for?” asked Terry.

  Larkin sighed. He gripped the three pages in his hand tightly, before carefully folding them in half and tucking them in his jacket pocket. “I really wish that you had parked out of sight of the building like I said,” said Larkin. “But this will have to work.”

  Terry gripped the gearshift and yanked. The engine or the transmission, or perhaps the raccoon in the radiator, made the same dreadful crunching noise again. Larkin smacked Terry’s hand.

  “Just leave it in park,” said Larkin. “Enough is enough. Get me the chair.”

  “The chair?” Terry turned and looked in-between the bands of the tribal tattoo decal applied to his rear window. “You need me to get it for you?”

  “That’s why I wanted you to park away from the building,” said Larkin. “Now you have to get me the chair. Just go.”

  Terry hopped out of the car and scurried to get Millie’s wheelchair from the bed of the truck. Though technically receiving disability income, Millie only used the chair for when she headed into town.

  “I suppose this is for heading into town and all,” he said as he opened Larkin’s door. The two of them performed a not very convincing show of a paraplegic man in tattered stained clothing leaping from a dented rust bucket and onto a wheelchair.