“We’re going to give you two weeks’ pay, but the majority of the partners voted that we don’t want either of you even going back to your office. A couple of years ago we had an associate who was discharged take some clients with him. It caused us a major problem. I’ll need your keys right now.”
The bastards! Martha gasps. My heart begins to race, and I feel my mouth go so dry I can hardly swallow. We are being treated like employees caught stealing. I am furious. After paying bills last night, I have maybe a hundred dollars in my bank account. My hands shake as I pull apart my key ring and hand it to him. God, I hope Andrew Chapman isn’t a figment of my imagination. Solo practice, here I come.
“I’m obligated to remind you,” Oscar says, placing my key in a plain white envelope and then looking at me, “that taking any clients you have dealt with here is a violation of your employment contracts.”
Automatically, I shake my head up and down, wondering what kind of specialty Chapman has. If I’m going to be treated as if I’m incapable of loyalty, I feel few qualms about displaying any. Am I a thief? It depends on the definition.
However, I doubt that this is a story I’ll brag about to my grandchildren some day.
“Personally I think this is ridiculous,” Oscar says, more to Martha than to me, his wild white eyebrows wagging up and down in a show of concern. He says, “I’m sure everyone here will give y’all a good reference.”
I glance over at Martha, who is finally getting herself under control. She is inspecting the damage in her compact mirror (now I know why she carries her purse everywhere).
If Oscar has to say he is certain, that means she had better be careful whom she asks. I won’t be needing any references.
I slide the Davis file over to him. Too late I realize it has my yellow pad with Chapman’s name on it. Perhaps he won’t notice it.
Oscar talks about the secretaries being available to update our resumes, but I tune him out. All I want is my check and out of here. My mind goes back to the document that Martha and I signed when we started: any client that we saw is a client of the firm’s. Well, I haven’t seen Chapman yet. Some body must have clipped them pretty good. I can’t wait to get to the jail.
Finally, Oscar takes two checks from his desk and slips them to us like he’s ashamed of them. I look at mine. He should be. It’ll cover the mortgage and utility bills. I wonder if I qualify for food stamps. I was beginning to have my doubts about the firm even before the cases were reversed.
Still, it was a living and held out the hope of something better down the line. Now I know I should have checked them out better. Yet, at the time I was under some pressure to get out of the PD’s Office. “If you want to drop by later this afternoon,” Oscar mumbles ‘we’ll have your personal items from your office boxed up at the front desk.”
I’ve had it.
“You run a class act, Oscar,” I say, letting Martha precede me out his door. I give him a look of pure hatred. I hadn’t realized until now how much I have sucked up to the partners. It feels good not to have to smile anymore.
Oscar’s face turns the color of a bruised peach, but he doesn’t have the nerve to respond, and I don’t blame him.
Thirty seconds later, unemployed for the first time in my life, and beginning to realize it, I am standing on the side walk in front of the Blair Building, as stunned as a witness to a bomb blast. I look up at the eighth-story windows, wondering if this is a bad dream. Martha is inside, presumably still crying in the bathroom, where she fled after leaving Oscar’s office. At least she has a husband. Where am I going after I leave the jail? I don’t have an office anymore. Dr.
Chapman, whoever the hell he is, will be impressed with his new lawyer. Well, Doctor, actually I’m practicing out of my car these days. Those bastards at Mays amp; Burton! American capitalism at its best.
As I cross the street at Chase and Fry, heat radiates from the pavement as though someone had poured on gasoline and ignited it. Central Arkansas in the summer is a twenty-four-hour steam bath. By the time I walk the four blocks to the municipal courts building and to the jail housed beneath it, my nicest shirt, an Egyptian broadcloth with burgundy stripes, is clinging to me through my undershirt like wet toilet paper. Fortunately, I didn’t see a single person I knew on the streets, since everybody with an IQ over 7 is standing over a vent in their offices, wondering why I’ve chosen to stagger around outside in the middle of the afternoon in 101-degree heat.
At the window inside the municipal courts building (which has all the charm of a bus station, someone has spilled a bag of popcorn on the scuffed marble floor), I write down my home address, obtain a red attorney’s pass, and clip it to the lapel of my sports coat. As I wind around the maze of offices toward the stairs that lead to the jail, I try to compose myself for my first interview in solo practice, but my mind is still in Oscar’s office, as I tell him what I think of such shabby treatment after over a year of busting my balls for him and his firm. The fuckers-I hope they never win another case.
At the rate they’re going, it’s not an idle thought.
It is only when I enter the secured part of the jail that my mind snaps back to the present. Instantly, I have my old feeling of claustrophobia as I approach the window. As a former Blackwell County public defender for a couple of years, I am no stranger to this facility, which, unlike other detention facilities in the county, has always given me the creeps. It is like being confined in a small pen full of attack dogs: too many angry people (cops, prisoners, detainees, drunks, persons with mental illness, and lawyers) compete in too small a space simply for a place to exchange information.
It is the constant noise that puts me on edge. I’ve never heard anyone speak in a normal tone.
Though I haven’t been gone from criminal practice that long, I recognize none of the jailers on this shift. Jailers don’t exactly get to be a defense lawyer’s best friends, but there is no sense in alienating them unnecessarily. I know some lawyers who spend hours waiting for their clients. I doubt if it is by accident.
“You’ll have to talk to him on that bench,” a pudgy black guy who comes to my armpit tells me, pointing with his chin to a gray wooden structure in front of us. He must be one of the civilian jailers. Why hire a rookie, spend all the money and time to train him, and stick him down in the jail to dispense medications and serve food? It only took us a couple of millennia to figure out the economics of it. “We’re out of space again.”
The new jail is under construction, but it isn’t the sort of job there’ll be a lot of overtime on to get completed. Not a real sympathetic constituency, as a friend at the PD’s Office used to say. I don’t argue, even though a federal case could probably be made of it. If this guy’s a doctor, I should have him out on bond this afternoon. I sit down on the bench and wait, feeling absurdly pleased. I have forgotten how much I missed criminal law.
In two minutes Dr. Andrew Chapman appears before me in a bright orange jumpsuit, and I almost keel over in amazement he is black. I didn’t have a clue from his voice, a wonderful, deep baritone. One thing is for sure: Chapman is not from the eastern part of the state, the Delta, where I grew up.
“I’m Andrew Chapman,” he says, holding out his right hand, which swallows mine, though we’re the same height at just under six feet.
“Sorry about the bench,” I tell him needlessly, sitting down. Some guys look rumpled in a brand-new tailored thousand-dollar suit: Chapman, on the other hand, is the type who can look good in a prison outfit. In his early thirties, I estimate, a decade younger than myself. Chapman has a lean, muscular body with no stomach (he’ll have one when he’s my age), a neat, carefully trimmed goatee, and reading glasses pushed down low on the end of his nose, all of which combine to make him look like a young Ed Bradley from “60 Minutes.” The resemblance ends there. My potential client has none of the world-weariness of Ed, who is beginning to look as if he has crossed too many time zones. De spite his apparent youth, and despite this setting. Chapman has the dignity of a much older man. Sitting erect next to me on the bench, he says quietly, “Aren’t you the lawyer who over a year ago got off with a light sentence the man who murdered the state senator?”