Then again, he reasoned, neither could she.
Robert Girardi
The Defenestration of Aba Sid
From A Vaudeville of Devils
Martin Wexler woke up one morning last September with a slight hangover and the vague certainty that something was wrong. Dull blue light slatted through the Venetian blinds over the windows fronting Massachusetts Avenue. He heard the thump and gurgle of water running from upstairs apartments, toilets flushing, keys scraping in locks down the hall, all the normal sounds of life stirring for another day in the world. The digital clock on the microwave in the kitchenette on the other side of his efficiency glowed 7:32 A.M. in square amber numbers. He was due in court in just under two hours.
Martin sat up, reached for his glasses on the night table, cluttered with pennies, crumpled scraps of paper, broken mechanical pencils, unread briefs, bits of food, and other junk. He got out of bed, showered, put in his contacts, shaved. He put on a pale blue button-down, somewhat wrinkled from its third wearing since the dry cleaners; a red and yellow striped tie with faint soup stains on the third band of color; and his second-best navy blue suit, just now going a little sheeny on the seat of the pants. He checked himself in the mirror; he looked presentable enough. He fell healthy. Everything was fine. But the something wrong would not let him go; it had its teeth in him and was biting down hard.
Not until he was halfway through his breakfast of stale Cocoa Puffs did he remember what was bothering him: as of today, he was the most incompetent attorney in the Public Defender’s Service of the District of Columbia. The former most incompetent attorney, a scattered woman named Genevieve Claibourne, had been fired the previous afternoon. Marlin thought about Genevieve as he walked down Massachusetts to the Metrobus stop. He had always liked her. She was a petite, loud redhead from Dallas with a wry sense of humor, not unaware of her own limitations. A diehard Cowboys fan, which is a tough thing to be in any Washington office. Like everyone, like Martin himself, she had started out with vague ideals about defending the poor and innocent and ended up bewildered by the utter brutality of modern urban life.
He was a little late getting to the bus stop this morning and so wailed alone in the heavy stillness directly following the end of rush hour. The wind off the river stank of a chemical he couldn’t identify. He bought the Washington Post from the usual blue machine but suddenly didn’t feel like reading. He folded the bulky paper under his arm and watched the G2 making its laborious ascension from the tunnel under Scott Circle in a cloud of dark exhaust.
You had to be a drunk or insane or you had to do many stupid things in a row to get fired from the PDS, or you had to — as in Genevieve’s case — do one stupid thing that gets picked up by the news media. That was plain bad luck. Martin thought. In any organization incompetence, even of the most blatant variety, was often tolerated for years. He wasn’t a good lawyer, everyone knew that. He didn’t have a mind for details, or he didn’t apply himself; he couldn’t decide which. Without Genevieve around, his own errors would stand out that much more glaringly. He could already feel the heat, like an ant squirming beneath a magnifying glass.
Martin’s second case of the morning involved a young black man who called himself Ibn Btu Abdullah but whose real name was Tarnell Edwards. He was accused of stealing dogs from the yards of million-dollar homes in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Upper Northwest and had been apprehended on elegant Newark Street in the act of stuffing a toy poodle into an old knapsack that also contained two marijuana blunts in a cut-down Pringles can — which accounted for an additional possession charge. Tarnell was a likable, dark-complected, dreadlocked youth just two weeks past his eighteenth birthday. He seemed surprised when Martin told him he would be tried as an adult in criminal court.
“I thought that was twenty-one or something,” Tarnell said.
“People take dognapping very seriously in this town,” Martin said. “I’ll be straight with you, Tarnell. You could be facing time in Lorton.”
Tarnell folded his hands like the Catholic school boy he had once been, looked out the narrow gun slit window of the holding cell, saw nothing there but wire mesh and empty sky, and looked back again. He tried to speak; emotion choked his voice. He slumped back in his chair and rubbed his eyes with his fingers.
“Fucking shit!” he managed finally. “They’re going to fuck me up for one mothafucking dog?”
“Thirty-five dogs have disappeared in Upper Northwest over the last few months,” Martin said, trying to sound reasonable. “The police want to blame them all on you. If you were acting with accomplices, if anyone else was involved, I need to know now. I’m your lawyer, remember?”
Tarnell was silent for a whole minute, thinking. Martin could almost see the wheels working, the improbabilities flashing up one by one, only to be shot down, exploding like skeet in midair. Finally Tarnell sighed.
“OK,” he said. “A couple of these brothers I know, they’ve got pit bulls, right? They fight them on Saturday night in this place in Anacostia, and people come from all over and a lot of money goes down. So, it’s like, the brothers they don’t want their fighters going soft during the week, so they like to keep them sharp on other dogs, like training, like a boxer or something. So they give one hundred dollars or two hundred dollars a dog depending on how big he is and fifty dollars for cats. I never done it before, but I needed the money, so I get on the Metro—” He stopped talking when he saw the expression on Marlin’s face.
“What happens to the dogs?” Martin said.
Tarnell gave him a blank look.
“If we could arrange to have some of those dogs returned to their owners, it might help our case.”
“They messed up, man,” Tarnell said at last. “Nothing left. Meat.”
Martin shuddered. He remembered seeing a piece on the news about an old woman whose bichon frise had been stolen from her front porch one afternoon. The dog was her only companion, had been with her seventeen years, ever since before her husband died. Martin remembered the woman crying and holding up a little red collar studded with rhinestones. It was all she had left of both her husband and the dog.
“This does not look good,” he said, shaking his head. “You were caught with a dog in your bag; they’re going to get a conviction on the basis of that evidence. I might be able to work a deal, but you’re going to have to give the cops everything. The names of the buyers. The men with the pit bulls.”
“They’ll kill me,” Tarnell said, and his eyes got big and scared. “I give you their names, I’m dead. These are some rough boys, you dig?”
“I’m really sorry,” Martin said, and he stood up and got his papers together and stuffed them into his briefcase. “You think it over, but I don’t see any other way.”
“It’s only dogs,” Tarnell said. “Not like they killing people.”
Martin turned to the door. “It’s other people’s dogs, Tarnell,” he said.
“That’s not what this is about,” Tarnell said, and there was bitterness in his voice. “It’s white people’s dogs! White people, they love their dogs more than they love their kids. Up there in Cleveland Park, they got those big beautiful houses, huge stretch of green out front with all them flowers and you know what? Where are the kids? No kids playing in the streets in the yards, nothing. I say that’s bullshit! I say fuck ’em and fuck their dogs too!”
Martin pressed the security buzzer for the guard to open the door. He shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other and turned back for a moment.