“Remember not to say that to the judge, Tarnell,” he said. Then the door opened, and he stepped out into the long corridor full of cages.
Later that afternoon Genevieve Claibourne came up to the PDS offices in the Moultrie Center to clean out her desk. Tayloe, the department head, carrying a large cardboard box with the solemnity of someone bearing a funerary urn, escorted her through the labyrinth of cubicles. His dark face was impassive; his eves set straight ahead. He spoke to Genevieve for a while in a low, serious voice, then left her alone in her cubicle, which was next to Martin’s. Martin heard her slamming drawers and sniffling a little, and he poked his head around the dusty burlap-covered divider to see how she was doing.
“How are you doing?” he said.
Genevieve looked up from where she was sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks of legal documents and other papers.
“Terrible,” she said. “What the hell do you think?” She was wearing grass-stained tennis shoes and old jeans and a white turtleneck, today’s uniform for the unemployed. Tears had smudged the mascara around her eyes.
Martin didn’t know what to say. He felt embarrassed for her but also thankful that he wasn’t the one cleaning out his desk. “I know how you feel,” he said finally. Then he thought of something. “You going to be around for a while?”
Genevieve made a helpless gesture at the surrounding piles of papers.
“I could use a drink after work,” Marlin said. “How about ii?”
Genevieve smiled through her tears, and Martin got up and tried to enlist some of the other attorneys for a happy hour to soften her departure. It wasn’t easy. Most people don’t like to associate themselves with failure. In the end he managed to convince only Jacobs and Burn, two attorneys on the low end of the pecking order without much seniority and with nothing to lose.
At six they went over to the D.C. Bar, a dingy basement establishment on 4th Street popular with the attorneys and investigators of Judiciary Square only because of its proximity. It was the sort of place where the Christmas decorations never came down and they had Bud and Bud Light on tap and Michelob and Michelob Light in the bottle. From the shoulder-high window, the terra-cotta frieze of the Grand Army of the Republic — soldiers, sailors, generals on horseback, mules, cannon, caissons, wagons — could be seen winding its way around the old Pension Building across the street toward a glorious victory just beyond the next cornice.
After two rounds of Bud, Burn insisted on a round of shots. He was not yet thirty, blond, big-shouldered and muscular. He had been an avid surfer during his years at the Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles. Four shot glasses of cheap Pepe López tequila were poured before anyone could protest. The bartender handed over a plate of brown lime wedges and a saltshaker. Burn took a lime wedge between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, salted his skin just above the wrist, and held up the shot glass in a toast with the other.
“Here’s to getting fired,” he said.
Genevieve frowned, but she followed Burn’s lead and downed her shot just the same. A few minutes later she and Burn did another, and then she sighed and laid her head against Burn’s shoulder.
“Why don’t we all go over to Arribé after this and dance with the Eurotrash?” she said to everyone, though she was really just talking to Burn.
Martin barely sipped his tequila. He would be thirty-five next month; the hard stuff sat uneasily in his stomach these days. Jacobs pushed his shot aside untouched. He was in his late forties, with a wife and two kids neatly ensconced in a split-level with a well-trimmed lawn out in Gaithersburg. Being a lawyer was a second career for him. He had been a salesman of heating and air-conditioning systems for twenty years before finally deciding to go to law school.
“Getting too old for tequila,” Jacobs said.
Martin nodded. “Me too.” But both of them had already drunk just enough beer to loosen their inhibitions.
“Failing to file a continuance can happen to anyone,” Jacobs said in a voice he thought only Martin could hear. “It could happen to me or you. But the newspaper thing was bad. Those bastards in the press! That poor little kid’s face all over the front page.”
“I was thinking exactly the same thing earlier,” Martin said.
Genevieve lifted her head from Burn’s shoulder and spun toward them on her barstool. “How do you think I feel?” she almost shouted, her bottom lip trembling. For a moment it looked as if she were going to break into tears.
“Just try to forget about it,” Burn said, and patted her consolingly on the arm. “It’s not you, honey; it’s just the way things are.”
She put her elbows on the bar and put her head in her hands. She was more than a little drunk now. “Everything is so goddamned serious these days,” she said to her empty glass. “One little mistake.”
“You want my opinion,” Burn said. “You were overextended, spread thin.”
“No different from everyone else,” Genevieve said in a glum voice. “Some can deal; others can’t. I guess I couldn’t deal without messing up.” Then she looked up and spun the barstool again in Marlin’s direction. “You’re next,” she said in a voice that held the grim resonance of prophecy. “You better be careful, Wexler! I’ve seen some of your filings. They’re a mess.”
No one could think of anything to say after that. Genevieve went off to Arribé with Burn, Jacobs caught the Red Line to Shady Grove, and Martin walked over to the Metrobus stop on C Street with unfinished work under his arm as always. Perhaps, as Burn said, Genevieve had spread herself too thin. Maybe the answer was as simple as that. She had been dividing her time between her PDS work and the half dozen cases left over from a defunct private practice in which she had specialized — rather ineptly — in representing the interests of children in custody matters. The facts of Genevieve’s last case were now well known no everyone in the service:
The child involved in the custody dispute, five-year-old Lashandra Shawntell Williams, had been living with her father, twenty-year-old Dontel Alonso Williams, in a dilapidated row house at T and Todd Streets, Northeast, on a block presided over by a gang of murderous African-American youths known as the Todd Street Posse. Dontel did no work, collected no unemployment checks, yet always seemed to have plenty of cash on hand. Lashandra’s mother, Elisa-Marie Cunningham, had disappeared under questionable circumstances in 1997; the child’s maternal grandmother, Mrs. Bernice Cunningham of Oxon Hills, Maryland, had been trying to gain custody ever since her daughter’s disappearance.
At the hearing before Judge Marcus Cooper in June, Bernice Cunningham’s request for custody had been denied, mostly because Dontel had showed up exactly on time, wearing a nice silver-gray Hugo Boss suit and six-hundred-dollar lizardskin loafers. Mrs. Cunningham got one look at the suit and the fancy shoes and that afternoon filed a motion for reconsideration, suggesting in her statement that Mr. Williams lived off the profits of a criminal enterprise. A second hearing date was set, and investigators were assigned to the case. An investigation like that takes time. It had been up to Genevieve to file a continuance to provide this time and to coordinate with investigators. Juggling seventeen other cases of varying degrees of complexity, she had forgotten about the case entirely.
Then, in August, members of the Todd Street Posse pulled up at the curb in front of Dontel Williams’s house in a purple Humvee decorated with gold trim and blue neon belly lights like the Goodyear blimp. Dontel Williams sat on the couch in the living room, oblivious, watching Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast on the cartoon network, comfortably high from a mixture of marijuana and Martell as his daughter played with a broken electronic toy on the floor at his feet. In the next few seconds seventy-five rounds of ammunition from various pieces of military ordnance poured through the living-room window. A single bullet shattered the little girl’s skull; she was pronounced dead by paramedics arriving at the scene. Possessed of the kind of luck available only to the irresponsible bastards of the world, Dontel survived the attack without a scratch.