Legally Wasted (4 page)

“I’ll call back the Judge and tell her yes
this afternoon,” he said, eyes squeezed shut and lost in her
hair.

Madeline tightened her hug for a moment
before relaxing and pushing herself back a bit. “You told her you
would think about it?”

“Yes.”

“This is what you want, isn’t it? I mean, am
I crazy, or is this just the best thing for us?”

Larkin’s left hand gripped his leg. The stars
- - or it might be better to say,
some
stars - - had so
quickly aligned. God he loved her. “It is. I’ve thought about it.”
He kissed her cheek. They embraced and while tightly snuggled, he
cheated and stared at the rusted air conditioner rumbling next to
the overfilled ashtray. “This is what I want,” he said. He closed
his eyes and smelled that wondrous cinnamon smell. “Yes,” he said.
“This is what I want.”

Larkin Monroe opened his eyes as the constant
thump of jazzercising people in the dance studio above his law
office forced him back into the waking world. As he flipped his
wrist over to glance at his watch, he suddenly realized that the
fingers of his left hand clutched something heavy and hard. His
gun.

“Jesus,” he said with shock as the cheap
pistol he took as payment in a divorce case slipped from his hand
and landed on the floor with a clatter. Had he been dozing with the
firearm the entire time? “How dramatic of my subconscious,” he said
aloud.

He did not remember opening the left drawer
of his desk where he kept the weapon. He only remembered leaning
back in his desk chair and shutting his eyes for a catnap. What the
hell had he been doing in his sleep?

For a minute he considered whether he truly
had some sort of death wish that his unconscious self sought to
realize.

Thump Thump Thump
went the
jazzercisers.

Larkin knew that he did not want to end his
life, but an article he read years ago in a magazine about deep
subconscious desires gave him a moment’s pause.

His mind wandered and he forgot the gun
beneath his desk and instead remembered the curvy form of some
redhead pinup in the same magazine. His eyes fluttered and began to
shut when the pounding above hit a sudden peak and he snapped back
to attention. He leaned forward and looked at his watch. 1:30 in
the afternoon. He had only twenty or so minutes to do what he had
to before heading out the door and back to court.

With a kick of a scuffed loafer, he sent his
chair rolling away from the paperclip and legal pad chaos on his
desk. Rainbow colored carbon paper copies of court-appointed
payment vouchers at least made it a jolly mess. Larkin steered
himself toward the small refrigerator humming quietly beneath his
printer. His kick only sent him about halfway forcing him to paw at
the door before it swung open. As his fingers grabbed the bottle of
gin, he sighed.

“Shit,” he whispered as he opened the plastic
bottle for the first time. His voice was mostly drowned out by the
people smashing syncro-jazzing cardio with what sounded like a
hyper up-tempo remix of
Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl
. He
looked up to the ceiling. The song had always saddened Larkin.

Though the floors of the old brick building
were thick, he was certain that in the six or so months since
Margie altered her business model from a quiet ballet studio to
free-spirited human cardiovascular downsizing that the plaster and
floorboards above his head had been pounded thin. He took a
sip.

“Good god,” he stammered as a stream of gin
slid down his stubble. He held the bottle away from his face to
examine his poison. “Damn you, Bowland’s gin,” he said as the
little liquid that had made it down his throat ravaged his gullet.
He winced when it reached the stomach. “I’m counting that as one,”
he said as his left hand reached for his calendar. He flipped
through the summer months and landed on mid-September. As he gazed
down at the 2:00 slot for that day, his heart sank. No less than
six poorly scrawled names of defendants filled up the afternoon
block below the heading “DCSE.”

DCSE stood for the Department of Child
Support Enforcement, a state agency. As a private attorney on the
Big Lick City Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court’s
court appointed list, Larkin had agreed to represent deadbeat
parents who had fallen in serious arrears on their child support
payments. The hearings themselves were rather simple. Aside from
trying to paint the deadbeat as a simple down-on-his luck father
unable to find steady work, Larkin had little to do but sit next to
his client and listen to the other court appointed attorney in the
room present the parent’s payment history, or lack thereof. Like
Larkin, the DCSE attorney was a court appointed attorney who had
worked some special deal out with the Department to represent the
state agency in court. Larkin made a lowly one hundred and twenty
bucks per deadbeat, but he was convinced that the Department
attorney made more.

Once the judge had heard the evidence, he or
she would either give the parent three or so months to cough up
some dough or send them directly to jail for thirty days to think
about their life and needy children. Despite any sentence the judge
might impose, the custodial parent sat fuming with tightly crossed
arms in the back of the courtroom. She, for it was typically a
mother, could never be satisfied when the system had already spent
years trying to pump an ounce of water out of what everyone already
knew was a bone dry well.

Larkin laughed to himself. “Maybe no one in
that court room gets what they want.” He considered the judges who
grew weary of endless child support cases.

“Six defendants,” Larkin mutters. “Seven
hundred and twenty dollars.” He stared at the bottle. Six
defendants meant six shots. “Fucking Deveraux better match this,”
he said as he brought the plastic bottle to his lips, held his
breath, and took another fiery swig.

A year ago, Larkin had entered into a
competition of sorts with Charlie Deveraux, one of the Department
attorneys. The rules were simple. For each defendant that Larkin
was assigned that day, both attorneys had sworn an oath to drink
that number of shots in the hour immediately preceding the
hearings. Larkin trusted Deveraux to follow through with his end of
the deal. Once, when Deveraux was six sheets to the wind out by the
lake, he had made his oath after an over-the-top clapping and
whistling demonstration that Larkin took for some fraternity thing
from Hampden Sydney or Washington and Lee or wherever the hell
Deveraux had gone to school. The oath had been just too damn
elaborate to indicate any fissure in Deveraux’s credibility. He
half-remembered some sort of animal call in the middle of it.

Larkin trusted himself to stand by his own
word because he was a locked and loaded fully enabled alcoholic. He
didn’t really care if Deveraux trusted him or not.

Both men seemed to get a good deal of
pleasure watching the other go through the motions while hiding
their eighty-proof breath from the court. Usually, Larkin only had
around three or four clients on his DCSE days. He furrowed his brow
and weighed the hazards. Six clients coupled with the cheapest gin
available at the state-run liquor store might prove deadly on a
steamy dog day afternoon.

“Three!” spit Larkin as he glanced at his
watch. He would have to drink faster. A year ago, when he and
Deveraux began the DCSE drinking club, he had sipped on Gordon’s
gin. Essentially a mid-list London dry gin, Gordon’s was still
certainly palatable and Larkin had reconciled the booze’s less than
smooth finish with the knowledge that it was James Bond’s gin of
choice. That thought used to give him a bit of swagger as he ambled
down to the courthouse in his worn shoes. But the recent decline in
his bottom line had forced austerity. Cuts were made so the law
office could continue its march both toward and away from a
hangover, a destination that could never fully be reached or
avoided.

After Larkin’s kindly and passably organized
secretary had passed away two years earlier, she was eventually
replaced with an answering service that he seldom checked.
Meanwhile, the office booze budget had dwindled to the bottom
shelf.

Surprisingly, after an “eureka” moment and
ninety seconds of groping under a desk, Larkin actually found an
airplane bottle of whiskey in Sam Wexler’s old office. Larkin had
never known the man to drink, but he half-remembered kicking it
under there a month or two ago. Or was it last week? Larkin
half-remembered a lot of things.

Drugs were Sam Wexler’s poison of choice, not
booze. If only Judge Wexler had known that her son’s would-be
apprentice was palming a Jim Beam when they first met. Larkin
likely would never have been offered the position with Sam. Shortly
after beginning his apprenticeship with Sam, Larkin became
accustomed to Sam’s frequent “trips” to Richmond. He’d disappear
for a day here or there early on. A few years later, that became
weeks at a time. One time, Sam left and he never came back. The
local paper wrote a story about his disappearance. A special lawyer
was appointed by the courts to handle Sam’s leftover cases left to
scatter without a shepherd. Larkin, though a fully licensed lawyer
at the time, was seemingly not trusted to handle the task by the
powers-that-be-robed. He had, after all, not even attended law
school. Another law firm received Sam’s entire book of
business.

A year later, Larkin drank a large bottle of
Kettle One vodka, slowly, next to a river, in honor of Sam when
police found his body in a Norfolk alley. As the story went, Sam
got to owing some bad people a lot of money. Another version added
that Sam had engaged in selling things aside from legal advice. He
shed some tears when he thought of poor Judge Wexler. If only her
son had possessed one-tenth of her pluck.

Out of respect for Sam’s mother, Larkin had
left the original sign hanging above the sidewalk, despite the fact
that no one named Wexler worked at the Wexler Law Firm. Larkin had
even paid to replace the sign with an exact copy when a windstorm
sent it into Luck Avenue.

“Four,” said Larkin, like a golfer, as a drop
of gin launched from his mouth and landed on his business card
holder at the edge of his desk. He remembered that he was running
dangerously low on cards after having entered into that new
marketing strategy with one of his former clients.

“Keep it up ladies!” Margie audibly shouted
from the dance studio.

“Lose those love handles!” answered Larkin,
truly meaning the encouragement, as he stooped to retrieve his gun.
He leaned back in the chair and took aim at the office door leading
to the hallway where the vacant secretary’s desk sat collecting
dust.

“I don’t think so, asshole,” he said. He
erased his Southwest Virginia accent and tried to echo a poor Clint
Eastwood. He pulled the trigger and the hammer snapped back. His
lips pursed and he made a fairly decent imitation of a gunshot. “I
told you, we’d fuck you in this divorce,” he said to no one.

Larkin pulled the trigger again. “Defendant
to decedent.” He said. “One shot.” What he would not give to blow
away an angered divorcee. He imagined his picture on the front page
of the Big Lick Times. Larkin Monroe: Deadeye Badass, Esquire.

He reached for the gin. “Five,” he squeaked
as he felt the accumulated booze beginning to swirl uncomfortably
in his stomach. He placed the gun back in his desk drawer and
attempted to forget that, while sleeping, his groping fingers may
have attempted to end his life. Standing, he quickly felt the
Bowland’s simmering in his bloodstream.

“Probably pickling my liver,” he muttered as
he approached the small mirror that hung over one of his black
aluminum file cabinets. His reflection, a once nearly-handsome
early middle-aged man stared back with vivid green eyes that shone
despite being mostly bloodshot to hell. With his fingers, he
delicately sculpted his dark hair which was in dire need of a
haircut.

“One more time!” wailed Margie. In response,
someone dropped all of her considerable weight on the dance floor
above and Larkin’s reflection shook as the mirror rattled against
the wall.

A nearby frame leaped from the wall and
smacked the edge of the metal file cabinet before falling to the
floor. Larkin looked down to see that a spider web of cracked glass
now obscured his ethics award. Careful not to slice his finger, he
retrieved the framed certificate and scanned the text. The broken
glass completely obscured the language regarding Larkin’s
consummate professionalism and the words “role model.” The text
beneath the signature line remained visible. “Hugo P. Winthorpe,”
the line read, “Chairman of the East Coast Trail Attorneys
Association.”

“Fucking ‘trail’ association,” Larkin
grumbled as he considered tossing the award from the fictitious
“trial” organization that he had misspelled late one night at a
Lynchburg copy center into the trash. “That gal should have caught
that,” he said as he remembered the judging glare from the girl
behind the print shop’s counter. Who was she to judge a man
drafting his own ethics award?

“Almost there!” Margie bellowed.

Larkin looked at his watch. He had only
minutes. “Shix!” he spat as he combined an obscenity with the
number of shots he was required to take. With a final swig, he
grabbed his brief case and wallet, straightened his tie in the
mirror, and raced past the secretary’s desk and out the door.

Although autumn had begun creeping through
the trees in the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains, the outside air
near the law office still felt saturated with the heat and humidity
of a persistent summer. The standing water left over from the
morning’s rain had nearly evaporated but filled the air to the brim
with hot moisture. As he double-timed it over the uneven sidewalks,
he scowled at the very stickiness of the air. It was as if someone
had created a bonfire of post-it notes and vaporized adhesive still
hovered above the sidewalk.