The Street Lawyer (18 page)

He finally looked at me, without a smirk or a smile, and the kidding was set aside. As bad as the thought was, I couldn’t help but wonder if Barry was wired. They had sent Hector into the fray with a bug under his shirt; they would do the same with Barry. He wouldn’t volunteer, but they could apply the pressure. I was the enemy.

“So you came here searching for Mister?” he said.

“I guess.”

“What did you find?”

“Are you playing dumb, Barry? What’s happening at the firm? Have you guys circled the wagons? Are you coming after me?”

He weighed this carefully, while taking quick sips from his mug. “This coffee is awful,” he said, ready to spit.

“At least it’s hot.”

“I’m sorry about Claire.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather not talk about it.”

“There’s a file missing, Michael. Everyone’s pointing at you.”

“Who knows you’re here?”

“My wife.”

“The firm send you?”

“Absolutely not.”

I believed him. He’d been a friend for seven years, close at times. More often than not, though, we’d been too busy for friendship.

“Why are they pointing at me?”

“The file has something to do with Mister. You went to Braden Chance and demanded to see it. You were seen near his office the night it disappeared. There is evidence someone gave you some keys that perhaps you shouldn’t have had.”

“Is that all?”

“That, and the fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints?” I asked, trying to appear surprised.

“All over the place. The door, the light switch, the file cabinet itself. Perfect matches. You were there, Michael. You took the file. Now what will you do with it?”

“How much do you know about the file?”

“Mister got evicted by one of our real estate clients. He was a squatter. He went nuts, scared the hell out of us, you almost got hit. You cracked up.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all they’ve told us.”

“They being?”

“They being the big dogs. We got memos late Friday—the entire firm, lawyers, secretaries, paralegals, everybody—informing
us that a file had been taken, you were the suspect, and that no member of the firm should have any contact with you. I am forbidden to be here right now.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Thanks.”

If Braden Chance had made the connection between the eviction and Lontae Burton, he was not the type who would admit this to anyone. Not even his fellow partners. Barry was being truthful. He probably thought my only interest in the file was DeVon Hardy.

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m your friend. Things are crazy right now. My God, we had cops in the office on Friday, can you believe that? Last week it was the SWAT team, and we were hostages. Now you’ve jumped off a cliff. And the thing with Claire. Why don’t we take a break? Let’s go somewhere for a couple of weeks. Take our wives.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Who cares. The islands.”

“What would that accomplish?”

“We could thaw out for one thing. Play some tennis. Sleep. Get recharged.”

“Paid for by the firm?”

“Paid for by me.”

“Forget about Claire. It’s over, Barry. It took a long time, but it’s over.”

“Okay. The two of us will go.”

“But you’re not supposed to have any contact with me.”

“I have an idea. I think I can go to Arthur and have a long chat. We can unwind this thing. You bring back the file, forget whatever is in it, the firm forgives and forgets too, you and I go play tennis for two weeks on Maui, then when we return you go back to your plush office where you belong.”

“They sent you, didn’t they?”

“No. I swear.”

“It won’t work, Barry.”

“Give me a good reason. Please.”

“There’s more to being a lawyer than billing hours and making money. Why do we want to become corporate whores? I’m tired of it, Barry. I want to make a difference.”

“You sound like a first-year law student.”

“Exactly. We got into this business because we thought the law was a higher calling. We could fight injustice and social ills, and do all sorts of great things because we were lawyers. We were idealistic once. Why can’t we do it again?”

“Mortgages.”

“I’m not trying to recruit. You have three kids; luckily Claire and I have none. I can afford to go a little nuts.”

A radiator in a corner, one I had not yet noticed, began to rattle and hiss. We watched it and waited hopefully for a little heat. A minute passed. Then two.

“They’re gonna come after you, Michael,” he said, still looking at the radiator, but not seeing.

“They? You mean we?”

“Right. The firm. You can’t steal a file. Think about the client. The client has a right to expect confidentiality. If a file walks out, the firm has no choice but to go after it.”

“Criminal charges?”

“Probably. They’re mad as hell, Michael. You can’t blame them. There’s also talk of a disciplinary action with the bar association. An injunction is likely. Rafter is already working on it.”

“Why couldn’t Mister have aimed a little lower?”

“They’re coming hard.”

“The firm has more to lose than I do.”

He studied me. He did not know what was in the file. “There’s more than Mister?” he asked.

“A lot more. The firm has tremendous exposure. If they come after me, I go after the firm.”

“You can’t use a stolen file. No court in the country will allow it into evidence. You don’t understand litigation.”

“I’m learning. Tell them to back off. Remember, I’ve got the file, and the file’s got the dirt.”

“They were just a bunch of squatters, Michael.”

“It’s much more complicated than that. Someone needs to sit down with Braden Chance and get the truth. Tell Rafter to do his homework before he pulls some harebrained stunt. Believe me, Barry, this is front-page stuff. You guys will be afraid to leave your homes.”

“So you’re proposing a truce? You keep the file, we leave you alone.”

“For now anyway. I don’t know about next week or the week after.”

“Why can’t you talk to Arthur? I’ll referee. The three of us will get in a room, lock the door, work this thing out. What do you say?”

“It’s too late. People are dead.”

“Mister got himself killed.”

“There are others.” And with that, I had said enough. Though he was my friend, he would repeat most of our conversation to his bosses.

“Would you like to explain?” he said.

“I can’t. It’s confidential.”

“That has a phony sound to it, coming from a lawyer who steals files.”

The radiator gurgled and burped, and it was easier to watch it than to talk for a while. Neither of us wanted to say things we would later regret.

He asked about the other employees of the clinic. I gave him a quick tour. “Unbelievable,” he mumbled, more than once.

“Can we keep in touch?” he said at the door.

“Sure.”

Eighteen

M
Y ORIENTATION lasted about thirty minutes, the time it took us to drive from the clinic to the Samaritan House in Petworth, in Northeast. Mordecai handled the driving and the talking; I sat quietly, holding my briefcase, as nervous as any rookie about to be fed to the wolves. I wore jeans, a white shirt and tie, an old navy blazer, and on my feet I had well-worn Nike tennis shoes and white socks. I had stopped shaving. I was a street lawyer, and I could dress any way I wanted.

Mordecai, of course, had instantly noted the change in style when I walked into his office and announced I
was ready for work. He didn’t say anything, but his glance lingered on the Nikes. He had seen it all before—big-firm types coming down from the towers to spend a few hours with the poor. For some reason, they felt compelled to grow whiskers and wear denim.

“Your clientele will be a mixture of thirds,” he said, driving badly with one hand, holding coffee with another, oblivious to any of the other vehicles crowded around us. “About a third are employed, a third are families with children, a third are mentally disabled, a third are veterans. And about a third of those eligible for low-income housing receive it. In the past fifteen years, two and a half million low-cost housing units have been eliminated, and the federal housing programs have been cut seventy percent. Small wonder people are living on the streets. Governments are balancing budgets on the backs of the poor.”

The statistics flowed forth with no effort whatsoever. This was his life and his profession. As a lawyer trained to keep meticulous notes, I fought the compulsion to rip open my briefcase and begin scribbling. I just listened.

“These people have minimum-wage jobs, so private housing is not even considered. They don’t even dream about it. And their earned income has not kept pace with housing costs. So they fall farther and farther behind, and at the same time assistance programs take more and more hits. Get this: Only fourteen percent of disabled homeless people receive disability benefits. Fourteen percent! You’ll see a lot of these cases.”

We squealed to a stop at a red light, his car partially blocking the intersection. Horns erupted all around us. I slid lower in the seat, waiting for another collision. Mordecai hadn’t the slightest clue that his car was impeding rush-hour traffic. He stared blankly ahead, in another world.

“The frightening part of homelessness is what you don’t see on the street. About half of all poor people spend seventy percent of their income trying to keep the housing they have. HUD says they should spend a third. There are tens of thousands of people in this city who are clinging to their roofs; one missed paycheck, one unexpected hospital visit, one unseen emergency, and they lose their housing.”

“Where do they go?”

“They rarely go straight to the shelters. At first, they’ll go to their families, then friends. The strain is enormous because their families and friends also have subsidized housing, and their leases restrict the number of people who can live in one unit. They’re forced to violate their leases, which can lead to eviction. They move around, sometimes they leave a kid with this sister and a kid with that friend. Things go from bad to worse. A lot of homeless people are afraid of the shelters, and they are desperate to avoid them.”

He paused long enough to drink his coffee. “Why?” I asked.

“Not all shelters are good. There have been assaults, robberies, even rapes.”

And this was where I was expected to spend the rest of my legal career. “I forgot my gun,” I said.

“You’ll be okay. There are hundreds of pro bono volunteers in this city. I’ve never heard of one getting hurt.”

“That’s good to hear.” We were moving again, somewhat safer.

“About half of the people have some type of substance abuse problem, like your pal DeVon Hardy. It’s very common.”

“What can you do for them?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. There are a few programs left, but it’s hard to find a bed. We were successful in placing Hardy in a recovery unit for veterans, but he walked away. The addict decides when he wants to get sober.”

“What’s the drug of choice?”

“Alcohol. It’s the most affordable. A lot of crack because it’s cheap too. You’ll see everything, but the designer drugs are too expensive.”

“What will my first five cases be?”

“Anxious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, and I don’t have a clue.”

“Relax. The work is not complicated; it takes patience. You’ll see a person who’s not getting benefits, probably food stamps. A divorce. Someone with a complaint against a landlord. An employment dispute. You’re guaranteed a criminal case.”

“What type of criminal case?”

“Small stuff. The trend in urban America is to
criminalize homelessness. The big cities have passed all sorts of laws designed to persecute those who live on the streets. Can’t beg, can’t sleep on a bench, can’t camp under a bridge, can’t store personal items in a public park, can’t sit on a sidewalk, can’t eat in public. Many of these have been struck down by the courts. Abraham has done some beautiful work convincing federal judges that these bad laws infringe on First Amendment rights. So the cities selectively enforce general laws, such as loitering, vagrancy, public drunkenness. They target the homeless. Some guy with a nice suit gets drunk in a bar and pees in an alley, no big deal. A homeless guy pees in the same alley, and he’s arrested for urinating in public. Sweeps are common.”

“Sweeps?”

“Yes. They’ll target one area of the city, shovel up all the homeless, dump them somewhere else. Atlanta did it before the Olympics—couldn’t have all those poor people begging and sleeping on park benches with the world watching—so they sent in the S.S. troops and eliminated the problem. Then the city bragged about how pretty everything looked.”

“Where did they put them?”

“They damned sure didn’t take them to shelters because they don’t have any. They simply moved them around; dumped them in other parts of the city like manure.” A quick sip of coffee as he adjusted the heater—no hands on the wheel for five seconds. “Remember, Michael, everybody has to be somewhere. These people have no alternatives. If you’re hungry, you beg for
food. If you’re tired, then you sleep wherever you can find a spot. If you’re homeless, you have to live somewhere.”

“Do they arrest them?”

“Every day, and it’s stupid public policy. Take a guy living on the streets, in and out of shelters, working somewhere for minimum wage, trying his best to step up and become self-sufficient. Then he gets arrested for sleeping under a bridge. He doesn’t want to be sleeping under a bridge, but everybody’s got to sleep somewhere. He’s guilty because the city council, in its brilliance, has made it a crime to be homeless. He has to pay thirty bucks just to get out of jail, and another thirty for his fine. Sixty bucks out of a very shallow pocket. So the guy gets kicked down another notch. He’s been arrested, humiliated, fined, punished, and he’s supposed to see the error of his ways and go find a home. Get off the damned streets. It’s happening in most of our cities.”

“Wouldn’t he be better off in jail?”

“Have you been to jail lately?”

“No.”

“Don’t go. Cops are not trained to deal with the homeless, especially the mentally ill and the addicts. The jails are overcrowded. The criminal justice system is a nightmare to begin with, and persecuting the homeless only clogs it more. And here’s the asinine part: It costs twenty-five percent more per day to keep a person in jail than to provide shelter, food, transportation, and counseling services. These, of course, would
have a long-term benefit. These, of course, would make more sense. Twenty-five percent. And that doesn’t include the costs of arrests and processing. Most of the cities are broke anyway, especially D.C.—that’s why they’re closing shelters, remember—yet they waste money by making criminals out of the homeless.”