The Street Lawyer (26 page)

I parked two blocks away from my building, and watched every empty car for suspicious characters. I made it to the loft, untouched, unapprehended.

My living room was now furnished with two lawn
chairs and a plastic storage box used as a coffee table/footstool. The television was on a matching storage box. I was amused at the sparse furnishings and determined to keep the place to myself. No one would see how I was living.

My mother had called. I listened to her recording. She and Dad were worried about me, and wanted to come for a visit. They had discussed things with brother Warner, and he might make the trip too. I could almost hear their analysis of my new life. Somebody had to talk some sense into me.

The rally for Lontae was the lead story at eleven. There were close-ups of the five black caskets lying on the steps of the District Building, and later as they were marched down the street. Mordecai was featured preaching to the masses. The crowd appeared larger than I had realized—the estimate was five thousand. The mayor had no comment.

I turned off the television, and punched Claire’s number on the phone. We had not talked in four days, and I thought I would show some civility and break the ice. Technically we were still married. It would be nice to have dinner in a week or so.

After the third ring, a strange voice reluctantly said, “Hello.” It was that of a male.

For a second, I was too stunned to speak. It was eleven-thirty on a Thursday night. Claire had a man over. I had been gone for less than a week. I almost hung up, but then collected myself and said, “Claire, please.”

“Who’s calling?” he asked, gruffly.

“Michael, her husband.”

“She’s in the shower,” he said, with a trace of satisfaction.

“Tell her I called,” I said, and hung up as quickly as possible.

I paced the three rooms until midnight, then dressed again and went for a walk in the cold. When a marriage crumbles, you ponder all scenarios. Was it a simple matter of growing apart, or was it much more complicated than that? Had I missed the signals? Was he a casual one-nighter, or had they been seeing each other for years? Was he some overheated doctor, married with children, or a young virile med student giving her what she’d missed from me?

I kept telling myself it didn’t matter. We weren’t divorcing because of infidelities. It was too late to worry if she’d been sleeping around.

The marriage was over, plain and simple. For whatever reason. She could go to hell for all I cared. She was done, dismissed, forgotten. If I was free to chase the ladies, then the same rules applied to her.

Yeah, right.

At 2 A.M., I found myself at Dupont Circle, ignoring catcalls from the queers and stepping around men bundled in layers and quilts and sleeping on benches. It was dangerous, but I didn’t care.

A FEW hours later, I bought a box of a dozen assorted at a Krispy Kreme, with two tall coffees and a newspaper. Ruby was waiting faithfully at the door, shivering from the cold. Her eyes were redder than usual, her smile was not as quick.

Our spot was a desk in the front, the one with the fewest stacks of long-forgotten files. I cleared the top of the desk, and served the coffee and doughnuts. She didn’t like chocolate, but instead preferred the ones with the fruit filling.

“Do you read the newspaper?” I asked as I unfolded it.

“No.”

“How well do you read?”

“Not good.”

So I read it to her. We started with the front page, primarily because it had a large photo of the five caskets seemingly adrift above the mass of people. The story was headlined across the bottom half, and I read every word of it to Ruby, who listened intently. She had heard stories about the deaths of the Burton family; the details fascinated her.

“Could I die like that?” she asked.

“No. Not unless your car has an engine and you run the heater.”

“I wish it had a heater.”

“You could die from exposure.”

“What’s that?”

“Freezing to death.”

She wiped her mouth with a napkin, and sipped her
coffee. The temperature had been eleven degrees the night Ontario and his family died. How had Ruby survived?

“Where do you go when it gets real cold?” I asked.

“Don’t go nowhere.”

“You stay in the car?”

“Yes.”

“How do you keep from freezing?”

“I got plenty of blankets. I just bury down in them.”

“You never go to a shelter?”

“Never.”

“Would you go to a shelter if it would help you see Terrence?”

She rolled her head to one side, and gave me a strange look. “Say it again,” she said.

“You want to see Terrence, right?”

“Right.”

“Then you have to get clean. Right?”

“Right.”

“To get clean, you’ll have to live in a detox center for a while. Is that something you’re willing to do?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Just maybe.”

It was a small step, but not an insignificant one.

“I can help you see Terrence again, and you can be a part of his life. But you have to get clean, and stay clean.”

“How do I do it?” she asked, her eyes unable to meet mine. She cradled her coffee, the steam rising to her face.

“Are you going to Naomi’s today?”

“Yes.”

“I talked to the director over there. They have two meetings today, alcoholics and drug addicts together. They’re called AA/NA. I want you to attend both of them. The director will call me.”

She nodded like a scolded child. I would push no further, not at that moment. She nibbled her doughnuts, sipped her coffee, and listened with rapt attention as I read one news story after another. She cared little for foreign affairs and sports, but the city news fascinated her. She had voted at one time, many years ago, and the politics of the District were easily digested. She understood the crime stories.

A long editorial blistered Congress and the city for their failure to fund services for the homeless. Other Lontaes would follow, it warned. Other children would die in our streets, in the shadows of the U.S. Capitol. I paraphrased this for Ruby, who concurred with every phrase.

A soft, freezing rain began falling, so I drove Ruby to her next stop for the day. Naomi’s Women’s Center was a four-level rowhouse on Tenth Street, NW, in a block of similar structures. It opened at seven, closed at four, and during each day provided food, showers, clothing, activities, and counseling for any homeless woman who could find the place. Ruby was a regular, and received a warm greeting from her friends when we entered.

I spoke quietly with the director, a young woman named Megan. We conspired to push Ruby toward sobriety.
Half the women there were mentally ill, half were substance abusers, a third were HIV-positive. Ruby, as far as Megan knew, carried no infectious diseases.

When I left, the women were crowded into the main room, singing songs.

I WAS hard at work at my desk when Sofia knocked on my door and entered before I could answer.

“Mordecai says you’re looking for someone,” she said. She held a legal pad, ready to take notes.

I thought for a second, then remembered Hector. “Oh yes. I am.”

“I can help. Tell me everything you know about the person.” She sat down and began writing as I rattled off his name, address, last known place of employment, physical description, and the fact that he had a wife and four kids.

“Age?”

“Maybe thirty.”

“Approximate salary?”

“Thirty-five thousand.”

“With four kids, it’s safe to assume at least one was enrolled in school. With that salary, and living in Bethesda, I doubt if they’d go the private route. He’s Hispanic, so he’s probably Catholic. Anything else?”

I couldn’t think of a thing. She left and returned to her desk where she opened a thick three-ring notebook
and flipped pages. I kept my door open so I could watch and listen. The first call went to someone with the Postal Service. The conversation changed instantly to Spanish, and I was lost. One call followed another. She would say hello in English, ask for her contact, then switch to her native tongue. She called the Catholic diocese, which led to another series of rapid calls. I lost interest.

An hour later, she walked to my door and announced, “They moved to Chicago. Do you need an address?”

“How did you …?” My words trailed off as I stared at her in disbelief.

“Don’t ask. A friend of a friend in their church. They moved over the weekend, in a hurry. Do you need their new address?”

“How long will it take?”

“It won’t be easy. I can point you in the right direction.”

She had at least six clients sitting along the front window waiting to seek her advice. “Not now,” I said. “Maybe later. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Don’t mention it. I’d planned to spend a few more hours after dark knocking on the doors of neighbors, in the cold, dodging security guards, hoping no one shot me. And she worked the phone for an hour and found the missing person.

Drake & Sweeney had more than a hundred lawyers in its Chicago branch. I had been there twice on antitrust
cases. The offices were in a skyscraper near the lakefront. The building’s foyer was several stories tall, with fountains and shops around the perimeter, escalators zigzagging upward. It was the perfect place to hide and watch for Hector Palma.

Twenty-six

T
HE HOMELESS are close to the streets, to the pavement, the curbs and gutters, the concrete, the litter, the sewer lids and fire hydrants and wastebaskets and bus stops and storefronts. They move slowly over familiar terrain, day after day, stopping to talk to each other because time means little, stopping to watch a stalled car in traffic, a new drug dealer on a corner, a strange face on their turf. They sit on their sidewalks hidden under hats and caps and behind drugstore sunshades, and like sentries they observe every movement. They hear the sounds of the street, they absorb the odors of diesel fumes from city buses and fried grease
from cheap diners. The same cab passes twice in an hour, and they know it. A gun is fired in the distance, and they know where it came from. A fine auto with Virginia or Maryland plates is parked at the curb, they’ll watch it until it leaves.

A cop with no uniform waits in a car with no markings, and they see it.

“THE POLICE are out there,” one of our clients said to Sofia. She walked to the front door, looked southeast on Q, and there she saw what appeared to be an unmarked police car. She waited half an hour, and checked it again. Then she went to Mordecai.

I was oblivious because I was fighting with the food stamp office on one front and the prosecutor’s office on another. It was Friday afternoon, and the city bureaucracy, substandard on a good day, was shutting down fast. They delivered the news together.

“I think the cops might be waiting,” Mordecai announced solemnly.

My first reaction was to duck under the desk, but, of course, I did not. I tried to appear calm. “Where?” I asked, as if it mattered.

“At the corner. They’ve been watching the building for more than a half hour.”

“Maybe they’re coming after you,” I said. Ha-ha. Stone faces all around.

“I’ve called,” Sofia said. “And there’s a warrant for your arrest. Grand larceny.”

A felony! Prison! A handsome white boy thrown into the pit. I shifted weight from one side to another, and I tried my best to show no fear.

“That’s no surprise,” I said. Happened all the time. “Let’s get it over with.”

“I have a call in for a guy at the prosecutor’s office,” Mordecai said. “It would be nice if they allowed you to turn yourself in.”

“That would be nice,” I said as if it didn’t really matter. “But I’ve been talking to the prosecutor’s office all afternoon. No one’s listening.”

“They have two hundred lawyers,” he said.

Mordecai did not make friends on that side of the street. Cops and prosecutors were his natural enemies.

A quick game plan was devised. Sofia would call a bail bondsman, who would meet us at the jail. Mordecai would try to find a friendly judge. What was not said was the obvious—it was Friday afternoon. I might not survive a weekend in the city jail.

They left to make their calls, and I sat at my desk, petrified, unable to move or think or do anything but listen for the squeaking of the front door. I didn’t have to wait long. At precisely 4 P.M., Lieutenant Gasko entered with a couple of his men behind him.

During my first encounter with Gasko, when he was searching Claire’s apartment, when I was ranting and taking names and threatening all sorts of vile litigation against him and his buddies, when every word uttered by him was met with a caustic retort from me, when I was a hard-charging lawyer and he was a lowly cop, it
never occurred to me that he one day might have the pleasure of arresting me. But there he was, swaggering like an aging jock, somehow sneering and smiling at the same time, holding yet more papers, folded and just waiting to be slapped against my chest.

“I need to see Mr. Brock,” he said to Sofia, and about that time I walked into the front room, smiling.

“Hello, Gasko,” I said. “Still looking for that file?”