Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

"We turn now to the issue of what constitutes an appro priate punishment for your various infractions," said the judge in the middle, the gray-haired one whose name Jay walker always had trouble remembering. "Disbarment cer tainly occurred to us, and would no doubt be fully deserved, were it not for your long years of service to the bar, your quite obvious devotion to your clients, as well as your con siderable legal skills, reflected in your current string of, what was it you told us? Ten consecutive acquittals?"

"Eleven, actually," said Jaywalker.

"Eleven. Very impressive. That said, a substantial period of suspension is still in order. A very substantial period. Your transgressions are simply too numerous, and too serious, to warrant anything less. Bringing in a lookalike for a defendant in order to confuse a witness, for example. Impersonating a judge to trick a police officer into turning over his notes. Breaking into the evidence room in order to have your own chemist analyze some narcotics. Refer ring to a judge, on the record, as-and I shall paraphrase here- a small portion of excrement. And finally, though by no means least of all, receiving, shall we say, a 'sexual favor' from a client in the stairwell of the courthouse-"

"It wasn't a sexual favor, Your Honor."

"Please don't interrupt me."

"Sorry, sir."

"And you can deny it all you want, but my colleagues and I have been forced to watch the videotape from the sur veillance camera several times through-complete, I might add, with what appears to be you moaning. Now I don't know what you w ould call it, but-"

"It was nothing but a spontaneous act of gratitude, Your Honor, from an overly appreciative client. She'd just been acquitted of a trumped-up prostitution charge. And if only there'd been a sound track, you'd know I wasn't moaning at all. I was saying, 'No! No! No!'

"

Actually, there was some truth to that.

"Are you a married man, Mr. Jaywalker?"

"I'm a widower, sir. As a matter of fact, I'd been dis traught over my wife's death."

"I see." That seemed to give the judge pause, though only briefly. "When did she die?"

"It was a Thursday. June ninth, I believe."

"This year?"

"Uh, no, sir."

"Last year?"

"No."

There was an awkward silence.

"This millennium? "

"Not exactly."

"I see," said the judge.

Sternbridge, that was his name. Should have been easy enough for Jaywalker to have remembered.

"The court," Sternbridge was saying now, "hereby suspends you from the practice of law for a period of three years, following which you shall be required to reapply to the Committee on Character and Fitness." He raised his gavel. But Jaywalker, who'd been to an auction or two with his late wife, back in the previous millennium, beat him to it just before he could bring the thing down.

"If it please the court?"

Sternbridge peered at him over his reading glasses, mo mentarily disarmed by Jaywalker's rare lapse into courtspeak. Jaywalker took that as an invitation to continue.

"In spite of the fact that I knew this day of reckoning was coming, Your Honor, I find I still have a number of pending cases. Many involve clients in extremely precari ous situations. These are people who've put their lives in my hands. While I'm fully prepared to accept the court's punishment, I beg you to let me see these matters through to completion. Please, please, don't take out your dissat isfaction with me on these helpless people. Add a year to my suspension, if you like. Add two. But let me finish helping them."

The three judges mumbled to each other, then swiveled around on their chairs and huddled, their black-robed backs to the courtroom. When they swung back a minute later, it was the one on the right, the woman named Ellerbee, who addressed Jaywalker.

"You will be permitted to complete five cases," she said. "Provide us with a list of those you choose to retain by the end of court business tomorrow, complete with a docket or indictment number, the judge to which each case is as signed, and the next scheduled court date. The remainder of your clients will be reassigned to other counsel. As for the five cases you'll be keeping, you'll be required to appear before us the first Friday of every month, so that you can give us a detailed progress report on your efforts to dispose of them."

Dispose of them. Didn't she understand that these weren't diapers or toilet paper or plastic razors? They were people.

"Understood?" Judge Ellerbee was asking him.

"Understood," said Jaywalker. "And-"

"What?"

"Thank you."

That night, working in his cramped, poorly lit office well past midnight, Jaywalker did his best to pare the list down. But it was like having to choose which people to throw out of a life raft. How could he abandon a fourteenyear-old kid who'd trusted him enough to accept a year long commitment to a residential drug program? Or an illegal alien facing deportation to the Sudan for the unfor givable crime of selling ladies' handbags with an expired vendor's permit? Or a homeless woman fighting for the right to visit her two small children in a shelter once a month? How did he tell a former gang member that the lawyer it had taken him two years to open up to and confide in was suddenly going to be replaced by a name chosen at random off a computer-generated list? How would he write to a completely innocent inmate doing fifteen-to-life in Sing Sing to say that he wouldn't be getting an attorney's visit any longer, come the first Saturday of the month? Or a retarded janitor's helper that his next lawyer might not be willing to hold his hand and squeeze it tightly each time they stood before the judge, so the poor man wouldn't have to shake uncontrollably and wet his pants in front of a courtroom of laughing strangers?

In the end, with a great deal of difficulty, Jaywalker managed to get the list down to a pretty manageable sev enteen names. He printed it out and submitted it to the judges the following afternoon, along with a lengthy apology that it was the best he could possibly do, followed by a fervent appeal to their understanding. A week later, a letter arrived from the court, informing him that the court had trimmed the list down to ten, and warning him not to drag out any of the cases unnecessarily.

His name wasn't really Jaywalker, of course. Once it had been Harrison J. Walker. But he hated Harrison, which had struck him as overly pretentious and WASPy, for as long as he could remember being aware of such things. And he hated Harry ev en more, associating it with a bald head, a potbelly and the stub of a day-old cigar. So, long ago, he'd taken to calling himself Jay Walker, and some where along the line someone had blurred that into Jaywalker. Which had been all right with him; the truth was, he'd never had the patience to stand on a curb waiting for a light without a pair of eyes of its own to tell him whether it was safe to cross or not, or the discipline to walk from midblock to corner to midblock again, all in order to end up directly across from where he'd started out in the first place. He answered his office phone (his soon-to-be former office phone) "Jaywalker," responded unthinkingly to "Mr. Jaywalker," and when asked on some form or other to supply a surname or a given name (for the life of him, he'd never been able to figure out which was which), he simply wrote "Jaywalker" in both blanks, resulting in a small but not insignificant portion of his mail arriving addressed to "Mr. Jaywalker Jay walker." It was sort of like being Major Major, he de cided, or Woolly Woolly. Names, he'd come to believe, were vastly overrated.