John Dobbyn: Neon Dragon

On the walk down the hall to my office, I had the feeling that I’d brought a blast of the winter chill in with me. While the joy of human camaraderie was not exactly the hallmark of the firm on its best day, I noticed as I’d pass their offices the partners giving me fleeting glances that were even more drained of warmth than usual.

I was something of an anomaly at Bilson, Dawes. The firm, and therefore the partners, thrived-in fact, more than thrived-on fees from clean, unsullied civil litigation. By contrast, my earlier days at the U.S. Attorney’s office had given me a familiarity with most of the judges at the federal district court, which meant that a fairly steady stream of criminal court appointments to represent indigent defendants followed me to the firm. For all of their pious and publicized pro bono posturing, the partners suffered this acne on the pristine skin of the firm not gladly. And the frequently scruffy, scratching, whiskey-breathing criminal clients who decorated the firm waiting room as a result of my court appointments did nothing to liberalize their sentiments.

I never made it to my office. Julie Benson, my secretary of three years and one of the human elements that made life tolerable at the firm, nearly had tears in her eyes when she intercepted me with a note.

“See me immediately! A.D.”

To the outside world, “A.D.” stood for Alexis Devlin. To any associate and most of the junior partners, it meant “Angel of Death.”

I had had no direct dealings with Mr. Devlin-“Lex” to those who dared-since he joined the firm two years previously. Word around the courthouse had it that in his day, which was some ten years past, he was the best there was at the criminal bar. For some reason, as he was rising from star to legend, he suddenly dropped out. You heard conflicting rumors among those with their three-piece suits pressed to the bars of the city’s watering holes, but no one really seemed to know why. Word had it that he had a taste for the grape, but you could lay that one at the door of a fair percentage of the trial bar. Given the pressures of the trade, it’s endemic.

Then about a year after I came to the firm, he dropped back in. To almost universal surprise, he accepted the offer of Bilson, Dawes to bring his still-legendary skill with a jury to the civil side of the court. I had not had the pleasure of working with or for him, but the associates who did bore mental lacerations that they would only bare to each other in the copy room.

As I walked back down the corridor to the gates of hell, it was clear that word of the summons had gotten around. Every associate I passed seemed to take one last look at me in life. I winked and smiled the smile of the incredibly brave. I whispered to myself for confidence, “Latinos rush in where Anglos fear to tread.”

His secretary never looked up. She just waved a pencil in the direction of the door behind her. There was apparently no question that I was the next item on the menu.

I opened the door. He was standing with his back to me at the window behind his desk. Maybe it was the expectations raised by the associates’ stories, but I could actually feel the weight of his presence in the room. When he turned around, I was struck almost breathless by the power of that presence. But it was far more than that.

He was on the phone. I doubt that my presence meant more to him than the cigarette butts in his ashtray, but I could not take my eyes off of him.

At about seventy years, he was block built, with a jaw that could cut granite and a nose that changed direction like the Boston streets. His double-breasted pin-striped suit coat lay open to expose burgundy suspenders and a blending tie that suggested that he took his style from an era I’d only heard about. On the other hand, I thought that there was more character in that face than in any I’d seen since the death of another man who’d done more than pass through my life, and who, by coincidence, somehow resembled him.

I stood there swimming in recollections that were churning my insides. While Mr. Devlin ignored me, I was back in the then Puerto Rican ghetto of Jamaica Plain on the southwest side of Boston. My dad had died when I was fourteen. My mother moved us to the Plain to be near some of our Puerto Rican relatives and for the comfort of a familiar culture after the loss of my dad. It was a reasonable move at the time, but by the time I was sixteen, our street had become the territorial border between two constantly warring gangs.

My mother was somewhat oblivious to it, as adults could be, but I had a choice to make. It was join the Diablos or join the Coyotes or lose everything from my lunch money to my life to members of both gangs every time I walked to school. For reasons that seem inadequate now, I joined the Coyotes.

The initiation was not exactly a fraternity hazing. For the first part I was sent out to hot-wire a particular vintage Cadillac parked outside of the Vasquez Funeral Home during a wake. Thank God, as fate would have it, I never got to the second part of the initiation. I would have belonged to them for life.

In those days before keys with electronic chips, you could punch out a car’s ignition slot, cross a couple of wires, and be on the road in a matter of seconds. And so I was. And so were the police. I was busted within eight blocks of the funeral home by a cop to whom I did not look like your average Cadillac owner.

I was tried as an adult because of the “seriousness of the crime.” It was actually because the then DA was targeting gang-related crime. My timing was impeccably bad.

The day of my trial, I found out that the car belonged to a big-ticket criminal-trial attorney by the name of Miles O’Connor. He came as a witness, but he stayed in the courtroom while my public-defender lawyer, who had graduated from law school a few hours before taking on my defense, fumbled his way through to my conviction. To be fair to my baby lawyer, he had a guilty client with no extenuating circumstances.

When the judge gave the prosecution two weeks to assemble a presentence report, Mr. O’Connor stood up in the back of the courtroom.

“Your Honor, may I speak?”

The judge recognized Mr. O’Connor, as would anyone who had ever read a Boston newspaper or watched the eleven o’clock news. The judge invited him to approach the bench. When Mr. O’Connor walked his ramrod-straight six-foot-two frame, impeccably draped in an eight-hundred-dollar suit, past me on the way to the bench, he glanced down at the little cockroach who had disrupted his routine. I was certain at that moment that between him and the judge, car theft was about to become a capital offense.

Mr. O’Connor’s back was to me, but I could hear every word.

“Are you considering jail time, Judge?”

“I am, Mr. O’Connor. Unless there’s something very convincing in the presentence report, this boy is going to do some serious time. I can promise you that.”

I went into shock. They were planning my life in the worst possible terms. My mind went into neutral and my ears jammed. For some reason that I couldn’t understand, the conversation went on and on. My mind and my hearing unblocked toward the end of it in time to hear the words that turned the course of my life in the least expected direction. Mr. O’Connor never looked back at me when he said it to the judge.

“Give him to me, Your Honor.”

I think the judge went into shock, and I came somewhat out of it. I was able to follow the details they discussed, which roughly came down to probation with the appointment of Mr. O’Connor as my guardian. The judge issued the order and I followed Mr. O’Connor out of the courtroom that day in complete awe. I’ve never gotten over it.

Mr. O’Connor gave me room and board at the thoroughbred-horse farm he owned north of Boston. He set me to a daily routine of mucking out three barns of stalls every morning. If the job was not completed to his satisfaction by six in the morning, it was as if the job had not been done at all. I came to believe in my bones that Ulysses had it soft with the Augean stables.