Grif Stockley: Religious Conviction

Lawyers like myself, who dropped by the courtroom to watch him try a case. His family, I suppose, of whom I know nothing. So what if religion is a crutch? For all I know, that’s all he’s got left.

“So what do you think this is all about?” I ask, watching Bracken scan his investigator’s report as if something new might have magically appeared in it.

“Page, I wish I knew,” he says.

“Make a copy of the file, get it back to me tomorrow, and we can talk. I’ll telephone Leigh and tell her that you’ll be working with me. Maybe she’ll talk to you.”

I take the file from him, shaken by how little confidence he has left in him. Normally, his arrogance is as much a trademark as his jug ears. I’d be cocky too if I got his results, but that is all gone now. His brusqueness almost seems a smoke screen to hide the lack of progress he has made. I’m amazed that Bracken managed to get her out on bond. Yet maybe it wasn’t that hard. I re call reading that members of Christian Life flooded the court with affidavits to the effect that Leigh Wallace was no threat to flee the court’s jurisdiction. Old hands around the courthouse said there had never been any thing like it in Blackwell County. The power of Shane Norman, I guess. There are many influential members in Christian Life, and not a few of them were contributors to Judge Shellnut’s reelection campaign for municipal court judge. Still, he set bond at $500,000, which didn’t faze Christian Life in the slightest.

Twenty-four hours later Leigh was out, living with her parents in the Christian Life compound in western Blackwell County. After the case was bound over from municipal to circuit court for trial after the probable cause hearing, Chet didn’t even bother asking for a reduction of the bond.

Bracken stands, looking relieved and tired at the same time, and surprises me by offering his hand. His palm is surprisingly soft as I feel his long fingers curl around my knuckles.

“Leigh and an old lady from the church she brought home for lunch discovered Wallace’s body, but once the cops got around to checking out Leigh’s alibi, it didn’t hold up, as you’ll see from the file,” he says, nodding at the folder on my desk.

I return the slight pressure, realizing Bracken has done almost nothing in the case. You get what you pay for, I think, but I know this doesn’t apply here. What ever his faults as a human being, Bracken has too much pride to lie down on a case if it is within his power to avoid it. The other side of the coin is that he has too much pride to say he is just too sick to do it right.

“You think she did it?” I ask, suspecting Bracken, like my self, never asks that question of his clients. Unless you’re arguing self-defense, knowing the answer to that question may ethically keep you from putting your client on the witness stand.

“Probably,” Bracken says, grabbing his briefcase and leading me out the door.

“For all I can tell, she could have been thinking about killing him every day for the last six months. We’re lucky Jill isn’t going for the death penalty.”

A smart move on the part of Jill Marymount, Prosecuting Attorney of Blackwell County, I think as I walk beside Bracken down the hall to our reception area.

There will be some not-so-subtle pressure on the jury, given Christian Life’s influence in Blackwell County No sense in adding to it. Life in prison for that beautiful body would be punishment enough, whatever her motive.

After Bracken is safely on the elevator, Julia looks down at her watch and sniffs, “Damn, I thought he was asking you to marry him.”

I hand her the cash to deposit for me, realizing now that Bracken didn’t even ask for a receipt. I’ll have Julia send him one.

“He was,” I say and explain.

Julia looks respectful for the first time in a month.

“Surely he can afford a tailor.”

I let that one pass and walk back to my office to study the file. I feel uneasy, wondering what I am getting myself into. I have the same mixture of dread and awe for Bracken that is supposed to be reserved for God. Where is the dread coming from? I can’t quite pin it down, but more than likely it is that I won’t come close to measuring up to him in a direct comparison.

This is my chance to prove how good I am in the sight of the master, and I already feel my stomach begin to churn. Fear. Attorneys don’t talk about it publicly, but the anxiety is so tangible it becomes like a separate organ in the body once you enter the courtroom in a big case, especially if you aren’t as prepared as you should be. No profession except acting and politics risks greater public humiliation, a professor told my fresh man torts class. That’s why he taught, he cracked. As he pointed out, the public isn’t allowed in the operating room with a surgeon during a triple bypass. Your mistakes in public can send men and women to their deaths just as easily.

As I squint at Bracken’s terrible handwriting, I realize I am imagining myself giving the closing argument in the case and Bracken nodding with approval. How ridiculous Bracken isn’t that great. But he is. Right at the top of the heap, and there would be nothing more satisfying than to read in the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette the day after Leigh Wallace’s acquittal a quote by Bracken that I was going to be better than he was. What an ego I have! The truth is, though, that I hope he is too sick to do anything but watch the entire trial.

“It’s about time you got a decent-looking male client,” Julia says so loudly the man sitting in the waiting room can’t help but overhear.

“Mr. Blessing,” I say, extending my hand, “would you like to come on back to my office?”

Richard Blessing stands and meets me at eye level with a firm handshake. Impeccably groomed in a slate green sports coat that I’ve seen at Dillard’s, he smiles, showing a row of strong, gleaming white teeth that make my dingy molars seem as if they came from a pawnshop.

“I hope you can help me,” his voice betraying an anxiousness that is at variance with his selfconfident appearance.

“I’ll do what I can,” I say, trying to get my mind off the file Chet Bracken handed me an hour ago. Over the phone yesterday Blessing had mentioned he had a products liability case he wanted to discuss. For about a year after I left the public defender’s office I was an associate at Mays amp; Burton, a firm that specializes in personal injury cases. Before being fired with another associate during an economic downturn (we were losing cases so regularly, somebody had to walk the plank, and it obviously wasn’t going to be one of the partners), I had learned enough about ambulance chasing to know I wasn’t any good at it.

The dream of every lawyer in private practice is that a client will crawl in with a ten-million-dollar injury caused by the alcoholic president of a solvent insurance company. The problem with Mr. Blessing is that he looks as if he could run a marathon without breaking into a sweat. He has a strong yet sensitive face, with so much hair on his head he is probably running a fever.

Yet every strand is in place. I resist the temptation to pat the ever-widening bald spot that sits on the back of my head like a dust bowl from the 1930s. Some guys have all the luck.

I lead him into my office and tell him to take a seat.

To get the ball rolling, I ask him what he does for a living and he explains he is a men’s clothing salesman for Bando’s downtown.

“Each guy’s got to turn a minimum of a hundred fifty thousand a year, or we’re a number on last year’s spreadsheet,” he confides.

“You wouldn’t believe the pressure to sell neckties to people who have a couple of dozen hanging in their closet already. The markup is terrific. We sell three-hundred-dollar suits that cost us maybe sixty bucks. If we can’t move ‘em, we’ll knock off a hundred and then another hundred and still make money. If it’s a good location, a store can clean up.”