Paul Levine: Fool Me Twice

Unlike her brother, she didn’t blink. “That was beneath you, Jake. You weren’t always like that, but I suppose that’s what comes from hanging around the Justice Building, spending every day with sociopaths.”

“ Some of the judges are okay.”

“ You’re not funny, Jake. Not to me, anyway. You’re just an aging jock who’s never grown up.”

“ Is this the part I’m not supposed to take personally?”

She sighed. “Okay, you’re right. I’m disappointed in you. You had such potential, but you never explored it. You never reached higher. You were a second-rate football player, but maybe you couldn’t help that. You went to a second-rate law school, and maybe that’s the best you could have done, too. Now you have a second-rate practice, and you seem happy with it, and that’s what disappoints me so much. You don’t strive anymore. You take pride in negatives, like that stupid line you always say, you’ve never been this, you’ve never been that…”

“ It’s true. I’ve never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude, and the only time I was arrested, it was a case of mistaken identity. I didn’t know the guy I hit was a cop.”

She didn’t laugh or even crack a smile. “I don’t blame you for the way you are, Jake. You were raised without a family, and it made you a loner. You’re really dysfunctional when it comes to relationships.”

“ I hate words like ‘dysfunctional.’ It’s right up there with ‘prioritize’ in bullshit quotient. Besides, I had a family. I had my granny.”

“ That’s what I mean. You were raised on moonshine whiskey by an old woman who’s half loco. You had no parents, no siblings, and it shows. Where do you hang out? The morgue! Dios mio! Who’s your best friend? A retired coroner who still does autopsies for fun! When you picked me up on Saturday nights, you smelled of formaldehyde.”

She was shaking her head. I seem to have depressed her.

Then she reached over and took a sip of my beer, leaving a faint impression of lipstick on the glass. It was the most intimate gesture she’d shared with me in years.

“ You know what Abe Socolow says about you?” she asked, sliding the beer in front of me.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“ That you’re not as bad as most defense lawyers. Is that how you want to be known?”

“ Abe’s a good man. A bit rigid, haughty, and self-righteous, but what prosecutor isn’t?” I smiled and hoisted my diminishing beer in her direction.

“ You mean me, don’t you? You think I’m rigid and haughty.”

“ And self-righteous,” I added, in case she had forgotten.

She seemed to think about it, little vertical lines creasing her forehead. If she didn’t dislike me so much, and if I wasn’t such an enlightened man of the nineties, I would have mentioned just how fetching she looked just now. Okay, if she didn’t dislike me so much, I would have mentioned it.

“ Maybe I am,” she admitted, “and maybe those aren’t such bad traits.”

“ I agree. They’re just what I’d look for in an executioner.”

“ And what about you? What are your character traits, Jake?”

Her voice was growing softer. Was there a touch of wistfulness there or was I imagining it?

“ Me? I’m humble, honest, and congenial, not to mention sexy.

She let the bait drift across the water. After a moment, she said, “We could have had something, Jake. We really could have.”

“ If only I’d been different, right?”

“ That’s your way of attacking me, isn’t it, Jake. You’re saying it was wrong of me to try and make something out of you.

“ No one can make anyone else anything,” I said. “I can’t make your brother into Albert Schweitzer, and you can’t make me…whatever it is you wanted me to be. I can’t live up to your schoolgirl image of me.”

“ Is that what you think it was?”

“ Yeah. I think if we’d met when you were older, maybe you would’ve been more realistic, a little less idealistic.”

“ You never knew how much I cared for you,” she said, her voice a whisper.

“ I thought I did. I thought I knew precisely how much.”

“ You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you? Well, you’re wrong. I loved you once.”

Why did once sound so achingly long ago?

There were a lot of things I wanted to say, and if I had twenty minutes or so, I could have come up with something meaningful and sensitive. Instead, I stood up, steady as a newborn calf on spindly legs. But I had nowhere to go, so I sat back down again, feeling foolish. I didn’t say a word, and in a moment, Mickey Cumello, the bartender, asked Ms. Josefina Jovita Baroso, prosecutor, judge, jury, and woman, if she’d care for a drink of her own.

“ Absolut Citron on the rocks, just a splash of soda,” she said.

“ Don’t have the Citron,” Mickey replied, politely, a clean white towel draped across a shoulder. He was a bartender of the old school, white shirt, black bow tie, hair combed straight back. “We have Absolut, and I could drop a twist into it.”

Jo Jo wrinkled her mouth into a frown. “How about a San Pellegrino, no ice?”

“ Club soda okay?” Mickey asked, his eyes shifting to me. We both knew he had San Pellegrino, but he’s entitled to some fun, too.

She shook her head. “Sodium. No can do.”

Life can be so difficult.

She started to ask about chardonnay by the glass, and I was still thinking about my possible reply to her belated professions of ardor, but just then the front door opened, letting in a blast of sunlight. Ernie Cartwright, the ninety-year-old bailiff, stood just inside the door, squinting in the darkness, calling my name.

Waiting for a verdict, I try to think of anything but what is going on inside the jury room. I try to be philosophical. No use worrying. I’ve done everything I can do to win; now it’s up to six strangers to tell me whether I’m worth a damn.

It works, too, until the knock on the door awakens the bailiff, who summons the judge, who sits forlornly in his chambers missing half the evening card at the jai alai fronton. The judge is either reading court files, or more likely, haggling on the phone with his bookie, mistress, or his cousin, the bail bondsman who kicks back a percentage of bond premiums.

The judge orders the bailiff to retrieve the lawyers from the Gaslight Lounge where they are getting shitfaced, something the judge is precluded from doing either by the Canons of Judicial Ethics or his duodenal ulcer.

When the bailiff comes calling, I tighten up. Helpless. In the game I used to play, you chased the butterflies by hitting someone. I did double duty on kickoff and receiving teams, so I was assured of physical contact and a grass stain within the first seven seconds or so.

Now, there was no one to hit. I once let a witness slug me in court, just to prove his dangerous propensity and help my client, a doctor accused of killing his patient with a deadly drug. The best I could do now was to whack Blinky across the back and tell him to look innocent when the jury filed in.

Riding up to the fourth floor, Blinky Baroso was silent and seemed a shade paler than an hour earlier. We were joined in the elevator by Blinky’s one-woman fan club. Nobody invited her along; she was just there.

H. T. Patterson was already in the courtroom, pacing in front of the bench, hands clasped behind his back. He stood all of five six, and that’s including three-inch heels on his ostrich skin cowboy boots. I admired Patterson’s style, white linen suit and all, but I’ve always thought the dress code for lawyers should require sharkskin suits and rattlesnake boots.