Steve Martini - Prime Witness

“No.” Chambers looks at him with an expression you might reserve for something run over on the road. “And you?” he says.

Harry looks down at his suit coat, wrinkled and dirty, like something the homeless would wear. “Oh no,” he says. “Just trying to crack the Coconut,” says Harry.

Chambers’s expression is quizzical. He is wondering, I think, if maybe Harry’s run afoul of a local ordinance designed to protect palm trees and their fruit.

“But I commend your attitude. It’s the first step toward rehabilitation,” says Harry.

“And what’s that?” says Chambers.

“Honest remorse,” says Hinds. “It works good at sentencing, too. It’s what I tell all my clients.”

“That so?”

I’m sure, knowing Chambers, that he can, just like Harry’s clients, switch this on and off, his remorse, at will. It is no doubt how he regained his ticket to practice law.

Chambers smiles at me, lips tight as banjo strings. “See you around.” He says this as if he means it, like perhaps I should pay more attention each time I walk past an alley.

“I doubt it,” I say. “I’m a little busy, nursing an assignment elsewhere right now.” I try to quell any rising expectations of revenge.

He looks at me, a steely-eyed smile. “We’ll be seeing each other,” he says. One last contemptuous look at Harry, and Chambers is gone, down the street.

In his day, Chambers had done some heady cases, mostly white-collar stuff, though he has seen the seamier side of crime as well. He defended to a standstill the prosecution of the White Angels a decade ago, a group of Aryan thugs charged with the murder of a black man on the fringes of Oak Park. In his abrasive courtroom style he drew the wrath of the cops and the city’s prosecutors. He also won, which in Adrian Chambers’s book, is all that counts.

“Delightful guy,” says Harry. “A little like Hitler, but without the charm.”

“Yeah,” I say, “with Adrian Chambers, his mouth’s a dead giveaway.”

Harry looks at me.

“You know he’s lying when you see his lips move.”

By the time we reach the house, Nikki is so angry she is not talking to me. We were late getting to the babysitter, and Nikki was called from work to pick up Sarah. I know my wife well enough to recognize her look when I get to the house, a gaze that seems to see right through me as if I am nothing more than a hole in space.

“How are you, Harry?” She takes his coat.

“Fine,” he says. “I’m doing fine.” She turns her back on me, leaving me on the stoop outside. Harry gives me a sideways glance, something that says maybe he’d be more comfortable in jail tonight.

“Mmm, smells good.” He puts a face on it. Odors from the kitchen are wafting out toward the front door.

“Sure does,” I say.

Nikki gives me one of her “drop dead” looks, turns and heads back toward the kitchen. At least she has acknowledged my presence. The first step in the long road to redemption.

In the last weeks the stress here at home has been palpable, ever since I took on the Davenport assignment. I have tried to assuage Nikki, offering to boost the housekeeper to once a week. I even tried to take part of the load, some household chores from her. The laundry became my province, washing, drying and folding. But the art of bleach put an end to this. Nikki took this task back after a few weeks when our underwear began to take on the gray-cast of the Confederacy.

These days Nikki is haggard, trying to handle a job and home, being both mother and father to Sarah, worn to a fine edge because I have taken on too much at my own job.

“Daddy. Daddy.” Sarah bounds down the hall and into my arms. “Guess what I did in school today.” She has dark hair kept short in a Dutch cut, and oval brown eyes the color of rich coffee. A few transparent fawn-like freckles dot the bridge of her nose, and wonder dances in her every expression. Kindergarten is a new and daring adventure each day for my daughter. In the afternoon she rides the bus with the high school girl down the street, the coolest thing since Barbie. As a result she talks constantly about all the homework she has to do and puts on a fatalistic expression that is comic in its efforts to look grown-up. Then she’s off to the playroom for hours of self-important scribbling on reams of binder paper.

It is the first night this week that I have arrived home at a sufficiently early hour to see her still awake.

She is pulling me like a little tugboat with her full hand around my forefinger down the hall now. “Look at what I did, Daddy. Look what I did at school.”

“Just a minute,” I tell her. “I’ll look at it in a second.”

Nikki asks Harry if he’d like something to drink, beer, wine, a soda.

“A beer would be great,” he says.

“Let me get that, honey. You’re busy.” I try to press past my wife to give her some help, a mild effort at amends.

In a move that would rival the queens of roller-derby, she gives me a hip in the side, sending me past the refrigerator door and halfway into the hall, the leverage of the female center of gravity. She grabs a single bottle of Coors from the rack on the door and slams it closed. Two seconds later she is handing this to Harry, the head frothing up in a tall, frosted pilsner glass. It is her way of telling me that as far as she is concerned, I can die of thirst. I begin to wonder if I’m eating tonight.

Finding myself in the hallway in the semi-darkness by the phone, I stand there for a moment to collect my thoughts. This day is not turning out well-first a reunion with Adrian Chambers and now this. I pull the phone book from the little shelf under the phone and look in the yellow pages under “Attorneys.” I am curious as to where Chambers is hanging his shingle these days. There is no listing. I look at the date on the book. No doubt it was published before Chambers was reinstated.

I turn to the white pages and look under his name-a single entry in bold type for a commercial listing:

Adrian Chambers

A.C. Associates

Limited Partnerships-Business Consultants

I suspect that it was during the time when he was high and dry, without a ticket to practice law, that formed the genesis of “A.C. Associates”-any way to turn a dollar.

I close the phone book and drift back into the kitchen. Nikki looks at me with a gaze that could stop a charging water buffalo.

“Why don’t you take some time with your daughter,” she says. “Look at her schoolwork?” she says to me.

I match her look for look. My own hostility is starting to build. I move toward the couch and Sarah.

Harry, sensing the onset of domestic discord, has lost himself in the din of the television set, channel surfing with the remote.

I sit on the couch in the family room while Sarah pulls wrinkled and folded pieces of construction paper from her plastic backpack, the one with spots like a Dalmatian. I unfold these and begin to decipher letters and numbers, in no apparent order, printed large, block-style in various colored crayon. The numbers appear fine. The letters look like they’ve been copied from images in a mirror, they are nearly all backwards.

We read these together. She struggles and guesses at a few.

“Very good,” I tell her. “Good job.”

She smiles at me big and broad as if to burst with satisfaction, little tiptoeing jumps, unable to control herself, overflowing with energy.

“She’s coming along,” I tell Nikki.

My wife turns to look at me, a cold expression.

She has been on the rampage for more than a month, ever since my decision to help Mario Feretti, to immerse myself in the Putah Creek cases.

After the trial in the Potter case and our earlier separation, Nikki and I sparred over the revelation of my affair with Talia while we were apart. We spent long months talking about our marriage, a succession of trips to a counselor. In his presence we negotiated a contract, more wheeling and dealing than a leveraged buyout.