William Lashner: Falls The Shadow

“She is four now. I have not seen her for three years, since my arrest. It is breaking my heart.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Beth.

“I have not hugged my daughter for three years, Mr. Carl. I am asking you as a father. Can you help me, please?”

It might have tugged at my heartstrings, his touching little plea, except I had no soft spot for the tiny bundles of snot that others went mushy for, and my own father had never been one for hugs.

“No dice,” I said. I took hold of my briefcase. I stood at the table. “Good luck, Mr. Dubé. Really, I mean that. But there is nothing we can do.”

“Maybe we can look,” said Beth.

I stopped and gaped at my partner. She was still seated, still with her hand over his. This wasn’t unlike her. Beth Derringer was the patron saint of lost causes, which was one reason our finances were always on the precipice. And for some reason, which I couldn’t yet fathom, she seemed ready to take on another.

“Beth, it won’t do any good.”

“We can’t promise anything,” said Beth to François. “But maybe we can look. When Victor is on the trail of evidence, he’s like a bloodhound. If there’s something to be found, he’ll find it.”

“I don’t think so, Beth,” I said.

She looked up at me. “Victor. Please. We should help him. He hasn’t hugged his daughter in three years. He needs our help.”

“There’s nothing we can do.”

“But can’t we try?” she said, her hand still over François’s hand, her face suddenly younger, like a little girl’s. “Please?”

“No.”

“What can I do to convince you?” said François.

“You can’t,” I said.

“How about if I arrange for you to be paid whatever money you require?” he said.

“Up front?”

“Of course.”

“It might be a lot.”

He shrugged.

“Say, ten thousand dollars?”

“Not a problem,” said François.

I sat right down, gave him a grin. “Okay then, Mr. Dubé. I’m convinced.”

See, sometimes it is just that easy to fall into a hole.

Outside Graterford Prison, as we walked to my car in the parking lot, I asked Beth what her little outburst in the interview room was all about.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Something just came over me. He seemed so lost, so helpless. He misses his daughter, and she misses him.”

“Does she?”

“Of course she does.”

“You talk to her lately?”

“I couldn’t stop thinking of her waiting for her daddy to come home. We couldn’t just do nothing.”

“Yes we could.”

“We had to do something.”

“No we didn’t.”

“He needs our help. Isn’t that enough?”

“See, that’s the problem with you, Beth. You view the law as a helping profession. Me, if I want to help, I help myself. That is the capitalist way, and I am a freedom-loving capitalist of the first rank: All I lack is capital.”

“Sometimes you’re a creep.”

“That may be true,” I said, “but I’m never as creepy as that creep in there.”

“Who? François?”

“Yes, François. I didn’t like him from the get-go. Frankly, I have no great belief in his innocence, and I have no burning desire to reunite this convicted murderer with his young and innocent daughter.”

“Then why did you take the case?”

“You’re my partner, you wanted the job, and there was the promise of ten thousand dollars. The combination was enough for me. If lawyers only defended those they liked and admired, the species would be endangered. I figure we’ll cash the check and spend the retainer preparing the motion for a new trial. Then we’ll stand stoically in court as the judge denies it. We did what we could , we’ll tell François. We’re sorry it didn’t work out. Easy money.”

“Is there such a thing?”

“This,” I said.

“You don’t think we have a chance?”

“There is no way, no how a judge will give that guy a new trial. He’s got nothing, nothing but the money he’s going to pay us, and pretty soon he won’t have that either.”

“I’ll go to the clerk’s office tomorrow and get the file. I assume reviewing the record will be my job.”

“Right you are. Last thing I want to do is bury myself for a month in his paperwork.”

“In exchange, then, you can handle this pro bono case I was assigned by Judge Sistine.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve told you before, I’m not one for causes.”

“It’s not a cause, it’s a kid. We’re representing a young boy whose mother has been neglecting him.”

“Pro bono, Latin for ‘empty bank account.’ Couldn’t you have just said, ‘Sorry, but we’re too busy’?”

“No, and neither would you have.”

“I think the reason we’ve stayed together so long, Beth, is that you still have no idea who I really am.”

“So let’s keep it that way,” she said. And then she added, “I thought he was cute.”

“Who?”

“François.”

“Everyone looks cute in prison maroon.”

“You didn’t think he was insanely handsome?”

“In a Charlie Manson sort of way.”

“There was something in his eyes.”

“The mark of Satan?”

“You know, Victor, when he said he didn’t do it, I almost believed him.”

I stopped, stared at her for a moment until she stopped, too. She turned to face me, and there was that same little-girl look in her eyes. She had said something came over her, and I could see that maybe it had, but what it was, I had yet not a clue. Part of it was the romanticism of a client she believed in, of a cause worth fighting for, sure, but there was something else, too, something that involved this man in jail and his daughter, whom he hadn’t hugged in three years. I didn’t understand yet what it was, the something, though I would discover it later, yes, I would, discover it from Bob, as a matter of fact.

“He’s a convicted murderer,” I said.

“He’s a human being, too.”

I pulled out my phone. “Let’s find out.”

“Who are you calling?”

I held up a finger, said into the earpiece, “A Chestnut Hill address. The name is Robinson, Whitney Robinson.” Then I looked at Beth. “You want to glimpse the rotting cesspools in the soul of a man, just ask his lawyer.”

The term WASP was coined by a Philadelphia professor who grew up among the city’s aristocracy and went on to write learned treatises about his clan. Even if he had never met Whitney Robinson III, the professor would have recognized as a brother the man who answered the door of the rambling stone house in the swankiest section of Philadelphia. Chestnut Hill was a place of great stone houses and ornate swimming pools, of horses and cricket clubs and tweed jackets. If you played tennis in Chestnut Hill, you wore whites and played on grass and wondered why anyone would play the game on anything else. Tall, gray, elegantly stooped, with argyle socks and a dignified sprinkling of dandruff on his dark jacket, Whitney Robinson, now in his seventies, seemed the very personification of the type of Philadelphia patrician who had inherited his seat at the Union League and his sinecure at the family firm. His nose was straight, his face was long, his step light, his manners perfect. I should have hated him as a matter of principle, but I never did.

“Victor, how nice,” said Whitney Robinson in his lock-jawed drawl. “So good of you to come.”

There they were, those perfect manners, making it seem as if I were doing him the favor even though I had asked for the meeting. Manners go further than you could imagine in defusing the natural animosities of class.