Rose Connors: Temporary Sanity

The Kydd has two clients seated in folding chairs in the front office, waiting to see him, but he’s fielding phone calls when I arrive. The cash flow won’t support a secretary yet-generally speaking, our clients aren’t high rollers-so the attorneys here answer their own phones, type their own pleadings, and open their own mail. It’s a no-frills operation. “Lean and mean,” Harry calls it.

Lean and mean though it may be, our practice is housed in a charming building, an antique farmhouse on Main Street in South Chatham. Harry chose that location, he said, so I would have the world’s easiest commute. I told him to forget it. I wouldn’t rush back into practice, I said, not even if he set up shop in my backyard. He bought the old farmhouse anyway.

And it suits him. South Chatham is a gem of a village, a seaside community of quaint shingled cottages and owner-occupied small businesses. Harry’s farmhouse was built in 1840 and it wears all the charm of that era; its original wide-pine floors are still in place, uneven and sloping through every room. Our clients are comfortable here in a way they would not be in the wealthier areas of Chatham. Their tired pickup trucks and work vans aren’t so glaringly misplaced here.

Harry and the Kydd both have offices on the first floor, on either side of our only conference room, a space with a large brick fireplace and built-in ovens. It served as the keeping room when the house was used as a residence. I work in a small, pine-paneled office on the west end of the second floor, a rustic, airy room with a view over the treetops to Taylor’s Pond, and beyond that to Nantucket Sound. Harry lives in the rest of the second-floor space. Turns out he’s the one with the world’s easiest commute.

I’m barely seated when the Kydd clambers up the steep staircase. I know it’s the Kydd because he always takes the steps two at a time, and my middle-aged partner doesn’t.

The Kydd bursts into the room with his usual air of urgency. “Can’t stay,” he warns, both hands in the air. “People waiting. But I have to know. What’d ole Geraldine have to offer?” His grin expands when he mentions his former boss.

The Kydd’s speech drops no hint that he ever left Georgia. He’s slender and tall, but his posture is poor; his shoulders are stooped. “Stand up straight,” I always tell him, but he never does. Instead, he routinely gives me his slow, Southern grin and says, “Gert.” Gert, he finally admitted last week, is his great-aunt, the nag. I haven’t told him to stand up straight since.

“Murder two,” I tell him now.

“What does Buck say?”

“Buck says no.”

He grins again, pointing his pen at me. “What do you say?”

The Kydd is a quick study. He assumes more and more responsibility each day, it seems, taking on clients Harry and I would otherwise have to turn away. He learned the basics from me, in the DA’s office. Now he’s learning from Harry how to blend that competence with a tough compassion. Our clients are, for the most part, people battered by life and baffled by the system. Handling them is something of an art form, and Harry has it mastered.

I take off my glasses and consider the Kydd’s question. “I don’t know,” I tell him honestly. “My crystal ball is cloudy this week.”

“Well, are you ready?” he asks, already turning back toward the staircase.

“Nobody’s ever ready for trial, Kydd, you know that. But I’m as close as I’m going to get.”

The Kydd rolls out his Southern grin from the top step. “You’re ready,” he tells me. “My crystal ball says Stanley’s about to meet his match.”

I start to thank him for his vote of confidence, but the look on his face stops me. His eyes dart from me to the first floor and back to me again. He utters one word before he disappears. “Trouble.”

The Kydd takes the entire staircase in three strides. I follow as fast as I can. The door to the front office is wide open, a raw northeast wind blowing snow inside, papers flying everywhere. A stack of files on the edge of the Kydd’s desk slides to the floor.

The waiting clients are on their feet, easing a tall, wafer-thin woman into the Kydd’s high-backed leather desk chair. She’s coatless and it’s freezing. Her face is swollen and bruised. Her white blouse is blood-spattered and open in front, the top buttons torn off. Her lower lip bleeds profusely, a dark red stream running down her neck and pooling at her collar.

The men part to let me through, and I see at once that her right arm is broken. It hangs from her shoulder at a tortured angle, the wrist taking a brutal bend. I take off my suit jacket and cover her chest, press my handkerchief against her lips.

“Who did this to you?” My own hands suddenly tremble.

Her eyes meet mine, but she doesn’t answer.

The Kydd reappears with a makeshift ice pack in a kitchen towel and an old blanket from the hallway closet. I replace my saturated handkerchief with the ice pack and cover the thin woman up to her neck with the worn blanket.

“Who did this to you?” I ask again, holding the ice pack away from her mouth so she can answer.

Her eyes dart around the room before she speaks. “My husband,” she whispers finally, “but he didn’t mean it. It was the drink. He didn’t mean it.”

Swell. That’s great. This scenario walked into the DA’s office more than once during the years I worked there. She defends the bastard even before she’s sewn up. By sunset, she remembers falling down a flight of stairs.

“How did you get here?” I ask, pressing the ice to her lips. She points behind me with her good hand, the left one, and I turn to see a skinny teenage girl wearing silver hoop earrings and a faded denim outfit, gnawing a thumbnail. She can’t possibly be old enough to drive-not legally, anyway. I decide not to inquire, the hallmark of a good defense lawyer, Harry says.

“Your father did this?” I ask instead.

The skinny girl gives up her thumbnail reluctantly. “He’s not my father.” She shakes her head. “And he’s not her husband either. She just says that. Like he’s some kind of prize.”

Harry rushes into the front office, Steady Teddy following at a slower, almost leisurely, pace. Steady’s light gray suit, a fine Italian cut, probably cost more than all of Harry’s suits put together. Steady has a narrow build, and he’s about four inches shorter than Harry’s six-foot frame, but he wears enough gold around his neck to stoop a much larger man. He stays behind Harry, adjusting his shiny watch band, looking away from the injured woman in the chair.

Imagine that. Steady Teddy doesn’t want to get involved.

Harry, though, moves to the woman’s side without a word and takes her pulse, one of those skills career criminal defense lawyers master somehow. “She’s not in shock,” he says, his eyes moving from the wall clock to the ice compress on the woman’s bleeding lip. “But she’s got to get to a hospital.”

Harry looks to the Kydd. “I’m due in court in an hour. Can you take her?”

The Kydd’s eyes widen and he gestures helplessly to the two men who’ve been waiting to see him since I got here. Harry’s eyes move to mine, but he doesn’t ask. He knows how anxious I am about tomorrow’s trial.

“I’ll call the rescue squad,” he says.

The woman pushes the kitchen-towel compress away and tries to get out of the chair, but she falls back against it almost at once. “No,” she cries. “No ambulance. No rescue squad. I won’t go with them.”

“She won’t go in an ambulance,” the teenage daughter confirms, her eyes rolling to the ceiling. She shakes her head again and sighs. “Never mind,” she says. “Forget it. I’ll take her.”