Steve Martini - Compelling Evidence

I have learned in my time with Dee to become master of all things electronic: answering machines, copiers, the fax, Mr. Coffee-and most of all the small personal computer which I moved from her desk to my office when I found her using its dark screen like some mystic high-tech looking glass, to comb her hair and apply makeup. I spend my evenings, before the usual rounds with Harry, typing my own correspondence and dreaming of some blameless way to fire Dee.

My secretary is not unattractive, in her early twenties, assertive, bright-eyed, and eager. But on an intellectual plane she is heavily into hairstyles and panty hose. She excels at clerical foreplay. All of the typing paper is stacked in neat piles. The plastic cylinders holding various sizes of paper clips are perpetually fondled like Buddhist prayer wheels, and the desk is endlessly combed for any object that might be out of place. I have learned by painful experience that anything beyond sealing an envelope or licking a stamp severely taxes her secretarial skills. She sports acrylic fingernails longer than claws on a saber-tooth tiger; from one of them dangles a minuscule gold chain stretching from the tip to a tiny star embedded in the half-moon, above the cuticle-almost as attractive as a bone through the nose. She wears these like a declaration of independence-it reads: “You really don’t expect me to type.”

As I enter the office she greets me enthusiastically. “Good morning, boss”-this latter to ensure that we both know who’s in charge. The tasks we each perform during the day have tended to muddy these distinctions. In the inner reaches of my brain, I issue a psychic growl like some snarling hound.

I respond with a flat, indifferent “Hello.” In recent days I’ve become increasingly abrupt in my manner toward her, a sort of cryptic message that she might look elsewhere for employment. But each day when I arrive for work she’s there, panting by the door like some warm puppy, to greet me. The thought that I must pull the trigger myself on this coup de grace is not pleasant, and so it waits.

“Do me a favor,” I say.

“Sure.”

“Call Susan Hawley and remind her we have a court appearance tomorrow.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out the Hawley file. “Then find the points and authorities that I did the other day and put them in the file. When you’re done,” I say, “put it in my briefcase.” I drop the file onto the center of her desk like some ponderous plane belly-flopping on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Before it can bounce she has it in her hands and is turning to place it in one of the file drawers behind her chair.

“Done,” she says.

“Sure,” I say as I watch the thing disappear into the dark hole of Calcutta. I make a mental note to retrieve it when she leaves for lunch.

As I enter my office I’m surprised at this hour to see Harry, comfortably reclining in my swivel chair with his feet propped on my desk, reading a newspaper. Harry is bow ties and pinstripes, silk gauze socks and wing tips, a bulbous nose and broad grin. At sixty, his career behind him and no signs of retirement on the horizon, he has a give-a-damn attitude that one in my circumstances can find refreshing. It is perhaps that since my fall from grace, when I look at Harry I see myself in twenty years.

“Lost?” I ask.

He looks at me over the top of the paper. “Clients needed a little privacy to talk; figured you wouldn’t mind.” He starts to get up.

“Stay there,” I say.

Harry and I have become increasingly close in the months following my banishment from Potter, Skarpellos. Hopelessly out of date, a different bow tie for each day of the week, we seem to tread the same route to court each morning.

Twenty years ago Harry was one of the foremost criminal defense attorneys in town. Tried no more than four cases a year, all front-page felonies. That was before he found courage and stamina in a bottle. Now his days are filled trying to keep other drunks from the clutches of the DA and the angry machinations of MADD. For variety, his life is punctuated by the occasional assault-and-battery.

I hang up my coat and open my briefcase on the couch, then sort through a couple of files I took home.

“Fuckin’ Congress,” says Harry. He’s finished reading the article. “First they allow their friends to steal all me money from the S amp;Ls, then they want us to pay it all back.” He follows this with a deep sigh as if conceding mat it is something over which Harry has no control.

“Every time I vote, I have the same feeling,” he says. “Like somebody put a bag of dogshit on my doorstep and set it on fire. I don’t know whether to just stand there and hold my nose, or try to stamp it out.”

The mental picture drawn by this little vignette leads me to conclude that Harry has probably seen these images, up close and personal, at some youthful point in his life from behind a wicked snicker at the edge of some poor soul’s front porch.

“Can’t trust government,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “I used to work for “em.”

Harry’s office is half the size of my own. He’s taken to camping here when clients and family need a private conference-a hit to get the money for his fees, or to square the details of an alibi before the story is locked in stone with their lawyer. They don’t know how flexible and creative Harry can be.

Silhouetted by the soles of his shoes, the surface of my desk is organized confusion. I’ve taken to hoarding the most important case files in my own office, a defense against Dee-saster.

There are a score of files piled here, marshaled in a system that only its maker can fathom-two approaching trials, cases that may settle, but only on the courthouse steps; and a criminal appeal with seven volumes of transcripts, referred to me by the district court as part of the indigent-appellate panel-an economic hedge I’d taken before clients became thick. Propagating like the poor is a stack of files requiring motions and correspondence, a chore that would involve a good afternoon’s work dictating to a competent secretary, but which I will no doubt spend endless evenings stroking out on my own keyboard.

I paw through my mail, which Dee has stacked on the edge of my desk-a few bills, letters in a couple of cases, a probation report in a sentencing matter, and an announcement that Jerome Feinberg will speak at the next meeting of the Capitol City Lawyers Association: “Probate and You-The Lawyer’s Tollgate to the Hereafter.”

I flip the announcement to Harry.

“Tasteful,” he says, “You and I said it, we’d be disbarred.”

“Half the judges in the county will be there to laugh. I’ll be there to take notes,” I add.

“What for?”

I tap a thick file that sits looming on the center of my desk, alone, solitary, like some ancient tome written in Sanskrit that waits to be deciphered.

“Probate file,” I say. “Only one I have. Only one I’ll ever take.”

Harry looks at the tab on the file jacket and then says but a single word: “Oh.”

With all of his warts, Harry Hinds at times displays the tact of a French diplomat. He has heard about Sharon Cooper.

This file is one of those objects in life, the sight of which churns acid in my stomach. Sharon’s probate produces in me sensations of creeping, escalating uneasiness. I have moved the file a dozen times, to the credenza, the floor, and back to the desk again. It lies there, a testament to my ignorance of probate and my inability to say no to a friend, in this case George Cooper.

I have spent hours poring through the loose-leaf binders of lawyers’ self-help books, that forest of publications with perennial subscriptions and annual pocket parts, each with its own transactional checklist of things to be done. It is, I have concluded, unfathomable. The probate lawyers have found the magic pellet that kills competition. They have constructed processes and crafted terminology that can be translated only by the high priests of their own cloistered sect. I read Dee’s secretarial handbook, which, like the computer I’ve bought for her, she has never used. I held hopes that maybe this would be my Rosetta stone, the key to the mysteries of probate. It was not. The probate secretaries, it seems, have their own guild. As might be expected, Dee is without a union card.