rlfj: A Fresh Start

"Mister Steiner, I presume you are my father's attorney."

"Yes, I have been for several years. Why?"

"The question is, are you now my attorney or are you his?"

Steiner sat back in his chair and eyed me curiously. Dad just looked confused and was on the verge of some more yelling when Steiner leaned forward and held his hand up. "Hold it, Charlie, this is good." He turned back to me. "I will be your attorney."

"Even though he is paying you?", I pressed.

He glanced at my father and then turned back to me. "Even though."

"And if his wishes were different than mine?"

My father was staring at the pair of us like we were speaking in Martian. "What in the world are you two..."

Steiner simply held his hand up to silence my father. "I know where this is going." He turned back to me. "If there was that much of a difference of opinion I would arrange for a new lawyer for you. Is that satisfactory?"

"Yes, sir, thank you very much." I stood and reached across the table and offered my hand again. "Like I said earlier, my name is Carl Buckman."

He shook my hand much more firmly. "I'm John Steiner and I'm your lawyer. You want to tell us what you're doing here?"

"Yes, sir, I would very much like to do that."

The sense of rationality in the room had grown by several orders of magnitude. Even my father seemed calmer now. In a much more reasonable tone, he repeated himself. "This still had better be good."

"That all depends on your definition of good." I told them everything, about how the three boys had decided to begin ganging up on the kids on the bus, taking lunch money, and how they had told me they were going to charge me five bucks a week. This had been announced on the bus yesterday afternoon on the ride back from school. Then I described the fight. Dad's a pretty tough guy himself, but it's mostly his size and looks. He might look like a stevedore, but he's actually a design engineer. Dad actually blanched when I described what I thought were the final results. "Jerry has got to have a busted nose, some busted teeth, and probably a broken jaw. Tim was just knocked out, a concussion, I guess, and Bob's knee is totally shattered. I would bet all three are staying in the hospital for a few days."

"Jesus Christ!", Dad said. He was finally looking at me with a mixture of horror and respect, the lawyer, too.

Steiner asked, "Have you told this to the police?"

"They never asked. I've been sitting here for the last couple of hours waiting for you. Besides, I'm not talking to them without a lawyer. Miranda v. Arizona comes to mind."

Both men stared at me for a second, and then Steiner stood up and pounded on the locked door. It opened a few seconds later and he spoke quietly to whoever was on the other side. He then came back and sat down at the table. "Okay, a detective will be in shortly. I want you to tell him everything you just told us. We'll get out of here afterwards. I can't imagine they'll charge you with much more than a misdemeanor. Fighting on a bus or something."

"Mister Steiner, I have no intention of agreeing to anything of the sort. I'm the victim here, not them. They attacked me, not the other way around.", I replied.

This sort of disagreement was what my father used to call 'back talk', 'lip', or 'sass', and you could see his face clouding up again. At home he'd start swinging at me by now. Mr. Steiner just nodded in understanding and motioned for Dad to keep calm. "Let's talk to the detective first. I won't agree to anything without discussing it with you first."

After another minute the door opened up and another man in a suit, smaller and thinner, with a noticeable bald spot even though he was still in his thirties, came in. He was carrying a legal pad and a pen and a manila folder. He looked at us and tossed his things to the table. "Hello. My name's Robert Ritchie and I'm a detective." He waggled a finger at the two men, pointing in turn at them. "Mister Buckman?"

"This is Charles Buckman, and I'm John Steiner, Mister Buckman's attorney.", answered Mr. Steiner.

Detective Ritchie shook their hands before turning to face me. "And you must be Carl. Can I call you Carl?", he asked, a big friendly smile on his face. Yeah, we were all buddies. He was my friend. He would remove my cuffs and send me home to my loving parents. I would leave the horrible police station. And to do this, I only needed to make a little confession. Kidnapping the Lindbergh baby came to mind as the little confession.

"Sure thing, Bob , you bet.", I answered happily.

Ritchie started at this and stared at me. Smiling to himself, he shook his head. "Okay, I deserved that, I suppose. Let's sit down and get this over with."

"Yes, sir.", I replied, much more politely.

"Can we do something about the handcuffs?", asked Steiner.

"I suppose, but these are some pretty serious charges.", replied Ritchie. It was like watching poker players raise and fold on their hands.

"There's three of us. I think we can take him if we need to." was the dry response.

Ritchie shrugged and removed my cuffs. I guess this gave him some form of card for later in the game. He put the cuffs and keys in his pocket and picked up his pad and pen. He turned to me and said, "So, tell me your side of it."

I glanced over at Steiner, who nodded silently, and told my story again, just like I had before. He made several notes, most specifically when I mentioned names. At the end he commented, "That's not precisely the story I got."

It was important that I stay in control as much as possible. Before my lawyer could respond, I said, "I imagine not, but who would you have heard differently from? The other three are all in the emergency room. No way have you talked to them yet. Who's left? The bus driver?"

Ritchie gave me a very sharp look at this. "According to the driver, you attacked all three boys on the bus, and then attacked the two he rescued when you got outside."

I snorted in derision. "He rescued them? That's rich. Let me guess, he stated he saw the whole thing, right?"

"Yes, he did."

My father was keeping quiet, which was good. He simply couldn't understand what had happened to his nerdy little asshole son. More importantly, the lawyer was keeping silent. He could always step in and claim I was being coerced or stupid if something came up that was bad, but in the meantime, if I was asking questions, the detective might just screw up himself. I was taking control of the interview session.

"You may consider that report as fine a work of fiction as anything Hemingway or Faulkner ever wrote. It has just about as much relation to the truth. The driver was sitting in his seat, facing out the windshield when this all started. The only place he could have seen anything from was standing in the aisle, but that is where all the kids getting on the bus were, so he wasn't there. He was sitting, face forward. When he heard the fight start, he would have turned around, but there were at least a dozen kids between us and him. He never saw anything."

"Uh, huh." Ritchie wasn't letting me know what he was thinking. He would have been a good poker player.

"Then later, after he threw my last two attackers off the bus - the phrase he used was 'get the fuck out of here' - he was kneeling on the floor trying to see to Jerry. He was three feet below any windows on the bus, which are six feet off the ground in any case, so how did he see me attack the other two? He didn't know anything about what happened until after the police and ambulance arrived and he came down off the bus." I continued.

"So why did he say different?", he asked.

"Well, what was he going to say? That he had no idea what was happening and couldn't keep control of the kids on his bus? How long would he stay employed after that? I would bet that he's not actually a school employee and protected by a union, but a part time employee of the contracting company that operates the busses." On the first go around, the same driver had reported that nothing at all had occurred, despite what some of the passengers had said.