Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Another network ran a story recapping a year’s worth of disappearances of young blond girls. The missing that year had always been girls, never any older than fourteen, affluent in their youth and beauty. From the moment they disappeared, it was even-money odds: for every family made whole, another would be left heartbroken, and somehow it all came back to the image. The anecdote of one rescue: The wife of a policeman in Fort Durango worked part-time at a local Wendy’s. From her perch at the register in the drive-through window, she saw a girl from northern Arizona cowering in the backseat. She couldn’t have been more than twelve.

The face was familiar only from the news broadcasts, but that had to be the missing girl, shaking gently against the restraint of her own arms, her hair already cut and dyed. Because this wife of a policeman knew the image—the slightly buck teeth, the coltish legs—the girl had been saved. The news had been broadcasting home video of the girl at a church picnic, shying away from her father’s camera; her picture had been superimposed behind the left shoulder of dozens of anchors. The image moved, evolved; in the case of this particular girl, the jump cut went to video of a tearful reunion with her parents, the father’s emotional thanks to a local sheriff, the refusal to speculate on what had happened to her in captivity, the usual wild gratitude.

More often, the girl, the body, was never found.

A family waited for answers that never came. A grieving mother gave a year-end interview, sitting on her plastic-wrapped couch; her daughter’s room remained a shrine, pristine, untouched. The only thing left was the image, the seventh-grade school portrait of a girl everyone knew was dead. The gap between her front teeth meant she wasn’t quite through her course of orthodontia, forever thirteen monthly payments away from the removal of her braces. The image was photocopied, faxed, emailed, broadcast; state troopers with creased hats stopped traffic at shopping malls and interstate on-ramps, hopefully comparing faces. Dogs used their noses to rout the undercarpet of desiccated leaves and moss in the nearest forest, their handlers hoping for the type of definitive answers that could only be provided by a body encased in the coroner’s black polymer bag.

The morning anchor did a live read promoting Richard’s next gig, an afternoon slot defending two Texas high school seniors who’d published an underground newspaper that even Richard thought fell on the wrong side of tasteless. For the past week, Richard had been giving it the hard sell, making the rounds of the cable news shows, pounding the same talking point over and over: Freedom of speech doesn’t stop at the front door of our public schools. It didn’t matter much that case law had proven him wrong on countless occasions, or that the two students in question were arrogant shits gifted with spectacularly bad judgment. It wasn’t the newspaper, just the kids and their preeminent sense of entitlement. Their little underground paper ended up in the legitimate news once the principal confiscated all its copies and suspended the pair indefinitely; the students got themselves called on the carpet by the local school board, which was rumored to be considering expulsion. And what was the crime, exactly? With its crude cartoons and sarcastic headlines, the stunt was hardly enough to foment revolution—the most controversial things it advocated were free condoms in the school clinic and the reinstatement of an assistant principal who had resigned after pictures of him were found on websites “promoting leather, motorcycles, and homosexuality.”

But because the week between Christmas and New Year’s was the dead time for the news—the top-of-the-hour broadcasts filled with B-roll video of dogs singing “Jingle Bells,” Good Samaritan stories about families who lost everything in a fire only to have their Christmas presents replaced by a millionaire benefactor—Richard had been on the air eight times on three different networks. The students were a spicy story that seemed to have a little of everything: race, class, the light and heat of a 1960s protest.

Richard secretly longed for marches in the streets and students seizing the university president’s office, putting their feet up on the desk, drinking his brandy, and smoking his cigars. He wanted flowers in rifle barrels and rioters overturning buses.

If these kids wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights, if they were willing to live up to the obligation to be truthful, then he would live up to his obligation to defend them. The principal had gone on Nightline and made the mistake of calling the paper libelous. Richard, in the following segment, told Ted Koppel, “There can be no such thing as libel when what you write is the truth.” Even though he didn’t much care for the attitude of his clients, he couldn’t help but egg them on; his advice was to do everything short of protesting at the school board meeting carrying sandwich boards that read I Am a Man .

Which meant that ever since Richard and his team of activists had taken up the cause, things had gotten worse for the two kids; their expulsion was upheld, and one of them had his acceptance to the University of Texas rescinded. The story’s place in the news cycle would soon be assumed by an outrage of newer vintage, but Richard’s strategy here was still slash-and-burn; he expected in every interview to throw out the word Nazi a time or two, mostly for the shock value, but also because it was one of the few ways to make a school board nervous.

So he advised the students not to back down. He had a law school classmate, a federal judge, whom he could turn to for a temporary injunction, at least to get the one kid back into college.

In an ideal world, the whole thing might turn into a show trial, wall-to-wall coverage that would provide Richard with the chance to parade and shout, a full contingent of press outside waiting for a news conference on the courthouse steps.

He knew that his histrionics could make good television. He’d started this phase of his career by writing amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in support of constitutional protection for even those types of free expression that he personally found to be in bad taste. He fancied himself an advocate, a watchdog of the state. This put his name out at the very edges of public consciousness; now, because he gave good television, the same arguments he once made on paper he now spouted on cable news programs, debating Tipper Gore–styled housewife activists or local prosecutors-cum-political aspirants who wanted to thin a library’s collection, put warning stickers on nearly everything, shut down the local porno shop. From these appearances Richard was on the record in support of medical marijuana, decriminalizing drugs and paroling drug offenders from overcrowded prisons, repealing three-strikes laws, protecting interstate commerce in adult videos and novelties, and the inalienable right to wear a diaper gathered from the stars and stripes of the American flag. Low crimes, all.

In the past few years, Richard had made almost nothing from the practice of actual law; most of his money came from these appearances on television, or short trips to conventions of activists and attorneys where he defended what his sister called the indefensible. She didn’t much care for what he was selling, and most of their attempts at conversation ended in arguments. Now they talked only on birthdays and holidays, and it was the fault of his burgeoning career. That and the fact that now she was fucking her boss.

With his head done up in a bonnet of foamy shampoo, Richard thought of who might play him in the motion picture, alternately dismissing Bruce Willis (too old) and Kevin Bacon (too skinny) before pausing to consider Kiefer Sutherland. A definite possibility. He was lathering up for his morning shave when the telephone rang.