Authors: Alfredo Vea
The assistant looked around for a response, but the chief medical examiner had already discarded his gloves and left the room. He was on his way to the parking lot and dreading the drive home. His wife would he sitting in the front room, waiting up for him. He had heard the assistant’s question, but he had long ago given up considering such foolish things.
“Hell, ten synchronous neurons could be an entire dream, a whole universe! She could be dreaming right now,” the assistant said to no one. “Their spirits could be searching for each other, maybe even linking up.” He heard his own voice coming back to him again and again as he looked down at Jane Doe number 37 and her lover. Before leaving the room he made his final entry:
Even as he wrote, he realized with a sudden rush of terror that this career would stalk him; it would take careful aim at his native curiosity, his romanticism, his passion. For the first time in his life, he felt the full weight of his own heart. In time even his wife’s lovely ears would become unremarkable.
“They both could be dreaming right now.”
Down deep in the restricted bowels of the Hall of Justice a small windowless cafeteria rang with sharp laughter. It was not the blithe, easygoing talcum and Rolex mirth of manicured civil lawyers that was swirled over heaps of greasy chow mein and between heated steam tables filled with glistening fried rice and orange-tinged meat-loaf. Nor was it the modest giggle, the discreet holy titter and righteous snickering of newly ordained assistant district attorneys that caused the overhead lamps and the menu board to shiver.
It was icy gallows humor, foxhole laughter soaked with dolor and with the great relief that remains when hours and days of mental trauma are now only harmless memories, though still very painful ones. It was the numbed laughter of wary men and women who know that a recurring danger has passed … for the moment. This kind of solemn mirth did not occur very often. It was a periodic ritual with a liturgy that included obsessive declarations of worry, grief, and panic and an occasional word of joy. This rite of laughter was a rhythmic purging, a monthly concurrence evolved over time to match the phases of the moon, much as when the menstrual periods of a group of close female friends have slowly become synchronized.
More often than not, defense lawyers met in this cafeteria to grumble about pro-prosecution judges, to wait nervously for jury verdicts, or to swig down cups of acrid caffeine and to bounce questions off the mind of a peer.
“What will the jury think about these facts? My client is one of five Mexican guys arrested in a 1954 Nash Rambler parked behind the Sheraton Palace Hotel at three in the morning.”
“There’s probable cause to arrest right there,” interjected a voice.
“Suppose each one of the suspects had a flashlight, a pair of pliers, and a screwdriver in his pocket. Further suppose that one of the windows at the loading dock had been broken but nothing was taken. No prints were lifted from the glass or the sill. It’s all circumstantial, right?”
But periodically, something more was called for. An organic imperative demanded ceremony: a formal gathering of warriors and a holy, saturnalian festival of sardonic humor. It was a profound act of ritual purification, an act of mending. It was incantatory, a precious rite of common healing. These war stories always began with the defense attorney’s preamble: “I once had this guy.”
“I once had this guy, a fifty-year-old child molester who woke up one morning believing that a ghost was trying to rape him. This guy was so terrified of being sodomized by this ghost that he came to court with his left hand down the back of his pants and his thumb jammed right up into his asshole. I can still see him now,” said the laughing lawyer, “bouncing around the courtroom like a paranoid jumping bean, making sure his back was never turned toward the spirit world.” The speaker shook his head at the memory. “He was all right until some smartass bailiff told him that a pervert ghost could poke him right through the wall. When my boy heard that, his tiny mind just snapped in two. Within twenty-four hours he was on the bus to Atascadero State Hospital. Can you imagine that bus ride? Three hundred miles, two cheeseburgers, a Coke, and hour after hour of invisible sodomy.”
“That’s nothing,” said Newton Lam, with a tone of mock disdain. The Chinese lawyer laughed as he wiped dribbles of coffee from his chin. “I once had this guy who decided to break into a house up on Pacific Heights.” The laughter around him subsided as another story began to unfold. “One of those huge, thirty-room mansions near upper Broadway. Anyway, this guy had five prior residential burglary convictions, all hot prowls—you know, the husband and wife asleep in the next room. So here he was, a five-time loser on the second-floor landing of a mansion, breaking the antique latch on a set of imported French windows. If he gets caught this time, it’s a mandatory life sentence.
“Now, when I first saw the initial police report, I thought that the owner of the mansion was a real tightwad, because he had neglected to install burglar alarms on the second floor; all of the sensors and magnetic switches were down on street level. The alarm company he hired hadn’t installed motion detectors. I decided at the time that he had figured no one was going to bother with climbing up to the second floor. I guess he’d never heard of a second-story man.
“So my boy is feeling real good about this job. He’s cased the place thoroughly and he knows the alarm system is only on the ground floor and he knows that there’s no guard dog on the premises. He’s checked out that, too. He looks around for a dog run and he lifts the lids on the garbage cans. There were no sacks of dog food anywhere, just a big pile of bloody butcher paper near the service entrance. This time no one is going to catch him. He could get in and get out in ten minutes, go sell the stuff to a fence, buy some heroin, and still have enough time to see his parole officer in the morning for his monthly urine test.”
Cigarettes were snuffed out and coffee spoons were stilled as bodies leaned forward to listen closer.
“So he cracks open the window and steps inside. Now my boy is smiling from ear to ear, because the place is pitch black and quiet as a church. There are no lasers, no pressure sensors. This job is gonna be a cakewalk. But when he turns his flashlight on, what do you think he sees?”
No one responded—not even a shrug was ventured. There was anticipation in every lawyer’s face, but no attempt to hazard a guess. Over time, each of them had learned better. Irony is delicious and distasteful, soft and savage. Irony is not to be trifled with. Its very essence was that it could never be predicted.
“There on the Persian rug in front of my man is the biggest cat he’s ever seen… and that was just the cub! He lifts his flashlight a little higher, and behind the cub is a huge pair of crimson eyes, as big as the taillights on a Harley. The owner of those eyes is a four-hundred-pound Bengal tiger!”
A groan of believing disbelief went up around him as he continued. On noticing that the cooks in the kitchen were smoking, Newton lit a cigarette for himself.
“So here’s my homeboy staring at this enormous cat! She’s sitting on the rug with a whole bloody sheep’s leg in her mouth. Now he knows why there’s all that butcher paper in the back! By now, he’s so fucking scared that all of his tattoos are sliding off his body. There are ink stains on the carpet. His stomach lining is turning into menudo, and he is so petrified that he doesn’t even hear the cub crying. It seems my boy had his right foot planted right on the cub’s tail.”
“Oh my God!” someone moaned.
“The supplemental report said that the cops located my client in a Dumpster across the street by following a clear trail of feces and urine, not to mention blood. The mother cat had torn off most of his right leg… and the all-important middle finger of his right hand. Seven cops and a paramedic couldn’t pull him out of that Dumpster. They had to send one cop over to a rest home near Park Merced. They dragged my boy’s dear, sweet mother away from her bingo game and drove her to the scene of the crime. It took her twenty minutes to talk him out of that garbage can.
‘Antonio, mijo,el tigre, ya se fue.’”
The table was quaking with sardonic giggles, tragic guffaws, sympathetic wails.
“Out of ten fingers, the tiger eats that one. His primary means of self-expression had been chewed off and swallowed. It would be like one of us losing our voice. When I went to see him at the hospital, he only had two things to say: ‘Hey man, you a lawyer, tell me, ain’t tigers illegal? Ain’t they against the law?’ After I recovered from my disbelief, my client begged me to ask the owner of the tiger to look around the house for his high school ring.”
Another burst of laughter filled the House of Toast, as this particular eating establishment was unofficially named. Like all such places in government buildings, the contract to serve sumptuous and appetizing food had gone to the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder—a petulant, brooding group of smoking Vietnamese cooks—did not look up from their tedious work. They had grown accustomed to the incomprehensible banter of these coffee-swilling lawyers. Though most of the cooks had learned to speak some English, the dialect these lawyers were speaking seemed totally alien.
Back home, in a South Vietnam that no longer existed, there were lots of police and lots of prosecutors, but no such thing as defense lawyers. One of the cooks wiped the sweat from his brow and sneered at the circle of men in suits and shirtsleeves. Back home any decent person would rather cross the street than walk on the same sidewalk with a lawyer.
“That was Antonio Ruiz, wasn’t it?” said Matt Gonzalez, the Te jano lawyer. “I represented him over at San Quentin.”
“Señor Antonio ‘El Tigre’ Ruiz to be exact,” said Jesse Pasadoble, a Chicano lawyer who was a veteran of the Vietnam War and of almost two hundred felony trials. “He renamed himself after that case and became a minor celebrity in the jails. You should have seen him at his sentencing. There he was, on crutches, flipping the judge the bird with that phantom middle finger of his. The judge cited him for attempted contempt of court. Of course we argued both legal and factual impossibility, but the judge thought the intent to flip the bird was sufficient. Why were you representing him in custody?” Jesse asked, turning to Matt.
“He got caught burglarizing the cells of his fellow inmates! They caught him by using the state of the art in forensic science and crime-scene detection. It seems the cells at San Quentin are pretty dusty and the thief left a series of shoe prints—all of a left shoe.”
“At least he’s consistent,” said one laughing voice. “How does he describe himself these days, as a cat burglar?”
“He told me,” said Matt, “that he wasn’t scared of getting caught burglarizing in the pen. After that damn tiger, those guys in the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia looked like a bunch of sissies. El Tigre is back on the streets, you know. Some Mexican lawyer got all of his priors stricken and worked out a great deal.”
He winked at Jesse, who smiled back.
“I saw him not too long ago. You won’t believe it! He went and bought himself a used prosthetic limb. Only problem is that it’s another left leg! At first I thought something was wrong with my eyes. I was talking to him for a few minutes, and I kept trying to clear my head, before I realized he was wearing two left shoes! Poor bastard. If you tell him to move to the right, he’s paralyzed!”
Matt laughed deeply at the memory, then gathered himself for his own contribution to the contest.
“But my dear, dear friends, I’ve got one even better than my man Antonio Ruiz,” he announced with a look of perverse expectation and masochistic glee dancing in his eyes. His arms were upraised in ministerial dignity, and his fingers were spread to signify the importance of what he was about to reveal. He paused for a long moment to heighten the suspense. The Right Reverend Gonzalez was about to testify before his congregation of peers. Surely he was about to relate the defense lawyer’s worst nightmare come true.
“I, Matt Gonzalez, was doin’ a rape trial a couple of years ago in front of old Judge Garfield. Do you remember him?”
“Yeah,” said a disapproving voice. “The old geezer with the inflatable doughnut pillow for his hemorrhoids and the stack of girlie magazines in the bottom drawer?”
“Yeah, I remember him, too,” said Jesse with a scathing, sarcastic tone. “Did you know that his clerk had this electric switch hidden under her desk that she would flip on whenever an objection was being lodged?”
One or two at the table knew of the secret switch. The rest had looks on their faces that spanned the full range of human emotion.
“That switch activated a strong electric vibrator under His Honor’s seat that would shake him awake, and he would jerk bolt upright and shout at the top of his lungs, ‘The motion is denied with prejudice! The objection is overruled!’
“The last time I tried a case in his court, one of the jurors had a heart attack right there in the jury box. God, it was something! It was pandemonium. The bailiffs were screaming into their walkie-talkies and running into each other. A nurse who had been on the jury panel was performing CPR right below the witness stand. The court clerk was pushing that switch so hard that it was lifting her desk clear off the floor, and the judge was rubbing the sand from his eyes and screaming, ‘Defense motion denied, defense motion denied!’ ”
“That’s my man,” said Matt, with a wide grin. “Last time he read the Evidence Code, it was written in cuneiform. Come to think of it, I think his girlie magazines were Sumerian. Good-looking women, those Sumerians. They all have such beautiful eyes. Anyway, here I’m doin’ this rape trial and the victim is up on the stand. I’d just finished cross-examining her, and the prosecutor was up doing his paint-by-numbers redirect. Even after being prompted by the DA, the victim, bless her soul, had just admitted on cross that she could not really identify her assailant.”