Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (19 page)

His face was blotched like a red rash. Reddish brown hair, graying at the sides, swept back from a flat forehead in a series of small, sharp waves. He was wearing what he always wore, a brown plaid sports coat and a solid brown tie. The left collar of his starched white shirt curled up at the tip, and the thread on the top button had begun to unravel. Without a word he pulled out a pack of Camels and lit one up.

“You quit drinking,” I remarked as I glanced through the stack of papers my secretary had left on my desk. “Don’t you think it’s time you quit that, too?”

“And make the same mistake twice?” Flynn asked in a gruff voice. He took a long drag, and then added, as if it was the end of all argument on the subject, “I’m Catholic.”

Each excuse he offered became more bizarre. “What?” I asked, astonished. “What do you mean? The reason you don’t quit is because you’re Catholic?”

He shrugged. “I’m Catholic. That means I believe in the here-after.” He paused as if this was some fine point of theology. “And that means that I’m not some goddamn health nut who doesn’t care about anything except how nice and pink his goddamn lungs are.”

Knitting my brow, I shook my head and studied him through half-closed eyes. “You really should have been a priest. With that kind of logic you might have become a cardinal.”

A faint smile formed on his heavy mouth. “Listen. I became a lawyer. How much more Jesuitical can you be than that?”

We exchanged a glance, a silent acknowledgment of what we both understood and never talked about.

Flynn looked away, the cigarette dangling in his pudgy fingers as he stared out the window. In the distance across the river the snow on the peak of Mt. Hood shimmered a rosy pink in the early morning sun.

“Actually, I was going to be a priest once. My mother wanted me to.” He caught my reaction out of the corner of his eye. “No, really,” he insisted. “I’m not making it up. I was an altar boy.

True story. For almost a year.” He raised his hand to his face and sucked on the cigarette that was stuck between his fingers like a nail driven through a board. “Then the goddamn priest decided he liked me.”

I thought I knew what he meant. “Liked you?”

“Yeah. He tried to put his hands on me. I never went back. My mother never quite got over it.”

“What the priest did?”

“No. I never told her about that. It would have destroyed her.

She was about as devout as they come.”

Leaning forward, I searched his tired, red-rimmed eyes. “You never told her? Not even later on?”

The single strand of smoke twisting up from the burning cigarette spread out into a slow-turning gray-marbled haze. Flynn stared into it, lost in the shapeless shifting design of something that had no plan, no purpose, nothing but the free-working forces of chance.

With one last drag, he blew what was left of it straight ahead, watching it like it was a river running into the sea.

“No,” he said finally, looking back at me. “What good would it have done?”

“Some people would tell you that things like this have to be brought out into the open; that you have to talk about things that happened to you as a child if you’re going to get on with your life.”

Pursing his dry lips, Flynn nodded thoughtfully. “Shows you what the fuck they know, doesn’t it?” A jaundiced smile crawled onto his mouth as he rolled his wrists over and opened his thick-fingered hands. “I mean, I just talked about it with you, and I hate to tell you, but I don’t feel any different about it now than I did before. Besides, you’re forgetting something. For a priest, the guy wasn’t that bad-looking.”

Shaking my head, I turned my chair until it was at a right angle to the desk. My eye caught the small clock I kept on the corner.

It was just seven-thirty.

“What are you doing here, anyway? You were supposed to come by this afternoon.”

I had known Flynn for years, and he had never once been on time. If he showed up within an hour either side of when he said, he thought you had nothing to complain about. Any later than that, he would shrug his shoulders and look at you with those ruined eyes that seemed to chronicle centuries of destruction and offer the same excuse he was giving me now.

“I’ve been in the program more than fifteen years. I do what they tell me. I take it one day at a time. But sometimes I have a little trouble keeping track of the hours.”

It did not make any sense at all, and I knew exactly what he meant.

“Tell me something,” I said, my eyes fixed on him as I tilted my head back and to the side. “How come I haven’t fired you?”

“Probably because you never hired me.”

“You sure?”

“No, not really. I started doing this kind of work sometime after they kicked me out of the law, but before I stopped drinking.”

“Well, I must have hired you then.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe I just showed up one day. Why?

You want to fire me now?”

I hesitated, as if I wanted to think it over. “No,” I said finally.

“You’d probably sue me, and the way I remember it, you were a pretty good lawyer.”

The grin faded from his face. He bent his head and slowly worked his jaw back and forth. “Not bad, I guess,” he said, looking up, and then quickly changed the subject. “I finished everything on those two cases.”

He reached down and opened the black briefcase he had set on the floor next to him. The stitching on the leather handles was frayed and one of the hinges was loose. He handed me two neatly marked file folders, containing the results of the investigations he had done on cases, both of which were still months away from trial. I was more interested in what he thought about the arrest in the Jeffries murder. He had not heard about it, and when I told him, he had no reaction. I wondered if it was because, deep down, he had hoped that whoever had killed Jeffries would not get caught.

It was a sentiment I could not entirely be sure I had not harbored myself, somewhere in the deep recesses of my soul. It was an evil, fugitive thought, the kind no one would admit, but one that would have been infinitely more excusable in Flynn’s case than in mine.

Without wanting to, Jeffries had helped make my name as a lawyer; he had made certain Flynn would never practice law again.

“You didn’t hear anything about who they were looking at?” I asked, anxious for the latest rumor. “No idea who it might be?”

He studied his hands, held in his lap, then raised his head, searched my eyes for a second, and looked away. When he looked back, there was a glint in his eye, whether of malice or amusement I could not tell.

“If I was still drinking,” he remarked with wry sarcasm, “I would have suspected myself.” With an effort, he shoved himself up and sat erect in the chair. “No, that’s not true. Well, it might have been true then. Not now,” he added, shaking his head like someone trying to free himself of a bad memory. “He did me a favor.”

“Did you a favor?” I asked, incredulous and a little irritated.

“Because he’s dead, you think you’re supposed to forgive him—

just forget about it? After what he did?”

Flynn put his arms on the edge of the desk and bent forward.

“What exactly would you suggest I do? Go out to the cemetery and kick a little dirt on his grave? It was fifteen—no, sixteen—

years ago. You weren’t there. Do you have any idea how drunk I was or what I said to him?”

He could not help himself. As the memory of what he had done, what he had said, came back, he remembered it all, and there was still a part of him that was glad he had done it.

“I got so damn tired of being put down by him, and the way he used to interrupt me to correct something I’d said, sometimes just the way I had pronounced a word. The bastard was relentless. He enjoyed it. You should have seen his eyes. You remember those eyes? The way they cut right through you. And that smug little thin-lipped smile of his. And all you could do was stand there and say: ‘Yes, your honor. No, your honor.’ It was like standing in front of your father after he had just beat the hell out of you with his belt and agreeing that you did something wrong and deserved everything you got. I couldn’t take it anymore.” He paused, clenched his teeth, and shook his head. “I couldn’t take anything anymore,” he said, a bitter look in his eyes. “Not one more thing. I tied one on. God, was I drunk! And I marched into his courtroom and called him every name in the book and then some. Hell, I don’t even remember most of what I called him.”

He laughed helplessly. “But I’ll never forget that look on his face.

‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’ he demanded. His face was all flushed. His eyes were popping right out of his head.”

Flynn thought of something. “You know how when you’re drunk—really drunk—there’s a place inside your head, the place where you watch yourself make an idiot of yourself and think it’s really kind of funny? Well, as soon as I heard Jeffries say that—

‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’—I had a whole speech ready, but the only part of it that came out was, ‘I have the privilege, your honor, to be addressing the biggest asshole in the western world.’ I think I even bowed.”

“You did bow,” I said. Flynn looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face. “That became part of the legend,” I explained.

“It was the first thing the two deputy sheriffs who dragged you out of there told everyone. ‘Called Jeffries an asshole and then he bowed.’ That’s the way the story got handed down. After that, for months, every time a lawyer had to appear in front of Jeffries, as soon as he finished, as soon as he said ‘Thank you, your honor’

and turned to leave, he’d whisper to the lawyer who was coming up next, ‘And then he bowed,’ just to see if he could make him laugh while Jeffries was watching.”

“And all this time I thought my short-lived legal career had been a failure,” Flynn drawled as he got to his feet. He stood in front of the desk, a pensive expression on his face. “The police came to see me about this.”

I could scarcely believe it. “His murder?”

“Yeah. Just routine stuff. But they knew all about what happened. They knew I’d been disbarred and that it was because of Jeffries.”

“How would they have known about that?”

“With all the pressure they were under, they must have looked at every case he ever had anything to do with. And besides, I was a legend, remember? As soon as they started asking around the courthouse about who might have held a grudge, who might have wanted to kill him, my name was bound to come up.”

“They never talked to me,” I objected.

“Maybe you should sue them for defamation.”

“So what did they want to know? Where you were that night?”

I asked. I was smiling because I knew where he was nearly every night.

“Yeah. I told them I was at an AA meeting. Stupid cop—he was young—asks me if I’m an alcoholic. I say no, I just go there because it’s the only place left I can still smoke.”

His eye wandered around the room, surveying the gold-sealed diplomas and the framed degrees; the hundreds of uniform cloth-covered volumes that contained thousands of appellate court decisions; the thick treatises on criminal procedure and the law of evidence and the endless updated alphabetized manuals on the criminal law; all the books every lawyer owns and seldom takes the time to read.

“I liked being a lawyer,” he said, thoughtfully. He took a deep breath and let out a long, soulful sigh. Glancing back at me, he flashed an apologetic smile. “But Jeffries was right. I had no business being one. Not like that.”

“You needed help, that’s all. You shouldn’t even have been suspended. You should have been put into a residential treatment program. That’s what anyone else would have done.”

Flynn was not convinced. “Sometimes you have to hit bottom.

I’m serious. Jeffries did me a favor. The law was all I had left, and when that was taken away …” As the thought finished itself, he remembered something else. “I once wrote him a letter of apology. It was part of the treatment. You were supposed to write to everyone that had been hurt by your drinking. I wrote to Jeffries, read the letter out loud in front of everyone in my group. I meant it, too. Every word of it. I was really sorry.”

I got up from behind the desk and walked him out to the elevator. “Did Jeffries ever write back?”

Flynn laid his hand on my shoulder. “I wrote it so I would feel bad, not so he’d feel good. I never sent it to him,” he said with a wry grin. “Screw him.”

It reminded me of the letter that was still sitting in my desk drawer, the one I had forgotten to mail.

“Why don’t you take the case,” Flynn said as the elevator arrived.

I did not know what he was talking about. “What case?” I asked as he stepped inside.

“The case of whoever they charge with killing Jeffries,” he replied, holding the door open with his hand. “Whoever did it probably had a pretty good excuse.”

A few minutes later, at precisely eight o’clock, my secretary, Helen Lundgren, hung her coat in the closet and with her usual efficiency entered my office with both hands full. “Finished with those?” she asked, nodding her forehead toward the stack of files she had left at the end of the day on Friday. Before I could answer, she dropped another manila folder in front of me. “This is the one you need for court this morning.
State v. Anderson.
Motion Calendar. Nine-thirty.” Her left hand now free, she placed it on my arm so I would not move while she set a steaming cup of coffee down on the desk next to the file.

She moved all around me, arranging files, issuing instructions, a bare-bones skeleton of a woman, with sharp pointed elbows and razor thin legs, a shrill high-pitched voice and dark black eyes that were always darting from one thing to another, as if she could never quite decide which emergency to handle first. I told her I needed to send a letter, and before I had finished the sentence, she was on the other side of the desk, perched on the edge of the chair, a pencil held at attention just above the steno pad open on her bony knees.

I handed her the envelope that had been entrusted to me by Elliott Winston and asked her to find the home address for Calvin Jeffries and send it on to his wife. Then I dictated a short note explaining the circumstances under which I had received it, and added at the end a few words expressing my condolences for her loss.