Eric Dinnocenzo - The Tenant Lawyer (11 page)

“Yes, I know, mother,” I said in a tired tone.
“Any more instructions for me tonight?”

My father chuckled. “Kind of touchy tonight, isn’t he?”

My mother changed the subject by saying, “Well, your sister is doing fine. She visited last weekend. You should see Nora and Ryan, they’re so cute. When was the last time you saw them?”

“I don’t remember exactly.
A few months ago, maybe.
I need to see them again.”

“Ryan is such a character,” my mother continued. “We were watching TV the other day and there was a picture on the screen of a big snow-capped mountain, and he said, ‘Boy, there are so many things I haven’t seen before.’ It was adorable.”

“That’s funny,” I said.

My mother mentioned that a new store was opening at the Greendale Mall and it was having a sale; its name went in one ear and out the other. She was something of a shopaholic, spending quite a bit of her free time at the mall. “Do you need any dress shirts for work? They’re having a forty-percent off grand opening sale.”

“Not really. I just wear them for court, so I don’t wear them every day. And I already pretty much have enough.”

“Forty percent off is a good deal.”

I took a bite of food and while chewing told her, “Don’t bother. You don’t have to get any for me.”

“It’s no trouble. You need good shirts. You want to look nice for court.”

“I have some from my last job. I’m really all taken care of.”

“But that was two years ago.”

I chuckled at her persistence. “I don’t want you to go to the expense. Plus, trust
me,
the Worcester Housing Court is no beacon of fashion.”

“Well, you never know where you might be in the next few years. You might have another job.”

“All right, Mom.”

In a short while I noticed my father gazing over my shoulder through the window at the backyard. Except for a small area illuminated by an exterior light, everything out there was covered in darkness.

“I’m going to put new mulch in the backyard this spring or summer,” he said dreamily, and then he looked over at me as if expecting a response.

“Okay,” I said.

“I may even put in some new shrubbery.” He paused for a moment, as if lost in thought. “I broke the shovel last year, so I’ll have to get a new one.” Again he looked at me for a reaction but I had nothing for him.

Soon we finished eating and cleared the table. When we were done, my parents invited me to watch TV with them, but I decided to go upstairs to my room instead. I carried my overnight bag up there and put it down on the floor, then stood there and took a look around. I hadn’t been in my old room in a while, and it seemed strange and unfamiliar, as if it belonged to someone else. It hadn’t really changed much from when I was in high school which all of a sudden I found a little unsettling. On top of my bookcase was an old boom box that for some reason no one had ever thrown away—the type that people carried around on their shoulders in the 1980s and required eight D batteries. Seeing it made me remember that my old cassette tapes from that time period—an expansive catalogue of Van Halen,
Def
Leppard
and Led Zeppelin—were stored in a couple of shoe boxes in my closet. I should really throw all of that stuff away, I told myself. When the hell am I going to listen to a
Def
Leppard
cassette?

I took a few steps forward and bent down in front of my old desk to look at a framed 5 x 8 inch picture of myself when I was ten or twelve with my pet chocolate lab, Maggie. She was sitting on her hind quarters with her tongue out, and I was on one knee with my arm around her. She died when I was fourteen, which really broke me up at the time. Next to it was a picture of me and my family together at my high school graduation. I marveled at how young I
looked,
my facial features soft and smooth. It was strange to me, upon reflection, that I had only a few clear and distinct memories from high school. They were separate and disassociated from one another, like different colored patches on a quilt.

My next clear memory after high school graduation was of my parents taking me to college for my freshman year. My mother stayed up late the night before we left, long after I had gone to bed, packing my stuff and even baking chocolate chip cookies for me. When my parents finished helping me set up my things in my dorm room, I walked them to their car to see them off. Hugging them goodbye and watching their car drive
away,
I felt a sense of desolation at being on my own for the first time in my life. But I was also excited at the prospect of it. I ended up eating only half of the cookies and felt guilty a few days later when I threw the rest away.

10

Th
e following Monday morning, the colonel called me into his office to do a case review. It was an exercise that I wasn’t particularly fond of. He would ask me detailed questions about my cases and I’d feel pressured to answer them off-the-cuff. Analyzing cases was the part of being a lawyer that he enjoyed most, and while I enjoyed it, too, I didn’t like being peppered with questions by him.

For the past ten years, since graduating from Columbia University Law School, the colonel had been a public interest attorney, starting off at Mental Health Legal Advisors in Boston and two years later coming to our office in Worcester. After only one year as a staff attorney doing my job representing tenants in housing court, he was elevated to the position of litigation director. That put him in charge of the more complex cases that came into the office, such as those involving housing and employment discrimination. Rumor had it that his promotion resulted from his cozy relationship with the executive director, a largely absent figure who was often off attending
conferences and engaging in lobbying efforts. For a relatively young and inexperienced lawyer, it was a rapid rise in the hierarchy. But he was a very smart guy and a good lawyer, and as time passed, the executive director more and more left the day-to-day operations of the office to him.

One thing always struck me as a little odd. Although he was the litigation director of the office, the colonel had only tried one case in his entire career. It was an eviction trial, and I never learned the specifics of it or whether he had won or lost. As litigation director, he had a stable of good cases that he worked up well, and the defendants tended to settle. The crappy cases that I routinely handled were the ones that often went to trial.

As usual the colonel and I got down to business without any small talk—not even a perfunctory question about our respective weekends. I didn’t have much to tell him anyway, given that I had spent the weekend alone. I had only left the apartment to go to Starbucks in the mornings to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee and to go out jogging in the afternoons.

Last Tuesday, Sara had mentioned that she might visit her parents for the weekend by herself. She always visited them without me, and like many times in the past, I made an issue out of it. I claimed that she wasn’t proud of our relationship, that it didn’t mean enough to her to make her stand up to her parents and tell them that her visits would have to include me coming with her. Things escalated from there into an argument and she stuck to her decision to go without me.

“You don’t understand my relationship with my parents or the position I’m in,” she said to me in an impassioned voice.

“What’s there to understand? They want you to visit them without me and you comply.”

“Yeah, because they’re crazy and they’re not nice.
I hardly see them, so I just go along with it because otherwise I wouldn’t see them at all.”

I never fully understood why her parents didn’t want me to visit with her. I had been out to dinner with them a handful of times and it had always been pleasant. But apparently behind the scenes they didn’t want their contact with me to extend beyond that. Sara always chalked it up to their being crazy and
unreasonable,
and not anything personal having to do with me, saying that they had always acted that way with her boyfriends. But she never spelled it out for me beyond that.

In part I understood the point Sara was making—that she was between a rock and a hard place—but I also couldn’t help feeling wounded by her actions. I couldn’t help thinking that in her shoes I would’ve taken a stronger stand. After seven years together, weren’t we supposed to come first in each other’s lives?

The colonel began by inquiring about what had happened at the last CDBG meeting. I briefly paused to order my thoughts. My general approach with him was to reveal limited information, but not to mislead him, which was a delicate balance to achieve. I cleared my throat,
then
told him that Father Kelly had made a convincing argument that we should propose a meeting with the city and that was the direction we were going in.

“Has anyone mentioned filing a lawsuit?”

“No, not seriously.”

“Well, keep me posted, okay?”

“Sure.”

We moved on to talk about other cases. I felt glad that the discussion about CDBG had been brief. It was a little pet project for the colonel that he liked to watch develop from afar. What interested him about it was that it had a political dimension, high stakes were involved, and he viewed it as a chess game where each move had to be carefully chosen. The colonel was a skilled legal tactician. If presented with a legal issue, he had an impressive ability to give a snapshot analysis of it and recommend the best immediate course of action. He was, in fact, my superior in that regard, given his considerable intellect and years of legal experience. But when it came to legal strategy his abilities were a little weaker. Legal strategy was different from tactics, because it encompassed seeing the big picture of the case and engaging in long-range planning. Uncertainty caused the colonel to waffle at times,
and he tended to err too much on the side of caution. If he saw a weakness in his case—and nearly every case has at least one—he would allow it to cast a big shadow over how he approached the case as a whole. His doubt made him tread cautiously at times when he should have marched forward. For instance, if he thought his client wouldn’t be a strong witness, he’d become convinced that the case couldn’t go to trial. It did not matter that the witness wasn’t really that bad, or that other witnesses could pick up the slack, or that the other side may have had even more serious flaws with its case. Consequently, he’d take less in settlement than he might otherwise have gotten if he’d been more hard-charging.

The colonel’s phone rang and he picked it up on the first ring, giving me the “one second” sign by sticking his finger in the air. When he began speaking in a soft voice, I knew he was talking with his wife. I looked to the side at his bookcase, pretending not to listen but eavesdropping all the while.

“I don’t want them to think it’s due to me.” He paused. “Yeah, but if you say that, then they’ll automatically think it’s me.” Thirty seconds later he hung up the phone. He leaned back in his chair and touched his fingers together. “So what else are you working on?”

“Just cases,” I responded with a shrug. “Same old stuff.”

“What’s new that you’re working on?”

Somewhat reluctantly, I told him about Anna’s case. When I finished he looked at me with an amused smile.

“What?”

“You really took this case? You know it’s a complete loser, right?”

“It’s weak, yeah, but it has an interesting legal issue with the notice to quit—whether the drug activity was on or near the premises.”

“But you’re still going to lose in the end. Even if you get it dismissed, the housing authority will just bring a new case with a thirty-day notice. With these facts, Judge McCarthy will definitely find that the son was involved in drug activity. He was arrested in a car that heroin was sold from. In the end, the client will be out.”

What he said was true. I was putting my stock in one particular argument that would probably go nowhere and then I would be left with a very weak case. “I know, but if we don’t stand up against this type of shortcut with the notice to quit,
Merola
will keep doing it. It’s a worthwhile issue to pursue.”

The colonel considered my statement. “You have a point. But you do know that Judge McCarthy is going to deny your motion to dismiss, right?”

“Maybe he’ll research all of the relevant Massachusetts law and write a lengthy, well-reasoned decision in my favor.”

“Yeah, right.”
The colonel chuckled. The only time he ever laughed at jokes was when they were of a legal nature. “So when is the trial date?”

“I don’t know.”

“You filed an answer and discovery request, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that means the trial date is automatically kicked over two weeks from the original date, right?”

“I made a request for a jury, so I haven’t been assigned a trial date.” The words escaped my lips quickly and without inflection. I knew they weren’t going to make him happy.

“You what?”

Although tenants in Massachusetts had a right to a jury trial in eviction cases, juries were never requested by our office, or by other private lawyers who practiced in the Worcester Housing Court. There were reasons for this. A jury trial took more time, expense, and preparation than did a case tried in front of a judge. Landlord-tenant cases, which were almost always small and uncomplicated affairs, generally did not warrant the investment of time and resources that were required. And although Judge McCarthy certainly had his faults, the general consensus was that for tenants, he was preferable to a jury in conservative Worcester County. Most people in the jury pool were
property owners who believed that landlords should have a sovereign right over their property. They had also been tainted by stories promulgated by the media and through word-of-mouth about landlords who were unable to evict deadbeat tenants for months and months. For the most part, the stories weren’t true. When tenants failed to pay rent in Massachusetts, landlords could get them evicted pretty quickly, usually in about a month. But the stories were out there and people heard them.