The Street Lawyer (25 page)

“We’ll worry about that later,” Mordecai said. “We have to win first.” We were in the front, at the desk next to Sofia’s where the aging computer worked most of the time. I was typing, Mordecai pacing and dictating.

We plotted until midnight, drafting and redrafting the lawsuit, arguing theories, discussing procedure, dreaming of ways to haul RiverOaks and my old firm into court for a noisy trial. Mordecai saw it as a watershed, a pivotal moment to reverse the decline in public sympathy for the homeless. I saw it simply as a way to correct a wrong.

Twenty-four

C
OFFEE AGAIN with Ruby. She was waiting by the front door when I arrived at seven forty-five, happy to see me. How could anyone be so cheerful after spending eight hours trying to sleep in the backseat of an abandoned car?

“Got any doughnuts?” she asked as I was flipping on the light switches.

It was already a habit.

“I’ll see. You have a seat, and I’ll make us some coffee.” I rattled around the kitchen, cleaning the coffeepot, looking for something to eat. Yesterday’s stale doughnuts were even firmer, but there was nothing
else. I made a mental note to buy fresh ones tomorrow, just in case Ruby arrived for the third day in a row. Something told me she would.

She ate one doughnut, nibbling around the hard edges, trying to be polite.

“Where do you eat breakfast?” I asked.

“Don’t usually.”

“How about lunch and dinner?”

“Lunch is at Naomi’s on Tenth Street. For dinner I go to Calvary Mission over on Fifteenth.”

“What do you do during the day?”

She was curled around her paper cup again, trying to keep her frail body warm.

“Most of the time I stay at Naomi’s,” she said.

“How many women are there?”

“Don’t know. A lot. They take good care of us, but it’s just for the day.”

“Is it only for homeless women?”

“Yeah, that’s right. They close at four. Most of the women live in shelters, some on the street. Me, I got a car.”

“Do they know you’re using crack?”

“I think so. They want me to go to meetings for drunks and people on dope. I’m not the only one. Lots of the women do it too, you know.”

“Did you get high last night?” I asked. The words echoed in my ears. I found it hard to believe I was asking such questions.

Her chin fell to her chest; her eyes closed.

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“I had to. I do it every night.”

I wasn’t about to scold her. I had done nothing since the day before to help her find treatment. It suddenly became my priority.

She asked for another doughnut. I wrapped the last one in foil and topped off her coffee. She was late for something at Naomi’s, and off she went.

THE MARCH began at the District Building with a rally for justice. Since Mordecai was a Who’s Who in the world of the homeless, he left me in the crowd and went to his spot on the platform.

A church choir robed in burgundy and gold got organized on the steps and began flooding the area with lively hymns. Hundreds of police loitered in loose formation up and down the street, their barricades stopping traffic.

The CCNV had promised a thousand of its foot soldiers, and they arrived in a group—one long, impressive, disorganized column of men homeless and proud of it. I heard them coming before I saw them, their well-rehearsed marching yells clear from blocks away. When they rounded the corner, the TV cameras scrambled to greet them.

They gathered intact before the steps of the District Building and began waving their placards, most of which were of the homemade, hand-painted variety. STOP THE KILLINGS; SAVE THE SHELTERS; I HAVE THE RIGHT TO A HOME; JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. The signs were
hoisted above their heads, where they danced with the rhythm of the hymns and the cadence of each noisy chant.

Church buses stopped at the barricades and unloaded hundreds of people, many of whom did not appear to be living on the streets. They were nicely dressed church folk, almost all women. The crowd swelled, the space around me shrunk. I did not know a single person, other than Mordecai. Sofia and Abraham were somewhere in the crowd, but I didn’t see them. It was billed as the largest homeless march in the past ten years—Lontae’s Rally.

A photo of Lontae Burton had been enlarged and mass-produced on large placards, trimmed in black, and under her face were the ominous words: WHO KILLED LONTAE? These were dispersed through the crowd, and quickly became the placard of choice, even among the men from the CCNV who’d brought their own protest banners. Lontae’s face bobbed and weaved above the mass of people.

A lone siren wailed in the distance, then grew closer. A funeral van with a police escort was allowed through the barricades and stopped directly in front of the District Building, in the midst of the throng. The rear doors opened; a mock casket, painted black, was removed by the pallbearers—six homeless men who lifted it onto their shoulders and stood ready to begin the procession. Four more caskets, same color and make but much smaller, were removed by more pallbearers.

The sea parted; the procession moved slowly toward
the steps as the choir launched into a soulful requiem that almost brought tears to my eyes. It was a death march. One of those little caskets represented Ontario.

Then the crowd pressed together. Hands reached upward and touched the caskets so that they floated along, rocking gently side to side, end to end.

It was high drama, and the cameras packed near the platform recorded every solemn movement of the procession. We would see it replayed on TV for the next forty-eight hours.

The caskets were placed side by side, with Lontae’s in the middle, on a small plywood ledge in the center of the steps, a few feet below the platform where Mordecai stood. They were filmed and photographed at length, then the speeches started.

The moderator was an activist who began by thanking all the groups that had helped organize the march. It was an impressive list, at least in quantity. As he rattled off the names, I was pleasantly surprised at the sheer number of shelters, missions, kitchens, coalitions, medical clinics, legal clinics, churches, centers, outreach groups, job-training programs, substance-abuse programs, even a few elected officials—all responsible to some degree for the event.

With so much support, how could there be a homeless problem?

The next six speakers answered that question. Lack of adequate funding to begin with, then budget cuts, a deaf ear by the federal government, a blind eye by the city, a lack of compassion from those with means, a
court system grown much too conservative, the list went on and on. And on and on.

The same themes were repeated by each speaker, except for Mordecai, who spoke fifth and silenced the crowd with his story of the last hours of the Burton family. When he told of changing the baby’s diaper, probably its last one, there wasn’t a sound in the crowd. Not a cough or a whisper. I looked at the caskets as if one actually held the baby.

Then the family left the shelter, he explained, his voice slow, deep, resonating. They went back into the streets, into the snowstorm where Lontae and her children survived only a few more hours. Mordecai took great license with the facts at that point, because no one knew exactly what had happened. I knew this, but I didn’t care. The rest of the crowd was equally mesmerized by his story.

When he described the last moments, as the family huddled together in a futile effort to stay warm, I heard women crying around me.

My thoughts turned selfish. If this man, my friend and fellow lawyer, could captivate a crowd of thousands from an elevated platform a hundred feet away, what could he do with twelve people in a jury box close enough to touch?

I realized at that moment that the Burton lawsuit would never get that far. No defense team in its right mind would allow Mordecai Green to preach to a black jury in this city. If our assumptions were correct, and if we could prove them, there would never be a trial.

After an hour and a half of speeches, the crowd was restless and ready to walk. The choir began again, and the caskets were lifted by the pallbearers, who led the procession away from the building. Behind the caskets were the leaders, including Mordecai. The rest of us followed. Someone handed me a Lontae placard, and I held it as high as anyone else.

Privileged people don’t march and protest; their world is safe and clean and governed by laws designed to keep them happy. I had never taken to the streets before; why bother? And for the first block or two I felt odd, walking in a mass of people, holding a stick with a placard bearing the face of a twenty-two-year-old black mother who bore four illegitimate children.

But I was no longer the same person I’d been a few weeks earlier. Nor could I go back, even if I’d wanted to. My past had been about money and possessions and status, afflictions that now disturbed me.

And so I relaxed and enjoyed the walk. I chanted with the homeless, rolled and pitched my placard in perfect unison with the others, and even tried to sing hymns foreign to me. I savored my first exercise in civil protest. It wouldn’t be my last.

The barricades protected us as we inched toward Capitol Hill. The march had been well planned, and because of its size it attracted attention along the way. The caskets were placed on the steps of the Capitol. We congregated in a mass around them, then listened to another series of fiery speeches from civil rights activists and two members of Congress.

The speeches grew old; I’d heard enough. My homeless brethren had little to do; I had opened thirty-one files since beginning my new career on Monday. Thirty-one real people were waiting for me to get food stamps, locate housing, file divorces, defend criminal charges, obtain disputed wages, stop evictions, help with their addictions, and in some way snap my fingers and find justice. As an antitrust lawyer, I rarely had to face the clients. Things were different on the street.

I bought a cheap cigar from a sidewalk vendor, and went for a short walk on the Mall.

Twenty-five

I
KNOCKED on the door next to where the Palmas had lived, and a woman’s voice asked, “Who’s there?” There was no effort to unbolt and open. I had thought long and hard about my ploy. I’d even rehearsed it driving to Bethesda. But I was not convinced I could be convincing.

“Bob Stevens,” I said, cringing. “I’m looking for Hector Palma.”

“Who?” she asked.

“Hector Palma. He used to live next door to you.”

“What do you want?”

“I owe him some money. I’m trying to find him, that’s all.”

If I were collecting money, or had some other unpleasant mission, then the neighbors would naturally be defensive. I thought this was a nifty little ruse.

“He’s gone,” she said flatly.

“I know he’s gone. Do you know where he went?”

“No.”

“Did he leave this area?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did you see them move?”

Of course the answer was yes; there was no way around it. But instead of being helpful, she withdrew into the depths of her apartment and probably called security. I repeated the question, then rang the doorbell again. Nothing.

So I went to the door on the other side of Hector’s last-known address. Two rings, it opened slightly until the chain caught, and a man my age with mayonnaise in the corner of his mouth said, “What do you want?”

I repeated the Bob Stevens plot. He listened carefully while his kids romped through the living room behind him, a television blasting away. It was after eight, dark and cold, and I’d interrupted a late dinner.

But he was not unpleasant. “I never knew him,” he said.

“What about his wife?”

“Nope. I travel a lot. Gone most of the time.”

“Did your wife know them?”

“No.” He said this too quickly.

“Did you or your wife see them move?”

“We weren’t here last weekend.”

“And you have no idea where they went?”

“None.”

I thanked him, then turned around to meet a beefy security guard, in uniform, holding a billy club with his right hand and tapping it on his left palm, like a street cop in a movie. “What are you doing?” he snarled.

“Looking for someone,” I said. “Put that thing away.”

“We don’t allow solicitation.”

“Are you deaf? I’m looking for someone, not soliciting.” I walked past him, toward the parking lot.

“We’ve had a complaint,” he said to my back. “You need to leave.”

“I’m leaving.”

DINNER WAS a taco and a beer in a corporate bar not far away. I felt safer eating in the suburbs. The restaurant was of the cookie-cutter variety, a national chain getting rich with shiny new neighborhood watering holes. The crowd was dominated by young government workers, still trying to get home, all talking policy and politics while drinking draft beer and yelling at a game.

Loneliness was an adjustment. My wife and friends had been left behind. Seven years in the sweatshop of Drake & Sweeney had not been conducive to nurturing friendships; or a marriage either, for that matter. At the age of thirty-two, I was ill-prepared for the single life.
As I watched the game, and the women, I asked myself if I were expected to return to the bar and nightclub scene to find companionship. Surely there was some other place and method.

I got dejected and left.

I drove slowly into the city, not anxious to arrive at my apartment. My name was on a lease, in a computer somewhere, and I figured the police could find my loft without too much trouble. If they were planning an arrest, I was certain it would happen at night. They would enjoy terrifying me with a midnight knock on the door, a little roughing up as they frisked me and slapped on the cuffs, a shove out the door, down the elevator with death grips under my arms, a push into the rear seat of a squad car for the ride to the city jail where I would be the only young white professional arrested that night. They would like nothing better than to throw me into a holding cell with the usual assortment of thugs, and leave me there to fend for myself.

I carried with me two things, regardless of what I was doing. One was a cell phone, with which to call Mordecai as soon as I was arrested. The other was a folded stack of bills—twenty hundred-dollar bills—to use to make bail and hopefully spring myself before I got near the holding cell.