The Four-Night Run Page 14

  Dan stared at Scrbacek for a moment and then turned to follow Jenny into the kitchen. “You want me to call someone?” said Dan.

  She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a can of coffee, started heaping teaspoon after teaspoon into a coffeemaker. “I want you to call no one. If I thought anyone should be called, I’m perfectly capable of picking up the phone myself.”

  “Jen,” said Dan, “it’s not a good idea for you—”

  “Go home, Dan. Get stoned, play guitar, watch television. Do exactly what you normally would do in your ultraproductive day.”

  “I think I should stay.”

  “What did I tell you about that?” she said, patting his cheek gently. “It’s not your strong suit, is it, thinking? Get your clothes on and go home.”

  Dan swiveled his head to stare at Scrbacek, turned to look again at Jenny, and then strode out of the kitchen and up the stairs.

  “That’s Dan,” she said to Scrbacek.

  “So I gathered.”

  She filled the water reservoir of the machine and plugged it in. “What are you doing here, J.D.?”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  “Your car’s blown up, your house is burned down, your intern’s dead, they think you did it, and your client, Caleb Breest, the dark lord of Crapstown, is not amused at his attorney. Yes, J.D., you’re in a boatload.”

  “And it’s following me around.”

  “So you bring it here. How nice for me and how typical of you. Are you clean?”

  “I need a shower.”

  She stared at him.

  “Yes, I’m clean. Forever, now. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t called. But I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “How heartwarming.”

  “Don’t act all hurt and bothered. It was you who got the restraining order.”

  “And you didn’t deserve it?”

  “It was a little harsh, don’t you think?”

  “You brought a gun into our house. Into our house.”

  “It was a client’s. It wasn’t loaded.”

  “And I was supposed to know that when you waved it in my face?”

  “I was a little cranked. It was a bad time. But now I’m clean and I’m in trouble and I need your help. Can you help me, Jen?”

  Steps pounded down the stairs before she could answer. Jenny bade Scrbacek to sit while she went to the entranceway to say good-bye to Dan. Scrbacek could see them there—the woman, the man, the dog—but not make out the words of their soft yet urgent conversation over the gurgling and hissing of the coffee machine. Finally, Dan leaned down to kiss her, and Jenny gave him her cheek. Dan patted Palsgraf’s head and took a final glance at Scrbacek. Jenny locked the door behind him.

  The thick smell of coffee permeated the kitchen. Jenny came back into the room, filled one of her huge coffee cups with the thick black slop, and sat down at the table with Scrbacek. She took her first few sips in silence. The dog raced around the room until fitting himself into a curl around her feet.

  “Remember how long it took,” she said, “for us to sleep together—all the hesitations and false starts? How scared I was because with you I was crossing some sort of line?”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “There was a Korean boy in college I never told you about, but that was just to piss off my folks. You were different.”

  Scrbacek smiled weakly.

  “Now there’s Dan. Things have a way of slipping from us, you know what I mean?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What do you want, J.D.?”

  “A shower and some sleep.”

  “And?”

  “And I need some answers.”

  “Boy, have you come to the wrong place. I don’t even know the questions anymore. Anybody know you’re here?”

  “Just you and Dan, and someone I trust completely.”

  “Is there anyplace else you can go? Think now. Anyplace?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re clean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can shower and sleep. You hungry?”

  “No, thanks. I just ate at Ed’s.”

  “Ed’s?”

  “Cute little bistro in the heart of Crapstown. But if you could put some bread, cheese, and fruit in a bowl outside, that would be great.”

  “Outside?”

  “For a friend.”

  “What is he—a bird?”

  “Close. I still don’t understand what is happening to me, Jen, but a fortune-teller told me part of the answer to how I ended up in this catastrophe was somewhere in my past.”

  “A fortune-teller?”

  “The Contessa Romany from the boardwalk.”

  “I’ve seen her sign. She has a good sign.”

  “So I was wondering if you had any ideas.”

  “On what a fortune-teller had in mind? Yeah, I have a pretty good idea.”

  “I came to you,” he said, “because you knew me better than anyone since I entered the law. If anyone has the answer, you do. Any ideas on what it was in my past that may have brought me so much trouble.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  He stared at her as she took another swallow of her coffee.

  She smiled over the brim of her oversize cup. “Think, J.D. Who’s been responsible for everything that’s happened to you since the very first day we met?”

  “I don’t know. Who?”

  “DeLoatch.”

  It had been almost a decade since J.D. Scrbacek, after a quick cigarette, walked with understandable nervousness into the majestic brick building that would be the center of his world for the next three years. He wore tan pants, a white shirt, suede bucks. It wasn’t his normal look, the preppy-on-the-make look, but it wasn’t a normal day, J.D. Scrbacek’s first day of law school.

  Whatever he had been in his suburban idyll of a childhood and his spent youth at college was gone, discarded now in favor of some future other. Isn’t that the bedrock hope of education, to learn enough to transcend the self, to become something new and better? And where better to start then at the Gap? So he bought all new clothes for school, choosing his wardrobe carefully to match his aspirations. He added a suit, too, from an upscale clothier—a blue suit, pin-striped and double-breasted, as was the style then—bottoming out his bank account to do it. He had considered wearing the suit that first day, but instead left it hanging in the closet. The suit, he felt, would be a bit much. This was still school after all, he was still a chrysalis. The suit was for after, when the process of becoming was over, and he simply was. Was what? A mover and a shaker in the big-money world. A man to whom wearing double-breasted suits and taking for himself all that came with them was as natural as breathing. Someone of whom the mother who made him tapioca pudding and the father who died could be proud. But for now, for the first day of law school, he kept the volume low and limited himself to the tan and the white and the suede.

  There were a hundred and twenty of them in the classroom that first day, nervous aspirants to the law, waiting with great expectation for their first law school professor to enter their first law school class. The hushed conversations all faded as the door opened. The man strode into the room with a proprietary air, as if he owned the room and the chairs and the very air inside. They didn’t know it yet, the aspirants, but that was how a trial lawyer entered a courtroom. He was small, this man, thin, with a great shock of gray hair and lively blue eyes. He stood before them in silence, as if gathering his words from a place on high, and the students sat on the edges of their chairs. The students had already bought their hornbooks. They held visions of making law review. Their fathers were lawyers, their uncles, their best friends’ mothers. They were ready, they had plans. They would be prosecutors and entertainment lawyers and public defenders. They would represent Greenpeace, they would represent Google. They would become investment bankers, divorce lawyers. But the path would be hard, they knew, and some would fail, tumbling lost into the lesser professions, like dentis
try or accounting.

  “What we’re learning here,” said the professor, “is criminal law. If you’ve come for contracts or civil procedure, you’re in the wrong class. But stay anyway. There’s no telling what you’ll be missing if you leave. Criminal law. I’ve been practicing it for thirty years on the defense side and still I have no idea what I’m doing. So why am I here? Because I know a hell of a lot more about it than do you. Criminal law.”

  He was wearing a suit, the professor, gray-checked and shabby. His tie was slightly askew, his shoes were scuffed, his eyebrows had gone decades untrimmed. His voice was prissy and precise and devoid of doubt. One and all they thought him magnificent.

  “Let me see,” he said, putting on his half glasses, taking a document from his case, examining it closely, turning over one page and then another. “There are so many of you. I have a question to start us off, and I need a volunteer to provide an answer.” He looked around. “No volunteers? Then let me see. Ah, here’s a strange conglomeration of letters. Mr. S-C-R-B—”

  “Scrbacek.”

  “Ah, there you are. Mr. Scrbacek, yes? And are you having trouble with your legs, Mr. Scrbacek? Good. Then stand, please, when you address the class. Thank you. Scrbacek. An unusual name. Where are your ancestors from, Mr. Scrbacek?”

  “Croatia.”

  “Good for you. Some of the greatest lawyers in this country’s history have been Croatian, though I can’t seem to name one off the top of my head. Let’s see if you measure up. Tell me, Mr. Scrbacek, what is a crime?”

  “Murder?”

  “Yes, that is a crime, but let’s be a little more general about it. Give me a rough definition.”

  “Physically hurting someone. Taking someone’s property without their consent.”

  “Oh, very good. So if I beat you senseless, that is a crime. And if I take your car without your consent, that too is a crime.”

  “Yes.”

  “But what if I’m a police officer and you’re a dangerous criminal who is resisting arrest, and in the process of subduing you, I beat you senseless. Is that then a crime?”

  “In that case, it would depend on—”

  “And what if I’m a banker and you’ve missed a year of loan payments, and I repossess your car without your consent but under authority of law. Is that a crime?”

  “Well, then, I would suppose—”

  “I take a gun and shoot you dead. Is that a crime?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But if you’re pointing a gun at me, what then? If you’re pointing a gun at my child, what then? If you are my father and you’ve beaten me every day of my life and you’re about to beat me again, what then?”

  “Those are different—”

  “What if you’re a Jew and I’m an SS soldier and we’re in Germany and the year is 1943. Is murdering you a crime?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if I’m ordered to shoot?”

  “Still a crime.”

  “Careful here, Mr. Scrbacek. Even if the law of the land compels me to shoot?”

  “Yes, it is still a crime.”

  The professor smiled, his small teeth bright and even. “I like you, Mr. Scrbacek. I admire your keen moral vision. You have a fine future ahead of you . . . in divinity school.”

  General laughter.

  “What is a crime, people? Very simply, it is an intentional act that violates a law. What kind of law? A moral law? A natural law? No, Mr. Scrbacek. A crime is an intentional act that violates the express and clear words of a criminal statute. Nothing less and nothing more. If it is not against the penal code, it is not a crime. And thank goodness, or we’d have a pack of Mr. Scrbaceks roaming the countryside determining which of us have violated his moral code and thus are deserving of citation, or imprisonment, or even death.”

  “I didn’t mean to say—”

  “Sit down, Mr. Scrbacek. We are finished.”

  “But I—”

  “Sit down, Mr. Scrbacek. Please. You frighten me.”

  And so he sat, J.D. Scrbacek, on his first day of law school, sat back down in his chair as the professor rattled on about the elements of a crime, sat in his chair and heard nothing but the voice of his own humiliation, felt nothing but the sweat rolling down his sides, soaking into the creased white of his new shirt, the tan of his new pants, running down his calf toward one of his new suede shoes.

  That was Professor Drinian DeLoatch.

  In the hallway, after class, Scrbacek tried to slip away unobtrusively, his head down, hoping no one would recognize him as the fool of that morning’s entertainment. With his eyes to the floor, he ran right smack into a public interest claque from the class. They were in jeans, sweatshirts and T-shirts, sporting backpacks, laughing in the hallway—laughing, no doubt, at him. And in the middle of the crew, tall and thin with long black hair, shiny and straight, was a woman startlingly beautiful. She looked at him and smiled and then shyly looked away.

  He just wanted to flee, to hide, to let time salve the pain of his embarrassment, but every postadolescent instinct in his body forced him to stop at the woman’s smile and smile back.

  And then this shy beautiful woman raised her eyes to his and said, in a voice not so soft, not so soft at all, loud enough, in fact, for all in the hallway to hear:

  “It’s a wonder you can still walk, Scrbacek, the way he reamed your ass in there.”

  And that was Jenny Ling.

  22

  AH, LAW SCHOOL!

  Scrbacek turned the shower to very hot and the nozzle spray to very narrow and let the water needle into his back and shoulders. He had tried at the start of the shower to keep the bandage dry on his swollen and purpled arm, had failed miserably, and hadn’t really cared. His hair was so filthy that he shampooed and rinsed once and then again, and still the water as it drained had been dark with soot and dirt and blood. So he shampooed and rinsed a third time and then a fourth. He scrubbed his chest, his legs, his neck, his bruise of an arm, his sliced nose. Now, when he felt almost clean, he stood still under the narrow nozzle spray and took a moment to pull himself together.

  DeLoatch?

  He had come to his old neighborhood, his old house, his old lover, had revisited his past to find what it was that had led him to his precarious state, and Jenny had given him one name.

  DeLoatch.

  She had implied that his current dire straits were his old law professor’s fault, but how was that possible? The professor surely wasn’t responsible for the hired assassin out to kill him, or the street gangs scouring the city for his body, or the first assistant county prosecutor seeking to indict him for murder. That was someone else, certainly. Joey Torresdale, maybe, or Caleb Breest, or someone else in the role of the magician, but not his old law professor. How could DeLoatch be responsible? How could a voice from his first year of law school have led him here, to this state of utter desperation?

  DeLoatch?

  “What is a criminal defendant?” had asked Professor Drinian DeLoatch rhetorically from his lectern. The professor’s hand was slipped Napoleonically into his vest, his chin rested on his chest as an outward demonstration of deep thought. “A human being with everything at stake. Reputation, property, freedom, sometimes life itself. A human being on the edge, facing the full weight of society’s damnation. Who in the whole of our legal landscape is in graver jeopardy? Who is in greater need of a champion?

  “What is a prosecutor? An instrument of Draconian justice. To a prosecutor, the human being in the dock does not exist. That person is simply the manifestation of an intentional violation of the penal code. He is not a man, he is a tax evader. She is not a woman, she is a thief. He is not a child, he is a murderer. A prosecutor’s universe is straight out of Dante. Violence against thy neighbor? Go to the seventh circle of hell, ring one. Forgery? The eighth circle of hell, ditch ten. For every violation, there is a punishment, and a prosecutor’s job is to see it enacted with dispassion and dispatch. A job made for our Mr. Scrba
cek, wouldn’t you say?”

  General laughter.

  “And what, pray tell, is a criminal defense attorney? The judge and jury are in league with the prosecutor. They agree with his Dantean vision of the world. They’re left only to determine whether a prosecutor has the evidence to enact the punishment. But the role of the defense attorney goes beyond the mere presentation or refutation of evidence. Because the defense attorney is defending more than the act. He is defending the innocent childhood of our defendant, the present conflicted soul, that soul’s very future, the potential to change, to grow, to become more than could ever be imagined by the limited vision of the Mr. Scrbaceks of our world. In so doing, the criminal defense attorney is not just the defender of the accused, but the defender of the accused’s humanity, and thus the humanity of us all.”

  DeLoatch?

  “Stand up, Mr. Scrbacek. I have a question that needs your sage consideration. What is the goal of a prosecutor?”

  “To convict the defendant.”

  “Ah, yes, to convict the defendant. You told me before, but I forget, Mr. Scrbacek, from where came your ancestors?”

  “Denmark.”

  “Really? Denmark. Generally an enlightened people, the Danes, which surprises, since your answers are unerringly wrong.”

  General laughter.

  “Does it seem as if I pick on you, Mr. Scrbacek?”

  “With an unseemly delight, Professor.”

  “Well, at least something’s getting through.”

  More general laughter.

  “The goal of a prosecutor should not be to convict, although that is unfortunately too often the case. No, Mr. Scrbacek, the role of a prosecutor is to do justice within the confines of due process. That is why prosecutors must turn over to the defendant all exculpatory evidence, known as Brady evidence. That is why prosecutors must turn over all grand jury statements once a witness testifies, known as Jencks material. That is why prosecutors are not permitted to cast away jurors on the impermissible basis of race—though they do, yes, they do. The theory, Mr. Scrbacek, is that it is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man lands in jail. Do you agree with that sentiment, Mr. Scrbacek?”