Defense, page 17
“You’re a paralegal, not a lawyer, correct?”
“Yes, that’s right. But I’ve started law school.”
Her eyes were honest, intelligent, sympathetic. They never looked away from my face. She thought Bernie Rothstein was innocent and she had said so. Whether she knew it or not that meant she was now on his side.
“Good for you. Let me ask you this: Mr. Thorndyke wants Dr. Rothstein to settle this out of court. Do you agree?”
“Of course she agrees,” Thorndyke interposed. “She’s my paralegal. What else do you think she’s going to do?”
I kept looking at her. I had just given her the best chance she would ever have to lose her job.
I turned and looked at Thorndyke. “Tell you what. You think this case should get settled. I think it should go to trial. And I think your own paralegal agrees with me. What do you want to bet?”
For just an instant, he seemed to hesitate, the smug self-certainty replaced by the bare shadow of a doubt. “Whatever you like,” he said with a tight, controlled smile.
“Well, Miss Macaulay,” I said, turning back to her, “what is it going to be? Should Dr. Rothstein settle out of court or go to trial?”
She did not bat an eyelash. “I’d never settle out of court for something I didn’t do.”
Thorndyke’s smile died. “Fortunately, decisions like that are not made by paralegals.”
“Well, in this case, Thorndyke, they are. Dr. Rothstein is my client, not yours, and I’ve just decided that I’m going to represent him in the civil trial.”
“You do criminal law, Mr. Antonelli, not civil litigation.”
“In this firm, Mr. Thorndyke, I do whatever the hell I feel like.”
I was halfway out of the room before I remembered. “I will need some help with this. You’re right, of course. I do criminal work, not civil. So, if you don’t object, I’ll borrow your paralegal for a while. I assume she was assigned to this case?”
She was, and losing her was the last thing to which he was going to object.
The next morning she appeared in my office, ready to begin. The day before she had been wearing a dark blue suit and a white, high-necked blouse, the no-nonsense attire of the young professional woman. Today, in a loose-fitting print dress and flat shoes, she looked more like a college girl. I had almost forgotten she was both.
“I should apologize,” I said, gesturing toward a chair in front of my desk.
“For what?” she asked, as she sat down and looked directly at me.
“For yesterday. That was very unfair of me. I should never have put you in a position like that. Thorndyke is not going to forget it.”
She was nonchalant. “Don’t worry about it. He may not forget it, but he won’t do anything about it.”
It made no sense. “You won’t be able to go back to civil litigation. I can try to keep you here, if you like.”
“No, really. Don’t worry about it. It’s not a question of going back. I haven’t left. I’m still there, in civil litigation, and I can be there as long as I like. Right after the meeting broke up he made a point of telling me that.”
I did not attempt to hide my surprise. “Thorndyke is a better man than I thought.”
I thought she was going to laugh. “No, he’s not. He just thinks he can eventually get me into bed if he keeps me working for him.”
A strange, burning rush went through me, the tortured feeling of an adolescent the first time the girl he dreams of dying for destroys the illusion of her innocence with the mention of something about sex.
She laughed out loud, a soft, teasing, almost musical laugh. “You’re embarrassed! You! That’s wonderful!”
“No, I’m not. It’s just that … What’s so wonderful about it? I mean, if I was embarrassed?”
“You mean other than the fact I’m probably the only unattached woman you know that you haven’t slept with?”
It was the unfortunate habit of a lifetime. I cringed before the words were halfway out of my mouth. “But, we only met yesterday.”
She tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. “There! The man every woman loves and every husband hates. The famous lawyer with the tousled hair and beautiful brown eyes, the winsome manner and ready wit; the man for whom women are ready to do anything, though they know—don’t they?—that in return they’ll only get the privilege of being the latest woman in his life and the next to be abandoned.”
I wanted to feel offended, but I was too baffled, too taken with her, to feel anything except the certainty that I had never met anyone like her before. Underneath the playful mockery of her words was a gentleness, a feeling of sympathy and regret, as if she believed everything she said about me and thought she should feel sorry for me because of it. I could not help myself, I liked her, everything about her, even the way she made me feel that we might become friends instead of lovers.
We spent part of every day together working on the Rothstein case. If it was late in the morning or early in the afternoon we ate lunch at a restaurant nearby; we never met for dinner or saw each other at night. After that first session in my office she didn’t refer to my personal life again. As a paralegal and law student, she was more professional than most lawyers I knew.
Gradually, through casual conversation that interspersed the long and grueling hours of trial preparation, she became comfortable enough to answer some of my questions. Alexandra was from Boulder, Colorado, the daughter of a biology professor and violist. Her mother died when she was a young girl.
It was difficult to learn more than that. Memories of her childhood had been banished, and Alexandra was reluctant to revisit them. One afternoon, over a glass of wine and a late lunch, she told me that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death. There was something about the way she said it, more unguarded than I’d seen her before, that led me to believe I could ask her about it.
“She used to sit in her room with all the curtains pulled, sit there in the dark, for days at a time. My father told me she had headaches, but I knew it was something else. She killed herself,” she said softly.
After her mother’s death, her father withdrew into a world composed solely of his work and his daughter. When she finished high school, she enrolled at the University of Colorado. The thought of leaving him never entered her mind. At the beginning of her junior year, he was diagnosed with cancer, and she watched his decline. Two months before she graduated, wasted away to almost nothing, he died. The illness that claimed his life took all his savings, everything he had expected to pass on to her. Alone in the world, she sold the house where she’d been raised, where both her parents had died, and, with the little that was left after the bills had been paid, she left Boulder for good. For three years Alexandra had been living in Portland, building a life of her own.
She sounded almost defensive talking about it, anxious to draw distinctions between her mother and herself. The way she asserted their differences led me to believe that she had worried about her health, that what had happened to her mother might one day be her fate. Perhaps this was the fear that drove her.
Alexandra had a will to work and a depth of understanding I had rarely seen in one so young. And I needed it, for I had not handled a civil case in years, not since I was a young lawyer, too desperate to turn down any case that walked through the door. Quick to find the right document or hunt down the appropriate precedent, she was a natural. With astonishing intuition, Alexandra anticipated my doubts and answered my questions before I had the wit to voice them.
Because of her I was ready for trial well ahead of schedule.
“You’ve been a great help,” I told her one morning in my office. “I never could have done this without you.”
“Do you remember that day in the conference room with Thorndyke? When you asked me if I could believe Bernie Rothstein guilty of rape? Actually, I was having a hard time believing he could even think about sex! God, he seemed so innocent! He really had an affair? With his nurse? I still can’t believe it!”
“What if I told you,” I said slowly and very deliberately, “that Bernie Rothstein—that cute little innocent physician—was guilty as hell? That he raped her? That everything she said at the trial was true, and that everything he said was a lie?”
She thought I was kidding, and then she was sure I was not. “I can’t believe it! He did that? I never would have believed it possible!”
“Why? Because he doesn’t look like a rapist? No one said he jumped out of the bushes late one night and put a knife to her throat. They had been having an affair. She decided to end it. He didn’t want it to end. She said no, and he refused to listen.”
“He just doesn’t seem the type.”
“The type? Like everybody else you think there are two types, the type that do terrible things, and the type that don’t. It’s not true. You can look at some people and know right away they can do violent things. You look at someone like Bernie Rothstein and all you can ever know is that you can never really be sure what they might do. In the right set of circumstances anyone might become a killer, even you or me. There’s no way to tell.”
“But Bernie Rothstein?”
“What about him?”
“A rapist.”
“Who said so?”
She looked up, startled, confused. “You said.”
“No, I said ‘what if I told you?’ Bernie? A rapist? How could you believe anything like that? Wait till I tell him.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t dare!” she cried, trying hard to be angry. “How could you lie like that!?”
“I’m a lawyer. I do it for a living.”
“No, you do it because you like it.”
“All right. I like what I do for a living.”
She had to be sure. “Bernie Rothstein is innocent. Right? He didn’t rape her. Right?”
“I can think of only one person less likely to commit a crime.”
“Who?”
“Leopold Rifkin.”
“Oh, yes. Judge Rifkin. I’d love to meet him some day.”
Rifkin’s annual party was coming up soon. I imagined what it would be like going there with Alexandra, watching her captivate everyone she met with her dazzling smile. I started to ask, but then, afraid she might say no, and almost as afraid she might say yes, I changed my mind.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked, looking at me as if I must have lost my mind.
“The sudden realization that I have become permanently and completely incompetent with women.”
She cocked her head. “Maybe you always were. Or maybe,” she added as she turned to go, “you just never met the right one.”
The second Rothstein trial ended as the first had. Joshua Thorndyke III could make all the distinctions he wanted between civil and criminal cases, but none of that mattered to the jury. Whether Dr. Bernard Rothstein was charged with a crime or made a defendant in a suit, no one believed he could have done anything worse than find himself a surprised accomplice to his own seduction. If they had not had to elect a foreman, the jury might not even have bothered to shut the door behind them. Thirty minutes after they left the jury box, they were back.
During voir dire I had used all my peremptories getting rid of as many men as I could. Women have a better instinct for telling whether another woman is telling the truth when she accuses a man of sexual assault. Most of the women were middle-aged or older, but the foreperson was a freckle-faced young woman who worked as a teller in a downtown bank. When the judge asked if they had reached a verdict, she stood up at her place in the back row, announced in a high-pitched voice that they had, and handed the verdict form to the clerk. Then, as she sat down, she glanced quickly across at me and smiled.
The long nightmare was over. Bernie Rothstein had lost his family and had spent nearly all his money, but he had finally won back his reputation. He started to thank me, but I thanked him instead. He had trusted me, and coming from one of the very few innocent men I had ever defended, it meant more than I could tell him, and until that moment, more than I could have imagined.
“Congratulations,” Alexandra said after we had both said goodbye to Bernie Rothstein on the courthouse steps.
It was late in the afternoon and a cold wind had started up. March was coming in like a lion.
“You’re the one who should be congratulated,” I said, pulling my topcoat together. “You’re the one who really prepared this case. And now that it’s over, why don’t we celebrate? Have dinner with me.”
She reached up and touched the side of my face. “Thank you. I’d love to have dinner. But I can’t. I really can’t.”
I watched her hurry down the steps and disappear into the swirling crowd that moved along the sidewalk. Suddenly, I felt exhausted and more alone than I had felt in a very long time.
xv
The telephone was ringing when I opened the door. Ignoring it, I put my topcoat in the hall closet and dragged myself upstairs to the bedroom. I kicked off my shoes, flopped down on the bed, and stared up at the ceiling, listening to the dying echo of the telephone like some remorseless reminder of time running out.
I pulled on an old pair of jeans and a torn, gray sweatshirt and went down to the kitchen. After rummaging through the refrigerator for something to eat, I sat down at the dining-room table with the unlit candles and a centerpiece of false flowers. There was something incongruous about sitting there barefoot with a peanut butter sandwich, a piece of pie, and a glass of beer on a glistening table with nine empty chairs around it. The interior decorator had known exactly what the room needed when she picked it out. Everything fit with everything else, everything but me.
After I cleared away the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, I sat in the study, my legs propped up on the corner of the desk, a half-empty glass of beer in my hand. The telephone started to ring and again I ignored it. I was concentrating on Glenn Gould’s second recording of the Goldberg Variations, made near the end of his too-short life. It was a life I envied, the life of a solitary genius who needed nothing but the perfect sound that was there at the touch of his fingers on the keyboard. I had lived my own life surrounded by strangers, driven by a desire to be admired by people I never knew. Juries whose faces I could not remember five minutes after a verdict were all I really cared about.
The telephone rang again. “Hello!” I barked into the receiver, angry at the intrusion.
“Christ, you’re in a good mood,” the rumbling, familiar voice laughed. “I’ll call back in a couple of years.”
“Oh, hell, Horace,” I said, embarrassed. “I didn’t know it was you. Sorry.”
“You must have thought it was a client,” he said. Then he remembered. “But your number is unlisted. You don’t give it out to them, do you?”
“Not very often. But, you know, it’s hard to keep the crooks from stealing it.”
“Just don’t let them know where you live. Listen, I heard the Rothstein case came out all right.”
My glass was empty. I picked it up, and while I talked to Horace on the portable phone, wandered down the hallway and into the kitchen.
“Better than if he’d lost.”
“You must be having a bad night.”
“No, I’m all right. Look, Horace, you know how it works. Rothstein won today, but all anyone will ever remember is that he’s a guy who was accused of rape. He’ll never shake it. If he’s smart, he’ll move as far away from here as he can, change his name, and start over.”
“You need to remember something. If it hadn’t been for you all anyone would remember is that he was convicted of rape and sent to prison for twenty years.”
Putting the glass down on the counter, I opened the refrigerator and grabbed another beer. With one hand I flipped it open and poured. Foam ran over the top and down the side. “The system sucks, Horace,” I laughed.
“We can discuss that at length Saturday night.”
“What happens Saturday night?” I asked, wiping the foam off my mouth after I took a drink.
“Christ, you really are out of it. Rifkin’s party. Alma wanted to know if you’d like to go with us. You know, a double date. Boy girl, boy girl. That kind of thing. Like high school. You remember high school, Joe? Anyway, if you haven’t killed yourself because of terminal depression in the next three days, why don’t you come with us? And, really, bring someone. It’ll save you from listening to Alma talk about all the women she wants you to meet. Believe me, I’ve met them. You don’t want to. We’ll have dinner before we go.”
“Sure. That would be great. But it’ll just be me. I’ve given up women.”
“Yeah, right. And the pope has given up—”
There was an eruption. Everything went black, and then, for a split second, everything lit up before going dark again. The shutters rattled in the howling wind and the rain launched a furious assault on the roof and walls and windows and everything that stood in its way.
“What the hell was that!?” Horace exclaimed.
“Storm,” I explained rapidly. “The electricity is out.”
Someone was banging on the front door. “I have to go, Horace. My neighbor wants to borrow a flashlight.”
* * *
Every time there was a storm, every time the lights went out, the next-door neighbor made a beeline for my front door. Why he never had a flashlight of his own was a mystery. I suppose he was the eternal optimist: every storm was the last one, and the lights would never go out again. I hardly knew him, but I liked him. He was the quintessential American. Nothing, not even the evidence of his own senses, would ever make him stop believing that somehow, some way, things will always get better.
I grabbed the flashlight from the cupboard where I kept it, opened the door and held it out to him in the driving rain.
He did not take it. He just stood there without moving. It was not my neighbor at all. It was Alexandra. She was drenched. Her hair, wringing wet, blew wildly in the wind. She looked like Medusa.
I pulled her inside and slammed the door shut behind her. “What are you doing here? You must be out of your mind to be out in this!”
