The Ditto List

The Ditto List

Stephen Greenleaf

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

FOR ANN, AGAIN

PLEADING

ONE

I know he's seeing a woman he's got three children older than, Mrs. Kunsman.…

“I know she wears peek-a-boo skirts and no underwear on her boobies.…

“I know they're probably doing things that will kill him what with his heart.…

“I know she's only after his money, I know your children are upset, I know the neighbors talk, I know all that and more, Mrs. Kunsman, and I have to tell you the same thing I told you the last time you called: there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You got the house and car and cat and half the assets and two thousand a month and a medical plan plus dental. He got the dog and what amounts to a permit to do the things you tell me he's been doing. And that's all there is, Mrs. Kunsman. The system doesn't let you spank him or send him to bed without his dinner or cover up his girlfriend's boobies. It only lets you take his money and keep his name if you want it. My advice is to forget about him and her and make a new life for yourself.

“I know it's easier said than done for a woman almost sixty, married forty years, Mrs. Kunsman. I know that as well as I know my own name.”

Deep within the fifth floor of the Hanford Professional Building, in one of the three windowless rooms that constituted the Law Offices of D. T. Jones, Attorney and Counselor at Law, Juris Doctor, Professional Corporation, Certified Specialist in Family Law, Available Day or Night, D. T. Jones who was all those things put down the phone, then reached across his littered desk and pressed a button on his cassette deck and silenced Willie Nelson in mid-lament. Then he glanced at the clock on the wall beside the framed photograph of John and Robert Kennedy he had purchased at a flea market for a buck from an Armenian exactly six years and six days after Jack had been shot in Dallas, the portrait marking generally the last time D.T. had felt an expression of optimism was warranted about anything remotely governmental, which included nearly everything, when you stopped to think about it.

The clock read 8:45. D.T. swallowed a dwindling chip of Cloret, unbuckled his thirty-two-inch belt, unzipped his thirty-four-inch slacks, stuffed the ends of his crew-neck T-shirt and the tails of his oxfordcloth button-down back below his waist, then redid his slacks and donned his size thirty-eight long side-vented blazer with the missing sleeve button and the cigarette burn above the left side pocket, snugged his challis necktie more firmly around his fifteen-inch neck, and forced the slightly frayed cuffs of his thirty-six-inch sleeves out of sight with a shrug of his narrow shoulders with the protruding clavicles that had provoked a giggle in every woman who had ever seen them. Dressed the way he had dressed for twenty years, he walked to the door and went into the neat, bright realm of his outer office, the domain of his secretary, Bobby E. Lee Merryweather.

Bobby E. Lee took one look at his boss and shook his tight black curls, then slid a three-inch stack of file folders across the desk. D.T. eyed the files and then eyed Bobby E. Lee, who was, on that morning as on all mornings, so impossibly pretty that the back issues of the magazines on the coffee table across from his desk, even the ones with Burt and Loni on the cover, were never touched by the waiting women. “How many?” D.T. asked him.

“Seven.”

“Problems?”

“Not that I've heard.”

“Same time, same station?”

“Roger.”

“Then let the Friday Fiasco begin,” D.T. proclaimed with the only grandeur that the day would bring. “I may be gone for the duration,” he added, as his head pulsed to the legato beat of his hangover.

“Oh, no, you won't,” Bobby E. Lee countered. “You've got three appointments. You told me I could schedule them. If you want to cancel, call them yourself.”

D.T. waved off the challenge. “If I'm not back by two you know what to do.”

Bobby E. Lee shook his fluffy head again, this time with resignation. “The flu or Chicago?” The words rose like gulls, above a bog of sour disgust.

D.T.'s pose became theatrical. “The flu, I think. One can recover more quickly from the flu than from Chicago, and one must always allow for recovery in the unlikely event that one discovers a place he actually wants to be or a person he actually wants to be with.”

“You're real bad today, aren't you, Mr. J? You always talk like an Englishman when you're hung over real bad.”

“Accurate as always, Bobby.”

D.T. scooped the pile of files under his arm and left his office. After a glance at his watch, he walked the two blighted blocks to the former grade school that now sheltered the southside division of the county court, through air that was already too warm and wet to please anything but fish and joggers, past the squat, concrete-block offices of bail bondsmen and tax preparers and lawyers even lower on the professional ladder than himself, around the panhandlers and prostitutes who knew him well enough to wave, then leave him alone.

He was running late. Judge Hoskins' clerk was closing the door with a liver-spotted hand as D.T. trotted down the marble hall toward Courtroom Two. “Hold it, Walter,” D.T. called out. “Can't start the show without the star.”

Walter's flesh trembled around his laugh. “If it's you, D.T., it must be Friday already.” A pink smile broke the gray ceramic of Walter's face, which then mended itself gradually.

“Friday it is, Walter. How's His Honor today?”

Walter rolled his eyes. “How's he ever? Best you watch your step. He's still grumping about the one that speechified on that guru, what's-ever-you-call-him, Maha-I-don't-know-who. The judge don't like speechifying, D.T. Not on Fridays, he don't.”

Walter's Gulf Coast accent acted on D.T. like a feather. He placed his arm across the fat man's shoulders. “No problems today, Walter. You have a good weekend. Reno?”

“You bet,” Walter said as he passed D.T. through the door before he closed it. “Hundred and a half for baby's new shoes last Sunday. Keno at the Grand.”

“Quit while you're ahead, Walter. That's my advice to keno players and married women.”

Walter ignored his counsel. “Who you like in the feature, D.T.?” he whispered.

D.T. shook his head. “Half the field's scratched, so it's a sucker bet, Walter. You got a better play at keno.”

“I hear you talking, D.T.,” Walter said, a grin again separating his pulpy lips. “I got just one question. Who you got
your
money on?”

D.T. smiled. “Mama's Buns at eight to one. But you're on your own, Walter. I don't recommend the action.”

“I been on my own since I was ten, D.T. Begins to look like it'll be full time.”

Walter waved and moved toward the chair directly below the judge's bench. Once there he would serve as everything from a bouncer to the custodian of admitted evidence to the nearest human target for Judge Hoskins' rubber bands on the frequent occasions when the expressway justice became strewn with man-made obstructions and the judge was moved to shoot at something.

D.T. slapped Walter on the shoulder as he passed, turned right at the second row of benches, and slid across the empty pew, looking all the while at the seven women who faced and watched him, their eyes locked on his and therefore sliding as he slid, their expressions midway between a plea and a barely stifled wail. His clients. Fodder for the Fiasco.

Appropriately, they sat like prisoners. Shoulder to shoulder, dress to dress, nylons to nylons, and dread to dread, they occupied the entire left portion of the back row of the courtroom, waiting patiently, all just as Bobby E. Lee had instructed. Bobby E. Lee issued wonderfully lambent instructions, but in one way each of the women had strayed. Hair too stiff, lips too red, cheeks mottled from the use and abuse of makeup, they all had tried hard to be something they were not and in the process had masked the one thing they all unquestionably were—young and undeserving of what they had endured in marriage.

D.T. had seen each of them for thirty minutes, a degree of client contact considered insanely bloated by most other practitioners in his specialty. One such, Randolph Q. Spivey, Esquire, boasted he had reduced his clients' claim on him to an average of seventy-two seconds. His goal was forty-five, at which time he would, according to his accountants, be earning one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Net.

Of course it was not a perfect world. Even in D.T.'s practice most of the actual work was done by a secretary—forms filled out, questions asked and answered, cautions issued, script rehearsed, assurances conferred, and, most important of all and therefore the first in time, the entire fee obtained up front. At each of these tasks Bobby E. Lee was far more proficient than D.T., so the client suffered not at all from the arrangement. For his part, D.T. mostly listened—a high percentage of women came to him primarily to publicize their predicaments and to be told, emphatically and repeatedly, they weren't crazy to think what they thought and feel what they felt. Then he asked questions designed to discover how in the world the woman had managed to get herself into the fix she was in. Only then did he explain, if she asked, how she could get out of it and what it would cost her and why she couldn't pay on credit.

“All set, ladies?”

D.T. eyed them one by one. Seven heads nodded, seven mouths stayed silent. D.T. quickly reviewed the files, then read off seven names and received seven nods in Pavlovian return.

Their stories were as interchangeable as their gestures. All of them had been married in their teens, all were barely literate, all worked at menial jobs involving food and could at any moment be replaced by workers in the country illegally, and all were married to raving assholes—drunks, addicts, or cretins who were in jail or in debt or in the next state in what they thought was love with a woman other than the one they had promised to cherish until death.

But the women were human as well as forsaken, and thus there were differences among them. Each had her own story, her own pet of anguish that accompanied her everywhere, the leash a chain of sorrow. One had a brother with a blood disease that was killing him, whom she visited every Sunday in a hospital a hundred miles from where she lived, fighting off drunken mashers on the Trailways every mile of the way. Once she had been almost raped in the toilet at the rear of the bus. Twice a guy had barfed all over her nice clean frock. Another of the women was married to a guy who made her wear Frederick's of Hollywood costumes whenever they went to a party, ones that displayed an expanse of her breasts not always excluding the nipples. And one was leaving the next day for Alaska to work as a cocktail waitress in a town near the pipeline where she'd heard a girl with a good body and a friendly smile could earn five hundred a week in tips without having to do anything but stand on her feet for eight hours and listen to stories about the girl back home. And if she was willing to spend some time on her back as well, she could get rich quick if she wasn't supporting a habit. And one of them had caught herpes from her husband who had earlier caught it from her sister, and one was going regularly to AA, and one was worried because her last period had lasted two weeks and she didn't know why and couldn't afford to hire a doctor who would tell her, and on and on. For over a year, D.T. appeared in court on behalf of five such women every week. He loved them all, and wished he could lavish them with riches, introduce them to swains, bathe them in oils, dress them in silks, shelter them from future sadness, all of which would be within the power of the thing he wished he was: Sir Jones. Knight Errant. Brave and Stalwart. Champion of the Miswed. But instead of silks and oils, on every Friday in the most definitely unfantastic atmosphere of the city's civil courts, D. T. Jones would obtain for his clients the minimum legal judgment available to women of their station—a Default Divorce. No alimony, no property settlement, no nothing, usually. Only the silent disintegration of a vow, to be memorialized six months hence in a humdrum legal form, with appropriate boxes checked and blanks filled in and notices and warnings printed in boldface at the bottom, entirely unsuitable for framing.