The Ditto List (3 page)

As Walter rolled his eyes and scurried after the departing jurist, D.T. picked up his files and whispered some words to the witness and guided her to the master calendar board, then directed her to Courtroom Six, where
Watson
v.
Rodriguez
—Unlawful Detainer—was scheduled for hearing. Then D.T. looked in the appropriate places for
his
Mrs. Rodriguez. Not finding her, D.T. left the building. Another day, another dollar, another slap of shame. D.T's only consolation was that no one except his ex-wife had ever called him anything he had not already called himself.

TWO

Problems?” Bobby E. Lee raised a brow as D.T. came through the door. “You've got that look.”

D.T. dropped the files on Bobby E. Lee's desk. “Problems indeed. But I don't seem to be able to blame any of them on you.”

“You never can,” Bobby E. Lee replied truthfully. “What was it this time?”

“An overabundance of the surname Rodriguez.”

“So no Chicago and no flu?”

D.T. nodded. “Judge Hoskins depresses me so much I can't do anything but work. What do we have?”

“Two dittos, plus one non-usual.”

“And the lad with the scarf and earring?” D.T. dared a glance toward the couch.

“He's with me. We're off to lunch.”

“Didn't it hurt to stick that diamond in there?”

“I suppose, but then Tod's rather into pain.” Bobby E. Lee placed the cover over his typewriter. “I may be late getting back. I have to buy Daddy a birthday present.”

“I thought you and Daddy weren't speaking.”

“We aren't. I'm going to get him some bikini underwear to remind him why.”

Bobby E. Lee smiled a trifle fiendishly and closed the drawers of his desk, then plucked his satin jacket off the rack, motioning for his punctured friend to follow. The pair exited the office with the flair of those who see themselves as
objets d'art
.

For the hundredth time, D.T. started to wonder about Bobby E. Lee, but as usual he stopped himself before his speculation became risqué. Bobby was a good secretary and a good person. It was all D.T. needed to know, all he trusted himself to know as well. The rest was Bobby's business. Still, D.T. felt uneasy, as though there was some continuing obligation he was not fulfilling. He guessed it had to do with Bobby being homosexual, and with his own nonspecific responsibility for the jokes about fags and queers that befouled the air without his protest, with his apparently congenital sense that he should somehow make it better. For Bobby E. Lee. For everyone. Of course, a concrete obligation did exist. D.T. was more than a month in arrears in paying Bobby's salary.

D.T. glanced at the empty waiting room, then straightened the already straight copies of
Cosmopolitan, Vogue, People, US, Self, Shape
, and
Mad
that littered the coffee table. Whistling tonelessly, he emptied the ashtray and threw away the wilted rose that Bobby E. Lee had picked in the park on his way to work. Happy to be momentarily a janitor rather than a lawyer, he wished he would not have to imagine, whether in a few minutes or a few months, how the women he had freed at the Fiasco that morning would ensnarl their lives again.

He entered his private office and took off his coat and hung it on the rack. The small refrigerator in the closet contained only a slice of swiss cheese the size of a domino, a can of light beer, and a magnum of French champagne, the latter received in lieu of a more fungible fee from a client with a flair for the unusual and a brother in the booze business. As the result of his second honeymoon—embarked upon with his ex-wife after only ninety-seven days of marriage—D.T. hated both the French and their champagne and so was waiting for a suitable occasion on which to present the magnum to Bobby E. Lee.

D.T. took out his buck knife and cut a sugary dollop of mold away from the cheese, then downed it. The bottom drawer of his desk yielded half a roll of Lifesavers and a quart of Bailey's Irish Cream, a Christmas gift from the member of his poker group for whom D.T. was in the nature of a perpetual annuity. The liqueur washed away the lingering dust of cheese, the beer washed away the lingering film of candy. The mechanics of sustenance accomplished, D.T. pulled his time sheets from the credenza behind his desk and made notations appropriate for the morning's activity, calibrating and quantifying his most recent humiliation.

D.T. rarely performed a professional service that was payable on an hourly basis as opposed to a flat fee, so the time sheets he prepared so meticulously were invariably worthless. But there was always, he frequently told himself and occasionally believed, a chance that an initially routine matter would burgeon into a great litigious engine that would unearth someone, somewhere, who could be directed by an appropriate court to compensate D.T. for each and every minute of his time, at an approximate rate of two dollars per. Then he could live the way half the lawyers he knew were living—from the proceeds of that one big case, a sinecure that had fallen into their undeserving laps like a starling struck by lightning and had nevertheless generated, despite their persistent lassitude and seamless incompetence, a fee of an outrageous and easily sheltered six figures.

In the meantime, D.T. used the time records as raw data from which to calculate a flat fee that would yield him a reasonable return for services rendered and at the same time keep the unfortunate ladies coming through the door at an approximate rate of three per day. The last time he had run the numbers it had come out thusly for a default divorce, the staple of the Friday Fiasco:

Bobby E. Lee—Intake interview, forms completion, telephonic instruction re court appearance: 30 minutes @ $25.00 per hour = $12.50.

D.T.—Client interview and forms review: 35 minutes @ $75.00 per hour = $43.75.

D.T.—Court appearance: 15 minutes @ $75.00 per hour = $18.75.

Expenses—Filing fees, service of process, etc.: $75.00.

Total time and expenses = $150.00.

Surcharge for overhead and unforeseen difficulties, tantrums, wails, interruptions, consolations, reconciliations, etc.: $150.00.

Surcharge for inflation: $50.00.

Discount for socioeconomic character of clientele and existence of storefront law firms that advertise on billboards and compete on price: $150.00.

Net total: $200.00. Flat rate for default or uncontested divorce. Entire amount payable in advance unless alternate arrangements made prior to initial interview. Subject to change without notice. Frequently subject to reduction, occasionally subject to waiver, a gesture followed inevitably by regret and self-reproach.

D.T. shoved the papers away from him and thought again about what had happened in court. Running into Jerome Fitzgerald after all these years reminded him how differently his own life had evolved from the course he had envisioned during the turbid days of law school. Had he known anyone to whom he could have been truthful about such things, he would have confessed during his freshman year that he believed himself a fermenting mix of Perry Mason and Clarence Darrow, a nascent champion of lost causes, reviver of trampled liberties, master of the sine qua non of the trial lawyer's art—convincing anyone of anything. But after he had gone into practice on his own—against the advice of everyone he knew and a lot of those he didn't—the clients who came his way all possessed totally prosaic difficulties, dilemmas that, while they involved the basic passions and requirements of life and therefore invoked D.T.'s empathy and an invariably unprofitable expenditure of his time, did not attract the kind of publicity or renown that would bring more glorious causes to his door.

Mildly injurious dog bites, trivial slips and falls, evictions, credit hassles, change of names—the clients trooped in and out of his office like files of captured soldiers, asking little, getting less. His silver tongue tarnished by life's relentless ambiguity, the major Perry Masonish mystery in his practice soon came to be whether he would be able to pay Confederated Properties the exorbitant rent for the suite of offices that, he insisted as a point of pride, be at least one storey above the street and occupy at least one more room than the nearest branch of Legal Aid. So, twenty years after his dreams of glory and eminence had vanished as steadily as a salt lick in a stockyard, here he was, not quite envious of others, yet not quite satisfied with himself, pursuing a profession whose moral component was detectable only with the aid of a microscope or a philosopher.

D.T. swore at the law and at Judge Hoskins, made a resolution to change his life in some respect as yet unspecified, and took a sip of Bailey's. While his cheeks swelled with liquid candy, the bell above the door to the hallway tinkled briefly and a few seconds later the bell on Bobby E. Lee's desk chimed to match it. D.T. walked to the file cabinet and extracted the form headed Petition for Dissolution of Marriage and the accompanying Confidential Counseling Statement and Property Declarations and laid them on his desk. Then he picked up the phone and called a number he had called once a week or more for the past three years.

“Conway residence.”

“May I speak to Mrs. Jones, please?”

“Mrs. Jones ain't Mrs. Jones no more, she Miz Conway back again, and besides, she out.” The voice paused and experienced metamorphosis. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

“The one still stuck with the name of Jones. How are you, Mirabelle?”

“I's fine, D.T. Didn't recognize you voice. Been drinking lunch again?”

“Not a drop,” he lied. “Where's her loveliness?”

“Jazzercise, she call it.”

“She turned hip in her old age?”

“Not so's you'd notice, D.T. She still buying them tunes like they play in the supermarket. She be back by four, I expect. Take her another hour to recover, you got anything strenuous in mind.”

Her laugh made D.T. laugh. “Jazzercise. Is that dancing, or what?”

“Jumping like a toad on a hot rock is what it look like. She all the time practicing with a nappy-headed man on the TV sounds like my niece Lucille.”

“Have her call me, will you, Mirabelle? I'm at the office. My picture still on the piano?”

“The day it ain't, I let you know.”

“How's Heather?”

“Sweet as a sugar lump, like always.”

“Give her a squeeze for me. Tell her I'll see her tomorrow.”

“You bet I will.”

“Take it easy, Mirabelle.”

“You, too, D.T. Wish you'd come around here more. You an amusing man, especially when you had a few belts.”

“See you soon,” D.T. said, and thought for a mostly pleasant minute about his ex-wife and for a wholly pleasant minute about his daughter, then hung up and pulled out of his In Box the small stack of freshly typed statements that Bobby E. Lee had left for him.

They were the bills about to be sent to clients whose obligations had not been entirely satisfied in advance of D.T.'s services, despite his sworn policy to the contrary. D.T. reduced the amount due on the ones whose recipients either could not pay or for whom he had done less than either of them expected, and increased the amount due on others for whom both the results and the ability to pay were exalted. He went through them quickly, abashed as always at having to make his living by dunning women. When he had finished, he ran a quick total on his calculator, multiplied the result by 45 percent, which was roughly the coefficient of collectability in his practice, and applied the product to the outstanding balance on his note at the Citizens Bank and Trust. A drop in the proverbial and gargantuan bucket of his debt.

When the lady in the next room had been waiting long enough to suggest her prospective attorney was a man of frantic and colossal accomplishment, D.T. went out to retrieve her. As he approached the couch she put down her outdated
Vogue
on the exact spot from which she had obtained it and rose to meet him.

She was forty, perhaps, laboriously neat and hyper-alert, as though applying for a job for which she was unqualified. Her hair was short and shaggy, the color of collies, a tattered curtain across her forehead. Her brown eyes were outsized and ill-defined, doubtlessly sculpted with one of those long hairy tools promoted on TV. She was tall and slender, simply dressed and slightly sexless, careful. The ceramic glaze over her eyes would have caused some to wonder if she were drunk or drugged, but D.T. saw that look every day. His clients wore it like a mandala.

The woman wiped her hand on her slacks, then extended it toward D.T. along with a firm smile. D.T. smiled back. Her name, she said, was Mareth Stone. After a minute of greeting and small talk while they walked to his private office, her firm rein of intellect upon emotion led D.T. to suspect she could serve as an exemplar of his First Principle of Modern Matrimony—at any given point in any marriage, the wife is more intelligent than the husband on any subject of importance.

As she took her seat, D.T. glanced at the metal indicator in the top drawer of his desk. She was divorce client number 998. He was fast coming on a landmark. He clicked to the next digit and closed the drawer, uncertain whether he was cheered or depressed by the number of scalps he had accumulated.

He offered Mareth Stone a drink and a cigarette and she declined them both. He mentioned the weather and an event of current controversy and she had interest in neither. He looked her over carefully and obviously and she neither squirmed nor preened. She made no effort to seem devastated or blasé. At which point curiosity drew him out of his doldrums. After twenty years he still wondered what had finally killed their marriage.

“So, Mrs. Stone. What seems to be the problem?”

“I seem to need a lawyer.” Her lips didn't quiver and her eyes didn't leak. Unusual, but not unprecedented.

“What makes you think so?”

“I've been served with divorce papers. Haven't I?”

She reached into her bag and brought out an unsealed manila envelope and handed it to him. On it was the word “Divorce,” written with savagery in what he suspected was her hand.