Authors: Matt Pavelich
But there came a sticking point in every interview, a place where team play was mentioned, and where would-be employers in silk ties began to rhapsodize about the local supply of young, fee-generating associates just then aching to live every waking moment in the offices
and at the service of an established law firm. Giselle was informed that this kind of dedication, rigorous though it may be at first, was how futures were built in the trade, and she was advised to think of all the child care options that became available to women with improved incomes, and so, before she'd ever managed to fight her way completely into the profession, she had already conceived a certain loathing for it, already begun to understand that as a vocation, the law might partake a little of her learning and good heart, but mostly it would want her time, and all of it.
Quite plain and chronically unlucky, she was barely making rent. Student loans were falling due. She had meticulously researched and written and circulated on ivory bond a hundred letters of introduction, been to a dozen interviews for firm handshakes and a good deal of looking squarely and earnestly into incurious eyes, but to date she'd received for offers only the memo from the office manager at Corwin and Mizner, a firm where she'd interned, and where, it seemed, one of the partners had wondered if she'd like to come in for some occasional light typing.
These were the dismal months when her daughter's doctor recommended that Sheila be given a stronger, more expensive inhalant to use, a time of no insurance. They were living in a studio apartment on a shag carpet then thirty years in continuous service, a thing that had absorbed the gross spillage of a hundred prior tenants and that wanted vacuuming twice a day. Giselle went six days a week to Ari's Little Athens, where she wore a smock and a floppy chef's hat and stood eight and ten hours at a time slicing spiced lamb from the spit. Ari was Syrian. He paid her under the table. She came home from these shifts and, even after her shower and a change of clothes, wore the scent of rendered fat and rosemary. They were eating surplus and hijacked Greek food at that time, and cheap noodles, and they were not especially healthy. They owned a hula hoop from the Goodwill,
and a Candy Land game that they kept for sentimental reasons though they both secretly hated it, and the radio, which they fought over, and they subsisted on a few exquisitely observed rituals: Friday nights were for bubble baths, Sunday mornings for cocoa over a their scattered
Missoulian
.
From this buck-fifty bonanza, Giselle extracted advice to the lovelorn and tips on how to play certain hands of contract bridge and how to do gratifying things to a garden. With Sheila deep in the funny papers, mom would read through announcements of births and weddings, read the obituaries and the gossip magazine with its lists of all-Americans, and finally, when she'd given herself a headache anyway, she'd turn to the paper's help-wanted ads, a place where, browsing under the Professionals heading, she was always made to feel the trespasser. Week after week, the state and the tribes and various law firms and debt collectors were seeking attorneys under this heading, but never new ones. There seemed to be no need of fresh blood in the legal industry, and the unmistakable implication of the want ads was that she was not wanted.
Finally a Sunday came, though, when a place called Conrad County was soliciting bids for its public defender contract. Applicants were only specifically required to hold a license to practice law in the state of Montana, and so her bid for the position was in the mail that Monday morning, equal parts a figure she'd pulled out of thin air and language she'd lifted from the ad itself. Giselle agreed, for what would prove to be a disastrously paltry sum, to stand for the calendar year as counsel within the county for all indigent persons accused of felonies and jailable misdemeanors or who faced probation and parole violations, and she would be indigent counsel as well in juvenile court and in some social services matters, as per appointment, and she would hold regular office hours in the county seat. She'd done none of these things before, but this was no time for the
irksome detail, and Giselle thought the terms of her offer might be desperate enough to succeed.
She found Conrad County on her road map. It had the profile of a bent leg with river systems for its bones, and it lay almost contiguous in places with the northern border of the county where she'd lived for the last fifteen years, yet she didn't know it by name. Conrad County? There were so many counties and their names were of no significance unless you lived in them, but she did recognize the names of some of the townsâthere were three of themâand at some indefinable time, and for reasons she couldn't now remember, she'd passed through them, and of the towns and of the roads between them she'd retained an impression of remoteness, of shade-tree industries and oiled gravel; she remembered deer bounding across yellow road signs. There must have been people, too, along the way, but she could not particularly recall anyâthere had been several long bridges, a dam she thought, and those deep and darkly timbered valleys. Perhaps the human presence was negligible there.
When she learned she'd won the contract, it came, somehow, as no surprise, and the flush of success lasted just half an hour before subsiding into a more familiar sense that she'd fallen into something else unwholesome, and this was the mood that persisted while they were moving and as the Toyota kept breaking down under the strain of being overloaded. Giselle went still deeper in debt to buy a desk and rent an office and rent them a cottage in the woods where Sheila, for the first three months, might be found weeping two and three times a day. Giselle Meany bought the Montana Code Annotated and some shelves to hold it, and she did her best to completely absorb Titles 45, 46, and 61. She painted their bedrooms, for they had bedrooms now. She screwed a hook outside Sheila's window and hung from it a hummingbird feeder, and it became her daughter's duty, as the birds regularly emptied the thing, to recharge it with Karo syrup.
And then one day she was the public defender. Giselle took possession of a filing cabinet full of cases, many of them still active. Her recent predecessors in this job, and there were a startling number of them, did not on paper seem to have been very interested in the work; she opened files in the hope of deconstructing them, of learning from them how to mount a defense, but counsel for the defense was a rare and tepid presence in these records, and there was little but professional contempt to be learned from them. So, without a mentor, and without any real example or precedent, she waded in, the throbbing razor of her ignorance always right at her throat, and she was suddenly in constant conference with people of astounding depravity, clients who knew far more law, or claimed to, than she could ever conceive of learning. In her first week's work she was presented with a burglary and an arson, and two fragile, raging alcoholics for clients. Giselle Meany finally understood that she'd thrust herself into the gravest affairs, and she was terrified all the time, and she'd managed her own circumstance so ineptly that she couldn't pay herself quite as well as Ari the ersatz Greek had paid her. She was working all those hours she had hoped to avoid, and all for an income so bad that she might have had food stamps if she'd applied for them. She remained a somewhat superfluous mother.
But a table was set for each of them in the life of the community, and they settled in. Sheila acquired Viktoria, a peculiar, angular girl, for her regular baby sitter, and Viktoria, as it happened, was an athlete, so Sheila became one, too, an agile, tireless prodigy, her asthma an unpleasant memory once she'd breathed greatly of the mountain air. With her mother at work, there was nothing much to prevent the girl from dribbling a basketball endlessly in the kitchen, and in time, other athletes learned of her, and she was always wanted for one game or another, and she fell into friendships with fellow soccer players and softball players and the like, an energetic group of giggling pals. Her mom, meanwhile, became addicted to caffeine and adrenalin.
It wasn't ennobling work Giselle Meany had got, but it was pure in its way. As she lacked the right to rank her clients with respect to their just deserts, she argued full force for all of them, all of the time, and in the county's courts and various offices, she gained a reputation as a meddlesome fool, a heart worn on a sleeve and bleeding inexhaustibly, without discretionâso be it. She was paid bottom dollar, and her clients were, by and large, bottom feeders, quick to whine and lieâand so be it. In the absence of any other satisfaction or incentive, she learned to serve the shining principle. Giselle Meany had decided it must be her lonely lot to just be everyone's champion.
So, year by year, she negotiated slightly better contracts, and in time she began to buy the cottage in the woods.
Six years into it now, and too stingy and too stubborn to buy professional wear appropriate to so short a season as Montana's summer, she waited on a muggy morning in the county attorney's outer office in one of the three suits she wore in rotation throughout the year, a garment that felt in such weather like chain mail over a hair shirt. Breathing her personal miasma of lanolin and bargain brand deodorant, she frequently let slip the word “bullshit.” There was always something better to do with her time than wait, but she was a professional supplicant and spent a good deal of time waiting. “Nelda,” she said, “what's he doing in there? Should I just come back later?”
“He's got the commissioner on the phone.” Nelda included Giselle in her league of long-suffering women, gals who met at random to express doubt about the doings of men folk.
“Which one?”
“Oh, it's that Mr. Rudolph,” said Nelda, “or Commissioner Chatty Kathy, as I call him.”
When Meyers finally did call Giselle into his office, he greeted her there with an open tin of Dr. Platko's Health Mints.
“How many times do I have to tell you I hate those things? It's like chewing Drano.” They were bracketed by whirling floor fans, and she had not the option of speaking softly if she wished to be understood. They did business always in his office, never hers, and she resented this several times every week. “I wanted to get started on this Brusett thing. I think we'd better work something out now, don't you? Don't you think it's time to be just a little bit reasonable? Deliberate homicide? What a mess now. This is a lot of extra work, and there's Mr. Brusett sitting in jail, which looks like it could just about kill him off. You've just barelyâjust
barely
âgot probable cause, Hoot.”
“Take a look at what I do have, and you tell meâwhat am I supposed to charge in this thing? What other charge fits? It's this or let it go completely, which I am not inclined to do.”
“You can't prove it.”
“You want to talk to the kid's parents for me? Tell 'em what a weak case I've got?”
“You could tell 'em what I just said. You could have told 'em you didn't have enough to convict. Which is only the truth. I mean, this is a âmere presence' case. It's well-settled law, you can't convict a guy of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“With a corpse in his lap. The man's blood all over him.”
“Okay. Probable cause. But that's it, and you know it. I think we've really got to do something now. Something smart.”
When she had first met the county attorney she'd mistaken him, with his brick red complexion, for a drunk, another lawyer too fond of his cocktail, but there was a pale boundary at his temples. It was weathering, a farmer's tan he wore, and she would learn in due course that he was the canny baron here, beholden in this fiefdom to no one. The practice of law, as she'd known it, had consisted almost entirely of shadowboxing with him. Of the men in her lifeâtormentors, lovers, friendsâit was Hoot Meyers, constant opponent, defining other,
who'd been most like a husband. He'd won eleven of the twelve cases they'd tried before Conrad County juries, and this hard history bordered their every conversation.
“What do you propose?” he asked her.
“I don't know. Motion to dismiss? You could do that.”
“Why? What's my basis? Tell the judge I was just kidding? Never mind. Sorry, Your Honor, I kind of lost interest. Look, I've got this fund drive going on for the hospital, and this-that-and-the-other-thing going on, so if you can give me any reason at all I'll be happy to ask for dismissal. But it would be up to you to find me that reason. Wouldn't it?”
“You can't prove it,” she said, an image of bloody, matted hair in her mind's eye. “How's that for a reason? How about you can't prove murder here? For a reason?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“It remains, that's the problem. What are we gonna do? You know as well as I do that that guy doesn't belong in jail.”
“All right. Personally, I think Henry Brusett's one of the nice ones, and personally I don't think he's likely to harm a hair on anybody's head. Not without a real good reason. But, see, that's just my opinion. If you look at this thing objectively, it's a little harder to come to that same conclusion. Looks like he must've done something or other up there.”
“Something or other? You know, this is just not like you. That man does not belong in jail, and you know it.”
“No? Who does?”
Giselle Meany had decided early on, and despite her client's murmuring to the contrary, that there was no violence in Henry Brusett. Having formed that companionable hope, she was not about to abandon it any time soon. There were lunar phases in her career when her need to touch upon actual innocence was so great that she would
sometimes cobble it together out of the most unpromising parts, and then believe and believe. Eventually someone had to be innocent, if only to satisfy the law of averages. “He's just an old sweetheart,” she said. “Not to mention a cripple.”