Bad Lawyer Read Free

avenge itself on a junkie-whore named Julia Gill. It was that simple.
    Without consulting my client, I worked out two deals, both contingent upon restitution: six months on Rikers Island followed by probation; or successful completion of a drug treatment program at a residential treatment center followed by probation. The second offer seemed the obvious choice, but “successful completion,” as defined by the RTCs themselves, meant at least a year of wall-to-wall group therapy sessions under conditions equivalent to medium-security incarceration. And Julia Gill had been around long enough to know it.
    Nevertheless, after a week of considering the alternatives (including going to trial), Julia took the RTC. I remember her as she appeared before the sentencing judge, spectral thin, her cheeks bruised gray by the pain of cold-turkey withdrawal.
    “Your Honor, I’m sorry for what happened.” She’d drawn herself up to her full height, though her voice quavered. “I didn’t know the statue was valuable when I took it. It was just supposed to be …” Julia’s lashes were long and so blond as to be nearly invisible. They’d whisked over her slanted green eyes like feathers. “Just something to have, I guess. Something to take with me when I left.”
    I remember willing her eyes to drop to the toes of her shoes. I remember whispering, “Bow your head.” I remember Julia’s sharp chin slowly falling onto her chest, the bemused smile she hid from the judge.
    It was a performance worthy of the Little Match Girl, a masterful performance, even if a bit on the pro forma side. Julia knew the statue was valuable (as she knew the exact nature of her sentence), that’s why she’d hidden it away instead of displaying it on a shelf. Nevertheless, this was her chance (her only chance) to rise above the back-room plea bargaining, to assert an individual self, and she took it.
    Fourteen months later, Julia Gill (encouraged by Caleb Talbot, who’d worked on her case) returned in search of a job. Again, noblesse oblige ruled the day and I took her (and her recently acquired secretarial skills) into my corporate bosom.
    I date the beginning of my personal demise from the day of my mother’s death.
    Magda Leibovits, eighteen years old, came to America in 1938 from Budapest, Hungary, shortly after Germany’s invasion of that country. Her escape was neither miraculous nor complicated. Magda’s family, after marshalling its resources, found it had a bankroll sufficient to secure passage out for a single member. Magda was chosen and packed off to distant New York.
    When I was very young, I remember her passing her mornings at the kitchen table, writing letters to one organization after another, seeking information on the fate of the family she’d left behind in Hungary. She corresponded with groups, official and unofficial, in the United States, in Israel, in Budapest, Kraków, Prague, Bonn, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels. A ghost searching for ghosts.
    She was always standing by the door when the postman arrived, and I, before I started school, stood with her. I loved the foreign stamps, the spidery handwriting, the odd return addresses. The letters seemed exotic and mysterious, an adventure in the making. They were, in fact, the only life my mother had.
    I lost a big case on the day Magda died, one of my biggest. My father was long gone by then, and I’d seen so little of my mother in the intervening years that my secretary (not Julia Gill) decided to hold back the news until after the jury came in with its verdict. I recall being angry, though whether at losing the case or my secretary’s oh-so-accurate reading of my priorities, I can’t say. Perhaps anger was my substitute for grief, as it was my substitute for every other emotion.
    For some reason, I went to Magda’s house, the house of my childhood, instead of the funeral home, and let myself in. It wasn’t a very big house, three small bedrooms upstairs, the last tiny enough