Dead Man's Thoughts Read Free Page B

“Berenice Abbott or bust.” Then I sighed. “I get the point, Nathan. I don’t like it, but I get it.”
    â€œSorry for the lecture, Cass,” he said, though he didn’t look sorry. “I just hate to see you putting yourself through this. If you could work things out, I think you’d be a lot happier.” He took my hand. “And I’d like to see you happy.”
    Then he looked at his watch. “Back to the salt mines.”
    â€œAre you kidding?” I asked. “Salt mining is a clean, wholesome occupation next to being a Legal Aid lawyer.”
    We walked along State Street in silence. In spite of the damp cold, there were kids hanging out in front of the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys. The stars that seemed to twinkle in the pavement were really hundreds of shards of broken glass. In the distance, the red hands of the clock on the Williamsburg Savings Bank pointed to ten o’clock. Three more hours of night court. My stomach knotted up, and I shivered, not entirely from the cold.

T HREE
    â€œH ey, lady, you my Legal Aid?” the kid with the huge Afro demanded.
    â€œAin’t you got my name on one of them files?” his buddy asked, pointing to the stack I was carrying.
    â€œI gotta see you about my case, and I mean now .” This from a black man with dried blood caked on his face and shirt.
    I held up my hands. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, okay?” I was back in court, in the holding pens, interviewing prisoners. It was like working in the dog pound, trying to decide which hungry puppy to feed first. I felt as though dinner had never happened. For them, of course, it hadn’t. While I’d been eating lamb stew and drinking white wine, they’d had stale bologna sandwiches and watery soup.
    Dick, the bridgeman—the court officer responsible for calling the cases—gave me the court papers on an ROW from New York County. When a guy gets returned on a warrant—which means he failed to show up in court when he was supposed to—we don’t get the usual defense papers. In fact, the court doesn’t have papers either. So nobody knows anything about the guy’s case. In this instance, neither did he. He sat on one of the stools in an interview booth, rocking back and forth, singing a tuneless tune. I tried to ask him some questions, but he waved me away, still singing, his wrinkled white hands flapping like dying butterflies. Even in the fetid pens, his smell stood out. He hadn’t bathed in months.
    He was clearly a loony tune. They’d 730 him—send him to Kings County Hospital to be examined by psychiatrists. But that’s all. Just examined. Not treated, except for pumping him full of thorazine. Then he’d be sent back to court to face the charges against him. Whatever they were.
    I put the wacko’s file at the bottom of my pile and looked for my next client. Nathan sat in one of the booths talking to a middle-aged white guy who looked like a defrocked cop. The guy was hunched over, his face distorted with intensity. That wasn’t unusual; most skells have an exaggerated sense of their own importance. What was unusual was that Nathan, nodding solemnly, seemed to share that sense. I wondered what was so special about the case.
    I called out a name: “Thomas Boynton.” A short black man with the name “Tom” embroidered in red over his shirt pocket stepped forward. Mechanic, I guessed. His hands were balled into fists and held rigidly at his side. I motioned him into the booth next to the one where the 730 candidate sat, still rocking. You could smell him faintly even in this booth.
    â€œI ain’t had no gun.” He punctuated his words by pounding one fist into his other open hand.
    â€œCalm down, Mr. Boynton, I believe you.” I did, too. I’d seen it before. Common-law divorce. A woman wants her man out of the house. He won’t go. The cops are