So Like Sleep Read Free Page B

didn’t open till nine. She did confirm that Rothenberg was due in that morning before court in Cambridge. After dressing reasonably well, I walked the eight blocks down Boylston to Rothenberg’s office, which was only two doors up from the old Mass Defenders building.
    The door on Rothenberg’s floor said simply LAW OFFICES, with a dozen full names on separate, mismatched wooden plaques underneath. Likely that meant that he shared space and expenses—but not fees—with the eleven other attorneys. I entered a waiting room containing a grab-bag of clients. The public defenders, now the Office for Public Counsel Services, typically got the good poor and the bad poor. Anyone on a higher economic rung had to scratch for private counsel. Therefore, lawyers like Rothenberg usually got the good not-so-poor and the bad not-so-poor.
    I gave the receptionist my name, profession, and mission. Ten minutes later, she answered her phone, called out my name, and pointed me down a hallway, all as she tried to persuade an animated woman speaking machine-gun Spanish to slow down.
    I was halfway down the hall when a balding head bobbed out of a doorway. He said, “John Cuddy?”
    “That’s right.” He beckoned me in.
    His office was cluttered and shabby but apparently all his own. We shook hands.
    “Steve Rothenberg.” He gestured to a chair with his free hand. He slumped into a cracked leather desk chair and put his feet up on the pullout from the old metal desk.
    “What can I do for you?” he said. Rothenberg’s beard, flecked with gray, also bobbed up and down, riding the Adam’s apple beneath. He wore a white buttoned-down shirt and a rep tie, but the collar was undone, the tie loosened, and the sleeves rolled up.
    “I’m working for Willa Daniels. I understand you represent her son, William.”
    “And?”
    “And I’d like to talk with you about his case.”
    Rothenberg frowned, tapping a pencil against a file lying on his desk blotter. “Can I see your identification?”
    I showed him. He studied it, copied some information onto a pad, and gave it back to me.
    “You have any references I can check?”
    “Sure,” I said, “but why?”
    He picked up a pink phone-message slip. “This was waiting for me when I got in. From Mrs. Daniels. She isn’t stupid, but this sounds like somebody else wrote it for her.”
    “I did. Last night, so I could speak with you today.” I shifted in my chair. “What’s wrong?”
    “When I spoke with Mrs. Daniels, I didn’t have the impression that she had the kind of money to have two professionals working on William’s case.”
    Rothenberg either was worried about getting more money or was suspicious that I might be leeching off a vulnerable relative. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “If it helps any, I’m doing this as a favor for a friend.”
    “That’s kind of what I’m doing too.”
    “I don’t get you.”
    “I represented William when he was a juvenile and I was with the Mass Defenders. You know how cases got assigned to us back then?”
    “Not really.”
    “Well, the short version is that we got assigned pretty regularly by some judges, not so much by others. A question of … attitudes.”
    “By ‘attitudes,’ you mean a judge’s cronies who got cut out of some court-appointed fees?”
    “Draw your own interpretations. Point is, almost everybody, every criminal defendant, can come up with money for private counsel somehow.”
    “So?”
    “So in William’s case back then, the judge at arraignment didn’t like us, and William was sort of borderline for indigency because of his mother’s job and all. But I thought I saw something in him, something worth pushing for. So we, read I, made the pitch in open court, and the judge grudgingly assigned us.”
    “And?”
    “And I kept the little shit he’d stepped in from becoming big shit, and then he went off to college, and then …” Rothenberg stopped, exhaling noisily.
    “And then your reclamation