Reckless Disregard (6 page)

On the opposite side of the hall, maybe half a dozen people are huddled in an alcove, each wearing a costume patterned after a character from one of Poniard’s video games. There’s a woman wearing a pink wig, with ribbons and a matching pink dress—Raggedy Ann Dohrn, a violent radical who led a revolution of dolls in Poniard’s game
Eggheads and Skinheads
. There’s a college-aged Goth Abe Lincoln with tattoos covering each arm, a tall man in his thirties dressed like a character at a Renaissance faire, a woman dressed like a combination druid and guerilla fighter—Sigourney Guevara, Poniard called the character in
Reality Rogues
—and a man dressed up as a Samurai Elvis Presley (sans sword, of course). And there’s a woman dressed like Felicity McGrath—a replica not of the real person but of the caricatured Felicity from Poniard’s video game. The bailiff glances over at them nervously. I’m sure he’d like to kick them out of the courthouse, but it’s a government building, and under the First Amendment, they have a right to be here no matter how they’re dressed. Way back in 1971, the Supreme Court held that a man named Paul Cohen had the right to wear in this very courthouse a jacket that bore the inscription “Fuck the Draft.”

The Renaissance man approaches me, bows, and waves his right arm in a courtly swirl. “Banquo Nixon at your service, Mr. Stern.” He has a full black beard that needs a trim, a long nose, and the dark, swampy eyes of a meth addict. It’s clear from the name he’s adopted that he’s fanatical about Poniard’s
Macbeth in the White House
, a role-playing game that conservative pundits, not without justification, have interpreted as advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government. He’s carrying a laptop computer under his left arm, the cover scratched and dented. The thing is so antiquated, it must weigh fifteen pounds.

“Nice to meet you.” I extend my hand, but he doesn’t shake it. Instead, he moves closer to me, almost aggressively. He reeks, emitting an alliaceous body odor. He has the wan face of a transient, but how could a transient access a video game? Though I want to move back, I hold my ground because I don’t want to offend the guy.

“Thanks for your support,” I say.

“We’re here for Poniard, not you,” he says. “We don’t know you. We’re here to protest this vicious attack on Poniard’s privacy, the attempt to silence one of the greatest minds of our era. We’re here to defy the corporate oligarchs and their Führer, the murderer William the Conqueror.” He speaks in a faux English accent, addressing not me but rather an invisible throng that must find his every word riveting. Then he meets my eyes and jabs an index finger at my chest. “It’s
your
job to stop Bishop and his henchpeople.”

The redhead dressed like Felicity McGrath comes over and loops her arm in Banquo’s. “Is this the lawyer?” she asks.

“Parker Stern, Esquire,” Banquo says.

“He’s cute,” she says. “Looks a little like Mercutio Clinton, don’t you think?”

“I most certainly do not,” Banquo says, pulling his arm away. “But Mr. Stern, if you need help—”

“Thank you, but my staff and I—”

“Even if it’s just playing Poniard’s video game. It’s a difficult game, and that’s what we do.”

As I struggle to find a way to decline this man’s offer of help without offending him and perhaps setting him off—who knows how stable he is?—there’s a jangle of keys and the click of a lock. The members of the media push forward, but the bailiff, a somber man in his late forties, shouts, “Hold on. Only the attorneys. Are counsel for Mr. Bishop here?”

As I wend my way through the pack of grumbling media members, Brandon Placek pushes past me and says to the bailiff, “Haven’t you people heard of freedom of the press? We have a First Amendment right of access to the courthouse. Our lawyers are standing by. If Judge Triggs thinks he can—”

“Nothing’s going to happen without you,” the bailiff says. “Logistics.”

“Out of my way, Placek,” I say, and he backs away when he hears my voice. We’ve clashed before. He’s made the mistake of considering himself a legitimate reporter when he’s nothing but a gossipmonger.

“What’re you doing down here, Stern?” Placek asks.

“Unlike you, trying to do the right thing.”

“You have court business, counselor?” the bailiff says.

“I’m representing the defendant in the Bishop ex parte,” I say.

He twitches the side of his mouth upward in a kind of oral shrug. “All right, come on in. The judge didn’t expect anyone to show up for the defendant.”

Once I’m inside, he locks the door. I don’t expect to see my adversaries. Lou Frantz and his protégés always come late, as if they’re heavyweight-boxing champions who’ve earned the privilege of waiting for the right moment to enter the ring.

The thought of what’s to come sends my heart careening. I list to the left and grab a chair-back to steady myself. I take some slow breaths and plead with my heart to decelerate. It doesn’t, but it doesn’t accelerate either. If it gets no worse than this, I can get through the hearing. I go to the defense side of the lawyers’ table and sit down. To take my mind off the stage fright, I power on my laptop and use the court’s Wi-Fi to search for Poniard and costumes. It turns out that many of Poniard’s most rabid fans are into cosplay, short for costume play. Or maybe they’re larpers—
live-action role players
who act out fantasy adventures physically and in real time. It’s common for rabid fans of comic books, anime, and video game fanatics to become cosplayers or larpers. Grownups playing dress-up, though some consider it performance art. There’s a whole society built around it. They worship Poniard like he’s a god. The thought makes me even queasier. I learned enough about fanaticism as a child to make me shun any charismatic leader or organized religion. That’s probably why I became a lawyer. The law is a profession that encourages you to get your questions answered, and I have a lot of questions. Maybe believers do too, but they don’t demand answers, because their faith or their prophet provides all the answers. As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m in court on this day, Poniard’s threat to expose my past aside. I hope to get an answer that has so far escaped me.

The bailiff opens the courtroom door, and Bishop’s attorney Lovely Diamond walks in. That’s her real name. I’ve seen her driver’s license.

“This is wild,” she says. “The media and the Muppets. Anyway, please let Judge Triggs know I’m here. Our application is unopposed, so—”

“Not unopposed, Ms. Diamond,” the bailiff says, tilting his head toward me.

Lovely stops halfway down the aisle.

“Good afternoon, counselor,” I say, drawing on the remnants of my childhood acting skills to deep-freeze my voice. “Parker Stern appearing for the defendant.” It’s the most I can muster without my voice shattering, just as I shattered when she left me a few months ago without explanation. For nineteen months, three weeks, and four days, I played her leading man in a sublime romantic dream, only to wake with a start and find that I’d nodded off in the back row of a seedy movie theater. I even missed the end credits, the hilarious outtakes, the fade to black, and now there’s only malign diffuse light and a future as blank as the screen. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After the excruciating pain dulled down into a cruel, incessant ache, I once again embraced a central fact of my life—the people I love always leave. Why had I expected her to be any different?

What does puzzle me, though, is what happened after we split. She was a rising star in the US Attorney’s office, a prodigy with an illimitable future, and yet suddenly she left her dream job to go back to work as a drudge for Louis Frantz, her former mentor. The same Lou Frantz who’d turned on her when she became involved with me. I agreed to take Poniard’s case because her name appeared as a cc recipient on Frantz’s cease and desist letter.

Her eyes widen and then shut for a moment, as if she’s trying to stave off a migraine. “Seriously?” She walks down the aisle and sets her briefcase on the table. I inhale, expecting the scent of orange blossoms and ginger, but now all I smell is soap. It occurs to me that she’s washed me out of her life, and now she smells sanitized. It seems as if she’s about to reach out and touch my arm, but she only set her hands on the table and leans forward.

“Did you take this case because you found out I’m working on it?” she says. “Because you shouldn’t have.”

There are few things more pathetic than a spurned lover’s futile hope. I’ve seen therapists and doctors and even a hypnotist for my glossophobia—the technical name for my stage fright. None of them helped. Only Lovely did. I wanted her to be proud of me, and she infused me with a quiet strength. And so for her I fought the fear and refused to fail in the courtroom. Now she helps rid me of the fear in a different way—she makes me angry. Anger sops up all other emotions, including terror, though only for a short while. Anger also makes you lie.

“I took this case because your client is trying to run roughshod over the First Amendment,” I say. “I took it because I want another chance to litigate against your arrogant boss. I guess he sent in the second team today.”

I want her to blanch at the insult, to quiver in regret, to storm away in rage, to show any form of emotion that will serve as a connection between us, however frayed. She doesn’t react, not even an arrhythmic blink.

“Are you filing opposition papers?” she asks in a tone colder than dry ice.

I hand her a set of my papers and give another copy to the clerk, an Asian woman with short dark hair and half-moon reading glasses already perched on her nose. The bailiff unlocks the main door, and the spectators file in, the reporters taking seats in the back so they can quickly exit the courtroom to report breaking news. Poniard’s groupies fill the rows immediately behind me. I wish they hadn’t. Harmon Cherry warned us that the judge or jury will draw inferences about you from the appearance of people who sit on your side of the room. Some courtroom regulars and several bemused lawyers who obviously have afternoon appearances find the remaining seats.

“All rise and come to order, this court is now in session,” the bailiff says.

Out of a hidden door emerges a hulking black man with a Beat poet’s goatee and a malevolent glare. Judge T. Tedford Triggs, former All-American offensive tackle and Rhodes scholar before going to law school. At the moment, in his billowing black robe, he resembles one of Poniard’s video game characters. Not just any character, but a treacherous level boss whom you have to defeat to advance to the next stage of the game. Triggs has a reputation for trying to do justice, though sometimes he uses his own definition of the term. “
Bishop v. Poniard
,” he says. “Counsel, state your appearances.”

“Lovely Diamond of the Louis Frantz Law Firm appearing for the plaintiff William Bishop.”

A woman giggles behind me. I twist in my chair and see the Felicity impersonator sitting in the second row and trying to stifle a laugh. I shake my head slightly at her—whether I like it or not, she and her cohort of crazies have become my responsibility. When she sees me, she shuts her eyes, as if that will stop the giggling and snorting, which only gets worse. Banquo, who’s sitting next to her, catches my eye. He wraps his arm around her shoulders, puts his hand on the side of her head, and forcefully draws her to him, so that her face and mouth are buried in his broad chest. He seems to be holding her so tightly that for a moment I worry that he’s smothering her, that the heaving in her shoulders is a struggle for breath. He whispers something to her, and the heaving subsides. When he lets go, she sits back, holding a fist to her mouth and biting down on her knuckles.

“Counsel for Defendant,” the judge says. “Are you going to state your appearance? I haven’t got all day.”

I have to enter an appearance for my client and myself, a simple task for everyone but me. As soon I stand, I experience that familiar rush of heat and light-headedness that has become a sine qua non of a Parker Stern court appearance. I fight the imminent syncope by gripping the edge of the table with both hands.

“Parker Stern for the Defendant.” My voice is raspy. Better that than no voice at all.

The judge lowers his head slightly, which turns his stare into a glower. “I’ve looked at the papers. Who wants to go first?”

I taught Lovely that a lawyer should always try to get to the lectern first. Now she hurries to the podium as if elbowing her way onto a crowded New York subway. I don’t move. Whatever happened between us, I will not push her out of the way.

The judge leans forward and strokes his goatee, his eyes fixed on her, almost a leer. She draws that kind of look wherever she goes. No matter that she spares the makeup, conceals the curves, cuts her hair. I’ve seen lawyers in a courtroom look at her that way, elderly judges, even women. But once she starts speaking, she has an uncanny ability to get even the most overheated admirer to focus on her words and forget the rest.

Without using notes, she briefly summarizes the case law giving a party the right to take early discovery and then says, “This person who calls himself
Poniard
, this so-called
man
who doesn’t have the . . .” she pauses, letting everyone think she’ll say
balls
, because in her short time as a lawyer Lovely Diamond has developed a reputation as someone who might say anything in a courtroom . . . “the
guts
to use his own name, has defamed Mr. Bishop. Instead of being brave and standing behind his words, he wants to hide. This
Poniard
”—she spits so hard on the
P
that a fine mist of saliva sprays into the air—“should be ordered to face his accuser, to face the man whose reputation he’s trying to destroy. But Poniard says he’ll submit to a deposition only in writing. How convenient, because that means we can never get a look at his face to see if he’s a liar or a con man or just some smartass doing this for the publicity.”