The Ditto List (34 page)

“I don't think it will do any good. He's convinced himself he can't live without me. He just calls and calls. I dread the sound of it, the phone. I just
dread
it.”

“Hang up. Change your number. Get an answering machine.”

“I have one. He used the entire tape on one call. It reminded me of
Hamlet
, for God's sake. That's what he teaches, by the way. Elizabethan drama. He's an actor in his own play.”

“You're in his play too, Mrs. Alford, if you go on like this. So don't talk to him. Don't let him in the house.”

“Okay.”

“Call me if there's trouble. After tomorrow, call the cops. He'll be a misdeameanant if he keeps harassing you.”

“I don't know if I could live with myself if I did that, Mr. Jones. I really don't.”

“It might be the best thing for him in the long run, Mrs. Alford. That's all I can say. My guess is he's been coddled all his life. It's time for a kick in the pants. Try not to worry,” he added, and said good-bye.

Something else to lose sleep over. Another drama that would stage itself above his bed in the wee hours of the morning, no doubt in a violent and tragic guise. The odds were small that the jerk would do it, but they were there; the portion of the population on the fence of sanity or beyond it was fantastic. Now that they were no longer locked away you saw them everywhere, babbling, raving, burrowing through the city like moles, their minds flapping like torn flags. They were pitiful, and helpless, yet in their abandonment and their potential somehow terrifying. D.T. swore. He hated how much he found in the world to fear. He pulled the phone to him and dialed another number.

“Mrs. Stone? This is D. T. Jones. Did you have a chance to read the transcript of your husband's deposition?”

“Is that what you call it? It read like a fairy tale to me. And I do mean grim.”

“I need to talk to you about it, Mrs. Stone. Can I come by this afternoon?”

“Can't we do it by phone?”

“I'd rather do it in person. Say four?”

“I suppose so. If you must.”

“See you then.”

Good. He would see her house, see how she fit in it, the way she kept it, see how much trouble she would go to knowing he was coming. Then some time before the trial he would drop by unannounced. To see whether she really was unfit. Not that it would make any difference. She had paid her fee and he was her boy. In court he would paint her a blend of Sister Teresa and Father Flanagan, Dinah Shore and Jimmy Stewart.

Bobby E. Lee peeked into the room. “Mr. Slater is here.”

“The process server?”

Bobby nodded.

“What's he want? His money?”

“That. Plus he mentioned the Finders case.”

“Send him in.”

Bobby E. Lee disappeared and a moment later a fat, ruddy-faced man stomped into the room, sneered at its contents, and marched to the front of D.T.'s desk as though volunteering for something risky. His clothes seemed to be struggling to escape him. A wad of something the size of a pear filled a front pants pocket. A pen was clipped to the placket of his shirt, its tip out of sight behind a polyester plaid. The temples of his glasses were taped at the hinge. “You ain't paid your bill,” he said, making it a proclamation.

“I told you I'd have it by the end of the month.”

“I know what you told me,” he countered, his puffy eyes inviting D.T. to make a further promise. D.T. said nothing. “The Finders guy? On Houston Street?” Slater went on.

“What about him? Is he served?”

Slater's lips curled as though they had begun to fry. “He pulled a gun on me. A fucking magnum. I could have crawled down the barrel and survived World War Three.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I didn't hear nothing from you about this guy being a cowboy, did I? Huh? Isn't that what I told you: the guy you want served is a fucking gun-toter you tell me up front, right? Didn't I fucking stand right here and tell you that?”

“I didn't know. I'm sorry.”

“Yeah, well, the guy looked like he was ready to give me an extra nostril. Most of them don't, you know, look like they'd really shoot the fucking thing. This one did. But at least I don't got to go back.”

“Why not?”

“You ain't paid your bill, number one. Number two, there was this broad standing behind him while he was waving his piece at me, tits like my old lady would kill for. Said she was the wife. Said she wasn't going to dump the cowboy after all. Said for me not to come around with no papers ever again. So here they are.” Slater tossed the documents on the desk. “Tab comes to eighty-seven fifty for this one alone. I don't get it the end of the month I give it to my collection agency and they smear your name all over town, the credit dentist won't clean your teeth. You get it?”

“I get it.”

“One more thing.”

“What?”

“Here.”

Slater thrust another paper at him. D.T. took it reluctantly. “Which is this, for God's sake? Don't tell me you missed another one.”

Slater's grin spread like a run in a nylon. “This is the case of
Dillinghert
v.
Jones
. Complaint for malpractice. Prayer of two hundred thousand actuals, plus a half million punitives, plus fees and costs. Enjoy.” Slater's face was one great gloat. He turned and left the office.

When D.T. discovered his mouth was open he closed it, then clutched blindly at the document Slater had handed him and tried to read its crackling pages. It was as Slater had said, a complaint against him, its code as familiar to him as the
Racing Form
.

Words slapped his eyes then vanished, acrobats, tumblers, unconnected to each other. Dillinghert. Jones. Plaintiff complains of defendant and alleges. Client. Attorney. Services for hire. Fiduciary relationship. Breach of trust. Neglect of duty. Negligently and carelessly failed to discover and include. Husband's pension. Property settlement agreement. Lack of due care. Failure to observe standards of his profession. Knew or should have known of said rights. Proximate cause of loss. Present value in excess of two hundred thousand dollars. Punitives. Fees and costs. Such other and further relief as the court may deem just.

Two hundred thousand.

Two hundred thousand.

Two hundred thousand.

D.T. dropped the complaint on his desk. Goddamned military pensions. A new community property right, first accorded women in the state a decade ago, then taken back by the Supreme Court, then awarded again by Congress. Murky area of the law, coupled with a client he could not abide. She had been arrogant and self-pitying, contemptuous of all men and lawyers except her brother, who lived off personal injuries in the state of Arizona and thus was somehow qualified to second-guess him. He'd wanted her out of his office, the way he wanted to lose a bad tooth, and his perfunctory questions had revealed no hint of pension rights or any other rights in her husband beyond those accorded every citizen. As he recalled, the husband had been self-employed at the time, a cabinetmaker, though evidently not forever. Fifteen pension-earning years in a federal armory, claimed the hysterical complaint.

Malpractice. The plaintiff's lawyer was Oswald Blacker, the sleaziest in the city, a snorting symbol of the profession's lack of standards that proscribed anything short of outrage—standards that in fact encouraged the sham and misrepresentation and false promise which were the specialties of far too many practitioners of the trade of Pound and Cardozo. Malpractice. Bobby E. Lee stuck his head in the door but D.T. waved him away. Mal-fucking-practice.

D.T. pulled out his form file and dictated a motion for a temporary restraining order that would direct the almost-tenured Louis Alford to refrain from communicating his design for self-destruction to his wife. The words fell off his tongue automatically: “restrained from contacting, molesting, attacking, striking, threatening, sexually assaulting, battering, telephoning, or otherwise disturbing the peace of the petitioner.” What horror the words encompassed, what insignificance the system had reduced them to, the same phrases used by all—from the truly endangered, like Lucinda Finders, to the trivially annoyed, like the client of D.T.'s who had called the cops when her husband stopped by to ask if she wanted to use his opera tickets.

Malpractice.
That
particular word still held its threat. Too bad there wasn't a restraining order protecting lawyers from their clients.

Louis Alford. Suicide. To be or not to be; right, Professor? Let me count the ways. Bite the barrel, the top of the head spattered against the wall. Slash the wrists and go with the flow. Jump off something. No, he would have to feign an accident, so Heather would receive the insurance proceeds he had been purchasing all these years. Drive into a wall. Stumble off a cliff. Inadvertent poisoning. Electrocution. Drowning. Supposedly the least painful, drowning. All tried and true methods, he supposed, though none as comfortably definite as a bullet in the brain. With his luck he would muff it, render himself an invalid, a prisoner in that most abhorrent of conditions—a human unable to flee the noise of other humans. Suicide. The worst that could happen would be to spend an eternity in hell, which couldn't possibly be worse than an hour at a bar association meeting. Suicide. He picked up the phone.

“Harry? D. T. Jones. How's it going?”

“It's a rocky road, D.T.”

“All the rocks on your road are diamonds, Harry.”

“A vicious calumny. Spread by those who equate virtue with impoverishment. All of them impoverished themselves, I might note. How can I be of service?”

“I got a call from the wife of one of your clients. Mrs. Louis Alford. Ring a bell?”

“A small tinkle, perhaps. The problem?”

“He's annoying her. Calls. Visits at all hours.”

“Violence?”

“Not yet. His gambit is a threat of suicide if she does not tuck him back into the conjugal bed.”

“Ah. Entreaty number three-oh-two.”

“Right. I'm getting a 4359(a)(2) order this afternoon, should you care to waste an hour opposing it.”

“You're kidding. For a few phone calls?”

“The guy's a nut, Harry.”

“Nonsense. He holds a distinguished position in one of the finest universities in the world.”

“Let's say he
almost
holds such a position He's up for tenure right now. She won't hesitate to call the law on him, Harry. Bye-bye sinecure if she does. Perhaps you should give him a word from the wise.”

“What judge?” Harry asked.

“Buchanan.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Say, Harry?”

“Hm?”

“Ever been sued for malpractice?”

Harry coughed. D.T. could imagine him straightening his silk tie, shooting his French cuffs, adjusting his rolled lapels. “Are you suggesting I've not met my …”

“Nothing like that, Harry. I was just asking.”

“You?”

“Yep.”

“Once,” Harry said.

“What happened?”

“My carrier bought me out of it.”

“How much?”

“Sorry.”

“Exposure, though?”

“Depends on who you talked to.
I
certainly didn't think so.”

“Did it get you down?”

Harry paused, longer this time, long enough for him to have poured a shot of his favorite cognac. “It was like someone cut off my balls, D.T. I wasn't the same man for a while. For quite a long while, actually. Sex life. Tennis game. Everything. It was as though that one transgression had tainted everything I'd ever done.”

“What'd you do about it?”

“Worked twice as hard and made three times as much money as I had before. Tried cases I should have settled and took on clients I should have sent packing. All to prove I was a good lawyer, the best, no matter what that damned complaint alleged. I got a little crazy for a while, is what I'm saying. So watch yourself.”

“Thanks, Harry,” D.T. said. Harry said good-bye.

After grabbing a sandwich at the Walrus, D.T. went to the courthouse, hunted up a judge, and got his order theoretically protecting Irene Alford from her husband but practically useless against anything Alford really had a mind to do. Harry never showed up to oppose him. After the order was filed, D.T. called Mrs. Alford from the courthouse to tell her the police now had a reason to respond to her calls for assistance. He also gave her his home number. His steps to protect her seemed only to make her more depressed. He could hardly hear her speak. After he hung up he drove to Mareth Stone's.

It was a white colonial in the middle of a block of them, its bricks painted to an alabaster gleam, its chimneys red and tall and undefiled by soot, its portico a triumph of Doric solemnity. It was the kind of house husbands think wives adore, and are usually wrong.

D.T. parked beneath the high porch and crossed the veranda and rang the bell. Although his imagination couldn't fit her in the place, Mareth Stone opened the door immediately, her face as fixed and managed as the first time he had seen her. As she led him through the house he tried and failed to find evidence of the sloth her husband claimed was flourishing there. The thing most out of place was himself.

Without looking back, she strode into the living room and sat down, knees locked, hands clasped, feet flat, aggressively demure. D.T. sat on the loveseat across from her.

“A beautiful house.”

“Thank you. I plan to sell it after the divorce.”

“You keep it up all by yourself?”

She looked at him archly. “My sister comes in once a week to help. I pay her,” she added after a moment.

D.T. nodded. He expected her to offer him a drink and he expected to accept it, but she said nothing. “You read the deposition?”

“Yes.”

“What'd you think?”

“Predictable.”

“How do you mean?”