Chapter 9.
Lawyering Up
Whenever I think of jail, I conjure up images of American History X. That movie where Edward Norton plays a neo-Nazi skinhead and goes to prison for curbing a black gangbanger. Now, I remember reading somewhere that Norton bulked up like twenty-five pounds to play the role of Derek Vineyard and he’s frickin' chiseled. His head is shaved clean and he has this huge swastika on one of his pecs. Scary. Super scary. Like if he rolled up on you in a dark alley you would shit through your pants. But then when Norton gets to prison, he isn’t so big anymore. In fact, compared to the other guys, he’s about as scary as a Netflix late charge. Anyhow, there’s this scene about halfway through the movie where Norton is taking a shower. Three guys roll up on him. The head guy is huge, like 6’7” and carved out of stone. So scary he doesn’t need to shave his head. Doesn’t need a big ass swastika. This guy eats scary for breakfast. He’s terrifying. He’s pancreatic cancer. He’s Ebola. He wraps a towel around Norton’s neck and proceeds to ram his Shaquille O’Neal sized cock up Norton’s ass. The scene ends with Norton lying on the floor of the shower, blood pooling around his body.
That’s what I thought of when I thought of jail. But, that's not how it was at all. It was more like Weekend at Bernies. Well, watching it anyhow. It’s stupid and boring and it makes you want to kill yourself. But it really isn’t scary.
The official charge against me was 2nd Degree Battery. Apparently, Larry the Innocent Neighbor From Down the Street had to be taken to the hospital. Apparently, Larry the Innocent had a massive concussion and two broken ribs. But Larry the Innocent would be out of the hospital before I was out of jail.
On that note, I’d been here four days. The Berlin-Deadbook-Confusion-Mistaken identity-Ass Kicking-Larry incident happened late Thursday. So I was here—Denver County Jail—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then last night, Sunday.
I was yet to make any phone calls.
I thought about calling Abby and asking her out on a second date. You know, something along the lines of, Hey. You busy tonight? Whaddaya say, you come bail me out and I'll take you to Chili's. Get you some Baby Backs. If that goes well, maybe a conjugal for date three.
I'm kidding of course.
I could still visualize Abby's face as I was dragged to the cop car. She was sitting outside in her little blue sedan, her knuckles white around the steering wheel. Her jaw slack. I doubted she stuck around long. She probably had my number deleted from her phone before they were done fingerprinting me.
I suppose I could have called JeAnn or Dr. Raleigh, but I didn’t know what I would say. Plus, if they knew when I was ten minutes past curfew, then they certainly knew I was in jail. So that led to another question, if they knew I was here, why didn’t they come?
But, then again, it wasn’t their problem.
It was my problem.
And what great timing, huh? Just when things were starting to look good. Abby. A possible job. And then in one fell swoop I’d screwed it all up. Abby probably already had a restraining order against me. And the job. JP had probably called early Friday. And his call had gone to voicemail. If I called him back today, there was maybe a chance I could concoct a story about why I didn’t get back to him sooner. But that wasn’t JP’s style. I probably had an hour window to return his call before the job went up in smoke. And Berlin. Well, Berlin had watched me kick the living shit out of her babysitter. Yes, there had been a bit of confusion over her Deadbook message, and maybe I could blame my tackling Larry the Innocent on that. But grabbing the lamp and shattering it over the man’s head when he was already decommissioned. That was something else. That was a side of myself that I’d never even seen.
“Young.”
I looked up from my cot. The guard was standing at the barred entrance to the large cell that held me and my seven new friends. The guard nodded at me.
He said, “You’re free.”
⠔
As the guard led me down the hall, he said, “You have a friend in the system.”
It took me a moment. Then it hit. Darrel.
You might be wondering why I didn’t call Darrel to bail me out in the first place. Well, you should know, Darrel was the first person I thought of. But with him just starting with the police department, I thought my calling him on his Denver-Police-Department-issued-cell phone to come bail me out of jail might blur the lines of ethics.
After I signed a couple documents and changed back into my freshly laundered clothes, I was free to leave. The guard buzzed me through a door. I expected to see someone fitting the mold of Denzel Washington from Training Day but it was more like Alec Baldwin from Thirty Rock. JP’s salty hair glistened in the stale overhead lighting of the jail foyer. He was holding a beautiful black briefcase in his right hand.
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I stood there with my hands in my pockets.
JP shook his head. He was without his cigar and he had a smirk buried within his right cheek. He said, “I hear you’re in the hero business now.” I’d forgotten about his heavy accent and the words came out deep-fried.
I smiled, meekly. “I think you mean the horrible decision making business.”
“That too.”
“Let’s talk outside.”
He turned and pushed through the doors. I followed. There was a bench outside and he plopped down. I did the same.
I asked, “How did you know I was here?”
“I called your phone this morning. A little girl answered.”
“My phone?”
“Your phone fell out of your pocket during your bullrush.”
So that’s where it went. “Berlin?”
“That’d be her. What is she seven going on thirty?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“She told me about the misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstandings don’t usually land you in jail.” I added, “Is she mad at me?”
“Nope. In fact, I think she’s quite fond of you.”
I rattled these words around for a while, then I asked, “Did you like post bail for me or something?”
“Nope. I made a couple calls. Had the charges dropped.”
“Dropped?”
“Let’s just say that Larry Waller didn’t exactly have the cleanest of records.”
This didn’t surprise me. Larry the Innocent didn’t look innocent of anything. “Really?”
“Not what you’re thinking. Mostly tax stuff. I made him a deal. He dropped the charges and all his tax woes go away.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you sticking your neck out for me?”
“Can’t have my newest public defender going to jail for five months. Looks bad.”
I knew there was more to it then that. Something more fatherly. I didn’t bring this up. “So I got the job?”
“To be brutally honest, there aren’t many people beating down the doors for a public defender position these days.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “Bad clients. Bad hours. And bad pay.”
“How bad are we talking?”
“The clients or the pay?”
“The pay.”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty thousand dollars?” Cha-ching!
JP eyed me. I think he was wondering why I was smiling. He said, “You know that’s not much money.”
“I know.” But I still couldn’t help smiling. I was already spending the money. Moving out. Buying dishes. Buying stock on E-trade. Getting a pedicure.
Halfway through my pedicure, I had an epiphany. I said, “What about the Bar?”
“What about it?”
I told him how I wasn’t sure whether I failed it miserably or whether I failed it completely or whether I failed it so utterly and horrifically that I might actually get sent back to the eleventh grade.
He laughed. “We'll cross that bridge when we have to.” <
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“All right. So when do I start?”
He opened his briefcase, extracted a thick manila folder, and tossed it on my lap. “Right now.”
⠔
I looked down at the manila folder. Then back up at JP. A cigar had magically found its way into the corner of his mouth. He said, “Read up, you meet with the guy in ten minutes.”
My pulse doubled. I stammered, “I’m supposed to meet this guy in ten minutes. Where at?”
“Settle down. You don’t have to go anywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
He nodded to the jailhouse.
I smirked. “Right.”
JP took a couple chomps, the cigar’s juices starting to coat his lip a rusty brown, and said, “You might have heard about this one. That triple homicide that’s been all over the news.”
I had. Firsthand. Over a game of Dominoes, the night before my interview, Darrel had told me a bit about the case. Darrel had been the first detective on the scene. They’d found these three guys in an old abandoned warehouse. What was left of them anyway. Their bodies had been destroyed. Darrel said it was the most gruesome sight he’d ever seen and he’d seen some “gnarly ass shit.” Darrel said they didn’t have any leads. Zip.
I said, “Yeah, sure.”
“Well, they found him on Saturday.”
“Who?”
“The guy who did it?”
It took a moment for this to register. “That’s my first client? The wackjob who killed those three guys?”
He stood up. Slapped me on the leg. “Let me know how it goes.”
Thirty seconds later, I watched as his Jaguar pulled away.
⠔
On October 1st, exactly one week earlier, Benny Villos was walking home from the bars. He was drunk as a skunk and walked five miles in the wrong direction. Villos soon found himself in a shady part of Denver, a six-block radius of abandoned, semi-abandoned, and mostly condemned industrial warehouses nicknamed INDO (Industrial Denver). Villos sobered up rather quickly and quickened his step. No one was behind him. In fact, the sitters and dealers and druggies could have cared less about the lost drunk. But Villos quickly became frantic.
He lifted an old creaky garage door, slid into the dusty confines of what used to be AAA Steel, and hunkered down where thousands of pounds of sheet metal used to be neatly stacked. He heard a noise behind him and turned. The moonlight shone through several broken windows and illuminated the offender scampering across the filthy concrete. A rat. The rat stopped, joining thirty of his colleagues. Villos took a couple steps forward. Then two more. Thirty quarts of blood were splayed across the concrete. The rats devoured what was left of three bodies. Villos turned and threw up all he’d drunk that night.
⠔
That’s as far as I got in the police report. Now, I had to go and meet the guy who had done this to those three guys. I flipped through the folder for the man’s mug shot. There wasn’t one. This would prove to be the first oddity of many.
I stood up and walked back through the front door of the prison. The irony that the last time I’d walked through the doors I’d been a prisoner did not escape me. I couldn’t help but smile as I swiped my card. I was now a lawyer. At least until the Bar exam results came out later this month. But for now, I was going to enjoy it.
I pushed through the doors and approached the woman at the front desk. She eyed me curiously. I couldn’t blame her. She had buzzed me out the doors just twelve minutes earlier. I said, “My name is Maddy Young. I have an appointment with my client at 11:30.”
I signed in and was buzzed through the metal detector. Then I was led to a small room. It was all concrete, with a metal table screwed into the floor, plus two chairs. I had just opened the manila folder to read more of the police report, when the door opened. Two men entered. The man at the back was a guard. Same guard who had ushered me out twenty minutes earlier. If he was perplexed by my presence he didn’t show it. The other man wore the standard prison issued orange jumpsuit. His hands and feet were cuffed. He shuffled forward, sat down in the chair. The guard cuffed his hands and feet through a series of brackets. I highly doubted that if I’d had a meeting with a lawyer, I would have had to go through the same rigmarole. Then again, this guy had not only killed three men, he’d destroyed them.
The guard nodded at me and said, “Knock when you’re finished.”
I nodded.
I gazed across the table. John Doe was about six feet. You could tell that underneath the orange jumpsuit the guy was all muscle. The tendons on his neck were taut rubber bands. He had the look of an NFL cornerback. He had dark brown hair. A small goatee on his chin. He reminded me of Brad Pitt from Fight Club. He had thin eyebrows. High cheekbones. His features were perfect. Strangely perfect. But it was the eyes that made your knees quiver. Made my knees quiver. His eyes were the color of pencil graphite. Gray. Not a trace of color.
I took a deep breath and said, “I’m Maddy Young. I’m your court appointed public defender.”
He smiled. People would pay millions of dollars to have his smile. I wondered how many women had fallen victim to that little grin. He said, “I know who you are.”
Before I had time to react to this statement, he said, “My name is Isaac.”
I don’t know if it was the way he said it. Or maybe the whole picture came into focus as he said his name. It was a wallop. A car crash. A cannonball to the gut. A sledgehammer to the side of the face.
They did exist.
Isaac was a Born.