Trial

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Atlanta, GA

Charles

THE LATE MAY heat, though not excessive, hit me with a blast as I entered the parking garage underneath the downtown Atlanta office building where my law firm was located. The heat did nothing to improve my mood, which had been spiraling downward for the past hour, although one would have to have been intimately acquainted with me to have picked up any indication of that from my demeanor.

As the scion of an old Georgia family, I’d been reared in the very best ‘stiff upper lip’ tradition by a dowager paternal grandmother, my parents having been killed in an automobile accident when I was very young. It was an article of faith in Gran’s world that well-bred people simply must not ever lose their composure—at least not in public. “If you ever have to scream, yell, or cry,” she’d said to me a thousand times while I was growing up, “wait for an appropriate moment, then go into the privacy of your room and do it. Whatever you do, never allow others, particularly servants or subordinates, see you lose control.”

In its own way, it had been good advice—and better training. I would most likely have phrased it “subordinates or peers,” but in Gran’s eyes, anyone descended from the Lewis, Marks, and Barnett families of post-Revolutionary Georgia had few equals and no superiors. I was in her debt for having thus trained me; a childhood and adolescence of rigid self-control spent displaying the proverbial poker face had benefitted me as an adult in more than one pretrial conference, as well as in quite a few trials.

As I retrieved my Jaguar from its reserved parking place, I reflected for the umpteenth time that I could just as easily have walked two blocks to the nearest MARTA station, ridden to the Midtown Station a couple of stops up from downtown, and then walked a few blocks to my home, which was a three-story town house that had been built, along with several others, on one of the cross streets running between Juniper Street and Piedmont Avenue. I lived in a midtown area that had been, during its eighty-year history, alternately grand, deteriorating, merely dilapidated, and finally, downright seedy. It was only a block or two removed from the notorious strip of topless bars and porno establishments that had flourished along Peachtree Street in the sixties and seventies.

During the seventies, the area had become something of a ghetto containing a mix of gays, blacks, and Hispanics. Then, as the strip along Peachtree was cleaned up, the inevitable process of gentrification had begun. Buildings that were too far gone were razed and replaced by high-rises or, in some cases, blocks of town houses like mine. Buildings that were still relatively solid were converted into condominiums and apartments. The area was still heavily gay, but the mix was now about half gay and half yuppie, with a few gay yuppies, sometimes known as guppies, for good measure. The majority of the blacks and Hispanics had been displaced by the workings of a free-market economy—they could no longer afford to live in the area unless they, too, were yuppies. In truth, the area was really totally yuppie, because the gays who occupied the expensive town houses and apartments certainly fit that mold, with most of the older members of Atlanta’s sizeable gay community preferring to live in and around Buckhead.

Actually, it would have taken me less time to go to and from work via the subway, but rising young (I kept telling myself, sometimes even convincingly, that thirty-two was still young) trial attorneys whose names had been appended for the past five years to the firm name of one of Atlanta’s oldest and most prestigious law firms were expected to observe some conventions. Strange, I thought; Andrew—Andrew Chandler, grandson of the founder of Chandler, Todd, Woodward, & Barnett, currently its senior partner and my mentor since forever, as he was an old friend of the family and Gran had turned to him regularly for advice in bringing up her orphaned grandson—hadn’t batted so much as an eyelash when I’d told him in my initial interview that I was gay. He had, in fact, over the years been at least covertly supportive of gay rights and related issues. However, the old boy would have had a fit were I to ride the subway to and from the office every day. Such are the sacrifices we make for the sake of appearances.

The Todd and Woodward of the firm had, as Gran would say, gone to their respective rewards years ago, leaving only Andrew and myself representing the living among the listed names. True, we had six other partners and more than a dozen associates, but it would be years before another name would be appended to the firm’s name, change being the antithesis of old-line law firms everywhere. Somewhere there was an unwritten code that allowed only one name change every decade or so.

AS I PULLED INTO the traffic heading north on Peachtree, those thoughts caused me to reflect for a moment on Andrew, who was the reason for my current annoyance bordering on anger. Andrew Chandler was tall, patrician, slim, silver-haired, in his early seventies, and possessed a razor-sharp intellect. He lived in an area of expensive old homes in Decatur with his wife of fifty-odd years, whom he referred to in the traditional southern manner as ‘Miss Emily’. Their only son had died in Vietnam, and Andrew had long ago more or less adopted me as a surrogate for his lost heir. For my part, having Andrew serve in loco parentis had provided a sort of balance to Gran’s rigidity. He and Gran were old friends, and the relationship between the two families went back decades, as indeed did that of many of the old families in Atlanta.

It was the Thursday before Memorial Day. I’d just successfully completed a grueling ten-day trial and had pretty much cleared my Friday schedule so that I could leave the office by noon and be out of the city shortly thereafter for a well-deserved (so I told myself) three-day weekend at my beach house in the Florida Panhandle. Andrew had called me into his office at four this afternoon and invited me to dinner at his club this evening to meet a prospective new client. I’d tried to persuade Andrew to have the client come to the office next week, but Andrew was adamant that the first meeting had to be both outside the office and tonight, i.e., a command performance. When pressed for details, he’d been somewhat coy, saying only that everything would be explained that evening. Hence my mood, for I could sense my weekend holiday slipping out of my grasp, and I really needed to get away. I could not, however, refuse Andrew—not so much because Andrew was my boss, but because I owed him so much. As an old friend of the family, Andrew had provided me with introductions to the right people at Harvard Law School and had further guided my career from junior associate to full partner over the course of a very short period of years. He’d been especially supportive three years ago, when Robert had died.

Robert…. Merely thinking the name invoked a flood of memories. When I’d buried Robert, I’d also buried the best part of myself and very nearly all of my emotions and feelings. The few that remained were now walled up in a remote compartment of my brain, and with every year that passed, the walls grew stronger and more impregnable. I threw myself into my work with a vengeance, stretching my ten-hour days into eleven and sometimes twelve. When work as anodyne failed to ease the pain of loss, I tended to exercise myself into exhaustion and thence oblivion. Dozens of well-meaning friends had, after what they deemed a suitable period of mourning, begun to invite me to functions and dinners where I would inevitably wind up paired with their latest candidate for my perusal. Once in a while I was even tempted, albeit briefly. On those rare occasions when I felt a slight breach in my emotional defenses, I responded by adding another layer of bricks and mortar to the wall. Eventually, the invitations ceased and I achieved a sort of equilibrium with the situation.

One of the advantages of my town house was the presence of an attached garage, and we’d indulged in one that would accommodate three cars. As the door opened and I pulled inside, I noted the absence of my roommate Richard’s Mustang convertible (a bright red GT, of course). The Mustang was part of his self-styled image as stud about town, and he was, no doubt, already at one of the after-work watering holes—most likely the Powder Magazine, a venerable old gay bar over on Juniper Street that was very popular as an after work meeting place—looking for a companion for the evening.

Richard’s love life, if one could call it that, was a succession of one-night stands. I couldn’t remember any of his flings having lasted more than a fortnight, and I frequently lectured him on the inherent dangers of promiscuity in this the era of AIDS. Richard insisted that he practiced only the safest of ‘safe s*x’, and wasn’t particularly worried about acquiring anything that penicillin couldn’t cure. He frequently teased me about the Jaguar, saying, “As a card-carrying homosexual, you should be driving something a little more exciting.” Truth be told, I would have preferred a coupe instead of a sedan, but I frequently had occasion to drive clients to meetings, and a coupe wouldn’t have been practical.

The ground floor of the town house contained the garage, a small foyer, and a large living room that looked out into a patio and landscaped yard surrounded by a high brick wall. There was also a half bath (or powder room) for the convenience of visitors. I took the back stairs up to the second floor, which contained the eat-in kitchen, formal dining room, my study, and a large laundry room and storage area. I went into the study and put a newly acquired recording of the Goldberg Variations on the CD player, having opened a Coke (I presumed I would be drinking enough alcohol later) on my way through the kitchen. Lance, who’d evidently been down in the backyard, came in through the doggie door that led from the kitchen to the balcony overlooking the backyard. The doggie door allowed him to go out onto the balcony and down the steps to the patio area whenever he felt the need. In the small backyard he was completely protected by the eight-foot privacy wall.

Sir Lancelot of Buckhead was a three-year-old pedigreed Irish Setter. He reared up, placed his paws on my shoulders, and lapped my chin briefly in greeting. Lance was probably the only reason I was still sane. During my childhood, I’d owned an Irish Setter. By the time I went away to college he had been old and infirm, and his failing health had required that he be put down during my first break between terms. One of the very few areas where Robert and I had ever been in complete disagreement was the subject of pets, dogs in particular. He didn’t like them, and they usually didn’t like him. In addition, he was severely allergic to both cats and dogs, so the subject of having a pet had never been seriously raised during our years together. A few months after Robert died, Richard had brought Lance home to me—a tiny seven-week-old bundle of love covered in what was then dark fur, which turned into a rich chestnut as he matured. It had been love at first sight, and he’d become my constant companion. I’d quickly retrofitted the house to accommodate a large dog, installing the doggie door, for example. It was a rigid rule of the household that the doors leading down to the formal living room and to the garage were never left open or even ajar so that there was never any opportunity for him to slip downstairs and possibly out the door to face the inherent dangers of busy city streets.

I decided to go upstairs and pack for the weekend—just in case this evening didn’t cancel my trip. Music is and has always been my passion, and I’d indulged myself to the extent of acquiring a state-of-the-art stereo system featuring speakers in every room that could be turned off and on at will from a master console in the study. Had I possessed the talent for it, I would probably have made a better musician than lawyer, but alas, more than one teacher had told me what I’d already suspected—that I was meant to enjoy music but not create it at any level beyond that of amateur. I did sing well enough to participate in choral activities at Harvard but hadn’t indulged even that small talent for years.

Arriving finally in my bedroom, I changed into shorts, a pullover shirt, and deck shoes. Lance, who’d followed me upstairs, hopped up on my bed, selected his favorite corner, and watched me intently.

As always when I entered the walk-in closet, I was confronted with the section of clothes that had belonged to Robert and were now carefully hung, protected by plastic dry-cleaner covers. I knew I should have sent them to Goodwill a long time ago, but somehow I hadn’t been able to make myself do so. I couldn’t wear them even though we’d shared the same six-foot height, as the similarity ended there. I’m relatively broad-shouldered from years of working out, while Robert had been possessed of a swimmer’s build and hadn’t been much interested in improving upon nature.

I did my packing, then laid out the clothing I planned to wear for the evening—since I was meeting a prospective client, I settled for a pinstriped suit, white shirt, and conservative tie. Having well over an hour to kill, I decided to sweat out some of my frustration, so I donned my running shorts and shoes, which was Lance’s signal to trot downstairs and find his leash. When I arrived on the second floor, he was waiting for me with his leash in his mouth, so I slipped the choke collar around his neck and led him to the door. We headed for Piedmont Park, which was only a block or so away and would be full of runners at this hour. I didn’t necessarily consider that a plus, but it would be a change from my normal early-morning runs, which were almost always solitary.

As I ran, I wondered what kind of client Andrew could have lined up that required such circumspection. Since I’m a trial lawyer, it could be either a criminal case or some civil litigation, but try as I might, I couldn’t come up with any ideas about the evening ahead.