They Framed the Wrong Lawyer

Chapter 9

The anniversary package ran on Friday, exactly as ordered.

I will say this for David: he has never once done an ugly thing carelessly. The local paper ran my photograph from the old life — the good suit, the courthouse steps — beside a fresh one some stringer had taken through the bar window: the towel, the bottles, the neon. The headline writer had done his duty: THE FALL OF JACK SULLIVAN: FIVE YEARS ON, STILL POURING. A television segment kept asking, in three different tones of concern, whether this was a comeback. Two podcasts I had never heard of explained my guilt to their listeners, patiently, the way you would explain a menu to a child.

Nobody in any of it asked about the case I was actually working. That was the craftsmanship. The story wasn't liar. The story was look at him.

By Saturday the bar had a problem, and the problem had forms: an anonymous complaint to the liquor board, a review of the premises' insurance, and a quiet word to Hank — who owns the building and the license, and roughly half my life — from a man in the kind of suit that never has to introduce itself.

Hank is a large, gentle man who has buried two wives and one business partner, and he talks about all losses the same, slowly, with both hands flat on the bar. He found me in the back with the inventory.

"I don't believe a word of it, Jack. You know that."

"I know it."

"The insurance man says a disbarred lawyer in the papers is a reputational elevation of risk." He said the phrase carefully, like it was a full glass. "Costs me four thousand a year just in adjectives." He folded the letter in half, then in half again, lining the edges up exact. "Two weeks, Jack. Just till it blows over. Have you got savings to—"

I had the apron off before he finished asking.

"Two weeks," I said. "Keep my shifts."

"They'll be here." He looked at the little folded square in his hand, four thousand dollars of adjectives, and set it on the shelf behind the bar, in the slot where the tabs go. "Whatever you did to those people, son — do it faster."

---

Hank let me clear my locker on Sunday, in the storage room at the back of the bar, among the dead kegs and the chair graveyard. Five years of a man's life fit into one garbage bag: shirts, a razor, forty napkins I had never thrown away, because a man in my profession does not throw away notes. At the very back of the locker, wrapped in a bar towel that had once been white, was my old casebook.

Every trial lawyer I ever knew kept one — the annotated record of the cases that made you, margins full of the handwriting of a younger man who still believed the truth lived in the footnotes. Mine had traveled with me from the firm to the bar, unread but never discarded. I had not opened it in five years.

I opened it now because the clasp was undone, and the clasp was undone because something was wedged in the lining of the back cover, and what slid out into my palm was a photograph.

Me. David. Five years ago, though the man in it looks a decade younger than I do now — the closing dinner of the Calloway matter, the last case we ever won together — yes, that Calloway; some families keep a firm in business for a generation, and I had known where they kept the second ledger since before Ryan Cole passed the bar. In the photograph David has his arm around my shoulders, and we are both laughing at something outside the frame. His other hand is raising a glass to the camera. I remember what that glass was toasting, and it never arrived.

I stood in the storage room a long time with the garbage bag at my feet.

Then I turned the photograph over.

On the back, in my own handwriting — the handwriting of the man in the photograph, who still had a license and a best friend — were nine digits and two words.

The digits were a safe-deposit box number, at a bank that had closed its downtown branch three years ago. The two words were: FOR RAIN.

I had no memory of writing it. Five years ago I had apparently stood somewhere — drunk, or frightened, or finally, at the very end, careful — and left myself a message in my own hand, and then spent five years polishing glasses on top of it.

---

The bank had merged since then, and the boxes had migrated to a branch across the river. I went on Monday morning, when the doors opened.

A clerk with more patience than years checked my face against a signature card older than her employment. I signed the card myself. It was the first signature in five years that was really mine.

She brought me the box in a small room with a door that locked, and left me alone with it. The rent had been prepaid for ten years — by me, apparently.

Inside the box there was no money and no deed. No cassette labeled in thunder, either.

There was a key — a small brass key, the kind that opens a locker, a cabinet, a desk drawer in a building that no longer exists. And beneath it, folded once, a single sheet of paper in my own hand, the writing steady, which meant I had been sober, which meant I had been planning.

The recording is in the old place. Trust the woman who feeds you.

I did not have to think about the old place. I knew it before I finished the sentence: the café across from the old courthouse, where I had eaten breakfast every trial day for nine years. They tore the courthouse down for a parking structure, but the café is still there. Greta's. Greta, who fed me eggs through three trials and one disbarment and never once let me pay during the worst month, who has a memory like a court reporter and an opinion of David Mercer she expressed exactly once, years ago, in words I will not set down here.

Trust the woman who feeds you.

My phone rang in the little room, loud in the locked silence, and I will admit that I jumped.

Greta. Four years since her last call, and she was calling on the first Monday of my suspension.

"Jackie," she said, in the voice of a woman who has been watching the news and does not approve of it. "You come to breakfast tomorrow. Early, before the lawyers' crowd, you understand me. There is a thing in my safe with your name on it. It has been there five years, and after what I am seeing on the television, it is time it stopped being in my safe."

The line went dead before I could say yes.