The Ditto List Read online

  “Oh? That’s too bad. I always liked Kathy. Who was her lawyer?”

  “Well, I was, I guess. I mean, the firm sort of handled the whole thing. Made a nice arrangement for both of us.”

  D.T. laughed. “How’s she getting along on food stamps, Jerome?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Jerome reset the already impeccable knot in his tie.

  “She still in town? There’s a remedy or two for that kind of ethical obtuseness that I’d like to apprise her of.”

  “Now, D.T.,” Jerome said, and started to move away. But for some sudden reason D.T. wanted him to stay.

  Jerome Fitzgerald had been one of the students he most despised in law school, one of those who had always known they wanted to be lawyers and had always known why—money and power and deductible vacations. No cause, no principle, no reformist zeal, just a respectably lucrative job. Less pressure than medicine, more fashionable than real estate or insurance, less risky than wildcatting or drug dealing. D.T. had once overheard a girl ask Jerome to name his favorite novel and movie and symphony. The novel was The Robe; the movie Spartacus; the symphony The Grand Canyon Suite. Yet Jerome provoked a certain fascination in D.T., an awe of his ignorance of doubt, of his seamless self-confidence, of his assessment of a scrambled world in such simple forms and rules that he could doubtlessly vote Republican, belong to the ABA, drive a car that cost as much as a house, and, in his racy moments, make snide remarks about divorce lawyers and liberal politicians and people who slept in doorways and ate free food.

  “Hang on a minute, Jerome,” D.T. urged. “What else you been doing for the last twenty years? You made partner yet?”

  “Of course.”

  “What department?”

  “Litigation.”

  “Really? Don’t see you down here in the trial courts much. Never, as a matter of fact.”

  “Most of our work is in federal court.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Oh, antitrust. Commercial litigation. Securities fraud.”

  “Yeah? Which side you on? The frauder or the fraudee? As if I didn’t know.”

  Jerome hitched up his slacks and searched again for a path that led away from where he was. “How many jury trials you had?” D.T. probed, conscious that he was close to pillory.

  “I … I’m not sure. I don’t keep count.”

  “Come on, Jerome, How many?”

  “Uh …”

  “Five? Ten?”

  “Well, none, actually. Most of our matters settle before trial, of course. All of them, actually. Protracted litigation is so … expensive.”

  “Right, right,” D.T. agreed. “Expensive and scary, too. Right? I mean, there’s always that chance the old jury foreman will stand up and look you right in the eye and say, ‘Jerome, my man. You fucking lose.’ Right? I do a little litigation myself, as a matter of fact. Not federal, of course. No big deal. Just who gets the kids and who pays the rent and the orthodontist. So let’s have lunch. Huh, Jerome?”

  Jerome adjusted his tie again. “Sure, D.T. Next time you’re uptown give me a call.”

  “Next time I’m uptown I’ll have taken a wrong turn,” D.T. said. “But I am eager to reminisce about the good old days. Like, remember that multiple-choice exam old Hardflood threw at us in estate tax?”

  Jerome smiled and fingered the Coif medal that swung from his watch chain like a soggy sock. “God, yes. What a total incompetent.”

  D.T. laughed and slapped Jerome on the back. “You can say that again. And remember how often you looked over at my paper? Huh? At least a dozen times, as I recall. God, that was a scream, wasn’t it? The way you cribbed your way through that one?”

  “Hey. Wait a minute, D.T. I never.…”

  D.T. turned his back and went inside the courtroom and sat in the row in front of his string of frightened ladies.

  Judge Hoskins was especially snappy as he moved through the calendar, which meant things clipped along at just below Mach two. Witnesses and attorneys were cut off in mid-word. Judgments were uttered before requested. Silences were castigated. “Blutz v. Blutz,” Walter finally called, and looked at D.T. and grinned.

  “Show time,” D.T. whispered to the women behind him, and then stood up. “Ready, Your Honor.”

  He turned back to the row of women. “Mrs. Blutz? You’re on. Relax and enjoy it. The court will set you free.”

  He allowed the trembling woman to precede him down the aisle. When they reached the counsel table he whispered for her to leave her gum with him, a stunt she managed with a minimum of notoriety, then directed her to the witness chair to the right of Judge Hoskins’ elevated throne. D.T. placed his pile of files on the counsel table and looked into the immaculate scowl of the Honorable Willard Hoskins, Judge of the Circuit Court.

  “How many this morning, Jones?” Each word was dipped in what the judge would have called justifiable vitriol and what D.T. would have called unearned pomposity.

  “Seven, Your Honor.”

  “All defaults?”

  “Yes.”

  “No husbands popping out of the woodwork today, demanding jury trials? No children suddenly announcing a preference to live with Daddy in Tahiti? No last minute allegations of spousal abuse or incestuous assault?” The judge rolled his eyes and rubbed his nose.

  “No, Your Honor.” D.T. bowed in chastened humility before the court’s unchallengeable rectitude and rolled Jerlene Blutz’ Double-mint into a ball and stuck it to the underside of the counsel table.

  “You may begin.”

  Begin he did. Questions of name, age, address, length of marriage, length of residence in the state and county, venue established, jurisdiction established, judicial system engaged. Then the high hard ones, in the language of a statute thought by the legislature and its advisors to be an advance in the sociolegal approach to crumbling domesticity—“Have you and your husband experienced irreconcilable differences during your marriage, Mrs. Blutz?” Why yes, that’s just what we’ve experienced, Mr. Jones; irreconcilable differences. A whole mess of them, too. Just that kind. “And have these irreconcilable differences led to the irremediable breakdown of your marriage, Mrs. Blutz?” You took the words right out of my mouth, Mr. Jones. That’s just what they led to, the what-you-call-it breakdown. Bang. “Petition for interlocutory decree of dissolution granted. Next case.”

  Five more times D.T. observed the ritual, and the staging and the script were flawless. “And have you and your husband experienced irreconcilable differences, Mrs. Rodriguez?”

  “What is that? I no understand.”

  “Have you and your husband had problems? Arguments?”

  “Fight? You mean do we fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Si. We fight. It José’s fault. Tequila make him loco.”

  D.T. began to sweat. “Fault is not at issue here, Mrs. Rodriguez, as we discussed. Now, have these differences with your husband led to the irremediable breakdown of your marriage?”

  “The furnace is what break down. Is that what you mean? The furnace break down and so I no pay the rent and the landlord he come put a paper in the door that say we got to leave by Sunday and I talk to woman at the neighborhood center by the laundromat and she send me to Legal Aid and they tell me to come here today and so here I am and I say we no leave. Huh? Is this when I say that? We no leave!”

  “Mr. Jones.”

  The judge’s voice awakened the dead and deeply buried. “Unless I miss my guess the young lady is here to defend an unlawful detainer action, not to petition for the dissolution of her marriage to the excitable José. There is undoubtedly another Rodriguez in the building, detailing her marital woes in response to questions about the furnace. Perhaps if you interviewed your clients, Mr. Jones, these travesties would not occur. I suggest you give it a try. In the meantime, I suggest you point this Mrs. Rodriguez in the right direction. I also suggest, no, advise, that if this happens again in my courtroom you will immediately be jailed for contempt and the ba
r association will be notified of the way in which you conduct your practice. Such as it is. Court is adjourned.”

  As Walter rolled his eyes and scurried after the departing jurist, D.T. picked up his files and whispered some words to the witness and guided her to the master calendar board, then directed her to Courtroom Six, where Watson v. Rodriguez—Unlawful Detainer—was scheduled for hearing. Then D.T. looked in the appropriate places for his Mrs. Rodriguez. Not finding her, D.T. left the building. Another day, another dollar, another slap of shame. D.T’s only consolation was that no one except his ex-wife had ever called him anything he had not already called himself.

  TWO

  Problems?” Bobby E. Lee raised a brow as D.T. came through the door. “You’ve got that look.”

  D.T. dropped the files on Bobby E. Lee’s desk. “Problems indeed. But I don’t seem to be able to blame any of them on you.”

  “You never can,” Bobby E. Lee replied truthfully. “What was it this time?”

  “An overabundance of the surname Rodriguez.”

  “So no Chicago and no flu?”

  D.T. nodded. “Judge Hoskins depresses me so much I can’t do anything but work. What do we have?”

  “Two dittos, plus one non-usual.”

  “And the lad with the scarf and earring?” D.T. dared a glance toward the couch.

  “He’s with me. We’re off to lunch.”

  “Didn’t it hurt to stick that diamond in there?”

  “I suppose, but then Tod’s rather into pain.” Bobby E. Lee placed the cover over his typewriter. “I may be late getting back. I have to buy Daddy a birthday present.”

  “I thought you and Daddy weren’t speaking.”

  “We aren’t. I’m going to get him some bikini underwear to remind him why.”

  Bobby E. Lee smiled a trifle fiendishly and closed the drawers of his desk, then plucked his satin jacket off the rack, motioning for his punctured friend to follow. The pair exited the office with the flair of those who see themselves as objets d’art.

  For the hundredth time, D.T. started to wonder about Bobby E. Lee, but as usual he stopped himself before his speculation became risqué. Bobby was a good secretary and a good person. It was all D.T. needed to know, all he trusted himself to know as well. The rest was Bobby’s business. Still, D.T. felt uneasy, as though there was some continuing obligation he was not fulfilling. He guessed it had to do with Bobby being homosexual, and with his own nonspecific responsibility for the jokes about fags and queers that befouled the air without his protest, with his apparently congenital sense that he should somehow make it better. For Bobby E. Lee. For everyone. Of course, a concrete obligation did exist. D.T. was more than a month in arrears in paying Bobby’s salary.

  D.T. glanced at the empty waiting room, then straightened the already straight copies of Cosmopolitan, Vogue, People, US, Self, Shape, and Mad that littered the coffee table. Whistling tonelessly, he emptied the ashtray and threw away the wilted rose that Bobby E. Lee had picked in the park on his way to work. Happy to be momentarily a janitor rather than a lawyer, he wished he would not have to imagine, whether in a few minutes or a few months, how the women he had freed at the Fiasco that morning would ensnarl their lives again.

  He entered his private office and took off his coat and hung it on the rack. The small refrigerator in the closet contained only a slice of swiss cheese the size of a domino, a can of light beer, and a magnum of French champagne, the latter received in lieu of a more fungible fee from a client with a flair for the unusual and a brother in the booze business. As the result of his second honeymoon—embarked upon with his ex-wife after only ninety-seven days of marriage—D.T. hated both the French and their champagne and so was waiting for a suitable occasion on which to present the magnum to Bobby E. Lee.

  D.T. took out his buck knife and cut a sugary dollop of mold away from the cheese, then downed it. The bottom drawer of his desk yielded half a roll of Lifesavers and a quart of Bailey’s Irish Cream, a Christmas gift from the member of his poker group for whom D.T. was in the nature of a perpetual annuity. The liqueur washed away the lingering dust of cheese, the beer washed away the lingering film of candy. The mechanics of sustenance accomplished, D.T. pulled his time sheets from the credenza behind his desk and made notations appropriate for the morning’s activity, calibrating and quantifying his most recent humiliation.

  D.T. rarely performed a professional service that was payable on an hourly basis as opposed to a flat fee, so the time sheets he prepared so meticulously were invariably worthless. But there was always, he frequently told himself and occasionally believed, a chance that an initially routine matter would burgeon into a great litigious engine that would unearth someone, somewhere, who could be directed by an appropriate court to compensate D.T. for each and every minute of his time, at an approximate rate of two dollars per. Then he could live the way half the lawyers he knew were living—from the proceeds of that one big case, a sinecure that had fallen into their undeserving laps like a starling struck by lightning and had nevertheless generated, despite their persistent lassitude and seamless incompetence, a fee of an outrageous and easily sheltered six figures.

  In the meantime, D.T. used the time records as raw data from which to calculate a flat fee that would yield him a reasonable return for services rendered and at the same time keep the unfortunate ladies coming through the door at an approximate rate of three per day. The last time he had run the numbers it had come out thusly for a default divorce, the staple of the Friday Fiasco:

  Bobby E. Lee—Intake interview, forms completion, telephonic instruction re court appearance: 30 minutes @ $25.00 per hour = $12.50.

  D.T.—Client interview and forms review: 35 minutes @ $75.00 per hour = $43.75.

  D.T.—Court appearance: 15 minutes @ $75.00 per hour = $18.75.

  Expenses—Filing fees, service of process, etc.: $75.00.

  Total time and expenses = $150.00.

  Surcharge for overhead and unforeseen difficulties, tantrums, wails, interruptions, consolations, reconciliations, etc.: $150.00.

  Surcharge for inflation: $50.00.

  Discount for socioeconomic character of clientele and existence of storefront law firms that advertise on billboards and compete on price: $150.00.

  Net total: $200.00. Flat rate for default or uncontested divorce. Entire amount payable in advance unless alternate arrangements made prior to initial interview. Subject to change without notice. Frequently subject to reduction, occasionally subject to waiver, a gesture followed inevitably by regret and self-reproach.

  D.T. shoved the papers away from him and thought again about what had happened in court. Running into Jerome Fitzgerald after all these years reminded him how differently his own life had evolved from the course he had envisioned during the turbid days of law school. Had he known anyone to whom he could have been truthful about such things, he would have confessed during his freshman year that he believed himself a fermenting mix of Perry Mason and Clarence Darrow, a nascent champion of lost causes, reviver of trampled liberties, master of the sine qua non of the trial lawyer’s art—convincing anyone of anything. But after he had gone into practice on his own—against the advice of everyone he knew and a lot of those he didn’t—the clients who came his way all possessed totally prosaic difficulties, dilemmas that, while they involved the basic passions and requirements of life and therefore invoked D.T.’s empathy and an invariably unprofitable expenditure of his time, did not attract the kind of publicity or renown that would bring more glorious causes to his door.

  Mildly injurious dog bites, trivial slips and falls, evictions, credit hassles, change of names—the clients trooped in and out of his office like files of captured soldiers, asking little, getting less. His silver tongue tarnished by life’s relentless ambiguity, the major Perry Masonish mystery in his practice soon came to be whether he would be able to pay Confederated Properties the exorbitant rent for the suite of offices that, he insisted as a point of pride, be at
least one storey above the street and occupy at least one more room than the nearest branch of Legal Aid. So, twenty years after his dreams of glory and eminence had vanished as steadily as a salt lick in a stockyard, here he was, not quite envious of others, yet not quite satisfied with himself, pursuing a profession whose moral component was detectable only with the aid of a microscope or a philosopher.

  D.T. swore at the law and at Judge Hoskins, made a resolution to change his life in some respect as yet unspecified, and took a sip of Bailey’s. While his cheeks swelled with liquid candy, the bell above the door to the hallway tinkled briefly and a few seconds later the bell on Bobby E. Lee’s desk chimed to match it. D.T. walked to the file cabinet and extracted the form headed Petition for Dissolution of Marriage and the accompanying Confidential Counseling Statement and Property Declarations and laid them on his desk. Then he picked up the phone and called a number he had called once a week or more for the past three years.

  “Conway residence.”

  “May I speak to Mrs. Jones, please?”

  “Mrs. Jones ain’t Mrs. Jones no more, she Miz Conway back again, and besides, she out.” The voice paused and experienced metamorphosis. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “The one still stuck with the name of Jones. How are you, Mirabelle?”

  “I’s fine, D.T. Didn’t recognize you voice. Been drinking lunch again?”

  “Not a drop,” he lied. “Where’s her loveliness?”

  “Jazzercise, she call it.”

  “She turned hip in her old age?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice, D.T. She still buying them tunes like they play in the supermarket. She be back by four, I expect. Take her another hour to recover, you got anything strenuous in mind.”

  Her laugh made D.T. laugh. “Jazzercise. Is that dancing, or what?”

  “Jumping like a toad on a hot rock is what it look like. She all the time practicing with a nappy-headed man on the TV sounds like my niece Lucille.”

  “Have her call me, will you, Mirabelle? I’m at the office. My picture still on the piano?”