Free Running from the Law by Lisa Scottoline Page B

way.”
    “What’s the right way?”
    “The right way is you finish what you started. The judge could be charged with murder. You told him you’d defend him, you defend him.”
    “I said I’d defend him against sexual harassment, not murder.”
    He punched up his glasses with his wrist. “You said you’d be his lawyer, you’re his lawyer. Finish what you started.”
    “But what if I shouldn’t have started it? What if he was using me, like you said?”
    “It don’t matter.”
    “Can’t I change my mind? Maybe you were right in the first place, Dad.”
    He straightened himself to his full height, which was five foot five. “I was right. I was right the first time and I’m right the second time, too. You don’t quit just because it’s tougher than you thought.” He drew a horizontal line in the air with the fork. I had no idea what this meant, except maybe it was the thirty-eighth parallel and I was North Korea and he was South.
    “It’s not that simple, Dad.”
    “No? Why not?”
    “It’s not getting tougher, it’s getting different.”
    He turned to LeVonne and pointed to him with the fork. “Do you understand what that means, Mr. President?”
    LeVonne shook his head.
    “It means it’s not what I bargained for, Dad. I’m not a criminal lawyer. What’s the matter with getting the judge a good criminal lawyer?”
    “It’s wrong!”
    “Why?”
    “General principles.”
    “General principles?” I smacked myself in the forehead. “How could I forget about general principles?”
    “Go ahead, make fun.”
    “You should write the general principles down somewhere, Dad, like they do with the United States Code. This way we could all look them up and know how to live. We wouldn’t have to come to Ninth Street every time we had a question. Think of the time it would save us!”
    He shook the fork at me. “You could visit more. It’s not the worst thing.”
    I rubbed my eyes and began to wonder why I had come. Had I really thought he could help? I didn’t even eat sausage. “Now, getting back to general principles. Which general principle is it we’re talking about? There are so many, and you can never find the index.”
    “You know which one, Miss Wiseguy.”
    “No, I don’t. I didn’t take general principles in law school. Maybe it was an elective?”
    LeVonne turned around in his seat, facing almost backward out the screen door to the tiny cement back of the store’s lot. I don’t know what he was looking at, there was nothing in the back except a cinderblock wall, two battered garbage cans, and a fig tree growing out of the concrete floor. Come to think of it, it was something to see.
    “The principle, Miss, is that you don’t quit. I didn’t raise a quitter. That’s what I’m saying.”
    “Why does it come down to what you raised? This has nothing to do with you. Whatever decision I make, it doesn’t reflect on you.”
    “Of course it does. Everything I do, everything you do … what did you say? What was that word?”
    “Reflects?”
    “ Reflects on each other. On all of us.” He made a circle in the air with the fork, and I figured we were talking the entire globe now, not just Korea. “It all reflects on us. Everything reflects on us. Our family name.”
    “Our what?” The concept was so ludicrous I couldn’t repeat it. “We’re the Morrones, not the Kennedys. Not the Rockefellers.”
    He slammed the fork down on the spoon rest. “Where did you get the idea that you have to have money to have a family name?”
    His vehemence took me aback, and LeVonne shifted farther out the back door.
    “Wherever you got it, it was wrong! We do have a family name—Morrone. It was my father’s name, and he came and started this shop in 1914. He was one of the first to come over, to come to the Market. My father, Vito Morrone, Senior. Your grandfather, you understand me?”
    “Sure, but—”
    “He had a name, and it counted as much as anybody else’s, and everybody