Free Glass Houses by Jane Haddam Page B

station.
    This courtroom had a ceiling as high as the one on a professional hockey rink, and the judge’s platform was made from something dark and solid looking, like mahogany. Margaret would like this better. One of the things she had always hated about having to bail him out of one thing and another was how tacky the places she’d had to go to had been. He thought of her sitting back there right behind the rail. The low murmuring hum of her voice would be going on and on in Elizabeth’s ear, telling her all the things that were wrong with him and why they were all the fault of his mother. He got a certain amount of mileage out of his mother when his sisters were in the right mood and he was sober enough to convince them he was sober at all.
    Next to him, the tall young lawyer from the Public Defender’s Office finished taking papers out of his briefcase and sat down. Henry liked the tall young lawyer. He wasn’t an idiot. If they’d sent him the kind of lawyer you sometimes read about in the news, the kind that fell asleep at their clients’ trials, he’d have howled blue murder and got Elizabeth and Margaret in. As it was, this was better. The tall young lawyer would work for him, not for his sisters. His concerns would be Henry’s own concerns, not Margaret’s need forpublic respectability or Elizabeth’s need for demonstrating how Very, Very Progressive she was.
    â€œDo me a favor,” Henry said.
    â€œWhat’s that?” the tall young lawyer said.
    â€œTell me your name again,” Henry said.
    The tall young lawyer gave him a funny look. It was a look Henry knew well. It was the look that said that your client was not only a drunk, but had been a drunk so long his mind was not working properly. Henry held his breath, waiting for a sign of contempt or for a lecture. Neither came.
    â€œMy name is Russ,” the lawyer said patiently. “Russ Donahue. You can call me Russ, but you’ve got to remember the Donahue. Because the judge will call me Donahue.”
    â€œOh, I know that,” Henry said. “I know about courtrooms. I’ve been in enough of them. Vandalism, you know. And disturbing the peace. When I was younger, you could get arrested for public drunkenness. I don’t know if you can do that anymore. They don’t do it to me.”
    â€œNo,” Russ said. “Usually they don’t do it anymore.”
    â€œIt’s too bad,” Henry said. “They’ve caused themselves a lot of problems. In the old days, if they found somebody falling down drunk, they threw him in the drunk tank. They didn’t leave him out on the street sleeping in the cold. Now it gets cold and people freeze to death and they go all loopy worrying about it, and what for? They should just bring back the drunk tank, like I said. Then they just arrest the guys and throw them in there, and it’s not great but it’s got central heat and nobody is going to freeze to death overnight.”
    Russ Donahue had his head cocked. Henry could tell he was interested. No, that wasn’t the word. Henry could tell he was
intrigued.
That got them, too, every time. They thought that if you were a drunk, you had to be stupid.
    â€œI think they send out vans,” Russ said, “from the shelters to bring people in so they don’t die in the cold.”
    â€œWell, of course they do,” Henry said, “but that’s no use, is it? A lot of the men don’t want to go to the shelters. They get so drunk they don’t want to do anything. And the people in the vans can’t make them go. They can’t force them to go. The police can force you to go. You get arrested and that’s that. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had so much liquor you’d be willing to fight Godzilla in the middle of the street with your bare hands.”
    â€œDo you get like that, so that you want to fight Godzilla?”
    â€œNah. I’m a