Free Swindlers by D.W. Buffa Page B

husband and had
now been charged with murder.
    “Are you going to do it?”
    I did not need to look up from my corner
table in the courthouse cafeteria. Philip Conrad had been a court
reporter for almost twenty years when I first started practicing
law, and in a strange way we had become friends; strange, because
we never saw each other outside of court. I knew him the way we all
know people with whom we spent part of our time at work. If I had
been asked where he lived or what he did on weekends, all I could
have said was that he lived somewhere in the city and that he
probably spent most of Saturday and Sunday typing up the trial
transcript some lawyer needed for an appeal.
    There were things I knew about him, however,
that others did not. He had taken an interest in me from the first
trial I had in which he was the reporter, and he used to tell me, a
young lawyer who could not find his way to the clerk’s office
without help, stories about the legendary lawyers he had known
years earlier. A few years after we first met, he told me that he
had married the girl from the neighborhood where he had grown up,
the girl he had known ever since he was just a boy, how he married
her after he came home from Vietnam, a twice-wounded veteran of the
war, how they moved into a small two-bedroom house out on the
avenues where he still lived. He had an old-fashioned way of
talking, especially when it came to things that were by any measure
personal and deeply felt. In a single sentence, spoken with the
kind of restrained emotion that only makes you, the witness, feel
how much another man has suffered, he told me in a firm, quiet
voice that she saved his soul every day he lived with her, and that
when she died, a year and a half later, struck by a car on her way
home from the store, the best part of him had died as well. He kept
her picture on the bedroom dresser, and year after year went
through the motions of his life, and never once, in that
regrettable phrase which treats all tragedy as a temporary
inconvenience, thought of ‘moving on.’ Modest, self-effacing, with
a pleasant round face and gentle eyes, he was, so far as the world
knew, a generally cheerful man.
    “Are you going to do it?” he asked again as
he settled into the chair on the other side of the plain plastic
table.
    “Do what?” I asked, though I knew very well
what he meant.
    He nodded toward the newspaper I had just put
down.
    “Defend her.”
    “I haven’t been asked.”
    “You knew them, didn’t you?”
    Beyond the fact that I had spent a weekend on
Blue Zephyr, I could not remember how much I had told him.
    “I met them; I couldn’t really say I got to
know them very well.”
    His eyes raised a question, seemed to suggest
a doubt. He had been the reporter in so many trials, listened to so
many lawyers, that he knew by a kind of instinct not just when
someone was lying, but when, in that more subtle form of deception,
they were leaving something out.
    “You should have been a prosecutor,” I
observed. “You ask a question, hear the answer, and then just sit
there and wait for something more. There isn’t,” I tried to assure
him, but then, because I could not ignore that somber, unrelenting
gaze of his, I had to qualify it. “Nothing important.”
    A prosecutor – any cross-examining attorney -
would have smiled at this admission, but Philip Conrad, with his
mute insistence, did not care about making a point, he only wanted
to hear the truth. The only change in his expression was a slight
movement of his thinning eyebrows as he discovered a deeper meaning
in what I had said.
    “A woman that beautiful, there’s always
something more.”
    “I suspect you’re right about that,” was my
vague response.
    “Are you going to do it, defend her? You
haven’t been asked. I know. But you’ve met her; she’s met you; and
even if you hadn’t met, who else would she ask? Everyone who gets
in trouble wants you for their lawyer.”
    There was something