thinks of the courtrooms she’d been in after her mother’s death, close, windowless, low-ceilinged affairs in which advocates decided her fate while consulting the notes in their files. “Family court,” it was called, and until she’d attended, she could only picture it as a dinner table, with a mom at the head wearing one of those British barrister wigs and wielding a gavel at the loud witnesses who wouldn’t eat their vegetables.
“What kind of attorney?”
“I work in a criminal law firm.” He coughs. “It doesn’t really work to say I’m a criminal lawyer, because then it sounds like I’m the criminal.”
He knows well the world she was thrust into, both with her mother’s murder and then with the books she’d turned to for answers.
“What?” he says after too much time has passed.
“My mom wanted me to be an attorney.”
“But you were not inspired?”
“I didn’t have the . . .” grades, she’s about to say, but it’s more than that. It’s that attending college and then law school would’ve required her to put down roots and become a stationary target. “I guess I wasn’t on fire to do it.”
“Yeah, you can’t really be lukewarm.”
“You always knew you wanted to be a lawyer?”
“Pretty much. People always told me I was a good arguer.”
“It’s nice you knew what you wanted.”
“And you?”
“You mean, was it my life’s goal to work in a coffeehouse?”
“Well, you’re young,” he says.
She doesn’t respond.
“I have to take that back, because it implies that where you are isn’t your final stop, and it may well be.”
She laughs. “Don’t worry, I’m not offended.”
“Good.”
But the moment does seem to have been a conversation killer, underscoring the fact that he’s on an upward trajectory and she’s not.
“You work with murderers?” she asks after they’ve walked a half block.
“Everyone deserves fair representation.”
“No,” she says firmly. “I don’t think so. Some people are evil.” She tucks her hair behind her ears, a nervous habit.
“The law provides that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.”
“But what if it’s clear as day that they’re guilty? It’s already proven? They’ve got blood dripping off their hands, standing over the victim, their bootprint in the victim’s face: Why do they need a trial?”
They continue in silence as he formulates his answer, past a closed bakery still radiating a smell of sweetness out to the street, and a bodega where the shopkeeper wears headphones and winks salaciously at Brooke as they pass.
“In that—let me just say, graphic and awful—case, it’s to ensure due process of the law and to decide sentencing for that clearly guilty individual.”
“That’s what I mean,” says Brooke doggedly. “Due process of the law. They don’t need it. They’re guilty.”
In a sudden rush, she dislikes him for his mouthful of multisyllabic words, for the way she knows he derives pleasure from saying them, especially in a courtroom faced with someone like her or, even worse, someone whose grasp of English might not be stellar. Those assholes in their expensive suits take great satisfaction in using words only other lawyers know, a parade of formal language to befuddle the poor soul on the witness stand.
It doesn’t help Anthony’s cause that he smiles, not at her, but privately. She is sure he’s thinking she’s stupid, doesn’t “get” the beauty of his well-oiled law machine. And that she’s a hot-headed Mexican who wants murderers to go straight to the chair. Thank goodness for cool-thinking intellectuals like him. He doles out fair treatment contemplated at hole 14, while some relative of the accused follows at his heels lugging the golf bag so he doesn’t have to.
“If you were ever accused of a crime,” he says, “you would want someone like me on your side. Sometimes the people who appear to be guilty aren’t. Or there are extenuating circumstances, and we want to take them into consideration while sentencing.”
“Extenuating circumstances.” She wants to spit. “That example I thought of, someone straddling the victim, blood literally dripping off their elbows . . . I want to hear how you think that person should get off.”
“Suppose the accused acted in self defense,” he says mildly. “Maybe that dripping blood is her own.”
“Okay, what if there’s no sign of injury to the, the . . .”
“Accused. Well, then, let’s say that there’s been a long history of attacks on the accused, and she believes that another is about to rain down on her. She preemptively—”
“Then it’s not self-defense.”
“Perhaps not, but it would affect the court’s leniency in determining how long this individual should be kept away from society. It’s not like there’s a chart somewhere that says, strangle someone, you get thirty years. Well, actually, there kind of is . . . but it’s more that there’s a span of time, fifteen to thirty years. And so the due process of the law might determine this wife has been beaten for years and so this time when her dirtbag of a husband brandishes his baseball bat, she goes after him. Do you think we’d want her to serve at the minimal or maximal end of the sentencing limit?”
She turns away to stare at the display in the store window. She can’t even tell what she’s looking at. All she can think of is his use of the word dirtbag. What her mother, Magdalena, had called her father on the birth certificate.
Tears don’t come. They never do. She’s never been a crier. How she hated the sobs in the group home. With the little kids, okay, but the teens should’ve been able to clamp it down. She has nothing to cry about anyway. She doesn’t know if her father hit her mother. She doesn’t know if he was in her mother’s life, or a one-night stand, or a rapist. She has no idea what he was to her—which means he is a nonentity to Brooke.
“I read a lot of true crime,” she says. “I know there are some people who walk this earth . . . well, let me ask you this. Have you ever been the victim of a crime?”
“No, other than having my swim goggles stolen out of my car once. What about you?”
She could kill herself for directing the conversation exactly where she didn’t want it to go. This was the question she’s spent years dancing around, maneuvering ways to not talk about her past. And she led him straight to it.
“No. I’ve been lucky.”
“I’m glad to hear it. So, you were making a point?”
“I
