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Thursday morning

--1--

The portly black man in turquoise silk pajamas pulled back the thick velour drapes and gazed out. Dawn was just beginning to lighten the sky, but there would be no sunshine today. The low clouds were too thick. A cold north wind howled in the eaves of his hilltop manor, but he was warm behind the triple-glazed picture window. He looked down on the lights of Oakland. His city, as much as any man's. A huge, natural grin curled like a fat cat and settled on his lips. He'd come a long way, baby.

Ten years ago he would already have been up and out, huddled near the creaking iron stove of the longshoremen's hall in San Francisco, waiting for some asshole nigger-hating shop steward to bark off his name sos he could push and shove and haul and lift all day until every muscle and joint protested. Even then, at forty-seven, he'd been too old for that shit. And that's just where he'd be right now if he hadn't of busted his ass on that law school correspondence course. Best damned thing he'd ever done.

Cedrick P. Collins, Esq., was now the most charismatic, elegantly dressed, and silver-tongued black defense attorney ever to ply the waters of criminal justice in the Greater East Bay. With a Rolls Royce and a Cadillac El Dorado, a plush suite of offices on the eighteenth floor of the Bay Area Bank and Trust Building, a medley of six hundred dollar suits, and a highly qualified white associate for his gofer, he had achieved the pinnacle of ostentatious success. He was the preeminent criminal attorney for the entire East Oakland ghetto, fielding cases in virtually every municipal and superior court of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, with periodic command performances across the bay in the courts of San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara Counties.

"Yes siree," he breathed and ran his fingers through the neatly trimmed graying stubble haloing his shining pate.

A rumbling in his bowels told him it is almost time to telephone his associate, young LeBaron. Collins shook his head. The boy was honest and reliable as an old hound dog, bright with booklearning, yet abysmally ignorant of the ways of the streets. Over the past year Collins had grown unexpectedly fond of him. Hell, he'd grown to need him. There was no way he could make all those court appearances by himself. Each dawn he would telephone and lay out a list of clients and courts for LeBaron to cover that morning. Collins knew he was lucky to get him, and cheap, too. His bowels rumbled again. Time to make that call.

He shuffled back through the bedroom, quietly so as not to wake Beatrice, grabbed his state-of-the-art portable cellular telephone from the bedstand, and slipped into the bathroom. He settled himself on the oak toilet seat, found the current page in his daily diary, and relieved himself while studying his own heavily scrawled handwriting, some of which he could no longer decipher. Then he punched LeBaron's button and waited while it rang.

Ecstatically he pressed against her intimate sexual warmth in a way he couldn't begin to comprehend and didn't try. When she moved, he moved with her. A garment of perfect fulfillment draped over them, blending his haughty desire with the distant lure of an inconstant world. To him, she was all women.

Or, to be more precise, she was to him a distillation of many women, fleshed out on the primordial bones of his Jungian anima. She bore the superficial likeness of a handful of Playmates he had studied on lurid calendars and in dog-eared magazines in days gone by, mingled with a persistent image of that young blond girl who had so moved him when he was twelve, glimpsed through the window of a passing train. Beneath her flawless skin, however, endured a primordial incarnation of his first wife and of his mother and of all the myriad lovers his father and his father's father had yearned after for springs immemorial. That she was merely a dream he would not discover for yet another few seconds, as the digital circuitry of his bedside clock computed inexorably toward zero.

Had he encountered her with his fully conscious mind, he would have discovered that, more than any other living woman, she reminded him of his brother's old college sweetheart, Sarah Brubaker, whom he hadn't consciously considered for the better part of ten years. Whatever happened to Sally, anyway? he would have wondered.

Jed Aaron LeBaron awoke to a persistent electronic beep. The dream peace of her sleeping beside him seemed momentarily real, then flickered, faded, and was gone. In its place crowded a foul metallic taste, a bottomless yawn, and a solitary world which demanded too much. He stretched his toes into the cool corners of the empty sheets.

LeBaron squeezed the stem on the alarm and swung his feet to the cold floor. He glanced at the clock to see if he had time to shave before the telephone rang. It was going to be close. The remaining strands of sexual fulfillment unraveled around him as he padded glumly into the bathroom to face another workday.

What would Mr. Collins have in store for him today? His brush thrashed the suds in his shaving mug into a dense cloud of soggy marshmallow. An arraignment or two, perhaps a preliminary examination, and maybe even a drunk-driving trial. A court trial, no doubt. "Wouldn't that be fun!" he razzed his mirrored scowl and smeared the thick lather over a day's stubble, his pale blue eyes watching above the froth. A court trial, he now had enough experience to conclude, was nothing more than a slow guilty plea. But Mr. Collins had instructed him that if the client couldn't cross his palm with at least five hundred dollars, new up-front cash money, he should waive the jury or withdraw from the case. Mr. Collins couldn't afford to have him getting bogged down in long jury trials unless the old quid pro quo was there. It was simply a matter of good business. The client was entitled to just as much spirited criminal justice as he was willing to pay for.

"'S'the 'mer'can way," LeBaron drawled in a lousy imitation of Lyndon Johnson, rinsing his brush in a stream of hot water. He plucked a fresh Gillette Good News razor out of the nearly empty carton--

The phone rang, and an icy hand closed on his heart.

The telephone had rung every weekday morning about this time for the past twelve months. A year ago, just after he had moved back to the city, thirty years old and four years out of law school, LeBaron had hung out his own shingle in the front window of his first floor Berkeley apartment. He had received a number of vague inquiries right away, but only one paying client. While waiting for his own legal fortunes to root and flourish, he had answered a terse ad in the Oakland Tribune, and hired on part time with Cedrick P. Collins, Esq., to supplement his meager income. He hadn't had the slightest inkling of what he was getting into. The part time work had swollen like a snake and swallowed him whole.

At first he had lost a good deal of sleep worrying about what each morning's telephone briefing might portend. He had been brought up, after all, on the simple rule of life encapsulated in the Boy Scout's infamous slogan, "Be Prepared!" His success in college and law school he attributed to adequate, perhaps even excessive, preparation. So at first it was more than a little disconcerting for LeBaron to wander into a strange courtroom, never having set eyes on his client and knowing absolutely nothing about his case or why it was on the docket, and hear an unfamiliar judge call the case as sharply as a weary bow watchman might report yet another floating mine in some obscure Middle-Eastern waterway. Mr. Collins would of course try to fill him in a bit as best he could remember, but LeBaron soon learned not to rely too heavily on his employer's crowded recollections. More often than not they proved flawed.

LeBaron learned instead to rely on The Quiet Presence. As his courtroom time accumulated and the cases piled up behind him like weathered slabs in an endless concrete highway, LeBaron grew to recognize its unassailable power. The secret was to stroll up to the bar with the somber dignity of a young Abraham Lincoln, but beyond a few ceremonial jingoes, to keep his lip buttoned. "Ready for the defendant!" was in most instances all that was prudent to declare, uttered with the booming self-confidence of one who was about to waltz the entire north cellblock off to freedom because of some hitherto overlooked loophole in the law.

The unknown judge would shuffle through his stack of files, perhaps muttering to himself, and at last announce what the matter had been calendared for. "Looks like this is on for a plea," he might say.

Frequently this was LeBaron's first clue. But simple patterns began to recur with reassuring regularity. To the on-for-arraignment gambit, LeBaron learned to respond, as surely as one of Pavlov's dogs might salivate to the sound of a tinkling silver bell, "Waive formal reading of the complaint, plead not guilty, waive time, request a jury." He would then relapse into The Quiet Presence, as if the next step were too obvious to be spoken, and wait for someone else, the poor overworked deputy D. A., or the judge himself, to move the dialogue forward. LeBaron's misgivings slowly abated as he began to comprehend that the criminal justice system, with its presumption of innocence, right against self-incrimination, heavy burden of proof, and inalienable Bill of Rights, was so stacked in favor of the defendant that the only proper function of a good defense attorney was to stand there and keep his mouth shut.

Sometimes things went wrong, of course, but LeBaron no longer doubted that even those events conformed to some secret agenda of Cedrick P. Collins, Esq. In the Hampstead case, for example, he had been sent in to select the jury with the promise that his employer would be there personally in the afternoon to conduct the trial. Then Collins had weaseled out by starting another trial in another court, leaving LeBaron to handle a very sordid affair. LeBaron assumed The Quiet Presence, convinced that the proper function of the criminal defense attorney at trial, as before trial, is reactive, not proactive, especially when his client was so obviously guilty. The only question for trial was, could the prosecution prove his client was guilty? Unfortunately for LeBaron, the cases Collins dumped off on him tended to be dead dogs, and the prosecution had been able to call more incriminating witnesses than LeBaron thought was in good taste. The jury had summarily found Hampstead guilty on every count.

The telephone rang a second time.

LeBaron stomped into the bedroom and snapped it up. "Mr. Collins, can I call you right back? I'm in the middle of shaving."

Silence.

"Mr. Collins? Hello?"

After an unsettling pause a soft female voice asked, "Jed LeBaron?"

"Yes?"

"My name is Sarah Brubaker. You probably don't remember me, but I used to date your brother. Do you know where I can get in touch with him?"

Sarah Brubaker. Not remember her! Christ, how could she think that! A roiling wave surged through him like a tsunami, memory, anguish, dream, desire. He saw a honey-haired young cheerleader, lithe as a fawn, tawny-skinned and flushed with excitement, prancing in the frosty air beneath the glare of stadium lights to the staccato pulse of the marching band's drums. Memory's foaming whitecap exploded and he was walking through the frozen juniper beneath a gently falling snow, feeling very grown-up, Vince and Sally and he between them clinging to their arms, plumes of breath from their mouths and fresh snow crunching underfoot, and the incredible warmth of her touch through his heavy coat strangely terrifying him. Vision overlaid vision with the confusing surge of crashing waves. His blood boiled with forgotten longing and desire. Colliding worlds twirled past, pictures, feelings deeply engraved and hidden away, a kaleidoscope running out of control. Weirdly disoriented, he stared at the telephone and stammered, "My brother? Vince?"

"Yes. D'you know where I can reach Vince? It's very important."

"Vince? Vince's at the Tehema Monastery at Mount Tehema."

"Thanks, Jed. I'll call you back sometime when you aren't so busy. Goodbye."

"Say, Sally, how've you been, anyway? Sally? Sarah?" But it was too late. The line was dead. Numbly LeBaron replaced the handset. He felt like he straddled a great gaping pit. What the hell was that all about? She sounded so . . . harried. Distracted. LeBaron considered trying to contact Vince, as difficult as that might be, and find out what Sarah Brubaker might want. And what she was up to nowadays. And, hell, since Vince was up to his neck in Zen Buddhism, maybe Jed could be a sport and help old Sally out. Hadn't Vince said he'd taken a vow of celibacy last time he saw him? When was that? His brother's celibacy seemed terribly relevant to LeBaron, although he didn't allow his imagination to pursue its essential ramifications with Sarah Brubaker.

The telephone rang again. Tentatively he picked it up.

"Hello?"

"Mornin', LeBaron. You don't sound so hot. Y'been gettin' 'nough sleep?"

"Oh, good morning, Mr. Collins. Yeah . . . er . . . I just had another call I was thinking about."

"Well thass fine. But now's time t'think about business. Looks like a busy day. Y'got your pencil handy?"

"Yes sir."

"Good. Y'got a Jones--I think that's 'Leroy', but y'better check the docket--he's in Oakland Muni. He's on for an arraignment or somethin' at nine fifteen. Try'n get two hundred dollars from him, will ya? He said he'll have some money for ya. Be sure t' a'ks for it. An' while you' there, see if y'can get Judge Tilsen t' sentence Monica Smith. She's been in custody on a 647b for three weeks. That'll save y'a trip back for the one o'clock calendar. Get'er credit for time served. The probation report'll be in the file. Then there's a LeVerne Biggers in Superior Court at ten . . . didn't you handle Biggers for me once already?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Uh. Anyway, I think that's a welfare fraud, but check the calendar, an' I'm not sure what it's on for . . . arraignment or bail hearing maybe . . . but if y'get into any trouble, have'em put it over t' the one o'clock calendar. Get some money from her! She's way behind . . ." And on and on, ten or fifteen appearances just that morning. Seemed to be getting busier every day.

"Got it," LeBaron said when Collins finally paused. "Is that all for today?"

"No, wait a minute." Collins was studying a name. Freeman. Something wasn't right about that one, but he couldn't quite remember what. Superior court, department fifteen. Arraignment? No, he didn't think so. Trial setting? Now which Freeman was that? Ruben? Or Rufus? Whatever it was, he sure wasn't paying very good if Collins couldn't even remember his first name. "Here's another'n for you. A Freeman. Ruben or Rufus, I think. Check the calendar. Superior fifteen, three p. m."

"Three?"

"Thass what I said."

"What's it on for at three?"

"Trial setting," Collins mumbled irritably, "or arraignment 'r somethin'. Jus' take care of it for me, an' if y'have a problem, jus' put it over an' I'll take care of it myself." He flushed the toilet.

"That's it then?"

"That's it." Collins started to hang up, then barked into the phone, "LeBaron?"

"Yeah."

"This Freeman. Get some money from him."