Criminal - Lawyer

By Donna Beumler

Told with a rare and visceral authenticity, Criminal/Lawyer is the story of criminal defense attorney Alice Dreyer, and of her clients: murderers, rapists, and drug addicts. She represents them all. Awash in the dark and sometimes deranged world of the criminal justice system, Alice's colleagues will become her strongest supporters and most cherished friends, until a shocking betrayal forces Alice to chart a perilous course between right and wrong, justice and injustice, criminal and criminal la

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644621769

Book preview

Chapter One

Ihave walked with murderers. I have talked with thieves. I’ve shared jokes with psychopaths and cups of coffee with child molesters. I’ve cried with addicts. And cried and cried.

I don’t think it’s too grim to say it that my life has been this ride through the legal system. Up, down, sometimes sideways. Mostly, a public defender. An employee with the Costa Vista County Public Defender’s Office in northern California. Someone who represents defendants charged with serious crimes.

I am among that group of lawyers who are broadly and universally despised. Even our clients despise us, and we know that.

I want to tell a story. My story. This story. Who I am, what I have done, and what I have chosen not to do. We all judge one another all the time; I’m no fool. But read this first, and then judge me. Or judge all of us, if you want, once you know the things we know—the pitiful weakness of the human heart, the desperation in a lie told over and over until it’s the truth, the smell of the soul as it’s losing ground. People judge us, but they don’t know us. I want you to know.

Chapter Two

Manny and I double team most of our cases. In our office, we are forbidden—for financial reasons, of course—from double-teaming cases, so most of us do it, unofficially, whenever we can. With Manny and me, it ends up looking like a kind of joke, because we always draw attention when we are out together, sifting through ashes at an arson scene, or interviewing a client at the jail.

Manny is Manuel Luna, the third most senior lawyer in our office, where seniority is something lofty, and we admire it and hold it up to the light all the time. He is a big guy, linebacker big, half Mexican and half Cherokee, wide and tall with thin black hair pulled back in a small pony tail. He has deeply tanned skin and flat, pockmarked cheeks. Someone you remember.

When I first set eyes on Manny, all those years ago during the first week of law school, I looked at him and said to myself, Mexican and Cherokee, and I was right. Anyone who had seen me lugging my books across the street in the downpour of a late summer thunderstorm would have said to themselves, trailer trash. And they’d have been right.

I am the fourth most senior lawyer in the office. Standing next to Manny, I look like a pale pawn next to his sturdy, noble black king. We are incongruous together, we throw people off, and that gives us the advantage. Sometimes in this job, we need that advantage. Other than his wife, I am probably Manny’s closest friend. And I am very proud of that fact.

The sixth most senior lawyer in our office was a woman we called Tee, short for Teresa. A year ago, on a summer afternoon so hot and airless it was difficult to draw a full breath, I drove Tee to the Greyhound station and sat with her in an awful silence as we waited for the bus.

She held in one sweaty hand the bus ticket that would take her home. I walked across the tarmac with her to the bus when it was ready to board, the tar sizzling and tacky under my sandals.

I watched as Tee got on the bus, filthy exhaust fumes in my face, and I didn’t care. I saw her profile in the window as she took her seat, her wild and beautiful hair falling in her face, and Tee not bothering to take her hand and brush it back out of her eyes. She never turned to look at me or wave goodbye.

Before the end of the year, Tee would be dead. She was one of the best lawyers I ever knew and a friend. At least there was a time when I would have said that.

Chapter Three

Ididn’t know Manny well back when we were in law school in Tucson. We only had a few classes together, and from the looks of him anyway, we wouldn’t have had much in common. Not having much in common with me back in those days would have been a feather in anyone’s cap. I will admit now, though, that had I known what a generous spirit lived inside that bear-shaped body, I would have made more of an effort to get to know him.

Back in law school, however, as it had been for most of my life, friendships were low on my list of priorities. I worked one and sometimes two jobs to put myself through school. In my free time, and not being a naturally bright or talented student, I studied. After the bar exams (I took two, back-to-back, Arizona and California, and have always been very glad that I did), I kept track of only a handful of classmates, and Manny wasn’t one of them.

I ended up in Phoenix at an insurance defense law firm which was widely considered to be quite well respected. I spent my first year as an associate lawyer with the firm secretly trying to figure out how I’d ever in the world become affiliated with anything well-respected. In fact, I wore out an entire credit card buying suits and silk blouses in order—I’d hoped—to look the part.

Before law school and the gift which was my job at the law firm in Phoenix, I had grown up living with my mom in a white trailer so dirty it could have been called gray, a single-wide, parked in a tiny mobile home park near the freeway just south of Tucson, where the traffic noise from I-10 let up only when a bad crash brought everything to a halt.

It was always windy in our part of town, a kind of narrow valley split between two high-desert mountain ranges, and we were parked not on asphalt but on the sandy, shallow dirt of the Sonoran Desert. Dust covered everything everywhere all the time.

In my experience, there are two kinds of people who live in this type of shabby trailer park: the poorly educated with drug or alcohol problems and the highly educated with drug or alcohol problems. My mom was the latter. A smart women with an MD who had lost her job at the medical center and become unemployable, she spiraled down further and further away from anything decent until people from her former life barely recognized her anymore. Whenever my mom and I would run into someone she used to know, she’d say to them, "I am not that person anymore." The goddamn understatement of the century.

The truth is, she’d been an alcoholic even back in medical school, which was one of the reasons that my father never married her and never had anything to do with me. She was an alcoholic when she worked at the medical center, and an alcoholic when a young woman in her care died during the course of what was otherwise a low-risk procedure.

As a result of being my mother’s daughter, I knew a lot about things I’d rather not have grown up knowing. Cleaning my mom up after she’d been vomiting cheap gin and bile, for instance, and dragging her home from a motel room in the middle of the night after her drinking buddy bloodied her lips. These things I knew.

And I knew well that roller-coaster ride you can’t get off of when your mother is an alcoholic: rehab and relapse, relapse and rehab, getting your hopes way up and being let down. Up and down, up and down, until it made you sick—until it made you not want to care anymore but you still did. I knew about scrounging dimes for bus fare and begging the utility company to wait, because it was winter and we needed heat. But good suits, silk blouses, and being a member of a well-respected law firm were as foreign to me as if I’d landed on the moon.

I liked my job; some days I absolutely loved it, and I think I surprised myself by being pretty good at it. I’d get into the courtroom and open my mouth, and I could somehow argue a legal perspective well and persuasively against lawyers who were much more seasoned than I was. It helped that I have a naturally strong voice and a confidence that is entirely an act. It also helped that I had only one, single, obsessive focus: to put that dusty, gin-soaked trailer park behind me and become good at what I did. I wanted to be proud of me.

I didn’t stay with the respectable law firm in Phoenix. The reason is probably less important than the fact of it, but it bears telling as part of the grand scheme of things: I got married and then he died, and I had to leave. Just like that. Well, almost.

After two years with the firm, I had fallen in love, in the hand-holding, old-fashioned sense of the word, with a junior partner from another law firm. We barely dated before we got engaged—it was that sure. His name was Jack, and even now saying his name makes me think I should have skipped this part. He was solidly a good man, in a world where that’s a relatively rare thing. He was smart and funny with a great smile, and he was the only person I’ve ever known who was from Iowa. His favorite song was Tony Bennett singing I Left My Heart in San Francisco, and yes, he did tell me this before he knew it was my favorite song too.

Jack and I, well, we fit together pretty perfectly, and I privately thought that the gods might have given Jack to me to make up for having given me my mother. Looking back on it now, of course, it was just a case of too-good-to-be-true. I should have known.

We planned our wedding, we bought a townhouse with a fenced yard for the dog I’d always wanted, and our world seemed so blessed that I didn’t notice that Jack seemed to have become a little distant until I did notice, and then it was just weeks before our wedding. I brooded over it for a while, absorbed in the possibilities, as is my habit.

And then one Sunday morning, eating oranges and drinking coffee in the shade of our back patio, I asked if he was having second thoughts about getting married. I held my breath while I waited for the answer.

Jack said he hadn’t been feeling well, for a month or two. He said he was tired; actually, the word he used was fatigued, a word that sliced through me as soon as he said it. And his muscles ached in a vague and troubling way.

I noticed that his orange sat untouched and his coffee had gone cold. I held my head up then and looked past my own selfishness, and I saw him clearly. I saw him the way that you do not notice the shape of the bark on a tree until you stop to look. His face was a strangely unpleasant silver-gray in color, like the aluminum in a soda can. His lips were badly chapped. He was thinner.

And there was this, very plainly, the look of fear in his eyes.

Jack had leukemia. We got the diagnosis a month after our wedding. My world began to reel and sway under my feet. I struggled just to keep my shoulders squared. The metallic taste of terror was always in my mouth now; I breathed it in and breathed it out, like a poison had become my oxygen.

Instead of courtrooms and legal documents, our lives became hospitals and lab tests. When Jack no longer had the strength to move from our bed, I carried the TV into the bedroom. We watched, albeit in a distracted way, old black-and-white shows from the fifties. We liked I Love Lucy reruns. On a good day, he’d chuckle. There weren’t many good days.

I stood by as my husband deteriorated, as numb as I could possibly make myself. His skin became white and felt like paper to the touch. His eyes were heavily rimmed with a pink mucous. He was spectral, but I was the ghost, floating through the house silently, not thinking, not feeling. The morphine kept Jack mostly quiet toward the end, but I was absent entirely, just that tinny taste in my mouth and a horror slightly beyond my peripheral vision.

Then he died, mercifully quickly, and I knew I had to leave Phoenix, with its garish blue sky and hot white sunlight that burned my eyes. I was nothing and no one. Again.

I put the townhouse up for sale and read the want ads in the National Bar Association journal. I didn’t take a full breath from the time Jack got sick until I arrived, all those months later, at the Costa Vista County Public Defender’s Office. And then I breathed deeply, fully, and felt both the weight of my sadness and, oddly enough, a freedom in knowing that I was home.

Chapter Four

Costa Vista County is located in the delta valley of northern California. The population is diverse, and geographically speaking, it’s the largest county in California. Families move here for the bike paths and good schools, laborers move here for the work in the fields and in construction. More and more, young professionals move here to take jobs with companies that have fled the San Francisco Bay Area due to the outrageously high cost of doing business there. Its public defender’s office had a wide-reaching reputation as an office of excellent trial lawyers, educated in the law at Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale… in other words, an office that wouldn’t be interested in me.

So I was as surprised as I could be to find myself flying out to California one exceedingly windy day in February, renting a car, and driving in the late-morning hours to the Costa Vista County administration building to interview for the job as a deputy public defender.

I took the elevator up to the seventh floor of the county building, trying not to be too optimistic about my chances. I was windblown and nervous and not prepared to see what I saw as I stepped out of the elevator: tile floors that shined like marble, leather sofas in the reception area, soft lighting, and a huge glass vase full of fresh flowers on a low table. It was luxurious and rivaled the offices of some of the most prestigious law firms in Phoenix. I would have turned around and taken the elevator back down—so convinced I was that I had been misdirected and was now lost—had it not been for the large brass letters on the wall confirming that I was in the right place.

While I waited, perched with my briefcase full of writing samples on an overstuffed leather ottoman, I marveled at the elegance of the place, reminded myself—maybe a little too harshly—that I was wholly unqualified for this job, and wished I’d at least had a hairbrush.

And as the interview started, it did seem clear that my trip to California was going to turn out to be a waste of time.

My interviewer was a youngish woman with big teeth in a small mouth, named Lorraine, who led me to a conference room with a massive, and impressive, table the color of old mahogany. Without first asking me, she brought me coffee in a dark blue mug with the scales of justice stamped on it in gold. No cream. No sugar. When I looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows, I saw the banks of a canal blanketed with very green grass and sprinkled with wildflowers. The Arizona-girl in me nearly craved a cartwheel or two on that lawn. Nearly.

Lorraine seemed angry for some reason, and in a hurry, and actually told me that this is not part of my job, but oh well. She read from a list of questions I figured Human Resources required that she ask and didn’t listen to my answers. Fifteen minutes later, Lorraine said, with absolute disinterest in her voice, Thanks, we’ll be in touch, and led me, on heavily padded, slate-colored carpet, through the maze of offices.

Quite sure that this would be the last time I was to spend any time in the place and wanting a good look on my way out, I lingered a bit in the doorway to the break room, the movie-theater smell of microwaved popcorn reminding me how hungry I was. But as I stopped to peek in, I was knocked to the wall by a lumbering young man leaving the room in a rush. As he started to apologize, we recognized each other immediately from law school—Manny Luna, with his thin black ponytail, all energy and bustle and a career that was going places—and Alice Dreyer, trailer trash from Tucson, with a look of keen disappointment on her face.

It was strangely and disproportionately wonderful to see Manny, whom I barely knew; probably it was relief from the stress of applying for a job for which I was not qualified. In turn, Manny was inordinately friendly toward me. I thought I sensed in him a certain simple happiness in seeing a familiar face. Also, he was just a really nice guy.

Manny, as it turned out, had a half hour before he had to be in court, and Lorraine was visibly pleased to be relieved of me. As he took me around the floor, Manny pointed out things I’d need to know, as if I’d been hired, which I obviously hadn’t been. There were the secretarial cubicles, large in size and mostly occupied, and appearing to be equipped with the newest gadgets, computer monitors beginning to replace typewriters. The pecking sound of nails on keyboards followed us as we took the tour.

The outer offices with windows and views, Manny told me, all belonged to the admins, and the big corner office, with the separate sitting area and some really lush green plants in nice ceramic pots, was the office of the public defender, Ida Pressley. While I stopped to consider where the lawyers’ offices might be, Manny told me, sotte voce, that the office was admin heavy. I was later to discover that Lorraine, my bored interviewer, was the acting chief administrator for caseload compliance, having been covering for the chief administrator for hiring and personnel, who was out on maternity leave. There was also a chief administrator for continuing education and training, a man named Allen Wu, whom I would come to like a great deal, and a chief administrator of budget and finance, who would one day be fired and charged with embezzlement. The real chief administrator was the public defender herself.

The public defender is not a lawyer? I asked Manny, as he opened a heavy fire door and led me to the staircase that would take us up to his office.

No, she’s not a lawyer, he replied, shaking his head. I thought for a second, then blurted out, A politician?

He nodded. But don’t say it that way when you meet her.

Chapter Five

Also referred to as the afterthought , the Crows’ Nest was a ramshackle addition built on top of the roof of the county building, with low ceilings, stained linoleum floors, small grubby windows, and the faintest smell of something like marijuana in the air. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to the tasteful luxury of the administrative floor below, and I loved it immediately.

Manny’s office in the Crows’ Nest was not a real office, but a battered, gun-metal gray desk, with walls created by stacking old dented filing cabinets on top of and next to one another. My tour didn’t take long—a half-dozen or so offices configured roughly like Manny’s, an open space along one wall with a conference table and mismatched chairs, metal bookshelves lining the other walls, and a soda machine in the corner making a loud buzzing sound, and held together in places with duct tape.

We sat at the conference table, Manny pushing aside a Styrofoam cup, spilling a little coffee, to reveal that someone had carved a word into the wood veneer of the table. It was hard to read, but it looked like it said Paradise.

It feels like that sometimes, he said, you know, ‘paradise.’ Like when you make a winning argument in court, or find the one case in a million that supports your position–the one the prosecutor didn’t even know existed. He was a big, happy kid. A kid at the circus. A kid at the circus watching the lions parade in.

I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but Manny hardly let me get a word in edgewise, describing some of the other lawyers who worked here (none of whom seemed to be around now), and explaining that the office was thin, meaning that there were unfilled attorney vacancies.

Our most senior lawyer is Vera, but she’s out on extended leave, he said, medical leave. And we have another opening, but it’s being held pending.

I didn’t get to ask what that meant, because Manny pretty obviously changed the subject, pointing out the exterior stairway, which looked to me like it was originally meant to be a fire escape, and which led steeply down the side of the building to a cement walkway which connected the back of the