The Drowning

By John Clark

A small-time, down-and-out, poverty-stricken, alcoholic sixty-one-year-old attorney is offered the case of a lifetime: a wrongful death claim involving the drowning of a young man in Long Beach, Washington. He must pull himself together in order to competently handle the case, and he must find the strength and resources that will allow him to bring it to resolution. His adversary is a large Seattle defense law firm. Soon after accepting the case, strange and unpleasant things begin happening to him and those around him. These events become increasingly dangerous and life-threatening. It comes down to a race between the trial date and whether the lawyer can hold on emotionally and financially until then. The case causes him to lose one romantic relationship and start another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524586911

John Clark

John C. Clark (PhD, University of Toronto) is associate professor of theology at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Illinois. He and his wife, Kate, live in Chicago with their two children.

Book preview

Chapter One

HEADLINE

Portland Oregonian

August 3, 2009

YOUNG MAN DROWNS NEAR LONG BEACH, WASHINGTON.

A 19-year-old man drowned yesterday after being sucked out to sea by a sneaker wave. He was visiting the beach with his parents and a younger brother. The younger brother was caught by the same wave, but was able to swim safely to shore. However, the body of the 19 year old was recovered approximately a mile out to sea. Hugh McCallister, Pacific County Sheriff, told the Oregonian that the man was obviously dead when his body was found. McCallister added that such accidents are not uncommon along the coastal beaches of both Oregon and Washington, although signs warning about sneaker waves and rogue waves are posted on many beach access roads. According to the Pacific County Coroner, no autopsy will be performed at the request of the deceased’s grieving family. No memorial or funeral date has yet been set.

After reading the article, I turned to the sports page and glanced at the box scores. The Mariners had lost again, as is their habit. I set the newspaper aside in disgust. As had become much too customary of late, I had no appointments, depositions or court appearances today. It was 11:00 a.m. My assistant, Hilary, whom I’d recently reduced to half time, wouldn’t be in until after Noon. I had a couple of options: I could return phone messages from a couple of whiny, hard-to-please clients; or I could call back a typically aggressive, irrational family law attorney about a petty issue in one of my divorce cases – an issue that had to date defied resolution (who was going to be awarded the family dog?). Bark. Bark.

I decided on a third option: reflection. How had I come to this point? After passing the Washington State Bar examination (on my first try, I might add), thirty-four years ago, I was full of idealism and itching to help the less fortunate denizens of the world. It was 1975 and things were like that. Cynicism and self-interest had, for many of us, taken a back seat to charitable endeavor. There was even a popular weekly television show about legal aid lawyers. Disco had not yet hit the scene, at least in the last-to-know Pacific Northwest. Fancy clothes were out. Many of us were still hurting from the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe to this day we would be living in a better world if Bobby hadn’t been killed. He was well on his way to securing the Democratic presidential nomination when he was gunned down by some guy with the same first and last name. I still harbor no doubt that Kennedy would have won the ensuing election and served for two terms.

We’d lived through the 1968 fiasco at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the ugliness of Mayor Daley and his uniformed thugs and the Kent State massacre. But many of us soon-to-be young lawyers (at least at my law school) were pretty rosy about the future. Nixon had just resigned in disgrace and it looked very likely that the next President would be a Democrat. It was truly a time of hope; a time to put away petty biases and to ignore the temptation of material wealth; a time to help change our nation, maybe even the World, for the better.

Soon after passing the bar examination, I went to work for a local branch of a national union called the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks. The Seattle branch members believed they were being treated unfairly by the national boss in Chicago – a guy named Dennis as I recall. He reminded me a lot of Mayor Daley. The union was not democratic. If anything, it was autocratic and corrupt. The local members wanted me to take on the boss, basically in order to reform the way in which national union elections were conducted. I mean this guy Dennis had been in charge for something like forty years. So I drafted a federal complaint under some statute or another. My contact person at the local union was a guy named Palipamu. He was from India. He invited me to his home for dinner one night. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about curry. It was one of the worst nights of my life and I have since always ensured, before ordering a meal, that it contained none of that dreadful spice. And, I have successfully avoided dinner invitations from anyone who may have once lived on the Continent of Asia.

But, I felt I was in over my head with this union thing. And, after all, these guys were doing fine financially. I wanted to be like those legal aid guys on television – and help the truly distressed. About two weeks after that frightening dinner, I spotted an ad in a Seattle newspaper offering an attorney position in Ellensburg – a small, sleepy, windy, cow pie of a town located in the middle of the State (which some Seattleites dubbed the wrong side of the Cascades). The ad had been placed by a Community Action Committee, having received a few bucks (by way of a federal CETA grant) to hire a legal aid attorney. I jumped on the opportunity. The pay wasn’t great (a little over $1,000/month as I recall), but I’d be doing what I wanted to do. After leaving the job interview (or what passed for it – since there were no other applicants), I drove around the town a bit. The topography was flat, high prairie. The town didn’t seem to have much going for it. I wondered who the hell Ellen was and why she’d even consider such a sad location for a town.

When I first established the office in Ellensburg, I was immediately ostracized by members of the local bar association (all twelve of them – most of whom probably moonlighted as cowboys). I mean, it was 1975 and I had long hair, but I don’t think that was the problem. They thought I’d be stealing clients from them, anticipated that it might now be more difficult to evict low income tenants, or to harass and obtain judgments against low income debtors, and, I think, just ideologically opposed the idea of free legal services. The (only) local superior court judge (whose nickname was Hangin’ Bob-seriously!), and his court personnel, didn’t exactly take a shine to me either. I knew I was in store for an uphill battle of great magnitude, even though Ellensburg is flat as a pancake.

But, I managed to stay in that forsaken place for five years and by the end of my time there, was actually winning cases and having a drink or two with some of the local attorneys. I had expanded my staff to three additional lawyers and established part time offices in two neighboring counties.

One thing ate away at me, though. Win, lose, or settle, my clients didn’t seem to appreciate my efforts. There were very few thanks, very little gratitude. It was as if the world owed this to them. And, when successful on cases, I seemed to be solving only their transient problems. The same old clients would come back with the same old problems, whether it be eviction, divorce, DUI, or bankruptcy. I wasn’t helping with their underlying demons – poverty, lack of education, alcoholism and the like.

I eventually had as much of Ellensburg as I wanted and took a position at another legal aid office in Vancouver – no not that one," the other Vancouver, as locals like to say. We here in this State also have to preface our State name with the same phrase – the other Washington," so as not to be confused with our nation’s capitol. It’s really a pain in the butt when news correspondents, etc. refer simply to Washington when talking about our national capitol. Sometimes, it is hard to tell which location they have in mind. Why can’t they say Washington State or Washington D.C. for chrissake?

Vancouver, uh, the other Vancouver, is a nice town located on the north bank of the Columbia River directly across the river from Portland, Oregon. It is prosperous, scenic and booming. Vancouver has a brief, but interesting, history. The first Caucasian known to see the area was a British sailor named Captain George Vancouver, who, in 1792, sailed his ship over the treacherous Columbia bar and 100 miles up the river. That would have gotten him a few miles east of what is now the city of Vancouver.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark camped in the Vancouver area several times on their way to and from the mouth of the Columbia during 1805-06. Lewis later dubbed it the only desired situation for settlement west of the Rocky Mountains.

In 1825, the Hudson Bay Trading Company moved its Northwest headquarters to the Vancouver area. From 1825 until at least 1849, the area was considered the fur trading capitol of the Pacific Northwest. In 1857 (six years after Portland was founded), Vancouver (formerly known as the City of the Columbia) was incorporated.

A US Army barracks was established in the area in 1849, apparently to protect the fur trade (or, perhaps, to serve as a bastion against the British, who, at the time, occupied the Pacific Northwest jointly with the United States under an 1818 treaty. Commanders of the Barracks eventually included Ulysses Grant, George McClelland and Phillip Sheridan, all of whom, of course, became well known Union generals during the Civil War. In the late 1930’s, the Barracks were commanded by General George C. Marshall, who soon after became FDR’s Army Chief of Staff during World War II.

When I arrived in Vancouver in 1980, it was a relatively sleepy little town of approximately 85,000. It was (and is) very attractive. The Pacific coast is less than ninety miles to the west. The Cascade Mountain Range rises approximately forty miles to the east. Mt. St. Helens (which erupted shortly after I arrived in Vancouver) is approximately sixty miles northeast of the town. Mt. Hood is about seventy miles to the southeast.

On a clear day (which generally occurs only in the summer, when it stops drizzling), one can see Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Adams (due east of Vancouver) and, sometimes, Mt. Rainier.

When I arrived in Vancouver, it was a smallish suburb of Portland (ten miles to the south across the Columbia River). Now, with a population of nearly 200,000, it has become the fourth largest City in Washington. That may not mean much to you people back east, but it’s a pretty good sized town out here.

Even in 1980, there were a lot more legal aid clients here than in Ellensburg. And, the staff was large enough that I could actually specialize in a field. I chose consumer law. Six months later, the whole thing came crashing down. Ronald Reagan was elected President and one of his administration’s first endeavors was to gut legal aid. Funding was cut in half nationally and the types of litigation in which we could participate with the remaining money were narrowed to nearly nothing. For one thing, as I recall, we were prohibited from suing governmental agencies – our most prominent adversaries and the types of endeavors that could, in one stroke, help masses of low income people. Reagan intended to write the obituary for legal aid in this nation.

My idealism worn down and seeing the writing on the wall, I decided to try my hand at private practice. I worked for a number of years in small, general practice law firms in the Portland/Vancouver area. My charitable instincts were still strong, though, and I encountered numerous problems attempting to meet the firms’ bottom lines. I had little freedom to accept a case simply because it was the right thing to do. Each case had to be a moneymaker.

After ten years of this, I’d finally had enough. In 1990, I started my own business in Vancouver, with the intent of accepting cases without undue consideration of ability to pay. Unfortunately, by then I’d started a family. It became necessary that both my wife and I financially contribute to the household – which, by now, also included our infant son, Nathan. Now, my clients’ abilities and willingness to pay had become more significant.

At least 75% of the demand for my services came from divorce clients. It paid the rent and it was not long before I was specializing in family law. I wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t feel this was what I had been trained to do. I don’t even remember a family law course in law school. Legal research, analysis and writing takes a backseat to preparation of mandatory family law forms and ugly, one-sided affidavits. Emotions run deep. Often, there is little way to get to the bottom of a married couple’s hatred and hostility for one another. Maybe, it was something she said at a bar, or something he did in a movie theater. Who knows? They wouldn’t tell me. I just had to deal with it, and, it was often difficult to do so in a rational manner. A reasonable settlement offer from the other spouse might be met with Fuck him! I’m going to suck him dry, or I want to tell the judge what a terrible person he is.

And, opposing counsel weren’t a lot of fun either. Most of the local family bar was comprised of female attorneys (as is probably the case just about everywhere now). Family law attorneys tend to take things personally, get caught up in petty side issues and consider their clients as saints and yours as pieces of shit. There is a lot of attempted character assassination. Worse, family law lawyers think opposing counsel are pieces of shit because they dare to represent their clients’ evil spouses. I wonder who represented Charles Manson? It’s a good thing Manson wasn’t married, I guess. Or was he?

But, for two decades, I continued to hang in there and mostly hold my own, while always searching for ethical high ground. I even got to handle a few appeals – which do require decent research, writing and analytical skills. But, still, I was almost always stressed out. And, unfortunately, my business was very cyclical. I could go weeks, sometimes a month or more, without receiving money from my clients. I never understood why. I could count on two periods of each year being relatively lucrative, though. The demand for divorce attorneys goes through the roof immediately after Christmas. This could be simply people’s disappointment in their presents. But I think it’s more likely they were holding the inevitable off until after the holidays. The other period is the early months of spring. Can you guess why? Yep, tax refunds.

But, for the past two years, things had become increasingly lean. Now divorced (from my second wife), I’d taken a cheap, one bedroom apartment and had to move my office to a much smaller building. I’d let two of my clerical staff go and had only one part time assistant left. The phones weren’t ringing. Current clients weren’t paying. I was now on a cash-only basis with my suppliers. I had one credit card left. And, I had no idea what had gone wrong or how to turn things around.

It must be the economy I said to myself hundreds of times. Worse, I had never reached anything close to a level of income that would permit me to set something aside for retirement. Even if I had, I probably would have lost it in the stock market, given the depth of the current recession in which the country is mired.

There was nothing to do but hang in there and hope things would get better. I had become increasingly reluctant to talk to, or do anything for, non-paying clients. I had to muster all the strength I had just to return phone calls from opposing counsel.

The stress of both dealing with family law cases and not knowing where the next dollar would come from, took its toll on