I make lists. I make memoranda to the files that contain detailed lists. I photocopy my lists and take copies of the most important ones home in case the law firm burns and I have to document my actions in a legal malpractice suit or during a partnership investigation of my work. Once I’ve memorized these memos, I store them in large plastic boxes in a climate-controlled, fire-protected (meaning sprinklers and an extra charge) storage unit, for which I pay a monthly sum to avoid collecting plastic boxes of paper in my own house.
This list-making is neither a genetic nor an environmental trait, as neither my brothers nor my parents were list makers, nor did they ever draft a memo to a file.
Oh, yeah, my mother’s list would be “Open Coke bottle. Drink. Take pill. Open next bottle.”
My outlaw Pentecostal brother’s list would be “Fertilize the pot. Pray in tongues. Save a heathen.” Delvon might have been three decades late for the Jesus Freak movement, but he fundamentally believed Jesus was the first great peace-and-love hippie who didn’t object to pot smoking so long as you loved your neighbors.
My other brother’s list would be “Go to work. Fill vending machines all day. Come home.” Proving the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, my brother Dan drives a Coca-Cola delivery truck and starts off each week by delivering two cases to our mother, who won’t let him in the house and never pays him. Dan had joined the Marines after graduating from high school, triggering identical cries of outrage from Delvon and me. But affable, shallow-thinking Dan had gone into the Marines and come out again still affable and shallow-thinking. Except he had seen enough of the world to satisfy him, and he had saved his money to put a down payment on a red-brick three-two, split design, and married his high school sweetheart, another affable, shallow thinker who reads TV Guide and Dear Abby and absolutely nothing else. They had two tow-headed kids who appear, so far, to be perfectly normal.
My father’s list would be “Get up. Walk to dock. Sit down.” In his days as an attorney, my father was a disorganized, somewhat disheveled professional who skated on thin ice and would never have survived in either a city law firm or the modern legal environment. But he was scrupulously honest and unfailingly polite, and he never let the paint peel on the outside of the house, and in our small town that made him a success, notwithstanding his dearth of lists and file memos.
My own lists and file memoranda transcend the mere to-do lists and cover your ass memos of the average attorney and approach Russian novels in their scale and proportion and incomprehensibility.
It was while boxing up the lists and memoranda I had collected in my house for the now closed Dr. Trusdale file that I realized someone had gone through that modest collection—modest because I had had the file only five weeks before he was killed and I had settled the case.
The papers were not perfectly straight across the top, and one page had been returned to the folder out of numerical order.
Newly, of course, became the lead suspect. Newly, who for some reason was still living in my house. Newly, who had no obvious reason to snoop in a closed file but was the only person with full access to the files in my house.
I discovered my misaligned and soon-to-be-stored papers on a Sunday and went to the television room to accuse Newly as he drafted a complaint in a rear-end collision case on a yellow legal pad balanced on his knees, sipped a beer, and cheered on the Marlins. Jack the Bear was a morose pudding of dog inertia at Newly’s feet. I glanced at the Rottweiler and wondered if you could give a dog Prozac. Somebody did something on the television screen, and Newly cheered. Jack didn’t even rise or growl or move.
“Don’t you need to concentrate?” I asked, looking at the legal pad where Newly was scribbling something his secretary would have to decipher later.
“I can do this in my sleep, hon,” he said, smiling at me. “What do you need?”
I needed him to get out of my house, I thought.
I needed him to explain why he was snooping.
But first, I realized, I needed him to fly with me to Atlanta when I met with Dr. Jamieson, the new expert witness I was going to hire in the veggie baby case unless he turned out to be an ugly, repulsive human that juries would inherently mistrust. I needed Newly to get me through the airport in Atlanta, given my dreaded airport phobia. It was bad enough that the doctor’s own schedule was delaying my trip to Atlanta to interview him, but the thought of flying there without Newly to protect me was just too much to consider right now.
Newly had, of course, already agreed to go, taking a day off from work, for which I could not reimburse him.
So, as I watched him lounging on my couch, I decided I’d better wait until after the trip to Atlanta to pick a fight and kick him out. Marriages have been based on less.
Now that Jack was off duty, Newly and I ended up christening the couch, which for some reason was about the only piece of furniture we hadn’t made love on or over, and then I showered and went back into my den for a few hours of work. Jack the Bear, looking like the poster child of depression, lay on the floor and refused to budge.