“Lookit.”
“What?”
“Tonto’s here.”
“Hi-ho Silver—awaaaay! Come bend an elbow with us.”
“Nice one, Wolfman.”
“Call me Kemo Sabe tonight.”
“Rack ’em, Kemo Sabe.”
“Shut the hell up, Staples! I won the last one. You rack. Better yet, let Tonto here rotate in. And get me another beer, long as you’re up.”
Friday nights the indigent defense team converges on a rundown watering hole north of downtown Oklahoma City known as the Cock O’the Walk. Cheap beer and cheddar fries draw a happy hour horde of twentysomethings hell-bent on blacking out the work week—muscle-shirted college kids and shaggy, oversexed slacker types, white-collared professionals and the large-haired southern girls who always end up drinking for free.
The gangly office intern “Staples” sidles around the pinball machine, pauses backlit before a big-screen TV blinking game five of the NBA finals.
“Who’s winning?” Dean asks.
“Knicks,” says Staples. “Who else? You want a beer, Dean?”
“Still on the wagon. Girlfriend’s orders. Get me a burger. And iced tea.”
Staples disappears into the shuffle-bump queue mobbed at the bar.
Dean flips a wooden triangle onto the felted bed of the pool table.
“Name the game,” he shouts to his boss, Trent “Wolfman” Paxton.
Wolfman seems hypnotized by something on the television set.
“Nine ball,” Paxton finally answers.
Dean plucks nine numbered balls from the well, assembles them into a parallelogram on the velvet tabletop. He lifts the triangle away with a twirl, grabs and chalks a heavyweight stick. Wolfman leans his weight into the break and a rifle-crack report cuts sharply through the hubbub, each ball ricocheting repeatedly against molted bumpers.
“There’s not a better sound I can think of,” Wolfman shouts.
“Not a bit of ambiguity in it,” Dean agrees.
“I’m looking for a word.”
“Clean.”
“No. Quick?”
“Quick has zero gravitas.”
“Pure?”
“How about true?”
“What?”
“True.”
“That’s the word.”
“True has gravitas.”
“True’s got gravitas out the ass.”
All nine balls have rolled to a halt.
“Pushout?” Wolfman asks.
Dean sizes up the state of play, shaking his head.
“Call it.”
“One in the corner,” Dean says. “Off the rail.”
Paxton, the Capital Trial Division Chief in the public defender’s office, is a bearish trial attorney who cut his litigation teeth doing a twelve-year stint as Judge Advocate General for the U.S. Marine Corps. The man’s swollen forearms are etched with tattoos paying tribute to a history still being written: one arm sports the faded USMC eagle, globe, and anchor emblem; the other is decorated with a catchphrase inked in bold and elaborate script: “What you kill ˆSAVE is yours forever.” Wolfman had an ink pusher cross out “kill” and replace it with “SAVE” when he left the Corps.
With an imposing courtroom demeanor and a tendency to howl theatrically behind closed doors, Paxton earned the handle Wolfman early in his tenure with the Public Defender’s office. Every staff member earns a stage name, eventually. There’s Staples, who can usually be found imprisoned in the sixth-floor copy room. Ethan Podesta, the ex-police officer heading up defense investigations, has been dubbed Dragnet. Dean, a Choctaw Indian, is known as Tonto.
“Nicknames are like bellybuttons around this place,” Wolfman told Dean on his first day, almost fifteen years ago. “Everyone gets one. Some are prettier than others.”
Nobody wants a name like “Kevorkian” there, the mousy attorney melting into the pinball machine, drowning the day’s trials in yet another perspiring tumbler of rum and Coke. She boasts the worst winning percentage in the office—eighty percent or more of her clients have been sentenced to death. “If your client pulls Dr. Kevorkian,” the saying goes, “nothing can save him.”
Dean misses his shot.
“I heard about Payton Taylor,” he says.
Wolfman ignores Dean, eyes welling. The big man is prone to blubbering, the hard-as-nails exterior harboring a heart soft as butter. Payton Taylor was his latest case. Last night a jury handed the boy a death sentence for a home invasion gone horribly wrong.
“You have this idea about an argument before it’s made,” Wolfman says, wistful. “This is the case you were put on earth to defend. It’s predestination, you’re thinking. This one I can win. This one makes up for all those losers.”
“Your hands were tied,” Dean says.
Wolfman sinks the one ball in a side pocket, clean. He straightens up, dries his eyes with the back of a fist.
“Spilled milk. Let’s talk about this client you stumbled across in Bricktown the other morning.”
It’s considered poor form to use the word “defendant” in Wolfman’s presence.
“No rest for the wicked,” Dean says.
Wolfman lines up another angled shot.
“Billy Grimes,” says Dean’s boss. “Injun. Choctaw or Cherokee. I can’t remember which.”
“We all look the same.”
“What I’m always saying.” Wolfman misses the two ball. “Grimes says he was mixed up in a drug deal gone bad. Filed for indigent status Tuesday. The judge bound over at preliminary hearing yesterday. Drop by and pay your respects next week. I’ve got to warn you, though, he’s a hard case. Not too chatty.”
Dean nods. “Two off the seven.”
The two glances from the seven to fall clacking into a side pocket.
“Thanks for this Grimes, by the way. I hadn’t had his name and the particulars, the kid might have sat in county a few weeks waiting for us. First time I can remember we’ve been this far ahead of the district attorney on murder one.”
Dean lines up the three.
“So we won’t be playing catch up with Macy,” he says.
“We’ll see.”
Staples materializes from the bar scrum, scarecrow-thin limbs wobbling a tray brimmed with pub grub. The intern is welcomed with convivial catcalls from his coworkers.
Dean misses the three ball. He finds his food and bites into a greasy burger. Wolfman scans the table, thinking.
The giant television display has abandoned the basketball game to broadcast the pixelated feed of a low-speed car chase unfolding along some crowded coastal freeway. Someone shouts, “Turn that up.” The bartender spikes the volume.
The CNN anchor’s punchy enunciation, “. . . was scheduled to turn himself into the Los Angeles Police Department this afternoon. LAPD spokesman David Gascon called a press conference earlier today to announce this unusual development in the highly publicized murder investigation.” A telegenic Gascon addresses the media with deliberate precision: “Mr. Simpson has not appeared. The Los Angeles Police Department right now is actively searching for Mr. Simpson.”
An almost ecstatic gasp from the assembled press corps. Someone in the media gallery whistles, long and low and slow.
A hush diffuses by degrees through the bar. Something is happening out there. An event captivating in its total lack of production value. Blurry and immediate and awkward and real. The screen cuts back to the chase. Filmed from the belly of a hovering traffic helicopter, the pan-and-scan picture jerks queasily about the San Diego Freeway, where a white sport utility vehicle cruises slowly down the highway, emergency lamps blazing. An ordered wedge of police cruisers follows from a respectful distance, pale rollers whirling red and blue through the vivid twilight. Cars slow and stop at the roadside, making way for a carnival-like conflux of satellite trucks and news vans, sports fans and taxicabs and rubbernecking Angelenos. Everyone nosing along in dazed disbelief behind their fallen gridiron idol.
“An anonymous source within the LAPD tells us they have a detective negotiating with Mr. Simpson right now,” the news anchor is saying. “We’re getting word that O.J. is armed, and might possibly be suicidal.”
A lone police car swerves lane-to-lane behind the phalanx of LAPD cruisers, holding the helter-skelter throng at bay. But the people refuse to be denied. They’re scaling concrete barriers to spill openmouthed into the road. Cheering pockets of pedestrians puddle in the medians, gawk from the overpasses, huddle in the thin threads of shoulder fronting the freeway.
“He’s going home,” someone says.
“They always do,” Wolfman adds.
“Guilty as sin.”
“He’ll get off with the best defense money can buy,” Dean says.
The procession passes the Los Angeles International Airport. Dean sees passenger jets landing beneath the chase choppers, wings twinkling silver against the gilded skyline.
“Two thousand yards in a fourteen-game season,” says Wolfman. “I’ll be God-damned.”
Dean and Wolfman are perched watching upon the pool table, their game all but forgotten.
“Listen. I mean . . . Really. Pay. Attention,” says Wolfman. “Do you hear that?”
“What?” Dean says.
“Silence.”
Someone sneezes.
“It’s . . .” Wolfman says. “Reverential. We’re paying tribute. All of us. Bowing down before the primetime pedestal of race and violence and celebrity and death.”
A bar stool scrapes complaining across the floor.
“You’re talking to yourself again,” Dean says.
“So what if I am?” Wolfman frowns down the field of felt at Dean. “I think I’ve earned the right.”
Dean wants to look away but he can’t.
A queer game of chicken breaks out in Simpson’s wake, as a trio of police motorcycles ride herd on the pedestrian swarm, the hulking machines revving and braking, revving and braking, over and again in irregular rhythm up then down the shoulder, cowing everyone out of the freeway and back to the sidelines in skittish, sluicing waves. O.J.’s white Ford Bronco steers for the Sunset Boulevard exit.
A woman bouncing in the median clutches an orange poster begging Simpson to “Run Juice Run.”
“I met him before,” someone says. “Got his autograph, his picture. The works.”
“I think maybe I dreamed this once,” Staples says.
The white Bronco is rolling slowly through the California gloaming.