I LEARNED at the beginning not to ask too many questions. When a client came to me, one I did not know, I asked whether he had money. Not: how he found me. During my sixth year in practice, I represented Joseph Vaster, a structural engineer with the Levitable Corporation. His responsibilities consisted of traveling around the world inspecting large buildings—hospitals, assembly plants for heavy machinery, entire college campuses, whole sections of new cities—which the company had constructed for foreign governments or other enormous international corporations. His job was to go to Basutoland and determine whether all the work contracted by Levitable for the new Ministry of Agriculture, say, had been done properly, so that when his firm turned it over to the provincial governor, or whoever was in charge that day, the roof would not fall in on all the happy local workers. “You sound like you must have been just about everywhere,” I said, the day I met him in my office. “I guess I have,” he said, “but most of the places I have been nobody in his right mind would ever want to go to.”
Joseph Vaster was in his early fifties that year, married, no children, with a three-bedroom house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His hobbies were golf and studies of the Crusades. “When I finish a job in the Middle East, or some place like that,” he told me rather shyly, “I sometimes have Beatrice meet me there and I take some of my vacation, and we trace the routes that the Crusaders took, where they stopped and the castles and the monasteries that they visited.” His particular hero was Richard the Lion-Hearted. He expected to complete his retracing of all of Richard’s journeys within the next couple years, a project which his indictment by a special grand jury sitting in and for the County of Suffolk, Massachusetts, seemed to place in some jeopardy.
I saw no reason to stress that possibility to Joseph. In the first place, he was certainly intelligent enough to have perceived it for himself. In the second place, he was the sort of man who was appropriately married to a woman named Beatrice, and not the kind of man at all to whom one mentioned potential unpleasantness. Heather, six that year, had a babysitter named Gwennie who was fourteen and a freshman at Thayer Academy; Gwennie’s word that year for dull persons was dreeb, which meant that Heather’s word that year for people who bored her was also dreeb. The night that she encountered Joseph in my office, an unusual visit for her because I keep my family affairs quite apart from my legal practice and my questionable clients, she told me and Mack that he was a full dreeb, a judgment which we assessed as pretty much correct. Heather was always an insightful child, and very outspoken in her views—we took her to the Enchanted Village and to visit Santa that night, as we had the two or three years previously, and she made it evident that we could abandon that tradition anytime we might find it convenient, noting that the mechanical chickens were going bald around the area where the eggs came out, and that Santa had had something which smelled very much like pizza for his dinner. Heather was always partial to reality, if there was a choice in how to look at things.
Joseph Vaster wasn’t. He admitted his experience, surviving coups and revolutions in most of the unstable countries of Central America and Africa, had not prepared him for the surprise that he had received in Massachusetts. “People shooting at me,” he said, “I could understand. I was there, a total stranger, when they started shooting. Everybody who was there at that time would get shot at. If you had some brains, you would take cover and start making plans to get out. It was nothing personal.
“This, though,” he said, fingering the paper that accused him of conspiring to pay bribes to a notorious crook in the state bureaucracy who had finally gotten nabbed and started squealing, “this seems to be quite different. This is very personal. This says that I schemed with someone I’ve never met, to do things I never dreamed of, and paid money I never saw to somebody I never heard of until I read this paper. How could something like this happen?”
The explanation, as we lawyers like to say, was not far to seek. Levitable had been engaged by the Commonwealth to construct a huge depot for heavy equipment storage and maintenance required by the National Guard, precisely because of its global reputation for experience in that line of work. The smell of money attracted the grafters the way that little pieces of fish draw much bigger fish who are hungry, and cash started changing hands at a modest but nevertheless illegal rate. Joseph Vaster’s innocent duties for the company had brought him to Massachusetts to inspect the new structure, four or five times. He stayed at the Parker House, close by Beacon Hill, and in the ordinary course of things was introduced to some nice-appearing gentlemen who were stealing money. They found him attractive, not because he knew a lot about the Crusades and could expound on them for hours, or because he was a sophisticated traveler who knew much about the world, but because he had an expense account which he could use to buy them drinks. They returned his kindnesses with tickets to the ball games they had cadged from lobbyists, and claims which they made boastfully to others of misdeeds that never happened. Joseph Vaster was a pawn, in other words, indicted by a sloppy prosecutor for offenses that he had not committed.
“Your trouble is,” I said to him, “that Ranger Damon thinks they did. He really thinks they happened. And Ranger is a strong witness, whose own hide’s on the line. We’ve got to go in there and prove that Ranger isn’t telling the truth, when he sincerely thinks he is. We’ve got to do it by showing that those transactions never occurred. Proving negatives is damned hard, Joe, very hard indeed. Proving someone’s wrong when he says that the horse was black is fairly easy, if you’ve got the horse. You just get the animal to stand still in the pasture, and you bring the jury out. They look at him. ‘He’s white,’ they say, ‘and this witness is lying. Leave the accused be set free.’ But when there isn’t any horse, then what do you do? Take the jury out to the field, say: ‘Where is the horse?’ They will just say: ‘The accused stole the horse as well. Throw him in the can.’ I don’t mean to be gloomy, Joseph, and I don’t mean we can’t win. All I’m saying is that this is liable to be tricky, and you’ll have to bear with me.”
Joseph did bear with me, and so did Levitable. Fine company, that outfit, very protective of its men. It paid Joseph’s legal fees, which were considerable. For those fees it got four days of the most intensive cross-examination that this advocate had ever put on up to that time—or since, for that matter. I made Ranger Damon recount all his days from birth, about, had him boasting of his heroic career as an Army commando during World War II, going on at great length and in tedious detail about all the honorable service he had given to his country and his Commonwealth until he fell amongst thieves on the Cardiff Depot project. For three full days, to the consternation of more senior lawyers whose clients still awaited trial on Ranger’s testimony, I cajoled and prodded that stool pigeon into recitations which established beyond anybody’s doubt that he could remember faultlessly the precise number and exact location of the freckles on the mother’s breasts that nursed him. And virtually every detail of every event that had happened to him since: where those events had occurred, who else had attended them, and what they were wearing at the time those events happened. Often, even, what he’d smelled when things were going on. And then, on the fourth day, without the Court’s permission, which I really should have gotten, I instructed Joseph Vaster to sit with the spectators when he came to court that morning, and covered it with the bailiff, who might have sounded an alarm when trial began with no defendant sitting at the bar, by whispering that Joseph had a bad case of the trots and should sit near the door in case he needed hasty exit. That arranged, I stood up as though resuming the line of questioning I’d interrupted when we recessed the previous afternoon, paused in the middle of my question, looked down irritatedly at my yellow pad, and let the witness show off once more his great memory, by having him spring in to remind me of what we’d been discussing.
“Now, Mister Damon,” I said, “let me ask you this: What does Joseph Vaster look like?” And the witness didn’t know.
He panicked. The color left his face and came back in a rush. He looked desperately at the defendant’s chair, and there was no one there. He knew Vaster had to be around that courtroom someplace. He scanned the whole room as though he had just learned that it harbored an assassin with a contract out on him. He could not pick Vaster out. He did all the things that lawyers dream about. He licked his lips. He rubbed his fingers and his thumbs together nervously. He sweated just a little. He tried to speak and couldn’t. I stood there silently, that question on fire in the air, for what seemed like an hour. When I rescued him, the point I made to judge and jury was already made. “You don’t know, do you?” I said. And Ranger Damon, who had very little choice by then, said quite softly: “No, I guess I don’t.”
“I have no further questions of this witness,” I said, and sat down. The prosecutor tried to rehabilitate him, but it was a perfunctory job, forty minutes or so of a losing struggle to remind the jury that old Ranger had met many people in his brief career as a corrupter, none of which in any way addressed the fact that he could not remember someone whom he had not in fact seen. The jury had the case for one hour after lunch, coming back at three o’clock to acquit Joseph Vaster.
“You were magnificent,” he said to me when he had been told by the clerk that he was free to go without day. “You’re right,” I said, “and lucky too. I was extremely lucky.” I did not tell Joseph Vaster, then or ever, that my strategy had been based upon my six-year-old daughter’s appraisal of him as a hopeless dreeb, someone who so much resembled everybody else that no one who had not in fact done business with him would ever recall him later, someone so ordinary that one who in fact might have had dealings with him might not recall him either.
Neither did I emphasize to the reporters or the courthouse trial buffs who congratulated me outside the considerable advantage I had enjoyed in the Joseph Vaster case, one that the defense lawyer almost never has: my virtual certainty that the man was really innocent. Almost all of my work, and the work done by my colleagues, is based on the safe assurance that our clients did it. Laymen and the press believe that those who are accused of crimes in fact committed them, and that the police don’t go around arresting people for no reason, and for the most part they are right. The only reason that they ever admire us is that the interval between indictment and trial cools off any passions that the defendant’s act aroused, and unless he is a monster he is on his way to victim status himself by the time the evidence appears. He is one man and the government’s against him, and most reasonably kindly people can feel sorry for a poor bastard in that position. Underdogs get sympathy, even if they did it. Underdogs who get off are seen to have been reprieved from an undeserved doom. Lawyers who spring them are extolled as champions, men who battled heavy odds, all by themselves, and won. I was willing to endure that reputation.
That evening, Joseph Vaster caught a plane back home to Tulsa. Gwennie got special permission to work on a school night. Mack came into town and met me at my office. We left that seedy lair and went to dinner at Locke Ober, just the two of us. We had a fine table by the window in the Men’s Cafe on the first floor and we had the waiters crowd it with Bollinger Brut and lobsters Savannah. We sat there beaming at each other over the feast and exchanging small improvements and embellishments of our delighted dreams by means of that telepathy that comes when first love matures into something cherished that will last a long and reliable time. I had been happy before with her, and I have been happy since, but I have never in those times been happier, and I don’t believe that she has either.
Into that magical evening, along with our dessert of strawberries Romanoff, came Frank Macdonald in the first expansive stages of his own intoxication. I knew him, of course, but Mack had not had more than a brief word with him at bar association lash-ups and that sort of thing. She did not welcome his intrusion that night, nor has she ever since.