The Last Innocent Man

T.S. considered the question and David wondered why he had asked it. What difference did it make? He had won. T.S. would be a free man after he testified at the trials of his former friends, and David would have earned his fee. Why did he need to know the truth about this idiot boy who would soon be at large again?

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. The pimple burst and white pus squeezed through his fingers. David felt cold and alone. The empty room was suddenly too close, and he wanted to get out.

“The district attorney has offered us a deal, T.S. She feels that she needs your testimony to convict Sticks and Zack. If you are willing to testify against them, she will grant you complete immunity. Do you know what that means?”

T.S. shook his head. His fingers were at work on another pimple.

“It means you go free. That they drop the charges against you for shooting Jessie.”

The fingers still worked, the stare was still vacant.

“I can go home?” he finally asked.

“After you’ve testified.”

“I have to testify in court?”

David nodded.

“Gee, I don’t know,” he said. Seals was trying to piece it together. David leaned back and let him think. He was floating and he needed some air. Dizzy. If he had some water.

“I guess it would be okay,” T.S. said finally. There was no excitement, no elation. David wondered if Seals even cared. For T.S. the world was a torment where everything was too complicated. He was a man made for prison where the rules and regulations set him free from the arduous task of having to make decisions.

“You’ll have to get on the witness stand in court and say exactly what happened, and you’ll have to take a liedetector test first, so the district attorney can be sure you’re being truthful. Will you do that?”

“If you say so,” the boy said. He had stopped picking his face apart and thought for a second. “I can really go home?”

“Yes, T.S.”

T.S. smiled, but only for a brief moment. Then he looked at David.

“You know, the guys in here said I was lucky to have you as my lawyer. They said you’d beat the rap for me.”

David stood to go. It was very warm in the narrow room and he needed air badly. He looked down at the idiot boy at the table and saw him back on the streets, the way he’d be in six months or a year. Back on drugs. Doing…what? Would he pull the trigger next time? Would there be a next time? David knew there would be, because he could see with his own eyes what Tony Seals was. His hands began to itch as if they were very dirty.

“ITHOUGHT YOU’D gone home,” Gregory Banks said.

David was sitting in his office in the dark. His jacket was folded over the back of a chair on the other side of his desk, and his tie was undone. He had turned his desk chair so that it faced the river, where a tugboat flowed with the current like a firefly tracing the path of a piece of carelessly thrown black ribbon.

“Just thinking,” David said. He sounded down.

“Want to talk, or should I leave?”

David swiveled around and faced his friend.

“Do you ever wonder what the hell we’re doing, Greg?”

Banks sat down.

“This does sound serious,” he said, half joking.

“I just made a deal with the DA. Tony Seals is going to get complete immunity.”

“That’s great!” Gregory said, puzzled by David’s mood. He was close to the Sealses, and he knew what this would mean to them.

“Is it? What do I do six months from now when Tony kills someone and his parents want to hire me because I did such a good job today?”

“The DA made the offer, Dave. You were just representing your client.”

“Jah, mein Herr, I vas chust following orders,” David said bitterly.

“Why don’t you tell me what brought all this on.”

“I don’t know, Greg,” David said. Gregory waited patiently for him to continue. “I guess I’ve just been taking a good look at the way I earn my living, and I’m not sure I like what I see. There are people out there hurting other people. The cops arrest them, the prosecutors prosecute them, and I shovel the garbage right back into the street. You know, that’s an apt metaphor. Maybe they should start calling us sanitary engineers.”

“I think you’re getting a little melodramatic, don’t you? What about that kid you helped out? The college kid who got busted with the marijuana. He was guilty of a felony, right? Should he have been convicted? If you hadn’t beaten that case, he wouldn’t be in medical school. And you beat that case using the same legal arguments you used to get that heroin dealer off last year. You can’t have two systems of justice.”

“Maybe not, Greg. Your arguments, as always, are very logical. That’s what makes you such a good lawyer. But I just made a deal today that is going to permit a very sick young man, who made a young girl dig her own grave and left her to die, to walk out of jail scot-free.