The Street Lawyer (5 page)

It was busy and dusty and I was fascinated with the place.

A fierce Hispanic woman stopped typing after watching me for a moment. “You looking for somebody?” she asked. It was more of a challenge than a request. A
receptionist at Drake & Sweeney would be fired on the spot for such a greeting.

She was Sofia Mendoza, according to a nameplate tacked to the side of her desk, and I would soon learn that she was more than a receptionist. A loud roar came from one of the side rooms, and startled me without fazing Sofia.

“I’m looking for Mordecai Green,” I said politely, and at that moment he followed his roar and stomped out of his side office and into the main room. The floor shook with each step. He was yelling across the room for someone named Abraham.

Sofia nodded at him, then dismissed me and returned to her typing. Green was a huge black man, at least six five with a wide frame that carried a lot of weight. He was in his early fifties, with a gray beard and round eyeglasses that were framed in red. He took a look at me, said nothing, yelled again for Abraham while sauntering across the creaking floor. He disappeared into an office, then emerged seconds later without Abraham.

Another look at me, then, “Can I help you?”

I walked forward and introduced myself.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, but only because he had to. “What’s on your mind?”

“DeVon Hardy,” I said.

He looked at me for a few seconds, then glanced at Sofia, who was lost in her work. He nodded toward his office, and I followed him into a twelve-by-twelve room with no windows and every square inch of available
floor space covered with manila files and battered law books.

I handed him my gold-embossed Drake & Sweeney card, which he studied with a deep frown. Then he gave it back to me, and said, “Slumming, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said, taking the card.

“What do you want?”

“I come in peace. Mr. Hardy’s bullet almost got me.”

“You were in the room with him?”

“Yep.”

He took a deep breath and lost the frown. He pointed to the only chair on my side. “Have a seat. But you might get dirty.”

We both sat, my knees touching his desk, my hands thrust deep into the pockets of my overcoat. A radiator rattled behind him. We looked at each other, then looked away. It was my visit, I had to say something. But he spoke first.

“Guess you had a bad day, huh?” he said, his raspy voice lower and almost compassionate.

“Not as bad as Hardy’s. I saw your name in the paper, that’s why I came.”

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.”

“Do you think the family will sue? If so, then maybe I should leave.”

“There’s no family, not much of a lawsuit. I could make some noise with it. I figure the cop who shot him is white, so I could squeeze a few bucks out of the city, probably get a nuisance settlement. But that’s not my
idea of fun.” He waved his hand over the desk. “God knows I got enough to do.”

“I never saw the cop,” I said, realizing it for the first time.

“Forget about a lawsuit. Is that why you’re here?”

“I don’t know why I’m here. I went back to my desk this morning like nothing happened, but I couldn’t think straight. I took a drive. Here I am.”

He shook his head slowly, as if he was trying to understand this. “You want some coffee?”

“No thanks. You knew Mr. Hardy pretty well.”

“Yeah, DeVon was a regular.”

“Where is he now?”

“Probably in the city morgue at D.C. General.”

“If there’s no family, what happens to him?”

“The city buries the unclaimed. On the books it’s called a pauper’s funeral. There’s a cemetery near RFK Stadium where they pack ’em in. You’d be amazed at the number of people who die unclaimed.”

“I’m sure I would.”

“In fact, you’d be amazed at every aspect of homeless life.”

It was a soft jab, and I was not in the mood to spar. “Do you know if he had AIDS?”

He cocked his head back, looked at the ceiling, and rattled that around for a few seconds. “Why?”

“I was standing behind him. The back of his head was blown off. I got a face full of blood. That’s all.”

With that, I crossed the line from a bad guy to just an average white guy.

“I don’t think he had AIDS.”

“Do they check them when they die?”

“The homeless?”

“Yes.”

“Most of the time, yes. DeVon, though, died by other means.”

“Can you find out?”

He shrugged and thawed some more. “Sure,” he said reluctantly, and took his pen from his pocket. “Is that why you’re here? Worried about AIDS?”

“I guess it’s one reason. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Sure.”

Abraham stepped in, a small, hyper man of about forty who had public interest lawyer stamped all over him. Jewish, dark beard, horn-rimmed glasses, rumpled blazer, wrinkled khakis, dirty sneakers, and the weighty aura of one trying to save the world.

He did not acknowledge me, and Green was not one for social graces. “They’re predicting a ton of snow,” Green said to him. “We need to make sure every possible shelter is open.”

“I’m working on it,” Abraham snapped, then abruptly left.

“I know you’re busy,” I said.

“Is that all you wanted? A blood check.”

“Yeah, I guess. Any idea why he did it?”

He removed his red glasses, wiped them with a tissue, then rubbed his eyes. “He was mentally ill, like a lot of these people. You spend years on the streets, soaked with booze, stoned on crack, sleeping in the
cold, getting kicked around by cops and punks, it makes you crazy. Plus, he had a bone to pick.”

“The eviction.”

“Yep. A few months ago, he moved into an abandoned warehouse at the corner of New York and Florida. Somebody threw up some plywood, chopped up the place, and made little apartments. Wasn’t a bad place as far as homeless folk go—a roof, some toilets, water. A hundred bucks a month, payable to an ex-pimp who fixed it up and claimed he owned it.”

“Did he?”

“I think so.” He pulled a thin file from one of the stacks on his desk, and, miraculously, it happened to be the one he wanted. He studied its contents for a moment. “This is where it gets complicated. The property was purchased last month by a company called RiverOaks, some big real estate outfit.”

“And RiverOaks evicted everyone?”

“Yep.”

“Odds are, then, that RiverOaks would be represented by my firm.”

“Good odds, yes.”

“Why is it complicated?”

“I’ve heard it secondhand that they got no notice before the eviction. The people claim they were paying rent to the pimp, and if so, then they were more than squatters. They were tenants, thus entitled to due process.”

“Squatters get no notice?”

“None. And it happens all the time. Street folk will
move into an abandoned building, and most of the time nothing happens. So they think they own it. The owner, if he’s inclined to show up, can toss ’em without notice. They have no rights at all.”

“How did DeVon Hardy track down our firm?”

“Who knows? He wasn’t stupid, though. Crazy, but not stupid.”

“Do you know the pimp?”

“Yeah. Completely unreliable.”

“Where did you say the warehouse was?”

“It’s gone now. They leveled it last week.”

I had taken enough of his time. He glanced at his watch, I glanced at mine. We swapped phone numbers and promised to keep in touch.

Mordecai Green was a warm, caring man who labored on the streets protecting hordes of nameless clients. His view of the law required more soul than I could ever muster.

On my way out, I ignored Sofia because she certainly ignored me. My Lexus was still parked at the curb, already covered with an inch of snow.

Five

I
DRIFTED through the city as the snow fell. I couldn’t recall the last time I had driven the streets of D.C. without being late for a meeting. I was warm and dry in my heavy luxury car, and I simply moved with the traffic. There was no place to go.

The office would be off-limits for a while, what with Arthur mad at me; and I’d have to suffer through a hundred random drop-ins, all of which would start with the phony “How you doin’?”

My car phone rang. It was Polly, panicky. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Who wants to know?”

“A lot of people. Arthur for one. Rudolph. Another reporter called. There are some clients in need of advice. And Claire called from the hospital.”

“What does she want?”

“She’s worried, like everybody else.”

“I’m fine, Polly. Tell everybody I’m at the doctor’s office.”

“Are you?”

“No, but I could be. What did Arthur say?”

“He didn’t call. Rudolph did. They were waiting for you.”

“Let ’em wait.”

A pause, then a very slow “Okay. When might you be dropping by?”

“Don’t know. I guess whenever the doctor releases me. Why don’t you go home; we’re in the middle of a storm. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I hung up on her.

The apartment was a place I had rarely seen in the light of day, and I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting by the fire and watching it snow. If I went to a bar, I’d probably never leave.

So I drove. I flowed with the traffic as the commuters began a hasty retreat into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, and I breezed along near-empty streets coming back into the city. I found the cemetery near RFK where they buried the unclaimed, and I passed the Methodist Mission on Seventeenth, where last night’s uneaten dinner originated. I drove through sections of the city I had never been near and probably would never see again.

By four, the city was empty. The skies were darkening, the snow was quite heavy. Several inches already covered the ground, and they were predicting a lot more.

OF COURSE, not even a snowstorm could shut down Drake & Sweeney. I knew lawyers there who loved midnights and Sundays because the phones didn’t ring. A heavy snow was a delightful respite from the grueling drudgery of nonstop meetings and conference calls.

I was informed by a security guard in the lobby that the secretaries and most of the staff had been sent home at three. I took Mister’s elevator again.

In a neat row in the center of my desk were a dozen pink phone messages, none of which interested me. I went to my computer and began searching our client index.

RiverOaks was a Delaware corporation, organized in 1977, headquartered in Hagerstown, Maryland. It was privately held, thus little financial information was available. The attorney was N. Braden Chance, a name unknown to me.

I looked him up in our vast database. Chance was a partner in our real estate division, somewhere down on the fourth floor. Age forty-four, married, law school at Duke, undergrad at Gettysburg, an impressive but thoroughly predictable résumé.

With eight hundred lawyers threatening and suing daily, our firm had over thirty-six thousand active files.
To make sure our office in New York didn’t sue one of our clients in Chicago, each new file was entered immediately into our data system. Every lawyer, secretary, and paralegal at Drake & Sweeney had a PC, and thus instant access to general information about all files. If one of our probate attorneys in Palm Beach handled the estate of a rich client, I could, if I were so inclined, punch a few keys and learn the basics of our representation.

There were forty-two files for RiverOaks, almost all of them real estate transactions in which the company had purchased property. Chance was the attorney of record on every file. Four were eviction actions, three of which took place last year. The first phase of the search was easy.

On January 31, RiverOaks purchased property on Florida Avenue. The seller was TAG, Inc. On February 4, our client evicted a number of squatters from an abandoned warehouse on the property—one of whom, I now knew, was Mister DeVon Hardy, who took the eviction personally and somehow tracked down the lawyers.

I copied the file name and number, and strolled to the fourth floor.

No one joined a large firm with the goal of becoming a real estate lawyer. There were far more glamorous arenas in which to establish reputations. Litigation was the all-time favorite, and the litigators were still the most revered of all God’s lawyers, at least within the firm. A few of the corporate fields attracted top talent—mergers
and acquisitions was still hot, securities was an old favorite. My field, antitrust, was highly regarded. Tax law was horribly complex, but its practitioners were greatly admired. Governmental relations (lobbying) was repulsive but paid so well that every D.C. firm had entire wings of lawyers greasing the skids.

But no one set out to be a real estate lawyer. I didn’t know how it happened. They kept to themselves, no doubt reading fine print in mortgage documents, and were treated as slightly inferior lawyers by the rest of the firm.

AT DRAKE & Sweeney, each lawyer kept his current files in his office, often under lock and key. Only the retired files were accessible by the rest of the firm. No lawyer could be compelled to show a file to another lawyer, unless requested by a senior partner or a member of the firm’s executive committee.

The eviction file I wanted was still listed as current, and after the Mister episode I was certain it was well protected.

I saw a paralegal scanning blueprints at a desk next to a secretarial pool, and I asked him where I might find the office of Braden Chance. He nodded to an open door across the hall.

To my surprise, Chance was at his desk, projecting the appearance of a very busy lawyer. He was perturbed by my intrusion, and rightfully so. Proper protocol
would have been for me to call ahead and set up a meeting. I wasn’t worried about protocol.

He didn’t ask me to sit. I did so anyway, and that didn’t help his mood.

“You were one of the hostages,” he said irritably when he made the connection.

“Yes, I was.”

“Must’ve been awful.”

“It’s over. The guy with the gun, the late Mr. Hardy, was evicted from a warehouse on February 4. Was it one of our evictions?”

“It was,” he snapped. Because of his defensiveness, I guessed the file had been picked through during the day. He’d probably reviewed it thoroughly with Arthur and the brass. “What about it?”