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Volume 22, Number 1/2/3 (1998) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum WRITER AND LAWYER LIA MATERA* Feeling pressured to make a sensible career choice, I started law school. Franz Kafka, I discovered, was right: “Studying law is like chewing thousand-year-old dust.” So I continued my summer novel- writing. I graduated from Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in 1981, after being editor-in-chief of one of its law journals, The Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. I was admitted to practice that year. Instead of law practice, I worked as a Teaching Fellow at Stanford Law School, teaching Moot Court and Legal Research & Writing. When my son was born, I saw it as my last chance to get something published and avoid a law career. (The world may not need another writer, but it can certainly do without another lawyer.) I bought my baby around $14,000 worth of GoBot toys, and wrote obsessively. I pasted a sign over my computer that read: Star Witness is my eleventh mystery novel. I have been nominated twice for the Edgar Allan Poe award, three times for the Anthony Award, and once each for Macavity and Shamus Awards. I live in Santa Cruz, California, and my baby is now fourteen. In addition, I had to endure three years at Hastings College of the Law, survive the bar exam, and even ply my trade for a while. But I always knew I’d drop out the minute I sold a novel. I always kept my distance, studying my fellow lawyers with an anthropologist’s eye. Having invested several years and serious money in the profession, it seems natural to use it as a backdrop in my novels. I hang around with lawyers; I know the patter. I’m not interested in explaining the law (I’d have continued teaching moot court and legal writing, if I were), but I enjoy showing lawyers at work and at play. I enjoyed presenting an unromanticized, student’s eye view of law school in Where Lawyers Fear to Tread. I enjoyed showing the differences between a union labor practice in A Radical Departure and a commercial litigation practice in Hidden Agenda. I don’t focus on the law—that would be dull reading. I focus on the lawyers. Different legal practices attract different personalities with different financial and political agendas. Clients are different, office decor is different, assumptions, attire, terminology, social functions are different. I like to think that to an audience raised on Perry Mason, these details will be interesting—more interesting than a motion by motion description of a case. And from my point of view, let’s face it—if I found case minutiae interesting, I’d be a practicing lawyer instead of a recovering lawyer. Since I do focus on details of milieu, I try to get them right. A lot of lawyers read mysteries. I think I’d lose much of my audience if the legal environment felt phony to them. That’s one reason I continue to hang out with lawyers; also, they seem to know the best restaurants. And every once in a while, a lawyer really makes my day (and how many people can say that?). For example, I once walked into a party and had a lawyer tell me his firm had a meeting to decide whether to sue me for invasion of privacy. “But then,” he continued, “I called so-and-so, and she assured me A Radical Departure was about her law firm.” They were both wrong. But in a flattering way, they were both right. Occasionally, readers are fooled into thinking I’m still a real lawyer. I’m not. You’d be better off taking rosary beads into court with you. But my legal training has given me themes and settings for all my books. Pretty good value, I’d say. The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I rented an electric typewriter and wrote my first novel. I had no idea how to get it published. The following summer I did the same. I still had no idea what to do with it. In fact, it would be almost exactly ten years from the day I rented that typewriter to the day I saw my first published novel on a bookstore shelf. In the meantime, I’d decided to be a lawyer. For many baby boomers, the theory was, if you don’t know what to do after college, try law school. (And you wonder why there are so many lawyers out there!) It was the early eighties. Competition was lionized. Enough so that a former hippie like me found it natural to become editor-in-chief of a constitutional law review, to extern with a conservative federal judge, and to work as a teaching fellow at impeccably stolid Stanford Law. I could walk like a duck and quack like a duck. But when it came time to fly south—to make a permanent career choice—I had to admit it: I’d been enjoying the legal community as an anthropologist might. I loved the Machiavellian game-playing, the clash of titanic egos, the meanness and subtlety, the high concepts: justice, restitution, equality. I loved the bloated rhetoric and pettifogging motions, the venal fussing over centuries of codified wisdom and best intentions. But I loved it as a writer might. My bliss was writing. But could I step away from the huge investment of effort and money and ego? Could I disappoint my family, and find something to say to fellow feminists who viewed my graduation as a statement of commitment to the new order? When Stanford asked me to continue teaching legal research and writing, it wasn’t easy to say no. I didn’t have much time or money to gamble. If I couldn’t establish a writing career quickly, I’d have no choice but to commit myself to lawyering. I kept an eye on that sign taped over my computer: PUBLISH OR PRACTICE. Luckily, the first book I wrote about lawyers was purchased on condition I turn it into a series. I’ve never looked back. Did I walk away from my legal career? Yes. Did I abandon the law? No. Every one of my novels deals with legal themes and how the law changes practitioners in one some arena of American law. In Designer Crimes, for example, attorney Laura Di Palma is caught in a dual power struggle to save her reputation and her law practice. Defending herself against the slanders of her ex-boss—an employment problem not limited to lawyers, unfortunately—she attracts another powerful enemy. She is forced into a high-stakes feud with a DA who is prosecuting Laura’s client by attacking Laura’s past. The book allows me to explore the theme of employee rage, as well as problems specific to lawyers. The trial of O.J. Simpson showed the world something lawyers have always known: In the heat of operatic battle, the personal and the professional blur. Clients, like victims and witnesses, can become mere pretexts for rancorous courtroom clashes. If an insider’s view of that drama is all I got out of my legal education, it was enough. wanted to be a capital W Writer. In college, I decided I’d better do some lower-case w writing. I rented an electric typewriter and wrote my first novel, a sprawling, pointless piece of drivel that, naturally, didn’t get published. The next summer, I tried again. But with graduation looming, I had to face the fact that my degree in Italian Literature wasn’t likely to be my golden goose. I had an uncharacteristic flirtation with practicality, and applied to law school. But I kept trying to write and, more urgently, sell novels. When my son was born and I could justify a brief hiatus, I knew it was my last chance to avoid a legal career. I wrote three books that year, including the first in each of my two series about frustrated women lawyers. Ten years after I rented that typewriter in college, I saw my “first” novel, Where Lawyers Fear to Tread, on a bookstore shelf. I remain a recovering attorney. Walter Sorrells: For readers who are new to your work, tell us a little about the differences between the Willa Jansson series and the Laura Di Palma series. Lia Matera: Both series are about practicing lawyers. Willa Jansson was a red-diaper baby, raised by political activists who continue to cling to their Yippie ways. Willa finds herself justifying her increasingly bourgeois tastes to her parents while keeping her hippie attitudes in the closet at work. The series is set in San Francisco, in labor law and corporate law firms. There are plenty of political barbs from a first-person narrator whose sense of humor is not unlike the author’s. Laura Di Palma is a litigator, and, like most trial lawyers, she’s aggressive, Machiavellian, and vindictive. She doesn’t shy away from high-profile cases, often getting tarred with the same brush as her clients. She, too, has a rather inconvenient family, including an uncle who is the disastrous mayor of her hometown. She practices law in San Francisco, though she sometimes takes cases back home near the Oregon border. The Di Palma books, because they are about a more intense woman, are darker books, usually turning on social and legal issues. Walter Sorrells: What is it that brings a character alive for you as you write? When do you know—ah-ha!—I’ve got someone here who’s worth writing about? Lia Matera: Writers and schizophrenics share their skulls with a host of voices. For me, writing dialog is pure channeling. I put my fingers on the keyboard and I listen to characters talk, watch them gesticulate, observe their attitudes. Then I edit what sounded right in my head, hoping some of it comes through to the readers. I do research before I write because it’s important to me that my characters have interesting opinions. But once I know, generally, what they think, they take on lives of their own. Now if only plotting and descriptions went so quickly! Walter Sorrells: Some legal suspense stories get sold as mysteries (yours for instance), while others get marketed as “thrillers.” What distinguishes a mystery from a thriller—if anything? (Feel free to say really venomous things about the current state of the publishing business.) Lia Matera: My agent once described thrillers as “a good guy, a bad guy, and a ticking clock.” I think that about sums it up. As does the name: people read thrillers to be thrilled. In a legal thriller, typically the lawyer-narrator is the good guy, and if s/he can’t stop the bad guy — evil defendant, unscrupulous opponent, mob boss, greedy pharmaceutical company—s/he or her client will meet a hideous onrushing fate. Thrillers are roller coaster rides, full of threats, action, reversals, chases. But that doesn’t leave much time for commentary, soul-searching, and other character-driven digressions. I try to write a fast-paced mystery, something on the borderline. I like enough elbow-room to examine current social and legal problems as they relate to my plot and characters. The mystery genre is also friendlier to smart-mouthed protagonists. Of course, this means I don’t get malachite book covers with embossed gavels on them—or the megabucks that go with that package. Walter Sorrells: With all the hoopla about legal thrillers of late—Turow, Grisham, Martini, Rosenberg—have you taken a stab at the legal thriller world? Lia Matera: If my creditors have anything to say about it, I may yet try my hand at it. But I have a problem with the basic premise of most successful thrillers: that the system doesn’t work and justice can only be achieved through personal vengeance. (When was the last time that you read a thriller where the bad guy was brought to his knees by a cumbersome but well-intentioned legal system?) I hate to see popular fiction glorify yahooism and add more sparks to the American tinderbox. My other fear is that I don’t have big enough hair for the obligatory full-page back cover author photo. Walter Sorrells: You’re a damn funny woman, if I may say so. Talk to me a little about the role of humor in your writing. Lia Matera: I like humor that’s observation-based, those things we all think but keep to ourselves because they’re so true they’re rude. In a book, this kind of humor has the added advantage of painting situations or characters vividly and economically. I like description to be funny because it’s dead-on. Walter Sorrells: Where’d you come up with the idea for the techno-shamanism stuff in your latest novel, Last Chants? (Without giving too much away, you might explain a little about how it fits into the story, too.) Lia Matera: When I was writing Face Value (about the pornography debate), I was filter-feeding, looking for interesting philosophies for a modern guru. I wanted someone who could fascinate professionals, lawyers, baby-boomers who’d grown up respecting science — I didn’t want the usual fundamentalist preacher or East Indian holy man. I became interested in cybernetics because it seemed simultaneously scientific and flaky. The field attracts eccentric geniuses hot-rodding their computers to try to connect to something, well, transcendental. (And if you don’t believe me, ask a Macintosh true believer to lunch sometime.) I’d also been traveling in British Columbia, growing interested in the shamanism of its native cultures. That led to my taking a workshop through the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. I became intrigued by the parallels between shamanic states and recent predictions about cyberspace, by the weird intersection of our newest and oldest forms of magic. So I wrote Last Chants, about a shaman who is murdered while working on a computer system designed to access “nonordinary” consciousness. My protagonist employs conventional methods of detection, including some computer work, while her client relies on shamanic “journeys” to get to the truth. Walter Sorrells: I know this is one of those tediously obligatory questions, but I occasionally find the answers to be really revealing: who are some of your favorite authors and why? Lia Matera: I admire Martin Cruz Smith because his characterizations are so delicate and his stories so multilayered. I love Dick Francis for grabbing the reader in the first paragraph and completely engaging the emotions. I love J.D. Salinger’s visual vividness and John Updike’s metaphors. I reread Jane Austen, the queen of observant commentary, so often it’s pitiful. Is it uncool to say I’m crazy about humorist Dave Barry? Walter Sorrells: Nah, he graduated from the same college I did, so I can’t say anything bad about him. How do you go from idea to story? Do you outline? Do you just plough ahead? Or what? Lia Matera: I can’t bear to outline. I’ll rewrite a hundred times because I’m too lazy to plan ahead. (I just had to have a pane of glass recut because I didn’t measure twice.) I have to be trapped in a corner, unable to write one more word, before I’ll continue the painful process of plotting. I’d like to be an outliner, but I resent them for being so smug about something that is probably genetic. Walter Sorrells: What are you working on now, and what’s coming up next for you on the publication front? Lia Matera: I recently turned in a book where Willa Jansson is forced to defend someone whose alibi is that he was abducted by a UFO. The physical evidence supports his claim, and offering no alibi would prejudice his case. So Willa, reluctantly, given her overexposure to and loathing of anything flaky, goes into court hoping she can get her client off without becoming a laughingstock herself. And I’ve just started writing a book about the effects and ramifications when a person feels “cursed.” But maybe it would be bad luck to say any more. . . drafted into both the Italian Navy and the U.S. Army despite having spent most of his life in Canada! Q: What got you started in crime writing? A: Part of it was my extended family’s frustration grappling with the English language. The ability to express oneself was the central issue in our lives. Add to that all the stories I heard around the dinner table—the sheer drama of the being forced to leave one’s homeland and start fresh with nothing. Every meal became an opera. So I was focusing on language and getting tutored in storytelling before I could even ride a trike. I’ve never wanted to be anything but a writer, though I had a brief flirtation with practicality at one point and became a lawyer. I chose crime writing because I’d read voraciously in the genre and had internalized the form. I’m also a twelve-year-old at heart; I love action, adventure, intrigue, mystery. By writing crime novels, I get to “live” the fantasy. Q: How do you plan your writing? Do you start with a crime first, or with a character? A: I sit down before starting each book and ask myself a single question: What do I care about right now? I believe that readers take away only a fraction of the emotion a writer puts into a book, and that only genuine obsession on the writer’s part can fully engage readers. So I have to start with an issue, a situation, a verity, a character; it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s at the top of the list of my emotional and intellectual concerns. Once I know this, I know who my characters have to be. And, after a process that’s only slightly more painful than being gnawed to death by weasels, I devise a plot to fit the characters. Q: Do you completely plot a book or story before you start? A: If, going in, I know too much of what’s going to happen, I lose interest in the book. I need to be in suspense as much as the reader does. As you might imagine, this means a tremendous amount of rewriting. Once I figure everything out—usually after painting myself into a tight plot corner—many scenes no longer work, my clues aren’t in place, the moods and tone are likely to be wrong. It would be far less work to outline, and it would certainly mean less hand wringing and breast beating. But I would lose my juice for the story, so I guess I’m stuck. Q: How do you find the many interesting characters in your books? A: I think most writers are filterfeeders, watching and noticing and filing away opinions, characteristics, mannerisms, quirks, delusions. The fun of writing is mixing and matching. Sometimes when I hit the right combination, the characters take over, spewing dialogue onto the pages. (I wish they’d work on those typos.) I guess the advantage to my approach is that, while obsessing over some issue or circumstance, I get to know the players in that arena. For instance, my first books were political, growing out of Vietnam era protest. Many characters were drawn from my experience with people in movement politics. More recently my plots, and therefore my characters, have taken a turn toward philosophy and mythology. Last Chants deals with shamanism and its modern arm, technology, and Star Witness deals with our fastest growing oral tradition, UFOs and alien abduction. The characters in these books are a synthesis of people I’ve met and people I’ve watched on videos. I am addicted to documentary videos, especially the talking-head variety such as the “Thinking Allowed” series. My supposed aim in watching them is to increase my knowledge and expand my horizons. But that’s just another way of saying I’m filterfeeding. Most of what I learn eventually ends up in a book. Q: How did you come up with Laura and Willa? A: Willa Jansson is a red-diaper baby raised in a radical do-gooder household. Her personal history is completely unlike mine, but her perspective and sense of humor are close. I wanted to offer an irreverent view of law school and law firms. I also wanted to talk politics, a bit of a no-no in genre fiction. It pleases me that readers like the character even if they disagree with her views. Laura Di Palma is a moodier, more driven lawyer. She instinctively chooses to act—to break rules, to go for broke. She pays the price for her choices, and doesn’t always come to terms with them. I suppose I see her as every lawyer’s stubborn side, as my own feminist edge. Readers seem either to love her or hate her. Q: How do you manage to be so prolific? A: My hours aren’t harder or longer than any working parent’s. The trick is to keep myself revved so I can do justice to the stories I tell. But I only write one book a year. There’s an old joke: “Show me a person who takes years to write a book, and I’ll show you a person who drinks at lunch.” Or, more probably, has a day job. I’m fortunate to be able to do this full-time. Q: Where and how do you write? In an ivory tower? The kitchen table? A cupboard? Do you write with a favorite fountain pen? An HB pencil? An old underwood? A word processor? A: I have a home office decorated with an eclectic mix of distracting objects—gargoyles and medieval art, psychedelia, a Tibetan skull bowl, blown glass, way too much gadgetry. I write on a perfectly fine computer that I’m forever disparaging because I want a real hot rod, a computer powerful enough to run the space program. I’m a terrible typist, so for me a computer, any computer, not the super model I will forever covet, is crucial. I can’t experiment if I have to keep retyping, and since I don’t plan, experimentation is my Path. Q: When do you write? Every day after midnight? Before dawn? Strictly 9 to 5? Weekends?) A: I used to get up and immediately start writing. I found that if I dawdled over the newspaper, I didn’t work up enough momentum. But lately, I’ve grown lazy. I get up, mill around, start late . . . and then work around the clock as my deadline approaches. I’m not sure why I’ve become less disciplined over the years, but it’s the sad truth. Q: Do you have any special writing habits to get you going and keep you going? Bach fugues in the background? Silence? Sharpen all your pencils first? Always leave off in mid-sentence? A: I do seem to follow a pattern or cycle. When I start a new book, I freak out early and often. I can’t seem to write anything but flat clunky sentences. I become convinced that my career is over. To distract and exhaust my inner Eeyore, I begin my main procrastination ritual. I rearrange all the furniture in my house, which involves disassembling and reassembling tables, bookcases, desks, and athletic equipment. When I’ve sprained at least one major muscle group, I get back to work on my book. Q: Who are your favorite authors (all genres)? A: I love Jane Austen because she is so perceptive. I love John Updike and John Steinbeck because their metaphors are perfect. I love J.D. Salinger because his writing is so visual. I love Dick Francis because he creates such a powerful bond with his narrator. I appreciate good writing more than a good plot. I don’t care if Raymond Chandler leaves loose ends, not when his prose is so evocative. I don’t care what Kurt Vonnegut or Joan Didion are writing about, I just want to hear their voices. But I have a prejudice against books that read like television episodes, even if they are well-written. Their predictability and button-punching undermine my pleasure. Lately, most of the books I read are nonfiction because I need new ideas to keep me plotting. I think Todd Gitlin, Tina Rosenberg, and John Hubner are wonderful writers. And I love Scott Adams’ and Dave Barry’s humor. Q: Are there any authors that greatly influenced you and that you used as a model? A: I wish I could observe as insightfully as Austen and Updike, create as vivid an impression as Salinger, and be as kind to my characters, as willing to let them speak for themselves, as Steinbeck. As a kid, nursing a desire to become a writer, I thrived on Sabbatini and Dumas. As teenager, I lived and breathed Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In college, it was Sciascia and Cassola. Adventure, emotion, love and death, the tyranny of history—I’ll never match these writers and their grand themes, but I’m grateful for the ride they took me on. Q: Have you read any new authors lately that you like? A: The most recent fiction books I read were Irvin D. Yalom’s Lying on the Couch, which was masterful, and Walter Mosely’s Gone Fishin’, which I loved even more than his mysteries. The last two books I wrote involved months of research. So most of my discoveries in the last couple of years have been nonfiction books in the areas of cybernetics, native cultures, shamanism, and UFOlogy.5 Recently I heard Robert B. Parker say that when he’s through writing for the day, he watches videos of ballgames. His imagination, he said, is depleted by writing, and so he can’t read fiction. Often, that’s true for me, too. Reading fiction can involve more visualization and involvement than I have left in me. Nonfiction, on the other hand, is replenishing because it feeds the imagination real-life details. Q: Which books would you want with you if you were stranded on a desert island? You can assume that you have all of your own books and books such as the Bible and other holy books, Shakespeare, and How To Build A Boat. A: I’d want Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Updike’s A Long Way to Go, Leonard Cohen’s Stranger Music, Leonardo Sciascia’s Gli Zii Di Sicilia, The Book of Changes (I Ching), Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Sabbatini’s Scaramouche, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, all the Dilbert books, and plenty of nonfiction, since I’d finally have the time to fill in some holes in my education. (For instance, the sciences, in their entirety.) Q: Tell us about your latest books. A: Last Chants is about shamanism and computer technology and the weird magical place where the two intersect. Star Witness is about the world’s most widespread oral tradition, alien abduction. Both books deal with modern mythology and the nature of reality, nineties style. They are Willa Jansson mysteries, so I get to do a lot of quick commentary. Q: Which of your books means the most to you and why? A: While I was researching Last Chants, I traveled all over British Columbia. I brought a certain feeling home with me and took into the woods here. I equate that book with the smell of cedar and a new way of looking at things. But Where Lawyers Fear to Tread, my first book, probably means the most to me because I put so much into it and I’d waited so long to see my work on a bookstore shelf. Q: Do you have any advice for other crime writers? A: Go to Tofino on Vancouver Island right now and order a crab dinner! But I suppose you mean writing advice? England, France, Italy, India, and China are just neighborhoods away in many Canadian cities. Add to this some of the most breathtaking scenery on the planet and you have a situation that is unique and wonderful. Exploit it. It’s time for more series set in Vancouver, Montreal, Queen Charlotte Island, Medicine Hat, Toronto. Q: Any tips for aspiring writers? A: I know very few writers who got their first manuscripts published. And I know very few writers who, having continued to write, did not eventually get published. This is a profession where perseverance is the price of admission. So don’t keep revising the same work. Move on. Give your imagination a chance to stretch. Give your writing a chance to grow. But most of all, keep at it. I wrote six books before I sold my “first.” I can only say that I’m glad I didn’t give up after five. Q: What has been your most interesting experience as a crime writer? A: When I was researching Face Value, about the debate within the feminist community over pornography, I spent a day at the infamous Mitchell brothers’ O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco. I was the only clothed woman in the place—definitely one of my stranger life experiences. I’ve also, in the course of doing research, learned to scuba dive, done some elementary computer hacking, undertaken a shamanic “journey,” and stained poisonous mushrooms spores under a microscope. I’ve visited a Cuban prison, attended a UFO conference, and had my aura photographed. I love this job. Q: Anything else you’d like us to know about you? A: There’s probably way too much about me tucked into my books already. Every time a book hits the shelves, I worry that people reading between the lines will learn a hundred embarrassing facts about me. I hate book tours for the same reason, I become convinced I’ve blurted out things no one should have to know about a stranger. Q: Do you have any anecdotes that you would like to share with us? A: Since I’ve brought up the subject of book tours . . . here are a few things folks said to me on my tour last summer. These comments were made with no trace of irony, so I wasn’t even allowed to laugh out loud: “So was it just a cynical marketing decision to write about shamanism?” “I read four or five of your books, but then I got sick of them.” “Sure your publisher wants to break you out, but without real talent, you’ll never make it.” “Here’s my card—I sell clothes for big women like you.” “I don’t like the characters you use to express my opinions.” And here I thought they were my opinions! But the Willa Jansson character is a different matter. Readers might hate her politics (and, boy, do they like to explain why) or her lifestyle (either her hippie days or her repudiation of them), but most seem to like Willa herself. From my point of view, writing a Laura Di Palma book is like being with someone who talks over you and interrupts, but whose opinions and company are worth it. Willa Jansson is more like a friend who can finish your sentences and knows how to crack you up. To say I’ve missed her, after a three book absence, is an understatement. But it was a strange reunion, after all these years (the last Jansson mystery was the Prior Convictions in 1991). As I wrote Last Chants, I found myself wondering if Willa saw as many small changes in me as I was seeing in her. I suppose Willa and I both discovered, to our mutual relief, that we’d come to terms with a few things and found some fun in them, too. And neither of us was in the mood to “think like a lawyer”—or, more accurately, to think only like a lawyer. So I introduced Willa to a famous mythologist, Arthur Kenna, loosely patterned after Joseph Campbell. In Last Chants, Willa’s botched attempt to “rescue” Arthur from imminent arrest forces her on the run with him. They begin searching for the murderer of Arthur’s assistant, a Kwakiutl shaman working for a computer designer. Along the way, they find a magical, menacing place where cybernetics and shamanism seem to intersect. To my surprise, their adventure changed my perspective on a few things. Which only proves how important it is to keep in touch with old friends. Next—can’t rush into working—I check the mystery writers on-line bulletin board. In answer to questions about whether I’m attending an upcoming conference, I confess that I’m still getting over a virus that usually afflicts puppies. I stress that I’ve already heard every conceivable “bitch” joke. The response is solicitous: How am I dealing with the flea problem? Is this a “bona fido” illness? I begin working. I’m finishing my ninth mystery novel, my fifth for Simon & Schuster. People begin phoning me. Writers, it is presumed, are available to chat and hang out because they are “at home.” I am easily tempted, so I screen my calls. By afternoon, I’ve added many little Post-It messages to the stack on my desk. Some are business related: Have I filled out my women mystery writers questionnaire yet? (No, but I’ll find it some months after the deadline.) Will I be at my paperback publisher’s breakfast at the American Booksellers Association Convention? (God, where is it, again? When is it?) I wish I could put a message on my answering machine: “If I were an organized person, I would be using my law degree. Instead, I am trying to get a book written. In the meantime, my life is a shambles. So please forgive me if I forget to call you back.” By afternoon, my brain is overheating. I reread the ten or so pages I’ve written that day and try to decide whether to put them on the pile or contact Dr. Kevorkian. My son gets home from school with a raucous band of Nintendo-heads. Kevorkian will have to wait until I order them a pizza. By four o’clock I feel as bad as I look, or vice versa. I’m about to work out or take a walk in hopes that will help. But suddenly, there is a red-headed stranger on my doorstep, all dressed up and wearing lipstick. (The stranger, not the doorstep.) I open the door crankily, hoping there are no holes in my sweat clothes. She extends her hand and introduces herself. She is the freelance reporter from Germany I am (whoops) expecting. The appointment is jotted down on a Post-It somewhere. I pretend I’ve been waiting delightedly for her to interview me about my books, which are translated into German. I pretend I always look this bad for an interview—we artists, ha ha. I lead her through the disaster four boys have made of the house, and settle into patio furniture outside. She has a microphone with what looks like a Nerf ball on the end. After a day of writing, I have no active brain cells. I can’t even come up with an opinion on my favorite Star Trek, TNG episode (which my son wants to know), much less why American writers (myself not included, the interviewer kindly adds) don’t allow their characters to be sensual. Americans are so obsessed with how their bodies look they forget how to use them to experience tactile pleasures? I guess into the Nerf ball. My real answer would be, Geez, how should I know? Or maybe a simple, Duh? Obviously, I am not hung up on the antisensual fitness thing myself. (Part of me is debating the far more important Star Trek issue.) An hour later, I have emptied my brain of trumped-up opinions. I console myself: I don’t speak German. I’ll never know if I came out sounding like a dufus. As she is leaving, the interviewer tells me that every few years she drives around America playing country music on the car radio even though she doesn’t like country music. This strikes me as beautiful. Especially when she sings “All My Ex’s Live In Texas.” I am somewhat groomed by the time I have to leave for San Jose. I have minimized pre-speech jitters by refusing to think about the event in advance. I walk in, expecting my usual throng of fifteen, sixteen people. I walk and walk. I grew up in a town smaller than the Barnes & Noble on Stevens Creek Boulevard. As I speak, the “crowd” grows. The bookstore is piping my ramblings over loudspeakers. In distant corners, people ask themselves, “Would anyone really be so indiscreet among strangers?” They wander over to look at the writer improbably discussing research that made her the only clothed woman at the O’Farrell Adult Theater one night last year. (It was for my book, Face Value. Really.) By the end of my speech, I have promised myself I’ll prepare a nice, safe little rap next time. I have made this promise before. I take questions from the audience. Every signing there is “The One Question” I have a hard time believing I heard right. I rush home in time to put my son to bed. I tell him my favorite Trek episode was the one where the Enterprise kept blowing up right before every commercial, but afterward the crew (unexploded) was back in the middle of the same poker game. He says that one was called “Cause and Effect.” He asks me what this signing’s “Question” was. I tell him: “When are you going to put some cats in your books?” He guesses my answer: “When I figure out how to get them flat enough.” Tomorrow, I vow, I’ll sort through all my Post-Its, return all my calls, fill out my questionnaire, and answer my real mail, not just my E-mail. This is a favorite and comfortable old vow. I go to bed singing “All My Exes Live in Texas.” My son and I had just watched the movie Jaws, and I couldn’t help but recast aliens as a sort of intergallactic great white shark. We were all watching the sky for that fast-approaching saucer-shaped fin. And there was just no way to close this beach. When I decided to write about UFOs and alien abduction in Star Witness, something weird happened. As soon as people—including old friends—heard about my research, they began treating me differently. There was a sudden edge, a reserve . . . and lots of nervous jokes. I didn’t think I’d been abducted, did I? I didn’t believe all this government conspiracy stuff? I wasn’t going to admit I’d had conversations with bug-eyed space creatures? I wasn’t going off to some mountaintop to wait for a spaceship? Was I??? In the last ten years, I’ve written twelve books. In the years before that, I was a lawyer. Is this the resume of a flake? (Okay, I know my rising sign and I own some translations of the I Ching. But I live in a part of California where it’s obligatory.) Suddenly, people who’d known me for decades were implying I’d gone off the deep end. When I researched pornography for Face Value, they hadn’t worried that I might become unduly licentious. When I’d researched shamanism for Last Chants, they hadn’t suggested I’d run off to join a rainforest tribe. No, this was different. People weren’t just concerned about my mental health, they seemed, well, fearful. Was I going to insist that We are not alone? Was I going to point to the heavens and start humming the Jaws theme? Last summer, I hit the road to talk about Last Chants. Invariably, someone in the audience would ask what I was working on. I’d just turned in Star Witness. I explained that it was about a lawyer struggling to decide whether to use her client’s alibi, recovered under hypnosis, that he’d been abducted by aliens. And in town after town, this was met with hostility. (Just ask the author with whom I toured. Boy, was he surprised.) A few people even leaped up, red in the face, and began shouting at me: This was antiscientific nonsense—if anything was going on, we’d know about it. The government wouldn’t keep something like this secret. (Never mind Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Black Budget scandals!) Why would I lend credence to crazy people who thought they’d seen spacemen? Why would I feed into this hysterical claptrap? And all I’d done was briefly describe my plot! No doubt about it, this subject hits a nerve. For me, a researcher who’s never even seen a mysterious light in the sky, an author who’d just as soon meet with epithets as apathy, this is all fascinating, even kind of fun. But imagine how I’d feel if I were making an actual claim — a sighting, an abduction, even a theory. All I can say is, thank goodness I’m not trying to convince anyone to close the beaches! Q: Your sleuth is Willa Jansson and she is known for investigating mysteries with a legal slant. What inspired you to add UFOs to the mix? A: As I researched the origins and effects of myths for Last Chants, I realized that right now, the world’s fastest-growing oral tradition involves UFOs and alien abduction. Millions of people worldwide have reported seeing mysterious lights in the sky. Hundreds of thousands believe they have had contact or abduction experiences. No matter what the truth may be, in and of itself this is a fascinating comment on life on earth. Q: Did you already believe in UFOs before you began writing Star Witness or was this all new territory for you? A: I neither believed in UFOs nor dismissed the idea. There are too many misconceptions and illusions dominating popular culture for anyone to think, “This many people can’t be wrong!” On the other hand, the skeptics I’d met just assumed there was no evidence. They were basically saying, “It can’t be possible, so it isn’t.” Well, a thousand years ago, the rotation of planets around the sun wasn’t possible. Two hundred years ago, germs weren’t possible. A hundred years ago, scientists scoffed at flying machines. And right now, there’s no way to explain the movement of subatomic particles. So it seems presumptuous to dismiss millions of sightings just because UFOs are “impossible.” Skepticism should be at least as much trouble as gullibility. Q: Suddenly there are stories on Heaven’s Gate, The X-Files, Independence Day, and the list goes on. Why does there seem to be such a fascination with UFOs, life on other planets and conspiracy theories? A: Whenever you have a situation where stories spread rapidly by word of mouth but aren’t reported in the legitimate press or confirmed by the government, two things are bound to happen. People will believe all the more strongly—why shouldn’t they believe their own eyes, their own friends, their own neighbors’ experiences? People will resent the derision greeting their views, especially in the nontabloid press, and they’ll wonder about the government’s silence on the subject. It took years of court battles under the Freedom of Information Act before thousands of pages of “non-existent” material on UFOs was released by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and most of the contents blacked out! This lent credence to suspicions that the government knew more than it was telling. Programs like The X-Files are only extrapolating from a quarter century of government secrets—CIA-backed assassinations and coups in Latin America, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Black Budget scandals. So as people hear about more UFO sightings and the growing number of abduction claims, they wonder if the truth is being kept from them. This makes the word-of-mouth stories even more powerful and more interesting. Plus, they can be shaped to fit existing worldviews. Optimists look to aliens to unite the planet. Pessimists assume aliens are here to exploit us or remove our reproductive tissue. Technophiles believe we are back-engineering their spacecraft. New Age folks equate ETs with angels. The subject has something for everyone. Q: In your book, your character attends a UFO conference. I understand you did the same thing while researching the book. What was the conference like? What things did you learn? A: I expected to walk into a room full of teenagers in Star Trek uniforms, women in lilac robes and glittery face paint, computer wizards and D&D players. Instead I found engineers, post-docs, and working people in weekend attire, average men and women concerned about the verifiability and quality of UFO evidence. I saw videos of objects in the sky, I heard accounts of abductions, descriptions of crop circles and cattle mutilations, archeological findings suggesting early space travel. Some of the evidence was tenuous, some downright wishful. But much of it, certainly more than most people would assume, had been cross-checked and examined by disinterested experts. UFOlogists have been working hard to get out from behind what they called “the laughter curtain,” the ridicule they routinely encounter in the press, at parties, even among friends. The UFO conference was also rife with theories and people guaranteed to raise a smile. There were booths with books about how to tell if you are an ET, and how to tell a “positive” from a “negative” ET. There were encounter groups for abductees. An author of abduction fiction—now there’s a niche market!—burst into tears describing an ET-guided journey to witness his own birth. A “xenoarcheologist” described an elaborate scheme of hybridization and mind-control enslavement. And there were enough fey posters and pamphlets to line a million New Age birdcages. But on the whole, I walked out of there with genuine respect for the serious-minded believers looking for answers to questions arising out of eye-witness experiences and tangible evidence. And I also walked out with a wonderful T-shirt reading, “My Mom Got Abducted and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.” Q: What surprised you the most while learning about UFOs and abductees? A: Whether these are actual occurrences or folktales, I didn’t realize how widespread they are. Nor are sightings and abductions the province of publicity-seekers. Hundreds of thousands of people have made contact or abduction claims. There are hundreds of multiple abduction cases, where several people tell the same story under hypnosis. Hundreds of abductees have passed lie detector tests, which means that, if nothing else, they believe it. There are thousands of trace cases—charred or radioactive earth, even cases of radiation sickness requiring weeks of hospitalization. California ranchers recently filed a lawsuit to try to find out how and why their cattle have been drained of blood (with not a drop on the ground around them!) and had internal organs removed more expertly than our technology would seem to allow. Four thousand pilots—trained to recognize satellites, balloons, bizarre weather pat-terns, ice crystals—have reported encountering UFOs. Seven astronauts and three former presidents claimed to have seen UFOs. Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper even says he saw a flying saucer on the ground. If this is a hoax, it is incredibly detailed and widespread, and it’s difficult to fathom the mechanisms behind it. If these sightings and experiences were somehow “caused” by our expectations, that’s a shocking revelation about the power of mind. And if it is evidence of alien visitation, then it’s been negligently under reported in this country. (Mexico, in contrast, has regular news updates about sightings, and does not treat the reports as a laughing matter. Mexican news stations estimate that over a million people in the corridor between Mexico City and Oaxaca have seen UFOs flying toward and around a nascent volcano.) It may be that every single bit of evidence can be explained or discounted (although no government agency or civilian has ever managed to do this), but it is truly phenomenal how much evidence there is. That came as a real surprise to me. Q: You talk about a lot of UFO theories in Star Witness—such as crop circles, Area 51 in Nevada, abduction experiences, and even a possible contract between the U.S. Government and aliens referred to as “grays.” How much of this is real (or at least believed) and how much did you create for the book? A: I didn’t make up a thing. Every theory and assertion comes from one of the books or videos I list at the end of Star Witness, or from a lecture or workshop at a UFO conference or crop circle seminar. Viewed as mythology in the making, these stories are among the most important being told today. According to a 1990 Gallup poll, belief in UFOs has outstripped Christian fundamentalism by five to one. There are twice as many UFO believers as Catholics. Whether or not we are alone in the universe, UFOlogy has become as much a slice of life in the nineties as religion or science or politics, and in fact, it incorporates elements of all three. Q: After doing all of this research have you developed any personal beliefs or theories about UFOs? A: Never mind aliens, humans are the strange creatures at the center of this drama. We are hardwired to take in data and organize it into some kind of story, something accounting for as many details as possible while ignoring bits that don’t fit. We instinctively find ways to create narratives from this sensory barrage. That works fine until we encounter impossible sights or have experiences that “just couldn’t be.” Then we edit and embellish and force things into storyboard order, creating folktales. I think it would be more practical, if less colorful, to acknowledge evidence of things we can’t explain and agree to reserve judgment about it. Do I have a theory myself? No. But I agree with J.B.S. Haldane, who offered the opinion that “The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine.” IX. A NEW BOOK, ANOTHER INTERVIEW Q: In Face Value you’ve tackled the tough issue of pornography and complicated the topic further by adding computer ‘morphing.’ Let’s try to take the issues one at a time: First, what inspired you to place your fans in the middle of a debate on pornography? A: Though the topic is confusing and even uncomfortable for most people, it’s impossible to ignore. Late-night television, even network TV, shows images that would have been labeled pornographic even last year or last week. Writers like Susie Bright and entertainers like Madonna speak for a generation of fans who want to reclaim erotica and be unashamedly “sex-positive.” Yet other women see pornography as rape or brainwashing. In Face Value, I try to let the characters speak from the heart; there are powerful, sensible arguments on both sides. It’s time for us to listen to one another and think carefully about this, in hopes of finding common ground. While the squabbling continues, important decisions are being left to TV and other mass culture outlets. The resulting pop sexuality just exaggerates our shallowest, anything-for-a-buck tendencies. Q: Face Value presents so many sides of the debate that it’s hard to guess your feelings about it. What are your thoughts about pornography? A: Pornography satisfies a powerful appetite. And it pervades our culture, especially lately. So of course some people rely on it, and of course they feel embarrassed or angered by accusations and reproach. Especially since its opponents, including two conservative Presidential Commissions, haven’t been able to prove it contributes to violence. I think it’s unrealistic to try to ban it, whether we have that “right” or not. It would be like trying to eliminate fast food—it’s almost that wide-spread. On the other hand, when sex-positive activists champion pornography, they’re usually speaking as consumers (though they may speak through porn stars). They minimize some obvious women’s-image and labor problems. They don’t know what to do with the fact that sex work in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America isn’t much different from slavery. Right now no one’s taking care of sex workers. Consumers don’t know who’s being hurt by what they buy. So I think we need to be careful about embracing pornography. We need to find a middle ground between useless blanket condemnations and rosy, half-the-story endorsements. Pornography has burst out of the closet, partly in response to the AIDS epidemic. It’s time to stop debating its desirability, and force it to show some responsibility. Q: It’s interesting that you’ve moved Laura Di Palma out of the corporate structure of the law firm and put her on her own. Do you think women have an equal shot at a partnership at an ‘old boys’ firm, or do you feel that women are better off creating law firms on their own terms? A: One of the themes of Face Value is the bitterness of lawyers, particularly women, toward their profession. A Fax poll by California Lawyer showed that seventy percent of those responding would quit if they could. Lawyering changed in the workaholic eighties: associates and junior partners were routinely asked to trade their personal lives, intellectual pursuits, and spiritual goals for more billable hours. Firms took the Edwardian view that an unemployed spouse or a servant could run the employee’s household. As primary child-care providers, women suffered disproportionate hardship. But in spite of it, they were phenomenally successful at networking and forming bonds. This is gradually becoming apparent in the governing echelons of law firms. My series character, Laura Di Palma, isn’t patient or compliant enough to wait for change. Nor is she willing to substitute the guarantees of big-firm practice for her fair share of time to herself. Unless the old-boy firms become less rapacious in their demands, I think they’ll experience mass defections, especially of talented women. “No one’s coercing us. And the men who come to our shows really appreciate what we do. They’re grateful. They need to see women who love sex— you know, maybe the women in their lives don’t. They need to see women who aren’t hung up, who like to show themselves off and touch themselves and be touched. There’s nothing bad about that. We like it. They like it. Isn’t that what work’s supposed to be?” The anti-pornography crusader: “We don’t advocate censorship— that’s a media lie. We ask people to speak out in some way, in whatever way they’re comfortable. Many of us choose civil disobedience. . . . You don’t know what it’s like to grow up abused and get into the pornography industry because it’s more of the same. Or what it’s like to live in the street. . . . We come from a position of experience, of inside knowledge. . . . “It’s not that I hate men, believe me; I always enjoyed my boys and their friends. . . . Oh, I’d hear the remarks they made; I was aware of the damage being done to them. The way they talked about women—exactly the way television presents them, as T and A. These were nice boys raised by smart women, and still they were brainwashed. That’s how powerful media images are. It reminded me of when I was in high school, going to James Bond movies with my dates and walking out afterward so depressed. All these impossibly beautiful women with nothing on their minds but lust. Having to act like that to be popular. Having to act like Pussy Galore. . . . Someone’s got to shock people out of their complicity.” The feminist lawyer: “A lot of people feel our thinking has evolved since the anti-porn days, but I’m not so sure. . . . I’m not so sure we didn’t just buy into using each other the way men used to use us. We couldn’t bear the portrayals of us, so we became that way, do you know what I mean? All that we’re-so-hot-to-trot stuff. It used to be we knew it was a construct so men would feel okay about objectifying us. Now we’re supposed to really feel that way. As a political statement. . . . When I belonged to the [anti-pornography] group, we used to say it was wrong to harass sisters—that our focus was male- dominated media. But I don’t agree with that anymore. Women need to take responsibility for objectifying themselves and other women. They need to answer for what they do to each other. . . . It can’t happen without us, and we have to start blaming ourselves. It’s dishonest to exempt ourselves. Because if we do, we end up screwing each other, and buying into getting screwed.” The former call girl: “Our media spotlight the negative. . . . People end up with a deep fear of [anything] that isn’t traditional. . . . And in the process, a lot of ‘sinners’ become expendable. Have you ever noticed how often sex workers are killed in movies? Because they don’t matter. They’re not ‘us’ in the conventional sense. . . . Because we’re trained to consider sex workers garbage. Half the movies made in this country, prostitutes are killed just to convey a sense of danger. They’re not real characters, they don’t count. Only the all-American hero matters. Only Arnold Schwarzenegger.” The adult theater lap dancer: “Do you have a little inspiration for me?” A man handed her what looked to be a ten-dollar bill. “Do you have another one of those?” the woman asked. He handed her another. “What do you like? I have toys.” She pressed one into herself. “For a little more inspiration, I could put it in deeper,” she offered. The women on stage began lip-syncing to a song called “Sex-Positive.” The lyrics basically said, We love it all the time in every way, we’re the new kind of woman, we’re sex-positive. The patrons seemed pleased to observe their enthusiasm and pleasure—which I supposed was the point. I tried to imagine other workers radiating such passion for their toil. But it was hard to imagine miners singing about being “coal positive.” The ex-cop: “You always think of me as such a strait-lace, such a traditional values fellow. . . . Well, now you know why. The shit I saw as a cop you wouldn’t believe. I couldn’t even describe it and you wouldn’t believe it. So that’s why. You liberals always think it comes from being puritanical, from wanting to protect our innocence or some goddam thing. But that isn’t even close. A person wants to take a step back into something cleaner than what he’s seen. Those old-fashioned values, they’re your week-long shower, you know what I mean?” The guru: “I sometimes think if they don’t find a cure for AIDS, this decade will become the craziest in the history of the planet. People’s sexuality is festering right into psychosis.” And what do I believe?: “To a certain extent, I think everyone’s wrong. The anti-pornography crusaders are too late. Pornography is everywhere. Given the huge market, it would probably be easier to eradicate fast food. And the porn industry, at least here in the United States, pays decent wages. How do you justify taking away a person’s livelihood? But why assume, as ‘sex-positive’ activists do, that erotica is a political boon? There’s already tremendous cultural pressure on women to look and act sexy. Why embrace a genre where atypically gorgeous people are paid to look happy even if it hurts? I’d never assume the obsequious good cheer of a waitress or shoe-shiner was sincere; and I’d resent anyone pressuring me to emulate it at home. Why look to erotica, or anything else, as a manifesto for sexual betterment? Why take any kind of stand in the bedroom? That’s not what bedrooms are for. If I advocate anything, I suppose it’s uncensored privacy.” The offices of the State Bar of California are just a few blocks from the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. And the Tenderloin does have a heart: for the thousands of teenage prostitutes of both sexes, for the rummies and runaways and addicts at peep shows, there is at least a soup kitchen, at least a church with gaudily uplifting angels. But try to find the State Bar’s heart. It doesn’t have one, just a ledger. I climbed the steps. I should have been glad to climb them; I’d waited three years to do it. Three years plus one day since they’d cut off my buttons and epaulets. Three years of paying an “inactive status” fee (and galling it had been, believe me). Now, for an additional four hundred and thirty dollars and proof I’d retaken the professional responsibility exam, I would once again receive a flimsy paper card with perforated edges. Frances Valentine, it would read, Active Member, State Bar of California. The State Bar. After my disciplinary proceeding, a tragic-faced girl stopped me in the hall to say that the State Bar was hiring. You don’t need anything but a law degree to work there; it didn’t matter that my license had been suspended. I’d bitten my lip to refrain from telling her I’d rather empty bedpans; she didn’t deserve the splash of acid that had grown to replace pleasantries in my conversational style. I didn’t empty bedpans. I took a bus to a hot griddle of a town with too many Burger Kings. I bought a newspaper and found a job in a title company with a tiled roof. That was the first of six white collar jobs I took in different valley towns, most of them with a Denny’s and a Woolworth’s and not much else. I could have done it differently, could have gone to some little gem of a seacoast town, maybe worked as a paralegal, maybe taught in some small college. I could have done myself and my résumé that favor. But I wanted Bradley Allen Palmer to know he’d ruined me. I wasn’t sure he cared, but I wanted him to know. My Persian carpet was soiled and stained after three years of rough treatment by the woman to whom I’d sublet my apartment. The afternoon light showed water spots and gouges on the dusty oak desk and table. Fleas hopped on the sofa, searching frantically for the cat I’d evicted. I opened the bay windows, grateful that my Chinese neighbors still cultivated small flowering trees, still hung vegetables to dry like laundry, still maintained their tiny fish pond. The twin spires of St. Ignatius, blurry with fog, hovered over distant rooftops. Damp wind rustled the want ads spread out on my desk: want ads from both San Francisco papers, from the Oakland paper, from the Advocate Journal, from California Lawyer. I’d crossed out a few ads: sole practitioners who couldn’t afford to be fussy, couldn’t afford to worry about a little moral turpitude in their employees’ past—maybe even had a little in their own. Men paying seventeen, eighteen thousand in a town where forty is considered low. But they all knew my story, let me know there were thousands of virgin lawyers out there. One expressed amazement that I hadn’t been disbarred. A distinction without a difference, if no one would hire me. I’d had my résumé redone. Three-quarters of the page listed my honors in painful detail: top five percent; law review; student article published; clerk for the Honorable Steven K. Dresge; another article published; teacher of legal writing at a downtown law school; associate with Winship, McAuliffe, Potter & Tsieh, one of the better criminal-law firms. Then a paragraph headed “Subsequent Employment” condensed the last three years of my life into categories: escrow clerk, loan officer’s assistant, registrar’s aide, junior budget analyst. At the bottom of the page, because honesty required it, I had written, “License to practice before the California Bar reinstated” and the date. I felt a wrench of nausea: rent due soon and not much money in the bank. I remembered the hurry-up anxiety of a waiting time clock, deadening days of shuffling of preprinted forms. Maybe the new résumé was an exercise in false hope. All recredentialed and no place to go. Bradley Palmer had made partner by now, pulling down a salary of $150,000 and a partnership share of that much or more. He’d taken me to Chez Panisse the night Millet, Wray & Weissel hired him, a three-hundred-dollar dinner for two, six years ago. The last time I’d made love to Brad, it had been a foregone conclusion that we’d marry. We’d been in my apartment. This room had smelled of blossoms from the Chinese couple’s trees. Now there was a faint zoo smell in the air, from cat puddles sunbaked into the carpet. Brad Palmer had prospered while I sweltered in secretarial-beige cubicles, spurning consolation. It wasn’t his nose I’d cut off to spite my face. If I closed my eyes, I could see Brad on top of me, his chest damp and hirsute, his arms tensed to support his weight, his wide-set eyes half closed, a vein standing out on his broad forehead, sweat beading on his flat cheeks, his thin lips parted, honey-colored hair damp at the hairline, stiffly combed back by my own fingers. But then, I could also see him sitting in the State Bar hearing room, straight and handsome in his banker’s blue suit, testifying against me. I rode the elevator to the twenty-first floor of the financial district monolith. I walked into the offices of Millet, Wray & Weissel and handed their aristocratic, carefully painted receptionist my résumé. The woman took it, thanking me dismissively. “Will you make sure Bradley Palmer gets it?” It was halfway to the “in” basket. Sighing, she diverted it to the blotter and scribbled “Attn: BAP” in the top corner. Then she glanced at the typeset name beneath her scrawl. Pencil arrested, she looked at me with startled interest. “Frances Valentine?” I fought an impulse to deny it. “Yes.” “If you’ll be seated a moment.” She pressed a buzzer on her space-age telephone, mumbling something to someone. Two minutes later, Brad stepped into the reception area. He wore navy pin-striped wool, a white shirt, a maroon tie. His hairline had receded slightly. He sported a coppery new mustache that disguised the thinness of his lips and lent his face an air of reserved goodwill. His eyes were brighter blue than I remembered, his brows thicker, nose straighter, face bigger, shoulders wider. He even seemed taller. I’d had three years to think about him. I’d experienced every shade of emotion, from crazy fury to tender regret thinking about him. But I hadn’t quite realized until yesterday, crying over want ads, that I didn’t love him anymore. There was nothing left to fuel the rage. There seemed to be several of me, rising simultaneously, to greet him. I shook his hand because the receptionist seemed to expect it of me. She handed Brad my résumé. It took me a minute to find my voice. Three years is a long silence to break. “Do you need a law clerk? Or a paralegal?” His eyes strayed to the bottom of the page to see how I’d handled my disgrace. A bit of color crept into his cheeks. He murmured, “This way.” As he led me down a suede walled corridor, he kept glancing back, making sure (or maybe fearing) that I followed. He preceded me into his office. I walked around the room, looking at the plush wheat carpeting, the natural suede walls, the golden oak desk, the sienna leather chairs, the unglazed pottery, the Georgia O’Keeffe on a pine easel. Brad watched me, a vein standing out on his forehead his eyes bright. “I need some kind of transition on my résumé, Brad. I want to practice law again.” “Why here?” “No one else will hire me.” And maybe you think you owe me a favor. “Frannie, it would be a hard sell. To say the least.” I visualized him in front of the hiring committee. How would he explain what I’d done? Baldly perhaps: You see colleagues, Ms. Valentine was convinced her client would be killed in prison. So she tried to buy him a forged passport. She contacted the passport forger herself. She then told him (maybe Brad would let the word hang in the air) what she’d done. Her fiancé was sure she’d get caught if she followed through. Her fiancé thought she’d gone a little crazy; maybe even thought she was a little in love with her handsome client. With characteristic paternalism, her fiancé contacted the State Bar to keep her out of worse trouble. (Or maybe he was jealous and angry. Who could tell, with his lawyer face wiped clean of emotion?) Her fiancé didn’t care if her client was blinded and carved up with sharpened spoons. Didn’t care if he lay in a pool of blood for hours while the prison guard ignored him. Didn’t care if it took him four slow days to die. Said she was lucky he’d died, in fact. Lucky because the government was too embarrassed to indict her. Lucky because it remained a State Bar matter. Lucky. Even Brad’s facial flaws, the tired lines and receding hairline, were signs of success. “Plus. . .” Brad remained poker-faced, straight-spined. “I don’t want to be a target of recriminations. If I go to bat for you, I’ll want some assurance that you don’t blame me; that you’ve accepted the consequences of your actions.” I turned to the wall of windows on my right, stood there feeling like Kirk at the helm of the Enterprise. The detail was magnificent: furbelows and banners and awnings, Peter Max colors in plate-glass reflections, churches and Victorians hoisted to eye level by distant hills, buckets of cut flowers polka-dotting corners, bobbing streams of pedestrians, a brick plaza and its windblown fountain, the slow, noisy jerk of traffic. More to see in Brad’s window than in entire inland valleys. “The thing is, Brad, Raul Alegria accepted the consequences of your actions.” “You’d have been prosecuted if you’d gone any further.” His voice seemed a dead and distant thing, the sentence three years stale. “That was my risk to take. Or it should have been.” I heard the sigh of leather cushions, the creak of a swivel chair. “What do you want from me, Fran? I don’t hear from you for three years. Like I’m the fucking bad guy. For keeping you out of jail. So? What do you want from me now?” I considered leaving. But I’d already thrown away three years. Three years of flat horizon, static air, cloudless blue white sky; like being trapped in a vast stoppered jar. What the hell had I proved? That I could make myself suffer? I turned to face him. His arms were folded across his chest, his chin tucked down. Guarded. I didn’t love him anymore. Such a relief. “No one will hire me,” I said carefully. “You know how I feel about my work.” “Come on—how good’s it going to look, a year or two here as a glorified law clerk?” “Look where I am now. Look at my résumé. He scowled at his desktop. He was motionless at first then he nodded slightly. “Most places, I can’t even get interviews. Even fly-by-night lawyers won’t touch me.” And nobody in town owes me a favor; nobody but you. “Okay, Frannie.” The new mustache hid the pained twitch of muscle at the corner of his mouth. I saw it in the paralyzed misery of his cheeks. I knew the face so well. “I’ll square it somehow. Come in Monday.” I told myself it was the smartest thing I’d done in a long time. I told myself I was nothing but a whore. Probably both were true. It was law clerk’s work, writing up the results of my research so someone else could go into court and argue the actual motions. But that was okay. The job wasn’t as exciting as my old job at Winship, McAuliffe. But after three years of invisibility, that’s not what I compared it with. At the end of the second week, John V. Cusinich, a senior partner with Coke-bottle glasses, a thin, pinch-lipped face, and slicked-back hair, came into my office. I was surprised. Cusinich was being considered for a federal court judgeship adding much to his already considerable consequence. Until that morning, he’d barely deigned to nod to me. “You did this memo?” His magnified eyes examined the small, unadorned room with distaste. “Yes. Is there some problem with it?” “No. It’s excellent. I didn’t think we had any basis for our claim, but this is a very clever argument.” He very nearly smiled, I think. “Good use of case law. I understand you have more experience than our other—than our clerks.” “I passed the bar six years ago. Clerked for the Northern District—Judge Dresge—and then spent two years at Winship, McAuliffe, Potter and Tsieh.” “Bradley mentioned that. Criminal law background. Actually,”—he brushed imaginary lint from his sleeve—”I talked to Roland Tsieh about you this morning. We’ve been asked to take on a criminal matter as a favor to a corporate client. You should look at the file. See what you think.” I already knew what I thought. The firm should take the case and let me handle it. Watching Cusinich inspect my undecorated burlap walls I felt light-headed, realized I was holding my breath. That afternoon, a large abstract oil painting was removed from above the Xerox machine and brought to my office. A man identifying himself as “maintenance” asked me where I wanted it. I didn’t particularly like the splashes of ocher, tan, and pink, but I knew a vote of confidence when I saw it. I had the man hang it above my desk, where it was clearly visible from the door. The next day, Brad brought me a file folder. He glanced at the painting. “John Cusinich suggested I assign you this case.” “Is it the criminal matter he mentioned?” “Yes.” I flipped the file open. A few notes on a phone conversation: client busted for growing marijuana in the Santa Cruz Mountains. No mention of when or how much. I’d need details, and I’d need them soon. “This office doesn’t usually handle criminal cases, does it?” “This is the only one. The defendant’s father owns a brussels sprouts farm down the coast. We handle all his business affairs. That’s why the son thought of us. We did tell him a criminal law firm might do a better job. But I guess he really wanted us. Asked John Cusinich if we had anybody here with criminal defense experience. I told John about you.” “I want the arrest report, indictment, all that stuff. Meet the client. Check out the scene.” A hesitant shuffle. “I’m sure you know”—trying not to take the hesitation personally—”that it’s a quick deadline for Motions to Suppress Evidence. Most of these cases are won or lost on that motion. I’m not trying to shirk my other work, but I need to move.” “I’m just wondering. . .” I looked up at him. “I remember how, Brad. Believe me.” “Okay.” With a parting glance at the oil painting, he left me to my first case in over three years. When the client phoned Cusinich back, Cusinich put him through to me. His file was significantly thicker by then. I had an arrest report from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s office, an indictment from the DA, and a Motion to Suppress Evidence well under way. The client gave me directions to the mountain property from which police had seized twenty-six marijuana plants. I drove down the coast, trying to enjoy the scenery. It was a clear, breezy day, the sky streaked with clouds, the air fresh and salty. Men in straw cowboy hats bent over rows of greenery between the highway and the ocean cliffs. Some of the farm workers were gathered around a pickup truck just off the road; most were Hispanic men, short with broad chests and dusty clothes. When I’d heard about Raul Alegría, I’d driven to a coastal farm and found Raul’s mother in the middle of a field sobbing and being comforted by men who looked like these men. I’d driven her to Folsom Prison, to the infirmary there. The drive had taken four hours, more or less, and Martina Alegría, a strong-looking woman with rough hands, had spent most of that time telling me what a good baby Raul had been, how he’d wanted to nurse all the time, and been bigger than the other farm workers’ children. I’d seen Martina Alegría again when I’d moved to Fairfield. She’d been picking lettuce and had a raw-looking pesticide rash on both arms. She’d come to the title company to bring me a plate of fried cookies and an icon of the Madonna. She’d cried a little and promised to buy a Mass for me next time she burned a candle for Raul. I hope she remembered. About three-quarters of the way down to Santa Cruz, I turned left, heading up Ben Lomond Mountain. Half an hour later, I approached a rustic, plank-sided A-frame. A man paced the road beside the driveway, running his hand over a lank mane of black hair. He motioned me to pull over, then helped me out of the car, murmuring, “Jerry Riener. Hi.” He might have been six four if he’d stood straight. He had puffy-lidded eyes and a square, stubbled jaw. He looked pale, maybe sick, maybe hung over. In top form, he’d have been male-model handsome, but he was far from top form. He wore a quilted jacket, patched and stained, shiny jeans, muddy boots. For a second, he gaped at me in my city-slicker clothes. Then he said, “Oh man, I hope you can keep me out of jail. They’ll kill me in there.” Something Brad had coached him to say? “Why would ‘they’ do that—whoever ‘they’ are?” He reeled slightly, as if my scorn had physical mass. “Don’t you know what I used to do for a living?” “No.” I stuffed my hands into my jacket pockets. It was sunless and gloomy under the canopy of pines and redwoods. The air smelled musty, fungusy, of damp roots and rotting leaves. Reiner’s eyes narrowed. Suspicion? Displeasure? “I thought I . . .” He sighed. “You mind a short hike? I’ll take you where they harvested the pot.” We crossed the road, heading away from the house. The woods ended almost immediately and we walked uphill, onto acres of tumbling meadowland, knee-high in swaying grasses. Miles away, at the foot of the mountain, the sea glimmered, flecked with whitecaps. Reiner inhaled deeply. “Botanically, it’s very rich. Seventy percent of the plants in Thomas’s Flora of California are in these mountains.” He uprooted a pad-shaped bit of greenery. “Miners’ lettuce. Edible.” He squatted in the tall grass, shading his eyes as he looked up at me. “I’ve learned what’s edible and what isn’t in the last few years.” “What did you used to do for a living?” “Prison guard. Soledad, among other places.” A prison guard. I thought of the guard who’d let Raul lie there half a morning bleeding. Folsom Prison had fired him but no other action had been taken. He’d vanished before I had a chance to spit in his eye. Scot-free. I heard myself murmur, “Do you know David Williams?” Reiner shook his head. “Should I?” “He was a guard at Folsom. . . . Never mind.” I felt a needling of irritation. New case, new start. Forget Raul. “Go on with what you were saying.” “Well, it’s not a very popular profession.” A hint of rueful grin, then: “The way you’re looking at me—you know, somebody’s got to do it. There’s some hard, nasty folks in there and we can’t all rely on someone else to watch them.” He stood, eyes flashing with defensive anger. Or maybe Just fear. Soledad was a big place. No matter what jail Reiner ended up in—if he ended up in one—there would be a former Soledad inmate coming through eventually. “If someone did recognize you, what would he tell the other inmates about you?” He stroked his jaw. “A diplomatic way of asking if I’m a sadistic asshole?” “Are you?” My tone was sharp. Almost unprofessional. “Goddamn.” A stillborn grin. “Lady, who do you think is in there? Christian martyrs? We’re talking serious gangs—people who literally bite each other’s fingers off, ears off. Not nice people.” My first case in three years. Had I forgotten how to act professional? “I’m asking how they saw you, not how you saw them.” An exasperated wave of the arm. “I wasn’t any rougher than I had to be. Maybe they thought I was an asshole, at times. Sometimes you have to clamp down for their own protection.” He looked suddenly weary. “It can be a real horror show, you have no idea. You start taking shit and there’s no end to it. On the other hand, get too much in the middle and you get hurt big-time. To some extent, you leave it alone. Other times, you get heavy. It’s a very fine line.” A screwed-up system, my old boss used to say. Accept that or find some other kind of law to practice. “Tell me about your arrest.” Reiner brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. His hand was callused, nails trimmed but rough. His hand was shaking. “It seems from your arrest report that the state has a very strong case against you, Mr. Reiner. If you are guilty . . .” Playing harbinger, my former boss called it; part of the job. “It might be possible to bargain the charge down to simple possession, if you’re willing to plead guilty. It could mean a much shorter sentence. And something else you should consider: There’s a statute allowing the government to confiscate your land if you’re convicted of cultivating marijuana on it.” Jerry Reiner folded his arms over his chest. His eyes were open wide, unblinking. He looked like a wax statue. I expected him to rail at the unfairness of the statute, the unfairness of the system. Most clients would. He didn’t. It was a minute, maybe longer, before he spoke. His lips moved without sound, at first. His color flooded back. Fight, not flight. “Look, I mean it: they’ll kill me in there. So I’ll just have to take my chances, okay?” My mouth felt dry, my throat tight. Three years of bitter nostalgia for criminal practice, but I’d let myself forget this part of it. Let myself forget how it felt to share a client’s fear. Except Raul’s. Raul had said to me, “I won’t last a week in there, Frances.” And I’d replied, “Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.” To Jerry Reiner I said, “It’s your decision, not mine.” His lips pursed and his brows pinched. There was determination in his eyes, raw and reckless. But no hint of supplication. No favors asked. “So you won’t buy me a fake passport?” The air temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. I felt myself take a slow step backward. “I kept track of you after the State Bar gave you that little slap on the wrist.” “How did you know about—” “ Alegría was scum. A punk. A snitch.” The landscape seemed to tilt. “How did you know Raul?” He pointed at me, two quick stabs of the index finger. “I think it’s bullshit you’re at a fancy law firm now! What’s the point of getting disbarred if you can go to work for a fancy law firm?” “Why do you know this?” Why do you care? “It’s not right.” Somewhere between a whine and a shout. “Are you Jerry Reiner?” “No.” He shook his head widely, emphatically. “Never heard of him, except what I read in the paper about his arrest. The article said his father’s a big-time farmer. I don’t know what made me run down who the father’s lawyer is. It was just a feeling I had—that he was your firm’s client. It was just” —he kissed his fingertips—”karma.” I scanned the meadow. It ended in a tangle of shrubs. Then more forest. “Who are you?” “A three-year suspension—a fucking slap on the wrist! Now you’re back at a fancy law firm.” “As a law clerk.” “You know what I’ve been doing for the last three years? Grunt fucking labor. When I can get it.” “David Williams. You’re David Williams.” You let Raul die. Let him lie in his own blood for hours. He nodded. His eyes glinted, maybe with tears. “It doesn’t matter.” I was chilled to the marrow in my wool suit. “Doesn’t matter what happened to me.” God knows I suffered as much as I could make myself suffer. “That’s not the point. What about Raul? How could you leave him lying there?” "I told you! Sometimes you can’t get in the middle. You’ve got to let them put the message out: Here’s what happens to guys try to rat out their friends and make a deal.” “Our system’s based on making deals. If you can’t protect a prisoner who’s testified—” “‘You.’ If ‘you’ can’t.” He ran both hands over his hair. “Leave it up to the prison guards, the garbage collectors. Sure, shun them, act like they must be mean stupid sons of bitches to want to do the job, but leave it to them to keep the psychos chilled! ‘You’! You have any idea what kind of powder keg it is? How rigid the codes are? Fuck. Sure, I could have jumped in the middle when they went for Alegría, maybe started a fucking riot, lots of gunfire and stabbing and maybe hostages and people dying, because that’s the kind of place Folsom is. I could have rushed Alegría to the infirmary, but you know and I know he wouldn’t have lasted an hour longer. Or even if he’d made it, they’d have got him next time, no joke.” There were times, living in Fairfield, in Woodland, that I’d stared at the flat line of sky on field and become overpowered by a sense of unreality. I’d attributed it to the sensory deprivation of a barren landscape. But now, with grasses tickling my ankles and distant sea sparkling in my peripheral vision, I felt the same disconnection. Raul was dead. The man who’d let it happen shouted at me. Defending himself. Like I could ever forgive him. “And then a bunch of fat bureaucrats sit in judgment—why didn’t you stop it, all that bullshit. But if you’re not there, you don’t know. You can’t know.” “I heard you got fired.” “Fucking right.” He took tow angry steps toward me, his face flushed red. “And what else am I trained for? Odd jobs, farm labor—fuck, I’ve been living in a Volkswagen squareback for three years, you know that? You know how hard it is to get by, get enough food when you’re trying to save for rent? Find any kind of decent job—never mind meet women—when you’re living out of a care?” What was it Brad had said? Accept the consequences of your actions? “Why?” I wondered. “Why did you go to all this trouble? Why lie about who you are? Why not just call me—” “Oh, spare me! Look at you in your nice suit, working for a hotsy law firm. You never would have talked to me!” “Why am I talking to you now? Why did you bring me here? He clenched both fists. “You made out like a fucking bandit!” “No!” I’d had a wider range of options to narrow, but I’d done it. For three years, I’d done it. He pressed his fists to his eyes. It took me a moment to realize he was crying. Then his hands dropped. From his jacket pocket he drew a small bundle wrapped in a red kerchief. He held it to his temple. He said, “I wanted you to see this.” I had no idea what he was doing. It was unreal and I was incorporeal. Not even the blast tipped me off. And when David Williams fell, the bundle arching out of his hand, I thought he’d suffered a sudden failure of adrenaline. I stood there a long time listening to grasses rustle, tree limbs creak. I stared at the dark spot on Williams’s temple, the slavering laxity of his mouth, the wide-open sheen of his eyes. I moved toward him cautiously, crouching beside him and staring. Staring and still not believing he’d shot himself right there in front of me. When I finally did believe it, I crawled away, scrambling at first on all fours like an animal. Then I ran, ran like hell down the hill, away from him. Before I reached the woods, a huge man caught me with a flying tackle, knocking the air out of my lungs. I spat out a mouthful of grit, struggled against the hands on my arms, tried to see through tears and dust. I panted, “Man shot himself. Up there.” “What I saw was you crouched over him. I think you better wait right here.” And wait I did, with the real Jerry Reiner frog-marching me back to the house so he could phone 911. “Do I have to tell you again how it happened?” Roland Tsieh examined the small room with interest. The Santa Cruz County Jail complex was relatively new: Winship, McAuliffe, Potter & Tsieh had never had a client there before. The tall man with the Oriental eyes and the supercilious face seemed pleased with me, for once; more pleased than he’d ever been when I’d worked for him. He nodded. “From the time he’s waiting for you in Reiner’s driveway.” Roland listened attentively as I went through it again. “Roland, the physical evidence supports my story, doesn’t it?” “The physical evidence. We have one small-caliber gun wrapped in a handkerchief about four feet from the body—yes, yes, I know it flew out of his hand when he fell. But basically the gun’s right where you were standing. It’s unregistered—and you are known to have connections with unsavory people like passport forgers, so presumably you could have obtained such a weapon. Also, which I did not realize, you know how to shoot a gun.” He shrugged. “Mainly, though, it’s who he was. The evil prison guard who let your pet client get killed. That’s really why you’re in here.” “But I didn’t know who he was until I got there. He told me he was Jerry Reiner!” “That’s what you say. It could have been the other way around. You setting up a meeting with him.” “He phoned John Cusinich and pretended he was Jerry Reiner. We can prove that.” “We can prove someone did that. It could have been you as easily as Williams. In fact, darn clever, if you’d set it up: you can’t make the shooting look like suicide, you claim self-defense. Big guy lures you to the mountains.” “But John Cusinich—” “Credible lawyer that he is, says he fixed you up with a ‘client’ who claimed to be Reiner but wasn’t.” Roland nodded. “Makes it look like Williams set a trap for you. Except you know what the prosecution will say: it could have been any man on the phone. It could have been your passport forger.” Passport forger—again Roland raked me with the words. “How can they get a motive out of this, Roland? Just because Williams was on duty when they killed Raul—” “Just because? Hell, Alegría dies and you’re in deep mourning for three years.” He looked startled by my tears. “You never said anything to anyone about that, did you? Never complained that the guard was an SOB?” “Only to Raul’s mother.” “Great! I can just see her on the witness stand, adding her own bit of venom as she repeats what you said! Anyone else?” I shook my head. Roland stood. “You’ve got the money, I assume? Your ten percent?” I could get ninety percent of the bail money from a bailbondsman. The rest would come out of my pocket. “If the bail’s under twenty thousand.” “Twenty thou!” he scoffed. “Five times that, if we’re lucky.” Bail was set at $350,000. It was set unusually high because I had “so recently” demonstrated my willingness to abet a flight from prosecution. Brad Palmer put up my ten percent. Even in his salary range, it must have hurt to write a check for thirty-five thousand dollars. I said, “Thank you. I’d have gone nuts in jail.” He said, “I knew that three years ago.” I held his hand, cold and creamed, but it felt like lizard skin to me. I couldn’t imagine ever having loved him. I felt nothing but tolerance and distance. But I was glad he’d put up my bail. It helped square things between us. Close the accounts. Because Brad would lose his bail money. Like I would lose the money I’d spent getting back my license. I couldn’t stick around. I’d been a criminal lawyer too long. I’d watched guilty men go free and nice men go to prison. I’d watched a client die slowly because a cynical guard wouldn’t lift a hand to help him. (Yes, I did blame Williams. More than ever.) I wouldn’t risk my freedom, my life. I still knew where to find the passport forger I’d contacted for Raul. The minute Roland Tsieh mentioned him, I knew I’d go see him. God knew where I’d go from there. Someplace lusher than Fairfield; I would give myself a break, this time. And I was almost used to drifting along without a career. Maybe when she heard what happened, Martina Alegría would buy another Mass for me. WILLA JANSSON MYSTERIES “Destroying Angel,” in Marilyn Wallace (ed.), 2 SISTERS IN CRIME (New York: Berkley Books, 1990). “Counsel for the Defense,” in Marilyn Wallace (ed.), 1 SISTERS IN CRIME (New York: Berkley, Books, 1989). |
