Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [38]
Most days Claire was investigating the provenance of an insurance scam or a molestation case. What the Public Defender’s Office did in their work was essentially defend any indigent brought up on a criminal charge. Until the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainright, only the rich would get a lawyer. The Public Defender’s Office had to respond to the police and the ‘evidence orgy’ that took place after a crime was committed. The police believed that if they didn’t solve the crime in three days, they were never going to. They rarely gave a case more time than that, so they didn’t want complications or subtleties. Public defenders were allowed to see the evidence only after the third day and had to quickly find witnesses and flaws, to prove either that the client didn’t do it or didn’t deserve to die. The latter applied to the penalty phase, and it was the only time the defence was permitted to try to influence the outcome. Claire had once researched the history of a man who was up for the death penalty, and discovered an earlier violent assault he had committed in the past, when he was twenty. She found that he had attacked a man who had been viciously beating his dog. Bingo. That turned out to be the detail that got him a life sentence, and saved him from lethal injection. As Vea had said at the time, if it had been discovered that he’d read all of Herman Melville, it would have had no effect, but the mutt had returned to save him.
After work, Claire would sometimes meet up with Vea for a drink at Fog City, watching that little oil slick on his vodka martini curling dangerously. Aldo Vea was the most principled man Claire knew, and he had taught her how to survive in this profession of crime and retribution, how to accept the flawed barrier between cause and effect, how to see that the present continually altered the past, just as the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one’s life like an image through a camera obscura. All that was consistent was a principle. ‘You believe in the principle,’ Vea would say, ‘if you cannot believe in the man. You meet monsters and you help defend them. You believe in the principle of full justice. When a murderer fights the death penalty, he is not the one asking to be pardoned, he doesn’t deserve to ask, we are the ones asking.’ Vea had been in Vietnam between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, and he had seen the monster. He knew how the monster could come upon you.
They would have that drink at Fog City at the end of the day, and she would stop him from having one more. If he drank more she would leave, and if he didn’t, she would stay and listen to him. He always needed to wind down, always. He talked Vietnam. He talked out the cases he was struggling over, but he was really talking Vietnam. One day she began to tell him about what had happened all those years earlier between her father and Coop, and how her sister had disappeared at that time. ‘Well, these are not monsters,’ he said, waving his hand as if dismissing an eyelash. ‘There’s always damage collected in childhood.’ Vea was the only person Claire talked to about where she came from. ‘Has she ever made contact with you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then there is still sadness in her life. Were you jealous of your sister?’ ‘No. Only once.’ If anyone calmed Claire and defused her past, it was Vea. She wondered whether her father and Coop and Anna seemed quaint to someone like him.
If she arrived too late at Fog City and he was already drunk, she would not sit with him. Instead she would take the car keys out of his pocket and wait until he struggled out of the narrow booth and paid the bill. They would find his car and she would drive him home,