The Brass Verdict

messed things up pretty good when we tried that last year.”
    Now the pain entered her eyes, like the shadows of clouds on the ocean.
    “But I’m still working on it, baby,” I said quickly. “We just have to take it one day at a time. I’m trying to show her that we should be a family again.”
    She didn’t respond. She looked down at her plate.
    “Okay, baby?”
    “Okay.”
    “Did you decide what you want to do?”
    “I think I just want to go home and watch TV.”
    “Good. That’s what I want to do.”
    We packed up her schoolbooks and I put money down on the bill. On the drive over the hill, she said her mother had told her I had gotten an important new job. I was surprised but happy.
    “Well, it’s sort of a new job. I’m going back to work doing what I always did. But I have a lot of new cases and one big one. Did your mom tell you that?”
    “She said you had a big case and everybody would be jealous but you would do real good.”
    “She said that?”
    “Yeah.”
    I drove for a while, thinking about that and what it might mean. Maybe I hadn’t entirely blown things with Maggie. She still respected me on some level. Maybe that meant something.
    “Um…”
    I looked at my daughter in the rearview mirror. It was dark out now but I could see her eyes looking out the window and away from mine. Children are so easy to read sometimes. If only grown-ups were the same.
    “What’s up, Hay?”
    “Um, I was just wondering, sort of, why you can’t do what Mom does.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like putting bad people in jail. She said your big case is with a man who killed two people. It’s like you’re always working for the bad guys.”
    I was quiet for a moment before finding my words.
    “The man I am defending is accused of killing two people, Hayley. Nobody has proved he did anything wrong. Right now he’s not guilty of anything.”
    She didn’t respond and her skepticism was almost palpably emanating from the backseat. So much for the innocence of children.
    “Hayley, what I do is just as important as what your mother does. When somebody is accused of a crime in our country, they are entitled to defend themselves. What if at school you were accused of cheating and you knew that you didn’t cheat? Wouldn’t you want to be able to explain and defend yourself?”
    “I think so.”
    “I think so, too. It’s like that with the courts. If you get accused of a crime, you can have a lawyer like me help you explain and defend yourself. The laws are very complicated and it’s hard for someone to do it by themselves when they don’t know all the rules of evidence and things like that. So I help them. It doesn’t mean I agree with them or what they have done – if they have done it. But it’s part of the system. An important part.”
    The explanation felt hollow to me as I said it. On an intellectual level I understood and believed the argument, every word of it. But on a father-daughter level I felt like one of my clients, squirming on the witness stand. How could I get her to believe it when I wasn’t sure I believed it anymore myself?
    “Have you helped any innocent people?” my daughter asked.
    This time I didn’t look in the mirror.
    “A few, yes.”
    It was the best I could honestly say.
    “Mom’s made a lot of bad people go to jail.”
    I nodded.
    “Yes, she has. I used to think we were a great balancing act. What she did and what I did. Now…”
    There was no need to finish the thought. I turned the radio on and hit the preset button that tuned in the Disney music channel.
    The last thing I thought about on the drive home was that maybe grown-ups were just as easy to read as their children.

Twenty-one
    After dropping my daughter off at school Thursday morning I drove directly to Jerry Vincent’s law offices. It was still early and traffic was light. When I got into the garage adjoining the legal center, I found that I almost had my pick of the place – most lawyers don’t get into the office until closer to nine, when court starts. I had all of them beat by at least an hour. I drove up to the second level so I could park on the same floor as the office. Each level of the garage had its own entrance into the building.
    I drove by the spot where Jerry Vincent had been parked when he was shot to death and parked farther up the ramp. As I walked toward the bridge that connected the garage to the Legal Center, I noticed a parked Subaru station wagon with surfboard racks