Chapter 5 of 9. See previous chapters beginning on Friday, July 26. Or check link to author archive – https://www.evesun.com/authors/31

Six years after moving to Yonkers, I was living in a seven-floor walk-up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It had concrete floors, a bathtub in the kitchen, and a fire station across the street. I moved there after graduating from law school and before I could afford highspeed-Internet or cable TV. When I finally got a telephone, I was given a 212-area code. I dialed the number.

“Hello,” said I said to twenty-four-year-old me.

“Hi,” she shot back.

Then her voice slid into a long “aaaah,” and she added, “So it’s you again.”

“It’s me.”

“Long time no see.”

She paused. I didn’t say anything, so she added, “It’s hot here today. Ninety-eight degrees in Central Park. So, it’s got to be at least a hundred and ninety-eight degrees in my apartment.”

I nodded. I remembered how hot that apartment had been. No air conditioner. No cross breeze. I didn’t even have a window fan. She interrupted my reverie.

“So, how’s the future?” she asked.

“From my point of view, or yours?”

“Mine.”

“Well,” I began. “The only thing I can promise is that someday, you will have an air conditioner.”

Twenty-four-year-old me sighed. In her sigh, I could hear the screech of sirens and the discomfort of dried sweat. I gazed gratefully at my beautiful garden apartment, blew a silent kiss at the cool, cool air, and said to my young, hot, faraway self, “Tell me about work.”

“Okay,” she said.

And she did. Her first job out of law school – the one where she’d been working for over a year – was as an assistant district attorney at the Criminal Court Building in Manhattan. “My boss,” she said, “has ‘Wonder Boy’ embroidered across the butt of his boxer shorts.”

I remembered Edward Nygh. “Tell me about him,” I said.

“Well,” she complied, “He has fat hands. Fat hands are problematical. A man can have the face of Adonis, the body of a gladiator, and Einstein’s brain, but if he has fat hands, one feels compelled to question the validity of his soul.”

I laughed. Of course, I felt the same way.

“Edward Nygh has a ratty face, a scrawny neck, twitchy lips, and his eyes are too close together. He’s no Adonis,” she continued. “He is clever, though.”

“How so?”

“He only prosecutes the cases he knows he can win, which means that his win record is astronomical. Justice never enters into his calculations.”

“So why are you working for him?”

“Because the little weasel hired me, and nobody else offered me a job. And he trusts me. I don’t know why he trusts me, since I seem to thrive on betraying his trust.”

“How? When?”

“Last week. In Criminal Court. I was prosecuting Alfredo Herrera.”

“For what?”

“First degree criminal trespass. First degree robbery.”

“Refresh my mind,” I said.

“Sure,” my younger self responded. “Alfredo enters a grocery store and waves a gun at grocer, who promptly surrenders fifty-seven dollars. Alfredo flees. The grocer goes to the police station to look at mug shots, and mistakenly identifies Tomás Sosa as the assailant; however, Alfredo Herrara, and not Tomás Sosa, is arrested two blocks from the grocery store.”

“What happened to Sosa?”

“Nothing happened, because the weasel neglected to inform the defense attorney that the grocer had fingered him instead of Herrera.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw a photocopy of Tomás Sosa’s mug shot in the file with the grocer’s signature scrawled under his name.”

“Did you bring that to Edward Nygh’s attention?”

“Of course.”

“What did he say?”

“He lifted a fat finger to his weasel-thin lips, and whispered, ‘Shush.’”

“Shush?”

“And then he smiled. Some people, Edward Nygh among them, should be constitutionally prohibited from smiling.”

“What next?”

“Next, the case went to trial, the grocer testified, and I casually let it slip that he had identified Tomás Sosa as the bad guy instead of the accused.”

“And?”

“Alfredo’s lawyer homed in on the discrepancy, and that was all he needed to create reasonable doubt for the jury.”

“You lost the case?”

“Yes. We lost the case.”

“Which is what you had intended all along?”

“Exactly. Even though I would like to see Alfredo Herrera hanging by his fingernails over a tank filled with piranha, I am not a big fan of withholding evidence.”

I nodded in understanding. Then my mind drifted back to that first year I had worked as an assistant district attorney. The cast of characters. The rewards. The frustrations. The challenges. I hadn’t been a dewy eyed romantic even then but … but what? What had I been feeling? What had I been thinking? I returned my attention to the phone.

“So,” I asked skeptically. “Your boss is a jerk, you lost an important case, and … what comes next? What are you going to do now?”

Over the span of the intervening years, I could feel my younger-self smile. It was a big, brave, bite-the-world-in-the-ass smile.

Then, with impeccable resolve, twenty-four-year-old me replied, “I’ll just keep doing my job.”

And the receiver went dead.

Continued next week.

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2024. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com.