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with, your clients are usually criminals. Say what you will. Secondly, most criminals don’t really have that much in the way of brains. Or they would not have been criminals. Again, say what you will.
    But we were selective, with the girl’s source of funds always the first consideration. Often the “source of funds” was surprising, and Tony could go to some amazing lengths to conceal who was paying the bill, even as he tied the man paying the bill to a legal retainer.
    Sometimes I wanted to take a case because “this girl really needs us.” Tony always overruled me.
    “We don’t work for free,” he said. “What we do is valuable. If a girl can’t afford us, she can find somebody else.”
    “Sometimes doing the right thing can be the right thing to do,” I said during the first and last discussion we had on the issue.
    “Not if it doesn’t pay. Which is why prostitution should be legal. If sex isn’t the oldest profession, it’s at least the oldest currency.”
    “So you’d rather be with a prostitute than have sex with someone you love?” I asked.
    Tony smiled at me. “Of course.”
    I waited for the rest of the answer, forgetting I was dealing with Tony, that he would make me ask. Maybe even proving his point, if not about power, then about currency.
    “Okay. Why?”
    “First, there’s less chance of coming away unsatisfied if you’re dealing with a pro. Pardon the puns. Second, money makes sex simple. Love and sex together are too complicated, coming and going. Pardon the puns again. And finally, if someone tells me they love me after sex, I can’t be sure. If I pay someone, I know where their self-interest lies. Self-interest is the only thing you can trust when dealing with others.”
    “Forget love. What if your partner just likes sex?”
    “How do I know what she likes, and what she’s just saying she likes? Or what she expects? Money clarifies the discussion.”
    Like I said, Tony had a reputation. I admired him in an odd way.
    The girls I defended were usually hauled in on drug charges or for prostitution. They were usually runaways from Port Angeles, or Aberdeen, or Everett, or Yakima, or Spokane, sometimes Portland, though some were from Seattle or Bellevue and were just rebelling from rich, but often preoccupied, parents.
    I would interview them, concoct from the facts some elaborate, sad story about why what happened was not my client’s fault; that they were seduced into bad decisions, they had no choice, etc.
    I would clean them up, dress them up if they were junkies, or dress them down if the rap was prostitution, make them look like homely, modest girls from some logging or fishing or manufacturing community (which they often were).
    You’d be amazed at how often these girls would fight me on that, wanting to go into court in their brightest feathers, looking every inch the hooker they were accused of being.
    I usually won the argument when I would point out that each hour they looked sexy in court could translate into a year in prison.
    And then we would negotiate some sort of reduced sentence with the District Attorney, sometimes suspended if it was a first time. It was a fun game, in a way. And at one level, I kind of liked it, because I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about, why these girls should go to prison for selling what they had to sell, or buying what they wanted to buy, even if it was heroin.
    Maybe Tony was rubbing off. But that’s all it was for me — a fun game.
    We quickly built a nice little practice in my corner of the building. After a while, word got out that I was pretty good at what I did, and I was assigned three women for my office staff: two paralegals and one really, really good “professional assistant.” The former were Sarah and Lily, two of the most white-bread gals you’d ever meet; they wrote a lot of the “stories” we would create for our clients in legalese. The latter was Claire, a black woman, who along with my