The Arraignment Read Online Free PDF Page B

sent back and forth.
    As I approach, he smiles broadly but doesn’t take his hands out of his pockets to shake. “I can now confirmHemingway’s thesis—the sun also rises,” he says. He looks up at the fog-shrouded sky. “Though you wouldn’t know it from standing here.”
    “Hemingway was too blitzed in the morning to know it himself. He took it from the Bible,” I tell him.
    “That’s what I like about you. You know all the trivial shit you know.”
    “It comes in handy when I have to deal with people like you.”
    “And what kind of people am I?”
    “People who deal only in the big picture,” I tell him.
    He laughs, but it’s true. Nick doesn’t waste energy on details that aren’t essential to the grand picture, the task at hand at any given moment. He has an intellect like a vacuum. He can suck up the minutest details of a trial in three minutes, organize them in the order of importance, and march them out like an army to do battle in court while his opponent is still trying to get his briefcase open.
    “I thought all the while you were doing these early morning court calls,” I tell him.
    “That’s why God invented young associates,” he says. “If Dana wasn’t involved with this prick, he’d be dealing with the federal public defender.”
    I warn him that after he hears what I have to tell him, he might want to reconsider taking the case. I suggest the cafeteria in the courthouse. Nick says he favors a little coffee shop around the corner and across the street, so he leads the way.
    This is federal territory, the few blocks around the two United States courthouses—one reserved for bankruptcy proceedings, and the other for more serious stuff. Like the Indian nations of old, this part of town has different rules and a culture of its own. Here the cops are the FBI, IRS, DEA, and a dozen other alphabet empires, each striving to showcase their indispensable primacy in the public-safety pecking order.
    The federal courts are realms of limitless marble and gray-haired marshals in blue blazers standing like men inlivery. It is more refined and genteel than anything at the local level. It speaks of limitless budgets and the boundless tax reach of the federal government whose hands are in everyone’s pockets and moving now from the elbow up to the shoulder. It is a world I do not often frequent; instead I confine myself to the lowly and somewhat disheveled state courts where those who set policy cannot print their own money.
    Nick thrives in all of this. He will go toe to toe with the most austere members of the local federal bench and on occasion walk the fine line of contempt.
    As if to reinforce this, he takes me to the seedy coffee shop at the street level under the old Capri Hotel.
    “I’ve been having coffee here for twenty years. Every morning,” he says. He leads me down a flight of stairs, chipped plaster and peeling paint. The handrail on one side is missing. Some vagrant must have borrowed it.
    “I used to know the guy who owned the place,” Nick says.
    I follow him through the door to the coffee shop. We get inside and I stop. The place is a dump.
    “I didn’t know you were so well connected,” I tell him.
    “It looked better back then,” he says. “It’s gone downhill in recent years.”
    “You’re kidding. I would never have known.”
    The walls in the coffee shop are that dingy brown color you know is not paint. The stainless steel hood over the grill in the kitchen is impregnated with enough grease that the cook could open his own tallow works.
    “Best of all, it’s quiet.”
    “I can see why.”
    I’m afraid to ask him about the hotel upstairs. Any little shake, and it may visit us while we’re sitting here.
    “The owner’s name was Wan Lu Sun. Chinese,” he says. “Good businessman. But he died a couple of years ago. His kids have the property now. Not like the old man. The new generation. They have no sense of values. Americanized,” he says.
    “If you say