The Confession
He spoke the words to me with his arms crossed. I could hear the rhythmic, puffy scraping of his pant-leg nervously twitching under the table. I heard the words before I processed them.
“You know I did it right?”
The words rested on a trust we had established over the past three years of work, but there was a faint twinge of nervousness in his eyes that seemed to suggest he was not completely sure how it worked when he came clean to his lawyer.
I took off my glasses slowly, placing them on the table in front of me, adjusting them discreetly so that they faced forward. I pressed my fingers into my eyes as my brain went wild. Psychedelic flashes shot from my compressed eyes onto the black canvas of my covered vision. I let out a slow, deliberate breath, measuring the sound and pressure I let out of my cheeks. Mr. Hoffman spoke.
“So what now? We’re still on for Tuesday right?”
I looked at him with a steady expression on my face, betraying nothing of the mile-a-minute chaos that had spun into action in my brain at his words. I let out another breath, calmer this time.
“Well that depends.” I studied him closely. There was nothing on his face to suggest that he was being dishonest or joking. “I’m going to ask you once and then I’m not going to ask you again, and keep in mind…” I tapped my pointer finger on the table twice. “That the trial is in five days. So….did you…do it?”
I watched him closely. He answered almost immediately, shrugging as he did.
“Yeah I just told you that, I thought that ya know…since it was so close you should know that, going into Tuesday. You always tell me to be honest and…”
“Not that honest James! And not a week out from trial!”
The words came out reflexively, almost without bidding. Mr. Hoffman shrunk back, tightening his grip around his arms.
“Jesus man I’m helping you out, attorney-client privilege and all that you don’t have to tell anyone. What’s the matter with you?”
I breathed in deeply, trying to gather myself.
“Let me tell you what’s the matter. You tell me on the eve of trial that you’re guilty when I took this case because I BELIEVED in you James. I believed your story and ya know, maybe I’m lucky you told me now and not when you were up on the stand in open court because now I feel like I can’t represent you, James. At least now I don’t have to be embarrassed in front of the judge when I discover my client, my friend, was lying to me. After all of this work James…”
I gestured to the papers strewn across the glass-top table where we sat, opposite each other. “This was all for nothing James, I….I’m sorry this is very unprofessional of me but I…I CARED about this case, James. I cared about you. Can you see what a spot this puts me in?”
Mr. Hoffman shrugged.
“Not really, you’re my lawyer and you can’t tell anybody and I have a right to a fair trial and since you’re my lawyer and I’m PAYING you, you’re gonna give me that. It’s in the Constitution that you have to represent me so I get a fair trial before a jury of my peers. This shouldn’t change anything.”
I let out another slow breath.
“Let me explain something to you James….” I paused, correcting myself. “Mr. Hoffman.” I could feel the blood starting to settle as I slipped into professionalism like it was my Monday suit. “When a client incriminates himself to his lawyer, that lawyer can do one of two things.” I held up two fingers in the air, emphasizing each point with a different finger as I spoke. “One, I can go through with the trial, ask you all the right questions to make you look good, which is my job in some ways, and pray to god that no one straight-up asks you if you did it. If they do, I get in trouble. If they don’t, I go home and drink away my conscience and try to forget that I helped you commit perjury. Or two, you remove or ‘discharge’ me as your representation, which is fine except it’s…five days from the trial and they would have to postpone the trial another six months so you can get another lawyer, bring him up to speed on your fake story…”
I could feel the anger bubbling in my gut. “Sorry I didn’t mean to say it like that.” I pressed my fingers against my eyes again and took a deep breath, then continued, steadying my voice. “…and then maybe you get away with it but it’s gonna be a LOT more money for you.”
Mr. Hoffman had been slowly leaning forward as I was talking, pushing himself onto the table so his elbows rested on the smooth glass next to his tablet as if pushing me back against my chair. “You’re forgetting one thing here, well two actually.”
I raised my eyebrows, incredulous.
“And what is that?”
Mr. Hoffman sat back in his chair again, folding his arms in front of him.
“First? Attorney. Client. Privilege. Second? I have a right to a fair trial even if you know I did it. That’s how the justice system works…sir.”
He thrust his chin up in the air as if passing a chess-move to me. I sighed, reaching down, rummaging in the bag on the floor next to my chair for a notepad and pencil.
I tried to be as measured in my response as I could.
“Here’s the thing, James…attorney-client privilege doesn’t work like that. It’s one thing to tell me something in confidence that might look bad for you at trial okay? Like telling me something irrelevant that you did that was awful. It’s another to tell me that we literally have no case because you are guilty and then I have to put you up on the stand and have you lie your ass off, Mr. Hoffman. Ether that or we have to hope against hope that the other lawyer didn’t pay attention in ANY of their classes and they don’t ask you the very first question they SHOULD ask you which is, “Here is accusation number 1, is it true? Here is allegation number 2. Is it accurate? Do you see where that’s tough?”
He paused before responding. “Yeah, but I get a fair trial even though I did it. That’s the Constitution.”
I sighed. “Mr. Hoffman. You’re guilty. A ‘fair’ trial would be you getting put away for what you did, but since I know you did it now I can’t tell you to go up there and tell the truth because you’d fire me, but I can’t tell you to go up there and lie because, well…I’d be before the bar before I got another referral. Do you see my problem here?”
Mr. Hoffman nodded slowly, his eyes looking up at the ceiling as he digested my words. The reality of his situation slowly moved through him like a slow, silent tremor. He took a minute in silence, his hands tapping on his forearm, his legs shifting under the table. After a minute, he looked at me with a look of disappointment in his face.
“Well you can’t tell anyone…right?”
It took me all of my strength to slowly shake my head. There was a sudden weighted pain in my chest. My life, for a moment, and the purpose and meaning I had poured around it like a moat, drained and collapsed.
“No. I cannot.”
Mr. Hoffman nodded.
“And I can just find another attorney and make sure I don’t tell him what I told you and I’ll probably get acquitted?”
I sighed.
“Since I’m still your attorney, briefly, I’m not going to tell you you will definitely get acquitted but, as a professional recommendation…” The pain in my chest grew as my heart beat faster. “I would advise you to start looking for other counsel. I will, of course, go through with the trial because that is my professional responsibility. I will not refer you to anyone personally but since you’ve confessed to me I feel a distinct conflict of interest between serving you, my client, and serving the Courts, or the system. If you feel that I cannot represent you, you can discharge me as counsel, and I will request leave to withdraw as counsel and I’ll notify the Court that we will need to postpone the trial but then after that I’ll just…send you the bill and…yeah that’ll be all she wrote. The Court will NOT be happy though. Tell me what you want me to do, it’s up to you. Do you want to go through with the trial, or do you want to discharge me as your counsel? Please know that the Court might not grant my request to withdraw as counsel this close to trial and we MAY have to just grin and bear it and go through with it.”
I spoke the words almost reflexively, chanting them from some deep muscle memory of rehearsed language, but my mind was elsewhere.
Mr. Hoffman nodded slowly. There was a heaviness in his eyes and he hunched over the table.
“I’m sorry I…didn’t know what it meant to tell you what I did.”
He looked down at the glass table between us, the conferencing speaker beeping its rhythmic red light. He looked up at me.
“You’ve done good work for me so far, I wish I had kept my mouth shut.”
I nodded and stared him down, swiveling back and forth slightly in my black office chair. “I’m not so sure. Before I knew I would have wished you did too but now that I know I’m glad you did. Saved me from having to approach the bench and explain why my client lied on the stand, ya know?”
Mr. Hoffman shrugged.
“Well that’ll be someone else’s problem soon don’t you worry. I’m going to discharge you.”
He spoke the words with a solemnity I had rarely seen in him. He was a fun-loving man and though the litigious years had worn him slowly, he still maintained a smile and shook a person’s hand with a grin that bordered on laughter, like there was something funny about the person. With all the time we had spent together over the years, I felt a kinship with James, he had been a friend to me. I got drinks with him often. I liked him.
We sat in silence for a full minute. Mr. Hoffman smiled sadly at me. I returned his gaze awkwardly and sporadically, writing an outline on my notepad for procedure going forward.
I looked up. Mr. Hoffman had pulled his chair back from the table and pushed himself up, propping himself on the table as he did. “Well it was a pleasure working with you.” He extended his hand to me.
I leaned across the table and shook it firmly.
“Well, hopefully the judge grants the request. If not, you’ll be spending most of your time with me this coming week. But yes, it has been nice. I hope you find…someone who will take you on this late in the game.”
Mr. Hoffman let my hand go and stood up, speaking in a sheepish voice. “Wanna grab a drink later at our old place?”
I turned my chair to face the glass window of the conference room that overlooked Maple Street. The Courthouse stood across the way. There was a line of cars shuffling through a light that had just turned green. The grand columns and Gothic architecture of the old Courthouse looked duller than they had the day before. All of the long nights of preparation for the excitement of a sure-thing trial had been punctured and slowly deflated like a shriveled balloon. It was more than that though. I felt a tugging at my heart, a disillusionment with something vague. It wasn’t just the fear of facing the judge with a last-minute destruction of their calendar. It was stepping into the Courtroom with knowledge of the truth, and being able to do absolutely nothing about it, being potentially forced to watch a farce happen, a group of intelligent people struggling over a puzzle that I had the key to, and maybe getting it wrong and having my lips sewn shut by the system I loved. It was a small crack in the foundation I had built over the years, the belief that the system I had defended had a chip in it now, its permanence questioned, its justness put on trial.
I swiveled back around to face Mr. Hoffman. I looked down at the glass top of the conference table.
“I don’t really…think we should get drinks. I’m not in the mood for drinks right now. I’ve gotta get this thing drafted and put my time entries in so I can send you your bill anyway and I want to do it tonight so I can notice the Court first thing tomorrow so they can postpone everything if they want to, ya know?”
I looked up at him. He had slumped at my words, his frame drooped. He managed a lackluster nod. “Well, nice working with you. Wish you the best Sam. Sorry again.”
I nodded. “Same to you James. Same to you.”
He walked through the conference room door and shut it behind him, the latch clicking in the door jamb. I sat and stared at the doorknob for what must have been twenty minutes, wondering whether I should walk out like him, close the door, and never come back. Find a cabin somewhere, think about the after-effects of capitalism, the weaknesses of any system, maybe read a book that didn’t educate me, for once. The speaker in the middle of the table beeped, the red light turned a steady green, and a metallic female voice came through the blackened metal grating: “Mr. and Mrs. Kryer are here for your 2:00, they’re a little early.”
I looked away from the door.
“It’s alright, my meeting got out early. Thanks Joan. Send them in.”
I reached down and grabbed a redwell from the floor. I placed it on the table and began pulling out documents and arranging them in order on the table. The small act of organization was comforting, if only slightly. There was a knock on the door.
“Come in” I said with a healthy but intentional amount of friendliness. The door opened. I pasted a warm smile on my face and reached my hand across the table to greet them, not wanting to notify them of the death that was eating me from the inside.
I looked back and forth between them and mustered an excitement I did not feel. “Okay, you two ready to get this thing closed?”
