I never felt good about defending Mr. Abrahms. Let me make that clear. My mouth went dry the first time I wrote the ultimate defense on paper, “the California wife-abuse statute explicitly discriminates on the basis of sex by only making mention of husbands, and is therefore unconstitutional.” I knew he was going to get off scot-free. As an attorney, that thrilled me. As a husband, father, and human being, I felt like my stomach was going to turn itself inside out.
You normally don’t ask your clients whether or not they did it. You normally don’t care. But I knew that Ralph Abrahms had killed his wife. This wasn’t the first time I was defending him, as wife Catherine had tried to nab him a few times before- sexual battery, tried for a restraining order, California Family Code Section 6250, yadda yadda yadda. She never succeeded, of course, not with my defense. Normally, when I win a case, when the words “not guilty”, or “dismissed charges” hit my eardrums like a golden harp, I get giddy like a little kid findin’ a Playboy under his daddy’s bed, like I’m gettin’ away with something. Normally I don’t give a rat’s ass about whatever dame gets left in the dust when I score a win. But when I the gavel came down in every case of Ralph Abrahms versus the State of California, I always found my eyes wandering towards poor Mrs. Abrahms. The way her eyes closed when she heard the verdict, how her long, black eyelashes touched her cheek before tears squeezed through them.... I felt like a real jerk.
I could always tell she was one of them battered wives. When I’d meet with her to draw up a statement, you could see bruises on her, first of all. I sat across my desk from her as she recalled the incident, and I let my eyes drift to her lean, supple legs. There was this big, ugly, splotchy patch, like a splat of oil paint, on her delicate china skin. Whorls of aubergine and mustard yellow tarnished the smooth surface of her thigh, and more dappled along the length of them as she crossed and uncrossed her ankles. She never scowled when she caught me staring, though. All she would do is shift her skirt over the bruises, look me in the eye,  and bam- I felt like a jerk again. All the catcalling in the world couldn’t make me feel as guilty as Catherine Abrahms did, and she ain’t even say a word about it. Catherine spoke apologetically, too. Every time I’d try to clarify a part of her story, she’d look confused for a minute, then shake her head, apologize, and insist my own version was probably right. My heart ached for her. I’d lose my bar license for saying this out loud, but I wanted nothing more than to speak for her.
I remember the day Ralph got in trouble. I was sittin’ at home watching The Lone Ranger with my wife and my sister’s bratty kid in the living room, plopped in my armchair and just trying to roll one goddamned cigarette. In fact, the phone rang so loud it made all of us jump, and I spilled the sticky tobacco all over my trousers. Grumbling, I had made my way to the kitchen and snatched the receiver off the wall. I ain’t even say hello before Ralph starts blubbering to me. “Tony, I really done it this time. You gotta come down to the station, they’re askin me all sorts of questions I ain’t even know the answer to. You gotta come help me.” He was breathin real heavy into the phone, like a little kid, and I knew this one was it.  All the bells and whistles starting going off in my head like they usually do when I know I have a case, but at the same time, my heart went right into my gut because I knew just what he’d done.  I grabbed my briefcase, shuffled my loafers on, gave the missus a wet kiss on the forehead, and I was out the door.
At the station I listened to Ralph’s statement and took his story down before I let those prosecutors have at em. I knew he done it right away. He had this crazed look in his eye, kept looking around all nervous like someone was coming after him. “She was screwin the milkman, Tony. I know it. I know she was. I couldn’t take it anymore.” His hands were shaking and he kept chewing on his nails, his breaths shallow and uneven. “I didn’t think I hit her that hard. But she just wouldn’t get up and I panicked and I-”
I cut him off, told him not to say s*** to the cops, and left.

I heaved up my tuna sandwich next to my car before I drove home. Maybe it was just bad fish.
The next couple weeks were tough. Ralph was to stay at the county jail until trial, and he couldn’t see his kids or nothin. I was the one who had to drive his kids to Ralph’s mother in law’s after his arraignment. All three of em, two little girls and a boy, crammed in the back of my Buick like sardines, their eyes all puffy and silent as little lambs. I’m not real good with words so I just kind of looked back at them in the rear view and said “Ah...Jeez. Your dad..He’s..good.” and one of em just met my eyes, opened his mouth like he was gonna say something, but then closed it and looked at his hands again. The thought of them living with Ralph again after the trial made me itch.
It started wearing down at me, and cases usually don’t bug me like this. This was a big one, and word was getting out about it. It started showin’ up on T.V., and every time they put up a picture of Catherine up- the last picture of her alone was her senior high school portrait. Dark hair all rolled into perfect curls, lashes long as a doe, dark eyes glittering and innocent as a rose. She was all but nineteen when she married Ralph, and here she was, dead as a doornail, at twenty-five. Every time they showed that portrait, it felt like a big punch in the gut. It didn’t stop there, either; every time I was between the office, the jail, or my house, reporters were all over my ass. We only got one damn news station in all of West Covina and these reporters gotta glom onto my damn case? Even once I got wherever I was going, the questions I was getting asked seemed to ring in my ears for hours. “How does it feel defending Catherine Abrahms’ murderer?” It felt like a hot load of crap.
I started drinkin’ at the office. Cooped up on my lonesome, I needed something to help me get through stacks upon stacks of paperwork or else I’d blow my own brains out. It took weeks to sort through every first-degree homicide defense in the books, and I’d thought I exhausted every last option before it stumbled upon me to read through the prosecution’s charges. And that’s when I saw it. Those couple of gendered words that would set Ralph Abrahms free. I scribbled it down on a sheet of paper and went home.
I didn’t even show up at the trial for the prosecution’s case. I knew I would have ran out of the courtroom and abandoned my defense if I had to hear about Catherine’s injuries, let alone the pictures from the coroner, or the testimony from Ralph’s kids. It wasn’t until three-thirty that I walked in, asked the jury be dismissed, and slid the paper over to the judge with my constitutional complaint. “Discriminates....basis...husbands..” He grazed his eyes over the paper, and finally, he stuck his big bottom lip out and nodded, as if to say fair enough.
A couple of words to the bailiff and Ralph Abrahms was a free man.

I never felt good about that case. When those charges were dropped, I felt like I had plopped the last pile of dirt on top of the casket of Catherine Abrahms. I was just as guilty as Ralph, and there ain’t no loopholes for sinners.