offensive, and his lawyer advised against it. I was there when his lawyer, a man named Swanson, whose lips were too red and who wore truly unattractive glasses, little beady grandma wire-frame dealies that made him look ten years older than he was, swept into the house at ten o’clock at night, also drunk, demanding that Ray pour him a scotch and then getting angry at the quality of the scotch (“Swanson, I don’t drink scotch! Forgive me, this was a gift from a client, blame him, not me!”), and told us that Ms. Harriet had called the DA and was demanding murder charges.
“There’s no way,” Ray said. “It’s involuntary manslaughter at the most, which you yourself said was a wobbler. Misdemeanor manslaughter. That’s the most they’ll do.”
“Ray, I’m telling you that the DA was making noise about going for second degree murder.” I was beginning to understand the dynamic between Ray and Swanson. They were like frat boys, even though neither of them had probably ever been in a fraternity. Maybe Swanson had, but there was deep acne scarring on his cheeks and he was a pedant through and through, so I doubted it. The man had no style, no swagger, he’d been pretending to be forty his whole life and now he had finally grown into it. But together they were making up for the youths they’d never had, or something along those lines.
“How? How would that ever fucking fly?”
“He’s saying she has a violent past. Some incident where she bit a kid.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Ray turned to us, the silent peanut gallery curled up under a fake-fur throw on the couch. “You never bit anybody, did you?”
“Uhh…” Bunny said. “Well, it was like—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ray said.
“I’m not a criminal defense attorney,” Swanson said. “Ray! I can’t take this to trial, you know I’m not a trial lawyer. We’ve gotta get you somebody else.”
“It has to be you,” Ray said. “I want you. You’re the only one I trust.”
“I know a great guy,” Swanson said, sucking down the rest of his poor-quality scotch. “His name is Remi, and he’s the best, he can sit in, and—”
“I don’t want Remi, I want fucking Swanson! Because you’re an animal, Swan! You’re a fucking dirty, cheating, little animal and I want you in my court.” The two men embraced. Ray was almost crying. Bunny was frantically chewing her nails.
“We’ll see what happens,” Swanson said. “Who knows. Some of those witness accounts, I mean, we could go in there and argue mutual combat.”
“But she didn’t hit me back,” Bunny said. Both men looked annoyed with her for interrupting.
“I thought you couldn’t remember anything,” Ray said in a singsong parody of her voice.
“Maybe she did hit you back, you hit her, you didn’t know your own strength, it was a hell of a punch and then she fell just the right way. These things happen. They happen all the time.”
“But that’s not what happened,” Bunny said.
“It’s not about what happened,” Swanson said, waving his glass of scotch around. “There was no video footage. We have nothing but your word, a dead girl, and a bunch of eyewitness accounts that vary wildly.”
“They vary?” I asked. This was the first I had heard of this. Bunny crossed her arms over her chest, pushed air through her nose.
“They vary substantially,” Swanson said, turning to me, warmed by a new audience. “We have some people claiming the punching went on and on, Bunny was like a wild dog, no one could get her off the girl. We have some people claiming it happened in a flash, was like a scuffle, they became aware of it and it was over before they could look. No one agrees how many punches, no one agrees who started it, everyone agrees Ann Marie was running her mouth about that gay kid.”
“He’s the gay kid,” Ray said, gesturing at me.
“Oh, sorry,” Swanson said. “But you know what I mean.”
“Do you think it would make any difference that I was later attacked?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Swanson said.
“Well, the girl who Bunny hit, her boyfriend and his friends jumped me. I was in the hospital for a little over a week.”
“No, no,” Swanson said, “I think that might look bad, make Bunny look even more guilty. Everyone is going to forgive the grieving boyfriend for getting wild after his girlfriend kicks the bucket, I mean, come on. You got any food around here, Ray?”