by Tony Covatta

(image c/o beststeakrestaurants)

Fledgling lawyer Gino Rossi and wife Frances were squiring prominent local architect- entrepreneur Bentley Meisner and his girlfriend to dinner, along with Gino and Frances’s pals, Kiki and Wayne. The venue was a trendy new spot, The Firehouse, on Cincinnati’s Eastside. Gino was impressed. A spacious room of floor to ceiling glossy glass panels had been built around the twin arched entrance of an abandoned fire station, with open kitchen and other rooms to the rear. Dining tables with linen cloths and napery, topped with Swedish-modern dishware and utensils, were set out front and around the slide pole and open floor once housing fire trucks and ambulances. Firefighter paraphernalia—boots, heavy canvas suits, wide brimmed helmets—adorned the walls. 

Winter, and the three couples were dressed warmly. As they came through the glass doors, the obsequious wait staff scurried to take their overcoats. Headstrong Bentley reluctantly surrendered his own, luxurious, thick camelhair. Its rich honey-brown pile looked a foot deep; a herd of twenty Kazakhstani Bactrian camels must have worked overtime to supply the fabric in his glorious garment. This was not any old off-the-rack coat, much less one like that worn by Gogol’s poor Russian civil servant but the sumptuous symbol of a successful man of means. After Bentley’s initial resistance, cute diminutive Kiki, batting lashes under her pageboy bob and gently pressing his forearm, prevailed on Bentley to surrender the coat. Over social and business chatter—Wayne was angling for Bentley’s insurance business—the couples enjoyed steaks, seafood, crisp ancient grain-rich salads, exotic desserts and a variety of wines from France and California. 

 It was only dinner, but a big event for Gino. Bentley was awash with commissions from Cincinnati companies and wealthy individuals and partnered various building ventures around town. He was a valued client of the law firm where Gino was a new associate. Here was one more piece in the complex life puzzle Gino was constructing. Frances, Bentley, Kiki, Wayne and the girlfriend had all known one another since childhood, frequenting the same Cincinnati schools, clubs, dancing academies, and parties, then scattering to top-tier colleges acceptable to their top-tier parents. Gino had grown up in working-class Cleveland in an Italian neighborhood of railroad shacks and corner bars. He attended public schools replete with peeling paint, crumbling brick and mortar, and eventually Cleveland State University. Eschewing enrollment at a local law school, he headed down I-71 to Cincinnati to attend University of Cincinnati Law School, where, unlike his richer friends, he tended bar at nights to make ends meet.

 Frances, after coming home from school in the East, lived in Clifton, the University district, and frequented Uncle Willie’s Tavern, the law students’ favored watering hole, across the street from the School of Law. Trim, athletic, and sporting a dynamic, ready smile under strikingly blonde-streaked hair, she found herself attracted to—and attracting—a medium-sized, curly black-haired, brown-eyed bartender, Gino. They agreed on most things, including the humor quotient of the jokes, the quality and attributes of the hopes, fears, and ambitions of the young, volatile denizens peopling the bar. One thing led to another, and Gino abandoned his notion of hooking on with a big firm in DC or New York. He’d stay put. Frances and he married. They could have a nice life in her hometown. 

Luckily enough, Frances’s doting Uncle Bob Applegate played golf at Cincinnati Country Club with Bart Headley III, managing partner of the town’s oldest white-shoe firm, Grayson, Madison & Headley. Gino wasn’t sure if it was his charm at lunch at the Club with Uncle Bob and “Trey” Headley that led to his job offer or Headley’s relentless drive to strengthen ties with old-line Cincinnati families like the Applegates and their corporations. And with good personal clients like Bentley Meisner. Learning that Frances had gone to high school with Meisner’s girlfriend, Trey encouraged Gino and Frances to invite them out to dinner. 

The dinner went well enough. The jokes were good. The wines delicious. Gino sprang for the check, to the gracious thanks of Bentley and Wayne. They had outstayed the rest of the clientele. Most of the waitstaff had disappeared. The party rose unsteadily from their table and searched for the alcove where their overcoats were hung hours earlier. Gino quickly counted five dark-grey and black coats but saw nothing butterscotch brown. Bentley’s coat was missing. The sole remaining waiter, young and inexperienced, offered only feeble excuses. Bentley’s satisfied air disappeared, his brow darkened. Gino, doing his best to lighten the mood and save the situation, told him he would look into the matter. “I’ll take care of it.”

Next morning, his car parked in the firm’s lot, seated at his shiny wood and steel firm desk, drinking firm coffee, munching a firm bagel, Gino’s calls to the Firehouse’s floor captain, manager and owner yielded no trace of camelhair or overcoat. Determined Gino was discouraged but not defeated, when Trey Headley stuck his bald pate in his office door: “Gino, we’ve got an angry architect on our hands. He says you and your friends encouraged him to leave his overcoat in an unlocked closet at that ginmill you went to, and it was stolen. He’s not happy.”

Gino sensed there was more at stake than a missing overcoat. Headley’s pot-belly was present as always, as were his shirtsleeves, rolled to the elbows, and his thinning side-hair eternally askew, but his customary smile was missing. “Chief”—Gino had quickly fallen into the servile office practice of calling Headley “chief,” a moniker Headley occasionally pretended annoyance with, but secretly, as everyone knew, reveled in—“let me get on this. The Firehouse will make good, one way or another.” 

Here was a chance for astute Gino not only to repair relations with favored client and disgruntled “chief” but also to display his blossoming courtroom chops. Lawyers who try cases—litigators, in short—are a breed apart. They are the jet jockeys of the profession, just as surgeons of essential organs are in medicine. Success, even on a small case involving a missing overcoat, could advance Gino’s climb up the greasy poles of firm acceptance and professional renown. 

He immediately reopened discussions with restaurant management. They were initially receptive to accommodation with the well-known Bentley, but the winds shifted when Gino broached replacement cost. Gino was talking several thousand dollars, and the manager countered with a hundred-dollar gift card. Gino soon found himself dealing only with Ken Solomon, a young, aggressive litigator at Snow & Craft, Cincinnati’s largest law firm, the only rival to Grayson Madison for carriage trade business. Indeed, Solomon had once worked at Grayson Madison but jumped to Snow when the latter firm waggled a sizable raise under his nose, not to mention succession to the fat book of business of a retiring Snow partner. 

Solomon invited Gino to the ornate, fusty faux granite columned Snow & Craft offices in the Tower of Commerce, more to display the prowess and power emanating from the ubiquitous formal portraits of Snow lawyers of yesteryear than to plan for trial. Smug Snow personnel quietly walked the halls in full dress—coats off in personal office only, door closed—solemnly carrying their coffee cups carefully lidded—mustn’t stain the Orientals, you know. Gino’s pedigree amused Solomon: “How interesting. Cincinnati Law School. Most of us were at Cambridge or New Haven.” He couldn’t understand why Gino had brought suit: “Gino, I’m afraid I have a case that will bury you. Why not dismiss right now, save embarrassment?” Gino appreciated his concern but declined the invitation. He was glad he had sued quickly, quelling the anxious enquiries of Headley and nagging phone calls from Bentley. Gino’s own research did not reveal any secret weapon. As far as he could tell, the law was on his side. He expected to prevail.

Given all the background noise, Gino only half noticed that the trial date was the same as that of reservations he had made for a long weekend shopping trip for Frances, himself as pack mule, to New York City. Gino’s practice was taking long hours. Frances and he were both looking forward to time together away. Even with the date conflict it appeared that things would work out. The trial was set for nine a.m. Their non-stop flight to Gotham was not slated to leave till half past four. The facts of the case appeared simple to Gino. He was sure he would be done and dusted by noon. Plenty of time to leave the office, pick up Frances and head for the airport. 

While Bentley cherished his beloved camelhair and grieved its loss, neither his feelings nor the replacement value of the coat established that the trial should take place in one of the capacious general courtrooms. The matter was set in municipal court, the narrow, tawdry confines of aptly named small claims, evictions, traffic tickets, judgment debtor exams, first criminal appearances and other flotsam and jetsam, not in one of the high-ceilinged echo chambers where stud litigators tried murder cases and batteries of attorneys, the lackeys of large corporations, went at one another like angry rogue elephants. Thus the morning of trial, Gino was not surprised to find himself in a small, windowless room on the backside of the courthouse, off a hallway next to the parking lot. The dingy room, with its gray peeling paint walls, dirty drop-ceiling buzzing with tired fluorescent panels, and grainy unwashed floor, had a gallery of perhaps thirty church-pew seats behind the inevitable scruffy iron railing. These unholy pews contained working men in greasy jackets, an assortment of malnourished women and men in T-shirts and ball caps, and a forlorn farmer in khaki-brown Carhartt overalls. Beyond the railing, more appropriate for enclosing an outdoor patio, were seats for the privileged lawyers, and two ratty-looking, chipped and splintered wooden desks topped with black plastic water pitchers from which no sensible lawyer would ever drink. All faced a low dais for the black-robed judge, perched on his wide-backed easy chair, and his supernumeraries, sitting below, officiously feeding him papers from the piles stacked before them, as they prompted his honor to call the cases in mysterious order. 

Gino was pleased to see from the nameplate taped askew to the front of the dais that the presiding jurist would be Jerry “Cotton” Mashburn, a tall, handsome, white-haired, athletic, middle-aged dandy, who taught adjunct courses at the law school. Gino had witnessed his chasing comely coed law students at Uncle Willie’s after night classes. Savvy Gino had treated the judge and his more than willing companions to friendly rounds—judiciously, you might say—and Cotton Mashburn was not one to forget favors. He remembered Gino well, better Gino suspected, than he did his dates of those pleasant extracurricular nights. When he emerged from the rear door of the forlorn courtroom, he immediately recognized Gino, nodding at him for a millisecond, but piously did not otherwise greet him among the assortment of other lawyers and landlords, prospective evictees, judgment debtors, and sore headed claimants. 

Matters started rolling only a half hour or so late. Solomon was sharply dressed in a tailored black pinstripe three-piece suit, complete with watch chain glinting across his slightly paunched midriff, and Gino wore his workaday lawyer’s uniform of wrinkled khakis, blue blazer, and tie inevitably combining red, white and blue. Gino was distressed to see sheriff’s deputies shepherding a chain gang of a half dozen prisoners attired in broad black and white stripes into the room. For some unadvertised reason, Cotton was going to receive the initial pleas—not guilty, of course—of these gentlemen and, after droning through the mandatory disclosures and admonishments and signing off on the requisite forms, send them back upstairs to await their bond hearings, elsewhere. This took time. Gino thought that his case might take an hour or so, and he still hoped to be finished by noon. Once these tedious first appearances were done, the bailiffs came over from their perch with copies of the morning docket. Meisner v. Cincinnati Firehouse, LLC was halfway down the list. Ordinarily, Gino would sidle up to the bailiff and ask him to move his case up. But he didn’t have that luxury here. Gino did not want to risk whatever advantage unknown prior contact with the judge gave him by approaching the bench and attracting the judge’s attention while seeking a favorable spot on the docket. He could see Solomon, poring over his papers, apparently unaware of Gino’s past relationship with the genial judge. Solomon had gone to law school at Yale, and his practice at Snow & Craft customarily took him to the oak- and marble-paneled courtrooms of the Federal courthouse down the street. As Solomon had been quick to tell Gino, he had only taken this case as a favor to the owner of the Firehouse, a prominent Snow & Craft client.

Even at the relaxed pace at which Mashburn ran his courtroom, Gino calculated that Frances and he would still make their flight. But events were working against him. Each of the cases ahead of his had its own idiosyncratic quirk. Even being on edge, Gino fell into the rhythm of the cases, the tone and tenor of wiseacre interchanges among the lawyers and judge; the occasional guffaws from attentive members of the audience; the buzz attendant on Mashburn’s hammy interrogation of a well-proportioned female realtor, attired in a form-hugging ladies’ pinstripe suit, short skirt and shiny heels, seeking repossession of an abandoned apartment; the hum of conversations during the quarter hour break Mashburn took after a couple of hours. Gino drifted back to Cleveland and his after-school hours as a cashier at the local A&P. Boring work for sure, but not without moments of lively chatting with and listening to inquisitive customers, delivery men, butchers, dairy and deli clerks. He saw that most if not all were doing their best to pass the time amiably. 

Meisner v. Cincinnati Firehouse, LLC was finally sonorously called at about one p.m. If they finished by two thirty, he could still race home, pick up a surely disgruntled Frances, race to the airport across the river, park long-term, race to the terminal, race to the departure gate, and board before the doors closed. Amazingly enough, the evidence, such as it was, went in without too many hitches. After both sides presented their witnesses—the restaurant manager, in stone-washed jeans and black turtle neck, Bentley, in olive-green and silver-striped Italian suit—and with the clock relentlessly ticking toward the failsafe moment for escape to the airport, Mashburn requested their legal arguments. Solomon jumped at the chance, insisting he had a case that would end the proceedings right there.

“Thank you, Mr. Solomon. That would be OK with me if it is satisfactory to Gino.” 

Gino, not Mr. Rossi. Gino smiled inwardly. “Yes, Your Honor. I’m happy to hear whatever Mr. Solomon has to offer.”

“Mr. Solomon—you may proceed.”

Heedless Mr. Solomon started a high-decibel, lengthy recitation of a New York State Supreme Court case holding that restaurant patrons hang their coats on restaurant walls at their peril. If they disappear? Tough luck. Gino had seen the case but found nothing like it in Ohio. Could Ivy lawyer Solomon be trying to put one over on not-quite-local-but-close-enough boy Gino and Mashburn, a graduate of Kentucky night law school? Gino knew that New York “State Supreme Court” was ill-named—not final authority there, the Court of Appeals was higher–and certainly not in Ohio. Thoughtful Judge Mashburn thanked Mr. Solomon profusely, turned and enquired, “What do you think of that, Gino?”

The fetching foot of Frances tapping in Gino’s mind, he cast aside his hastily planned, yet lengthy, argument and went for the unexpectedly exposed jugular. “That might be the way it goes in restaurants in New York City, but that’s not how we treat folks here in Cincinnati.” 

The scruffy audience, proud Reds and Bengals fans all, erupted in laughter, joined by chuckling Cotton Mashburn. He quickly closed the proceeding, telling the two adversaries that a decision would be forthcoming—certainly a checked box on a postcard, the favored medium of decisions of this jurist—“in a few days.”

Gino and “Mr. Solomon” shook hands. Behind Ken’s cold gray eyes and frozen demeanor, Gino saw that Solomon knew he’d been rolled. But did not know why. When the favorable decision arrived via postcard weeks later, well after Gino and Frances’s return from their Big Apple idyll—they had made the flight with ten minutes to spare—Gino did not share with Headley or Meisner what had turned the trick. Because there really wasn’t much to it. He had simply done what he needed to do to recover the value of a gorgeous fine tailored overcoat, not the cobbled together overcoat stolen from a lonely Russian clerk but that of a privileged local fat cat. He would continue using this street wisdom—accumulated in frowsy neighborhoods, on asphalt public school playgrounds, at checkout counters, in dimly lit sleazy bars—to take him as far from the world that had nurtured him as he could go.

(image c/o mensflair)

Tony Covatta is a retired lawyer, and before that a teacher of college English. Now he tries his hand at short stories, full length, flash and micro, literary non-fiction and the occasional poem. He lives with his wife of fifty years in Cincinnati. For more info visit tonycovatta.com.