with leather chairs and pictures of horses jumping over fences in the nearby Virginia hunt country. I had never actually met a horse, but I knew them to be great symbols of wealth and pedigree, often associated with white fences and acreage. In defiance of this legal tradition and with a tip of the hat to local pride, I hung a picture of an oyster boat with two old guys raising hand tongs from the misty waters of the Bay. I liked the freshness of starting my own office.
I didn’t have a library, but it seemed unlikely I would need a lot of precedents anyway. I did have a piece of computer software titled: Practical Law Applications. It could have been called a floppy disc for the mellow minded, but it included a sample will with blank spaces to fill in; sample real estate agreements; and instructions for filing civil lawsuits on behalf of any aggrieved party. I figured if I used two out of three I could survive.
I was straightening the furniture when Mansfield Burlington grasped the outside door handle, leaned back on his heels to read the stenciled gold letters, Ned Shannon, Attorney at Law, and entered.
“Hello Burl,” I almost shouted.
“What,” he said, “no waiting room. No big busted secretary. No cases of empty law books.”
“You mean empty cases with no law books.”
“You heard me,” he said.
“No capital, huh,” he said. “I’m here to help. Your first client. I need a new will.”
“Come right in, Burl. You’re in great luck, because I’m having a first time special on wills, one thousand dollars for the whole process or two hundred dollars an hour.”
“How long will it take?”
“About five hours,” I replied, “but it could go longer.” I saw Burl doing the math in his head and realizing the thousand dollars was a floor in this process, no matter what happened.
“You would be good in the used car business,” Burl joked.
I had spent so many years as part of a legal team, advising corporate clients on regulatory laws related to safety and environment, that it made me nervous to define a simple legal service and state my fee. At Simpson, Feldstein and James, all that was done for me. Furthermore, I was getting nearly three hundred dollars an hour there and the firm had devised so many ways to hide the fees that I never had to actually say to anyone, “My fee is….” Rather, it was part of a proposal, presented on paper and explained to the client by one of our administrative partners, who painted our merits with such gusto that people actually couldn’t wait to pay us the big money. Indeed, they usually breathed a sigh of relief just knowing that our firm would keep them out of jail, or avoid a fine of even greater dimensions than our fee. Corporations would always rather pay the fee than a fine. It puts them on a much higher road for their public relations team. And over the years we had even made it an honor to pay our fee, a distinction like winning the Purple Heart for being shot in the rear.
“I hear you saved the Blenny Man,” Burl said unexpectedly. “Not many people will thank you for that one.”
“Who’s the Blenny Man?” I asked.
“Word is you and Vinnie plucked that little mouse out of the water, and then towed his boat home like a lost dog.”
“We did pick up a guy, but I thought his name was Ray,” which was what I thought Vinnie told me.
I remembered that the guy did look like a little mouse, wet and wrapped in a blanket, with black hair draped in every direction. He hadn’t said much, except thanks for the coffee. Vinnie gave him a mug on the way back to Parkers Marina. I did remember that when he raised the cup to his lips, his teeth were shaking, and his hands were unsteady when they grasped the handle. On his left hand was a diamond ring that looked out of place, and when he saw me notice it, he pulled his hand back under the blanket, still holding the mug with his right. No doubt new wealth. Even so, I hadn’t paid much attention to Ray as we nursed his boat into an empty slip at the end of the pier. Vinnie climbed onto the pier, tied the bow line to one piling and the stern line to another. I helped Ray out of the Martha and took back the blanket, all without him saying a word. He looked like a stray animal standing on the dock. We left Ray and his cruiser at the Marina and maneuvered the Martha Claire out into the creek channel for the few hundred yard trip to the Bayfront. At least that’s the way I remembered it.
“Who is he?” I asked Burl.
Mansfield looked across the office, raised his long frame from the chair and picked up the dictionary, one of three books that I simply couldn’t start a business without. The other two were from my first year in law school. Mansfield always looked elegant, even in tan pants and a blue shirt. Sometimes, like today, he wore an ascot, which was so out of place in Parkers that it looked natural. At the Willard Hotel, I would have placed an ascot as among the most pompous of apparel, belonging either to a dandy or a nutcase. But Mansfield pulled it off, the way a fur coat looks all right in church if the lady is elegant in every stitch. Burl was that way, with leather docksider shoes that were richly brown, not scuffed or polished. His brown leather belt was wide, and catalog proper for the ensemble. I made a mental note to dress that way myself, although it seemed unlikely to happen. I just can’t seem to shake the inevitability of wrinkles.
Mansfield Burlington picked the dictionary from my desk, flipped through the early pages, and ran his finger to the correct word. He stood erect and read from the dictionary: “Blenny. Any of several small, spiny-finned fishes of the family Blenniidae, having a long, tapering body. Blennius, a kind of fish. Blennos slime, mucus: so called from its slimy coating.”
He looked up. “Now tell me that isn’t the man you so ceremoniously pulled from the depths of the Bay.”
“That’s him,” I replied. “But is that his reputation? Slimy?”
“I rather like the term, ‘spiny-finned,’” Burl said. “Reminds me of a skinny little man I met in Paris. I commissioned a painting he never painted, but he took my money, tried to take my girlfriend, and denied it all till the day he went to jail for forgery.”
“Before you launch into another historical tirade on the French, tell me about the Blenny Man,” I said.
“Insurance,” Burl said. “I think he sells it because he looks so much like death that it frightens people into buying. Also, he has no shame and will push himself into any gathering.”
“Burl, I’ve never heard you so expansive in your disgust for someone,” I said. “What did this guy do to you?”
Burl was really warming to the task. “You know when you look through the security hole in your door, and there’s a distorted face with fat cheeks looking back at you – that’s Ray Herbst. I’ve known him for years. Everything about him is distorted.”
“Well, he doesn’t know much about the water,” I ventured.
“More than you think,” Burl responded. “He probably was taking a leak when he fell off the boat. That could happen to anybody. Blenny has had a hundred boats in his life; he prowls around the marshes of this place and turns up on remote islands for every crab festival there is.”
“Why are you so down on him?” I asked.
“The resort,” Burl said, looking at the floor. “He’s fighting it.”
“But so are you.”
“That makes it worse. He’s on my side,” Burl said. “But I don’t believe him. I’m telling you, Neddie, if the Blenny Man darts in here to say thanks for saving his dark heart, grab your belt cause he’s trying to steal your pants.”
Mansfield was becoming a bit of a grump in his old age. But I could see why he was one of the most respected men in the county. He helped everyone who asked for it, and he helped in ways that mattered. He doesn’t give money to charities, probably because he doesn’t have a lot, but he gives himself. He attends all the church dinners, Elks Club bingo nights, and oyster feasts, usually wearing his own apron that’s dark blue with red letters on the front that