Jennifer Parker was not only on the evening news – she was the evening news. The story of her delivering a dead canary to the District Attorney’s star witness was irresistible. Every television channel had pictures of Jennifer leaving Judge Waldman’s chambers, fighting her way out of the courthouse, besieged by the press and the public.
Jennifer could not believe the sudden horrifying publicity that was being showered on her. They were hammering at her from all sides: television reporters, radio reporters and newspaper people. She wanted desperately to flee from them, but her pride would not let her.
‘Who gave you the yellow canary, Miss Parker?’
‘Have you ever met Michael Moretti?’
‘Did you know that Di Silva was planning to use this case to get into the governor’s office?’
‘The District Attorney says he’s going to have you disbarred. Are you going to fight it?’
To each question Jennifer had a tight-lipped ‘No comment.’
On the CBS evening news they called her ‘Wrong-Way Parker,’ the girl who had gone off in the wrong direction. An ABC newsman referred to her as the ‘Yellow Canary.’ On NBC, a sports commentator compared her to Roy Riegels, the football player who had carried the ball to his own team’s one-yard line.
In Tony’s Place, a restaurant that Michael Moretti owned, a celebration was taking place. There were a dozen men in the room, drinking and boisterous.
Michael Moretti sat alone at the bar, in an oasis of silence, watching Jennifer Parker on television. He raised his glass in a salute to her and drank.
Lawyers everywhere discussed the Jennifer Parker episode. Half of them believed she had been bribed by the Mafia, and the other half that she had been an innocent dupe. But no matter which side they were on, they all concurred on one point: Jennifer Parker’s short career as an attorney was finished.
She had lasted exactly four hours.
She had been born in Kelso, Washington, a small timber town founded in 1847 by a homesick Scottish surveyor who named it for his home town in Scotland.
Jennifer’s father was an attorney, first for the lumber companies that dominated the town, then later for the workers in the sawmills. Jennifer’s earliest memories of growing up were filled with joy. The state of Washington was a storybook place for a child, full of spectacular mountains and glaciers and national parks. There were skiing and canoeing and, when she was older, ice climbing on glaciers and pack trips to places with wonderful names: Ohanapecosh and Nisqually and Lake Cle Elum and Chenuis Falls and Horse Heaven and the Yakima Valley. Jennifer learned to climb on Mount Rainier and to ski at Timberline with her father.
Her father always had time for her, while her mother, beautiful and restless, was mysteriously busy and seldom at home. Jennifer adored her father. Abner Parker was a mixture of English and Irish and Scottish blood. He was of medium height, with black hair and green-blue eyes. He was a compassionate man with a deep-rooted sense of justice. He was not interested in money, he was interested in people. He would sit and talk to Jennifer by the hour, telling her about the cases he was handling and the problems of the people who came into his unpretentious little office, and it did not occur to Jennifer until years later that he talked to her because he had no one else with whom to share things.
After school Jennifer would hurry over to the courthouse to watch her father at work. If court was not in session she would hang around his office, listening to him discuss his cases and his clients. They never talked about her going to law school; it was simply taken for granted.
When Jennifer was fifteen she began spending her summers working for her father. At an age when other girls were dating boys and going steady, Jennifer was absorbed in lawsuits and wills.
Boys were interested in her, but she seldom went out. When her father would ask her why, she would reply, ‘They’re all so young, Papa.’ She knew that one day she would marry a lawyer like her father.
On Jennifer’s sixteenth birthday, her mother left town with the eighteen-year-old son of their next-door neighbor, and Jennifer’s father quietly died. It took seven years for his heart to stop beating, but he was dead from the moment he heard the news about his wife. The whole town knew and was sympathetic, and that, of course, made it worse, for Abner Parker was a proud man. That was when he began to drink. Jennifer did everything she could to comfort him but it was no use, and nothing was ever the same again.
The next year, when it came time to go to college, Jennifer wanted to stay home with her father, but he would not hear of it.
‘We’re going into partnership, Jennie,’ he told her. ‘You hurry up and get that law degree.’
When she was graduated she enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle to study law. During the first year of school, while Jennifer’s classmates were flailing about in an impenetrable swamp of contracts, torts, property, civil procedure and criminal law, Jennifer felt as though she had come home. She moved into the university dormitory and got a job at the Law Library.
Jennifer loved Seattle. On Sundays, she and an Indian student named Ammini Williams and a big, rawboned Irish girl named Josephine Collins would go rowing on Green Lake in the heart of the city, or attend the Gold Cup races on Lake Washington and watch the brightly colored hydroplanes flashing by.
There were great jazz clubs in Seattle, and Jennifer’s favorite was Peter’s Poop Deck, where they had crates with slabs of wood on top instead of tables.
Afternoons, Jennifer, Ammini and Josephine would meet at The Hasty Tasty, a hangout where they had the best cottage-fried potatoes in the world.
There were two boys who pursued Jennifer: a young, attractive medical student named Noah Larkin and a law student named Ben Munro; and from time to time Jennifer would go out on dates with them, but she was far too busy to think about a serious romance.
The seasons were crisp and wet and windy and it seemed to rain all the time. Jennifer wore a green-and-blue-plaid lumber jacket that caught the raindrops in its shaggy wool and made her eyes flash like emeralds. She walked through the rain, lost in her own secret thoughts, never knowing that all those she passed would file away the memory.
In spring the girls blossomed out in their bright cotton dresses. There were six fraternities in a row at the university, and the fraternity brothers would gather on the lawn and watch the girls go by, but there was something about Jennifer that made them feel unexpectedly shy. There was a special quality about her that was difficult for them to define, a feeling that she had already attained something for which they were still searching.
Every summer Jennifer went home to visit her father. He had changed so much. He was never drunk, but neither was he ever sober. He had retreated into an emotional fortress where nothing could touch him again.
He died when Jennifer was in her last term at law school. The town remembered, and there were almost a hundred people at Abner Parker’s funeral, people he had helped and advised and befriended over the years. Jennifer did her grieving in private. She had lost more than a father. She had lost a teacher and a mentor.
After the funeral Jennifer returned to Seattle to finish school. Her father had left her less than a thousand dollars and she had to make a decision about what to do with her life. She knew that she could not return to Kelso to practice law, for there she would always be the little girl whose mother had run off with a teenager.
Because of her high scholastic average, Jennifer had interviews with a dozen top law firms around the country, and received several offers.
Warren Oakes, her criminal law professor, told her: ‘That’s a real tribute, young lady. It’s very difficult for a woman to get into a good law firm.’