TO-WIT: THE EIGHT BILLION WAYS TO LIE
Art Clark slowly hung up the telephone on his desk and took a deep, contemplative breath. It was late in the afternoon and it had up to now been a nice enough day, one of the few in recent years in which he hadn’t fantasized about throttling the bejesus out of someone or other.
Rancid cigar smoke, the only palpable remains of a wasted client conference he had had earlier in the day, pecked at his nostrils from the ashtray across the room. Remnants of smoke remained, and the late afternoon sun pierced through the window blinds and haze to cast an eerie shadow of repeating vertical stripes into the room and across to the wall behind him. He sat there for a long, unbillable time, thinking about the conversation he had just had.
“Your wife is on the phone,” Miss Murgatroyd, his secretary, notified him through the intercom. He ignored them both, instead placing a call to Billy Vitornot, his best friend since childhood.
“I just got off the phone with my best client, a guy I’ve represented for more than thirty years,” he told Billy, “and he just lied to me, he flat out lied. He’s never done that before.”
“You get no sympathy from me,” Billy replied. “I’m a psychologist, remember? You think all my male patients mean it when they say they really don’t “want” their mommies, if you catch my drift? If you don’t like being lied to, hey, start representing another species.”
Art went home in a funk. Over the course of the sullen evening, neither he nor Jack Daniels could figure it out. Why would his client lie to him?
Sometime past the witching hour, he turned on his computer and googled “why clients lie to their lawyers.” The little hourglass spun and spun for a really long time and when it stopped whirling Art stared at the screen in disbelief; there were more than five million hits.
Wildly he began to scroll through the results, moving his forefinger over the mouse wheel so fast and hard that it soon began to throb. He could hardly believe what he read. There was lying by word, by deed, by silence, by presence, by absence, by writing, by oath, by pledge, by signature, by body language, the list went on and on and on. Some lies were just plain obvious, others quite sophisticated and inventive.
On hit 3,542,875 he paused. There was the translation of a treatise written by Perpetonio Lybaldli, a 14th century lawyer/alchemist who had calculated that between content and presentation there were eight billion different combinations of lies clients could tell. He posited that once all those had occurred all lawyers would be by the blackest of arts turned into dentists. He shuddered uncontrollably at the thought.
That morning he got to work early. The rancid cigar smell had lingered and when he opened the blinds the same vertical shadows reappeared. He sat there catatonically until the familiar noises of his secretary’s arrival stirred him into action. He picked up the phone and dialed his client; the secretary answered
“Good morning, Jez,” he said, “Is he in?” “Good morning, she replied, “he said to say he’s off on a three-hump, blind camel ride and expects it to be very slow going. He won’t be back anytime soon.”
Yet another lie. Art hung up the phone and slowly sat back in his chair again. At first imperceptibly, then increasingly, his jaw began to hurt. Soon it became quite painful and started to throb. He rubbed his jaw and felt around inside his mouth with his tongue. “Must be a damn cavity,” he thought. “Miss Murgatroyd,” he called out, “where did we put those pliers?”
© 2019, S. Sponte, Esq.