SO I'LL TELL YOU. I'll tell you because confession is supposed to be good for the soul, and when choosing between the tonics available -- from religion to Tony Robbins to the friendly late-night chemist -- this unburdening seems to present the least risk. When it comes to my soul, I have adopted a doctor's attitude: First, do no harm.

The complete overthrow of my principles. That was what I had done. A moment in time, and my life -- previously not lived to the highest standards, but plenty respectable -- blew up. The distance between integrity and the loss of innocence proved to be razor-thin, a handful of decisions, frictionless, greased with desire. I thought I was choosing a woman. I thought -- and I have to swallow this back, but it's the truth, and this is the unburdening, after all -- I had earned her. And now she is my ghost, come to judge me.

This is the beginning of moral collapse: to be held captive by a woman's eyes. Looking into hers, my mind went blank. All I knew was that she was in my office, and she was crying, and at some point I asked her to sit down. Her name was Violeta Ramirez, and I ignored her faux leather pocketbook, her Wal-mart dress, the run in her stocking. These were signals that she was in the wrong office, of course, in the same way that a Timex is the wrong watch in a store that sells yachts. But I was looking at her flawless, caramel skin, the deep, black hair pulled back, the fathomless, brown eyes. The familiar script in my body began to play, this hormone washing over these cells, neurons lighting up, a million years of evolution lining up my thoughts like little soldiers.

The clients of Carthy, Williams and Douglas did not generally cry in my office. They were far more likely to rant, curse, or even, when I was lucky, to intently listen. But having paid four hundred dollars an hour for the privilege of occupying the chair opposite me, complaints about their manners were not welcome. A crying woman was something else, however, and I found myself leaping up, asking her if I could get her anything. She was exquisitely beautiful, she was crying, and she could not be ignored.

Caliz was the father of her child, she said. There had been a mistake; he had aggravated the police; they had planted las drogas on him. He was good, if only people understood him. He had a smart mouth, and the police had made him pay. He was no choirboy, she knew that -- was that a bruise hiding underneath her dark makeup? -- but of this, he was innocent.

I don't know if she was aware of the effect she was having on me. I watched, mesmerized, as each tear slipped down her cheek. She crossed her legs, and I caught my breath. It's not that I didn't appreciate most women. I have appreciated them from my earliest memories, from the bosomy warmth of my mother to the incisive intelligence of the female associates at the firm. It's just that feminism doesn't mean anything to the human body, and there was something so uncomplicated and vulnerable in her that I couldn't stop my entire soul from wanting her.

There were obligations, which I met: I explained the firm didn't do drug cases, or for that matter, criminal law of any kind. The crying had gotten worse then, and in the end I couldn't even bring up the obvious impossibility of her paying my fee. But it wouldn't have mattered, because Carthy, Williams and Douglas would sooner invite the archangel of death into their offices than defend a drug dealer. So I simply said that my hands were tied, which was true. I did not have the power to change the rules of the firm. She rose, shook my hand, and crept from my office in tears and humiliation. Hours after she left, the image of her lingered. I stared at the chair where she had been, willing her back. For two days, I couldn't do a thing at the office. At last I called her, telling her I would see what I could do. The truth is, I would have moved heaven and earth to see her again.

It was work selling the idea to the firm. By meticulous design, Carthy, Williams and Douglas was as far away from legal aid as it was possible to get. Its offices occupied three floors of the Tower Walk building in Buckhead, the part of Atlanta where it's a crime to be either old or poor. And if anybody was going to go play in the slums for a few days, it wasn't likely to be me, Jack Hammond. At three years out of law school, I had just moved to Atlanta -- the magnet that pulls together the shards of humanity from all over the Southeast -- was working seventy-hour weeks, and generally outspending my salary with a vengeance. I couldn't afford any detours. But in spite of this, I made an appointment with founding partner Frank Carthy.

Carthy was seventy years old and had come up when pro bono work was a part of every big firm's responsibility. Until the early 1980s it had been expected, and judges had handed it out as a part of the obligation of the profession. That had suited him fine; he was an old-school southern liberal, with a soft spot for civil rights cases. He still told stories about getting protesters out of jail in the 1960s, mostly for things like being the wrong color to sit at a particular place in a restaurant. So even though he would resist a drug case, he might be attracted to a case about a crying girl and false arrest based on race.

I didn't see Carthy much; within the hierarchy of the firm he occupied Mount Olympus, rarely descending into Hades two floors below him where the new associates worked. In spite of working my ass off -- mostly to live down growing up in Dothan, Alabama, with an adolescence so ordinary it could have been cut out of cardboard -- my access to the gods of the firm was limited. I had arrived with the impression that I was in possession of a significant legal gift. What I discovered at Carthy, Williams and Douglas was that being the smartest little boy in Dothan, Alabama, was like being the shiniest diamond in a pool of mud. So in a way, just having something to talk about with a founding partner was a boost to my prospects.

I knew the second I told him I had hit a nerve. For a while, I was actually worried he would volunteer to try it with me. For Carthy, a millionaire several times over, taking a case like this was the equivalent of standing outside a grocery store for a couple of hours with a red cup for the Salvation Army, except he wouldn't risk getting wet: it was good for the soul. He probably assumed that this expression of legal largesse would be a minor diversion, likely taking only a few hours. Drug court -- a tiny courtroom attached to the police station, with seating for only ten people -- was little more than a revolving door.

I went to meet Caliz the next morning, which required a trip to the inner recesses of the Fulton County Jail. The smell of that place is the atmospheric accumulation of everything unpleasant when things go horribly wrong. It is composed of equal parts human misery, sweat, and indifferent bureaucracy, of metal filing cabinets and the homeless and overweight cops and fluorescent lighting that has never been turned off. I followed a wordless guard to a nondescript room with two metal chairs and a long table.

Caliz came in a couple of minutes later, and it took me no time at all to dislike him. Still in his early twenties, he already had the insolent, blank stare of the small-time thug. His eyes were pools of detached anger, precursors to sociopathic behavior. Whatever he lacked in that department, he would certainly find after a couple of years at the school for cruelty known as state prison. Getting a straight story out of him was impossible, his ability to lie having already become effortless. He looked right at me, expressionless, and said, "No, la policía put las drogas in the car. I never take las drogas. Bad for you. I stay away."

Horseshit, I thought, which wasn't strictly the point. The real question was why his car had been pulled over in the first place, and why, after a brief but unfriendly conversation, the backseat of his car had been removed, disassembled, and his trunk thoroughly searched. Bad attitudes didn't void the Constitution.

Pitting the word of Miguel Caliz against the Atlanta Police would not be a walk in the park, except I met the arresting officers later that afternoon, and they were exactly as Caliz described. That was the moment I knew for certain that Caliz would walk, whether or not he was guilty. The two policemen were a couple of mean-spirited assholes who couldn't keep their dispositions off their faces. They reminded me of Caliz himself: they were bullies, making their living off the pain of society. It was simple human nature, therefore -- people despising being reminded of their own short-comings -- that Caliz would bring out the worst in them. I could see it in their eyes: they didn't like Latinos, they didn't like Caliz, and above all, they didn't like people they couldn't scare. If I put together a jury with the right disposition, just looking at those officers would be all it would take to spring Caliz.

None of that explained what happened, how I took his girlfriend to dinner, how for three or four hours the conversation drifted easily into areas she knew nothing about: law school, the summer I had backpacked across Europe -- it was only three weeks, but we were a couple of drinks into it by now -- how the cost of a really good bottle of wine wasn't something to compare with other, lesser things. In fact, I knew very little of these matters, but she had watched me with those shining, dark eyes, which was enough. It was a wet fall evening, and she had huddled close to me as we walked past the shops in Buckhead, a world she couldn't reasonably expect to ever call her own. She was wearing what ghetto girls always wear when they go someplace decent -- something black, a little too tight, a little too short.

The word seduction implies a victim, and there is too much confusion about what happened next to assign the word here. Certainly, I found myself wondering what it would be like to lose myself in her beauty, to see myself in her dark, shining eyes. And after a few hours I invited her home -- I fumbled the invitation a little, but she didn't seem to notice -- still telling myself we were only going to talk, to spend some time together. But inside my apartment she brushed against me, bringing her breasts against my chest, and I pulled her to me, determined to treat her like the angel I wanted her to be. My sin was not lust. My sin was the sin of Satan, who wanted to be like God. I wanted to be the savior of the earthbound Violeta Ramirez, and I wanted her to worship me for doing it.

The next morning there was a rustle of sheets beside me, her exquisitely feminine scent creeping over me as I woke, making me dizzy. She sighed deeply and turned over, her light brown backside coming up against my hip. I closed my eyes and felt something like euphoria, only deeper, earthier. Her sleeping was so deep, so untroubled, that I marveled once again how God, with His infinite capacity for irony, so often paired angels like Violeta with losers like Caliz. Maybe I was romanticizing. I'm certain that I was, because at that point in my life I still had that capacity. Maybe she had a bad-boy complex. Maybe she was working through some father issues by dating a guy like Caliz. Maybe she was like me, and just wanted someone of her own to save. Caliz certainly fit that bill. The mind is infinitely complex.

Lying awake beside her in bed, I didn't know if what happened between us was romantic or cheap. There was so little context, and I never had the chance to find out. One of God's tricks is to cloud the human mind at the moment of mating with so much angel dust that it's only in looking back at things that you can discover what they really meant. We fall in love and then, on the fourth date, we wonder who the hell we're with. I do know that when Violeta finally awakened and started to dress, she looked even more beautiful to me than the night before. It hit me how extraordinary sex was, that she was walking around with me inside her, every strand of genetic code containing the purest essence of myself. Inside her warm body was every detail of who I am, and I felt extravagantly, marvelously happy.

We didn't speak much before she left. She dressed and slipped away gracefully, without imposition or demand. She left me with my task: in other words, to get Miguel Caliz out of jail. If nothing else, I owed her that. And after what had just happened, I owed him that.

I had to buy him clothes. I paid for them myself, probably out of a sense of penance. I knew I had crossed an ethical line, although lately the lines were moving so quickly that I wasn't sure where they were. I only knew one thing for certain, that winning was the most ethical thing of all.

I met Caliz at the jail to give him the suit, and he accepted it without a word. I waited for him to dress to go over his testimony. He looked good, but not slick, which was the idea. I didn't want the jurors to know I had dressed him, so the suit I brought was cheapish, nothing too stylish.

Ten minutes into the trial, I realized it didn't matter. I had planned carefully, ready to cite the most cutting-edge legal opinions on constitutional law, from search and seizure to racial profiling. I never had the chance. Everyone in the courtroom was spellbound as they watched the police officer on the stand blowing up, his face covered with ill-concealed loathing for all things brown in the inner city of Atlanta. I actually wondered how long the prosecuting attorney would let it go on. But she had no choice. The policeman was the arresting officer, and without his testimony, there was no case. In spite of his angry, narrow eyes, sarcastic tone, and generally hate-filled countenance, she had to keep asking him questions. The jury -- there had never been a question in my mind whether or not to ask for a jury -- was more than half Latino, and they were hating him back with a combined hundred years or so of built-up resentment.

Caliz himself had helped; like a lot of cons, the kid could act. His expression, with me suspicious and dangerous, transformed itself into victimized fear. His voice trembled. The officers had pulled him over because of his skin. He was humiliated. They had searched him because they didn't like his accent. Of course he knew about drugs. Everybody in his neighborhood knew about them. But he had never taken them in his life.

It took less than an hour for the jury to acquit. There was some satisfaction in that, I suppose. I had to take satisfaction where I could get it, because I didn't get any from Caliz. He didn't shake my hand when he heard the verdict. Instead, he turned and looked at Violeta, who was sitting quietly behind the two of us. Which was the moment I began to wonder who was driving the train I was on.

I thought about her that night, missing her. I was confused, wondering what she was doing. Was she flat on her back, happily letting Caliz replace my heritage with his own? Or was she declaring her independence, telling him having her man in and out of jail wasn't acceptable anymore? I wanted to will her back into my bed, to feel her legs wrapped around me, to lose myself again in her dark hair and eyes. The next morning, submerged into my normal life, she floated in and out of my mind, coalescing in my memory. I very nearly called her, formulating some banal question to ask, some bit of paperwork needing to be signed.

I did not yet understand the chasm between normal and criminal thinking. To Caliz, it didn't matter whether or not Violeta had sacrificed herself to get him the kind of legal expertise he could never afford on his own. It only mattered that he was the kind of angry young man who beats the woman in his life. If she had seduced me on his orders, maybe he just suspected that she had enjoyed herself too much. I never found out. I only know that two days after I got him out of jail, he beat her to death.

The coroner explained to me that when he broke her jaw she would have stopped begging him for mercy. But it was when he broke her ribs that she stopped breathing. Respiration wouldn't have continued for long, what with the punctured lung, the rapid and inevitable buildup of fluid around the heart. He testified that she would have survived between four and six minutes.

No one was able to testify what Miguel Caliz had on his mind while he was beating the hell out of Violeta Ramirez. He might have been taking revenge on her for breaking the foremost rule of dating a thug: never cheat. He might, on the other hand, have felt nothing at all. He might have been as calm as a hot, airless Atlanta day in summer. But either way, Violeta Ramirez was dead.

I learned what happened when I was served witness papers in the middle of a lunch with clients at 103 West, a trendy and expensive restaurant in Buckhead. I smiled apologetically for the intrusion, set down my glass of pinot noir, and read the handful of lines that were to blow up my world. Caliz's lawyer this time was cheap -- I had never heard of the firm -- but not so cheap that he didn't know there was sympathy for his client in the fact that I had just slept with his girlfriend. So my deposition would be required.

Some weeks later I put my hand on a Bible and swore that my name was Jack Hammond, and these were my sins. But a judge isn't a priest, and he didn't offer any penance. I would have to find that on my own. He did, however, use the word reprehensible in his admonishment to me before I was excused. That word was powerful enough for the firm of Carthy, Williams and Douglas. They did not desire to have a person who committed that word in their employment. The tawdriness of what happened to the girl was not a positive reflection on the firm, and I was on the street.

For several weeks, I didn't turn off the lights in my bedroom. I simply sat, watching the hours click by slowly. Eventually, my body demanded its due, and I closed my eyes. But it was a dangerous sleep, and there was no protection in it.

It means nothing at all to me that Miguel Caliz will spend the next several decades in a federal penitentiary. Locking up Caliz did nothing to restrict the memory of Violeta Ramirez. That memory continues to haunt me, both in daylight and dark.

The complete overthrow of my principles. That was what I had done. And here I make confession, for the benefit of my soul. But even as I confess, I know that the scar remains. Until I make this one thing right in my life, I will have no peace.

Copyright © 2004 by Reed Arvin