Before I Sleep

by Rachel Lee

  Of course, she would rather have hit her thumb with a hammer than admit that to Seamus. In many respects he was a caring, sensitive, modern man, but in others he was a definite throwback to the caveman. Heaven forbid she should pander to his male ego.

  Twenty minutes later, they pulled into her driveway. It was getting near midnight, but it was Friday night, and some of the lights in the houses around were still on. As she pulled up into the carport, she glanced at her door and wondered with an uneasy lurch of her stomach what was all over it now. It looked like a bunch of white rectangles.

  She climbed out and waited for Seamus to join her on the sidewalk. He was carrying his gun now.

  “Maybe I'd better go first,” he said.

  “Why? You think a bunch of nastygrams is going to kill me?”

  “You don't know what might be written on them.”

  “They're not sticks and stones,” she said, referring to the old nursery rhyme.

  “Maybe not, but words can do a damn fine job of scaring you.”

  “Just how far are you going to carry this protection business? You want me to climb into a bell jar you can put on the mantlepiece?”

  “I don't have a fireplace.” He shook his head. “Okay, okay, but don't say I didn't try to spare you.”

  “I'd rather know what I'm up against.”

  When they got to the stoop, they could see that a variety of envelopes were taped to the door with cellophane tape. None of them had anything written on the outside.

  “We shouldn't touch them,” Seamus said. “Fingerprints.”

  “Now I need the St. Pete PD to open my mail? I think not.”

  “Carey, you of all people should know better than to ruin potential evidence.”

  Just then the door of the next town house opened and her neighbor, Julius Blandford, stepped out.

  “Are you all right, Carey? I heard voices.”

  “I'm fine, Julius. This is Seamus Rourke, with the police.” The last thing she wanted was to have her neighbors gossiping about the fact that she'd brought a man home at midnight.

  “Oh. That's good. We're all kind of worried about you. We saw your door.”

  “Ugly, isn't it? Anyway, we're just trying to decide what to do about all these envelopes. Do you have any idea who put them here?”

  “Sure. Folks from around here. Maybe something from the property owners’ association about getting the door fixed.” He chuckled. “You know how they are. No violations allowed.”

  “Well, the insurance adjuster can't get out here until Monday morning, so they'll have to wait at least that long.”

  “Like it's a crisis or something. If you need anything, just holler. We're all trying to keep an eye out for you.”

  “Thanks, Julius. Thanks an awful lot.”

  “It's the least neighbors can do. I just wish one of us had seen the guy who did it.” He said good night and went back inside.

  Carey reached for the envelopes and pulled all ten of them off the door. “I think that settles the fingerprint issue.”

  “Probably.”

  They stepped inside and Carey dumped her laptop and sweater on the lowboy beside the door. “Decaf?”

  “In a minute. Call me paranoid, but I want to check out the house first. You just wait here by the door. If you hear anything suspicious, run like hell.”

  She didn't think he was being paranoid, though she didn't say so. Truth was, it made her feel good that he was going to look around before he left her here alone. She didn't even mind that he was going to be looking into the private places of her life.

  He was back in less than ten minutes, gun holstered. “Everything looks fine. Windows are locked, closets are empty, no bogeyman under the beds.”

  “Thanks.” She carried the envelopes into the kitchen, where she tossed them on the table, then set about making a pot of coffee. She was hungry, too, not having eaten since a light meal just before she left for work, so she pulled out the griddle, whipped some eggs and milk together, and began to make French toast.

  “So tell me,” Seamus said, “how do you get it to brown just right? I never do.”

  “What? The toast? I don't know. Patience, I guess. How many slices do you want?”

  “Four. Five. I'm starved.”

  She melted butter on the griddle, then slapped the first four slices of soaked bread on, sprinkling them generously with cinnamon. By then the coffee was done, and she carried a couple of mugs to the table, where she sat and began to open the envelopes.

  One by one she read the brief notes, and one by one she passed them to Seamus. By the time she finished, her eyes were damp. Ten of her neighbors had taken the time to pen her notes telling her they were sorry her door had been vandalized, assuring her they didn't share the opinion of the vandal, and promising to keep an eye on her property.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Seamus remarked as he set the last one aside.

  “It's sure a pleasant contrast to what I found on my door this morning.”

  “I'm working a case in a different kind of neighborhood now. Everybody swears they didn't see a thing, and I don't believe them.”

  “The one where that young man was shot while he was riding his bicycle?”

  “The same. You know something about it?”

  “Only what was in the papers.”

  She went to flip the toast, then leaned back against the counter. “Did you find out anything about the Summers case?”

  “Nothing you didn't already know. The nightgown that was slashed didn't belong to her. Somebody broke in through glass patio doors in the back of the house, out of sight of any neighbors or passersby. No prints left behind. They're still checking out the carpet sweepings, but it probably won't help much. She entertains a lot.”

  Carey snorted. “Yeah. A lot from what I hear.”

  “So it was probably an angry ex-boyfriend. Summers thinks it was something to do with her—and I quote— ‘hard-hitting investigative series about the local drug trade.’ “

  “She would.”

  He gave her a crooked smile. “Why do I get the feeling you don't like her?”

  “Because she's a blond bimbo who mistakes poorly thought-out opinion pieces for being real reportage.”

  “Ouch. The claws are out tonight.”

  “At least I have the sense to realize that what I do is entertainment.”

  “You could have fooled me the last few days.”

  She shrugged, not liking him very much at the moment. “So I picked up an issue I care about. I wasn't deluded enough to think that was news.”

  “It's news now.”

  “Not my fault.”

  He leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee, regarding her steadily. “It is your fault,” he said finally. “You're never going to convince me you don't know exactly how much power you wield when you get behind that microphone. On any night of the week, you have a half million listeners. There aren't many people who can claim that kind of podium. When you pick a topic of major public interest, your show becomes news.”

  “A sidebar. All I do is provide a forum.”

  “You've been doing more than that the last few days. And you know it as well as I do, Carey. You've picked the issue, and you've campaigned for it. You didn't just throw it out for public discussion. You had an agenda.”

  “So?”

  “So it's news when somebody with that big a podium starts campaigning on a particular issue. If you were talking about people who insist on passing someone who's just put his turn signal on, that might not draw a whole lot of attention. But you're talking about how the death penalty is applied in this state, which is a screamingly hot political issue, and you're using all the might of your microphone to do it. You become the news along with the issue, and I don't for one moment believe you thought you were merely being entertaining.”

  She gave up the battle and put the French toast on a plate. She put another three slices on the griddle to brown, one more for Seamus and two for
herself. He was right, of course. And more than once she had used her show in ways that didn't have solely to do with entertainment. Much as she liked to believe herself a cynic, she often came uncomfortably close to playing Don Quixote.

  “You can't make the whole world play fair, Carey.”

  She felt her shoulders and neck stiffen with resistance. “I know that.”

  “Do you?” He sighed audibly, and she heard his chair scrape on the floor as he moved. “I think you keep trying to tell yourself that.”

  She didn't want to look at him. Seamus had always had an uncanny knack for finding the parts of her that made her most uncomfortable.

  It was a minute or so before he spoke again. “You never told me exactly why you resigned from the State Attorney's Office. Was it because of the Otis verdict?”

  She wanted to say that it had been, but that wouldn't have been truthful. There had been a time when she had cared enough about Seamus's opinion of her to shade the truth, but not anymore. He had hurt her as much as he could hurt her, and had told her what he really thought of her, and it didn't matter anymore. She couldn't let it matter.

  “The verdict was the next-to-last straw,” she said, watching steam rise from the griddle as the toast cooked. “But at the time … at the time I was confused about it. I wasn't really certain that I was right. I mean … wiser heads than mine thought Otis was guilty. So …” She trailed off and tilted her head back a little, drawing a deep breath. “So I doubted my own feelings about it. And I was a chicken.”

  “Chicken? What more could you have done?”

  “Just about anything!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I could have made some of those arguments I drove you crazy with to someone who could have done something about them!”

  When he at last spoke, he sounded almost tentative, like a man who knew he was stepping into a minefield. “You … didn't share those arguments at work?”

  “I not only didn't share them, I never even mentioned that I had doubts!” Her voice was sharp with anger, grief, guilt, and self-loathing. She sounded like a woman on the edge of hysterics and maybe she was.

  “I thought …”

  She knew exactly what he thought. Night after night she had come home and dumped her doubts, arguments, and objections on him. Why wouldn't he assume she was making the same case at work?

  “Actually,” she said, her voice thick, “I never said a word.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because! Because it was my first death-penalty case! What the hell did I know about it? I was a gofer, go here, go there, take a deposition, check a story, answer a motion with a specified argument—I had no autonomy! Worse, I'd bought into the prosecutorial mind-set. Charge and try, charge and try, to hell with what kind of case you've got, just put it in front of a jury. Let the jury decide. Let the judge decide. Our job was just to make sure we charged everybody and tried everybody. It wasn't our job to decide who was guilty. That was somebody else's burden. Our job was just to do our damnedest to make everybody else think the guy was guilty.”

  “I … see.”

  “No, I don't think you do. Do you know how many cases get settled by plea bargain when we know damn well we don't have a case strong enough for conviction? Loads of them, Seamus. Put a weak case in front of the prosecutor, and he or she will play a game of poker with the defendant, and win more often than not simply because the defendant isn't willing to take the risk that the jury might convict him anyway, and he might get a worse sentence. We play God with people's lives every single hour of the day, and count on them being too scared or too poor to really fight us. Finally, we even have ourselves convinced that they wouldn't plead out if they weren't guilty.

  “Well let me tell you, that's one of the biggest delusions in the legal system. But the biggest delusion of all is the one the judge and jury have, that the defendant wouldn't be in court if he hadn't committed the crime. The nicest part of that one is that a prosecutor can tell herself that the judge or jury wouldn't have convicted if the guy weren't guilty. It's an easy, comfortable way to look at the system, and you get to buying in to the whole idea that where there's smoke there must be fire. The guy was arrested, so he must have done something.”

  “Most of the time that's probably true.”

  “I'm glad you're so sure of that, because I'm sure as hell not.” She turned and faced him. “Then comes the Otis case. I'm already believing the idea that if the guy was arrested, he probably did it. But the case was so weak, we tried a plea bargain. Did you know that? But the defense attorney said we didn't have a leg to stand on, John Otis said he didn't do it and wouldn't say he did, and the media got so hot to trot that the State Attorney figured he'd never get reelected if he didn't go to trial for the death penalty.”

  Seamus nodded, saying nothing.

  “So we go forward with the prosecution. From the instant that decision was made, no word of doubt was allowed. Why not? Because the jury would decide. It would be on the jury's head. And honest to God, Seamus, I never thought any jury would send a man to death on that lousy case. I got through the entire pretrial and trial periods by believing that twelve honest men and women couldn't possibly execute a man based on circumstantial evidence, not without one scintilla of real physical evidence to link the man to the murders. God, I was so wrong!”

  “Carey …”

  But she turned her back on him and flipped the French toast with angry movements. She didn't want to look at him right now. “And all the way through that, I'd come home at night and express my doubts and you'd argue with me. You'd tell me I was thinking with my heart, not my mind. You'd tell me I wasn't being logical. You'd tell me I was wrong! Well, I was twenty-nine years old, with only four years as a lawyer under my belt, and I honest to God didn't have enough confidence to stand up and object when the whole damn world was telling me just how wrong I was.

  “And for that I am never, ever going to forgive myself!”

  “Jesus.” He spoke the word softly, almost prayerfully.

  She suddenly felt tired, beaten. When she spoke, her voice was heavy. “Worst of all, I was just simply afraid of losing my job.”

  His chair scraped again, and the next thing she knew, his hands were on her shoulders, squeezing gently. “I'm sorry.”

  She couldn't even make herself answer. There wasn't enough air in the room to fill her lungs. She tried to draw a breath, and her diaphragm refused to budge. Her throat tightened until it hurt, and not even to save her life could she have made a sound.

  “I'm sorry,” he said again, and turned her around. He pulled her gently against his chest, wrapped her in his strong arms and held her close, as if he wanted to shelter her from all of life's outrageousness. “I'm sorry. I didn't understand…”

  She refused to cry. Much as it would have eased the tightness in her chest and the ache in her throat, she refused to give in. She had cried her eyes out for many nights when she and Seamus had split, and she hadn't cried once since then. She wasn't about to start now, and she wasn't about to do it in his arms. Ever.

  But she couldn't force herself to draw away from the haven he offered, a haven she needed more than she had realized. Her self-image of a competent, independent, cynical, tough, hard-nosed entertainer had just been stripped away, and she wanted to hate him for it.

  But she couldn't.

  He had touched the throbbing nerve that had been torturing her since word of the death warrant had reached her, and the pain had blossomed into an all-consuming agony. None of the words she so easily tossed about had really expressed what it was that was hurting her.

  She had helped sentence a man to death, and she hadn't done one little thing to prevent it. She hadn't once spoken up where it might have counted. She hadn't even refused to be a party to the case. Instead she had gone along in cowardly cooperation, always reassuring herself that at some point the system would see what she saw, and John Otis would not be sent to death. For the last five years, s
he had promised herself that one of his appeals would triumph.

  Instead, his death warrant had been signed, and now, when it was too late to save him, she didn't think she was going to be able to live with herself ever again. She was guilty of the worst possible crime of conscience, the crime of silence. The crime of going along. The crime of expecting others to do what she didn't have the gumption to do herself.

  And there was no way to make it better.

  “You can't blame yourself,” Seamus said. He lifted a hand and stroked her hair gently. “Sweetie, even if you'd shot off your mouth until you got fired, the case would have gone forward. You're right, it was a political hot potato. No amount of protest would have kept it from going to trial. What you did or didn't do had no effect on the outcome.”

  She sucked in a large gasp of air and pulled her head away from his shoulder. She couldn't stand him right now. Rationalization was an ugly thing, and no matter how he rationalized for her, there was no escaping the fact that she had failed in her ethical duty as a lawyer and her moral responsibility as a human being.

  She turned away and tossed the French toast onto the plates, then switched off the stove. When she turned again to face him, with a plate in each hand, her face was as composed as a stone sculpture. “You like syrup, don't you?”

  He nodded, watched her closely, as if he were afraid she was going to explode into a million pieces of screaming, deadly shrapnel.

  She carried the plates to the table, set them down, then moved briskly to get silverware and more coffee for them. When at last she sat facing him, she spread her napkin on her lap and kept her eyes fixed on her plate.

  “Delicious,” Seamus remarked several mouthfuls later.

  “Thank you.”

  He used the edge of the fork to slice off another piece of toast. “So,” he said slowly, “what was the last straw?”

  She looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “You said the verdict was the next-to-last straw.”

  “Oh.” She turned her head to the side, looking at the bow window, wishing it weren't night so she could see the small garden that always gave her a sense of peace. “Well, it was nothing, really. I was assigned a felony case. The charge was battery on a law enforcement officer.”