Act of God

by Susan R. Sloan

  It was well past midnight before the telephone in the McAuliffes’ cozy Magnolia house rang. Dana was waiting, grabbing the receiver on the first ring, hoping it hadn’t awakened Sam.

  “It’s all right,” Craig Jessup told her. “I’ve got everything we need. You can go to bed now, and sleep like a baby.”

  TWELVE

  Mr. Clune, I have just a few questions,” Dana began pleasantly, when court resumed on Wednesday morning.

  “Joshua,” the witness corrected her, with a trusting smile.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m not Mr. Clune,” he said. “I’m just Joshua.”

  “Oh, I see, I’m sorry,” Dana said, smiling back. “All right then, Joshua, who was the first person you told about seeing the delivery man at Hill House?”

  “Big Dug,” he replied. “I told Big Dug.”

  “Who is Big Dug?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “And when you told your friend, what did he say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. Not right then, anyway.”

  “When did he say something?”

  “It was weeks past that, after that man got hisself arrested,” Joshua replied, nodding at the defendant.

  “What did Big Dug say then?”

  “He showed me a picture in the newspaper, and asked me if that was the delivery man I saw.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t know.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  Joshua shrugged. “Because it wasn’t a very good picture.”

  “Then what did Big Dug do?”

  “He took me to the bar where we go sometimes, ’cause they let us sit all night and drink one beer, if we want, and he showed me the man’s picture on the TV.”

  “What did you say then?”

  “I said I didn’t know again.”

  “Do you mean you couldn’t recognize the defendant on the television, just like you couldn’t recognize him from the newspaper?”

  “Yes,” Joshua said.

  “But you went to the police anyway, didn’t you?”

  “Much later, after Big Dug said it was the right thing to do.”

  “And when you talked to the detectives, were you able to identify the man you saw at Hill House?”

  Joshua shook his head. “No. I told them it was dark, and he was too far away.”

  “And what did the detectives say after you talked to them?”

  “They said I wouldn’t have to come here and tell in front of people.”

  “Was that because you couldn’t identify the man you saw at Hill House?”

  “I guess so,” Joshua said.

  Over at the prosecution table, Brian Ayres began to shift uncomfortably in his chair.

  “Then what happened last Saturday?” Dana asked.

  “The police came and put me in jail,” the witness testified. “Big Dug said they wouldn’t, but they did.”

  “And have you been at the police station ever since?”

  Joshua nodded. “Yes, but I don’t want to stay there. I want to go home. I didn’t mean to sleep at Hill House. I told them I was sorry. But Big Dug said I didn’t make the fire happen. If I didn’t make the fire happen, do I have to stay in jail?”

  “No,” Dana said gently. “You won’t have to stay in jail. We’ll see to it that you get to go home.”

  A big smile spread across his face. “That’s good,” he said. “’Cause I really miss my friends.”

  “Joshua, tell me, what happened after the police came and got you on Saturday?”

  “You mean after they put me in jail?”

  “Yes.”

  “They talked to me, first one and then another, all day. I got hungry, and I was sleepy, too, and after a while, I didn’t know what they were saying. Then they gave me food, and let me sleep on a bed. The next day, they talked to me again, like before, all day.”

  “When they talked to you, what did they say?”

  “They talked to me about the delivery man. About how bad a man he was, and how he deserved to be punished for what he did.”

  “What else?”

  “They showed me pictures.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “Of Hill House when it was burned down. And of people lying on the ground.”

  “And they told you the man who did that should be punished?”

  “Yes. Then they showed me pictures of different men, lots of pictures, until I finally remembered the man I saw.”

  Brian scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it to Mark Hoffman.

  “Okay, Joshua, one last question, to put this all together,” Dana said. “Until the police talked to you over the weekend, and showed you all those pictures, you couldn’t identify the defendant as the man you saw at Hill House the night before the bombing, could you?”

  Joshua thought for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “I guess I wasn’t sure about him before that.” Then he smiled brightly, wanting to please. “But I am now.”

  Mark Hoffman did Brian’s bidding and summoned Dale Tinker to the courthouse.

  “Do you want us to lose this case, Tinker?” Brian charged the detective. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the police officer retorted.

  “What you gave us was marginal at best. Did you have to compound it by coercing a witness?”

  “The retard identified the guy, didn’t he?” Tinker replied. “And he stuck to it in court. What do you want from me?”

  “Yeah, he identified him all right, but was it before or after you locked him up for two days and scared the piss out of him?”

  The detective looked at his shoes. “I don’t know how she found out about that,” he mumbled.

  “She’s not the problem, Tinker, you are,” Brian said. “And I’m starting to wonder whether you got any of it right.”

  “You want my badge? Is that what you want?”

  “I want a conviction,” the prosecutor declared. “That’s what I want.”

  “We don’t have the wrong guy,” Tinker insisted. “That son of a bitch did it. I can smell it on him. And I’ve been in this business long enough to know.”

  “I don’t care what you can smell,” Brian told him. “I care what you can prove.”

  “I’m proud of you,” Jefferson Reid declared over the telephone. “I’m proud that you’re my daughter.”

  “Thanks, dad,” Dana said. They had spoken at least once a week since the trial had begun, she seeking him out for guidance and support. But this was the first time he had called her.

  “What you did with that eyewitness was brilliant,” he told her. “You’re taking full advantage of every opportunity they give you.”

  “It’s because I believe in Corey,” she said simply. “I believe the police either stumbled on him, or were led to him, couldn’t believe their good luck, and just held on to him for dear life, to the exclusion of everyone else.”

  “All you need is to establish reasonable doubt,” he told her. “You’ve discredited their eyewitness and you’ve given the jury another person with means, motive, and opportunity to look at.”

  “Jack Pauley had every bit as much reason to bomb the place as Corey did, and no alibi,” she said in disgust. “The police hardly looked at him.”

  “There’s one thing that still niggles at me, though,” he said.

  “I know, the anonymous letter,” she said. “Not so much who sent it, as why. My investigator’s working on it. But he’s also working on half a dozen other things that are just as important, and he’s a one-man operation.”

  “I keep thinking this may be as complicated as a conspiracy,” he mused, “or as simple as someone who really knows something, but didn’t want to come forward personally.”

  “I just don’t think there’s anything to know here,” she told him. “I’m a pretty good judge of character. I know I am. And I couldn’t be so wrong about Co
rey. I just couldn’t.”

  “If nothing else, I admire your loyalty,” her father said with a gentle chuckle. “If I were ever on trial for my life, you’re the one I’d choose to represent me.”

  Those words meant more to her than anything.

  The event was a Seattle institution, the annual black tie dinner of the Coalition for Conservative Causes. Some five hundred people filled the ballroom at the Olympic Four Seasons Hotel, and for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars, dined on lobster bisque and roast squab.

  Each year, someone who exemplified the ideals of the organization was invited as an honored guest. On the dais this year was the Republican nominee for president of the United States, in the middle of a ten-city fund-raising tour.

  It was during the cocktail hour, when the champagne was flowing, and three kinds of caviar were being passed around, that Roger Roark, the executive director, happened upon an acquaintance.

  “Why, Paul Cotter, you old reprobate,” he exclaimed with a friendly slap on the back. “I don’t think we’ve seen you around here in years.”

  “Roger,” the attorney acknowledged, as the rather sizable group surrounding them turned to observe.

  “Come to hobnob with some of the old crowd?” Roark asked.

  “Come to see the nominee in person,” Cotter replied. “If he’s going to be our next president, I wouldn’t say no to an introduction.”

  “It would be my pleasure,” Roark said. “By the way, I hear your firm is involved in that Hill House trial.”

  “We are.”

  Roark shook his head. “Sad case,” he remarked. “In my opinion, it’s a no-win situation, any way you look at it. All those people dead, that poor young man caught in the middle.”

  “Sometimes,” Cotter suggested, with an eye on those listening, “we do things because we have to, not because we want to.”

  “Of course, we do,” the executive director said, slapping the attorney on the back. “Just get the poor slob exonerated, my man. Isn’t that right, everyone?”

  The surrounding group vigorously nodded their agreement.

  THIRTEEN

  Judith Purcell sat on the floor of her bathroom with her head hanging over the toilet. She could not stop vomiting. The nausea had hit her yesterday, when she called Tom Kirby to tell him his shirt was laundered, and the residence hotel operator told her he had checked out.

  “What do you mean, checked out?” she demanded.

  “I mean he’s no longer staying here,” the operator said. “He’s gone back to Los Angeles.”

  “Did you say Los Angeles?” Judith asked, knowing it had to be a mistake. Kirby told her he had come from Detroit.

  “Yes, Los Angeles,” the woman confirmed.

  “Did he leave a forwarding address, or a telephone number?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Thank you,” Judith said automatically, and hung up. She didn’t have a clue what was going on, but perhaps it wasn’t such a big mystery after all, the operator had just gotten it wrong and he was going to Los Angeles, not returning there. It made no sense that he would have lied to her about where he came from. What reason would he have had?

  And then the first wave of nausea hit, because she realized that it didn’t matter where he came from or where he was. What mattered was that he was gone, without so much as a word.

  The next witness for the prosecution was an expert from the United States Navy. He spent Thursday morning testifying, in as great detail as possible without breaching military security, about Corey Latham’s training in weaponry, his undergraduate work in engineering, his acumen with firearms, and his understanding of the fundamentals of precision bombing and warfare.

  Dana’s questions of the expert were few and mostly perfunctory. Corey’s military training was not in dispute, and there was little to be gained by a lengthy cross-examination.

  On Thursday afternoon, Elise Latham’s sister, Ronna Keough, was called to the stand. She wore an ill-fitting navy blue suit and high heels that made her appear taller than she was but pinched her feet.

  “Mrs. Keough, will you please tell the court where you were on the afternoon of September 14 of last year?” Brian inquired.

  “I was with my sister Elise,” Ronna said, clearly uncomfortable with her situation.

  “Exactly where were you and your sister?”

  “We were at Hill House.”

  “Will you tell the court why you and your sister were at Hill House on that particular day?”

  Ronna glared at the prosecutor, then glanced helplessly at Elise, seated in the first row behind the defense table. “We went to Hill House to have an abortion,” she replied, reluctantly. “It was a terrible thing Elise was doing, and she didn’t want to go through it alone.”

  “And you stayed with her at Hill House while she had this procedure?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t in the room, of course. But I waited for her out in the lounge.”

  “And you took her home afterward?”

  “Yes,” Ronna replied. “She was in some discomfort, and pretty emotional about the whole thing.”

  “What sort of discomfort?”

  Ronna sighed. “Mostly, she had cramps, and she was bleeding a bit. The doctor said she might.”

  “The doctor who performed the abortion?”

  “Yes. He gave her some pills to take, and he said she shouldn’t be left alone. So I took her home, made her some soup, gave her the pills, talked to her for a while, and then put her to bed. She was exhausted. She fell right asleep.”

  Suddenly, a woman rose from her seat in the middle of the spectator gallery. “She sleeps the sleep of the devil,” the woman exclaimed. “Her soul will burn in hell for taking that life. And yours, too, for helping her!”

  At that, a second woman jumped up. “Deny a woman’s right to choose,” she cried, “and you deny her the right to exist!”

  Abraham Bendali banged his gavel sharply.

  “Abortion is neither a right nor a choice,” someone else shouted. “Not in God’s eyes!”

  The judge banged his gavel again. “That will be enough,” he ordered, in a voice that in twenty years on the bench had never brooked an argument.

  “If you can’t trust me with a choice,” a woman chanted, ignoring him, “how can you trust me with a child?”

  “I wouldn’t trust you with either,” a man shouted back at her.

  Bendali banged his gavel a third time, and kept on banging it, to no avail. The courtroom erupted. All the restraint of the past month vanished, as emotions burst like water over a dam.

  Allison Ackerman couldn’t believe it. The spectators were ignoring the judge and practically spitting at one another, hurling insults as fast as they could think them up. Not even in her wildest mystery novels had she conceived of such a thing happening. Around her, the other jurors sat wide-eyed.

  Dana was astonished. She had never witnessed a scene like this, not in fourteen years of practice. “This is something that might happen in the movies,” she murmured to Joan Wills, “but not in a real courtroom.”

  “Please don’t obscure the issue here,” Raymond Kiley rose from his seat in the Hill House section to implore. “This isn’t about abortion. It’s about a bombing.”

  “That’s right,” Joe Romanadis said in support. “It’s about a man on trial for murder.”

  “Yes, murder,” another person cried. “The murder of all those innocent people. May he burn in hell!”

  “The murder of murderers is no crime!”

  “That’s not what the Supreme Court says,” someone declared.

  “Conception is holy. The hell with the Supreme Court,” another shouted.

  With that, a woman threw something that hit Elise in the back of the head. Then several people began hurling things at her, and at her sister. Corey leaped from his chair and tried to cover his wife with his own body. One of the jailhouse guards pulled him away, while the other grabbed Elise and pulled her to the floor.


  “Abortion is legal in this country,” someone shouted.

  “Legalized murder is still murder,” someone else retorted.

  “Safeguard women’s rights!”

  “Save the preborn!”

  “Protect free choice. It’s all that stands between us and slavery!”

  “Kill the killers!”

  It was only a matter of seconds before the invective turned into violence—shouting, punching, kicking, hair-pulling, clothes-tearing, and what was later revealed to be spitball-throwing violence. The two deputies stationed at the door to the courtroom jumped into the fray, with little effectiveness.

  Almost immediately, people began looking around for anything that could be used as a weapon. Handbags started swinging. Frances Stocker’s cane was snatched from her side by a man who promptly began wielding it like a baseball bat.

  Betsy Toth Umanski was seated in the first row aisle, where, unable to turn, she could hear, but not see, what was happening behind her.

  “What’s going on?” she asked her husband. It was a rare day when he was able to stay with her. But before he could reply, she was abruptly and unceremoniously dumped from her wheelchair. As the culprit made off with what he intended to use as a battering ram, Andy Umanski leaped on top of him. After that, it didn’t matter what ideology one espoused, the madness engulfed everyone. The crowd had become a mob.

  From the very beginning of the trial, Abraham Bendali had been anticipating something like this. When he motioned to Robert Niera, it was barely an instant before the bailiff was escorting the jury out of the room, through the front, to the judge’s own chamber. Just as quickly, Corey’s guards removed the defendant, his wife, his mother, his former landlady, and his sister-in-law to another location, with Charles Ramsey, Joan Wills, and Mark Hoffman scurrying after them.

  Just before exiting with the remaining court personnel, the clerk picked up a telephone and called for help. But the judge, not knowing exactly what he was dealing with, and not about to take any chances, had already pressed the alarm button positioned beneath his right hand.

  Within minutes, half a dozen deputies descended on the scene. In the ninth-floor corridor, network cameramen saw the officers rush by, and caught a glimpse of the commotion as the courtroom doors opened and closed. But they were obliged to stay where they were, helpless and frustrated, while inside, reporters scribbled furiously, and the court sketch artist tried his best to capture at least the essence of what was taking place.