The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  *

  The white ceramic glare of the immaculate bathroom blinded Thomassy for a moment as he tried to focus on his face in the mirror, the red deltas of his eyes, the streaked cheeks of boyhood tears. Despite the sweet bullshit of the judge, he heard himself thinking 1 can’t do it, and then, plucked from memory were the same words.

  He’d been eleven. His father, before heading for the stables, had said to his mother and himself, When a man breaks leg, they fix cast. When horse breaks leg, finish. What kind of God sins against horses? He’d slammed the door so hard the dishes on the table rattled.

  “Go to him,” Thomassy’s mother said.

  Thomassy didn’t want to be with his father when he was railing.

  “Go,” his mother ordered.

  In the farthest stable, away from the whinnying of the other horses, he found his father sitting on the ground with his arms around the mare’s neck. The mare’s huge right eye betrayed its fear.

  Thomassy saw the pistol lying near his father’s knee. He wanted to run back to the house. Can you do it? his father had asked. You put the gun against the side of the head behind the ear and pull the trigger just once.

  Thomassy ran from the barn, and his father had run after him, the gun in his hand. When Haig Thomassian caught up to his son, he held the gun pointing heavenward for safety, and said to the quivering boy, When I am dead and you are the man, you will have to do what is necessary. God is a coward. Do you understand?

  Thomassy had stood rooted in the field, watching his father walk back to the barn in the moonlight, and then, after an endless time, he’d heard the shot.

  He’d gone closer to the barn, and when his father finally came out, he remembered his father put his arm around his shoulders and Thomassy had instinctively put his arm around his father’s waist, and the two had walked in mourning together back to the house where Marya waited.

  When Thomassy emerged from the bathroom, his hands and face and eyes were dry. He said, “You are a very understanding man, Your Honor.”

  The judge said, “We’ve all been touched by the same thing.”

  Not quite the same.

  “I will do what is necessary,” Thomassy said, grateful that in the carnival of the law, he did not have to pull a trigger.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Thomassy, facing the twelve rapt jurors behind their wooden barrier, felt like a man who had come out of a terrible fever. He was back in his world.

  He began his summation with the words he always started off with. “I wonder if you and I couldn’t talk this thing out.”

  The jurors strained to hear him. That meant the judge and the spectators would be straining even more. Straining helps the attention.

  With his eyes he was saying to the jurors: This is between you and me.

  “When I got out of law school,” he said, “I did a lot of civil liberties work because I was interested in justice and I saw a lot of injustice around to older people, black people, Spanish-speaking people, people people. I learned that there are a few individuals with a lot of power, most of them working—when they’re working—for the government. Since 1776 we don’t have a king, we have a lot of little kings who get their kicks out of coming after the people who don’t have power. Looking at you I’d guess your parents came from a lot of different backgrounds. My parents were Armenians. They came to this country because here you can fight back. The law here doesn’t let the little guy get beat up in some back room and thrown into the jug to rot the way they do today in a lot of places. The law gives us this big room so what we do is in public view. And we pick twelve citizens who are as clean of prejudging other people as we can find and let them know that they are the sole judges of the facts in this case.”

  Before this trial he had always enjoyed what he thought of as jury bullshit, building their egos, palsying, flirting, pretending, talking down, telling them what to think, and they loved it. But as he walked along the front of the box, looking at each one of them, making sure they knew each one was under the tent he had erected to seal them and him off from the others, he knew he no longer loved it.

  Even lawyers can grow up, George.

  Go away, Francine. I’ve got a job to do.

  “There is much about this case that is confusing, even how it got here in the first place. We all know the biggest growth industry in this country is violent crime. We all know that billions of dollars of hard drugs come into this country, that kids the defendant’s age and younger get hooked on hard drugs to the point where they have to steal and rob and commit violence to support their expensive habits. The government admits they get only about ten percent of the drugs coming in, and you’d think with our concern about the violence that results from just this one habit that the government would go after the ninety percent like gangbusters. But they don’t. The government is going after an accomplished young man, a scholar with two graduate degrees at the age of twenty-four, and a respected book to his credit. And what do they go after him with? Circumstantial evidence. Not real hard eyewitness evidence—I saw him do this or I saw him do that—but what I call ‘maybe’ evidence.”

  Thomassy turned his back on the jurors and looked directly at Roberts. “The prosecution,” Thomassy said, “has the burden of proof of every issue that’s been raised in this trial. In New York—and that’s what we’re operating under here, New York law—Section three eighty-nine of the Code of Criminal Procedure says that if anyone is accused of a crime, the presumption is in favor of his innocence. No ifs and no buts. The defendant is entitled to rest upon the presumption of innocence in his favor unless the prosecutor offers evidence that so far outweighs the presumption of innocence that each and every one of you without exception is convinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “The easiest way to understand reasonable doubt is that if you are a hundred percent sure of someone’s guilt, okay, but if you’re only ninety-nine percent sure, the other one percent is reasonable doubt.”

  The judge may hang me for that definition but the jurors will remember it.

  “You’ve probably been in a lot of situations in your life where you felt your opinion didn’t count for all that much. But here it’s different. If eleven other people are one hundred percent sure and you’re not so sure, that’s enough reasonable doubt for an acquittal. This is one election in which your personal vote can be as important as everyone else’s put together.”

  Francine, this is the first time in an exemplary legal career that I am delivering a summation with half my mind. I have to work. Take your hands off my thighs. Stop kissing my arms. Stop making me need you so much!

  Thank God the jury still had its attention fixed on him. He took a deep, ghost-chasing breath. “Now that that’s settled,” he said, “let’s take a look at the so-called evidence that the prosecution has offered here for your inspection. There’s the button that the detective detected in the garage. It could have come off the accused’s jacket, or the detective’s raincoat or any of thousands of other MacGregor jackets or raincoats that we don’t know about. Does that prove that the bathroom fire wasn’t an accident? That anybody did it on purpose? And that Edward Porter Sturbridge in particular committed assault with intent to murder with a deadly weapon? Or are we talking about a button found in a garage?”

  Thomassy looked down at his jacket. “Just checking the buttons,” he said. “You never know what someone will make out of a dropped button. If they don’t have a case.

  “What are some of the other things that have been said here? Edward Porter Sturbridge slept over at the Fullers’ lots of times. Do you invite someone to sleep over if you have any reason not to trust them? You heard Mrs. Fuller in her grief say she trusted the defendant. The night before the accident the defendant was one of three people who slept over at the Fullers. If sleeping over ever becomes a crime, you’d have to lock up a significant portion of the teenage population. And maybe some of the adult population as well. Actually, the only crime that’s been
admitted in this courtroom was the adultery committed by the other two people who slept over. Were the goings-on in Miss Troob’s bedroom a cover-up for some more insidious activity? There’s been no more proof of that than there’s been proof that the defendant did anything that night except what he said he did, use the downstairs bathroom because the hall door to the upstairs one was left locked by Mr. Melling.

  “We heard some testimony about some strange detective work. Detective Cooper found some folded curtains stashed on a high shelf in a closet. I don’t know how normal it is for guests to go prying into their host’s closets, but Detective Cooper is a detective and I guess that gives him a chance to do what we folks abstain from doing. He pushed the curtains aside and found some old magazines of a kind that I assume didn’t belong to the Fullers, but he didn’t inquire as to who they might have belonged to in order to ascertain how long those magazines had been there. But behind the magazines, lo and behold he finds a flask of the kind he used to take to football games. There has been no link between that flask, used for carrying liquor, and the accused, who testified he does not drink liquor. No initials. No identification. You heard absolutely zero proof that the stashed curtains, the magazines, or the flask belonged to the defendant, and ladies and gentlemen, you are here to examine proof and not to get romanced into a lot of speculation of a kind that could be said about anybody who stayed overnight anywhere. We have heard that the accused ran downstairs naked. If you run downstairs naked because you hear someone screaming for help and you don’t want to take the time to even slip something on—is that a crime or the act of a Samaritan? Or a friend? Pushing a six-foot torch under the shower to try to get the fire out, does that sound like someone trying to hurt or to help? Common sense tells you it was to help, and any other interpretation requires you to turn logic upside down.

  “Being someone’s disciple is not a crime. Helping out around the house, doing chores older people sometimes find difficult, like mowing the lawn, is not a crime. When you get into the jury room, you take a good long hard look at the counts of the indictment because, ladies and gentlemen, those are the crimes. If the evidence you’ve seen doesn’t support those counts beyond a reasonable doubt, you’re going to find the defendant innocent.

  “Suppose what happened was not an accident? Nobody has proved it wasn’t, but let’s do what the prosecution has done, rely on some conjecture. Who would want to kill Martin Fuller. He was doing important work for the United States. Who would want to put an end to that? Obviously, the enemies of the United States, and I’m afraid we’ve got quite a few. My question to you is were the disciples of Martin Fuller, the young people who were his friends and junior colleagues, threats to him? Please remember that all of those people got some kind of security check from the federal government. Wouldn’t those experienced people have sniffed out someone who was potentially dangerous to Professor Fuller? If so, where must we then look? You heard testimony here from Professor Ludmilla Tarasova, second, perhaps, only to the late Professor Fuller in the field of Soviet experts, how the U.S.S.R. has had people killed in this country for decades. Have those killers been caught? And if they haven’t, is that what’s so embarrassing to the government, that we can’t stop hired dedicated foreign assassins from operating on our turf? We don’t yet know if President Kennedy was killed by a loner or as part of a well-worked-out conspiracy. If there was a conspiracy to kill Martin Fuller—if his death wasn’t an accident—where are those conspirators? Why isn’t the law chasing them down? The point I’m making is that all of the potential or probable killers of Martin Fuller have not been put on trial here. The government took the easy way. They picked one young man, devoted to Professor Fuller, who was his mentor, and who—you heard the testimony—whom he loved.”

  Thomassy looked around the courtroom. All you angels filling those seats, he wanted to say, do you know the statistics? That you kill someone you love much more often than you kill an intruder, an enemy, someone you don’t know? In Europe, according to Francine the Intelligent, pleading a crime of passion is practically a guaranteed way of getting a client off. Was this a crime of passion?

  Some of the faces seemed to be wondering why he was not speaking.

  I am not obligated to tell you the whole truth, only what I choose to tell you. I do not have the responsibilities of a witness. I am an advocate, and that word, advocate, ladies and gentlemen, sticks in my fucking craw. Is this what every ambassador for every country in the world feels like when he feels revulsion at the message he’s been ordered to deliver?

  Judge Drewson said, “Mr. Thomassy?”

  “Sorry, Your Honor. Just getting my second wind.”

  He adjusted the knot of his tie. No one ever faulted you for adjusting the knot of your tie.

  Then he said, “Which brings me to the subject of intent. Ladies and gentlemen, without proof of intent the government has no case. The judge will support me on that when he instructs you on the law.

  “I’m afraid this case is flimsier than the paper the charges were typed on. It was irresponsible to bring those charges into this or any other courtroom. Governments, where the power lies, should act with greater responsibility. But we say that all the time, don’t we?

  “Under the New York law, it is a well-settled rule that where the prosecution relies wholly upon circumstantial evidence to try to establish the guilt of the defendant, the circumstances must be—I repeat must be—of such a character as, if true, to exclude to a moral certainty every other hypothesis except that of the accused’s guilt. And I say to you that each of us has lots of other hypotheses rattling around in our brains as a result of what we have seen and heard here. The law says all those other hypotheses have to be ruled out before you can begin to think about the defendant losing his presumptive innocence.

  “Which brings me to my final point, a point that I want you to take into the jury room if you take no other. It doesn’t matter whether you memorize it word for word or remember the idea behind it. The most important words of this trial are: The defendant is entitled to rest upon the presumption of his innocence unless it is so far outweighed—so far outweighed, remember those words—by the evidence offered by the prosecution that you are convinced of his guilt and nobody else’s possible guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If there are only four words you should remember exactly they are: beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  Thomassy spotted the woman in the front row of the juror box move her hands as if to applaud and catch herself just in time, blushing embarrassedly. He looked at her and nodded as if to say it’s all right. He hoped she’d feel the same way after the prosecution got its last licks in. Just once, just once he’d like the last words to be his.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Thank heaven there wasn’t a lineup at the phone booths. Thomassy closed the door, plunked in his dime, heard the mechanical voice ask for thirty cents, and his right hand fished in his change pocket for two more dimes, plunk and plunk, and when he was connected, asked for Francine’s room.

  “One moment, please,” the woman at the hospital switchboard said, then got back on the line. “Not putting through calls to that room right now. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Let me have the nurses’ desk on that floor.” He hadn’t meant to bark an order.

  “Okay, okay,” the woman said.

  He waited. The goddamn way they make you wait, hanging. Finally, a voice.

  Thomassy said, “I’m calling about Miss Widmer in six-oh-eight. They’re not putting calls through. What’s up?”

  “Who is this calling, please?”

  “Mr. Widmer,” Thomassy said, almost without thinking. He had a prerogative, a right to know.

  “Oh,” the voice said, “there’s another Mr. Widmer right here. I’ll let you speak to him.”

  Christ. Ned Widmer said, “Yes?”

  “Ned, this is George. I have no credentials so I said I was you. Or her husband. What’s the damn matter?”

  “I just got here, George. Pr
iscilla says her temperature went up.”

  “How up?”

  “Hundred one. The doctor ordered some tests after he’d made his rounds. Her white count’s up. Possible she has an infection somewhere. They’re doing a lung scan just to be sure they didn’t miss anything on the X-rays. He said with auto trauma they go after the obvious things first, like the broken arm, sometimes miss some minor internal injury. It could be something totally unrelated to the accident like an infection of some kind. They’re checking that, too.”

  “Do you think it’s serious?”

  “No, I’m sure nothing serious.”

  It’s very serious. I love her crazily. “Ned, they’re beginning the prosecution’s summation in just a few minutes. I’m tied down here.”

  “There’s no reason to be concerned.”

  I made her worse.

  Widmer continued, “I’m coming back over to the courthouse, George. I’ll see you there.”

  *

  Thomassy crossed one leg over the other. Then reversed. A good fuck always made you feel better not worse. Francine said she felt wonderful. It’s your fault, he said to the place where his crossed legs joined.

  Ed Porter touched Thomassy’s arm. “That man,” he said.

  Thomassy, from his distraction said, “Which man?”

  Ed pointed to Roberts.

  “Oh, he’s just working himself up for his summation,” Thomassy said. “What you’re seeing is a cold fish trying to warm his blood a bit. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “When was the last time you lost a case?” Ed’s eyes seemed to be shimmering.

  “Look, Ed,” Thomassy said, “consult your horoscope. What counts is how we make out in this trial this time. If you don’t like Roberts staring at you, stare back.”

  Ed, pinching the edge of the wooden table in front of him, turned just enough to face Roberts directly. Instantly, Roberts looked away.

  “See,” Thomassy said, busying himself with his marginal notations, “rabbits run.”