Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  Fine, thinks Jake. Fine. She’s eliciting information at the exact right pace. He wouldn’t have done it any differently if he was counsel. Susan was the correct choice. He looks back at Dana, sitting in the second row of the gallery, and without quite winking he tries to tell her with his eyes that everything is going to be okay.

  “Can you describe the circumstances of your daughter’s death?” Susan asks.

  “Objection.” Francis is on his feet, buttoning his jacket.

  Judge Frankenthaler looks at him in a daze, as if he’s been awakened from a rich confusing dream.

  “It’s really straying far afield to talk about what happened to various members of Mr. Gates’s family or parts of his family background,” Francis says. “I don’t see any relevance. He’s not even the defendant in this case. Mr. Schiff is.”

  He points a bony accusing finger at Jake.

  Susan walks in a half circle toward the judge. “It goes to the witness’s state of mind at the time of this incident. That’s the whole point of this hearing: to make sure he’s capable of making an ID.”

  “All right, all right, but I don’t need to hear a whole Homeric recitation of ship names,” says Frankenthaler, already sounding fed up.

  Great, thinks Jake. If he’s pissed off now, how’s he going to feel once the trial begins?

  “That’s my point exactly, Judge,” says Francis, trying to seize the advantage. “Even in a preliminary hearing, there has to be some limit to the scope of the questions. Otherwise, we’ll be here until next week discussing Mr. Gates’s views about the 1969 Mets.”

  “I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan myself,” the judge grumbles.

  “The jury still needs some foundation for understanding Mr. Gates’s condition,” Susan insists.

  “All right, let me think about it,” says the judge, shooing both of them away with the back of his hand. “Move on to something else in the meantime.”

  Susan crosses back to the podium, her blazer and dour black skirt making a quiet seething sound as they brush against each other.

  “Mr. Gates,” she says, “shortly after your daughter died and you left the Transit Authority, did there come a time when you became homeless?”

  “Yes,” Gates murmurs.

  “NO!” Jake scrawls on his legal pad. “GOING TOO FAST! STRESS CITIZENSHIP!

  “And at around that time, did you start experiencing problems?”

  “Yeah . . . maybe a little bit before that.”

  “Can you describe those problems?”

  Gates mumbles.

  “Could you repeat that?”

  “I was confused,” he says. “I couldn’t understand how things got the way they were.”

  “OY!!!” Jake writes on the legal pad. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with what Susan is doing. When you have a witness with a troubled history—whether it’s with the legal system or the mental health system—you try to bring it out and cast it in the best light before the other side has a chance to ask about it. The problem is that Gates has a number of other strong points Susan could be talking about first: his family life, his work record, his determination to elevate himself after a childhood of abandonment and foster homes. Somewhere there’s a backbone in there. Otherwise he’d be dead by now.

  Jake looks at his lawyer with a bitten lower lip and a raised left eyebrow. Susan asks the judge to excuse her and then comes over to see what Jake has written.

  She purses her lips and her brow folds over as she reads. Then she leans over and whispers in his ear: “Remember. I’m the one trying this case.”

  Having uttered the very same words five or six thousand times, Jake sees no way to argue. He slumps just a little in his seat as she goes back to the podium.

  “Did there come a time, Mr. Gates, when you started seeing a city psychiatrist?”

  “Right after I left the MTA.”

  “Did that doctor prescribe medication for your condition?”

  “Yes.” Gates reaches for a glass of water.

  “What was that medication?”

  “Haldol.”

  “And while you were taking Haldol, were you more or less lucid and able to make rational decisions?”

  “Yes.” Gates raises the glass to his lips and Jake sees the water shaking a little.

  “Would it be fair to say you were aware of everything going on around you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Objection.” Francis stands. “She’s leading him around by the nose with these questions.”

  “Sit down, Mr. O’Connell.” The judge doesn’t look up. “This is just a hearing.”

  Susan nods at John G., trying to keep him focused. “Do you have trouble recalling things that happened to you while you were taking Haldol?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Jake looks over at the prosecutor’s table, expecting another objection. But Francis and Joan Fusco are busy passing papers to each other.

  “In fact, you’re on Haldol right now,” says Susan. “Is that correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  The water glass goes down. Jake is relieved to see there’s no other obvious shaking. The last thing he needs is for his lead witness to have some kind of breakdown on the stand.

  Susan studies her notes for a moment before she starts the next line of questioning.

  “Did there come a time, Mr. Gates, when you stopped taking your medication?”

  There is a very long pause. Gates stares at her. Jake hears a crystal snap near his ear.

  “Could you repeat the question?” Gates says.

  “Sure,” says Susan, trying not to sound thrown. “Did you stop taking Haldol at some point?”

  John G.’s mouth fakes to the left, twitches to the right, and then hangs open for a second. “Yeah. Yeah. I did stop taking it for a while.”

  “And can you tell us why that was?”

  Gates reaches for the water glass again. This time the shaking is much more pronounced. It’s as if he suddenly developed Parkinson’s disease. His right hand seems terrified of his mouth.

  “I thought I was dying,” he says. “I was raped at a men’s shelter in Brooklyn and thought I’d been given the HIV virus.”

  The shaking is so uncontrollable now that droplets of water are appearing on the front of Gates’s white dress shirt. Come on, Jake finds himself muttering through clenched teeth. Keep it together, man. A couple of months before, he was trying to put this guy in the loony bin. Now his whole future depends on John G. maintaining his tenuous grip on sanity.

  “And so after that incident, you stopped taking your medication?”

  “I didn’t see any point,” he says abruptly, as if Susan was the one he was angry at all along. “I didn’t have anything to live for. My baby was dead. I didn’t give a fuck.”

  With the rise and fall of his voice, the courtroom is silent again. The only sound is Gates slamming down the water glass on the railing of the stand. Jake’s stomach groans as he leans forward to see if it’s cracked. The judge thumbs his lower lip as if he’s considering asking Gates if he wants to pause. But he doesn’t. Gates just sits there, watching his left fist open and close.

  “During this time, Mr. Gates, once you stopped taking your medication, did your behavior begin to deteriorate?”

  Susan is on truly dangerous ground. But there’s no way to avoid it.

  “I was out on the street, living like an animal,” Gates answers in a low, wounded voice. “What do you want me to say?”

  A loose cannon. No matter how often you go over the testimony with some witnesses, you have no idea what they’re going to say on the stand.

  “Did there come a time when you became violent?”

  “There were things going on in my mind that I couldn’t control.”

  Jake turns around and sees Dana looking pale and shaken. He has the terrifying sensation of being on a roller coaster that’s just broken free from the rails.

  “And it was around this time that you first met Mr. Schiff a
nd his family. Right?”

  “His wife over there, she was my social worker.” John G. stares at Dana, as if he’d like to lunge at her. “She was going to help me put things back together.”

  “But you never reached that point in your therapeutic relationship. Right?”

  “I went off on her.”

  They’re in free fall. Jake closes his eyes and waits for the crash.

  “You began behaving erratically? Is that correct? You showed up at Mr. and Mrs. Schiff s house and acted in a threatening way.”

  “That’s what they tell me.” He gives Susan a surly glare.

  “Did you menace Mr. Schiff’s son with a box cutter?”

  He blinks three times and lists to the right a little. “It’s possible.”

  “And did you confront the whole family on the street, yelling that you were going to kill them?”

  Gates just looks at her and blinks twice. There’s no way around this knotty part of the case. So Susan might as well get right to it. She has to establish that Jake had reason to fear Gates and therefore it was understandable that he would act to protect his family. Yet she then has to come back and show that John G. is credible when he says Jake tried to stop the assault in the tunnel.

  “I wasn’t in my right mind,” says Gates carefully, looking down at the brown oak railing in front of him.

  A wave of heat hits Jake as if the temperature in the room had just risen a dozen degrees.

  “So did there come a time when you began taking your medication again?”

  “Yes.” Gates puts his hands out straight and rests them on the railing, trying to steady himself.

  Francis drops a pen loudly on his table, to register incredulity and perhaps to distract the witness.

  “When?” Susan leans forward so far that Jake worries she’s about to go crashing down with the podium.

  “When Abraham made me start taking it. Like right before the thing we’re going to talk about.”

  “Objection,” Francis says.

  “Sustained,” the judge drones. “Let’s get a move on, Miss Hoffman. The Renaissance is coming and soon we’ll all be painting.”

  “Okay.” Susan takes a deep breath like a marathon runner trying to pace herself for the second half of a race. “To the best of your recollection, were you back on your medication the night of September fifth?”

  Gates rubs his right eye, then his left. “Yeah, I was.”

  Susan clears her throat. “So do you have any recollection of the events that took place on the night of September fifth?”

  John G. stares out into empty space, as if he’s grappling with some incorporeal presence in the courtroom.

  “Yeah,” he says finally. “I think I can recollect some things.”

  Francis starts to stand and object, but then waves his hand as if to say, Ah, never mind.

  “On the night of September fifth, where were you living?”

  “In the tunnel with Abraham.”

  “You’re referring to the Amtrak train tunnel under Riverside Park. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Did there come a time during the course of the evening of September fifth, when you saw my client, Mr. Schiff, in the tunnel under the park?”

  Gates shifts his gaze over to Jake. Their eyes meet for just a second, but it’s still jarring. This man doesn’t like him, Jake realizes. Doesn’t care about him. It’s only by force of circumstances that he’s the one who could end up saving Jake’s neck.

  This is it, thinks Jake. This is where John G. is going to lose it once and for all.

  “I seen him a bunch of times,” says Gates slowly, still looking at Jake.

  He stops and seems ready to leave it at that. Susan looks down nervously, trying to come up with another question to prompt him.

  “But only once in the tunnel,” Gates says suddenly, his timing throwing everyone off.

  “I see,” says Susan, trying to fall into his rhythm. “Can you tell us who was with Mr. Schiff that night you saw him in the tunnel?”

  Again there’s a long pause, this one even more nerve fraying than the last. Listening to this testimony is like watching a drunk lurch around in the dark. Gates looks blank. Jake could swear he’s about to say he didn’t see anyone with him that night.

  “I think there were.” Gates puts a hand in front of his mouth and rests his nose on his knuckles. “I think there were a couple of other guys with him.”

  The stenographer, who wears patent leather high heels and a tumbleweed of black hair, throws up her hands in exasperation.

  “Could you speak up?” Susan asks.

  “There were some other guys with him,” says John G., raising his voice just a little. “Two of them.”

  “I see. Can you describe them?”

  Gates looks thoughtful and then startled, like he’s suddenly realized one of the men was Abraham Lincoln. “One of them was bigger than the other,” he says.

  “Can you say more?”

  “Hmm.” He looks around the courtroom, as if he’s making sure Philip isn’t there. “Well, uh, I guess the bigger one, he was older. He had, like, light-colored hair, you know. I didn’t get that good a look at him. Actually. Huh.” He seems to lose his place for a second. “He was kind of solid like.”

  Jake looks at the judge. He’s massaging his temples. Is he buying this or getting ready to throw it out? It’s hard to tell. The vagueness of the description might actually work in Jake’s favor, as it shows the witness wasn’t overly coached. On the other hand, there seems to be a thickening cloud of ozone forming around the witness stand, as Gates grows more tentative in his answers.

  “The other guy was smaller,” he’s telling the judge and Susan. “I don’t remember much about him. Except he had a baseball bat. I remember the baseball bat.”

  He touches his midsection where he got walloped and then jerks his head back. He doesn’t seem assured that Philip isn’t there. Instead, he stares at a bald moustachioed attorney named Howard Jaffee sitting in the back row, as if he’s a potential conduit to Cardi.

  “Can you describe what happened that night?” Even Susan’s sounding tense. “What did the men say to you and Mr. Collingwood?”

  “Jeez.” Gates’s eyes open wide and his jaw goes slack. Where to begin? “I remember Mr. Schiff over there, he told me to leave his family alone.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “They attacked both of us with the baseball bats. They hit Abraham over the head with the bat. Then there was a spark and that was it.”

  “Right. But what was said before that?”

  “I just told you, he said, ‘Leave my family alone,’ “ Gates says, turning testy.

  “But what did the other men say?” Susan asks, with carefully measured patience.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  The judge’s fingers stop their massaging. He looks directly at Susan, as if he’s about to ask whether this should be declared a hostile witness.

  Gates begins to list to the left. “There were words,” he says in a flatter voice.

  “What kind of words?” says Susan, struggling to get back on track.

  “They . . . He ...” He stops, grimaces, and looks up. He seems surprised to find himself in the witness box. “They had words with each other.”

  Jake is no longer watching from the analytical lawyer’s perspective. His heart is on a bungee cord.

  “It’s hard for me to think of it all . . . It was dark down there . . .”

  “To the best of your recollection,” Susan says evenly.

  Gates’s mouth goes one way. His eyes go the other. “I dunno. I dunno.”

  He’s still struggling with that invisible presence.

  “Mr. Gates. Please. Try.”

  “They said something, then Abraham said something.” He appears as much annoyed with himself as with Susan. “Then they jumped us with the bats and there was the spark. That was it.”

  This won’t work. “W
hat about Philip blinking the flashlight?!” Jake scrawls on his legal pad. If he mentions that in subsequent testimony, it will seem like an inconsistency. But it’s too late. Susan is too busy trying to bail out the sinking boat of this testimony to look his way.

  “Was Mr. Schiff one of the people who attacked you?”

  Gates looks over warily, as if he’s never seen Jake before. He starts to say something that sounds like “yeah,” but then catches himself.

  “He didn’t have a bat,” he says. “The others had them. He didn’t.”

  An unexpected moment of relief. Jake rubs his aching eyes. At least Gates doesn’t have him leading the charge. But only one wheel of the plane is down on the runway. The fact that Jake was standing there still makes him party to the assault and the homicide.

  “Mr. Gates,” says Susan, taking a long beat, “do you recall if Mr. Schiff actually tried to prevent the attack?”

  A large bubble of saliva forms between Gates’s lips. It lingers for a moment and then breaks. “Yeah, okay,” he says unconvincingly, as if making a deal with his invisible adversary. “He tried to stop it.”

  “Do you recall his exact words?” Susan tries to strengthen his resolve.

  “What?”

  “Do you recall the exact words or gestures he made to halt the attack?”

  John G. stares at her as if she were an eighteen-wheeler bearing down on him. His lips move but no words come out.

  “Mr. Gates?”

  He reaches for his water glass, but his palsied shaking is too much. The water is leaping over the sides and splashing over the rail before him. He’s having some kind of breakdown right here on the stand.

  “Would you like me to repeat the question?”

  Gates’s whole body is shivering and his lips appear blue.

  He mutters something that sounds like “I don’t even wanna be here.”

  Jake is looking hard at him from counsel’s table twenty feet away, but he can’t get Gates’s attention. His chest tightens and his left arm goes numb. Is he about to have a heart attack right here in the courtroom?

  “Mr. Gates? Could you please answer the question?”

  A harsh noon sun slants through a window high on the courtroom wall. Gates turns and blinks into the white light, as if reconsidering something. He still doesn’t answer.