Decision

by Allen Drury

  “They’re all alike!” was the general reaction.

  And at heart, they were: animals, no matter if they were as sophisticated as he or as cretinous as the stabbers in the street—lost, abandoned, bereft—outside the pale of society and the necessary restraints of organized living.

  Not, of course, that the defendant would ever admit this. He clung tenaciously to his lifelong conviction that he was something different and something special, because to admit otherwise would have been to shatter his very being. The attorney general, who had studied him with great care in the past three weeks, realized this and concentrated on the ego that challenged him with bitter venom. The defendant’s counsel did what she could, with little help from him, to protect him.

  For several minutes after Earle took his seat on the stand, Regard went through an elaborate charade of searching through his papers, conferring with the two junior aides who had been with him throughout the trial, apparently for the purpose of carrying his briefcase since he had never before sought their opinions on anything; and generally consuming time. On each occasion when Debbie thought he was ready and started to ask her client a question, Regard would raise a supplicating hand and burrow into his papers again. Presently a little titter began to run through the audience as Debbie became more and more openly annoyed and on the stand a deep and frustrated scowl settled on the face of the defendant. Finally he could stand it no longer and turned to Perlie Williams to say sharply,

  “Your honor—”

  “Yes,” Perlie said in an icy voice. “For what purpose, and on what excuse, does the witness directly address the bench?”

  “For the purpose of getting this show on the road,” Earle snapped, “and because I am getting damned well fed up with the antics of that clown over there—”

  “Your honor!” Debbie and Regard cried together, she in genuine alarm, he in genuine anger. Judge Williams was ahead of them.

  “Do you wish to be held in contempt of court, Mr. Holgren?” he demanded. Earle shook his head and, in one of his lightning changes of mood, grinned amicably.

  “No, sir, your honor,” he said expansively, “how could I be? I feel no contempt for you, sir, only for him. And he isn’t the court, I don’t believe. He just happens to be here.”

  “He is here for the purposes of the court,” Perlie Williams began, “and therefore—” Then he shook his head in disbelief and broke it off. “If counsel for the state is ready,” he said, “suppose we proceed.”

  Regard flushed, the crowd stirred, Earle beamed with elaborate complacency.

  “Your honor,” Debbie said in a shaken voice, “if I may begin with a few questions for the witness—”

  “He’s your client, Miss Donnelson,” Judge Williams noted. “And your problem. You handle him any way you like. But I will say to him”—and he stared at Earle, who ignored him and stared out into some distance that prompted him to keep on smiling—“that if he wishes to avoid citation for contempt he will refrain from too much cuteness. What he does to his own cause is his business, but respect for the law is my business. Remember that!”

  “Yes, your honor,” Earle said, still not looking at him but smiling now at the jury. “I’ll remember that.”

  And the members of the jury, curiously enough, were suddenly leaning forward intently, paying little notice to anyone else, concentrating all their interest and attention upon him. “Score one for the bastard,” Moss muttered. “He has them where he wants them, already.”

  And from then on, until Regard finally succeeded in prying them loose, he did not let them go. As far as he was concerned, there was no one in the world but that jury. He courted them, he frightened them, he wooed them—he fascinated them. “It’s as though he were a snake,” Tay commented at one point, and they a flock of hypnotized birds. Debbie gave him his openings and away he went. Within a few minutes it was almost—almost—conceivable that if they had been required to vote then, they might have failed to achieve unanimity and thrown the case. That they finally did not was a tribute to Regard but even more, perhaps, to the insistent demands of Justice NOW! whose members, outside and free from his hypnotic personality, kept up a distant but continuing reminder that a new era had dawned in American justice.

  “Mr. Holgren,” Debbie began, “what was your interest in the atomic energy plant at Pomeroy Station?”

  Earle considered.

  “I really had none, counsel, aside from sharing the views of millions of concerned Americans that atomic power is a dangerous, and dangerously unnecessary, enterprise for us to be engaged in. I’m against it, because it is so dangerous and as such, in a general way, I was against—still am against—the Pomeroy Station plant. But I had no desire to hurt it or in any way to interfere with its operation. It just made me sad. I hated to see it, but”—he sighed heavily—“what can a citizen who wants to protect himself and posterity do?”

  “It didn’t occur to you to do anything specific?” Debbie inquired. “Such as blow it up, in the manner mentioned in the indictment entered here?”

  “No, ma’am,” Earle said in the same respectful tone. “Why would I want to do such a thing?”

  “It is so charged,” she said.

  “Has anyone proved it?” he inquired like a flash, and several members of the jury couldn’t keep from smiling a little.

  “Not to my knowledge,” Debbie said and paused to let it sink in. “Tell me, Mr. Holgren, why you were, as one of the workers at Pomeroy Station put it the other day, ‘around the place a lot’? Were you there so frequently as that would indicate, and if so, why?”

  “First of all,” Earle said reasonably, “I really wasn’t there all that much. I used to jog past there quite a lot before”—he looked straight at a couple of ladies on the jury and smiled—“before I got slowed down a bit in the last three weeks. It’s healthy.” He stretched and spread his legs a bit. “I like to be healthy.” The ladies, in spite of themselves, smiled back.

  “Did you live alone, Mr. Holgren?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I had a girl friend—we weren’t married, but we’d been together awhile. We had a little boy, too. They were about the same ages as those poor folks they found in the cave.” He shook his head, grieved by the enormity of it. “That was a very sad thing,” he said gravely. “Very sad.”

  “Where are your girl friend and the baby now?”

  “Took off,” he said. “Just took off. Someplace. Up north, maybe—down south—out west. Who knows?” Again he shook his head sadly. “That’s the way it always seems to happen with me. I just don’t have any luck with love, that’s all. Never have had.”

  “I don’t see why not,” one of the jury ladies whispered to another. “He’s the cutest thing!”

  “Except for the eyes,” the other lady, more level-headed, replied. “Look at the eyes.” She shivered suddenly. “He gives me the creeps.”

  “Mr. Holgren,” Debbie said, “were the young woman and the baby boy found in the cave your girl friend and your baby boy?”

  “Has anybody identified them as being such?” he inquired in surprise.

  “You heard two witnesses day before yesterday testify that they thought they might be. They couldn’t be sure.”

  He shrugged.

  “Oh, well. ‘Might be.’ If apples were peaches, lots of things might be. But then, they aren’t.” He smiled at the jury again, a confidential, skeptical look. “No, I’m afraid not. They showed them to me—he did”—he nodded toward Regard without looking at him—“but it wasn’t anybody I’d ever seen before in my life. I just didn’t know them.” He did look at Regard. “Sorry about that.”

  Regard gave him a long look, quite expressionless. Earle, unmoved, stared back.

  “Did you see the witness Boomer Johnson up in the woods above the plant prior to the explosion?” Debbie asked, suppressing an inner shiver but telling herself that he was her client, and Harry Aboud had asked her to do it, and that was what lawyers were for.

  “Bo
omer?” Earle repeated, and his eyes came to rest for a moment on the big round saucers of Boomer, sitting with his mother toward the back now that his part of it was over. For a moment Earle stared straight at him and instinctively Boomer shivered too and clutched his mother’s arm. She tried defiantly to stare back but Earle wasn’t interested in her. It was almost as though he were memorizing Boomer. Then he smiled and turned his terrible eyes away—leastways, Boomer thought they were terrible and he was scared-to-death, and so was his mother.

  “Boomer?” Earle said again. “No, I don’t remember seeing any Boomer up there. Because of course,” he added smoothly as there was a catch of breath through the room, “I wasn’t up there, you see, so how could I see any Boomer? And how could any Boomer see me?”

  “He says he did,” Debbie said.

  “Oh, I heard him say it,” Earle said indifferently, “but you know kids, particularly black kids. They’re always imagining things… No, I didn’t see any Boomer because I couldn’t have, not being there. And he didn’t see me.”

  Yes, I did, Boomer cried in his mind. Oh yes I did, you awful, terrible man. But he didn’t dare say anything aloud, of course, and his eyes just got a little bigger, if that was possible, and he clutched his mother’s arm a little harder, and she got even more frightened of that terrible man, and his thoughts about Boomer, than she was already.

  “What is your opinion of the Supreme Court?” Debbie inquired.

  “The U.S. Supreme Court?” Earle said. “Why—okay, I guess. I haven’t had much to do with it”—he grinned at the jury and more of them than expected to found themselves grinning back—“but I guess it’s all right. I certainly don’t wish it any harm, even though he”—and again he tossed a nod toward Regard—“seems to have some bee in his bonnet about it. I couldn’t care less, really. They do their thing, I do mine. I mean, isn’t that true of most Americans, the way they feel about the Court? I mean, they’re just”—he flung his left hand in the air—“up there. I mean—that’s it, right?”

  “Then you don’t bear any particular animosity toward Justice Pomeroy?”

  “How could I?” he asked, puzzled. “I don’t even know the man. I never even saw him until this whole stupid mixup began.”

  “Even though you have testified strongly that you are completely opposed to nuclear power, you did not blow up, or attempt to blow up, the Pomeroy Station plant with the added objective of killing or injuring Justice Pomeroy, who was to be principal speaker at the dedication?”

  Earle looked amazed, and disgusted as well.

  “Now—now, look. How ridiculous can you get? Why would I want to do that?”

  “That isn’t what I’m asking,” Debbie said. “I’ll get to the why in a minute. I just want to know if you did.”

  “Has anybody proved it?” Earle inquired blandly and Regard said, “Christ” sotto-voce but quite audibly enough for Perlie Williams to give him a look—not unsympathetic, but a look.

  “No testimony has been adduced,” Debbie said.

  “Good,” Earle said. “‘No testimony has been adduced.’ Well, good for me, then. I guess the answer to your question must be No, then, right? Absent testimony adduced, that is.”

  “It isn’t my place to make judgments,” Debbie said. “That’s the jury’s job.”

  “And I certainly hope,” Earle said, turning upon them a sudden dazzling smile, “that they will do their job to the very best of their ability. In fact, I know they will—fairly, honestly, without fear or favor, not yielding to public clamor or pressure, but upright, objective, compassionate and honest, like true sons and daughters of old Carolina. I know that.”

  “I can hear ‘Dixie,’” Tay murmured. “He’s unbelievable.” “And getting away with it, or close to it,” Moss agreed grimly. “Look at them!”

  And indeed most members of the jury were, for the moment at least, obviously enthralled. Only two or three continued to look skeptical, including the lady who was disturbed by the defendant’s eyes.

  “You say, then, that you did not intend or inflict any harm upon the Pomeroy Station plant, and that you did not intend or inflict any harm upon the person of Justice Pomeroy. And that you have no animosity toward the Supreme Court of the United States and no desire to do harm to it through the person of Justice Pomeroy.”

  “I couldn’t have stated it better myself,” Earle said admiringly, and again turned directly to the jury. “Isn’t she wonderful? You see why I selected her to be my lawyer. I knew she was good. But she’s really good.”

  “You are too kind,” Debbie remarked, and her client shot her a sudden sharp look that momentarily changed his face entirely; but it was gone as instantly as it came when she went on calmly, “When did you break off relations with your parents, Mr. Holgren?”

  “About age twenty,” he said, his eyes flicking quickly and impersonally over the sad, strained faces of the two distinguished old people sitting in the front row. “I just couldn’t take it any longer.”

  “Take what?”

  “Being smothered to death. Having my life lived for me. Being told what to do all the time and being disapproved and punished when I did what I wanted to do. Being ruled. And overruled.”

  “You heard your mother’s testimony.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said indifferently. “I heard it.”

  “You heard her say that your parents detected a noticeable change in you about your sophomore year in college. What was that?”

  “I think I found out about girls,” he said dryly. “Or maybe it was boys. I don’t know what it was!” he added with sudden savagery. “I thought I was doing all right!”

  “Not according to her,” Debbie said, referring to the transcript. “She says you came home ‘different’—in dress, manner, habits, beliefs. I quote from the attorney general: ‘Was there dope?’ And from Mrs. Holgren: ‘Some. But we felt that was an effect, not a cause—something he felt he had to do to satisfy some—some peer group that was watching him. To look big in their eyes.’ And the attorney general: ‘Watching him?’ And Mrs. Holgren: ‘Telephoning. Calling him away to meetings. Keeping an eye on him. Encouraging him.’ And the attorney general: ‘Encouraging him to do what, Mrs. Holgren?’ ‘Hate us. Hate his country. Hate everything we had reared him to be.’”

  She laid down the transcript and turned again to her client.

  “Did you change in all these ways, Mr. Holgren?”

  He shrugged.

  “Maybe. Kids do. Everybody grows up sooner or later, much as some parents hate to admit it. I think I probably just grew up.”

  “What was this ‘peer group’ your mother talked about?”

  “There wasn’t any ‘peer group,’” he said patiently. “That’s just an inadequate mother’s rationalization.”

  In the audience, Mrs. Holgren clutched her handkerchief to her mouth to stifle some inarticulate, anguished sound. Earle gave her an impassive, appraising glance as though he had never seen her before. Some members of the jury began to look a little upset.

  “Why do you say she was ‘inadequate’?” Debbie demanded sharply. “I’m sure she was doing her best.”

  “Oh, yes,” he agreed, taking the cue, suddenly amicable. “I’m sure she was. I don’t know that I was all that easy a kid to understand, either. Maybe it was partly my fault. It’s hard to assess these things fairly. I’m sure we’ve all had similar problems, either as kids or parents.” And he smiled once more directly at the jury, whose members appeared mollified.

  “So there was no ‘peer group,’ then,” Debbie said quickly.

  “Of course not,” he said with a dismissing smile. “What would that mean, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

  “Well, I don’t know either,” he said, smile broadening. “I took to running around a lot, but again, lots of kids do. And I was critical of my parents, probably, and what kid isn’t at that age? And they were pretty conservative and I guess I was pretty liberal, and again, what�
�s so unusual or unnatural about that kind of generation gap? But I didn’t ‘hate’ anybody. I didn’t ‘hate’ them or ‘hate’ my country. That’s absurd!”

  This time it was Mr. Holgren who uttered some muffled, protesting sound. But Earle just continued to smile, not looking at his father, and no further sound came from him, and presently the jury relaxed again.

  “How were you treated at the time of your arrest?”

  “I was savagely beaten up,” he said, a note of genuine anger entering his voice. “His thugs set on me—”

  “Your honor,” Regard said sharply. “I must object to that description of the law officers and good citizens of Pomeroy Station who apprehended this man. They are not thugs, nor are they mine. They are law-abiding citizens seeking to capture a man who had just blown up the plant and murdered three—”

  “Your honor,” Debbie said with equal sharpness, “now I object.”

  “The defendant’s remark and that of the attorney general will be stricken from the record,” Perlie Williams said. “Please proceed, Mr. Holgren. In order.”

  “Yes, sir, your honor,” Earle said, not yielding much, “but I can’t help but feel indignant still at the way I was brutally treated. The jury has seen photographs of me taken after the arrest, they’re in exhibit here, and some of them were in the papers and on television. I wasn’t such a pretty sight, thanks to those who did it. Frankly,” he said, again addressing the jury with an intimate directness, “I felt like holy hell. I hurt. I really hurt. And when I get around to suing the state for false arrest, I’m going to include as many of the bast—as many of those who did it as we can find. Furthermore, counsel,” and he swung back to Debbie, “I was denied my rights as well. Nobody notified me of them and as you know it was not until early morning of the next day that you were permitted to visit me and I was permitted to have myself a lawyer.” He turned and glared at Regard for a moment. “That will be taken into account, too.”