Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment

by D. W. Buffa

I watched out the passenger-side window the river and the mountain fall farther away as we drove up the hill to the hospital. Scattered across the blue high-arching sky, great billowing clouds had turned the color of copper dust; down below in the city, reflected off the glass-walled buildings, the late afternoon sun painted everything behind it a black-edged gold as it ran reluctantly ahead, chased by the soft summer night.

  “I’m sorry about what I said. It was unforgivable,” I said, looking across at Flynn.

  He kept his eyes on the curving road, the only response a slight change in the way he tilted his head, a gesture meant to let me know that it was not important.

  “I knew what was inside,” I remarked as the car approached the front of the hospital.

  “How could you know that?”

  “I read the file.”

  He brought the car to a stop. “That part was under seal.”

  “It’s just a little adhesive,” I said as I gathered up my attache case, the one Jennifer had given me, and opened the door.

  “Then you just resealed it?” He shook his head at the sheer simplicity of it.

  “It was hard to believe that even Jeffries would go that far,” I explained. “I had to be sure.” I ran my finger along the letters of my name, engraved on the narrow brass plate, as I thought about what had happened in court and what had happened twelve years before. “Makes you wonder,” I said, looking at Flynn as I started to get out, “which of them was really insane.”

  I had to wait a long time to see the doctors, and I stayed with Jennifer until I was told I had to leave, but Flynn was still there, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I asked him if he had another, and without a word he reached inside his sport coat pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack. The smoke caught halfway down my throat and made me cough. I let the cigarette tumble from between my fingers and crushed it out with the heel of my shoe.

  “They’re still running tests,” I reported, trying to sound encouraged. “More tomorrow.”

  Flynn took one last drag on his cigarette, stomped it out with his foot, and stood up.

  “Why don’t I take you home. You need to get some sleep.

  You’ve been running on nothing but nervous energy.”

  I did not want to go home; I was afraid to go home. All night the night before I had been chased by ghosts of my own invention, maddening thoughts about what I could have done to stop all this from happening. I had not slept at all and had not even tried.

  “Listen, why don’t we get something to eat,” I suggested as we walked to where he had parked the car. “There are some things we need to talk about—to get ready for tomorrow.”

  He knew it was not true, but he went along with it as if it was. We had a sandwich and a bowl of soup in a diner I had never heard of, and when he offered to take me by the house to get a change of clothes and spend the night at his place I accepted with an eagerness that surprised even myself. First we stopped at the jail.

  “I told Danny I’d come by,” Flynn explained as we waited for the jailer to open the metal door. “If I didn’t show up, he might start to wonder if he could trust me.”

  I sat next to him every day in court, and except when I wanted by some gesture, some apparent word of encouragement, to convince the jury I believed in his innocence, barely noticed he was there. He had neither the mannerisms of a child, nor the idio-syncrasies of an adult; his face had none of the physical features that reveal the character, the essential lines of what we are: He was a blank page on which nothing permanent had yet been written.

  We did not stay long.

  “Just came by to say hello,” Flynn said cheerfully when he was brought in.

  Danny greeted him with a drowsy smile. “Hello, Howard.”

  Flynn smiled back. “Just had dinner, didn’t you?”

  “It was good,” he replied as he turned to me. “Hello, Mr. Antonelli. Do I get dressed up again tomorrow?”

  “Want a different tie?”

  He seemed alarmed, and I realized he thought it meant having to give up the one he had. “Then you’ll have two you can choose from.”

  He brightened immediately. “Sure. I’d like that.”

  When we left the jail and drove through the city to Flynn’s apartment, it was almost completely dark. Under the blue-black sky, a scarlet haze hung low on the horizon, the last light till morning.

  Flynn made up a bed for me on the bulky tattered sofa in his makeshift study, while I stood in the doorway, glancing furtively at the aging picture of his long-dead son.

  “I really am sorry about what I said.”

  Holding a pillow under his chin, he tugged on the dull white pillowcase. “I know you are,” he grunted. “Let it go. Things get said. They don’t mean anything.”

  He gave the pillowcase one last pull. “There, that should do it,” he said, plopping it into place at the far end of the couch.

  A wry grin spread across his broad, heavy mouth. “What did you expect: a mint on your pillow?”

  I followed him back into the kitchen. The cat heard us coming and, before Flynn could grab him, jumped off the table and ran for cover.

  “Stupid cat won’t give up: thinks there has to be something to eat in that bowl,” he growled, nodding toward the wax fruit and glass grapes.

  Things I had forgotten that yesterday seemed important started to come back into focus. “You must have called Asa’s office. That’s why Jonah came to court with him,” I said as we sat down at the gray Formica table.

  “Strange little bastard,” Flynn observed. “When I told him Bartram’s life might be in danger, he laughed. Said he thought you were nuts. Swear to God—that’s what he said. He wasn’t happy about the subpoena. He didn’t think you had any business taking up the old man’s time to come over and testify that he’d made a court appearance for some screwball a dozen years ago.”

  “That sounds like him. I wonder what he thinks now, after he heard what good old Asa helped Jeffries do.” I remembered the other call I’d asked him to make. “Did you reach Jeffries’s widow?”

  “There was no answer,” he replied. “I left a message, but she never called back. Maybe she’s out of town.”

  “She better be back by morning,” I said, stretching my arms.

  “She’s my next witness.”

  Flynn got up to get a bottle of milk out of the refrigerator.

  “What are you going to ask her?”

  I asked her a question a gentleman would never ask; I got an answer no lady would ever give.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Jeffries,” I asked the next morning as soon as she had been sworn in as a witness, “did you and I ever sleep together?”

  Jean Jeffries was not a young woman anymore, but in a gray jacket and an ankle-length skirt she was, if anything, more beautiful than when I had first met her, years before, the wife of Elliott Winston. Even then she had been a little too sure of herself.

  “Why?” she asked with a taunting glance. “Don’t you remember?”

  Standing at the corner of the counsel table, I stared back at her. “I’m sure I would have, Mrs. Jeffries. I take it your answer is no. Which brings me to my next question. Why did your husband—your first husband—think we had?”

  “Because he was a very sick man. You of all people should know that, Mr. Antonelli. He tried to kill you, didn’t he?”

  “So there was no basis in reality for his belief that you were having an affair?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But he was so convinced of it, so convinced you were having an affair with me, that he tried to kill me?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Because he was crazy?”

  “He was sick.”

  “Isn’t it true, Mrs. Jeffries,” I asked, searching her eyes, “that the reason Elliott thought we were having an affair is because Calvin Jeffries told him we were?”

  “No, of course not. Calvin wouldn’t have—”

  “And isn’t it true, Mrs. Jeffries, that h
e did that because he wanted to keep him from finding out that you were actually having an affair with him?” I asked with a scathing glance.

  She sat on the edge of the witness chair, her hands held rigid in her lap, her long-lashed eyes flashing, speechless anger the only answer she could give.

  I walked toward the jury, my arms folded, my eyes lowered, trying to get myself back under control. “How often did you visit your husband when he was first sent to the state hospital?” I asked quietly. There was no answer, and still staring down at the floor I repeated the question.

  “I didn’t visit him there,” she said, clearing her throat.

  “I’m not sure everyone could hear that. Would you please say it again?”

  “I didn’t visit him there,” she said more loudly, and more irritably.

  “And your children—Elliott’s children—how often have they been to visit their father in the twelve years he has been locked up in that place?”

  My head bowed, I listened to the silence and felt something of the loneliness Elliott must have known. Then I felt something else and turned on Jeffries’s wife with a rage I barely recognized as my own.

  “You never allowed them to see their father, did you? You were afraid of what might happen—afraid of what he might tell them—

  weren’t you?”

  Her hands, clutched tight together, began to tremble. “I was afraid of what he might do! I’m still afraid of what he might do!”

  “Afraid he might harm you?—harm your children?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he’s threatened you?—written letters threatening you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of what you and Calvin Jeffries did to him?”

  “We did nothing to him,” she insisted.

  “You never went to see him, you divorced him, you married Calvin Jeffries, and then the two of you took away his children so Calvin Jeffries could adopt them and call them his own, but,”

  I added, glaring at her, “you can say ‘we did nothing to him’? You did everything to him, and you know it, and you know what he’s done because of it, don’t you? He’s managed to kill your husband, hasn’t he? And you know who he’s coming after next, don’t you?”

  Loescher was screaming an objection, trying to make herself heard over the bedlam that had broken out as the courtroom exploded in noise and confusion.

  “You knew that Calvin Jeffries fixed it so that Elliott would be sent to the state hospital, didn’t you?” I shouted while Bingham was trying to quiet the courtroom.

  “Calvin did it for me,” she shouted back. “I didn’t want Elliott to go to prison!”

  All the noise had stopped as everyone suddenly turned to hear what she said. Her voice reverberated off the silent square walls of the courtroom and then slowly faded away. I stood a few feet from her, my hands in my pockets, and watched as her head sank down between her shoulders and she began to rub her hands together.

  “So you both knew—you and Calvin Jeffries—that Elliott didn’t need to go to the state hospital, because you knew—didn’t you?—

  that he was never really insane.”

  She lifted her head and stopped rubbing her hands. “No, that’s not what I meant. What I meant to say was that—”

  Waving my hand in the air, I turned away, cutting her off before she could finish. “No more questions of this witness, your honor.”

  I had shown anger and contempt; Loescher made a show of boredom and indifference. She got to her feet, managing to make even that seem an effort, then shook her head and sighed. Facing the witness with an apologetic smile, she asked two or three questions designed to underscore the fact that the widow of Judge Jeffries had no knowledge about either the defendant or the murder of Quincy Griswald. Then, when she was finished, she looked at me with a puzzled expression and shook her head again, as if she was trying to understand what in the world I thought I was doing wasting the jury’s time like this. Smiling smugly to herself, she sat down.

  There were only two witnesses left to call, unless I decided finally to call the defendant himself. One of them was waiting in the hall; the other one was supposedly on his way to the courthouse. I wondered if Elliott Winston would ever actually arrive.

  “The defense calls Dr. Melvin Friedman,” I announced before the wife of Calvin Jeffries had reached the door at the back of the courtroom. If the name of her former husband’s doctor meant anything to her, she did not show it. With her head held high she opened the door and let herself out, as certain as she had ever been that every eye was still on her.

  With an armload of file folders, Dr. Friedman, a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth, pushed through the gate in the railing at the front of the courtroom. In doubt what to do with the documents he carried, he looked up at the judge. Bingham smiled, nodded to his clerk, waited until she had relieved Friedman of his burden, and smiled again.

  “Dr. Friedman,” I asked, “you’re here under subpoena, correct?”

  He tugged on the lapel of his lightweight tan sports jacket, then straightened his slacks. “Yes, that’s correct,” he said, pulling his shirt cuff.

  “You were also served with a subpoena duces tecum, requiring that you produce certain documents in court today. Do you have those documents with you?”

  “Yes. The clerk has them,” he replied, pulling on the other cuff.

  “There is a patient at the state hospital by the name of Chester MacArthur?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have his file with you?”

  “That was one of the ones I was told to bring.”

  The clerk, at my instruction, handed him the file.

  “Chester MacArthur was a high school history teacher who thought he was a soldier in Vietnam, and he murdered a man—

  an insurance salesman, I believe—who was walking to his car in a parking structure because MacArthur thought he was Vietcong.

  Am I right, Dr. Friedman?”

  Clutching the file on his lap, Friedman agreed.

  “He hid in the garage, waiting, and then slashed his throat with a knife, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Leaning against the front edge of the table, I pointed toward the file he was holding. “Can you tell us if during his incarcera-tion in the state hospital Chester MacArthur has ever been let out?”

  He did not need to check; he had already done it—checked and no doubt double-checked—after I obtained a court order compelling him to show me what was in MacArthur’s file.

  “During a period of eight months he participated in a standard community release program. This is part of a supervised effort to help patients make the transition back into society,” he explained to the jury.

  “How often was he let out under this program?”

  “Patients are let out three days every other week at the beginning, gradually increasing to a week at a time, sometimes longer, depending on how well they adjust to life outside.”

  “MacArthur is no longer in that program, is he?”

  “No. He found it too difficult. He didn’t think he was ready yet.”

  I told Dr. Friedman the date on which Quincy Griswald had been killed. “Chester MacArthur was out then, wasn’t he?”

  Opening the file, Friedman fumbled through the pages. “Yes, he was.” He held his finger on the page as he looked up. “He was out for two weeks that time.”

  “It was the last time, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s right, it was, but—”

  “This release program: Isn’t that the same program Jacob Whittaker was on?” Friedman seemed to hesitate. “You were asked to bring that file as well. If you need to consult it, I’ll have the clerk give it to you.”

  “No, that’s right,” he said, nodding abruptly. “It was the same program.”

  “Only Jacob Whittaker didn’t come back, did he? He murdered Calvin Jeffries and then killed himself, didn’t he?”

  Pressing his lips together,
Friedman looked down at his hands.

  “I’m afraid so.” His head bounced up. “But there’s no reason to think that Chester MacArthur did the same thing.”

  “They were both in the forensic ward of the state hospital, weren’t they? And both of them had killed before, hadn’t they?”

  Before he could respond, I added, “And both of them were there with Elliott Winston, weren’t they?”

  “We have hundreds of patients in the forensic ward, many of them in that transition program we were just discussing.”

  “What is Chester MacArthur’s middle name, Dr. Friedman?”

  “William.”

  “Does anyone ever call him Billy?”

  It seemed to surprise him that I knew. “Yes. It’s the name he prefers. He doesn’t like the name Chester. He thinks it’s too formal. His father insisted on always calling him that. He associates it with authority.”

  “Elliott Winston calls him Chester, doesn’t he?”

  Friedman shrugged. “You may be right. I really don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? I see. Well, tell us this: How long does someone have to be a patient at the state hospital before they become eligible for this release program we were talking about?”

  He wanted to make it sound as safe as he could. “Quite a long time. A patient would have to be very near the end of the time for which he had been committed, and even then only if he was not considered a danger to others. Unfortunately,” he added, deciding to bring it up before I did, “in the case of Jacob Whittaker a mistake was made. When you’re dealing with the human mind you’re dealing with something that is always going to be something of a mystery.”

  Pushing away from the table, I closed the distance between us until I was just a step away. “But it’s not such a mystery that you don’t routinely decide which people are sane and which are not, is it?”

  “I meant the individual case, trying to decide precisely what is wrong with someone who isn’t sane, and what can be done to help them.”

  “Elliott Winston: What is precisely wrong with him?”

  Knitting his brow, Friedman slowly nodded. “Paranoid schizophrenia.”

  “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure of that?” I asked, staring hard at him. “Whatever may or may not be wrong with Elliott Winston, Dr. Friedman, he’s different from the other patients at the state hospital, isn’t he?”