The Furthest City Light

by Jeanne Winer

  She sat. “What’s the question then? I’ve forgotten.”

  “The question is whether you deserve to spend the rest of your life in prison for defending yourself.”

  “What if I wasn’t?” she asked, and for a moment my heart stopped, not because I thought she was telling the truth, but because she was even capable of asking the question. Which was also why I loved and admired her. Even behind bars she insisted on living the examined life. How wonderful, unless of course you happened to be her defense attorney, in which case it was a nightmare.

  “Listen, Emily, the very first time we met, I asked you whether you thought Hal was about to hurt you when you stabbed him. Do you remember?”

  She sighed. “I remember.”

  “And you said, ‘of course he was.’”

  She spread her hands on the table. “But I could have been wrong. I’d been wrong in the past. For all I know, he might have been planning to kiss me.”

  We were in dangerous legal territory now, a tricky no-man’s land where the right jury instruction could mean the difference between freedom and life in prison. “Okay, Emily, I need you to listen carefully. No matter what Hal’s real intentions might have been, based on your past experiences, you thought he was going to hurt you. He’d broken your jaw just six weeks earlier. Right?”

  She nodded reluctantly. “Right.”

  I dug through my briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “These are all cases that say in self-defense situations like yours, the defendant gets to have an instruction on what’s called ‘apparent necessity and the right to be wrong.’”

  For the first time since we’d started this conversation, I could feel Emily beginning to yield. She was leaning forward, paying close attention now.

  “So these cases say,” I continued, “that an apparent necessity instruction should be given when the trial court’s self-defense instruction doesn’t adequately inform the jury of a person’s right to act on the appearance of being killed or receiving serious bodily injury. In other words, we can argue that someone who’s been subject to the battering and domination of another may have an altered perception and evaluation of a situation, and could, on the surface, appear to overreact to a particular incident. The instruction will tell the jury that it has to consider your prior experiences of helplessness, beatings and threats which may have caused a heightened response at the time Hal came at you.”

  Emily was staring at me. “Do you think it’ll work?”

  It has to, I thought, and then stood up to leave. I had five arraignments scheduled for one o’clock at the courthouse. “In conjunction with Dr. Midman’s testimony, absolutely.”

  ***

  A few days later, I met Donald for another working lunch. Since we couldn’t agree on a restaurant we both liked—he couldn’t smoke or get a hamburger in the ones I favored, and I couldn’t stand the way my hair and clothes smelled after eating in the ones he preferred—we’d settled into bringing our own lunches to the office and working together in the conference room.

  After interviewing the staff at both the library and the Humane Society, the two places Emily had worked as a volunteer, Donald had found only one witness at the Humane Society who’d noticed a couple of bruises on Emily’s forearms. The woman was unenthusiastic about testifying and told Donald that Emily always acted aloof and seemed to have an attitude problem.

  “What kind of an attitude problem?” I asked, nibbling on a carrot stick.

  “Couldn’t say exactly,” Donald replied, tearing into his third Big Mac. “Like she thought Emily read poetry all the time because everyone’s conversation bored her.”

  “Oh.” Poor Emily: wrong husband, wrong century, wrong life.

  Donald took another huge bite of his hamburger, squirting special sauce on his shirtsleeve. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray next to his plate.

  “Why don’t you put out that cigarette?” I suggested. “You can’t smoke and eat at the same time.”

  “Sure I can.” Donald picked up the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and then bit into his hamburger. Smoke drifted out from between his teeth as he chewed.

  “That’s really gross, Donald.”

  He looked pointedly at the open container of hummus next to my carrot sticks. “Talk about gross,” he said, burping loudly.

  Help, I thought, I’m trapped in a room with a four-year-old. But, I reminded myself, a four-year-old without whom I would not win Emily’s case. I picked up my carrots and hummus—they were kind of gross—and tossed them in the trash. Donald stared at me as if I were crazy and then laughed. Thank God four-year-olds don’t hold grudges. I glanced at my notes.

  “What about Louise Watkins, Hal’s mother?” I asked.

  Donald lit another cigarette, but was careful not to blow any smoke at me. “She lives in some kind of retirement setup in downtown Denver called The Lincoln Suites. I tried calling her again last week and she hung up on me.”

  “Shit. Louise is probably the only person alive who saw Emily’s black eyes and bruises. Not that she ever asked about them of course. And she knew about Emily’s broken jaw as well.”

  Donald flicked his ashes in the general direction of the ashtray. “I’ll find the doc who treated her for the jaw,” he promised. “He just moved to Utah, but I’ll find him.”

  “Thanks,” I said and meant it. I drummed my fingers on the conference table and glanced around me. The room was lined with shelves of forest-colored law books: Colorado statutes, treatises on search and seizure, books about forensic medicine, legal encyclopedias, tomes on blood splatter analysis, ballistics, eyewitness identification and various journals devoted to the so-called science of criminology. There was one cheap print on the wall that our secretary had brought in to liven up the place, a French café scene in which everyone appeared drunk and uproariously happy. The picture always made me feel sad.

  “Hey,” I said, “why don’t we just drop in on Louise and see if she’ll talk to us?”

  Donald picked something out of his teeth. “That’s not a bad idea. It’s harder for people to tell you to get lost to your face. Could you go now?”

  I nodded. “Let’s take my Toyota.” I’d once looked inside Donald’s van, a horrifying experience I never wanted to repeat. “My car’s faster.”

  The ground floor of The Lincoln Suites looked like a classy hotel with exposed brick walls, oak floors and expensive looking southwestern-style furniture. At first, Donald and I thought we’d come to the wrong place, but a woman dressed in a stylish mauve pantsuit whose nametag identified her as “Barbara” assured us we hadn’t. I told her we’d come to visit Louise Watkins.

  “Oh yes,” Barbara said. “Unfortunately, we’re in the middle of switching to a new phone system, so I can’t call and announce you beforehand. You’ll have to take the elevator to the third floor and knock on three-twelve.”

  “No problem,” Donald said, and then we hurried to the elevator before anyone could stop us. “Pretty ritzy,” he mumbled on the ride up.

  Any vague hopes I might have had that Mrs. Watkins was a timid old lady were immediately dashed.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, peering at us through a peephole in her door.

  I pushed Donald to the side. “My name is Rachel Stein. The court appointed me to represent Emily Watkins. I’d like to ask you a few questions about your son, to find out what kind of man he was.”

  “He was a good man,” she said through the door, “and that bitch he married deserves the death penalty.”

  “Would you be willing to let me in and tell me why you think that?”

  “Why should I?” she asked.

  I looked at Donald, who shrugged. “Well,” I improvised, “how else can I find out what a good man he was? So far, nobody’s willing to come forward and talk to me about him.”

  This was all true. None of Hal’s acquaintances (mostly ex-cops) were willing to be interviewed. It had been five months since her son was killed. I was hoping she wanted to talk ab
out him, even to us. I was right.

  We heard the door unlock, and then we were face-to-face with a thin, elegant-looking woman in her late seventies. Her hair was stark white and recently permed, not a strand out of place. I’d have bet that none of the lines in her face were from laughing. In fact, she looked like someone who’d been dissatisfied for a very long time, maybe her entire life. I couldn’t imagine Emily cooking dinner for this woman and her son every Sunday afternoon. How could she have survived it? Dissociation, I decided, cheaper than booze, easier on the body.

  The room matched Mrs. Watkins’s hair. Everything in it was white: the carpet, the walls, the loveseat, the two chairs, all perfectly arranged and lacquered into place. Donald looked astonished, as if he’d stumbled into a nightmare landscape. Just don’t touch anything, I thought.

  “My son’s life,” Mrs. Watkins said, taking the loveseat and leaving us the two chairs, “was ruined by your client, even before she murdered him. He never should have married her. He’d been engaged for years to a wonderful young lady he’d met in high school, the daughter of a good friend of ours. Janet, however, couldn’t bear the idea of Hal going into law enforcement. She thought it was too dangerous. When she broke it off with him, he never recovered.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “So it was Janet that ruined his life?”

  Mrs. Watkins looked confused for a moment, and then shook her head. “No. It was Emily that made him so unhappy.”

  “Which is why Hal drank?” Donald tried.

  Mrs. Watkins glanced at Donald as if he were a bug that was unfortunately too big to kill. Donald receded into his chair and I knew he would simply take notes for the rest of the interview.

  “Please go on,” I urged.

  Mrs. Watkins was nodding. “Oh, Hal drank, but only enough to stand his marriage. He’d made a commitment and he intended to honor it. Hal was very much like me. We honor our commitments.”

  “You and Hal were close?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Very.”

  “Did he confide in you?”

  “Always. And I was always there for him.” She paused. “But I wouldn’t give him money as long as he stayed with her.”

  “And so,” I continued smoothly, “he told you that sometimes he’d lose his temper with Emily and then feel badly about it?”

  “Of course,” she said, and then thought about her answer. “But he never hurt her. If she said he did, she’s lying.”

  I backed up a little. “He was very lucky to have you as a confidante.”

  “Yes. He had little in common with his wife.”

  I decided to take a leap. What the hell, she’d never talk to us again. “He was concerned, wasn’t he, that Emily was so accident-prone?”

  Donald blinked, but said nothing. Mrs. Watkins looked wary; she was no dope.

  “What are you getting at?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Nothing. Just that Emily was obviously very clumsy. All those bruises and black eyes. She must have always been running into things.”

  Mrs. Watkins hesitated, and then said, “I didn’t see anything.” The interview would be over in a minute. I had to move fast.

  “Well, the last Christmas you all spent together, didn’t Emily have a black eye?” Before she could answer, I said, “Didn’t Hal tell you she’d run into a door in the middle of the night?” I was totally prevaricating now.

  “That sounds familiar,” she said cautiously.

  “And that Easter Sunday when she was too embarrassed to go to church with you and your son because of the bruises on her face? Surely you remember that?”

  “I think so. I’m not a hundred percent sure.” She sounded old and tired, and I was beginning to feel sorry for her. But I felt sorrier for Emily.

  “One last question. Which car was Emily driving when she got into that accident and broke her jaw? Hal’s car or hers?”

  Mrs. Watkins shook her head impatiently. “What difference does it make?”

  “But didn’t Hal tell you?” I pressed.

  “Hers, I think. And now I’d like you to go.” Donald and I both jumped up as if we’d been ejected from our chairs. Mrs. Watkins escorted us to the door.

  “I hope they give your client the death penalty,” she said.

  “Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us.”

  She shook her head and closed the door. Then locked it.

  “What a bitch,” Donald said as we headed down the hall. “Poor Hal. I assume you want me to follow up on this Janet lead?”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  On the drive home, I thought about Hal and Emily’s marriage, and how it had been sabotaged from the very beginning. Without his mother’s toxic support, Hal might have given Emily a chance and they might have had a normal relationship. But, probably not. Mrs. Watkins didn’t make Hal drink, and she didn’t make him hit his wife either.

  The rush hour traffic finally caught up to us and we had to slow down until we were barely moving. Every once in a while, Donald groaned in frustration, no doubt counting the minutes until he could smoke again. To the west, the foothills were bathed in a soft peaceful glow. It would be dark in less than an hour.

  “This is a sad job we have,” Donald muttered.

  I looked over at him in surprise. “Yes, it is. Nobody ever needs our services for a happy reason.” I hesitated. “Okay, you can smoke, but you have to lean as far out of the window as possible.”

  “Really? Thanks!”

  I sighed. “You’re welcome.”

  We drove the rest of the way home in companionable silence.

  Chapter Four

  When I was nineteen years old and still suggestible, I allowed my friend Leslie to talk me into dropping acid with her. We were at a party on the bohemian (i.e. seedy) edge of Beacon Hill celebrating the end of our first year at Boston University.

  I’d known Leslie since the third grade and whenever I’d gotten into trouble—ditching classes, smoking cigarettes in the park, getting drunk at my sixteenth birthday party, hitchhiking to the Newport Folk Festival—it was always with her. We’d been inseparable all through high school and so far through college.

  Although it never occurred to us we ought to be sexual (“alternative lifestyles” weren’t quite yet in vogue), it’s clear to me now that had one of us been male, he or she would have been my first ex-lover. Instead, we were simply best friends: innocent, sweetly clueless women who dated men but preferred each other’s company to anyone else’s.

  As soon as we arrived at the party, a fashionably gaunt man with long flowing hair handed each of us some blotter acid and advised us to hurry since everyone else had already dropped theirs twenty minutes ago.

  “We want everyone to be in sync,” he explained.

  I looked at Leslie. “I don’t know about this.”

  “Oh come on, Rachel. It’ll be a new experience.”

  It was May 1969 and everyone was being urged to use psychedelic drugs to blow their minds and thus expand their ordinary limited consciousness. And so, before I could stop her, she swallowed her portion. Throughout our years together, it had been Leslie’s genius that got us into trouble and mine that got us out—usually at the last possible moment—mainly because I could think faster than almost everyone around me and even more importantly distinguish the truly dangerous people from the merely wacky. But I couldn’t help Leslie, I reasoned, if I couldn’t understand her and so I swallowed mine as well.

  About forty minutes later, I tapped Leslie on the shoulder and informed her I’d figured the whole thing out. We were part of an unorthodox but valid experiment in which some people had been given LSD and others a placebo, the point being to see if those of us who had been given the placebo would begin to imitate the ones who were genuinely under the influence.

  “It just stands to reason,” I explained, lifting my arms to include, at that moment, the whole gestalt of everything.

  Leslie stared at me for a moment, then burst out laug
hing. “That’s brilliant,” she said, pulling me down to the floor. For the next hour, we crawled around on our hands and knees trying to guess which people were under the influence and which ones were faking it.

  “I bet they’re faking it,” Leslie would say, pointing at a couple of women who were tossing record albums out the window, or a group of men trying to light their hair on fire.

  “I don’t know,” I’d reply. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell.” Although I was trying not to notice, it seemed as if I could actually see all the atoms in the air zipping around and colliding with one another like bumper cars in an amusement park. The room felt very crowded.

  “What about that cannibal in the corner?” Leslie finally asked.

  “What cannibal?”

  “The one with the big white bone in his nose.”

  I stared in the direction she was looking. “I don’t see any cannibals, Les. Which makes me think you took the real thing, not the placebo.”

  She shrugged. “Anything’s possible. What do you see?” She pointed across the room at a middle-aged man with short black hair who was wearing a tuxedo.

  “Him?” I started to smile. I could feel my face cracking as if it were made out of dried clay. “That’s Jerry Lewis, but he’s acting genuinely funny which makes me think I took the real thing as well, since Jerry Lewis is never genuinely funny.”

  Leslie shook her head in awe. “My God, Rachel, you’re probably the only person in the world who could have rationally determined you were out of your mind.”

  If so, it was the last rational thought either one of us had for the next twelve hours. The night is sketchy, but at some point I was sitting cross-legged on the floor watching Leslie press her thumb repeatedly into the carpet attempting to kill thousands of tiny blue insects. After what seemed like hours, I grabbed her arm and told her it was useless, that she’d never get them all. The Doors were singing “Light my Fire,” and the next thing I remember we were kissing.

  When we finally stopped, Leslie traced a finger down my face and said, “I thought I was kissing myself.”