Fairbairn, Ann

by Five Smooth Stones

  "Do you always have these letdowns?"

  "Always. But don't let me pass this one on to you."

  David, tired but not admitting it to the emotionally exhausted man beside him, drove slower than usual over the route he had traveled only a few years before with Bill Culbertson on that first visit to the Willis house, and as he drove his mind strayed back over the trial they had just completed.

  There had never been any hope of acquittal for twenty-one-year-old Pete Martinez, the client they had just left at the Middlesex County Jail, awaiting transfer to State's prison. Their only hope had been a recommendation for life imprisonment instead of death, and that hope could only be realized by revealing to a jury the environmental pressures of his childhood and youth: poverty, slums, a bestial, drunken father who had once thrown him across a room after a brutal beating for bed-wetting. The resultant broken arm had been bungled in the setting by a neighborhood doctor and the too tight cast had left him with a semiparalyzed, stunted arm. The father had disappeared, and been followed by a procession of successors who were little better. The stay of these successors had slowly decreased from months to weeks and, finally, to hours.

  Pete had been arrested less than two miles from the place where he and two companions had held up a gas station. The attendant had been shot and later died, and a witness, just coming out of the men's room of the station, identified Pete Martinez as the man who fired the gun when the attendant made a break for the telephone. The identification was more positive than that given by most eyewitnesses because of Pete's misshapen arm; the witness had mentioned it even before the police began detailed questioning.

  David gave a little shiver now, remembering his interview with Pete's mother as soon as they received the case, unable to erase from his mind the smells and filth of the fiat in which she lived. If she felt sorrow and concern over her son's plight, they were well hidden under a blanketing fog of self-pity. Brad had told David their only hope of a fee lay in her possession of some diamonds given to her during a drunken weekend by a merchant seaman whose tenure as a successor to her husband had lasted almost a year. She had clung to them tenaciously, refusing to sell them, pawning them when the need arose, but always managing to redeem them. Her son told Brad, "She'll see me burn before she'll sell 'em."

  "No, she won't, Pete," Brad said quietly. "In the first place, you won't burn, and in the second place, she'll sell them. I'll take care of that. She owes you your defense."

  For the purposes of that first, fact-finding interview David was instructed not to mention fee or the means of raising it Yet it had obviously been on her mind. Toward the end of the interview she had broken down and cried, the weeping mean, shallow as dirty water running in a gutter, calling attention to her poverty. "You don't know how it is," she whined. "You don't know." She looked him over with swimming eyes. "You've had it good. Even if you are a nigger you've had it good—"

  And then in a final obscene gesture of maudlin self-sacrifice she had offered her untidy, sated body, and when David ended the interview in stuttering haste and hurried down the stairs she screamed after him, "You black son of a bitch!"

  When he described the incident to Brad he found disgust had added new life to his vocabulary. "I know I sound like a damned self-righteous phony, but I can't help it. I keep thinking of that guy—Pete. If he goes to the chair it won't be the jury that sent him there. With all the evil he's had going for him, how the hell could he come out much different?"

  "Than being a killer? People do. He didn't. Anyhow, you had a good chance to see how the other half lives."

  "Yeah. And how about the ofay bastards all over the country screaming about our low moral standards?"

  "When she gets on the stand—"

  "On the stand! You going to put that slut on the stand?"

  "Yes. Yes, indeed. I look forward to it."

  "They'll tear her apart on cross-examination."

  "They won't cross-examine if they've got any sense."

  During the next weeks, and especially during the trial, Brad was scarcely recognizable except in physical features. The speech slowed; the deep voice developed a cutting edge; the green eyes became shallow and expressionless. In the courtroom his deference to his opponents and the black-robed judge was different from the easy, sincere deference of Brad Willis appearing in a civil case or one in which a man's life was not the stake. It was an alert deference that made no effort to conceal a distrust of every man, even the man that sat on the bench above him. David, who liked things defined, tried to find a word for this attitude, and finally settled on "protective." He was like a lean and hungry mother cat, wary of all living creatures, vicious or slyly ingratiating as it suited her purpose, reflexes sharpened and made quicker by responsibility. Outside trial hours he showed unsheathed and unexpected claws, and David developed a catlike quickness of his own in dodging them.

  Dora was both sympathetic and amused. "Never mind," she said soothingly one afternoon when he all but staggered into the office at the end of a trial day. "Remember the old saying, 'Even this shall pass away.'"

  "How about swapping a cliche for a cup of coffee? Like now."

  During the long hours waiting for the jury to come in, David was silently hoping there would never be another murder trial. It had been a year and a half, more or less, since he had first seen his own name on an office door. During that time only one capital case had come to the office, and that had been Mike Shea's, and Mike had unashamedly sought Brad's counsel. There was an undercurrent of excitement and tension in the office during the life of the case, and David had been secretly envious of the junior who assisted Mike. A "reasonable doubt" that had been strongly established brought an acquittal. Now David wondered why he had ever been envious of anyone who actively engaged in the rough-and-tumble, yet subtle and devious, tactics of a murder trial. He flinched from the sight and sound of a District Attorney who, acting on behalf of the "people," demanded of a jury the right of the State to take a man's life. The first time he had ever been in a fight Gramp had practically had to force him to go out and tackle the neighborhood bully; he didn't think he liked fighting any better today.

  And in a murder trial you got yourself involved in ways that clouded your judgment. You found yourself thinking of a killer as a "good kid." At least, in this case that had just wound up, the guy had killed from fear, stupidly, not from hate. And that, damn it, was no grounds for tolerance, yet— after an hour in that sordid flat with the woman who had borne and reared Pete Martinez—it was no grounds for bitter condemnation either. He found himself wondering if he would ever—could ever—fight as hard to save from death a southern leader of a lynch mob, or a man such as the one Gramp told him had killed Gram's nephew, in cold blood, during a rape scare. "Going out and get me a nigger," the man had said, and blasted Gram's nephew's brains out with a shotgun just outside Mandeville. "Boy hadn't done a thing," Gramp had said. "Wasn't even walkin' on the sidewalk on the wrong side of the street." Could he ever base an advocacy for such a man on the evil influences of early environment, early pressures, the fact that he had been taught to hate, the intangibles on which Brad was basing his plea for mercy for a young killer named Pete Martinez?

  The case went to the jury in midafternoon, and not until midmorning of the next day were he and Brad summoned to the courtroom from their uneasy coffee-drinking in the Cambridge Street restaurant. Brad's face was impassive as the foreman read the verdict, but David could feel himself grinning like a fool. Afterward Brad insisted upon going across the street to the jail to visit his client before he was transported to State's prison.

  Pete, the specter of the electric chair no longer haunting him, seemed far easier and more relaxed than his attorneys. He thanked David, who said, "I didn't do much. There's the guy who really worked—"

  "You worked like a son of a bitch." Pete's face flushed. "At first I didn't want no—" He stopped, embarrassed.

  "Forget it, Pete. I'm used to that. As long as you don't feel that w
ay now."

  "Hell, no. Maybe you got something going for you instead of against you. Anyhow, thanks."

  David caught the "Beat it!" signal in Brad's eyes, and walked down to the front office to wait. A trusty, mopping up the hallway, looked at David with a sort of curious contempt as he passed. David knew the man must be aware that the Negro he looked down on was one member of a team of two whose efforts had just saved a white man from death. Even up here, thought David, there are the likes of you, who'd spit on the hands that gave one of your people life—if the hands were black.

  He talked for a moment with the sheriff while he waited. "That's a good lawyer you're working for, young fellow," said the sheriff. "Never misses coming over to see a client he's defended after the trial, even if he knows he's done all he can for him."

  "It's my first capital case. Can't say I like 'em."

  Brad came out, somber and slow-walking. "Ready, David?" He turned to the sheriff. "There was only one thing Martinez wanted. Or didn't want, I should say. Wanted to know if it could be fixed so his mother would stay the hell away from him."

  "We can't fix it so she'll stay away, but I'll pass the word along that he doesn't want to see her. Can't anyone force him to see a visitor he doesn't want to see. Can't say I blame him after hearing her on the stand."

  After Brad had put Rita Martinez on the stand, David realized it was this move that would have the greatest effect on the jury. Brad had been without semblance of mercy. There was not even a hint that he regarded her as a suffering, anxious mother, grief-stricken over what her son had done. He flirted dangerously with the possibility of a challenge that he was treating her as a hostile witness while he cut through the layers of self-pity like a surgeon cutting through layers of fat with a keen scalpel to get at vital organs; once the vital organs had been reached he revealed them as diseased and corrupt.

  "Your son was identified by his stunted arm. Was this congenital?...Then how did it happen?... And the scar on his forehead. Was this injury also inflicted by his father?... Then if not his father, who was the man?... Please speak so the judge and jury can hear you.... Just a friend? Did you make no effort to save a small boy from these drunken beatings?... Objection!... Your honor, I am attempting..."

  The prosecution had wisely avoided cross-examination, even though, as Brad pointed out to David, they might have brought out the fact that the boy was incorrigible. "Once upon a time it might have been possible to justify a broken arm and a head cut open by a belt buckle by pleading incorrigibility and the need for stern punishment. But not today. That's why I hung in there till I got a reasonably young jury with a better than average education. 'Child psychology' isn't a foreign phrase to them. A busted arm as the result of punishment for bed-wetting? They won't buy it."

  While they had been sweating out the jury's deliberations, Brad said: "By the way, I've made arrangements for Rita Martinez to sell those diamonds. They're in our safe. I'll sit in on the sale."

  "Yeah? How'd you do it?"

  "Told her a few days ago I'd pull out of the case. Even Rita couldn't face what her conscience would do to her if she let her son burn so she could keep some jewels. She's too dumb to know I couldn't have done it in midtrial."

  "Would you have? I mean if you could ethically?"

  "Hell, no."

  ***

  "Hey brat! Slow down and turn around; you just passed the house—"

  Peg Willis must have already learned the verdict on the noon radio news and been waiting for them, because as David swung the car into a U-turn in front of the house she ran down the steps and across the sidewalk. It was when he saw Peg under circumstances like this, rather than when she had been drinking, that his sympathy for Brad was deepest. There was a kind of satisfaction in just looking at her tall handsomeness, the red-gold hair invariably swept back in loose waves from the. broad forehead, the warm dark beauty of her eyes. At times like these there were few indications of the inner drives of tension.

  Now she leaned through the open window of the car, and drew Brad's head close, her kiss landing on the corner of his eye. "It was grand! I just heard it—"

  "Hey! You passing those out?" David leaned forward, laughing up at her.

  "Come in for coffee and I will."

  "Lobster?" said Brad.

  "Idiot! I don't keep them on hand—"

  "Want to drive down to Stickney's for some? We're starving and restless."

  "Love it, darling. Give me four minutes."

  David watched her hurry into the house, and said, "Any other woman would have to do a jillion things—makeup, change clothes—"

  "She'll make it in less than four minutes." Brad tapped nervous fingers on the window ledge of the car door. After a moment he said, "There's got to be an answer somewhere, David."

  "Sure there has. One of these days it will show itself."

  "I wonder. I can't help feeling that somehow it has something to do with me."

  "That's a lot of bull and you know it. The pattern was there when you were married. It goes back beyond the time Peg even knew you."

  "I'll grant the cause does. I'm talking about the effect, and overcoming it."

  "I don't believe there isn't an answer and that you won't find it—my God! Here she comes. Three minutes flat—"

  "That's what I said—"

  ***

  After dinner David walked out on the wide veranda of the old-fashioned hotel near Marblehead. Stickney's was a big, rambling building, weatherbeaten outside, shabbily comfortable inside. It was in the hands now of the third generation of Stickneys. The veranda ran around three sides of the building, its easterly end overlooking the tumbling chaos of giant rocks spilling from the headland to the sea. He was alone; inside, Brad and Peg were still in the wide hallway that served as a lobby, talking with friends who had waylaid them as they left the dining room.

  He walked to the eastern railing, leaning on it with his hands, looking out across an angry sea and then below at the mountainous cresting swells that rushed toward land with silent fury, finding voice at last as they spent themselves on the rocks below in a dying shout and final show of white, defiant beauty.

  Brad's letdown had come immediately, as soon as they had left Pete Martinez in the jail. His own was coming now, sweeping over him in waves that grew higher as they rolled in, like the waves of the rising tide below. For him the most poignant loneliness had always followed good fortune rather than bad. I can ride out disappointment alone, he thought. I can rassle with trouble better alone, we all can. He had kidded Peg when she ran to the car and kissed Brad, but within him there had been sharp pain. Would he always, he wondered, all his life, cry out instinctively, in times like this: "Sara! Good news! Let me tell you—" then hear the cry die within him, unspoken, in desperate futility?

  He tried to let the sound of the surf drown the sound of her voice that at a time like this could be within his mind soft and quick and loving, and louder than any thunder.

  ***

  A voice just behind him said, "Don't be so sad."

  He turned quickly to smile at Peg. "How'd you know?"

  "You looked as though doom had just reared its ugly head right in front of you—"

  "Maybe it had, Peg. Here—I'll get some chairs together."

  "We can sit here for a while before the storm breaks. I love it when it's like this. You boys can have a drink while I guzzle coffee."

  "Don't you mind?"

  "Not in the least. I usually start wanting a drink when there isn't a drop within sight or reach. Right now it's repugnant."

  Peg was being franker about what, for want of better identification, was known as her "problem" than David had ever known her to be.

  "I just want a small, nonbulky drink," he said. He had been dreading for weeks any personal talks with Brad. The fact that Peg was there now he knew would not save him from a discussion of his contemplated trip to England. In fact, Brad might just be devious enough to bring it up because she was there, clearheaded and
keen of judgment.

  Brad came out carrying a tray with glasses and a cup of coffee. He set it down with a flourish on the wicker table in front of Peg and David. When David raised his eyebrow, questioningly, Brad said, "I know they don't sell it here, but old man Stickney has his own ideas of hospitality. His compliments, by the way."

  David sipped, grinned, and said, "Gosh!"

  "You don't hardly ever taste brandy like that no more," said Brad.

  "No more?" said David. "I never have. I didn't grow up in rare old brandy circles."

  "Never mind the rare old brandy. You're flirting with a real menace. Warm beer."

  "Warm beer? Since when?"

  Peg answered, laughing: "In England. I prefer it myself. Brad doesn't mind it, but you'd have a hard time getting used to it."

  "I don't think I could." He turned to Brad in an effort to change the subject. "Know something, Brad? I've learned more about trial work, rules of evidence, that sort of thing, in this last trial than in all the years at school, swear I have."

  "David, you're trying to wiggle off the hook," said Peg. "Brad's been saying you'd like to go to England, Oxford. Why?"

  "Well, look—" He stirred uneasily. "Isn't just a desire to learn more a valid reason? Who told me that the learning of law never ends? Guy named Bradford Willis."

  "Not quite, David," said Brad sharply. "You're taking what I said out of context. If you'll recall correctly I said that the learning of law is progressive, from history through statutes, all that—on up—and I said 'up'—through its application in the courts, to the needs of the people. And I said that it holds just as true in a dry-as-dust civil case as in a criminal case. What were your struggles with Litchfield if they weren't a valiant effort to fit into the framework of the law the affairs of a delightful but fuzzy-minded man who would never knowingly violate the law or hurt his fellowman but must nevertheless be bound by it? Did you have any real concept of the words 'reasonable doubt' until Mike Shea won that acquittal? Did you have any real knowledge of how the 'eye for an eye' concept of law can have its fangs drawn until the verdict this morning?"