Death Penalty

by William J. Coughlin

  “I can still make things happen over there,” he said, sounding like he really thought he could.

  “Judge, what are you trying to tell me?”

  He studied me for a moment, then looked around. We were alone.

  “You were a clerk over there once, Charley. You know about the hearing memo, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Secret, right?”

  I nodded again.

  “Only the judges on the hearing panel, their chief clerks, and the clerk who prepared the memo have access, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled. “If that document was given out to someone who wasn’t entitled to see it, such an indiscretion would result not only in discharge but probable disbarment, correct?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. “If the attorneys could get their hands on the memo they would know when to settle and when not to settle. It would destroy the purpose of the appeal, would it not?”

  “Okay, Judge, you’ve made your point. I know all this as well as you do.”

  This time there was no smile. He reached into his inside coat pocket and extracted a folded piece of paper and handed it to me.

  “Read it,” he said, “but quickly.”

  The wind off the river had picked up; the paper danced in my hands as I unfolded it. It was a photocopy of the hearing memo in the McHugh case.

  “Interesting, eh?” he said.

  The memo was standard. I had written enough of them myself to know it was genuine. The facts were brief, but accurate. The law was set forth in an evenhanded way, citing the strongest cases for both sides.

  The recommendation was to overrule the jury verdict and decide the case on the law and against Will McHugh.

  I read it twice and then looked up at Mallow.

  He snatched the paper from my hands and carefully began to tear it up into small pieces, letting the wind pick up each piece and wing it into the choppy river water where it floated for a moment and then sank.

  He said nothing, merely looked at me without blinking.

  “So, I presume this means I lost,” I said.

  “As I said. It doesn’t look good.”

  I thought about Will McHugh. I could almost see his haunted eyes looking at me. And I thought about poor Mickey Monk.

  “Why did you show this to me?”

  For a moment he didn’t reply. Then his face grew stern. “I may be able to help you, Charley.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you like to win, Charley? Despite that memo?”

  “The court doesn’t always follow those memos.”

  “True.”

  “Judge, what are you trying to say?”

  He looked around, and then across the river at Canada. “Beautiful,” he said. “So peaceful.”

  He smiled; it was a soft, secret expression, as if he knew something but wasn’t ready yet to say what it was.

  “I may be able to help,” he said quietly. “There’s a lot of money involved here, and that always means there’s elbow room. I’m glad you agree to my help. Stay here, Charley, and enjoy the view. I’ll be in touch later.”

  He ambled away quickly before I could reply. I watched him go.

  It seemed to me that the Honorable Jeffrey Mallow was starting to put together some kind of shakedown.

  Maybe the case had already been won and decided. Perhaps Mallow was looking to take credit for something that had already happened. He would want to cut himself in for a big slice of the fee. It would be raw theft. For whatever reasons, he was a desperate man.

  I wondered what the next step might be.

  I looked down at the roiling river water. It was twenty-five feet deep there, murky with swirling currents. It was dangerous.

  From my point of view, it wasn’t the only thing that was dangerous.

  I WALKED BACK SLOWLY to where my car was parked. And I took my time, for a change, driving back to Pickeral Point.

  I needed to think. I wasn’t even sure that the conversation had been the opening gambit to solicit a bribe. Jeffrey Mallow was a peculiar man in a number of ways. Perhaps stealing that secret memo was some kind of demonstration that he still had clout at the court where once he reigned. For all his bluster, I began to sense the pathetic man beneath the noise. A failed man. A man who once had power and a degree of fame, and now no longer had it. Maybe this was no more than a demeaning act to solicit someone to look upon him with respect one more time.

  He had mentioned money but only in an oblique way.

  Perhaps he was like the old ragged man he had so roughly rebuffed. Maybe this was his way of asking for a handout.

  I thought of Mickey Monk telling me that rumor had it some of the judges were for sale.

  I again wished I had never heard of the damn McHugh case.

  My small ship was sailing into very dangerous waters.

  A lawyer, who did nothing wrong, except perhaps to fail to report a bribe, could lose his license, or even go to jail.

  Especially a lawyer with a past like mine.

  11

  When I got back to the office I decided to skip lunch. It wasn’t any attempt at a diet, or even the press of business. I just didn’t feel like eating. Mrs. Fenton, who apparently didn’t wish to join in my unofficial fast, went off to lunch at her regular hour.

  There was nothing particularly interesting in the mail, not even a catalogue of note, nothing to take my mind off Mallow’s strange conversation.

  I was watching a big freighter coming up the river when I heard the office door open. Even the sound was tentative.

  I got up to take a look.

  He was young, early twenties, dressed in working clothes with the Harwell logo, which meant he was employed in the local boat building plant. The Harwell name always gave me a jolt, even though that case was well behind me now.

  He was short, stocky, and had the thick hands of a workman. His sandy hair was worn long to hide jug ears that stuck out like side porches. It only made things worse. I recalled the ears but nothing else.

  “Do you remember me, Mr. Sloan?”

  I nodded and smiled as if I did.

  “You handled the deal when we bought our house a couple of years back. My name’s Ed Ravell. My wife is Mary.” I remembered them.

  Ed Ravell’s face was the bland, innocent kind that they use to sell soap. A nice face, nothing much behind it maybe, but honest. And well scrubbed.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call for an appointment. I’m on my break, and I was hoping you could fit me in for a few minutes.”

  “Sure, Ed. Come in.”

  I sat behind the desk and he took a seat opposite me. I remembered the wife, too. They had one small child who ran all over the bank’s closing office and Mary Ravell had been very pregnant with another close on the way. I remember thinking that she was probably a very pretty woman when not frazzled and had time to attend to herself. She was the obvious boss of the family and handled all the details at the real estate closing.

  “How are the children, Ed?” I made it sound as if I had been the family lawyer since the arrival of the first Ravell in Kerry County.

  “They’re fine,” he said quickly, obviously anxious to get on to the business that brought him in.

  “What can I do for you, Ed?”

  He had a complexion that colored easily. Suddenly he looked like a ripening cherry.

  “My wife is seeing someone.” He blurted out the words quickly, as if just the physical act of saying them was painful.

  “How do you know?”

  “She told me.”

  “She did?”

  “Well, more or less.”

  I sat back in my rickety chair and studied him for a minute. “More or less?”

  “I want a divorce,” he said. “How much will one cost?”

  “Depends. Michigan is a no-fault divorce state. If you want one, you get one, that’s the simple part. What isn’t so simple is things like alimony, custody, and child su
pport. People tend to fight about those things and that runs up the legal bills. Does your wife want a divorce too?”

  He looked surprised. “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it.”

  I took out a legal pad so it would look like I had some purpose and then looked back at him.

  “How did all this come about, Ed? Just tell me the story as you know it.”

  In a way it was difficult to keep from laughing, the story was so mundane. But it would have been like laughing at a dying man who lay writhing in pain.

  The Ravells had joined a card club in the neighborhood after moving in. It wasn’t much, just four couples who played cards every other Saturday night. Pickeral Point is not a hub of show biz activity on weekends.

  Without Ed noticing, his wife became attracted to one of the male players, a man much different than Ed, outgoing, exuberant, fun loving. And, I guessed, his ears were probably not as prominent as Ed’s.

  I got the impression that Ed was the type who wouldn’t notice much unless it was brought forcefully to his attention.

  The other couple moved away, and it was then that Mary told Ed that she had engaged in what she described as heavy petting with the other card player. She said it had never gone beyond that, although the affair had gone on to last several months. She said she was filled with guilt and remorse and desperately needed forgiveness from her husband.

  Ed figured she had screwed the daylights out of the guy each and every day of those several months.

  So did I, although I didn’t say it.

  “So,” he said, his lips tightly compressed, “that’s why I want a divorce.”

  I tossed the pencil across the desk in a show of disbelief.

  “It never happened,” I said.

  “What do you mean? She said it did.”

  “Ed, women are funny sometimes. Different from you and me, you know?”

  “Hormones?”

  I nodded, as if that was the true meaning of life.

  “They have different needs than we do. I think Mary invented this whole thing just to get your attention. I see a lot of this kind of thing, Ed. All lawyers do. Women get desperate. They’ll say the goddamnest things, even if they aren’t true.”

  “But . . .”

  “You said you noticed nothing, right? If she hadn’t ‘confessed’ this great sin, you saw nothing to even make you suspicious. Right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No buts. You have some marital problems, Ed, but not the kind you think you have. You and Mary had better start seeing a marriage counselor, so she won’t have to cook up crap like this to get your attention.”

  “They cost money.”

  I nodded. “They do. Depends on who you see. I’ll give you some names. They might see you a half-dozen times at say fifty to seventy-five bucks a visit.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Well, it’s well worth it. If you should get a divorce, even if the legal fees didn’t get too high, you’d still be paying support for almost eighteen years for two children. We’re talking maybe sixty thousand dollars, maybe more.”

  His mouth flopped open but nothing came out.

  “So you see, a small investment now in keeping a happy marriage will add up over the years.”

  His cherry complexion had gone dead white.

  “Anyway, Ed, she invented all that crap just to see if you’re still really interested.” I wrote out two names of counselors, although I knew he probably wouldn’t see either one.

  I handed him the paper. “These are good people,” I said.

  He was still in shock. With some people, money really talks. Ed Ravell was one of those.

  “What do I owe you?” he asked, obviously afraid of the answer.

  I glanced at my watch. “I charge a hundred an hour,” I said. “We’ve been here about half of that. Fifty bucks should cover it.”

  “You didn’t used to be-so expensive,” he said.

  I smiled. “You know how it is, Ed. The price of everything is always going up.”

  “I don’t have that much on me.”

  I escorted him to the door. “Send it to me.”

  Mrs. Fenton came back as Ed Ravell was going down the stairs.

  “Who was that?” she asked. “A client?”

  “That was a man who came seeking justice and instead found faith.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Think nothing of it,” I said as I walked back into my office. I could almost hear her fume.

  MICKEY MONK CALLED ME just after I got home. Mickey was drunk, but I had come to expect that. He had two kinds of drunk—one, the best, was happy and cheerful. The other, the worst, was morose and whining.

  Tonight it was number two. I let him ramble on about a number of subjects, his wife, his children, a small-time case that had found its way into his office, all kinds of cheerless patter. I thought he was about to wrap up the nightly report, and then he asked if I had heard anything about the McHugh case.

  I told him no. If I had even suggested that Jeffrey Mallow had showed me the secret court memo, Monk would explode the case, himself, and me.

  I asked him where he was.

  He was in a bar on Detroit’s west side. I knew it well, it was a dump. It was one of those places where the atmosphere is a mix of stale beer and urine, and at times the urine was the least offensive aroma. It was not the kind of place you’d take your mother, unless Mom happened to be a drunken stevedore.

  I suggested Mickey take a cab home.

  He resented the implication and declared that he was in full possession of his faculties. He wished me a frosty farewell and hung up.

  It was a quiet evening after that, at least for a while. I watched the cable news and then a documentary.

  My daughter, Lisa, called from school. I understood it was one of those duty calls. School was good, she was working hard, she was seeing a new guy. Lisa had dropped some weight and had apparently joined a boy-of-the-month club. Anyway, this month’s sounded like he was half-human, which was an improvement over last month’s boy.

  I asked if she needed money. She said she didn’t but it was one of those slow, reluctant refusals. There were a few expenses she hadn’t anticipated. The income from her part-time job wasn’t stretching quite as far as she thought it should. I huffed and puffed, she expected it, and said a check would be in the mail tomorrow.

  She told me she loved me and I told her I loved her, and that was that, the duty on both sides discharged, until the next time. Still, it made me happy to talk to her, duty or not.

  I turned off my apartment lights and looked out on my scenic parking lot while I sipped an iced ginger ale. I knew I would have trouble sleeping. I tried to think of good things, like Sue Gillis, but my mind kept returning to the riverside meeting with Jeffrey Mallow.

  I could still see, as if it had been recorded on film, the sight of those little pieces of torn memo paper fluttering down to the surface of the water, floating for a moment and then sinking slowly, one by one, dreamlike, a fairy paper trail disappearing forever.

  The more I thought about the conversation, the worse it became. Trying to figure out what Mallow was up to was like trying to work out a chess problem. No matter what piece you mentally moved or where, you created a new problem for yourself, a new threat.

  I was almost relieved when the phone rang.

  I didn’t bother to turn on the light, there was adequate illumination from the parking lot. My watch’s shining dial said it was just past eleven o’clock.

  “Yes,” I said, expecting a wrong number at this hour.

  “Mr. Sloan?” The woman’s voice was shaking. “Mr. Charles Sloan?”

  “Yes, this is Charley Sloan.”

  “I need your help, Mr. Sloan,” she said and then started to cry.

  I figured it was a wife whose husband had just walked out the door.

  “That’s what I’m here for. Help. Who is this?”

  There was some more sniffling, it sounded genuine, th
en she spoke as best she could. “You may not remember me.”

  “Try me.”

  “I’m Rebecca Harris.”

  “Becky Harris,” I said. “Sure, Becky, I remember you. What’s up?” I presumed Howard Wordley, her sometime lover, had probably smashed her around again. “Is it Howard Wordley?”

  “Can you come over to my house?” she asked, again in a voice that trembled so badly her words were almost inaudible.

  “It’s late, Becky. Frankly, I’m in bed. Let’s meet at my office first thing in the morning.” Then I thought about the earlier problem. “Are you hurt, Becky? Did he hurt you?”

  All I got was tears.

  “These matters are usually best handled by the police, Becky. I know that may sound a little odd, given your recent experience, but . . .”

  “Oh, God . . .” It was a wail of pain, more spiritual than physical, but nevertheless real.

  I flicked on the light. “Where do you live, Becky?”

  She gave me the address. I knew the area, a fringe neighborhood not too far physically from the gold coast mansions on the river but economically on the other side of the moon. It was a place of transients, people hanging on to their lives by their fingernails. “I’ll get dressed and be there as quickly as I can.”

  It was impossible to get anything more from Becky Harris. She was crying too hard.

  IT WAS A NICE CLEAR NIGHT, a little nippy for the end of May, but pleasant. Out on the river a freighter signaled , sounding like a distant train. It was answered a moment later by another big boat. In the still night, both boats sounded lost and lonesome.

  Pickeral Point had gone to bed, or so it looked. I passed only one other car on the main street. Nothing stirred on the side streets.

  I found Becky Harris’s place easily enough. It was at the end of a block of very old, poorly maintained houses. Two houses were boarded up and one had obviously burned, leaving only a ghostly shell. Those who lived here lived close to the bone, and the mailman and government checks were the only touch these citizens had with the people who ran their lives.

  Close up, you could almost smell poverty’s breath.