“Yes, I advised him to stop taking his medicine, and I am now once again formally instructing the prison authorities to stop giving him any drugs that could affect his mind, his brain, or his emotions.”
“Is that what he wants, Counselor? Maybe I should appoint a guardian to act in his best interest, rather than in your best interest.”
“I am acting in his best interest, and any reasonable guardian would agree that his best interest is to stay alive, even if that requires him to be crazy for a period of time.”
The prosecutor called the prison psychiatrist, Dr. John Blanchard, a dour man in his fifties who wore his gray hair in a 1950s-type crew cut. Dr. Blanchard testified that Charles Odell had a full-blown psychotic episode after his final appeal had been denied, that he did not comprehend what was happening to him, and that, in his professional opinion, Odell was then incompetent to be executed under the relevant legal standards. The psychiatrist described the drug regime he had prescribed for Odell and how it had restored his competency to be executed. Then he described what had happened to Odell since he’d stopped taking the pills.
The judge asked, “In your professional opinion, is Mr. Odell competent to be executed today, as he sits here?”
“No. He has no understanding of the punishment he faces. He’s totally psychotic and suicidal. We have him on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch.”
“One more question. In your professional opinion, would he be restored to competency if I ordered him to receive his medication by force?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Abe then cross-examined Dr. Blanchard.
“Doctor, before you began to practice medicine, did you take the Hippocratic oath?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall what its first principle is?”
“Yes.”
“Tell the court, please.”
“First, do no harm.”
“Do you abide by that oath?”
“I try to.”
“Were you aware when you prescribed the drugs that if they worked, Odell would be executed?”
“That he might be executed. You never know for sure in these cases.”
“But by prescribing the drugs, you were increasing Odell’s chances of being executed?”
“Yes, but—”
“Before we get to the ‘but,’ I want to be sure of the ‘yes.’ You would be increasing his chances of being executed.”
“Yes—but not his chances of actually dying,” the doctor added quickly.
“Why, Doctor, because in your view he was suicidal without the drugs?”
“Exactly.”
“Through your procedures, can you reduce that risk?”
“We can certainly try.”
“There’s nothing you can do to reduce the risk that Odell will be executed if he’s returned to competency, is there?”
“No, Counselor, that’s your job and the court’s. Not mine.”
“Is it your job to help the state execute Charles Odell?”
“No,” Dr. Blanchard said, his voice moving up in volume. “It’s my job to help restore him to competency.”
“You know that if you help restore him to competency, the state will try to execute him, right?”
“Right, but—”
“So you would be doing Odell harm by restoring him to competency, right?”
“No, wrong!” the doctor said emphatically, pointing a finger at Abe’s face. “I would be doing him good by eliminating his psychosis. The state would be executing him.”
“Not without your help, right?”
‘Right, but that’s not my responsibility. I don’t write the laws.”
“You just follow orders, right?” Abe asked contemptuously, not even waiting for an answer. The prosecutor’s expectant objection was sustained, and the doctor left the witness stand seething with anger.
The judge was visibly frustrated. “Mr. Ringel, do you want your client to commit suicide or don’t you?”
Abe responded, “No, we don’t want him to commit suicide. But we also don’t want him to take the antisuicide medicine, because it’s really not anti-suicide medicine. It’s pro-execution medicine. If he takes it, he will die. What we want is for you to stop him from killing himself without making him take the medicine.”
Now the judge was furious. “I know what you want. You want him to be suicidal, just not to actually commit suicide. You want him to remain incompetent but alive.”
“That’s right, Your Honor. That’s my job—to keep him alive.”
“That’s not my job,” the judge barked. “My job is to make sure that lawyers like you don’t play the system for a fool and manipulate the law so as to make it look ridiculous. Does the state have any more witnesses?”
“Not at this time, Your Honor.”
“Call your first witness, Mr. Ringel,” said the judge. For some reason he reminded Abe at that moment of his Boston Latin trigonometry teacher, who taught every equation by rote.
“The defense calls Dr. Ralph Hoxie.”
Dr. Ralph Hoxie was a small, somewhat effeminate man with a nervous twitch, but his face, covered with red hair and a red beard, projected warmth and compassion. He looked as though he worked in a laboratory all day, which he did.
After Dr. Hoxie cataloged his very extensive professional background, Abe asked him to tell how the drugs prescribed by the prison psychiatrist had worked. There followed a detailed two-hour account of the pharmacological operation of various antipsychotic drugs and their side effects. Most of the spectators had left the courtroom as Dr. Hoxie’s testimony began to wind down. Courtroom TV switched to a rape case in California.
The judge then asked the prosecutor how long it had been since Odell had last been given the drugs. “Since before your temporary restraining order, Your Honor. I guess about four or five days.”
The judge asked the bailiff to bring Charlie to the bench. A predictable hush fell over the court as the bailiff complied. Shackles dragging along the linoleum floor, the prisoner wavered back and forth before the bench. The judge addressed him:
“Mr. Odell, do you know who I am?”
Abe jumped up. “Your Honor, please address my client onlythrough me. Mr. Odell pleads his Fifth Amendment privilege not to answer any questions.”
“Sit down, Mr. Ringel. I want to find out for myself whether Mr. Odell wants to continue taking his medicine.”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. Mr. Odell cannot and will not answer any questions.”
The judge then turned to Dr. Hoxie, who had laid out several of the antipsychotic drugs on the desk in front of him as part of his testimony.
“Dr. Hoxie, will you please hold up a Thorazine capsule so that Mr. Odell can see it?”
“Objection, objection!” Abe screamed. “This is absolutely improper.”
“Sit down and be quiet, Mr. Ringel. This is my courtroom, and I decide what’s proper. You have your objection and your appeal. Now, Dr. Hoxie, hold up the capsule.”
Dr. Hoxie followed the judge’s order, nervously holding the large yellow pill in front of him between his thumb and forefinger.
“Now, Mr. Odell, you can have this pill if you want it,” the judge said slowly and loudly as he pointed to the capsule between Dr. Hoxie’s fingers.
“Objection!” Abe shouted. Then, turning to Odell, he said, “Charlie, go back to your seat. Bailiff, take Mr. Odell back to his seat.”
“Do no such thing, Mr. Bailiff. Keep Mr. Odell right here at the bench,” the judge ordered.
Charlie, who was standing about two feet from Dr. Hoxie, looked intently at the doctor. Then he looked at the pill in the doctor’s outstretched hand. Then he looked at the judge. Then he looked back at the pill. Abe was seething. The courtroom was absolutely silent except for quiet murmuring among the camera crew, who were urging Court TV to switch back to this proceeding.
Suddenly Charlie Odell thrust his entire body—shackles and all—at the terrified Dr. Hoxie, biting the docto
r’s hand as he tried to grasp the pill between his lips.
Pandemonium broke out in the courtroom. The bailiff tried to separate Charlie from Dr. Hoxie. Abe jumped up to try to stop Charlie from swallowing the pill. The pill fell on the floor, and Abe grabbed it.
The judge said, “Mr. Ringel, give that pill to your client. He obviously wants it.”
“I will not,” Abe said defiantly. “My client is incompetent. He can’t decide whether he wants to take the pills.” With that Abe threw the pill on the floor and stamped on it, crushing it into powder.
“I hereby order the prison authorities to require Mr. Odell to take his medicine,” the judge bellowed, banging his gavel. “My ruling is that taking his medicine is in Mr. Odell’s best interest and that he wants to take the pill. You probably won’t even have to use force,” the judge said, turning to the prison psychiatrist. “If you do, you’re authorized to use reasonable force.”
“I hereby request that Your Honor’s order be stayed for twenty-four hours so as to allow me to appeal.”
“No more game playing, Mr. Ringel. Mr. Odell begins taking his pills right now. Court is adjourned. Remove the prisoner. Have a nice day.”
“A nice day!” Abe repeated cynically as he left the courtroom, thinking of the Texas case in which a judge had signed a condemned man’s execution warrant with a signature that included a happy face. Over the din of yapping reporters and gawkers he could hear only one sound—the clanking of Charlie’s shackles as the bailiff led an innocent man back to his private hell and closer to his appointment with the executioner.
Abe left Judge Cox’s courtroom feeling miserable. The Odell hearing had been a disaster. Odell’s only hope was to appeal Judge Cox’s order. Judge Cox’s behavior might well offend the appellate judges, Abe hoped.
While in the judge’s courtroom, Abe hadn’t thought about the Campbell problem. When he got outside, his focus shifted back to the basketball player; he took out his cellular phone and tried to reach Justin. The cells were all busy, so Abe had to keep redialing.
The pattern in the screen saver danced before Justin’s eyes as he puzzled over the printout before him. His concentration was shattered by the ringing telephone.
“Bad news,” Abe said, and filled Justin in on Charlie’s situation.
“You’ll get Cox reversed, Abe. The court of appeals will never tolerate Cox’s shenanigans. That was bullshit, offering a crazy man his drugs.”
“I sure hope so.”
“Listen, Abe, back to Campbell for a minute. There’s something weird going on.”
“Something new?’
“Yeah. Remember that when we punched up the search for ‘false allegations,’ the Beters case didn’t come right after the Dowling stuff?”
“Yeah, you couldn’t explain that.”
“Well, now I think I can. It turns out that all of the cases that now come between Dowling and Beters were inputted into the database between February 20 and March 10. That means Campbell probably did the search sometime before February 20—not after March 10, as he told us.”
“Justin, are you back on the timing thing? I thought you agreed that was a dead end.”
“It sure looked that way after you noticed the markings at the bottom, but now I’m not so sure. I still think that Joe may have first met Jennifer sometime before the March 10 day he gave us.”
“Why would he lie about that?”
Abe waited for Justin’s answer in vain as the phone went dead. After a quick battery replacement, Justin was back on the phone.
“Yeah, anyway, Abe, I have no idea why Campbell would lie about anything—if he’s as innocent as you insist he is. What are you going to do about this new information?”
“Nothing,” Abe shot back. “At least not yet. We don’t have enough to confront him. It’s all just suspicion so far. We need more.”
“We’ve got plenty. This computer information—”
“I have to tell you, Justin,” Abe cut in, “I don’t have much faith in your little computer games. I admire your persistence and creativity, but I have more faith in my human instincts than in your technology. I would need something a lot more convincing, something conclusive, before I would be ready to believe Campbell’s guilty of lying to us—or of rape. I’ve got Rendi working the human angle. Let’s see if she comes up with anything. Remember how weak Jennifer Dowling’s story is. We’ve got an innocent client, and nothing you’ve come up with makes me think differently. Keep digging. It’s only a presumption.”
Chapter Eleven
CAMBRIDGE—FRIDAY, MARCH 31
It just didn’t feel right. The idea of investigating a client’s sexual habits without telling him made Rendi squirm. And when Rendi squirmed, her whole body literally pulsated. She was the kind of woman who put her entire being into every gesture, every emotion, every reaction. Justin had once described Rendi as “emotion in motion.”
Rendi was the most captivating women Abe knew—dark, wiry, quick moving, fast talking, and even faster thinking. Though they had been intimate friends and associates for nearly a decade, there was still much about her that was shrouded in mystery. She loved to say, “I came from everywhere and nowhere. I don’t know where I will be next month.” She had lived in Cambridge longer than she’d ever lived in one place before. She loved to relate the joke about the Romanian Gypsy who told her friend that she was moving to America. Her friend said, “But that’s so far,” to which the Gypsy responded, “From where?” Rendi was a spiritual Gypsy, a nomad. She had no “where” from which to be far.
Abe hoped he would learn more about her in time, though she seemed to agonize over revealing anything personal about herself. As a teenager she had been an actress, traveling with the road company of an international troupe that specialized in doing Ibsen in several languages. Indeed, it was during that stint, which had lasted about two years, that she had been recruited to do her first undercover job for the Mossad: nothing particularly dangerous; mostly taking pictures of specified locations in Turkey, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and once in Lebanon—before the current chaos. Twice she was caught and her film confiscated, but she played the innocent tourist to perfection.
Everything about Rendi was unpredictable, especially her opinions. She was a strident feminist—by her own lights and by her own actions. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept second-class status, in employment or anything else. For her, rape was the ultimate degradation, but she also believed that women had to take responsibility for their own actions, which was why the Campbell case was such an enigma for her. Her own feelings about Jennifer Dowling’s role in the crime were upsetting to her.
Several months ago she and Emma had engaged in a shouting match over dinner about the “dressed for sex” defense.
“Of course no man has the right to rape a woman who is wearing a see-through dress with no underwear,” Rendi agreed with Emma. “But,” she continued, emphasizing her point with her whole body, “only an idiot woman would wear such clothing in front of a man with whom she did not want to have sex. Clothing, my dear, sends a powerful message. Wear it with extreme care.”
Emma went ballistic. “A woman has the right to wear anything she pleases, in front of anyone she pleases, without inviting some animal to read that as an invitation to rape.”
“You are right, of course, my dear. When you live in a world full of animals, you must never make the mistake of assuming they will not act like animals. A zookeeper never keeps the cage unlocked, even though he has a right not to be eaten by the lion.”
Rendi was Abe’s crack investigator. Because she was chameleonlike, she could get inside any closed group. He had used her to infiltrate the Newark Black Muslims in a futile effort to find out if they were responsible for the Monty Williams murder. In another instance she had passed as Italian and sat around a North End coffee shop for days, listening to conversations that had helped Abe discredit a government witness in a money-laundering case.
In addition to her r
ole as Abe’s trusted investigator, Rendi also served as resident cynic and realist. She had seen it all and trusted no one. She had strong personal values, such as fierce loyalty and honesty, but she was nihilistic about rules. To her, the golden rule was “He who has the gold, rules.” Her version of the rule of reciprocity was “Do it unto others before they do it unto you.” She was a complex person, this woman Rendi.
Besides being Abe’s episodic lover, Rendi was Emma’s best adult friend. Watching Rendi with her father, Emma often wondered why the two of them, who seemed to get on so well, couldn’t “just get married, and stop this on-again, off-again romance.” Abe wished he could tell Emma about their “problem,” but that was one secret he could never share with her.
Now Abe was asking Rendi to pretend she was part of a most bizarre culture. “You want me to become a basketball groupie?” Rendi asked incredulously. “What in hell is that?”
Abe tried his best to explain, and Rendi agreed to come over to his house that evening to be prepped and dressed for her new role. Rendi arrived with her box full of props. Abe handed her a pair of falsies, which she examined and then tossed in the air. “I like my breasts just the way they are,” she insisted.
“It’s not you we’re sending to the sports bar, Rendi. It’s a groupie we’re sending, and you have to look like a groupie if you’re going to get inside that circle.”
“Why can’t I go with her, Daddy?” Emma asked, knowing the answer. “It wouldn’t really be me. I would just be pretending like Rendi. And I would love to have big breasts—at least for one night.” Emma reached for the discarded falsies on the floor and held them up to her chest.
“I knew I shouldn’t even have told you about what Rendi is going to be doing,” Abe said. “I certainly shouldn’t have let you help her with her costume.”
“Does that mean I can’t go?”
“Yes, that means you can’t go. Rendi is a trained investigator. She knows how to handle this kind of undercover role. It takes a lot of experience. You’re not old enough to go to a bar of any kind, and certainly not a sports pickup bar like Champion’s. I don’t want you becoming a jock groupie.”
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