Drawing Conclusions
Page 26
Throughout the questioning, my father maintained an airtight story. He had no idea that his son, Dr. Theodore Prentice, was averse to the DNA transfer, and he was completely unaware that Teddy had approached Dacks with the intent to reveal his unethical attempt to package and resell personal medical data. I can’t say the courtroom believed my father, but he wasn’t the one on trial.
In fact, it was in both my father’s and Peter Dacks’s interest to act as if they didn’t know each other. Both men played as if they were passing acquaintances in the medical industry. Dacks just happened to be hired to recruit patients for one of many tests conducted by the Sound View labs. If the jury had been apprised of their previous relationship, Dacks would have looked guiltier and my father’s testimony would have been less believable.
I caught the accused man’s eye as Teddy’s image faded in the background. Dacks’s demeanor seemed impenetrable. Despite the accusations, he seemed strangely confident, smiling to witnesses and patting his lawyer on the back periodically. He was a complete phony. I had seen footage of my father and Dacks socializing on the beach in Italy, and there was no question that for many years, these men had worked in professional harmony. Dacks had been my father’s right-hand man abroad, providing a myriad of services my father would have never been able to accomplish by himself in a foreign country.
But the jury knew none of this. Nor would they ever.
I busied myself during the long weeks of trial in the dead heat of summer by sketching a child who possibly had yet to be born. Strange as it was to think of a child created by myself and my brother, I needed a way to wrap my head around what my father had done. I compiled years of photographs of me and Teddy, attempting to find a combination of features that balanced our strengths and minimized our physical weaknesses. I played with eye shapes and nose alignment. I worked through ratios of facial spacing, even measuring distances from the major features and extrapolating results with my charcoal pencils. I drew young girls and boys in profile, then full-faced, and I mixed the results with straight, curly, and wavy hair. Every few days, I’d pass one to DeRosa with the caption your niece or your nephew.
The trial ended in late September, with Dacks convicted of premeditated murder. The courtroom cheered. Charlie cried like a baby. Trina and Jonathan embraced as if they had just married, and I climbed across the rows of wooden benches and straight into DeRosa’s arms.
“Happy birthday,” he said as he lifted me so high in the air that I could observe the courtroom from a bird’s eye view. I realized, as I stared at the tops of heads, that this was how my father saw the rest of us, a notch beneath him. I slid down DeRosa’s body, resting comfortably in his arms, looking up into the eyes of my new future. A lot had happened, much of it terrible, but there was no doubt I had the best seat in the house.
THE END
© Tina Hoerenz
About the Author
Deirdre Verne (Scarsdale, NY) is a college professor and active blogger. A writer whose target audience is the millennium crowd, Deirdre’s interest in green living inspired her to create an off-the-grid character who Dumpster dives her way though a suspense-filled mystery series. A member of Sisters in Crime, Deirdre’s short stories have appeared in all three of the New York chapter’s anthologies: Murder New York Style, Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices, and Family Matters.