In Self-Defense

by A. W. Gray

  “Doctor,” Sharon said, “in how many cases have you testified for the state?”

  Mathewson smiled like Jesus. “I’m not sure.”

  “Is it more than a hundred?”

  “Possibly.”

  “More than two hundred?”

  “It could be.”

  Sharon stopped at that. In front of a jury she would have built the figure up to five hundred or more, but Court Master Tucker already knew that Mathewson was the state’s number one hired gun, and going on and on about the number of cases in which he’d testified would be kicking a dead horse. Sharon now said, “Doctor, during your examination of Midge Rathermore, how did she act?”

  Mathewson frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Well, did she blow any spit bubbles?” Sharon couldn’t keep the sarcastic bite out of her tone. Lying old bastard, she thought. When she had been a prosecutor, her conscience wouldn’t allow her to use Mathewson as a witness, even though she’d received pressure from upstairs to change her mind.

  “I don’t recall.” Mathewson continued to smile.

  “Did she ask you for a Hershey bar?”

  “Objection,” Fraterno said loudly.

  “Sustained.” Tucker favored Sharon with a stern glare. Sharon was too worked up to stop. “Let me ask you, Doctor,” she said, grabbing the sheet of paper from Midge and holding it up for the psychologist and the family court master to see, “did she draw any cartoons while you were conducting these … these tests?”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained. I’m warning you, Counsel.” Kenneth Tucker turned red and pointed a finger.

  Sharon sighed. She was out of line and knew it. A lawyer wasn’t entitled to make vicious attacks on an expert witness, particularly when said lying shit was giving testimony on behalf of the sovereign County of Dallas. Sharon dropped Midge’s cartoons on the table and regarded her knees. “I apologize to the court, Your Honor,” she said. “I must have gotten carried away.”

  Kenneth Tucker had no authority to rule on Midge’s status and said so. The family court master could only make a recommendation to the judge, and, Tucker said, the judge’s ruling would be forthcoming within a week. The judge’s ruling, Sharon knew, would consist of the old boy signing an order—prepared by Tucker, of course—without even reading it. On the day the order was ready, the court clerk would make the usual call over to the DA’s office, and then Fraterno and Milt Breyer would hot-foot it into the grand jury room to ask for an indictment. The grand jury proceeding would be even more of a farce than the certification hearing, so within a week Midge would find herself in the county jail with the big folks. Tucker terminated the hearing with a wave of his hand. As Sharon turned away from the bench alongside Russ Black, she briefly caught Kathleen Fraterno’s eye. The prosecutor locked gazes with Sharon for an instant, then Fraterno lowered her lashes and studied the floor. Personally, Sharon knew, Kathleen didn’t have much stomach for this sort of thing. The job as a prosecutor, however, had no conscience. Maybe Milt Breyer did me a favor, Sharon thought, hitting on me until I quit. She took a couple of steps toward the defense table, preparing to retrieve her gear.

  Midge’s guard had problems. As he led the teenager away toward the holding cell, he reached up to remove Sharon’s jacket from around the prisoner’s shoulders. Midge grabbed the lapels and pulled the garment tight around her, at the same time sniffling and twisting away. The guard looked helplessly around the courtroom. In private he would have yanked the jacket away from Midge and possibly even roughed her up a bit in the process, but here in the public eye he wouldn’t dare. He reached once more for the coat. Midge drew the lapels even tighter around her body.

  Sharon walked quickly over. “Let her keep it,” she said gently.

  The guard said in a hoarse whisper, “It’s against the rules, Miss Hays. You know that.”

  Sharon smiled at Midge and patted her client’s thick upper arm. “Well, maybe it is,” Sharon said. “But at least let her wear it back to the cell.”

  Midge’s eyes grew big and round as she looked at Sharon with an expression near worship.

  “I guess I could stretch a point,” the guard said.

  “Thanks,” Sharon said.

  Sharon watched the fat girl leave the courtroom, watched Midge duck her head slightly as the guard followed her through the side exit. Midge lovingly stroked the jacket’s sleeve as she disappeared from view.

  If there’s any way, Sharon thought, I’m going to help that poor baby.

  6

  Sharon felt nervous anticipation as Russell Black, stone-faced, opened the courtroom door and stood aside for her to go out in the hall before him. Sharon had taken the bull by the horns, both in the pre-hearing conference with Midge Rathermore and in the hearing itself, and she was slightly fearful of Black’s reaction. He’d told her in no uncertain terms during her job interview that all courtroom decisions were up to him, yet here she was upstaging Black her first day on the job. She’d already seen her new boss fly off the handle once, over her remark about Midge’s former court-appointed lawyer. Likely I’m in for it, she thought with a sort of fearful resignation. As they moved down the corridor with the top of her head on a level with Black’s ear, Sharon mentally held her breath.

  They’d gone about halfway to the elevators, side-stepping lawyers with briefcases, defendants with worried looks, and clerks who hustled to and fro lugging boxes loaded down with file folders, when Black cleared his throat and said, “Listen, I—”

  Here it comes, Sharon thought.

  Suddenly Black touched her arm and stopped her in her tracks. Near the elevators Milt Breyer and Kathleen Fraterno were in heated conversation with two men. Sharon had always prided herself on being able to classify strangers she encountered in the courthouse—as lawyer, defendant, or general hanger-on—just by their dress and demeanor, but this pair who were hobnobbing with the prosecutors had her buffaloed. Neither man wore a suit, so they weren’t lawyers. Both showed confident, almost cocky grins, so they weren’t criminal defendants, either. One guy was mid-forties with long sideburns and a mustache, and was wearing pressed jeans, denim long-sleeved shirt, and gray alligator boots. He was sucking on an unlit pipe. His sidekick was younger, thirty or so, with longish but neat sandy hair which touched his collar. He wore pleated Dockers along with a white knit polo shirt, and as his partner talked a mile a minute to Milt Breyer, the younger of the two strangers looked at Sharon and Black. His lips curved upward in a smile of recognition.

  “Don’t say a word to ’em,” Black whispered. “If they speak to us, let me handle it.” He took Sharon’s arm and steered her around the foursome toward the elevators, then reached out to press the Down button. Fraterno glanced at Sharon, then looked quickly away. I’m going to have to call her, Sharon thought. Something was bugging the devil out of Kathleen, and Sharon suspected that it didn’t have anything to do with the Rathermore case. Sharon clutched her briefcase in both hands as Black stood impatiently by, first on one foot and then the other. The younger of the strangers excused himself from the group and walked over. “Mr. Black? Hey, Russ, got a minute?”

  Black turned toward the newcomer with a sigh of resignation. “Look, we’re in kind of a hurry.” The elevator doors opened with a swish of air.

  The man quickly removed two business cards from his breast pocket, handed one card to Black and the other to Sharon. He smiled at her and stroked one sleeve of his white knit shirt. “You’d be Miss Hays, wouldn’t you? Sharon Hays?”

  She nodded dumbly. The guy was good-looking, but in a slicko sort of way, the type she might pick for a door-to-door salesman.

  Black ushered Sharon firmly onto the elevator. He said brusquely to the stranger, “Nice seeing you.”

  As the man opened his mouth to speak, the doors closed swiftly in his face. Sharon felt suddenly lighter as the car descended.
/>
  She looked at the business card. Apparently the man was Rayford Sly, executive producer of something called Aviton Productions. The firm’s logo was a movie camera mounted on a tripod.

  “So you’ll know,” Black said, “we don’t talk to TV movie people. We don’t make deals, and we don’t have anything to do with ’em.”

  The car halted, Sharon’s feet pressing into the carpet as gravity reversed. She led the way into the building lobby, and Black fell into step beside her. They gave the escalators a wide berth and headed for the rear exit leading onto Jackson Street. Sharon said, “I know some lawyers who’ve represented people for free just for the exposure. They say that sometimes the TV movie people pay more for the exclusive rights to the story than the fee would’ve been to begin with.”

  Black halted and turned to face her. Sharon licked her lips and waited. Two lawyers in expensive suits approached, did a bread-and-butter split to pass on either side, then hustled away toward the elevators.

  “What you’re sayin’s true,” Black said. “These people offer big money. Was a time all you saw around these trials was book writers, but that’s all changed. Now the movie people bypass the book people, and what they used to pay for the screen rights to the book, they dole out to lawyers and witnesses for exclusives to their stories and take the case direct from the courtroom to television.

  “But that dudn’t make it right,” Black said. “Five’ll get you ten Milt Breyer’s up there right now negotiatin’ his movie deal for the Rathermore case, and once the deal’s made, old Milt’s gonna be a damn sight more interested in the movie money than what’s right for the little girl up there in the holdin’ cell. What the movie money does, it means that Milt’s got to win the case no matter what. Well, Russell Black don’t play that game, and anybody throwin’ in with old Russ has got to learn that real quick. Now, let’s go.” He turned toward the exit.

  Sharon swallowed hard, then stood her ground and said, “Russ?”

  He stopped and raised shaggy gray brows.

  Sharon stepped closer. “Look, as long as you’re already wound up, why don’t you finish what you started to say upstairs?”

  Black frowned. “Huh?”

  “I think I already know,” Sharon said, “and I’d rather get it over with now so we won’t have to talk about it later on. I apologize, I suppose, for stealing your thunder up there in the courtroom. I remember what you said about, you’re running your cases and the assistant’s supposed to keep her mouth shut. It’s just … hard for me, you know? I’m used to doing things.”

  He glanced up at the ceiling, then looked at her. “Oh. Oh, that. Hey, that was good goin’, girl. Anybody that goes in the courtroom swingin’, old Russ Black wants that somebody on his side. Now come on, we’ve got to hook ’em.” He turned on his heel and led the way toward the rear of the building.

  Sharon stood speechless for an instant, then took off after him, her high heels clicking on courthouse tile and her bulging satchel banging softly against her hip. As Black stopped to hold the door for her, she rolled her eyes and shook her head in bewilderment.

  Near the bottom of the courthouse steps, Black paused and said, “What the hell … ?” He was looking to his left, up Jackson Street.

  Sharon halted and followed her boss’ gaze. A block away, an ambulance stood at the curb with roof lights flashing. Three black-and-whites were parked near the ambulance with bubblegum flashers spinning and shooting red beams, and a mob of pedestrians had gathered on the sidewalk. As Sharon watched, four paramedics lugged a gurney from a glass-front office and, with uniformed cops holding back the crowd, loaded the gurney into the rear of the ambulance. On the gurney lay a shrouded body, secured with cloth straps. Two of the medics climbed up to pull on the gurney while the other two pushed from the rear, and the gurney rolled out of sight. One medic slammed the rear gate while another walked around to open the driver’s-side door and reached in to throw a switch. The ambulance roof lights stopped flashing.

  “Idn’t Howard Saw’s office down there?” Black said.

  Sharon wasn’t certain. She’d been to Saw’s office only once, during pretrials while she’d been prosecuting the Donello case, and all of the glass fronts along Jackson Street looked alike to her. “I don’t know,” Sharon said. “It could be.”

  “Old Howard,” Black muttered. “Be a shame if anything was to happen to him.”

  7

  “Will you be gone a lot?” Melanie said.

  “Quite a bit, sweetheart. Now that I don’t work for the county anymore, it’s going to be different. Someone in private practice has to put in whatever hours it takes to get the job done. And we’ll be needing a lot of money pretty soon. Your braces.”

  “Pew.”

  “You won’t wear them forever. You’ve already got a pretty smile. You need straight teeth to go with it.” Sharon wondered if she’d said the right thing. As Melanie grew older it was harder and harder for Sharon to know what to say. Straight white teeth in Melanie’s future were something to look forward to, and projected a good self-image for the eleven-year-old, but Sharon feared her words had implied that at the present Melanie’s teeth were crooked and therefore ugly. “Your teeth are already pretty, but then they’ll be perfect,” Sharon added quickly.

  They were sitting on the den sofa, a comfortable but outdated Spanish piece. Spanish had been the rage for about two years during the early seventies, just about the period when Sharon’s mother had decided to replace her furniture one piece at a time. Before there had been money for wing chairs and settees, Spanish had been out, and then the cancer had come and Sharon’s mother had died. Her dad had lived on in the small East Dallas house until ’83, and then cancer had taken him as well. Now that the red brick home was Sharon’s—and though she’d been sufficiently flush with cash to replace the Spanish sofa numerous times—she’d let the couch stay on as a friendly old memory. There it sat as the den’s centerpiece, in between the modern loveseat and wing chairs, and visitors who thought the combination sort of odd simply could like it or lump it. The TV was playing on low volume—The System another in the endless string of lawyer shows—but neither Sharon nor Melanie paid the program much heed, both of them grabbing the chance to spend mother and daughter time.

  Melanie brought the sofa pillow up from her lap and hugged it to her chest, the pillow fringe falling to cover her forearms. “Mom?” A hesitant tone of voice, a little girl about to ask questions covering territory where she wasn’t sure she should tread.

  “Yes, honey.”

  A downward cast to Melanie’s gaze, a small, timid smile which reminded Sharon of her mother’s look. “How can you tell when a boy likes you?” Melanie said.

  Now, that’s a good question, Sharon thought. For her it had been a long, long time since she’d known the answer. She assumed that in the fifth-grade set, the boys didn’t cast hungry glances at the girls’ asses and legs, and that no one had to go through the experience of having her boob grabbed in the county witness room after trial. “Oh, you can just tell,” Sharon said, and added, “I suppose it’s when a boy wants to come around you a lot. Why, does someone like you?”

  “I think so. Jason White sits by me in the cafeteria.”

  Now, that should set the tongues a’waggin’, Sharon thought. “Is he nice?” she said.

  One corner of Melanie’s mouth tugged to the side in thought, her expression a duplicate of Sharon’s while researching cases. There was a whole lot of Sharon in her daughter, as a matter of fact. Melanie was the tallest in her class, which, Sharon knew, would make her self-conscious until around the eighth grade, when some of the guys would grow into gangly beanpoles. If Melanie ran true to mommy’s form, in another year her breasts would begin to swell; her periods would likely begin at thirteen and be crampily painful and irregular until the middle of Melanie’s fifteenth year. Adolescence had been a curse to Sharon, though at the t
ime she’d thought of herself as cool and all adults as nerds. In the short span left before she became a nerd to her own daughter, Sharon was going to cherish the feeling of being loved and looked up to.

  “I guess Jason’s nice,” Melanie finally said. “But he’s sort of immature.” She pronounced the grown-up word carefully, in a grown-up manner. Only a year ago Jason would have been silly. Now he was immature.

  “Don’t let that bother you,” Sharon said. “Males tend to stay that way.”

  “Immature?”

  “You’ll learn. Men are just big little boys.”

  Now Melanie’s features tightened, her look a trifle on the crafty side. It was the only expression which Melanie had inherited from her father, which meant that the eleven-year-old’s next question was going to be about her dad. “Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was my father immature?”

  “Oh, I think we both were.” Sharon lived (and sometimes died) by the straightforward answer. She’d made the decision while Melanie was in diapers to be open and honest about Melanie’s conception, and then only after lots of study and meetings with discussion groups. Sharon personally thought that Melanie was emotionally better off than the youngsters (fifty percent of all the kids in America, according to published statistics) whose parents were divorced, because Melanie didn’t have the problem of being torn between the two. Melanie had understood the situation ever since she’d been old enough to understand anything, and seemed adjusted, but the questions about her father had become more and more frequent of late.

  “But didn’t you like each other?” Melanie’s fifth-grade jargon substituted like for love, or maybe even more in context, for get turned on by.

  Sharon lifted, then dropped her shoulders. “We did for a while. Then we didn’t anymore.”

  “Like people divorcing?”

  “Well, sort of.” Sharon was still uncomfortable talking about the relationship, the really in and with-it aspiring actress and actor as live-in lovers. She’d been four months pregnant when she’d realized that acting was really all she had in common with Rob, and that life was in fact not a stage. Since neither of them had really thought of the arrangement as permanent, there had been none of the bickering and bitching which always accompanied divorce proceedings. In keeping with sensible with-it and ultramodern partings of the ways, Sharon had agreed that since the tiny Brooklyn Heights flat had been Rob’s to begin with, it was she who should move, and she had done so. Even when Rob had taken up with Sharon’s stand-in from an off-Broadway production within weeks of the split, Sharon and the other young woman had remained on friendly terms, all parties having really in and with-it attitudes. Equally in and with-it had been Sharon’s stand with the anti-abortion radicals, so the decision to have Melanie hadn’t really been a decision at all. Deciding to return to school back in Texas had taken more deliberation. Though she still missed New York and missed acting even more, it had been a few years since Sharon had felt regrets. Rob, she supposed, was still trooping around Broadway fringes, playing one part after another and taking up with a succession of leads and stand-ins. She’d never asked him for any support, and, given his dream-world sense of values, she supposed that he had never considered offering any.