My eyelids throb spastically at the thought of the damage the needles could do to them, while my mind goes back to the hearing. The sight of Leon’s crying suddenly has stayed with me. I was touched by his emotion and thought he could be brought around to testify if I knew how to handle him right. He was hostile, but I thought I understood the reason, since he had taken care of Pam for years. Maybe there are some feelings of guilt I can exploit.
“He didn’t seem so bad,” I say, rubbing my left eye to still it. Perhaps she will give me a clue to his personality.
“How come?”
“He hates blacks,” Yettie says flatly, not even bothering to look at me. Rosa wasn’t as dark as Yettie, but there is something that reminds me of her. Maybe her body.
I am fascinated by the needles: I can’t follow them at all.
God, she is bitter. Does she like anybody? For all I know, the sweater is for herself. “How do you know?” I ask, more urgently than I intend. “Has he ever said or done anything?”
Yettie shrugs, refusing to look at me. I could develop an ego problem around this woman. The needles click for what seems like a full minute. Finally she says, “You can just tell.”
I suppress a sigh and decide to leave. More female intuition.
It seems to me a lot of blacks think all whites are racists. It gets old after a while. I doubt if I would be too crazy about blacks if the only one around was Yettie Lindsey.
Still, I may need her.
“My wife used to knit,” I say, leaning forward to get a better look at her hands.
“She wasn’t as fast as you, though.”
Yettie puts down the needles and looks at her watch.
“Anything else?” she says.
Andy comes for me in half an hour. During that time it seems I have gotten more information out of Homer, my retarded escort the first time I was here, than from Yettie Lindsey. Homer, who saw me sitting in the waiting room on his way outside, greeted me as if I had come to take him home. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand a word he said. He didn’t seem to mind as long I kept smiling. I wish I could make everybody that glad to see me.
Andy doesn’t seem any happier to see me than Yettie was.
“Got called to a meeting,” he explains tersely. We walk side by side in the wide corridor to his office, our silence interrupted only by a retarded man who greets Andy with such genuine enthusiasm that Dale Carnegie himself (were he not dead) would approve of his effort. Though I am on Andy’s shit list, Jake, who looks normal except for his crossed eyes and jug-handle ears, is not: My client lets Jake pump his hand as though both of them expected oil to spurt from Andy mouth. I know Andy resents my talking to Olivia about his affair. Clients want you to help them, but they hate like hell for you to do it.
Andy’s office, I see, has not been repainted. In fact, the room has an even more temporary look than it did before.
On his desk is a cardboard box filled with books as if he were moving in or moving out. Before I can comment, he lights into me.
“You had no right to ask Olivia about our relationship!”
he says, closing the door behind him. His voice is under control but just barely. Standing in front of his door, he has balled both his fists, but I doubt he has ever physically fought another man. Even with his face stretched tight with anger, he looks too elegant. His goatee and mustache look freshly trimmed this morning, and there is not even the hint of a wrinkle in his tan poplin slacks. Mine always make me look as though I have an accordion on my lap five minutes after I’ve put them on. I can imagine Andy fighting a duel with pistols at fifty paces but not in a street bawl.
I turn my back on him and sit down across from his desk, wondering how to handle him. The best defense is a good offense, especially with a cream puff like Andy. As he comes around behind his desk, I say softly, “You sure as hell weren’t going to tell me.” Though his office is at the end of the hall and the door is closed, there is no sense trying to sell some tickets to this conversation.
“I hope you’re not going to tell me an affair with Olivia isn’t relevant to your case.”
Andy is more formally dressed than the last time I visited him here, in a turquoise gingham shirt, blue sports coat, and maroon tie. All heated up, he discards the coat.
“It won’t be if no one knows about it!” he says, still taking time in his rage to hang up his jacket properly and place it on the coat rack in the corner by the door. Neatness counts with this guy, I think, as he goes back behind his desk.
“I suppose,” I say sarcastically, “that you think nobody has a clue to what’s going on.”
Folding his arms across his chest like a used-car dealer who won’t let a sucker get his money back, Andy purses his lips and says disdainfully, “Nobody can prove a thing.”
I resist a smile. This attempted guile has its own charm in a man who usually displays the naivete of a scientist: Who, me blow up the world? This bomb is purely for research purposes. Andy must have lead an unusually sheltered life for a black person. The ones I have encountered have no illusions about whitey’s power.
“If the prosecutor ever gets hold of it, she’ll bring your used rubbers into court if she has to.”
Andy narrows his eyes at me in pure hatred. There has never been a messenger of bad news in the history of the world who hasn’t been despised, and I’m no exception. I know how crude I must sound, but he has to start living in the real world.
I fairly yell at him: “Don’t you realize you have to tell me the things that will affect this case? I can’t represent you in the dark. I ‘m not a magician who can pull a trick out of a hat at the last moment and save you, goddamn it! Frankly, I couldn’t care less whether you’re shacking up with the Queen of England, but you can be awfully damn sure the prosecutor is going to try to get that information to the jury, especially since the Queen is white.”
Andy’s expression changes from one of contempt to disgust.
“I know all that,” he says wearily and leans back hard in his chair.
I continue to press him.
“You don’t act like it. You’re the one who doesn’t want race to be an issue at your trial,” I say, remembering his words.
“I can’t do it without your help.”
This last point seems to mollify him somewhat, and his face loses some of its intensity. He shifts restlessly, as if he is trying without success to think of a comeback. “You could have asked me first,” he says lamely.
This is a minor point to concede, and I try to do so graciously.
“I should have,” I admit, “but I was afraid you wouldn’t tell me the truth and would try to stop me from talking to Olivia about it.”
A frown spreads over Andy’s face as he looks at me for a long moment and then says, in a voice stiff with formality, “I’ve given you absolutely no reason to distrust me.”
I soften my tone and try to smile at him.
“My experience is that we all lie when we’re cornered, Andy. It’s really nothing personal.” Candor is an overrated virtue, since often I resort to it when I need to manipulate somebody, I think, but don’t say.
“How patronizing,” he retorts, glowering at me as he shoves his chair back and turns away to the second-story window directly behind him.
“There was a time right when I first met you,” he says, his voice so quiet and flat I have to strain to hear him since his back is almost directly to me, “when I thought after this was over you and I might be friends. You seemed to be taking my situation personally, and I found I appreciated that.”
Perhaps, as a defense mechanism, I find myself beginning to shrug, but I am uncomfortable: not only do I like this guy, I finally recognize that I have begun to admire the hell out of him. Unless he has managed to fool me completely, his life has awakened in me a memory of the idealism I must have felt over twenty years ago when I joined the Peace Corps. His color-blind stubbornness and his commitment to the Homers of the world are so naive, he seems from another
world. I believe he made a serious mistake in using shock on Pam, but unlike so many of us who live our lives virtually indifferent to the horrific suffering that is an inseparable but ignored part of daily life, he made an error of commission, not omission. He is in trouble precisely because he was willing to care and risk himself for other people. It is rare that a lawyer has the opportunity to represent a person in a criminal case whose life he sees as a positive force. At best, my other clients have been, and are, victims. Andy, I have come to believe (unconsciously until this moment I realize) is much more than that. Doubtless, he will appear unaccountably quixotic to a jury composed of ordinary Arkansans; but Andy, I hope I get them to see, though not blameless, should not be judged so harshly that his life and career are destroyed Under the circumstances, Pam’s death is punishment enough. This man is willing to make himself as vulnerable as a teenager who falls in love for the first time.
“You’re absolutely right,” I admit, squaring my shoulders to the desk and looking him in the eyes. “I put all my clients in the same box, and I’m wrong to do that. In fact, I admire you a great deal.”
His brown eyes lose some of their hurt look.
“I’m not looking to be admired,” he instructs, “but by explicitly categorizing all people as being willing to lie, you’ve illustrated what whites do to blacks when they make judgments about us as a race.”
I nod, my agreement automatic, thinking that Andy is obsessed by the issue of race. Though surely he doesn’t in tend it, his effort to pretend his blackness isn’t the denning quality in his life merely emphasizes that it is. Since he insists that he is honest, I have no qualms about testing it.
“Why does Yettie Lindsey hate your guts?”
Andy blinks rapidly.
“I won’t go out with her.”
A button has been punched here. There is something more going on here than a case of hurt feelings.
“That’s all there is to it?” I ask, remembering Rainey’s gossip.
Andy sighs and, as if he felt a sudden chill, hugs himself by squeezing his arms against his sides. He says, “If you’re black, Arkansas is a small state. Yettie’s family and my family have been friends for years. When I was in high school in Fayetteville, she was still a child, but our families used to kid each other that we’d end up together. Actually, it’s not a coincidence that Yettie is here. Before she graduated from Arkansas State in May, because of our families’ friendship, but also because Yettie’s going to make a good social worker, I persuaded David to give her an interview, and she got the job, largely because of my recommendation. I see now that she thought I had something else in mind.”
I tap my pen against my pad as if to applaud, appreciating the depth of Yettie’s disappointment. It is likely that she has been in love with Andy for many years. What she had hoped was coming true. He was sending for her, but when she arrived, finally ready to begin an adult relationship, she found out that she, a black woman, was nothing special to him.
Like the fools men are, Andy probably thought she should be happy just getting a job. Black people in love! It occurs to me that since Rosa died (she was the exception), I have never really thought that the complexity of their inner lives mirrored my own. I equate their material poverty with an emotional poverty as well, I realize. No wonder I can’t figure this case out. I’m such a racist I can’t even imagine them.
Poor Andy! She hates him now, and he didn’t even realize it. I lean forward to ease a sudden crick in my back and try to empathize.
“If Freud couldn’t figure out what women wanted, why should you?”
Andy tries to smile, but his heart isn’t in it. He is a behaviorist and won’t find much consolation in the befuddlement of Sigmund Freud. I close my eyes and see old Mrs.
Whitelaw, my high school English teacher, swaying back and forth before thirty bored and horny small-town and farm kids and quoting in a voice choked with rage: “Remember, always remember, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!”
” I warn Andy, “We’ve got to treat Yettie with kid gloves. So far, she hasn’t volunteered anything to the prosecutor’s office. I wouldn’t do anything to upset her further if I were you.”
Andy nods, a preoccupied expression on his face, and I move the subject to our Mississippi expert witness. As we talk, Andy seems to be thinking about the past. Why didn’t he fall in love with Yettie? Who knows? I got my wife in a foreign country: I can’t really assume he would want to marry his next-door neighbor any more than I did. Does it bother me? Obviously, or I wouldn’t be wondering about it. After a few minutes of desultory discussion (Andy doesn’t seem much interested right now in our expert, though I have to assume he is relieved somebody is willing to come to Blackwell County to justify shock), I head back to my office, thinking how a New England jury would react to a psychologist from Mississippi who proclaimed the virtues of a cattle prod.
I can hear the discussion in the jury room: “They probably used cattle prods on blacks, so shocking retarded kids is no big deal.” Outside the Blazer, which is close to overheating, the central Arkansas countryside, shimmering in the summer heat, appears on fire. Prejudice is everywhere.
16
“Gideon,” Jill Mary Mount says, her hectoring voice crackling through a bad connection, “in about five seconds after I get off the phone, I’m walking down to the clerk’s office to file a charge of capital felony murder against Andrew Chapman. You want to come over to my office and see what we have?”
The client sitting across from me, a middle-aged man whose paycheck has just been garnisheed on a judgment taken by a health spa (he had signed a lifetime contract and discovered he wasn’t that interested in trying to keep a thirty-two-inch waist), must be able to read my reaction, because he looks as if Julia had interrupted me to say the building was on fire. Furious at what I am hearing (in the last two weeks I had begun to have some hope I could persuade a jury to come in with a conviction of negligent homicide and let Andy off with probation), I reply sarcastically, “I appreciate the advance notice,” and wag my finger at my client, who surely must think I am warning him instead of trying to reassure him.
“I’ll be right over.” I hang up and exhaust my knowledge of debtor-creditor law in one sentence by explaining that he can’t be put in prison for debt, and that an emergency has come up requiring me to postpone our interview.
“I can come back tomorrow,” Mr. Welford says gratefully, absurdly relieved. I know nothing about bankruptcy law and have no idea what to advise him. With as few clients as I have, I can’t afford to refer him
out, and I tell him I’ll see him on his lunch hour. This way I’ll have time to run down to Frank D’Angelo’s office to find out what to ask him.
When he had made the appointment, it sounded like a contract dispute, but with a legal judgment against him, it is past that stage. Like a man who has a tumor the size of a tomato in his testicles, but who says he is just having a little problem passing water, Mr. Welford, a salesman in the men’s department at Sears, had told me only that he owed a little money on a debt he thought he shouldn’t have to pay. I dial the Human Development Center and am told that Andy is not in his office. I leave a message for him to call me in an hour and say that it is urgent.
Finding I am almost sprinting to the courthouse, I force myself to slow down to a brisk walk; otherwise, in this heat, I’ll be as sticky and nasty as a sponge soaked in blood. The thermometer outside First Capitol Bank across from the courthouse reads 101. They ought to give the humidity. It’s got to be almost 100 percent. I am angry and confused. What evidence could there be that Andy deliberately killed this child? To charge him with first-degree murder, Jill will have to show intent, and to my mind, that leaves only the possibility that somehow Olivia is in on this.
“Hey! Don’t be actin’ like you don’t know me!”
I squint into the glare across the street and see the old woman from the jail. An orange jacket covers part of the filthy black dress that reaches
the top of her red high-top tennis shoes. Her hair is as wild as ever. I don’t want to encourage her, but neither do I want her to begin screaming at the top of her lungs.
“How’re you doing?” I call to her, moving toward the courthouse at the same time, as if I’m late for a hearing.
“Where’s that half-nigger who you had wid you?” she screams as two men come out of the bank beside her. Despite the heat I break into a run up the south steps into the courthouse. This is an explanation that will only get worse with the telling. We all assume the worst, and sometimes no amount of explaining can help. I realize I hadn’t doubted Andy until I got the call from Jill. The most I thought he was guilty of was bad judgment. Damn it, “ever since I saw that kid jump into Andy’s arms, I’ve thought the guy was unique.
A black male as smart as he is doesn’t have to be stuck in the boonies covered up with people who can’t even say their own name, and yet that’s what he had committed himself to doing with his life. Damn Olivia. Why couldn’t she leave him alone? She has to be behind this. I don’t want him to have deliberately ended this child’s life, even if somehow he thought it was the right thing to do.
The receptionist, obviously forewarned, waves me on back, and I walk knowingly back into the maze of offices as if I worked there myself. I wonder if my old pal Amy Gilchrist knew this was coming. I would have appreciated a tip.
Jill, wearing a dressy red pantsuit that, perversely, re minds me of the orange jumpsuits county prisoners are given, is standing behind her desk with a telephone clamped to her ear. She waves me on in as if I were a long-lost friend instead of someone she clearly does not like. Holding an earring in one hand, she laughs and whispers, “See you later,” and hangs up. A personal call to a lover? Not likely, I’m afraid.
Every person has secrets, but I doubt if sex is one of Jill Marymount’s. Oddly, she seems relaxed, as if filing a capital murder charge has discharged the tension within the case instead of creating a great deal more.
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