“He’s got a death wish you wouldn’t believe,” I conclude, wondering for the first time if he does. Martyrs don’t lose much time getting on my nerves.
“He’s always been like that,” Rainey says.
“He spoke out against affirmative action when he was a psych examiner at the state hospital.”
I suppress a sigh. What an attractive political candidate he would make to whites. And unlike other first-time candidates, he would have a record to run on thirty years in the Arkansas prison system.
“What did you do today?” I ask, remembering how quickly she fell asleep last night.
“Went to work,” she says.
“Your talking was better than a sleeping pill.”
I laugh. Even if we had wanted to have sex, we wouldn’t have dared. Rosa used to say the walls in our house are so thin that if she so much as coughed in our bedroom it would be damp in Sarah’s room for a week. It felt good just to lie next to her for a few minutes. I thank her for the casserole and hang up, feeling good for the first time since I went to work this morning, and then I try Charlene Newman’s number again, giving up on the tenth ring. I should never have agreed not to subpoena her, but I was afraid she would lie if I forced her to testify. All she would have to answer is that she had never told me that Leon was a member of the Trackers I do not remember if she was ever willing to come out and say directly that he was. While I wait for the casserole to heat, I worry that I have misunderstood the conversation with her that day in Hot Springs. What difference does it make? She isn’t coming anyway. Damn. I’d fuck up a wet dream.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asks, standing in the doorway of the kitchen.
“You’re sitting there like a zombie.”
I look up and force a smile, hearing the anxiety in her voice. God, she is pretty.
“What would you think if I quit my job and became a janitor?”
Sarah laughs indulgently.
“No way! You can barely change a light bulb.”
“Thanks,” I say, pretending not to be hurt. I can usually manage a light bulb all right, but the truth is that I’m not fit to do another damn thing in my life except run my mouth. I get up and try Charlene’s number again. Where the hell is she? I sit down, trying not to sigh. Rainey’s casserole is delicious, but I can’t eat it. As I push chicken, cheese, and broccoli around on my plate and try to keep a conversation going with Sarah, some weird things start to occur. The phone rings twice while we are eating, but all there is when I answer is a click.
“What is it?” Sarah asks, watching my face carefully the second time I put the phone down.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I say. I debate telling her. Probably nothing.
After dinner, Sarah, her black eyes no longer trusting me, comes again into the kitchen where I am working on the table and says, “Something’s going on outside. I can hear a lot more cars and trucks going past our house than usual.”
I listen, and hear the sound of a pickup turning the corner.
The sons of bitches. They are watching the house. I feel the hair on my neck standing up like cat’s fur.
“I don’t think it’s anything,” I lie, not wanting to alarm her. They are watching to see if Charlene shows up here.
“Sit down and I’ll tell you what I think is going on.”
For the next fifteen minutes, as I listen for more activity, I tell Sarah everything that is going on in the trial.
“Just to be on the safe side,” I say, “why don’t you and Woogie sleep back in my bed tonight and I’ll sleep on the couch in the den where I can keep an eye on things?”
Sarah’s eyes are round with fear and disapproval.
“Call the police!”
Ah, the police. I can’t tell my daughter I may not be able to trust them either. Candor has its limits. Exhausted, I rub my eyes, though it is only nine o’clock.
“Babe, nobody is doing anything illegal.”
Sarah begins to twist her hair again.
“They’ll hurt her,” she says, her voice almost a sob, “just like they hurt you.”
Not if they can’t find her. I watch as Woogie sidles into the kitchen and rubs against Sarah’s legs. Some watchdog he is. The phone rings, scaring me. I get up and answer it.
“Is this Mr. Page?” Charlene Newman asks.
“Where are you?” I ask, barely able to keep my voice under control. Sarah is watching me as if I were taking a call from the President. If anything happens to Charlene, she will never forgive me.
“I’ve been trying to get you all day.”
“I’m at a service station on Lehigh and Third.”
She is downtown, not far from the bus station. I can hear cars passing in the background.
“I think they’re looking for you.” “A friend warned me,” she says, her voice low and frightened
Though I do not want to say it, with Sarah two feet away from me, I have no choice.
“For your own safety, I think you shouldn’t testify. It’s not necessarily going to do my client any good. Have you got enough money to get back to Hot Springs?”
There is silence for a moment, and I think she is going to hang up. Finally she says, her hillbilly voice cracking in my ear, “I owe Leon, you hear me? I owe that son of a bitch.
You get me a place to stay tonight and a bus ticket to California after the trial, and I’ll testify if you want. I don’t really care what happens to your client. I just owe Leon for all he done to me.”
I look at Sarah. Her face is a stone mask of disapproval.
If I thought I had a chance in the case, I’d tell her to walk back to the bus station. Instead, I give her Rainey’s address and tell her to call a cab.
“Call me when you get there.”
Afterlhangup, Sarah screams, “You can’t involve Rainey in this! She’s got enough to worry about!”
I dial Rainey’s number.
“This’ll take her mind off her self,” I say, hoping she won’t go through the roof. When she answers, I say, unable to keep a smile off my face, “I’ve got a little favor to ask you….”
When I get off the phone with Rainey (as I suspected, she had no problems 1 didn’t quite tell her everything), Sarah is slamming doors all over the house. “You’re horrible!” she screams at me when I track her down in her room. “All you do is manipulate people just so you can win a case! You don’t care what happens to the others just as long as you get your client off!”
I stand under her doorway watching her glower at me from her bed where she is seated, her knees drawn up under her chin like two iron bars. Beside her, Woogie cowers as if this lecture were intended for him.
“That’s what I’m paid to do,” I say, already beginning to worry that Charlene is being followed. Rainey is supposed to call me the moment she gets there.
Like a child throwing a tantrum, Sarah kicks out angrily at me as I start to sit down beside her.
“You’re not paid to use people, and that’s what you’re doing and don’t pretend you aren’t! You’re using this woman; you’re using Rainey!
You’d use me if you thought it would help!”
I lean against her chest of drawers. Ugly beyond belief (it looks like a project from high school shop with its knobs and handles of different sizes and uneven brown stain), it was mine when I was growing up in eastern Arkansas, and I can’t seem to throw it out.
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say automatically, but I wonder. This case has begun to seem like a war in which no prisoners will be taken.
“I’m sorry, Sarah. The dirty work usually gets done at the office.”
She throws a pillow at me and begins to cry.
“No, you’re not! You like this! You should have seen your face when you called Rainey! You get off on it!”
I lay her pillow beside her and retreat from her room to wait alone in the kitchen for Rainey’s call. I sit down and begin to go over my questions for my Mississippi expert.
&nbs
p; There is no sense in lying to her. A part of me loves this crap. In thirty minutes the phone rings.
“She made it,” Rainey says, a little breathless.
“Gideon, she’s just a child!” “I know,” I say, a little breathless, too. I want absolution, but now is not the time to ask for it. Maybe I’m right though.
Rainey hasn’t mentioned her lump tonight.
“Can you see that she gets down to the courthouse tomorrow morning?” I ask.
Rainey sighs.
“I guess,” she says.
After a few minutes I get off the phone but decide not to chew this bone with my daughter any longer tonight. Sarah will forgive me. She always does.
The morning, at least, starts out all right. Though he is clearly not happy about it, Andy has decided to attend the rest of his trial. Before I went to bed, I had tried to call him, but either he wasn’t answering or Morris had taken him out for his last night on the town. Dressed defiantly in his Moby Dick suit, he glares at me as we enter the courtroom as if he is about to testify against me at an ethics hearing to revoke my license.
Morris, who looks as if he spent the night drinking to blot out the nightmare he is having to pay for, whispers across me to his brother, “You keep looking this mean, and there won’t be enough left of you for a barbecue sandwich.”
Having already notified the judge that my client has decided to play the game by its normal rules, I am content to let Morris scold his brother, since I’m afraid Andy will change his mind if I start in on him. Andy responds with a curt nod, and I will be satisfied if we can get through the rest of the trial without his coming out of his chair at me. I would pay part of my fee to know what finally changed his mind.
The rest of Jill’s witnesses roll by quickly. Dr. Beavers, the emergency-room GP on duty who pronounced Pam dead, substantially repeats his testimony from the probably cause hearing. Stubbornly, on crossexamination, he won’t admit that he can’t say to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Pam’s death was caused by the cattle prod.
“Everything I know about this situation convinces me she died as a result of the electric shock,” he says smugly as though he were a world-famous pathologist instead of a small-town primary care physician.
“For all you know, she could have had a heart attack unrelated to the electric shock since there was no autopsy, isn’t that correct?” I ask, knowing the question is pointless. It’s not as if the jury doesn’t have any common sense.
“It doesn’t seem like much of a possibility to me,” Dr.
Beavers says, his tone implying that I have asked him a question similar to one about the chances of my being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“But I suppose it could have happened.”
Jill’s last witness is David Spath. If I had any lingering hopes that Andy’s former administrator would suddenly come forward and shoulder some of the responsibility for what happened to Pam, they are smashed thirty seconds into his testimony. Spath, whose English accent delights the jury, must be fighting to save his job, because he acts as if Andy were a rogue elephant who had totally disregarded written policies and procedures that might well have been part of the Ten Commandments. His bird wing of a mustache almost napping with indignation, Spath turns on Andy with the fury of a petty tyrant. If he knew Andy was going to try shock, he will take the secret to his grave.
On crossexamination, I can’t even get Spath to admit that Andy cared about the persons he was supposed to be helping.
“The way a true professional shows his concern,” Spath says in reply to a question, “is by the way he works with his staff on the most difficult cases. I can’t stress enough that highly aversive procedures are never used without exhaustive debate first. In every institution I’ve worked in that has been the rule, and Dr. Chapman was well aware of that.”
They teach you in the trial advocacy course in law school to end any crossexamination with at least some concession, but Spath is so adversarial and difficult to shut up after a while I sit down abruptly, hoping the jury will realize Spath wouldn’t publicly say anything good about Andy even if he had been his own father.
“Can you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if you hired Dr. Chapman?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all. Your Honor,” I say, taming my back on him.
With Spath through, Jill rests her case. After the briefest of recesses in chamber Judge Tamower, pleasant again now that Andy is acting the part of a typical defendant, perfunctorily denies my motion for a directed verdict, and immediately we begin Andy’s defense.
As I have feared, my Mississippi expert is a disaster, since he comes across in person like a former Nazi labor camp guard. Shock is simply not a technique easily justified by even the most distinguished-sounding of experts, and Goza, talking out the side of the mouth, begins to sound more like Jill’s witness than my own. After his direct testimony in which he said in his crablike fashion that Andy’s use of shock was appropriate, Jill gets Goza to admit on crossexamination that he has not even read of a cattle prod being used on a person in at least fifteen years. He admits his own research has just been published in a journal that is so obscure it hasn’t even been abstracted. Human Rights Committees, he concedes, his lips barely moving, are routinely consulted before decisions about procedures like shock are used.
When Goza doggedly defends Andy’s decision, Jill, dressed in a dark blue suit today instead of a black dress, asks, “Dr. Goza, would you agree that you’re an expert on the amount of pain required to stop a child from hurting herself?”
Forced to answer whether he is the Dr. Joseph Mengele of the Nazi death camps, Goza stared at Jill with the squint of a man who has just been released from a long stretch in prison.
“I’m a psychologist,” he says, blinking rapidly, surely knowing he has been mortally wounded by this question
“Paid a handsome amount, I presume,” Jill asks, enjoying this piece of cake, “to try to defend Dr. Chapman?”
Coached yesterday, Goza remembers the right answer.
“Compensated for my time,” Goza responds haughtily, but it is no use. He is dying up there, and by the time Jill is finished, he is a corpse. Preferring to get his body out of the jury’s sight, I don’t redirect.
It’s now or never, and I call Andy, who mounts the witness stand like a man climbing on a scaffold to put his head in a noose. I glance back at Morris, who is shaking his head. He and I know that the only thing I am trying to accomplish is to save Andy from being convicted of outright murder. It is a foregone conclusion in my mind that Andy will do some time, even if Leon Robinson were to come back in and testify he is the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Andy, sullen and balky, at first comes across woodenly as he gives his credentials as a psychologist; however, as he begins to try to explain himself, he becomes the warm, compassionate man who took me on a tour of the Blackwell County Human Development Center. His defensiveness evaporates and he admits that he might have done things differently if he could begin over again.
“But I was in love,” he says, looking directly at the white faces on the jury, “and the child of the woman I loved was in a horrible situation. Olivia was desperate, as are all parents who see their children tearing themselves to bits, and I got caught up in her desperation….” As he speaks, I realize that Andy, in the process of accepting his own guilt, has been finally freed to do what he has always secretly wanted: he is preaching a sermon about an ideal world in which people risk themselves, no matter what the costs. Yet, instead of coming across as an ideologue, he seems a romantic figure from another century. He is no longer intellectualizing about prejudice; his text is the power of love, and in his hands, it is not, despite the results, destructive but liberating.
“Every previous psychologist had approached Pam as a problem to be minimized. You could see that in their approach: they drugged her; they kept her in restraints.
After I began to love her mother, I could no longer do that….”
I would love to be inside the brains of the jurors right about now. From the podium I sneak a look, but their faces are strangely blank, as if they have no idea what to make of this man who yesterday was ready to fire his lawyer and represent himself. In a sense he has done exactly that: his lawyer has no control over him today, and this one fact keeps his testimony from seeming like pure melodrama. As he testifies, I find myself gently injecting myself from time to time to play to him: “Do you now think,” I ask, more as if we were discussing this five years from now over a drink in a bar than like a lawyer fighting to keep his client alive, “Olivia was manipulating you from the very beginning into using a dangerous procedure in the hope that it would end her child’s suffering one way or another?”
Jill pops up out of her seat before Andy can answer. “Objection, Your Honor, it’s not relevant what he thinks Mrs. Le Master thought.”
“It goes to his intent,” I argue, “and that’s what a murder charge is all about. Judge.”
“Overruled,” Judge Tamower says irritably as if Jill had interrupted her favorite soap opera. She is interested, and I wish desperately that this case were not being tried in front of a jury.
“Of course not,” Andy says.
“Every person in Olivia’s situation wishes at some point her child’s suffering would end through death, because that seems the only alternative.
Olivia expressed that wish as any human would. Initially, worried that she thought I was using my willingness to shock Pam to get close to her.”p›
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Harriet Tamower duck her head slightly as if she is nodding in agreement. Is Andy trying to outsmart all of us? As he tells the jury his version of the story, I stay out of his way as much as possible. As I wind down, I debate whether to risk confronting him with Olivia’s denial or to let it go. I decide I have no choice, knowing a denial from Andy will put me in a position no lawyer ever wants to be in-knowing without a doubt his client is lying under oath. Though it is seldom done, a lawyer is supposed to request a moment to confer with his client and then ultimately inform the court if his client persists in his prevarication. If it comes to this, the only way I’ll ever get another client is in hell.
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