Absolute Certainty

by Rose Connors

  For just a split second, I thought Charlie had decided to examine Jake Junior’s chest, to answer for himself the question I wouldn’t answer for him three days ago. But I was wrong. Charlie made no move toward Jake Junior’s torso. Instead, he held Jake Junior’s right hand in his own for several moments, then placed it down just long enough to reach into his brown shopping bag.

  His basketball. Charlie took it from the bag and tucked it next to Jake Junior, under his right forearm. He nodded up at the funeral director, then, and together they covered Jake Junior and his basket-ball for the last time. Luke and I each took one of Charlie’s arms afterward, and the three of us walked in silence back to the Thunder-bird.

  The chapel is filled beyond capacity. The usher leads Luke, Charlie, and me to the front pew, which has been roped off and saved for us. Harry ducks through the side door, waves to us, and disappears into the crowd standing in the back. Loudspeakers are set up outside the church, so that those who can get no closer than the sidewalk will at least be able to hear Jake Junior’s service.

  The back doors open and the priest begins the solemn words of the service. Six members of the varsity basketball team, all juniors and seniors, carry Jake Junior’s white coffin down the center aisle. Justin is one of them. He is in front, on our side of the aisle. Charlie breaks down again beside me. I take his hand and hold it in both of mine.

  Once the coffin is in place on an elevated platform in the center aisle, the pallbearers file into the pew across from ours. The remainder of the basketball team is standing along the far wall. I look across the center aisle, past the coffin, and offer a small smile to Justin, who is in the end seat. Justin nods back at me, his sore eyes running like faucets. Rob is seated behind him, keeping a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder.

  Father Burrows leads us in the ancient and comforting words of the service. He tells us to sit, and he reads three passages from scripture. He delivers a homily on the mysteries surrounding our lives and our deaths. He acknowledges our inability to comprehend an event like Jake Junior’s tragic end. He recognizes our feelings of anger, hopelessness, and despair. God is here, he tells us. God will help us through our grief.

  Charlie shakes his head. “I don’t know, Miss Marty,” he whispers. “I think God has just plain turned his back on the people of Chatham.”

  I squeeze his hand.

  Luke stands and walks to the pulpit. He is wearing a suit we bought a few months ago for the basketball awards banquet, and it’s too small for him already. The sleeves are an inch and a half too short. He doesn’t seem to care.

  Luke faces the crowded church. He has a few pages of notes, but he doesn’t look at them. He nods to Charlie and me, then looks beyond us to what must be an ocean of sorrowful faces.

  “This past Monday,” he begins, his voice shaking a little, “the sun rose over Stage Harbor just like it always does. It looked like another beautiful morning on Cape Cod. But it wasn’t. It was a black morning, a morning we will never forget, a morning that brought with it the abrupt end of a great young life.”

  Luke stares down at his hands and swallows hard before he looks up again. “For those of us who loved Jake Junior, the world stopped turning that morning.”

  Luke’s voice is strong and steady now. He looks toward the coffin in the center aisle. “And the world will never be the same again.”

  Charlie is crying hard, but there is a small smile on his face as he nods up at Luke. He wants these words to be said, painful though they are to hear.

  “Everybody knows that Jake Junior was a great basketball player. But those of us who were lucky enough to be Jake Junior’s friends, lucky enough to be part of his everyday life, we know he was a lot more than that. We know he was a great human being.

  “Jake Junior was good to everybody. Not just to his friends and teammates, but to everybody. When a new guy came to our school last term, Jake Junior was the first to sit with him in the cafeteria. And because Jake Junior joined him, the rest of us joined him too. Just like that, the new guy had a whole bunch of friends.”

  Luke looks directly at Charlie. “He made the rest of us better people.”

  Charlie continues to cry silently, nodding at Luke.

  “Jake Junior had an iron will. If he missed a shot during a basketball game, which he didn’t do often”

  Soft laughter ripples through the church, a small and welcome relief.

  “…you’d find him in the gym the next day, taking that shot over and over again. Next game”

  Luke smiles and raises both hands as if taking a shot.

  “…nothing but net.”

  This ripple of laughter is louder. More relief.

  “And coupled with that iron will was a great big generous heart. If you needed a favor—no matter what it was—Jake Junior was right there. If you needed advice—no matter what about—Jake Junior was right there. He’d fill you in on teachers, coaches, and—sometimes— girls.”

  Everybody laughs. Even Charlie chuckles through his tears.

  “And, oh boy, did Jake Junior love basketball. If he wasn’t playing basketball, he was trying to put a pick-up game together. And if the Celtics were on television, Jake Junior wouldn’t let anyone else have the remote.”

  Another ripple of laughter. More precious relief.

  Luke reaches over the side of the pulpit and takes the photograph from its perch on the wooden easel. “But more than anything, Jake Junior loved his grandfather.”

  Charlie catches his breath, and I squeeze his hand again. I have always been proud of Luke, but never more so than at this moment.

  “Jake Junior told me once, about a year ago, that he couldn’t remember anything about his mom or dad. He’d seen pictures and heard stories, but he didn’t have any memories of his own. When I said I was sorry, that it must be rough to not have folks, Jake Junior was surprised.”

  Luke looks directly at Charlie. “I still remember what he said to me that day. He said, ‘Gosh, Luke, don’t feel sorry for me. I live with the greatest guy on earth.’”

  Charlie’s shoulders are shaking, but he is smiling. His eyes are riveted to Luke.

  “And I remember what he was doing while we had that conversation. He was fixing up an old bicycle, one he had outgrown years before. He said he had heard about a kid in the sixth grade who rode his bike to school every day until somebody stole it. Jake Junior was fixing up his old bike to give to him.

  “When I asked who the sixth-grader was, Jake Junior said he didn’t know his name. Then I asked a really dumb question. I said, ‘Jake Junior, if you don’t even know the kid’s name, why are you giving him a bike?’ Jake Junior shrugged, and you know what he said?”

  The crowd is still; the church is silent.

  “He said, ‘Because it feels like the right thing to do.’”

  Luke takes a minute to put the photo of Jake Junior and Charlie back on the easel. He looks out at the crowd and takes a deep breath.

  “Early last fall, Jake Junior went to a Saturday meeting for high school seniors interested in the army’s college credit program. Obviously, that was before he got his scholarship from Duke.”

  The congregation laughs again.

  “He came back from that Saturday meeting with a dozen identical tee shirts. One for himself, and one for every other member of the varsity basketball team. They are plain white tee shirts, with ‘United States Army’ written in small letters across the front. But that wasn’t what Jake Junior liked about them. What grabbed him was what was written in larger letters on the back. The army’s slogan: ‘Be all that you can be.’

  “He was. More than anyone I have ever known, Jake Junior was all that he could be. He was wearing that shirt—and those words— the morning he died.

  “That is Jake Junior’s legacy. He taught me—and everybody else who knew him—to be all that we can be. To do all that we can do, even when the rest of the world doesn’t expect it from us. To do all that we can do, just because that’s the right w
ay to live. And if we keep Jake Junior’s legacy alive, then his spirit will live on in each one of us.”

  Luke leaves the pulpit and walks back to our pew. Charlie stands and embraces him. They are frozen. For the first time today, I break down.

  Father Burrows says a final blessing over the coffin. The organist begins the recessional hymn. The pallbearers take their places and lift the coffin up over their shoulders. We follow them down the aisle and outside, where the Chatham fog has taken over Main Street.

  Luke and I stand with Charlie on the steps of the church while the pallbearers load the coffin into the polished gray hearse and close its rear double doors. Harry comes out of the chapel and stands next to me.

  “I’ll do it,” I tell him. “Call Mr. Kendall. We’ll set up the surveillance equipment this weekend.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Why, Marty? Why did you change your mind?”

  I look up at him. “Because it feels like the right thing to do, Harry. And I have to do all that I can do.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Sunday, June 20

  Father’s Day has always been a challenge. For years, Luke pretended not to notice the holiday. He’d say since his father ignored him all year, he should ignore his father on Father’s Day. But I always knew it weighed on him.

  Last year was especially awkward. Luke’s first visit with Ralph was over the Memorial Day weekend, and three weeks later we were shopping for a Father’s Day gift. “I don’t even know the man,” Luke kept saying as we rummaged through the men’s department of Puritan Clothing Store. Each time he said it, the saleswoman arched her eyebrows and cast a disapproving frown at me over her rhinestone-studded half-glasses.

  This year is better. Luke announced last Sunday night, after watching the Red Sox trounce the New York Yankees at Fenway Park, that he wanted to get a pair of tickets to another Sox game and give them to Ralph for Father’s Day. That’s giving a gift you’d like to receive, I told him. Actually, it’s giving a gift you will receive, which must be worse.

  Nonetheless, I thought it was a good idea. More important, it was Luke’s idea, and not mine. We ordered the tickets first thing Monday morning, before we left the house for work and school, before we were aware of what had happened beneath the Mitchell River Bridge, before our world turned upside down.

  We tried to get tickets for today, Father’s Day, but they were sold out. We settled on a pair of tickets for a home game against the Seattle Mariners next Saturday night. And it’s just as well. The events of the past week have left Luke drained. I’m used to death, though not the death of a young friend, but for someone Luke’s age, such a death is devastating. He spent most of yesterday on the beach behind our cottage with Danny Boy, halfheartedly skipping stones through the waves. He left our property only once—to walk the beaches of the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge with Justin. Neither of them wanted to be far from the familiar sounds of the ocean, Luke said.

  Luke normally sleeps in on Sundays, but he agreed to set his alarm clock and get up in time to go to a Father’s Day breakfast with Ralph at nine today. Ralph is flying into the Chatham Municipal Airport again on a small chartered plane. He’ll spend a few hours with Luke, then fly back into Logan where, once again, he’ll catch a commercial flight to Seattle. He doesn’t have a choice; he’s been recalled to the stand in the Dr. Wu trial.

  Technically, every trial witness is subject to being recalled later in the trial if subsequent evidence raises a new issue that the witness should address. As a practical matter, though, witness recalls almost never happen. Trial judges expect the attorneys on both sides of a case to get every piece of information they might need from a witness the first time he testifies. Only when the subsequent evidence is truly a surprise—one that couldn’t have been anticipated by the attorney requesting the recall—is the recall granted. This past Friday, a recall of Ralph was granted to the attorneys prosecuting Dr. Wu.

  According to the press, the final witness for the defense was Willie Chung himself. Mr. Chung has no criminal record and, by all accounts, he did a credible job on the witness stand. Over and over again he denied playing any role whatsoever in any of the five murders. Even under grueling cross-examination, he professed ignorance of the methods of homicide used by Dr. Wu. His testimony provided the necessary factual backup for Ralph’s expert psychiatric opinion that Chung couldn’t be held criminally responsible for the conduct of Dr. Wu.

  The prosecutor cross-examined Willie Chung for the better part of three days. He had all but wrapped it up when he asked the question that elicited the surprise testimony. “Dr. Ellis is an expensive expert witness,” he said to Mr. Chung. “Where did you get the money to pay for him?”

  The fees charged by expert witnesses are fair game in all trials, civil and criminal. A jury is entitled to conclude, if it so chooses, that the expert’s opinion has more to do with the sum of money he’s being paid than with his professional evaluation of the facts. Any competent cross-examination of an expert witness calls for disclosure of the expert’s hourly rates. The cross-examination of Ralph was no exception.

  Ralph recited his rates to the court matter-of-factly during his cross-examination, and his testimony was broadcast on the evening news. He charges four hundred dollars an hour for reviewing medical records and other documents. The same rate applies to travel time. His rate rises to five hundred for each hour of deposition testimony and each hour spent clinically evaluating a patient. The rate tops out at six hundred dollars for each hour of courtroom testimony.

  Further cross-examination elicited the fact that Willie Chung had paid Ralph a one-hundred-thousand-dollar retainer, and had replenished it promptly on two separate occasions when it fell below the fifty-thousand mark. The checks were drawn on Chung’s personal account, Ralph testified.

  It was only natural, then, that the prosecutor would wonder how a man who made his living doling out herbal remedies came up with such a staggering sum of money. The defense attorneys should have anticipated as much. Apparently, though, they did not.

  Willie Chung was thrown by the question. In the portion of his testimony that aired on the news he stammered and coughed, then testified that the money had come from a friend. “A very generous friend,” he said. After further questioning, Chung explained that the friend had wired the funds into Chung’s personal account to pay the initial retainer, and again each time he needed to replenish it. When the prosecutor asked Chung to identify his generous friend, the defense attorneys went through the roof.

  After a lengthy sidebar, the presiding judge ordered Willie Chung to answer the question. During the pause that followed, the lead prosecutor employed one of the oldest trial tactics known to litigators. He pulled a sheaf of documents from his briefcase and leafed through it—looking smug—while waiting patiently for Chung’s answer. The prosecutor’s performance was intended to suggest to Chung that the government already knew the identity of the generous friend, and had the documentation to prove it. It worked.

  After minutes of deafening silence, Willie Chung leaned forward in the witness stand and said into the microphone, “Lester Pan.” Those two words launched pandemonium in the courtroom, a scene the eleven o’clock news aired three times. It seems that Lester Pan is well known in the Pacific Northwest as the dictator of a small but powerful faction of the Chinese mob. He specializes in importing illegal immigrants from China, almost all of them underage females.

  But that’s not all. Lester Pan is also the sole suspect in the murder of an immigration officer who got too close for Pan’s comfort. He remains a suspect—rather than a defendant—because the intimidated witnesses won’t talk and, without them, prosecutors can’t convict. All in all, Lester Pan does not seem to be a man who would help Willie Chung—or anyone else, for that matter—out of the goodness of his heart.

  The revelation of Willie Chung’s mob connection puts Ralph in a terrible spot. If he testifies that he knew Lester Pan to be the
source of his retainer payments, he will appear to have been less than forthcoming when he testified that the money came straight from Chung’s personal account. His overall credibility will be damaged. He will be seen as an advocate, rather than as an unbiased psychiatrist. The jury might discredit his testimony altogether.

  On the other hand, if Ralph testifies that he knew nothing of Lester Pan, then it will seem that Ralph’s patient was able to outwit him, hiding potentially important information from him. If Chung successfully hid his mob ties from Ralph, he may have hidden other important facts as well. He might even have hidden facts that would prove he has firsthand knowledge of the murders. Ralph’s diagnosis, then, will be rendered meaningless.

  Ralph taps on the kitchen door and lets himself in promptly at nine. His expression—usually self-satisfied—is anxious and tense. He knows he is in for brutal questioning this week. I decide not to touch it.

  Luke is ready on time again and, within minutes, they are out the kitchen door. I sit on the back deck with Danny Boy just long enough to finish my coffee. I am headed out myself this morning. I’m meeting Harry at ten o’clock outside the Barnstable District Courthouse. He won’t be alone.

  CHAPTER 41

  Mr. Kendall is an odd-looking man and that appears to be a matter of choice. He is taller than Harry by about three inches, and painfully thin. He is dressed all in black, from the tam on his head to the shiny toes of his wing tips, in spite of the summer sun. He carries two large equipment bags, both solid black with no markings of any kind. He puts one of them down as I walk toward the side entrance to the courthouse, and extends a chalk white hand equipped with extraordinarily long, tapered fingers.