Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause

by Grif Stockley

  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.

  “Why don’t you close the door, Gideon,” she instructs me as she attaches her earring, a plain silver hoop the circumference of a half dollar, “and we’ll have a little talk after you read what we think your client has been up to.”

  Confidence. Jill’s borders on smugness. I wish I had some about this case. I shut the door while she sits down and opens a file on her desk. “I was beginning to have some sympathy for your client and wonder if I had overcharged him,” she says, handing me the document in which the formal allegations of capital murder are contained.

  I notice that though the dozens of pictures of the children remain on the walls, she has changed the desk in her office.

  Replacing the exquisitely handcrafted wood with its delicate finish, a museum piece I openly coveted, is a metallic surface a jet fighter could land on, reminding me of the Persian rug my old boss at the PD’s Office replaced after repeated coffee spills. Women keep trying to humanize the workplace, but work keeps getting in the way, I suppose. Sitting down across from her, I read the “Information,” as the formal charging document is called, and learn nothing new. Murder, as opposed to manslaughter, is, of course, a question of intention, a conclusion, and is easily stated.

  “So what do you have?” I ask, clutching like a security blanket the briefcase on my lap as I wait for the bad news.

  “We’ve known since the girl died that the cattle prod had very little tape insulating the handle,” Jill explains.

  “It was a lethal weapon in the hands of somebody who knew what he was doing with it.”

  To give myself time to respond, I pretend to study the paper in front of me, remembering Andy’s apparent lie to me that he had carefully wrapped it and couldn’t understand what had happened. God knows how many others he has told. If I’ve ever had a client who didn’t lie about something, I’d like to meet him. I say, “Obviously, I’d like to examine it. Do I need to get an order?”

  Jill shakes her head as if I’m missing the point.

  “Still, I gave Chapman the benefit of the doubt until we found out this,” she says, shoving at me a fourteen-year-old Blackwell County Circuit Court Consent Judgment that is styled: Pamela Le Master, by her Mother and Next Friend, Olivia Le Master, and Olivia Le Master, Individually, versus Dr. Hamilton Corbin, et al. Ham Corbin is a now retired obstetrician who owns a major chunk of the First Capitol Bank. What I’m looking at, I quickly realize is a copy marked “confidential” of a structured malpractice settlement in which Pam was awarded slightly over three million dollars, to be paid in increments to Olivia on her behalf, over her life. At her death the balance was to be paid to Olivia. “Where’d you get this?”

  I ask, knowing it doesn’t matter. I’m in a daze as I try to catch up. Olivia must have decided that not only would Pam be better off dead but that she, as her mother, would as well.

  So how come I’m not reading about Olivia?

  “Marvin Hippel has a long memory,” Jill says, nipping through her own file. Her posture makes my back ache. I couldn’t sit up that straight if I had a rod of reinforced steel inserted into my spine.

  “The same Marvin Hippel who passes out his cards to doctors after he speaks at their meetings?” I say, remembering a seminar I attended when I first went to work at Mays & Burton. So what? Now that lawyers can advertise, I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw some of my colleagues walking up and down the street in front of the Blackwell County Courthouse wearing those front-and-back sandwich placards with their phone numbers in glitter on them.

  A glint that might pass for a smile steals into the corners of Jill’s eyes. Hippel, who is a partner in one of the largest firms in the state, is notoriously shameless about hustling business he wants. Like our part-time state legislators who labor as employees the rest of the year on behalf of the industries for which they vote tax loopholes, Hippel professes not to have a clue as to the propriety of his conduct.

  “They say he’s great in the courtroom, too,” Jill says, her voice sarcastic.

  “Anyway, Hippel finally started hearing about the case and immediately came forward to let us know he had some information we would be interested in.”

  Feeling perverse as well as powerless in this situation, I slump disrespectfully further into my seat.

  “I ‘m sure the fact that he would like to torpedo what’s left of the settlement has nothing to do with the exercise of his civic duty.”

  Jill, who now has removed a nail file from her drawer (we could be a husband and wife sniping at each other), says sweetly, “I wouldn’t be too holier-than-thou. There’s a rumor going around that you stole Chapman from Mays & Burton after you got fired, but I’m sure there’s not a word of truth to it. By the way, there was quite a bit left—over two million dollars.”

  What have I ever done to this bitch? She hates my guts, or maybe she is just tough. I bite my tongue, telling myself she wants to goad me into something that will implicate Andy further. I wish I knew something. Now I can’t believe a thing out of his mouth.

  “So what?” I say, feigning a casualness I don’t feel.

  “My client didn’t stand to benefit from it.”

  As if she has been waiting for me to say exactly this, Jill puts down her nail file and reaches into her desk drawer and takes out a document and hands it to me, making me straighten up.

  “That’s not what Yettie Lindsey is going to say on the witness stand.”

  Yettie has signed a statement for Jill, dated only twenty-four hours ago, in which she says that outside Andy’s office approximately a week before Pam died she heard Olivia tell Andy (among other things) that “there’ll be more than enough money for you to go back to school for as long as you want.” Yettie admitted that she has been trying to eavesdrop, and that someone had come up behind her and she had not heard anything further that she can remember. Yettie’s statement goes on to say that she had not previously disclosed this information to the prosecutor’s office because she had not understood or remembered the remark until it had been disclosed to her (by Jill, obviously) that Olivia stood to gain financially from Pam’s death. Nor had she divulged until now that it was her belief that Andy and Olivia were romantically involved because she had no proof (only her suspicions from the way they looked at each other and talked together) and because she was jealous of Olivia.

  “It’s still a pretty thin case,” I say more bravely than I feel. I am furious for talking myself into believing there was nothing more to this case than a tragic accident. My problem is that I allowed myself to like my client too much. Damn it, I still do.

  Jill picks up her nail file again and begins to go to work on the nail on her left pinkie, reminding me again of my old boss at the Public Defender’s Office. Her actions are totally unprofessional, but Jill is so calculating that I have to believe her studied casualness is a form of contempt. She looks up at me and says, “Come on, Gideon, your client has told more than one person he thought he had the cattle prod insulated.

  I assumed he just didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and that’s why I only charged him with manslaughter.

  Obviously, I didn’t have all this other evidence when I charged him the
first time.”

  I stand up, unable now to keep still.

  “So why haven’t you charged Olivia?” I say angrily. But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize Jill needs Andy’s testimony to get her. Without it, she doesn’t have enough even to charge her.

  With it, Olivia will go to jail for life. It flashes on me, too, that I know now why Ken Bowman, her lackey assistant, is not in this room. Jill had said in front of him, in a moment of self-righteousness, that she would never offer Andy a deal, and now she has to if she wants to get the woman who instigated this. I know what Jill’s version of this conversation will be: “I made him beg for it.”

  She blows on the nail file to rid it of her dead skin.”

  “There’s no hurry.”

  Bullshit. Despite knowing where this is heading, I rise to the bait.”

  “You wouldn’t get past a motion for a directed verdict without my client’s testimony,” I huff, “and you know it.”

  Now that I’m on my feet, I have no place to go except out the door. Still, I have to see where she’s heading.

  Jill begins on her ring finger. Her nails are clear and appear from where I’m standing to be perfectly buffed.

  “Now that I know what happened,” she says, “I have no doubt there’s a lot more evidence out there. Your client won’t be going anywhere, will he? I think I would like to increase the bond a bit though.”

  Thoroughly disgusted, I jam my hands in my pockets.

  “You expect me to ask for a deal.”

  She can’t suppress a smile.

  “Not right now,” she purrs, holding her fingers up to the light for us to admire. Her fingers are long and surprisingly sensuous.

  “But maybe you’ll want to after you’ve had a little talk with him. By the way, we’ve asked for a bond hearing first thing tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll be quite so generous this time,” she finishes, her face now a frozen sneer.

  What crap, I think, as I pick up the Information, the Consent Judgment, and Yettie’s statement from her desk.

  “We’ll be there,” I promise. As I walk toward the door, I notice again the photographs of children on both sides. I halfway expect to see Pam’s round face mounted on the wall like a trophy.

  An hour later I pull into the Clearwater Apartments to meet Andy in his home. Soon the media will be swarming over us like teenaged girls over Florida during spring break, as the news of his murder charge boils out of the courthouse. Though over the telephone at the Human Development Center he had sounded shaken (but not nearly as stunned as I would have preferred), I know that from now on I won’t trust anything he tells me. Parking the Blazer near the manager’s office, I note that Andy has gotten about as far from downtown as possible. But why not? Crime is all over Blackwell County, but it is worse downtown. I pass the pool area on my way to his building and see four young women in bikinis—all of them white, of course. Probably teachers on summer vacation who are sharing two apartments. Clearwater isn’t cheap. Stretched out on bright yellow loungers, two of the four have their shoulder straps down, and I can’t resist staring at them.

  One of them glances up at me. Her bored expression tells me I can look, but I better not even nod. If there are other blacks out here, I bet most of them cut the grass. Again I wonder where Andy is getting his money. The admiring brother story is beginning to sound a little quaint.

  Andy, his face grave, opens the door and invites me in.

  “Want something to drink?” he says politely, leading me past an area that encloses his kitchen.

  “It’ll cool off in here in a minute.”

  Apparently, he has been home long enough to change clothes, but even in faded jeans and a blue work shirt rolled up at the cuffs, he looks better than most guys I know dressed in tuxes. I take off my suit coat and fold it over my arm. It must be close to ninety degrees in here. I’d love a beer, but take ice water instead.

  “Nice pool,” I say, as he drops three cubes of ice in my glass. Though I am ready to jump on him, I want to ask the questions. I am curious where he will go first.

  He fills the glass from the tap and hands it to me. “Schoolteachers,” he confirms casually, as if I’m a bachelor interested in becoming his neighbor in a singles complex instead of his lawyer trying to defend him on a murder charge.

  “There’re out there all the time. I don’t know why they’re not dead from skin cancer. The two blondes are damn nice-looking though.”

  Given his involvement with Olivia, I wonder how much he has seen. I gulp the water, all the while glancing around the kitchen. Most single guys live like pigs. Not Andy.

  Not even a dirty dish in the sink, which, unlike my own, is as white as his teeth. Surely he doesn’t have a maid, but why shouldn’t he? Maybe one of those white schoolteachers comes over and gets on her hands and knees and scrubs the floor until she can see her face in it. As I follow him into his living room, it occurs to me that I haven’t been in a black person’s house since before Rosa died.

  Despite her conservatism, Rosa moved easily between both worlds; I was the token white at the few parties I went to with her in our neighborhood in the late sixties and early seventies after I had come back from the Peace Corps and still believed it was just a matter of time before blacks would be just like us. Just a matter of enough Head Start classes and compensatory education and after a while we wouldn’t be able to tell if they were white or black if they called us on the phone—like Andy the first time he called me. I never felt comfortable despite my liberal pretensions at the time. I always felt most at ease with the women.

  Why? Was it sex? Or was it that I was secretly petrified that beneath the bullshit that passes for party talk one of the men was waiting to get enough bourbon in him to unload on the nearest male honkie. At my insistence, we always went home early before the booze kicked in and turned them sour.

  “Have a seat,” Andy says, his voice still calm. If I were in his place, I’d be climbing the walls.

  “I like this room,” I say. I mean it though. Dark colors, but the space still seems light, airy. Part of it is the plants. If I look at something green, it dies. Chapman has several—a veritable tree in the corner, a bush hanging from the ceiling, a couple in pots around the room, and they are thriving yet not overgrown. On the walls are Van Gogh themes: sunflowers, peasants in fields, etc.” perhaps the real things stolen from museums, for all I know. My knowledge of art blossomed and withered one spring in Fine Arts 101, but there is one picture directly behind Andy’s chair that gets my attention. It is the only hint that he is black—a painting of an old African woman, judging from the load on her head and her dress. There is suffering in her weathered visage, but it is the kind that is mastered somehow by the victim and becomes merely a part of the geography and history of the face.

  No self-pity in those bones.

  I can’t contain myself.

  “You realize if you’re convicted of this new charge,” I say urgently as I sit down on the couch, a tan-and-green jungle-colored monster that blends nicely with the straw-colored wallpaper in the room, “you could either die or spend the rest of your life in prison trying to keep from getting raped.”

  He perches on the edge of a wicker chair across from me. “I swear to you,” he says, his voice intense for the first time since I’ve been in the apartment, “I didn’t kill Pam deliberately.”

  I sip at the remaining ounce of water in the glass, watching his face for a clue. He is as impassive as ever. How can he not be devastated by a charge of capital murder? Maybe he is, and is hiding it behind that black mask. Or maybe he realizes he’s been found out. I’ve been lied to by clients who waved their arms and screamed at the top of their lungs that they were innocent; yet, I’ve had clients whisper their lies to me as quietly as penitents given their confession.

  “I suppose you didn’t have the slightest idea,” I say sarcastically, “that Olivia was scheduled to receive about two million dollars by Pam’s premature death.”

>   Andy narrows his eyes at me as if I were suddenly having a stroke. Finally he says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I unzip my brief case and take out the documents Jill gave me as I tell him about the malpractice settlement, wondering as I do if it is possible that Olivia has set him up. He wouldn’t be the first man ever fooled by a woman. I can vouch for that. But how can he not know? They were lovers. They could have spent hours setting this up.

  “Come on, Andy,” I say, feeling anger flow into me as I pick up Yettie’s statement “you were going back to school after you got married.

  Who was going to pay for that?”

  For the first time I get a strong reaction. His head jerks down sharply as he leans forward to see what I have in my hands.

  “How do they know,” he asks softly, “that we were talking about marriage? No one knew that.”

  The telephone rings, startling me almost out of my chair. The media surely have the story by now. It will be only a matter of time before they are here camped out by the pool.

  “Don’t answer that,” I instruct him.

  “It’s a reporter.”

  In two strides Andy is in the kitchen.

  “It might be Olivia,” he says, picking up the phone from the counter that separates his kitchen from the living room.

  “She’s been trying to reach me since eleven this morning.”

  “Say, “No comment’ and hang up if it’s the press!” I yell at him and rise to my feet. If it is Olivia, I want to hear what he says. Jill, I realize belatedly, must have had someone talk to Olivia this morning to try to catch her in some lies; and she has been attempting to warn Andy. Had Jill gotten an additional statement from her, she would have told me. Obviously, Olivia was shrewd enough to shut her mouth. I hear Andy mumble that he has been advised by counsel to make no statement and watch him put down the phone. He is beginning to appear shaken, and, sitting down again, I read him Yettie’s statement. “We had begun talking about marriage, but I ‘d been thinking about medical school,” he mutters as I finish reading.