Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause

by Grif Stockley

  I think of Morris’s impassioned plea to Andy and realize it worked. Maybe I should have asked if Morris could make the closing.

  Later, Clan, who has brought a bag of popcorn into the courtroom with him, nods at Andy and his group.

  “That’s gratitude for you,” he says loyally as I tell him Andy’s words to me after the trial.

  “Not your average dope dealer from Needle Park,” I say, looking over at the group of rednecks sitting near the middle of the courtroom. If there aren’t some Trackers waiting with us, I’d be real surprised.

  Clan understands just enough about the case to sound like an idiot.

  “Looks like he wants to play both ends against the middle,” he says, nodding at Andy and his all black group.

  His lawyer maybe.

  “Not Andy,” I say, wondering if the jury will have to come back Monday. It has been just over two hours. Jill and I have agreed that we jointly will move to sequester the jury this weekend if they can’t reach a verdict tonight. They could get a few anonymous calls from somebody in this group, “I could be wrong,” I whisper, “but Andy may be one of those one in a million people who mean what they say.”

  “Sure,” Clan says, leering at Kim Keogh, who is waiting by the double doors to the courtroom.

  “Women fall for that kind of guy every time.”

  I have to laugh, knowing Dan’s views on the human condition.

  The truth is, between Andy and Morris, I’d take Morris every time. Morris lives out of his experience; his brother lives out of his head. As a behaviorist, Andy ought to know better. I smile at Kim, but I don’t go over to her yet. I am going to catch enough grief from the other journalists present when this is over. I will keep my end of the bargain, but I never screwed up the nerve to ask Andy to honor my commitment to Kim. A black female deputy comes through a side door, stopping my heart. Is the jury back? As she comes over, Clan says, “I figure thirty years. You saved him from the chair at least.”

  I try to swallow but can’t manage any spit. Was it that bad? I guess so. I can’t imagine how Andy will stand even a year in jail.

  Her uniform still starched and crisp at five o’clock in the afternoon, the deputy reads my anxiety and shakes her head.

  Coming over to the table, she says, “The judge says to tell you the jury reports it thinks it can reach a verdict tonight.

  They don’t want to fool with it this weekend.”

  Fool with it? My mind seized on these words. What does that mean? I stand up.

  “Did the jury foreman say that?” I ask.

  She makes a face.

  “No, I did.”

  Clan chuckles at me, “Down, boy. You did all you could.”

  As she leaves, the deputy frowns as if to say, bullshit. She’s right. You never do enough, and the mistakes you make may be the difference in the verdict. For all I know, the jury resents the hell out of what I tried to do to Leon. Sure, he was a member of the Trackers, but so what? As Jill said, he loved that little girl. He wouldn’t have let go of her intentionally.

  “Mr. Page has tried to smear a man to save his client. A cheap lawyer’s trick playing on the racial fears of the community.

  Well, Blackwell County is bigger than that. Stunts like that don’t work here….” As Jill was saying this to the jury, I look over at Andy. His chair was as far away as he could get it and still be at the same table. It was cheap. Now I wish I hadn’t done it. Still, knowing myself as I do, I’d probably do it again.

  At seven Rainey appears in the middle of the main door to the hallway and motions me over. In the hall, bearing gifts from McDonald’s, is Sarah. The two together somehow make me more nervous than I already am. Maybe it is that Kim Keogh is lurking about. They could all have a nice chat about me: My dad was ready to bail out as soon as he heard you might have cancer. Your dad’s got a prostate as hard as a walnut; by the way, did he tell you he screwed me on the first and only date? Did you know that besides being a jerk your dad’s a first-class demagogue with the race issue?

  I wolf down the hamburger and fries so I will not have to say anything.

  “I told Sarah,” Rainey says dryly, “you’d be too nervous to eat.”

  Perhaps smelling food, Clan comes outside.

  “Ah, the longsuffering women in your life,” he says to me, winking at Sarah.

  “Have some of Dad’s trench fries, Mr. Bailey,” Sarah says, recognizing him by my description.

  Clan bows, simultaneously digging his fingers into the sack, which has enough salt in it to preserve a herd of cattle, and says, “A woman after my own heart.”

  I make the introductions, wondering what they must all be thinking. They’ve heard enough about each other. After I’m finished, I say, “All we need to round out this group is my rat burner.” This gets a laugh from everybody. Confidentiality is not my long suit either. Rainey gives me a wan smile as if to say that I’m hopeless. For some reason it occurs to me that if she has a mastectomy, I will never have seen both her breasts, but that won’t be anything new. For the few minutes we were in bed together, we were as innocent as newborn kittens.

  “Where’s Dr. Chapman?” Sarah asks. She is wearing a rare outfit, a dress. Rainey’s advice, I suppose. I note approvingly that it conceals her lush figure. Usually her clothes are too tight.

  “He’s waiting in the courtroom,” I say, knowing she’s curious.

  “It’s not a real good time to meet him.” I am worried, actually, about what he might say.

  Clan, who is rubbing the salt from his fingers onto his pants, cracks, “It may be her last chance.”

  While Clan takes Sarah into the courtroom to point out (quietly, I hope) which one is Morris—she has seen Andy’s picture in the paper or on TV a half-dozen times, Rainey takes me aside and tells me she thinks she got Charlene on a bus headed west without anyone following her.

  “She said to tell you that no matter what happens, she isn’t sorry.”

  I nod, thinking I wouldn’t have been so brave. What was her reinforcement? It surely can’t be a two-day bus trip to California. Maybe just the knowledge she stood up to Leon.

  In her own way, Charlene is probably as stubborn as Andy.

  It is at this moment we are told the jury is coming back in. I have a premonition this is going to be worse than I expected. I hope to hell Morris won’t try to cancel his check.

  We hurry back into the courtroom and I motion to Andy to come forward. Jill come hurrying in, followed by Kerr, and I see the look of expectation on her face. She knows it is not a question of “if” but how long. After the jury went back, she admitted she doesn’t expect the death penalty—just life without parole. Despite his principles, Andy would kill himself.

  Who could blame him?

  It is a piece of conventional wisdom that if members of the jury look at your client and smile on their way back in to the jury box then you’ve won. It was my experience at the Public Defender’s that juries almost never smile, no matter what they’ve done, until the verdict is announced. No one is smiling now. The two African-Americans, at opposite ends of the first row, seem particularly dour to me, and I prepare for the worst. Beside me, Andy stiff as a mannequin, speaks voluntarily to me for almost the first time all day.

  “They don’t look happy, do they?”

  I feel nauseous, as a wave of indigestion rumbles through my lower intestines. It is all I can do to nod in agreement.

  Judge Tamower, who now at the end of a long day and a long week looks exhausted, pats down curls that already seem limp (so much for that perm). “Has the jury reached a ver dict?”

  The foreman, a slenderly built accountant in his mid-forties with a rim of fat around his middle, says, “We have. Your Honor.”

  I look back over my shoulder at Sarah and Rainey. Twisting her hair in anxiety, Sarah doesn’t see me, but Rainey nods, a look of sympathy crossing her face. Wednesday she faces her own verdict. I hope I am more help to her than I have been to Andy.

 
As Judge Tamower silently reads the verdict form handed to her by the bailiff, I steel myself not to react if they have come back with the death penalty. I have been here before, but that time the man standing beside me. Harry Potter, who killed two convenience-store clerks deserved to die and, in fact, his appeals exhausted, was executed last week.

  “To the charge of capital felony murder,” Judge Tamower reads, her voice solemn, but not without a note of satisfaction, “not guilty.” I watch the air go out of Andy’s chest.

  We have exhaled simultaneously.

  “To the lesser included charge of second degree murder, not guilty,” the judge says quickly.

  Involuntarily, Andy clears his throat, but I am not terribly surprised, since they didn’t come back with capital felony murder. It is the manslaughter charge I am now worried about.

  “To the lesser included charge of manslaughter,” the judge I reads, looking up at the jury, “not guilty.” With this, the small contingent of African-Americans begin clapping, only to be silenced by Judge Tamower’s quick gavel.

  My heart has begun to race. Is it possible the jury will acquit Andy entirely? Again impassive, Andy stares straight ahead, as if he has not heard a word the judge has said.

  “To the charge of negligent homicide,” the judge says, and looks directly at Andy, “guilty.”

  I look at Andy, who blinks rapidly, but the maximum is only a year in the county jail. He could be out in four months.

  Judge Tamower continues.

  “The jury recommends that ; Dr. Chapman be placed on probation for one year and be required to perform sixty hours of community service.” I Judge Tamower looks at the twelve men and women seated } to her left and says, “I will accept the jury’s recommendation.

  This court is adjourned.”

  ; So quickly I will later wonder if I imagined it, Andy ; brushes his left eye beneath his glasses. Then, turning to me, : he says, sounding for all the world like a priggish old-maid i schoolteacher, before Kim Keogh can reach me, “I still don’t I think the end justifies the means.”

  ; Somehow I keep my mouth shut. At least the sanctimonious asshole has the decency to shake hands. Besides, who knows why the jury didn’t convict him of murder or at least ; manslaughter? They may not even know themselves. As Kim I Keogh opens her lovely mouth to ask her first question, I think again that I’d take Morris any day.

  the surgery waiting room at St. Thomas is so littered with the debris of the slow passage of time (paper cups, magazines, newspapers, gum and candy wrappers) that I am re minded slightly of the Blackwell County Social Services office where I once plied my trade as a child-abuse investigator. The difference, of course, is the clientele. St. Thomas is for mostly the middle class and rich who have private insurance Down the street is University Hospital, which handles mostly Medicaid patients and people without insurance.

  Judging by his bemused manner. Dr. Brownlee, Rainey’s surgeon, seems to regard me as something of a chump: I keep getting involved with women who have breast cancer.

  Correction. May have breast cancer. Only a biopsy can tell for sure, he said repeatedly, but by his haste in scheduling Rainey’s surgery Brownlee left no doubt what he thought.

  Strangely inarticulate for a man who surely earns several hundred thousand dollars a year, Brownlee apparently lets his knife do his talking.

  Things have moved with such haste that I am the only family or friend Rainey has in the waiting room. Before being wheeled into the operating room, Rainey told me to bend down and then whispered into my ear that she loved me.

  Since I had told her the same thing the night before, it was not as if the subject hadn’t been mentioned. Still, better late than never.

  Stopping my heart, the female volunteer sitting behind the scarred, wooden desk at the front of the room calls out, “Mr.

  Page?”

  I find I can barely force myself out of the chair, so heavy is the fear weighing down on me. “You have a phone call over there,” she says, pointing to a pay phone booth in the corner .

  “Thanks,” I say, feeling a momentary reprieve. I have promised to call Rainey’s daughter immediately, but I won’t be surprised if she couldn’t wait.

  “Hello,” I say, my voice feeling slightly rusty from disuse.

  “Any word?” Dan asks, his high voice cracking against my ear. “Not yet,” I report, looking out at the exhausted and anxious faces around me. Good ol’ Dan, I think. He would have come with me but he has to be in court this morning.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.”

  We talk for a few moments, and I then go sit down, thinking a friend like Dan can be a pain in the butt (he asked me over the weekend to represent him before the bar ethics committee if it decides to bother with him because of his Twinkie conviction), but I wouldn’t trade him for the world. We don’t talk much about serious issues except our cases, but he knows what is important to me. The ethics committee won’t do much, maybe send out a letter of admonition, its lowest level of action. Compared with what some lawyers have stolen, a Twinkie isn’t much to get excited about.

  I drink my third cup of coffee and stare unseeing at the pages of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, trying to think about anything except what’s occurring in one of the rooms next to me. The papers have been full of stories about Andy’s trial. One of the jurors has talked since the verdict, and his comments have proved rather enlightening. Emerson Clawson, one of the white males who kept yawning during my closing argument, has told a reporter for the Democrat Gazette that it never seemed like a murder case to him.

  Shocking that pitiful child was just a stupid thing to do, a case of poor judgment. Still, as awful as that kid’s life was, you could see why somebody would try it. Why such a light sentence? Why not put him in jail to warn people like Andy not to experiment with children’s lives, as Jill had demanded of the jury? According to Clawson, the jury figured that somebody has to work with those poor devils and it might as well be somebody who gives a damn and doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Sure, Chapman had screwed up, but you have to remember he had the kid’s mother panting all over him. As far as he was concerned, the dumbest part of the trial had been the defendant’s lawyer trying to make an issue of the aide being in the Trackers. He didn’t blame Chapman for wanting to fire his lawyer. Lawyers are always trying to use the issue of race in Blackwell County for one reason or another. The prosecutor, he told the reporter, apparently rather indignantly, was right about one thing: cheap tricks like that don’t work there. Sure they don’t.

  The night after the trial I called Amy Gilchrist who told me that from the beginning Jill had been convinced that Leon was in on it—that she was certain he had been paid off by Andy and Olivia but never found the slightest evidence to prove it. When Leon hadn’t shown up for work this past Monday, Jill, according to Amy, had nodded and collected a five-dollar bet from Kerr. When she checked with his landlord, she was told that Leon hadn’t bothered to ask for his deposit back and had left no forwarding address. Without any evidence to charge him, Jill had been stuck with Leon’s story, and then I had really messed things up when I found out about Leon being in the Trackers. She had ended up having to defend a man she thought was guilty as sin! Conspiracies!

  How prosecutors love them! Jill would really be agitated if I told her that last night I got a call from California from Charlene telling me she had called Leon and he had gotten on the plane Sunday afternoon.

  “I wouldn’t of tried to hurt him so bad if I didn’t still love him.” I could tell Jill this, but she wouldn’t believe Charlene. Since I heard Leon laughing in the background, I do. Jill’s problem is she’s too logical. As the song goes, “The things we do for love!”

  After spilling the beans on her boss, Amy had said she was leaving the Prosecutor’s office next month. Now that she’d had the abortion, she had no future there. The Layman Building has space, I told her. Yet I am dismayed at the thought of one more lawyer competing for business again
st me. Amy confided that sometimes she dreams she is having the baby. Regret is the price of freedom, my mother used to say, but I didn’t drop this pearl of wisdom on Amy, who promised to come by and see me. Before I hung up, I asked her about the possibility of Olivia being prosecuted. Given the view of the jury that the child’s death was accidental, Amy confided, Jill has given up. In turn, she asked me if I thought Olivia and Andy would get back together. I doubt it, I told her, not after her testimony. Andy may be capable of love—but forgiveness? I’m not so sure.

  Benign. The sweetest word in the English language. Outside the hospital, I roll up the window of the Blazer on my side to keep out the cool rain. My passenger however sticks her bare arm out the window and waves it around like a naughty child. Her face is wet and shining.

  “You don’t have to go back to work after you take me home,” she says shyly.

  I smile. My face is wet, too.

  “I guess I don’t,” I say.

  There is something to be said for private practice after all.