You Don't Have to Live Like This
Page 33
“I’ve been hitting the weights.”
“I don’t think that’s what you need.”
“What do you think I need?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
There was a joke on the tip of my tongue, anger management, but it was a stupid joke and anyway I didn’t want to piss him off. I said, “This whole thing has taken up a surprising amount of head space. It must have been worse for you.”
“Cris is the one who’s really on edge. We’ve been fighting a lot. She doesn’t know who to get mad at, so she takes it out on me. But Nolan is high on her shit list, too. She’s mad at all of us, and it was just getting better, it was just getting like we could forget about it, when this comes along.”
We broke for lunch, and then we came back and waited some more. Tony and I talked desultorily, as they used to call it in the books. At first there were uncomfortable silences but we waited so long they got comfortable again. I could say things to him if I wanted to or not if I didn’t. He felt the same. At one point he said, “This is what everybody dreams of. My day in court. What kind of society do we live in, where this is something people want?”
“Nobody wants this.”
“I’ll tell you something, Marny, I do. I want to say my say.”
A little while later the sheriff or orderly or whatever the hell he’s called called him in, and I had to wait out the afternoon by myself, and another morning, I had to sit through another catered lunch, before I could say mine.
WHEN THEY CALLED ME IN, I can’t deny it, I felt excited; it was like stepping up to the plate in a softball game. They led me through a corridor into a room. My impressions at this point became a little confused. There seemed to be a lot of lights and people. You could feel their body heat and the wattage heat, and since the room itself wasn’t very big, the atmosphere tasted low on oxygen. I looked for windows but there weren’t any, just some kind of vinyl wall paneling, which went with the plastic/wooden tables and desks, and the beige carpeting.
Liz Westinghouse was the first face I recognized. She sat at the front of the room, a little raised up, in a leather office chair; she was leaning forward, resting her weight on a lectern. But I also saw Robert James on my way in, against a wall. Beatrice sat next to him; I kept turning my head. The truth is, there wasn’t much room, there weren’t that many people. Nolan was sandwiched by a couple of lawyers, one white, one black. They had their papers on a table. Nolan wore a gray suit. There was a cop by the witness box and a cop by the exit, and for the first time it hit me (I don’t know how to put this without sounding stupid) that we had taken up our official positions. Nolan was on trial, I was a witness, and when I sat down I noticed Gloria in one of the rows of chairs.
Then everything happened like it happens on TV. They gave me a Bible to hold, they swore me in. You say the words and wait for something to change. It’s like you believe in magic. In fact, there was a little magic. I felt nervous before, and afterwards somehow the nervousness deepened, which made me calmer on the surface. Then there was a kind of administrative pause. Some of the lawyers looked through their papers, they talked to each other, not in low voices; the judge said something to a woman sitting a few feet below her and typing at a computer. And I tried to get my head on straight. I looked at Gloria and she looked back at me, but without communication. Her look had the privacy of a stranger, and the distance between us was big enough (with the lights in my eyes), she might have figured I was staring into space. But if it was a staring contest, she won, because I turned away.
On my left hand, against another wall—it was an odd-shaped room, with six or seven sides—the jury sat in rows. Two black guys and one black woman, a total of eight women and six men—I counted. There must have been a couple of alternates. The youngest-looking juror looked like Steffi Graf, but not as pretty. She had worse skin. The oldest had cornrows. He sat up real straight and looked strong and frail at the same time. The overwhelming impression made by everything—I don’t mean just the jurors, but the public, the lawyers, the judge, the cops, everybody in the room, the furniture, the lighting system, the vinyl paneling—was a kind of intense boredom, a careful, painful, necessary boredom, which only the lawyers seemed used to. That’s why they talked in their ordinary voices and sometimes laughed at office jokes.
Then Larry Oh stood up—he had decided to take on the case himself, instead of farming it out to one of his staff. He shuffled his papers and put them down, and walked over to me, like you might walk over to someone you know in a bar. In fact, I did know him slightly. We had worked on my witness statement together, but I saw him first on TV at the Elwood Bar & Grill. After a while, when this kind of thing keeps happening, the lines get blurred, everything feels connected. What you read in the papers, what you see on TV, your life. Larry Oh wasn’t fat exactly but had one of those boyish faces that suggests a boy’s figure, which he didn’t have. But he moved pretty well and dressed to hide his weight.
He asked some questions, I answered them. It was like dancing with a guy who can dance, you just follow his lead, and Oh took me slowly through the day. Tony picking me up, dropping his kid at Robert’s house, coming back from lunch to find him missing. Driving the streets, running into Nolan at my house, getting everybody inside. Then he said, “I want you to explain what made you leave the room.”
“Nolan wouldn’t tell us where the kid was. We tried to call the police but he took the phone out of my hand, by force. And then when Tony wanted to leave Nolan blocked the door. It was a physically threatening situation. Tony said, don’t you have a gun, and Nolan said something like, that’s right, Marny, get your gun. I keep it in my bedroom, next to my bed, and went upstairs to get it.”
“And then what happened?”
“Nothing. I mean I went upstairs and sat on my bed and didn’t do anything. I think Tony called out, I couldn’t hear what, and when I came back down they were fighting. You know, punching each other and wrestling on the floor, with Nolan on top. But Nolan was already pretty beat up and Tony caught him in the face, where he had this bandage, and kind of pulled it away. After that he managed to get out from under. Nolan was still on the ground, on his knees, and when he tried to stand up Tony kicked him. That’s when he hit his head on the floor.”
“Is that what knocked him out?”
“Objection, Your Honor. Counsel is leading the witness.” It was one of Nolan’s lawyers, the black one, who stood up politely to make his point and sat back down.
The judge said, “Sustained. Let him say it for himself, Mr. Oh.”
So he tried again. “What happened after Nolan’s head hit the floor?”
I looked at Nolan, who was sitting between his lawyers and leaning back in his chair. His arms were folded, which made the shoulders of his suit ruck up against his neck.
“He was out cold,” I said. “I don’t know what knocked him out. Tony kicked him, too. But I think it was probably the floor.”
“And after he passed out, what did you do?”
“Tony called the police, and I told him to send an ambulance, too. I thought, maybe Nolan left the kid with his mother. So I told Tony to look there, but he didn’t know the way.”
“Did you show him the way?”
“I tried to describe it for him, but nobody was in any kind of shape to follow directions. So I went with him.”
“How long did you stay at Mrs. Smith’s house?”
“I don’t know. Five minutes? It could have been two minutes, it could have been ten. I really wasn’t in a normal frame of mind.”
“If Mrs. Smith testified that you stayed at least fifteen minutes, would you have any reason to doubt the accuracy of her testimony?”
“If that’s what she says, I’m sure she’s right. Because at that point for her it was just, you know, an ordinary visit.”
“Can you tell me why you left Nolan unconscious in your apartment for more than a quarter of an hour, while you sat around with his mother drinking lemonade?”
A few minutes later Judge Westinghouse called it a day. What surprised me is this: already I was reluctant to get off my chair. For someone who likes to talk, who cares about the difference between one way of saying something and another, who thinks of speech as the best kind of action . . . it was like, for sailors, being in a high wind. People were paying attention, my answers mattered. Whereas that evening, I made myself dinner alone and had nothing to do but go over these answers in my head.
37
Every morning the steps of the courthouse were packed with reporters and television crews. There were protesters, too, waving placards: Free Nolan Smith, with a picture of Nolan, based on one of his mug shots. Some guy held up a handmade sign that said It Isn’t a Crime on one side and To Live in Detroit on the other. And the next day I had to push my way through these people. All of which reinforced what I felt the day before, that I was an important person, out of all proportion. This time I didn’t have to wait in the waiting room. When the judge called me up to the witness stand, I felt very conscious of the way I walked—about fifteen paces from my seat, around a table and up a few steps. It was like going on stage.
The heating was on, and since it had rained all morning the smell of wet clothes was strong. But you couldn’t hear the rain outside; there were no windows.
Judge Westinghouse took us through the motions. And then Nolan’s lawyer, the black guy, stood up to cross-examine me. He looked fifty, maybe a little older—he had short, well-cut, grizzled hair and rimless glasses, he wore a bow tie, I don’t think he could have been taller than five foot seven. His name was John Barrett; he introduced himself.
“Mr. Marnier,” he said, “I’m going to start by asking you a few general questions. I want you to bear with me for a moment.” He looked at his notes and put them on the table and walked over to me. “How long have you known Robert James?”
“I don’t know, fifteen years, a little more.”
“Can you tell me where you first met?”
“At university,” I said.
“And which university is that?”
Larry Oh stood up. “I don’t see how this is relevant,” he said. “Mr. Marnier is not on trial here. Robert James is not on trial.”
So Barrett wandered over to Judge Westinghouse. He didn’t do anything in a hurry. “Judge,” he said. “I’m going to show that what happened that day happened as a result of a misunderstanding. You had at least two, maybe three, angry people who weren’t listening to each other. Now, there’s a context to that misunderstanding, there’s a history to it, and I plan to show what that history is.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll let this go for now. But it better go somewhere.”
“Yale,” I said.
“When did you move to Detroit?”
“About two years ago.”
“Had you ever been to Detroit before?”
“No.”
“Do you have any connection to the city, any kind of family history here?”
“No.”
“Can you explain to me why you moved here? Was it for the job opportunities?”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t have to call me sir,” he said. “Mr. Barrett is fine. So why did you come?”
And it went on from there. I found him hard to read. For one thing, his accent shifted sometimes, he changed his voice, too, usually to make a joke. When he asked me again why I moved to Detroit, I told him, “Cheap real estate.” He said, “Come to Gary. We got a lot of empty houses,” and a few people laughed. It doesn’t take much in a courtroom, people are nervous and bored, it’s tension laughter, but still, there was something in the way he said it, like, you and me, buddy, we come from different sides of the tracks. Later I looked up Barrett online (there was a profile of him on legalnews.com), and it’s true, he grew up in Miller Beach, Indiana, and was raised by a single mother. But she was superintendent of the Gary Community School Corporation, and he majored in economics at Notre Dame before going on to Michigan Law. I mean, his background wasn’t that different from mine.
Eventually he said, “Can you describe for this court your first encounter with Nolan Smith?”
So I did my best. I told him some guys were working on my house, and there was a problem with the grid connection, so we had to shut down the street. Anyway, I knocked on people’s doors, I wanted to give them a heads-up. That’s how I met Nolan.
“Did he threaten you on that occasion?”
“Isn’t that a leading question?”
So he smiled at me and said, “I’m cross-examining you, Mr. Marnier. I’m allowed to lead. But I’ll put it this way if you prefer. What was the nature of his response to this information?”
“He wasn’t too happy about it.”
“How did he express this unhappiness?”
“I was with a friend of mine, the guy who was supervising the work. Nolan said that if we went ahead he’d break this guy’s windows with a baseball bat.”
“Did you feel threatened?”
“I don’t know. Nolan talks a big game.”
“Did you go on with the work?”
I thought about this for a minute and said, “Not immediately.”
I couldn’t understand what Barrett was driving at. A lot of what he asked put Nolan in a bad light. But he was also interested in the time Michael told Clarence that he didn’t like “chocolate people”—and Clarence poured milk in his face. It’s amazing the information these people get access to. Maybe Gloria told him. Every little thing becomes a fact.
“What was Tony’s reaction to this incident?”
“Well, he came in right in the middle, when the kids were fighting on the couch. And Clarence is bigger than Michael. Tony wasn’t best pleased.”
“Did he say anything to you about it?”
“Of course he did. We had to break them up.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“I don’t know. We talked about it.”
“Was he angry with you?”
“Yes.”
“Why was he angry?”
“He thinks I should have stepped in.”
“Did he say anything else? Did he make any kind of request?”
“Yes. He did. Tony said he didn’t want his son hanging out with Nolan’s son anymore.” I looked at Nolan, who was looking at me, so I looked away. “I don’t know why you’re asking me about all this.”
“You let me worry about that. Did you tell Nolan what happened?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have told Tony, except Tony walked in.”
“Is that the whole reason?”
“I don’t know.” After a minute, I said, “I didn’t want to get Clarence in trouble.”
“Do you think Clarence would have got into trouble?”
“I didn’t want to make Nolan any more pissed off than he already was.”
But we talked about Robert James, too.
“Did he ask you to say something to Nolan about the Meacher case? Did he ask you to intervene?”
“What do you mean, intervene?”
“Were you aware that Nolan was talking to Dwayne Meacher’s family, that he was talking to lawyers and trying to drum up publicity?”
“I guess so.”
“Did Robert James ask you to intervene?”
“I still don’t know what you mean by intervene.”
“Did he want you to stop Nolan from doing the things he was doing?”
“You can’t stop Nolan from doing something if he wants to do it. I told Robert that. But Robert just wanted me to pass on some information.”
“What information was that?”
“About the medical attention Meacher was getting.”
“Did you pass it on?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you or didn’t you?”
“I went to see Nolan about it, but I don’t know if I said what Robert asked me to say. I guess when I saw him it didn’t seem—appropriate.”
“What about this case?”
“What about it?”
“Did Robert James ask you to communicate something to Nolan about this case?”
“No.”
“Did he ever express any opinion to you about it?”
“Of course, he’s a friend of mine. This case is a big deal in my life.”
“I’m glad to hear it. So what did he say?”
“He said that it’s the job of Nolan’s lawyers to make sure it doesn’t go to trial.”
There was a little laughter at that, and Barrett smiled when he said, “And why was that?”
“Because he didn’t think Nolan would win.”
“Did he have any other reasons, do you think?”
But here Larry Oh stepped in and I didn’t have to answer. Barrett kept pushing, though. He asked me about Beatrice, too. He wanted to know if she ever told me to talk to Nolan.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“We had a conversation about Nolan, and maybe she wanted me to say something to him, but it wasn’t clear.”
“But she had, let’s call it, misgivings about the trial, which she expressed to you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe for me what those misgivings were?”
Larry Oh stood up again, but the judge overruled him. It gave me a minute to think of an answer, and eventually I said, “This isn’t the kind of publicity they want for what we’re doing here.”
There was a lot more on these lines; it’s all in the transcript. When I was talking to Gloria about my testimony, I had this idea that all I had to do was tell the truth. She thought I needed to do more than that. I needed to edit and shape what I said, for Nolan’s sake. The fact is, I found it hard enough just answering the questions. Answering them honestly, I mean. Partly because there were things I wanted to be dishonest about, but also because the answers seemed so limited, they left so much out. I was too caught up in the whole thing to exercise any control over how I came across. I wasn’t telling the story, Barrett was. I didn’t get to say what I wanted to say.