Temporary Sanity

by Rose Connors

  I sit up straight and the Kydd nods at me. “Revocation hearing scheduled next week, first thing Tuesday. Old Frank’s going back to the Big House right now, for parole violation. No need to wait for the armed robbery trial.”

  The Kydd straightens up and runs his hands through his hair. “Trouble is, he hasn’t been picked up yet. He’s running.”

  A low whistle sails into the room. Harry fills the doorway. “You’re good, Kydd,” he says, throwing his jacket and briefcase on top of the cluttered table. “You’re damn good.”

  The Kydd grins. “Damn good” is the highest praise Harry doles out.

  “Anything from the lab?” Harry crosses the room and drops into the chair next to mine, loosening his tie.

  “Not yet,” I tell him. “Geraldine says we’ll have everything by the end of the day tomorrow.”

  Harry leans back in his chair, adds his scuffed shoes to the chaos on the table, and winks. “Cross your fingers.”

  We all laugh. The chance of finding a match of any kind with Frank Sebastian is slim to none. Pointing a finger at a third party to create reasonable doubt is one thing. Proving that the third party is, in fact, guilty is quite another. It happens only in Hollywood scripts and Perry Mason reruns.

  “We do have a small problem,” the Kydd says, his tone apologetic. “When Sebastian got hauled in the first time, for failing to report, our friend Stanley wanted to lock him up on the spot. A violation is a violation, Stanley said. It was Howard Davis who convinced Judge Long to give Sebastian another shot. Davis told the judge to ignore Stanley, said Stanley would lock up every last Boy Scout in the county if he could.”

  Harry and the Kydd laugh out loud, and I reluctantly join them. It’s really not funny, though. The prosecution will have a party with that information. We’ll end up arguing that Frank Sebastian murdered the one guy who spoke up for him. Sometimes I hate this business.

  Harry leans over and gives me a pretend punch on the arm; he knows what I’m thinking. “Not a big deal,” he says. “Davis wasn’t going to give Sebastian a break on this one. And Sebastian knew that. That’s why he’s on the run.”

  “Listen to this.” The Kydd’s grinning again, holding up the transcript. “Stanley told Judge Long that he had no discretion. Stanley said the judge was duty-bound to send Sebastian back to prison; the rules don’t allow for anything else.”

  Harry laughs again. “The rules according to Stanley?”

  “He told the judge he shouldn’t listen to Davis, that Davis is a disgrace to the criminal justice system.” The Kydd looks up from the transcript, eyes wide as if he can’t believe what he just read. “Stanley actually said that.”

  Harry leans back in his chair, hands behind his head. “Can’t argue with that. I hate to agree with Stanley about anything, but he’s got a point there.”

  “What was the ruling on that one?” I ask.

  The Kydd shakes his head, his grin growing wider. “Judge Long didn’t respond. But Howard Davis did. Davis asked the judge, ‘Where the hell’d you find this little guy?’”

  We’re all laughing again.

  “That’s how the transcript ends,” the Kydd adds, pointing at the document in case we don’t believe him, “with ‘Where the hell’d you find this little guy?’”

  Harry stops laughing and looks sympathetically, almost mournfully, at the Kydd. “You know you’ve had a bad day,” he says, “when you feel a kinship with Howard Davis at the end of it.”

  “End of it?” The Kydd shakes his head. “I’ve got two more files to review.”

  “Not tonight you don’t,” Harry says.

  The Kydd arches his eyebrows at me. I shrug.

  Harry stands and takes his wallet from his back pocket. “You look like hell,” he says, pushing a fifty into the Kydd’s shirt pocket. “Go get a steak.”

  “What? I don’t want a steak.”

  “Then get a lobster,” Harry says. “Get whatever the hell you want. But whatever you get, order a decent wine with it. Then go home and get some sleep.”

  The Kydd leans back and looks up at the ceiling, considering.

  “You look like hell,” Harry repeats. “Get out of here.”

  The Kydd puts his hands in the air, surrendering. “Okay, okay,” he says. “Lobster sounds pretty good now that you mention it.”

  Harry slaps him on the back and heads for the steep staircase that leads to his second-floor apartment. The Kydd starts packing his briefcase. I head up to my office to do the same.

  The Kydd’s car is barely out of the driveway when the door between my office and Harry’s living space opens a crack. “Hey, Marty,” Harry whispers. “Come here a minute.”

  I leave my desk and walk toward the door, but I can’t see him. He’s behind it. “Why are you whispering?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I open the door and Harry whisks me inside, closing it behind us. I’m stunned.

  Harry’s living room, normally something of a mess, is transformed. It’s uncluttered-tidy, even-lit only by the glowing logs in the fireplace. On the coffee table is an ice bucket, a fine Fumé Blanc perspiring in its cubes, and two long-stemmed wineglasses. An even longer-stemmed yellow rose (my favorite color) stands tall in a vase between them. The mellow sounds of a saxophone drift softly through the room.

  “One hour,” Harry says, slipping both arms around my waist and pulling me close, beginning his signature version of a slow dance. “Let’s take one…goddamned…hour…for us.”

  My mind jumps back to the image of Harry stuffing a fifty in the Kydd’s shirt pocket. I feel like a high school senior whose prom date just bought off the little brother. I look up into Harry’s hazel eyes and drape my arms over his shoulders. He pulls me even closer then, pressing his cheek against mine.

  “You’re good,” I tell him. “You’re damn good.”

  Chapter 24

  The chefs aren’t cooking tonight. They don’t have time, Luke said when I called. I’d hung up before I wondered what was keeping them so busy. Then I decided I’d better go home.

  Cape Wok is decorated with tiny green lights and red tinsel garlands. The owners are happy to see me, as always, and they should be. I’ve put one of their daughters through college already. And there’s little doubt that I’ll educate the other one before my son reaches adulthood.

  Our dinner is ready, small white boxes with tin handles packed in two brown paper bags, each one carefully stapled closed. The owners wave as I leave, wishing me a Merry Christmas and saying they hope to see me again soon. None of us has any real doubt that they will.

  The spicy aromas of Szechuan shrimp, orange chicken, and fried rice fill the Thunderbird, then merge with the smell of burning wood when I pull into our driveway. Luke is at the kitchen counter when I come through the door, piling mounds of whipped cream on two mugs of steaming hot chocolate. He puts his nose in the air and sniffs, then closes his eyes as a satisfied smile spreads across his face.

  “All right! Cape Wok!”

  My stomach knots a little-a guilt spasm. In our house, Chinese takeout is comfort food.

  There’s another smell, I realize, competing with the spices, the wood, and the chocolate. Again, it’s familiar, but it’s not Ragú. It’s something sweet. I can’t name it.

  I park the bags on the table and then notice that it’s clean. In fact, the whole room is clean. Last night’s dishes have been washed and put away. The pots and pans are spotless, shiny even, hanging from their hooks over the gas range, and the counters have been wiped down. It’s nice to have a girl around the house.

  The living room, though, is another story. The furniture’s been moved and the relocated couch holds two cardboard boxes, tissue paper and tree ornaments spilling over their sides. A wide red ribbon decorates the staircase banister, tiny white lights dancing around it. Bing Crosby croons in the corner.

  The crèche sits on the coffee table, the nativity scene characters scattered around in no particular order. A cow stands alon
e in the center of the barn. The baby in his manger is somewhere out in the field, his mother unaccounted for. A handsaw is on the table too, three unshepherded lambs meandering across its blade.

  And there’s a tree. That’s the other smell. In the middle of our living room, in front of the picture window, stands a tall, scrawny pitch pine, a Cape Cod native not normally selected for Christmas duty. Not even by Cape Cod natives.

  I turn to face Luke, who followed me in from the kitchen. He’s beaming. He points one of the dripping mugs at the saw, the other at the scarecrow tree. “We chopped it down today,” he says, “just before dark. It’s a beauty, huh?”

  Beauty’s a stretch.

  Luke hands one mug up to Maggie, who’s seated on the top rung of a ladder, crooning with Bing about a white Christmas and stringing unlit bulbs around the highest branches. He holds the other one out toward me, but I shake my head. Hot chocolate is not my drink of choice with Szechuan shrimp. Luke shrugs and inhales half of it in one swallow.

  Maggie stops crooning long enough to take a gulp from her mug. She comes up with a whipped-cream mustache. “Check out your bedroom,” she says. “We’ve got a surprise for you.”

  These days, surprises make me nervous. I head for the bedroom door with Luke on my heels, Maggie scrambling down the ladder to follow. There’s a faint glow in the darkened room, the kind thrown by the last embers burning in a fireplace.

  My stomach knots again. I don’t have a fireplace.

  Danny Boy’s bed, normally in Luke’s room, is here instead. A wicker oval lined with an old pad and worn blankets, it’s pressed against the wall beside my bed. And a night-light-one I haven’t seen since Luke was a toddler-is plugged in above it. A yellow, giddy dish dashes over the outlet with an equally enthusiastic spoon.

  Danny Boy isn’t in his bed, though. He’s curled on the braided rug beside it, his eyes alert and focused on a small, dark-brown bundle inside. His tail thumps to greet us, but his steady gaze doesn’t move. The bundle lifts its head and opens moist, chocolate-colored eyes. A puppy.

  Maggie bends and scoops up the small dog. “We found him in the woods,” she says. “Someone must have dropped him off at the edge of the highway, and he wandered into the woods, away from the traffic. He was scampering around from tree to tree, all alone, whimpering.”

  “We couldn’t just leave him there,” Luke adds. “He’d have frozen.”

  More likely he’d have been a coyote’s dinner. Better keep that thought to myself.

  “We named him Charles,” Maggie says, scratching the puppy’s floppy ears.

  Charles? A mental picture of the Prince of Wales pops into my head, uninvited.

  “He looks like a Charles, don’t you think?” Maggie hands the prince’s namesake to me.

  Charles looks up, as if awaiting my opinion of his christening. He drops his lower jaw, and his long tongue falls over one side of it. He looks like he’s smiling. And he’s far more charming than the prince.

  “He does,” I agree. “He looks like a Charles.”

  “Danny Boy has been taking care of him since we got home,” Maggie says, bending again to pat the old dog. “Like a mother hen.”

  This news is somewhat surprising. “Maggie, Danny Boy is-well-he’s a boy.”

  “I don’t care,” she says. “He’s been acting like a mother hen.”

  Charles raises his face toward mine, his smile widening, confirming Maggie’s account of Danny Boy’s maternal attentions.

  “Watch out,” Luke warns. “He’s got a wicked case of dog breath.”

  “He’s a dog,” I tell him. “He’s supposed to have dog breath.”

  “Anyway,” Maggie says, “we thought Charles should sleep with Danny Boy, but not upstairs. Charles can’t handle the steps yet.”

  I examine the warm bundle in my arms. He has sizable paws. He’ll handle the steps in no time.

  “So we moved them in here,” Maggie continues. “But it’s temporary. When I go home, Charles can live with Mom and me.”

  Charles smiles again. He approves.

  Maggie’s face brightens and her eyebrows arch, an idea dawning. “And Luke and Danny Boy can visit.”

  Danny Boy’s ears perk up and his tail thumps the floor again at the mention of his name. He doesn’t realize he’s a mere pawn in this plan.

  “I was never allowed to have a pet before,” Maggie says. “Howard hates animals. But now”-she shrugs, reaching over to scratch Charles’s ears-“I can.”

  Howard Davis for Charles. A good trade if ever there was one. I bite my tongue.

  Maggie and Luke head back to their tree trimming, and Danny Boy follows, leaving Charles and me to get acquainted. I sink into the old rocker at my bedside and nestle Charles, still smiling, in my lap. In the space of three days, we’ve added a teenager and a dog to the household. Maybe it’s time to build an addition.

  By the time Buck’s trial was a week away, I had almost convinced myself that my own misgivings about the temporary insanity plea were irrelevant. The only meaningful thoughts on the matter, I told myself, are those of the experts: members of the medical and psychiatric community. Surely, I thought, Mr. Justice Paxson would agree.

  He didn’t.

  Physicians, especially those having charge of the insane, generally, it would seem, have come to the conclusion that all wicked men are mad, and many of the judges have so far fallen into the same error as to render it possible for any man to escape the penalty which the law affixes to crime.

  We do not intend to be understood as expressing the opinion that in some instances human beings are not afflicted with a homicidal mania, but we do intend to say that a defense consisting exclusively of this species of insanity has frequently been made the means by which a notorious offender has escaped punishment.

  One thing seemed certain the night I read those words. Harry should handle the experts.

  Chapter 25

  Thursday, December 23

  The judge is missing. Buck Hammond is seated and the attorneys are ready. Today’s witnesses are present and the press is hyperactive. The jurors aren’t here yet, though. There’s no judge to call for them.

  Joey Kelsey, the newly hired bailiff, is antsy. He was just getting comfortable with the morning routine; he doesn’t like this wrinkle. He’s consulted his cheat sheet more than once, rehearsing, I guess. But it’s almost nine-thirty, and the bench is empty.

  Stanley is agitated. He must have arrived later than usual this morning; his hair is still wet from his morning shower. Even so, he beat Harry and me to the courtroom. And he checked his watch when we arrived.

  The crowd in the gallery has grown impatient and noisy. Harry and I are seated at the defense table, leaning back in our chairs and laughing. Stanley fires an admonishing stare in our direction, mouthing “you people” before averting his eyes. It seems J. Stanley Edgarton the Third disapproves of our lack of decorum.

  But Harry and I have good reason to laugh. We know where Judge Leon Long is. It’s Thursday morning before Christmas. He’s in traffic court, ripping up parking tickets, bestowing his annual gift upon the citizens of Barnstable County. And Geraldine, no doubt, is enduring the festivities. Too bad Stanley couldn’t join them.

  Stanley did, though, receive a small surprise of his own this morning. When Harry and I set up at the defense table, Stanley was visibly flustered. He informed us that he had arrived early, though not as early as usual, and had found the courtroom dark, as it always is when he arrives. But when he flipped the switch that lights the old courtroom’s four ornate chandeliers, he found Nicky Patterson already seated on the front bench. He’d been waiting in the darkness.

  Stanley apparently didn’t like the idea that someone beat him to the courtroom-even someone not involved in his case. “He made himself right at home,” Stanley complained. “You’d think he owned the place.”

  I wondered who Stanley thinks does own the place.

  “It’s okay,” Harry consoled him. “He doesn’
t look like he’s having a good time.”

  And he doesn’t. Nicky is still seated on the front bench, alternately biting his nails and pulling an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, checking its contents. The Kydd isn’t here yet, and it’s clear from the darting of Nicky’s eyes-from the clock to the back doors to the clock again-that he doesn’t want to face Judge Leon Long alone. Whatever he’s got in that envelope, it isn’t enough.

  The Kydd rushes into the courtroom and almost runs down the center aisle. He’s a half hour late. He nods at Nicky and Nicky waves to him as if greeting the Messiah. The Kydd stares at the empty judge’s bench as he heads for our table. He loosens his tie, a man freeing himself from a noose.

  “He’s not here?” The Kydd can hardly believe it.

  “Not yet,” I tell him.

  “Merry Christmas,” Harry adds.

  “The electricity went out,” the Kydd says. “My alarm didn’t go off.”

  This happened more than once last winter, during our joint tenure with the DA’s office. It was the Kydd’s first winter on the Cape, his first winter north of the Mason-Dixon line, for that matter. I explained to him several times that ocean winds wreak havoc with overhead wires. On Cape Cod, I told him, wintertime electricity is a gamble. A battery-operated alarm clock is a must. Obviously, he wasn’t listening.

  I roll my eyes at him. “You’re not in Georgia anymore, Toto.”

  He ignores me.

  Harry tosses his head toward Nicky. “Does he have the twenty-two thousand?”

  The Kydd closes his eyes and releases a long sigh, shaking his head. He pulls a chair up to our table and drops into it, leaning forward and lowering his voice. “Turns out child support isn’t the only unpaid bill. He owes more on the damned truck than it’s worth.”