The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  Ruben’s job was to keep an eye upon Officer Gonzalez, Juror Number 7, to chart the warmth of her sympathy and the keenness of her attention.

  The problem was, from the minute the judge brought the gavel down, Ruben’s attention kept drifting to Evelyn Keener, with whom he had merely exchanged a shy “Hey” on coming in, both of them probably a little cowed by the solemnity of the room and the occasion, or maybe the enormity of having contracted to go to the dance together, now coming up. He had thought maybe she wouldn’t be here and then was surprised that her parents let her come, and he figured maybe she’d also asked for permission to come on certain days, too, and they’d both ended up choosing today, and wasn’t that cool?

  Like him, Evelyn was wearing fancy clothes for court. She had on a sheer off-white blouse with eyelet cutouts along the collar. He noticed a slender strap beneath the thin fabric of her court dress, and he wondered if she was wearing a tank top under the shirt, or an actual bra, and then he told himself he was a pervert and turned his attention furiously back to Juror Number 7. He watched her watching Dr. Cudley as he described the differences between the various kinds of scans, how on a CT a brain bleed turns up as bright white, against the mass of gray brain around it. He saw that she was sort of listening, and he wrote “sort of listening” in his notebook.

  The day of the dance was April 24. Three Saturdays from now. He had circled it in the wall calendar on his desk and put a notification on his phone.

  Shenk, for all his protestations and hand-wringing, would have liked nothing better than to have Ruben, junior partner and great love of his heart, at his side for every minute of this thing: sitting beside him biting his lower lip and furrowing that little brow of his and showing in every way the intensity of his interest and affection.

  The only problem was every time he caught Ruben’s eye, every time he gave him a deep, knowing wink—We got this, my lad, we are in this together—his heart seized and squeezed because of that call he’d made over the weekend to his money man in New Jersey.

  “It’s your money,” Joey Boston had said, and now even that money, the money he had sworn he’d never spend, was all but spent.

  Relax, Marilyn told him from the other side, it’s going to be fine.

  And Shenk did relax. It was going to be fine. Although of course a lot of times those voices that comfort us, the ones belonging to our wisest counselors, our beloved ancestors or dear departed lovers, that’s just us, right? That’s just your brain talking to itself, that’s just people telling themselves what they need or want to hear.

  Dr. Catanzaro was being sworn in, with his placid eyes and his monastery beard. He swore to tell the whole truth, one plump hand raised like a statue.

  “Good afternoon, Doctor,” said Shenk. “Thank you for finding the time to testify today.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said softly. “I’m happy to do it.”

  No you’re not, thought Shenk. He thought it as hard as he could without saying it aloud. Go fuck yourself.

  Dr. Thomas Angelo Catanzaro proved as unflappable on the witness stand as in the deposition room, cool as a marble Buddha. He suffered all of Shenk’s needling with the same heroic forbearance he had displayed in the Telemacher, Goldenstein conference room. He described how Wesley had presented, described how in his judgment the surgery had been not only necessary, but urgent. Again and again he parried any suggestion that the decision was made in haste, that he had been somehow overeager to operate; as he had in deposition, Catanzaro turned his undue haste into a badge of decisiveness. Catanzaro with his deep voice, his wise eyes, his thick white beard.

  As to Wes’s condition, post-surgery, Catanzaro concluded sadly that it remained a medical mystery.

  “A mystery?” wondered Shenk.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And it could not have been prevented?”

  “Tragically, yes, Mr. Shenk. There is nothing that could have been done.”

  This was a trap. Shenk could see into the future, he knew what Pileggi was going to say tomorrow, and he knew that with his own certainty Catanzaro was digging the hole he would fall into.

  Still, Shenk didn’t like it. He didn’t like the way the doctor’s pronouncement seemed to settle across the jury like truth itself. He looked to Ruben, and Ruben was looking at Celia Gonzalez, who was looking at the witness with something approaching awe.

  “May I say one more thing?” said Catanzaro. He turned to the judge. “Would that be all right?”

  “Counselor?” said Cates, properly deferring the answer to the lawyer who had the floor, but Jay’s eye had been caught by someone in the crowd. A stranger sitting in the court, in a back row, among the crowd of the curious and fascinated who had come to watch Keener. Shenk could not make out the man’s face, only the shape of him, the stiffness of his shoulders.

  Shenk was tugged by a dim but urgent sense of remembrance: I know that guy. For some reason he thought of the silver Corolla that had been outside his office, the other night, when he was prepping Pileggi for trial. His old self, remember? His old self, sitting in his old car—Shenk from a previous life, come to visit.

  “Mr. Shenk?” said Judge Cates again, and Shenk nodded, distracted, trying to catch a clean glimpse of the stranger.

  “What I wanted to add,” Catanzaro continued, great wet tears appearing in his solemn eyes, “is how much I wish there was something we could have done for this boy.”

  Shenk snapped to attention, realizing too late what the sneaky bastard was doing, as Dr. Catanzaro produced a giant handkerchief from some recess of his tent of a doctor’s coat, and blew his nose elaborately.

  “We are doctors, but we are people, too. I’m a father myself.”

  Shenk stood with his hands on his hips, flustered, frustrated, his eyes still seeking the stranger in the back. “OK, thanks for that, Doctor,” said Shenk. “I’m sure that’s appreciated.”

  Beth, God bless her, in her seat at the plaintiff’s table, glared at Catanzaro, showing no sign of accepting his empty sentiment. But Celia Gonzalez, the key to the jury box, was looking at the doctor with open sympathy: this poor man who had experienced the tragedy of failing to keep Wesley Keener from turning into a golem.

  “Dr. Catanzaro…” said Shenk, rummaging in his mind for one more thing, some needle to deflate this great Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon of a witness, before he would have to turn him over to Riggs, who would only exalt him further.

  The man in the back row stood up. Shenk watched him rise, but before he could see his face he turned away.

  “Mr. Shenk?” said Judge Cates.

  “Yeah?”

  The man was gone. The courtroom door closed behind him.

  Oh God. Holy shit.

  “Mr. Shenk?”

  Holy shit.

  “Your Honor, could I have a brief recess?”

  “What?”

  “Just a—I just need a second, Judge.”

  “Mr. Shenk, you have a witness on the stand.”

  Of course Cates was going to reject this insane request, and that was fine, it was OK, he had help. He rushed over to the defense table and scrawled a note and balled it up and tossed it to Ruben in the front row.

  Ruben read it, brow furrowed, and got up.

  Silver Corolla, it said. Get him!

  “My client will not be pressured into putting himself in the path of legal action. My client has a clean conscience.”

  “Your client was sitting outside my office in the middle of the night, trying to work up the courage to come and talk.” Shenk pointed at the young man in the white shirt and thin tie and blue jeans, whom he had last seen poolside at the swim and tennis club, dripping with spa water and indignation.

  Now he looked at Paolo Garza while Paolo Garza, in Judge Cates’s chambers, surrounded by lawyers, looked at the floor. “Right, son?”

  Garza mumbled “Right.”

  He was miserable. His lawyer, a red-cheeked blowsy woman named Donna Rourke, wasn’t too hap
py either. Apparently what had happened was, this handsome young radiology tech had shown up in her third-floor office on Wilshire a few weeks ago, having gotten her name from a friend of a friend. He had information relating to a pending litigation, and she had accepted a retainer and then ordered him in no uncertain terms to do nothing, to let her handle it. She was going to monitor events and let him know if and when it made sense to bring what he knew to the attention of the court.

  But Garza, sensitive soul, had found himself unable to heed that instruction.

  “It was—it has been eating away at me,” he said softly, one hand clutched in the other, avoiding not only Shenk’s gaze but that of the judge, that of John Riggs, and that of his own counsel, this infuriated woman Rourke. “Eating away. I have tried to ignore it, but I—I can’t.”

  “Of course you can ignore it,” said Rourke. She was right behind him, chomping at a piece of Nicorette. Shenk could smell it, minty and stale, from across the room. “That’s what ya do, son. You ignore it.”

  It, of course, meaning the twinge of conscience; meaning the small inner voice saying what the right and wrong things are to do. Shenk smiled graciously at Rourke, who was shaking her head with sadness at this naive young fellow, at the frailty of humans in general and of clients in particular.

  “It would be marvelous,” said Judge Cates, stern and consternated, “if someone would tell me what is going on here.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Garza, and Rourke said “Hang on,” and the judge turned to glare at her.

  “Respectfully, Your Honor,” she said, except with the gum it sounded like ya ahnah. “Respectfully, my client won’t be saying anything until we have some reassurances.”

  Cates’s glare intensified. Riggs made a muted hippopotamus grunt. They were crammed together in the judge’s inner sanctum, far from the ears of the jury, using up all the chairs plus one ottoman, on which Shenk was awkwardly but happily perched. Judge Cates’s chambers, unsurprisingly, were a monument to Judge Cates, the walls covered with plaques and commendations; one towering shelf was lined with law books and collated law review articles; another displayed his esoteric reading interests—Europe Between the Wars, a collected Keats, a biography of Tallulah Bankhead.

  “What kind of reassurances are you referring to, Ms. Rourke?”

  “Mr. Garza wants to do the right thing here,” she said. “He’s a good kid. Of course his impulse is to get the truth out there, say what he knows.”

  “Whether he wants to or not,” said Judge Cates sternly, “it is his responsibility to do so.”

  “I must say,” ventured Riggs, “that I do not like new information being entered at this late date.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” said Shenk. “I certainly would have entered it, had I known about it.” He looked at Garza scoldingly. “Whatever it is.”

  “I didn’t know about it either, Mr. Shenk,” said Riggs, offended.

  “You sure about that?”

  Riggs narrowed his eyes at Shenk, who winked at him, greatly enjoying his discomfort. Shenk was slightly tipped back on the ottoman, trying to forecast what hidden secret we were talking about here: Was Catanzaro a drunkard after all? Had his ex-wife poured her heart out to young Garza, her unlikely bosom buddy? Had Shenk been right the first time, and Dr. Allyn had witnessed some surgical hijinks and been paid off to leave town?

  Shenk’s only regret was that Ruben—no doubt pacing in the hallway beyond—couldn’t be here to witness the denouement. It was his heroic intercession, after all, that had saved the day. Ruben, racing down six flights of stairs to beat Paolo Garza to the short-term parking lot on Olive Street; Ruben, looking younger than he was, playing the helpless child, separated from his dad and missing his phone and worried about getting in trouble; Ruben who had gratefully accepted Garza’s phone to make a call and then handed it back, said “It’s for you, actually,” leaving Garza, confused, to say “Hello?” and hear the voice of Shenk like a strict God: “Young man, I believe you have something to tell me.”

  “Look, the thing is,” said Rourke now, laying one hand on each of Garza’s shoulders, “is that I can’t let this kid spill his guts until I can be assured that he won’t face retribution down the road. Him, personally.”

  “No one here can offer you immunity before we know what you’re going to tell us, son,” said the judge.

  “He hasn’t committed a crime,” said Rourke quickly.

  Garza looked like he was going to say something, and Rourke squeezed the shoulders hard, in warning.

  “He’s just got information, and he doesn’t want to end up in the crosshairs for giving it over.”

  Cates stroked his beard slowly for a moment, and then a moment more. As these moments passed, Rourke kept her pose, hovering above Garza, looking first to Shenk and then to Riggs, clearly not accustomed to the judge’s slow, deliberative style. She probably thought he was having a stroke.

  “It seems to me,” said Cates at last, “that the only person who can offer the reassurance you’re seeking…is Mr. Shenk.”

  All eyes turned to Jay, who nodded and let the ottoman tip back forward, so all its little square feet were on the carpet.

  “Well, Ms. Rourke,” he said, though he was looking right at Garza. “You have my word.”

  Garza looked at him fleetingly and then tilted his head back and looked up at Ms. Rourke, pleadingly, this random woman in whom he had put all his trust. He wanted to talk; he was dying to. His conscience was a sad animal, locked in a box, scuffling against the lid and waiting to be freed.

  “Oh, all right,” said Rourke, and Shenk exhaled, and Keener, like a battleship, changed its course.

  It had been a simple mistake.

  People made mistakes all the time, but Paolo Garza had been a radiology tech for five years and had never made such a mistake before.

  Three days before Wesley Keener, another patient with a traumatic head injury had been seen in the ER at Valley Village. A boy of sixteen years old named Martin Smithson, from Sherman Oaks; an accident at hockey practice; nonresponsive; swelling on the brain.

  So when Wesley was brought in, Dr. Catanzaro requested the scans and Dr. Allyn ordered them and Garza took them and processed them, and then—and here Garza let Ms. Rourke take his hand in hers, and looked to Shenk, a thousand times more vulnerable than he had been, dripping wet and virtually naked, when first they met at the country club pool—he said he’d presented the doctors with the incorrect scans. He had miskeyed the date on the computer, summoned up the wrong CT for display.

  Dr. Catanzaro, in hurried consultation with Dr. Allyn and Dr. Amandpour, had operated on Wesley Keener based on Martin Smithson’s CT scan.

  “Holy smoke,” whispered Shenk, and Cates, white-lipped, told him to keep quiet. He was asking the questions now.

  “When did you discover this error, young man?”

  Garza shut his eyes again. “About—maybe—a half hour later.”

  Meaning, when Catanzaro had already begun. When Wesley Keener’s scalp had already been peeled back, when his skull had already been drilled with holes.

  Riggs was processing his surprise and grief by writing furiously, the pencil gripped like a kidnap victim in his thick hand, his heavy cheeks and jowls quivering in a way Shenk found quietly delightful.

  “My God,” thundered Judge Cates, gaping at this trembling soul. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because it didn’t matter,” he blurted, and then, before Cates could react, he went on: “I mean of course it mattered, I don’t mean it didn’t matter, but it was the exact same kind of injury, the same problem. The doctors would have done the same thing. The scans were virtually the same.”

  He stopped. He took a deep breath. But he had gotten it all out. He had said it.

  Cates was struck dumb with shock, and Rourke was shaking her head, chewing her gum, while Riggs just wrote and wrote, wearing his poor pencil down to the nub. Shenk risked being the one to ask. “What do you mean, virtually
the same?”

  “Well…”

  Garza looked up at Rourke, who gave him a why-not shrug. He’d come this far.

  “The CT. The new one.”

  “Wesley’s.”

  “Yes. It had a—I don’t know. Like a shine on it.”

  A pause. The room waited, breathing softly.

  “I didn’t even think it was anything. But, yeah, like a, a bright patch, kind of. Blood is white. On a CT scan, blood shows up white. Brain matter is gray. The spaces between are black. The ventricles, the subarachnoid space, that’s all black. But this…”

  He looked helpless. He shrugged.

  “It was bright. Some sort of brightness.”

  Cates had stood up and walked to the window of his chambers. Riggs had finally stopped writing, struck at last by what was happening to his case. Not Shenk, though; Shenk had more questions.

  “Where?”

  “Back here.” Garza pointed to his own head. “Near the brain stem. Just a…a brightness. But like I said, it was nothing. It was probably nothing. I don’t think it would have affected the surgical decision-making.”

  “Oh, you don’t think so,” said Shenk, and then—unable to resist—“Mr. Riggs? Did you hear that? Mr. Garza, in his judgment—as—no offense, kid—in his judgment as a five-year veteran of the radiology tech department—he doesn’t think so.”

  Riggs exhaled slowly, turned toward him, but Shenk didn’t press it further, because he didn’t have to—Riggs knew, the judge knew, any juror in the world would know, that Garza was unqualified to have made that determination.

  And that Catanzaro, for all his acumen, had been operating without all the facts.