Court of Lies

by Gerry Spence

  “Let me refresh your memory, Your Honor.” Coker’s voice began rising again. “Lillian Mortensen’s ‘bad conduct,’ as Mr. Sewell likes to call it, was with her first husband, and she was a mere juvenile. She never—”

  “No need to holler,” the judge said.

  “She was never convicted. You sent her home to her father. She has no criminal record. Her conduct as a juvenile cannot be entered against her these many years later. She is protected under the law. According to State v. Hammond, a juvenile—”

  “I know the case,” the judge said.

  “Well, she wasn’t a juvenile when she stabbed her second husband with that pen,” Sewell said.

  “If we prosecuted every woman who took after her old man with a pen or table knife, we’d have most women in prison. Maybe even Betsy,” Coker said. He lifted his eyebrow at the judge, as if he knew something.

  Sewell started to speak, but the judge interrupted.

  “Mostly, Lillian Adams hurt her second husband’s pride,” the judge said, “a man named Gordon Ford, as I recall. She testified that he was beating their dog and wouldn’t stop. Said she couldn’t live with a dog-beater. I’ll admit, there’s nothing in the statutes that allows a judge to grant a divorce for dog abuse. But I gave her husband all the money and gave her custody of their child, Tina, and the dog. I remember her saying that she didn’t want a dirty dog-beater’s money.”

  “I’ll admit that one who beats a dog is entitled to little mercy,” Sewell said. “But this woman is charged with murder, and her history of violence is admissible under the rules.” Then he added words touched with poison: “It’s too late for me to disqualify you, but you should disqualify yourself.”

  “Why didn’t you file for a new judge when you had the chance?” the judge asked.

  “No reasonable person would have guessed that a fair judge would rule as you have in this case,” Sewell said through his usual curled-up top lip, “nor, given your obvious conflict, could a reasonable person have foreseen that any judge burdened with such disabilities would remain on this case.”

  The judge studied the face of the prosecutor, his skin drum-tight over his skull, his eyes hard, almost yellow. So Sewell wanted to present evidence of Lillian’s past violence? Another judge would likely agree. Then Lillian would have to take the stand to defend herself. The judge could already hear Sewell’s cross-examination:

  “You struck your first husband with a brass vase, knocked him unconscious, and tried your best to kill him, isn’t that true?”

  “He was naked and in bed with the landlady,” Lillian would protest.

  “So, Ms. Adams, you believed it was your right to take the law into your own hands and render the death penalty to your first husband, isn’t that true?”

  It would make no difference how she answered. Lillian’s willingness to kill would become a fact in the case.

  But Sewell would just be beginning. Then he’d ask, “And after you thought you’d killed your husband, you tried to kill the police officer who came to stop your killing, isn’t that true?”

  She might respond, “I was a just a teenager. I was upset.”

  “Yes,” Sewell would reply, taking in the jurors with his long, imperious look. “You are willing to kill when you get upset, isn’t that true?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And,” Sewell would continue, “you stabbed your second husband with a pen, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, he was beating our dog and wouldn’t stop.”

  “And so your remedy to stop his beating the dog was to kill him?”

  Sewell knew all the tricks to transform the understandable, the forgivable, even simple habit, into evil. “He exercised the devil’s power,” the judge had often called it.

  The judge cleared his throat, as if to open an entrée to his decision. “The years have provided me with enough enmity against both of you to pretty much even things out.” He smiled first at Coker and then at Sewell. “Yes, gentlemen, I will treat both sides with equal respect and fairness, given the state of my underlying animosity toward both of you and toward all of mankind in general.” He smiled again to confess his humor, but neither attorney smiled back.

  Sewell shook his head in disbelief. “When she beat her first husband nearly to death, you sent her home to her father. Killing runs in that family. You let her off for stabbing her second husband, and you’re going to sit on this case in which she is charged with the murder of her third husband? With all due respect, I again insist you have no business whatever in this case.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” Judge Murray said, “I am getting too old for this kind of unprofessional fiddle-faddle. I am going to give my standard ‘reasonable doubt’ instruction—you’ve both heard it many times, and Mr. Sewell, if you have competent evidence of Lillian Adams’s violence that’s admissible under Rule 404b, and that evidence isn’t more prejudicial than probative, I’ll let it in.”

  “Lillian Adams is like a daughter to you and your wife, Betsy, and you’re still sitting on this case?” Sewell’s voice was ominously low, almost a whisper. “How can that happen in an American court of law?”

  “Perhaps the better question is, Why did you waive your disqualification of me in the first place?” the judge asked. “It appears you’ve played a little game and now you believe you made a mistake, and you want me to correct it.”

  “No, I just wanted the record to show that I reminded you of your impropriety, for later reference at an appropriate time.” His threat was clear.

  Impeachment.

  Then as if nothing untoward had occurred, the judge proceeded to conduct the pretrial conference in his standard way. “Gentlemen, have you arrived at any stipulated facts?”

  Coker said, “Yes, I will stipulate that Mr. Adams was shot once in the head. The shot entered the forehead and exited the back of his head, killing him instantly.” Coker started to sit down. Instead, he began pacing, all the while jabbing his finger at Sewell. “And I want this man ordered to stop calling this death a murder. That’s for the jury to determine.”

  “I’ve offered Mr. Coker’s client a plea to first-degree murder, with the possibility of parole after thirty years,” Sewell stated. “It was a cold-blooded, premeditated killing. I hope you recall, Your Honor, that I predicted years ago that Lillian Adams would come to no good end.”

  “First off,” Coker replied, “Sewell has no business making any reference to our discussion concerning a plea bargain. That’s privileged and he knows it. He’s up to his dirty tricks again.…”

  “All of us in this room know the woman’s proclivity toward violence,” Sewell said. “She’s playing Coker like she’s played all of you all these years, if you don’t mind my saying so, Your Honor.”

  “I mind it,” the judge said. “And I remind you to be professional. You demand that my personal feelings, whatever they might be, should not be visible here. So both of you are bound by the same rule of conduct. Remember that nearly sacrosanct rule of law: What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as it were.”

  Sewell said, “Coker has been hoodwinked by his client. But then he’s ready prey for her kind.”

  Coker glared at Sewell and took a menacing step toward him.

  “Sit down, Mr. Coker!” the judge ordered. “Your boxing days are over.”

  Coker slowly slumped into his chair.

  “As you can plainly see,” Sewell said, “Lillian Adams has bewitched what little common sense Mr. Coker has left.”

  Coker sprang to his feet again.

  “That will be enough,” the judge said to Sewell. “There’s plenty of space in that nice concrete room for lawyers who can’t conduct themselves in a professional manner. Mr. Coker, you remember the last time you stepped over the edge. That goes for you, as well.”

  After the judge dismissed the lawyers for the day, he sat alone in his chambers. He could see it all very clearly. He must keep watch over the law in the same way he would protect the public fro
m a schizophrenic killer.

  The law, too, was a killer.

  Yes, he thought. The law itself is like a person suffering from what the psychiatrists call a “blunted affect”—a person who feels no emotional response to real-life situations that bring on pain, anger, sorrow, and the whole agglomeration of human feelings experienced by normal people. The law is a cold, emotionless, lifeless killer, and it sweeps away all human emotions like dead houseflies.

  Even a jury’s rare acquittal meant only that the prosecutor had failed to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, not that the accused was innocent. We are all guilty, the judge thought. We were all born in sin. Ask Jesus. Ask the Pope. Ask any Baptist preacher. Ask the law. The judge heard himself saying aloud, “I should have studied the discourse of birds. When birds are joyous, they know how to sing. I’ve never seen a judge singing.”

  And he remembered what Betsy preached to him every morning: “You have a duty to both of us just this once. Lillian is like the daughter we never had. Please don’t forget that.”

  As Judge Murray gazed blankly out the window of his chambers, he saw Haskins Sewell take fast, measured steps to his car. He carried his small, hairless gray dog under his right arm. Yes, the judge thought, the birds are wiser. Most fly south in the winter, but I’m trapped in Jackson Hole with Haskins Sewell, and I’ll never escape.

  * * *

  One evening, Horace and Lillian were dining in the town of Jackson at the Howdy Pardner Café, a joint locally famous for its buffalo T-bone steaks—probably steaks hacked off a grass-fed steer but called “buffalo” on the menu. The tourists would pay an extra half buck for the experience. Yeah, they’d been in old Wyoming. They’d even eaten buffalo steaks. Horace chopped at the meat with his steak knife. No one complained that the steaks were tough. They were buffalo.

  “I sort of grew up without parents,” Horace told Lillian. “My mother left my father when I was seven. I was told my mother was a hopeless alcoholic and ran off with a beer salesman who worked for my father. My father said she was insane. I don’t know if she was or not. But it became an established fact in the family history. Growing up, I worried she might kill me, you know, like you think crazy people will kill you.”

  Horace was gazing off into the room’s dense fog of smoke, which drifted in from the open kitchen and melded with the smoke of the diners’ cigarettes. “When I was still seven, my mother sneaked into our house on Christmas Eve and crept into my room. I thought she was drunk. I was terrified. She saw I was afraid, and she tried to entice me with a box of Cracker Jacks. She said. ‘Honey, your father is crazy, and he’ll kill me if he catches me here.’ She was looking every which way and her eyes were wild.”

  He struggled to say more. Finally, he said, “Her skin was white and her hair was long and shaggy, like old rope. I tried to get away, but she cornered me and kissed me, and told me she loved me, and after that I never saw her alive again. I was handled by a string of nannies.”

  Lillian reached across the small table for his hand. It was large and strong and felt safe.

  “I ate the caramel corn in the Cracker Jack box, and inside there was always a little toy. That time, it was a play cigar made of dark brown paper with red and white painted fire at the end. I treasured it—the only thing my mother ever gave me. I have it today. I keep it and the empty Cracker Jack box in my safe and take the box out sometimes and talk to it. I get comfort from that.” He looked away. “Maybe insanity runs in the family.” Then he added, “At her funeral, my father made me walk by her open coffin and say good-bye. She was pretty in her casket.”

  She felt his hand tighten.

  “I like being with you because you hear me,” he said. “Everyone can listen. But hearing is an art.”

  “Yes,’” she said, “hearing can break a hole through a wall.”

  “I know about hearing through walls,” Horace said. “My father was always hollering. You could hear him no matter where you were in the house. I used to pile the pillows over my head so I couldn’t hear him. He ran around hollering when no one was in the house. He hollered about the goddamned farmers who supplied our barley, or the goddamned railroad that shipped it, and he hated his goddamned competitors like one hates thieves. He hated the goddamned Democrats who were ‘wannabe Commies,’ as he called them. He lived a life fueled by hatred.”

  Lillian had discovered that Horace was a man, all right, and she was “man-sensitive,” as she called it. Every kind and nature of man inhabited the planet, each as different from the other as their fingerprints. Some were indolent, some aggressive, some nutty, and some even toxic to the touch. Some were empty boxes with a smile inscribed across the front of the box, and a few, she thought, were potentially trustworthy, and fewer still even marginally engaging.

  “At this stage in my life, I’m attracted to very few men,” she said. “Still, I don’t see myself as a full-blown ‘misandrist.’”

  “I’m glad of that,” he said, “whatever that means.” They both laughed, and he lifted his wineglass in a quick salute.

  “But I’ve had enough of those little side trips with certain subtypes who call themselves men,” she said. Horace not only made her feel safe; he had his own mind, which often wandered, but he wanted to share himself with her, and his trust endeared him to her. No secrets? We all have secrets, she thought. Most people only tell the secrets they need to tell to create trust. And you don’t find out a person’s real secrets until the door’s been closed and locked after the “I dos.” Then their secrets can come bursting out in every imaginable queer quirk, hang-up, and horror.

  As for his gifts as a lover, she thought that Horace was no physical athlete under the covers, nor was he a bag full of tricks. He led her into deeper waters, where the experience was often dark but also inviting and exciting. And frightening. She told Sylvia Huntley, “He makes me feel loved in places I didn’t know existed.”

  Horace was still carrying on with his life’s story. “When I was twenty-three and in Harvard Business School, my father started showing signs of losing it; the doctors called it ‘senile dementia.’ He’d forget where he was. Sometimes he thought he was still living with my mother, and he’d be screaming at her, accusing her of running around on him with ‘that asshole jerk,’ the beer salesman.

  “I was never allowed to enter his office. I wondered if the room hid some horrible secret. One night when I was eighteen, I decided to investigate this forbidden chamber. The old man was attending the annual brewers’ convention in Chicago, where Clark Gable was the guest of honor. After ten minutes of my hollering and pounding on the office door, the watchman, Hank, came stumbling to the door. I started for the hallway leading to my father’s office. Hank stepped in front of me.”

  Horace said that with both hands he shoved the watchman aside and with one thrust he kicked in the door, and there he stood for the first time inside his father’s office, surveying the forbidden. The lights were on. They were always on.

  “Hank came staggering into the room. He grabbed me by the back of my collar and jerked me toward the door. All it took was a single punch to the belly, and old Hank crumbled.”

  Horace said he stepped into the middle of the room, walked around a long, wooden, beaten-up conference table, and started shuffling through the papers. In the bottom drawer of a large adjoining chest, he came upon a series of old yellowed newspaper clippings. They were stories about a starlet known as Colatta Connley, “the future Irish queen of the screen.” He wouldn’t have recognized his mother except for those vacant eyes and a mouth that appeared to be constantly saying no.

  “Do you know what happened to my mother, Hank?” Horace asked.

  “I’m going to lose my job,” Hank pleaded. “I let the boss’s kid break into the old man’s office. Me and my wife are raising our grandkids and all.” He started for Horace again.

  “Don’t,” Horace warned. “Stay put.” Then he asked, “What happened to my mother?”

  Hank
stood stone-statue mute. Finally, he said, “Some claim the old man beat her to death. I happen to know that ain’t so. She died down there in the park. A couple days before she died, I seen her wanderin’ around. They found her body there on a park bench. She probably froze to death.”

  Horace held up a photograph of a nude woman.

  “Do you know who this is, Hank?”

  “It’s one a them autopsy pictures.”

  “Who is it, Hank?” Horace was in the man’s face.

  “It’s your ma, Horace.”

  Horace slipped the photograph into his jacket pocket. Then he and Hank worked at straightening things up. They were able to get the door locked again by lifting it slightly by the knob until the lock fell into place.

  “This hasn’t been the perfect crime,” Horace said. “But neither one of us knows anything about this, right, Hank?”

  “That’s for damn sure,” Hank said. “And by the way, if you want to get into boxing, I know some people. You got one hell of a right.” Then he added, “But it was a lucky punch.”

  Horace was still sharing his life’s story with Lillian. “One night, my father fell down the stairs in our house. I’d been out with some workers from the brewery and got home about two in the morning. I found him dead, bunched up against the door at the bottom of the stairs like a pile of old bloody rags. I felt guilty. I thought if I hadn’t been out drinking, I might have saved him. But in a way, I was glad it was over for him. He was losing his mind. I had to take over the business. That’s been punishment enough.”

  Horace looked off to some distant place, and his words stalled.

  “What?” she prompted.

  “I was thinking about his funeral. Before they closed the coffin lid, I dropped the autopsy photo of my mother inside so that it rested on my father’s dead heart.”

  His eyes clouded.

  Then he proceeded. “The workers got half an hour off to attend the funeral,” he said. “No one cried. Not even me.”