"You", Sarah says, bringing me the phone from the living room, “It’s Mr. Bailey. I think something’s wrong. He sounds weird.”
Clan must be drunk, I think, putting down my pen to take the phone. I am working in the kitchen on direct examination questions for my Mississippi expert. With the trial only three days away, I have begun to panic. Though Olivia seems intent on testifying and not invoking the Fifth Amendment, that has been my only good news. Andy has become uncharacteristically morose and distant, which has had the effect of further convincing me that he knows more than he is telling me. While he continues to maintain his innocence, it is as if he realizes he has been fooled by Olivia but can’t quite bring himself to admit it. I put the odds at his implicating her at the last minute at fifty-fifty. It is still not too late to cut a deal with our prosecutor.
“Gideon,” Clan says in an agonized voice after I speak his name into the receiver, “I’ve been arrested, and I’m down here at the police station.”
I nearly drop the phone. Clan, I realize, is my best friend.
Despite his juvenile nature (or maybe because of it), he and I have become as close as brothers this summer. What on earth could he have done? He doesn’t sound drunk. An argument with Brenda that led to a shooting? Clan is a gun nut and has a workshop in which he makes his own ammunition.
“What’s happened?” I ask, trying to keep my voice normal, “They say I shoplifted a Twinkie!” he says, his voice screeching against my ear.
“Can you come down here?”
For God’s sake, I think, looking at Sarah and rolling my eyes back in my head to indicate this phone call is surely more nutty than tragic. What next? I look at my watch. It’s almost nine.
“I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asks, as I hand her the phone. If she hadn’t already washed her hair and wasn’t in her robe, I’d take her with me. Every kid ought to see a jail at least once.
“Middle age,” I groan.
“Dan’s gone middle-age crazy.”
I tell her what he told me.
“Don’t you gossip about this,” I warn her.
“I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding.”
Unfortunately, it is not.
“I ‘m guilty as hell,” Clan confides as I drive him back to his car, which is still parked in front of the Quik-Pie, an all-night convenience store five minutes from his house.
“All of a sudden I just scar fed it up before I had paid for it,” he says miserably.
“A little piece of the wrapper was even hanging from my mouth when this security guard pops up out of nowhere and starts screaming as if I was gonna try to crawl up through the ceiling. I must be nuts.”
Turning to the Quik-Pie parking lot, I agree but do not say so. Clan would have been released on his own recognizance if he hadn’t given the cop, who had just pulled in to get a cup of coffee, so much lip. With Brenda out of town and five dollars in his pockets, I have had to put up a minimal bond for him.
“Obviously, you had no intent to steal it. They should have waited until you were out of the store. You can sue ‘em for a million bucks for false imprisonment.”
Clan leans his head against the window on his side of the Blazer.
“You can’t go in and suck down a package of Twinkies and expect to get away with it.”
I turn off the engine which has begun to shudder in neutral and listen to ominous sounds coming from the hood. From the noise it sounds as if someone is trying unsuccessfully to shut down a nuclear power plant.
“Why in the hell did you do it? Maybe we can get a doctor to testify that you suffer from some eating disorder.”
His head still against the glass, Clan cuts his eyes to me.
“I do,” he says grimly.
“I eat too much damn food.”
I look through the window at Quik-Pie and see a good-looking blonde in shorts at the magazine rack. She must be looking for something to read before bed. For a society as obsessed with sex as the United States, we don’t spend much time actually doing it.
“That’s not a crime,” I say, losing the thread of our conversation.
“Stealing is,” Clan says wearily, as he opens the door.
“Look, why don’t you just go in there and ask her to come home with you. You can tell Sarah this woman was going to have to sleep down at the jail and you took pity on her.”
I laugh and him to look at Clan who, incredibly, seems about to cry.
“We’ve got to do something,” I say, now ashamed that I let myself be so easily distracted.
“This could be really humiliating if they make it stick.”
Dan’s eyes are red.
“Thanks for that insight,” he says dryly.
“Well, damn it,” I argue, “you just can’t plead guilty.”
Clan sighs, making a mournful sound through his nose.
“Why the hell not? Because it’s not the American way? Do we have to litigate everything in this country? I ate me damn things! I’ve done it before, if you can believe I’m that stupid.
Why? I haven’t got the slightest idea.”
Jesus Christ, I think, now uncomfortable with what I am hearing. He really is middle-age crazy. Is this Dan’s idea of living dangerously, or what? Some guys get a sports car;
others inhale Twinkles. What do do? Sleep with women almost twenty years younger, I guess. For the first time in weeks I think I feel a twinge of pain in my rear. I got caught, too, I realize glumly. I pat Dan’s shoulder.p›
“Everybody does stupid things,” I say.
“This doesn’t have to make you want to jump off the Arkansas River bridge.”
Clan stands outside the door and bends down to peer inside at me.
“I’m so fat I couldn’t climb over the side if I wanted to,” he says smiling, albeit wanly, for the first time tonight.
“I’d have to roll down the bank.”
I grin, feeling better. If he can joke about it, he is all right or will be.
“Well, you’ve got a free lawyer, of’ buddy,” I say, sticking my hand through the window.
“You think about it tonight and I’ll do whatever you want.”
His big paw, which is as moist as an ink blotter, clamps down on mine. I look down to avoid the tears in his eyes.
Hell, I might be crying, too. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette will carry this story. Reading my mind, Clan mumbles, “I can’t wait to read the paper tomorrow.”
I return the pressure but still can’t look him in the eye.
“It’ll seem more like a joke than anything else,” I say, unable to deny the story will make the rounds.
As usual, Sarah, like a longsuffering wife, is waiting up for me.
“What happened?” she asks from the couch, still in her robe, just as I left her an hour and a half ago. In her lap is a European history book. Woogie, who is sitting primly by his mistress’s side, looks at me suspiciously as if he has no intention of buying a cock-and-bull story about a late-night client.
I sit down by her on the couch and begin to pet Woogie, who quickly rolls over on his back to have his stomach scratched. When all is said and done, it doesn’t take much to make my family happy. If I were to go strictly by our code of ethics, I would never have told Sarah a word about Clan.
A lawyer is bound to keep his client’s confidences, but she would only think he had done something worse than he has.
Still, I am at a loss to explain his behavior.
“He’s a lawyer!” Sarah exclaims as I try to minimize his actions.
Woogie’s eyes looked glazed with pleasure. This is as close as he will ever come to an orgasm.
“But not exactly a serial murderer.”
Sarah, who ought to be more charitable after reading her history book, with its unending story of mass slaughter, will have none of it. As if banging a gavel at me, Sarah’s hand moves Woogie’s muzzle in an up and down motion.
“Behavior like this is exactly why people don’t trust lawyers.”
Actually, it’s for stuff a lot worse, but she is missing the point.
“My own theory is that lawyers’ worst sins are of omission,” I say, noticing for the first time how gray Woogie is getting. He probably thinks the same thing about me.
“There are lots of people we refuse to help or just go through the motions because they don’t have the money to pay us. If there’s a hell, those are the kind we’ll burn for.”
Woogie hops off the couch. All this attention is beginning to get to him. My daughter nods, but I suspect she is still too young to feel comfortable with the various shades of gray that stipple the middle-aged human organism. There is only one cure for that, and with luck, it’s a good thirty years off.
As I’m brushing my teeth before getting into bed, it occurs to me that the partners in Mays amp; Burton would consider me a far worse thief than Clan. I’m glad I have never told Sarah when I acquired Andy as a client. As someone who hasn’t stolen even so much as a boyfriend, my
daughter probably i wouldn’t be very sympathetic. | the next morning in municipal court, Daniel Blackstone (I never knew before what the initial stood for) Bailey pleads guilty to the crime of theft of property which has a value of less than one hundred dollars.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Darwin Bell, our black judge, says more to me than to Clan, who is resplendent in an expensive charcoal gray pin-striped suit from Dillard’s.
The suit makes Clan look like some visiting dignitary rather than a petty thief confessing his sins. Tunkie Southerland and Frank D’Angelo, who with me form Dan’s male support group, are in the front row. I turn and glance at their solemn faces. It is as if we are expecting Clan to be sentenced to die in the electric chair.
I nod in the direction of my friend Amy Gilchrist, the prosecutor in this case. Amy, whom I realize now I haven’t seen in weeks, has obviously been sent down to the minor leagues as punishment for having an abortion. Amy, who perhaps is sad for a number of reasons, looks somber without her usual jewelry. She says in a puzzled tone, “I haven’t talked to the defendant’s attorney about this. Your Honor.”
Patting down an out-of-fashion Afro (only acquired since the election), Darwin Bell, who seems destined for a much higher judicial calling (except for his hair, he is developing a reputation for conservatism) squints at Amy as if to ask:
Why is he pleading guilty if there is no deal? Amy’s small palms turn out to her sides in a gesture of frustrated ignorance.
Normally, there is a litany of formal questions the judge will ask to assure himself (and to protect himself on the record in case there is an appeal) that he has a guilty client in front of him who is voluntarily pleading guilty and who knows the court is not obligated to accept the prosecutor’s sentencing recommendation, but here Clan is simply throwing himself on the mercy of the court with no questions asked.
“Judge, my client would like to make a statement about what occurred,” I say, confined by Clan to an embarrassingly small role in this drama.
Plainly puzzled by what he is witnessing, Darwin looks past us to the rest of his morning’s docket seated impatiently behind us. Lawyers are served first. For a group that contains a high percentage of drunks, druggies, street persons, and irritable cops, the men and women sitting behind the railing are remarkably restrained today, though not entirely silent.
In federal courtrooms (I’ve been in a total of two-one when I carried Oscar May’s files in a diversity of jurisdiction car accident case and last week on my first appointment in a minor, federal firearms violation case involving an alien from Panama), a majestic dignity pervades. There is no such mystique in municipal court. Darwin, whose already big shoulders look immense beneath his black robe, says casually, “Please do.”
Clan begins in a dignified, quiet voice that is several octaves below his normal gossipy, breezy tone.
“Your Honor, what happened is that I opened a package of Twinkles in the Quik-Pie on Texas Street and ate them. I had no intention of paying for them because I would have been too embarrassed to admit what I had done. I’m sorry and I apologize to the court and to the manager and to every member of the bar.”
Darwin Bell rubs the bridge of his nose as if a headache has settled in between his deep-set eyes. A fat white lawyer stealing Twinkles. What next? Amy Gilchrist, who had seemed on the verge of tears, says cheerfully to the judge, “Your Honor, for the last five years I’ve known Mr. Bailey to be an honorable and valued member of the bar, and I recommend that the court accept his guilty plea and order him to pay costs and to stay out of the Quik-Pie, and if there’re no other incidents of this nature within a year, to expunge his record.”
Looking squarely at the reporter from the Democrat-Gazette, the judge pauses for what seems like an eternity, then barks gruffly, “I’ll accept the prosecutor’s recommendation.”
Clan , blinking back tears, nods gratefully at Darwin Bell and whispers in a choked voice, “Thank you, Your Honor.”
Tomorrow there may be headlines charging lenient treatment for lawyers, but today justice reigns in Blackwell County. I wink at Amy, who manages a thin smile from hollow cheeks. She must be going through a living hell at the Prosecutor’s Office. Until this morning, I had never seen her perky face when it wasn’t bursting with energy and high spirits. This might have cost her job today. As Darwin hastily calls the next case, I make a note to call her. I know Clan will.
Before noon I swing by my old place of employment. It is virtually impossible to call the Blackwell County Division of Social Services office because of their automated telephone-answering service. They might as well have dug a shark-filled moat around the building, so effective is the system at denying access. After ten minutes of “dial this” and “dial that” with no results, I decide to hell with it. In sixty seconds I am back in the office of my old supervisor from my days as a case worker for the agency.
“Been seeing you on TV, Gideon.” Shelley Jenkins grins from behind her desk.
“But you’re looking a little rougher even in person.”
“Got any openings, Shel?” I ask, mugging for her so she won’t think I’m serious. At the rate I’m going, I ought to consider it.
“With this phone system though, I guess you’re trying to lay some people off.”
She cackles mournfully, “Isn’t it a disgrace?” Shelley, an obese woman in her early sixties with sad eyes, took a special liking to me for some reason. Actually, it was Rosa she probably enjoyed. When we had her to dinner, at least once every year, like a mother and daughter-in-law they conducted a comprehensive discussion of my shortcomings that covered my performance at home and at the office.
” I need some help,” I tell her after a few minutes of office gossip. The state is being sued because of the lack of resources and management problems in the Division of Child and Family Services. The papers have had a field day documenting the failures of the child welfare system. Rumors about mass firings crop up every month, according to Shelley.
I worked in this building for more years than I cared to remember, primarily as an investigator of dependency-neglect cases. Over the years I investigated scores of allegations of sexual and physical abuse in Blackwell County, but more often situations involving neglect. I have no memory of Olivia Le Master being in the system, but Shelley, who kept up with all the cases in the office, might, and I tell her what I’m looking for, “Olivia Le Master wouldn’t have been our typical poverty-stricken welfare mother. She’s a tall white woman who owns River City Realty. You’ve seen her ads on TV.”
“Threw the damn thing out ten years ago,” she mutters, opening her desk drawer. As I have seen her do so many times in the past, Shelley takes out a calligraphy pen and begins to doodle on green graph paper while she thinks.
“Around what year are we talking about?”
I shift in the uncomfortable wooden chair. If they keep this furniture much longer, they can sell it as antiques. This is one agency that doesn’t get in trouble for spending state money to redecorate bureaucrats’ offices.
“Maybe close to fifteen years ago,” I say, wondering if Olivia had another name back then. For all I know, she could have been married four times since her divorce.
Abruptly, Shelley stands, telling me, “I think I know who you’re talking about. I’ll be back in a minute.”
While she is gone, I look around her office, stilling an urge to go see who has my desk. Shelley has told me only three people remain in the entire office from the time I was there, which was only three years ago. The turnover is enormous.
Insufficient staff, low pay, and unqualified people who shuffle paper until the next tragedy hits the news have long made the place a revolving door. Why did I stay so long?
Much of the time I felt like a voyeur of horror. I know I would have gone crazy if I had accepted a supervisor’s job.
In a system this bad, you have to prove that a case worker lay in bed drunk for six months before you are allowed to fire him. Ordinary incompetence and negligence are part of the job description. On Shelley’s wall is a sign she has lettered herself.
“IP YOU GET YOUR PANTIES IN A WAD BEFORE 10 A.M.” YOUR MEDICINE ISN’T STRONG ENOUGH.”
Shelley returns, panting a bit as she comes through the door and shuts it behind her. Her blue polyester pants, freak-show size, strain against her hips as she turns the handle on the flimsy door.
“If you reveal where you got this information, I’ll be in bad trouble.”
I watch her ease her huge body into the chair, thinking she could set the governor on fire and no one would touch her.
“You know I’d never do that.” What motivates her to stay?
She’s been here twenty-five years. Low pay and bad working conditions only explain part of it. Actually, I know the answer.
Without making a federal case of it, she is totally convinced there is nothing else on earth she could do with her life that is more important. “Don’t you remember this?” She grins happily, delighted by her superb memory.
“Good, good talker. We were about to file once before and she talked us out of it. This case was not your run-of-the-mill, attractive middle-class single white woman struggling to sell real estate and raise two small children;
and we kept getting calls she was neglecting the one-year-old. The older child, a girl, was retarded. We never exactly understood the problem, but when there was an incident with boiling water that burned the boy, she agreed to a placement with her mother in Ohio and we closed the file.
We never went to court. We’d file on a case like that now instead of having an informal agreement.”
I feel a chill run down the back of my neck. Olivia has never mentioned a word about any of this. Boiling water?
Give me a cattle prod any day. I think of her commercials.
She is a damn good talker all right, but, I suspect, a better actress.
“Can you live with a subpoena?” I ask.
“All of a sudden my memory’s crystal clear.” It isn’t, of course, but I have no qualms about lying to protect her.
My old friend’s smile becomes a smirk.
“You better say that,” she says, squinting at the file in front of her.
“And I didn’t tell you a damn thing.”
After getting a few more details (Olivia would admit only that her infant might have pulled a pan off the stove but had no answer when Shelley pointed out he wasn’t tall enough to reach it), I thank her and leave through the rat’s maze of cubicles, watching the workers at their desks, some gobbling sandwiches and talking at the same time. Almost always it is the poor who get caught up in abuse and neglect proceedings.
Was Olivia that down and out? This child would have had to have been born only a year or so after Pam but before the settlement with the obstetrician came through. Her husband left her, so maybe at one time she wasn’t all that much different from the terrified parents who are sitting across from the desks of my former colleagues. I look into the eyes of a young black man sitting in my old cubicle. Does Andy know about this part of Olivia’s life? I seriously doubt it. Just because she abused one child and let it be sent away doesn’t mean she wanted Pam to die. Yet, if I were a prosecutor, I’d be rubbing my hands with glee and wondering what else I could find out about the past of the star of the River City Realty Commercials.
“My brother’s a little naive,” Morris Chapman says soon after Andy introduces us. He flew in this morning from Atlanta and has accompanied Andy to my office for our final interview before the trial begins tomorrow.”
“You’ve noticed,” I say, unable to resist sarcasm now that I have an ally. Morris Chapman does not have his brother’s flair for clothes. For this visit at least he is dressed in a drab blue business suit that in no way announces its wearer’s presence Taller than Andy, he is also skinnier, but the family resemblance is there around the eyes and mouth. Yet, where Andy’s intelligent face mirrors his emotions even beneath his trim beard and glasses, his brother has a wary, pinched look as if he has an internal computer clicking off prices that he knows aren’t ever coming down. So this is where the money has come from, I think, already wishing this guy had been around for the last couple of months. His long fingers, clenched until this moment like talons around the arms of the chair, finally uncurl but do not relax. He lives in the real world; his brother does not. Uncertain how he will take the information about Olivia, and still wondering how to use it at the trial, I have not yet told Andy about what I learned at the Blackwell County Social Services office.
Andy, who seems to have returned to his more open and accessible personality now that his brother is here, flashes his first smile in days.
“Just a few days in prison will make me like y’all,” he says easily crossing an ankle over a thigh.
The half grin, half smirk on his face suggests to me that some of the weight he has felt in the last two months has been shifted to his brother.
“Not that normal,” Morris replies, shrugging, each digit of his hands now a blunt poker testing the strength of the wooden arms of the chair.
“Any dude dumb enough to get involved with a white bitch in your circumstances needs a lot of work.”
His crudeness crashes over his brother’s face like a tidal wave. I lean back in my chair, content for now to watch the family dynamic work itself out. Andy cocks his head at his brother as if he is amazed that Morris can use such terms, and especially in front of me. Yet his tone, when he finally speaks, is mild.
“White bitch?” he says, laying equal emphasis on both words.
“Mo, you haven’t even laid eyes on her.”
“Damn straight,” Morris says dispassionately as he looks squarely but blandly at me as if I were a poorly painted bowl of fruit in a frame on the wall.
“She’s played you for the starry-eyed, guess-who’scoming-to-dinner nigger aristocrat you’ve always wanted to be. If you had to have some respect able pussy, what’s wrong with Yettie? She’s always gone into heat every time your name comes up. You’ve dragged Yettie down to work with those shit-for-brains fuck-ups and now you won’t even look at her ‘cause you’re too busy sniffing white pussy. Damn, Andy, the only way they’ll let more than one nigger at a time in that bunny hutch where you live is in a maid’s uniform.”
As awful as Morris sounds, I have to resist the urge to hug him. I have thought everything he is saying. But white people can’t talk to blacks that way. Afraid I will end what is be coming an embarrassing but revealing harangue, I stare into the space between the two brothers, wondering how much more of this Andy will take. Yet surely Morris is no surprise to him. Everything comes with a price, and perhaps Morris is merely presenting his bill. After a few polite minutes of chitchat to show him I was real, I had intended to ask Morris to wait outside, but now I wanted him to stay. Despite his crudeness, he is delivering some badly needed reality therapy to his brother, who, amazingly, doesn’t seem angered by it.
As if he were a child learning to pray, Andy brings his hands together and touches them to his lips.
“My brother’s living proof,” he tells me, “of my theory that the most rabid racists and chauvinists are black men.”
Peeling somehow that Morris, Leon Robinson, and I are not all that different, I shake my head.
“I doubt that.”
Brother Morris, clean-shaven and almost burr-headed, so closely clipped is his bristled head, clearly couldn’t care less about our sociological speculations and now gives me a hard stare.
“I should of figured Andy’d get a white lawyer but I hear you don’t mind leaning on people. Can’t he agree to spill some shit on this Olivia Le Master and still cut a deal?”
Perhaps I should feel insulted, but I can live with the word “lean.” Morris understands the game, but surely he doesn’t know how prescient his remark is, and I doubt he knows how deeply involved Andy and Olivia are. Quickly, before Andy can interrupt, I reply, “Sure he could, but he says she hasn’t done anything wrong except trust his judgment.”
“Bullshit!” Morris explodes, slapping the arms of the chair.
“According to you,” he says, turning to his brother, “she was gonna pocket a couple million off her own kid’s death.”
Implicit in Morris’s question to me is the suggestion that Andy conspired with Olivia. More probably, Morris, cynical beyond words, thinks as I do that Andy may have been duped.
Andy returns his brother’s stare. He is younger, but he isn’t about to be bullied by him.
“Olivia’s only mistake in this nightmare,” he says stubbornly, “was to let me shock her daughter.”
I watch Andy’s lips curl into a rare but now familiar pout, signaling he won’t even begin to be budged. If this were still a charge of manslaughter, I’d have another guilty plea on my hands. It is as if it has taken his brother’s presence for him to admit he has some responsibility for Pam’s death, something that can’t be easy to accept when all his energy has been directed toward fighting for his freedom. How ironic that his streetwise, misanthropic brother has had the effect of stimulating his conscience.
“And your mistake,” Morris replies to Andy but nicking a glance at me, “was to pull your pants down when she started wagging her white ass at you.”
Maybe Morris knows more than I think. Andy, who rarely uses profanity in my presence and never refers to women in sexist terms, merely winces as he says to me, “Morris is a real liberal, isn’t he?”
Never having had a brother, and not being particularly close to my only sister (we blow hot and cold), I don’t get it.
What binds these two except blood?
“I think that species,” I reply, “has gone out of business.” “I hope to hell you’re right,” Morris says benignly.”
“They were about to kill us black folks.”
Despite my vow to keep out of this, I laugh out loud.
Morris probably thinks Franklin Roosevelt was part of a Communist plot to overthrow this country, while his brother may well pray to him every night. Still, they must touch something in each other. Maybe it’s just as simple as sleeping in a room together for a number of years and calling the same man and woman your parents. “The composition of the jury could be crucial for us,” I say, having called attention to myself and feeling forced to speak. I would like to be able to discuss my plan to force Leon Robinson to admit his membership in the Trackers, but I am afraid of the reaction I’ll get from Andy. Despite a concerted effort in the last few days on my part to get some information on Leon, I still have no evidence that he deliberately let go of Pam. Yet, surely it was as obvious to Leon as it was to Yettie that Andy and Olivia were romantically involved; and, given his feeling about blacks, Leon wouldn’t miss an opportunity to act upon his pent-up hatred. Too bad I can’t prove it.
“Damn straight,” Morris says emphatically, giving the chair a rest and slapping his knee with the palm of his hand. With his height and aggressiveness, Morris could have been a point guard in basketball had he gone to col lege. Owner of several businesses and some real estate in downtown Atlanta, according to his brother, Morris had better things to do than dribble a basketball and waste his time fantasizing about the pros.
“It only takes one to hang up a jury,” Morris says, looking at me for confirmation.
When I nod, he says, “On the other hand, no nigger I know, man or bitch, is gonna like it when it comes out Andy was messin’ with white pussy.”
I’ve almost gotten used to Morris, but when he says the “N” word, I flinch. For the last two days I’ve worried that there will be no blacks on the jury. Since Blackwell County is about twenty percent black (though its percentage of registered voters from whom the jury panel is selected could be lower), there should be at least a couple. But this is the kind of no-win case that makes prospective jurors, especially blacks, suddenly remember they are about to miss their mother’s funeral in Cleveland.
As if we have touched on something sacred, Andy pointedly changes the subject.
“Tell Morris about our expert,” he says to me.
Morris, like a dog with his favorite bone, shakes his head.
“You’re not gonna pull this shit about race not being an issue,” he says to his brother.
Again, I feel relief that Morris is here.
“It’s the most important thing in this case,” I tell Morris, convinced that only he can bring Andy around on this subject.
“As a psychologist Andy has got to appreciate more than either of us that the jury is going to be influenced by their own racial biases.
We just can’t sit there while the prosecutor takes advantage of that and we don’t,” I plead, hoping Morris will work on him.
For the first time today, Andy’s magnificent eyes begin to smolder behind the gold frames of his glasses.
“You know exactly how I feel about this,” he warns me, his voice a low rumble, “and you gave me your word. You are not going to pander to the racist instincts in the courtroom, and that is final.”
“Using peremptory strikes to keep whites who won’t admit their racism off” the jury,” I say, somewhat disingenuously, “is hardly pandering.” Andy and I have previously discussed that in a capital case the defense gets to eliminate up to twelve potential jurors without having to disclose a reason, and the prosecution gets to eliminate ten. This tradition, not required by the United States Constitution and purely a creature of state law around the country, has as its purpose the selection of an impartial jury.
Like a law professor lecturing the statistically inevitable bad apple in his ethics class, Andy adjusts his glasses as if he would prefer not to see me and thunders, “You just want to use the system to get a black racist on the jury.”
Instinctively, I shake my head. Hell, I want both. I want to win his damn case for him. His long arm striking like a snake, Morris bridges the space between their chairs and clutches his brother’s arm.
“Jesus Christ!” he yells.
“Every person on this earth is racist. I don’t give a damn who you are. You think you aren’t one the way you run after whites? You hate us niggers so bad it makes you sick to look at us!”
Andy recoils as if Morris were trying to spit on him.
“I
don’t live where I do,” Andy says icily, “because I hate African-Americans.”
Morris laughs, sending an ugly barking sound through my small office as he holds the arm of Andy’s chair so he can’t pull back further.
“You’re scared shitless by us. You always have been. Even when you were a kid, you wouldn’t go play basketball if it was just a bunch of niggers.”
“I wasn’t any good and didn’t enjoy playing,” Andy observes coolly.
“And I live where I do because of the crime downtown.”
Disgusted, Morris gives Andy’s chair a shove.
“Bullshit!”
he snorts.
“Every other black person you see looks like a mugger to you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Andy scoffs, meeting his brother’s now malevolent gaze. Watching this, I wonder how close to the truth Morris is. Their shared history has to count for something. Though I doubt if I would call for Morris to come hold my hand while I struggled through a life-threatening illness, I’m glad to have him now because I don’t have the guts to challenge Andy this way. And I can’t imagine he is making any of this up for my benefit. By the expression on his face he is as frustrated by his brother as I am.
“If you get convicted,” Morris says, his voice dropping,
“we’ll get a chance to see how scared you are, ‘cause the penitentiary is full of us!”
Maintaining his composure, Andy looks at Morris and me as if we are necessary but inescapably inferior beings. Maybe we are, but when this case is over, it seems highly likely that Morris and I will be going home, while he goes to jail.