With Olivia’s departure, Andy and I adjourn for a couple of minutes to allow me to go take a leak and find us both some coffee. At the front desk Julia has a smirk on her face that says my own IQ is so low it may not be testable as she reminds me that there is free coffee in the break room, which is only one door down from the conference room. She is dressed (except for a denim skirt) in what I’d call a Hell’s Angels biker outfit, complete with jackboots, and snarls through her peephole of a mouth, “Reminds me when I was a kid of my dog nearly starving one time. Blitz, our boxer, he whined at the front door for a solid day when all he had to do was walk around to the side and go through the garage.”
I study her face, wondering where a bullet would cause the most pain before it killed her. I do not want to mar her precious childhood memory, but I mutter, “That’s really fascinating.” Applying mauve nail polish to the bitten-off stubs on her right hand, Julia stops and smiles sweetly.
“It helps me sometimes when I can find something to identify with.”
Thank you, Julia.
“That must be difficult,” I say with an equal amount of venom and head back toward the break room. Before eastern Europe totally embraces capitalism, maybe it’s proponents should come take a look at Julia. What have I done to make this woman hate me? I don’t usually have this effect on people. I wonder what a cattle prod would do to her.
Armed with two steaming paper cups of coffee, I find Andy waiting for me in the conference room with his own coffee. I shut the door in case Julia has gotten up to roam the halls.
“Olivia may be the difference between you and a guilty verdict,” I say, hoping my comment will get back to her. “Would you have tried shock if it had been another parent?”
I ask, hoping he will answer honestly. I am not ready to ask if there is a sexual relationship between them, but if he wants to volunteer, that will be fine with me.
“The parent has to be behind you totally,” Andy replies softly, peering down into his coffee.
“I don’t know the first thing about what you do,” I admit, seeking a place to begin. From my years representing mentally ill patients in civil commitment hearings when I was a public defender, I know something about the mentally ill, but mental retardation calls up a harmless, beautiful male giant from my childhood in eastern Arkansas who had a brain the size of a pea. This once stubborn memory has been gradually replaced with a TV image of valiant, lovable children somberly trying to cope with the simplest of tasks.
Andy nods briskly, his manner businesslike, now that Olivia is gone. He instructs, “You’ve heard of behavior modification?”
“As in B. IF. Skinner?” I ask, recalling a psychology course at the University of Arkansas when I was a sophomore.
“Skinner was a prophet,” he says reverentially, fixing me with a stare made more intense by his slightly magnified eyes, “who was so honest that few could stand his message.
He demonstrated over and over again that free will is an illusion. In a society as out of control as the United States, it’s lucky he wasn’t lynched.” With this last phrase his voice is tinged with irony.
I lean back in the comfortable swivel chair, wishing I could steal it for my office, and scratch the middle knuckle of my right hand. The permanently swollen joint is a souvenir of too many balls that bounced off the tip. A nearsighted wannabe Mickey Mantle who couldn’t be trusted with contact lenses until I was sixteen, I am lucky to have my teeth. It seems strange to hear a black say, “Sorry, folks, there’s been some kind of awful mistake all these years. You only think you’re deciding what kind of cereal you want for breakfast each morning.” I hate to tell Andy, but this decade, freedom is in. Even the most devout Marxist is trying to make a buck.
He reads my skepticism and adds, “I know what I’m saying is anathema to the legal profession. There’d be a major recession in this country if you lawyers couldn’t peddle free will.”
I can see a jury shaking twelve heads at once. Surely he accepts the rules of the game, or he wouldn’t be in my office.
“Why don’t you just tell me what happened,” I say, already bored with theory. Despite his profession (there is a lot of bullshit in this area), I can’t help but like him. He is obviously a bright guy, yet unpretentious. Blacks who are as educated as this guy like to use a lot of big words. Andy reminds me of a good teacher, patient as a coyote and without the sarcasm and condescension that some otherwise competent professors can’t manage without.
In no hurry to get to the meat, he rests his hairy chin on his fingers.
“In order to fully understand my situation, you are required to accept the proposition that behavior modification is a science and proceeds on that basis.”
I tap a Flair pen against my legal pad. Sure it is. Shocking a child with a cattle prod is right up there with a cure for polio. I don’t blame him for not wanting to talk about what happened.”
“I ‘we no doubt it was an accident,” I say, smoothing his path. Rockets blow up all the time. If I can get this knocked down to a charge of negligent homicide, I’ll be earning my pay.
Behind his glasses, Andy squints as if he is trying to picture the event.
“It happened so fast that it still seems unreal.”
Poor guy, he didn’t have time to change his mind. Though he is tired, he needs to go through this. I plunge ahead.
“We need to talk about what happened. What I know about electricity won’t fill up a thimble,” I confess.
“Did you accidentally shock her in the chest, or what?”
Chapman rubs his head as if he still can’t understand it. “What happened was that she grabbed the handle of the prod with her right hand, I suppose to push it away,” he says slowly, ‘and according to the doctor who pronounced her dead, the current passed from one of the electrodes touching her left thigh and traveled through her chest and heart down her right hand, which was touching the handle.
It happened so quickly I didn’t realize she was grabbing at the handle.”
Without realizing it, I have brought my hands together. A complete circuit. I have jumped smack into the middle, but I can always come back for details.
“Didn’t you have her hands tied?”
“Leon Robinson-he’s an aide-was trying to hold her,” Andy says, “but it was hard to keep her still, I guess.”
“Was it really a battery-powered device that’s used on animals?” I ask, praying it wasn’t. When I was fourteen, I worked on a cousin’s farm and watched a cattle prod used on sheep. I remember thinking that even through all that wool it hurt them. Of course, that was the point.
“Let me explain about that,” Andy says, his voice rising for the first time since I ‘we met him. “Once you start learning about this procedure, you’re going to find that there are commercial products available you can send for to use on individuals.
The problem was that I knew if I asked, I wouldn’t get permission to try shock on Pam. I thought that if I showed the administrator, David Spam, what could be accomplished with Pam, he would back me and let me work with her.
Shock works incredibly quickly to suppress self-abusive behavior, and both Olivia and I were convinced that he would go along with it once he saw Pam for the first time in years not hitting her head. Shock works like a miracle, and all that bullshit about it being too aversive comes to a screeching halt when, after years of keeping a child in restraints or on drugs and trying everything under the sun, you see the kid not hurting herself. Of course, it’s a last resort, but the scientific literature is clear: shock works. And someone at the Human Development Center knew it at one time, because that’s where I found the equipment I used. All it needed was new batteries.”
I try not to squirm with impatience. You can’t expect a jury to be sympathetic when you have to tell them that your client took a device you use on an animal and used it on a human. It has to hurt like hell.
“Surely no one has used a cattle prod before.”
Stubbornly, Andy, his lips pursed, shakes his head.
“Sure they have. In some of the first published research in which shock was effective a cattle prod was used. What is recommended, and what I did, was wrap the metal case in insulation tape, so that even if the case was grabbed while Pam was being shocked, there wouldn’t be a closed circuit.”
At least he seems to know what he was supposed to do. I ask, “So what happened?”
Andy lets out a deep sigh.
“I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t thick enough.”
I study Andy Chapman’s face, which, for the moment, seems lost in confusion. His brown eyes look puzzled, as if he has thought many times about what went wrong. The difference between me and him is that electricity scares me too much to even think about fooling around with it. Involuntarily my mind goes back to the time when I was twelve and was shocked by an electric lawn mower. Closing my eyes, I can still feel the pain. My fingers felt like someone laid back the skin and briskly rubbed a hacksaw blade back and forth over the exposed nerves.
“Couldn’t she let go of it?” I ask, thinking of a movie I saw with Martin Sheen where, in the first five minutes, his wife was accidentally electrocuted while using an electrical appliance. Her muscles contracted, and she couldn’t let go of it.
His face takes on the hardness of a clenched fist as he remembers, “I released the button as soon as I realized what was happening, but it was too late.”
It sounds so grisly I feel my stomach turn.
“What happened then?”
Andy stares over my head and says in a monotone, “I tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and the emergency-room technicians said the doctor worked on her for thirty minutes after they got her to the hospital, but I think she was dead before then.”
I nod, feeling steadily sickened by the portrait he has painted. Perversely, but perhaps not unexpectedly, given my eastern Arkansas background, what is most vivid in my mind is an image of his black lips blowing into the girl’s mouth.
When I was entering puberty in eastern Arkansas my best friend, Jeffrey “Draino” Cummings, “made” me choose between what our adolescent minds agreed were the two worst choices in the world: having sex with one’s mother, or in Jeffrey’s words, “sucking snot from a dead nigger’s nose.”
I remember saying primly that I’d choose the second. Jeffrey, who obtained his nickname because of an experiment with a frog, hooted in derision until I changed my mind.
“Was it just you and the aide?” I ask, wondering if Leon is also black.
Andy closes his eyes as if the memory is too much for him.
“Olivia was there, and I had a social worker there to write down the exact number of shocks it was going to take, and also count how many times Pam hit herself before she stopped.”
I am stunned by the news that Olivia was watching. She is even tougher than I imagined.
“How could a parent watch her own child being shocked?” I blurt.
Andy does not seem to take offense at my tone. He says mildly, “Olivia’s one hell of a strong woman. She insisted that I shock her, too, so she’d know exactly what Pam was feeling.”
Once again I can imagine the jolt that radiated through me as I tried to splice the electric cord that summer morning in the backyard. It had to be over thirty years ago, but the memory of the pain has reappeared as if a skillful therapist had uncovered a traumatic incident from my childhood. My stomach queasy, I take a sip of my coffee, wondering if I’m about to throw up.
“Did you try it, too?”
I ask.
Somberly, he nods.
“One of the descriptions from the journals is that it is like having a dentist drill on a tooth without first having your mouth numbed. Frankly, I think it’s worse than that, but it’s also true that the pain goes away as soon as the current stops. It’s local and doesn’t radiate through the body.”
“Jesus Christ!” I exclaim.”
“Why couldn’t you have started with something milder?” I do not add that if he had, Pam might be alive today.
Perhaps irritated by my tone, his voice less patient, Andy says, “They can get used to a lower voltage. It can be reinforcing.
The literature says that if you’re going to use shock, not to hold back on the intensity.”
But a cattle prod? Nonplussed now by the image of Andy and Olivia shocking themselves a single time, all I can do at the moment is blink at this comment. Some comfort that must be to a retarded teenager. As a child, I used to be terrified when my mother made my sister cut a switch for her that she would then use on our legs. The fear of what was coming was somehow worse than the pain. Of course, that was part of the punishment. Can a jury handle this so-called treatment? On “60 Minutes” recently they did a segment on the comeback electro convulsive therapy was making in the treatment of suicidally depressed mental patients after years of bad publicity. Why? It works when nothing else does, according to the shrinks on the program. Yet there is a difference. The electricity itself
(no one seemed to know how) has a therapeutic effect;
here, its only function is to inflict pain. A theory as subtle as the one in the Spanish Inquisition. Doubtless, its defenders would howl in disagreement. I try to focus on what it is supposed to accomplish: the cessation of pain, the prevention of injury, maybe it can even save a life when it isn’t taking one. Andy would be so much better off if he could have obtained someone’s permission to try shock. It begins to sink in that maybe his boss, David Spath, knew what he was up to, but they made a deal:
Andy could try it, but if it didn’t work, he would have to walk the plank all by himself. Why else would he be so confident that his boss would agree to let him continue working with Pam and using a method that can’t stand the light of day?
“I’d like to talk with your boss and the other two who were there,” I say casually.
“Do you think they’ll be sympathetic?”
Andy spreads his hands and then slaps his legs softly.
“They don’t want to lose their jobs.”
I begin to doodle on the pad in front of me. Maybe they should lose their jobs. I doubt if what they helped Andy do is in their job descriptions. I anticipate him by saying, “They were just following your orders.”
Andy nods too quickly, convincing me that he has told them something similar. The problem was that this defense has already failed-at Nuremberg. Yet usually nobody cares about the peons. They probably need all the warm bodies they can get at the Human Development Center. He says, “I wouldn’t even bother with David. I’m just lucky he hasn’t fired me. I’m sure from the governor on down, they’ve put pressure on him to get rid of me immediately.”
I wonder if they are all black, but I will find out soon enough. David, whoever he is and whatever his color, must be quite a fellow. How does someone get into this business?
I suspect not too many kids say they want to be an administrator of an institution for the retarded when they grow up.
I write his name down, hoping he is white. The testimony of a black boss won’t mean much, since the jury will assume blacks stick together on everything. Thinking about the issue of race reminds me of Andy’s admonition after the probable cause hearing not to raise it again. I ask, “We need to discuss your problem with planting a seed in the jury’s mind that you might be the victim of racial discrimination. If we can even get one juror to hold out, I don’t think the prosecutor would retry it.”
Andy shakes his head vigorously, as if I’d suggested that he try to bribe the judge.
“Don’t you see that all you do is reinforce the belief that blacks are inferior by raising the issue of race?”
I rock back in my chair, totally dumbfounded.
“Are you crazy? You should know better than I do that it’s not going to break this prosecutor’s heart if some members of the jury are racists. She wants a conviction.”
Andy sets his chin and neck as if he is locking them into position.
“I’ve spent my entire adult life refusing to reinforce white or black racism. Each time a black asks for special treatment, he reinforces the behavior of whites who think we can’t make it by ourselves.”
I can’t believe my ears. This guy sounds as if he was programmed by Ronald Reagan.
“It’s not special treatment to demand a fair trial.”
A frown passes over Andy’s face.
“Neither you nor the prosecutor want a fair trial. You just admitted that. All you want to do is win.”
This guy can’t be for real.
“This is your fucking life at stake!” I bark at him, slapping the table for emphasis. “You can’t think you’re going to use this trial to reform society.
All you’d do is let them get away with what they’ve been doing for years which is screwing blacks simply because you are black!”
The louder I get, the calmer he becomes. “Every minority in this country from Jews to Japanese have been discriminated against,” he says, his voice barely audible, “and the way they have overcome it is by outworking you.”
The bitter coffee makes my stomach hurt. Suddenly, I realize Andy is the worst kind of client a martyr.
“There’s no comparison between blacks and Jews in the United States.
Jews weren’t degraded by being brought to this country in chains and bought and sold. They didn’t have laws here literally branding them as less than human beings.”
Andy begins nodding his head again.
“I don’t want you even implying to the jury that this case is about racism. If I had wanted to do that, I could have gone to a number of black attorneys who could do a much better job of it than you. What you don’t really understand is that the first thing a black child understands is that his entire society thinks he is inferior. This is drummed into his head day and night.
Every time we use the excuse of racial discrimination we allow society to confirm and reinforce our worst suspicions about ourselves. I’ve resisted that with every fiber in my being, and I’m not going to let this trial play into that trap.
Do you hear me?”
I stare at him, wondering how he got to this planet. A black Don Quixote. Logically, he doesn’t even make sense, but a part of me sees what he’s getting at, and I begin to feel a grudging admiration for him. Though I think he’s dead wrong, the stubborn son of a bitch has the ridiculous idea that he can help make this a color-blind society by pretending it is one. I shrug. This is absurd. If all blacks were like him, maybe I could see his point, but they’re not. Yet, as I think about it, I realize I have been let off the hook. Though I would have done it, I wasn’t looking forward to arguing that he was being singled out because he is black. Arkansas juries, like everyone else, resent being told they’re racists.
“Okay,” I say.
“I can live with that if you can.”
“Good,” Chapman says simply. Abruptly changing the subject, he volunteers, “I’ll get you some material on the theory of punishment, if you want.”
I give him an absent nod.
“Including whatever you used.” An involuntary sigh escapes me. Isn’t “Do no harm” the first rule? But maybe I can argue to a jury that what Andy did is no different from the invasive procedures doctors inflict upon critically ill patients to keep them alive. Aren’t those people often comatose and without a meaningful choice? The motive is no different-it is all for their benefit-to keep them alive. God, we fear death in this country. I look up at him and see a crack in his usually stoic face.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“It must have broken your heart to go through this.”
For an answer, he raises his head and looks through the blinds at the sky. He does not tell me that the heart is merely an organ that pumps blood to the rest of the body. He says, “You have no idea.”
The truth is, I don’t. And I’m afraid no juror will either.
I decide not to try to find out more today. When I was first starting out at the Public Defender’s Office, I used to try to wring every detail out of my clients in the first interview. It took me a while to admit this meat-ax approach was often a mistake. People talk when they’re good and ready. He has more to tell me, but perhaps not today.
There are interviewing techniques they try to teach you in the clinical course in law school to deal with client reluctance.
He and I have come a long way since yesterday, but we’re not through yet. I say, “I’ve got some other things I have to do this morning. Do you want to continue now or talk later?”
He pushes back from the table.
“I’m more tired than I realized.”
Who wouldn’t be in his position? Regardless of what I can do for him, his career may never recover from the charge. I look up from my worthless notes.
“Andy,” I say, feeling weary even though I haven’t lived with the story I’ve just heard for more than an hour, “I can’t imagine sleeping a minute in the jail.”
He gives me a sad smile, his brown eyes as mournful as a clown’s.
After Andy leaves, Clan waddles into my office, as if on cue, munching on a bag of popcorn and carrying under his left armpit a couple of manila folders spotted with grease.
“At least I have a client,” I say, thinking I may not be able to do much more than plead him out to negligent homicide.
Clan collapses into the cheap chair across from my desk.
Ten more pounds of pressure on the back of it and I can sell the chair for firewood. “What a shitty way to make a living,” he complains mildly.
“People think lawyers are all rich. I wouldn’t know a corporate client if one grabbed me by the balls.”
As gross as Clan is, I can’t imagine it either. “The business is out there,” I say hopefully.
“The trick is to get a reputation.”
Clan drops the files on my desk.
“There’re all kinds of reputations,” he reminds me.
“In twenty years, when I’m in for my third bypass, I don’t want the nurses sitting around figuring out ways to torture me because they heard I’m a scumbag lawyer.”
I wonder if I’m a scumbag for walking off with Andy Chapman. By the plain black phone that obviously had been hooked up while I was in court this morning, a wadded-up pink message slip with Oscar Mays’s name on it is staring me in the face. I’ve got to return the man’s call and get it over with. Surely Andy Chapman isn’t worth trying to sue me over. I’m not normally the philosophical type, but I can’t help remarking, “We didn’t invent the free enterprise system;
we’re just paid to defend it.”
“Bullshit,” says Clan amiably, hitching up his pants to keep them from binding him.
“Lawyers like you and me fight over the crumbs. With the kind of clients we get, we don’t really make money practicing law; if you can’t get ahead enough to invest what little windfall occasionally comes your way, you’re gonna end up like old man Sievers.”
I feel a shiver sweep the back of my neck thinking of Cash Sievers, who was still trying to represent clients until his death earlier this month, although he was senile. With no investments, no Social Security, he was the Blackwell County bar’s oldest and most visible legal disaster. The story was that nobody had the heart to blow the whistle on Cash, and lawyers spent entire days cleaning up his messes. Though ancient and stooped, even toward the end he still attracted clients, but rumor has it that he represented most for nothing, presumably on the hope that they would give him something at the end of their case. Judging by his office and the clothes he wore, they didn’t give him much.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I tell Clan, who is missing his mouth with the popcorn as often as he is hitting it.
“Find a rich widow or divorcee-there’s so many women looking for men out there you can almost advertise for ‘em,” he advises, “and then bird-dog her till she drops. You’re just the right age.”
I laugh, but with Clan you never know. His wife’s family has money. I have no doubt that Dan’s home near the Pinetree Country Club wasn’t paid for by him. The thought of marrying for money is sickening, but my usual thoughts about women aren’t all that noble either.
“To paraphrase St. Augustine when told he had to give up sex for the church,” I tell Clan, repeating a story I heard told by a Catholic priest when I was in boarding school at Subiaco after my father’s death, “
“Can’t I wait a few years?”
” At the mention of sex, Clan snickers, his sophomoric humor always waiting for the opportunity to surface.
“As long as you possibly can, but if you lose too much more hair, you’re gonna be playing in the minor leagues the rest of your life.”
I pat my bald spot. Is it my imagination, or has it expanded another finger’s width since I got up this morning?
“You know anything about Kim Keogh?” I ask.
Clan wipes the grease from his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Do dreams count? What a fox! If they’ diet her anchor the ten o’clock news, I’d have a reason to make it past nine-thirty. Jesus Christ, isn’t middle age the pits?”
The odor of popcorn before lunch is starting to make me nauseous. The grease, I suppose. I brag, “She interviewed me this morning. She’s not married, is she?” I say, knowing she’s not. I didn’t see a ring.
A gleam of envy comes into Dan’s sparkling blue eyes, his only good feature now that he’s hidden the others.
“Damn!
This time last year you were about to get nailed by that social worker at the state hospital, weren’t you?”
I think of Rainey and smile.
“We’re just friends.”
Clan drops the empty bag into my trash.
“Kim Keogh, huh?” Clan muses.
“You look at these women on TV and wonder what they’re like once they’ve washed their faces.
Did you see Postcards from the Edge7 I lost all my illusions about Shirley MacLaine.”
So did I. Those old broads will do anything to stay in front of the camera. I can imagine Mike Nichols coaxing her, “Come on, it’s for art’s sake.” Shit. Maybe it is. But I hope she won’t start taking her clothes off.
“That was the point,” I acknowledge.
“It’s all fake, but nobody said the male species had any brains.”
His face red, Clan chuckles as he struggles to his feet. I can imagine his heart exploding through his chest someday.
“You about ready for lunch?” he asks.
I look at my watch. It’s only a quarter after eleven. Clan would get more work done if he moved his office down to the cafeteria.
“I got a call to make,” I tell him.
“I’ll see you down there in a few minutes. Don’t forget your files,” I add, shoving the two folders at him.
He wags his head.
“I need you to take a couple of cases for me. One’s a DWI and the other’s an adoption. I got the money, but I haven’t done anything with them. A check’s in there for them. I’m kind of stacked up right now. I’ll talk to the clients. They’ll be excited they’re getting a star.”
Bullshit. He’s giving them to me because he knows I need the money. It’s not much, but it’s more than I brought with me, if I don’t count what I stole.
“Thanks,” I say softly.
“I appreciate this.”
In a gesture of dismissal, Dan’s hands twitch outward.
“You’re doing me favor.”
Sure I am. I holler after him, “If you want to do me a favor, get rid of Princess Fishmouth out front.”
He comes back to the door, and shows me his dimples.
“You need to kiss and make up. We just heard our Miss Twin Peaks called in and said she’s taking a job at a health spa. The good news”-Dan leers-”is that she said all the lawyers on our floor can get a free workout if we come when she’s on duty.”
“From the way you describe her,” I say, playing to Dan’s fourteen-year-old side, “that wouldn’t be hard.”
“At our age,” he dead pans “it doesn’t get very hard.”
I laugh obligingly.
“Speak for yourself.” As if on command, Clan opens his mouth and closes it.
“This I can do,” he says and, turning to leave again, repeats solemnly, “this I can do.”
While I wait nervously for Oscar Mays to come to the phone, I reflect on my friendship with Clan. In part, perhaps the major part, of our affinity for each other is that if given the opportunity, we’d just as soon be back in junior high.
Oscar Mays sounds as if he had just buried his wife.
“Gideon,” he says sorrowfully after the most perfunctory of greetings, “I’m really disappointed in you. I thought you had more integrity than to steal a client from us.”
I say nothing, uncertain how to respond. My desire to lash out at him for firing me is balanced by the need to take whatever action I can to limit any potential repercussion. The pause becomes too long, and I say weakly, “I wouldn’t call it stealing under the circumstances. He didn’t want the firm of Mays amp; Burton; he wanted me.”
An angry tremor comes into Oscar’s voice for the first time since I’ve known him.
“You signed an agreement! When you give your word on something, doesn’t it mean anything to you?”
Lawyers! We hide behind pieces of paper like cockroaches.
He can treat me like a used sheet of toilet paper, and I’m supposed to feel guilty because I was coerced into signing a document that at the time meant nothing to me. I was so eager to leave the Public Defender’s Office when I came to Mays amp; Burton that I would have signed my name in blood. Why? The memory burns my face as I listen to Oscar pontificate on the sanctity of a contract. I was terrified that Carol Anderson would tell my boss I had slept with her.
I would have been fired on the spot for getting involved with a woman, who, had the case gone to trial, would have, in effect, testified as an expert witness for my client, who was accused of murdering her husband. Our way of life, Oscar preaches, depends on human beings’ keeping their agreements.
My experience is that if the bastards can squeeze you by the balls, they will not hesitate to do so when it is in their self-interest. In our society lawyers are brought in to do the heavy-duty squeezing. I recall my own righteous indignation from a case earlier this year in which I collected a debt for a client for Mays amp; Burton. I was about to take almost every last stick of furniture the defendant owned when he finally filed bankruptcy. The nerve of him! My realization that if I were in Oscar’s situation I wouldn’t be acting any differently tempers my tone but does not prevent me from slamming down the phone after I mutter, “So sue me!” Fuming over this conversation, I lean back in my chair and try to relax. I won’t be sued. It would embarrass them too much, and, anyway, I might win. As much as the law reveres a contract, it favors competition.
After lunch with Clan and two other lawyers in the building, I walk the four short blocks to the courthouse to look at the prosecutor’s file on Chapman. When I ask for Kerr Bowman, I am told that Jill Marymount would like to see me.
The Queen Bee herself. This is awfully early in the case to be having
tea with the prosecutor, but not all work the same y way. Some are like generals and won’t get their hands dirty until the actual battle, relying on subordinates to do the work;
others, like Jill, have a reputation for interviewing their potential witnesses from the very beginning. An ironclad argument can be made that a prosecutor in as large an office as Blackwell County doesn’t have the time to do her own pretrial investigation. Basically an administrator, she is being paid to exercise her professional judgment, not run up mileage on her car for her expense account. We’ve had prosecutors in Blackwell County who almost never tried cases once they were elected. But Jill’s approach allows you to get a feel for a case you wouldn’t have unless you got your hands dirty. You get ideas about motivation you’d otherwise miss, and you obtain a real sense about credibility of witnesses.
After a moment Jill comes for me herself, even though I could have found her office. She is dressed more informally than I expected. She is wearing a light blue plaid skirt and could be headed for a barbecue after work. Her simple red top is sleeveless, and she is wearing flats. I realize I was expecting full battle armor. Bare-armed she looks more feminine than usual.
She smiles as if we’re old enemies, though we’ve never tried a case against one another.
“Gideon, I hear you’re in solo practice,” she says, letting me know she’s aware I was fired. She offers fingers and a palm that are cool and dry.
As we walk side by side to her office, I say, “Thanks for the help on the bond. I was about to ensure that my client stay locked up for the duration of the trial.”
As we turn into her office, she demurs, “Your client isn’t a martyr, and I didn’t see any point in making him one.”
If you only knew, I think. The last time I was in the Blackwell County prosecuting attorney’s office the walls were covered with diplomas and awards. Today, children’s themes provide the most unusual motif I ‘we ever seen in a lawyer’s quarters. It is as if I have wandered into a museum of child poverty. There are literally dozens of black-and-white photographs of children in extreme conditions:
reproductions of Walter Evans photographs, sallow beanpole kids standing in front of Appalachian shacks; children from the Delta, black toddlers playing in front of a housing project; pictures of modern urban teenagers receiving some kind of group drug therapy; a white girl who can’t be more than junior high age but is surely in her last month of pregnancy; Down’s Syndrome children smiling into the camera, perhaps taken at the Blackwell Human Development Center, for all I know; a Native American teenager, his long black hair silken and shiny even behind the metal bars of what must be an adult jail; Third World nightmares, all manner of starving children with enormous eyes and distended stomachs. On an adjacent wall are pictures of children of affluence. American, Japanese, and European teenagers in designer clothes simply facing the camera, the girls carefully made up, their arms and hands gleaming with jewelry; some of them, mostly the boys, are seated behind the wheel of sports cars, mounted on snow skis, driving boats the size of tanks. The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty is effective. I cut my eyes back and forth between the walls. From behind her desk Jill watches patiently as I take these in. The wall opposite her desk is her constituency, the pictures shriek. I think about what Amy said. Kids can’t vote.
“Great photographs,” I say sincerely, noticing the expensive matting behind one picture that shows a child with AIDS or perhaps simply starving.
“These ought to be in a museum.”
She goes to the wall with the rich kids and adjusts a frame that has begun to tilt to the left.
“Some of them were. When people learn of my interest in children, they send them to me.”
There is a knock at the door, and Kerr Bowman enters, carrying a file. Men working for women. It is still a rare sight in the South-especially in the law business. Kerr smiles at me as if I were best man at his wedding.
“Hi, Gideon,” he says and pumps my hand for the second time in twenty-four hours.
“Nice to see you again!” Maybe he is running for something, too. All this friendliness is beginning to make me want to gag.
“Would you like to sit down at my workbench?” Jill says, ignoring Kerr’s glad-handing. Kerr, her expression implies, is like a gorgeous but brainless secretary, nice to look at but not to be taken seriously.
For the first time I notice her desk. A “workbench” it isn’t. I sit down at one of the loveliest pieces of furniture I ‘we ever seen. Most lawyers’ desks are as functional and ugly as the floor of a public men’s room. This looks like a French antique from the seventeenth century. The ornamentation on the sides is so delicate I can’t imagine how she got it in here without breaking it. This is a desk a king’s mistress would bend over when writing her lover. As I sit down across from her, I run my fingers over the surface. I’m not much on decorating, but I love wood.
“This is exquisite,” I acknowledge.
This woman, I’m starting to realize, is a cut above the usual occupant in this office.
“Thank you,” Jill says simply, and takes the file Kerr had handed her. She looks down at it.
“I don’t know how much you know about the death of the child. Have you seen a picture of her?”
“Not yet,” I admit. I should have asked for one from the mother, but I may not have wanted to see it.
Jill hands me a five-by-seven-inch black-and-white.
“The back says it was taken a couple of years ago.”
I take the picture and study it. I don’t know what I was expecting, a freak maybe. But Pam, though not pretty by a long shot, is not hideous either. My guess is that she was in restraints at the time this picture was made. Her shoulders are square to the camera, but since it is mostly of her head I can’t be sure. Her brown hair, with bangs almost to her eyebrows, is combed. She seems to be grimacing rather than smiling. Her teeth are her worst feature.
As strapped as the state is, I guess I shouldn’t expect to encounter the work of an orthodontist. Since I know she is retarded, I think from the picture it is obvious. But I’m not sure I would know otherwise. Fourteen is not the most attractive age for any kid, and there were plenty of round-faced girls this slow-looking in Sarah’s high school yearbook. There is no resemblance at all to Olivia. What I want is a picture of Pam after she was dead, to see if her face is swollen or bruised from blows she might have inflicted on herself before shock was applied. That is the photograph I want the jury to see, so it will understand why shock was necessary.
This is no autopsy report. The decision to treat the death as a crime obviously has come in the last few days. The body had been cremated. A statement signed by Travis Beavers, M.D.” the doc who pronounced Pam dead, concludes:
“Apparent fibrillary contraction of heart secondary to electric shock.” There are straightforward statements from Andy and the others present about the accident. I learn Olivia and the social worker were watching behind a oneway mirror. The damage comes from a statement by a psychologist by the name of Warren Holditch, who is identified as a member of the staff at the Bonaventure Clinic, a psychological consulting and testing group in Blackwell County.
Holditch, a Ph.D.” rips Andy a new one with each sentence.
I scan it hurriedly, but even a cursory reading tells me Andy is in trouble. I ask Jill for a duplicate of the file, and she tells me I am looking at my own copy. Evidently, she is waiting for a reaction from me, but until I have studied the report of Holditch and done some research of my own, she won’t get a peep out of me. I smile and tell her thank you and get up to leave.
Jill is studying me as if I were one of the photographs on her wall.”
“You’re not going to be able to blackmail this office this time around,” she says, her voice sweet and innocent like that of a child announcing she is ready to be tucked into bed.
I stand up straight and pretend to look at one of the pictures on the wall to give myself time to think of an appropriate comeback. I know she is referring to the Hart Anderson case. I want to stick it to her in the worst way, but down the road I will have to deal with her office many times, and I manage to bite my tongue. I turn back to her and say brusquely, pretending anger I don’t feel, “Of all people, you ought to be aware there was more than one side to the way the Hart Anderson case got dealt down. You were in this office then.”
She doesn’t blink.
“Don’t waste your time asking for a deal, Gideon. You won’t get one.”
I leave her office then but manage not to slam her door. A tough bitch if there ever was one. Why had I ever thought of her as a schoolteacher?