Saturday, December 25
Joey Kelsey doesn’t normally work in Judge Beatrice Nolan’s courtroom. And that’s a good thing for Joey. Beatrice doesn’t have a positive impact on anyone’s nervous system. But Joey’s seems more fragile than most.
When it became clear that some unlucky bailiff would spend Christmas Eve tending our jury, though, Joey automatically got stuck. He’s the new guy, the rookie. Big Red wasn’t about to volunteer.
It’s eight A.M. When Joey called Beatrice at midnight to tell her the jury was ready, she informed him that she was not. Snow or no snow, she said, Judge Beatrice Nolan doesn’t drive in the dark. She’d leave her house at daybreak, she told him. Not a minute sooner.
Joey didn’t seem to remember that Beatrice somehow managed to drive home in the dark, and I didn’t mention it.
Beatrice’s trip to the courthouse will take at least an hour, and it’s been light only forty-five minutes or so. But Joey is watching the door to her chambers anyway, fingering his cheat sheet into tatters. After spending the night trying to justify the delay to our jurors, he’s a wreck. They’re all exhausted, he reports. And they’re mad as hell. Joey may never be fit for trial again.
Harry and I spent the wee hours in Geraldine’s office, the three of us drafting the tedious documents necessary to secure Sonia Baker’s release. By four o’clock, the papers were ready and Geraldine left the complex with them to track down the required signatures. She was back by six, mission accomplished, whereupon Harry and I hand-delivered Sonia Baker’s freedom to the Barnstable County House of Correction.
The jail has its own formal exit rituals and paperwork, of course, but Sonia Baker should be out soon. And in a rare accommodating gesture-explainable, perhaps, by the spirit of the season-one of the matrons offered to bring her to our courtroom when she’s ready. Maggie is twisted around in her front-row seat between Patty Hammond and Luke, watching the back door with all the anticipation of a child on Christmas morning. Which, of course, she is.
The Kydd went home as soon as he heard about Beatrice’s aversion to night driving. He’s back now, though, looking thoroughly refreshed. It’s obvious he’s had a few hours’ sleep and a hot shower. I feel a twinge of envy. He grins at Harry and me, then slips into the aisle seat of the front bench, next to Patty.
Reporters and photographers roam the courtroom in search of a scoop. Most of them were hanging around the hallways waiting for the verdict when the police evacuated the building. For the moment, at least, Buck Hammond’s fate is not their chief concern. They want to know what happened in the Superior Court holding cells.
The cops won’t let them anywhere near the scene, of course. The elevator is shut down, and the staircase leading to the basement is roped off and guarded. But they all heard the gunfire from the parking lot and they all saw the ambulance leave the county complex. They also see that Harry and I are disheveled, to put it mildly. And, with the reading of the verdict imminent, more and more of them are questioning the whereabouts of J. Stanley Edgarton the Third.
The steady rumble from the gallery rises a notch when Geraldine Schilling arrives. The reporters pelt her with questions about Stanley. Has he been taken ill? Called to another crime scene? Found to have a conflict?
If Geraldine were inclined to answer, she could say “all of the above.” She’s not, though. She ignores them with a thoroughness honed over almost two decades. They may as well hurl their questions at the walls.
Geraldine crosses the front of the courtroom and pauses at our table to scowl. More than ten years I’ve known Geraldine Schilling. She’s never looked worse. “You’re a lousy shot,” she says.
“How can you say that? My shot took him down. I hit him.”
“In the thigh,” she fires back.
“That’s where I wanted to hit him.”
She rolls her green eyes at me.
“Geraldine, I wasn’t trying to kill the man.”
Another eye roll.
I turn to Harry. “She thinks I was trying to kill him.”
Harry nods knowingly. “Would’ve been better that way,” he says.
“Now he’ll probably enter an insanity plea.”
Geraldine scowls again and starts toward her table. She stops for a moment, though, and turns back to me. “Oh, and Martha, good of you to drop by the other night. We should get together more often.”
It wasn’t the other night. It was yesterday morning-early. Better left unsaid.
Harry watches her leave, then arches his eyebrows at me. “Drop by? You dropped by?”
“Please,” I beg, “don’t ask.”
The courtroom grows louder still when two prison guards arrive with Buck Hammond in tow. He waits patiently while one of them unlocks his cuffs and shackles, then sends a signal to Patty and settles into the chair between Harry and me. He eyes Harry with obvious concern. “You okay?” Buck asks.
“Me?” Harry turns toward him. “Of course I’m okay. You’re the one we’re worried about.”
“Did you have to stay in jail very long?”
“No,” Harry says. “Marty shot the place up and got me out.”
Buck laughs.
The noise in the courtroom subsides when the chambers door opens and Judge Beatrice Nolan emerges. She climbs to the bench, her expression on this Christmas morning even more dour than usual. Joey speed-reads through his litany. He wants to get this over with.
Beatrice pauses before taking her seat and stares down at Geraldine. “Attorney Schilling,” she says, “you’re here for the Commonwealth?”
Geraldine stands. “That’s right, Your Honor.”
“And Mr. Edgarton,” the judge asks, settling into her leather chair, “where might he be?”
Geraldine gazes over at our table as she searches for words. Harry leans forward and smiles at her. She frowns back. “Mr. Edgarton is indisposed at the moment, Your Honor.”
“Yes,” the judge replies idly, erect in her chair. “Aren’t we all?”
With that, Beatrice nods at Joey and he scrambles through the side door as if the room is on fire. He returns moments later with the beleaguered jurors in a single line behind him, every one of them scrutinizing the courtroom floor.
In my peripheral vision, I spot Geraldine casting a satisfied glance over her shoulder at the press. My knees go weak. Popular wisdom among criminal law practitioners holds that jurors who’ve acquitted look the defendant in the eye when they return to the courtroom with their verdict. Those who’ve convicted don’t. If that theory proves true, then Buck Hammond is headed for Walpole.
But I don’t buy that particular tenet of popular wisdom. Murder trials are gut-wrenching. Deliberations are worse. Jurors returning with a verdict in a murder case are exhausted. Most of them don’t look at anyone.
The jurors take their seats and everyone else does too. Everyone, that is, except Harry, Buck Hammond, and me. We stand side by side at our table, Buck in the middle, facing the panel. We’re close enough to each other that I can feel Buck taking slow, deliberate breaths. This is a tense moment, but he’s been through worse. Even so, I’m glad when Harry rests a steady hand on Buck’s shoulder.
Judge Nolan swivels in her chair to face the jurors. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury,” she says, glaring at them. “Have you reached a verdict?”
Juror number five, the fifty-something restaurant owner, stands in the front row, and I feel a small wave of disappointment. He wasn’t high on my list of candidates for foreman. He’s seated next to the retired schoolteacher and she’s had his ear throughout this trial. I haven’t been able to read her-or him, for that matter-at all. She looks up at him now and nods.
“We have, Your Honor.” The foreman’s voice is a deep baritone; his eyes are fixed on the judge.
Judge Nolan turns to Joey Kelsey. He stares back at her, blank. Beatrice sighs and grimaces-you can’t get good help these days, her face says-then tosses her head at the foreman. He’s waiting, verdict slip in hand.
Joey freezes for a moment, then recovers and scurries to the jury box. He fetches the verdict slip like a golden retriever and almost runs to the bench with it. Judge Nolan reads, expressionless, then returns the slip to Joey, who ferries it back across the courtroom to the foreman.
The judge doesn’t glance in our direction. Her eyes rest on Geraldine’s for the briefest of moments before she turns to the panel again. If she telegraphed a message, I missed it.
Geraldine’s eyes linger on Judge Nolan a while longer. She missed the message too, it seems, if there was one.
“Mr. Foreman, what say you?”
Trials, by nature, are unpredictable. But certain aspects of them are not. The delivery of the verdict, for instance, follows a pattern, especially in murder cases. The juror announcing the fate of the accused always stares at the verdict slip and reads. And it’s not because he forgets what’s written there.
The verdict slip is a crutch. It allows the foreperson to avoid eye contact with the defendant. In a courtroom pregnant with anxiety, even the most stalwart juror needs a mechanism to control his emotions, his voice. The verdict slip provides it.
But our middle-aged restaurateur defies the pattern. He folds the verdict slip in half and palms it, lowering his hands to his sides. He shifts in the jury box and faces our table, looking neither at me nor at Harry. He stares at Buck.
Most trial lawyers can predict the verdict from the foreperson’s body language. But for me, at least, this is a first. I’ve never seen a foreperson look directly at the defendant. I don’t know what it means.
“We, the jury…,” the foreman begins.
My mouth goes desperately dry.
“…in the matter of Commonwealth versus Hammond…”
Buck isn’t breathing anymore. I guess I’m not either.
“…on the charge of murder in the first degree of one Hector Monteros…”
The foreman pauses to swallow, and it takes a moment for me to realize he’s choked up. This could mean just about anything. Maybe he’s sorry for what happened to little Billy Hammond, for all that Patty and Buck have suffered. But maybe he’s sorry about the verdict, about the eternal turmoil that lies ahead for Buck at Walpole.
“…do find this defendant, William Francis Hammond…”
Buck takes a deep breath and holds it. He grasps the edge of our table with both hands and leans into it until his fingertips turn white. His eyes remain on the foreman, though. The two men seem unable to move, frozen in this moment of judgment.
Beatrice Nolan leans back, gavel in hand. This is her courtroom, after all. Face-to-face dialogue doesn’t often happen here. She apparently finds it unsettling. She’s poised to put a stop to it.
Finally, the foreman blinks and shakes his head. “Mr. Hammond,” he says.
This is unheard of. No foreperson addresses the defendant by name.
“The truth is…”
The foreman’s voice breaks and Buck looks sympathetic. He nods repeatedly, encouraging the weary restaurant owner to continue. I can take it, Buck’s eyes say. Whatever it is you have to tell me, I can take it.
He’s right, of course. He’s taken worse.
“We agree with Attorney Edgarton.”
Eleven heads nod in the jury box.
“We’re disappointed,” the foreman continues, “that Mr. Edgarton isn’t here. We wanted to tell him-face-to-face-that we agree with him.” I’ve practiced law for more than a decade, tried more than a hundred cases. I’ve lost before. More than once, the reading of a verdict made my eyes fill, left my vision blurry.
But not this time. This time my eyes are dry. And I’m going to be sick. I sink to my chair. I can’t help it; my knees are about to quit again.
“What Mr. Edgarton said was true, Mr. Hammond.”
I find it hard to believe that the foreman is still speaking directly to Buck.
“When you shot Hector Monteros, it was, in fact, a moment of temporary sanity.”
A low rumble emanates from the crowd.
The foreman looks at his verdict slip for the first time. “We find that the defendant, William ‘Buck’ Hammond, knew exactly what he was doing when he shot Hector Monteros. He was not insane then, and he’s not insane now.”
I tell myself to take deep breaths, to focus on the appeal. The appeal of a capital murder conviction is automatic. We’ll farm it out. An experienced appellate attorney can argue ineffective assistance of counsel. I’ve got ineffective assistance written all over me. I never even gave an opening statement, for God’s sake.
The foreman straightens his shoulders and pauses again. His eyes don’t budge from Buck’s.
Without making a sound, the gray-haired schoolteacher gets to her feet in the front row. Then the young pharmacist rises behind her. So does the construction worker. And the juror next to him. And the one next to her. The rest of the panel stands too, then, in unison.
For a split second, I don’t get it. I look up at Harry and Buck. Buck’s face is unchanged. Harry’s mouth is open, his expression a question mark; he’s not sure what’s happening either. But his hand starts thumping Buck’s shoulder.
The foreman pauses to look at each of his fellow jurors, gratitude plain on his face. Their show of solidarity spurs him on. He turns back to Buck and takes a deep breath. “We also find Mr. Hammond…”
He shakes his head, his eyes again locked with Buck’s.
No one breathes.
“Not guilty.”
Silence.