Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (11 page)

I was back under Friedman’s clinical gaze. “That’s very amus-ing. But what difference did it make whose voices he heard? He was hearing voices, after all.”

“That’s what one of the doctors said. And then I pointed out to the doctor that while I couldn’t say I ever heard the other two, I heard Linda Ronstadt singing in my head fairly often and that I would frankly be surprised if he hadn’t heard the same thing. And to tell you the truth, depending on the song, there were times when I could not get her voice out of my head at all.

Even right now, sitting right here, if I concentrate, I can hear her. I mean, once it starts, you just can’t get ‘I’ve been cheated, been mistreated’ to stop, can you? Now, tell me, Dr. Friedman, am I going to get to see Elliott Winston or do I have to have myself committed and become a patient first?”

For a moment I thought he was going to take it under advisement. “No,” he said, blinking rapidly, a nervous smile rushing across his face. “Elliott wants to see you. That’s what concerns me.” He immediately qualified it. “Not concerns me, interests me.

You see, Mr. Antonelli, you’re the first visitor he’s ever had.”

He waited for my reaction. I had the feeling he was trying to find out whether I knew something about what had happened to Elliott before he was committed, something that would tell him more about his patient than he already knew.

With a civil smile I expressed a polite doubt. “He has children, parents, relatives, and a great many friends. Surely, some of them must have come to see him?”

Stroking his chin, he gave me a measured look. “I should have said you’re the first person he has allowed to come. Others have tried, though no one now for a long time. You’re the only one he wanted to see. He’s quite eager, actually. Why do you think that is?”

I turned the question back on Friedman. “What reason did he give?”

“He said you were a partner in the law firm where he worked, that you had given him the job, that for a long time he had thought he wanted to be just like you.” He paused. “I’m sure he meant what he said, but I’m also quite sure that that isn’t the real reason he wants to see you,” he added candidly. “There’s something else. Perhaps it’s the same reason you want to see him.”

He put it to me directly. “You’ve never come before, Mr. Antonelli. Why now?”

There was not a trace of reproval in his voice, no suggestion that I had done something wrong by waiting this long. It was simply a question put to me by someone who I understood was trying to help.

“I always wanted to,” I explained. “I always thought I should.

About a month after he first came here, I started to drive down.

I hadn’t called ahead. I just decided to come. Halfway here I changed my mind. I told myself I needed to make an appointment before I came, but that was just an excuse.”

He moved his head, just a slight turn to the right, enough to create the impression that while his left eye kept me under sur-veillance, his other eye was drawing back, as if there was something else it needed to see.

“I’ve always felt a certain responsibility for what happened.”

“For what happened?” His voice was calm, reassuring, full of reasonable encouragement.

“Yes. I saw it all happen, each step. But I didn’t understand what it meant, not until the end, when it was too late. I should have known. I should have done something before it ever got to that point, though I’m not sure, even now, what I could have done.”

Friedman did not say anything. He did not ask me to explain.

He sat there, watching, waiting for me to go on.

“Have you ever read Sallust?” When he did not answer, I explained: “One of the Roman historians.”

“Oh,” he replied, laughing softly, the willing admission of his ignorance. “But you must have. I’ve always envied people who read serious things. Perhaps someday. When there is more time.”

He smiled and waited.

“I had not read him either, not until about a year ago. And it reminded me, or rather it explained, because it described what I’m almost certain someone did to Elliott Winston. Sallust talks about what he calls the conversion of the zealous and the innocent to a criminal conspiracy. First, they have you tell an innocent lie, a white lie, something that can’t possibly hurt anyone and may even help someone. Then, they bring you around to more substantial lies. You had lied before, and after all, this is only a difference of degree.”

Friedman, the passive observer, was listening intently, caught up in the insidious logic of evil.

“Once they get you to tell lies like these, lies that have consequences, lies that if discovered can get you into trouble, serious trouble, then it is not so difficult to lead you into acts of violence. Not against anybody, you understand, but against somebody who has done something terribly wrong, an enemy, someone who is part of a conspiracy, a conspiracy directed at all the things you believe in. But then, after it’s been done, you discover that it was done to the wrong person, someone falsely accused. You’ve made a terrible mistake, and it has to be covered up. You have to protect your reputation, but you can’t do it alone. They tell you, these friends of yours who taught you how to lie, who convinced you to commit a violent act, that everyone makes mistakes.

They tell you, these friends of yours, that they’ll do everything that has to be done to make sure no one ever finds out what you did. After all, friends have to protect one another. Then, finally, when they do something you never would have dreamed of doing, something that was not the result of some tragic mistake, they come to you and remind you, these friends of yours, how they protected you when you needed them.”

Friedman stared at me. “Someone did that to him?”

“I think so. There was no violence. That came later, after he broke down. But before that, yes, I think so. I think he was taken, step by step, from one thing to the next, until he finally realized he had become someone he did not want to be and he did not know what to do about it.”

“Who would have done a thing like that? How could anyone have done a thing like that? He was a lawyer, after all. He must have known when he was being asked to do something that was wrong.”

How childlike, how trusting, we all are outside the narrow, limited range of our own experience! Dr. Friedman, the student of human behavior, actually believed that the law was a rigid system of unbreakable rules. I began to feel more confident in my own analysis.

“There was a judge,” I began to explain. “A much older man.”

Friedman nodded emphatically. “His parents were divorced when he was a very young child. He was raised by his mother.

He seldom saw his father. Elliott was always drawn to older men as sources of guidance, inspiration. He was drawn to you that way.

You were the older, successful attorney, the model of what he wanted to become. But not only that, of course. He needed someone he admired to give him encouragement and approval. He would have been dependent—extremely dependent—on anyone who could give him that. And a judge—yes, well, that is the source of the most important kind of approval for a lawyer, isn’t it?”

I thought he was wrong about the way Elliott viewed me and almost certain he was right about the way he had become attached to Jeffries.

“And you think this judge abused Elliott’s trust?”

It was a question only someone who had never known Calvin Jeffries could have asked.

“It’s like I told you, there were things that at the time did not seem like much.”

As I said this I began to doubt whether they would seem any more important now. Maybe I had read too much into them.

“A short time after they first became acquainted, Elliott missed a deadline. Or at least he was told he had missed a deadline. It seems odd. He was always very well organized. When you practice law,” I explained parenthetically, “there are time limits on everything. Ten days to file this, twenty days to respond to that, everything has a schedule, and if you fail to meet it the consequences can be lethal: You lose the motion, you pay costs to the other side, you lose the case. Elliott knew that. When he told me what had happened he looked like death itself. But when I saw him the next day, he had that embarrassed, grateful look of someone who has just been saved from his own stupidity. The judge, he informed me, had simply instructed his clerk to back-date the document. So far as anyone would ever know, Elliott had done everything right.”

Dr. Friedman rocked back and forth in his chair, pressing together the tips of his outstretched fingers. “The rules were relaxed because of who he was, because the relationship between them was more than just that of lawyer and judge. And the relationship was even closer now because they had done something together that they had to keep secret. I see. Yes.”

“A few months later, it happened again, or rather, it happened again and I knew it. I don’t know how often it may have happened in between. He was working on a motion, and he came into my office to talk to me about it. The issue was interesting, and the more we talked, the more I thought he was on to something, that he actually had a chance, if not to win at the trial court level, to take it up to the appellate courts and help make some new law. We talked for a couple of hours, and at the end he thanked me and told me I had given him some new ideas he wanted to pursue. I asked him when his brief was due. He told me it was due the next morning, but he thought he would work on it through the weekend and get it in on Monday. I must have looked alarmed, because he just laughed and assured me there was nothing to worry about. ‘They always give me a few more days, if I need them.’

” ‘But you can’t do that,’ I blurted out, angry that he could so blithely dismiss the obligation to follow the rules.

” ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t hurt anyone.’ That was his answer, and I remember how struck I was, not so much by what he said, as by the almost cynical indifference with which he said it. It was as if the rules had been made for other people, people who did not know how things really worked, people, he seemed to believe, who could not be trusted to do the right thing on their own. There was something else—I still can’t quite put my finger on it—but something that told me that he thought I was one of those people, too.

“I didn’t see him quite so much after that. He was an associate in the firm, and I probably saw him several times every day, but we did not talk, not the way we had before. But if you had asked me at the time whether there had been any change in our relations, I probably would not have thought so. It was impercepti-ble, one of those things that happen and you don’t become aware of it until, suddenly, one day, you realize that everything has changed. And with Elliott, of course, there was no question of when that day came.”

Friedman knew what I meant, or thought he did. “The day of the shooting.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “The shooting happened later.

It would not have happened at all if any of us had had a whit of intelligence about us. Think of it. We see it all the time, but when it happens to one of our own, it’s the last thing we think of. Elliott was tired, overworked, and he had a breakdown, so of course it must have been stress. Give him some time off, get him into counseling; everything will be fine. No one wanted to be the first to say: Elliott Winston is insane and needs to be in a hospital.

“The twelve jurors on the case he was trying that day would not have hesitated to say so. He had just finished the direct examination of a witness for the defense. He sat down, scratching at something on the back of his wrist. As the prosecutor began to ask his first, preliminary question on cross, the scratching grew more rapid, more intense. Jurors started to look. Elliott was tearing at his skin, digging into it, drawing blood. A juror screamed and as everyone turned to look, Elliott shot out of his chair, stabbing the air with his hand, the fingernails glistening red with his own blood, shouting at his own witness, ‘You’re part of it, aren’t you? I saw the way you were looking at the prosecutor. I saw the two of you giving each other messages with your eyes!’ He wheeled around and began to challenge the jury. ‘And I’ve seen the way you look at him, and the way you look at each other!’ He turned to the judge, one of the most fair-minded men on the bench.

‘Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on here! What’s the case number?’ he demanded.

“That stopped everyone cold. No one had any idea what he meant. ‘It’s the number of the year I was born,’ he announced as if it proved everything. ‘You’re in it, too, aren’t you?’

“A long time after it happened, months after the shooting in fact, I read the transcript, trying to figure out what had happened.

I could not believe it. The day before, he seemed as normal as anyone else.”

“That isn’t surprising,” Friedman assured me. “It’s a classic case.

Acute schizophrenia, the sudden onset of symptoms in a person who until that point appears to be functioning quite well. The delusions you describe are exactly what you would expect. There is a sudden, perhaps slight change in the chemistry of the brain.

That is all it takes, I’m afraid. It is usually precipitated by precisely the kind of crisis you described, some kind of emotional trauma from which they can see no way of escape.”

The doctor got up from his chair. “We better go. Elliott is waiting.”

The rain was pounding down, exploding on the pavement when it hit. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the sky was lit up with lightning. Pulling our coats over our heads, we ducked down and jogged across the parking lot to the hospital on the other side.

“Tell me,” Friedman asked once we were inside. “You obviously have a great interest in what happened to Elliott. You read the transcript because you wanted to know what happened at the time of the first episode—what you call his breakdown. What do you know about the shooting, the crime for which he was committed?”

I stopped and looked at him, searching his eyes until I was certain he really did not know. Then I turned and we started to walk again down the long gray corridor.

“I’m the one he shot,” I explained.