Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (30 page)

They were cigarette burns, the doctor said, and they had probably been there since he was a child.

“The next day he was interviewed again.”

“Without a lawyer?” I asked.

Stewart raised his head. “That’s right. He was told he had a right to one,” he added, anticipating my next question. “Well, not told, exactly.” His eyes seemed to open wider, while his gaze turned inward. “They read it to him from the card we all carry, read it to him in a flat monotonous voice. Then, at the end, the detective put down the card, bent toward him, and put his hand on the suspect’s arm. ‘Or do you want to just talk to me?’ He asked that question like he was talking to a friend. It’s an old technique.”

“And he didn’t want a lawyer?”

A scathing look came into his eyes. “He didn’t know what a lawyer was! We should have known it from the beginning—the way he talked, the look in his eyes. Without the beard, without those filthy clothes, you had to know what he was. It was not just his eyes anymore. You could see it in the way his mouth sagged to one side, the clumsy, awkward way it moved when he gave his one-or two-word answers to a question, the way the words seemed to drag out: rough, slurred, without any definable end. Our suspect—the one arraigned this morning for the murder of Judge Griswald—is retarded. God knows just how retarded!

There aren’t any records. He doesn’t have an identity. If he was ever tested we don’t know about it.”

With narrowed eyes, Stewart studied me for a moment, and then looked down at his hands and again began to rub one thumb over the other. “This is a travesty,” he said without looking up.

“And there’s nothing I can do about it. Everything was done by the book. He had the weapon; his prints are all over it; and he was living under the bridge.” With his head bent over his hands, he raised his eyes. “It’s the similarity. A homeless man with mental problems murdered Jeffries with a knife. Griswald is murdered with a knife, and a homeless man with mental problems of his own has it. He doesn’t confess, but that doesn’t matter because you can tell yourself that he’s so far out of it he might not even remember what he did. Besides, that’s someone else’s problem.

The police did their job. They found the evidence and they made an arrest. They read him his rights and they brought him to court.

That’s the way the system is supposed to work, right? The lawyers will sort it all out.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Flynn remarked as he rubbed the back of his thick neck. With a droll look, he added: “He’ll have the finest defense lawyer the public defender’s office can spare.

They’ll probably plead him to two murders instead of one just to get rid of it.”

I leaned my head against the back of the booth, slowly shifting my gaze from Flynn to Stewart and back again. It was a setup and they knew I had finally caught on.

“All we’re asking,” Flynn said as his co-conspirator concentrated on the spoon with which he began to stir his coffee, “is that you think about it.”

“Think about it?” I asked, with a laugh. “You don’t want me to think about it. You want me to do it.”

Flynn never backed down. “What do you have to lose? Why do you practice law, if it isn’t to take a case like this? The kid’s retarded, for Christ sake; and when he was growing up some son of a bitch tortured him just for kicks. You imagine? … A child, retarded, somebody tortures him!” Hunching forward, Flynn hit the table hard three straight times with his stubby fingers. “He lives under a bridge; he’s got things crawling all over him. If you’re not going to help someone like that, who the hell are you going to help?”

Stewart was glued to the coffee cup, mesmerized by the movement of the spoon. “I’ll help,” he said. Reversing direction, he began to stir counterclockwise. “I’ll get you everything we’ve got.”

His hand stopped moving, and for an instant he seemed to tense.

“On both investigations,” he said, looking straight at me.

“Aren’t you taking something of a chance?”

He shook his head. “So what? Let me tell you something: I was one of the people in charge of the Jeffries investigation. There was too much pressure, too many people with too much to lose.

As soon as Whittaker confessed, as soon as he was dead: That was all anyone needed to end it. No one wanted to go farther; no one wanted to hear about it anymore. We know who did it.

What difference did it really make why he did it? Well, I still want to know. Maybe there’s a connection between the two murders. Maybe Griswald wasn’t a copycat killing. The only way we’ll ever know is to catch the killer. This kid didn’t do it. See for yourself. You tell me if you think he could have killed someone.”

I did not agree to take the case; I did not even agree to see for myself, as Stewart had put it, whether John Smith was capable of murder. I did agree to talk with whoever in the public defender’s office had been assigned the case; and two days later, when I finally had a break in my calendar, I dropped by a few minutes before noon.

With the telephone cradled between her chin and shoulder, the receptionist glanced up at me while she continued filing her nails. “Hang on a second,” she said into the receiver. “Which case was that?” she asked, reaching for a thin gray three-ring binder.

She was young, not more than nineteen or twenty, with long brown hair and eyes that never stayed still. On the counter in front of her, a straw smudged with red lipstick stuck out of an ice-filled container of Pepsi-Cola. When I told her the name of the defendant, she hesitated just long enough to decide that I was serious. Her eye followed her finger down a handwritten list of cases and the lawyers assigned to them.

“You’d think they’d put all this in the computer,” she remarked, making a face. Her finger came to a stop. “William Taylor,” she said, looking up. She flapped her hand in the air and picked up the phone with the other. “Third door on the left.”

I went down a corridor, passing between same-size cubicles identically furnished. Sitting in his shirtsleeves, his tie pulled down from his throat, William Taylor wadded up a piece of paper, leaned back and took careful aim at a wastebasket next to a file cabinet on the other side of the small room. It hit the edge and bounced onto the floor. With a sigh, he got up from behind his metal desk and picked it up. I was standing in the doorway, just a few feet away, but I might as well have been invisible. He went back to his chair, leaned back the same way he had before and tried again, with the same result.

“Mr. Taylor?” I said when he bent down to pick it up.

He did not look at me. “Yeah?” he said as he resumed his position and got ready to throw.

“Do you have a minute?” I asked patiently.

The paper wad ricocheted off the side of the file cabinet into the basket. It did nothing to improve his mood. He looked at me with sullen, insolent eyes. “Depends,” he replied as he opened his desk drawer and began to rummage through it.

In his early thirties, he was tall and lean, with fine brown hair and a pale complexion. He had the dour look of a moralist, someone who could never bring himself to admit there was a second side to anything about which he had a firm conviction. He was the kind of lawyer who became apoplectic about the death penalty, but seldom cared that much about any particular case.

I decided to start over. “My name is Joseph Antonelli. I’m interested in a case you’re handling. The defendant’s name is John Smith.”

He kept searching through the drawer. “I know who you are.

Why are you interested?” Whatever he was looking for—if he was looking for anything—he gave up. “You don’t represent the indigent.”

I had been standing in his doorway the whole time, deliberately ignored. He stretched out his arm and waved his hand toward the chair in front of his desk, a reluctant invitation to sit down. I did not move. “No, thanks. I don’t want to take any more of your time than I have to. What can you tell me about John Smith?”

The harsh tone of my voice got his attention, but that was all it got. “I can’t discuss a client,” he said, as if I should have known better than to ask.

“Look, Mr… .” I twisted my head around until I could see the place where his name was printed on the door. “Mr. Taylor. I just want to know whether this is a case you’re going to take to trial.”

He was not going to answer me until I answered him. “Why are you interested?” he asked in a voice filled with fatigue.

“Because I’ve been asked to take the case.”

“I thought he was homeless.”

“He has a few friends,” was my vague reply.

“He has a few friends? He’s homeless and he has a few friends that can afford to hire you?”

I had had enough of this. “Have we met? Is there some reason you don’t like me, or is this just the way you talk to everyone?”

It did not faze him. He shrugged and looked away. A short while later, he sat up, pulled a file out of a metal holder on the corner of his desk, and glanced at the first page inside. “We entered a plea of not guilty,” he said as he closed it. “It won’t get to trial, though. We ordered a psychiatric. He’s not competent to stand trial,” he said with assurance. Sitting back, he crossed his ankle over his knee and laced his fingers together behind his neck. “Good thing he’s a loon,” he said with a cynical glance.

“It’s the only thing that can save him from the death penalty.”

“You think he did it, then?”

“Probably,” he said with indifference. “It doesn’t matter. As I said, we’re getting a psychiatric. There won’t be a trial. He can’t assist in his own defense,” he said, using the phrase that provides one of the standards by which a court decides upon the mental competency of a defendant.

Without waiting for another invitation, I sat down in the chair in front of him. “You know what will happen to him then, don’t you?”

His eyes flashed. “I handle more cases in a week than you do in a year. You think I don’t know what will happen? What should happen. He isn’t responsible. He has a mental disease. He should be hospitalized, not put in a cell on death row!”

“Have you talked to him?”

“John Smith? You can’t talk to him. That’s my point. He doesn’t understand anything. He has no idea what’s going on.”

“He knew enough to tell the cops that someone gave him the knife.”

Taylor just looked at me, and I knew then that he did not know anything about it. The police had apparently not bothered to include that little detail in their report.

“You didn’t know that, did you?”

“It doesn’t change anything. He isn’t competent.”

“And he isn’t guilty. Do you really think an innocent man should be locked up in a hospital because of something he didn’t do?”

“He isn’t competent,” he repeated. “And all the evidence is against him. If he went to trial, he’d be found guilty. Don’t you think he’d be better off in a hospital? Even if he wasn’t found guilty, what does he have to go back to? More nights under a bridge?”

I got up from the chair and looked down at Taylor, wondering whether, if that was the choice, he might not be right after all.

“The innocent are supposed to go free,” I said. “If he needs help, there are other ways to get it.”

Before he had a chance to ask me what they were, I heard myself announce a decision I did not know I had made. “I’m taking the case. I’ll have my office send over the substitution order.”

I paused. “If that’s all right with you, that is.”

Even if he had wanted to keep the case, he could not. The public defender could only represent clients who could not get an attorney of their own. But he was glad to get rid of this one.

Taylor did not mind losing—public defenders were used to it.

What he did mind, what he could not bear to face, was the possibility that someone he was representing might be sentenced to death when they could have spent the rest of their life in the relative comfort of the safe white sheets of an insane asylum bed.

It was a risk he would not have run for himself; it was a risk he thought me mad to run for anyone else.

Eighteen

_______

Jennifer refused to think there was any risk at all; and even if there was, she did not see that there was any choice. “If he didn’t do it …” she said, letting the thought finish itself as she searched my eyes.

We were at the restaurant bar, waiting for a table. She was sitting on a leather stool, one long leg crossed over the other, the hem of her black dress just above her knee. I was standing, wedged in tight by the crowd that pressed two and three deep all around us. She said something, but the noise was so loud I could not hear. I bent closer, and as I did her soft, pliable hand slipped into mine. Her eyes were laughing.

“When was the last time you lost a case?”

I started to reply, forgot what I was going to say, and, unac-countably, felt my face grow hot.

“You’re blushing. That’s perfect,” she said, gently squeezing my hand.

“No, I’m not,” I replied, trying to shrug it off. “I just looked down the front of your dress and got all excited.”

She wrinkled her nose and tossed her head. “You’re such a liar.

Why can’t you just admit it? You blushed.”

She watched me out of the corner of her eye as she lifted the thin-stemmed glass of wine to her mouth and drank. We had lived our separate lives and she still knew me better than anyone ever had.

“Was I a liar then?” I asked, pretending that it was too long ago and that I had forgotten half of what had happened.

Sliding off the stool, she took my arm. The waiter was beck-oning from across the room. “Every time I said don’t, and you said you wouldn’t?” she whispered in my ear.

The waiter pulled out her chair, and I settled into the one across the small table for two. As he handed her a menu, I said, as if it were nothing more than a casual remark, “Then we were both lying, weren’t we?”

She thanked the waiter and opened the menu. “I used to wonder why it took you so long to figure that out.” Her eyes came up until they met mine. “You’re doing it again,” she said with an innocent stare. “Your face is turning red.”

The waiter returned and took our order. Jennifer sipped on her wine, a pensive look in her eyes. “What is he like?” She put down the glass. “You saw him today in jail?”