Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (52 page)

He tried to dismiss it. “Well, I think that’s going a little far.”

“Do you? You’ve read about Islamic Fundamentalists who blow themselves up in a terrorist attack. Would you describe that as the act of a completely sane man?”

“No, of course not.”

“What about a Russian Communist who confessed to a crime he did not commit because he was convinced it was the only way he had left to serve the Communist cause? Insane?”

“Yes, I’d certainly say so,” he replied, nodding his head nervously.

“An American soldier who throws himself on a live grenade to save the lives of other soldiers: insane?”

“Well, no, that’s completely different,” he said, shifting uneasily in the witness chair.

“You treat the mentally ill. Through therapy, through medication, you try to establish—reestablish—some stability, some structure to the way they think, correct?”

“Yes, that’s what we try to do.”

“And isn’t an important part of that properly functioning mental structure what I think you call a coherent belief system?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“If I could make you believe the world is flat, you probably wouldn’t be going on any very long boat trips, would you?”

“No, probably not,” he admitted, as he began to relax.

“And if I convinced you that Calvin Jeffries, or Quincy Griswald, was the worst human being alive and that you would never be safe until the one or the other was dead, that might give you a reason to kill, wouldn’t it?”

I was finished with him, but Cassandra Loescher knew right where to begin. With an impish grin, she looked first at Friedman, and then at the jury. “Is the world flat, Dr. Friedman?”

“No,” he said, relieved to be talking to someone sane.

“And is there anything Mr. Antonelli could do to convince you that it is?” He was certain I could not. “Are there many patients in the forensic ward of the state hospital who believe the earth is flat?”

“Not too many.”

“So there are limits to how far even a person with Mr. Antonelli’s fevered imagination could convince someone of something that wasn’t true?”

I could have objected, but I let it pass. There was one question I had left to ask.

“Tell us, Dr. Friedman,” I asked on redirect. “Is there a telephone in the ward, one that a patient could use to call out?”

“There’s a pay phone. Patients can use it if they have permission.”

“Do you have another witness?” Bingham asked after Friedman was excused.

“Yes, your honor. The defense intends to call Elliott Winston.”

Bingham looked at the clock on the back wall of the courtroom and then motioned for Loescher and me to approach.

“Do you know if he’s here yet?” he asked me at the side of the bench. “The hospital called just before we started this morning and said they had just left. He should be here by now.”

I did not know why they had not arrived, and I did not want to talk about what I was afraid might have happened.

“It’s almost noon anyway,” Bingham observed, making up his mind what he was going to do. “We’ll recess for lunch and start again at one-thirty. He certainly should be here by then.”

He was about to let us go, then thought of something else. “Is this going to be it? Is he your last witness?”

I was not ready to make a final decision. “Unless I call the defendant.”

“Understood,” he replied. “How long do you think this witness is going to take? Can you finish with him today?”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I assured him.

“Then if you don’t call the defendant …” He looked at Loescher. “Any rebuttal witnesses? I won’t hold you to it,” he added when she appeared reluctant to answer.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Then we could have this to the jury before the end of the day tomorrow. Good.”

With a brief explanation that the defense would call its next witness after lunch, Bingham gave the jury the admonitions they had now heard a dozen different times and excused them until court reconvened at one-thirty.

As soon as the jury was gone, all I wanted to do was to get away from the courthouse and from anyone who might want to ask me about the trial. More than anything, I wanted to be left alone. Something was going to happen and I did not know what it was. All I knew was that waiting for me on the other side of the next hour and a half was the strangest witness and the most important courtroom examination of my life.

Unless Elliott Winston did not come at all. Where was he, and what was taking so long? As I walked across the dark-shaded park on my way to the privacy and solitude of my own office, I began to think about what it must have been like for him, being driven here to the city where he had lived, to the courthouse where he had practiced law. I tried to imagine what was going through his head, let out of the hospital for the first time, that dismal, desolate place that had become the only world he knew, revisiting his life twelve years after it had been taken away from him. He would notice the way the city had changed, the way it had spread out over the other side of the river, the way the buildings downtown crowded out the light. More vivid than anything that was actually in front of his eyes, he would see the face of his wife, the way she looked the last time he had seen her, young and beautiful, cold and duplicitous, the mother of his children, the whore of the man he had trusted, the man he had revered. How could he not want to kill her?

A woman I did not know was waiting in the outer office. I was too preoccupied to notice much about her except that she had a soft round face and open, friendly eyes. Helen grabbed the stack of accumulated telephone messages and caught up with me as I dropped into the leather chair behind my desk. When she saw the look in my eye, she changed her mind.

“These can wait,” she said as she sat down on the front edge of the armchair across from me. “You need to get some rest,” she went on with a worried smile.

“Who is that?” I asked, motioning toward the doorway. “I can’t see anyone now. I have to be back in court in an hour. I don’t have the time, and even if I did …”

Helen had the expression of someone who does not know what to do. “Her name is Mrs. Lewis. She’s been here for an hour. She said she knew you a long time ago and she just wanted to say hello.”

“I don’t know her,” I said honestly.

“She seems like a very nice person. She’s visiting a friend of hers and saw your name in the paper and just wanted to say hello.

I’m sure she doesn’t want more than a few minutes.”

If I didn’t do it, Helen was going to have to get rid of her, and for all her hard surface toughness, Helen hated to be rude.

I relented, and began to regret it as soon as Mrs. Lewis appeared in the doorway and I got a clear look at her. I had never seen her in my life. I was certain of it.

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Lewis?” I asked in a perfunctory tone.

She smiled a little, then she smiled a little more. “There’s no reason for you to remember me, Mr. Antonelli. It was years ago.

You helped my mother once, and when I read your name in the paper—this trial you’re in—I thought it was about time I said thanks. You helped me, too.”

I turned up my hands, embarrassed that I did not remember her or her mother.

“You defended my mother when she was charged with the same thing my father was doing to me. My mother was Janet Larkin.”

I forgot all about the trial and about Elliott Winston. “You’re Janet Larkin’s daughter?” I asked, astonished.

“Amy,” she reminded me. “Amy Lewis now.” She laughed a husky, full-throated laugh. “Amy Lewis for going on quite a while.”

“You’re married?” I asked with a kind of stupid surprise, as if it had happened just last week and I should somehow have known.

“Two children,” she added with a certain matronly pride.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at her, shaking my head at how perfectly normal, how wonderfully well adjusted she seemed to be. “I used to worry about you. I wondered what was going to happen to you … after everything.”

A shadow crossed over her eyes, a hint of the secret I had once forced her to share with a courtroom full of strangers, and I wondered if it was a secret she had shared with anyone since. I did not ask.

“I’ve had a very good life,” she said.

Her smile was muted now, and for a while she did not say anything more. She let her eyes roam around the room, past the shelves filled with law books and the windows that gave a view of the city and the river and beyond that of the mountain that somehow gave a sense of permanence to all the transitory things that happened below it.

“It might not have been such a good life if you hadn’t saved my mother. She died two years ago, and I think I only started to realize then how much I owed her, and how much she went through because of me.”

“What happened to … ?”

“My father? I don’t know. After the trial I never saw him again.

He moved away—somewhere—I don’t know.”

“And your brother?”

A faraway look came into her eyes. “It wasn’t true, you know: what he said about my mother. Poor Gerald. It was all he could think to do; the only way he thought he could get us all back together.” Her gaze came back into focus. “That was the worst part of all of it. He knew it was a lie, but he could never bring himself to admit it, and the longer he denied it, the more real it became for him until I think he actually believed it must have been true.”

Amy Larkin Lewis looked at me with the candid eyes of a woman who had learned more painfully than most that the past is never really gone. “Sometimes I think it was my fault; then I remember how young I was. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? That Gerald and my mother should have ended up paying the price for what my father did to me.”

It was not fair, but then, it was hard to think of many things that were.

We stood up and said goodbye. She noticed the photograph on the credenza, a picture of Jennifer and me, taken just a few weeks before. “Your wife? She’s very beautiful.”

There was no reason to correct her assumption. “Yes, she is.

I’ve known her since we were kids. The strange thing is,” I remarked as I walked her to the door, “that even though there were long periods of time when I didn’t remember her, I know now that even then I was still in love with her.”

I told her how glad I was she had come and watched her for a moment as she walked down the hallway to the elevator. When I closed the door and turned around, Helen was holding the phone, her hand cupped over the receiver, waiting.

“It’s the hospital,” she explained. “The doctor wants to talk to you.”

Thirty

_______

Iwas at the courthouse a half hour early. An old man with sharp-edged shoulders and a sunken chest hobbled into the courtroom ahead of me, a newspaper folded under his arm. He sat on the aisle in the last row, just inside the door. He was a fairly frequent visitor, sometimes the only spectator in the routine trials no one remembered the moment they were over. I had never known his name, but I had been told that he had spent a long life as a lawyer and did not know what to do with himself after he retired.

“Interesting case,” he remarked as I went past him.

I kept going, pretending not to hear, but then, perhaps because I felt something—a memory of something that had not yet happened to me—I stopped and turned around.

“You were a lawyer, weren’t you?” I asked, trying to seem interested.

His gray wispy eyebrows uncovered clear, fully lucent eyes.

“Until I was seventy-five, when a cabal of notorious and incompetent doctors conspired to deprive me of the only reason I had left to live.” With a bony finger he tapped his chest. “Heart,” he explained. “That was ten years ago,” he said. “I think the doctors are all dead now.”

He got to his feet and leaned on the bench in front of him.

“Now I just come and watch. I like trials. Every one of them is a different story; every one of them has an ending and you find out what happened.”

He was eager to talk to someone, another lawyer, someone who knew what he meant.

“Life isn’t like that. You don’t know when it’s going to end, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. In the trial, you know if you’ve won or if you lost. How do you ever know that outside a courtroom?”

A troubled expression in his eyes, he thought about his own question. Then, pulling himself up, he patted my arm. “Better get ready,” he said with an encouraging smile. “Interesting trial,” he added as I turned away and walked to the front of the otherwise empty courtroom.

From my chair at the counsel table I glanced back over my shoulder, but the old man was lost in his newspaper, reading perhaps the obituaries of just a few of the people he had managed to outlive. He was right in what he had said: Trials were stories, stories about other people’s lives, told in a way that made each part fit with every other, as if they had from the very beginning followed a single design and had come at the end to form a single, coherent whole. That is what I was: a storyteller who made sense out of the lives of other people and could not make any sense out of his own. I was the storyteller who had no story of his own to tell.

The door at the back of the courtroom squeaked open and I heard the sound of shuffling feet as someone else found a place on the spectator benches. A few minutes later the door opened again. It was Harper Bryce, notebook in hand, getting ready to jot down anything he thought essential for the story he was going to write for the readers of tomorrow morning’s paper. Five minutes later, at twenty past one, the first juror, careful not to glance in my direction, made her way to the jury room. The bailiff, an amiable deputy sheriff with a gray mustache, caught up with her and opened the door. The courtroom began to fill up, and the court reporter, getting ready for the afternoon, put a new spool of paper into her machine.

My mind was a blank, and I felt nothing, not even a vague curiosity about what was going to happen. I listened to the sounds made by the courtroom as it gradually came back to life, and the only thought I had was that like the old man who sat watching somewhere behind me this was what my life had always been and would always be, the endless repetition of one trial, one story, over and over again.