Authors: Allen Drury
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Genre Fiction, #Political, #Contemporary Fiction
Decision (43 page)
Debbie nodded with equal care and Regard said,
“Justice Pomeroy, if you will please take the stand.”
There was a muted stir of deep sympathy and warmth as Moss came forward; yet though his testimony was perhaps even more tragic than Tay’s, it was in a sense anticlimax. There was, after all, nothing much to add to the implacable, unchangeable fact that Sarah was dead. Nor could there be at this point much more sympathy than had already come to him and Sue-Ann in the past three weeks from all over the state and the nation. The Pomeroys were much admired and much loved; their tragedy was South Carolina’s and it had already been expressed in a hundred editorials and television and radio commentaries, many thousands of letters, telegrams, telephone calls.
He testified quietly, with obvious emotion but without the open and uncharacteristic bitterness that had momentarily overwhelmed his old friend; and although what he had to say was devastating, it basically covered old ground and no longer carried quite the same emotional impact.
When the trial was reviewed and recapitulated, as it was in almost every area of the media all across the country in the week immediately following its conclusion, it was recognized that the two witnesses most responsible for the conviction of Earle William Holgren were Boomer Johnson and Justice Taylor Barbour; and of these it was the Justice, with his heavy burden of living tragedy that he would most likely have to carry with him as long as he lived, who was generally conceded to be the final factor.
To Moss, also, Debbie put her two questions and from him elicited answers both more direct and more damaging to her client’s hopes. Although Regard again tried to protect him, and Perlie Williams sharply reminded her of his statement not an hour ago concerning her second question, Moss brushed them both aside with thanks and said he would be glad to answer.
To the question, “Do you or do you not believe in the death penalty?” he replied calmly,
“I do.”
There was the start of applause, hastily quelled in response to Judge Williams’ monitory glance, inside the room. Outside a triumphant roar of approval came from members and friends of Justice NOW!
Debbie waited patiently, if with some obvious annoyance, until it quieted. Then her second query:
“If the matter here should ultimately come before the Supreme Court of the United States, and if you should not disqualify yourself, will your daughter’s death affect your judgment concerning this defendant?”
“Miss Donnelson,” Perlie Williams began sharply, “I warned you—”
“Your honor,” Regard said simultaneously, “I thought we had been all over that—”
Moss interrupted. “That’s all right,” he said again. “I don’t mind.”
He sat for a moment considering. The room again became very still. Finally he spoke slowly and thoughtfully, looking directly at his fellow Justice, who looked somberly back.
“If you bring this case before us, Miss Donnelson, as it is quite obvious you intend to do should the jury render a verdict of guilty upon your client and should the verdict be upheld by the supreme court of the State of South Carolina, then I would have to be honest with you”—he paused and the room if possible became even quieter—“and say that, yes, if I remained on the case, I could not help but be influenced by my emotions. However—” he said, holding up a hand, very much as Tay had done in response to the immediate murmur, “however, I hold an office for which I have a great regard, in an institution for which I have a great regard. I certainly am not prepared to say at this time how
much
I might be influenced, or whether you could count on my vote one way or the other. To expect me to say that now—or even, in fact, Miss Donnelson, to
know
that with any certainty now—is a little naïve, it seems to me.”
“Would you disqualify yourself?” she asked, and again Judge Williams and Regard both started to protest. But again Moss stopped them with a mild “I don’t mind … Miss Donnelson,” he said, as though he were querying a child, “do you really expect me, at this moment, to give you an answer to that question?”
“I would appreciate it, your honor,” she told him crisply. He shook his head as if in disbelieving wonderment and said, “Miss Donnelson. Oh, Miss Donnelson! How naïve can you get? Again, I don’t know. It isn’t one of those things you just decide on the spur of the moment or with a snap of the fingers. I can’t tell you until I actually face it. And although you were precluded from asking this same question of Justice Barbour, which I guess you intended to do”—she nodded—“I expect if you had asked it of him that his answer would have been exactly the same as mine.”
He looked at Tay, and the audience turned and looked at him, too; and Tay also nodded, expression grim.
“There you have it, Miss Donnelson,” Moss said softly, and for the only time his hatred for her client came into his voice. “You and your friend just don’t know, do you? You just don’t know what might happen, if you get up to the Supreme Court of the United States. You’ll just have to guess, won’t you? You can’t really plan, you just won’t know ’til the time comes. I feel sorry for you both, Miss Donnelson, I really do. But there it is.”
“Your honor,” she said to Perlie Williams, “I have no further questions of this witness.”
“Probably wise, counsel,” Perlie said dryly, prompting sarcastic, approving laughter from courtroom and Justice NOW! “Probably wise… Justice Pomeroy, thank you very much, sir, you are excused.” He turned to Regard. “Counsel?”
“Your honor,” Regard said, “the State of South Carolina rests its case, reserving summation until the defense has also completed its case.”
The courtroom seemed to relax for a few moments. But when Debbie stood and addressed the bench, something in her rigid back and tone of voice brought an immediate hush again.
“Your honor,” she said, sounding strained and unhappy, “as counsel for the defense I have an announcement to make to the court. I wish to emphasize that while the first portion of what I am about to announce is my decision, taken in consultation with my client, the second portion is solely and entirely his own idea. It is a decision taken by him over my strenuous and repeated objections. But he is determined upon it, your honor, and this being so I have no choice but to abide by his wishes. I just want to emphasize that it is not my doing and the results are not my responsibility.”
“I think you’ve made that clear enough,” the defendant said in an impatient voice that carried clearly in the excited hush. “Just get on with it now, okay?”
“Yes, your honor,” Debbie said with sudden anger. “I shall ‘get on with it.’ Firstly, the defense will call no witnesses—”
There was a gasp of surprise, followed by a murmur of voices despite Perlie Williams’ stern looking about. Several reporters half rose, poised to dash out with bulletins. The pool television camera swung in upon her tense, determined face.
“—since we believe the prosecution has not proved its charges beyond a reasonable doubt and because we rely on the good sense, honesty and integrity of this jury and the traditional American principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty. No such proof has been produced here and we do not believe any witnesses from our side could give additional force to what the record already clearly shows.”
She paused, took a drink of water and resumed, looking if possible even more tense.
“At his request, however”—her audience, if possible, growing even quieter—“the defense will put one person on the stand. I have here a written notice, addressed to the court, of his desire to waive his constitutional right against self-incrimination. I now hand it to the court.”
She stepped forward, handed a paper to Judge Williams and stepped back while he took it, read it without expression, and handed it to the bailiff, who handed it to the official reporter. Then he looked down for a long, thoughtful moment upon the defendant.
“Earle William Holgren,” he said. “This is your own decision, made without coercion from this court or anyone else?”
“It is.”
“Please come forward and be sworn.”
“He’s crazy,” Moss whispered to Tay as the room and the crowd outside exploded, as spectators gabbled, reporters dashed and the television camera swung wildly from Debbie’s grim face to Earle’s triumphant expression to the elder Holgrens’ anguished dismay to the two Justices’ own startled disbelief.
“He has a monumental ego,” Tay responded, “which I guess is craziness. And it’s going to be the death of him.”
“By God,” Moss said, voice rising savagely against the hubbub. “I hope so.”
***
Chapter 8
The testimony the defendant gave under the questioning of his counsel and the cross-examination of the state received substantial praise from some of the major media, but in the minds of the great majority of his countrymen it really had very little to do with the crimes at Pomeroy Station. Very little—or everything, as Moss murmured to Tay as they listened to the destroyer of their children duck, dodge, defy and orate. Very little about the specific things with which he was charged—everything about the state of mind that had made them possible. The clichés of that small but much-publicized segment of a generation that had lived outside reality, and now was frozen in time with nothing for company but its own twisted misconceptions of the world, passed in review. Along with them went a contemptuous disregard for human life, the law and the ordinary decencies by which most people live as the simple price of survival, which linked the defendant directly to the rising tide of street crime, murder, rapes and robberies throughout the land. Those who had regarded Earle Holgren as a symbol of all that was wrong with the public safety felt more than justified in making his case the focus of their organized efforts.
“They’re all alike!” was the general reaction.
And at heart, they were: animals, no matter if they were as sophisticated as he or as cretinous as the stabbers in the street—lost, abandoned, bereft—outside the pale of society and the necessary restraints of organized living.
Not, of course, that the defendant would ever admit this. He clung tenaciously to his lifelong conviction that he was something different and something special, because to admit otherwise would have been to shatter his very being. The attorney general, who had studied him with great care in the past three weeks, realized this and concentrated on the ego that challenged him with bitter venom. The defendant’s counsel did what she could, with little help from him, to protect him.
For several minutes after Earle took his seat on the stand, Regard went through an elaborate charade of searching through his papers, conferring with the two junior aides who had been with him throughout the trial, apparently for the purpose of carrying his briefcase since he had never before sought their opinions on anything; and generally consuming time. On each occasion when Debbie thought he was ready and started to ask her client a question, Regard would raise a supplicating hand and burrow into his papers again. Presently a little titter began to run through the audience as Debbie became more and more openly annoyed and on the stand a deep and frustrated scowl settled on the face of the defendant. Finally he could stand it no longer and turned to Perlie Williams to say sharply,
“Your honor—”
“Yes,” Perlie said in an icy voice. “For what purpose, and on what excuse, does the witness directly address the bench?”
“For the purpose of getting this show on the road,” Earle snapped, “and because I am getting damned well fed up with the antics of that clown over there—”
“Your honor!” Debbie and Regard cried together, she in genuine alarm, he in genuine anger. Judge Williams was ahead of them.
“Do you wish to be held in contempt of court, Mr. Holgren?” he demanded. Earle shook his head and, in one of his lightning changes of mood, grinned amicably.
“No,
sir,
your honor,” he said expansively, “how could I be? I feel no contempt for
you,
sir, only for
him.
And he isn’t the court, I don’t believe. He just happens to be here.”
“He is here for the purposes of the court,” Perlie Williams began, “and therefore—” Then he shook his head in disbelief and broke it off. “If counsel for the state is ready,” he said, “suppose we proceed.”
Regard flushed, the crowd stirred, Earle beamed with elaborate complacency.
“Your honor,” Debbie said in a shaken voice, “if I may begin with a few questions for the witness—”
“He’s your client, Miss Donnelson,” Judge Williams noted. “And your problem. You handle him any way you like. But I will say to him”—and he stared at Earle, who ignored him and stared out into some distance that prompted him to keep on smiling—“that if he wishes to avoid citation for contempt he will refrain from too much cuteness. What he does to his own cause is his business, but respect for the law is my business. Remember that!”
“Yes, your honor,” Earle said, still not looking at him but smiling now at the jury. “I’ll remember that.”
And the members of the jury, curiously enough, were suddenly leaning forward intently, paying little notice to anyone else, concentrating all their interest and attention upon him. “Score one for the bastard,” Moss muttered. “He has them where he wants them, already.”
And from then on, until Regard finally succeeded in prying them loose, he did not let them go. As far as he was concerned, there was no one in the world but that jury. He courted them, he frightened them, he wooed them—he fascinated them. “It’s as though he were a snake,” Tay commented at one point, and they a flock of hypnotized birds. Debbie gave him his openings and away he went. Within a few minutes it was almost—almost—conceivable that if they had been required to vote then, they might have failed to achieve unanimity and thrown the case. That they finally did not was a tribute to Regard but even more, perhaps, to the insistent demands of Justice NOW! whose members, outside and free from his hypnotic personality, kept up a distant but continuing reminder that a new era had dawned in American justice.
“Mr. Holgren,” Debbie began, “what was your interest in the atomic energy plant at Pomeroy Station?”
Earle considered.
“I really had none, counsel, aside from sharing the views of millions of concerned Americans that atomic power is a dangerous, and dangerously unnecessary, enterprise for us to be engaged in. I’m against it, because it is so dangerous and as such, in a general way, I was against—still am against—the Pomeroy Station plant. But I had no desire to hurt it or in any way to interfere with its operation. It just made me sad. I hated to see it, but”—he sighed heavily—“what can a citizen who wants to protect himself and posterity do?”
“It didn’t occur to you to do anything specific?” Debbie inquired. “Such as blow it up, in the manner mentioned in the indictment entered here?”
“No, ma’am,” Earle said in the same respectful tone. “Why would I want to do such a thing?”
“It is so charged,” she said.
“Has anyone proved it?” he inquired like a flash, and several members of the jury couldn’t keep from smiling a little.
“Not to my knowledge,” Debbie said and paused to let it sink in. “Tell me, Mr. Holgren, why you were, as one of the workers at Pomeroy Station put it the other day, ‘around the place a lot’? Were you there so frequently as that would indicate, and if so, why?”
“First of all,” Earle said reasonably, “I really wasn’t there all that much. I used to jog past there quite a lot before”—he looked straight at a couple of ladies on the jury and smiled—“before I got slowed down a bit in the last three weeks. It’s healthy.” He stretched and spread his legs a bit. “I like to be healthy.” The ladies, in spite of themselves, smiled back.
“Did you live alone, Mr. Holgren?”
“Nope,” he said. “I had a girl friend—we weren’t married, but we’d been together awhile. We had a little boy, too. They were about the same ages as those poor folks they found in the cave.” He shook his head, grieved by the enormity of it. “That was a very sad thing,” he said gravely. “Very sad.”
“Where are your girl friend and the baby now?”
“Took off,” he said. “Just took off. Someplace. Up north, maybe—down south—out west. Who knows?” Again he shook his head sadly. “That’s the way it always seems to happen with me. I just don’t have any luck with love, that’s all. Never have had.”
“I don’t see why not,” one of the jury ladies whispered to another. “He’s the
cutest
thing!”
“Except for the eyes,” the other lady, more level-headed, replied. “Look at the eyes.” She shivered suddenly. “He gives
me
the creeps.”
“Mr. Holgren,” Debbie said, “were the young woman and the baby boy found in the cave your girl friend and your baby boy?”
“Has anybody identified them as being such?” he inquired in surprise.
“You heard two witnesses day before yesterday testify that they thought they might be. They couldn’t be sure.”
He shrugged.
“Oh, well. ‘Might be.’ If apples were peaches, lots of things might be. But then, they aren’t.” He smiled at the jury again, a confidential, skeptical look. “No, I’m afraid not. They showed them to me—
he
did”—he nodded toward Regard without looking at him—“but it wasn’t anybody I’d ever seen before in my life. I just didn’t know them.” He did look at Regard. “Sorry about that.”
Regard gave him a long look, quite expressionless. Earle, unmoved, stared back.
“Did you see the witness Boomer Johnson up in the woods above the plant prior to the explosion?” Debbie asked, suppressing an inner shiver but telling herself that he was her client, and Harry Aboud had asked her to do it, and that was what lawyers were for.
“Boomer?” Earle repeated, and his eyes came to rest for a moment on the big round saucers of Boomer, sitting with his mother toward the back now that his part of it was over. For a moment Earle stared straight at him and instinctively Boomer shivered too and clutched his mother’s arm. She tried defiantly to stare back but Earle wasn’t interested in her. It was almost as though he were memorizing Boomer. Then he smiled and turned his terrible eyes away—leastways,
Boomer
thought they were terrible and he was scared-to-death, and so was his mother.
“Boomer?” Earle said again. “No, I don’t remember seeing any Boomer up there. Because of course,” he added smoothly as there was a catch of breath through the room, “I wasn’t up there, you see, so how could I see any Boomer? And how could any Boomer see me?”
“He says he did,” Debbie said.
“Oh, I
heard
him say it,” Earle said indifferently, “but you know kids, particularly black kids. They’re always imagining things… No, I didn’t see any Boomer because I couldn’t have, not being there. And he didn’t see me.”
Yes, I did,
Boomer cried in his mind.
Oh yes I did, you awful, terrible man.
But he didn’t dare say anything aloud, of course, and his eyes just got a little bigger, if that was possible, and he clutched his mother’s arm a little harder, and she got even more frightened of that terrible man, and his thoughts about Boomer, than she was already.
“What is your opinion of the Supreme Court?” Debbie inquired.
“The U.S. Supreme Court?” Earle said. “Why—okay, I guess. I haven’t had much to do with it”—he grinned at the jury and more of them than expected to found themselves grinning back—“but I guess it’s all right. I certainly don’t wish it any harm, even though
he”—
and again he tossed a nod toward Regard—“seems to have some bee in his bonnet about it. I couldn’t care less, really. They do their thing, I do mine. I mean, isn’t that true of most Americans, the way they feel about the Court? I mean, they’re just”—he flung his left hand in the air—“up there. I mean—that’s it, right?”
“Then you don’t bear any particular animosity toward Justice Pomeroy?”
“How could I?” he asked, puzzled. “I don’t even know the man. I never even saw him until this whole stupid mixup began.”
“Even though you have testified strongly that you are completely opposed to nuclear power, you did not blow up, or attempt to blow up, the Pomeroy Station plant with the added objective of killing or injuring Justice Pomeroy, who was to be principal speaker at the dedication?”
Earle looked amazed, and disgusted as well.
“Now—now, look. How ridiculous can you get? Why would I want to do that?”
“That isn’t what I’m asking,” Debbie said. “I’ll get to the why in a minute. I just want to know if you did.”
“Has anybody proved it?” Earle inquired blandly and Regard said, “Christ” sotto-voce but quite audibly enough for Perlie Williams to give him a look—not unsympathetic, but a look.
“No testimony has been adduced,” Debbie said.
“Good,” Earle said. “‘No testimony has been adduced.’ Well, good for me, then. I guess the answer to your question must be No, then, right? Absent testimony adduced, that is.”
“It isn’t my place to make judgments,” Debbie said. “That’s the jury’s job.”
“And I certainly hope,” Earle said, turning upon them a sudden dazzling smile, “that they will do their job to the
very best
of their ability. In fact, I know they will—fairly, honestly, without fear or favor, not yielding to public clamor or pressure, but upright, objective, compassionate and honest, like true sons and daughters of old Carolina. I
know
that.”
“I can hear ‘Dixie,’” Tay murmured. “He’s unbelievable.” “And getting away with it, or close to it,” Moss agreed grimly. “Look at them!”
And indeed most members of the jury were, for the moment at least, obviously enthralled. Only two or three continued to look skeptical, including the lady who was disturbed by the defendant’s eyes.
“You say, then, that you did not intend or inflict any harm upon the Pomeroy Station plant, and that you did not intend or inflict any harm upon the person of Justice Pomeroy. And that you have no animosity toward the Supreme Court of the United States and no desire to do harm to it through the person of Justice Pomeroy.”
“I couldn’t have stated it better myself,” Earle said admiringly, and again turned directly to the jury. “Isn’t she wonderful? You see why I selected her to be my lawyer. I knew she was good. But she’s
really
good.”
“You are too kind,” Debbie remarked, and her client shot her a sudden sharp look that momentarily changed his face entirely; but it was gone as instantly as it came when she went on calmly, “When did you break off relations with your parents, Mr. Holgren?”
“About age twenty,” he said, his eyes flicking quickly and impersonally over the sad, strained faces of the two distinguished old people sitting in the front row. “I just couldn’t take it any longer.”
“Take what?”
“Being smothered to death. Having my life lived for me. Being told what to do all the time and being disapproved and punished when I did what
I
wanted to do. Being ruled. And overruled.”
