Redemption (10 page)

“Do you know her?”

“Does a man ever know a woman?”

“Doesn't answer.”

“She's a good, sweet, gentle woman. She's a believing Catholic. She goes to Mass and Communion every Sunday.”

“Do you know me, Ike? I sing in the church choir. I'm a good Baptist. You were my teacher. I come here two nights a week and cook you dinner. I defend men I know are guilty. A woman can know a man, but no man really knows a woman. You've known her for a few months—how well?”

“Sarah, for God's sake, you don't think—” It was a whisper left unsaid.

“No, I don't think she killed him, but I don't know. The cops think she did and Rudge thinks she did. And we have to save her. That's my job. And she will have to take the stand.”

“No!”

“Ike, she must. It's the only way.”

“No—no, not with the man you tell me Rudge is. No, it's bad law.”

“Ike, you're a dear man, but what do you know of criminal law? I have defended three women—two black and one white, battered wives who killed their husbands. And I put every one of them on the stand—the white one against Rudge—and I won. Why the hell are you hiring me if you won't listen to me?”

“I'm ready to listen, but to put that child on the stand?”

“She's no child. She's forty-eight next month. Ike, you can fire me and get some big media-type lawyer; but if you use me, you must listen to me.”

“I listen to you, but I can't forget that I'm a lawyer.”

“You're a teacher, not a litigator. You're an upright, decent human being whose stomach would crawl at the things some litigators do. I was born to be a litigator. So if you want me in this and you want to keep your love out of jail, listen to me. We have one witness that matters—Liz—and I pledge you that after I'm finished with her, Rudge won't do one damn thing to hurt her. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Now, I'm going to need a paralegal. I know a good one. She'll cost us thirty dollars an hour.”

“Fine. What else?”

“I'll call you as a witness.”

“OK.”

“We have to rehearse it.”

“OK. I'm totally available,” I said. “But you have to keep me off the witness list, and then convince the judge.”

“I'll take care of that. Now, is there any other way to get in and out of this building without being seen?”

“You're still harping on Liz.”

“No. I don't believe she did it. Rudge does.”

I sighed and shook my head. “No other way.”

“What does that mean?” Sarah asked me.

“Never mind. Out—yes. The super lives in a basement apartment. The door there has one of those bar things; push the bar down and you can open the door. No key or keyhole. Deliveries from outside must press the buzzer.”

“The back elevator runs all night? Could a perp press the down button and get out before the door closes?”

“I suppose so.”

“I came up the back way tonight,” Sarah said, “buzzed the buzzer and the door was opened by the super. I anticipated the back way might matter, and I thought I'd try it.”

“So why ask me?”

“You live here. I don't, and I never came up the back way before. This is 1996. Could you fold a piece of paper and keep the back door from locking?”

“I suppose.”

“Don't get nettled by me, Ike. It's my way. We have to work together. I was afraid of this when you talked me into taking this case. Now I'm not a student or a cook—I am a damn good criminal lawyer. I've defended pushers and pimps and killers and hookers, and, once, a woman who killed her two children.”

Smiling wanly, I said, “I'm sorry, Sarah,” feeling like a small boy being verbally whipped by his mother. “Did you get her off?”

“I did. She and the kids hadn't eaten for four days—too proud or crazy to beg, and too ignorant and too new to Harlem to know what else to do. The paralegal's name is Jane Johnson—we call her J. J. Now, it's going to be difficult if not impossible to work out of here. Can you make some arrangements for downtown?”

“I already have. Dave Friedman has a suite in the Woolworth Building, with a small room he can lend us. They use it as an extra storage place for the library, and it has tables and chairs. He does contract work exclusively, and he's happy as a clam to be able to watch a criminal case at close quarters. He was one of my students, and he's a decent young man. He assured me that we can use his copying machine and fax, but we'll have to rent a computer and printer. I'll take care of that. Can your J. J. take dictation?”

“She spent a year as a court reporter.”

“Good. And about my attitude—you're the first counsel. You litigate. That's settled,” I assured her. “But my world has changed, Sarah. I was living my death. Now, I'm living my life. This woman has given me life and hope, and she wants to have a child with me.”

“Ike, she's—what—forty-seven, forty-eight? Besides, I thought she was barren.”

“She is willing to adopt.”

“Go slowly, please,” Sarah begged me. “I've watched the two of you together. She's good and loving and innocent, but we have a mountain to climb. I wish this was uptown. I know one cop in the first precinct, and in Manhattan South I'm an uppity nigger. That doesn't bother me too much, but it would help if I weren't a stranger there. With Rudge, it's another matter; he hates my guts, and that helps. I want the jury to see him as someone who can't wait for a hanging. He has a good case, and he convinced the grand jury to indict without much trouble; but the grand jury's one thing and the trial is something else.”

“You don't hold out much hope for my meeting with the District Attorney?”

“No. The very fact that he's an old friend mitigates against it. They have too much evidence and too much motive. If Jerry Brown finds motive in a few other women, it might help; but I want you to understand one thing, Ike: as matters stand now, at this moment, they have enough evidence for a conviction.”

“All circumstantial.”

“Ike, for God's sake, stop being a law professor and start to think like a criminal lawyer. If I had a dollar for every perp convicted on circumstantial evidence, I'd be rich. The woman you love, the woman you agreed to marry, faces the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison. This is a carefully premeditated murder. The woman—”

“You keep saying ‘woman,'” I interrupted. “You can't be sure of that. No one can be sure of that. Why can't we argue that a man is an equal possibility and my motive is as good as Liz's. Better, because I don't share her belief in God's justice or that vengeance is His. Why shouldn't I have killed him?”

“And used the lipstick? And implicated the woman you love? And sent her to prison? It won't wash. Anyway, Liz was their decision, and the lipstick makes me agree that a woman killed him. As I said, it was carefully premeditated. The woman made an appointment to see Hopper. She put the gun to the back of his head and ordered him to write a check for cash in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. Cash, because a name on the check would have given the whole game away, and when he lifted his pen to sign it, she shot him. There's a beautiful gesture of hate—one hundred thousand dollars worth of hate.”

“Liz didn't kill him:”

“No, and that's what we're going to prove. We've talked enough tonight. I'm going home. I'll see you tomorrow, and we'll look at that space in the Woolworth Building.”

Sarah left, and I turned off the lights and went into my bedroom. Liz had closed the door and was huddled under the covers and I thought she was asleep. I undressed quietly, but when I crawled into bed, she opened her eyes and kissed me.

“How is the headache?”

“All right now. The truth is, Ike, I couldn't talk about it anymore, and I didn't want to hear you and Sarah talk about it, so I closed the door. Hold me in your arms, Ike, please—I'm so frightened.”

I took her in my arms, her head on my shoulder.

“Ike, so many times I thought of him dead, of being released from my fear of him—in my heart, I wanted him dead. I have to face that.”

“No, you don't have to face it and you don't have to think anymore about it.”

“I love you, Ike.”

“I know you do.”

“You don't have to marry me, Ike. If you didn't want to marry me after all this, I'd understand.”

“I want to marry you—more than I ever wanted anything.”

“And you don't think I'm a murderer?”

“I don't think nonsense, and you're talking nonsense.”

She fell asleep in my arms, but sleep did not come so easily for me. Suspicion is an ugly little monster that crawls through your brain and leaves dirty bits of doubt behind. Was it conceivable that Elizabeth had murdered this man who had abused her so? To me, it was not, and I can say truthfully that it had never entered my mind except as a seed planted there by others. Did Sarah believe that Liz was guilty? I know that the question of guilt or innocence is not the determining factor in the acceptance of a case by a criminal lawyer—then, what did Sarah believe? Why was she so insistent on putting Liz on the stand and thereby giving the unspeakable Rudge an opportunity to cross-examine? I knew Sarah, or at least a part of her, recalling her statement that no man really knows a woman. But she had come to my house twice a week after Lena's death—cooking for me and berating me for not eating enough to keep me alive—and again and again, we had talked for hours. I had gone to court at least a dozen times to watch her defend some wretched person, and I had watched her win cases that I felt could not be won, but to put Liz on the stand? What on earth did she have in mind?

Finally I fell asleep with Liz's warm body still cradled in my arms, her soft, easy breathing marking the sleep of innocence.

FIVE

T
HE
D
ISTRICT
A
TTORNEY

T
HE
D
ISTRICT
A
TTORNEY
rose from behind his mahogany desk to greet me and to shake hands. Should I take that as a bad sign or a good sign? I wondered. He could be sealing the bond of friendship, or he could be saying, “Nothing we say now, Ike, dissolves the fact that we are old friends.” Nothing? He had already branded the woman I loved as a murderer, and he had assigned his most ferocious combat hound to bring her down.

“Ages since I've seen you. You look good—not a day older.”

It wasn't “ages” by any means. A year ago we had sat for two hours at the Harvard Club, while I unraveled one of the most complicated contracts I had ever seen. Any other lawyer would have charged his office at least a thousand dollars for the work. To me, it was simply a favor for an old friend, paid for by the accolade that I was the best contract lawyer in New York. “Why you don't take up a practice, I don't know,” he had said. “You're not that much older than I am. My word, there are a dozen firms that would roll out the red carpet for you.” I told him that I like to read, that there were at least a hundred books I should have read and never had the time for.

“What can I do for you, Ike?” he asked me, as if he didn't know why I was there, and I refrained from saying that such pleasantries were beneath him at this moment.

Instead, I put an end to good fellowship by saying flatly, “You can drop the case against Elizabeth Hopper.”

He regarded me for a long moment, and then said quietly, “You're angry, Ike. That doesn't help a serious discussion. Sit down. If you have your pipe with you, you can smoke—which is a favor I grant very few. Anyway, I love the scent of your tobacco.”

I ignored that and sat in one of the carved chairs that faced his desk. Like many people from very good families, he had inherited good furniture as well as good taste.

“You want me ‘to drop the case,'” he repeated. “What? As a favor? You know I don't operate that way. You, above all people, should know that criminal law is based on evidence; and we did not thoughtlessly indict Mrs. Hopper. We have evidence, and the grand jury accepted our evidence. I had no alternative.”

“And with over four hundred assistant DAs, you chose Michael Rudge to prosecute.”

“He's senior, and he's good. He asked for it.”

I calmed myself, knowing that anger would get me nowhere, and I said, “Every bit of evidence is circumstantial. You haven't one fact that places her at the scene of the crime. You will have my testimony that she was at my apartment in my bed at the time of the crime.”

That had been decided by Sarah and myself. The truth of the matter was that when I awoke during the night of the murder, Liz was in bed with me, cold and clinging to me. The fact that I took a sleeping pill would not come up at all, and if it did, I would lie about it. The District Attorney made a point of that.

“Ike, you should know as well as I that a man and a woman in love with each other are worthless as witnesses. An old widower who has been married for years and who has experienced the agony of living alone and then finds a younger woman who loves him will lie under oath as easily as a hardened criminal. That's a given, but we won't call either of you as a witness. You say this case is circumstantial, but we have a motive that's overwhelming. We have sent an ADA to Boston, and the police are cooperating.”

“And you still have no evidence that isn't circumstantial. Why not indict me? I had equal motive.”

“We've discussed that, and we think otherwise.”

“In other words, you intend to go ahead?”

“Unless you want to talk about a deal.”

“No, thank you,” I said bluntly, and got up and walked out of his office. Not very diplomatic; but if I lost a friend, I could tell myself that with such friends, one did not need enemies.