Redemption (12 page)

SIX

C
HARLIE
B
ROWN

W
HEN YOU REACH
my age, friends become fewer and increasingly precious. I can write down the names of a hundred people I know well enough to call and receive a pleasant reply when they pick up the telephone, but they're in another category. Take the District Attorney for example. On and off, I had known him for at least twenty-five years—but as a friend? When had I dined at his house? When had he reached out to me for other than a favor—
you, Ike, the best mind in New York on contracts
—when? To be used is flattering, and a man loves flattery. When I was young, I turned to older people. I suppose that's only natural for someone in my position, but you grow old and they pass away; and then you come to an age when each friend is a particular jewel, very valued. If you have, at my age, half a dozen of such, you are a fortunate man indeed.

Charlie Brown was an old, good friend. He called and said we must talk—and seriously—and I met him in the faculty lounge at the university a few days following my visit to the District Attorney. After some words about the weather, Mayor Giuliani, and the gonadal drive of our president, he turned to his profession and remarked that he liked to think of himself as a good shrink, if only because one learns more through teaching than practicing—although he has never given up his practice.

“The point is,” he said, “that teaching, one never surrenders the process of self-examination. Teaching, you must examine and explain. The kids demand it. The patients don't.”

“Which leads you where, Charlie?”

“To places where angels fear to tread. I want to talk to you as a psychologist and as a dear friend. You're a proud man, Ike, and as soon as I step out of line, you're going to be sore as hell at me. I want to avoid that.”

I shrugged. “Let's see.”

“You've never gone in for psychoanalysis, have you?”

“No. It's not my thing, Charlie.”

“Well, it has its value, however besmirched the good Sigmund is these days.”

“You don't think that Burns said it all when he wrote, ‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, / To see ourselves as others see us'? The trouble is that the good Lord withholds that giftie very jealously. Of course, one makes guesses, Charlie. Here's old Ike with a woman half his age whom he has decided to be in love with. You're almost old enough to remember the Peaches Browning case. An old man loves a young woman, and he becomes a clown, and the tabloids have a great basket of plums. Add murder, and you even knock the terrorists off the front page. We're obsessed with murder, Charlie. It's the great American thing. What could you possibly say to me that would be any worse than what our great media has already done to me and to that poor woman whose soul has been torn to shreds by a monster?”

“Are you in love, Ike?”

I thought about that for a while before I answered. “Kids fall in love. It's a process of the ductless glands, a gift from a God who desired this thing we call the human race to perpetuate itself—for what purpose I surely don't know.”

Charlie nodded and waited.

“I'm a lonely old man. Is that what you were going to tell me?”

“Partly.”

“And I'm Jewish.”

“Thank God, I'm not,” Charlie said. “Too many guilts.”

“I mean I saved her life. I owe her.”

“No. She owes you.”

“I see it differently, but we're not going to argue about that.”

“No. I want to talk about this objectively. I've been following the case, reading every word about it I can find. You can't fault me for that.”

“You and several million others.”

“They're not your friends, Ike. I don't enjoy seeing you mauled and hurt. Fame is the curse of our society, and this kind of fame is absolutely the worst. I'm not here with apologies. I want to help you.”

“Charlie, I don't need help.”

“Oh, but you damn well do. Now I'm out of line, and if I go on talking, I'll be even more out of line. Either you listen to what I have to say, or you tell me to shut up and that's the end of it.”

“No. I want to hear everything you have to say.”

“Clint Gordon was here the other day. He lectured at the Law School, and afterwards, he was in here having a drink. Someone introduced him to me. Very curious about an old friend of Ike Goldman—I suppose because he's professionally pissed off at your hiring Sarah Morton instead of some big player like himself. Of course, he sees himself as king shit in criminal cases, and those bastards are all ego. He feels that the people have a solid case and that your Elizabeth will spend the rest of her life in prison.”

“I'm not impressed.”

“He wanted to know whether I knew Liz, and what did I think psychologically.”

“What do you think psychologically?”

“Do you want to hear that from me?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right. The gesture of having Hopper write out a check for one hundred thousand dollars and then putting a bullet into his head before he could sign it signifies a hatred so filled with rage and contempt that it calls for a history. You told me that Elizabeth has a history of abuse and even what can be considered torture, both physical and mental. If her history of what she suffered at the hand of Hopper can be trusted—even the little you have told me—and if in all that time she never fought back, never resisted, then the rage has been bottled up.”

I took out my pipe and stuffed it.

“They don't like that here,” Charlie said.

“I won't light it. So you think Liz killed him?”

“Put yourself in her place.”

“I can't do that, Charlie. No one can inhabit another's mind. I was married for years, and now when I look back, I realize how little I knew my wife. Men and women—there's an ocean between us. Men make wars and kill.”

“Have you ever faced the thought that Liz might have killed him?”

“No. Liz could not kill a rabbit.”

“Hopper was not a rabbit. Would you have killed him, if you'd had the opportunity?”

“Where is this leading us, Charlie?”

“You told me you had decided to marry her.”

“Yes.”

“You're standing by that?”

“Yes.”

“Ike—Ike, my dear friend—for God's sake, think. Who is she? She's a stray you found on a bridge, with no background, no family, no education, and a Catholic—a Catholic, Ike.”

By now, I was blazing inside, but I controlled myself. There's no cord attached to words spoken in rage; you can't pull them back. Charlie Brown was the best friend I had in this life, and I was too old to make new ones. “Charlie,” I said softly, “what kind of a background do I come from?”

“Your father was a judge.”

“Charlie, did I give you that impression? My pop was a Justice of the Peace. There were only seven Jewish families in Oneonta then. He had a tailor shop. They made him JP because they wanted a Jew on the town council—just to show how broad-minded they were. And what's this about Liz being a Catholic?”

“Sorry. I should not have said that, Ike. But it's a different world.”

“Oh, is it? Charlie, just allow me a word or two about this waif. She's fluent in Latin. I've been trying to read Tacitus in the original. She translates on sight, as she reads. Her French is perfect, and she knows more about art than anyone I ever met. When we go to a museum, I ask the questions and she answers them. I've talked more deeply to her and more openly in a week than I did with Lena in a lifetime. She loves me, and for the first time in my life I have the feeling of being really cherished. I am the luckiest man on earth. Instead of dying bit by bit, I have her. Why she wants me, I don't know, though I did save her life. She was crushed almost to death by that bastard she was married to—and then, day by day, what was in her unfolded and freed itself. You think she could have killed Hopper. Charlie, she didn't kill him. I know that.”

“You're thinking that it's hard to kill. You're a man of peace, and you can't face the very notion of taking another man's life.”

By now, I was becoming tired of the whole discussion. What kind of gift was Charlie bringing me? Swallowing my anger, I told myself that I would not lose my temper, I would not hit back at him, I would not thank him for trying to convince me that I must not plan to marry a murderer. I took the words from him and said, “But you're convinced that she will not win, that she'll be found guilty and sentenced to life in prison?”

“That's what Clint Gordon said.”

“And what would you advise, my friend?”

“Right now, you hate my guts,” Charlie said.

“No. I don't.”

“Then bring someone like Gordon into the case and wash your hands of it.”

“Oh, Jesus, Charlie!” I sighed, almost at a loss for words. “You know, like so many Jews, I could fantasize myself with a gun to Adolf Hitler's head. I couldn't pull the trigger.”

“I could. Oh, shit—why did I ever start this?”

“You care for me. Thank God, a few people do.”

That was the end of my discussion with Charlie. We shook hands and remained friends, but he had cut deep. The easiest person to doubt is oneself. What did I know of Elizabeth Hopper? I had made myself a picture of her as a simple, direct, and open person, but had defended her to Charlie as a well-educated and complex woman who could read Tacitus in the original Latin, who knew more of art than I had ever dreamed of knowing. My wife, Lena, had been direct and open, content with being a teacher of mathematics and dedicated to her single child and to myself. I had known her entirely, or at least I thought so. I knew her family, her friends, her dreams. If I didn't adore her passionately, I had lived happily with her.

And I told Charlie, fervently, that Liz was incapable of murder. But Charlie obviously didn't believe that, and the District Attorney did not believe that. I knew one thing about the Irish—they dissemble easily. The thought that Liz would steal my gun, put me in harm's way, and use it to kill a man whom she loathed, was something I had never countenanced. But it faced me now.

It was not that they had a shaky case against Liz—and evidently Clint Gordon felt it was far from shaky—it was the thought that she had taken my gun.

I dismissed it. I told myself that even the thought was beyond decency, and I would never allow it into my mind again. But the thought did not dismiss me.

SEVEN

T
HE
T
RIAL

I
HAD NOT
anticipated the ravenous interest the trial would arouse in the media, but after all, it was the trial of a woman accused of murdering a notorious Wall Street broker and onetime Olympic star, already in the news for doing his clients out of fifteen million dollars. It had all the elements required to arouse a jaded public, tired of the O. J. Simpson trial and the arguments its aftermath had provoked, and the battered wife and the lipstick note brought everyone in, from the
New York Times
to the television networks.

Judge David Kilpatrick presided, an elderly gentleman with long sideburns and a large mustache, and small steely blue eyes that promised nothing for anyone. I had never met him, which I now felt was all to the good. When he walked in for the first time, he made a simple statement: “I will tolerate no disorder in my court—no disorder of any kind. I want that understood.”

Sarah had given me a quick rundown on him: “He's utterly technical and very good. A walking repository of law. He's a sour man, but equally for the defense and the prosecution. A good Catholic. Married over forty years to the same woman, two daughters. But expect no sympathy from him on that count.”

He was good in the selection of the jury. He came down hard on Rudge's attempt to load the jury with men, and we ended up with three black women and two white women. The remaining seven were men, but three alternates were women, one black. Sarah was more than satisfied. Rudge had run out of preemptors when we accepted a black woman named Fay Jones. Sarah's mother had known her. She was a woman in her fifties who had done housework and put her son through college. Sarah had never met her, but Sarah's mother had talked about her with endless admiration. She had married a worthless bum who had beaten her and then walked out on her forever when her son was three years old. Three of the men were married. One was a widower.

Rudge's assistant, Helen Slater, had been a student of mine at Columbia Law. I remembered her now as a bright, perky young woman, who even then was determined to become a prosecutor. She shook hands with me decently and wished me the best, saying, “Who ever thought, Professor, that I'd be working against you. I know you can't wish me the best.”

“I'm afraid I can't,” I replied, rather surly. This was neither a game nor a drama to me.

“It's how the cards fall,” she said cheerily, and I thought about what Sarah had said of a criminal trial as theater. I was still somewhat uncertain about what Sarah's trial plan was, although we had discussed it and I had the gist of it watching her rehearse.

Liz was strangely calm. She told me that she had gone to confession a few days before the trial began, and she was at peace with herself. In the months that had passed since I met her, I had thought that I knew her, body and soul, better indeed than I had ever known Lena, my wife; but this present Liz, a woman facing life in prison, made me wonder. I had read somewhere that a Catholic who kills can confess to murder and receive absolution if he or she professes repentance, a determination never to repeat the offense, and a belief in God. As I have said, I disliked myself for even harboring the thought of this, and my own belief in a just God was far from firm. But the woman who sat beside me in the courtroom, her small hands folded in her lap, her face calm and reposed, made me realize that there were depths in her I never plumbed. Here she was on trial for murder, with the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison; then where was the hopeless, terrified woman I had seen on the bridge? Had I done this? Then, whatever she might have done was also a part of my doing. Yet, still I attempted to believe in her totally, and I told myself again and again that she was innocent.