Snow Falling on Cedars (49 page)

‘I see,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘And then what?’

‘We sat and talked,’ said Kabuo. ‘I ate lunch and took care of some bills I had to pay. About five I headed down to the docks.’

‘About five,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘And did you stop anywhere along the way? Errands, perhaps? Did you visit anyone or go anywhere? Speak to anybody about anything?’

‘No,’ said Kabuo. ‘I left around five and went straight to my boat. That was all there was to it.’

‘You didn’t, say, stop at the store to stock up on supplies? Nothing of that sort, Mr. Miyamoto?’

‘No.’

‘At the docks,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘Did you see anyone? Did you stop at another boat for any reason, speak to any other fishermen?’

‘Straight to my boat,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘I didn’t stop for anything, no.’

‘Straight to your boat,’ Alvin Hooks repeated. ‘And there you were, preparing for a night of fishing, when the sheriff came along with his warrant.’

‘That’s right,’ said Kabuo. ‘He searched my boat.’

Alvin Hooks crossed over to the evidence table and selected a folder from it. ‘The sheriff indeed searched your boat,’ he agreed. ‘And the details of his search, Mr. Miyamoto, are recorded in this investigative report I’m holding right here in my hand. In fact, in the course of cross-examining the sheriff, your counsel – Mr. Gudmundsson – made reference to this report, including an item on page twenty-seven which says – ’Alvin Hooks shuffled through the pages, then stopped and tapped his forefinger against it, tapped it three times, emphatically. Once again he turned toward the jurors, swiveling the sheriff’s report in their direction as if to suggest they read along with him despite their distance across the courtroom.

‘Now this is highly problematic,’ Alvin Hooks said. ‘Because the sheriff’s report states that in your battery well there were two D-6 batteries. “Two D-6 batteries in well. Each six celled” – that’s what it says, right here.’

‘My boat runs on D-6s,’ answered Kabuo. ‘There are many boats that do so.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘I know about that. But what
about the fact that there were
two
batteries?
Two
batteries, Mr. Miyamoto. If your story is true, if you loaned one to Carl Heine as you say you did – if you pulled one out of your own battery well in order to loan it to Carl Heine – shouldn’t there have been just
one
present when the sheriff made his search? I’ve asked you about the course of your day, how you spent your afternoon, and at no point did you tell us that you stopped at the chandlery to purchase yourself a new battery, at no point did you say anything suggestive of time spent purchasing or finding a new battery. You didn’t tell us that you spent any time getting another battery down in your well – so why, Mr. Miyamoto, why did the sheriff find
two
batteries on your boat if you’d loaned one to Carl Heine?’

The accused man looked once again at the jurors and let a moment of silence pass. Once again his face showed nothing; it was impossible to know what he was thinking. ‘I had a spare battery in my shed,’ he said evenly. ‘I brought it down and put it in before the sheriff showed up with his warrant. That’s why he found two batteries when he searched. One of them had just gone in.’

Alvin Hooks put the sheriff’s report in its place on the evidence table. With his hands behind his back, as though contemplating this answer, he made his way toward the jurors’ platform, where he stopped and turned to face the accused man, nodding at him slowly.

‘Mr. Miyamoto,’ he said, and his tone suggested admonition. ‘You are under oath here to tell the truth. You’re under oath to be honest with the court, to be forthcoming with the truth about your role in the death of Carl Heine. And now it seems to me that once again you wish to change your story. You wish to say that you brought a battery from home and inserted it in your battery well during the hour before your boat was searched, or something of that sort – you’re adding this now to what you said before. Well then, all right, that’s all well and good, but why didn’t you tell us this earlier? Why do you change your battery story every time a new question is raised?’

‘These things happened almost three months ago,’ said Kabuo. ‘I don’t remember every detail.’

Alvin Hooks held his chin in his fingers. ‘You’re a hard man to trust, Mr. Miyamoto,’ he sighed. ‘You sit before us with no expression, keeping a poker face through – ’

‘Objection!’ cut in Nels Gudmundsson, but Judge Lew Fielding was already sitting upright and looking sternly at Alvin. ‘You know better than that, Mr. Hooks,’ he said. ‘Either ask questions that count for something or have a seat and be done with it. Shame on you,’ he added.

Alvin Hooks crossed the courtroom one more time and sat down at the prosecutor’s table. He picked up his pen and, revolving it in his fingers, looked out the window at the falling snow, which seemed to be slowing finally. ‘I can’t think of anything more,’ he said. ‘The witness is free to step down.’

Kabuo Miyamoto rose in the witness box so that the citizens in the gallery saw him fully – a Japanese man standing proudly before them, thick and strong through the torso. They noted his bearing and the strength in his chest; they saw the sinews in his throat. While they watched he turned his dark eyes to the snowfall and gazed at it for a long moment. The citizens in the gallery were reminded of photographs they had seen of Japanese soldiers. The man before them was noble in appearance, and the shadows played across the planes of his face in a way that made their angles harden; his aspect connoted dignity. And there was nothing akin to softness in him anywhere, no part of him that was vulnerable. He was, they decided, not like them at all, and the detached and aloof manner in which he watched the snowfall made this palpable and self-evident.

Alvin Hooks, in his final words to the court, characterized the accused man as a murderer in cold blood, one who had decided to kill another man and had executed his plan faithfully. He told the court that Kabuo Miyamoto had been driven by hatred and cold desperation; that after so many years of coveting his lost strawberry fields he had found himself, in early September, in a position to lose them for good. And so he’d gone to Ole Jurgensen and heard from Ole that the land was sold, and then he’d gone to Carl Heine and Carl had turned him away. He’d pondered this crisis during his hours at sea and come to the conclusion that unless he acted, his family’s land – for from his point of view it
was
his family’s land – would slip from his grasp forever. Like the man he was – a strong man of bold character, trained from an early age at the art of stick fighting; a man Sergeant Victor Maples had described for the court as not only capable of committing murder but willing to commit it as well – this strong, cold, unfeeling man decided to solve his problem. He decided to end the life of another man who stood between him and the land he coveted. He decided that if Carl Heine was dead, Ole would sell him the seven acres.

So it was that he trailed Carl to the fishing grounds at Ship Channel Bank. He followed him out, set his net above him, and watched while the fog concealed everything. Kabuo Miyamoto was a patient man and waited until the deepest part of the night to do what he had in mind. He knew that Carl was not far off, a hundred and fifty yards at best; he could hear his engine in the fog. He listened and then finally, at about one-thirty, he laid hard on his foghorn. In this way he attracted his victim.

Carl, Alvin Hooks explained, came out of the fog towing his net behind – he’d been nearly ready to pick salmon from it – to find the accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, ‘adrift’ and ‘in need of help’. It was here, he said, that the treachery of the defendant was surely most horrible – for he relied on the code among fishermen to assist one another in times of trouble and on the residue of friendship he knew remained from the youth he and Carl had passed together. Carl, he must have said, I am sorry for what has come between us, but here on the water, adrift in the fog, I plead with you for your help. I beg you to tie up and help me, Carl. Please don’t leave me like this.

Imagine, Alvin Hooks implored the jurors, leaning toward them with his hands outstretched like a man petitioning God – imagine this good man stopping to help his enemy in the middle of the night at sea. He moors his boat to his enemy’s boat, and while he is busy making fast a line – you will note there is no sign, anywhere, of struggle, such was the treachery of the defendant over there – his enemy leaps aboard with a fishing gaff and strikes a blow to his head. And so this good man falls dead – or nearly dead, that is. He is unconscious and mortally wounded.

Let us imagine, too, said Alvin Hooks, the defendant rolling Carl Heine over a gunnel and the splash on the black night water. The sea closes over Carl Heine – it seeps into his pocket watch, stopping it at 1:47, recording the time of his death – and the defendant stands watching the place where it seals up, leaving no trace behind. But just under the surface the tidal current is working – stronger than the defendant had imagined it – and carries Carl into the folds of his own net, which still trails out behind. The buckle of his bib overalls catches in the webbing and Carl hangs there, under the sea, the evidence of Kabuo Miyamoto’s crime waiting to be discovered. It is one of three things the defendant hasn’t counted on – the body itself, the bloody fishing gaff, and the mooring line he’d left behind in his haste to leave this scene of murder.

Now he sits in this court before you, Alvin Hooks told
the jurors. Here he is in a court of law with the evidence displayed and the testimony given, the facts all aired and the arguments made and the truth of the matter manifest. There was no uncertainty any more and the jurors were bound to do their duty to the people of Island County. ‘This is not a happy occasion,’ Alvin Hooks reminded them. ‘We are talking about convicting a man of murder in the first degree. We’re talking about
justice,
finally. We’re talking about looking clearly at the defendant and seeing the truth self-evident in him and in the facts present in this case. Take a good look, ladies and gentlemen, at the defendant sitting over there. Look into his eyes, consider his face, and ask yourselves what your duty is as citizens of this community.’

Just as he had throughout the trial, Nels Gudmundsson rose with a geriatric awkwardness that was painful for the citizens in the gallery to observe. By now they had learned to be patient with him as he cleared his throat and wheezed into his handkerchief. They had learned to anticipate how he would hook his thumbs behind the tiny black catch buttons of his suspenders. The jurors had noted how his left eye floated and how the light winked against its dull, glassy surface as it orbited eccentrically in its socket. They watched him now as he gathered himself up and cleared his throat to speak.

In measured tones, as soberly as he could, Nels recited the facts as he understood them: Kabuo Miyamoto had gone to Ole Jurgensen to inquire about his land. Mr. Jurgensen had directed him to Carl Heine, and Kabuo had sought out Carl. They had spoken and Kabuo had come to believe that Carl was pondering the matter. And so, believing this, he waited. He waited and on the evening of September 15 a circumstance of fate, a coincidence, brought him through the fog at Ship Channel Bank to where Carl was stranded at sea. Kabuo had done what he could in these circumstances to assist the friend he had known since childhood, a boy he’d fished with years earlier. And finally, said Nels, they spoke of the land and resolved this
matter between them. Then Kabuo Miyamoto went his way again and fished on into the dawn. And the next day he found himself arrested.

There was no evidence presented, Nels Gudmundsson told the jurors, to suggest that the accused man had planned a murder or that he’d gone to sea in search of blood. The state had not produced a shred of evidence to suggest premeditation. Not a single witness had been brought forward to testify about the defendant’s state of mind in the days prior to Carl’s death. No one had sat beside Kabuo at a tavern and listened to him rail against Carl Heine or announce his intent to kill him. There were no receipts from any sort of shop where a murder weapon had been newly purchased; there were no journal entries or overheard phone calls or late-night conversations. The state had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the crime the defendant had been charged with had in fact occurred. There was more than reasonable doubt, added Nels, but reasonable doubt was all that was needed. There was reasonable doubt, he emphasized, so the jury could not convict.

‘The counsel for the state,’ added Nels Gudmundsson, ‘has proceeded on the assumption that you will be open, ladies and gentlemen, to an argument based on prejudice. He has asked you to look closely at the face of the defendant, presuming that because the accused man is of Japanese descent you will see an enemy there. After all, it is not so long since our country was at war with the Empire of the Rising Sun and its formidable, well-trained soldiers. You all remember the newsreels and war films. You all recall the horrors of those years; Mr. Hooks is counting on that. He is counting on you to act on passions best left to a war of ten years ago. He is counting on you to remember this war and to see Kabuo Miyamoto as somehow connected with it. And, ladies and gentlemen,’ Nels Gudmundsson pleaded, ‘let us recall that Kabuo Miyamoto
is
connected with it. He is a much-decorated first lieutenant of the United States Army who fought for his country – the United States – in the European theater. If you see in his face a lack
of emotion, if you see in him a silent pride, it is the pride and hollowness of a veteran of war who has returned home to
this.
He has returned to find himself the victim of prejudice – make no mistake about it, this trial is about prejudice – in the country he fought to defend.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Nels pressed on, ‘perhaps there is such a thing as fate. Perhaps for inscrutable reasons God has looked down and allowed the accused man to come to this pass, where his very life lies in your hands. An accident of some kind befell Carl Heine at a moment that could not be less propitious or less fortunate for the accused. And yet it happened. It happened and Kabuo Miyamoto has been accused. And here he sits awaiting your verdict, in the hope that although fate has acted against him, human beings will be reasonable. There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. Your task as you deliberate together on these proceedings is to ensure that you do nothing to yield to a universe in which things go awry by happen-stance. Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on
reason.
And so the shape of Kabuo Miyamoto’s eyes, the country of his parents’ birth – these things must not influence your decision. You must sentence him simply as an American, equal in the eyes of our legal system to every other American. This is what you’ve been called here to do. This is what you must do.