The Furthest City Light (2 page)

“What if he wasn’t?” I asked for the hell of it.

“If he wasn’t? Well, I guess I’d stop feeling so guilty and start worrying more about retaliation. Hal doesn’t like to be opposed.” She was watching the door now as if Hal might burst in at any moment, retaliation on his mind.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Emily. I didn’t mean to confuse you. He’s dead.”

“Ah.” She nodded sadly. “That’s what I thought. And so I think I’ll go ahead and plead guilty.”

As a public defender, I’d interviewed more than a thousand clients, many of whom were mentally ill. Emily wasn’t crazy, but she was missing something that most people would agree was essential. During that first interview, I couldn’t have said what it was, but I noticed I was beginning to feel alarmed for her. In retrospect, I would say Emily lacked a sense of self-preservation. In a Darwinian universe like ours, without protection, she was doomed.

“Emily, did you think your husband was going to hurt you when he was coming toward you?”

“Of course he was.”

“Then why isn’t it self-defense?”

Emily looked at me as if she hated to be the bearer of bad news. “Because I was still there after ten years of it, because I never left. For the last three years, I even had a suitcase filled with some of my favorite clothes hidden in the upstairs closet. Hal never found it.”

I considered giving her a short lecture on battered women, but she beat me to it.

“Yes,” she said, smiling wearily. “I know. I’ve read a number of books about battered women. I know all about the cycle of violence, the theories of learned helplessness, the analogy between a battered woman and a laboratory rat who keeps pressing the bar and mostly gets shocked, but occasionally gets rewarded with a pellet of food. I know all about it and I’m sure you do, too. But in the end, the jury will still wonder, why didn’t she leave?”

I glanced at my watch. I was supposed to be at the Justice Center at one thirty. Judge Solomon would be irritable if I was more than five minutes late. On the other hand, Judge Solomon was often irritable even when I was on time. I looked up again at my new client. “Okay, so why didn’t you leave?”

“That’s just it,” she said, rising from her chair to help me end the interview. “I don’t know. It just never seemed like a truly viable option. I could picture myself pulling out the packed suitcase from behind all the boxes in the closet. I could picture myself grabbing my purse and the keys to my car, picking up the suitcase and heading for the front door. But I could never picture myself actually walking through it. I suppose I was like a bird that’s been in a cage too long. Even if someone unlocks the cage and swings the door open, it remains on its perch staring at its freedom, but not moving.”

I slipped my pen and legal pad into my briefcase, then stood up to face her. “Then that’s what we’ll tell the jury. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve finished reviewing all the police reports. In the meantime, don’t give up.”

“Now that I have you, I won’t.” Suddenly, she swayed a little and I grabbed her arm. “My goodness,” she murmured, “Hal’s really dead, isn’t he? And I’m really here.”

“I’m afraid so.” I pushed the door open and checked the hallway, which was empty. Normally, Emily would have simply crossed the hall to the women’s cellblock, knocked on the thick metal door, and they would have let her in. “Would you like me to call a guard?”

She shook her head. “Oh no. A cup of tea and I’ll be fine. Thank you.”

***

By the end of the day, I’d skimmed through the initial police reports, which included interviews with the coroner, the emergency room doctor, the emergency medical technicians who’d first responded to the scene, the defendant, two neighbors who hadn’t heard or seen anything, and the deceased’s elderly mother who lived in a nursing home in Denver. There were no surprises. My client had obviously told the truth about how the victim had died and there was no physical evidence, helpful or otherwise, to suggest what might have precipitated the stabbing.

In the next week, the detectives on the case would interview the rest of the neighbors and any other relatives, but nobody would be working overtime on this one—they didn’t have to. They had the 911 tapes in which the defendant repeatedly advised the police dispatcher she’d stabbed her husband and thought he was dead, a crime scene video with plenty of blood, and a good, fairly coherent confession that lacked any mention of self-defense. What more did they need? It was an open-and-shut case. Lady goes berserk, kills husband, feels remorse, calls police, confesses to the murder. The end.

Because the defendant had no prior record and had killed her husband in Boulder (one of the most liberal jurisdictions in Colorado—maybe only Aspen would be better), the prosecution would eventually offer her second-degree murder. She would plead out, spend a couple of decades in prison, and then...who cared?

I did. If this was self-defense, then Emily Watkins would plead guilty over both Hal’s and my dead body. She was a battered woman. Somebody had to stick up for her. Who better than Rachel Stein, Public Defender (it’s my job, ma’am)? With the help of my talented investigator, Donald Baker, I would figure out how to convince the good citizens of Boulder to acquit her.

In a first-degree murder case, time is of the essence and I was already three days behind the police. If not investigated, evidence disappeared, witnesses forgot helpful facts and possible leads evaporated. While Vickie snored beside me, I read and reread the reports, then considered various strategies. At four in the morning, of course, the case looked grim, but almost every case starts out that way. Criminal defense is like trying to fit your station wagon into an impossibly small parking space—there’s no way you’ll ever make it. But you position yourself as close as you can and begin inching back and forth, back and forth, creasing a few edges if you must. You tap the car in front, tap the car in back, then bump the car in front, and bump the car in back. And then, after you’ve created as much room as possible, you take a deep breath, hold it, and with great finesse, you squeeze yourself in.
Voila
!

The next day, I asked Donald to meet with me at noon. Donald was an excellent investigator, but so physically unappealing that none of the lawyers in the office used him unless they had to. As far as anyone knew, Donald lived in a battered VW van, which he parked behind our office. He was somewhere between thirty-five and sixty, with dark ferret eyes, a bad complexion and long greasy hair. His belly strained ominously against the one shirt he always seemed to wear, which was always stained with whatever food he’d eaten in the last month. Worse, he smoked Marlboros nonstop and reeked like an overflowing ashtray.

In a town like Boulder, where everyone jogged, meditated and made their own granola, it was hard to believe a guy like Donald would be successful, but almost everyone he tried to interview was willing to talk to him. They let him into their homes and answered his questions not, as you might think, because they felt sorry for him, but because he made them feel better about themselves; no matter how bad off they were, here was a loser in much worse shape. I imagined potential witnesses thinking,
What harm could there be if I talk to someone like him?

At exactly noon, Donald clumped into my office without knocking and sat down on one of the two client chairs that faced my desk. Without looking up from my reports, I asked him to put out his cigarette.

“I’m not smoking.”

I looked up. He wasn’t. He just smelled like he was.

“Oh,” I said.

I gave him a copy of the police reports and quickly filled him in on what I knew, then handed him a sheet of paper. “Here’s a preliminary list of witnesses I’d like you to start interviewing today.”

“This the lady that killed the ex-cop?”

“Her husband was an ex-cop?” Shit. Emily hadn’t bothered to tell me. “How did you know?” But Donald always knew things the rest of us didn’t.

“A guy I know from Greeley told me. The vic used to be a cop up there about ten years ago, got shot in the leg and had to go on disability. I’m sure the police down here know all about it by now.”

“That’s a bad fact,” I said.

“It ain’t good,” he agreed. “Accident or self-defense?”

“Self-defense.”

Donald nodded. We talked strategy for another thirty minutes, and then he stood up to go. “When you see her,” he said, “ask if she’s ever gone to the doctor or a hospital. Maybe we can get some records to show he’s hurt her in the past.”

“I will.”

“In the meantime,” he said, “I’ll nose around, see if anyone in the neighborhood has ever seen her with any bruises.”

“Great. I’ll get the names and addresses of all her friends, relatives and acquaintances. Let’s meet again on Friday.”

“Okay,” he said. There was a huge red smear across the front of his shirt. Normally, I refrained from commenting on his appearance, but this time I couldn’t help it.

“That’s not blood, is it?”

Donald had no sense of humor. He looked down at his shirt and considered the stain. “Unlikely. Probably ketchup.”

***

The next time I saw Emily Watkins, she had a black eye.

“What happened?” I asked as a female guard was escorting us into another tiny interview room.

The guard grinned and put her hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Last night, this one here got in between Alicia and one of the other inmates. The first one who ever stood up to Alicia. If it wasn’t for her, that other lady would have been hurting pretty bad before we could have stopped it.”

After the guard left, I examined Emily’s eye and said, “So now you’re Superwoman?”

Emily smiled at me. “Is there only room for one in this relationship?” She had pulled her thick blond hair into a youthful ponytail. Barbie goes to jail and gets a black eye.

I sighed audibly. “Yes, but not because I’m selfish. You’re in jail facing first-degree murder charges. I need you to keep a low profile and keep yourself safe.”

“No one’s safe.”

“Okay, you’re right, but I’d prefer you don’t get a reputation as a fighter. If we’re going to rely on self-defense, I want the jury to believe you’d never fought back before, that you were too afraid.”

Emily’s face grew serious. “That’s absolutely true. But now that I’ve done it, I’m not afraid to do it again. Now, I wish I’d resisted Hal from the very beginning. He either would have killed me right away or he would have respected me.”

“Which do you think?” I asked, pulling out my legal pad.

“Oh, he would have killed me. He used to be a sheriff in Weld County. Did you know that?”

“I found out yesterday.”

Emily nodded. “Hal was eleven years older than me. He started working for the sheriff’s department right after graduating from college. It was his boyhood dream. When I met him, he’d been a sheriff for fifteen years and still loved it. He was tall and lean and incredibly self-confident. We’d been married for only six months when a teenage boy shot him in the knee. He had to go on disability and that’s when he started drinking.”

“I see.” While I wrote down what she’d told me, I asked, “Did he ever hit you before that?”

She hesitated. “Just once, when I asked if he’d like to have children. For some reason, that upset him. Later, after crying and apologizing, he said he wanted it to be just the two of us. I never brought it up again. It was one thing to risk my own safety, but I would have never risked anyone else’s.” She rubbed her injured eye. “Oh dear, now I have a headache. And I’m feeling so ashamed. Not about Alicia, but about my relationship with Hal. I think I might need to go lie down. Could you possibly come back later?”

“There’s a lot more questions I need to ask you.”

“I miss him,” she confessed. “I’m sorry I killed him. I don’t wish we were still married—oh, yes I do—I just wish we were happily married.”

“Makes perfect sense.”

She shook her head. “I just want to plead guilty and get this over with.” She closed her eyes then and sat very still. She was gone for only a minute or two, but her absence was palpable; clearly she’d been practicing this for a long time. The art of vanishing. I watched and waited. According to the police reports, she was thirty-six, only a year older than me, but the skin on her face was prematurely lined and drawn, living proof that a decade of being battered by your loved one isn’t good for your complexion. Eventually, she opened her eyes.

“Hey, you promised not to give up,” I reminded her.

“Did I?” She sighed, sat up a little straighter. “Besides Frost and Eliot, I’ve always loved Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I was named after her, you know. She was such a brave young woman. Very tender, but saw things clearly. She had a weak constitution and died young. I think I must be like her.”

Now it was my turn to shake my head. “I don’t think so. You’re a fighter. You told me, you’re Superwoman.”

She laughed, which made her look ten years younger. “Why does that appeal to us?”

“That’s easy. Nobody likes to feel helpless. It’s a sickening feeling.”

“You want to know what’s worse?” she asked.

“What?”

“When you get used to it.”

***

The preliminary hearing was set for the end of November. During the five and a half weeks leading up to the hearing, I probably visited Emily about ten times. If I had to go to the jail to see another client, I’d drop by the women’s section and visit Emily as well. Each time I gleaned a little more information, but after a while, I mostly came to keep her company.

Each week I checked her inmate sheet. No one else ever visited her. We talked poetry, politics, theories about battered women, co-dependency and addiction. One day, I described rock climbing (my other passion besides saving people) and promised to take her up an easy pitch after we won her case.

From those hours we spent together, I learned a few surprising things. Despite never finishing college, my client was fluent in both French and German, she knew how to ride a unicycle, and the only time she’d ever cried was at her mother’s funeral. And though I revealed some personal information too—that I wished I were closer to my mother, that I was ethnically Jewish but thought all religions were irrational—I never told her the most important thing: that my partner was a woman and that we’d been together for eight and a half years. I knew it wouldn’t matter to her, but keeping it to myself was a way of maintaining the attorney-client relationship with someone I was already beginning to care too much about.