Probable Cause g-2 Page 11

  “You want me to drive?” I say. I worry about the Blazer overheating.

  The air conditioner already sounds under normal conditions like a 707 reversing its engines.

  “I’m okay,” she says and checks the rearview mirror.

  Instinctively, I turn my head to make sure no cars are coming a habit from the days when she was learning to drive.

  She notices and frowns.

  The rest of the way home I try to talk to her about what her mother was like as a real person, not some icon we have worshiped. I reveal to her for the first time that her mother was fired from two jobs at hospitals because of her temper.

  “She couldn’t keep her mouth shut when she thought a doctor was screwing up. Once, right in front of the patient, she exploded and told a surgeon he was pre scribing too much medication. They fired her on the spot, and she never admitted she might have at least waited until she got out in the hall to ream him out. I had decided to start law school by then, so it wasn’t a cool move from the standpoint of money.”

  Her eyes on the road, Sarah listens intently. Rosa, for all her reality therapy when she was dying, usually protected Sarah as much as I did. So that she wouldn’t worry, Rosa made me promise that we not tell her the time she was fired.

  Now I think Rosa was embarrassed. Naturally, since qualified and competent nurses are typically rare, she had a new job two weeks later, so it was no real strain. Sarah grins.

  “She sounds like she had a lot of guts.”

  “But no tact,” I say, determined to be objective.

  “Her strengths were her weaknesses and vice versa.”

  Sarah ignores my observation which, in fact, sounds as soon as it is out of my mouth like a slogan from Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace, slavery is freedom.. She says, “I hope I’m as assertive as Mom was.”

  Hell, I hope she is, too. My reaction at the time was one of delight that Rosa had stuck it to the arrogant son of a bitch.

  “There’s a right and wrong time for it,” I pontificate.

  Sarah glides onto the access road off 140 to Rison Drive, which will eventually get us home.

  “Did she lose her temper at you much? I don’t remember you having any real big fights.”

  I can’t either. Despite my best efforts I’m having trouble painting over my dead wife’s memory and giving her the warts she surely had. I look out the window and notice an attractive woman behind the wheel of a beat-up old yellow Volkswagen Beetle in the lane beside us. Damn, poor or rich, women are everywhere. For my daughter’s sake, I try not to stare.

  “You remember how she was,” I say, reluctantly turning my head toward her.

  “If something was wrong, she got it off her chest immediately; nothing built up that way.” Her directness took getting used to, but I found I preferred it.

  Like me, Sarah broods too much.

  “I saw you looking,” she says, the barest hint of a smile playing at her lips.

  When we are finally home, I pull out Sarah’s suitcase from the backseat. It weighs a ton. If she has done her laundry even once, I’ll be surprised. Within seconds Sarah is on the phone with her friends, and I am left at the kitchen table to ponder how to tell Sarah I was fired. In five minutes she is back in the kitchen to tell me she needs the keys to visit her best friend, Donna Redding. I start to protest she hasn’t been home a minute, but I know she is dying to go see her friends.

  “I’ve got a new job,” I say casually.

  “I’m in solo practice, and I’ve already got a big murder case.”

  Sarah is not fooled by my tone.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demands, standing in the kitchen with her hands on her hips. Woogie, delighted she is home if ever so briefly, wags his tail beside her, hitting her bare legs.

  “It’s no big deal,” I say, knowing now I’ve deliberately tried to avoid this subject. I resort to sarcasm to defend my self.

  “If you’d bothered to watch the news the last few days, you’d seen me on TV. I’ve even been interviewed by Kim Keogh,” I brag.

  Sarah sits down opposite me.

  “Did you get fired?” she asks, her voice reminding me of her mother’s when she was worried.

  “It was more of a layoff of lawyers,” I say and tell her about Martha.

  “Poor woman. She had just gotten married the week before.”

  Sarah’s face is flushed.

  “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” she says, leaning forward on her elbows.

  “A disaster occurs, and you try to protect me! You should have called me.”

  What could you have done? I think. Sarah has begun to twist her hair, a characteristic sign of frustration.

  “You’re overestimating the significance of this,” I lie.

  “I’ve already got a half-dozen clients.” I do not add that none except for Andy and Mona Moneyhart are worth discussing in terms of the money their cases are generating. What good will it do to tell her that I am scared to death of not being able to pay our bills, much less sending her to college? If she wants to worry about God and the meaning of existence, that’s okay with me, but she’s not my wife, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to treat her like one. I reach in my wallet and bravely take out a ten.

  “You’re going to need some money this week end.”

  She flinches as if I had pulled out a condom.

  “I’ve still got some money from my job,” she says uncertainly. “That’s supposed to be for clothes this fall,” I said, thrusting the money into her palm. I had given her some spending money before she went to Governor’s School. What has she done with the thirty I gave her? Spent it on Lobotomy Beer, I suppose.

  “Are you sure?” she asks, nervous now. She takes the money and puts it into a wallet crammed with pictures of her friends.

  “I should have gone out on my own two years ago,” I lie, thinking of the marginal status of some of the attorneys on the sixteenth floor of the Layman Building.

  “I’ve been on TV this week because of this new case I picked up.”

  “When and how did you get it?” Sarah asks innocently.

  As much as Sarah worries, I’d rather not have to parse the niceties of contract law. “He remembered the Hart Anderson murder,” I say, answering only half the question.

  “You’re looking at the new Chet Bracken,” I say, throwing out the name of the most famous trial lawyer in Blackwell County.

  “You didn’t like him much,” my daughter reminds me, “in the Hart Anderson case.” She stuffs her wallet into her purse, which looks weighted down with slugs. What does she carry that weighs so much? I have learned not to ask. It’s none of my business.

  “I respected him though,” I say weakly, remembering how he intimidated me until I finally stood up to him. Maybe I just think I did. Lawyers have the psychology of dogs: in our dealings with each other we are much more conversant with the emotion of fear than affection, though in public we sniff each other and trot around together as if we are the best of pals.

  “You couldn’t stand him,” my daughter says, now slinging her purse over her shoulder.

  “You said he was a bully.”

  I said a lot worse out of her presence. Chet Bracken works at being an asshole twenty-four hours a day, but if I got charged with a crime, he’d be my first phone call. It disturbs Sarah that difficult people can be so competent. When Sarah stops expecting virtue to be rewarded, I’ll know she’s grown up.

  “Wooly, bully,” I stand and sing, shuffling my feet and swinging my hips and arms in an effort to pretend I’m dancing as I remember a song that was popular when I was about her age, or so my memory conveniently lies.

  “Watch it now, watch it now….” These inane words are all I think I can recall of the song, but it is enough to make her smile and forget a period of my life when I wasn’t particularly sterling silver myself.

  “Do you act silly when you’re here by yourself?” Sarah asks, a familiar, indulgent smile settling in on her
face.

  This is the old man she is comfortable with an affection ate buffoon who is tolerable as long as he controls himself in public.

  “Not as much,” I say, and pivot on my toes, one of the Temptations.

  “Woogie isn’t much of an audience.”

  When I’m finally still, she gives me a quick hug and then she’s out the door in her Lobotomy Beer T-shirt, leaving me to sit at the kitchen table and wish I had some of Chet Bracken’s ability to convince a jury that his client is really the victim, regardless of the crime. Who will believe that a black psychologist was the victim in this case when Jill Marymount waves a cattle prod at the jury? Given the identity of the municipal court judge, old Tom Bruton, the outcome of Monday’s probable cause hearing is al ready a foregone conclusion. I have decided against giving Jill even a whiff of our case and will not crossexamine her expert witness. Warren Holditch, who will testify that Andy should never have attempted shock. Had Darwin Bell, who is black, not felt obliged to recuse himself, the probable cause hearing might be Andy’s best shot at an acquittal, and I would be working nonstop on the case now. Since I know this case will get to a jury, I have resisted the temptation to rush the process and will begin to conduct my investigation after I hear their witnesses at the probable cause hearing Monday. I wander over to the refrigerator to see what kind of lunch I can throw together.

  One slice of lunch meat, a jar of reduced-calorie mayonnaise. Almost bare bones, like Andy’s defense so far. Four days isn’t enough time to find an expert who will testify how wonderful shock is. I close the refrigerator door, realizing I can’t go to the store until Sarah comes back with the car. Monday will be a long day. So what else is new?

  9

  When I was a public defender, even I managed to dress better than my clients, but in private practice I am expected to look better-dressed than I do today: a blue pin striped summer suit that fits as though I stopped at Pinehearst Cemetery on the way downtown and robbed the freshest grave I could find. It has shrunk, but I have not. Not without a trace of envy, I glance at my client. White linen suits on black males historically have a way of arousing my suspicions. In eastern Arkansas, where I grew up, a black man who put on a suit that wasn’t the color of midnight was assumed to be up to no good. Hoping to spruce up my ward robe this spring, I tried on a white suit at Dillard’s that made me look like Moby Dick. It was just as well. Five hundred dollars goes a lot further at Sears. In contrast to his lawyer’s ill-fitting attire, Andy’s suit looks tailored. Where in the world is he getting his money? If Jill Marymount asks Olivia this question, I will object like hell. Maybe I am wrong, but I did not believe Andy when I asked him earlier this morning.

  Despite the withering look he gave me, I think he cannot admit that Olivia has agreed to subsidize him. I think, too, that there is at least a good chance they are having an affair.

  As we walked into the courtroom this morning, I caught an agonized look before she realized I was watching her. It seems odd to me that there are far fewer interracial liaisons today than in the days of slavery, but perhaps it is not so strange now that I think about it. Before the Civil War, black women had no choice in the matter, and today desirable eligible black men are so scarce a white woman would have to risk censure not only from white men but also from black women.

  I turn and look over my shoulder at my daughter, who, to my great surprise, asked if she could come down to watch.

  Never before has she showed the slightest interest in seeing her old man leave the house except to take her somewhere, but she has heard that during the second half of Governor’s School a mock trial is part of the curriculum. Hardly an original idea, but to a teacher it must sound good. Surely the national fascination with lawyers will fade when TV moves on to something else. The only thing it hasn’t done, and it’s surely only a matter of time, is a program called “Bankruptcy Court.” Sarah gives me an embarrassed nod, but she can’t very well pretend I’m not in the same room with her today. She is sitting by an old woman in the second row, and wearing a yellow sundress that had prisoners riding up in the elevator with us rattling their chains. The media are out in full force for the hearing, and I wouldn’t put it past one of the males to find out that Sarah is my daughter and try to interview her. I suspect she is the best-looking young woman in this courtroom in a long time. Beautiful people don’t make many appearances in municipal court.

  Taking a beating in court isn’t my idea of fun, but Andy needed little convincing that we have no chance in front of Bruton. We could have waived the probable cause hearing, but I wanted to see and hear Warren Holditch and Jill’s other witnesses testify and perhaps do a little discovery as well.

  Holditch is most of Jill’s case today, though I suspect that for the main event she will have lined up more than one expert to hammer home the point that Andy knew he didn’t have any business trying shock on Pam.

  Jill and Kerr Bowman walk in together. I almost expect him to be carrying her briefcase, but his hands are empty except for a yellow legal pad, as if she doesn’t even trust him to lug her stuff around for her. Jill, trailed by Kerr, comes by the table, and I feel forced to make introductions. I say snidely, “Dr. Chapman, this is the woman who is prosecuting you, Jill Marymount.”

  Graciously, Andy has risen to his feet (I wouldn’t have if I were in his shoes, and rudely I remain seated). Jill has the nerve to extend her hand as if she is out campaigning for votes.

  “Sorry to meet you under these circumstances, Dr.

  Chapman,” she purrs. “Believe it or not, I ‘m aware of what I’m putting you through.”

  The hypocrisy of such a statement makes me want to puke, but Andy nods deferentially as if she were a dignitary who had thoughtfully stopped on the street to offer condolences on the death of an aged parent. Kerr, behind her, has to clear his throat to be acknowledged, but I let Jill introduce her own flunky. As he and Andy go through the same charade of civility, I notice Jill looks untypically feminine. Usually, female attorneys have their own battle dress-suits and high-buttoned blouses that make them look as formal and forbidding as their male counterparts-but today Jill is wearing a beige silk blouse over a red skirt that might be more appropriate for lunch at the Blackwell County Country Club. She has deliberately dressed this way for Judge Bruton, I realize.

  The old bastard hates woman lawyers and once sent home a woman who dared to show up in his courtroom in pants. If Jill has to play a part to get along with him, she will gladly do so.

  Jill’s first witness is Leon Robinson, the technician who was trying to restrain Pam when she grabbed the prod. Leon, in his twenties, is hard for me to figure. I have talked to him briefly over the phone, but he seems to have a streak of bitterness in him toward Andy that extends beyond getting him involved in this mess. Had he been able to keep Pam’s arms pinned, as directed, none of us would be here today. Undoubtedly, he feels guilt and is defensive about his role in this tragedy. Leon is pure country. With sideburns and an inky pompadour he reminds me ofConway Twitty, the country singer who, legend has it, took for his first name the town where Sarah is attending Governor’s School. He is wearing a blue work shirt stufled into faded jeans that are, in turn, jammed into cream-colored cowboy boots. Despite a washed-out junk-food look (too many years on the road), he walks with an ex-athlete’s grace. In a low, sullen voice, he relates how Andy asked him to help with Pam the day before.

  He hadn’t really known what was going to happen. All he was told was that they were going to try something new to keep Pam from hurting herself. Andy leans over and whispers to me that he had shown Leon the cattle prod and had told him exactly what would happen. So what, I think glumly.

  Andy should never have asked him to get involved in the first place.

  It comes out that Leon had become quite attached to Pam.

  When she was in restraints, which was most of the time, he fed her, talked to her, even brought his jam box to work to entertain her. None of this is relevant, but it occurs to
me that he has insisted that he be allowed to say this before he testifies about how she died. Despite Bruton’s look of impatience (what does this boy’s feelings have to do with the case?), Jill lets him run.

  “I went to her funeral,” he says, finally winding down.

  “If I had known how bad it was gonna hurt, I would of realized how hard she was gonna try to get away.”

  I could be objecting to this, but I want Leon to commit himself to the best memory of Pam he can muster. At the trial I want a jury to see that Pam meant a great deal to the people who worked with her. This wasn’t an experiment on a mannequin. Pam was real, somebody to help if you could.

  And you didn’t have to be her mother to think that way.

  Finally, he gets to the actual event, which, because of the emotion in his voice, brings me and Andy, I notice, to the edge of our seats. Dr. Chapman told him to take Pam into the treatment room with the one-way mirror. He didn’t even see Yettie Lindsey, the social worker, or Mrs. Le Master until all hell broke loose. He talked to Pam until Dr. Chapman got there and then Dr. Chapman told him to remove her restraints, which he did. His face balled into a frown, he says, “She started hittin’ herself on the side of her face just like I knew she would.”

  Leon pauses as if he is trying to get control over himself, but he does not quite manage to do so and speaks now in a scratchy, hoarse tone.

  “He told me he was going to shock Pam with this electric rod he had, and it would make her quit hittin’ herself. So when we got in there he said to hold on to her hands so she wouldn’t get free. When he touched her with the prod, it was like she had been struck by lightning she bucked so hard. She just went wild and pulled out of my hands, and that’s when she grabbed the prod. She fell down after that and he hollered for me to go call 911 and get an ambulance. I did, and when I come back Pam was dead.”