Love & Other Crimes

by Sara Paretsky

  However, the Times coverage meant that the Ex-Left fat cats put up so much money for the doctor’s defense that Ruth Lebeau had agreed to take the case. Lebeau was a formidable Constitutional lawyer with a team of experienced research lawyers at her side. Except for the court reporter and Dr. Herschel, she was the only woman in Justice Sessions’s courtroom, and the sole African-American. She seemed to pay no attention to that distinction, nor to the insults lobbed by Real News, comparing her to a talking chimpanzee.

  Opening statement of Melvin Coulter, federal attorney for the Northern District of Illinois:

  “Dr. Herschel is well known to federal agents throughout the Northern District. She runs what she calls a medical clinic, but is in reality a squalid den where the most vile crimes are committed. She not only harbors known enemies of the United States, but is a self-proclaimed murderer of the most innocent lives in our midst. So heinous are the crimes, and so intent is this so-called doctor on keeping them from public view, that she spent a small fortune in turning her abattoir into an armed fortress.”

  Coulter droned on for over an hour. Ruth Lebeau, dressed in navy suiting with an Elizabethan collar framing her face, made a few notes, but spent most of Coulter’s speech either smiling reassuringly at her client or mouthing comments to her chief associate, a young man whose impeccable tailoring matched her own. He seemed to find Lebeau extremely witty. The court reporter noticed that he often covered his mouth to keep from laughing out loud—a gesture that made Justice Sessions scowl with fury. The court reporter was surprised that Sessions, who was known for his short fuse, hadn’t expelled the lawyer from his courtroom.

  Dr. Herschel was a small woman, with graying hair cut close to her head. She wore no makeup and no jewelry. The court reporter thought she looked like the kind of doctor you could trust, not the formidable monster described in the government’s brief.

  It troubled the reporter that the doctor didn’t look at Coulter or Sessions during the opening statement. The reporter believed innocent people could stare down their accusers. She didn’t know that sociopaths could also stare down their accusers and that innocent people might look at their clasped hands so that judge and prosecutor couldn’t see the furious contempt in their eyes.

  When the prosecutor sat down, Ruth Lebeau made her own opening statement. She sketched Dr. Herschel’s history: an orphan, a refugee, who had dedicated her life to the health and welfare of women in the United States. The many awards she had received for her humanitarian work, for her innovations in perinatal medicine and in surgery. Lebeau spoke about the Constitution, as well, and how the law under which Dr. Herschel was charged set up two classes of people.

  “We’re skating perilously close to Nuremberg laws here. Americans reject the idea that one class of person has higher value than other classes, whether the division is between black and white, Christian and Jew, foreign born or native born. We will show that Dr. Herschel’s whole life and career have been devoted to caring for women and children who most need help, and that she has used her own resources to bring free medical care to Americans who can least afford it, but need it most.”

  The court adjourned for lunch. Melvin Coulter was seen eating with Justice Sessions and the other judges on the tribunal. A photograph of them together in the Potawatomi Club circulated on Fake News websites, but Real News assured Americans that there was nothing wrong with two old friends meeting for lunch. The Ex-Left also put up videos of the federal marshals dragging protestors from the courtroom; Real News showed patriots cheering the marshals.

  In the afternoon, the evidence part of the trial began. The government had been surveilling Dr. Herschel and her clinic for many months. Even before the Keep America Safe Act, ICE agents had paid particular attention to her Damen Avenue clinic because she treated so many low-income women, not just immigrants from Muslim countries and Mexico, but poor Americans as well.

  Coulter began with photographs of the Radbuka-Herschel Family Clinic projected onto the three screens in the courtroom. These days the clinic was padlocked, the windows covered with obscene graffiti, as well as swastikas and “death camp” in jagged capital letters, but the pictures had been taken during the surveillance and data gathering phase of the case.

  The clinic stood near the corner of Damen and Irving Park Road in Chicago. The sidewalks were dirty, the nearby storefronts run-down or boarded over. The court watched two women in headscarves approach the building, one with toddlers in a double stroller, the other carrying an infant while an older child held her skirt. The women glanced around furtively, then rang the clinic bell.

  “You can see the armor-plated glass”—Coulter tapped the windows in the photograph—“and the video cameras. Once the women gained entrance through the first door, they were sealed in the equivalent of an airlock while clerks videoed them. Only then did they gain admittance to the death chambers inside.”

  The testimony of all the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents, along with the FBI, took close to two weeks to hear. The most dramatic testimony actually came from one of Dr. Herschel’s own nurses: Leah Shazar had worn a tiny body camera to record many of Dr. Herschel’s patients and procedures, even patients she herself was examining.

  When Ruth Lebeau rose to cross-examine her, Shazar broke down into sobs. “They threatened to deport my own mother, my sisters, back to the men who raped them. What else could I do?”

  “Find someone to help you fight them,” Lebeau said. “What did you think you were doing to the patients entrusted to your care?”

  After Shazar’s weeping went into its second inarticulate minute, Justice Sessions ruled that Lebeau was badgering the witness and to stop such an emotional line of questioning. When Shazar stepped out of the witness box, she tried to approach the doctor, but Dr. Herschel turned her head away and refused to look at her.

  The court reporter didn’t know how to react. If she’d been a patient in the clinic, she sure wouldn’t have wanted her own private business shown in a courtroom. Had it been fair for the FBI to coerce Shazar into recording people? At the same time, the nurse was truly sorry—shouldn’t Dr. Herschel at least accept Shazar’s apology?

  During Shazar’s testimony, Coulter showed videos that she had taken. “Yes, Dr. Herschel routinely performed abortions in her abattoir. And she helped illegal immigrants avoid federal agents.”

  The five male judges, the bailiff, the clerk, and the two armed marshals gasped in delighted indignation as a camera focused on a woman’s vulva, where the doctor was inserting a speculum. A nurse, back to the camera, was bathing the woman’s forehead with a towel. After a moment, blood flowed. The camera zoomed in on a blood clot, which Coulter identified as a dead baby.

  After letting Justice Sessions and the rest of the all-male court lick their lips for a long moment, Coulter showed a video of the alley behind the clinic. A dark van was backed up to the clinic’s rear door.

  “We can’t see who is coming out at this particular moment, but we do know that Dr. Herschel used this and other vehicles to whisk away illegals before ICE agents could demand their papers. Of course, once we spotted the ruse, we stopped the vans and arrested the occupants.”

  Here, the video showed Immigration & Customs Enforcement agents stopping several different vehicles. They pulled out women and children, cuffed them, and thrust them into government cars. Dr. Herschel’s lawyer directed a contemptuous smile at the prosecution table and made a point of writing an exceptionally long note. She whispered something to her own chief associate. The young man once again bit back a guffaw, earning yet another frown from Justice Sessions.

  The final charge against the doctor claimed she’d helped spirit away the notorious immigration activist Sofia Pacheco. Since appearing on the FBI’s ten most wanted list, Pacheco had been hidden in churches and attics by sympathizers across the nation. Every time the government seemed poised to make an arrest, it turned out they had the wrong information, or, worse, someone at the FBI or ICE had leaked the r
aid and given Pacheco time to make her getaway.

  Finally, thirteen months ago, they were sure they had cornered Pacheco in a Chicago garden shop. The shop made a delivery of gladioli and daylilies to Dr. Herschel inside a long carton; Pacheco, apparently, lay underneath the flowers.

  At the clinic, someone, perhaps the doctor, perhaps one of her staff, styled Pacheco’s hair to resemble the doctor’s own, streaked it with gray dye, put her in a lab coat, and brazenly sent her outside.

  “The agent detailed to follow the doctor had stepped away from his post for three minutes—even our dedicated ICE agents sometimes have a call from nature.” (Laughter from Sessions and the other four judges.)

  “The clinic staff seemed to be watching our agent, because they used that window of time to send Pacheco out; she drove off in Dr. Herschel’s own Audi.”

  The Audi had been found in the meatpacking district; the doctor was in surgery all day and claimed to know nothing about Pacheco. “Of course she knew about Pacheco: why else did she leave her Audi at the clinic instead of driving herself to the hospital?”

  Ruth Lebeau cross-examined the agent to no avail: Wasn’t it true that Dr. Herschel often used a car service between the clinic and the hospital? Wasn’t it true that she was often in the operating room for ten or even fifteen hours, so that she was too fatigued to drive herself at the end of surgery?

  “You’re arguing generalities,” Justice Session rebuked Lebeau. “We’re looking at a specific day and a particular crime.”

  At the end of the eighth day, the prosecution rested. “The government has irrefutable evidence that warrants that Dr. Herschel be stripped of her U.S. citizenship. However, we believe her crimes rise to the level of deliberate treason against the United States by refusing to acknowledge the power of the Government to pass the Keep America Safe Act and to enforce its provisions.”

  Coulter wiped his mouth with the red handkerchief he kept in his breast pocket for such moments and resumed his seat. Justice Sessions adjourned the court and said they would hear the defense in the morning. He and Melvin Coulter rode down the elevator together and were later seen yet again at the Potawatomi Club, laughing over their drinks—martini for the prosecutor, iced tea for the abstemious justice.

  All during the final day of the prosecution’s case, Coulter had been smirking with his juniors at the prosecution table, watching as Ruth Lebeau sent her own young team members out in flocks.

  In the morning, it became clear that the defense was in trouble, and why: their key witnesses had disappeared. The detective V.I. Warshawski, who had gathered much of the defense’s evidence, was in prison herself: she’d been arrested two days earlier, charged under the same sections of the Keep America Safe Act as Dr. Herschel.

  The court reporter thought Dr. Herschel was going to faint. Her dark, vivid face turned pale and waxy and she swayed in her seat. Ruth Lebeau, her attorney, asked if she needed a break.

  “I require water,” the doctor said.

  Ruth Lebeau’s chief associate produced a large thermos of hot water from his case and poured a cup for the doctor. Since the rest of her witnesses had been disappeared, Lebeau called the doctor to the stand.

  As the doctor spoke, her vocal cords gradually regained their flexibility. The court reporter had strained to understand her at first, but after half an hour, the grating harshness left the doctor’s voice. She spoke clearly, almost musically: the reporter realized it was a pleasure to listen to her after all the men she’d been recording during the prosecution phase. Too much bullying and swagger, none of this evenness, this effort to be clear that the doctor exhibited.

  “I treat everyone who comes to my clinic,” Dr. Herschel said. “I don’t need to see a driver’s license or a passport to diagnose measles or an ectopic pregnancy.”

  On cross-examination, Coulter demanded to know why she’d refused to treat the pregnant woman who’d been brought to her jail cell.

  “I am curious about your knowledge of this woman,” the doctor said. “Did you direct the guards to bring her to my cell?”

  The members of the tribunal seemed to gasp, but Justice Sessions said, “You are on the stand, Doctor. You don’t get to ask questions.”

  The doctor bowed her head.

  “You must answer the attorney,” Sessions said.

  “The woman was not pregnant,” Dr. Herschel said.

  “You refused to examine her, so how can you possibly know this?” Coulter asked.

  “How many pregnant women have you examined in your legal career, Mr. Coulter?” the doctor said. “Oh, yes, I must not ask you questions. But we will assume it is one woman, your wife, who produced two children with you. I have seen thousands. I know the difference between an abdomen with a fetus inside it, and a body with a pillow buckled to it. Perhaps you would have been fooled, but I was not.”

  “You can’t know that!” Coulter snapped.

  The doctor shrugged but remained silent.

  “Have you nothing to say?” Sessions demanded.

  Before Lebeau could jump to her feet to remind the court that Coulter had made a statement, not asked a question, the doctor said, “I have lived a long life. I have seen governments taken over by ravening weasels, I have watched them incite bored or ignorant or fearful mobs to violence. That you would bribe or coerce a woman to pretend a pregnancy does not surprise me, but it does sicken me.”

  Coulter sat down again. There was a moment of silence and then Ruth Lebeau asked the prosecution to put up one of their videos of a couple of women being pulled from an SUV in handcuffs. She zoomed in on their faces and asked the doctor if she recognized them.

  “Yes, they were patients, first in my clinic, and then, because the daughter had complications, I saw her in surgery at Beth Israel.”

  “And can you identify them, by name, I mean?” Lebeau asked.

  “I can, but I will not. It is enough that these strange men can look at them and know they sought medical help, but I will not violate their privacy further by naming them.”

  “Did you know that the older woman was Justice Sessions’s housekeeper?” Lebeau asked.

  The doctor’s eyes widened: the court reporter, barely keeping back a gasp herself, thought the doctor hadn’t known. “I did not know that, but I do not discriminate among those I treat.”

  “And did you know the daughter, whose abortion you performed, had been raped by the justice?”

  At that, Sessions slammed his gavel and demanded an end to the proceedings. “The defense will rest. They cannot call independent witnesses to this calumny—”

  “Yes, we cannot call your housekeeper, who looked after you for twenty-three years, because she was deported last week, was she not?” Lebeau said.

  “That was a decision by Immigration and Customs, not by me. The court is adjourned for today. The tribunal will meet tomorrow to discuss a verdict.”

  The court reporter couldn’t sleep that night. She was shocked by today’s testimony. Abortion was evil, and the doctor was wicked to perform them. But Justice Sessions—when the black lady lawyer said he’d raped his housekeeper’s daughter, he’d ended the trial. If he’d been innocent, surely he would have denied the accusation.

  The court reporter had a high security clearance, which required her to sign papers promising never to speak to anyone of the proceedings she attended. She thought of her oath; she thought of the doctor, the presiding justice, the men licking their lips at the video of the naked woman’s vagina.

  At five in the morning, she got up and went down the street to her local drugstore. The clerk was yawning, barely awake, counting the seconds until her overnight shift would end. The reporter, her hands shaking, paid cash for a cheap phone. She made a call to the cousin who had helped get her the job with the federal courts.

  In the morning, the tribunal met for less than an hour before summoning the prisoner. The court reporter could see that the doctor had probably not slept any more than she had herself. The doctor’s walnut-c
olored skin was pale, her eyes a pair of black holes sunk deep in her face.

  Justice Sessions said, “The court has voted four to one to find you guilty on all counts under the Keep America Safe Act. We debated stripping you of your citizenship and deporting you, but we are well aware that your native country, Austria, is prepared to make you an international heroine and martyr, and so we are sentencing you to natural life in a federal prison in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Prisons will inform your attorney when they have decided where to house you. For now, you will remain in Chicago in the care of the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Court is adjourned.”

  A marshal seized Dr. Herschel and marched her through the side door that led to the fenced-in yard at the back of the building where prisoners were transferred into the buses that returned them to the various jails around town.

  Her lawyer and the lawyer’s chief associate walked with the doctor as far as the exit: they weren’t permitted beyond the doorway. As she tried to thank the lawyer, the doctor seemed to stumble. Lebeau’s young associate caught her as she fainted.

  He pulled his thermos from his briefcase and unscrewed the top. No one could agree on what happened next, but one of the marshals thought the young lawyer poured a glass bottle labeled sugar into the thermos. Smoke billowed out. It covered the doctor, the lawyer, the marshal, and spread through the fenced-in courtyard. The marshals pulled their weapons and began firing into the thick fog, but someone screamed: they’d hit the driver of the prison van, who’d been standing behind it, waiting to lock the doctor inside. By the time the fog cleared, the prison van was gone.

  Later that day, the van was discovered at Belmont Harbor on the Chicago shore of Lake Michigan. The Coast Guard began a search of all boats on the lake, but they didn’t find the doctor, Lebeau’s chief associate, or the federal marshal who’d handcuffed the doctor as she was taken from the courtroom. No one noticed that the court reporter had also disappeared.