A Time for Mercy

by John Grisham

  A wave of emotion swept over Jake and he couldn’t speak. A long moment passed as both men looked away. Finally, Lucien said, “Let’s go sit on the porch and have a drink. We need to talk.”

  With a scratchy voice, Jake said, “Okay, but I’ll stick with coffee.”

  Lucien left and Jake shuffled to the door and stepped onto the veranda with a grand view of the square and the courthouse. Lucien returned with a whiskey on the rocks and sat next to him. They watched the late afternoon traffic and the same old men whittling and spitting tobacco juice under an ancient oak next to the gazebo.

  Jake said, “You called it a ‘secret.’ Why?”

  “How many times have I told you not to do your banking in this town? Too many people see what you do and know your balances. You settle a nice case, rake in a nice fee, and someone will see a big deposit at the bank. People talk, especially around here. You have a few bad months and your accounts get low, and too many people know it. I’ve advised you to bank out of town.”

  “I really had no choice. I get loans from Security because I know the banker.”

  “I’m not going to argue. But one day, when you’re back on your feet, get the hell away from these banks.”

  Jake was not in the mood to argue either. Lucien was troubled and wanted to discuss something important. They watched the traffic for a moment, then Lucien said, “Sallie left me, Jake. She’s gone.”

  Jake was surprised but then he wasn’t. “I’m sorry, Lucien.”

  “It was sort of a mutual breakup. She’s thirty years old and I’ve encouraged her to find another man, a husband, and start a family. Wasn’t much of a life living with me, you know? She moved in when she was eighteen years old, started off as a housekeeper, and one thing led to another. I grew very fond of her, as you know.”

  “I’m sorry, Lucien. I like Sallie, figured she would always be around.”

  “I bought her a car, wrote her a nice check, and waved goodbye. Damned place is awfully quiet these days. But I’ll probably find someone else.”

  “Sure you will. Where did she go?”

  “She wouldn’t say, but I was suspicious. I think she’s already found someone else and I’m trying to convince myself that’s a good thing. She needs a family, a real husband, kids. I couldn’t stand the thought of her taking care of me in my decline. Driving me to the doctor, doling out pills, catheters, bedpans.”

  “Come on, Lucien, you’re not ready for the end. You have some good years left.”

  “For what? I loved the law and I miss the glory days, but I’m too old and too set in my ways to make a comeback. Can you imagine an old geezer like me trying to pass the bar exam? I’d flunk it and that would kill me.”

  “You could at least try,” Jake said but without conviction. The last thing he needed was Lucien with a new law degree causing trouble around the office.

  Lucien raised his glass and said, “Too much of this, Jake, and the brain is not what it used to be. Two years ago I hit the books and was determined to pass the exam, but the memory is not working. I couldn’t remember statutes from one week to the next. You know how taxing it is.”

  “Yes I do,” Jake said, recalling, with horror, the pressures of the bar exam. His best friend from law school flunked it twice and moved to Florida to sell condos. A great career move.

  “My life has no purpose, Jake. All I do is putter around here and spend most of my time on the front porch reading and drinking.”

  In the twelve years he had known Lucien, Jake had never heard such self-pity. Indeed, Lucien never complained about his own problems. He might rage for hours about injustice and the state bar association and his neighbors and the shortcomings of lawyers and judges, and he would on occasion suffer a bout of nostalgia and wish he could sue people again, but he never let his guard down and revealed his feelings. Jake had always believed Lucien’s inheritance had grounded him well; that he considered himself luckier than most.

  “You’re always welcome around the office, Lucien. You’re a great sounding board and I value your insights.” Which was only partially true. Two years earlier when Lucien was making noise about getting reinstated, Jake had been unhappy with that prospect. With time, though, as the studying became too rigorous, Lucien stopped talking about the bar exam and fell into a routine of stopping by for a few hours on most days.

  “You don’t need me, Jake. You have a long career ahead of you.”

  “Portia has come to respect you, Lucien.” After a rough start, the two had settled into an uneasy truce, but in the past six months had actually enjoyed working together. Already, and without the benefit of law school, she was an excellent researcher, and Lucien was teaching her how to write like a lawyer. He was delighted by her dream of becoming the first black female lawyer in town and he wanted her in his old office.

  “Respect might be too strong a word. Plus, she’s leaving in two months.”

  “She’ll be back.”

  He rattled his ice and took a drink. “You know what I miss the most, Jake? The courtroom. I loved the courtroom, with a jury in the box and a witness on the stand and a good lawyer on the other side and, hopefully, a seasoned judge refereeing a fair fight. I loved the drama of the courtroom. People discuss things in open court they wouldn’t talk about anywhere else. They have to. They don’t always want to, but they have to because they are witnesses. I loved the pressure of swaying a jury, of convincing good skeptical people that you’re on the right side of the law and they should follow you. You know who they’ll follow, Jake?”

  At that moment, Jake couldn’t count the number of times he’d heard this little lecture. He nodded and listened as if for the first time.

  “Jurors will not follow a fancy Dan in a designer suit. They will not follow a silver-tongued orator. They will not follow a smart boy with all the rules memorized at his fingertips. No sir. They will follow the lawyer who tells them the truth.”

  Word for word, same as always.

  “So, what’s the truth with Drew Gamble?” Jake asked.

  “Same as Carl Lee Hailey. Some people need killing.”

  “That’s not what I told the jury.”

  “No, not in those words. But you convinced them that Hailey did exactly what they would do if given the chance. It was brilliant.”

  “I’m not feeling so brilliant these days. I have no choice but to put a dead man on trial, a guy who can’t defend himself. It will be an ugly trial, Lucien, but I see no way around it.”

  “There is no way around it. I want to be in that courtroom when that girl takes the stand. Almost eight months pregnant and Kofer is the father. Talk about drama, Jake. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I expect Dyer will howl for a mistrial.”

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “What will Noose do?”

  “He won’t be happy, but it’s rare for the State to get a mistrial. I doubt if he’ll do it. She’s not your client and if Dyer calls her first then the mistake will be his, not yours.”

  Jake took a sip of cold coffee and watched the traffic. “Carla wants to adopt the baby, Lucien.”

  He rattled his ice and thought about it. “And you want this too?”

  “I don’t know. She’s convinced it’s the right thing to do, but she worries that it will appear to be, what’s the right word, opportunistic?”

  “Somebody will get the kid, right?”

  “Yes. Kiera and Josie are going the adoption route.”

  “And you’re worried about how this will look.”

  “I am.”

  “That’s your problem, Jake. You worry too much about this town and all the gossipmongers. To hell with them. Where are they now? Where are all these wonderful people when you need them? All your friends at church. All your buddies in your little civic clubs. All those important people at the Coffee Shop who o
nce thought you were the golden boy but don’t care for you now. They’re all fickle and uninformed and none of them realize what it takes to be a real lawyer, Jake. You’ve been here for twelve years and you’re broke because you worry about what these people might say. None of them matter.”

  “So what matters?”

  “Being fearless, unafraid to take unpopular cases, fighting like hell for the little people who have no one to protect them. When you get the reputation as a lawyer who’ll take on anybody and anything—the government, the corporations, the power structure—then you’ll be in demand. You have to reach a level of confidence, Jake, where you walk into a courtroom thoroughly unintimidated by any judge, any prosecutor, any big-firm defense lawyer, and completely oblivious to what people might say about you.”

  Another mini-lecture he’d heard a hundred times.

  “I don’t turn away too many clients, Lucien.”

  “Oh really. You didn’t want the Gamble case, tried your best to get rid of it. I remember you whining when Noose dragged you into it. Everybody else in town ran and hid and you were pissed because you got stuck with it. This is exactly the kind of case I’m talking about, Jake. This is where a real lawyer steps up and says to hell with what people are whispering and walks into the courtroom proud to be defending a client no one else wanted. And there are cases like this all over the state.”

  “Well, I can’t afford to volunteer for many of them.” Once again, Jake was struck by the reality that Lucien had the means to be a radical lawyer. No one else owned half of a bank.

  Lucien drained his glass and said, “I need to go. It’s Wednesday and Sallie always roasted a hen on Wednesdays. I’ll miss that. I guess I’ll miss a lot of things.”

  “I’m sorry, Lucien.”

  Lucien stood and stretched his legs. “I’ll call the guy at Third Federal. Get your paperwork together.”

  “Thanks, Lucien. You’ll never know what this means.”

  “It means a lot more debt, Jake, but you’ll bounce back.”

  “I will. I have no choice.”

  37

  In 1843, an unstable Scottish woodturner named Daniel M’Naghten believed that the British prime minister Robert Peel and his Tories were following and persecuting him. He saw Peel walking along a London street and shot him in the back of the head, killing him. He got the wrong man. His victim was Edward Drummond, Peel’s private secretary and longtime civil servant. At his trial for murder, both sides agreed that M’Naghten suffered from delusions and other mental problems. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. His case became famous and led to an insanity defense that was widely accepted in England, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and in most of the United States, including Mississippi.

  The M’Naghten Rule states: To establish a defense on the ground of insanity it must be clearly proved, that, at the time of committing the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

  For decades the M’Naghten Rule ignited fierce debates among legal scholars, and it was modified and rejected outright in some jurisdictions. But in 1990 it was still the standard in most of the states, including Mississippi.

  Jake filed a M’Naghten notice and attached a thirty-page brief in support that he and Portia, and Lucien, worked on for two weeks. On July 3, Drew was again taken to the state mental hospital at Whitfield to be examined by its doctors, one of whom would be selected to testify against him at trial. The defense had little doubt that Lowell Dyer would find one if not more psychiatrists willing to say that Drew was not mentally ill, did not suffer from mental disease, and knew what he was doing when he pulled the trigger.

  And the defense would not argue otherwise. So far, there was nothing in Drew’s profile to suggest he suffered from mental illness. Jake and Portia had obtained copies of his youth court abstracts, intake and discharge summaries, incarceration records, school reports, and evaluations from Dr. Christina Rooker in Tupelo and Dr. Sadie Weaver at Whitfield. Taken as a whole, they portrayed an adolescent physically, emotionally, and mentally immature and whose first sixteen years had been shockingly chaotic. He had been traumatized by Stuart Kofer and threatened repeatedly, and on the night in question was certain that his mother had been killed. But, he was not mentally ill.

  Jake knew it was possible to find and hire an expert who would say otherwise, but he did not want a courtroom fight over insanity that he could not win. Portraying Drew as deranged and unaccountable would backfire with the jury. He planned to pursue the ruse of M’Naghten for the next few weeks, then drop it before trial. It was, after all, a chess match, and there was nothing wrong with sending Lowell Dyer off in the wrong direction.

  * * *

  —

  STAN ATCAVAGE WAS at his desk when Jake interrupted with “Hey, got a minute?”

  Stan was genuinely glad to see him. He had stopped by the house a week earlier, as soon as Carla would allow it, and had a glass of lemonade on the patio.

  “Good to see you out and about,” he said.

  Seventeen days after the beating, Jake was almost back to normal. The scars were small but visible, and his eyes were clear with only a trace of bruising under them.

  “Glad to be out,” he said as he handed over some papers. “A little gift for you and the boys in Jackson.”

  “What is it?”

  “My mortgage cancellation. Security Bank is paid in full.”

  Stan looked at the sheet on top. It was stamped CANCELED.

  “Congratulations,” Stan said, shocked. “Who’s the lucky bank?”

  “Third Federal in Tupelo.”

  “Great. How much did they loan?”

  “That’s really none of your business, now is it? And I’m moving all my accounts over there too. Meager as they are.”

  “Come on, Jake.”

  “No, seriously, they’re really nice folks and I didn’t have to beg. They recognized the full value of my lovely home and they have confidence in my ability to pay. How refreshing.”

  “Come on, Jake. If it was left up to me, you know?”

  “But it’s not, not anymore. All you have to worry about now is the litigation loan. Tell your boys down there to relax and it’ll get paid soon enough.”

  “Sure it will. I have no doubts. But you don’t have to move your business. Hell, Jake, we’ve handled your accounts and loans since the beginning.”

  “Sorry, Stan, but this bank couldn’t help me when I really needed it.”

  Stan tossed the paperwork onto his desk and cracked his knuckles. “Okay, okay. Are we still pals?”

  “Always.”

  * * *

  —

  ON FRIDAY, July 6, Jake awoke in the dark from a nightmare and realized he was soaked with sweat. The dream was the same—his head stuck on the hot asphalt as a hulking, faceless thug battered his face. His heart was pounding and he was breathing heavily, but he managed to settle himself without moving and waking Carla. He glanced at the clock—4:14. Slowly he calmed himself and his breathing returned to normal. For a long time he was still, afraid to move a muscle because they all still ached, and he stared at the black ceiling and tried to shake off the nightmare.

  The trial was one month away, and once he started thinking about it there would be no more sleep. At 5:00, he managed to gently pull down the sheets and swing his stiff legs to the side of the bed. As he stood, Carla said, “And where do you think you’re going?”

  “I need coffee. Go back to sleep.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be okay? I’m fine, Carla, go back to sleep.”

  He went quietly into the kitchen, made the coffee, and stepped onto the patio where the air was still warm from the day before
and would only grow hotter with the hours. He was still wet with sweat and the coffee did little to cool things, but he needed it because it was an old friend and starting the day without it was unthinkable. Thinking—that was the curse these days. Too much to think about. He dwelt on Cecil Kofer and the beating and how badly he wanted to press charges and sue for civil damages, to at least get some measure of justice, not to mention a few bucks to cover his medical expenses. He thought of Janet and Earl Kofer and their tragic loss, and as a parent he tried mightily to feel sympathy. But the sins of their son had caused heartbreak that could not be measured and would last for decades. Sympathy was an emotion he could not feel. He tried to imagine them sitting in the courtroom and absorbing blow after blow as Jake put their son on trial, but the facts could not be changed. He thought of Drew and for the thousandth time tried to define justice, but it was not within his grasp. Murder must be punished, but murder can also be justified. He engaged himself in his daily debate about putting Drew on the witness stand. To prove the crime was justified it would be necessary to hear from the defendant, to re-create the horror of the moment, to visualize for the jury the unmitigated fear in the house as his mother lay unresponsive and Kofer roamed the house looking for the kids. Jake was almost convinced that he could adequately prep his client with hours of practice before he took the stand.

  He needed a long hot shower to wash away the dried sweat and soothe the aches. He went to the basement to take one without making noise. When he returned to the kitchen in his bathrobe, Carla was at the breakfast table in her pajamas, sipping coffee, and waiting. He kissed her on the cheek, told her he loved her, and sat across the table.

  “Rough night?” she asked.

  “I’m okay. Some bad dreams.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Better than yesterday. Did you sleep well?”