I ignored the stares of everyone in the office. I told Cheryl, “I’ll be in my office for the rest of the day. But no one comes in. No calls go through. That includes the Big Man. Understand.”
She nodded, then asked, ‘But what about –“
“There are two other top assistants in this office, and dozens of attorneys. Let someone else trying running this place for a day.”
I locked the door behind me. And tried my level best to forget there was a world out there.
No happy endings.
CHAPTER 7: THE ANGEL OF DEATH
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 – 10 A.M.
My name is William Maitland. I’m an Assistant State Attorney in Jacksonville, Florida. Until a little more than three months ago I had a job I loved and a wife I loved who I thought loved me. Since then, I’ve learned that she stopped loving me, and I may have stopped loving my job.
To do my job, I’ve had to have the faith that it is a job worth doing because there is an innate justice in the world. And if there isn’t justice, it’s the job of people to make it exist.
Which is probably why the last case I prosecuted, yesterday, has shaken my faith in that concept of justice. A 74-year-old man had murdered his dying wife by giving her an overdose of morphine. He admitted what he had done, but hadn’t mentioned that he’d been carrying on an affair with a neighbor as his wife died.
Did he overdose his wife to be free of her and have his girlfriend? I was sure he had. But if he had committed murder in cold blood, all he had done was kill a woman so far gone to all intents and purposes she wasn’t really alive anymore. I had brought out the affair and an almost-confession that was as good as the real thing. He might have been sent to prison. At the least, his life was ruined. One daughter had turned away from him; his girlfriend would never be with him again after their affair was exposed.
And for what? He was no threat to society. He wouldn’t be out raping and pillaging at the ripe old age of 74, suffering from severe rheumatoid arthritis. A friend, who happened to be a fighter on the other side of the bar, had told me I was playing God and I could not put myself in the husband’s mind as he made the decision to kill his wife.
And he was right. But if I ignored what he had done, and what I had learned, it meant that I had let pity override the demands of justice. Would I start looking the other way when friends got in trouble and the ultimate decision of what to do with them came in front of me? It was too hard as it was not to bend the law to my personal needs. I’d known and heard of other chief prosecutors who let themselves be swayed by those human feelings.
Sometimes they got away with it. Sometimes they put a gun in their mouth. Sometimes they wound up behind bars rubbing elbows with people they had put away – for a little while. They usually didn’t last too long.
On the other hand, if I had let what I knew remain hidden in a few documents that no one would ever look at, an old man who had suffered for years to do what was right of his wife would alive now. He would probably be going home to his two daughters. And in time, probably be loving a woman he had known for 30 years that he was now free to openly be with. His two daughters could have grieved their mother, loved their father, wished him happiness in his new relationship, and remained sisters.
But, I had done what I thought was right, the old man had killed himself, the two daughters had ripped apart their relationship and might never be sisters again, and the daughter who had stayed at his side spit in my face and hoped that somebody would break my heart too.
And so I sit in my office today, the door locked, taking no calls. The daughter didn’t know that my loving wife had already done what she wished for. So I have lost my wife and my children and my family.
And because I had let the old man’s tragedy get to me, shake my faith in the rightness of what I am, shake my faith that justice is more than a word, I sit here alone and wonder if I want to do this job anymore.
If I can’t believe in my job, and I have been a miserable failure as a husband and father, obviously, what do I have left?
Tuesday, July 12, 2005 – NOON
His secretary came back out of his office with Dr. Ernst Teller right on her heels. He was a tall, angular, brown haired man with the hair cut in an old fashioned almost-buzz cut. Combined with the hawk nose, the piercing gaze and the ram-rod straight posture, he could have posed for a World War I German Aircraft Ace Poster. The only thing missing was a monocle and a cigarette held loosely in his lips with a cigarette holder.
“Mr. Maitland,” in that dry but friendly tone completely at odds with his appearance. “To what do I owe the honor?”
Teller was in his late 50s, maybe older but he was one of those men that could be any age from 45 to 65 and you’d have to guess on which end of the spectrum he belonged. He’d been the prime court-appointed psychiatrist for the entire 10 years I’d been with the State Attorney’s Office. We called him in when we wanted to know just how badly screwed up a suspect was, if there were legitimate reasons for considering an insanity, defense or if the defendant was just playing crazy.
Teller was great at seeing through the bullshit. He had no problems saying a defendant was sane and play acting crazy. On the other hand, he had investigated some really horrible people when the public was clamoring for their blood and had no hesitancy in saying they couldn’t be held legally liable for their actions, no matter how unpopular that made him with cops, prosecutors or the general public. He was as honest a man as I had ever met.
Of course, the fact that he had his own private psychiatric practice, with a lot of well-heeled patients and apparently although no one could ever prove it, came from money, probably enabled him to be a little more able to say what he felt and let the chips fall wherever they chose to.
“Could I have a half hour, maybe an hour, of your time, doc?”
“A legal matter?”
“Personal.”
He gave me one of those looks that seemed to go straight to your soul. It worked wonders with defendants and most defense and/or prosecution attorneys. Personally, I considered it another one of those shrink tricks they teach you at Shrink U. But he was good.
He thought about it and then told his reception/nurse, “Abby, hold my calls and give Mr. – Smith – a call and tell him I’ll have to reschedule for next week. Just tell him not to call his mother and stay away from sharp knives.”
Abby grinned at him and he told me over his shoulder, “That’s just psychiatric humor, Mr. Maitland. Follow me.”
His office was fairly small, intimate would be the word. He had an overstuffed chair that bore the imprint of his body after God knows how many shrink sessions. He had a desk behind him and a low coffee table sat between his chair and a low couch. The coffee table had an inlaid Rorschach black and white ink spot design and there was a large abstract painting on the wall with the same design.
I wondered if he’d run the “what do you see” in the ink spots routine on me. But he was straight.
He gestured to the couch and I sat on it. Damned if I’d lay down. He picked up a pipe, lit it and began puffing contentedly.
“It’s your dime, Mr. Maitland. You’ve never come to me for anything other than my professional advice on cases so I’ll admit to being curious as to why you’re here. Odds are that it has something to do with the Bingham case. Still, I would have thought you were made of sterner stuff. They don’t call you the Iceman for nothing around the office.”
When I gave him a questioning look he shrugged and said, “Psychiatrists know and hear everything.”
“That must be why psychiatrists have among the highest suicide and divorce rates around.”
“Touché. Now, what would you like to talk about? I should tell you that Mr. Edwards already called me and said he might need my services regarding you. Something about your locking yourself in your office, refusing to take calls and acting in a completely un-Iceman-like manner.”
“I guess it has something to do with the Bingham case. It�
��s just that –“
I stopped and he just sat there silently. Just like prosecutors and reporters, he obviously had mastered the tactic of silence. It broke more people than any other tactic.
“Not the Bingham case per se. It’s just that it made me look – at other things. At my life.”
“So this is about your impending divorce and your wife’s affair?”
I just looked at him.
“I told you, psychiatrists hear and know everything.”
“In this case, so does everybody in the courthouse and a dozen adjoining blocks. It’s not exactly a National Security secret.”
“Granted. So, talk.”
“I need to give you some background first so you’ll have the context. I met Debbie at the University of Florida. She was a freshman, I was a junior. She was – hotter than she is now. She’d won some beauty contests, was in communications thinking about becoming a broadcaster. I doubt there was a guy on campus that wouldn’t have had her. But the only guys that had a shot were jocks, BMOCs, guys that could afford a Maserati or Lexus because their daddies had more money than God
“Me, I was some guy raised by a single mom with no money. I was there on a scholarship because I’d worked my ass off in school and applied for every loan and scholarship anybody ever heard of. I got some money as the son of a deceased coal miner.
“I’d seen her around campus, but she couldn’t have picked me out of a lineup. I was nothing special. She was. And then one night I was earning some extra cash by working at a frat party. Mostly cut work so the brothers could concentrate on more important things – booze and pussy. I saw her when she came in with some guy on the football team. She was drinking and having a good time. But I kind of got the feeling that the guy she was with was deliberately – getting her drunker. Those were the days before date rape drugs but, hell, you really never needed anything more than enough alcohol or cocaine to get most girls to spread their legs.
“You say, so what? She was nothing to me and for all I knew she’d been banging the whole fraternity on her own before that. So I didn’t do anything. But I happened to notice her asshole boyfriend and a couple of other guys moving her toward the back of the frat house and I knew from working there that night that there was nothing there except for a few storage rooms.
“I guess it was curiosity, or maybe I had it in the back of my head that I was going to play hero somehow but I wandered back there and I could hear noises coming one room. The door was closed but not locked. I opened it and looked inside. There was a lamp on a table and there was enough light to see her on the bed with three guys on her. One was underneath her, one was in her mouth and the other guy was ramming it in her ass.
“I was kind of innocent and naïve in those days, although I wasn’t a virgin, and I didn’t know anything about anal sex, but it sure looked as though she was hurting, because the guy putting it to her was hitting her hard and each time he went in she kind of shuddered and whimpered. If I’d known more about sex at the time I might have just figured he had her going and she was enjoying it. But it looked like he was hurting her. And afterwards I found out they had all been rough as hell. They really hurt her, front and back.”
I looked up at Teller but his eyes betrayed no emotion. I was pretty sure he had heard things that made the story I was telling him sound like a children’s story from “Mother Goose,” but the dark pools of his eyes were unreadable.
“Needless to say, Doc, nothing of this ever leaves this room. No notes. No talking about it with your receptionist. No case studies ten years from now. Right?”
“You wound me. I’m a medical doctor, as well as a psychiatrist. Nothing anyone ever says to me goes outside these walls and since this is completely unofficial, there won’t be any written records as well. Does that suffice?”
“Okay. Just wanted to get the ground rules straight. Anyway, I looked at her and I made a decision. I know that part of it is that she was who she was. I like to think if she’s been some ugly, little shapeless sorority pledge, I would have done the same thing, but honestly, who knows? So I went in there and grabbed the guy with his dick in her mouth and pulled him away and told them all I was calling the cops and reporting a gang rape if they didn’t get out.
“We tussled for a minute or two and they were calling out and then there were two or three guys who were bigger than mountains – or that’s the way it seemed – and they just pulled me off the guy I was wrestling with and threw me outside the room. The biggest guy just stood over me and told me if I kept on being a shit they were going to put me in the hospital. They told me to mind my own business.
“There wasn’t much I could do at that point. It would have been suicide to go up against those guys but I couldn’t leave it alone. I looked around until I found an equalizer in another storage room – a fireplace poker. And then I went back in the room.
“Three guys went to the hospital and the rest of their friends put me in a coma. I was in it for nearly a week. I probably would have come out of it anyway, but a guy named Henry Clark heard about what had happened and came to my rescue. He owned a PR agency in Jacksonville and he had a few bucks. My mom didn’t have much health insurance and being a student I had none. He paid out of his own pocket, and called in a favor to a West Coast neurosurgeon who flew in to Gainesville and took over my case.
“I came out of it a week later, with no apparent long term damage that anyone could ever tell. I got hold of Clark a few weeks later and asked him why. I didn’t know him from Adam. He told me he’d gone through UF nearly a decade before me and met his wife during a frat riot. Something about gorgeous women and frat boys.
“Anyway, after I got out of the hospital Debbie came by my off campus apartment one day. She wanted to talk, to thank me for what I’d done. I should have said no. It was just opening up a can of worms, but I didn’t have the balls to say no. We talked and then we went out for dinner and it was plain as hell that she had some hero fantasy going about me. And I should have nipped that in the bud. But she was so damned gorgeous and I was 21.
“Long story short, I tried to play it cool and we didn’t do anything for awhile, but it happened and we were together. And after awhile we got married. And the whole time we were together guys have always drooled over her. I couldn’t take her to dances without guys trying to keep her out on the floor. They practically dry humped on the dance floor. I would have been in fights every time we went out if I’d let it get to me, but I could see that she could handle herself.
“And she said she loved me and the funny thing is, I always believed her. But I knew, guys would always be on the hunt. Guys who were bigger, better looking, richer, funnier. And if I hadn’t been working at the frat house that night, I knew I’d never have known her socially and one of those guys would have married her and she’d have had their children.”
I stopped. I had never told another living being what had happened and how I had felt about what had happened for the last 18 years. Teller just stared at me and puffed on that damned pipe.
Finally he said, “And...”
“You know the story. I think everybody in the courthouse does. She met a big, good looking younger professor at UNF. She either was having sex with him or would have been if I hadn’t found out about the affair – either emotional or sexual. Doesn’t matter either way. And she’s filed for divorce. The thing that’s been in the back of my mind for 18 years finally happened.”
“I repeat, and....?”
I leaned forward and asked, “The thing that’s killing me, the question that I can’t stand, is if I caused this to happen.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Maitland.”
“I’ve heard that people can – sometimes create what they most fear. When I first joined the State Attorney’s Office one of the first cases I prosecuted was a Navy officer who had shot his wife and her lover. He’d come back from a deployment overseas, heard rumors about an affair, and managed to catch them together. It was pretty open
and shut. But when I was working the case I had a chance to talk to him.
“He told me he’d loved his wife and was sure she loved him until one day when he heard a couple of friends joking about his wife and another officer. He confronted them and they told him it was just a bad joke because they’d known he was listening. And he accepted that.
“But it got under his skin and he started thinking about it. And he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He started questioning his wife about what she did when he was away and who she saw. And he started watching her. Every time she came home later, every time she went out with her friends, he saw her with other men in his mind. And naturally, the more suspicious he got and the closer he tried to hold her, the more he drove her crazy and angrier with him.
“Eventually she wound up going to bed with another guy. It was inevitable. I was sitting with him in a cell when he told me that. He looked at me and said, ‘I made her cheat, Mr. Maitland. I know that now. I’ve talked to her friends since...this happened. She had never cheated on me. She loved me. She was a good woman. And I turned her into a cheating whore. I made her what she was. Why would I do that? I never have been able to figure that out’.”
“He was in Raiford until 2003. He upset somebody and they stuck an ice pick in his ear.
“But I still remember what he said and the expression on his face when he said it.
“I’ve read enough psychology books to know that there’s a name for this – a self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s where you create the situation you fear. I don’t know if I believe any of that crap. But I do know that since I joined this office I’ve been retreating from my wife and family. There were too many nights when I wasn’t home. Too many days I skipped holidays and school functions.
The Long Fall Page 25