Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Beautiful,” said Tom Grady. “I’ll get right over there.”

  After lighting another cigarette, that was. At the twelve-step meetings, they always told you it was best to concentrate on one addiction at a time. You wanted to stop drinking, you were going to need your nicotine and your caffeine to get you through the day.

  No sense arguing with advice like that, was there?

  On that same Tuesday morning, Theresa Mulholland was already up in Albany covering a breakfast meeting of the regional chapter of Mothers Against Gun Violence. Inside the League of Women Voters Center, 137 women listened as the guest of honor and featured speaker, Hillary Clinton, called for stricter gun-control measures. Outside, in temperatures hovering around the 20-degree mark, thirty-eight other women and fifty-two men -every one of them a hunter and a dues-paying member of the National Rifle Association - carried signs condemning the women for violating their Second Amendment right to bear arms (or, as one hastily drawn sign put it, to arm bears).

  Theresa picked at her cold scrambled eggs and limp bacon, rearranging them on her plate so it would look like she’d eaten something. Pretty soon, she told herself, she was going to have to do something about getting a life.

  The bail application was heard a little after eleven. Stephen Barrow had gotten a call from Flynt Adams the night before, telling him to be there.

  “Is there any chance he’ll lower it?” he’d asked.

  “There’s a chance,” Adams had told him. “Besides which, what do we have to lose?”

  Jim Hall had heard from Adams at ten that morning. “Sure, I can make it,” he said. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Unlike Adams, Hall already knew about the reports Judge McGee had received from the therapist and the pediatrician. He’d gotten a call first thing that morning from Judge McGee’s law secretary, a bright young man fresh out of Albany Law School, who, as things would have it, was hoping to land a job with the Columbia County District Attorney’s Office. The way he figured things, there was no harm in getting on Jim Hall’s good side.

  Stephen looked around the courtroom, noticed there were no crack dealers or their families present this time. It was just him, his lawyer, the DA, and the court staff. And one old guy he hadn’t seen before, who from time to time would break into a burst of coughing that threatened to be his last.

  There was an “All rise!” as Judge Wainwright strode into the room and took his place. The clerk called the case, and Stephen and his lawyer stepped forward.

  “Good morning,” said the judge. “I understand we’re on at the defense’s request, on an application to reduce bail.”

  “That’s correct,” said Adams. “And I thank you for-”

  “You’re welcome. Before I hear you, I want to know if you’re aware of these two reports Judge McGee has received, from Cathy Silverman and this, uh, Dr. Singh?” He held up some papers.

  “Reports?”

  To Stephen, the look on Flynt Adams’s face said it all. He obviously had no clue.

  “How about you, Mr. Hall?”

  “First I’m hearing of it, your honor.”

  “Why don’t we recess for a few minutes,” the judge suggested, “while I have my clerk make copies of these for both sides?”

  For Stephen, the next half hour was an absolute blur. He read the reports over his lawyer’s shoulder, phrases like “classic behavioral signs of sexual abuse,” “consistent with sexual abuse,” and “sexual abuse therefore cannot be ruled out” spinning wildly on the pages in front of him.

  “What are they saying?” he asked Adams at one point.

  “They’re saying they think you’ve been sexually abusing your daughter.”

  “Sexually abusing her? How?”

  “They don’t say,” Adams told him. “And they’re not sure. But this is going to absolutely kill us.”

  And kill them it did. When they resumed, Adams made his bail application. He called the reports “nothing but speculation and innuendo,” and asked the judge to disregard them. But it was clear that the wind had gone out of his sails; he knew he was done even before he’d begun.

  Jim Hall conceded that the reports didn’t quite rise to the level of establishing conclusively that Stephen had been abusing his daughter. “Still,” he contended, “as the old saying goes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And I say there’s enough smoke here, coming from two independent, court-appointed experts, to warrant raising this man’s bail to $250,000. And that’s the People’s request.”

  Those people again, thought Stephen.

  In the end, Judge Wainwright, to his credit, left the bail right where it was. He found the reports preliminary and “somewhat speculative.” On the other hand, he was troubled enough by what was in them that he certainly wasn’t going to reduce the bail.

  “So, counselor,” he asked Adams. “Is your client going be able to post the $50,000 by the end of the day?”

  “No, sir, he’s not.”

  “Then why don’t we spare him a difficult afternoon? Deputy, please take Mr. Barrow into custody.”

  And Stephen heard again the ratcheting sound of handcuffs opening and saw a large man in a gray uniform walking toward him.

  “Hands behind your back,” the man said.

  Then there was silence, broken only by the consumptive coughing fit of the older man who’d been taking notes while seated in the jury box, off to one side.

  Downstairs in the building’s basement level, they removed the handcuffs so Stephen could empty out his pockets. He was then searched up and down, the deputy apologizing as he patted Stephen’s crotch area.

  “You never know,” he said.

  Stephen nodded, not wanting to make trouble. Besides, he guessed there had to be a reason for it, like maybe he’d shown up for his bail application with a machine gun hidden in his undershorts. He was placed in a holding cell. The only other occupant was a black man, no doubt a crack dealer.

  “Wha’ they got you for, man?” he wanted to know.

  “I took a picture of my daughter,” Stephen said absently.

  “Nekkid?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wit’ no clothes on?”

  Stephen nodded.

  “Sheeeet,” said the black man.

  It dawned on Stephen that he probably shouldn’t have answered the man, at least not truthfully. Weren’t you always reading about other inmates killing people like him, or castrating them, as soon as the guards walked away? But the black man didn’t say anything more, just shook his head slowly from side to side, and said “Sheeeet” again.

  An hour later, Stephen was taken out of the holding cell by a deputy and led down a series of corridors. They stopped at a desk long enough for Stephen to be handed a blanket, an orange jumpsuit, and a pair of paper shoes. Then he was led down one last corridor, with barred cells on either side. The deputy used a huge key to unlock one of the cells, and Stephen stepped inside. It was square, maybe eight feet on each side. There was a cot on the far wall, a sink, and an exposed lidless toilet. In the middle of the ceiling was a bare lightbulb, protected by a wire cage. There was no window.

  The door was slammed shut and locked behind him. The upper half of it had a cutout portion, with bars, so he could see the area of the corridor that was directly in front of him, but nothing else.

  “Whatchoo in heah faw, Whitey?”

  He couldn’t see the man who was asking, and decided not to answer him.

  “I said, Whatchoo in heah faw?”

  “Murder,” said Stephen.

  It was a full two days before Theresa Mulholland learned that Stephen Barrow had been put in jail. She found out almost by accident, when she saw a note on the weekly assignment board saying that Tom Grady had been put back on the story, and that one of the things Neil Witt had suggested was for him to “try to get an interview with Barrow in jail.”

  Jail?

  “What happened?” Theresa asked Grady.

  “Couldn’t make
the bail,” said Grady. “That, and it looks like he’s been abusing his kid all along.”

  “Abusing her?”

  “Yeah, as in sexually abusing her.”

  “Tom, that’s impossible. It can’t be true.”

  “You were there?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I drove up there to interview him, and I got snowed in and ended up having to spend the night. I’m telling you, Tom, this guy’s a super parent. There’s no way on earth he could have done anything to her.”

  “Well, there’s a child therapist and an M.D. who think otherwise,” said Grady. “But I’ll be sure to bear in mind what you’ve told me.”

  It didn’t take long for things to fall into a routine for Stephen. He’d expected jail to be like it was in the movies: hundreds of men banging spoons against the bars of their cells, arguing over which TV channel to watch, and gathering at mealtimes in a huge mess hall; race riots punctuating half-court basketball games in the exercise yard; mournful guitar strumming by a lone death-row prisoner late at night; and sadistic guards eager to mete out vicious beatings for the most trivial of infractions - all watched over by a stern but wise warden.

  It was nothing like that.

  Places like that they called prisons, Stephen soon learned, where you went to serve out your sentence. Columbia County was simply a jail - or more euphemistically, a detention facility - where you were kept while awaiting trial, if you weren’t lucky enough to have the money to make bail. The total population fluctuated somewhere between a handful of inmates and a couple dozen. There was no mess hall; meals were slid through the bars of your door on a cardboard tray and picked up half an hour later. There were no fights over TV channels, because there was no TV; no half-court basketball games, because there was no exercise yard. There was no mournful guitar strumming by anyone on death row, because there was no death row, and because no musical instruments were permitted. The guards - who were actually deputy sheriffs - weren’t sadistic. And there was no stern but wise warden, only a sheriff, who, on the one appearance he made, struck Stephen as neither stern nor particularly wise.

  The cot was narrow and hard, the blanket thin and moth-eaten. The food was bland to the point of being tasteless, but was otherwise edible. The coffee - Stephen assumed it was coffee - was weak and lukewarm. Every third day, you were permitted a shower, three and a half minutes under a trickle of water that alternately froze and scalded you.

  But by far the worst thing was that there was nothing to do, absolutely nothing. No books to read, no TV to watch, no radio to listen to. You could talk to the inmates you could see across the corridor, or those in the adjoining cells you couldn’t see, so long as you were quiet about it. But for the most part, none of them had anything interesting to say, or cared much about what Stephen might have to say. So you sat and waited, and ate three times a day, and showered every third day. And you counted the days to your next court appearance. Stephen’s was March third, a week and a half away from the time he first came in.

  It might as well have been a year and a half.

  On the seventh day, or maybe it was the eighth - in spite of the fact that he had nothing else to do, he still found it impossible to keep track of the days - Stephen was told he had a visitor. The only visitor he’d had up to that point had been Flynt Adams, who’d dropped in to see him twice, to tell him he was working on his motions for the criminal case. Those visits had taken place in a special counsel room, where an inmate and his lawyer were permitted to sit at a table so they could go over court papers and stuff like that.

  This was different.

  This was what they called a social visit.

  He was taken from his cell and led through the underground maze to a room that had tiny cubicles along one wall. Each cubicle had a chair, which faced a dirty, yellowish window. The windows had chicken wire in the glass. There was a phone, or at least the handset from a phone, which you picked up and used to talk to your visitor, who sat in another room, seated in an identical chair, holding an identical handset, on the other side of the chicken-wire window.

  The visitor was an older man, thin and gray-haired. At first Stephen didn’t recognize him and figured there must be some mistake. Still, talking to someone else’s visitor was better than talking to nobody at all. Stephen picked up the phone, and when the older man did the same, he said, “I’m Stephen Barrow. Who are you here to see?”

  “You,” said the man. And then he launched into a prolonged fit of coughing, which prompted Stephen to remember him. He’d been in the courtroom the day Judge Wainwright had put Stephen in.

  “I’m Tom Grady,” the man said, once his coughing had subsided. “I write for the Hudson Valley Herald.” The phone connection, all two feet of it, was full of static, making it difficult to hear.

  “What happened to Terry?” Stephen asked. He couldn’t remember her last name.

  “She got taken off the story.”

  “How come?”

  “She only caught it in the first place ‘cause I was out sick for a coupla days. I’m the regular crime reporter, see? So I’m the one who’s going to do the follow-up, tell the readers your story.”

  “My story,” Stephen echoed. There was something about this guy he didn’t like. “What kind of a story am I?” he asked.

  “That’s entirely up to you.”

  Stephen had to wait through another coughing spasm for an explanation.

  “The way I figure it,” said Grady, “you’re either a sick pervert, or you’re just a dumb jerk locked up for what amounts to felony stupidity.”

  Stephen managed a small smile.

  “So what’s it gonna be?” Grady asked. “You gonna let me help you, or not?”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Everything, start to finish.”

  “My lawyer told me that under no circumstances-”

  “Kid, do yourself a favor, why don’t you, and cut the crap. You been doing everything your lawyer told you to so far, right?”

  “I guess so, pretty much.”

  “And look where it’s got you.”

  He had a point. Still, Adams had been insistent. “He says we’ve got an excellent chance of beating this thing in court, and I should just be patient.”

  “He says,” Grady mimicked. “Lookit, willya? It’s all the same to me. I get my paycheck at the enda the week either way. So to tell you the truth, I don’t give a rat’s ass one way or the other. I’m here to help you if you want me to. If you don’t, hey, that’s okay, too. But I got a deadline to meet and a story to write, and I’m going to write it, with or without your help. So it’s your call, Barrow. Whaddaya say?”

  “I guess,” said Stephen, “it’s going to have to be without me.”

  There’d been a reason Flynt Adams had told Stephen Barrow not to talk to anybody, especially now that he was in jail. Adams knew how inmates were always looking to get an edge. Suppose one of them were to get in touch with the detective on his case, tell him that the guy accused of taking porno shots of his daughter had confided in him that he’d been doing it for years, and making money selling the photos? Next thing you knew, the guy was the DA’s star witness at trial. And then, maybe six months later, after everyone had forgotten all about him, he’d quietly be released after serving two years of a fifteen-year sentence. So Adams knew how important it was for Stephen not to talk to anybody. And he’d let Stephen know, in no uncertain terms.

  What’s more, Flynt Adams had indeed told Stephen that, according to what he’d come up with while doing research for his motion papers on the criminal case, it was beginning to look like the law was on Stephen’s side. The three felony charges had one thing in common: In order to win a conviction, the prosecution would have to prove “sexual conduct” by a child. The New York State Penal Law defined “sexual conduct” as “actual or simulated sexual intercourse, deviate sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality, masturbation, sadomasochistic abuse, or lewd exhibition of the genitals.”


  Since none of the other categories even began to fit the photograph, it was clear to Adams that Jim Hall would contend that it was the last category - lewd exhibition of the genitals - that the photo depicted. And since the genitals were obviously exhibited, the only question left - in fact, the only question in the entire criminal case - was whether or not that exhibition was lewd.

  If it was, Stephen Barrow was guilty.

  If it wasn’t, he was innocent. Not just not guilty on some technicality, or some inability of the prosecution to prove its case. No, he’d be truly innocent.

  Flynt Adams had heard of lawyers who’d had clients who were actually and truly 100 percent innocent. He’d just never had one himself. Not till now, anyway.

  Since the word lewd wasn’t defined in the Penal Law, the rule was that its normal meaning would control. Adams found his dictionary and looked it up.

  lewd (lood), adj. 1. Inclined to, characterized by, or inciting lust or lechery. 2. Obscene or indecent, as language, songs, etc. 3. Obs. a. base or vile, esp. of a person, b. bad, worthless, or poor, esp. of a thing

  If the third meaning was obsolete, he figured he could safely forget about it. That left the first two. And of those, only the first made any sense, or took you anywhere in your analysis but in a never-ending circle. So could you look at the photo and conclude from it - and from it alone - that the child’s genitals were displayed in such a way that they were “inclined to” (which to Adams had to mean likely to) “incite lust or lechery”?

  Of course you couldn’t.

  First, it was only a single photograph among many. (The one or two other partially nude shots were just that, the kind of photo any parent might take of a prepubescent child.) Next, there was no suggestion that his client had ever done anything like this before, no indication that he’d deliberately posed his daughter for the shot, compelled her to display herself that way, punished her if she refused, or rewarded her if she complied. As far as Adams knew, the DA had no evidence that Barrow had intended to exploit his daughter in any way - whether by selling the photo, sending it off to some pornographic magazine, posting it on the Internet, running off copies to share with friends or associates, or by any other method. Nor could the DA prove that Barrow had intended to gratify some strange sexual desire of his, or of anyone else’s.