Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Just keep getting better,” she’d tell him. “That’s all the thanks I want.”

  So he got better. Not just physically, but emotionally as well. And on the sixth day, a Wednesday, it was - he was keeping track of time by then - as she was telling him for the umpteenth time that Penny still wasn’t back in school, Stephen rose from the chair he’d been sitting in and started screaming at the top of his lungs. And Terry? Terry only smiled. For in that instant, from that screaming, Theresa knew that Stephen was back at last. He’d somehow managed to rediscover that part of him he’d left behind in his cell, or more likely misplaced even before he’d gotten there in the first place. That part of him he was going to need so desperately now.

  His anger.

  Ever since Cathy Silverman had been asked by Assistant District Attorney Hank Bournagan to come up with something new from Penny Barrow, she’d been trying her best. She’d already asked the child in a dozen ways if her father had ever abused her, only to receive the expected (but no doubt false) denial each time. She’d handed Penny a box of sixty-four crayons and instructed her to draw a picture of her family. Penny had drawn a man and a child, walking through the woods, holding hands. Silverman had not only considered the subject matter of the portrayal troubling, she’d also noted Penny’s selection of a red crayon when it had come time to draw herself. Abused children invariably chose red. No one knew exactly why, but it was right there in all the textbooks. And what had the odds been of Penny’s picking red? One in sixty-four, that’s what. Or maybe a little less, if you wanted to get technical and count magenta and maroon, and a few others like that. Still, Silverman knew she couldn’t ascribe it to mere coincidence.

  She’d had Penny study inkblots, draw pictures, arrange anatomically correct dolls, play word-association games, and share secrets (Silverman went first at that, and the secret she revealed was that her daddy had liked to rub her back). Now she graduated to more suggestive methods (though Silverman would never call them that, preferring to use the term directed).

  “Penny,” she said one afternoon, “I know you keep telling me that your father didn’t do anything else bad to you. Right?”

  And Penny, sitting with her Baba in her lap and her thumb never far from her mouth, said, “Right.”

  “Well, Penny, suppose we play a little game. Why don’t we close our eyes - go ahead and close them - and just for a moment, let’s just pretend your father did do something else bad. Okay?”

  “I don’t want to play that game.”

  “Come on, just give it a try,” said Silverman.

  Penny’s thumb went into her mouth.

  “I’ll tell you what. You do this for me, and I’ll give you a special surprise.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  “I can’t tell you. It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, would it be?”

  Still nothing. Whatever it was her father had done to her, he’d obviously done a pretty good job of buying her silence about it. But Cathy Silverman was a professional, and she was determined to get to the bottom of it, no matter what it took.

  “How about this, Penny? You tell me a story about some other father, and what he did to his little girl. We’ll call the father ‘Sam,’ and the little girl will be ‘Patty.’“

  Still nothing.

  “How about I start it for you?” Silverman suggested. “That way, we can take turns, and it’ll be over very quickly.

  All right. Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Patty. She lived alone in a big house with her daddy, whose name was Sam. She loved her daddy, but one day . . . Okay,” she said. “Your turn.”

  Gently, she pried Penny’s thumb from her mouth. “But one day . . .” Silverman repeated.

  “One day they took her away from her father.”

  “Good,” said Silverman. At least it was a start. “And the reason they took her away from her father was because her father. . .”

  “Loved her.”

  “All right, he loved her. In fact, he loved her too much. It turned out he loved her so much that one time he . . .”

  “Got mad that people were trying to make things up about him.”

  “And when he got mad, he . . .”

  “Killed them.”

  Well, if the response wasn’t quite what Silverman had been hoping for, it certainly was a textbook symptom of homicidal ideation. Silverman made a written note of it. “Why is it,” she asked, “that your daddy wants to kill somebody?”

  “It’s not my daddy we’re talking about,” said Penny. “It’s Sam. Remember?”

  Silverman smiled. Smart-ass kid. Fortunately, she wasn’t smart enough to understand the concept of transference, and to realize she really was talking about herself and her own father. “Right,” she said, “Sam. Why does Sam want to kill somebody?”

  “Because,” said Penny, “he hates stupid people.”

  They were interrupted, perhaps mercifully, by the telephone. Silverman picked it up after the first ring, something she always tried to do. “Cathy Silverman,” she said.

  “Hello, Dr. Silverman. “This is Hank Bournagan, from the Columbia County DA’s-”

  “Yes, Mr. Bournagan. As a matter of fact, I have the subject in front of me right now.”

  “The subject,” Bournagan repeated. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of people as subjects. Defendants, witnesses, victims, yes. But subjects?

  “The Barrow child,” he heard Silverman whispering into the phone.

  “Oh, right.”

  “And I’m doing my best,” said Silverman. “But you have to understand how difficult these cases are. There’s often a tremendous amount of fear, and a reluctance to open-”

  “Yes, yes, I do understand. You take as much time as you need, Dr. Silverman. In fact, Mr. Hall - he’s my boss - he says he’d be especially appreciative if you were to say that the, uh, subject won’t be ready to testify in court until sometime next month.”

  “Well, I suppose I could say that.”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me that right now, so I can go in to my boss and tell him you just said it. What do you say?”

  What Cathy Silverman didn’t say was that all of a sudden this eerie feeling came over her, as though she was one of her own patients, being told to mouth words that weren’t quite her own. But mouth them she did. “The subject won’t be ready to testify until next month,” she said. And the eerie feeling passed, as quickly as it had come.

  “See how easy that is?” she told Penny Barrow.

  Stephen Barrow’s newfound anger didn’t suffer from any lack of targets. He was angry at the stupid store clerk who’d started the whole thing in the first place; angry at the troopers who’d arrested him, the grand jurors who’d indicted him, and the DA who was prosecuting him; angry at the doctors who were accusing him of abusing his daughter, without having even met him; angry at the judges - the one who’d been too timid to dismiss the case, and the one who’d taken his daughter away from him; angry at his ex-wife, who was no doubt doing her best to make Penny’s life completely miserable; and angry at her lawyer, who was behind her every step of the way.

  The problem was that as angry as Stephen was at all these people, he couldn’t get at any of them, at least not without getting himself thrown back in jail. So over the course of the next day and a half, he simmered, he cursed, he shouted, and he even snapped once or twice at Theresa - who quickly put him in his place and assured him she’d leave the next time he did it.

  The fact is, some people are good at anger, and some are not. Stephen had always been in the second camp. On the rare occasion when he’d been moved to true anger, he’d found it absolutely consumed him. It preoccupied his every thought, made functioning on a normal level all but impossible, and ended up draining him of all his energy. He actually admired people who could sustain anger and feed off it. To his way of thinking, there was something truly noble about a man driven by rage to get even, whatever the odds, whatever the price, whatever the
penalty.

  That man simply wasn’t Stephen Barrow.

  So he continued to simmer, but it was an unproductive, unsatisfying simmer that left him wandering around the house looking for someone or something to kick, but never quite fixing on a suitable target.

  On the Friday before his trial was scheduled to start, Stephen and Theresa drove over to Flynt Adams’s office in Chatham. At first, Theresa had balked at the idea of coming along, questioning whether it was smart for her to be present.

  “C’mon,” Stephen had said, “I need some moral support. Besides which, you could be a witness. You said so yourself.” Theresa had, in fact, mentioned to Stephen that she still had a distinct recollection from the day she’d first seen him at the Drug Mart, and could say with certainty that he’d almost forgotten to drop the roll of film off for developing. To Stephen, that helped prove how unimportant the photos were to him, and how he couldn’t possibly have had a special interest in them.

  Flynt Adams wasn’t so sure about the idea.

  “For one thing,” he was quick to point out, “the fact that you’re sleeping together is going to undermine your credibility. Jim Hall will want to go into it, and Wainwright’ll have to permit him. It shows bias.”

  “Who says we’re sleeping together?” Stephen demanded to know. Apparently not all of his anger had simmered away.

  “That reporter guy, he’s been writing all about it in his newspaper stories,” said Adams. “Weren’t you fired because of it?” he asked Theresa.

  “Does that mean it’s true?” she countered. “Any more than Stephen’s a criminal, just because people are saying he is?”

  “That’s different,” Adams told her. “The judge will presume he’s innocent; the law requires him to. But the two of you sleeping together-”

  “We’re not,” said Stephen.

  “Not what?”

  “Not sleeping together. Terry sleeps on the sofa, in the living room. I sleep in my bedroom.”

  “So you haven’t-”

  “Had sex? No,” said Stephen, “as a matter of fact, we haven’t.”

  Adams shook his head at the two people sitting across the desk from him. They were both extraordinarily good-looking. Stephen was older, but by how much? Five years? Ten, tops? She’d gone into debt to bail him out, and lost her job over him. They’d been living alone, under the same roof, for a week now. They’d come together to his office. Adams had simply made what he considered a logical assumption. And if he had . . .

  “Nobody’s going to believe that,” he said.

  There was an awkward silence. To Stephen, it was a revealing moment, a painful lesson the three of them had collectively stumbled upon. At trial, the truth didn’t matter. It was other people’s perception of what the truth was that mattered.

  They spent the next hour preparing Stephen’s testimony. Adams felt strongly that however weak the prosecution’s case turned out to be, unless they got a clear signal from Justice Wainwright that it wouldn’t be necessary, Stephen had to be ready to take the stand and talk about his healthy relationship with his daughter, the spontaneity with which she’d mooned him, and his lack of any sexual or commercial interest in the photos he’d taken of her.

  “How does he send us a signal?” Stephen asked.

  “Easy,” said Adams. “At the end of the DA’s case, before we’ve had our turn, I move to dismiss the charges. The judge says something like, ‘I’ll deny that motion, counselor.’ That’s his way of telling me to rest, without putting you on the stand, and make my next motion, which would be for an acquittal.”

  “And you think he’ll do that?” Theresa asked.

  “He just might,” said Adams. “Or he might want to hear Stephen’s side before finding him not guilty. It all comes down to whether or not Hall has anything up his sleeve besides the photo itself.”

  Jim Hall, of course, had plenty up his sleeve. Hall was a firm believer in the theory that cases weren’t won or lost by courtroom theatrics. They were decided long beforehand, by the pre-trial maneuverings and counter-maneuverings of the lawyers. Infighting, Hall liked to call it. He considered himself a master at it, and few who’d been up against him cared to argue the point.

  Take the Barrow case, for example. Jim Hall was determined to win this case. A year or two ago, he’d prosecuted a case against a sex offender, a Peeping Tom who liked to hang out in neighbors’ backyards at night. The various shrinks who’d examined the guy concluded he didn’t pose a danger to the community. So Hall had gone easy on him, allowed him to plead guilty to a reduced charge and get five years’ probation. Six months later, the guy goes and kills a nine-year-old boy. Cut his privates off, he did, although they kept that little detail out of the papers.

  So much for leniency.

  This time there’d be no sympathy, no lesser charges, no probation. This case was going to go to trial, and Jim Hall was going to win it. Not with some dramatic opening statement or brilliant last-minute summation; not with a bunch of Ivy League experts with fancy degrees; and not with a lot of legalese and case citations.

  If it took pulling out those Valentine’s Day cards the deputies had seized when they executed the search warrant, then Hall would pull them out, especially the one that said “To the love of my life” and was signed “Love, Stephen.” None of the rest of the stuff seized had panned out as well as Hall had hoped. The eight pairs of child’s underpants, for example, had tested negative for semen stains, human hairs, and traces of DNA. The porno film, The Devil Made Me Do Him, had turned out to be mismarked; it was actually a copy of an A1 Pacino movie, The Devil’s Advocate, and pretty boring at that.

  Or maybe it would take reaching into Stephen Barrow’s past. While his print sheet had shown no priors, Hall knew from experience that that simply meant there had been no convictions of crimes. So he’d had his investigator, Ed Sprague, run an FBI check, and Sprague had come up with an old arrest from New York City, way back when Barrow was eighteen. The original charge had been indecent exposure - Public Lewdness, they called it - and even though some liberal judge down there had let Barrow cop out to an Administrative Code violation for urinating in public, getting the word lewdness into the record wouldn’t hurt too much, would it?

  That would have to wait. But one way or another, Jim Hall was going to win this case, because he was a master at infighting. In fact, he was going to try to win it first thing Monday morning, by saying five little words.

  By Sunday night, Stephen was too nervous to sit still. Theresa had made soup, something thick and good-smelling, but he couldn’t get more than a mouthful down.

  “It’s a nonjury trial,” Theresa had reminded him. “Your lawyer says you’re going to be acquitted. Try to relax a little, will you?”

  “Relax?” Stephen snapped. “I lose this case, and they’re going to make Penny stay with her mother for the rest of her life. Do you know what that’ll do to her?”

  “You’re not going to lose it, Stephen, unless maybe you fall asleep on the witness stand, in the middle of your testimony. Look at you.”

  He didn’t have to. He hadn’t slept at all Saturday night and had managed only an hour or two the night before. He’d barely eaten all weekend. He knew what he must look like.

  “Well, it’s after midnight,” she said. “I’m going to bed, so at least one of us’ll be able to drive to court in the morning.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  They both chuckled. It would be his third shower of the day. He claimed they calmed him down, the way baths calmed Penny. Theresa was yet to be convinced.

  He left her to make up the sofa and closed the door of his bedroom behind him. He checked the outfit she’d laid out for him on his bed: a blue blazer, gray slacks, a white shirt, a subdued tie. Brown loafers and belt. “You want to look nice,” Flynt Adams had told him, “but not too nice. A sport jacket and tie is respectful. A suit starts getting too dressy.”

  The water felt good. He turned it
up a notch and inched the dial a little farther over toward the “H.” He let it hit his back and shoulders full blast, trying his best to relax. Steam rose around him. Twelve hours, he figured. Twelve hours and this whole thing’ll be over. We win the criminal case, everything else’ll fall into place, it’ll have to. So hold on, Penny. Hold on one more night, Sweetie.

  Drying off, he caught sight of his face in the mirror. Jesus, he thought. I really do look scary. If I didn’t know me, I’d think I was, what? A sex maniac? He tried to smile at his little joke, but the muscles in his face refused to cooperate. He knew how tired he was. But the mere thought of it brought on a whole new wave of anxiety: The more he needed to sleep, the more he knew he wouldn’t be able to.

  Back in his bedroom, he was surprised to find he’d already hung up his clothes for the morning and dimmed the lights. That kind of stuff had been happening to him a lot lately - he’d do something, and then ten minutes later he’d completely forgotten he’d done it. Two days ago, the morning after a light snow, he’d gotten all bundled up and gone outside to shovel the walk, only to discover that he’d done it the night before. This must be what it’s like to lose your mind, he decided.

  He tightened the towel around his waist and wandered over to the bedside table. Out of habit, he set the alarm clock, a precaution he knew was unnecessary: He knew that no matter what time it went off, he’d be awake to hear it.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, and in the near darkness, felt something there. He must have left something on the bed, he realized, though he couldn’t remember having done so. He reached out and felt a lump, but it was beneath the covers and too large to be clothes.

  “Hello,” it said.

  Flynt Adams didn’t expect to get much sleep, either.