Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  They stopped at the base of the driveway so that Grady could rest, his six-ashtray habit taking its toll. “When we get up there,” he told Danny, his words punctuated by short gasps, “you get right up close behind me. I’ll knock on the door. Whichever one of ‘em answers it, I’ll ask for the other one. Soon as they’re both standin’ there in front of us, I’ll step aside, and you fire away. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Danny.

  Ever since Theresa’s surprise appearance in his bed, Stephen Barrow had been sleeping considerably better. If Theresa could do little during the day to help him overcome his anxieties, at least she could be there beside him at night, to help him fight off the terrors that tended to grow and multiply and visit him in the dark.

  Not that this particular night was an unusually dark one. The moon had been full just two nights earlier, and had risen over the treetops in the eastern sky only slightly bent out of shape, and as they lay under the covers of his bed, Stephen and Theresa, if not quite bathed in white reflection, were at least fully visible to each other from the neck up. They’d shared a half-bottle of wine with dinner, he to celebrate Passover, she to usher in Good Friday. If their different faiths made for some slightly schizophrenic toasting, including a brief but determined attempt to come up with a suitable name for an equal-opportunity wine (neither Mogendavi nor Manichablis seemed to do it), their efforts at least left them in good spirits, in every sense of the phrase.

  Which is why they were still very much awake around midnight when they heard footsteps outside, a muffled coughing, and finally a knocking on the front door. Stephen, who didn’t own a bathrobe - like umbrellas and hats with brims, bathrobes were strictly for city folk and old men - had to retrieve his jeans from the floor, climb into them, and remember to take care in zipping them up (a decidedly hazardous procedure in the absence of undershorts). He pulled a sweatshirt over his head as he walked to the door, the floor cold under his still bare feet.

  It was at times like this that Stephen wondered if it might not be a bad idea to keep a rifle or a shotgun handy, loaded or not, or even one of those pellet guns that looked like the real thing. All his neighbors were armed, at least all the year-rounders. Trapper Jeff down the road had a veritable arsenal at his disposal, with everything from pistols to antitank guns and medium-range missiles. Even old Martin Andre, who was now well into his eighties and blind in one eye, got his deer each fall and filled his freezer with steaks to get him through the winter.

  But Stephen didn’t live with Trapper Jeff or Martin Andre; he lived with his daughter, Penny. To her, guns were not just dangerous tools possessed by hunters; guns were weapons of destruction. Guns were what killed small, furry animals, dropped beautiful songbirds out of the sky, and blew away innocent schoolchildren in faraway places with names like Colorado and Florida. If three years after having seen the movie, she still wasn’t prepared to forgive the cold-blooded murderers of Bambi’s mother, what chance would her father possibly have in pleading his Second Amendment rights?

  Which is why Stephen had no gun in his hand, real or fake, loaded or unloaded, when he unlocked the front door and confronted the two men who’d been knocking on it. The first man - because there was definitely a first, and a second hiding behind him - was older and not particularly threatening in appearance, and even looked familiar to Stephen.

  “Sorry to bother you so late at night,” he said, holding his hat in both hands as though to demonstrate how truly sorry he was. “But we’ve been looking for Miss Theresa Mulholland. I’m afraid we have some bad news for her.”

  “What kind of news?” Stephen asked, not quite ready to invite them in.

  “There’s been a death in the family,” said the older man.

  Which, of course, disarmed the unarmed Stephen even more. “Why don’t you come in?” he said, opening the door wider and stepping back to let them enter.

  “No, no,” said the older man. “We’ll just tell her and then be on our way, if that’s all right.”

  So Stephen, not knowing quite what else to do, turned from them and called Theresa’s name. But he needn’t have; she’d already slipped on her robe (evidently not sharing Stephen’s concern about being mistaken for either a city folk or an old man) and made her way from the bedroom. As soon as she came into view, Stephen reached a hand out to her.

  “There’s been a death,” he said, taking her hand in his own, readying himself to be there for her as much as she’d been there for him.

  Only when she was alongside him did Theresa seem to recognize the older man, too. But unlike Stephen, she was able to put a name on his face.

  “Tom?” she said.

  What happened next happened very fast. The older man, the one Theresa had addressed as Tom, shouted “Now!” and jumped to one side. The younger one left standing in the doorway raised something to his face, and there was a sudden explosion of white light, accompanied by a popping sound. Stephen was completely blinded, and might have thought he’d gone deaf, as well, except that he heard something coming from the older man, or at least from where the older man had been the instant before everything went white.

  “Gotcha!” is what he heard.

  Theresa heard Gotcha, too. But unlike Stephen, Theresa hadn’t been fooled for a moment by Tom Grady’s standing there in the doorway with his hat in his hands and Danny LaFontaine hiding behind him, or by Stephen’s announcement that there’d been a death. Like Stephen, Theresa had been blinded by the flashbulb; but unlike Stephen, she needed no time to piece together the events that had occurred in order to make sense out of them.

  At one point in her exercise routine at the gym, Tony the Trainer had lost all patience with Theresa’s inability to get any kind of a rhythm going on the speed bag. “Stop lookin’ at it, Red! The thing ain’t gonna bite you, fer Chrissakes. Feel for it. Close yer pretty green eyes and feel for it. That way you’ll be able to tell which way it’s goin’, insteada tryna remember where it was last time you seen it. The hand is quicker than the eye, see?” So she’d done as she’d been told. She’d closed her eyes and tried to work the bag by feeling for where it would be next, rather than by watching it where it had been before. And it had worked, up to a point. Later on, when she’d finally gotten good at the routine, she found she could comfortably glance away from the bag from time to time, even take her eyes off it altogether for short stretches, without losing track of where it would be, where its arc would position it for her next right or left.

  Now she waded in, sightless, hands held high, jabbing at where Tom Grady’s head had been when last she’d seen it, until finally she felt contact with a left, then a right, then another left. She remembered what Tony always told her, that there was no need to hit the thing hard, it was the rhythm that counted. And she had a rhythm going now, a sweet, pleasing rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat of lefts and rights, lefts and rights, and she kept hitting it, kept it going, back and forth, nothing able to stop her. . . .

  By April of each year, winter begins to loosen its icy grip on Columbia County. In the woods surrounding Stephen Barrow’s home, deer have foaled and black bear awakened from hibernation. The thickets teem with red fox and their newborn kits, raccoon, fisher, martin, and even an occasional bobcat. With dens full of tiny hungry mouths to feed, nighttime means hunting time.

  This April night was no different. It was alive with the crunch of dry leaves underfoot, the yips and barks and wails of the chase, the eight-note cry of the barred owl, the distant piercing howl of the coyote.

  But on this night the symphony was suddenly silenced, as though the raised hand of some unseen conductor had stopped it mid-note. In the brush, a thousand pairs of glowing eyes widened, a thousand pairs of ears alerted, trying to identify a strange new sound coming from the place on top of the hill, where lights sometimes shone in the evening and tiny red sparks flew up into the night sky.

  Rat-tat-tat, it went, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. A muffled groan, then silence. And, tentatively at first, but
soon with abandon, the hunters returned to the hunt.

  It took all three of them to stop Theresa, and even then it wasn’t easy. By the time she was finished using his head for a speed bag, she’d given Tom Grady a bloody nose, a matching pair of black eyes, a fat lip, and a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget. Danny LaFontaine fared better: He got off with a broken Leica and an overexposed roll of film. Theresa herself ended up with cuts and bruises on both hands, but enough satisfaction to make the pain a small price to pay.

  For a while, they worried that Grady and LaFontaine might file criminal charges or bring a lawsuit, but in the end, they did neither. They must have figured they were on pretty shaky grounds, considering that their death-in-the-family ruse was likely to expose them to trespassing charges. Not to mention the considerable embarrassment of having been taken to the woodshed by a skinny, unarmed woman who couldn’t see.

  Stephen went back to court on April 24. Flynt Adams again answered ready for trial. To no one’s surprise, Jim Hall did not.

  “Your honor,” he said, “the People are submitting two motions today. Naturally, we’ve already served copies upon the defense. Our first motion is to have the child victim in this case declared ‘vulnerable’ within the meaning of Article Sixty-five of the Criminal Procedure Law. As you can see from my affirmation and the attached extracts of reports from Dr. Silverman, we contend that having to be in the same room as the defendant would intimidate the child to the point where she’d be unable to testify truthfully.”

  There was a brief interruption in the proceedings as Flynt Adams had to restrain Stephen Barrow from jumping out of his seat and physically attacking Jim Hall.

  “See what I mean?” said Hall, once order had been restored. “Our second motion, if I might move on, is made very reluctantly. But as the elected district attorney of the citizens of this county, I feel it is nonetheless my duty to make it, and therefore I-”

  “Cut the crap and get to the point,” said Justice Wainwright. “What’s the motion?”

  “The motion, your honor, if you’ll just allow me,” said Hall, who was good at many things, but cutting the crap and getting to the point were decidedly not among them, “is to recuse you from further involvement in the case.”

  “On what basis?”

  “On the basis that you’ve prejudged the facts, or at very least created an appearance that you’ve done so. Either way-”

  “Mr. Adams, do you wish to be heard?”

  Adams rose. “Your honor, this puts the defense in a very difficult position,” he began. “Mr. Hall did indeed serve me with copies of these motion papers, but he neglected to mention that he did so about three minutes ago. I haven’t even had time to read them, much less respond to his arguments.”

  Wainwright looked up at the clock. “It’s ten after ten,” he noted. “We’ll be in recess until eleven o’clock. I suggest you read Mr. Hall’s papers, Mr. Adams. I’ll be doing the same. And in the event I rule against you on both issues, Mr. Hall, are you ready to proceed?”

  “No, your honor, I’m afraid not.”

  Stephen Barrow couldn’t be sure, but he thought he detected just a hint of a smile on Hall’s face as he spoke the words. “Give me five minutes with him,” he told Flynt Adams, “five minutes.”

  “Careful,” Adams warned him. “Jim Hall’s a pretty big guy.”

  “My thinking,” said Stephen, “is to hit him between the eyes with a pretty big sledgehammer.”

  Everett Wainwright was sitting in his chambers, reading through Jim Hall’s motion papers and writing sarcastic comments in the margins, when the phone rang. Rather than waiting for his secretary to answer it at her desk, he picked up himself and said, “Chambers.”

  “That you, Everett?”

  “It’s me. Who’s this?”

  “Clay Underwood, from the Third Department.”

  Wainwright sat up. Clarence Underwood was a fellow Supreme Court justice, but he was assigned to the Appellate Division up in Albany, the court that handled appeals for all of eastern New York State except for the greater New York City area. As such, he was one of Wainwright’s superiors, if not quite technically his boss.

  “Hello, Clay. What can I do for you?”

  “I hear you’ve been asked to step aside on a child-abuse case.”

  “Word sure travels fast,” said Wainwright. “How’d you hear that?”

  “Oh, my staff tries to keep me posted,” said Underwood. “How’s your wife, by the way?”

  “She’s well, thank you.”

  “Now I understand there’s probably not much to this recusal motion.”

  “Not much? There’s nothing to it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Underwood, “I’m sure you’re right. Still and all, they tell me it’s a bench trial.”

  “They.” Wainwright was pretty certain they were Jim Hall. It was widely known that Underwood and Hall played golf together and that each had helped the other out by raising money in past elections.

  “My staff.”

  “Right.”

  “The thing is, Everett, sometimes the appearance of bias can be just as harmful to the system as actual bias.”

  “What makes you think,” Wainwright asked, “that there’s even the appearance of bias here?”

  “May I speak frankly?”

  “Please do.”

  “The rumor we’re picking up is that there’s talk of a contract on the case. You know, that you gave some sort of a signal to the defense attorney that he should waive a jury and try the case before you.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Wainwright.

  “I’m sure it is, I’m sure it is. These things always are. Still, the point is, there is this rumor, and a waiver was executed, and now there’s all this talk.” He left it at that.

  “So you’re telling me to recuse myself.”

  “No, no,” said Underwood, “of course not. I’d never do that. All I’m suggesting is, perhaps you ought to just knock the case over a week or two for a response or a decision. By the time it comes back on, you’ll be out of the part, and it won’t be your problem anymore. End of crisis.”

  “Are you saying this is a crisis?”

  “No, Everett. I’m saying we don’t want a crisis, and that it’s part of my job to see to it that we don’t have one. That’s all. So tell me, how’s everything else going?”

  “Everything else is just fine.”

  “They tell me you might be in for a little primary battle this time around.”

  “Might be.”

  “Well,” said Underwood, “maybe we can be of some help there. We’ve got some friends down in Columbia County, you know.”

  I bet we do, thought Everett Wainwright.

  “The motion to recuse me is denied,” announced Justice Wainwright, much to the relief of Flynt Adams and Stephen Barrow, who couldn’t help smiling in Jim Hall’s direction. “As for the motion pursuant for closed-circuit television testimony by the child witness, decision is reserved until May first. Mr. Adams, if you want to submit papers in opposition to the motion, have them in by this Thursday.”

  Adams was already on his feet. “I assume, your honor, that you’ll be keeping this case before you, even after the end of the month.”

  “You assume incorrectly. We’ll operate as we always do. When Judge McGee comes into the part, it’ll become her case.”

  It was Jim Hall’s turn to smile.

  With Priscilla McGee scheduled to replace Everett Wainwright as the judge on the criminal case, spirits in the defense camp darkened. The thought of trying the case without a jury suddenly became unthinkable. Beyond that, McGee was all but certain to grant the prosecution’s motion to permit Penny Barrow to testify over closed-circuit television. The result of such a ruling, Flynt Adams knew, could be disastrous for the defense. Penny was Jim Hall’s witness; even though Hall would be in the courtroom, his people would be the ones setting up the equipment and working the cameras at some remote location. They�
��d be in a position to coach Penny and suggest answers to her. Their mere presence in the room with her would have an effect on her, just as would the absence of anyone connected with her father. So even as Flynt Adams submitted papers in opposition to the motion - arguing first that a six-year-old child was too young to testify under oath in the first place, and second that even if she could testify, she should do so in open court like any other witness - he was forced to take the fallback position that if closed-circuit TV was used, the defense should be allowed to have somebody present at the remote sight to observe what went on there.

  The thought even occurred to Adams that Justice McGee might raise Stephen Barrow’s bail. But, very much aware of his client’s fragile emotional status, he kept that concern to himself.

  As it turned out, Adams need not have worried about the bail. He should have worried more about other things. The first thing McGee did when the parties appeared before her on the first day of May was to announce that she was granting Jim Hall’s motion to permit the use of closed-circuit television for Penny Barrow’s testimony.

  “I find,” she said, “that the child is indeed a ‘vulnerable witness’ within the meaning of the law. As to the defense’s wish to have somebody present where she testifies, that’s precisely what the statute is designed to avoid. Anyway, no one’s going to coach the child, are they, Mr. Hall?”

  “Of course not, your honor.”

  “Very well. How soon can you have the necessary equipment set up, Mr. Hall?”

  “I figure it should take my staff a day or two, at most.”

  “A day or two? This is a nonjury case, Mr. Hall. I was hoping to try it this afternoon.”

  Adams jumped to his feet; it was becoming something of a routine with him. “Your honor,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Adams?”

  “My client has had a change of heart. He’s decided he wants a jury trial after all.”