by Stan Jones
“If she did, I’m going to object again to Ida Palmer’s testimony,” Hughes said. “As your honor was suggesting earlier, it clearly indicates the insanity defense was raised in bad faith.”
“Your honor, I’ve made it clear I didn’t know about Ida Palmer’s role in the murder when I mounted the insanity defense, which, if I may remind you again, the court essentially compelled me to do over my own objections,” Procopio said. “I’d be happy to go under oath on that point if the court wishes. So would my client.”
Stein shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, at least for the moment.”
Procopio nodded. “Thank you, your honor. In any event, in light of this development, I felt I had no choice but to bring Mrs. Palmer’s evidence forward and move for a dismissal.”
“Just how much time have these two been spending together?” Hughes asked. Then he looked at the face of Jim Silver, seated beside him at the prosecution table, and his own face sagged. “Never mind, your honor. I don’t think I want to know the answer.”
“The court would be interested to know,” Stein said.
“I believe Miss Palmer was allowed to visit her mother in the hospital once or twice a week for the past couple of months,” Procopio said. “Before that, her mother was well enough to visit the defendant in jail.”
Silver sank down in his chair, dodging the glare Hughes shot at him. “It seemed like the human thing to do,” Active heard the police chief mutter.
Stein was silent a few moments. Finally he shook his head again, then spoke. “I have to admit, I’m still deeply skeptical of all this, but I think we do have to allow Mrs. Palmer to testify. Her evidence, such as it is, is clearly exculpatory of the present defendant.”
“Then let her testify at trial,” Hughes said. “That’s the time and place - -”
Stein held up a hand. “Sorry, Mr. Hughes, but the one thing I am persuaded of here is, as Ms. Procopio claims, that it’s likely now or never for Mrs. Palmer’s testimony. You’ll have to do your best on cross-examination.”
“I still see a problem here,” Hughes said. “If Ida Palmer is about to confess to murder, does she have representation? Ms. Procopio can hardly represent them both.”
“She’s waiving her right to an attorney,” Procopio said.
“Very well,” Stein said. “Will you need some time to bring in your witness, Ms. Procopio?”
“Yes, your honor, about twenty minutes,” Procopio said. “Also, with the court’s permission, we’ve arranged for Mrs. Palmer’s testimony to be videotaped. As noted, today’s proceedings may be her only chance of testifying at her daughter’s trial, if it comes to that.”
Hughes rose, crying “Your honor!” on the way up.
Stein waved him off. “Save it, Mr. Hughes. You two can argue about admissibility later. We’re in recess for thirty minutes.”
Fifteen minutes later, Theresa Procopio returned with a young Inupiaq Active didn’t know, who set up a video camera and pointed it at the witness box.
Ten minutes after that, a nurse’s aide from the hospital pushed a shrunken and frail-looking Ida Palmer into the courtroom. The cameraman fiddled with his equipment, then signaled he was ready. Ida Palmer didn’t take the witness stand, but was sworn in below Stein’s bench in her wheelchair. Stein verified that she was testifying voluntarily, was waiving her right to counsel, and knew what that meant.
“Whenever you’re ready, Ms. Procopio,” he said.
Procopio rose and gazed at her witness. Like Charlie Hughes, Procopio was new to Chukchi and still maintained the trappings of urban professionalism. She wore a dark blue business suit with an actual skirt.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Palmer,” the public defender said when the formalities were out of the way. The shrunken figure in the wheelchair was silent for a moment, eyes closed. Active noticed the failing liver had now turned her skin yellow. Finally she opened her eyes. The drained face, surrounded by damp strings of silver-streaked black hair, looked incapable of speech, but when she spoke her voice surprised Active with its strength.
“It was me that kill Jason, all right,” Ida Palmer began. “I hear him talking to little Nita, my niece, and when I hear what he say I know Gracie always tell me the truth about what he do to her and Jeanie, even if I always never believe it before, and I know he’s gonna do same thing to little Nita if I don’t stop him.” She began to cry, then spoke in Inupiaq, looking at Grace.
“It’s OK, Aaka,” Grace said.
“Your honor!” Hughes said.
“Ms. Procopio, your client will refrain from addressing the witness,” Stein said.
From behind, Active saw the two dark heads at the defense table nod.
“Mrs. Palmer, do you want Esther here to translate for you?” Procopio pointed at the nurse’s aide, who had taken a seat near Active in the front row of the spectator section. “Would you feel more comfortable speaking Inupiaq?”
The woman in the wheelchair shook her head. “No, I know you naluaqmiuts will understand me better if I talk in English.”
“OK,” Procopio said. “Then why don’t you just start from the time when Grace came to see you the day Jason was killed. I think we’ll understand it better if you start at the beginning and go up to now, like telling a story.”
Ida gave a tired sigh. “OK, I will.” She fell silent as if gathering her energy. For a moment she looked almost dead, except for a subdued fire in the eyes.
“I’m home by myself resting,” she began. “Nita’s over at the school with Jason, he’s catching up on some of his work, when someone knock at the door and it’s Gracie. She look terrible, all beat up and smell like a bar, and I tell her to go away because I know what she’s going to say about Jason, same old lies as always, that’s what I think.” She sniffled a little and smiled wanly at her daughter. “But Gracie start crying and she say this one time I have to listen or Nita will end up like her or like Jeanie and something just make me say OK and I finally let her come in.”
She closed her eyes for perhaps a minute, then opened them again with the same subdued fire.
Grace, she said, had repeated the old stories about Jason Palmer molesting his two daughters, the same stories Ida Palmer had never wanted to believe and still didn’t want to believe.
Finally Gracie had asked where Nita was and when Ida had said she was with Jason at the school, helping him with his paperwork, Gracie had begun to wail, just like Ida herself had wailed when the coffin with Jeanie’s ashes was lowered into the ground, and Gracie had said, “That’s where he always starts, the school. That’s where he always starts.” And then Gracie had left, still crying.
After that Ida had tried to rest again, tried to tell herself again that Gracie was just the same crazy, lying daughter as always, but this bad feeling kept growing inside her heart. It was like the cancer that had been growing in her liver all these years since Roy was born and it wouldn’t stop growing and she decided she had to go to Jason’s office and see for herself.
So she had left the house and crossed the alley to the back door of the school and crept to door of Jason’s office and listened outside. She had heard Jason showing little Nita a biology textbook with pictures that explained about sex. “That’s when I know it’s true, everything what Gracie always say, because that’s what Gracie tell me he say to her when it start, how they could look at the school book to learn about how men and women love each other. Oh, why I never believe her?”
This last came out as a wail and Ida stopped and looked around the courtroom as if someone present could answer the question. When her gaze stopped for a moment on Active, he looked down and waited for her to continue. Finally she started again.
She had dared to take one glance through the window in the office door, and had seen the two sitting side by side looking at the text on little Nita’s lap, Jason’s one hand resting on her knee as he pointed at the page with the other.
Nita didn’t look like she even noticed Jason’s hand on her. That was
probably because she was so young and trusting and hadn’t been around men very much.
But Ida knew she had to get Nita out of there, so she crept down the stairs and went back across the alley to her house and called the office and told Nita to go to the store and Nita said, “Uncle Jason was teaching me biology,” not sounding worried or upset at all. Dessert was going to be Nita’s favorite that night, Oreo cookies and vanilla ice cream and, yes, Ida had told her, she could eat some Oreos on the way home, but no more than three, so Nita was happy to go to the store.
After that, Ida had sat in her living room a long time, thinking what to do. And she had decided finally that only one thing was right. She had one daughter that was lost and one that was dead and now there was little Nita who pretty soon might have no one to protect her from Jason.
So she had gone down to the basement and dug Jason’s gun out of his survival kit and gone to the school again and shot him with it, missing his body once and hitting his hand. That had surprised her, because she was pretty good with guns from being around them all her life and from hunting with Jason in his plane before the children came along.
So she had aimed better the second time, hitting him in the chest, the heart, she thought, and she had said, “That’s for what you do to my girls.”
She had thought he was already dead, sitting there slumped back in his chair with one hand, the hand that was shot, pressed over the spot where all the blood was coming out of his chest. But he had opened his eyes and looked at her and said in a weak, bubbly voice, “Tell her I’m sorry.” Then he had slumped forward onto his desk and didn’t say anything else or move.
So Ida had returned home, put the gun back in the basement and gone upstairs to think what to do next, maybe call the police and turn herself in because they would probably figure it out anyway, but then what would become of Nita? She had dozed off, awakened, and started thinking about it again when Gracie had come to the door with Jason’s gun and asked if she had killed him.
When Ida had told her yes, then Gracie had said she would take care of it, had told her to do some dishes to get the gunpowder off her hands, then lie down and rest until the police came. And Gracie had explained what she should say when the police asked her questions. “After that, I guess you know everything that happen, the police wrote down everything I said when they came to my house.”
The courtroom was silent.
Finally Stein spoke. “Any questions, Mr. Hughes?”
Hughes rose and looked at Silver, who shrugged. Then the prosecutor looked at Ida Palmer in her wheelchair, and finally at the defense table. “Mrs. Palmer, we can see you love your daughter very much, is that right?”
Ida nodded.
“And you’d do anything to help her, is that right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Like any mother.”
“What if you needed to lie for her? Would you do that?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “Of course.”
Now it was Hughes’ turn to look surprised. He looked at his notes for a moment to recover his composure. “Of course a mother would do that. And are you lying now to save your daughter?”
The tired yellow face smiled. “No, not any more. I was lying before, but now Gracie say it’s time to tell the truth, so that’s what I’m doing here today.”
Hughes opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at the defense table. “Your honor, is our present defendant going to testify here today?”
Procopio nodded. “She is, your honor.”
“Then I’d like to reserve any further cross examination of Mrs. Palmer until we’ve heard from her daughter.”
The judge looked at Ida, then at the nurse’s aide who had brought her to the courtroom. “Mrs. Palmer, could you wait in my office a few minutes? We can get you some coffee or tea there, and you can rest on my couch, if you like.”
She nodded wearily, and Stein had a bailiff show her and the nurse’s aide to his chambers. Then Grace Palmer took the stand and was sworn in.
It was Active’s first clear look at her in months. Without thinking about it, he’d been expecting someone who looked crazy, disheveled, wild-eyed—the Grace Palmer who had slammed the pistol down on his desk. But, no, she was the cool, clear-eyed, calculating Grace Palmer of the Triangle lunchroom.
“Miss Palmer, would you tell us what happened after your first visit to your mother’s house the day your father died?” Procopio said.
“After Mom kicked me out,” she began, “I walked around town for a while, then I went over to the old cemetery behind the Arctic Mercantile store and looked at Jeanie’s grave. It seemed like all these years had passed and nothing had changed. Nobody believed me and Jason was going to keep … hurting little girls.”
The quicksilver eyes drifted out of focus, returned. “So I decided to go back to the school and kill him. I couldn’t function any more with him alive and doing what he was doing, so what did it matter if I went to jail again?”
So, she told them, she had gone back home, let herself in quietly, and descended to the basement to see if Jason still kept his pistol there. She had found it, the same old gun as always in its same old holster, the same gun Jason had taught her to shoot when she was only eight or nine, so little the recoil almost knocked her down. She had gone to the school to kill him with his own gun, only to find him already dead, his blood covering the desktop like a red carpet on which, she hoped, he would walk straight through the gates of Hell, the son of a bitch.
She stopped and sat back slightly as if recoiling from her own words.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I sat in the office and looked at him for a while and I knew it had to be Mom, and it made me so happy that she finally believed me and she finally stood up to him after all these years.” She fell silent and wiped her eyes with a Kleenex.
“And I just decided the son of a bitch wasn’t going to claim another victim if I could help it, so I went and told Mom that I’d take care of it, all she had to do was act surprised and say she didn’t know anything when the police came and told her I killed Jason.”
“Mom didn’t want to do it,” she continued. “She told me I was still young and she was dying anyway. She was right, but I just couldn’t let my mother go to jail for killing that son of a bitch. We had a big fight, and finally I promised, if she didn’t get well, if they didn’t get a match for a liver donor, then we could tell the truth, like now.”
“Then I told her to wash some dishes with a lot of detergent, in case you guys would check her hands for gunpowder, and then I went over to Nathan’s office and gave him the gun. I couldn’t confess, of course, because of what I promised Mom, but I wanted to make sure I was the only suspect for a while.” She stopped, with an inward smile and a silver flash from the eyes. Active sensed she was waiting for something, had the old feeling she was ahead of him, ahead of all of them. “And the rest you know.”
Hughes was silent, looking over his notes. Then he raised his head. “If you never fired the gun, how did the powder residue end up on your hand?”
“Oh, but I did fire it.” Grace’s smile widened. “You don’t have to watch much television to know about gunshot residue. I went back down into the basement and cleaned the gun and then I fired it into a post down there and I made sure not to wash my hands. You’ll find the bullet hole behind an old black snowmachine suit hanging from a nail on the post.”
Hughes thought for a while before speaking. “And I suppose we’ll find the casing in a pocket of the suit?”
Her smile widened even more, her teeth showing now, and she gazed straight into Active’s eyes. “No,” she said, “I believe you’ll find that in a cup of pens and pencils on Trooper Active’s desk. I dropped it in there - ”
By now, the scene in his office was flashing before Active’s eyes, Grace pushing the cup aside as she dropped the Colt on his desk. Had there been a little clink?
“- - when I brought him the gun.”
She dropped her gaze, so that her
smile seemed the reflection of a private joke for a moment. Then she turned her gaze on him again. “You haven’t cleaned that cup out lately, have you, Trooper Active?”
“We’re fucked.” Charlie Hughes glared at Active’s desk blotter, where the empty .45-caliber casing they had just extracted from the pen cup lay in a plastic baggie. “Double fucked. Buggered, banged, humped and screwed like Marcus Ashashik’s lead dog.”
He raised his gaze and fixed it on Active, the twinkle in the blue eyes looking more like a blaze for once. “Nice work, hotshot.”
“This doesn’t prove anything.” Active heard his voice getting high and tight, and tried to calm down. “It’s just a stunt to get Grace off the hook. I still can’t believe you’re buying it.”
“Doesn’t matter what we’re buying,” Silver said. “Question is, would a jury buy it? I think they would.”
“I agree.” Hughes grinned sourly at Active. “You gotta admit, Grace letting you hold the exculpatory evidence for her was a nice touch. Jury’s really gonna love that.”
“It’s not exculpatory!” Active picked up the baggie with the casing in it and waved it at them. “All it proves is, she shot a post. It doesn’t prove she didn’t shoot her father.”
“So what?” Hughes said. “We’re fucked either way. If I bring Grace Palmer to trial and they play that videotape, or worse, have Grace and Ida re-enact it all in court … well, the jury won’t just acquit Grace, they’ll probably convict me of felony time-wasting.” He shuddered.
“Which that Procopio woman is well aware of,” Silver said.
Hughes shuddered again. “As you know Nathan, we lost your animal husbandry case and there wasn’t a soft spot in it, not one. This one’s like rotting ice.”
Active looked at his knees again, grinning despite himself at the memory of the jury’s reaction to Hughes’ prosecution of Willie Piqnaraq. “Yeah, that was a bitch, all right.”