Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Hey.” Jesse felt the light clutch of a hand on her shoulder and turned to see the young bow-tied Jimmy Olsen look-alike she had briefly met in McCoy’s bar now standing two places behind her in line. “Congratulations.” He held up a copy of last night’s Dempsy Register. “Nice work.”

  “Thanks, thank you.” Jesse looked away, her eye falling on the headline of a New York tabloid held by one of the other reporters. LIAR topped a photo of Brenda leaving her apartment house. The same paper, being read by someone else, a photo of Curious George. He was walking out of County; the header on that item read: FURIOUS GEORGE.

  Judicial processing in Dempsy County had streamlined itself over the last year, doing away with the required physical presence of the accused. The court had opted for arraignment via television, and a booking studio was set up in the county jail. The defendant would make his appearance on two video-screen monitors—one facing the judge, the other the benches—the judge, in turn, appearing before the accused on a jailhouse monitor. Both of them would also show up on their own screens, in a small, boxed “picture in picture.”

  The courtroom was standing room only, all eyes on the blank twenty-five-inch monitor angled at a slightly downward tilt from its ceiling mount. The glum, mostly stoic assembly of out-on-bail perps, family members, and Legal Aid lawyers who normally populated the benches was almost lost in the profane and anxious hum of professional court hounds, Jesse seated on the aisle, third row from the docket.

  The hospital feed was unprecedented, but Jesse thought she knew where the prosecutor was coming from on this: offer up, in the most public way possible, the beginnings of Brenda Martin’s mortification and, by doing so, possibly mollify some of the hotheads out there getting ready for Night Two.

  “All rise.” The court officer’s voice was sonorous and automatic as the judge entered from offstage and took his seat—the honorable Joe Pisto, five feet even, with a too black hairpiece, a brace of gold chains under his judicial robes, and, parked out in the lot, Jesse knew, a custom-made El Dorado replete with champagne-pink pinstripe trim and a monogrammed driver’s door.

  “Be seated.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the media,” Pisto began. “I assume you’re here for the headline act, but unfortunately, sort of like pay-per-view boxing, you’re going to have to sit through a mess of prelims in order to get to the Tyson fight, so please bear with us.”

  Among the members of the press, there was a barely perceptible rustle, a low-key bristling at the preemptive reproach. Jesse wasn’t bothered, knowing that Judge Pisto’s idea of a headline act was Judge Pisto and that he would be harrumphing and sardonically side-mouthing like this at every opportunity.

  The first two names called were no-shows, so Pisto issued fugitive warrants, and then the monitor came to life, a bald switchblade of a man in the standard royal-blue jumpsuit of the county jail staring blankly into the camera. After a reading of the charges, and some preoccupied rote exchange with the prosecutor and the Legal Aid representative, Pisto addressed the monitor.

  “Mr. Cortez.”

  “Hah?” A honk.

  “I’m setting your bail at three hundred dollars.”

  “Hah?”

  “Do you have three hundred dollars?” Pisto speaking to the TV.

  “Hah?”

  “I said, do you—” He cut himself off, then addressed the benches—“Is it him or me?”—people laughing like a TV audience.

  “Can I go?” Cortez asked.

  “Where would you like to go?” Pisto responded, slowly and distinctly.

  “Hah?” Cortez honked, bringing down the house.

  Two more inmates showed up on video, and their bails were set; then a middle-aged man in a rumpled summer suit made a personal appearance to hear that his wife’s assault charge against him had been downgraded to unlawful entry; then another video visit, the defendant filmed lumbering into the video room. Instead of taking a seat, he nosed up to within inches of the camera, his face fanning out as it filled the screen, fishbowl-style, Jesse thinking, Ernest Goes to Prison.

  Once the last jailhouse video prisoner was disposed of, the screen flipped into a solid field of bright blue. A female court officer called out the name, charge, and docket number of another customer out on bail, the guy not in the room, and Pisto ordered yet another warrant.

  The reporters were looking at one another now, growing impatient. Then, finally, Brenda’s name rang out in a flat, blaring proclamation and was met with an abrupt jump in focus and energy out in the room, a poised tension, everybody working now. One of the assistant DAs approached the bench. It was John Savio, a popular, politically wired ex-cop prominent in the Dempsy County Save the Children fund, a guy who could put his heart into this one. Jesse watched him as he centered himself before the lectern, rolling his neck and shoulders as if he were waiting for the first-round bell.

  The solid-blue overhead screen coughed in black and white before coming alive with a grainy, pixel-deficient image, the handheld camera seemingly trained on either a wall or a ceiling, then swinging in a blur before sharpening somewhat, finally focusing on a humped rumple of blankets, an IV tube sneaking in from a bedside drip stand, the picture in picture of Judge Pisto blocking out the foot of the bed. A thrum coursed through the benches, Jesse and everyone else inching forward in their seats, the court officers unconsciously criss-crossing one another’s paths behind the rails as they glared vigilantly at the reporters.

  Up on the screen, the camera pulled back to reveal a man standing bedside, the resolution once again too poor to identify the face. But the rumor had gone around, and the chest-length beard confirmed it: Brenda’s lawyer was Paul Rosenbaum, champion of the poor, the downtrodden, the nonwhite, the addicted, the desperate, the technically guilty, the occasionally framed, the submoronic, the psychopathic, the abused turned abuser, the formerly innocent casualties of a racist free-enterprise system now fully grown to payback size; Rosenbaum, a world-class pain in the ass who turned every case into an indictment of the society into which both victim and victimizer had been involuntarily deposited at birth.

  Two years earlier, during a front-page trial in which Rosenbaum was defending a cop shooter, Jesse had decided that the way to get close to him was by playing up her red-diaper pedigree, coming off as if she were more interested in justice than in getting the wood. He had gone for it, even given her his home phone number and asked her to keep tabs on the outside buzz for him. She had then misplayed her hand badly, though, calling him one evening to toss him a wild story that was making the rounds—that his client was in partnership with some cops in a drug deal—calling him not so much to give him a heads up on this ridiculous scenario but to provoke a quotable response from him. He had instantly seen through her gambit and mildly reproached her for abusing the privilege of having access to him, his voice registering as much disappointment in her as anger. Then he had excused himself, announcing that he was in the middle of putting his daughter to bed. And, upon hanging up, Jesse had retreated to hers, pulling down the shades and lying there in the dark from eight in the evening until the next morning.

  Now, already feeling emotionally punchy and scoured-out by her marathons with Brenda, Jesse found the sight of the two of them up there on the screen together almost too much to bear. The reception worsened, Brenda somewhere in that electronic blizzard, the judge waiting until the video operator found his focus.

  “Today is July the third, the time is 10:45 A.M., I’m Judge Joseph Pisto. Gentlemen?”

  “Good morning, Judge,” the prosecutor said, shifting his feet. “I’m John Savio, assistant district attorney of Dempsy County, representing the state.”

  “Good morning, Judge.” Rosenbaum took a step closer to the camera. “I’m Paul Rosenbaum of Rosenbaum, Winbarg, and I’m representing the defendant.”

  “Gentlemen? Are we ready to proceed?” Pisto’s question was met with stereophonic affirmatives.

  Rosenbaum: Jesse wondered who had done the r
each out, taking a wild guess, coming up with someone who, under normal circumstances, would have preferred to see Rosenbaum befriended by one of his own clients in a jail cell; she guessed that the phone call to land Paul Rosenbaum had come from Danny Martin. The video operator tended to rock slightly from side to side, making Jesse seasick.

  “Mr. Rosenbaum, is your client ready?”

  “Yes she is, Judge.”

  “Can we see her?”

  Rosenbaum peeled back a flap of blanket to reveal Brenda, cheek to the mattress, staring straight ahead. As the camera zoomed in, the screen was hit with another flurry of static, and it seemed to Jesse that Brenda was dissolving before her eyes, dematerializing into glazed, no-exit grief.

  “Miss Martin?” the judge asked in a slightly louder than necessary voice. “Are you among us?”

  “Yes she is, Your Honor,” Rosenbaum answered for her.

  Jesse could hear the sound of writing.

  “I would like Miss Martin to respond.”

  “Yes,” Brenda said, a sandpapery whistle, all faces in the courtroom angled to the monitor like flowers to the sun.

  Jesse wondered why Rosenbaum was allowing Brenda to be arraigned publicly like this, then answered her own question: To be seen like this.

  “How’s your reception there, Counselor? Can you see us?”

  “Yes we can, Your Honor.”

  “Miss Martin?” The judge’s voice took on a somewhat measured, slightly loud tone again. “I have a complaint here, signed by Detective Lorenzo Council of the Dempsy Police Department, charging you with the homicide death of Cody Martin. Do you understand these charges as I have read them to you?”

  The focus became sharper, but, simultaneously, something was affecting the film speed. The transmitted image slowed down just a hair, so that when Brenda limply raised, then dropped a hand in acknowledgment of the question, its trajectory seemed to move in minutely checked gradations—dream speed, like a progression of pages in a flip book.

  “Miss Martin?” Pisto waited.

  After another interminable silence, she croaked out another “Yes.”

  “And how do you plead?”

  “Not guilty, Your Honor,” Rosenbaum responded with confident gusto, just as Jesse expected.

  Earlier this morning, Jesse had made a few off-the-record breakfast-table calls to some detectives and lawyers around town, the general consensus being that the only way the prosecutor could make the straight-up homicide charge work was to prove the ingestion was forced—caustic burns around the mouth, caustic liquid in the boy’s belly, the presence of some harsh toxic substance that no one would drink voluntarily, especially a child. But if the toxicology reports came back indicating that a sweetish-tasting substance had done the deed, then the prosecutor had a real job on his hands. Jose probably had it pegged about right last night: criminally negligent homicide.

  “Gentlemen? I’ll hear you on bail. Mr. Savio?”

  Savio gently rocked from side to side, unconsciously miming the swaying of the image on the monitor. “Good morning, Your Honor.”

  “You said that.”

  “The state feels this is a heinous crime, the murder of a four-year-old child by his mother, and requests that bail be set in the amount of one million dollars, no cash option.” A knowing whoosh ran through the pews; it was a sum fit for a terrorist. “Your Honor, we were initially told one story by the defendant, that story causing near chaos in this city; now we’re about to hear another. Miss Martin went to great lengths not only to conceal the truth of what happened but also to dispose of the body in a most egregious manner.”

  “Egregious and Kathie Lee,” someone behind Jesse whispered.

  “Given the notoriety of this crime, the potential for, for mayhem set in motion by Miss Martin’s actions, we consider her a menace to society, an expression I have rarely used in this courtroom before.”

  “Whoa, whoa.” Pisto reared back. “Slow down there, hoss.”

  “In addition,” Savio plowed on, “the state feels there’s a reasonable question of flight, and if the defendant should skip out, I feel the anger in this city would reduce it to rubble.”

  “Mr. Savio.” Pisto cracked his knuckles. “Despite the presence of so many reviewers out in our audience today, I would like to remind you that this is not the Winter Garden, and I would appreciate it, as of right this second, if you would kindly refrain from playing for the rear seats.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  There was scribbling fever out in the benches, heads-down grins.

  “Mr. Rosenbaum?”

  Rosenbaum was no theatrical slouch either. During Savio’s grim soliloquy, he had been slowly shaking his head with ostentatious dismay, the speed-hobbled image, with its infinitesimal stops and starts, converting that gesture into the head swivel of an automaton.

  “Your Honor,” he began, “Brenda Martin is an exemplary citizen, born, bred, and living in Dempsy County. A professional educator committed to the welfare of its people. She has never garnered so much as a parking ticket in the past, and, as far as being a menace to society, I would ask Your Honor to take a good look at my client and to consider what here is so particularly menacing to society or to anyone else. We respectfully ask for a bail of five thousand dollars.”

  “Mr. Rosenbaum, I believe when the state uses the expression ‘menace to society’ they are not afraid of Miss Martin rising from her hospital bed and planting land mines, but I’m sure you know that.” Pisto coughed into his fist, then vigorously rubbed his hands, as if anticipating some game of chance, some challenge. “All right, based on the nature of the crime, the publicity, and—as Mr. Savio has melodramatically but accurately pointed out—the number of lives affected by Miss Martin’s actions, I’m going along with the prosecution’s request. Bail is set at one million dollars, no cash option.”

  “Your Honor.” Rosenbaum raised his hand but was plowed under.

  “And if it’s any consolation to you, Mr. Rosenbaum, I think jail right now is the safest place for your client to be. Thank you.”

  Pisto banged his gavel, and the room came alive with the hum of bottled information.

  “OK.” Pisto banged his gavel again, without any real impact, and his voice carried a trace of regret. “OK. Now that prime time is over, I’m giving our distinguished visitors three minutes to clear out. Anyone still in here after that better sit tight until lunch unless they care to see themselves on TV tomorrow”—he gestured toward the monitor—“live from county jail.”

  As the other reporters began to collect themselves, each one gearing up to blow on out of there as fast as he could, Brenda still lay in a sizzle of static, the video operator somehow not having gotten the message that transmission was no longer required. Brenda hovered over the courtroom like a wraith, floating in and out of sight through fields of electronic drift yet so inert within herself that, if not for the inexpert shakiness of the handheld camera, Jesse wouldn’t have known that she was still staring at a live feed.

  Those around her made for the doors, but Jesse, transfixed, kept her seat. As Brenda once again began slowly, unblinkingly to dissolve under another electronic swarm, Jesse was abruptly struck with the premonition that Brenda would not survive the summer—that what was up there on the monitor for all to see right now, if they cared to look, was a spirit photograph, a portent. Jesse was sure of it: Brenda was in her last days, and this arraignment, along with whatever was to follow, would all come to nothing.

  29

  Lorenzo stood to the rear of the small crowd that had collected outside Brenda’s hospital room during the arraignment. He knew Paul Rosenbaum by reputation only and, as with many of the local personalities who affected life in the urban trenches, he was of at least two minds about him. But when Rosenbaum came out into the hallway after the arraignment, Lorenzo was flattered that the lawyer instantly recognized him, wading through the mob to shake his hand.

  “How are you?” Rosenbaum smiled, giving him the once
-over.

  “Good,” Lorenzo returned in kind, playing it close, save for one thing. “Here.” He handed Rosenbaum a shopping bag containing Brenda’s Discman, her CDs, and some fresh batteries thrown in for good measure. “She might want this.”

  “That’s very thoughtful.” Rosenbaum shook his hand again. “Be seeing you.”

  Last night, caught up in the death of Barry Watrous, Lorenzo had almost forgotten Brenda—how her criminal processing would continue to impact on this city, on himself—but once the body had been removed from the shaft, he had begun a slow return to a sober appreciation of the big picture, and before packing it in he had made a quick run to the Southern District station to gather and retrieve her musical gear. He had done this because he wanted her to remember him in a positive light, didn’t want his handling of her during the investigation to be a liability to the prosecutor. But he also vaguely understood that there was more to the gesture than just professional prudence. She wouldn’t be able to take the music into the jail, but at least she could have it for the duration of her stay in the hospital.

  This hospital; he could have spent all day here visiting people—Brenda, Bump, Jesse’s brother. But the person he wanted to see, the one he needed to see, was the rev. There were rumors floating about that, despite his latest hospitalization, Longway was attempting to put together some kind of protest march through Gannon tonight. Lorenzo thought the man had to be completely out of his mind. Last night’s ultimate peace was a false one, purchased with a spectacular death from out of left field, but the rage out there was still on the build.

  On his way over to the medical center this morning, Lorenzo had seen some of the local boneheads beginning to congregate at last night’s hot spots, as if to be first in line for tonight’s potential mayhem. And he knew from experience that the cops out there today would be jumpy as hell, treating every two-bit pullover and street-corner roll-up as if they were taking down terrorists, D-Town, as the thermometer climbed, a land of twitchy fists and hair-trigger emotions on both sides of the line.