The Pardon

by James Grippando

  Indeed, that had been Jack’s impression of Goss four months ago, when Jack had watched a videotape of his client bragging about the grisly murder to police investigators. It was supposed to be an open-and-shut case: The prosecutor had a videotaped confession. But the jury never saw it. Jack had kept it out of evidence.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” asked the judge.

  “We have,” announced the forewoman.

  Spectators slid to the edge of their seats. Whirling paddle fans stirred the silence overhead. The written verdict passed from jury to judge.

  It doesn’t matter what the verdict is, Jack tried to convince himself. He had served the system, served justice. As he stood there, watching the judge hand the paper back to the clerk, he thought of all those homilies he’d been handed in law school—how every citizen had a right to the best defense, how the rights of the innocent would be trampled if not for lawyers who vindicated those rights in defense of the guilty. Back then it had all sounded so noble, but reality had a way of raining on your parade. Here he was, defending someone who wasn’t even sorry for what he had done. And the jury had found him . . .

  “Not guilty.”

  “Noooooo!” screamed the victim’s sister, setting off a wave of anger that rocked the courtroom.

  Jack closed his eyes tightly; it was a painful victory.

  “Order!” shouted the judge, banging his gavel to calm a packed crowd that had erupted in hysteria. Insults, glares, and wadded paper continued to fly across the room, all directed at Jack Swyteck and the scum he’d defended.

  “Order!”

  “You’ll get yours, Goss!” shouted a friend of the dead girl’s family. “You too, Swyteck.”

  Jack looked at the ceiling, tried to block it all out.

  “Hope you can sleep tonight,” an angry prosecutor muttered to him on her way out.

  Jack reached deep inside for a response, but he found nothing. He just turned away and did what he supposed was the socially acceptable thing. He didn’t congratulate Eddy Goss or shake his hand. Instead, he packed up his trial bag and glanced to his right.

  Goss was staring at him, a satisfied smirk on his face. “Can I have your business card, Mr. Swyteck?” asked Goss, his head cocked and his hands planted smugly on his hips. “Just so I know who to call—next time.”

  Suddenly, it was as if Jack were looking not just at Goss, but at all the remorseless criminals he had defended over the years. He stepped up to Goss and spoke right into his face. “Listen, you son of a bitch,” he whispered, “there’d better not be a next time. Because if there is, not only will I not represent you, but I will personally make sure that you get a class-A fuck-up for an attorney. And don’t think the son of the governor can’t pull it off. You understand me?”

  Goss’s smirk faded, and his eyes narrowed with contempt. “Nobody threatens me, Swyteck.”

  “I just did.”

  Goss curled his lip with disdain. “Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve hurt my feelings. I don’t know if I can forgive you for that, Swyteck. But I do know this,” he said, leaning forward. “Someday—someday soon, Jack Swyteck is gonna beg me to forgive him.” Goss pulled back, his dark eyes boring into Jack’s. “Beg me.”

  Jack tried not to flinch, but those eyes were getting to him. “You know nothing about forgiveness, Goss,” he said finally, then turned and walked away. He headed down the aisle, scuffed leather briefcase in hand, feeling very alone as he pushed his way through the angry an disgusted crowd, toward the carved mahogany doors marked exit.

  “There he goes, ladies and gentlemen,” Goss shouted over the crowd, waving his arms like a circus master. “My ex-best friend, Jack Swyteck.”

  Jack ignored him, as did everyone else. The crowd was looking at the lawyer.

  “Asshole!” a stranger jeered at Jack.

  “Creep!” said another.

  Jack’s eyes swept around, catching a volley of glares from the spectators. He suddenly knew what it meant, literally, to represent someone. He represented Eddy Goss the way a flag represented a country, the way suffering represented Satan. “There he is!” reporters shouted as Jack emerged from the bustling courtroom, elbow-to-elbow with a rush of spectators. In the lobby, another crowd waited for him in front of the elevators, armed with cameras and microphones.

  “Mr. Swyteck!” cried the reporters over the general crowd noise. In an instant microphones were in his face, making forward progress impossible. “Your reaction? . . . your client do now? . . . say to the victim’s family?” The questions ran together.

  Jack was sandwiched between the crowd pressing from behind and the reporters pressing forward. He’d never get out of here with just a curt “No comment.” He stopped, paused for a moment, and said: “I believe that the only way to characterize today’s verdict is to call it a victory for the system. Our system, which requires the prosecutor to prove that the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable—”

  Shrill screams suddenly filled the lobby, as a geyser of red erupted from the crowd, drenching Jack. The panic continued as more of the thick liquid splattered Jack and everyone around him.

  He was stunned for a moment, uncomprehending. He wiped the red substance from around his eyes—was it blood or some kind of paint?—and said nothing as it traced ruby-red rivulets down his pants onto the floor.

  “It’s on you, Swyteck,” his symbolic assailant hollered from somewhere in the crowd. “Her blood is on you!”

  Chapter 4

  •

  Jack drove home topless in every sense of the word. His blood-soaked shirt and suit coat were stuffed in the back of his ’73 Mustang convertible, and the top was rolled back to air the stench. It was a bizarre ending, but the press had been predicting an acquittal, and the prospect of a not-guilty verdict had apparently angered someone enough to arm himself with bags of some thick red liquid—the same way animal-rights extremists sometimes ambushed fur-coated women on the streets of New York. He wondered again what kind of ammunition had been used. Animal blood? Human blood infected with AIDS? He cringed at the thought of the photo and headline that would appear in the next day’s tabloids: “Jack Swyteck—Bleeding Liberal.” Shit, does it get any worse than this?

  It was after dark by the time he got home. He noticed immediately that there was no red Pontiac in the driveway, which meant his girlfriend, Cindy Paige, wouldn’t be there to listen to the day’s events. His girlfriend. He wondered if he was kidding himself about that. Things hadn’t been the best between them lately. The story she’d handed him about staying with her friend Gina for a few days “to help her with some problems she’s been having” was starting to sound like just an excuse to get out from under all the baggage he’d been carrying these past few months. Hell, he couldn’t blame her. When he wasn’t up to his eyeballs in work, he was having these dialogues with himself, questioning where his life was going. And most of the time he left Cindy on the outside looking in.

  “Hey, boy,” said Jack as his hairy best friend attacked him on the porch, planting his bear-like paws on his master’s chest and greeting him nose to cold nose. His name was Thursday, for the day Jack, Cindy, and her five-year-old niece picked him up from the pound and saved him from being put to sleep—the most deserving prisoner he’d ever kept from dying. He was definitely part Lab, but mostly a product of the canine melting pot. His expressive, chocolate-brown eyes made him an excellent communicator—and at the moment, the eyes were screaming, “I’m hungry.”

  “Looks like you have a case of the munchies,” Jack said, gently pushing him away as he entered the house. He went to the kitchen and filled the dog’s bowl with Puppy Chow, then dug the pizza-bones appetizer out of the refrigerator. Cindy never ate the crust or the pepperoni. She saved them for Thursday.

  He set the bowl on the floor and watched the dog dig in.

  Fortunately, the blood—or whatever it was—washed off easily in the shower. As he toweled himself dry, Jack could hear Thursday pushing his empty bowl acro
ss the kitchen floor with his nose. Jack smiled and pulled on his boxer shorts. Then he went to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the king-size bed. His eyes scanned the room, finally coming to rest on a framed photograph of Cindy that stood on the nightstand. In it she was standing on a rock along some mountain trail they’d hiked together in Utah. She had a big, happy smile on her face, and the summer wind was tossing her honey-blond hair. It was his favorite picture of her, because it captured so many of the qualities that made her special. At first glance, anyone would be struck by her beautiful face and great body. But for Jack, it was Cindy’s eyes and her smile that told the whole story.

  On impulse, he reached for the phone. He frowned when Gina Terisi’s machine picked up: “I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now . . .” said the recorded message.

  “Cindy, call me,” he said. “Miss you,” he added, and put the receiver down. He fell back on the bed, closed his eyes, and began to relax for the first time in more than a day. But he was disturbed as he realized that Gina would get the message first and convince Cindy he was pining away for her. Well, he was, wasn’t he?

  Idly, he flipped on the TV and began channel-surfing, searching for any station that didn’t have something to say about the acquittal of Eddy Goss. He fixed on MTV. Two mangy-looking rockers were banging on their guitars while getting their faces licked by a Cindy Crawford look-alike.

  He switched off the set, nestled his head in the pillow, and lay in the darkness. But he couldn’t sleep. He looked straight ahead, over the tops of his toes, staring at the television on the dresser. There was nothing he wanted to watch. But as the day’s ugly events played out in his mind, there was one thing he suddenly had to watch.

  He rolled out of bed, grabbed his briefcase, and popped it open, quickly finding what he was looking for even in the darkness. He switched on the television and VCR, shoved in the cassette, and sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. There was a screen full of snow, a few rolling blips, and then . . .

  “My name is Eddy Goss,” said the man on the screen, speaking stiffly into a police video camera. Goss’s normally flat and stringy hair was a tangled, greasy mess. He looked and undoubtedly smelled as if he’d been sleeping under a bridge all week, dressed in dirty Levi’s, unlaced tennis shoes, and a yellow-white undershirt, torn at the V and stained with underarm sweat. He sat smugly in the metal folding chair, exuding a punk’s confidence, his arms folded tightly. Four long and fresh red scratches ran along his neck. The date and time, 11:04 p.m., March 12—four and a half months ago—flashed in the corner of the screen.

  “I live at four-oh-nine East Adams Street,” Goss continued, “apartment two-seventeen.”

  The camera drew back to show the suspect, seated at the end of the long conference table, and an older man seated on the side, to Goss’s right. The man appeared to be in his late sixties, gray-haired, with a hawk nose that supported his black-rimmed glasses.

  “Mr. Goss,” said the man, “I’m Detective Lonzo Stafford. With me, behind the camera, is Detective Jamahl Bradley. You understand, son, that you have the right to remain silent. You have the right—”

  Jack hit the remote, fast-forwarding to the part he’d seen at least a hundred times before. Visible in the frame now was a different Goss, more animated, boasting like a proud father.

  “. . . I killed the little prick tease,” Goss said with a carefree shrug.

  Jack stopped the tape, rewound, and listened again, as if flogging himself.

  “. . . I killed the little prick tease,” he heard one more time. Just the way thousands of other people had heard it—with expletive deleted—and were probably hearing it again tonight, on the television news. The tape rolled on, and Jack closed his eyes and listened as Goss described the deed in grisly detail. The car ride to the woods. The knife at the young girl’s throat. The tears that had stemmed his vulgar attempts at gentle caresses. The struggle that had ensued. And finally, pulling the nylon tight around the girl’s neck . . .

  Jack sighed, keeping his eyes closed. The tape continued, but there was only silence. Even the police interrogators, it seemed, had needed to catch their breath. Had they been allowed to hear it, a jury probably would have reacted the same way. But he’d prevented that. He’d kept the entire videotape out of evidence by arguing that Goss’s constitutional rights had been violated—that his confession had been involuntary. The police hadn’t beaten it out of him with a rubber hose. They hadn’t even threatened him. “They tricked him,” Jack had argued, relying on one questionable remark by a seasoned detective who so desperately wanted to nail Goss that he pushed it a little too far—though the detective had still played good odds, knowing from experience that only the most liberal judge would condemn his tactics.

  “We don’t want to know if you did it,” Detective Stafford had assured Goss. “We just want you to show us where Kerry’s body is, so we can give her a decent Christian burial.” That was all the ammunition Jack had needed. “They induced a confession by playing on my client’s conscience!” he’d argued to the judge. “They appealed to his religious convictions. A Christian burial speech is patently illegal, Your Honor.”

  No one was more surprised than Jack when the judge bought the argument. The confession was ruled inadmissible. The jury never saw the videotape. They acquitted a guilty man. And the miscarriage of justice was clear. Nice going, Swyteck.

  He hit the eject button on his VCR and tossed the confession aside, disgusted at himself and what he did for a living. He grabbed another cassette from the case beside the television, pushed To Kill a Mockingbird into his VCR, and for the fifteenth time since joining the Freedom Institute, watched Gregory Peck defend the innocent.

  Peck’s Atticus Finch had just launched into his peroration when a shrill ringing startled Jack from a state of half sleep.

  He snatched up the telephone, hoping to hear Cindy’s voice. For a few moments, though, all he heard was silence. Finally, a surly voice came over the line. “Swyteck?” it asked.

  Jack didn’t move. The voice seemed vaguely familiar, but it also seemed raspy and disguised. He waited. And finally came the brief, sobering message.

  “A killer is on the loose tonight, Swyteck. A killer is on the loose.”

  Jack gripped the receiver tighter. “Who’s there?”

  Again, there was only silence.

  “Who’s there? Who are you?” Jack waited, but heard only the sound of his own erratic breathing. Then, finally . . .

  “Sleep tight,” was the cool reply. The phone clicked, and then came the dial tone.

  Chapter 5

  •

  Governor Harold Swyteck jogged down a wood-chip jogging path. He muttered a soft curse as he reflected on the political repercussions of Jack’s victory the previous day. The governor and his advisers had been speculating for weeks on how the trial might affect his bid for re-election. They figured a few tough anti-crime speeches would probably counter Jack’s involvement. Never, however, had they figured he’d actually win an acquittal. Had they considered it, they might have had a comeback when the media issued its hourly reports that it was indeed the governor’s son who’d gotten a confessed killer off on a technicality.

  “Damn it all!” Harry blurted with another husky breath, his arms pumping to a quicker cadence. As his legs surged forward he felt his anger building. It was a father’s anger, tinged more with disappointment than with vitriol.

  The governor struggled to maintain his pace. Since the Fernandez execution, he’d taken up jogging and sworn off the booze. In some twelve hundred days in office, he’d jogged about as many miles and thought about that one disturbing night at least as many times, wishing he’d just listened to his son and stopped the execution—if only for a few days, long enough to investigate Jack’s story. Jogging gave him a chance to reflect on events and feelings without yielding to the urge to confide. His advisers pleaded with him about security, but he avoided escorts, except late at night or in big cities. “If some cr
azy is gunning for me,” he’d always say, “he won’t come looking on a back road for some guy in frumpy jogging sweats and a baseball cap.” So far, he’d been right.

  Harry slowed as he neared a cluster of sprawling oak trees and royal poincianas that marked the halfway point of his route. He reminded himself of the rules: The first half of his run was for venting anger; the second was reserved for positive thoughts.

  “My fellow Floridians,” he silently intoned as he reached his halfway marker, jogging beneath the fire-orange canopy of a royal poinciana. He could feel his attitude changing. His troubles were falling behind him; this morning’s speech and throngs of loyal supporters were looming ahead. In just a few hours he would officially launch his re-election campaign.

  “. . . in this election, you have a choice,” the speech continued in his mind. But his feet went out from under him, and he found himself sprawled on the ground, his right elbow and knee skinned and bleeding. At first he thought he’d tripped over something, but as he looked behind him a dark blur raced out from the shadow of a huge cold oak and pounced on top of him, knocking him flat again. Their bodies locked together as they tumbled down a steep ravine along the deserted jogging path. They landed hard amid the tangled weeds and cattails beside a scummy green canal. The governor quickly reached in his pocket for his electronic pager to alert security, but before his finger could hit the red button, his attacker knocked the wind out of him with a fist to the solar plexus. In a split second, Harry was flat on his belly, his face pushed into the dirt.

  “Heh!” the governor gasped, his head moving just enough to the side to allow his mouth to work. But a cold steel blade was at his throat before he could utter another word.