by D. W. Buffa
He hesitated, just for a moment, and Micronitis opened his mouth. With a shake of his head that was more like a quick shudder, the old man cut him off. “There was something quite destructive about it, this way he had of demolishing every argument he heard. It became an obsession with him. He was so intent on showing everyone that they did not measure up, that he sometimes completely lost sight of the difference between better and worse. With that restless mind of his, everything was reduced to the absolute equality of imperfection.”
This moment of lucidity seemed to exhaust his critical facul-ties. His head sagged down and as he fumbled with his coffee cup his hand trembled for a moment before he was able to bring it back under control.
“Well,” he said, looking around the table, “for someone who wasn’t interested in money, he did all right.” His eyes landed on Micronitis. “Thanks to us, he was pretty well off, wasn’t he.”
You could almost see the electrons racing around the agile brain of Jonah Micronitis as he calculated, no doubt to the last dollar and cent, the net worth of Asa Bartram’s deceased friend. “Quite a wealthy man.” He caught the meaning of the look that passed between Harper and myself. “It all started years ago,” he explained.
“Before I joined the firm. Asa always had an eye for investments.
He put the judge into some things—real estate, mainly—that didn’t cost that much at the time.”
With a grim laugh, the old man interjected: “But whoever killed him didn’t get any of it. One thing you could always count on about Calvin—he never had enough money on him to pick up a check.”
“The killer was probably after the car,” Harper suggested. “That’s where he was stabbed, right next to his car in the courthouse parking structure.”
Wincing, Asa dropped his eyes. “Terrible thing, terrible thing,”
he muttered. “Just left there to die like that, and then somehow managed to drag himself back to his office. Must have crawled part of the way.”
Micronitis checked his watch. “We better get going,” he said.
Asa gave no sign he had heard. Instead, he raised his head and grinned at me. “Jonah was right. Calvin really hated you.”
Laying my hand on his forearm, I looked into his aging eyes.
“And do you hate me, too, Asa?” I asked gently.
He was startled at first, but then he realized I was not asking him about me at all. “No, of course not,” he replied, patting my hand. “Calvin hated everybody.” A shudder seemed to pass through him, and his mouth twisted into a grimace. He stared down at the table, shaking his head. Then he stopped, placed both hands on the arms of his chair, and drew himself up to his full height. “He was the most brilliant man and the meanest son of a bitch I ever knew. I made him rich, and he made me feel like he was doing me a favor by letting me do it.”
“Then why did you?” Harper asked.
Asa did not understand. “Why did I what?”
Harper never had a chance to answer. Before the second word was out of the old man’s mouth, Micronitis had already begun to explain. “Why did you make him rich if he treated you like that?”
With a toss of his head, Asa snorted. “Wish I knew. I just did it, that’s all.” He paused, his dim eyes twinkling with a thought that had just come to him. “It was like a marriage. After a while you settle into a kind of routine, and later on you can’t remember why. I handled the business end of things when we started out together. It became one of the things I did, and I kept doing it after he went on the bench.”
With his elbows on the table, he wrapped one hand over the other and rested his chin on top. His eyelids were closed into narrow slits and a shrewd smile played at the corners of his wide mouth.
“Once you did something for Calvin Jeffries, it stopped being a favor and became an expectation. He never thanked me, not once in all those years.” Folding his arms across his chest, he sank back in his chair. “I don’t think he even liked me,” he said, pressing his lips together as he pondered the meaning of what he had received for all his trouble. Brightening, he turned his head until his eyes met mine. “He didn’t like me, but he hated you.”
Micronitis could hardly contain himself. “Yes, he really hated you,” he said, his voice a cheerful echo.
I turned away from Asa and looked at Micronitis. “Do you know why he hated me?” I asked, irritated.
His eyes darted from mine to Asa and back again. He fidgeted around in his chair. The side of his mouth began to twitch. “No,”
he finally admitted. “I just know that he did.”
Finished with his breakfast, Harper set his empty plate to the side. “Do you know why?” he asked, looking right at me.
“It was the Larkin case,” Asa explained. Harper turned his head, waiting to hear more. “The Larkin case made our friend here famous,” he said, nodding toward me. “Every lawyer who ever became famous became famous because of one case. The Larkin case was yours, wasn’t it?”
Harper’s eyes flashed. “I remember now. It was years ago. I couldn’t cover it. I’d already been assigned to a murder trial that was scheduled at the same time.” Harper thought of something.
“Wasn’t that the case the judge threw you in jail for contempt?”
Then he realized what had happened. “Ah,” he said, suddenly subdued, “Jeffries.”
For a moment, no one said anything. Then, turning to Asa, Harper asked, “What was it about the case that made him hate Antonelli so much?”
Furrowing his brow, he tried to remember. Finally, he shook his head. “I don’t really know. I never paid much attention to what went on in the courthouse. All I know,” he said, repeating himself, “is that it was the Larkin case.” He smiled apologetically at Harper and looked at me. “Tell us what happened, Joe. The Larkin trial.”
Micronitis started to object. He tapped his fingernail on the glass crystal of his wristwatch, trying to remind Asa that there was somewhere he was supposed to be.
“Go ahead, Joe,” Asa insisted. “I’ve always wanted to hear about it.”
Harper endorsed the suggestion. “I’ve always wanted to hear about it, too.” He stole a quick, sideways glance at Micronitis, then added, “And take your time. Don’t leave anything out.”
Two
_______
The Larkin case. As soon as I was reminded of it, I remembered everything, all of it; the way the women who worked in the courthouse went out of their way to let me know what an awful thing she had done; the rigid certainty that she was guilty; the vexation that whatever sentence she was given would be less than she deserved. Perhaps part of it was because she looked so much like they did, a plain, scarcely noticeable woman who seldom wore makeup and thought nothing of wearing the same dress two days in a row. Most of it of course was because her husband had already confessed to having done with their daughter what she was accused of having done with their son.
That was perhaps the most intriguing thing of all, and even now I cannot pretend to understand why the reaction against her was so much more ferocious than it was against him. He had been having sex with his own daughter for three and a half years. Not his stepdaughter, his own flesh and blood. It is difficult to imagine anyone doing anything worse, yet from the time his wife was first accused of having sexual relations with their young son, she became a monster of depravity and he became, well—nothing.
He was a part of the background, a bit player, someone who had done something unspeakable, but something no different than the unforgivable acts of a thousand other men. The blame that attached to what he had done to his daughter had, as it were, been diffused by the frequency with which such things had been done before. Edward Larkin was a sexual predator who would be dealt with in the normal course of the criminal law; what Janet Larkin had done was beyond anyone’s experience. No mother had sex with her son; it was an unnatural act outside the boundaries of not only every convention but every instinct. It was the ultimate taboo, and for that reason it had to be t
rue. It was not the kind of thing someone, especially a child, would just invent.
I got the case for no other reason than that it was my turn. I was still doing court-appointed work, and when Janet Larkin was called for arraignment and announced she could not afford to hire a lawyer of her own, my name was next on the list. It is strange how often the most important things that happen to us are matters of chance, and how often we don’t understand it at the time. I certainly did not. When I went to the district attorney’s office to pick up the discovery in the case, the clerk, a tall woman in her late forties with long dangling brightly colored ear-rings, suggested I come up with a reason to get out of it.
“Have you heard about the book?” she asked, shaking her head in disgust. “It talks about having kids in the same bed with their parents. That’s really sick,” she added, as she turned away.
Just as I got to the door, Spencer Goldman grabbed my arm.
Short, with a bristling brown mustache and wiry hair, he talked the way he moved, in sudden, explosive bursts.
“There’s not going to be any deal in this case,” he announced with ill-disguised hostility. There was a look of triumph in his eyes, as if he were certain that he had just inflicted a mortal wound. We had had cases together before, and he knew I was not shy about going to trial. I took every case I could to trial—
that was the whole reason I became a lawyer: to try cases. He was not trying to scare me; he was trying to show me just how confident he was that Janet Larkin was guilty and that he was going to be able to prove it. There was something else as well, a sense of moral outrage about what had happened. Others, of course, had the same feeling, but I believe that he felt it perhaps more than anyone else.
“It was his case,” Asa suggested by way of explanation.
“It was more than that. It was personal. Not between him and me,” I added quickly. “Between him and the boy. He believed him, believed every word of the story the boy had told. Goldman didn’t have any doubt—none—and it was, really, the most extraordinary story you’ve ever heard.” Pausing, I stared down at the table, remembering the look of defiance on Goldman’s face when he told me he knew the boy was telling the truth. “I suppose we believe what we want to believe, or what we think we’re supposed to believe. Whatever the reason, he believed him, and he came to believe that the only chance the boy had to recover from the awful thing that had been done to him was to let him know that everyone believed him. The mother had to admit what she had done, or there had to be a trial to prove to the world that she had done it. He wanted to punish the mother, all right, but he mainly wanted to save the child.” I shook my head. “The child! He was smarter than anyone else involved in the case.
There was no question he was his father’s son.
“Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that Edward Larkin, the father, never got caught. He had been abusing his daughter for years, and no one knew. The girl never told a soul. Once, it is true, she tried to tell someone—a girl she went to school with—but she pretended she was talking about someone else. She could not bring herself to admit the truth. It was a secret, and it might very well have remained a secret, if her father had not decided to talk about it himself.
“Try to imagine, if you can, what happened to Edward Larkin.
For years he had been having sexual relations with his own daughter. I can’t tell you that he felt guilt, or remorse, or had any kind of regret about it at all. I can’t even tell you he thought it was wrong. Of course he had to have known that other people thought it was wrong; he had to have known that it was the kind of thing people get into very serious trouble about. It is certain that he never breathed a word about it to anyone. Then, one day—or so he claimed—he saw a television show, a discussion about incest, and he decided he had to talk to somebody. I don’t know. It may be true. It’s easier to admit you’ve done something when it’s something other people do. And it’s easier still, if it’s something that can be considered a disease, something that isn’t your fault, something that can be cured. He began to see a psychologist, and the psychologist convinced him that he had to see the police.
“Larkin told them everything. Charges were filed, but because he had come forward voluntarily, and because he was already in therapy, he pled guilty to one count of sexual abuse and was placed on probation. And because he was in therapy, the rest of that family had to go as well. Obviously, the girl needed help, and the mother, who had just learned what her husband had been doing with her daughter, needed it as well. The boy, it was thought, required counseling to help him cope with what had happened to everyone else.
“Gerald Larkin was eleven years old, and all of a sudden his whole world had been destroyed. Before anyone else could tell him what had happened, his father told him, though precisely what he told him no one ever really knew. But it would have been natural for the father to suggest that what he had done was not all that serious, or all that blameworthy, to spare his son as much pain as he possibly could and to tell him that at some point everything would be back to normal.
“Two months after he began seeing a counselor, the boy revealed that at the same time his father had been abusing his sister, his mother had been abusing him. He did not bring it all out at once. At first he remembered only being touched by someone’s hands. Then, gradually, under the questioning of the therapist, he was able to recall more of what had happened until, finally, he had a clear recollection of everything. His mother, he insisted, had repeatedly forced him to have sexual intercourse.
“Everyone believed him, the psychologist, the police, the district attorney’s office. It explained certain things. How could the father have been doing these things with the daughter without the mother knowing anything about it? The answer of course was that the mother did know, but did not care. You can see why everyone thought she was a monster. And then, of course, it seemed to explain the meaning of that book. It was nothing more than the simple proposition that it was better to let children crawl into bed with their parents when they felt afraid or insecure, than force them to stay in their own room alone. Whether that is good advice or not, I would not know, but there was nothing sinister in what it intended to teach. You could not tell that to anyone who had only heard about it, however. As far as they were concerned, it was a manual of depravity, written by the devil himself, instead of something you could find in any bookstore.
“Everyone knew she was guilty, and her continued insistence that she was not seemed only to prove her contempt for decent behavior. Not satisfied with ruining her son’s life by repeated acts of incest, she was determined to make him a public spectacle by dragging him through the indignities of a jury trial. Janet Larkin inspired something close to universal hatred, and because I was her attorney, much of it was directed at me. Nearly every day a new batch of letters was delivered to my office expressing in language laced with obscenity the moral outrage of their anonymous authors. Even people I knew began to look the other way when they passed me in a hallway of the courthouse. I decided that in the best interest of my client I had no choice but to ask that the trial be moved as far away from Portland as possible. I filed a motion for a change of venue. It was the first major mistake I made.
“I was of course a lot younger then, and it was early in my career. Still, it’s hard to believe I was ever that naive. Jeffries was already the presiding circuit court judge, and he could have had the case assigned to any judge he wanted. He assigned it to himself. He wanted that case, and he was not about to let it go. The motion never had a chance, but the price I paid for filing it had nothing to do with that.
“Someone once said that chance rules the universe. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do know that there are occasions on which it can completely change your life, and this, like the fact I was given the case in the first place, was one of them.
I drafted the motion and then put it in final form. Normally, I would have had it sent to the court by registered mail or simply drop
ped it off at the clerk’s office. But I was in a hurry. I wanted a hearing on it as soon as possible. I did not want to wait while it was sent through all the usual bureaucratic channels. I took it directly to Jeffries’s office.
“No one was there. The outer office, where his judicial assistant had her desk, was deserted. It was not quite one o’clock, and assuming that she was probably on her way back from lunch, I took a chair and waited. Not ten seconds later, the door to Jeffries’s chambers opened, and she emerged from the darkness inside. Barefoot and disheveled, she was pinning her hair up in back when she caught sight of me out of the corner of her eye.
Flushed with embarrassment, she froze in her tracks. I walked from the chair straight to her desk, pretending that I had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Laying the motion down in front of her, I gave a brief, formal explanation of what it was. She glanced at the document and, without breaking her silence, looked back at me, a question in her eyes, not whether I knew what she had been doing—no, she was certain of that—but whether I was someone who was likely to talk.
” ‘I’d like to have a hearing on this as soon as the judge has time on his calendar,’ I said, maintaining the fiction that there was nothing in my mind but the motion I had come to deliver.
” ‘Is someone out there?’ I heard Jeffries call as I turned and left.
“There are few things that make us feel more vulnerable than the suspicion that someone knows something about us we don’t want them to know. It was not a feeling that Jeffries enjoyed, and the first chance he had he let me know that it was within his power to give me that same feeling a dozen times over. It happened during the first day of trial.
“The motion for a change of venue was denied. There was no hearing, no oral argument, nothing, just a two-sentence order that read: ‘Defendant has moved for a change of venue. Defendant’s motion is denied.’ The trial started a few weeks later, on a Thurs-day afternoon. As soon as Jeffries took the bench, I renewed my motion.