by D. W. Buffa
“Yes, Mr. Antonelli?” Griswald asked as he jotted a note on a file.
I waited until he looked up and then, with a shrug, tossed my head slightly to the side. “You’re never going to believe this, your honor, but—”
“How much of a continuance do you need?”
“A month. We have a problem with a witness. The state doesn’t oppose the motion,” I reported.
He nodded once. “The case will be continued one month per defense counsel’s motion,” he announced, passing the file over to the clerk.
As soon as we were outside the courtroom, Harper badgered me for an explanation.
“It’s simple. Griswald started out as a deputy district attorney.
There weren’t as many of them then, and they didn’t get paid nearly as much as they are now. So he thinks they’re underworked and overpaid and that none of them are as good as he was. He never misses a chance to make life difficult for them, especially if they’re as young as that one was. Why? Did you think there was some interesting legal distinction between the two cases? You’ve been around as long as I have. Do you think if there had been a distinction like that, Griswald would have known it? He hasn’t read a law book since law school, and he probably didn’t read one then, either,” I grumbled. “He probably cheated his way through.”
I had gotten so caught up in what I was saying about the new presiding circuit court judge, I had forgotten that Harper was going to tell me who had killed the old one.
“Who did they arrest?” I asked, turning so we were face-to-face.
“Who murdered Calvin Jeffries?”
Twelve
_______
You could almost feel the simultaneous movement of a hundred thousand hands reaching for the remote control to change channels. In love with death, Americans could mourn collectively for victims they never knew when schoolchildren were slaughtered by classmates and that event became the central preoccupation of the national news. They would become overnight experts in every dull detail of a trial reported at second hand when someone famous was charged with murder. Calvin Jeffries, however, had been killed by someone no one had ever heard of, a man without a name, one of the anonymous hordes of homeless that, like other unpleasant facts of life, we train ourselves not to see.
The air had gone out of the balloon. For eight long weeks, the police had been under enormous pressure to make an arrest. It had reached the point where editorial writers had started to call for an investigation of the investigation. Quick to anticipate the ephemeral moods of the electorate, politicians lined up for the chance to offer their own assessments of who should be blamed and what should be done. The governor—belatedly, in the eyes of some—suggested it might be wise to bring in the FBI. Inside the investigation itself, where double shifts and weekends had become the normal work schedule, nerves were frayed and tempers were on edge as everyone wondered whose careers would be sac-rificed next as part of the ongoing cost of catching a killer.
Now the killer had been caught, and suddenly it no longer seemed that important. It was written on their faces as they stared straight into the vacant eye of the television camera, describing the arrest. After all the endless stories about possible conspiracies, hidden motives, and rumored revelations about powerful people, stories that seemed to make sense out of the murder of a prominent public official, it turned out not to have had anything to do with money, power, or sex. It was a random act of violence, committed by a poor pathetic human being who would not have known Calvin Jeffries from the proverbial man in the moon. Despite a long recitation of facts and figures purporting to show how incredibly exhaustive the investigation had been, the police were forced to admit that a single anonymous phone call had told them where the killer could be found.
His name, or at least the name he gave them, was Jacob Whittaker. They were using his fingerprints to get a positive identifi-cation. Whatever his real name turned out to be, there was no doubt he was the killer. They had found the knife, and the suspect, after all the proper warnings about his right to a lawyer and his right to remain silent, had made a full confession.
My legs were stretched out over the corner of my desk, one ankle crossed over the other, watching on the small television set I kept on a shelf in my office the murder of Calvin Jeffries become yesterday’s news. When the police finished their statement, the questions asked by reporters were all ordinary, routine; questions about whether blood was found on the knife and what kind of tests were going to be run if there was; questions about the condition of the prisoner and the time and place of his formal arraignment. After each answer, there was a dead silence before someone could think of what to ask next. The same reporters who had struggled into front-row seats, convinced this was only the beginning of one of the biggest stories they would ever have the chance to cover, were sitting back, an ankle crossed over a knee, an arm thrown over a chair, following what was said with a shrug and a yawn, and only occasionally jotting down a note to use in what would undoubtedly be the last front-page mention of a story that was now without interest.
With the droning sound of another question fading into the background, the anchorwoman appeared on screen and, with a cursory five-second summation of what everyone had just seen, turned to the other day’s news. The murder of Calvin Jeffries had now been relegated to the vast obscurity of a homicide finally solved and quickly forgotten.
I flicked the button on the remote control. Helen stuck her head in the doorway to say good night. “Someone named Jennifer called to tell you that it was not too late if you wanted to have dinner.” Helen arched her painted black eyebrows. “Well?”
she asked when I did not say anything. “Are you going to have dinner with her or not?”
“I was waiting for you to tell me.”
Her mouth turned down at the corners. “It’s after five, and after five you can do whatever you like.” She thought of something as she turned to go. “Just make sure you’re here on time in the morning.”
“Thank you,” I said after I heard the outer door shut behind her.
I picked up the phone to call Jennifer, started to dial, and then hung up. I had been fretting about it all day. I still did not know what I wanted to say. One minute I was certain I wanted to see her again; the next minute I was not sure about anything. It had taken me years to get over her. There had been times, especially that first year, when I was certain there was nothing else to live for. Sometimes I think the only thing that kept me alive was the knowledge that I would not have to live forever. It gave me a kind of detachment about myself, and I became, as it were, an observer of my own desperation. Eventually, the pain went away, but what had happened had changed me forever. I understood, and I accepted, what I was, a permanent stranger, someone who passes through other people’s lives without leaving a mark.
I picked up the telephone again, and saw myself back in college at a pay phone, dropping in quarters, deciding as the last coin rattled in that I could not do it. I told myself it was a matter of pride, but knew it was because I was too scared to hear her voice again, afraid of how much it would hurt if I did, especially because I knew what she would say. I did hear her voice, once.
It was just before Christmas, and the snow was falling thick and heavy outside in the freezing night air. She answered the phone, and I listened to her say hello, and then I listened to her voice go quiet, and then I heard her say my name, like a question, and then I hung up. I went back to my dormitory room and lay on the bed and hoped I would fall asleep and never wake up.
I dialed the number and, when she answered, felt for just an instant that same fear of being hurt again.
“Joey?” she asked, when I did not respond.
I stared down at the desk. “Yes,” I said, clearing my throat.
“It’s me. Do you still want to have dinner?”
We met at an obscure little restaurant on the west side of town and spent the next two hours trying to remember who we had been. She asked about law school
and about being a lawyer, and I found I was talking about things that happened years apart as if they had taken place at the same time. I asked her about what she had done after she got married and she was talking about her life as a fashion designer before I knew she had once lived in New York. We would start on one thing and come back to another. The history of our lives became a vast circle which could be traced from any place you cared to begin.
“I called my mother after you dropped me off last night.”
She looked alarmed. “You shouldn’t have done that.” Reaching across the table, she wrapped her hand around my wrist. “What good would it do?”
“I was angry, but as soon as I heard her voice, I knew she would not remember. She would not have remembered a week after she did it,” I added. “Do you know how often I had to listen to her tell me she only wanted the best for me?”
She drew her hand away from my wrist and placed it in her lap.
“I think that’s one of the reasons I became a lawyer. She wanted me to be a doctor.”
“Like your father.”
“No, not like him. She didn’t want me to become a general practitioner who loved being a doctor. She wanted me to be someone she could think of as successful, a surgeon, the chief of staff of a hospital. My mother didn’t know a damn thing about medicine, but she could take one look around a country club dance floor and know immediately where each couple stood on the social scale.”
A woman who had grandchildren was sitting across from me, and I was telling her things about myself that I had never told anyone. I leaned over my plate and lifted my fork to my mouth, and then put it down before it reached my lips.
“The worst part is how much like her I am.”
She looked at me with those wonderful oval-shaped eyes that had once inspired so many romantic thoughts and erotic dreams, and a moment later began to laugh.
“I have a very hard time imagining you at a country club dance.
And I don’t believe for a minute that you ever gave a thought to someone’s social standing or even if they had any. You didn’t even like to dance,” she said, taunting me with her eyes.
“I remember I liked to dance with you,” I said, grinning.
The color deepened in her cheeks. “That wasn’t dancing. We were just necking, standing up.” She dared me to deny it, but I just looked at her as if I had no idea what she was talking about.
“You still do that, don’t you?” she asked, a glimmer in her eye.
“You get that look, that really extraordinarily larcenous expression on your face, like a thief announcing at the door that you’ve come to rob them blind, and it all seems so honest no one thinks twice about trusting you completely. That’s right, isn’t it?”
I issued every false-faced denial I could think of that would let her know that I hoped she was right about me and that I was still the boy she remembered.
“I remind myself of my mother sometimes when I hear myself giving advice to a client. I never have any doubt that I’m right.”
It was too flippant, and it was not true. “No, it’s when I catch myself going crazy because something isn’t quite perfect. Everything always had to be just right for her. Nothing out of place; nothing that might cause a complete stranger to notice you for the wrong reasons. Sit straight, walk straight, pronounce each word properly, always be polite, never lose your temper. I can still feel her fingers picking away a piece of lint from my slacks, or pushing a strand of hair back from my forehead. She was always fussing over me. She still does it.” I caught myself. With an embarrassed laugh, I tried to explain.
“She came out last summer. She stayed a week. Every morning when I got up,” I admitted with a sheepish grin, “I made my bed, put everything away, made damn certain my room was all cleaned up before I went downstairs for breakfast.” With a frown, I added, “She still wants to know when I’m getting married.”
There was something I wanted to know, something I wanted to hear her talk about, but I sensed a reluctance on her part to discuss it. Finally, over coffee, I asked.
“Why did you come back here? What happened?”
A brief smile flitted over her mouth and then disappeared. Her eyes looked away and then peered into mine, and then looked away again. She bit her lip, tried to smile, but could not. For a long time she stared down at her hands, and when she finally raised her eyes there was a distance there that I had not seen before.
“Seven years ago I got sick, very sick. I couldn’t do anything.
I couldn’t work, I couldn’t function.” She sighed and then turned her face up to me with the kind of trusting smile that once made me feel we were the only two people alive. “I had a breakdown.
I was in a hospital for months. I’m a manic-depressive. I used to sit in my room for days, staring at the walls. Sometimes I couldn’t even get myself dressed. For a long time I thought I was just depressed, the way everyone gets depressed about things once in a while. But then I started to have these strange thoughts, things that did not make sense, delusions really. I thought people were following me. If someone looked at me on the street, I thought they were letting me know they were watching me. I thought things that were said on television were secret messages being sent to me.”
She saw the look in my eye and, instinctively, reached across and ran her hand over the side of my face. “I’m all right now.
When they finally figured out what it was, a chemical imbalance in the brain, they put me on lithium.”
A thoughtful expression on her face, she sipped some coffee and then, very slowly, put the cup back in the saucer. With her middle finger she traced the edge all the way around to the beginning.
“I got a divorce four years ago. I told you that I’d felt sorry for him—because I never loved him. And I never did, not the way you think you will, not the way I loved you; but we had a child together—it doesn’t matter why we had a child—and we had a life together. It hurt—it hurt a lot. He did what he could, he handled it the best way he knew how, and I think he always thought it was somehow his fault—that I got sick like that—but it made him as crazy as I was. It really did. He was depressed, and angry, and nothing seemed to be going right in his life, either, and … Well, that’s what happened. I went crazy and now I’m better, and I was married and now I’m not.” Struggling with herself, she managed to force a smile. “See how much trouble I would have been.”
It was like seeing her again for the very first time, and falling even more in love with her than I had before. There was no place else I wanted to be, no one else I wanted to be with, nothing else I wanted except to do whatever I could to make sure she was never afraid or unhappy again.
She took my hand when we left the restaurant and walked to the end of the block where she had parked her car. The night was cool and clear and there was no one else on the street. I pulled her toward me, and felt her free hand slip around my neck.
We kissed the way I think we must have kissed the very first time, a brief, awkward trembling touch, and then she snuggled against my shoulder and I felt her warm breath on my neck and the smell of her hair was like the morning breeze that floats through the window when you are only half awake.
“I have to go,” she whispered.
“It’s early,” I said. I held on to her hand as she let go of my neck.
“I told you I had an early flight tomorrow.” She kissed the side of my face, and we walked the last few steps to her car. I would not let go of her hand. She fumbled with her key ring until she found the one she needed. Laughing, she managed to unlock the door, and as soon as she did I pulled her back into my arms.
“Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere and dance?”
She was still laughing, softly. “I’d love to, but not tonight.”
I let go of her and held the car door open while she got in.
“How long are you going to be gone?”
She switched on the ignition and turned on the headlights.
With one hand o
n the convertible top and the other on the window of the door, I watched her buckle herself in. She looked up and tugged playfully on my tie. “Just a week. I’ll call as soon as I get back.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little curious that even now, at our age, you still have to leave me because of your mother?”
At first she did not understand, but then it came back to her and her eyes gleamed with that same schoolgirl seduction she had used on me that night on the doorstep of her parents’ home.
Then it was gone, and I bent down and we kissed each other on the side of the face like the two old friends we were. As I watched her drive off, I felt empty and alone, and the self-sufficiency of my solitary life suddenly seemed pretentious and false.
It was still early and the last place I wanted to be was in that strange place I called home. For a long time I wandered aimlessly through the streets, in a neighborhood I did not know. My leg began to hurt, and I thought it was funny, because I thought it must be psychosomatic. That leg had not bothered me in years.
The bullet had passed right through, without doing any real damage at all. There was no reason for it to hurt now.
Everything seemed to be conspiring to bring back the past; more than that, to make the past seem more real than the present. I kept switching back and forth, looking back at the past and then going back to the very beginning of things, when I first fell in love with Jennifer, when I first started to despise Calvin Jeffries, when Elliott pointed that gun in my face; going back to the beginning to then watch the way things happened, watching them as if I were seeing them for the first time, like someone who had been given the gift of clairvoyance and could see the future and everything that was going to happen.
The leg hurt like crazy. I passed the open door of a crowded restaurant full of friendly noise. I went inside and found one last place at the bar. The bartender removed a crumpled napkin and a glass of melting ice, wiped the bar with one pass of a towel, and then flung it over his shoulder. He looked at me just long enough to let me know he was ready for the answer to the question he did not need to ask.