by D. W. Buffa
“Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a whole civilization all around us, right in front of our eyes, and we didn’t even know it—like a kind of parallel universe that is there and yet isn’t there?”
She cranked down the window and lifted her face to the rush of cool night air. It seemed to sweep away all the feverish excitement, all the anxious care. A dreamlike smile floated across the long curve of her sad gentle mouth.
“Want some music?” she asked as she turned on the radio. As soon as she heard it, the smile on her face started to dance and her eyes began to come alive again. Then she was laughing, the way she had laughed when she was still a girl and did not yet know what it was like to be unhappy. She was laughing, and I knew why.
“You just happened to turn on the radio to Johnny Mathis singing ‘Chances Are’?”
She reached down between the seats. “I cheated a little,” she admitted as she pulled out a plastic CD holder. The laughter faded into the night and the sparkle in her eyes became a warm, luminous glow.
“It’s Saturday night,” I said, as she turned onto the street that ran along the river at the edge of the city. “What would you like to do?”
“Nothing,” she said, a wistful look in her eyes. “Be with you.
What would you like to do?”
“Marry you.”
She did not look around to see me and there was no change in her expression, nothing, except a slight quiver at the corner of her mouth.
“I love you, Joey. I always have. I always will.”
That was all she said. She did not say yes, and she did not say no, and when she reached for my hand it did not seem to matter.
She lived in a condominium on the edge of the river less than half a mile from town. As soon as we shut the door behind us, she was in my arms. She kissed me on the mouth and then, keeping hold of my hand, led me into the living room. She turned on some music and kicked off her shoes. We went onto the balcony and watched the lights of the city reflected in the black water of the river and listened to the thousand sounds drumming in the glass and steel darkness. Closing the sliding glass door, we went back into the living room and with both her arms around my neck we began to dance. We moved slowly to the rhythm of the music and then more slowly still.
“It’s like the first time,” she said in a muffled voice as she lifted her face to mine.
I slept late into the morning and for a few minutes after I woke up thought I was still asleep. At first I did not know where I was, and then, when I remembered, wondered if I had been left there alone. I found my clothes draped neatly over the arm of an up-holstered chair in the corner of the bedroom and put on my pants.
Then I slipped on my white dress shirt, fastened one button and rolled up the sleeves. In the bathroom, I washed my face and tried to do something with my hair. With my shirttails hanging down behind me, I walked barefoot out to the living room and through gauze curtains saw Jennifer sitting on the balcony.
Leaning against the sliding glass door, I squinted into the bright yellow sunlight. “What are you reading?” I asked.
She put the paperback novel down next to her coffee cup on the black metal table, got up from the deck chair, and kissed me on the side of my face. “I’ll get you some coffee,” she said, laughing at the way I looked.
I stood there, in my rumpled shirt and wrinkled pants, bleary-eyed and unshaven, watching her as she walked away, clean and fresh, in a white silk T-shirt and a pair of cuffed shorts that flared out above her thin knees. When she disappeared into the kitchen, I went out onto the balcony and sat down on the other green-cushioned wooden chair. I picked up the book she had been reading and looked at the cover. A woman with a low-cut dress was laid out in a half faint, held around her slim waist by a muscle-bound bodybuilder with hair longer than hers.
“I’ll bet you can’t find anything like that in that library of yours at home,” she said as she handed me a cup of coffee.
“Is it any good?”
She laughed. “That? Of course not. But I’m afraid I don’t read much of anything that is. I just do it to escape.” She sat down on the edge of her chair, her knees close together. She could not stop laughing. “I’m sorry. But you look like someone who got caught sneaking out of someone’s hotel room.”
She stood up, took the cup away from me, and held out her hand. “Come on,” she commanded. “Get the rest of your things.
I’m going to take you home so you can change clothes and we can go somewhere.”
“Where?” I asked, stumbling along behind her.
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. It’s a gorgeous day. We’ll just go.”
She drove me home and waited in the library while I changed.
When I came back, she was sitting in a chair with her glasses on, peering intently at the open page of a leather-bound book.
“So if we were married,” she said, looking up, “we would sit in here every night, and while I read some of my trashy novels you’d be reading …” She thumbed back to the title page. “The History of Italy by Francesco Guicciardini.”
“I have to read that sort of thing,” I explained as I took her by the hand. “I spent too much time in school chasing girls.”
“You caught a few, too, from what I heard.”
“Lies, all lies.”
We climbed into her car, and she switched on the ignition.
“Yes,” she said just as she pushed on the accelerator and we shot down the driveway and out the open gate at the bottom.
“Yes?” I asked, my hand braced against the dashboard.
“I’ll marry you.”
“When?”
“In a year—if you still want to.”
From the moment weeks before, when she showed up on my doorstep and after an interval of a lifetime had gone on another drive to the coast, what I wanted or did not want had disappeared as questions I could no longer ask. I had never lived with anyone for longer than a few months at a time, and had been hurt so badly the last time it had never entered my mind that I would ever do it again. And then Jennifer showed up on my doorstep, and before we had reached the coast I had known that nothing any longer was a matter of choice. We were going there again. The top was down and the wind raced past us as she drove ahead of the sun, speeding toward the western sea. I folded my arms in front of me, and sank back against the leather seat and closed my eyes, and I knew better than I had ever known anything before that I belonged to her and she belonged to me. We were nothing more than different parts of the same person. We might as well have been married at birth.
Nineteen
_______
It was simply a matter of chance. Any one of a dozen different deputy district attorneys might have been assigned to the case of State v. John Smith. Despite all the publicity, despite the editorials insisting that the district attorney himself should handle the first murder trial in which the victim was a sitting circuit court judge, it was treated like any other homicide. Whether the victim was one of the homeless found butchered behind the garbage cans in an alleyway, or a member of the state judiciary found stabbed to death next to his car, the bureaucratic machinery of the criminal justice system treated everyone with the same rigid equality of death. Cases within the same category were assigned in a strict rotation among the deputies within that division. Without a second thought, an anonymous clerk entered the name Cassandra Loescher and with that simple act made her famous.
When the district attorney announced that Cassandra Loescher would prosecute the killer of Judge Quincy Griswald he lavished such praise on her qualifications that it would have been hard not to believe that she had been his personal choice. With the wide-eyed sincerity that had helped get him elected, he insisted she was one of the most experienced, best-trained prosecutors in his office. Leaning toward the cameras, a confident smile on his suntanned face, he called her “a tough, smart lawyer who knows her way around a courtroom,” as if it might have entered anyone’s mind that she did not. A quick,
furtive glance at a three-by-five card was followed by the observation that “there are not more than three or four prosecutors in the whole state who could match her 96 percent conviction rate.” Turning to the somewhat bewildered woman next to him, he shook her hand and, with one last smile and one last wave to the circle of reporters crowding the corridor, vanished into his office.
Blinking into the TV lights, Cassandra Loescher was left alone to listen to herself repeat the same vapid generalities she was too intelligent not to have once ridiculed in the mouth of someone else. It was always interesting, the way the words we mock in others no longer seem insincere when we use them ourselves. She meant it when she said she was determined to bring this killer to justice; she meant it when she said she had the greatest faith in the world that a jury would do the right thing. She was now so convinced of the importance of a guilty verdict in the case against John Smith that she had probably forgotten the day when, while I watched, she had tried to trade insults with Quincy Griswald and then stalked out of his courtroom, wishing him dead.
The look she had given him then was the look she was giving me now. She was annoyed she had in effect to repeat the arraignment with a new attorney, and even more irritated that it had not started on time. It was scheduled for ten o’clock; it was now seven minutes after. She sat at one of the two tables reserved for counsel, tapping her fingers and clicking her teeth, listening to the murmurs of the handful of reporters and spectators scattered over the hard wooden benches that ran across the low-ceilinged room behind us.
The clerk took two steps inside, stopped and stamped her foot.
“All rise,” she announced.
His black robe trailing behind him, Judge Morris Bingham walked briskly into the room where in the course of a long tenure on the bench he had heard nearly every complaint and every excuse suffering could create or duplicity could invent. In his mid-fifties, with blue eyes that were lively and alert, Bingham had only a tinge of gray in his close-cut brown hair. Though he was not in any serious sense a legal scholar, he had a clear mind and the kind of sound judgment that builds on its own experience.
No one—not even the criminal defendants he had sometimes to sentence to long terms of imprisonment—had ever complained that he had treated them unfairly. He was civil, sometimes to a fault, but his impeccable manners, an honest reflection of his ba-sically decent character, also provided him a barrier against any closer contact. Lawyers who practiced before him loved him without knowing him; judges who worked with him did not like him because he had no interest in knowing them.
There was no wasted motion in what he did, and no sense that he worried about time. He sat down, folded his hands together on the bench in front of him, leaned forward, and turned to the deputy district attorney. With nothing more than an expectant look, he let her know what he wanted.
“We’re here in the matter of State v. John Smith, your honor.”
He glanced at the deputy sheriff standing next to the door at the side. The deputy understood. His eyes still on the judge, he opened the door and called the name of the prisoner. When John Smith appeared in the doorway, the deputy put his hand on his arm and led him across the front of the courtroom.
Shackled with chains, the young man—the boy—known only as John Smith shuffled across the floor, his wrists held together in front of his waist, his head bobbing slowly up and down. As he drew closer, he stared at me with a puzzled expression. I had spent an hour with him late Friday afternoon, just three days before, but I was not sure he remembered who I was.
The deputy guided him to a spot next to me and then stepped back to a place in front of the wooden railing a few feet behind.
Bingham looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“Your honor, for the record my name is Joseph Antonelli. I have agreed to undertake the representation of the defendant known as John Smith. Mr. Smith, as the court is aware, has previously been arraigned on an indictment charging him with the crime of murder in the first degree. At the time of that arraignment, Mr. Smith was represented by the public defender’s office.
A not guilty plea was entered, defense counsel filed a motion for a psychiatric examination to determine if Mr. Smith was in fact competent to stand trial, and the case was assigned to this court for all further proceedings.”
This was one of those routine appearances which, though most lawyers hated them as a waste of their time, were among my favorite things to do. I was like an actor who has only five lines, but knows that they are as important as any lines in the play. I stood with my shoulders straight and my hands held behind my back, bent slightly forward at the waist, my feet spread wide apart.
I spoke each sentence rapidly, snapped off the last word, paused long enough for the word to echo back, and then did it again.
“I have filed with the court a substitution order, signed by both previous counsel and myself. With the approval of the court, I wish to begin my representation of Mr. Smith by asking that the motion for a psychiatric examination be withdrawn. The defendant has no desire to avoid trial of this case on the merits. The defendant, your honor, wishes to establish once and for all that he is innocent and that whoever killed the honorable Judge Quincy Griswald is still at large and—”
Morris Bingham raised his chin, and with that single gesture cut me off. I had begun to play to the reporters and he was not going to allow it. His gaze lingered a moment longer, and I thought I detected something close to a smile. Then he looked over at Cassandra Loescher, who already knew the question and had no doubt about her answer.
“The state has no objection,” she replied as soon as he lifted his eyebrow.
With a quick, abbreviated smile and an even quicker nod, Bingham sat up, glanced inside the case file, closed it, and nodded once more. “Mr. Smith,” he said, leaning forward.
There was no response, none that I could hear. I looked to the side and was surprised to find John Smith looking up at the bench, waiting for what the judge was going to say next.
“Do you understand what we’re doing here today?”
Smith said nothing, but he seemed completely attentive. More than that, he seemed drawn to the judge in a way I had not seen before. Perhaps it was the sound of Bingham’s voice: soft, quiet, the sound of someone you could trust, the sound of someone who would never hurt you.
“Mr. Antonelli has indicated that he wants to be your lawyer.
Do you want him to be your lawyer, Mr. Smith?”
I moved a quarter turn away to watch more clearly, hoping he would do something, make some sign so that we could satisfy at least the minimal requirement that the defendant know that he has been charged with a crime and that he has a right to an attorney. To my astonishment, he answered out loud, a single three-letter word that seemed to stretch out forever between the beginning and the end, a long, quivering cry that until it was over you were not sure he would have the strength to finish. It was like the first full word spoken by a child, who then wants to see if he got it right.
Biting on his lip, Bingham stared at him, and then stared hard at me, as if there was something he would have liked to know.
“Very well,” he said presently. “The order previously entered for a psychiatric examination of the defendant is withdrawn. Is there anything else, Mr. Antonelli?”
“Yes, your honor. I would ask that the defendant be released on his own recognizance.”
Startled out of a reverie, Cassandra Loescher shot up from her chair. “Your honor,” she sputtered, barely able to contain herself.
“The defendant is charged with capital murder. Even if he wasn’t, he has no job, no family, no ties to the community. For that matter, your honor,” she said, putting her hand on her hip, “he doesn’t even have a name. The police called him John Smith because they had to call him something. They ran his prints: Nothing came back. There are no records of any kind. We don’t know who he is, and if he were let out there would be no way to find him.” Glancing across to where I stood, she
added caustically,
“Perhaps Mr. Antonelli can tell the court who his client is. Someone hired him to represent him.”
I waited until Bingham’s eyes left her and came to me. “The terms under which I have agreed to represent Mr. Smith are a private matter between myself and my client.”
Bingham did not need to be told what he already knew. Without expression, he waited for more.
“The court will notice that Ms. Loescher did not say that Mr.
Smith has a criminal record. She did not say that Mr. Smith has a history of violence. We may not know who he is, but if he had a criminal record—if he had ever been arrested—Ms. Loescher would have known that, because his fingerprints would have told her that. We have, your honor, a man without a name; a man, as nearly as I can tell, without much in the way of a memory; someone who has almost certainly never hurt another human being, now charged with a crime to which he has pled not guilty, held in confinement for something he did not do.”
Bingham threw out his hands and spread open his fingers, tilted his head and looked at me, waiting. I answered his unspoken question with the same sort of gesture. “I know,” I agreed. “I just wanted to point out the unfairness of it all.”
“In light of the seriousness of the charge … without a stable home … someone to take responsibility … the defendant will remain in custody,” he said reluctantly. “Trial will be set for …”
He looked down at the clerk and waited until she found the next available date on his calendar.
“I’ll see you later today,” I said to my client, carefully pronouncing the words as the deputy put his hand on John Smith’s shoulder and led him away.
Howard Flynn was waiting for me in the corridor, a solemn expression on his rough-edged mouth. I started to ask him why he had not come inside. Then I remembered.
“It still bothers you, doesn’t it?” I asked as we walked toward the elevator.