Key Witness

by J. F. Freedman

  “I don’t ever want a gun in my house again,” Michaela piped up. “I did before but I didn’t understand what it really meant.”

  They all sat silently for a moment, digesting that.

  “Moira’s about to open up a bookstore,” Roberta said, navigating the session back to less-tense waters. “How do you feel about that, Wyatt?”

  “I think it’s a great idea.”

  “You approve.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What if she wanted to open a whorehouse?” She turned to Michaela. “Excuse me.”

  “I’m okay.” Michaela was composed, attentive to both her parents.

  Wyatt stared at Roberta. “Come on,” he said curtly.

  “Or a strip joint? A porno shop.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Why?”

  “Because those are scuzzy, awful things. Moira’s not …”

  “Scuzzy? Awful?”

  “She isn’t those things.”

  “But still—you are making judgments on her behalf, aren’t you? Judging what Moira should or shouldn’t do?”

  “Yes,” he admitted grudgingly. “In those cases I would.”

  “Because you’re her husband.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what she does impacts on you. Affects you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not only that people would say, ‘Oh, isn’t Moira Matthews awful, opening a whorehouse,’ but that it isn’t good for her. As a moral, ethical person. Which makes it not good for you two as a couple, among other issues.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “That’s right.”

  “But if she really, really, really wanted to open up a whorehouse—assuming it was legal and there wasn’t any chance of spreading disease or whatever, like they have in Nevada—you wouldn’t support her, would you?”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “So husbands and wives shouldn’t unilaterally support each other in everything?” Roberta continued. “There are certain things that are wrong, and it’s your obligation to not support her. By not supporting her operating a whorehouse, you’d really be supporting her, wouldn’t you?”

  “I think I would be,” he answered. “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I agree with you. Does that surprise you?”

  He looked at her. “I don’t know.”

  “Because I’m Moira and Michaela’s therapist and we’re in cahoots against you?”

  He nodded. “I’ve thought about that.”

  She smiled. “I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d said otherwise. But I’m not in cahoots with them against you. I am in cahoots—with all of you, for you.”

  “You should hear how Roberta defends you when you aren’t here, Daddy,” Michaela chimed in.

  “She’s boxed my ears severely many times about my attitude toward you,” Moira added acidly.

  Roberta kept her focus on Wyatt, “You’re my patient,” she told him. “The collective you—you three sitting here.”

  He nodded, but his body language belied that acceptance.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Roberta said. “You don’t know me yet. Hopefully, trust will come.”

  “Hopefully.” At this point he was dubious about that—about everything that was going on in here.

  “Good.” She smiled at him. “Let’s keep on this train of thought—about how sometimes not supporting your partner is really support.” She paused. “You changed careers recently, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t change my career. I’m still a lawyer.”

  “Excuse me. I meant focus. You’re practicing a different kind of law now than you were for the bulk of your career, isn’t that right?”

  “For a while. I’ve changed to a different aspect of the law. It isn’t permanent—I don’t think.” He stole a look at Moira. She was looking right at him. He turned his attention back to Roberta.

  “It was a big change, wasn’t it?” Roberta asked. “From the kind of law you were practicing to the kind you’re practicing now?”

  “Very big,” he agreed. “About as different as two disciplines can be and still be under the same umbrella.”

  “It’s affected your family, hasn’t it.”

  “Big-time.”

  “That change was one of the reasons Moira bought the gun, isn’t it.”

  “Yes. I’m sure it is. One of them.”

  Roberta paused. “When you decided to change careers—let’s not argue semantics—what was Moira’s reaction?”

  “She was against it. She still is.”

  “He’s right,” Moira stuck in her two cents’ worth. “I am against what my husband is doing. Firmly.”

  “Which you knew from the beginning,” Roberta asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “Yes. I had to.”

  “Even though your wife—your partner in life—was dead set against it.”

  “Yes. I had to. I would’ve burned out otherwise. I came really close. And I don’t feel there was anything wrong with what I did. I still don’t.”

  “So there are times when one has to operate unilaterally, regardless of the consequences to anyone else.”

  “Yes.” He admitted it. “That’s true.”

  “Following that logic, your partner should support that decision.”

  “I wanted her to.”

  “But even if she didn’t, you did what you had to do.”

  “Yes. I did what I had to do.”

  “And when Moira bought the gun, knowing you couldn’t, wouldn’t, support it, she did what she had to do.”

  “Ahhh.” He closed his eyes.

  “She did what she had to do,” Roberta repeated. “The same as you did.”

  He opened his eyes. “Abstractly, you could say it’s the same.”

  “But it was wrong.”

  “I think it was wrong. I’m not going to back off that.”

  “And what you did was right.”

  “Yes. I’m not backing off that, either.”

  “So it’s all right for you to operate unilaterally, but not Moira. You should be able to call the shots, and she should fall in line.”

  “That’s pretty harsh coming from someone who isn’t in cahoots against me.”

  “I’m only parroting what you’ve been telling me.”

  He shrugged.

  “By the way, you’re doing great, Wyatt.”

  He didn’t feel like he was doing great. He felt like he was barely surviving.

  “Do you know that basic law of physics?” she asked. “For every action there is a counteraction of equal strength and force?”

  “It’s been a long time since high school physics,” he said. “But okay, I’ll buy that.”

  “Do you see how that applies here? To your family?”

  He stared at her.

  “You took an action. You changed—if not careers, a large shift within your career—which caused some severe but inevitable counteractions. When you changed jobs you turned your family dynamic upside down. That was inevitable. Wasn’t it?”

  “I didn’t know it had to be,” he said.

  “Oh, it had to be,” she assured him. “What you didn’t know was that it would bring about negative consequences. Which it didn’t have to,” she added. “More often than not these kinds of changes are positive counter-actions, for everyone. In this case, that didn’t happen. But something had to happen. A decision of this size has to send ripples out that go on and on, way past where you can see them.”

  He nodded. “I can see that now.”

  Roberta glanced at the clock on her desk. “I’m really glad you came in, Wyatt. This has been a very productive session. When can you come again?” She reached for her appointment book.

  “I don’t know. I’m in the middle of a trial that’s consuming me.” He stood up. “I’ve got to say something.” He moved away from the couch so that he could look at all three of them at the same tim
e. “Philosophically, or … what’s the word—therapeutically?—I can understand that my trying to control Moira’s life is as wrong as her trying to control mine. I have no quarrel with that—as a concept. But you’re talking about process, and I’m looking at the real world, and there’s a difference. For me, anyway. I know that changing the kind of law I practice was traumatic for Moira, and I should have been more in tune with her. But I’m not doing anything wrong. That’s an important distinction. I’m defending a disadvantaged kid on a murder charge who I’ve come to believe is innocent. Right now I’m not blowing my own horn when I say I’m all that’s standing between him and the abyss.”

  He focused on Moira. “I’m sorry that anything I’ve done has caused you pain. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. Causing pain for someone is wrong, especially for your family. But the rest of what I did isn’t wrong and nothing that will be done or said in here will make me change my mind about that. And nothing that will be done or said in here will make me change my mind that buying a gun and shooting and almost killing my child—our daughter—can be justified. Or that my defending a black kid and bringing his world into ours can be equated with shooting someone. What you did and what I did are not equal. There is right and wrong in the world—my world, anyway, maybe that’s why I became a lawyer—and nothing anyone can say or do will make me change my mind about that.” He turned to Roberta. “So if the point of my coming here is to find some justification for that, then there’s no reason for me to come back.”

  “Daddy …” Michaela started to break in.

  “I hope someday we can work through this,” he pressed on, overriding his daughter’s interruption, “but I will never accept that there was anything right about it.”

  Moira was rigid, her expression cast in stone as she listened to him.

  “Daddy …” Michaela began again.

  He turned to her. “What is it, darling?” He was suddenly spent, completely drained of all feeling, emotionally and physically.

  “Do you think you can ever forgive Mom? Completely forgive her?”

  He stared at her, then looked at Moira, then back to her.

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

  “Will it help if you know that I have?” she asked.

  He took a deep breath. He could feel Moira’s and the therapist’s eyes on him, but all his attention was with Michaela. His daughter, this young font of wisdom and forgiveness.

  “Yes,” he said after some reflection. “It would.” He knelt down to her. “You’re a wonderful young woman,” he said. “You’re a far better person than I am.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not true.”

  “If you can forgive this quickly, you are.”

  “I have to, Dad. She’s my mother.”

  Behind his back he could hear Moira sobbing.

  He put a hand on his daughter’s forehead, and she leaned down and hugged him fiercely.

  JOE GINSBERG’S BAR EXAMINER friend called Wyatt at the office.

  “I snuck a look at that score you’re interested in,” he said over the phone. “Which you don’t know I did.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “It was a seventy-six, like you thought.”

  Wyatt cursed to himself.

  “It puts her in the eighty-five percentile,” the examiner said.

  “That’s hard to believe.” He had met Doris Blake, spoken with her. She had given no indication of being that smart, or even close.

  “It is awfully high,” the examiner agreed. “One of the highest we’ve ever had from a part-time law student. Usually it’s the cream of the Harvards and Yales who get those high scores.”

  Wyatt had been in the top ten percent of his class at Yale, twenty-five years earlier. He’d scored a seventy-four, which was considered very respectable for someone of his exalted position. This convict-fucking shlub had outscored him. He couldn’t believe it.

  “Is there any chance the score was misrecorded?” he asked, throwing himself a lifeline.

  “One in a million.”

  “Bad odds.”

  “If you want, I could cross-check it against her test book, to be sure. It is an elevated score, and her class standing doesn’t merit her doing that well. But stranger things have happened, as we all know.”

  “I’d appreciate it.” He was grasping at straws but he had to be one hundred percent sure.

  “It’ll take me a few weeks. Right now we’re rereading the sixty-nines and sixty-eights.”

  A score of seventy percent was passing. About half of those who took the twice-yearly exams passed each time, scoring seventy percent or better—mostly in the seventy to seventy-two percentile. Test scores that had just missed the mark were reexamined to see if another point or point and a half could be squeezed out of them. The trauma of taking the bar exam was extreme—your entire career hung in the balance. To fail by a point or less could make someone suicidal. Wyatt had heard of people who’d taken the test a dozen times and never passed. He would have figured Blake for that category before he put her in the upper echelon.

  “What about her knowing her score before it was officially posted?” he asked the examiner.

  “That’s serious,” the man said, “and we will look into that Leaking scores could ruin the credibility of these tests.”

  “If you find anything out I’d appreciate knowing that, too,” Wyatt said.

  “I’ll be getting back to you.”

  So Blake had found out about her bar exam score before she was supposed to. It wasn’t kosher, but as Josephine had pointed out, people were always finding things out they weren’t supposed to. The important thing was that she’d passed with flying colors; and that meant he had one less piece of ammunition to use against her.

  SCHOOL WAS OVER. SUMMER was officially less than two weeks away. Already the mercury was climbing into the high eighties and nineties, with the humidity correspondingly brutal. And the trial of the People v. Marvin White was coming like a runaway freight train. Wyatt was going to have a long, hot summer.

  He was going to be spending it alone. Moira and Michaela weren’t going to be home for the summer.

  “I’ve rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard,” Moira told him. “Michaela and I are going to spend the summer there. It’s too hot in the city.” Stating the obvious: “And she can’t work.”

  “When did you decide that?”

  “Last week. After the session with Roberta.”

  He nodded. “I wish you’d told me.”

  “Would it have mattered?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t feel we needed permission, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

  That stung. “I don’t own your life, Moira.”

  “No,” she said, more aggressively than he would have liked. “You don’t.”

  That stung, too.

  “We’d be a drag on you.”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s true.”

  “What about your bookstore? It’s opening soon.”

  “Cissy can handle it while I’m gone. This is more important. Michaela and I being together.”

  “Maybe it’s for the best.”

  “Michaela and I have to work our stuff out,” Moira said. “And you can think about what you want to do.”

  “I want to work. On us.”

  “Maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” she answered with brutal honesty. “But that kind of work is full-time, and you don’t have that kind of time. I understand that. But that is the truth.”

  “When the trial’s over …”

  “We’ll see.”

  Their flight was called. He hugged them both, hard. They hugged him back. Michaela had tears in her eyes; Moira was resolutely dry-eyed. “I’ll call you tonight,” she said briskly.

  “Good-bye, Daddy,” Michaela said. “Take care of yourself.”

  “I will, sweetheart. You, too.”

  One last dry kiss from Moira. Then they
were handing their boarding passes to the flight attendant and walking down the ramp, disappearing into the fuselage.

  He stood at the window, watching the plane taxi out onto the runway. It took off, picking up power, the flaps lowering—then it began climbing, up above him, banking away from the terminal and heading into the sun.

  He watched until the plane was out of his line of sight. Then he walked out of the airport, got into his car, and drove home to an empty house.

  PART FOUR

  WYATT WOKE UP IN his hotel-room bed at three-thirty in the morning and knew he wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so he threw on shorts, a T-shirt, and his Nikes, and went for a run. The streets were deserted except for delivery trucks, street-cleaning vehicles, and an occasional cop car cruising by. This section of town was considered safe—it was the hub of both commerce and tourism, so the police patrolled it stringently: hookers, purse snatchers, drug dealers, and other criminal types were roughly removed and relocated to scuzzier environs.

  Even though it was the apex of the night, the heat and humidity, so viscid it felt like he was moving through a film of oil, hung over the city, giving him the feeling of being inside an immense Turkish bath. The air was dead still. Discarded dog-pissed-on newspapers lay limp in the gutters, and the faint perpetual smells of garbage and sewage rose up through the street vents and manhole covers like the aromas of a devil’s stew cooking far underground.

  The city at rest, he thought, with all its age and imperfections exposed, an old dame way past her glamour years who somehow, before the break of every day, manages to get up and get dressed and put on her makeup so that she can display a presentable face to the world.

  Wyatt loved his aging city. He knew her smells and wrinkles and curves and secrets. His forays into the huge uncharted sections inhabited by the African American population had clearly shown him some of the things he didn’t know—but he was learning. What the city was; and what it wasn’t.

  He was keyed up and at the same time he was calm, much calmer than he’d expected he would be. So much had gone down in these last few months, personally and professionally (the two pretty much intertwined), that all the anxiety had been driven from his system and replaced with clarity, self-belief, and power. He had been preparing for this day all his life, from the day he graduated law school. He was going into a courtroom to fight for another man’s life.