DeBrough said, “I'm surprised juries don't find everyone guilty.”
“Reasonable doubt,” Langley reminded him. “It's like giving the defense a head start. Sometimes the lead is insurmountable. A while back I handled the case of a man accused of a street mugging. He had—‘allegedly’—attacked the victim in front of the man's house, in the commission of the crime knocking the victim to the ground, causing him to hit his head. The injury resulted in permanent brain damage. The heart of the prosecution's case was the testimony of an eyewitness, the victim's wife. She was an old woman, the grandmotherly type and as honest as a June day is long. She was waiting by her front door while her husband parked the car. The attack took place directly across the street, about thirty feet from where she was standing. She was a very persuasive witness. But—
“But I had my investigator do some checking. I had no idea what he would find, if anything. Well, he discovered that without her glasses the old lady was as blind as a bat. He discovered further that two days before the mugging she had visited her optician to have a pair of replacement glasses made up; she had lost the pair she had. She didn't receive the new pair until several days later. I very quietly brought out this fact, careful to in no way mock the old woman. I managed to punch a considerable hole in her credibility, a hole large enough for my client to slither out through.”
Langley lifted his drink, then set it down again untouched.
“The funny thing is, it was the woman's testimony that convinced me of my client's guilt. The accused was a local man. He had grown up on the block. As a teenager he'd even run errands for the old woman. He was familiar to her. I believe she could have recognized him without seeing his face. From an article of clothing he wore, from the way he stood. I was switching channels on TV the other night. On this one channel a western was playing, and I stopped to watch it for a minute. In the scene the character was walking away from the camera. I hadn't seen the scene or the movie before, but I knew right away the actor was John Wayne. I could tell from the way he walked. Just then the camera cut to a front-on shot, and I saw I was right. The old woman could have recognized my client the same way.”
“It wasn't your responsibility to bring that out.”
“Just the opposite. My responsibility was to do everything I could to undermine her. But I couldn't help thinking how easy it would be to suppress what I knew. I could have left the old woman looking good and, most probably, my client would have been convicted.”
“And,” DeBrough said, “you still would have gotten paid.” He would think of that.
“That's right. I could have sold my client down the river and gotten paid for it. And no one would ever know. Not my client, not the judge, not the jury. As far as they would be able to tell, I was doing my best.”
“Of course you would know,” DeBrough said.
That was Langley's cross. He knew. Here he was three sheets to the wind on champagne paid for by the insurance money Gregor Mylong had received for the life of his little girl. Even as he contemplated the absurdity of the idea, he couldn't shake the thought that by helping to spring Mylong he had become an accomplice after the fact in Myra's murder. Hell, he was a lawyer. Lawyers got guilty people off. Professor Steadman said so, and he was right.
But the knowledge didn't help.
There was, he knew, but one cure for what ailed him, which was to give up being a lawyer. It was a cure he wasn't willing to take. He had invested too much time and money and hard work to get where he was, to think seriously about giving it all up now. After some very lean years, he was finally beginning to taste some success. Mylong had been his most important client yet, his case by far the most serious Langley had handled. There would, he had every reason to expect, be even bigger cases down the road. His being a lawyer was part of the package he was offering Fay. Marry me and you marry a lawyer and you get all that goes with that. If he were to switch to something else now, it would be like changing the rules in the middle of the game. A lawyer was what he was and a lawyer was what, for better or worse, he intended to remain.
That being the case, the sensible thing to do was adjust to the realities of the profession he had chosen for his life's work. It was, he knew, well past time he did this. It should not have been necessary to cry his troubles on someone else's shoulder (that he was half drunk was no excuse). If he was not prepared to stand up for himself and his actions, he should keep his mouth shut.
Changing the subject, he remarked that he had heard rumors that DeBrough planned to run for Mayor in a year's time.
DeBrough didn't say yes and he didn't say no, but at the same time he made it clear he was seriously contemplating a run. Spoken, Langley thought, like a born politician. DeBrough's main concern seemed to be his age: he would be only thirty-six and the voters, he feared, might regard a man that age as too callow to be mayor.
It was, Langley thought, characteristic of DeBrough that he gave not a moment's reflection to the possibility that he might in fact be too callow to handle the duties that would devolve upon him as the Mayor of New York City. The mayor, after all, was a “public servant.” As such, he was accountable (or was supposed to be accountable) to the wishes of the people he represented. No one's wishes but his own figured in DeBrough's calculations. To be fair, Langley guessed the same could be said about most politicians, who paid little more than “lip service” to the wishes of their constituents. Perhaps, he thought, DeBrough had found his true calling, after all.
They parted a few minutes later. DeBrough suggested they get together again soon, but, Langley noticed, mentioned neither a time nor a place for such a get-together. Which was fine with him. As far as he was concerned, if he didn't see DeBrough again for another fourteen years it was soon enough.
CHAPTER 2
November, 1956
“It will be like the first day of school,” Fay said. “Thirty unfamiliar faces bobbing before your eyes. They'll all know your name right off, but it will be a while before you know theirs. Except for one person. The class hoople. Before ten minutes have passed, you'll know his name. If he doesn't volunteer it, you'll be forced to ask it. In our family, that's Uncle Walter.”
A month earlier he had proposed to her finally. Without coyness she had said yes. They had set the date for the following June.
It was Fay's wish that they break the news of their engagement to her parents in person. The perfect occasion for doing that, she decided, was the Thanksgiving gathering of the Redmond clan at her parents' home in Connecticut. To make sure they would have some time alone with her parents before the other guests arrived, they made plans to leave New York early Thanksgiving morning. Unfortunately, their plans failed to allow for a Thanksgiving Eve snowstorm. The city received scarcely a dusting. But north of the city it was a different story. At no place did the snow measure more than four or five inches, but that was enough to make a mess of the roads. A trip that should have taken two hours took almost six. They didn't reach Fay's parents' home until mid-afternoon, the last of the guests to arrive.
For Langley it meant that, instead of meeting Fay's relatives one or two at a time with an interval between introductions to allow him to connect names to faces, he had to meet them all at once. All twenty-four of them.
Now as he looked around the dinner table at their faces, he couldn't tell them apart. Was Aunt Beatrice the one in the high-necked blue dress, or the one with the red hair? Cousins Marty, Roy and Lyle all looked alike to him. The only one he was able to identify with absolute certainty, other than Fay's parents, was (as Fay had predicted) Uncle Walter.
Boorish when sober, Uncle Walter, drunk, Fay had warned him, was downright obnoxious; steer clear of him. The other family members apparently didn't have to be told. They left him alone to stew the afternoon away in a chair by the window, drinking.
Fay had arranged to have the two of them seated as far as possible from Uncle Walter. But that strategy backfired when he began to fire
questions at Langley across the length of the dinner table, requiring Langley to fire his answers the same distance back.
“I want to ask you something, Owen,” Uncle Walter said now.
There was an ebb in the conversation around the table, as people broke off their talk with their neighbors to listen. Langley had noticed earlier, when being introduced (as Fay's “friend”: they had decided to hold off the announcement of their engagement so that they could share the news with her parents first), that everyone reacted with almost a kind of reverence upon being informed that he was a lawyer. He supposed it had something to do with the fact of his education. Like him, Fay had been the first in her family to go to college. Most of her male relatives worked in the textile mills; the women, of course, stayed at home. Which made her a double oddity: college-educated and employed. To their credit, her relatives reacted to her accomplishment not with envy or resentment but with pride. To think of it, a schoolteacher in the family! And now soon a lawyer (although no announcement had been made, Langley suspected that most of the gathered relatives had guessed). He was, he was certain, the first lawyer to sit at the Redmond dinner table. Hell, most of these people, he suspected, like most other people, didn't know a lawyer to speak to.
“What is it, Walter?”
“What's it like to be a lawyer?” Walter asked.
Oh, great. Well, a general question could be met with a general answer.
“It's a lot of work, Walter.”
Some of the men laughed, sharing his point that hard work was hard work whether it was done in the mill or in the courtroom.
“You know what Shakespeare said about lawyers, Owen?”
Langley knew only too well. But he suspected it didn't much matter whether he replied Yes, he knew, or No, he didn't. He decided to play dumb.
“What did Shakespeare say, Walter?”
“‘Kill all the lawyers.’”
“Walter!” the aunt in the green dress cried. His wife? Was he married? Langley couldn't remember what Fay had said.
“Is it all right if I finish my turkey first, Walter?” he said, winning several laughs around the table.
“Are you a famous lawyer in New York, Owen?” Walter asked.
Determined to smother him with politeness, Langley was about to reply “Not yet” when Fay beat him to the punch.
“He will be one day, Uncle Walter,” she said. Unlike the joke-y tone Langley would have used, hers sounded quite serious.
“How do you defend someone you know is guilty?” Walter asked.
Langley thought, Give it a rest. “The same way I defend someone I know is innocent.”
Uncle Walter wasn't going to let him get away with that. “Have you ever defended someone guilty of murder?”
“Walter!” Fay's mother said. “It's Thanksgiving. For heaven's sake, let's talk about something more cheerful.”
“You don't have to listen, Nina,” Walter told her. Back to Langley: “Well?”
Answer “No” and put an end to the interrogation? Or tell the truth?
“I defended a man who was accused of murder. The jury found him innocent.”
“Was he?”
“The jury said he was.”
Like a dog with a bone, Walter wouldn't let go. “Yes, but was he?”
Langley was aware of eyes turned in his direction. He said, “I don't know.” For truly, he didn't know. He suspected Mylong's guilt, but he didn't—would never—know.
Uncle Walter was relentless. “Didn't you ask him?”
“No.”
“It was me, I'd want to know.”
“What would you do if you were his lawyer and he told you he did it?” Langley asked. As soon as he spoke the words, he knew it was a mistake.
“I'd have told him to go to hell! What would you have done?”
There were several answers he could have given Walter. He could have said a lawyer never asks a client if he did it, for the simple reason that the lawyer (if he's any good) doesn't want to know: the knowledge limits his freedom to act. Or he could have said a man might confess to a crime and still be innocent: he might be crazy, or acting to protect somebody else—any number of possibilities.
He said, “I'd have defended him anyway.”
He waited for someone to object, but no one did. There was even a murmur of approval around the table. His directness had won the day. Walter knew it, too. Finally he shut up.
Langley took no satisfaction in his victory. While he had told Walter no outright lies, he felt like a liar. Would he have defended Mylong if he had known he was guilty? Probably. So where had he lied? He had lied by portraying himself as operating from noble motives, holier-than-thou motives. In reality his motive (singular) was the same as Walter's was for working in the mill or wherever it was he worked: to get paid.
***
After dinner he and Fay went for a walk.
The snow crunched under their feet, breaking a silence that was, otherwise, absolute. Before they had gone a quarter of a mile down the road that passed before Fay's parents' house, they were in open country.
“I thought you handled Uncle Walter rather well,” Fay said.
Langley didn't want to dwell on his accomplishments. “How does he manage to get himself invited back?”
“Well, he's my mother's brother. It's funny, he always makes an excuse when he's invited to one of these get-togethers. Can't make it. Got other plans. But then he always shows up. And he always manages to start something, almost as though he's paying my mother back for insisting he come. To tell the truth, I don't think he'd miss it for the world.”
“How much are we going to see of him?”
“Not a lot. Thanksgiving here. Christmas at Gran's. Easter at Aunt Beatrice's.”
Langley understood that he had just been given a preview of what their married life was going to be like. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter mapped out into the foreseeable future. There would no doubt be frequent weekend trips to visit Mom and Dad, interspersed with their visits to the city. But then since he had no alternative to offer, he had no kick coming. Not that it was something to kick about. But it was something to get used to. He had spent his holidays alone for so many years, it had begun to feel like a normal state of affairs. Uncle Walter notwithstanding, Langley had enjoyed this day far more than he would ever have guessed.
They stopped at a fence overlooking a meadow coated with snow that was perfectly smooth except for the tracks of some small animal. Leaning against the fence, Langley looked up at the sky. The night was crystal clear; stars were visible by the millions. The quiet was immense. No horns beeping, or dogs barking, or radios blaring. Only the occasional cracking sound off in the woods, ice breaking off a tree.
“It's so peaceful here,” he said.
Fay stepped away from the fence to look at him. The starlight was bright enough that he could see her face clearly. She looked half amused, half annoyed.
“It's not peaceful here, Owen. It's dull. There's nothing to do here.”
What did she expect to do in the city? Did she think they'd be out on the town every night? Not on his income, he wanted to tell her.
“I think they already know,” she said.
“Your parents?”
“All of them.”
“I had that feeling too.”
“Well, you're the first man I've ever brought home to meet the folks. That's rather a large clue right there. And then there's the way we look at each other. Do I have the same look on my face that you have on yours?”
He had no idea what she was talking about. Trying not to sound too stupid, he asked, “What look is that?”
“A look that says you'd like to take me in your arms and kiss me.”
It sounded like a line from a B-movie. But then somebody once said, Life is a B-movie without the soundtrack. Cupping her chin in the palm of his hand, he tilted her head back and pretended to examine her face.<
br />
“Yes,” he said, “there it is,” and taking her in his arms, he kissed her.
“I think,” she said, taking him by the hand, “we should break the news to mother officially, before she bursts.”
***
When they came in the door, Fay's father was on the phone in the hall. Holding his hand over the receiver, he waved to Langley.
“It's for you, Owen.”
Kicking the snow off his boots, Langley crossed to the phone. It wasn't until he had taken the receiver in his hand that it occurred to him to wonder at what Mr. Redmond had said. The call was for him? He had told no one he was coming here. He hadn't left this number with his answering service. He couldn't have even if he had wanted to: he had never had cause to call Fay here and he didn't know the number. Unless it was Uncle Walter calling to renew their debate, Langley couldn't imagine who it might be.
“Owen Langley speaking.”
If he had been given a hundred chances to guess who would answer, he would have been wrong a hundred times. But as soon as he heard, and recognized, the voice on the other end of the line, he knew it could be nobody else.
“It's Terry DeBrough, Owen.”
“How did you know where to find me, Terry?”
It was a foolish question. If DeBrough wanted something done, it was done. It was why, in retrospect, Langley knew it had to be him calling.
“That's not important. I need your help, Owen.”
“My help? How can I help you?” He was unusually slow on the uptake tonight. There was only one kind of help he could offer DeBrough.
“My brother has been arrested. I want you to represent him.”
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