Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “He’ll be okay,” said Harkin. “But I still wish you’d consider doing it yourself. In my book, blonde and beautiful beats old and craggy every time.”

  “Well, I appreciate the blonde and beautiful part, but no thanks.”

  “Why not? As I recall, you had a pretty good batting average as a prosecutor.”

  That much was true. Jessica Woodruff had been an assistant district attorney in New York County, where Bob Morgenthau ran as good an office as any in the country. She’d cut her teeth trying sex cases but soon realized there was room for only one leading lady there, and it was going to be Linda Fairstein. She’d transferred over to one of the regular trial bureaus, where she’d specialized in homicides.

  “I had the best murder conviction rate in the office,” she said now, “but only because I was smart enough to pick and choose which cases I wanted to try.”

  “I always thought,” said Harkin, “that it was the defendant who decided whether or not to go to trial. Or at least the defendant and his lawyer.”

  “Shows how much you know,” said Jessica. “Oh, the defendant thinks he’s deciding, you’re right about that. But what really used to happen was this: I’d take a good look at the case and size up my chances of winning or losing. If I figured it was a lock, a case I couldn’t lose, I wouldn’t offer them any kind of a lesser plea. The defendant would figure, ‘Why should I cop out to the top count?’ In other words, he’d be forced to go to trial. On the other hand, if I saw I was going to have problems, I’d offer them a manslaughter plea, something they could live with.

  “Then, after a couple of years, I had enough seniority that they used to let me take cases from other assistants - you know, to trade. So I made it my business to follow the Rule of Three.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” said Harkin. “What’s the Rule of Three?”

  Jessica smiled. She was clearly enjoying her little discourse.

  It was one of the things that made her such a compelling anchorwoman to her fans. “Most homicides are either shootings or stabbings, right?”

  Both men nodded in agreement.

  “Say you get a case with a single gunshot or a single stab wound. Right away, you’re going to have a problem proving intent to kill. One shot, or one slash, just isn’t enough. At the other end of the extreme, you’ve got the defendant who empties all fourteen rounds from his automatic into the victim, or stabs him seventy-five times. The jury - at least a Manhattan jury - is going to find he acted under the influence of extreme emotional disturbance. Either way, I’m going to end up with nothing better than a Man One.

  “But give me a case with three gunshots or three stab wounds, and I’ll get a murder conviction every time out. Just enough to show intent to kill, but at the same time not so much to suggest extreme emotional disturbance.”

  “The Rule of Three,” said Harkin.

  Jessica smiled again.

  Gilbert leaned forward from the back seat. “But nobody would expect you to win Wesley Boyd Davies’s case,” he told her. “You’d be like David going up against Goliath. And the American public just loves underdogs.”

  “The American public may love underdogs,” Jessica conceded, “but they have no patience for losers. When’s the last time you heard anything about Marcia Clark, or Chris Darden?”

  “Who?”

  “My point exactly. This case isn’t a career-maker, it’s a career-breaker. I’m thirty-one years old,” she lied, “and not quite ready to have my career broken, thank you.”

  “But August Jorgensen?”

  “August Jorgensen,” said Jessica, “has no career to be broken.”

  He busied himself for three full days. He stacked wood, split more wood, stacked it, cut wood, split it, and stacked it. It was mid-October, and winter wouldn’t come to the Outer Banks for another two months, but when it came, it tended to come with a vengeance. It wasn’t just the cold - he was far enough south that it rarely dropped much below freezing. No, it was the dampness, the dampness and the wind when it came from the east, off the ocean. And when there was no wind, there’d be fog, thick shrouds of fog that would rise from the ocean and envelop the lighthouse for days at a time. So no matter how much wood he cut and split and stacked, he could never have too much.

  On the morning of the fourth day, a fresh breeze picked up from the south, and he said to Jake, “Hey, fella, want to go for a sail?” And the old Lab, who knew exactly what that meant, rose from his spot by the wall - it would have been his corner, but lighthouses tend to be notoriously short of corners - barked once, and wagged his tail.

  They rowed the little dinghy out to the catboat, where he tied it fast to the mooring. Jake jumped onto the bigger boat and made a quick inspection of it while Jorgensen climbed aboard. There was half a foot of water above the floorboards, but ten minutes at the hand pump took care of that. Jorgensen untied the halyards and shook them free. He loosened the sheets, so that when the sail was raised it would swing free, keeping the boat from tugging at the mooring line. Then, pulling hand over hand on the main halyard, he began to raise the sail.

  The catboat was gaff-rigged, with a single large sail held to the mast by a series of wooden hoops. With the sail dropped, the hoops piled up lifelessly on top of each other around the base of the mast. But as Jorgensen hoisted the sail now, each hoop rose in turn and danced skyward, until the topmost reached the very tip of the mast. As the last of the hoops cleared the deck, the long boom came free and swung back and forth in a lazy arc. He repeated the process with the peak halyard, which lifted a small spar near the top of the mast, stretching the sail to its full height.

  Next, he checked the sail for damage, and saw none. Once bright red, it had faded over the years to a dull rust color, which Jorgensen much preferred. And it was canvas, real old-fashioned canvas. No plastic, no Dacron, no Mylar, no space-age miracle fibers. The boat itself was unpainted wood, as was the tiller, the rudder, the gunwales, the chocks, the mast, and the boom.

  Canvas and wood.

  Up at the bow, Jorgensen uncleated the line, leaving it running once through the eye of the mooring. He gave the bitter end to Jake, who took it and held it tight in his retriever’s vise of a mouth. Once, when they’d been trying to reef the sail in the middle of a sudden squall, the dog had slipped overboard with a line in his mouth. He’d never once loosened his grip on it, so much so that Jorgensen had been able to reel him back in and pull him aboard with it.

  Back at the stern now, Jorgensen took up the slack in the lee sheet with one hand and wrapped his other around the tiller. Then, as the breeze stiffened the sail and swung them away from the dinghy, he whistled once and shouted, “Cast her off, mate,” and Jake obliged by dropping the line from his mouth. The bitter end quickly slipped through the mooring eye, and they were free.

  With the breeze coming up out of the south, Jorgensen knew it would be safe to head out into the open ocean. The same gusts that would be on their starboard heading out would be on the portside carrying them back in. And the old catboat, whose one-sail design made her ill-fit to point close to the wind, was at her best on broad reaches such as this.

  Marge had never been much of a sailor. She’d loved the sea, and it was for her that they’d bought the old lighthouse once it had been decommissioned and came up at auction. But she’d loved the sea as a landlubber loves the sea, as something to gaze upon from the beach, to listen to at night, to take long walks beside, and - at the end - to take comfort from, as she lay dying.

  So it had been to Jorgensen’s delight to discover that, like he himself, Jake was a born sailor. His Labrador genes gave him a head start, instilling in him a love of everything to do with water - whether swimming, splashing, drinking, running in circles beneath a waterfall or sprinkler, diving off a dock or into a pool, or tirelessly attacking the stream of a hose. But it went beyond that. When they were sailing, he seemed to love the very waves and swells themselves - not only the splashing and spraying, but the rhythmic rising and falling of
the boat, the heeling to one side or the other, the rolling, the yawing, the pounding. His ears never rested, taking in every sound - the beating of the canvas, the slapping of the fixed lines, the groaning of the boards, the smacking of the waves against the hull, the whistling of the wind through the fittings. He drank in every smell - the salt spray of the sea, the oiled wood baking in the sunlight, the fishiness of the seaweed as they skimmed across the flats. And, standing surefooted and open-mouthed at the bow, his long nose pointing their heading like a compass needle, he was the quintessential lookout, ready to bark out at the first sign of lurking danger or unexpected delight.

  His love for sailing, in other words, was a perfect match for that of August Jorgensen.

  They sailed out a good five miles - out beyond the sandbars, beyond the banks, out to where the swells were a good eight feet from tip to trough, out to where they could no longer make out the lighthouse - before coming about. On the way back in, Jorgensen tried to fool Jake by setting a course a good 15 degrees north of their intended landfall, but the old dog would have none of it, pointing to the exact spot where the lighthouse would come into view, and barking until Jorgensen made the correction.

  And when finally the faded tower appeared in the distance, dead ahead of them, Jake looked back over his shoulder and shot the old man his best “I-told-you-so” look.

  “Good boy,” said the captain.

  There’d be time for hugs and treats later. For the moment, there was still work to be done.

  Although it was growing dark, no beacon shone from the top of the old lighthouse, only a faint light from a porthole halfway up. The Coast Guard had been decommissioning lighthouses up and down the coast for years, finding that computers turned out to be better light-keepers than humans. But in the case of the Fog Point Light - the official name of Jorgensen’s, as it appeared on nautical charts - they’d simply discontinued it altogether, advising mariners to look for the newer Sand Harbor Light to the north, or Tallman’s Tower to the south. The problem was, the barrier islands were shifting over time. With each new storm, tons of sand were washed away from the ocean side, to be redeposited on the backside of the next island in the chain. The net result was that the islands themselves were literally moving westward, toward the mainland. And the Fog Point Light, which had once stood more than a quarter of a mile inland, now found itself less than a hundred yards from the breakers. In another six or seven years, the water would be lapping at Jorgensen’s door; once that happened, it would make short shrift of the lighthouse. Concrete reinforced with half-inch rebar made for strong stuff, but it was nothing before the sea.

  All of which suited August Jorgensen just fine. In six or seven years, Jake would be dead, and if he himself were still alive, he’d be nearing ninety, too old by far for this world. Let the sea come and get him; there surely were worse ways to go.

  He reheated yesterday’s soup for dinner and awarded Jake the bone. It had been a good sail and a good day, and it galled him to ruin it. But ruin it he must; he knew that. For four days now he’d put it off, and with each day, it loomed larger. He put another log into the wood-burning stove, found a jelly glass, and poured himself an inch and a half of blackberry brandy. It was all he allowed himself anymore, and only in the evening, to keep the chill from his bones. Then he walked around to the other side of the kitchen table, to where it had sat, untouched, for all of these four days.

  The manila envelope.

  The present they’d left behind for him.

  “Is it all right if we leave this with you?”

  Bastards. Sneaky bastards. They’d known what they were doing. They’d known he wouldn’t be able to leave it there forever, wouldn’t put it out of sight, wouldn’t throw it away unread. They’d known that sooner or later, he’d have to get around to it.

  But beyond that, they’d miscalculated; they’d underestimated him. Oh, he’d open it up, and he’d read whatever was inside - he was only human, after all, and humans are by nature curious animals. But he hadn’t spent the past four days in idleness; each day, he’d forced himself to imagine what he’d find inside, envisioning all sorts of heart-rending handicaps and sickening injustices. A defendant born to an alcoholic mother and an abusive father, abandoned in his early teens to a life on the street, driven to commit some petty crime that went inexplicably, horribly wrong. A court-appointed lawyer who’d never handled anything more serious than a speeding ticket, reimbursed by the state at a rate of $15 an hour. A no-nonsense trial judge elected on a law-and-order platform. A politically ambitious prosecutor determined to win a verdict - and a death sentence - whatever the cost. A jury suckered into believing they were only making a “recommendation” that the defendant die, a recommendation that the judge was free to reject.

  Though he’d never rejected one yet.

  Not that they were told that.

  A state appellate court, when forced to concede there might have been a possible shortcoming or two in the trial, could smugly proclaim, “While the law says the accused is entitled to a fair trial, nowhere does it say he’s entitled to a perfect trial.”

  And in imagining it all, in distilling it down to the single most horrendous scenario he could conceive, befalling the most pathetic defendant ever, Jorgensen had been able over time to desensitize himself, to steel himself against whatever it was that lay inside the manila envelope.

  In fact, earlier that very day, out on the ocean, out of sight of home - out of sight of land itself - it had suddenly come to him that something else would be in there, too. It might be right on top, the very first thing he’d see upon opening the envelope. Then again, it might be buried somewhere in the middle, ready to jump out at him when he least expected it. Or they might have saved it for the bottom of the deck, the joker, the wild card revealed at the last moment, just in case he hadn’t been won over yet.

  And what would that something else be?

  That something else would be a photograph, a photograph of the defendant. The face, the human being. The human being who’d be put to death if August Jorgensen refused to help them.

  And just as he’d steeled himself against the facts, so had he steeled himself against the face. He’d pictured a frightened black young man, a malnourished boy, a crying baby abandoned in a dumpster. He’d pictured dull, uncomprehending eyes, a nose broken in infancy, a mouth horribly misshapen by some genetic disorder. He’d pictured pain - pain and poverty and privation.

  Until at last, he’d felt prepared to open the envelope.

  Sitting in the back of a New York City cab creeping along West Thirty-fourth Street, Jessica Woodruff answered her cell phone on the second ring. Even before she spoke, she knew from her Caller-ID that it was Brandon Davidson, Trial TV’s president.

  “Hello, Brandon,” she said.

  “Hello, Jess. How are you?”

  “Other than stuck in midtown traffic, fine. What’s up?”

  “I was just wondering if you’re going to pay another visit to the hermit, and try to firm things up with him.”

  “I will if you like,” she said. “Though personally, I’d like to give him some more time to think it over. The old fart fancies himself a moralist. Hell, he thinks he’s the last moral being on the face of the earth. He’ll come around, Brandon, but not if he feels pressured. He’s one of those idealists who needs to think he’s doing it for all the right reasons.”

  “And what are the right reasons, Jess?”

  “You know. Truth, Justice, the American Way. That kind of crap.”

  “Are you sure he’s the one we want?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. He’s even craggier looking than his photos.”

  “You don’t think a bla - an African-American might be better?”

  “Who are you going to get, Johnnie Cochran? I told you, Brandon, there are no African-American appellate lawyers. They’re all too busy trying cases.”

  “Or making guest appearances on your show.”

  “That, too,” she said. Then, more
quietly, “I miss you.”

  “Careful,” he said. “You’re on a cell phone.”

  If August Jorgensen thought he’d figured out what he’d find inside the manila envelope and was prepared to deal with whatever irresistible emotional impact it was designed to have upon him, he couldn’t have been more mistaken. Slitting it open at one end - he had no patience for those little metal clips or those annoying red strings wrapped around cardboard circles in whichever direction you hadn’t counted on - he emptied the contents onto the table in front of him.

  And in the process, surprised himself.

  No haunting photograph of Wesley Boyd Davies stared back at him. No background study of his childhood years presented itself, no IQ test score revealing him as “borderline retarded.” No letters slipped out, attesting to his having become a born-again Christian in prison, or having taught himself to read or write. No recantations of witnesses, no regretful affidavits from jurors who would have voted differently if only they’d known this or that, no apologies from lawyers who hadn’t been up to the task.

  None of that.

  What slipped out of the envelope instead were four sheets of paper, nothing else. Each was a Xerox copy - Jorgensen could tell they were copies, the originals having been made on notebook paper, the kind they make you use in school. In the copying process, the ruled lines had faded some, grown wavy here and there, or disappeared altogether. No words adorned the sheets, except at the bottom right-hand corner, where the single letter “b” appeared.

  What they were, were drawings. Drawings of trees, of pastures, of a meadow, of a clearing in the woods. Drawings made in pencil, or perhaps, as Jorgensen looked more closely and studied the details, pen and ink.

  Extraordinary drawings.

  Exquisite drawings.

  And in that instant, as he sat immobilized and transfixed at his kitchen table, he knew that all his imagining, all his steeling, all his desensitizing, all his preparation had come to naught. August Jorgensen might not be sucked in yet, but in spite of everything, he found himself nibbling at the bait.