The Faculty Club

by Danny Tobey

  “I see. So you’ve told us what the attorneys think of Mr. Reid.”

  “Objection,” Nigel and John said at the same time.

  “Withdrawn,” Daphne said. “Mrs. Reid, would it be fair to say that your husband never raised his voice at you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So he was a kind and gentle man who yelled at you?”

  “We had fights like everybody else.”

  “Big fights or little fights?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Mrs. Reid, please, my question isn’t difficult. Did you and your husband have big fights or little fights?”

  “Little, I guess.”

  “So he yelled at you during little fights?”

  “Well, I mean . . . he only yelled during big fights.”

  “So you had big fights too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I’m going to trust that you are answering my question accurately this time. Is that fair?”

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Reid was starting to get steamed, and Daphne hadn’t raised her voice once.

  “Mrs. Reid, can a husband be kind and gentle if he hits his wife?”

  “Objection,” Nigel blurted, standing up. “The question is vague, more prejudicial than probative, assumes facts not in evidence . . .” He was talking as fast as he could think.

  “Your Honor,” Daphne said pleasantly, “the defense is putting a lot of weight on this phrase kind and gentle. I think the jury deserves to know exactly what it means.”

  “Go on,” the U.S. Attorney said.

  “Mrs. Reid, can a husband be kind and gentle if he hits his wife?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And Mr. Reid never hit you?”

  “Never. Not once.”

  “Can a husband be kind and gentle if he pushes his wife?”

  “No.”

  “And Mr. Reid never pushed you?”

  “No.”

  “Can a husband be kind and gentle if he grabs his wife and shakes her?”

  “Nuh—”

  Halfway through the word no, Mrs. Reid came to a halt.

  “Mrs. Reid? It’s a simple question. Can a husband be kind and gentle if he grabs his wife and shakes her?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Yes or no, Mrs. Reid.”

  Silence.

  “Your Honor, please instruct the witness to answer my question.”

  “Mrs. Reid?” Bernini looked at her curiously.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  Daphne cocked her head, confused.

  “Mrs. Reid, for the record, are you saying that a husband can be kind and gentle if he grabs his wife and shakes her?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  “Please, answer my question. Yes or no?”

  “No,” she said softly.

  “Good. We can’t call a husband kind and gentle if he grabs his wife and shakes her. Mrs. Reid, I’m sorry, but I have to ask, has Mr. Reid ever grabbed and shaken you?”

  Mrs. Reid shook her head, not yes or no, but as if she were warding the question away. Nigel and John stared straight ahead, betraying nothing.

  “Yes,” she said finally.

  “Thank you for your honesty,” Daphne said kindly. “It was on the night of your husband’s company dinner, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought you two were alone in the coatroom, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, starting to weep softly.

  “Would it surprise you to know that a man named Arthur Willey, the man working in the coatroom that night, saw you two fighting?”

  “I didn’t see anyone else.”

  “Your husband was yelling, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He grabbed you by the arms, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He shook you and shouted at you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” she said, and tears started to run down her face.

  Daphne leaned in, like a priest or a cellmate.

  “What were you fighting about that night?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Was someone cheating?”

  “No.”

  “Were you in financial trouble?”

  “No.”

  “It must have been something big. Surely you remember?”

  Mrs. Reid was shaking her head, wishing the questions away.

  Then she said, “No.”

  “Are you saying your husband grabbed you and shook you over something you can’t even remember?”

  “Asked and answered,” Nigel called out.

  “Sustained.”

  Daphne spoke softly to Mrs. Reid, ignoring Nigel and the judge. “Just one more question, and then we’re done.”

  Daphne made a sad face, as if it hurt her to even ask it.

  “Was this fight before or after Mr. Reid’s accident, when the piece of metal went into his head?”

  There was a painful pause.

  “Before,” Mrs. Reid said, so softly you almost couldn’t hear it at all.

  John faced Mrs. Reid and smiled kindly at her. He looked at the jury, with his understanding eyes and his broad hand on the back of his neck, as if to say: this woman deserves better than what she just got.

  “Mrs. Reid, how long have you and Arnold been married?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “Did you have boyfriends before Arnold?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you fight with those boyfriends more or less than you did with Arnold?”

  “More, I think. Arnold and I didn’t fight that much.”

  “But you did fight sometimes, right?”

  “Sure. We were married for twenty years!”

  John smiled sheepishly, as if to say, you got me, ma’am—that was a dumb question. He let her answer sink in.

  “The night you were just talking about, did you call the police?”

  “No,” she said, looking confused.

  “Who drove you home that night?”

  “My husband.”

  “Did you go to the hospital?”

  “No . . .”

  “Did you have bruises?”

  “No,” she replied, with a baffled look that said, aren’t you on our side?

  “Are you surprised by these questions?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it just wasn’t like that. I mean, police? Bruises? He didn’t grab me hard. We were just fighting and he kind of, you know, held me here. It didn’t hurt. It was just, you know, passionate. We were having a fight.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “No. I was pissed.”

  A couple of the jurors laughed.

  “Mrs. Reid, we’ve just heard a lot about one fight. Except for that one night, did Arnold ever lay a hand on you in anger?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Did he ever hit you or push you or do anything physical at all?”

  “Never,” she said. “He was a gentle man. With our kids too. He was so sweet.”

  “So in twenty years of marriage, you had one really bad fight. Is that it?”

  “Objection, leading.”

  “Withdrawn. Mrs. Reid, do you think a person should be judged by twenty years of marriage or by one night?”

  “Objection, argumentative.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Mrs. Reid, before his accident, did Arnold ever do anything, anything, that made you think he was capable of truly hurting another person?”

  Mrs. Reid sat up straight and looked right at the jury.

  “Never in a million years.”

  12

  Mock trials are designed to be dead heats; you play with the facts you’re given. Our witnesses say Arnold was a jerk. Their witnesses say he was a saint. Our expert witness, a psychiatry resident from the university hospital, testified that you don’t need a scrap of metal to explain this murder. Sometimes, even the q
uietest, sweetest men just snapped. Sometimes especially the quietest, sweetest men.

  But when the defense called its expert, my heart stopped. It took me a moment to recognize her, in her professional suit and her neat ponytail. The glasses were new; they were smart glasses, with small lenses and thin copper frames. She wore makeup now. But it all came rushing back with the force of a memory triggered by perfume: the crisp night, the split grocery bag, the oranges rolling everywhere. The moonlight confession; that pretty, kind face splashed with tears.

  Her name, it turns out, was Sarah Casey.

  Her credentials were impeccable. Our mock expert was a budding authority on personality disorders. Their mock expert was a budding neurosurgeon; she was a cruise director on a tour of the brain: cut here and get rage; smash here and lose control. She was patient and clear, modest but confident. She smiled and made jokes. She told us about other brain-injured soldiers who came home suddenly different, as if possessed. She even gave it a name—traumatic brain injury, or TBI—and once something had a name, it was real. By the time she was done, it seemed completely reasonable that Arnold’s injury had forced him to act against his heart and soul—whatever those were.

  I don’t think she recognized me until the judges asked if the State was ready for cross-examination.

  “You take this one,” I whispered to Daphne.

  “What?”

  “I know her,” I said.

  “You prepped this part. You’re prepared. Do it.”

  “I know her.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Is the State ready?” the judge asked again, irritated.

  I rose and said, “Yes, Your Honor.” Then Sarah looked at me. I watched the thoughts unfold in her eyes: first puzzlement (where have I seen him before?), then recognition, then a recalling of our conversation—and then, of course, ragged, saw-toothed fear.

  “Dr. Casey,” I said, my voice sounding thin in my ears. “Did you meet the defendant before his accident?”

  “No,” she said softly.

  “Did you interview people who knew him before the accident?”

  “No.”

  “So, you can’t say for sure that the defendant’s personality changed at all, can you?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  I should have gone to my next question. But I stuttered and drew a blank. She kept talking.

  “But I can say, with medical certainty, that Mr. Reid’s brain injury is consistent with a personality change.”

  Damn it, I thought. Focus.

  “Consistent with. I see. But you can’t say for sure?”

  “No.”

  Good. Keep moving.

  “Now—is it possible to sustain a brain injury and not have a personality change?”

  “Of course.”

  “Could someone fake a personality change after a brain injury?”

  “Objection.”

  “I’ll rephrase, Your Honor. If someone claims to have a personality change, is there any way to prove it?”

  “Not in this case.” Next . . . Keep moving . . . What next? “But,” she continued, “if someone has a brain injury and a personality change, we can ask whether the two are consistent. In this case they are.”

  Shit.

  “I see,” I said, trying to sound like I had just scored a major point. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t at all. I was screwing up, blowing it.

  “Why did you appear here today?” I asked her. It was an insane question. For one thing, it was open-ended. I was giving her a chance to make a speech. But that wasn’t the half of it. It was crazy, because I wasn’t asking for the good of my case. I was asking for me.

  She met my eyes, as if she understood.

  “Honestly,” she said, “when I saw the flier, I just thought it would be fun. I spend all my time in the hospital. It seemed like a chance to get away for an hour and do something different.”

  That’s when I saw it in her eyes. Some tiny part of her, deep down, wanted to be exposed. Consciously or not, the guilt-ridden part of her brain had come here to flirt with professional suicide. Freud called it the Death Instinct. Poe called it the Imp of the Perverse. Now I knew the answer to the question I’d posed to her that night: she couldn’t live with the lie, and she couldn’t live without it. So she put herself on trial. And now I knew exactly how to win this case, if I was willing to indulge my own darker instincts.

  “I see,” I said again, this time without even pretending I had a point.

  That’s when I realized my mind was completely blank.

  I was standing in front of a silent room. I started to hear the rustling of people shifting in their seats. I didn’t dare look up at Bernini. A few uncomfortable coughs in the crowd . . .

  I stalled.

  “Just a moment, please, Your Honors.”

  I walked back to our table and stood over it, pretending to flip through my notes. Daphne leaned over. “What the fuck are you doing?” she hissed in my ear. I nodded thoughtfully for the jury, as if she were giving me priceless information. “Listen to me very carefully,” she whispered. “You are not going to fuck this up for me. What’s the matter,” she jeered, “you can’t cross-examine a girl? You think she can’t take it? Don’t insult her and don’t insult me. You need to grow a pair of balls.” I pretended to jot something down, but really I just wrote Fuck and underlined it.

  I stepped back from the table.

  “You’re appearing here on behalf of the defense, aren’t you, Dr. Casey?”

  I tried to make Doctor sound like a dirty word.

  “Yes.”

  “And they are paying you for your testimony, aren’t they?”

  “No, sir. I’m being paid for my time. My testimony is my own.”

  Damn it. It was an old trick, and she dodged it perfectly. Nigel and John had prepped her well. Damn them too.

  I looked at Sarah on the stand. I didn’t want to hurt her. She’d trusted me. I liked her. Maybe more than like.

  I don’t want to do this, I thought. I won’t do this.

  I could see it now. It was a dead heat. All those weeks of sleepless nights, endless motions, skipped meals, nightmares, sneaking into the men’s room to puke my nerves away. I hadn’t talked to my parents in a month. I hadn’t gone on a date, seen a movie, had a beer. I was so sure that this was the way to the V&D—to success beyond my wildest dreams—that I hadn’t studied for my classes or even attended them. God help me if I had to rely on those grades! I had all my eggs in this one basket. This case. I couldn’t lose. Not to mention Daphne, who hadn’t laid a hand on me since that night outside my dorm room. Goddamn her lips! My career, my future, my life. The whole damn thing hung in the balance.

  I don’t want to do this.

  On the stand, Sarah looked relaxed now, calm. She caught my eye, and there was a hint of a smile—a shared secret. She’d already decided I wasn’t going to hurt her. It was almost smug when you thought about it. So confident in her power over me—that I would throw away my life, my future, everything—to cover up for her lie.

  Who did she think she was?

  I felt a shock of guilt, or pain—that voice saying Please, I don’t want to hurt her—but somehow it lost out to other dreams and urges.

  I made a decision.

  “Dr. Casey, you are appearing as an expert witness, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this jury is trusting your opinion because of your credentials, right?”

  Suddenly she seemed wary.

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me hard, searching.

  “You are a neurosurgery resident in the top program in the country. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  “Getting this position, it shows you had top grades in medical school, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all of this—your grades, your position in a top residency—all of this is the basis for your expertise here today, isn’t it?”

 
“Yes,” she whispered, looking at me desperately, trying not to reveal anything, begging me with her eyes.

  “And that’s not all. Your honesty. Isn’t that part of your expertise here today? The jury can trust what you say because you are an honest person?”

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes starting to well up, perceptible only to me, standing so close.

  I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath.

  Daphne was swept up in my new rhythm. She looked curious, excited. I found my own righteous anger and turned back to the witness.

  No going back.

  “Dr. Casey, isn’t it true that your application to this program contained serious misrepresentations about your abilities and accomplishments in medical school?”

  John and Nigel erupted.

  They had no idea where I was going, but they let out a string of objections.

  “Yes or no?” I pressed.

  Sarah froze, stunned.

  “Yes or no, Dr. Casey? Why are you hesitating?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Dr. Casey,” I said, the word doctor now sounding absolutely pornographic, “did you or did you not allow your father to cover up numerous failed classes during your medical school education?”

  “I don’t have to put up with . . . this isn’t real.”

  Her lips were trembling.

  “Yes or no, Dr. Casey?”

  No answer.

  “YES OR NO?”

  Her face started to break.

  “Did you or did you not get this prestigious residency as a result of lies and cover-ups?”

  “Yes,” she said softly, her voice cracking.

  “Did you allow this cover-up to occur?”

  “Yes,” she repeated, now sobbing.

  “Did you go from interview to interview, passing yourself off as something you are not—to get a job you did not deserve?”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  The objections were raining down now, washing over me.

  I didn’t pay attention.

  I didn’t even listen for her last answer.

  The damage was done. The witness was toast.

  I sat back down at our table. Daphne gave me a look of such pride it was almost lustful.

  I heard Sarah’s steps as she left the courtroom. But I couldn’t find the courage—not even for a single second—to look up and watch her go.

  13

  We won. That’s what the head juror announced, holding a sheet of paper. The judges critiqued our performances, but I can’t remember a word they said. I just kept repeating the phrase—part cheer, part question—over and over in my head: we won, we won, we won.