“The system went down that day,” Brand said, looking down at his hands. “All calls for a forty-seven minute period were lost.”
“How convenient for the prosecution.”
“Objection, your honor,” Marlene Quest intoned.
“Watch the sarcasm, Mr. Tinheart,” Tanaka reminded the barrister.
“You are aware that Mr. Fortlow says that he is the one who placed the 911 call are you not, Detective?” Tinheart continued.
“He says so but it’s not true. The operator who took the call remembers that it was a woman’s voice.”
“If only we had the recording to corroborate that memory,” Tinheart opined.
“Badgering the witness, your honor.”
“Mr. Tinheart.”
“Did anyone have a gun in hand when you and the two officers entered Mr. Fortlow’s place of work?” Tinheart asked.
“Yes.”
“One gun?”
“We all had our weapons out.”
“And, after finding the body did you holster your pistols?” “No.”
“So Mr. Fortlow might have felt threatened by armed gunmen roaming around him.”
“We are the police not thugs,” Brand said.
“Bearing arms though. Maybe Mr. Fortlow held out his hands because he was afraid of being shot.”
Brand had no retort.
“Tell me, Detective, did you find a woman in the house?”
“No.”
“Was there a window in the hall that would have allowed someone from the outside to witness the alleged crime?”
“No.”
“Has anyone else come forth as a witness admitting that they made the emergency call?”
“I’m not aware of anyone who has done so.”
“Did you or the officers you had watching my client see a woman run from the house?”
Turning abruptly from the policeman Tinheart faced the jury. “We do have, as exhibit 12-B, phone records from the Big Nickel proving that a 911 call was made from the office phone at the time this supposed woman was alerting the police.
“No more questions.”
Socrates watched his lawyer come back to sit by his side. The white man had been a constant support since even before the charges were brought. He didn’t like Mason Tinheart but he had no criticism of him either.
Socrates noticed Lucius Brand glaring as he walked between the prosecution and the defense. Following the detective with his eyes he found himself looking at the gallery. His friends were assembled there. Darryl, Chaim, Billy Psalms, and Cassie Wheaton. There were others too. Every day at least a dozen folks from the Big Nickel came to support him. He didn’t mind their presence any more than he cared about Mason Tinheart. The only people in the room that mattered to him were Luna, his one day wife-to-be, and Bellandra, their baby.
It was late in the afternoon and so the judge ended the proceedings for the day. Socrates was taken to a van and driven to a small jail in Redondo Beach. He had no windows but when he was escorted from the van to the prison each afternoon or early evening he caught the scent of the ocean from between ten seconds and half a minute, depending on how long it took for internal security to notice the guards and open the electronic lock.
Socrates had a cell to himself. This was a luxury. Billy Psalms had even managed to get him a small entertainment unit that had a TV, radio, DVD player, and even an MP3 unit. Socrates didn’t understand the MP3 player nor did he listen to the radio or watch TV or movies. He only used the clock to test himself on how aware of time he was.
Keeping the face of the unit against the wall he’d turn it around from time to time to see if he knew the hour. He was right most of the time. Every convict kept a clock running in their mind. Time was the only thing a prisoner had; and time was always running out.
Socrates was reading a biography that Chaim Zetel had brought him. It was a thick tome about Albert Einstein.
“You’ll like the book,” Chaim had said. “It’s about a man whose life was just as important as what he did. And what he did was very big.”
Socrates did like the book. It was friendly and inviting. It was told in a loving manner, the way a relative who knows your flaws, but cares for you anyway, would talk.
When the lock to his door slid open Socrates looked up. This motion seemed to bring him from one world into another. Just the movement of his head felt like a long journey that was immediate and at the same time far behind him.
2.
“Maxie,” Socrates said. Standing in the doorway stood the first undercover cop that had infiltrated the Big Nickel’s Thursday Night Meeting. He was acorn-brown with eyes that never seemed to meet the person he was talking to. His clothes were green and dark blue but otherwise unremarkable.
Socrates could see that Martin Truman, aka Maxie Fadiman, had always been a spy, a mole in his own life as well as in the lives of his victims.
“Hey, Socco,” the ex-cop said. He moved to the chair across from the cot where the ex-con, soon to be con-again, sat.
“What’s up?”
“I went to your lawyer and said that I was proof that the police were hounding you. He took me to the judge,” Maxie said. “The prosecutor was there and they told me that I couldn’t testify. Tanaka claimed it would be prejudicial.”
“She’s somethin’ else,” Socrates said without anger. “It’s like she wants to help me but then she gets all worried that she’s gonna break the law and so she ends up gettin’ on me harder than if she was my enemy.”
“What happened in there, Socrates?”
“The courtroom?”
“No, at the Nickel. I knew Kelly. We worked a couple’a jobs together.”
Fortlow’s attention withdrew from the judge that he had studied so closely in the last weeks. Now he was completely intrigued by his visitor.
“What you doin’ down here, man?” he asked the one-time snitch.
“Tryin’ to help.”
“But who are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you Maxie the spy, Martin the cop, or the guy that came to us and said he was sorry?”
“The last one.”
Socrates’ whole life, it seemed then, had been getting him ready for this time when he was on trial for murder. And it wasn’t just the courtroom where he was being tested. It was in his windowless cell and with strangers like Maxie who came in and out asking questions. Brigitta Brownlevy, Mason Tinheart’s girlfriend, offered him sex in his cell. Luna brought Bellandra every day that they would let her visit. The prosecutor, through Tinheart, made him offers of reduced sentences. Reporters asked for interviews. There was even a biographer named Nell Hardwick, who wanted to tell “. . . a true story about a real man, not some trumped up celebrity with nothing to them.”
He told Brigitta no, realizing that he might well regret it one day. Luna was his strength. She sat with him for as long as possible talking about Big Nickel business and his opinions about the judge and jury members.
“There’s a old black woman on the upper left look like I just insulted her,” he said. “And then there’s this white girl who keep shakin’ her head.”
“I know that one,” Luna said. “I cain’t tell if she for ya or against ya.”
“Ain’t that life in a dark alley,” Socrates said and they laced fingers.
Socrates had rejected the prosecutor’s offers because no matter what they found him guilty for he would spend the rest of his life in prison since he’d already gone down for murder once.
He’d refused any interviews with reporters. Socrates had been reading newspapers for years and he had not been impressed with their ability to understand men like him. Whether they were on his side or not he was sure that they’d get it wrong.
But he agreed to meet with Nell Hardwick, the biographer.
When she came into the visitor’s room and sat across the table from him he raised his manacled hands, asking her without words to stay silent. The graying white woman
was tall and thin. She wore a boy’s dress shirt and a red skirt. She had a notepad, papers, and a tape recorder all visible in a clear plastic purse.
“Don’t take no notes and don’t record me,” Socrates said. “I just wanna say some things to you and then you can go. If what I say gives you somethin’ then you can write your book, or not.
“I want you to know that I don’t mind bein’ in here, in jail. That’s where I been most’a my adult life. A long time ago I murdered two people and just recently I killed a man in my place. I’m on trial because I killed him and they don’t like me and they don’t believe it was self-defense. In some other neighborhood they might’a believed what I said but down where I live if you kill one’a them then you got to go down. That’s why I got my Big Nickel and my friends—because down where we live the law is like a mugger and a thief, down where we live at you got to concentrate real hard to know just how to walk out the door with pride and common sense too.
“I killed a man who was stealin’ from me and who wanted to kill me and now I’m on trial. That’s all there is to it, Miss Hardwick. Who I am, what I am, don’t mean a thing. It just come down to me and him and then me and them. So go on and write your book or don’t, it’s all the same to me.”
“I want to help you, Socrates,” Maxie said.
“Help me how?”
“First tell me what happened in that house?”
“How me tellin’ you that gonna help me?”
“I need to know,” the ex-cop, ex-snitch, ex-patriot said. Socrates could see the pain in Maxie and he wondered if it
was real or conjured in order to fool him.
“I killed him, Maxie,” Socrates said after some time. “I saw him
breaking into my personal file cabinet, I called to him, he pulled
his pistol and before he could shoot I hit him and he died.” It was the truth in the world of bodies in motion but it was
also a lie. Maxie sniffed the air almost aware of the subtlety of
the well constructed fabrication but then he pulled back. “I can get you outta here, Socco,” he said.
“How you gonna do that?”
“I got all the keys. I can walk in here at midnight and walk you
out the back door. I could do that tonight and by the time they
know you gone you’ll be in Toronto at a house up there that’s
ready for you and Luna and the baby too.”
Socrates stared at the evasive face of the man before him, remembering that when Martin was Maxie at the Big Nickel he
looked you right in the eye because he was playing a role that he
could hide behind. But the real man, the one sitting before him,
was ashamed of who he was and shifty and vague in his appearance.
Socrates was wondering not about the possibility of freedom
but at the offer. He’d spent more than a quarter-century in prison and no one offered to break him out like a chick from its
shell; no one held out a hand and said, “Come on let’s go.” The gift was in the offer—like money in the bank or somebody loving you from far away. It was like the smell of your
brood on the wind from the west or a nod from another black
man in the street.
Socrates liked his cell with its featureless lime-colored walls
and a book about the rebel physicist. He liked the courtroom
and the ambivalent judge and the men and women sitting judgment on him; blind as Justice. He liked the prosecutor’s figure
and his own attorney’s girlfriend. He had no need for freedom.
The Japanese judge and the jury and even the cop who testified
against him weren’t free; at least he wouldn’t trade places with
any of them.
“If I was free I could fly to that mountain ovah there,” Billy
Psalms had once said on a clear Los Angeles day. “I could rise up
in the air an’ go there like a bird. But the ground got its chains on
me. It say, ‘you stayin’ right here,’ an’ here I be.”
No, Socrates didn’t need freedom. He liked his cell, missed his
prison life. And even when he exulted in the liberty of walking
down the streets without a guard, or sleeping behind a locked
door when he held the key, he was still thinking about not being
locked up.
No, Socrates thought again, I don’t need freedom but my
child needs me; her lock and chain, her mean daddy who won’t
let her cross the street by herself.
“Socrates,” Maxie said. “You wanna get outta here or not?” “You like it up in Toronto, Maxie?”
“Better than this here jail.”
“Your baby like it?”
“She’s a baby, she don’t even know where she is.”
“I really appreciate the offer, Max. I know how hard this must be for you. It’s a big step to do what’s right when the big boss is wrong. ’Cause you know loyalty is a chain too. So’s your job and
your house an’ even yo’ dick.”
Maxie laughed. “I miss the Thursday nights, Socco.” “They don’t have nuthin’ like that up in Canada?” “They don’t have nobody like you anywhere, Brother,” Maxie
said, forcing himself to look Socrates in the eye for a brief
moment.
For five minutes or more the men sat looking at each other’s
hands. After that Maxie stood up and turned away. It was awhile
before Socrates felt alone again, as if the informer had left his
shadow to make sure the test was over.
3. Weeks went by. The trial dragged on and Socrates spent his time studying the faces of the judge and jury. He was also intrigued by the young woman who took notes of the proceedings. The court reporter was white and pretty but she held herself like an ugly teenager shy of her appearance. Every once in a while she’d catch him staring at her and then she’d brush an imagined lock of her black hair away from her face. Socrates would smile when she did this and sometimes she smiled back.
The guards in the jailhouse liked him. Two of them had even shaken his hand.
The forensic doctor found it hard to believe that a sixty-yearold man could hit someone that hard with his fist alone. The police, however, found no weapon that could have been used.
Under oath Captain Telford Winegarten, the man in charge of the Anti-gang Tactical Division, admitted that Kelly Beardsley worked for him.
“But he was under strict orders to simply observe,” the captain said. “It was what we call non-invasive reconnaissance. He would not have broken any lock in that house. He was just there to listen and report on gang activity.”
“Did he discover any gang activity?” Mason Tinheart asked.
Winegarten did not reply.
“I have already subpoenaed your records,” Tinheart reminded him.
“No.”
“And how long had he been there?”
“Nearly six months.”
“If he didn’t find out anything then why keep him there?”
“The police have to have patience, counselor,” Winegarten said. “We don’t have the luxury of retaliation.”
Tinheart smiled and walked away.
“This is a big moment, Mr. Fortlow,” Mason Tinheart said in Socrates’ cell after the trial had gone on for six weeks. “We have to decide whether or not to put you on the stand.”
Socrates didn’t say anything to this because he didn’t know what was right.
“On the one hand you are the only witness to the killing,” Tinheart continued. “You were there. You hit him.”
“Twice,” Socrates said.
“What?”
“I hit him twice.”
“But it was a one-two punch right? You didn’t wait and hit him again later?”
“No. It was one right after the other, hard and fast.”
“So the proble
m is,” Tinheart said, “do we put you in the witness chair and let the jury see the man you are?”
“They already seen me,” Socrates said. “And you know I’m ugly as a mothahfuckah to most of them. Everybody got a different life but I doubt if any of them have seen a life like mine.”
“But do we dare pull back the curtain?” Tinheart asked. Before Socrates could answer he added, “Brigittta says that you should do it but I think she’s infatuated with you.”
“Maybe somebody on the jury will like me.”
“Brigitta came to see you didn’t she?” Mason asked.
Socrates nodded.
“What did she say?”
“That I shouldn’t give up. That I should keep up hope,” Socrates said, thinking about sex as hope. “But I told her that I just take life as it comes. I don’t hope its comin’ ’cause it’s comin’ still and all.”
Socrates could see that the lawyer had other questions, that he was afraid of something between Brigitta and other men. But the lawyer didn’t voice his fears.
“All we need is one juror to keep you from jail,” Tinheart said. “I think you should go on the stand.”
Maybe, Socrates thought, Tinheart wanted to destroy him because he believed that his woman had betrayed him. Maybe Socrates on the stand would give the lawyer his own private justice.
“Lemme think about it, Mason. I’ll talk to you in a few days.”
“We have to decide quickly.”
“I need to think about it.”
“We have to plan our approach.”
“Should I get me a new lawyer? Maybe Cassie?”
“No. I understand,” Mason said. “I’ll come by day after tomorrow.”
“Two days after,” Socrates said.
Cassie Wheaton, after hearing the full explanation of Socrates’ fears, agreed to sit with Tinheart at the defense table. She said that she didn’t know if his testimony would help or hurt his case.
“Tinheart is right about one thing,” she’d said. “You have to expect that the jury will be mostly against you even if your case is strong.”
“I’m a bad person to ask, Socco,” Billy Psalms had said. “You know me, my hands just itchin’ for some dice to throw. An’ you cain’t make a bet wit’ yo’ mouf shet.”
It just so happened that during the time that Socrates was deciding about his answer to Tinheart Chaim Zetel came to visit. The tinkerer liked to visit and play a game of chess on a stone board that he’d found rooting through the trash in Beverly Hills.
The Right Mistake Page 22