‘That course you taught on The Emergence of Modern America really changed my life, Professor MacCabe,’ Osmo told him.
Larry was flattered by the comment and wanted to know why.
‘It made me realise I was studying the wrong subject,’ Osmo said. ‘I changed fields at the end of that semester and I’ve never looked back. If it wasn’t for you I’d have never been an attorney.’
Osmo had bumped into Larry at the City Jail while visiting a client suspected of staging traffic accidents. He’d offered his services pro bono in the hope that such a high-profile case would boost his career. If Wayne Trout hadn’t been interested in the Big Time, Osmo McNulty was. At the time Larry had thanked him for his thoughtfulness but told him he didn’t need a lawyer and that the misunderstanding that had brought him to jail would soon be cleared up. When it became clear that it wouldn’t, Larry asked Osmo to represent him. Who better than an alumnus of Georgetown University to speak on his behalf?
Before Osmo got to work on Larry’s defence he asked him a couple of questions. Had he ever been involved in a traffic accident in the last three years that hadn’t been his fault, and had he ever suffered from whiplash? Larry said that he hadn’t. Osmo asked if he was sure about this and Larry said that he was. Osmo then asked Larry if he knew of anyone who had, and when Larry said that he didn’t, Osmo again asked him if he was sure.
Osmo told Larry that the prosecution’s case was circumstantially damning and he was glad he wasn’t sitting in his place and wearing his shoes. They were, however, short on motive. Apart from their assertion that Larry, if not a psychopath, was a thoroughly disagreeable person who took his own unhappiness out on the world by making the lives of others as miserable as possible, it appeared they had little. The problem for Larry was that no one was stepping forward to refute this picture, and his best witnesses were either dead or suffering from amnesia. It was looking to Osmo that he’d have to rely heavily on his own dimples if he was going to win over the jury. ‘Everyone likes a man with dimples,’ he told Larry.
‘I could understand them bringing these charges against you if you were black, Larry, (they were on first name terms by now), because that’s how the system works. But you’re not black, you’re white, and so they’re trying to portray you as a white man with a black heart. And I doubt they’d have brought these charges if so many animals hadn’t been slaughtered at the church. People are more sensitive to pets being killed than they are to people being murdered. They get desensitised to human suffering because it happens all the time, especially in Washington. With pets it’s different. Pets are innocents, no bad bones in their bodies and no bad thoughts in their heads. You wouldn’t believe the number of stuffed animals left outside the church after the bombing or how few were the bouquets for the three dead people. I think this is an angle we could explore.’
In thinking this, Osmo might have had a point. Four days into the trial a note was passed to the judge and proceedings interrupted. ‘I’ve just been handed the good news that Steady Eddie is alive and well,’ the judge smiled. The courtroom had then burst into applause. (Steady Eddie was the tortoise taken to the church by Joyce Flake. Miraculously, considering how close he’d been to the bombs, the tortoise had survived the explosions and been spotted walking down Wisconsin by a motorist.)
It was difficult for Osmo to make headway against the prosecution’s case and his questioning of witnesses – intended to damage their credibility – was often oblique, seemingly without purpose and continually being interrupted by objections and sustentions. He asked Clive if he held a grudge against Professor MacCabe because his client knew more about mops and cleaning products than he did, even though it was his job to know more about mops and cleaning products than Professor MacCabe. He wondered aloud if Professor Clayton’s purpose in shaving his head was to make it look like a football, and suggested to Mr Cotton that his wife had been pigeon-toed and that only his client had noticed this and that Mr Cotton now felt badly that he hadn’t and was taking his guilt out on Professor MacCabe. When Mike came to the stand wearing a hemp jacket with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder, Osmo asked him if he’d smoked the sleeves and, if so, how often did he smoke his clothes? After Mrs Newbold had given evidence he implied that she appeared more upset by the death of her cat than she did her son, and when it became clear in his cross-examination of Delores that she was unhappy with her weight, he asked her why she hadn’t done something about it and blown up a church for instance. From what he’d gathered from the prosecution this was what unhappy people did.
When Larry took the stand it became apparent that Osmo McNulty wasn’t the best of attorneys to defend him and that he was his own worst enemy. It would have gone better if they’d spent more time rehearsing and twenty-four people hadn’t walked into Osmo’s office claiming to have suffered whiplash after the bus they’d been travelling in had been rear-ended by a Chevrolet Sonic. The only advice he’d been able to give Larry before he took the stand was to keep his answers short.
The idea was for Larry to appear to the jury as an average Joe and not the sinister person the prosecution depicted. Osmo instructed him to face the jury when he answered the questions and look them in the eyes. Larry did, but his incessant blinking made them uncomfortable, and after several of the jurors started blinking, the foreman asked the judge to direct Larry not to look at them.
‘How did you meet Wayne, Professor MacCabe?’ Osmo asked.
‘I was running away from a wasp and he fell out of a tree,’ Larry answered.
When Osmo asked him to elaborate Larry turned on the taps, and for the rest of his evidence forgot they were running. ‘Well for breakfast, I usually alternate between cereal and toast but that morning I’d decided to eat pancakes…’
Larry’s answers became ever longer, more convoluted and overly detailed, and the only things that stuck in the jury’s mind were that he occasionally ate sand, often discussed things with his deceased wife and had been bitten by seven different dogs. Twenty minutes into Larry describing his trip to Israel, and at the point where he’d just emerged from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Osmo noticed that the jury was yawning and decided to cut Larry’s testimony short.
‘So what you’re telling the jury, Professor MacCabe, is that you were in Israel until the time you left?’
‘Yes,’ Larry replied.
‘The defence rests, your Honour,’ Osmo said.
It took the jury less than a day to decide Larry’s guilt, but only in relation to the church bombings and Dr Young’s death. The judge directed them to find all other charges against him not proven: in the case of Lydia Flores no gun had been found, and in the case of his sons, no bodies.
Even before the jury sat down to consider the evidence, a majority of them had already decided Larry was guilty. For a start he looked guilty – that weird forehead and his incessant blinking – and who but a guilty man would talk so endlessly? And did he really expect them to take his word against the word of two governments and have them believe he’d been duped by a simpleton? Did he take them for simpletons, too? And as the jurors deliberated over plates of sandwiches and a choice of either coffee or soft drinks, the pieces of jigsaw fell into place and his guilt became clear to all.
Professor MacCabe, they determined, had accepted an invitation to speak at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem only as a cloak to blow up the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans. He’d gone out of his way to tell people he was going to Israel and even bought an airline ticket, but in the event had remained in Washington and only left his house after Dr Young had been killed. Where he’d gone to after that was unknown, but one thing was clear: he hadn’t gone to Israel.
The answer as to why he’d chosen to blow up the church was also clear: Professor MacCabe was a no-good! He was a cold man, embittered and without feeling, and out of deep dissatisfaction for his own life had manipulated another hapless man into planting bombs that w
ould kill both humans and animals. He might have held no specific grievance against those killed in the church – or even the Church of Latter-Day Lutherans itself for that matter – but he’d used the gathering, and the friendship of a weak-minded flathead, to wreak ‘representative’ havoc on a society that had shunned him and the dogs that had bitten him.
Case closed! Lock the fucker up!
Osmo and Larry stood as the judge pronounced sentence.
‘Don Lokey’s agreed to take the case,’ Laura said. ‘He’s going to appeal the decision.’
It wasn’t quite the news Larry had been hoping for.
Laura’s memory had returned nine months after the operation borrowed it. Immediately she’d known that Larry was no murderer and that only an outbreak of war in the Middle East would have stopped him from going to Israel to deliver a paper on the Desert Land Act. And she’d also known who Kevin was! And in the intervening period it had also become evident that Larry had played no part in either the murder of Lydia Flores or the disappearance of his sons. She’d gone directly to the US Attorney’s Office and told them there’d been a terrible miscarriage of justice and that Larry MacCabe was an innocent man.
Justice and innocence in the US Attorney’s Office, however, were abstracts and without currency. The vogue was for conviction rates and never admitting a mistake, moving on to the next case and climbing the ladder. The St Francis Day Massacre had made the headlines, bolstered the reputation of the department, and on the back of Larry’s conviction the prosecuting Assistant US Attorney was now running for political office. It didn’t matter that Herb Flores was currently under indictment for arranging the death of his wife or that Grover MacCabe had turned up in an Alaskan hospital with an arm missing, because Larry had never been found guilty of those crimes. Maybe the FBI had been overly hasty in connecting him to Lydia’s shooting and the disappearance of his sons, but on the matter of the St Francis Day Massacre, they held firm. The evidence pointed to Professor MacCabe, and they would need more than the word of a middle-aged woman recovering from a brain injury to convince them otherwise. Unless Laura could bring them actual proof that Larry was innocent – and more than the name of a dead person – the case would remain closed.
It was then she’d gone to Don Lokey, an attorney with a high profile in the city and whose mother was a resident at the care home.
‘Don can’t believe you were convicted on such circumstantial evidence,’ Laura said, ‘and the mere fact that Osmo McNulty was defending you is grounds for appeal. And I can testify to the fact that Wayne talked to Kevin on a regular basis even if his psychiatrist claims that he didn’t. It’s clear now that Wayne was a lot more disturbed than either of us thought.’
‘It’s good of you to think of me, Laura,’ Larry said, ‘but, well… um… would you mind if you didn’t? The truth is I’m happy here. I like being in prison.’
Laura stared at him, wondered for a moment if she’d misheard him and asked him to repeat his words. Larry did and she felt like slapping him. She told him to pull himself together and stop being a bufflehead and that she had no intention of abandoning him to a life in prison. Like it or not, he would just have to get used to the idea of being a free man again. It was going to happen!
‘Well, if that’s what you want,’ Larry said with an air of resignation. ‘But there’s no rush, is there? I mean, you could take your time, couldn’t you?’
Laura left for Georgetown and Larry went back to his cell, neither of them smiling and both despairing.
Larry had been sent to a Federal Correctional Institution in Virginia, 25 miles south-east of Richmond. Apart from Laura the only regular visitor he had was Osmo, who kept dropping by to see if he’d had an accident that wasn’t his fault. He’d settled in well at the prison, and his reputation as the mastermind behind the St Francis Day Massacre had held him in good stead with the other inmates, who all made a point of addressing him as professor. It was the first time he’d enjoyed such status. There were people on tap in the prison every day of the week and every week of the year – 1800 not counting the guards. He’d made friends here, lots of friends, and there was always someone to talk to. He taught literacy classes, wrote and read letters for prisoners who couldn’t and helped with their appeals and official paperwork. When in life had people ever needed him more? And he’d also been put in charge of the prison library and allowed to keep a pet mouse called Joshua (named after Moses’ lieutenant) in his cell. The only thing he missed about not being on the outside was visiting Helen at Willow Columbarium.
He’d tried explaining this to Laura, but Laura had told him he’d been watching too many old prison movies and it was time he got a grip on himself. But what did he have to return to? His house was uninhabitable, he didn’t have a dog and, apart from Laura, whose time was committed to the care home, no friends. Wayne and Tank were both dead and it had been difficult during the trial to learn how Alice had thought of him and to hear the doubts of Mike and Delores. It would be difficult going back to Volta Park and taking up where they’d left off. No, he was better off staying where he was. As long as he was in prison he’d never be lonely again.
That night Larry lay in his bunk thinking, something he always did before going to sleep. Usually he would remember his years at the university and his days in Volta Park, the Desert Land Act and Moses. He would think of his wife and his three-armed twins, of Laura and Tank and the people he’d met in the park. And he would think of Wayne and every night wonder if he’d failed him in some unknown way. He would never understand the young man’s reasons for planting the bombs and sending Moses to his death, but he remembered and missed him as a friend. If only he’d focused more on his grammar…
Tonight he wasn’t thinking of the past or dead people, but of life, and how awful his would be if he was ever released from prison. ‘Oh dear,’ he sighed repeatedly. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Hey, Larry! Pssst! Larry!’
He leaned over the edge of the bunk. ‘Did you say something, Bill?’
Bill was his cellmate, a forty-year-old man serving a twenty-five year sentence for armed robbery. He made no reply and continued to snore.
Larry returned to his thoughts.
‘Pssst, Larry! I can help you!’
Larry propped his elbows on the pillow and looked around the room. ‘Who is this?’ he asked.
‘It’s Kevin,’ the voice whispered, ‘Wayne’s friend. There’s a vent…’
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2017
First published in 2017 by No Exit Press
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© J. Paul Henderson 2017
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