A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  The four-wheel-drive vehicles had been added to the fleet the previous year after the selectmen, their skepticism worn down by three years of relentless lobbying by Chief Paradisio, had included an item appropriating funds for their purchase in the warrant for town meeting, at last accepting his strenuous argument that the two specially equipped vehicles were needed to pursue and capture what he foresaw as a growing host of similarly outfitted law-breakers seeking to escape detection and arrest 'merely by going in the woods to commit their crimes, or else committing them where they always have, and then getting away by driving off into the woods, where we can't go after them." There was some opposition but the item passed by voice vote.

  Ins Blanchard, thirty-two, was a member of the ad hoc Canterbury School Citizens Advisory Committee. Petite but muscularly athletic at sixteen she had been a state champion gymnast; later she had graduated from Springfield College with a degree in phys ed and a certificate to teach it she was the fierce single mother of four daughters, all enrolled in Canterbury public schools Their father, Dave, a heavy equipment operator, had found winter work in Louisiana two years before but failed to return from it in the spring as promised, or remit any money for support. His whereabouts remained unknown. Unable to secure a position as a gym teacher, she kept the mortgage current on the house resentfully using money she'd inherited from a grandmother and earmarked for the girls' education, supporting them meagerly with her earnings as an instructor in aerobics in the Canterbury Spa and Health Club. Earlier that evening she had angrily expressed her considerable fury at rejection of a school budget item of $113,000 earmarked to restore art, music and drama to the curricula in all grades and establish a full varsity athletic program, including gymnastics, for girls at Canterbury High. When Sal's Blazer item passed she came to her feet enraged and shouting: "Oh you filthy rotten bastards."

  Ruled out of order by the moderator, Mason Turner, the forbidding grey-haired senior loan officer at the Pioneer Trust Co." she ignored repeated blows of the gavel and refused to sit down. She called the selectmen 'nothing but a bunch of lowdown dirty cop-suckers," bringing some startled laughter and scattered applause, 'approving extravagant new toys for the Paradise gestapo instead of doing what's right by the kids."

  Scattered cheering broke out, countered at once by booing and shouts of'Ah sid down ya big-mouth bitch." When she again failed to heed the gavel declaring "I'll talk as much as I want, assholes' and the moderator's fourth order to be silent, calling him 'a damned lickspittle for that gang of spineless clowns," Turner ordered the policeman on duty, Ptl. Greg Morrison, to escort her from the building.

  She at first ignored Morrison's purposive approach and his gently regretful statement, "Fraid I'll have to ask you to come along now, Ma'am," instead yelling: "Oh sure, Turner, pompous old fart, calling Sal's goons to the rescue." Then she turned and snarled at Morrison:

  "Get away from me, you jerk."

  He extended his left hand toward her. "Intending," as he testified before Judge Cavanaugh a month later in Commonwealth v. Blanchard, 'since she had indicated that she would not come with me voluntarily, to place it firmly on her right shoulder, in order to lead her away."

  She grabbed his wrist with both hands and bit him on the joint of the thumb and the fold of flesh between it and the forefinger, chomping down so that she broke the skin, tore the flesh and drew blood. After Morrison had subdued her with the help of an off-duty policewoman, Ptl.

  Connie Foley, a recreational boxer, who piston-punched Blanchard hard three times in the solar plexus and placed her under arrest to be transported to the station and locked up, he was driven to the emergency room at Holyoke Hospital for nine stitches and a painful series of precautionary shots to guard against blood poisoning and infection.

  "Not that we think she's rabid," the nurse with the big needle told him, 'but human bites're the worst kind, when it comes to infection."

  "I've heard that," the cop said, 'heard that many times. I don't need to be convinced JesusmotherfuckingChrist! you hit the goddamn bone again. Is this your first time doing this or is it you don't like my looks?"

  At trial, Officer Morrison further testified that doctors had told him he would have to wear the white plastic prosthetic device specially moulded to immobilize his left hand for at least six more weeks, in order to allow damaged cartilage to heal and see whether a torn tendon would mend without surgery. If x-rays showed that the tendon had mended, he could expect to spend between one and two months in rehabilitation. If the x-rays showed the tendon had not repaired itself, he would require surgery and rehabilitation and about a year to recover full use of his left hand.

  Officer Morrison testified that since he was left-handed, the prosthesis prevented him from gripping his sidearm or baton, writing incident reports or using the two-way radio in his patrol car while underway, since to do so would require him to depend upon his unusable left hand to steer while operating the radio with his right. He said that as a result he had been on total disability ever since the incident and expected to remain off-duty for at least three more months.

  After the trial, jury-waived, on a pretty afternoon in April, Iris Blanchard was found guilty by Judge Leonard Cavanaugh on charges of disrupting a public meeting; disorderly conduct; making an affray; assault on a police officer; assault and battery with a deadly weapon to wit: teeth; resisting arrest; and mayhem.

  "These are very serious charges, Mrs. Blanchard," the judge said, Merrion having briefed him about what the cops were saying at the station and around the courthouse about noisy female politicians who bit cops to dramatize their advocacy of children's issues and their own obvious interest in creating new teaching jobs. "If you think there's something funny or endearing in what your lawyer's tried to minimize as this "feistiness" of yours, I assure you I do not. And if you should appeal this verdict, as you certainly have every right to do, my guess is any judge and jury you may get in the superior court will agree with me not you. Or your lawyer, either. Same when it comes to sentencing:

  You've given any judge deciding what to do with you several excellent reasons to do as the police prosecutor here's suggested: send you down to Framingham for a year or so, to reflect on what you did.

  "And in fact I am going to sentence you to the women's correctional institution," the judge said, 'not for a year and a day, as the prosecutor's recommended, but for five full years." Iris Blanchard had been striving to hide signs of secret amusement, trying to appear contrite; now she flinched visibly and gasped. Her lawyer, Maxine Golden from the Mass. Defenders, moved closer beside her and put a reassuring hand on her arm.

  "What you did wasn't funny. And I've been very much concerned by your debonair demeanor, the way you've behaved in this court. Also by some rather light-hearted statements that your lawyer's made in questioning the witness," Golden's eyebrows lifted, 'suggesting to me that deep down inside you believe it was mischief you did, some sort of amusing prank.

  "It was not. This was a bad and serious thing that you did. It was also extremely dangerous. For someone serving on a school committee, supposedly concerned with the education and development of children, you set one lousy example. You have to (I pay for your actions. Not literally, of course: there isn't any point in fining you a substantial amount, say several thousand dollars, as the statues would allow me; that would only be another way of sending you to jail, because you clearly couldn't pay."

  Blanchard gasped again and then began to sob, putting her hands to her face. Golden put her arm around her. "So I'm in a dilemma, Mrs.

  Blanchard, which I do not like, and I blame you for putting me in it. I think you need a severe lesson, but at the same time I'm aware you have young children and appear to be their only source of parental support.

  So I know you've been under a lot of pressure, and I'm willing to take that into account.

  "You have to understand that you've put someone else now under pressure, terrible pressure. Officer Morrison's also a young parent.

/>   He and his wife have a new baby, who of course they both love very much. Just as much as you do your kids. And after what you did to him, to Officer Morrison, breaking the skin and causing him to bleed as you did, they both have to be very concerned of the possibility of very serious consequences.

  "I'm talking about the HIV virus, the possibility that you may have given him AIDS."

  Now thoroughly alarmed, Golden stared at the judge, then she looked at her client and mouthed the words: "Do you know if you have AIDS?"

  Blanchard sobbed and shook her head, moaning: "No, of course I don't.

  How could he say that to me? How could I have AIDS?"

  Golden wheeled to face the judge. "I have to object most strongly to the court making that statement," she said loudly and as gruffly as she could. "Without any grounds whatever to make that allegation? That's an awful thing to do, in a public forum, absolutely shocking. My client doesn't have AIDS. How could you even suggest such a thing."

  "Contain yourself, counsellor," the judge said. "Taking your client at her word, the most she can possibly say is that she doesn't think she has AIDS. As I understand it, when her no-good husband went to Louisiana and deserted her and their children two years ago, once and for all, it wasn't his first defection, just his last. He'd wandered off repeatedly before that, picking up women in bars. There'd been several previous separations, each followed by another unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation, during which she said he was always loving and tender. I assume that means they had sex.

  "She doesn't know whether those other women, however many there may have been, were free of AIDS. Or whether one or more of those "women" might've been a man. All she knows is what her rotten ex-husband told her, and as we all know now, he was not to be trusted.

  "So unless she's been tested, she doesn't really know whether he contracted the disease and passed it on to her during one of their lovey-dovey reconciliations, before he left her the last time and vanished into the mist. Therefore, Ms Golden, my question to you is:

  Has your client been tested since her husband lit out for the territories, and if so what were the results?"

  Golden conferred urgently with Blanchard, pulling her loose to whisper and cupping her hand over the side of her face otherwise visible from the bench. Blanchard shook her head and said audibly: "No, I never have been."

  Golden sighed. She lowered her hand and faced the bench. "She says she's never been tested, your Honor."

  The judge sighed and shook his head. "Oh dear," he said, "I was afraid of that.

  "Well, no help for it; this is what I'm going to do here. Having in mind the very real anxiety that Officer Morrison and his wife have to feel here, Mrs. Blanchard, and also the fact that as I'm sure Attorney Golden can tell you I have no power to order you to do this; there's a law against it and anyway, as I see it, you could invoke the Fifth Amendment: I am going to put over for one week formal imposition of the sentence in this case. During that time I want you to consult with your attorney and decide, of your own free will, whether you should have a blood test to determine whether you carry the virus that causes AIDS. If you do that you'll be able to say whether you would have tested positive when you attacked Officer Morrison last month. And, if you instruct the testing lab to deliver a copy of the results to Mister Merrion, my clerk, for the court's information and that of Officer Morrison, we will then know that too.

  "Now, if all that should take place, this is what I will do here when I review the case next week:

  "I'll suspend imposition of the sentence to MCI Framingham for a period of two years, provided you agree to resign immediately from the School Advisory Committee, making a public statement you now understand that your conduct at the town meeting was an outrageous, shameful, reckless, and dangerous act for which you are deeply, deeply sorry. And ashamed.

  And that even though you have expressed your deep regret to Officer Morrison and are keeping him in your prayers for his full recovery of the use of his left hand, you agree your actions mean that you're unfit to serve on the committee. And so you must step down.

  "Assuming you decide that it's in everyone's best interest for you to do that, and the test results turn out to be negative as I'm sure you hope they do as fervently as everyone else involved you will further agree that at the end of that two-year period you will voluntarily submit to testing again. And if those results also prove to be negative for the HIV virus, and you have not been in any other trouble between now and then, I will reconsider, revise and revoke the jail sentence and you will be free to go."

  Blanchard's first blood test had been negative. In the fourteen months since then the x-rays had shown that Morrison's tendon had failed to repair itself. Surgery had been performed. The doctors had found greater damage to the thumb joint than the x-rays had led them to expect, and now believed the operation should have been performed the night of the attack. They predicted Morrison would never regain more than sixty percent use of his left hand probably less, around forty.

  Morrison two days later received a letter from Sidney Ferris, P.C." A Legal Corporation, doing business at 16 Amherst St. in Hampton Falls, expressing his belief that the officer had grounds for a medical malpractice suit which could be brought on a contingent' fee basis at absolutely no cost or expense to him unless the suit was successful, in which case the fee would be one-third of the damages collected.

  Morrison had retained Ferris as his lawyer, authorizing him to file suit against Holyoke Hospital and the attending physician on duty in the emergency room town-meeting night, claiming actual damages for lost career earnings of $625,000 and an additional $600,000 for mental anguish, pain and suffering.

  Ferris also handled Morrison's case before the Board of Workmen's Compensation, which awarded a tax-exempt permanent disability pension equal to fifty percent of his patrolman's pay. Ferris on behalf of Morrison had filed an appeal, saying that, as a matter of law, since Morrison had been injured in the line of duty, he was entitled either to a pension equal to one hundred percent of his pay, or else a fifty-percent pension calculated on the basis of the wages that he would have earned, given his likely prospects of rapid promotion to higher ranks during the additional thirty-three years he had expected to serve on the force.

  Purely for amusement one night in the bar at Grey Hills, Merrion one night while having drinks with Hilliard had used drink-napkins to estimate the probable total cost of Iris Blanchard's tantrum, not only to the taxpayers of the town of Canterbury but also to the hospital and the doctor and their insurance carriers as well. Hilliard worked the figures faster in his head than Merrion could write them down on the napkins.

  "With interest compounded at six percent, by the time they get the malpractice case tried, and figuring Morrison lives another fifty years, which at twenty-eight he should, collecting his pension all that time, I figure a little over seven million bucks. Seven million, seventy-thousand, you throw in the cost of Sally's two Blazers, the most expensive trucks built since the world began. And a good thing for all involved old Iris wasn't bred for the work, like a pit bull or something, take a man's arm off at the elbow; have to deed the cop the town if she had been."

  When Merrion got to his car, alert for sounds of stealthy scuffling in the dark as he always was such nights, even though he was at the police station, lest some disgruntled defendant after being released had waited in the shadows to conk him when he came out and swipe his wallet and his car. Hearing nothing, he unlocked the Caddy quickly, tossing the portfolio in the back seat, sliding in and closing up all in one swift motion, re-locking the doors as he turned on the engine, the earphone keypad glowing green and chirping readiness on the center console.

  At the next corner he had made up his mind and said loudly and roundly:

  "Call… Danny." As he took the turn the voice-activated dialer started hooping digits to reach Hilliard at his condo at the Wisdom House in Hampton Pond (to call Hilliard at his office Merrion would have said: "Call… Hilliard'; in his M
ercedes "Call… Daniel').

  Moving north on Truman Boulevard under the blacker shadows cast by the oaks along the edges, he listened to the phone ring eleven times before Hilliard answered thickly through the phlegm of sleep: This'd better be important." Then he coughed.

  "It is," Merrion said. "Put some coffee on for yourself and pour me a serious drink. No traffic, this hour. I'll be there in ten or twelve minutes."

  "Minutes?" Hilliard said, 'what minutes. Whaddaya talkin'. You muss be drunk or you're nuts. You got any idea what time…"

  "Yeah, one-forty-one," Merrion said, glancing at the digital clock on the dash. "I'm coming from the Canterbury cop house and I'm not drunk although I must be about the only one who's still awake in town and isn't. Very drunk out tonight. Every time I thought we must be finished, they'd bring in another indi gene tanked to the gills, singin' and talkin', all kinds of ragtime. Disgusting how they carry on."

  During the late Seventies, Sal Paradisio had returned from a convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Montreal smitten by the lingo in a lecture given by an Indiana University criminologist from Bloomington. He had started referring to locally resident groups as 'the indigenous population' and to individual residents as indi genes The usage had become a Canterbury PD inside joke. Richie Hammond and Merrion when Richie for some reason wasn't hogging the bail fees as usual had gotten used to being summoned by solemn cops on busy weekends to 'come down and handle a whole herd' ah misbehavin' indi genes Two decades later Merrion still heard older officers say 'the fuckin' indi genes getting' outta hand again."

  "I was asleep," Hilliard said.

  "Figured you would be," Merrion said. "Most people are at this hour."