Mittman, Stephanie

by The Courtship

  "To continue, Your Honor, I feel it is only fair," he said before she could get in another kick, "that if you call Mr. Brent Mister, you should accord my attorney the same courtesy. That is, you should call her Mrs. Whittier."

  The ceiling fans, which had no business being on in February anyway, got louder.

  Other than that there wasn't a sound. Not even that pathetic little bird had the nerve to chirp in the silence. The entire courtroom refrained from drawing a breath until the judge signaled to his clerk, who stepped up on the rise, yet still needed to stand on his toes to hear the judge's request.

  "There will be a short recess," the clerk said. He glared pointedly at Charlotte. "One minute!"

  Charlotte looked up at the judge, saw that he was busying himself with the papers on his desk, and whispered at Ash through clenched teeth. "Didn't anyone ever teach you to pick your fights carefully? Would it do us any good to have him call me Mrs. Whittier and slap you in jail? Good glory! They must have used up all the Whittier common sense on Cabot and left none for you."

  "Anyone with a shred of common sense can see that the law is stupid and needs changing if it doesn't insure you the same dignity as your adversary," he hissed back, convinced he had made a good point.

  "My adversary wants to put you in jail," she reminded him in hushed tones. "Are you bent on helping him?"

  "So we don't care what's right, is that it?" he whispered, knowing she was right but not knowing how to back down. "I just need to know how the game works, so I can play it along with you."

  "Okay," she said, crossing her arms over a blue suit jacket that was doing its best to negate her even being a woman. "The game goes like this. You pretend you're gagged and let me do the talking. Is that simple enough?"

  "Are we ready?" Judge Hammerman asked, his voice filling the room as he looked over his half-spectacles at Charlotte expectantly.

  "Simple enough would be to allow a man to defend himself," Ash muttered. "Or to find his damned brother.... Sorry, I shouldn't have said that in front of you." Mixed company and all that. He knew better, he just didn't hang around ladies much. Not the kind whose eyebrows rose at a word like damned.

  "You can say anything you want to your lawyer," Charlotte whispered. "But not to the judge. Where you sleep tonight is going to be up to him."

  "I asked if you were ready, Charlotte, dear. Do you need me to explain it to him?" The judge motioned for Ash to step forward, but Charlotte put a restraining hand on his arm.

  "No, Your Honor. He understands perfectly."

  "I guess you'd better tell him I'm sorry," Ash whispered.

  She smiled, and Ash realized that he'd been stingy in his assessment of her. Cabot's wife left pretty in her wake—before she seemed to remember that smiling was definitely not lawyerly.

  "Now you whisper?" she asked quietly. "Had you done that before, we wouldn't be risking a contempt-of-court citation." She addressed the judge politely on his behalf. "Your Honor, my client wishes to apologize for his outburst, and assure the court that it will not be repeated."

  The judge nodded. "The defendant will stand for the reading of the charge."

  This time he needed no prodding from the woman beside him. He stood and stared down at the plain dark-blue hat beneath which was hidden the fledgling, and wondered idly what the austere fedora would look like atop his sister-in-law's small head.

  "In the matter of the State of California versus Ashford Warren Whittier. Defendant is charged with the following crimes in connection with a fire occurring at one-thirty a.m. on the morning of February ninth, 1888." The clerk stopped to cough and clear his throat. Ash wondered if he did that regularly just for the dramatic effect. It was surely working in this case. "One count of arson in the first degree; one count of arson with the intent to commit insurance fraud, and three counts of murder in the first degree subject to the felony-murder provisions of the State of California—"

  "What?" Ash dragged his gaze from the clerk to the man sitting smugly on the other side of the aisle. In the benches behind them, people gasped. The hum of the crowd grew so loud, he could hardly hear himself ask, "Murder? Are you crazy?"

  "Murder?" Judge Hammerman repeated, pounding his gavel and demanding silence. The judge made no effort to hide the shock that registered blatantly on his face. "I thought this was a simple case of business gone bad. Nowhere in the papers is there..." He shuffled the papers before him, sifting through them haphazardly and glancing toward the back of the room. "Get Whittier the hell in here," he said to the guard standing at the rear door. "I don't care what he's doing next door."

  "Your Honor," Charlotte began.

  "Sit down, Charlotte. This is a serious matter, not one of your silly little cases. I won't have some woman fainting in my courtroom. Especially not when she's Cabot Whittier's wife!"

  Ash looked down at his sister-in-law. She looked a lot closer to exploding than she did to fainting.

  But obediently, she sat, her fists clenched tightly enough to turn coal into diamonds.

  Behind him people spoke out of turn and shouted questions.

  In front of him the judge banged his gavel while the clerk called for order.

  And inside him his stomach turned sour and breakfast teased his tonsils.

  After what seemed to Ash like a very long while—but not so long as to produce his brother in the courtroom— Judge Hammerman shook a chubby finger at the district attorney and grimaced. "What in hell is this all about, Brent? There's no mention of murder in these papers. You can't just—"

  "Your Honor," the district attorney said, approaching the bench somewhat cautiously, "page four of the indictment specifically begs leave to amend the charges should person or persons be discovered to have been injured or annihilated by said conflagration."

  "And I take it that there was a body found?"

  "Three, Your Honor."

  "Whose?"

  The attorney turned and looked at Ash, his eyebrows coming down until they melded with the frames of his glasses. "Burned beyond recognition." Ash sat down heavily in his seat. No one ordered him to come to his feet again. "According to the coroner, probably a woman, and two small children."

  Ash put his face in his hands, and fought the nausea that threatened to embarrass him.

  "The doctor thinks they might have jumped to their deaths down the lift shaft."

  Ash felt Charlotte's hand on his shoulder, warm even through his jacket, and surprisingly strong.

  "Then the charge stands as murder in the first degree," the judge agreed. "Where the hell is Cabot Whittier?"

  "Your Honor, if it please the court, we're ready to proceed with the preliminary examination," Charlotte said. "And we ask that any and all witness be produced so that—"

  "Open the damn door!" Cabot's voice was the one thing that hadn't changed in all the years. It still sliced through Ash like a fencer's foil—clean, neat, and deadly.

  While the clerk hurried to open the double doors at the back of the courtroom, Charlotte reached down for her hat, placed it in the little metal rack beneath her seat, and silently closed the satchel that sat open between them. She looked at Ash blankly, innocently, as if she had no knowledge of any baby bird at all, or of the reaction Cabot would have had upon finding it in the courtroom. And quite as if she dared him to suppose otherwise.

  "Your Honor," Cabot said from the back of the room, as if he'd been in the court from the very beginning. Ash sensed the movement behind him, knew that everyone had turned to watch his brother's rather dramatic entrance.

  Everyone, that was, but Ashford Whittier. He kept his eyes on a point just above the judge's head and listened to the slow sound of rubber wheels turning against the polished wooden floor.

  Once again he was out on some goddamn precipice and his big brother Cabot was coming to save him. The last time it had cost Cabot the use of his legs.

  Ash wondered what it was going to cost him this time.

  ***

  He was doing it again
, Charlotte thought testily. What had been the point of all the coaching, the teaching, the studying to be admitted to the bar, if he was going to rush in like some white knight every time she faced a challenge in court? Oh, he was perfectly content to let her flounder when it came to representing her indigent clients, the ones who could only pay her in freshly laid eggs or cords of chopped firewood, but let it be a matter of any interest to him...

  A tiny tsk sound escaped her lips. Of course this was of interest to him. It was his own brother, for heaven's sake. She slid her chair closer to Ashford's and nudged him to move farther still to make room for Cabot's wheelchair at the defense table. Cabot's manservant, Arthur, with him since the day he'd been placed in his invalid's chair, pushed the wood-and-cane chair up the aisle slowly, as he'd no doubt been instructed to before the doors had ever opened.

  Sometimes she wondered if Cabot wasn't more actor than lawyer; the way he used the area in front of the jury box as a stage; the way he paused, sighed, shook his head. His voice, too, was a well-honed tool. He could shout without raising the volume of it at all. He could whisper and be heard in the last row.

  Now he sat in front of the prosecution's table, shaking his head as though he were thoroughly disappointed with the district attorney.

  "Without me here, Brent?" he asked. "Springing a murder charge on an unsuspecting woman whose bailiwick consists largely of apple-stealing urchins and women whose drunken husbands attempt liberties that liquor tends to nullify? I'd thought better of you than that."

  Charlotte's wedding band dug into her fingers as she balled the fists in her lap. The ragged thumbnail on her left hand nearly broke the skin of her right. The ends, Charlotte... he would no doubt say once they were back home, raising his palms while he waited for her to conclude his statement with justify the means.

  "The facts are the facts," Brent said, straightening his lapels, as if that could give him back the dignity Cabot had clearly stolen from him. "And the charge is murder."

  Cabot waved his hand in the air as if the charges were merely so much smoke and could be dismissed as easily. Charlotte wished that it were so. Three people dead! And two of them children. She rubbed at the corner of her eye, a gesture that didn't go unnoticed by her husband.

  "Proud of yourself, Mr. District Attorney?" he asked, handing Charlotte his hanky with more show than concern, and letting the courtroom suppose her so distressed by the sudden turn of events that it had brought her to tears. If there was a trick he didn't use, she wasn't aware of it. And the fact that they involved her every now and then never stopped him, not even after she'd made it clear, damn clear, he'd said, chuckling at her frustration, how much it irritated her.

  Times like this, she wished he had feeling in his legs just so that she could give him a good swift kick in the shins.

  "Charlotte?" Judge Hammerman asked solicitously. "You all right?"

  "Of course I'm—" she began, only to be interrupted by one of Cabot's convenient coughing fits. She refused to look at him, knowing full well that he was trying to catch her eye. Time, he was telegraphing her. They needed some time. "Your Honor," she asked, "if I might just go down the hall for a moment?"

  "Again?" Brent said, then clapped his hand over his mouth and turned three shades of red. "The prosecution has no objection," he added quickly.

  "I'm relieved," Cabot said, obviously amused by his own choice of words.

  As she came to her feet, her brother-in-law gently lifted her alligator bag and offered it to her. "Need this?" he whispered, raising one eyebrow in question.

  Was he taunting her? Could the man have so little sense of self-preservation? He antagonized his brother at nearly every visit, and now he was alienating her. Who did he think was going to do the work involved in getting him off on a murder charge? A chill ran up her arms as she thought of the babies killed in the fire. Good glory! Was that really a tear? She hadn't cried in so very long.

  Lawyers don't cry, Charlotte, Cabot had counseled her, shaking his head at her in disappointment when she'd broken down after losing her first case. They file appeals, they serve writs, they submit memorandums of law and affidavits in support. They don't crawl off in a corner and bawl.

  Of course, he was right. She had a whole sex to vindicate. She was paving the way for her sisters (in the figurative sense), her daughters (again, symbolically speaking), the young women of generations to come. And every sign of weakness was a giant step backward not just for her, but for them all. At first she'd hidden herself in the closet to cry, but Cabot had heard her through the wall. Then she'd moved her tears to the cupola's high room. Finally she'd managed to move them out of her life altogether.

  Pacing in the ladies' room, she gave Cabot five minutes. It wasn't as if any amount of time would enable him to pull a rabbit out of his hat—not even for his brother. Oh, in the long run they'd clear him—Cabot always saw to it that the justice system worked—but the plan to keep him out on bail was surely burned in the bottom of the pot.

  How would they ever tell Kathryn that instead of sitting down to the delicious meal of salmi de perdreaux she had planned, her son would be feasting on greasy fried chicken and bread and water in the county jail until his trial? Kathryn's younger son seemed too big to cage, and much too fine.

  Well, Kathryn was strong. Hadn't she supported Charlotte fully in her quest for recognition, helped her to conquer the weaknesses that kept her separate from her male colleagues, and advised her on everything from her boots to her bun?

  And now Kathryn would be called upon to practice what she preached.

  "Three people," Brent was saying when she returned to the courtroom. Naturally they hadn't waited for her. She was only the attorney of record. A formality with which men like Judge Hammerman and her husband had no problem dispensing. "Not vagrants. People."

  "Uh, uh, uh," Cabot said, waving one finger back and forth to show Brent the error of his ways. "Not people. Vagrants."

  Hurriedly she took her seat, whispering for her brother-in-law to explain what she had missed.

  "Someone's killed three people," Ash said quietly, his voice cracking. "One just a baby. And he's—"

  "My point is that under the law, if there were occupants of the warehouse at the time of the fire, which for our purposes we shall call 'nighttime'—that period referred to in the penal code as the time between sunset and sunrise—they were not 'lodgers,' a category of protected occupants which constitute an 'inhabited building'; but rather 'vagrants,' unlawfully occupying, or more specifically trespassing, at said time and therefore not entitled to the protection of the law."

  "They're still dead," Brent said dryly, removing his glasses and tossing them carelessly on the table as he rubbed at his eyes.

  "Dead, yes," Cabot said, wheeling himself around in a wide circle until he faced Judge Hammerman. "But murdered? No. This is a case of arson. If that. For all we know, those vagrants were responsible for the fire. Trying to keep warm on a cold night with no thought to the public safety—"

  "This is California, not Siberia," Brent said. "Your Honor, please!"

  But Charlotte could tell from the way Judge Hammerman was lapping up every word Cabot was saying that, at the very least, Ash Whittier would be released to his older brother's custody.

  "Surely the charge of murder seems excessive," the judge argued on Cabot's behalf. "There is certainly not the required malice aforethought here. And while death could possibly have been the result of arson, which would certainly make it fall within the purview of a felony, I think manslaughter is the best you could hope for, Brent, considering that the vagrants were likely to be foreigners."

  Beside her, Ash threw up his hands. "Are they less dead if they're not citizens?" he asked her under his breath. "If they made my roof theirs, then they weren't people?"

  "I'll go for manslaughter," Brent agreed, while Charlotte studied the anguish on her brother-in-law's face. It was a nice face, too, weathered by his trips at sea, burned by the sun of exotic ports an
d crisscrossed with smile lines by his eyes and his lips. "And arson in the first degree with intent to commit insurance fraud."

  On the pad in front of him Ash set to doodling with a pencil. A lefty, his hand curled around his work, hiding what he drew and no doubt smudging it. "Sure you don't want to add that I was toasting them to eat for breakfast? Or that I torched the Piedmont Springs Hotel while I was still away in Argentina?" Ash asked the DA.

  Charlotte clapped her hand over her mouth while Cabot glared at his brother. "My client apologizes to the court, Your Honor."

  "Again," Brent added.

  "Again?" Cabot asked, raising an eyebrow at Charlotte as if she had any more control over his brother's behavior than he did.

  "Your Honor," Charlotte said, coming to her feet, "Mr. Whittier arrived last night from a six-month sail in connection with his business. After only a few hours' sleep he was arrested on his boat, brought to the mainland, and interrogated extensively without benefit of food or sleep. He is tired, his nerves are frayed. I beg the court's indulgence on his behalf."

  "You left out the part about being told his business was well into the red because the coffee beans he'd bought on the last trip were rotten and couldn't be sold. That surely didn't soothe your client's nerves."

  Only Charlotte Whittier could sense the change in Cabot. Five years of marriage had taught her the subtle signs that others missed. Two fingers traced the spokes of his chair wheel. He sucked for a moment on the corner of his mustache.

  "And tired? Not surprising after the knock-down-drag-out fight he had with his partner, Mr. Greenbough, over the receipts," Brent added, gesturing toward the judge as if he'd made his case.

  Idiot. He ought to know better than to show a single card to Cabot Whittier, never mind his whole hand.

  "My client admits to being tired and unnerved," Cabot said. "Within hours of his arrival he learned that his warehouse had been burned to the ground, then was accused of the crime, arrested, and deprived of sleep. Now he learns that deaths occurred on his premises. He apologizes for any thoughtless statements arising from that condition."