Even as I tried to convince myself I am already a dead man.
Of course, capital punishment was not a possibility. The charge of murder in the first degree had been reserved in New York State for cases involving the killing of police officers or prison guards, but it was recently declared unconstitutional. Second-degree murder, as Ottinger explained, was a fairly general category, with which prosecutors might do as they wished; it yielded to three subcategories, which blurred and overlapped—“intentional” murder, “felony” murder, and “depraved indifference to human life.” Such homicides ran the gamut from coolly premeditated gangland murders to crimes of passion to acts of self-defense, overzealously prosecuted. And there were those “murders” that were, at best, types of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide.
“If I am convicted,” Ian said, “what would be my sentence, and where?”
Ottinger winced. “You aren’t going to be convicted, Ian. Lederer’s case is so weak, I’m reasonably sure Harmon might dismiss it. I intend to—”
“Yes, of course,” Ian said, “but if he doesn’t, and if there is a trial, and if—?”
“It’s impossible to say. The charges will probably be dropped to manslaughter-one or -two, for one thing. And there is the fourth degree of homicide, ‘criminally negligent.’ Which, at the discretion of the judge, could mean probation and no prison sentence at all. You have no prior record, your character witnesses will be impressive, your professional standing is extraordinary . . . and so forth. When you take the witness stand—”
“I’m not going to take the witness stand,” Ian said.
Ottinger very carefully did not look at him. “That is your prerogative, of course.”
“I have nothing to say in my ‘defense.’ It was an accident, and I don’t remember its details. It was not my fault, nor was it Glynnis’s fault, no one can prove it was not an accident, and I have nothing more to say.” Ian paused. His voice had become high-pitched and defiant.
“As you like, Ian.”
“Except for me, Glynnis would be alive today. I know that, and you know that; it is the single incontestable fact.”
“Yes, perhaps. But—”
“If it had not been for me, for the very fact of me, not even taking into account any of my actions,” Ian said, “my wife would be alive today.”
“Perhaps. But you must not say such things.”
“I will say such things,” Ian said excitedly, “as I want to say. And I will not say such things as I do not want to say.”
Again Ottinger spoke carefully, and tactfully. “You must understand, Ian, that the law is incapable of calibrating anything so subtle as metaphysical distinctions. It tries to measure intent, but it cannot measure what one might call the swerve, or the inclination, of the soul. . . . If you retain me as your defense attorney you will have to allow me to defend you as if I were defending—which indeed I am—an action, and not, in the most abstract terms, a man. Do you understand?”
Ian shrugged impatiently. “I’m not sure I want to understand.”
“The law under which we operate, and cooperate, is adversarial in structure, as you know. It’s a game of a kind, but unlike most games its boundaries are somewhat hazy. For instance, if the jury, however improbably, were to vote for conviction—”
“Yes, if the jury were to vote for conviction?”
“We would naturally appeal to the state supreme court. And there, of course, the game is radically altered: no jurors, for one thing; no emotion, or not much. I have had good luck,” Ottinger said modestly, or was it in fact reluctantly—an acknowledgment of past success being simultaneously, in this instance, an acknowledgment of past failure—“with the state supreme court as it’s presently constituted. But I won’t go into that now. The point is—”
“But if I am convicted,” Ian interrupted, “and if the supreme court upholds the conviction, what then? How long might I be sentenced to prison, and where?”
Ottinger said, almost irritably—how the man disliked being driven into a corner!—“It’s difficult to answer, since sentencing is at the discretion of the judge. Murder-two, with which you’re charged, carries with it a mandatory minimum of fifteen years; the maximum is twenty-five years of life. By minimum I mean that you would serve fifteen years before being eligible for parole.”
“Fifteen years. That doesn’t seem very long.”
Ottinger stared at Ian as if he had said something not only mad but incomprehensible. He said, “In one of our state prison facilities, for instance at Sing Sing, a man like you—given your background, your profession, your temperament, your physical type, and, not least, the color of your skin—might discover that a single week is very long. A single day. A single hour. What is your field exactly? Demographics? It might be difficult to explain that to some of your fellow inmates.”
“They would not like me, would they,” Ian said slowly.
“They would not like you quite as you are accustomed to being liked.”
“As, perhaps, I have not deserved being liked.”
“That has nothing to do with the law,” Ottinger said. “Very few of us are liked, still less loved, to the degree we imagine we deserve. The point is, Ian, for the sake of everyone in your life, particularly, I’d think, for your daughter’s sake, you want to keep out of prison. Being physically humiliated, beaten, terrorized, sodomized, whatever, might have its theoretical appeal—”
“You think, then, it is only theory?”
“—but you are not a criminal in any reasonable sense of the word, and it’s ridiculous to acquiesce to charges that you are. Keep in mind that ‘Samuel S. Lederer’ is no principle of wrathful justice but a run-of-the-mill backwoods prosecutor who went to a third-rate law school, hides his envy of more successful men inside a pose of moral rectitude, and would railroad his own grandmother into prison if it could help his faltering career. If you don’t want to testify in your own behalf that is your decision; you can’t be forced, and I won’t try to coerce you, though I should say it’s possible, in mid-trial, when you hear some of the prosecution’s witnesses, you’ll be moved to change your mind.”
“I will never change my mind,” Ian said. His voice was flat, icily uninflected. “There is no power on earth that can make me change my mind.”
“Well. You make it a challenge, then,” Ottinger said, smiling, “to defend you.”
“Would you like me to find another attorney?”
“Of course not!” Ottinger said happily. “As I said, it’s a challenge. You are a challenge.”
“But if the trial drags on, if there’s an appeal,” Ian said thoughtfully, “there may be some problem about paying you. My finances are limited. My resources. With Bianca’s college tuition and bills, and if I am forced to resign from the Institute—”
“You are not going to be forced to resign from the Institute,” Ottinger said. “Put that thought out of your mind immediately.”
“—and I’m not going to sell the house, because, you know, it was always, from the first, Glynnis’s house; she loved it so, did so much to improve it, furnished it with such imagination, decorated it—well, you know. I would be killing her a second time if I sold the house . . . and for such a petty expediency, defending myself.” Ian paused, looking at his hands. He spoke in the same flat dull dead voice, but his hands had begun to tremble. “I won’t do it.”
“Of course not,” Ottinger said.
“I won’t do it. She’s so much more there, in the house, than she is at the cemetery . . . that’s the main thing.”
“You won’t have to sell the house.”
“Even as I know it’s ridiculous to talk like that, as if a dead person ‘were’ anywhere at all, except in the memories of the living. Like the illustrious dead, our great mentors and ancestors—our fathers, you might say, if not, strictly speaking, our fathers. . . .” He paused; touched the back of a hand to his forehead, as if confused. “Still the house may, in time, be sold anyway,” he said,
“as my estate. If something happens to me, and Bianca inherits. Bianca will inherit, won’t she, even if she is not yet twenty-one?”
“Don’t think about the house, please,” Ottinger said.
“You would help Bianca, wouldn’t you, if something happened to me?”
“Of course,” Ottinger said, managing, still, to smile, “but what are we talking about, exactly?”
Ian said, “The future.”
“It might be better for you to leave the future to me,” Ottinger said. “And not to think about the house, or your daughter, or going to prison, or—whatever. After all, you have indicated your faith in me, haven’t you?” Ottinger’s kindly, practical, eminently reasonable voice was so finely modulated as to suggest control achieved at some cost; he was regarding Ian as—was it Denis Grinnell, or Malcolm Oliver, or another of his friends?—had looked at him recently: a look of sympathy, pity, mild fear. Ian noticed for the first time a scattering of tiny scars around Ottinger’s eyes, near-invisible, like stitches in the skin: an expression of perpetual squinting, and perpetual and intense thought. Had he had an accident? Slammed his head through a pane of glass?
Ottinger talked as Ottinger so brilliantly, and not inexpensively, did; and Ian nodded, as if knowing himself rebuked, chastised. He saw that his attorney was, as usual, handsomely dressed, in a powder-gray sharkskin suit with a silk polka-dot tie and matching silk handkerchief in his lapel pocket, dark polished shoes, white shirt, cuff links, clean close-trimmed nails. Of course he was smoothly shaven and gave off a subtle astringent odor, the very fragrance of sincerity. Beside him, or, rather, facing him—they were in Ottinger’s inner office, a walnut-paneled and beautifully furnished room with a large disordered antique-looking desk behind which Ottinger sat erect and alert—Ian felt like a poor relation, an embarrassment: not yet shaven that day, or even showered, and dressed in clothes he’d pulled out of drawers and closets, groggy from another night’s uneasy sleep. He was coatless, tieless, in a shirt and trousers surely in need of laundering, rundown and entirely too comfortable “moccasins,” one frayed navy blue sock not quite the mate of the other. Help me, he thought.
Had Nick Ottinger been Glynnis’s lover?—improbable, yet not impossible; not even, if one thought hard about it, improbable. Adulterous affairs were a matter (Ian gathered) of propinquity and opportunity; you drove out, if you were a woman, with the intention of shopping at the A & P, and did in fact shop at the A & P, but after a deftly orchestrated hour or so with your lover—in his office perhaps, if his office was private, or reasonably so; or in (this, upon reflection, more practical, and certainly more decorous) a room rented for that purpose, a motel room perhaps, miles away, the farther away the better (except of course for the logistics of time: marital life is bound together by a perpetual logic of time), one of the new Holiday Inns, Ramada Inns, Hilton Inns, Sheratons. Or one of those cheap, sleazy, film noir motels, older, grittier, possibly more evocative of sexual excess, sexual shame. Ian could not have said, the thought being so fresh and consequently so unnerving, whether he preferred Nick Ottinger to Denis Grinnell as Glynnis’s lover: the one admittedly more stylish and attractive, the other frankly warmer, sweeter, more . . . fun. Did adulterous lovers have fun with each other’s bodies, as, it might be presumed, married lovers often did not? Married lovers with a history of knowing too much, and too intimately, about each other’s bodies? She’d scorned him for his impotence and of course it had been so, in his memory now, blurred as an underwater scene, decades of impotence, one after another episode of sexual failure and humiliation, the limp penis, the too-erect too-excitable too-quickly-ejaculating penis, so many ways of failing, like so many avenues of entropy, and so few of succeeding: a principle of the physical universe, as of civilization, that there was but one ideal standard of order beside which, falling away from which, all others were disorder. Ian tried to recall that year or two, so condensed in retrospect, when the Ottingers’ daughter Rachel had been a friend of Bianca’s, had drifted in and out of the McCulloughs’ house in a pattern of tides, like most of Bianca’s high school friends—H’lo, Mrs. McCullough; H’lo, Dr. McCullough!—pretty, smart, flirtatious, as brainy girls are flirtatious, all ironic nuances and ellipses, as difficult to interpret as a miniature poem of Emily Dickinson’s. With her father’s darkly bright eyes and his lawyerly interrogative manner, Rachel had been a favorite of Glynnis’s, if Ian remembered correctly: a contrast, if not a rebuke, to their own daughter’s less subtle style. Unless Ian had imagined it, he’d noticed the girl’s level gaze sometimes lingering on him . . . unless he had imagined it. Oddly, his memory of Rachel’s mother was less vivid, though the McCulloughs and the Ottingers, at one time new to Hazelton-on-Hudson, had been social acquaintances for a while: on the brink, one might have thought, of being friends. Each couple had entertained the other in their homes; for a while each had included the other in fairly small dinner parties; then, in obeisance to the law of tides of social life, of which Ian McCullough knew increasingly less with the passage of time, they had drifted apart. . . . Ian could not remember the last time he had been in the Ottingers’ house; could not remember, in fact, the house itself. He wondered if Nick Ottinger was more familiar with his own.
All this while Ottinger had been talking, in that voice—of Ottinger’s several voices—Ian thought teacherly, even avuncular: explaining to his client the differences, which seemed to Ian very difficult to grasp, between gradations of guilt, under the state statute. Why was “depraved indifference to human life” a murder-two charge instead of a manslaughter-one, or -two, or . . . Ian, who was not listening to much of this, interrupted—oddly, it must have seemed—to ask, “How is Stephanie these days? I don’t think I’ve seen her in a long time.”
“Stephanie? She’s fine.” Ottinger paused just long enough to allow Ian to know, as Ian perhaps did not quite know, that his question was both rude and inappropriate. “You may have heard,” he said, “we’ve been divorced for about two years.”
“No,” Ian said, surprised. “I hadn’t heard.”
Ottinger, staring at papers before him, on the desk, said, “Well—I might have mentioned it to you, in fact, a while back; but there’s no reason for you to remember.”
Ian said, awkwardly, “You and Stephanie always struck me as such a . . . well-matched couple. And your daughter. Rachel. She always struck me as . . .” But why was he speaking of these people as if they were no longer living? “Is Stephanie in Hazelton? Or—?”
“No. Neither my wife nor my daughter is in Hazelton at the present time.”
“I’m terribly sorry to hear it.”
“I’m sorry,” Ottinger said, coolly. “But, as you must know, these things happen.”
“These things,” Ian said sadly. “Or others.”
With the precision of a finely calibrated machine, Ottinger reverted to his subject, to the exact sentence Ian had interrupted; but, now, nerved up as he was, oppressed by a new heaviness, as of a thickening of the air itself, Ian could not listen at all. Divorced! So that was it! He began to see, with hallucinatory vividness, Nick Ottinger (the vigorous hairy muscle-legged Nick Ottinger of the squash court, the locker room, the shower) making love to Glynnis, in the McCulloughs’ very bedroom, luridly reflected by the several mirrors with which Glynnis had decorated the room. Their love affair would account for the atrophying of the McCulloughs’ and the Ottingers’ friendship; it would account for the Ottingers’ divorce.
Ian wondered if there was, hidden away inside Ottinger’s rather pretentiously impractical desk, in a folder at which no one but he was ever privileged to look, a sheaf of letters, cards, notes in Glynnis’s handwriting.
Though, being a lawyer, the man would have them locked away. In a safety deposit box, perhaps.
Or would he, being a lawyer, have destroyed them systematically. . . .
Ian said, rather bluntly, “I never quite understood, Nick, why the four of us—that is, Glynnis and me, and you and Stephanie—didn’t cont
inue to see one another, as we were doing at one time. It was always something of a riddle to me”—though in truth, over the years, he’d only given the Ottingers a thought, and that fleeting, when he encountered them at Hazelton parties or ran into Nick at the gym—“our drifting apart.”
“Well,” Ottinger said reluctantly, clearly annoyed, or alarmed, at the turn their conversation was taking, “—these things happen too.”
“Even our daughters, I think, aren’t as close as they once were?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Glynnis, I’m sure, was very fond of you. Of you and Stephanie. I really can’t understand—”
“Why don’t we talk about this another time?”
“Another time?”
“This isn’t, after all, the most felicitous time.”
Ottinger smiled, to lessen the sharpness with which he’d spoken.
“Because I’m paying you two hundred dollars an hour, is that it?” Ian said, smiling too. He thought, You bastard.
And then, with no warning, he began to cry; tears astonished him, spilling hot and stinging from his eyes. He leapt to his feet and hid his face in his hands. “Christ, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d better leave.”
Ottinger too was on his feet, as if outbursts of this sort, and his professional intervention, did not entirely surprise him. He said, “No. Don’t leave. Use my lavatory, Ian, until you feel better.”
So Ian used Ottinger’s lavatory: a white-tiled, rather too coldly air-conditioned little room, with a light switch that tripped a waspish rattling fan. He ran water, washed his face, could not stop crying, angrily, helplessly, thinking that Nick Ottinger was the logical man to have been Glynnis’s phantom lover, and that of course he had not been her lover; the idea was absurd. I am losing my mind, he thought. I must stop thinking of these things.
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