“It’ll be a Christmas verdict,” strangers kept assuring Floyd Calhoun, meaning that the state of New Jersey was going to give him his son back for Christmas. Floyd looked grateful, yet not believing.
The jury had been out since noon. It was now six P.M. By the time the jury got back from dinner it would be eight o’clock. By ten the judge would send them back to their hotel. The possibility of acquittal appeared to be growing by the hour.
Floyd Calhoun was not a man who danced easily or lightly. In his upbringing, dancing had been sinful. Yet, in the restaurant, before the jury had come in, Floyd rose quietly from the table and began dancing, to a jukebox’s tune, solemnly, with himself:
Night and day
the juke box sang,
You are the one …
It was slow, heavy-footed old man’s dance,
Only you beneath the moon
And under the sun …
Floyd was five inches taller than his son and forty pounds heavier. In all his seventy years he had had nothing to dance about. Now he had.
And he danced his solemn joy out about the room, his eyes closed and hands extended, palms turned upward as if accepting some divine gift.
Nobody laughed at the old man. Everyone caught his immense dignity. It was a dance that might have been named: Dance of an old man’s joy upon the release from prison of his son.
He returned to his table and sat down as though unaware that he had done anything unusual, or even that he had been watched, in hushed astonishment, by everyone in the room.
“I had a strange dream once,” he told Barney Kerrigan, “during Ruby’s first trial. I dreamed I was an American soldier. I was in uniform and I had a gun. We were firing at some enemy. The enemy kept firing at us.
“We were fighting across a plain. I put my gun down and started walking toward the enemy lines. Who the enemy was I have no idea.
“‘Don’t harm a hair of his head,’ I heard an enemy officer command, and the firing stopped. I reached the enemy lines.
“‘What are you doing here?’ the same officer’s voice asked me, ‘Why did you leave your own lines?’
“‘I don’t belong there anymore,’ was all I was able to tell him.
“‘Lie in the ditch,’ the voice commanded me. I lay down in a shallow trench. The firing began again over my head. Again the firing stopped.
“‘Go back to your own lines,’ the enemy officer’s voice ordered me. Behind me his voice repeated, ‘Don’t harm a hair of his head.’
“‘They aren’t going to electrocute Ruby,’ I told my wife when I woke up, ‘he’s going to come home in time. I don’t know when. In time.’”
Wooden barriers, the kind used to block off streets, had been set up in the lobby. Twenty-two Hudson County sheriffs officers circled the inside of the courtroom.
When the jury filed in they seemed to be walking on eggs, eyes downcast.
Calhoun rose to face them slowly.
A short, stout matron of sixty, the jury forewoman, rose and read the jury’s verdict in a voice only just audible:
“Ruby Calhoun: for the murder of Donald Leonard, we find you guilty as charged.
“Ruby Calhoun: for the murder of Nicholas Vincio, we find you guilty as charged.
“Ruby Calhoun: for the murder of Helen Shane, we find you guilty as charged.”
For one long moment there was nothing, nothing at all.
Just a group of people, in seats, looking at a smaller group in the jury box.
Then a small crippled wind, like a wind off some old half-sunken grave, began limping soundlessly about the courtroom. A young white girl began sobbing hysterically and a matron cautioned her to control herself. A black woman, beside the girl, put an arm about her. The girl regained control yet continued weeping softly.
Max Epstein rose to ask the judge to take his client’s excellent prison record into consideration when resentencing him. He then asked whether sentencing could be postponed long enough to let Calhoun spend Christmas with his family; but the judge shook his head, No.
Somebody leaned across the rail dividing the courtroom and handed Calhoun a Christmas stocking, red and white, filled with nobody knew what.
Then he stood, straight and expressionless, while cops took the ridiculous Christmas stocking from him and began stripping him of his personal possessions publicly. Everybody stared helplessly and reluctantly at this demonstration of the state reducing a man to a number.
Floyd Calhoun handed him a couple of bills as the police turned the number around and marched it out.
Judge Oritano congratulated the jury upon the “trauma,” as he termed it, that they had endured. He congratulated them also upon voting their consciences. He was proud of them, individually and as a group.
“We’ve come a long way in ten years in race relations in this town,” Humphrey Scott assured the press. “We didn’t try for an all-white jury. We had three blacks who didn’t vote their color. People are proud here of the fact that black and white have now come to trust one another in Jersey City. The celebrities never bothered to acquire the facts. And it’s going to be a cold day in hell,” he added with his voice rising, “before Madison Avenue hucksters try to take down an honest cop again.”
“Another kangaroo court,” was how Floyd Calhoun saw it, and added bitterly. “You can’t fight them on their grounds.” He was, obviously, not among those blacks, observed by the state’s attorney, who had come, through Calhoun’s trial, to love and trust all whites.
“Iello,” Scott continued, “was just part of the case. The defense could have expressed reasonable doubt without attacking the police. They could have said certain officers had been mistaken instead of charging them with conspiracy to frame a suspect. The American jury system, to my judgment, is the greatest instrument of justice in creation. The contest between the Madison Avenue hustlers and the American jury system was no contest.”
“After twenty-seven months of being castigated and maligned by the New York media,” Vincent de Vivani agreed, “it is indeed a grand relief to be absolved by our jury system.”
“Of course I feel bad, very bad,” Max Epstein acknowledged. “It doesn’t look like anything in America has changed. It is still too easy to make people feel that blacks will kill whites for race. Apparently the jury didn’t hear it the way we heard it. It was numbed by Iello’s lies. It accepted a perjuror’s word even though the man himself admitted to have lied, under oath, at every opportunity given him.”
“It’s like walking around in a circular tunnel, around and around,” was Calhoun’s reaction. You think you’ve come to the end and you find yourself right back where you started.”
“He wanted a new trial and a new trial was what he got,” was how the governor let it be known that he would no longer consider Calhoun for clemency.
Security at the New Jersey state prison is both too loose and too tight. When Kerrigan entered the main gate, a guard asked him casually, “You got a gun or knife?” He could have been holding two grenades, five shivs and a police special, but he said No and passed on.
There were half a dozen women and children in the visitors’ room waiting to see husbands, brothers or sons. One guard was supervising; he had one ear bent above a small transistor. Kerrigan got tired of waiting, went to the door and found it locked.
Locked! The women smiled knowingly; they’d known it had been locked. Kerrigan thought: What do you know, I’m doing time on an unspecified charge.
He went to the soft-drink machine and put in a quarter. No drink. The quarter was returned. He repeated it in another slot. The quarter came back. On his third try there was no drink and the quarter was not returned. He turned to the guard, a burly young buck with a beard.
“I lost two bits in the machine,” Kerrigan told him.
The guard continued to lean across the thin, faint music but made no reply. No sign he had understood. Kerrigan repeated the information.
No reply and no expression. The man wasn�
�t, apparently, deaf. Kerrigan came up closer and repeated himself, “I lost two bits in the machine.”
Kerrigan saw the women smiling and understood at last. He was telling Kerrigan that the machine was no business of his, the guard’s. He was telling him that no man, woman or child was any business of his. His business, the man was telling Kerrigan, was with himself, and with himself alone. And that was his only business. He was never going to get involved, he was determined, with anything, or anybody, for any reason, outside of himself. Living was a matter of keeping yourself shut up tight within yourself.
Kerrigan had observed many people playing it safe. But this safe? Of walking around dead years before the funeral?
Kerrigan turned away from the machine that had stolen his quarter with the realization that these dummy-uppers, wearing the uniforms of security guards, were as fully prisoners of the establishment as were the prisoners.
He was carrying a book and also a magazine report on the second trial he wanted to give Calhoun. When the visitors’ door was unlocked he told the clerk at the visitors’ window, “I’d like to leave these for Calhoun.”
“You can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“Can’t.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Might I ask why not?”
“Because what you have to do with books is mail them.”
“I see. What about this?”
Kerrigan showed him the magazine. Consultation was now required.
A decision was at last handed down.
“Yes. You can take it. You can show it to Calhoun. Calhoun can read it in front of you. But he can’t keep it to read by himself.”
“I’ll mail it with the book.”
Kerrigan was then escorted to a dining room where guards were being served lunch in cafeteria style. A restaurant-sized coffee urn stood beside their table, with cream, sugar and paper cups at hand.
“Do you mind,” Kerrigan asked courteously, “if I help myself to the coffee?”
“No,” a guard told him firmly, “you can’t.”
“Can’t?”
“Can’t.”
“Might I ask why not?”
“Because the coffee is just for security guards,” one explained.
“If I pay for it, can I have a cup?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Water,” one of them told Kerrigan.
“Water what?”
“You can have water. That’s all.”
Kerrigan helped himself to a cup of water, shaking his head sadly. He couldn’t quite believe that any one group of men could get this tight up.
Kerrigan had read that Calhoun was now living, without contact with either prisoners or guards, in a small one-man cell, and living by night. He had become estranged from his wife and daughter. They no longer visited him. Nor did any of the media celebrities who had once borne witness for him. He subsisted on canned foods, brought to him once a month by some devoted fan, so he no longer had to leave his cell.
He was waiting, looking owlish, when Kerrigan returned from the water cooler. Kerrigan filled him in on the dummy-uppers but Calhoun didn’t think it funny. He didn’t laugh.
“I live with that, Kerrigan.” He explained, “They’re crazy as Dick’s hatband. This is an insane asylum where the patients have taken over the administration. Prisoners, after all, are forced to live here. The guards prefer spending their lives between walls. Who is crazier? If every prisoner were set free tomorrow, there would be guards who would want to remain. They would be afraid of the risks they would have to take in the outside world. It’s why we don’t call the P.B.A. the Police Benefit Association. We call it the League of Frightened Men.”
Losing his second trial had left Calhoun undismayed, Kerrigan perceived. The appeal he now planned to file would be upon the contention that Iello had disqualified himself, as a witness, before the trial.
His problem was money. The trial transcripts, which the defense would have to have to write the appeal, cost ten thousand dollars. Calhoun didn’t own a nickel. Every dollar contributed to his defense had been appropriated by Adeline Kelsey.
“She must have cleared a hundred thousand,” Calhoun conjectured, yet without apparent bitterness. He’d declared himself indigent in hope of having the county put up the ten thousand for the transcripts.
“For sure, Iello didn’t do you much good,” Kerrigan acknowledged, “and Epstein looked like he was patterning himself after a TV soap opera. But the who lost you case was yourself.”
“How?”
“Because, after nearly ten years of proclaiming your innocence, you fail to take the stand and tell the jury, ‘I never shot those people in the Melody Bar and Grill.’ Had you done so, it may well have made all the difference. Whose idea was it not to testily? Yours? Or Epstein’s?”
“Epstein begged me to take the stand. I refused.”
“I don’t understand you, Ruby.”
“They had witnesses backed up, for one thing and another, for two decades back. They would have hit me with everything.”
“So let them hit you with everything. Then you turn to the jury, admitting all charges, and tell them, I am not the man who should be standing trial. The fact is, Calhoun, I can’t understand how you could not take the stand. When you think of the people who have borne witness for you, who have invested belief in you, you had no choice except to bear witness for yourself.”
Calhoun merely sat studying Kerrigan.
“Look at the position you put me in,” Kerrigan added. “Scott wanted me on the defensive, and that was where I was. ‘Where are receipts for the money you handled for Calhoun? Was this recorded on your income tax, Mr. Kerrigan?’ He put me into the light of a man seeking money and personal glory and nothing more. If you had taken the stand, you could have given me support, but you didn’t. You could have explained that Kerrigan handled your money for you because you had nobody else you could trust. But you didn’t. You sat there while Scott kicked my ass, threatened me with subpoenas. I just don’t understand you, Ruby.”
Calhoun studied Kerrigan a long moment.
“If I had to do it all over again,” he finally decided, “I’d do it the same way.”
Kerrigan looked like he could not believe what he had just heard.
“You would do it the same way,” he repeated, trying to grasp it, “and you’re now eligible for parole in nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. And you would do it the same way?”
Calhoun looked away as though Kerrigan were no longer there.
“Lord,” Kerrigan heard him say as he rose, as though he were praying. “Lord, I don’t ask you to move mountains. Just give me the strength to climb this one.”
Kerrigan left without shaking hands.
The madman stood naked before his window bars, wondering at the midnight moon.
He did not see the midnight moon, no more than the moon saw him. He saw an image of a black girl’s face, eyes wide but pupils rolling.
His hair had turned snow white.
Now a man in his forties, yet his face had become that of one in his twenties. No lines of anxiety across his forehead, nor lines of worry about the mouth.
His mouth, indeed, was held in a childlike half-smile, lips partly parted. The eyes no longer held the shadow of depression.
There was nothing left to depress.
He returned to his bed, switched on his light and sat looking, for a long while, at the calendar on his wall. The days had been marked off, day by day, above the colored photograph of a brown cow in a green field.
Finally, having ascertained the date beyond all doubt, he turned off the light, and slept.
Slept, yet had no dreams.
In the morning he washed and dressed himself carefully, then sat in his armchair in his stocking-feet, waiting for his attendant.
When the attendant arrived he greeted Red with a hearty, “Good morning, Edward!”
I
f spoken to harshly, tears might come into Red’s eyes. If spoken to softly, he smiled faintly.
The attendant waited for him to put on his tennis shoes, which took a couple of minutes more than it would have taken another man, because the knots had to be tied so carefully. Then Red stood up and they walked slowly toward the Coffee Cup, a small building in which vending machines stood against the walls, where paperback books, newspapers and magazines were sold, and where there were tables and chairs for patients.
The attendant brought Red a copy of the New York Times. Red scrutinized the date to be sure it was not yesterday’s edition. With the paper folded beneath his arm, he stood before the coffee machine with the attendant beside him.
There was black coffee with sugar, black without, coffee with cream but no sugar and coffee with cream and sugar. The attendant always gave Red time to choose. He was paid by Hardee to give small services, beyond those of his regular duties, to Red. He waited now for Red to point to his choice. Then he put in the coin, Red picked up his cup, his paper still under his arm, and moved to an empty table. If no table were empty he would drink standing against the wall. If he was joined by another patient, he would rise slowly, say “excuse me” and finish his coffee standing.
Once, seeing a group of people approaching, he drew to one side and waited for them to pass.
“What’s the matter, Edward?”
“They might hurt me.”
“Nobody is going to hurt you.”
“If they want to, they can.”
The attendant would leave him at the Coffee Cup for half an hour, while he tended to other patients. Red preferred the table under the radio and the attendant knew the station Red preferred. It was a local station that played old-time popular tunes all day. No rock and no classic. Sometimes Red would hum to the music above him:
Nights are long since you went away
My buddy
My buddy.
Or:
Make my bed and light the light
I’ll arrive late tonight…
One morning a little aging man, in his late sixties, approached Red’s table. He was dressed neatly in a white shirt, dark bow tie, dark trousers carefully creased, but without socks or shoes. Red started to rise when the old man sat down, but the old man stayed him, with a sly expression.
The Devil's Stocking Page 31