by D. W. Buffa
Darnell shook his head in scorn as he began to search the eyes of each juror in turn, searching, as it seemed, for some light of reason, some inner sense that they had a higher obligation than to serve up vengeance. He wanted them to feel all the remorse of the lynch mob that, caught in a ghastly revelry after it has just hung a man it knew must be guilty, learns that the real killer has just confessed. He stood there, staring them down, as if they ought, each of them, to feel ashamed.
“Now, let’s talk a little more about this,” he said as he moved closer. “Let’s be sure about things before we decide to convict a man for murder, especially when it is a young man who never lived a day of his life in this country and never could have known the requirements of our law. The prosecution tells you that none of this matters, that murder is murder, and that since Cain slew Abel everyone knows what murder is. The prosecution doesn’t tell you, though there was evidence in this trial to prove it, that in other places and in other times – and in our own country not that long ago – the killing of a newborn child – infanticide – was under certain circumstances not considered a crime and was even thought to be an obligation. This may strike our modern, more sensitive ears as nothing short of monstrous, a primitive custom no civilized people would tolerate, but it is a fact, and facts cannot be ignored. Adam – Lethe – lived among a people where there was no choice - when a child was born that could not live – but to let it die. Yes, I know, he isn’t charged with letting the child die – he isn’t charged with neglect –he’s charged with murder. But do you have any doubt that if he had let the child die, the prosecution wouldn’t have come after him for that? And if that had happened – if he had let the child die of natural causes – the prosecution might well have had a stronger case. They could at least have then argued that he had done nothing to stop a child’s suffering!”
Darnell stepped back from the jury box and looked across at Hillary Clark who stared right back. He seemed to draw a kind of strength from the depth of her disapproval.
“Would you really have preferred that the child die in torment, lingering for no purpose in awful, hateful, pain? There was no hope of recovery, nothing anyone could do. Has that kind of cruel indifference become the standard of civilized behavior?”
With smoldering, stiff-necked anger, Hillary Clark stared back a moment longer before she picked up a ball-point pen and, as if she had just remembered something, scratched a note. Darnell did not move. He stood there, as if in silent vigil for something lost, an older sensibility, a feeling for the tragic circumstances of other people’s lives.
“It’s no use, I suppose,” he went on, turning again to the jury, “asking what someone would do in a situation they will never have to face. But still, if we can’t put ourselves in Adam’s place, how can we know whether what he did wasn’t right? Because that is the question – the serious question – you have to ask, and if you can’t answer it, then despite what you’ve been told, the only decision you can make is to acquit, to find him not guilty on the ground that there wasn’t any decent choice.
“The prosecution repeatedly insists that this is simple murder, and that everyone knows what that means. But nothing is quite as simple as she would have you believe. Imagine for a moment that you’re a soldier in a war and that your best friend, the one person you know you can always count on, had just been shot and is nearly dead and there isn’t any way to save him. He lays there, writhing in horrible agony, begging you, his best friend, to put an end to it. What do you do? What would Ms. Clark do? – Let him suffer, die a thousand awful deaths before he finally dies? I don’t believe that and neither do you. But this is a child, not a soldier in a war – a child who hasn’t learned to talk, to put its suffering into words. The child didn’t ask to die. Is that the argument, to make a child suffer?
“But let’s be honest about more than this. The truth is that if Adam is guilty of the child’s murder, so must also be the mother. Remember what she said – Alethia, as remarkable a witness as I’ve ever seen – remember her confession, that she knew the child could not live, that the child had to die, and that what Adam did he did in part for her, to save her from a necessity that he was willing to face himself, to end the life of the only child they had. Ms. Clark didn’t much like what her own witness said, but do you remember what the witness said back? - That she felt sorry for anyone who could be that cruel.
“Why did she say that? Was it only because she understood that neither Ms. Clark nor anyone else Ms. Clark is likely to know will ever be confronted with the awful choice she had to make? Or was there something deeper, something about what she and Adam were raised to believe: that life has a meaning beyond itself and that whatever else that meaning might involve, preventing whatever cruelty and suffering you can is part of it. We know nothing about these people. We did not even know they existed until two short years ago. They’re different than the other islanders of the south pacific, a seeming race all unto themselves. Where did they come from? How long have they been there? Is it possible they’ve been in existence longer than we have - the descendants of some ancient people that time and history have forgotten - people who may once have been, as we are now, a dominant power in some other place on the globe? These are questions we cannot answer, questions that may forever go unsolved, as much a mystery as the question where we ourselves have come from, whether born perfect, the work of some all-knowing God, or something that just started millions of years ago in the mud, a creature only now beginning to understand the world in which he lives.
“It doesn’t matter that we have no answers. The questions are important. They remind us of our ignorance and the need for caution in our judgments.” Darnell stretched out his arm and pointed straight at Adam. “You’ve watched him sitting here from the first day you were summoned to the jury box, you listened to him testify. Do you believe for one minute that he would have done what he did if there had been any other choice, any other way to stop the suffering of the child he had with the woman he loved? Do you believe for one minute that what he feels for this girl, for Alethia, is anything like the incestuous perversion the prosecution insists it was? I don’t believe that and neither do you. They were living in perfect justice, the two of them, Adam and the girl, until we came along and, like the serpent in the garden, told them that everything they believed was wrong. There will be a day of reckoning for what we’ve done. Let us hope that nothing we decide here will make that reckoning even worse.”
Chapter Nineteen
“How long do you think the jury will be out?” asked Henry Hammersmith.
Sprawled in an overstuffed chair, Darnell peered into his scotch and soda, but he found nothing in the swirling amber liquid to help him read the future. He glanced up at Hammersmith, sitting with his wife on the sofa in the immense living room of their Russian Hill apartment. They looked so earnest, so eager to hear something that would give them hope that Adam might still be saved. Darnell felt a little like a swindler who has suddenly discovered his conscience. A physician, someone like Summer, could tell you with some degree of precision what the chances were that a patient would recover, but a lawyer whose case was now in the hands of a jury? One might as well look to a flight of birds to guess what the verdict might be.
“They could be out for hours, they could be out for days; there have been juries stayed out for weeks and still couldn’t come to any decision.”
“Yes, Bill, we understand that,” said Laura Hammersmith, in the warm, silky voice of a leader of taste and fashion. “But you’ve been doing this a long time. Surely you can make an educated guess.” Like many women who had always had money, she was a stranger to the idea that there were things that could not be controlled. “Adam isn’t guilty; surely it won’t take them too long to understand that there is only one decision they can make.”
Her husband rolled his eyes. He often treated her with impatience. When she was not wrong, she either failed to get to the point fast enough or did not quite express herself in
the way he would have preferred. They had been married so long they barely knew each other.
“She’s right, Bill – Adam isn’t guilty. How long can it take for them to realize that?” Still brooding over it, he got to his feet and took the glass from Darnell’s hand. “Here, let me get you another.”
“It’s almost time for dinner,” his wife reminded him, but he paid no attention to what she said. He filled the glass at the small bar at the far end of the room and brought it back. The worried look in his eyes vanished, and with a wine bottle in his hand he teased Summer, sitting in the chair next to Darnell, with how little she had had to drink.
“No, I’m fine,” she said, holding her long, tapered fingers over her glass. “Well, all right,” she said, relenting under his friendly, gentle pressure. “Just a little.”
“What do you think, Summer?” asked Laura Hammersmith. “You were there today, during closing arguments. Didn’t you think Bill was magnificent?”
While the two women talked about how well he had done, Darnell sipped on the scotch and soda. The Hammersmith’s co-op apartment, which occupied the top floor of one of the oldest buildings on Russian Hill, had a view of the Golden Gate and the headlands of Marin at one end of the bay, down to the Berkeley hills and the Bay Bridge at the other. There was a sense as you sat there that nothing could be better than this, that nothing could ever go wrong. When you looked out at all the lights than circled all around the dark black waters of the bay, you felt the same way you had that first time you had seen it, when you were very young and Saturday nights were still the best nights you ever had.
“I think the chances are not very good,” he said abruptly.
“What?” asked Henry, alarmed. “After what you did in there today? You were brilliant. The jury hung on every word.”
“They hung on every word of the prosecutor’s as well,” replied Darnell. “Maybe more so. I appreciate what you say, but you have to understand that the emotion of a closing argument doesn’t last. What happened when I finished, when I sat down? The judge took a brief recess and then, half an hour later, when the heat of the moment had passed, when everyone was all settled down, went about the business of giving the jury the instructions they’re supposed to follow during their deliberations. And besides – and this isn’t false modesty – in terms of closing arguments, Hillary Clark had the better of the exchange.”
“She didn’t – that isn’t true,” objected Summer, with both of the Hammersmith’s echoing their agreement.
“You’re too close – we’re all too close – to see it,” said Darnell, trying to explain. “If Adam had been tried on that island, tried to a jury made up of people who were brought up the same way – really tried to a jury of his peers – there wouldn’t be any question what the verdict would be. The only question would be why anyone would have thought to prosecute him for what he had done. But he wasn’t tried there, he was tried here, not to a jury that shared all his assumptions and understands him, but to a jury that is being asked to forget everything they have ever learned, everything they have ever believed – everything the only law they know tells them is right. When you cut through everything - all the evidence, all the questioning, all the arguments – that’s really what I’m asking them to do: ignore the law and decide on their own that this is a case where the law doesn’t work. There’s a chance they might do that, but I’d be lying if I said I thought that the chances were very good.”
“If he loses,” asked Laura Hammersmith after a long, depressing silence; “if they jury does convict him, you can appeal it, can’t you?”
The blind assurance that things could always be arranged, that she would never have to suffer any serious misfortune, had disappeared. There was now a pleading quality to her voice. Darnell did not have the heart to disappoint her.
“Yes, of course; we’ll certainly appeal. And you shouldn’t be too discouraged by what I said. I’ve been wrong before about what a jury was going to do. I’m just feeling a little let down. It happens sometimes at the end of a trial, before you know what the verdict is going to be – a sense that I could have done more.”
He looked at their worried faces and thought it remarkable, the effect that Adam had had. The Hammersmiths had long had the easy attitude of the comfortable upper classes that anyone charged with a crime must be guilty, and now both of them were so convinced of Adam’s innocence that all they could think about was what could be done to fight a conviction. No one thought much about fairness when it was just for people they did not know.
“Perhaps I’ve been too pessimistic,” he allowed as the maid came in to announce that dinner was ready. “At least the jury doesn’t have to decide between convicting him for murder and letting him go. The judge gave the instruction on lesser included offenses.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” asked Laura Hammersmith, intensely interested, as she brushed back a lock of the platinum hair that, until recent years, had drawn attention the moment she walked into a room.
“It means that if they think they have to convict him of something, they could find him guilty of manslaughter instead of murder. And that would mean,” he added, his voice vibrant with hope, the way it often was in court, “that he’d be given a suspended sentence and he and the girl could go back to the island where they belong.”
Saying it out loud made it seem more tangible, more real, than an abstract possibility in which he did not believe. Hearing it, and remembering the determined look in Evelyn Pierce’s eyes when she first advised them in chambers what she was going to do, Darnell began to feel much better. The color came back to his cheek, the bounce back into his step. He began to recall the words of his closing argument with something close to pride.
“Where is Adam, anyway?” asked Summer, as they sat down to dinner in the silver glow of a crystal chandelier. “Isn’t he joining us?”
“He went out about an hour ago,” explained Henry. “He walks for hours, often misses dinner. I didn’t think – especially today, with the case just gone to the jury - that I ought to insist. He seems to like to be alone, seeing everything he can. He has more curiosity, always asking questions about things, always -”
“He’s gone to see the girl,” said his wife abruptly. A strange, wistful smile, the look of love once remembered, flickered on her fine, cultured mouth. More than nostalgia, it was a kind of defiance, a protest against anyone who did not understand the importance, the value, of a passion that cared for nothing but itself. “He’s gone to see the girl. You thought he was out exploring the city, a tourist all alone? He’s gone to see the girl. That’s what he does every night, once he discovered where she was.”
Her husband was not quite sure whether he should believe her.
“And you know this how? Did he tell you that’s what he was doing?”
She took a delight in his confusion. Tossing her napkin on the table, she taunted him with the wisdom he did not have.
“What is it they say? Two things, really: A woman always knows when her husband is having an affair; but then, when the situation is reversed, the husband is always the last to know. No, he didn’t tell me, Henry; he didn’t have to. I know what that look in his eye means. I used to see it, years ago, when I first knew you. And just because I haven’t seen that look in quite a while doesn’t mean I wasn’t able to recognize it again, when I first starting seeing it on that young man’s face.”
“When you first started…? Probably right after they met together in my office,” said Darnell, certain it was true. “Of course she would have told him where she was staying. And once he knew that – you’re right – he couldn’t stay away.” He glanced across at Summer. “Well, good for them – All I knew was that they were keeping her at a small hotel on Sutter. They wouldn’t tell me which one.”
“You knew this,” said Henry Hammersmith to his wife, “and you didn’t tell me?”
“No, I didn’t tell you.”
“And may I ask why?”
“
I was afraid you’d feel an obligation to do something about it, try to stop it, or, if you couldn’t do that, tell the authorities.”
He threw up his hands in frustration.
“Tell the authorities? Why in the world would I do that?”
“You put up his bail, and you promised to make sure he complied with all the conditions of his release, one of which was that he not have any contact with the girl.”
“To hell with the money - and to hell with their conditions! He’s innocent, he ought to be able to spend time with his wife; and as far as I’m concerned the only people who have done anything wrong are the people who are trying to put him away. You really think I would…?”
For the first time in a long time she smiled at him the way she used to, when they were lovers instead of strangers.
Later that evening, after they had gone home, Summer asked Darnell what he really thought Adam’s chances were, but the truth was that Darnell did not know. The case was too unusual, too different, a case without precedent that, as he had kept telling everyone who would listen, should never have been brought to trial.
“We do a lot of things these days we shouldn’t do,” he confided to Summer as he sat next to her after she had crawled into bed. She tugged at his sleeve, a gentle reminder that he needed to get some rest. “I will,” he promised. “In a little while; there are too many things going through my mind right now.”
“About the trial? You’ve done everything you can. It’s up to the jury now. All you can do is wait.”