by Gerry Spence
Judgment.
He needed judgment. Judgment was his business. He couldn’t shoot at every moving target out there—Sewell, the sheriff, the damn newspaper, and, yes, the voters.
He needed to talk to Betsy. Where was she?
He thought about putting something on the stove for supper, but Betsy didn’t want him near the stove. When the phone rang, he recognized the voice right off. “Judge Murray, I know I shouldn’t be calling you, but I have to talk to you.”
“You can’t talk to me, Lillian,” he said, and hung up.
It was as if the woman he’d known and loved all these years had become a witch. Yet he understood her fear, her defenselessness, and, yes, he was also aware that she was a woman with few peers.
He put another slab of wood on the fire to make sure the kitchen would be warm for Betsy when she got home.
CHAPTER 27
LILLIAN HAD HURRIED straight home after the court recessed to find Tina standing in the kitchen with a butcher knife in her hand. The girl was wild-eyed, like a kitten caught in the corner by a pack of mad dogs.
“Tina!” She ran to the girl and grabbed the knife from her hands.
“They’re going to come after us, Mother, and I won’t let them.” She was screaming in the high, wild voice of a terrorized child. “Mother, Sewell is going to kill you! The voices told me. We have to leave!”
Lillian tried to comfort the girl, held her close and patted her softly, like a mother with a child just taken from her breast.
“You can hear the voices, too, can’t you, Mother? Listen to the voices!”
“No, darling, there aren’t any voices. They’re just bad sounds in your head.”
She continued to pat Tina. At last, Lillian put on some canned soup. The only way she could coax the girl to eat was to feed her a spoonful at a time, and with gentle, persistent coaxing, she got her to swallow the pill Dr. Brady had prescribed to quiet her and to encourage sleep. “Sleep can cure,” the doctor had said. “She needs sleep.” So did Lillian.
It was late in the evening when Lillian called Sylvia Huntley. Tina was finally in bed, her medication having at last taken hold. Sylvia heard Lillian’s panic-stricken voice and rushed to the house. When she arrived, she found Lillian struggling on the cliff’s edge of hysteria, her hair a tangle and heavy circles under her eyes.
Lillian burst out with it. “Coker won’t listen to me. With Coker, it’s all about tactics and ethics and the law. I can’t talk to my father. He’s threatening to kill Sewell and has my mother scared to death. She’s calling me all the time. I tried to talk to the judge. He won’t talk to me. I have to talk to somebody.”
“Of course,” Sylvia said, reaching for Lillian’s hand.
“All of this has to always, always, be just between us,” Lillian said.
Sylvia nodded, followed Lillian to the living room sofa, and waited for her to begin.
“You remember our last meeting at the drugstore? When I got home that night, I found Tina in Horace’s study. She was screaming, ‘The witch killed himself. The witch killed himself.’ I was terrified.” Lillian’s eyes were wide and frightened at the memory.
“I tried to be calm. I thought I was insane—Horace lying in all that blood, and Tina screaming, with a gun in her hand.”
“Oh my God,” Sylvia whispered.
“Then later that night, Tina changed her story. She said Horace was going to kill her. Tina said she picked up the gun, put it to Horace’s head, and shot him.” Lillian began to weep.
“Oh my God,” Sylvia whispered again.
“Tina said he fell down on the desk and was shaking all over, just like her grandpa said they all do when you shoot somebody in the head.”
Lillian tried to gather herself. Her eyes were wild. “I grabbed the gun from Tina. Then I put my arms around her and held her. She was screaming and repeating over and over, ‘I had to kill him. He was going to kill us both.’
“Then I remembered what Dr. Brady said—that when they’re sick like that, they can blame themselves for things they didn’t do. I tried to explain that to Tina, but she kept insisting, ‘I did it, Mother. I had to kill him.’”
Sylvia held tight to Lillian’s hand.
Lillian was still breathing heavily. “I wiped the prints off the gun. Then I put the gun back on the desk by Horace’s hand. My hands were bloody. Blood everywhere. I had blood on my clothes. I ran to the bathroom and washed as well as I could. Then I called the sheriff.”
Sylvia sat shocked and silent.
“I gave Tina the sedative that Dr. Brady had prescribed in case of an emergency, and thank God she quieted down. Then the deputies came, and the coroner. I kept Tina locked in her room. Finally, hours later, they took Horace’s body, and they all left.
“After everybody left, Tina finally wakened and started crying hysterically, and I held her until she fell asleep again.” Lillian was speaking barely beyond a whisper. “I called Dr. Brady and asked her what to do. I remember the doctor saying, ‘No one knows yet where the truth lies. Tina hated your husband, and if she walked into the room at the moment he shot himself, she could easily be experiencing a transference of guilt and has come to believe she killed him. In Tina’s hysteria, she might have picked up the gun where he dropped it, and that’s when you walked in.’”
“Could be, honey,” Sylvia said.
“Dr. Brady said, ‘My advice is to say nothing to anyone. Let the law work it out.’ She said I should continue to keep Tina sedated and feeling as secure as possible.”
“What was Tina doing in Horace’s study?” Sylvia finally asked.
“She said she went in there looking for me. She thought I was home.”
“What about the suicide note?”
“I never saw one. Somebody must have planted it later on.”
Finally, Sylvia said what she’d wanted to say all along. “You can’t take care of Tina if you go to prison.”
“I know.” The long silence again.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. What should I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish I could talk to the judge. He always knows what to do.”
Dr. Brady increased Tina’s medications, and the doctor spent many hours with the girl. If she was delusional about killing her stepfather, she nevertheless continued to insist she’d killed him.
“Dr. Brady wants me to send Tina to a hospital. I can’t abandon Tina to a hospital. If I put Tina in a hospital, she’ll never get out. She’ll die there. If she killed Horace, she did him a favor.”
Lillian struggled against more tears. “I think Horace solved it for all of us. He dealt with it in the only way left for him.” She stopped to gather herself. “He must have thought he was saving me from the hell he went through with his father. He was always thinking of me.”
“What about Tina?”
“I’ve hired Roberta Clemmins, a psychiatric nurse from Salt Lake City. She’ll join with Mrs. Houseman, who does foster care for troubled children, and the two of them can watch over Tina. Dr. Brady will look in on them. As long as Tina’s on her meds, she gets along very well with Mrs. Houseman. And I’ve hired a couple of tutors to help Tina with her homework. But she’s not able to respond to them right now. I know in my heart she didn’t do this. But if she did, she was an angel of mercy.” The two women held each other with their eyes. Suddenly, Lillian said, “I had no choice. I’m her mother.”
“She may be dangerous, Lillian. She could kill you in one of her episodes. She’s as strong as a strong man.”
“She would never do that. If she were sick with cancer, I’d fight for her to the end. She has a sickness of the mind. I have to stand by her in the same way. I never realized how much I would miss Horace. You never know how much you love somebody until they’re gone.”
“In a way, I envy you,” Sylvia said. “I never had that.”
* * *
“Well, sweetheart,” Betsy said to th
e judge when she got home, “Nancy Honaker at the grocery store—you know her; you kept her out of jail that time she tried to shoot Carl Middleford for beating up on her youngest son—you remember her?”
“No.” He couldn’t remember all his cases.
“Well, Nancy told me she didn’t believe a thing that Haskins Sewell said about you.”
“You saw the paper?” he asked.
“I know you’re not messing around with Lillian, for God’s sake. I know you both too well. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should keep Sewell in jail. Teach him something.”
“I’m not his teacher. I’m going to sleep on it.” He needed sleep, and he’d learned long ago that good decisions were never the product of a weary mind.
“There’s a lot of people out there who’ll support you,” Betsy assured him. “You haven’t been a judge here all these years without people growing to respect you. You have a lot of friends.”
“Yes, and a trainload of enemies. Every time I hold against somebody, or they go to jail, I win a new enemy, and all of their family members become enemies, and all of the family’s friends and the friends of their friends.”
“The good people will come forward,” she said. “They always do.”
That was Betsy all right. But the judge thought the law spoke with dead lips. In the minds of most, a prosecutor’s charges were synonymous with guilt.
The judge looked off into the black-and-white landscape of winter, as if the answer lay buried there in three feet of snow.
CHAPTER 28
GILDED HIGHLIGHTS DANCED on the snow, the work of the sun and its filigreed fingers. A great gray owl perched on a post, waiting for a hungry mouse searching for its breakfast, a seed from a late-summer dandelion.
The judge hadn’t slept much. Why should I feel afraid? he’d asked himself. I’ll deal with Sewell head-on. I can be hurt only if I fall prey to my own fears.
Betsy fed him his usual breakfast of two soft-boiled eggs, a couple of crisp bacon slices with half a piece of buttered whole wheat toast. As usual, he put on his old mackinaw over his black suit with its frayed cuffs and bulging knees, his blue shirt, and the black necktie that he slipped over his head, the knot always tied and ready to be pulled into place. And, as usual, he took along a thermos of coffee.
At the door, he said, “Honey, everything’s going to be all right. I promise,” and he gave Betsy his usual good-bye peck on the cheek. Then he walked out the door with a slight limp—on the left side.
He tried to focus on the beauty of the day. He could see it mechanically. Yes, he saw the beauty of the early-morning frost and its painted magic on leaf and limb, but he felt only fear chewing at his belly.
Hope.
“Live with hope” had been his advice to those lost souls who were hauled before him every day, and who were buried alive in their own baggage of misery.
Horatio had followed him out of the cabin. The judge lifted the old dog up and into the passenger seat of his pickup. Horatio loved a trip to the office, and the judge decided this would be Old Dogs Day—yes, hopefully.
Horatio was a celebrity in the courthouse. He stopped for a pat on the head from every passerby and returned the gift with a vigorous wag of his tail. Benjamin Breslin and the clerk’s assistants made a fuss over him, as if he were the judge’s only child, and even Jenny Winkley smothered him with her baby talk, a kiss on the side of his broad head, and a dog cookie from the box she kept in her bottom desk drawer.
As usual, Jenny Winkley was sitting behind her desk, but for the first time he could remember, she was wearing lipstick and a pink silk dress he’d never seen. She’d arranged the spray of red roses he’d sent her in a quart Kerr canning jar to serve as a vase.
Then Hardy Tillman called. His voice was ragged and filled with excitement. “Judge, I maybe shouldn’t ’ve called you. But I figured Sewell, knowing we was friends, knew I’d call and rat on him. That rat bastard wasn’t in jail at all. He stopped by the station here and filled up with gas about fifteen minutes ago, just to make sure I noticed. His tank only took four gallons.”
“What do you mean, you thought you shouldn’t call me?”
“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. He probably wanted me to rat on him so you and him could have another one of your famous showdowns.”
“Well, you did rat on him.”
“Yeah, but that’s what you do to a rat, even if the rat wants to be ratted on.”
The judge thanked his friend, hung up, and ordered the bailiff to have the sheriff as well as both attorneys and Lillian Adams in his chambers at once. He took off his robe, loosened his tie, and made sure the bottom button on his shirt was fastened. Betsy had often warned him, “You can’t command respect as a judge if your naked belly is hanging out.” A sudden surge of adrenaline began to crowd out his fear, readying him for the coming combat.
As Sewell made his appearance, he stopped to examine the plaques and photographs on the judge’s wall. He seemed most interested in a photo of Coker and the judge with their arms around each other’s shoulders. They were standing behind a string of cutthroat trout about eighteen inches long, and both were holding up the weapons of conquering warriors—their fishing poles.
The judge motioned to Sewell and the sheriff to approach him.
“Sheriff, did you follow my direction to incarcerate Mr. Sewell until further order of this court?”
“I did, Your Honor.”
“Was he in your custody and control at all times?”
“Of course.”
The judge turned to Haskins Sewell. “What do you have to report in this regard?”
“I had to go to my house for a change of clothes. I was gone half an hour. The sheriff was kind enough to grant me trustee status.”
Be careful, old man, the judge thought.
“If Mr. Sewell requires attention outside your jail, Mr. Sheriff, you’re ordered to arrange for his needs,” the judge said to Sheriff Lowe. “He is not to leave your physical custody until I order him released. Do you understand?”
“Of course.”
“And, Mr. Sheriff, you say that Mr. Sewell was in your custody and control at all times. Yet you allowed him to go unattended to his home in order to change clothes? It appears you haven’t been candid.”
The sheriff was quick to answer: “I didn’t think you’d want Mr. Sewell to appear in your court in the suit he slept in all night. Therefore, I permitted him to get into a fresh suit of clothes. Technically speaking, he was in my custody and control.” The sheriff’s accompanying laugh was void of mirth.
They are still taunting me, the judge thought, but he would not fall for the ploy. He turned to Sewell. “Are you prepared to proceed?”
“Yes,” Sewell said, rising from his chair. He walked toward the judge’s exit door. “My next witness is Hamilton Widdoss, the renowned handwriting expert.”
“And for what purpose are you calling him?” the judge asked.
“To establish that the alleged suicide note was a forgery.”
Coker leaned in toward the judge’s desk. “The dirty little secret is that handwriting analysis is mostly voodoo. One expert says a document is forged and another, depending on who’s paying him, says the opposite. It’s not a science. It is bull—” He stopped short.
“I must say that Mr. Coker is being a bit cavalier about this,” Sewell said. “I have a study conducted by a world-famous expert who reports that in ninety-six percent of all cases the writer of a given sample could be positively identified.”
The judge thought that Sewell’s handwriting expert constituted an inescapable danger to Lillian. If the judge let Widdoss testify, he’d swear that the suicide note was a forgery. He might even claim that Lillian was its author. On the other hand, if the judge ruled that Widdoss couldn’t testify, Sewell would accuse the judge of illegally withholding evidence from the jury. He might even suggest that the judge was part of a crimin
al conspiracy to protect Lillian. Yet the judge thought Coker was right. Handwriting experts testified according to who hired them, and over the years the law, by its own ill-advised precedent, had propped open the door to potential scams.
“Lay your foundation, Mr. Sewell,” the judge ordered, “and we’ll see where this takes us.” Whereupon the two attorneys and Lillian Adams returned to the courtroom and the judge to his bench.
Hamilton Widdoss took the stand. He was middle-aged, black-bearded, and beginning to gray. He wore round spectacles perched at the end of a long, inquiring nose and a black suit with vest, a white shirt, and a red bow tie.
Sewell took the man’s history: Widdoss had been a forensic handwriting analyst for the Chicago Police Department for twenty-three years. “I’ve examined over five thousand questioned documents and signatures. I was trained by the FBI,” the witness said, speaking to one juror at a time to personalize his credibility. “As an expert, my opinions have been accepted in seventeen state courts as well as in numerous federal courts around the country.”
The jury seemed mesmerized. The woman in the front row nodded with every phrase that slid from the witness’s mouth.
“Is handwriting analysis an exact science that can be tested?” Sewell asked.
“Of course.” Widdoss smiled up at the judge. “We undertook such a study at the department in Chicago. We gathered fifteen hundred unknown signatures and compared them with fifteen hundred known signatures, and my individual rate of error was less than three-tenths of one percent. The national average is about five-tenths of one percent.” He looked at each of the jurors with an inviting smile, as if he’d just asked them to join him for a drink at a local saloon.