BLIND TRIAL

by Brian Deer

  No reply.

  “But now you ask yourself what the fuck we do about this? Not how we think or feel about it, but what we do.”

  “That asshole belongs in jail.”

  “Damn right. Damn right. What I thought, soon as I knew. But what’s important now? Huh? Ask yourself. Is the thing here about nailing that sick bastard, or is it about getting that vaccine out on time to the folks who need it, and everything the company’s been working for? Coz right now, we can’t do both.”

  “What he did’s over the line. It’s immoral.”

  “Right again. But do we compound that immorality by making innocent folks suffer? Do we? Do we punish the millions who need the timely protection of our product? Folks whose futures might be depending on what we do tonight?”

  “Yeah, well, there’s FDA and experts and government agencies for all that. That’s not for anyone here to decide.”

  Hoffman’s shoe sole rasped on brick. “Maybe so. Maybe so. But you think now. We’re lawyers, right, you and me? Members of a licensed profession. These people might be psycho, murdering motherfuckers. All of them. But they’re still our clients. All we do’s we represent them, professionally and privileged, no matter what crazy stuff they do. We hope for better things.”

  “That’s crap.”

  “It’s not crap, damn it. You ask Henry about the duty of an attorney.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “He’s your father for Christ’s sake.”

  “What, you’re saying he’s in on this?”

  “Course he’s not in on this. Knows nothing about it. What I’m saying’s, we didn’t get you into the company on his say-so. We didn’t put you through school because we’re holding his dough in class A preferred stock. We did it because you’re cut from his hide. You’re family. If anyone should understand this, it’s you.”

  “What, he’s a crook, so I must be a crook? Like father, like son. That it?”

  “No, that’s not it. But I tell you, he sure needs to straighten you out about a thing or two.”

  “Yeah, well you fucked up on that too. He won’t be doing any straightening. We’re not exactly close.”

  “Not what he says. You know he’s done everything he could.”

  “Everything he could? Everything he could? You think walking out when I was five years old was doing everything he could?”

  “Yeah, well that shit happens all over in families. Least he stayed in touch and watched out for your interests. He tried to be a father. Not like some.”

  Ben swayed against the wall. “Tried to be a father? Oh, yeah? Sure. Never heard from him once. Not once in twenty years.”

  Hoffman stalled. What crap was all this? The fuck was he talking about now? “Said you talked every week or so. Week or two never passed without you talking.”

  “Just goes to prove what fucking liars we are. Like father, like son. You’re right.”

  “He didn’t come see you?”

  “He didn’t come see me.”

  “You didn’t talk on the phone?”

  “We didn’t talk on the phone.”

  “Shit. Goddamn.” Hoffman punched his own palm. “Must have meant you used to talk in his head.”

  BEN’S HEAD throbbed. It felt as ready to split as a hydrant hit by a truck. He leaned against the wall. His right ear was bleeding. He breathed hot air. His body hurt. His brain was shorting, his heart losing power. He wanted to pass out. He was fucked.

  Hoffman stood silent. Doctorjee skulked distant. Doc Mayr sat unmoving in the Sentra. There was just this throbbing by a piss-stained wall, one hundred miles north of San Francisco.

  Now he heard talking, up close, near his ear. The Black Bill Clinton’s shoulder pressed. “Now all I’m saying’s, you don’t go judging. Judging’s not for folks like us.”

  Ben choked up. “Yeah, join biotech for a life of crime. Thank you so very much my fucking father.”

  “Now don’t you disrespect.” Hoffman pulled away. “He’s always loved you. Loved his boy. I know that.”

  “Hah, yeah right. Probably never loved anyone. Probably wouldn’t know how.”

  “Who’d you get that from? Suzy? Where else? Okay, if you want your mother’s rap on all that, you can believe it if you want. But I know Henry Louviere, know the man.”

  “Evidently not.”

  Hoffman leaned, straight-armed, against the wall. “Yeah? So, how’s the Gibson? It is a Gibson? That so? With the sunburst finish?”

  “The fuck you talking about?”

  “What you reckon that cost then, new?”

  “What’s that to do with anything? My mom got it me.”

  “Huh. You think some Bible-beating night nurse at Northwestern Memorial paid for that? Two thousand bucks. And wrong again.”

  He couldn’t take this. His father bought the Gibson? He felt himself sinking to the asphalt. His back scraped the wall, dragging his shirt from his pants. His bones met the pavement. Hard.

  He clutched his knees, pulled them to his chest. An illusion, a dream, a dance.

  Hoffman loomed over him. “Stand up like a man. Don’t crawl on the ground like a worm.” Henry’s buddy reached down, grabbed hold of Ben’s arms, and hauled him back to his feet. “I’ll ask him about this. Said he saw you all the time. Used to see you play softball. Used to stop by your school. So proud when they called you ‘Pudge.’”

  “Proves what perfect liars we are.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t lying. I know when he’s lying. What you know about your father anyhow?”

  “I know what I know. I know enough.”

  “Diddly-squat by the sound of it. Probably that Sun-Times crap, or some weather girl spouting outside the courthouse.”

  “Well, what he did was wrong. It was wrong, what he did. Ask anyone. What he did was a crime.”

  “Let me tell you this, kid. You talk about crime? Huh? You want to talk about the cause of crime.”

  “He didn’t have to do it. He had choices.”

  “So, you know why yourself? You’re the man with all the answers? Go ahead. You tell it to me.”

  Ben’s head throbbed. The dog kept barking. He was fucked. “Don’t know. Don’t care. So shut the fuck up. It’s nothing to do with anything.”

  “See, now kid—scrub that—Ben, you take this vaccine. Huh? Perfect example of how it all works. The cause of the crime is the crime scene itself. It’s AIDS. It’s not that motherfucker. He’s attending to the crime. He’s a crime fighter. The cause of the crime is the injustice.”

  “Bullshit. You just made that up.” Ben hardly felt strength left to speak.

  “It’s injustice. You hear me? That’s the story of this life. The cause of crime is injustice. That’s you, me, Henry. That’s America. The cause of crime is injustice.”

  No reply.

  Hoffman spoke again, now soft and deep. “Please don’t think you can sit in that car there, razoring right from wrong, thinking how everyone else here’s a crook, or a sucker. You don’t know how this’ll turn out. You don’t, I don’t, he don’t, she don’t.”

  “Yeah, well if you or that psycho have anything to do with it, what’ll turn out’ll be wrong. That’s fucking obvious. It’s obvious.”

  “Obvious, you say? Not much in this life’s obvious, I can tell you.” A cloud dulled the light of the moon. “Okay, let me think of something… An example… Okay… Okay… Here, you take Richard Nixon when he lost out to Jack Kennedy now. Nineteen sixty. They say your man in Chicago fixed the poll. But, let me tell you, what lost it for Nixon was whacking his knee getting out of a car. Simple as that.”

  “Crap.”

  “It’s true. Been in the hospital, had an infection, was looking like shit, all pale and sweating on TV debating Jack Kennedy… Now, was that obvious? Was anyone in that car gonna know how that whack was gonna play out? How Nixon’s sweat would turn the tide of history?”

  “What?” />
  “So, was that whack on that car good, or bad? Right, or wrong? Glad about it, or not? Obvious? Would the twin towers of the World Trade Center have fallen, forty years on, if Nixon had gotten out the other side of the vehicle?”

  “Yeah, well, forging medical trials is a crime. It’s wrong. Killing people’s a crime. That’s murder.”

  “What’s what you call ‘crime,’ but a consequence? Huh? I say the crime here’s this goddamn HIV, and what’s not been done about it in Africa, India, South America. That’s where the real murder’s going on. And it’s not one case either, like we’re talking about here. Five-thousand-dollar-a-year drugs for your Near Northside buddies. But Africa? Not too profitable for bidness.”

  “If it wasn’t profitable, nobody would be doing any of this.”

  “Yeah, we made that vaccine profitable. The company made it profitable. And that’s why I’ll stick with that woman in that car there, come what may. You look behind the crime, sir, and you find the real criminals.”

  HOFFMAN CROUCHED. His knees felt old. He wasn’t expecting this. Funny how kids grow up. He remembered the little dude who’d climbed into his lap during poker with Tony Demarco and Marty O’Toole.

  “Dymon, haar, cub, cub, cub.”

  And every card in Hoffman’s hand was a spade.

  “Look, son, you want me to tell you a thing here?”

  “No.” The kid’s eyes were hollows.

  “No, you wanna pass judgment, but you don’t want the facts. Don’t want the responsibility of knowledge.”

  “And you’re so responsible?”

  “Shit, what you know about me?” He reached to the asphalt—still warmer than the air. “Let me tell you something about me, yeah?”

  “I know enough.”

  “What? You know my name and I work upstairs. But you even take my name here, ‘Hoffman.’ Yeah?”

  “Don’t want it.”

  “No, but let me ask you, would you say that’s even any kind of credible Black man’s name?” He waited for an answer, but none came. “Let me tell you, ‘Hoffman’ was the name of the people that owned my people. Must have reckoned, hell, they’re our property, so we better call them ‘Hoffman.’”

  “Well that’s all pretty sad and everything. And it’s got nothing to do with anything.”

  Hoffman rose, pressing the wall for support. “No? You’re not even curious about how a guy from the Detroit projects came to cruise the streets with the smartest, wittiest, best-looking, biggest-dicked, most-certain-for-success-in-this-life white boy in the whole of Wayne County?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. My granddaddy—the first Theodore Hosea Hoffman—well, in his golden days, he was privileged to mop shit at Fort Street Depot.”

  His grandson buried his knuckles in his pockets.

  “I don’t care.”

  “And his son—my daddy—Theodore Hosea Hoffman Jr., well, he was the boy in the US Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Michigan.”

  “Land of opportunities.” Vintage Henry.

  “Yes, sir. At the age of thirty-four, my daddy was the boy. Changing water coolers. Xeroxing papers. They said he was good at Xeroxing. Kept up his suntan, they said. And course, he was too dumb to make anything of what he was Xeroxing.”

  Hoffman paced three steps beside the wall, spun, and stabbed a finger. “Well, I tell you, sir, my daddy read two books a week, a whole one weekends. Up there in the Jeffries Homes, eleventh floor, facing the Lodge Freeway, with Melville and Twain and James Baldwin and Richard Wright. And he sure read one of those documents he slapped down on that Xerox glass. And he’d an idea of who else might like a copy.”

  “You mean he was a crook as well?”

  “My daddy? No sir. Just another working guy who said, ‘I ain’t taking this shit no more.’ And I tell you that one document—eleven sheets of clean white paper—got my daddy a Firebird. And when we got that car, I knew what I wanted. I wanted out of there. Free at last.”

  He knew he was ranting. He was really going at it some. He paused and leaned a shoulder against the wall. But even as he figured how to bring himself down, a red glow flashed across the lot.

  The brake lights on the Sentra came on. Then off.

  Then on… off… and on.

  Forty-six

  THE SEAT could wait. First thing’s first. Trudy yanked the gearshift out of park. The Sentra didn’t budge. Then she raised her left foot, and the car began to roll, edging back. Lights on. Right foot gas. Get this right. Get this right. She swung the wheel left, barely missing the Camaro. She cleared it by inches.

  That was close.

  She heaved a foot onto the brake and the other off the gas. The car pointed at the carwash. Shift to drive.

  Once upon a time, she’d loved to drive. Her first lesson: on the seashore, aged nine…

  The headlights snared Ben and Theodore Hoffman by the wall. They looked like naughty children caught smoking.

  Hoffman ran toward her. “Stop, stop, stop.”

  At school at Chapel Hill, she’d run a silver Catalina: a beast, a gas guzzling monster…

  “Hey, hey, hey,” shouted Ben.

  She locked the driver’s door and felt a dopamine rush. She’d leave Ukiah now, no matter what.

  In her first real job, at a lab in New Jersey, she drove a Bel Air with Carol…

  Ben yanked open the passenger door. “Didn’t think you drove.”

  “Thought wrong.”

  Later, her driving forewarned of her condition…

  Hoffman banged the windshield. “Trudy please.”

  Ben leaned into the doorway and brushed aside a pillow. “You can’t drive. Honestly. Let me.”

  First, came a stumble in a Houston parking lot. She’d been walking on the flat, with no obstructions…

  “If you don’t get in, I’ll go on my own.” She raised her left foot.

  Car moving.

  Hoffman stepped aside. Ben ran with the Sentra. The car rolled a lazy half-circle.

  Then leaden-toe errors with gas and brake…

  She stamped her left foot. The car stopped.

  “You getting in?”

  “You can’t do it ma’am. You’ll kill yourself. It’s crazy.” He leaped into the seat and slammed the door.

  Hoffman shouted, “Trudy, get real.”

  She pushed the shift to R.

  Brake off, gas down. Then a thump.

  “Jesus Christ. You’ve hit Doctorjee. Oh brother. Oh man. You’ve hit him. He’s behind. He’s behind.”

  She’d forgotten about him, waddling through the dark. He wouldn’t be hurt bad, more’s the pity.

  “Trudy, quit this now,” Hoffman yelled. “Trudy, listen. Ben, throw the key out.”

  “You dare.”

  Ben reached for his seatbelt and fastened the clasp.

  “We gotta talk,” Hoffman shouted. “All of us. Please.”

  Shift to D. Brake off. Gas on. Steer right.

  The Sentra jumped forward toward Talmage Road, then left, across the railroad, right, and right, down the ramp onto 101 South.

  ALL THREE mirrors showed nothing but blackness. The mirrors, however, were wrong. She’d lurched from the ramp into the outside lane and car after car, SUV after caravan, bore down in a flood of dipped headlights. They swung right, then left, past the slow-moving Nissan, in a stabbing yellow flight of turn signals.

  “Is anything there, Ben? On the right? On the right? Now tell me when it’s clear, when it’s clear.”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s clear, if you promise to pull over.”

  “Alright, I promise. Very well.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “Very well.”

  “Not now. Not now. Not now.”

  As he yelled, she heard the growl and saw the high, wide beams of a chromium-plated Mack eighteen-wheeler. It steamed out of the darkness, its horn a single blast as it s
urged alongside the white sedan. One yellow sidelight, then another, and another, as the trailer whined past, glinting silver.

  “Okay now. Go now. Go now. Clear to go.”

  She nudged the wheel right. What a fuss.

  “Let her roll onto the shoulder, ma’am. This is excellent. Like, okay. Found a place to stop here. Am I right?”

  The car shuddered on a rumble strip and shook from a passing van. Peacefully, it rolled to a halt.

  He clicked his belt. “Hey, that was random.”

  Door open. Interior light. Chime.

  THE SKY was now cloudless, the half-moon crisp, embedded in a canopy of black. The brightest stars sharpened against the smear of the Milky Way. A light wind breezed from the west. Looking up, Ben tripped on a chunk of shredded tire. He kicked it as Doc Mayr changed seats.

  One hundred miles to go. He wasn’t sure he could make it. He wasn’t sure he could make one hundred yards.

  He slumped into the driver’s seat and clamped up the belt as the vaccine chief adjusted her pillows. He studied the mirrors, then stamped on the gas: 40… 50… 60… 65. Then he flicked on the radio and scanned the rural airwaves: lite rock, progressive country, Christian talk.

  He settled for a station rocking to Green on Red. “So, what we doing? Calling the cops now, or what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking… Let me think here a minute.”

  “I’m feeling pretty wasted.”

  “You’re wasted?”

  “Not sure I could take a police station tonight.”

  He reached for his Samsung. Fuck, Hoffman snatched it. That asshole threw it somewhere near the liquor store.

  Green on Red gave way to Elton John. Ben switched to Iron Maiden and REM. He lowered the volume to match the car’s four cylinders, now pounding out a sleep-inducing hum. The window behind him was open half an inch and the night air hissed white noise.