Gideon - 02 - Probable Cause (27 page)

“How patronizing,” he retorts, glowering at me as he shoves his chair back and turns away to the second-story window directly behind him.

“There was a time right when I first met you,” he says, his voice so quiet and flat I have to strain to hear him since his back is almost directly to me, “when I thought after this was over you and I might be friends. You seemed to be taking my situation personally, and I found I appreciated that.”

Perhaps, as a defense mechanism, I find myself beginning to shrug, but I am uncomfortable: not only do I like this guy, I finally recognize that I have begun to admire the hell out of him. Unless he has managed to fool me completely, his life has awakened in me a memory of the idealism I must have felt over twenty years ago when I joined the Peace Corps. His color-blind stubbornness and his commitment to the Homers of the world are so naive, he seems from another world. I believe he made a serious mistake in using shock on Pam, but unlike so many of us who live our lives virtually indifferent to the horrific suffering that is an inseparable but ignored part of daily life, he made an error of commission, not omission. He is in trouble precisely because he was willing to care and risk himself for other people. It is rare that a lawyer has the opportunity to represent a person in a criminal case whose life he sees as a positive force. At best, my other clients have been, and are, victims. Andy, I have come to believe (unconsciously until this moment I realize) is much more than that. Doubtless, he will appear unaccountably quixotic to a jury composed of ordinary Arkansans; but Andy, I hope I get them to see, though not blameless, should not be judged so harshly that his life and career are destroyed Under the circumstances, Pam’s death is punishment enough. This man is willing to make himself as vulnerable as a teenager who falls in love for the first time.

“You’re absolutely right,” I admit, squaring my shoulders to the desk and looking him in the eyes. “I put all my clients in the same box, and I’m wrong to do that. In fact, I admire you a great deal.”

His brown eyes lose some of their hurt look.

“I’m not looking to be admired,” he instructs, “but by explicitly categorizing all people as being willing to lie, you’ve illustrated what whites do to blacks when they make judgments about us as a race.”

I nod, my agreement automatic, thinking that Andy is obsessed by the issue of race. Though surely he doesn’t in tend it, his effort to pretend his blackness isn’t the denning quality in his life merely emphasizes that it is. Since he insists that he is honest, I have no qualms about testing it.

“Why does Yettie Lindsey hate your guts?”

Andy blinks rapidly.

“I won’t go out with her.”

A button has been punched here. There is something more going on here than a case of hurt feelings.

“That’s all there is to it?” I ask, remembering Rainey’s gossip.

Andy sighs and, as if he felt a sudden chill, hugs himself by squeezing his arms against his sides. He says, “If you’re black, Arkansas is a small state. Yettie’s family and my family have been friends for years. When I was in high school in Fayetteville, she was still a child, but our families used to kid each other that we’d end up together. Actually, it’s not a coincidence that Yettie is here. Before she graduated from Arkansas State in May, because of our families’ friendship, but also because Yettie’s going to make a good social worker, I persuaded David to give her an interview, and she got the job, largely because of my recommendation. I see now that she thought I had something else in mind.”

I tap my pen against my pad as if to applaud, appreciating the depth of Yettie’s disappointment. It is likely that she has been in love with Andy for many years. What she had hoped was coming true. He was sending for her, but when she arrived, finally ready to begin an adult relationship, she found out that she, a black woman, was nothing special to him.

Like the fools men are, Andy probably thought she should be happy just getting a job. Black people in love! It occurs to me that since Rosa died (she was the exception), I have never really thought that the complexity of their inner lives mirrored my own. I equate their material poverty with an emotional poverty as well, I realize. No wonder I can’t figure this case out. I’m such a racist I can’t even imagine them.

Poor Andy! She hates him now, and he didn’t even realize it. I lean forward to ease a sudden crick in my back and try to empathize.

“If Freud couldn’t figure out what women wanted, why should you?”

Andy tries to smile, but his heart isn’t in it. He is a behaviorist and won’t find much consolation in the befuddlement of Sigmund Freud. I close my eyes and see old Mrs.

Whitelaw, my high school English teacher, swaying back and forth before thirty bored and horny small-town and farm kids and quoting in a voice choked with rage: “Remember, always remember, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!”

” I warn Andy, “We’ve got to treat Yettie with kid gloves. So far, she hasn’t volunteered anything to the prosecutor’s office. I wouldn’t do anything to upset her further if I were you.”

Andy nods, a preoccupied expression on his face, and I move the subject to our Mississippi expert witness. As we talk, Andy seems to be thinking about the past. Why didn’t he fall in love with Yettie? Who knows? I got my wife in a foreign country: I can’t really assume he would want to marry his next-door neighbor any more than I did. Does it bother me? Obviously, or I wouldn’t be wondering about it. After a few minutes of desultory discussion (Andy doesn’t seem much interested right now in our expert, though I have to assume he is relieved somebody is willing to come to Blackwell County to justify shock), I head back to my office, thinking how a New England jury would react to a psychologist from Mississippi who proclaimed the virtues of a cattle prod.

I can hear the discussion in the jury room: “They probably used cattle prods on blacks, so shocking retarded kids is no big deal.” Outside the Blazer, which is close to overheating, the central Arkansas countryside, shimmering in the summer heat, appears on fire. Prejudice is everywhere.

“gideon,” jill mary mount says, her hectoring voice crackling through a bad connection, “in about five seconds after I get off the phone, I’m walking down to the clerk’s office to file a charge of capital felony murder against Andrew Chapman. You want to come over to my office and see what we have?”

The client sitting across from me, a middle-aged man whose paycheck has just been garnisheed on a judgment taken by a health spa (he had signed a lifetime contract and discovered he wasn’t that interested in trying to keep a thirty-two-inch waist), must be able to read my reaction, because he looks as if Julia had interrupted me to say the building was on fire. Furious at what I am hearing (in the last two weeks I had begun to have some hope I could persuade a jury to come in with a conviction of negligent homicide and let Andy off with probation), I reply sarcastically, “I appreciate the advance notice,” and wag my finger at my client, who surely must think I am warning him instead of trying to reassure him.

“I’ll be right over.” I hang up and exhaust my knowledge of debtor-creditor law in one sentence by explaining that he can’t be put in prison for debt, and that an emergency has come up requiring me to postpone our interview.

“I can come back tomorrow,” Mr. Welford says gratefully, absurdly relieved. I know nothing about bankruptcy law and have no idea what to advise him. With as few clients as I have, I can’t afford to refer him

out, and I tell him I’ll see him on his lunch hour. This way I’ll have time to run down to Frank D’Angelo’s office to find out what to ask him.

When he had made the appointment, it sounded like a contract dispute, but with a legal judgment against him, it is past that stage. Like a man who has a tumor the size of a tomato in his testicles, but who says he is just having a little problem passing water, Mr. Welford, a salesman in the men’s department at Sears, had told me only that he owed a little money on a debt he thought he shouldn’t have to pay. I dial the Human Development Center and am told that Andy is not in his office. I leave a message for him to call me in an hour and say that it is urgent.

Finding I am almost sprinting to the courthouse, I force myself to slow down to a brisk walk; otherwise, in this heat, I’ll be as sticky and nasty as a sponge soaked in blood. The thermometer outside First Capitol Bank across from the courthouse reads 101. They ought to give the humidity. It’s got to be almost 100 percent. I am angry and confused. What evidence could there be that Andy deliberately killed this child? To charge him with first-degree murder, Jill will have to show intent, and to my mind, that leaves only the possibility that somehow Olivia is in on this.

“Hey! Don’t be actin’ like you don’t know me!”

I squint into the glare across the street and see the old woman from the jail. An orange jacket covers part of the filthy black dress that reaches the top of her red high-top tennis shoes. Her hair is as wild as ever. I don’t want to encourage her, but neither do I want her to begin screaming at the top of her lungs.

“How’re you doing?” I call to her, moving toward the courthouse at the same time, as if I’m late for a hearing.

“Where’s that half-nigger who you had wid you?” she screams as two men come out of the bank beside her. Despite the heat I break into a run up the south steps into the courthouse. This is an explanation that will only get worse with the telling. We all assume the worst, and sometimes no amount of explaining can help. I realize I hadn’t doubted Andy until I got the call from Jill. The most I thought he was guilty of was bad judgment. Damn it, “ever since I saw that kid jump into Andy’s arms, I’ve thought the guy was unique.

A black male as smart as he is doesn’t have to be stuck in the boonies covered up with people who can’t even say their own name, and yet that’s what he had committed himself to doing with his life. Damn Olivia. Why couldn’t she leave him alone? She has to be behind this. I don’t want him to have deliberately ended this child’s life, even if somehow he thought it was the right thing to do.

The receptionist, obviously forewarned, waves me on back, and I walk knowingly back into the maze of offices as if I worked there myself. I wonder if my old pal Amy Gilchrist knew this was coming. I would have appreciated a tip.

Jill, wearing a dressy red pantsuit that, perversely, re minds me of the orange jumpsuits county prisoners are given, is standing behind her desk with a telephone clamped to her ear. She waves me on in as if I were a long-lost friend instead of someone she clearly does not like. Holding an earring in one hand, she laughs and whispers, “See you later,” and hangs up. A personal call to a lover? Not likely, I’m afraid.

Every person has secrets, but I doubt if sex is one of Jill Marymount’s. Oddly, she seems relaxed, as if filing a capital murder charge has discharged the tension within the case instead of creating a great deal more.

“Why don’t you close the door, Gideon,” she instructs me as she attaches her earring, a plain silver hoop the circumference of a half dollar, “and we’ll have a little talk after you read what we think your client has been up to.”

Confidence. Jill’s borders on smugness. I wish I had some about this case. I shut the door while she sits down and opens a file on her desk. “I was beginning to have some sympathy for your client and wonder if I had overcharged him,” she says, handing me the document in which the formal allegations of capital murder are contained.

I notice that though the dozens of pictures of the children remain on the walls, she has changed the desk in her office.

Replacing the exquisitely handcrafted wood with its delicate finish, a museum piece I openly coveted, is a metallic surface a jet fighter could land on, reminding me of the Persian rug my old boss at the PD’s Office replaced after repeated coffee spills. Women keep trying to humanize the workplace, but work keeps getting in the way, I suppose. Sitting down across from her, I read the “Information,” as the formal charging document is called, and learn nothing new. Murder, as opposed to manslaughter, is, of course, a question of intention, a conclusion, and is easily stated.

“So what do you have?” I ask, clutching like a security blanket the briefcase on my lap as I wait for the bad news.

“We’ve known since the girl died that the cattle prod had very little tape insulating the handle,” Jill explains.

“It was a lethal weapon in the hands of somebody who knew what he was doing with it.”

To give myself time to respond, I pretend to study the paper in front of me, remembering Andy’s apparent lie to me that he had carefully wrapped it and couldn’t understand what had happened. God knows how many others he has told. If I’ve ever had a client who didn’t lie about something, I’d like to meet him. I say, “Obviously, I’d like to examine it. Do I need to get an order?”

Jill shakes her head as if I’m missing the point.

“Still, I gave Chapman the benefit of the doubt until we found out this,” she says, shoving at me a fourteen-year-old Blackwell County Circuit Court Consent Judgment that is styled: Pamela Le Master, by her Mother and Next Friend, Olivia Le Master, and Olivia Le Master, Individually, versus Dr. Hamilton Corbin,
et al.
Ham Corbin is a now retired obstetrician who owns a major chunk of the First Capitol Bank. What I’m looking at, I quickly realize is a copy marked “confidential” of a structured malpractice settlement in which Pam was awarded slightly over three million dollars, to be paid in increments to Olivia on her behalf, over her life. At her death the balance was to be paid to Olivia. “Where’d you get this?”

I ask, knowing it doesn’t matter. I’m in a daze as I try to catch up. Olivia must have decided that not only would Pam be better off dead but that she, as her mother, would as well.

So how come I’m not reading about Olivia?

“Marvin Hippel has a long memory,” Jill says, nipping through her own file. Her posture makes my back ache. I couldn’t sit up that straight if I had a rod of reinforced steel inserted into my spine.

“The same Marvin Hippel who passes out his cards to doctors after he speaks at their meetings?” I say, remembering a seminar I attended when I first went to work at Mays & Burton. So what? Now that lawyers can advertise, I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw some of my colleagues walking up and down the street in front of the Blackwell County Courthouse wearing those front-and-back sandwich placards with their phone numbers in glitter on them.