Unbuttoning my coat, I slid my hands down around the small of my back as I hunched forward and peered down at the tips of my shoes.
“Now we see them, out of the patrol car, Joyner and O'Leary, guns drawn, creeping toward the Mercedes. Then, suddenly,”I said, slowly raising my head, “someone jumps out of the car and starts running down the street, moving through fog so heavy you can barely see him. Then, somehow, it's clear enough that we can see he has a gun, that he's looking back, that he's ready to fire. But Officer O'Leary fires first and, as she put it, 'the subject went down.' ”
I looked from one end of the jury box to the other.
“We've heard it so many times we think we were there. We know Jamaal Washington killed Jeremy Fullerton because we saw it happen, didn't we? We heard the shot; we saw him jump out of the car; we saw him run away. We know what happened. We saw it with our own eyes, didn't we?”
Shoving my left hand into my pocket, I rubbed the back of my neck with my right, a puzzled expression on my face.
“Or did we? We saw Fullerton's face pressed against the glass on the driver's side of the car; we saw Jamaal Washington dash out of the car. But we never saw the murder, did we? No one saw the murder, did they? The prosecution paraded out a long line of witnesses; but none of them was a witness to the only thing that is really important: Not one of them witnessed the crime.”
Turning until I was face-to-face with the district attorney, I continued: “The single most important fact in this case is that there were no witnesses to the crime. The entire case is built on circumstantial evidence, and only circumstantial evidence. The prosecution is asking you to convict Jamaal Washington of murder, not because anyone saw him do it, but because of the circumstance in which he had the misfortune to find himself when, in a remarkable act of courage, he decided someone had been shot and he might not be too late to help.”
I turned away from Haliburton and back to the jury, pleading with my eyes, begging them to do the right thing.
“He was there, in the senator's car, when the police arrived: We admit that. He tried to run away: We admit that as well. He explained to you why he did that. The prosecution tells you he had the murder weapon in his hand when he was shot by the police: He insists he never touched the gun. I confess I don't know if he did or not. Perhaps in his panic he picked it up and, after the trauma of being shot, blocked it out of his mind. I don't know. But he believes he did not, and that is what he testified.
If it's true—that he never touched it—the question becomes: How did it get there, next to his hand, after he was shot?”
Pausing, I looked over at Jamaal. He was sitting straight in his chair, his hands folded in his lap, following me with his eyes.
“The district attorney tells you that Officer O'Leary was just trying to be accurate when she repeated word for word the same story three different times. But if you're going to tell the truth, just going to describe what happened, why do you have to memorize your testimony down to the tiniest detail? The truth doesn't change. It's only a lie you have to be careful not to forget.
“But you must have asked yourselves: Why would she lie? What motive could she possibly have?”
I placed my hand on the railing and peered into their open faces.
“ To cover a mistake, a mistake that at the time did not seem to matter much. Just like the district attorney, she knew—she was certain—that Jamaal Washington was guilty. She had just seen her first homicide victim, his blood-covered face shoved against the glass. A split second later, someone in a leather jacket and a wool cap, a young man, a black man, bolts out of the car. She's scared out of her mind, just like you or I would have been scared. He hesitates, looks back. She thinks the only thing she can think: He's going to kill me! She fires, and 'the subject went down.' Then, but only then, she discovers that he didn't have a gun after all, nothing, no weapon of any kind. But he's just killed someone, and not just someone: a United States senator. He's a murderer. He might not have had a gun, but the gun was in the car and he was in full flight from the police. The gun is an irrelevance, an inconvenient detail, a minor omission. What difference does it make! He did it! He's a killer, a cold-blooded killer, and he's lucky he's not dead. They take the gun from the car and put it next to his outstretched hand while he's lying there, sprawled on the sidewalk, unconscious and barely alive. What difference does it make? He did it. No one will ever know.
“No one, let me repeat, witnessed the murder of Jeremy Fullerton. The only witness to what Jamaal Washington did that night before the police arrived was Jamaal Washington himself. He testified under oath. He told you what he did. He heard a shot; he went to help; he saw a light cut through the fog; he was afraid the killer had come back and he ran away—not because he was guilty, but because he was afraid. And there is not one witness that has been able to tell you anything different.”
When I finally finished, I sank into my chair, my heart racing, my hands full of sweat. I knew I had won.
E
verything that happened after the verdict, everything that took place after the jury pronounced Jamaal Washington guilty of murder, was lost in an alcoholic haze. I never did remember where I had gone or what I had done during the three days and nights that I apparently wandered, a drunk without a memory, lost somewhere in the city. Because of my own astonishing incapacity, a young man of exemplary habits and character was going to pay with his life for a crime I knew he had not committed. He was going to spend years on death row, growing old in the narrow confinement of a cell, waiting through a long series of losing appeals for the date that nothing could now avoid, when the executioner would finally come. I had known the moment I heard the verdict that every day he lived like that a little bit of me would die; and so I drank myself into oblivion in a stupid, self-indulgent attempt to walk away from my own grave.
I was on the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the night, gripping the steering wheel of the car so hard that my knuckles turned white. Cars were racing by me, honking their horns. I had to force myself to take my eyes off the road in front of me and look in the rearview mirror. Long parallel rows of dim yellow lights were rushing up behind me, shooting past me as if I were not moving at all. My eyes had become intolerably heavy and kept trying to close. I rolled down the window and opened my mouth to gasp the cold midnight air, hoping it would keep me awake. Focusing on the road, I gradually increased my speed. Cars still shot by me, but not quite so fast as they had before. My right hand was frozen to the wheel. I had to loosen it, one finger at a time. Once it was free, I shook it and shook it again, trying to get the circulation back.
I could not remember why I had come, why I had crossed the bridge in the first place. All I knew was that I wanted to go home, and I could not remember where it was. Beneath the swirling surface of my mind, something, some instinct, pulled me on until I was parked in front of a shingle-sided house on a narrow street on a steep hillside facing the bay. All the lights were out.
Carefully, methodically, afraid I might not remember each thing I was supposed to do, I switched off the ignition and turned off the lights. I opened the car door, started to get out, and then, because I had forgotten, reached back behind me to set the hand brake.
I shut the car door, quietly, using both hands, so I would not wake anyone up. In the distance, the lights of the city danced upside down on the bay. I tried to turn my head to make them come right side up again, but I started to stumble, and then, spinning around, I started to fall. Laughing at it all, I rolled over on the ground until, with my hands spread behind me, I stared at a sky full of stars and wondered if I was looking up or whether I had landed on my head and was watching their reflection on the water far below.
Just as I was struggling to my feet, the porch light came on and the front door opened. I could feel a stupid grin cut across my godforsaken face as I pointed an unsteady finger and wobbled toward the woman in the doorway.
“I know you!”I exclaimed as if I could not really be sure that I did.
“Where have you been?”asked Marissa, gently and with relief, as I draped one arm over her shoulder and let my face collapse against the warm smooth skin of her neck. She put her arm around me to help me stay on my feet.
“Everybody's been looking all over for you.”
That idiotic grin had pasted itself on my face. I raised my head, just enough to see the worried expression in her eyes.
“Did they find me?”I asked, grinning even more broadly at what I was sure was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life.
When I woke up, some fifteen hours later, my head throbbed with a dull, constricting pain; even the late afternoon light was too harsh for my exhausted eyes. Wrapped like an invalid in a soft cotton robe, I stayed inside, sitting motionless on the davenport, protected by the shadows that lengthened across the living room floor. Cradling in my feeble hands the cup of coffee Marissa had given me, I blinked, in measured intervals, the blank verse of my empty, desolate mind.
“I lost,”I said presently, as if I had just remembered something terrible that had happened a long time ago.
“I know,”she said, consoling me with the gentle, soft sympathy of her eyes.
My mouth hung open and I tilted my head toward her, trying to remember if I had told her before. Marissa bent forward and crossed her arms over her knees.
“The trial was over four days ago.”
I had no memory of any of it, nothing between the verdict and late last night, coming over the bridge.
“Four days?”I mumbled, everything a blank. “I left the courthouse,”I said, trying to remember. “I came here, went to bed—last night. Didn't I?”
“Yes, you came here last night,”she said as she stroked my hand. “But the trial was over four days ago. No one knew where you had gone. You just vanished. Everyone was worried: Bobby, Albert … me.”
For the next few days I did nothing except what I was told. I slept late every morning and sat outside every afternoon with Marissa, basking in the lazy warmth of the October sun, talking aimlessly about things of no importance. The better I felt, the more ashamed I became of what I had done.
“I've never lost a case before,”I tried finally to explain. “Not a case I should have won; not a case where I knew the defendant didn't do it. The truth of it is, I didn't think it could happen to me. Arrogance, pride—call it what you want—I didn't think I could lose.”
There was at times a certain ruthless clarity about the way her mind worked, an unwillingness to pretend things were better than they were.
“You must have known it could happen, though. I wouldn't know how often it happens, but people do get convicted for things they didn't do. What is it that really bothers you: that you don't think he murdered Jeremy Fullerton, or that you think you did something wrong?”
“You think it wouldn't bother me if someone was convicted of something he didn't do, so long as it wasn't my fault that he was convicted?”
“Of course you'd be bothered, but not like this.”
She paused for a moment and then said, quite seriously, the way someone might counsel her closest friend, “The greatest sin is self-pity, and you have less right to it than almost anyone I know. Listen to yourself. You didn't think you could ever lose a case you should have won. Of course that's arrogance, but it's something else as well, isn't it? You've never lost before; you never had to hear a jury say someone you were certain was innocent was guilty. You're incredibly good at what you do; Bobby says you're the best. If you made a mistake—if you really believe it's your fault—what do you think it's like for all those other lawyers out there who aren't half as good as you and lose cases all the time, cases you would have won? If you made a mistake, do what everyone has to do—learn from it. What else can you do—quit? Things don't always turn out for the best. You're old enough to know that. We're both old enough to know that,”added Marissa with a smile that tried to appear indomitable but could not conceal the look of vulnerability that lay only half hidden in her eyes.
She was right, of course: There was nothing I could do except face up to my own responsibilities and somehow learn to live with the awful fact that I had not been able to save an innocent man from the death penalty. Early Monday morning I forced myself to go back into the city and try as best I could to explain to Albert Craven why I had lost. Though he had never tried a criminal case in his life, he seemed to have a pretty good idea of what I was going through.
“You can't blame yourself,”he insisted firmly as we sat in his darkened office discussing the case.
I had come not only to say good-bye and to thank him for everything he had done, but to say I was sorry.
“When I finished my closing argument,”I said, still astonished at how badly I had judged the effect of what I had done, “I was certain they'd have to acquit. I may have made—no, I'm certain I made a mistake in the way I handled Marshall. I shouldn't have treated him like that—like someone with a criminal record lying to save himself. I shouldn't have thrown around accusations without having something more specific I could prove. I was so certain—I'm still so certain—that someone desperately wanted Fullerton dead that I thought everyone else would believe it, too. And then I thought that after they had seen Jamaal, listened to him, heard how intelligent he is, they'd know it couldn't possibly have been him.
“As I say, I made a mistake; but during that closing argument, as I took them through each step of what they thought they had seen, reminded them that no one had been able to tell them what had actually happened—no one besides Jamaal— because there was no other witness, I thought everything had fallen back into place and that they could not possibly find him guilty.”
Craven rested his small hands in his lap as he leaned against the chair. He was dressed as he always was in the office: a dark suit, silk tie, gold cuff links; but the cheerful demeanor of easy exuberance and quick intelligence that made what he wore seem impeccable and made him seem distinguished had vanished. He looked old, old and tired; more like a man resigned to a few last years of quiet contemplation than someone who had either the energy or the patience for the kind of bright, free-wheeling, and perhaps inconsequential conversation that enlivened his table and made him one of the few seemingly indispensable members of San Francisco society.