The Four-Night Run (13 page)

“What we’re learning here,” said the professor, “is criminal law. If you’ve come for contracts or civil procedure, you’re in the wrong class. But stay anyway. There’s no telling what you’ll be missing if you leave. Criminal law. I’ve been practicing it for thirty years on the defense side and still I have no idea what I’m doing. So why am I here? Because I know a hell of a lot more about it than do you. Criminal law.”

He was wearing a suit, the professor, gray-checked and shabby. His tie was slightly askew, his shoes were scuffed, his eyebrows had gone decades untrimmed. His voice was prissy and precise and devoid of doubt. One and all they thought him magnificent.

“Let me see,” he said, putting on his half glasses, taking a document from his case, examining it closely, turning over one page and then another. “There are so many of you. I have a question to start us off, and I need a volunteer to provide an answer.” He looked around. “No volunteers? Then let me see. Ah, here’s a strange conglomeration of letters. Mr. S-C-R-B—”

“Scrbacek.”

“Ah, there you are. Mr. Scrbacek, yes? And are you having trouble with your legs, Mr. Scrbacek? Good. Then stand, please, when you address the class. Thank you. Scrbacek. An unusual name. Where are your ancestors from, Mr. Scrbacek?”

“Croatia.”

“Good for you. Some of the greatest lawyers in this country’s history have been Croatian, though I can’t seem to name one off the top of my head. Let’s see if you measure up. Tell me, Mr. Scrbacek, what is a crime?”

“Murder?”

“Yes, that is a crime, but let’s be a little more general about it. Give me a rough definition.”

“Physically hurting someone. Taking someone’s property without their consent.”

“Oh, very good. So if I beat you senseless, that is a crime. And if I take your car without your consent, that too is a crime.”

“Yes.”

“But what if I’m a police officer and you’re a dangerous criminal who is resisting arrest, and in the process of subduing you, I beat you senseless. Is that then a crime?”

“In that case, it would depend on—”

“And what if I’m a banker and you’ve missed a year of loan payments, and I repossess your car without your consent but under authority of law. Is that a crime?”

“Well, then, I would suppose—”

“I take a gun and shoot you dead. Is that a crime?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But if you’re pointing a gun at me, what then? If you’re pointing a gun at my child, what then? If you are my father and you’ve beaten me every day of my life and you’re about to beat me again, what then?”

“Those are different—”

“What if you’re a Jew and I’m an SS soldier and we’re in Germany and the year is 1943. Is murdering you a crime?”

“Yes.”

“Even if I’m ordered to shoot?”

“Still a crime.”

“Careful here, Mr. Scrbacek. Even if the law of the land compels me to shoot?”

“Yes, it is still a crime.”

The professor smiled, his small teeth bright and even. “I like you, Mr. Scrbacek. I admire your keen moral vision. You have a fine future ahead of you . . . in divinity school.”

General laughter.

“What is a crime, people? Very simply, it is an intentional act that violates a law. What kind of law? A moral law? A natural law? No, Mr. Scrbacek. A crime is an intentional act that violates the express and clear words of a criminal statute. Nothing less and nothing more. If it is not against the penal code, it is not a crime. And thank goodness, or we’d have a pack of Mr. Scrbaceks roaming the countryside determining which of us have violated his moral code and thus are deserving of citation, or imprisonment, or even death.”

“I didn’t mean to say—”

“Sit down, Mr. Scrbacek. We are finished.”

“But I—”

“Sit down, Mr. Scrbacek. Please. You frighten me.”

And so he sat, J.D. Scrbacek, on his first day of law school, sat back down in his chair as the professor rattled on about the elements of a crime, sat in his chair and heard nothing but the voice of his own humiliation, felt nothing but the sweat rolling down his sides, soaking into the creased white of his new shirt, the tan of his new pants, running down his calf toward one of his new suede shoes.

That was Professor Drinian DeLoatch.

In the hallway, after class, Scrbacek tried to slip away unobtrusively, his head down, hoping no one would recognize him as the fool of that
morning’s entertainment. With his eyes to the floor, he ran right smack into a public interest claque from the class. They were in jeans, sweatshirts and T-shirts, sporting backpacks, laughing in the hallway—laughing,
no doubt, at him. And in the middle of the crew, tall and thin with long black hair, shiny and straight, was a woman startlingly beautiful. She looked at him and smiled and then shyly looked away.

He just wanted to flee, to hide, to let time salve the pain of his embarrassment, but every postadolescent instinct in his body forced him to stop at the woman’s smile and smile back.

And then this shy beautiful woman raised her eyes to his and said, in a voice not so soft, not so soft at all, loud enough, in fact, for all in the hallway to hear:

“It’s a wonder you can still walk, Scrbacek, the way he reamed your ass in there.”

And that was Jenny Ling.

22

A
H
, L
AW
S
CHOOL
!

Scrbacek turned the shower to very hot and the nozzle spray to very narrow and let the water needle into his back and shoulders. He had tried at the start of the shower to keep the bandage dry on his swollen and purpled arm, had failed miserably, and hadn’t really cared. His hair was so filthy that he shampooed and rinsed once and then again, and still the water as it drained had been dark with soot and dirt and blood. So he shampooed and rinsed a third time and then a fourth. He scrubbed his chest, his legs, his neck, his bruise of an arm, his sliced nose. Now, when he felt almost clean, he stood still under the narrow nozzle spray and took a moment to pull himself together.

DeLoatch?

He had come to his old neighborhood, his old house, his old lover, had revisited his past to find what it was that had led him to his precarious state, and Jenny had given him one name.

DeLoatch.

She had implied that his current dire straits were his old law professor’s fault, but how was that possible? The professor surely wasn’t responsible for the hired assassin out to kill him, or the street gangs scouring the city for his body, or the first assistant county prosecutor seeking to indict him for murder. That was someone else, certainly. Joey Torresdale, maybe, or Caleb Breest, or someone else in the role of the magician, but not his old law professor. How could DeLoatch be responsible? How could a voice from his first year of law school have led him here, to this state of utter desperation?

DeLoatch?

“What is a criminal defendant?” had asked Professor Drinian DeLoatch rhetorically from his lectern. The professor’s hand was slipped Napoleonically into his vest, his chin rested on his chest as an outward demonstration of deep thought. “A human being with everything at stake. Reputation, property, freedom, sometimes life itself. A human being on the edge, facing the full weight of society’s damnation. Who in the whole of our legal landscape is in graver jeopardy? Who is in greater need of a champion?

“What is a prosecutor? An instrument of Draconian justice. To a prosecutor, the human being in the dock does not exist. That person is simply the manifestation of an intentional violation of the penal code. He is not a man, he is a tax evader. She is not a woman, she is a thief. He is not a child, he is a murderer. A prosecutor’s universe is straight out of Dante. Violence against thy neighbor? Go to the seventh circle of hell, ring one. Forgery? The eighth circle of hell, ditch ten. For every violation, there is a punishment, and a prosecutor’s job is to see it enacted with dispassion and dispatch. A job made for our Mr. Scrbacek, wouldn’t you say?”

General laughter.

“And what, pray tell, is a criminal defense attorney? The judge and jury are in league with the prosecutor. They agree with his Dantean vision of the world. They’re left only to determine whether a prosecutor has the evidence to enact the punishment. But the role of the defense attorney goes beyond the mere presentation or refutation of evidence. Because the defense attorney is defending more than the act. He is defending the innocent childhood of our defendant, the present conflicted soul, that soul’s very future, the potential to change, to grow, to become more than could ever be imagined by the limited vision of the Mr. Scrbaceks of our world. In so doing, the criminal defense attorney is not just the defender of the accused, but the defender of the accused’s humanity, and thus the humanity of us all.”

DeLoatch?

“Stand up, Mr. Scrbacek. I have a question that needs your sage consideration. What is the goal of a prosecutor?”

“To convict the defendant.”

“Ah, yes, to convict the defendant. You told me before, but I forget, Mr. Scrbacek, from where came your ancestors?”

“Denmark.”

“Really? Denmark. Generally an enlightened people, the Danes, which surprises, since your answers are unerringly wrong.”

General laughter.

“Does it seem as if I pick on you, Mr. Scrbacek?”

“With an unseemly delight, Professor.”

“Well, at least something’s getting through.”

More general laughter.

“The goal of a prosecutor should not be to convict, although that is unfortunately too often the case. No, Mr. Scrbacek, the role of a prosecutor is to do justice within the confines of due process. That is why prosecutors must turn over to the defendant all exculpatory evidence, known as Brady evidence. That is why prosecutors must turn over all grand jury statements once a witness testifies, known as Jencks material. That is why prosecutors are not permitted to cast away jurors on the impermissible basis of race—though they do, yes, they do. The theory, Mr. Scrbacek, is that it is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man lands in jail. Do you agree with that sentiment, Mr. Scrbacek?”

“It depends on what the guilty did. Ten psychopathic murderers running around loose is a frightening prospect.”

“And if the innocent man convicted of a crime is you, Mr. Scrbacek, and you are forced to spend the remainder of your life in a six-by-eight cell with a three-hundred-pound murdering rapist named Bubba, what then? Would that change your opinion?”

“Does he sing?”

“Oh, you’d find out, Mr. Scrbacek. Believe me, yes, you would.”

DeLoatch?

“Criminal defense attorneys are always asked the eternal question,” intoned DeLoatch from his lectern. “How can we defend the guilty? I can see that very same question work its way over Mr. Scrbacek’s simple features. Your keen moral sense is outraged at the idea of it, is that not so, Mr. Scrbacek? What kind of morally corrupt monster can defend the guilty?”

DeLoatch ran his hand through his handsome mane of gray hair, pausing as if he had never before considered the question.

“First, I’ll ask how, pray tell, Mr. Scrbacek, you are so certain of your client’s guilt? What if she says she’s innocent? Is it your job to prove her a liar? And even if the evidence shows her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, how certain then is your certainty? You weren’t there, things might have been rearranged, things might have been doctored. It has been known to happen, Mr. Scrbacek. Yes, indeed.

“But what if you do know for certain. Defense attorneys don’t usually ask the key question—they purposely don’t want to know. But what if your client blurts it out, what if he says, ‘Yes, I killed that man.’ What then, Mr. Scrbacek? Stand and tell us. What then?”

“You tell the client to get another lawyer.”

“Well said. Sit down. Wrong again, Mr. Scrbacek, wrong again.”

General laughter.

“No, still you fight. How? Why? On what moral ground? On the very foundation of this country’s system of law.

“We can’t determine what is truly just. That is for God, and God alone, to decide. And so we create an approximation, where no single man stands in for God. It’s no damn good, our approximation, we know that. Man is lousy at approximating God’s work—man’s approximation of food is Spam—but this legal system is our best chance, a system of law and due process that requires all to do their part. The judge. The jury. The prosecutor. The defense attorney. One part breaks down, and the system goes awry. One actor takes the role of God for himself, and the approximation is ruined. Bad people will go free, yes. Good people will be convicted, yes. Justice will be defeated at every turn, yes, yes, yes. But the system itself will prevail. We take our solace in the system, we take our courage from our best efforts, we take our hope from the fairness and equal protection that we promise to every person in this great nation. If you believe in America, then you play your role with a song in your heart and a prayer on your lips that our approximation is close enough to find favor in God’s eyes.”

DeLoatch rubbed his mouth for a moment. “Well, you do,” he said finally, “unless you’re Mr. Scrbacek, in which case you simply throw your hands in the air and say, ‘What the hell.’”

DeLoatch.

What a bastard he had been, the imperious Professor Drinian DeLoatch. He had mocked Scrbacek through the whole first year as an example of petty moral righteousness and had treated him with undisguised contempt. When the ethical questions in the casebook became ever so difficult—questions of cannibalism, insanity, abuse—DeLoatch regularly pulled Scrbacek to his feet and roasted his assumptions to the vocal amusement of the class. DeLoatch was like a never-satisfied father to Scrbacek’s dim-witted son.