Benighted (43 page)

He looks at me, and suddenly he’s older again, old enough to be my father, old enough to be beyond my reach. “I can’t say I know what you’re talking about. Why did I do what?”

I smile at him, just for a moment, then I calm my face. “I’m not asking why you killed Johnny.” He blinks, a short static twitch, as if his eyes weren’t connected to the rest of his face. “I don’t suppose I could get that out of you. Maybe if I arrested you, put you down in our cells, ran an interrogation over you, but I don’t think that’s really my thing anymore. Anyway, I can make a guess. You panicked, both of you. Johnny had a gun, he threatened you. When you spend your life hunting lunes and taking pressure from lycos all day, it’s easy to feel they’d all tear your throat out given a chance. But you weren’t to know that. You don’t deal with us after we’ve grown up. Maybe you really thought he’d kill you.” He’s looking at me, his eyes blue and clean, the whites bright enough to break your heart. “Probably that’s what you think now, anyway. If he hadn’t known something that could ruin you, would you really have thought he was so dangerous? You could think about that, sometimes, you know, when you’re waiting for a train and haven’t anything else to do.”

“Is that a suggestion?” he says. “Or just a thought you had while waiting for your own train?”

I shrug, spreading my hands, bare palms and scarred wrist open to his gaze. “Humor me.”

He looks at me for a long second. “What is it you want?”

“I want you to know you’re going to hell,” I hear myself say.

He glances at my throat, sees the St. Giles medal hanging there. Not a crucifix, something says inside my head. I’m no real Christian, just a woman making the Aegidians her own faith. A wrathful God frowns before my face for speaking so utterly beyond my rights.

It’s almost reassured him, though. He didn’t hear a warning against his soul, he heard a hysterical woman preaching at him.

“I’ll worry about my own soul, thank you,” he says. He isn’t comfortable, but he isn’t really afraid of me.

“I’d like to hear your justification.”

“For my work?”

“Yes.” I nod, almost polite. “Please.”

“My work is practiced with the consent of your own order.” He looks at my pale hands. “Has it occurred to you that one reason people with your disability experience so much discrimination is because you are so few? Most people have very little contact with you. Anmorphic people work all day for DORLA, they socialize among themselves, they don’t meet the rest of the population very much unless they arrest them. A few thousand more members could make all the difference for you. If you want to keep the curfew system going—and personally I can’t think of a better alternative.”

I sit quiet, listening to him. Becca sits behind me, rocking Leo to and fro.

“Then there’s the other reason for your unpopularity, of course. You’re known, infamous for your treatment of prisoners. I don’t believe you can be sitting there with no blood on your hands, Ms. Galley, not for a second. It seems to me that with more of you, you might be less inclined to resort to such primitive methods. I’m concerned for your victims, you know, most people are. It would be a great humanitarian advance to improve DORLA’s resources. For you, as well as anyone else. Look at you. You’re”—he glances down, looks at a file on his desk—“twenty-eight years old, and already you have white hairs. I don’t say this to hurt your feelings, but you could pass for ten years older than you are without a question.” It’s not aggressive, it’s assessing, a doctor’s opinion. “I’m sure you’d appreciate more help in your life.”

I turn around, look at Leo for a moment. He doesn’t want to be sitting on Becca’s lap; he’s decided he’s old enough for the floor. He arches his back and churns his legs, willful and determined and vitally concerned with his own wishes. “I’d appreciate more financial resources,” I say. “Not more children, not like this.”

“You don’t like your life, I see. But I do believe that if you were more numerous, it wouldn’t be so difficult for you.”

“Don’t tell me this is for our benefit. You talk as if it was DORLA’s suggestion. I know it wasn’t. Someone came to DORLA and suggested it.”

“How would DORLA suggest it? You don’t request a medical treatment if you don’t know it’s available. They needed to be made aware of the possibility.”

“But why would you come up with it? How? How could you do experiments to find out if it was possible?”

Parkinson sighs. “They weren’t begun ethically, certainly. Prisoner-of-war camps, for the most part, or political prisoners in countries even less civilized than our own. Experiments that tended to fail.” Fail and take the mother and child into the dark with them. I’ve heard those stories. “It began as an academic exercise, really. A tremendous challenge. Think of it: no other species experiences metamorphosis at the rate we humans do, transformation from one state to another and back again. It’s truly a miraculous process. Brilliant men have studied it for a lifetime and still don’t know all there is to know. It’s miraculous, and it’s tremendously fragile. A few adverse conditions for a few minutes at the moment of birth, and it’s destroyed forever. If we could just understand those conditions, we’d be so much closer to understanding our own nature. And we’re doing it, we’re closer now, far closer than we would have believed twenty years ago. Such a difficult process, and we’re mastering it. How many medical techniques can you think of that only affect humans, that can’t be tested on animals at all because there simply isn’t anything comparable in the animal experience?”

“You’re using research tested on humans, aren’t you?”

“Discarding a valuable medical discovery for the sake of some dead sufferers who are beyond help is not an ethical practice. Ask any doctor, they’ll tell you the same thing.”

“You’re talking as if this—this thing you can do to children is for their own good.” It’s Becca talking. Both of us turn. Parkinson’s face is surprised, as if I’d brought a dog in and it had decided to voice its own opinion, and heat floods up my arms from fingertips to chest as I see my sister, her voice a little hesitant, speak my thoughts ahead of me, of her own free will declare herself against this glossy room and the articulate man within it.

He doesn’t address her. He turns back to me. “For the greater good. As for the individuals—well, they manage. You manage, I’m sure you could tell me hundreds of examples of individuals coping perfectly well with this”—he raises his hand, held stiff like an oar—“minor disability.”

“Oh, yes,” I say. “This is how we cope.” I reach into my bag and pull out a sheaf of photographs. I lay them on the table before him, one after the other, like a card dealer.

The flattened silver bullet the pathologist took out of Nate’s broken skull.

A crime scene photograph, an empty cell after a lune mauled a catcher. Blood pools on the ground, gels around the straw, smears up and down the tiled walls. It’s an old picture. There’s no one in the cell. This is how it would have looked, the night Johnny brought Ellaway to the shelter.

Paul. He stands, looking away from the camera as if ashamed. Bruises layer his chest, black and purple, cracked skin laces around his ribs. They all took pictures, the day they were released: Sarah was thinking of suing. They didn’t, of course. Paul’s head is averted. There’s a window to his side with the sun pouring through in a cold winter blaze. His eyes are creased against the unaccustomed light.

Parkinson looks at the pictures. “What are you trying to prove, Ms. Galley? Is this supposed to disturb me? I am a doctor, I’m not unused to the sight of blood.”

I laugh, I actually laugh. “Oh, I know you’re not.” I lay out more pictures.

Nate on the slab. “Seligmann did this,” I say. “The man you let out onto the streets to take our eyes off you.”

Another picture. David, his arm destroyed. “And Seligmann’s friend. Who you wouldn’t treat. I can’t believe he didn’t ask you to steal antiallergens for him. You helped Seligmann escape and hid him so he’d get rid of the evidence for you. But you wouldn’t take that risk for another man.”

“Do you expect me to dignify that with an answer?”

“No,” I say, “I don’t.” I lay out my last two pictures.

Johnny stands with his family. Debbie stands holding her mother’s free hand, her face clean and cheerful, full of the prospect of a new baby. A little gawky, but sweet as only a child who hasn’t learned her body yet can be. Julio slouches against his father, trying to look cool, and Peter stands beside him, leaning on his shoulder. Sue’s pregnancy doesn’t show much yet, there’s just a little rounding of her stomach, but you can see it, because Johnny has looped his arms around her and is holding it, his hands cradling his unborn child. He’s grinning, his jowls crease all over with the smile on his face.

The second picture comes from the mortuary. Johnny lies on a slab. His head rests at the wrong angle, the great hollow at the back of it pulling it off balance. Pieces of his face are missing.

Parkinson looks at the pictures, looks up at me.

“I don’t like your theory of the greater good,” I say. “The price is too high.”

And I reach into my bag again.

He opens his mouth again, but when he sees the gun, he closes it. His hand edges toward the telephone, and I reach out and take hold of it, put it gently back where I can see it. He feels warm, damp, his touch comes off on my skin.

“May, what are you doing?” Becca’s on her feet, her arms tight around Leo.

“It’s okay, Becca.”

“What are you doing?”

“This won’t take a minute.” She starts toward me, but I flinch, just for a second, and she stops. “I’m sorry about this, really I am, but this won’t take a minute.”

Parkinson sits with his hands where I can see them.

“I don’t think you did it out of public spirit,” I say. “You’re no hero of medicine. I think maybe you did it for the money, and because you could. That’s what I think. Mostly, you did it because you could. Because it didn’t really touch you. That isn’t so anymore.”

Parkinson twitches; one hand jumps on the desk.

“Don’t try to grab the gun off me. You did that once before, remember? Not again.”

“You’ll go to jail for life if you shoot.” His voice is shaking, his face pale. The gloss is gone, the life he’s lived, the security and authority and success that his safe birth bought him. All the nourished, healthy blood has drained out of it, and I see it, I see the face that Johnny saw.

“I took a life sentence at birth,” I say, and draw back the catch.

“May, don’t.” Becca is hoarse, whispering with fear.

I look at the face of the murderer, and pull the trigger.

Parkinson gives a small, hoarse cry, and Becca gasps. The click of the empty chamber is the quietest thing in the room.

I look at him for a second more, then put the gun back in my bag. “You thought I’d do it.” I shake my head. “I’m not you. I wouldn’t do that.”

Leo starts to cry; the pressure of his mother’s arms is crushing him. Becca is shivering, the sound of her panting rises over her son’s tears. I sweep up the pictures and walk over to her. “Here, let me take him.” She looks at me, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, and she shakes her head. It isn’t a rejection. She presses a hand to her forehead and passes Leo over to me. Over his head, I look at Parkinson.

“You’ll…” he says.

“Nothing will happen to me. The gun comes from DORLA. I didn’t even have to steal it: I went straight into Weapons, spoke to the man at the desk. I told him I didn’t need ammo, and he didn’t even bother signing it out. I’ll return it tonight, and no one will ask.” Maybe some discipline will be handed down, I might lose my pay raise or have to be yelled at. It doesn’t mean a thing. “You can tell them about this, the day they come for you,” I say.

Leo is still crying in my arms. I rest his wet cheek against mine, cupping his head, still looking at Parkinson. His face has flooded red, bright under his graying hair, and I see him again, not the face of a murderer, but just a man, an aging man who thought for a few moments that death was coming sooner than he was prepared for. I smile at him, shake my whitening hair out of my eyes. “Now you know,” I say. “That’s how it feels on the other side.”

FORTY-FIVE

T
he day Marty comes back to work, I haven’t much time to talk to him. I’m going one way down the corridor, my arms full of papers, he’s going the other. His throat is wrapped in scars, and when we stop to talk, his voice is thinner than before, but his eyes are clear and he carries himself well, all six foot one of him is straight and balanced. It’s an unusual look in DORLA, and it takes a moment to figure out what it is. He looks rested.

We haven’t much time to chat. He’s heading for the Seligmann trial, he’s going to be a witness. The Harpers have already gone through the system; they’re sitting in different prisons now, waiting for fifteen years to pass. Attempted murder, resisting arrest. They’re in a mainstream prison, where we can’t get at them anymore. Seligmann, we’ve been saving.

I can’t go to the trial. The Ellaway case, my guilty client, has been scheduled to take place at the same time, and I have to present a case. I’m safely out of the way. A very tactful piece of scheduling.

“I heard you got the bastard,” Marty says. The story is all around DORLA now, how I bravely confronted the desperate Seligmann, brought him in single-handed. This is the man who tore Marty’s throat out, and there’s a burning satisfaction in Marty’s face as he speaks. Marty thinks I’m a heroine. I haven’t the heart to disillusion him.

Ellaway has told Franklin what happened in his captivity. Franklin asked me if it was true, and I didn’t deny it. I told him, when he asked me, that I was a DORLA lawyer, not much worse than most, that there but for the grace of God went he. I suppose he expected me to say something like that, and I had to give him some way of dealing with having such an unconscionable colleague. To his credit, Franklin actually thought about it. It’s too bad. I’d rather liked him.

When I first met Ellaway, he was insisting that he’d been trying to get to a shelter during moonrise, that his car had broken down on his way home. A simple defense, a classic. Since then, I discovered how much he had lied.

I tell Ellaway the truth will make things worse, that faking evidence is a more serious crime than prowling. Of course, it’s not concern for my client that makes me say this. If Ellaway tells the truth, he’ll drag other people down with him, Albin, Sarah, Carla, people who’ve helped me. Paul.

Ellaway told me a lie the first time he met me, and expected me to build a case out of it. He can damn well stick to it now.

I look around the courtroom as I go in. This is a room I’ve worked in dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of times. I’d like to work in a grand court, oak panels and carved docks, crests behind the robed judge, but this is just another room in our building, with chipped ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights, scuffed blue carpets wearing away around the door. I look around for the Marcos family, before I remember. They’ll be at the murder trial next door. Whatever Ellaway did to him, it’s all the same now.

It startles me to see Bride sitting on the benches. She hadn’t told me she was coming back, but now Seligmann is in jail, no threat to her, I guess she figured it was safe. She sees me, gives me a grin and a wink. For a moment, I stay blank-faced, wondering at her. Gone without a word, back without a word, convinced that we can pick up just where we left off. Then I let it go. She has her sick husband to think of, her own life, her own fear of dying. And the more I think about it, the more of a relief it is. No scenes, no awkward apologies either way. I did one thing, she did another, and we can get on with our lives without looking back. I smile back at her. I need all the friends I can get.

Looking farther down the bench, I see Becca. She doesn’t know much about this trial, even now. She’s just come to see me work. I could wish she’d come to watch a better trial, but I guess she’s seen the worst of me now.

After she sat with me in Parkinson’s office, we went home together. We walked in silence, block after block. My hands shook. It was a long time before I could say to her, “Are you still speaking to me?”

She looked down at Leo. I could see her thinking of what to say, ways to make peace, ways to hurt me, ways to free herself of me for the rest of her life.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She looked at me. Her face was pretty in the daylight. “I’m really not happy about it,” she said. There was a pause. “Was it true what you said about that man? Did he really shoot someone?”

“Yes, he did.”

Her hand rested against her son’s chest. “It was all true, what you said?”

“Yes. I didn’t make anything up.”

She looked away from me, looked back. “I’m really not happy about it,” she said again. “But I guess you know your own business best.”

I reached out and touched her hand, and she didn’t move away.

Some days she calls me and talks for hours, pouring out words about her son, her marriage, details and intimacies I’d never heard before and would never have expected. Some days when I go to see her she’s distant, looking at Leo as he sits up and grins, not meeting my eyes. I don’t know quite what to make of her. I guess she feels the same way about me. It’s a queer kind of fresh start, but someday soon I’ll start talking back, I’ll tell her things about me. Maybe we’ll find better things to say to each other.

Sitting on another bench, near the back, is a dark-haired man, on his own, speaking to no one. His face is turned away from me, but I know it’s Paul.

Becca sees me first. She gives me a little wave. It’s an odd gesture, strangely encouraging. My schools never went in for concerts or recitals, and my mother never attended a trial of mine, but there’s something in Becca’s salute that makes me think of a mother—not mine, someone else’s mother, someone better—watching her child perform, applauding from the backseat. It’s so strange that I don’t know how to respond, but in the end I just raise my eyebrows and try to smile at her.

Then Paul turns his head and sees me. My arms are full of documents, hugged to my chest, and I can’t gesture. Paul looks at me and I look back, we hold each other’s gaze for long seconds.

It’s only when someone brushes past me that I turn my head. I go over to the table where I sit with my client, lay down my papers, pull my chair up to the desk, tidy my hands on the surface. I sit and wait for the judge to come in, ready to be a lawyer.

Nick Jarrold takes the stand. Sitting there, he tells the story of how he and Johnny came upon Ellaway, tried to arrest him, how Ellaway brought Johnny down and tore his hand away. Nick holds a pack of cigarettes he’s not allowed to smoke, not while the trial is in session. He turns it over in his lap, tapping it against his knee, so that the logo on the front upends and rights itself again and again. He tells the prosecution everything he remembers about that night. I don’t cross-examine him. He coughs and rasps in the stand, and I wonder how long he’ll have before cancer finally comes to claim him.

Lisa Rahman, one of our expert witnesses, takes the stand. A map of the city is placed on an easel next to her. Distance Assessment is a small department; she testifies in dozens of trials every month. She studies locations, assesses how fast you could walk them, how far someone could travel over this terrain or that in any given time. People often say they were trying to get to a shelter when the moon rose. She calculates whether, if they’d been trying, they could have. In this case, she concludes that Ellaway probably could. I stand up, ask her if she’s a hundred percent certain, she says no. The redirect asks her if she’s convinced herself; she says yes.

Even though I knew it was coming, I still feel an ugly little twist in my chest when I see Ally come into the room and walk up to the witness stand. He was there, the night Johnny brought Ellaway in. He has to testify. He doesn’t look at me when he comes into the room; I see the back of his head, and for a moment I don’t recognize him. His ragged hair has been cut short, shaped to his skull. I remember, as if it was a long time ago, the bet we once had, that he’d shave his head the day I spoke to a lyco lawyer who didn’t mention that public opinion is against us. We used to bet each other a lot, when we got too old to dare each other. I guess all our bets are off now.

He turns his head and sees Paul sitting in the benches. Paul looks back at him, implacable, untouchable. It’s only a moment before Ally reaches the stand and sits down. His eyes flick over the tables, and when he sees me, his fidgeting stops, he sits still.

Under oath, he tells the judge how Ellaway was brought in with Johnny bleeding almost to death from a mutilated arm. That Ellaway was tranquilized and unconscious, and that he was still luning, but clean, there were no brambles or leaves in his hair, there was no mud on him, that he didn’t look like a man who’d got lost and wandered into a park.

I stand up, straighten my jacket, to cross-examine him.

“Did you keep any samples of this hair?” I ask. From my tone, you wouldn’t know I’d ever met Ally before.

“No. There was blood all over the floor, and we had to sterilize everything. The hair was incinerated.”

“So we have no concrete evidence for this claim of yours. We’re just going to take your word?”

He looks at me, dark-eyed. “I remember what happened.”

I know he’s telling the truth, and he knows I know. “What time was my client brought into your shelter?”

“About one thirty.”

“Had you been on duty all night?”

“Yes.”

“What time was sunset that day?”

Ally shrugs, his shoulders roll. The familiarity of the gesture cuts at my heart. “About four fifteen, I think.”

“So you’d been on duty for over nine hours?”

“Yes.”

“Was he the only arrest you’d had?”

“No, there were five others in the shelter.”

“You must have been tired.”

Ally looks at me when I say this. A year ago, in another room, it would have been a stupid thing to say. He would have laughed at me, or with me. My voice is almost sympathetic, and even after everything, I still feel a tug of pain at the thought of Ally, my old friend, nine hours into the night, trying to keep awake and work through it.

“When John Marcos was brought in,” I continue, “would you describe his condition as serious?”

“His hand was taken off, of course it was serious,” Ally snaps. I’ve heard myself snap the same way, many times.

“You must have been concerned about him.”

Tired, concerned, desperate. Ally must have been all these things. I know everything he must have felt that night. He doesn’t hear any fellow-feeling in my voice, though, because he knows where I’m going with this. Everything he has to say about the night Ellaway was captured is fair and accurate, but easy to raise doubts about, and that’s what I’m doing. It’s terrible, really, that of all the people in this trial, I’ll probably do the best job discrediting Ally. If things hadn’t happened the way they did, he wouldn’t hold it against me, but I have a feeling he will now. It can’t be helped. It’s over. He won’t owe me a thing anymore. I’ve set him loose.

They raise the issue of the car, its damaged engine. No conclusive proof. I’m able to get the witness—Kevin White, the garage owner who was finally told to stop just storing Ellaway’s Maserati and look under the hood—to admit he can’t say for sure it was tampered with, not a hundred percent. It’s still a big point for the prosecution. I discovered it, this damaging point. I disclosed it to my opposite number a week before the trial, just as the law says I must.

The free-rangers, I did not disclose. I didn’t have to: everyone in DORLA knew about them, all that time they were down in the cells. I could raise them, make them an exonerating circumstance, or at least a chance to spread the blame. I don’t. I could call my client to the stand, too, have him tell his story. For a whole day, I was tempted. It would have given him the opportunity to add perjury to his crimes, a couple of years to his sentence. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

As a result, the case I make is a thin one. Franklin works with me, calls up witnesses to refute the engine-tampering charge, finds other cases where people with similar stories were found innocent. He’s very good. While he’s speaking, even I’m half convinced by what he says. When he stops talking, though, and it’s quiet, after all the speeches are over, everyone knows what’s going to happen.