Final Appeal (27 page)

The afternoon wears into the evening and I go through cup after cup of coffee and box after box of files. Eletha pops her head in to say good-bye when she goes; then Artie, Sarah, and Ben, who’s still carrying a briefcase. I tell them I lost some papers, and they all offer to help, even Ben.

I check my watch. Maddie’s bedtime. I decide to call home, then Winn after that. I punch in the numbers to my house.

Maddie answers the phone, then proceeds to work me over. “But
why
do you have to stay, Mom?” she asks, her thin voice rising on the other end of the line.

“I told you, honey. Because it’s an important case. I have to work on it.”

“Why can’t somebody else work on it? Why does it have to be
you
?”

“Because I’m the only one who can.”

“Are you with your boyfriend?”

I laugh. “Of course not. I don’t have a boyfriend, I’m working. Now tell me what you’re gonna read with Grandma before you go to bed.”

“I’m too sick to go to school tomorrow, Mom. Madeline feels sick too, her forehead’s hot. She’s
burning
.”

I ease into the chair next to the conference table. “You’ll be fine in the morning. You just need to sleep.”

“But my head hurts. My neck is swollen.”

“Honey, listen. We’ll see in the morning, okay?” I tug a box over to the chair and cross my legs on top of it. “I’ll check if you have a fever.”

“You have to use the thing. The glass thing. Grandma says you can’t tell with your hand, not really.”

Thanks, Mom. “Maddie, I’ve never used a thermometer with you and I’ve never been wrong. I can tell with my hand.”

“No, you can’t. It’s not science.”

I look out the window into the night. The orange lights are twinkling again, running in thin strips to the river, the way they were that night. I was sitting right here, but tonight is different from before. It’s raining hard, a spring down-pour, and Armen is gone. The streets below glisten darkly.

“Mom?”

“Tell you what. Remember last week, how you wanted to wear your party dress to school and I said no?”

“The purple one?”

“Yes. Well, I’ll let you wear it tomorrow, just this one time, since it’s a special occasion.”

“What special occasion?”

I think of the case file; it’s in here somewhere. “We’ll make one up. Happy Thursday.”

“You’re silly.”

“I am. I get it from you.”

She giggles. “Mom, I have to go now. The commercial’s over.”

“What, are you watching TV? It’s after nine o’clock!”

“It’s Disney.”

“Disney is still TV. What happened to reading?”

“Just Donald Duck, then we have to turn it off.”

“All right, but after that it goes off. Now go get ready, you don’t want to be too late to bed.”

“Yes, I do,” she says, hanging up.

I press down the hook and am about to try Winn when I see a dark form reflected in the window. Someone must be in the doorway behind me. I hang up and twist around in my seat.

The gun is the first thing I see.

I scramble to pick up the phone.

30

“H
ang up, Grace,” Ben says. He closes the door behind him and locks it from the inside. “Hang
up
.”

The phone clatters uselessly onto the hook. “Ben?”

“Surprise! Did you find the file yet?”

“What? How—”

“Lexis. The computer saves the last search request, remember? I saw it after lunch when I logged back on. Nice search request, by the way. You’re improving.” He moves to the head of the conference table and points the gun at me.

I’m terrified. My mouth turns to cotton. No one is around. Eletha is at class. God knows where Winn is, or security. “How did you get that gun past the metal detector?”

“I took the judges’ elevator.” He smiles down at the gun, handling its heft with satisfaction. He looks strange, unhinged. “I bought this the other day. Isn’t it nice?”

“What are you doing, Ben?”

“It’s not what I’m doing. It’s what you’re doing.” He slips a finger inside his jacket, pulls out a small piece of white paper, and holds it up. “Your suicide note. Sign it.” He places the paper in front of a brown package that reads
PHOTO OF A MOUNTAIN
. “Oops, I almost forgot.” He puts a rollerball pen on top of the paper.

I don’t touch the letter or the pen. I can’t believe this is happening.

“Please sign, Grace. Make it easy on yourself.”

My own suicide note. A fake suicide. Oh, no. “Did you kill Armen, Ben?”

“Yes.”

I can barely catch my breath. I assumed wrong.

“I didn’t plan to, if that’s any consolation.”

“But why?” It comes out like a whisper.

“Why did I kill him? What’s the difference?

“I want to know, to understand.”

“I wanted that clerkship.”

I stare at the paper. It’s almost inconceivable. “You wanted a clerkship that bad? A
job
?”

“It’s the Supreme Court of the United States, Grace. I’ve been preparing for it my entire adult life. I’ll teach after that, then on to the appeals court. I intend to end up on the high court myself. I wasn’t about to let
Hightower
stand in my way.”

“It was Armen who stood in the way.”

He flinches slightly. “Sacrifices had to be made.”

Armen: a sacrifice for a young lawyer’s ambition. “But you could’ve gotten the clerkship anyway.”

“Why take a chance?”

I don’t understand. I feel sick with fear and dread. “You got the clerkship, so why this? Why me?”

“It’s your own fault. You were the one digging around. You dug up McLean, now there’s a glitch. It’s only a matter of time before he points the finger at me.”

“Did McLean kill Faber?”

“The reporter? Yes, at my suggestion. Faber was too close to finding out.”

Two men dead. I feel stunned. “Was McLean the one who hit me on the head?”

“No, that was me. Now open the letter and sign it. I want no question later that you wrote it.”

I feel myself break out into a sweat. The lethal black eye of the gun barrel is almost at my head; I think of the gunpowder star the detective found on Armen. “What does it say?”

“That you hired McLean to kill the reporter. You see, Faber had found out that you had killed the chief.”

I look up at him behind the large gun barrel. “Why would
I
kill Armen?”

“Sexual harassment is a terrible thing. He raped you that night in the office.”

“He did no such thing!”

A smug smile inches across his lips. “I heard. You were very willing, McLean said.”

“You—”

“Of course, McLean was all too happy to help you cover up the murder. He’s been nursing his hate for a decade. He thinks the chief ruined his life, so it didn’t take much convincing to get him on board. I bought him a few drinks and pointed him in the right direction.” He levels the gun at me. “Sign, please.”

I pick up the paper and unfold it. It’s neatly typed, and the last line makes me sick inside:

I love my daughter very much.

I stare at the paper.
I love my daughter very much
. Maddie. She’ll think I abandoned her. I know how that feels. I fight back the tears; I’d beg if it would do any good. “She needs me, Ben,” I said hoarsely.

“You were the one who wouldn’t let it lie.”

I look at the note. The typed letters seem to swim before my eyes against a vast backdrop of brown packages.
PRAYER RUG. STATUE. ANOTHER STATUE.
Then I remember the label on one of the other packages.
BIG THING.

The cudgel. It’s on the chair by the window. Eletha called it a baseball bat. How will I reach it? I need time to think. Stall him.

“You have a problem, Ben. I don’t have a gun like Armen did.”

He laughs abruptly. “He wasn’t very good with it, Grace. I had the letter opener, but he couldn’t bring himself to shoot me. I grabbed his hand and pointed it at his own head. It was over in a minute.”

Poor Armen. I imagine the scene with horror. I can’t speak.

“Don’t think too badly of me. I did give him a last chance to come out the right way in
Hightower
, even brought him a draft opinion. We discussed the case law for some time, even the policy issues. It was sort of a final appeal. For him, and for me.”

He makes me sick, outraged. “How are you going to pull this off, Ben? You going to make me shoot myself, too? Your fingerprints are all over your gun.”

“Oh, you won’t use my new toy, Grace. You’ll jump.”

I feel my mouth fall open. My mind reels. “From where?”

“The window.” He gestures with the gun barrel.

I wheel around toward the window, petrified at the thought. Then I glimpse the cudgel right near the window, on the chair. Armen said it was used to kill. Can I kill? “Ben, you don’t mean this.”

“Yes, I do.”

My blood runs cold. “But the windows.”

“I’ll break them. They’re just a single layer of glass, not even thermapane. This building was built in the sixties.”

“But the marshals will hear it.”

“Not from inside. We’re eighteen floors up. Even if someone sees it, they’ll think it’s the wind from the storm and phone GSA. They should be here by tomorrow morning.” He cocks the trigger on the gun and it clicks smoothly into operation. “Sign the paper. Now.”

He’s thought of everything. I feel a stab of stone cold fear, then will myself to stay calm. Remember Maddie. Use the cudgel. It destroyed families, now it will protect one. “I’ll sign it,” I tell him, “but ease off the trigger. You want them to find me shot?”

“Now you’re thinking.” He relaxes on the trigger and I pick up the pen. My hand is trembling as I read the letter one last time. What if I can’t get to the cudgel. What if I blow it? “Hurry, Grace.”

I scribble my name, then lift the pen from the paper. Just in case, underneath I write,
I love you, Mads. You are the best
. I blink back the tears that seem to come.

“Get up,” Ben says. “Stand near the window.”

Good, you bastard. That’s just where I want to be. My whole body shivers. Get a grip. I’m not within arm’s length from the cudgel, not yet. It’s too close to the window.

Still aiming the gun at me, Ben crosses the room. He picks up a chair and swings it into the wall of windows. The huge panel shatters instantly into brittle shards; cracks race all over the pane like nerve endings, electrified. Breathing like a madman, Ben hurls the chair into the cracked window again, at full speed. It bounces off with a crashing sound. The glass explodes into a million pieces. Slivers fly in all directions. The window collapses and falls away, hurtling down the side of the courthouse, leaving a jagged opening like the mouth of a dark cave.

Wind and cold rain blast into the office, gusting hard off the Delaware. Glass particles and loose papers flutter wildly around the room in crazy currents. My hair whips around. The rain soaks my face and clothes. Glass stings my cheek, my forehead. The room seems to hang in the middle of the thunderstorm. Wind buffets my ears.

“Walk to the window!” Ben shouts against the wind.

I brace myself and step closer to the cudgel near the window. The wind howls. The rain drenches me.

“Now, Grace! Jump or I push you out! Your choice!”

I take another step to the window. The city glitters at my feet. The cudgel is at my right, and behind it is Independence Hall, lit up at night. I face the wind and take one deep breath, then another. One, two…three!

I grab the wrapped cudgel by its end and whip it full force into Ben’s face. It makes contact with a dense, awful thud. I drop the weapon, horrified.

Ben staggers backward, shrieking in pain and shock, blood pouring from his mouth and teeth. His jaw hangs grotesquely and his hands rush to it. His gun slips onto a pile of broken glass. I dive for it a second before Ben does and scramble to my feet, my own hands cut and slippery with blood.

I point the gun at him as he lies on the floor, in the whirling holocaust of splintered glass and paper. “Stay down!”

But he won’t. He staggers to his feet, moaning in agony. It’s a wild animal sound, as loud as the wind. Blood runs in rivulets between his fingers.

“Stay back! Stay away!” I can barely look, but he keeps coming toward me, backing me up against the conference table. I hold the gun up. I don’t want to shoot him, please don’t make me. “Ben, stop!”

Suddenly, he stops and shakes his head, still cupping his chin. His suit is heavy with rain and blood. His dark eyes brim with tears as they meet mine, and for an instant he looks like the Ben Safer I remember.

“Ben, I’m so sorry.” I start to sob. “You’ll go to a hospital, they’ll fix it.”

He shakes his head again, then turns toward the window. I feel a cold chill as soon as I understand what he’s going to do.

“
Ben! No! Don’t!
” I scream into the rain, but he won’t hear me.

He runs headlong toward the darkness, and when he reaches the edge of the carpet, he leaps mightily into nothingness and the thunderstorm.

The next sound I hear is a heartless clap of thunder, then the shrillness of Ben’s scream.

And my own.

31

I
wake up in silence and semidarkness. There’s a bed table at my side and a boxy TV floating in the corner. Moonlight streams through the knit curtains, casting a slotted pattern on a narrow single bed. A hospital room. I lie there a minute, flat on my back, taking inventory.

I am alive. I am safe. I wiggle everything, and everything works.

I hold up my hands in the dark. There are bandages on some of my fingers. My face aches, the skin pinching like it doesn’t quite fit. I can only imagine what I look like. My fingers go instinctively to my cheeks. The surface is rough underneath, cottony. More bandages.

I hear myself moan, remembering slowly how I got to be here.

It comes back to me like a gruesome slide show, with hot white light blinding me between each freeze frame. Ben, entering with the gun.
Click
. The suicide note.
Click
. The cudgel at the window.
Click
. Independence Hall at my feet.