Redemption (13 page)

Rudge's opening statement was rather flat and straightforward and shorter than I had expected; but Sarah told me that opening statements were soon forgotten in what followed, and that Rudge very consciously built his case from a slow beginning. He began by saying that the state intended to prove that a cold, callous, and premeditated murder had been committed by the defendant, Mrs. Elizabeth Hopper. Then he laid out the details of the case according to the police reports. Then he said, “The defense will attempt to convince you that all of the evidence we intend to present is entirely circumstantial. What is circumstantial evidence? Unless the police have a reliable witness to a murder, then all evidence becomes circumstantial. The dictionary defines circumstantial as having to do with circumstances surrounding a fact. Every fact, every action, exists in what we might call a pool of circumstances. That is the nature of reality. We look at motive for a crime, and the facts of motive depend-on a series of circumstances. No man or woman lives apart from reality, and what is reality but a set of circumstances? Were we not to depend on circumstantial evidence, few crimes would be solved. Now the state intends to call a series of witnesses who will testify to the facts and circumstances surrounding this vicious and premeditated killing. You, as the jury, will be responsible for putting together the pieces. If the pieces fit and make a perfect pattern, you will have no other choice than to find the defendant guilty.”

When he finished, the judge said, “Would you approach.”

Sarah and I, and Rudge and Slater walked up to the bench; and Judge Kilpatrick said softly, “I did not interrupt you, Mr. Rudge, but I will have no prejudgment. You phrased it cleverly, but the jury does have a choice. You cannot make it for them. Remember that, all of you.”

It was a very mild reprimand, but it pleased me; and when the court broke for lunch, before Sarah's opening statement, I told her what I felt.

“He's meticulous,” Sarah said, “but don't let it fool you. He's not leaning one way or another.”

Sarah's opening was made that afternoon. Like Rudge, she began with a detailed itemization of the police events, but it fascinated me to hear how different it sounded as Sarah put it forth. She was speaking about a crime that had been committed somewhere, on Wall Street in this case, by one of many people who had reason to wish William Sedgwick Hopper dead. She itemized the members of the firm—the three partners whose names headed the list and the junior partners, the dozens of men and women who worked for Garson, Weeds and Anderson, the cleaning crew, the concierge—and then concluded by saying, “I neither accuse nor attempt to implicate any of this list of almost a hundred men and women. That is not my function. My function is simply to defend a good and innocent and gentle woman who has been chosen out of this large group of people to stand trial here with her life as forfeit for a crime she did not commit.

“The District Attorney made a long statement about circumstantial evidence. His definition was quite correct, and each name I have given you here is part of the circumstances of this case. He was careful not to tell you that the police found not a single fingerprint that belonged to Mrs. Hopper. What did they find? They found a note written with lipstick, and that happened to be a lipstick used by literally hundreds of thousands of women, some of them working at the same firm. Their so-called circumstantial evidence is so shoddy that if I were a district attorney, I would be ashamed to produce it. I intend to prove the innocence of Elizabeth Hopper. I beg you to keep that in mind. At this point, I know that she is innocent.

“This court, according to our law, must presume that she is innocent; and Mr. Rudge intends to prove her guilt beyond reasonable doubt. I see no basis for their intention. I put this question to you, as twelve men and women who will hear all the evidence. I ask only that you listen and weigh the evidence fairly and thoughtfully, and this I know you will do. If you have doubts that are reasonable, you must find her innocent. Thank you for being here.”

The court broke after Sarah finished her opening; and we went back to my apartment together, all of us, including J. J. Sarah had sent Jerry Brown to Boston, and he was due back this same evening and would meet us at the apartment. He arrived at about five o'clock, and we decided to send out for Chinese. But when Sarah opened the door for Brown, she said to him, “You bastard, you waited until the last minute! You should have had this stuff a week ago!”

“Honeychile, it'll be a week before the state finishes their case. You got plenty of time.” He came into the living room and plopped his briefcase down on the coffee table and stared at Liz.

“We don't have plenty of time!” Sarah snapped. “And why are you looking at Liz like that?”

“Because she's as pretty as a doll, and according to Boston, she took more punishment than Muhammad Ali. Two hospitals and three police stations—and the Boston cops are not good on race, no sir. They see a black man and double the charge. I put out three hundred bucks for copies of the damn records. What a corrupt bunch of bastards!”

“You have all of it?”

“All I could get, xeroxed and notarized. Give me a break, Sarah.”

“A break? We're paying you eight hundred a day and expenses, and you want a break?” She was rummaging through the papers in his briefcase.

“Liz's going to phone for Chinese,” I told them. “Will you please tell me what you want?” I asked, feeling that the argument between Brown and Sarah had gone far enough.

“I love Chinese,” Brown said. “My favorite is pork fried rice—or anything else. Ah, Sarah,” he said to her, “be a doll and smile at me.”

“This is very good stuff,” she admitted. “Very good.”

“Give me a kiss.”

Liz was laughing. It was a long time since I had seen her laugh. She phoned out for a vast order of Chinese food, and finally we dragged Sarah away from the pile of documents that the briefcase contained. We stuffed ourselves with Chinese food, and I told Sarah that I thought her opening was damn good.

“What would you have said if I had done something like that in class?”

“An interesting question. Of course, it's no opening for a contract case, but it's still an interesting thought. It's hard for me to think of myself as a teacher in the middle of this case. I must say I miss teaching.”

“Then why don't you teach again?” Liz demanded.

“I don't know. I'm old—”

“You're not old.”

“Liz, I was never happy after Lena died. But I was sort of content. I actually read Proust's great boring novel, and I read
War and Peace
for a second time. Now I'm happy but not content.”

“I told you, Ike,” Sarah said, “we will win.”

“She ain't just whistling ‘Dixie,'” Brown put in. “Professor, you got the best damn defense lawyer in the business.” He looked at her adoringly. “She has a mean temper and she's too good-looking for her own good—”

“Oh, shut up!” Sarah cried. “Flattery will get you nowhere, and for you to talk about being good-looking turns me off.”

“Well, he is very good-looking,” J. J. put in, rather timidly.

“And what about Annabelle?” Sarah demanded. “I told you two weeks ago to see Annabelle again and get me the whole story.”

“I don't make passes at white women.”

“That'll be the day. Your notion of virtue—”

Brown spread his hands. “I talked to Annabelle.”

“I hope you talked sweet.”

“Sweet as butter. The detectives and Joe Kennedy, her partner, didn't have a clue. You know she said it was a woman, her idea. The others argued with her, but she's a tough lady. She convinced them it was a woman—the way it was done. She said no man would do a killing that way because no man could develop the kind of frustrated hatred that was inherent in the nature of the crime.”

“On the basis of the lipstick?”

“She says she felt it, woman's intuition.”

“Good,” Sarah admitted grudgingly. “I talked to her and got nothing. Now would you and J. J. go home? Ike and I have work to do with Liz.”

“Tonight?” Liz protested.

“And every other night.”

I gave up at ten o'clock, and it was not until an hour later that Sarah left and Liz crawled into bed next to me. I woke up, as she snuggled into my arms and kissed me. “I'm tired,” I said. “I'm old and tired.”

“You're not old and not too tired to kiss me.”

I kissed her, and we lay there in silence for a while. Wide awake now, I asked her what all this bickering between Brown and Sarah was about.

“Don't you know?”

“There's a great deal that I don't know. I don't even know what was in that briefcase Brown brought back from Boston. My position in this is purely titular.”

“It is not. Sarah consults you constantly.”

“About what she intends to do,” I said. “What's with her and Jerry Brown?”

“They lived together for five years. Then she threw him out. She says he's great at what he does, but when it comes to women, he's a no-good bum. Those are her words. I think he's darling, and J. J. is madly in love with him. I don't blame her.”

“What does that mean—that you ‘don't blame her'?”

She snuggled closer. “Oh, Ike, you're jealous.”

“You think he's darling.”

“Ike, I love you so much there are no words for it. I will never love anyone else. I never have. I never could. My life is yours, entirely and always.”

She fell asleep after that, curled up against me, my arm under her head, and I couldn't bring myself to pull my arm out and awaken her. Unless she changed her position, my arm would be dead in the morning—well, for a few minutes at least.

I didn't sleep easily, thinking of what Charlie had once said about there being no fool like an old fool in love with a young woman—and yet he added that he'd change places with me in a moment.
Let me be an old fool
, I thought,
but don't take her away from me;
and then I wondered to whom I was addressing the thought? Would I end up like Liz, believing in what was still utterly unbelievable—that someone or something or some force looked after me, and that nothing happened that was not ordained to happen? It was not a comforting thought; I preferred a system that was malleable and subject to change.

Neither was another thought: the
given
in a nation of law that when, one is a prisoner in the dock, confronting. whichever district attorney faces and prosecutes you, then you are likely enough guilty, in spite of the legend that no man or woman is guilty until proven so, beyond a reasonable doubt. As a lifelong professor of law, I should know and uphold the law; but what one knows intellectually does not always stand up against a lifetime of immersion in the media. A man builds a bridge, and he knows that every calculation has been correct—every measurement, every bit of steel and concrete—and then the bridge collapses.

Murder is the deepest, darkest stain against the human race that exists; it is also the deepest, darkest mystery—which is why it holds an endless fascination for us. You open a newspaper and stare at the picture of two small boys' round, innocent, beautiful faces—the faces of choir boys, loving children—then you read on to discover that these same two children have murdered their mother and father … and there is no reason or explanation ever to tell us why, and the mystery remains unsolved.

These are thoughts. My arm is around a woman who has brought a dried-up old weed to life. Was it a wise man or a fool who said that he who saves a human life saves the whole world? And what of he or she who takes a human life?

Liz, next to me, slept the sleep of the innocent, and I prayed to a God I hardly believed in that some of that innocence would seep into whatever soul I had.

EIGHT

T
HE
P
EOPLE
'
S
C
ASE

T
HE PEOPLE BEGAN
its case by calling Alec Prosky as its first witness. “Rudge is methodical,” Sarah whispered to me. “He will pile on facts and more facts even when he has no facts, counting on the accumulation of detail to impress the jury.”

Prosky stated his name and took the oath.

“What is your work?” Rudge asked. “Would you describe it, Mr. Prosky?”

“I work for Kelvin Kleaners. We clean office buildings after the people who work there have left.”

“We, I take it, means you are part of a crew.”

“Yes, sir.” Prosky, a burly man in his thirties, was a mixture of awe and pride. Here he was, in the great Greco-Roman-style building that housed the New York Supreme Court, as the first witness in a sensational murder case that had been headline news for weeks.

“How many men are in the crew?”

“It depends on the building. For the Omnibus, we use six. Frank Goober is the job boss.” Prosky was gaining assurance as he spoke.

“What time do you begin at the Omnibus Building?”

“Midnight.”

“And where were you at twelve-thirty
A.M.
on May twenty-fifth, 1996?”

“I was working the seventeenth floor, the offices of Garson, Weeds and Anderson.”

“Alone? No one was working the floor with you?”

“No, sir,” Prosky said. “I was alone.”

“Please tell us what happened at twelve-thirty of that night.”

“I opened the door of Mr. Hopper's office, and I seen him sitting at his desk. Sometimes some of the people there work late, and at first I thought he might be asleep. He was bent over the desk. I decided to wake him before I began to vacuum, and then when I went over to his desk, I seen the bullet hole in the back of his head and blood on his neck and the collar of his shirt, so I know he's dead.”

“Did you touch anything there in the office?”