Redemption (20 page)

“But you could kill him and say it was an accident, couldn't you?” Sarah said.

“Oh, my God, no! No!”

“But you have told us that you had eight years of what might be regarded as pure hell, didn't you? And there you were, sitting next to him with a loaded shotgun, and all you had to do was to pull the trigger and then say it was an accident—”

I was watching Rudge as he half rose from his seat to object—and then he dropped back. He still didn't know where this was going.

Liz was in tears now. “How can you ask me such a thing?” This had not been rehearsed.

“Because it's my role to ask the questions and yours to answer them. Will you please answer the question, Mrs. Hopper.”

“Do you want a recess?” Kilpatrick asked Sarah.

Liz shook her head, and a recess at this moment was the last thing Sarah desired. Liz wiped away the tears and assured the judge that she was all right.

“I think my client can answer the question,” Sarah said. “Why didn't you kill your husband? Eleven times you had to call the police. He knocked out your front teeth, smashed your face, broke your arm, and beat you again and again. Why didn't you kill him when you had such an easy and safe opportunity?”

“This kind of hypothetical question certainly calls for a conjecture,” Kilpatrick said. “Mr. Rudge has not seen fit to object. Do you intend to continue in this direction?”

“I have introduced nothing,” Sarah replied. “Everything has been introduced as evidence, some of it by the people. Her state of mind certainly goes to the facts.”

“Very well. If Mr. Rudge has no objections, she may answer the question.”

Liz had pulled herself together. “Because I would have to answer before God,” she said softly.

“Would you speak up,” Kilpatrick said. “I don't think the jury heard you.”

“Because I would have to answer to God,” Liz said firmly.

A black woman and another woman on the jury, a white woman, were wiping away their own tears.

“What was your state of mind during the years of your marriage?”

“I was broken,” Liz said. “My heart and mind and soul.”

Rudge objected to this, but the judge said that since he had allowed what had preceded it, he would allow this as well. He overruled the objection.

“I asked you why you didn't leave him.”

“My vows were my vows. That never changed.”

“Why didn't he leave you?”

“He would have, but he wanted an annulment. He could not inherit from his father if he were divorced without an annulment.”

“Why didn't you leave him in Boston, Mrs. Hopper?”

“Because there was nothing left of
me
. He had crushed everything in me. I was incapable of leaving, of doing anything of my own will. He had called me a liar so often, beaten me so often with words as well as fists, told me I was worthless so often that I believed him. And there were the other women, one woman after another, and he never failed to tell me how superior they were to me. Where would I go? I believed him.”

Rudge was on his feet, objecting and asking whether we had to listen to a psychological history of her state of mind.

“She answered the question, Mr. Rudge,” Kilpatrick said mildly.

“Did he get the annulment, Mrs. Hopper?”

“Yes, in New York, and then the divorce.”

“Why did he move to New York, Mrs. Hopper?”

“Some clients in Boston raised questions about his methods. He got an offer from a Wall Street firm, and he accepted it.”

“And you went with him to New York?”

“Yes. I had already accepted a new teaching job in the art department at Marymount College. I thought I could start a new life in a new place. I really hoped I could speed up the annulment and divorce if I came to New York, too. At that point, all I wanted was the annulment and the divorce—and then never to see him again.”

“And since you met Professor Goldman, have you ever seen Mr. Hopper?”

“No!”

“Do you love Professor Goldman?”

“He gave me life and hope when I had no life and no hope. I love him more than I can say.”

“I will ask you again, and I will ask you to remember that you are under oath, an oath taken before God. Did you kill William Sedgwick Hopper?”

“No, I did not.”

“I have no other questions for this witness.”

“Mr. Rudge?” the judge asked.

Rudge shook his head.

“Then we will adjourn until tomorrow—unless you wish to call a witness—either you, Ms. Morton, or the people.”

Rudge and Sarah replied in the negative, and the judge asked them to be ready to deliver their closing statements the following day.

We left the court as usual, pushing our way through the cluster of media people and cameras, and found a cab to take us uptown. At this point I felt certain that we would get either a hung jury or an acquittal. But as Sarah had said often, in a capital case there is no certainty. She had played her cards as she saw them, laid them out with all her skill, rehearsed every possible question and answer for weeks—with only one end in mind, to win the case. I was unsure whether or not I had perjured myself; whether Liz had I did not know, and I had no intention of asking her. Much would depend on the closing statements, and Sarah said that she and J. J. would go on to her office for some last-minute work on her closing. We were a somber group, and now that the witnesses had been heard, no one appeared willing to talk about it.

Sarah dropped us off at my apartment. There were no more secrets. We were public figures and would remain so for a goodly time to come, as Gregory, the doorman, underlined by wishing us luck and hoping that it had gone well today.

I suggested to Liz that we might go out for dinner later, but she shook her head. “I wish it weren't too warm for a fire,” she said. “I was thinking all day how good it would be to sit in front of the fire and just curl up to you, Ike, and pretend that there was no world outside, and perhaps look at the river as the sun sets. I would feel safe.”

“You are safe.”

“No, dear man. I will always be that woman accused of murdering her divorced husband. That will never change. Wherever I go, they'll look at me and say, that's Elizabeth Hopper.”

“Well, they might say, that's Elizabeth Goldman.”

“You still would?”

“I still will, and you must eat something. We can go to that Chinese restaurant over on Broadway where no one will know us. You've had an awful day.”

“It was not so awful. Sarah and I rehearsed it until I was answering questions in my sleep. She knew every question and every answer. She even knew which jurors would cry. I never thought that a trial could be anything like this.”

“But you didn't rehearse your tears.”

“No. They were real. They came from remembering. Memory is a terrible thing, Ike.”

“But without it, we wouldn't be human, would we?”

“No, I guess not.”

“And will you come out to that Chinese place, and we'll order Peking Duck?”

“Oh, no. Don't make me eat, Ike. I know it's a thought of love, but don't tonight. Open a bottle of wine and put out some crackers, and we'll just sit and watch the sunset and get a little tight, and then go to bed, and I'll take one of those sleeping pills that they made such a fuss over and I'll fall asleep in your arms.”

And that's what we did, and she fell asleep with her warm body against mine.

TEN

T
HE
S
UMMATION

A
T ABOUT FOUR
A.M.
the following morning, Liz awakened, whimpering with fear; and when I took her in my arms and quieted her, she told me that she had a nightmare, so real that she could not shake it off. In her dream, she was in prison—an old, withered, white-haired woman, who had just been told that her parole had been denied and she would have to die in prison.

“Ike,” she said, “it was so terrible and real. Everything was real, not like in a dream. I saw the little drops of water condensing on the stone walls of my cell, and I wore a gray prison dress that was torn and tattered. People say you dream of the future, that what you dream will happen. But Ike, you won't let it happen—oh, Ike, I've been rotten for you. I've dumped on you and dumped on you, and given you nothing but trouble.”

“Liz, baby, I used to dream that I had sprouted wings and I could fly, but I'm still walking around on these two old feet. A dream's a dream, nothing more. You're frightened, but it will all be over soon, and you'll be free, and we can go on with our plans. I get phone calls from my son asking whether I need money. I don't need money. I need you. Now it's half past four and the clock is set for seven. Let's get a few hours of sleep.”

We both managed to fall asleep. The clock woke us at seven, and while Liz fixed breakfast, I turned on the TV. We were headline news, burnished with crayon portraits drawn by the network artists, none of them too flattering. Liz rebelled at the price of cab fare down to the tip of Manhattan. We took the subway, grateful that we were not recognized—but no one actually looks at anyone on the subway. J. J. and Sarah were already seated at the table when we got to court, which was almost full, still a half hour before Kilpatrick was expected. Liz took her seat at the table, and J. J. put her arms around her and kissed her and told her not to worry. Sarah looked bright and cheerful. “Jerry Brown came around last night. No matter how decisively you throw a man out, he still thinks he can come around for conjugal visits now and then. He was in court yesterday. He says it's a lead-pipe cinch, and he enjoys being on the winning team. I threw him out anyway.”

“Except that he came back later with three big pizzas.”

“You have a big mouth, J. J.”

“I like him.”

I took my place in the row behind them. Rudge came in with his silent assistant, doing Sarah the honor of nodding at her. There were more black people in the audience than I had ever seen in court before, due to a big story in the
Post
the day before, with Sarah's picture on the front of the paper. Precisely at ten, Kilpatrick came in and took his seat on the bench. The jury was already in the box, and a couple of photographers who had the temerity to photograph the judge as he entered evoked an angry response from him.

Then he tapped with his gavel and asked Sarah whether she was ready.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I want absolute silence during the summations,” the judge said. “There is to be no applause and no comment. Anyone who violates this will be ejected.”

Sarah was dressed in a black sheath, with a bit of pink silk around her neck. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she began in her deep, throaty voice. “There are summations that go on for hours, because there are cases of great complexity. I don't see this as a case of great complexity. The facts of this case are very simple, and they add up to a loose circle of circumstantial evidence. A murder was committed on May twenty-fourth of this year, in the Omnibus Building on Wall Street. You have listened to the details that the police presented. You have listened to the evidence of the detective sergeant in charge of the case. Briefly, a man named William Sedg-wick Hopper was either working late or had an after-hours appointment with a person at his office. At some moment near ten o'clock, this person held a gun to the back of his head and killed him. Hopper, the murdered man, was in the process of writing a check for one hundred thousand dollars. The check was made out to cash, but Hopper died before he had an opportunity to sign his name to it, so the check is worthless. Then his killer tore a sheet of paper from the fax machine in Hopper's office and wrote on it,
SWEET JOURNEY, BILLY.
The killer then put the murder weapon on the sheet of fax paper and left.

“The New York Police could have called his former employer, the president of the Boston Investment Corp., who had a long and intimate acquaintance with William Sedgwick Hopper; and the police could have asked him by what name friends of Mr. Hopper called him. It seems to me that this would be one of the most important facts of this case, but they did not bother to make the call. We did. We made the call, and were told that at the Boston Investment Corporation, Mr. Hopper was known as Sedge. Mr. Brown spoke to the golf pro at the Cambridge Country Club, of which Mr. Hopper had been a member. The golf pro did not even know that Hopper's first name was William. He always called him Sedge, as did everyone else in the golfing circle.

“For some months, when she lived in Boston, Mrs. Hopper had employed a maid. Her name was Agatha Jones. By telephone inquiry, Mr. Brown found her address in Boston, and he spoke to her. She, too, confirmed the fact that she had never heard Mr. Hopper called anything but Sedge by a person familiar to him. This information was given to the police at the first precinct, but they evidently considered it of no importance. I consider it of the greatest importance. I ask you, members of the jury, why and how, at a moment of high excitement and after an act of murder, the perpetrator of the murder should suddenly use a name for the victim that he had never used. Why should Sedge become Billy? Perhaps I can answer that. My investigator, Jerome Brown, questioned a number of women who worked at Garson, Weeds and Anderson—all of them knew Mr. Hopper either as Mr. Hopper or Billy, as did a number of male members of the firm. I accuse no one, but I do wonder why the accused could make this sudden switch of familiar name.

“Now, let us see how the police went about deciding that Elizabeth Hopper, the defendant in this case, was none other than the killer: Their first bit of brilliant deduction led them to believe that the killer was a woman. Why? Two reasons: first, the note on the fax paper was written with a lipstick. Second, they decided that a man would never use the name Billy. A man doesn't call another man, named William, Billy. Effeminate! Not macho! He calls him Bill. I must add a third reason, women's intuition. A female police officer, Annabelle Schwartz, was present. Her intuition told her that the killer was a woman.