The First Time (20 page)

“That was an accident.”

“I’m sure it was.” Jake spun around in a small circle, drawing the jurors effortlessly into his orbit. His eyes fell across the rows of spectators until they connected with the matching blue eyes of his daughter, her body now leaning forward in her seat. She pulled back as soon as she became aware of his gaze, resumed her earlier slouch. Jake almost smiled. “Isn’t it true that virtually all your arguments ended with your slapping your wife around?”

“Objection, Your Honor. Mr. Butler is not the one on trial here.”

“Sustained. Move on, Counselor.”

“You fought with your former wife on the night in question, isn’t that correct?” Jake asked.

“I didn’t hit her,” came the immediate response.

“But she had reasonable expectation to think you
might,” Jake stated, waiting for the inevitable objection, which followed immediately. “You stated that your wife then became very calm and asked you to change a lightbulb in the kitchen.”

“Yes.” Leo Butler took a deep breath, visibly relieved at the change in topic.

“How did she look?”

“What?”

“Your wife. Ex-wife,” Jake corrected, once again smiling at several of the middle-aged women on the jury. “How would you describe her demeanor?”

Leo Butler shrugged, as if he’d never given much thought to how he would describe the woman to whom he’d been married for more than thirty years. “She just became very still,” he said finally. “Her eyes kind of glazed over.”

“Glazed over? You mean, as if she were in some sort of trance?”

“Objection,” Eileen Rogers said. “Mr. Hart is putting words in the witness’s mouth.”

“On the contrary, I’m just seeking clarification.”

“Overruled.”

“Did Nora Butler appear to be in a sort of trance?” Jake repeated.

Leo Butler went through his growing repertoire of assorted grunts, coughs, and squirms. “Yes,” he admitted finally.

“And after she shot you, how did she appear?”

“The same.”

“As if she were in some sort of trance,” Jake repeated a third time.

“Yes.”

“When you asked her to call nine-one-one, how did she respond?”

“She called them.”

“No argument? No resistance?”

“No.”

“How would you describe her movements? Sprightly? Sluggish? Did she run to the phone?”

“She moved slowly.”

“As if she were in some sort of trance?”

“Yes,” Leo Butler agreed.

“No further questions, Mr. Butler,” Jake told him. “You may step down.”

Jake watched the witness as he extricated himself from the witness stand and walked quickly, hunched slightly forward as if to disguise his great bulk, to his seat beside the assistant state’s attorney. Score one for the good guys, Jake thought, sneaking another look at the spectator gallery, hoping to catch a congratulatory smile on his daughter’s face. But when his eyes reached the fourth row, he saw only an empty space where Kim had been sitting. He heard movement behind him, and turned around in time to see his daughter as she slipped through the heavy wooden doors at the back of the courtroom and disappeared.

S
o, what did you think?”

Kim shrugged, looked around the dark, decidedly dingy greasy spoon at the corner of California Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. Her father had already apologized several times for the lack of fine restaurants in the area, although he assured her that Fredo’s made one mean hamburger. Mean, Kim thought, thinking it an interesting choice of words. “I don’t eat meat,” she told him.

“Since when?”

“Since it’s disgusting and cruel and fattening,” she answered.

“You eat chicken.”

“I don’t eat
red
meat,” she qualified. “Am I on the witness stand?”

“Of course not. I was just curious. I hadn’t realized you didn’t eat red meat.”

Kim made a face meant to signal her supreme disinterest in the topic at hand. There were plenty of things her father didn’t realize, she thought, wondering if there was any way she could get out of going back to court after lunch. That’s when he’d asked what she’d thought of the morning’s proceedings, although Kim knew what her father was really asking was what she’d thought of his performance.

“It was okay.” She shrugged again, the gesture smaller, less defined than the previous shrug.

“Just okay?”

“What do you want me to say?” she asked.

“I’m just interested in what you thought.”

“I thought it was okay.” This time Kim didn’t even bother to shrug. “Can we order now?”

Jake signaled for the waiter, who approached their small booth to the right of the rapidly crowding bar, pen poised to take their order.

“Do you have a Thai chicken salad?” Kim asked, ignoring the menu.

The waiter, whose wavy dark hair was almost the same shade as his skin, looked confused. “We have chicken salad sandwich,” he replied with a heavy Spanish accent.

“I don’t want a chicken salad sandwich,” Kim said stubbornly. “They’re loaded with mayonnaise. You might as well be eating a pound of butter.”

“Chicken salad sandwich sounds good to me,” Jake said, closing the menu and smiling at the waiter. Kim wondered if her father was deliberately trying to antagonize her.

“Two chicken salad sandwiches?” the waiter asked.

“No!” Kim all but shouted. “Oh, all right. But can you make mine with low-fat mayonnaise?”

“French fries or salad?” the waiter asked Jake, ignoring Kim altogether.

“French fries,” Jake answered.

“Salad,” Kim said, though the fries someone was eating at the next booth smelled delicious. “And could you put the dressing on the side?”

“Something to drink?” the waiter asked Jake.

“Coffee,” he said.

“Diet Coke,” Kim volunteered loudly.

“I read somewhere that diet pop isn’t very good for you,” Jake said as the waiter departed, shaking his head.

“Didn’t I read the same thing about coffee?” Kim asked.

Jake smiled, which Kim found more than slightly irritating. Why was he smiling? She hadn’t said anything funny or charming or even vaguely positive. Was he deliberately trying to provoke her? First he drags her into court to watch him browbeat some poor sucker on the witness stand until the jerk has to slink away with his tail between his legs, even though he was the one who got shot, for heaven’s sake. Six times, no less. In the back! And then he gives her the choice of the courthouse cafeteria or this weird little diner for lunch. Who ever heard of a greasy spoon with a full bar, for Pete’s sake, where visiting lawyers compete with local drunks for the bartender’s attention, their clothes the only way to tell them apart?

“Where did you go this morning when you disappeared for so long?” Jake was asking.

“It wasn’t long.”

“Half an hour,” Jake said.

Kim sighed, looked toward the door. “I needed some fresh air.”

“Fresh air or a fresh cigarette?”

Kim’s eyes shot to his. “Who said I had a cigarette?”

“Nobody had to say anything. I can smell it on your hair from here.”

Kim thought about protesting, decided against it. “So?” she asked defiantly, as if daring her father to do something about it.

“So, you’re not even sixteen. You know how dangerous smoking is.”

“It’ll kill me, right?”

“Good chance,” Jake agreed.

“Mom never smoked.”

“That’s right.”

“She’s dying,” Kim stated matter-of-factly, although she had to push the words out of her mouth.

“Kim—”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“I think we
should
talk about it.”

“Not now,” Kim stated.

“When?”

Kim shrugged, released a deep breath of air, heard her father do the same. “Did I miss something interesting while I was gone?” she asked. “You make mincemeat out of some other unsuspecting fool?”

Her father seemed genuinely surprised. “Is that what you think I do?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I like to think I’m getting at the truth.”

“The truth is, your client shot her husband six times in the back.”

“The truth is, my client was in a hysterical dissociative state at the time.”

“The truth is, your client planned the whole damn thing.”

“It was temporary insanity.”

“It was an act of cold-blooded premeditation.”

Amazingly, Jake smiled. “You’d make a pretty good lawyer,” he said.

Kim heard the unsolicited pride in his voice. “Not interested,” she snapped, watching him wince. “I mean, really. How can you defend these people? You know they’re guilty.”

“You think all people charged with a crime are guilty?”

“Most of them.” Did she? Kim wondered. Is that what she thought?

“Even if that were true,” Jake argued, “our justice system is based on the premise that everyone is entitled to the best possible defense. If lawyers started acting as judges and juries, refusing to defend anyone they thought was guilty, the whole system would fall apart.”

“Seems to me it’s falling apart already. Look at you—you get guilty people off all the time. You call that justice?”

“To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, my job is not to do justice. My job is to play the game according to the rules.”

“So this is nothing but a game to you?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Sorry. I thought it was.”

“You’re telling me there’s no room in your world for mitigating circumstances?” Jake asked.

Kim made the visual equivalent of a growl. What was he talking about now? “What’s that?”

“Mitigating circumstances,” Jake repeated. “Circumstances that lessen the severity of an act, that provide a justification—”

“For shooting your husband six times in the back? Good thing Mom didn’t own a gun.”

Jake paled, his chest caving forward, almost as if he’d been shot himself. “I’m just saying that things aren’t always that cut-and-dried. Sometimes there are valid reasons—”

“For taking a life? I don’t think so. I find it disgusting you would think so.”

Kim braced herself for her father’s outrage. Instead, she saw a smile playing with the corners of his mouth. “How about cruel and fattening?” he asked.

“What?”

“Sorry. I was just trying to be funny.”

“By making fun of me?”

“Sorry,” Jake said again as Kim fought back the sudden threat of unwanted tears. It was her father’s outrage she’d been expecting, not her own. “Honestly, Kimmy, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“Who said my feelings were hurt? You think I care about what you think?”

“I care about what
you
think,” Jake said.

Kim sneered, looked away, focused her attention on the young man working behind the bar. She watched him pour a glass of scotch for one of his customers,
continued staring at him as he wiped the counter, poured someone else a shot of vodka. Seconds later, he became aware of Kim’s gaze and smiled. Kim did something with her lips she hoped was sexy and provocative.

“Is something wrong?” her father asked. “You have something caught in your teeth?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

The waiter approached with their drinks. “Sandwiches be out in a minute,” he said.

“Can hardly wait,” Kim said, letting her eyes wander across the small gathering of men and women around the bar. “Who’s that?” Kim asked, referring to an attractive woman at the far end who was waving in their direction. “One of your girlfriends?”

“Her name is Jess Koster,” Jake said evenly, although Kim detected a slight twitching of the muscles at his temples. He waved back. “She’s an assistant state’s attorney.”

“She’s very pretty.”

Jake nodded.

“Ever sleep with her?”

“What?”

Kim watched the coffee cup almost slip through her father’s hands. “Ever sleep with her?” she repeated, picturing her father leap across the scratched and narrow laminated table that divided them, his hands quickly surrounding her throat, throttling the life right out of her. How would he plead to the charge of murdering his only child? she wondered. Temporary insanity? Justifiable homicide? Mitigating circumstances?

“Don’t be ridiculous,” her father said, the words more painful than any imagined hands around her throat.

Kim felt her eyes fill with tears. She lowered her head before her father could notice them and slid out of the booth, grabbing her large black leather purse and pushing herself to her feet, looking helplessly around the room, eyes refusing to focus.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?” her father asked.

“Where’s the washroom?” Kim demanded of the waiter as he approached with their sandwiches.

The waiter pointed with his chin to the back of the room. “Down the stairs,” he called after her.

Kim walked briskly toward the back of the restaurant, watching the room blur with her tears. Damn it, she thought. How dare her father be so dismissive. Her question might have been out of line, but that didn’t give him the right to mock her and call her ridiculous. She wasn’t ridiculous. He was the one who was ridiculous, with his neat blue suit and sleeked-back hair, with his superior smirk and know-it-all attitude, lecturing her about the justice system when everyone knew there was no such thing as justice. If there was, her beautiful mother, who’d never done anything to hurt anyone in her whole life, wouldn’t be dying of a stupid disease no one could even pronounce, let alone understand, while her father, who’d lied and cheated and devoted most of his life to keeping killers and other assorted lowlifes out of jail, was alive and well. Where was the justice in that?

Kim found the steep row of stairs at the back of the dimly lit main room and walked slowly down the
steps, her purse slapping against her side as her hand trailed against the wall for support. In the background, John Denver was singing about the glories of nature. Sure, Kim thought, pushing open the door to the tiny women’s washroom at the bottom of the stairs. Poor guy spends his life singing about mountains and sunshine and the simple joys of everyday life, and what happens to him? The experimental plane he’s piloting runs out of gas, and he crashes into the ocean and dies instantly. Talk about justice!