The Simple Truth (6 page)

Rider caught Harms’s silent meaning and said to the guard,
“Private, I’m his lawyer, so you’re going to have to give us some space here.”

The reply was automatic.
“This is a maximum-security prison facility and every prisoner here is classified as violent and dangerous. I’m here for your safety.”

The men here
were
dangerous, both prisoners
and
guards, and that was just the way things were, Rider knew.

“I understand that,”
replied the lawyer.
“I’m not asking you to abandon me, but I’d be obliged if you could stand farther away. Attorney-client privilege — you understand, don’t you?”

The guard didn’t answer, but he did move to the far end of the room, ostensibly out of earshot. Finally, Rufus Harms looked over at Rider.
“You bring the radio?”

“A strange request, but one that I honored.”

“Take it out and turn it on, would you?”

Rider did so. The room was immediately filled with the mournful tunes of country-western music, the lyrics contrived, shallow in the face of the genuine misery sensed at this place, Rider thought uncomfortably.

When the lawyer looked at him questioningly, Harms glanced around the room.
“Lotta ears around this place, some you can’t see, right?”

“Bugging the conversations of an attorney and his client is against the law.”

Harms moved his hands slightly, chains rattling.
“Lot of things against the law, but people still do ’em. Both in and out of this place. Right?”

Rider found himself nodding. Harms was no longer a young, scared kid. He was a man. A man in control despite being unable to control one single element of his existence. Rider also observed that each of Harms’s physical movements was measured, calculated; like he was engaging in chess, reaching out slowly to touch a piece, and then drawing back with equal caution. Here, swift motion could be deadly.

The inmate leaned forward and started speaking in a tone so low that Rider had to strain to hear him above the music.
“I thank you for coming. I’m surprised you did.”

“Surprised the hell out of me to hear from you. But I guess it got my curiosity up too.”

“You look good. The years have been kind to you.”

Rider had to laugh.
“I lost all my hair and put on fifty pounds, but thank you anyway.”

“I won’t waste your time. I got something I want you to file in court for me.”

Rider’s astonishment was clear.
“What court?”

Harms spoke in even lower tones, despite the cover of the music.
“Biggest one there is. Supreme Court.”

Rider’s jaw went slack.
“You got to be kidding.”
The look in Harms’s eyes would not brook such a conclusion.
“Okay, what exactly do you want me to file?”

With smooth increments of motion, despite the restraints of the manacles, Harms slid an envelope out of his shirt and held it up. In an instant, the guard stepped across and snatched it from his hand.

Rider protested immediately.
“Private, that is a confidential attorney-client communication.”

“Let him read it, Samuel, I got nothing to hide,”
Harms said evenly, eyes staring off.

The guard opened the envelope and scanned the contents of the letter. Satisfied, he returned it to Harms and resumed his post across the room.

Harms handed the envelope and letter across to Rider, who looked down at the material. When he looked back up, Harms was leaning even closer to him, and he spoke for at least ten minutes. Several times Rider’s eyes widened as Harms’s words spilled over him. Finished, the prisoner sat back and looked at him.

“You going to help me, ain’t you?”

Rider could not answer, apparently still digesting all that he had heard. If the waist chain had not prevented such a movement, Harms would have reached out and put his hand over Rider’s, not in a threatening manner, but as a tangible plea for help from a man who had experienced none for almost thirty years.
“Ain’t you, Samuel?”

Finally, Rider nodded.
“I’ll help you, Rufus.”

Harms rose and headed for the door.

Rider put the paper back in the envelope and tucked it and the radio away in his briefcase. The lawyer had no way of knowing that on the other side of a large mirror that hung on the wall of the visitors’room, someone had watched the entire exchange between prisoner and attorney. This person now rubbed his chin, lost in deep, troubled thought.

At ten A.M., the marshal of the Supreme Court, Richard Perkins, dressed in charcoal-gray tails, the traditional Supreme Court dress of lawyers from the Solicitor General’s Office as well, stood up at one end of the massive bench, behind which sat nine high-backed leather chairs of various styles and sizes, and pounded his gavel. The packed courtroom grew silent.
“The Honorable, the Chief Justice, and the Associate Justices of the United States,”
Perkins announced.

The long burgundy-colored curtain behind the bench parted at nine different places, and there appeared a like number of justices looking stiff and uncomfortable in their black robes, as though startled awake and discovering a crowd next to their beds. As they took their seats, Perkins continued.
“Oyez, oyez, oyez. All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this honorable Court.”

Perkins sat down and looked out over a courtroom with the square footage of a mansion. Its forty-four-foot ceiling made the eye look for drifting clouds. After some preliminary business and the ceremonial swearing in of new Supreme Court Bar members, the first of the day’s two morning cases would be called. On this day, a Wednesday, only two cases during the morning would be heard, afternoon sessions being held only on Monday and Tuesday. No oral arguments were held on Thursday and Friday. On it would go, three days a week every two weeks, until the end of April, approximately one hundred and fifty oral argument sessions later, the justices assuming the modern-day role of Solomon for the people of the United States.

There were impressive friezes on either side of the courtroom. On the right were figures of lawgivers of the pre-Christian era. On the left, their counterparts of the Christian period. Two armies ready to have go at each other. Perhaps to determine who had gotten it right. Moses versus Napoleon, Hammurabi against Muhammad. The law, the handing down of justice, could be damn painful — bloody, even. Right above the bench were two figures carved in marble, one depicting the majesty of the law, the other the power of government. Between the two panels was a tableau of the Ten Commandments. Swirling around the vast chamber like flocks of doves were carvings — Safeguard of the Rights of People, Genii of Wisdom and Statecraft, Defense of Human Rights — representing the role of the Court. If there ever was a stage of perfect proportion for the hearing of matters paramount, it seemed that this landscape represented it. However, topography could be deceiving.

Ramsey sat in the middle of the bench, Elizabeth Knight at the extreme right. A boom microphone was suspended from the middle of the ceiling. The moms and pops in the audience had noticeably tensed up when the justices appeared. Even their gangly, bored kids sat a little straighter. It was understandable enough even for those barely familiar with the reputation of this place. There was a discernible feeling of raw power, of important confrontations to come.

These nine black-robed justices told women when they could legally abort their fetuses; dictated to schoolchildren where they would do their learning; proclaimed what speech was obscene or not; pronounced that police could not unreasonably search and seize, or beat confessions out of people. No one elected them to their positions. They held their positions for life against virtually all challenge. And the justices operated in such levels of secrecy, in such a black hole, that it made the public personae of other venerable federal institutions seem vainglorious by comparison. They routinely confronted issues that had activist groups all over the country banging heads, bombing abortion clinics, demonstrating outside prison death houses. They judged the complex issues that would bedevil human civilization until its extinction. And they looked so calm.

The first case was called. It dealt with affirmative action in public universities — or, rather, what was left of the concept. Frank Campbell, the counsel arguing on behalf of affirmative action, barely got through his first sentence before Ramsey pounced.

The chief justice pointed out that the Fourteenth Amendment unequivocally stated that no one shall be discriminated against. Didn’t that mean affirmative action of any sort was impermissible under the Constitution?

“But there are broad wrongs that are trying to be — ”

“Why does diversity equate with equality?”
Ramsey abruptly asked Campbell.

“It ensures that a broad and diverse body of students will be available to express different ideas, represent different cultures, which in turn will serve to break down the ignorance of stereotypes.”

“Aren’t you premising your entire argument on the fact that blacks and whites think differently? That a black raised by parents who are college professors in a well-to-do household in, say, San Francisco will bring a different set of values and ideas to a university than a white person who was raised in the exact same affluent environment in San Francisco?”
Ramsey’s tone was filled with skepticism.

“I think that everyone has differences,”
Campbell responded.

“Instead of basing it on skin color, doesn’t it seem that the most impoverished among us have a greater right to a helping hand?”
Justice Knight asked. Ramsey looked over at her curiously as she said this.
“And yet your argument draws no distinction on wealth or lack thereof, does it?”
Knight added.

“No,”
Campbell conceded.

Michael Fiske and Sara Evans sat in a special section of seats perpendicular to the bench. Michael glanced over at Sara as he listened to this line of questioning. She didn’t look at him.

“You can’t get around the letter of the law, can you? You would have us turn the Constitution on its head,”
Ramsey persisted after finally taking his eyes off Knight.

“How about the spirit behind those words?”
Campbell rejoined.

“Spirits are such amorphous things, I much prefer to deal in concrete.”
Ramsey’s words brought scattered laughter from the audience. The chief justice renewed his verbal attack, and with deadly precision he skewered Campbell’s precedents and line of reasoning. Knight said nothing more, staring straight ahead, her thoughts obviously far from the courtroom. As the red light on the counsel lectern came on indicating Campbell’s time was up, he almost ran to his seat. As the counsel opposing affirmative action took his place at the lectern and began his argument, it didn’t seem like the justices were even listening anymore.

* * *

“Boy, Ramsey is efficient,”
Sara remarked. She and Michael were in the Court’s cafeteria, the justices having retired to their dining room for their traditional post-oral argument luncheon.
“He sliced up the university’s lawyer in about five seconds.”

Michael swallowed a bite of sandwich.
“He’s been on the lookout for a case for the last three years to really blow affirmative action out of the water. Well, he found it. They should have settled the case before it got here.”

“You really think Ramsey will go that far?”

“Are you kidding? Wait until you see the opinion. He’ll probably write it himself, just so he can gloat. It’s dead.”

“I can partly see his logic,”
Sara said.

“Of course you can. It’s evident. A conservative group brought the case, handpicked the plaintiff. White, bright, blue-collar, hardworking, never given a handout. And, even better, a woman.”

“The Constitution does say no one shall discriminate.”

“Sara, you know that the Fourteenth Amendment was passed right after the Civil War to ensure that blacks wouldn’t be discriminated against. Now it’s been forged into a bat to crush the people it was supposed to help. Well, the crushers just guaranteed their own Armageddon.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that poor with hope starts to push back. Poor without hope lashes back. Not pretty.”

“Oh.”
She looked at Michael, his manner so intense, so mercurial. Serious beyond his years. He climbed on the soapbox with regularity, sometimes to an embarrassing degree. It was one of the elements about him that she both admired and feared.

“My brother could tell you some stories about that,”
Michael added.

“I’m sure he could. I hope to meet him someday.”

Michael glanced at her and then looked away.
“Ramsey sees the world differently than it actually is. He made it in the world by himself, why can’t everybody else? I admire the guy, though. He sticks it equally to the poor and the rich, the state and the individual. He doesn’t play favorites. I’ll give him that.”

“You overcame a lot too.”

“Yeah. I’m not blowing my own horn, but I’ve got an IQ over one-sixty. Not everybody has that.”

“I know,”
Sara said wistfully.
“My legal brain says what happened today was correct. My heart says it’s a tragedy.”

“Hey, this is the Supreme Court. It’s not supposed to be easy. And by the way, what was Knight trying to do in there today?”
Michael was perpetually in the loop on everything that happened at the Court, all the inner secrets, the gossip, the strategies employed by the justices and their clerks to further philosophies and points of view on cases before them. He felt behind on whatever Knight had alluded to in court this morning, though, and it bothered him.

“Michael, it was only a couple sentences.”