The Simple Truth (7 page)

“So what? Two sentences with a ton of potential. Rights for the poor? You saw the way Ramsey picked up on it. Is Knight posturing for something down the road? A case she was trying to set up in there?”

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that. It’s confidential.”

“We’re all on the same team here, Sara.”

“Right! How often do Knight and Murphy vote together? Not very. And this place has nine very separate compartments, you know that.”

“Right, nine little kingdoms. But if Knight has something up her sleeve, I’d like to know about it.”

“You don’t have to know everything that goes on at this place. Christ, you already know more than all the clerks combined, and most of the justices. I mean, how many other clerks go down to the mail room at the crack of dawn to get a jump on the appeals coming in?”

“I don’t like to do anything halfway.”

She looked at him, was about to say something, but then stopped herself. Why complicate things? She had already given him her answer. In reality, although a driven person herself, she could not imagine being married to someone with standards as high as Michael Fiske’s. She could never reach them, sustain them. It would be unhealthy even to try.

“Well, I’m not betraying any confidences. You know as well as I do that this place is like a military campaign. Loose lips sink ships. And you have to watch your backside.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you in the grand scheme of things, but I am in this case. You know Murphy, he’s a throwback — a lovable throwback, but he’s a pure liberal. Anything to help the poor he’d go for. He and Knight would be aligned on this, no doubt about it. He’s always on the lookout to throw a wrench in Ramsey’s machine. Tom Mur-phy led the Court before Ramsey got the upper hand. It’s no fun always being on the dissenting end in your twilight years.”

Sara shook her head.
“I really can’t go into it.”

He sighed and picked at his meal.
“We’re just pulling away from each other at all points, aren’t we?”

“That’s not true. You’re just trying to make it seem that way. I know I hurt you when I said no, and I’m sorry.”

He suddenly grinned.
“Maybe it’s for the best. We’re both so headstrong, we’d probably end up killing each other.”

“Good old Virginia boy and a gal from Carolina,”
she drawled.
“You’re probably right.”

He fiddled with his drink and eyed her.
“If you think I’m stubborn, you really should meet my brother.”

Sara didn’t meet his gaze.
“I’m sure. He was terrific during that trial we watched.”

“I’m very proud of him.”

Now she looked at him.
“So why did we have to sneak in and out of the courtroom so he wouldn’t know we were there?”

“You’d have to ask him that.”

“I’m asking you.”

Michael shrugged.
“He’s got a problem with me. He sort of banished me from his life.”

“Why?”

“I actually don’t know all the reasons. Maybe he doesn’t either. I do know it hasn’t made him very happy.”

“From the little I saw, he didn’t strike me as that sort of person. Depressed or anything.”

“Really? How did he strike you?”

“Funny, smart, identifies well with people.”

“I see he identified with you.”

“He didn’t even know I was there.”

“You would have liked him to, though, wouldn’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that I’m not blind. And I’ve walked in his shadow all my life.”

“You’re the boy genius with a limitless future.”

“And he’s a heroic ex-cop who now defends the very people he used to arrest. He also has a martyr quality about him that I never have been able to get around. He’s a good guy who pushes himself unbelievably hard.”
Michael shook his head. All the time his brother had spent in the hospital. None of them knowing if he was going to make it day to day, minute to minute. He had never known such fear, the thought of losing his brother. But he had lost him anyway, it seemed, and not because of death. Not because of those bullets.

“Maybe he feels like he’s living in your shadow.”

“I doubt that.”

“Did you ever ask him?”

“Like I said, we don’t talk anymore.”
He paused and then added quietly,
“Is he the reason you turned me down?”
He had watched her as she observed his brother. She had been enraptured with John Fiske from the moment she saw him. It had seemed like a fun idea at the time, the two of them going to watch his brother. Now Michael cursed himself for doing it.

She flushed.
“I don’t even know him. How could I possibly have any feelings for him?”

“Are you asking me that, or yourself?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”
Her voice trembled.
“What about you? Do you love him?”

He abruptly sat up straight and looked at her.
“I will always love my brother, Sara. Always.”

Rider wordlessly passed his secretary, fled to his office, opened his briefcase and slipped out the envelope. He withdrew the letter from inside, but barely glanced at it before tossing it in the wastebasket. In the letter Rufus Harms had written his last will and testament, but that was just a dodge, something innocuous for the guard to read. Rider looked at the envelope closely while he punched his intercom.

“Sheila, can you bring in the hot plate and the teakettle? Fill it with water.”

“Mr. Rider, I can make tea for you.”

“I don’t want tea, Sheila, just bring the damned kettle and the hot plate.”

Sheila didn’t question this odd request or her boss’s temper. She brought in the kettle and hot plate, then quietly withdrew.

Rider plugged in the hot plate and within a few minutes steam poured out of the kettle. Gingerly grasping the envelope by its edges, Rider held it over the steam and watched as the envelope began to come apart, just as Rufus Harms had told him it would. Rider fussed with the edges, and he soon had it completely laid out. Instead of an envelope, he now held two pieces of paper: one handwritten; the other a copy of the letter Harms had received from the Army.

As he turned off the hot plate, Rider marveled at how Rufus had managed to construct this device — an envelope that was actually a letter — and how he had copied and then concealed the letter from the Army in it as well. Then he recalled that Harms’s father had worked at a printing press company. It would have been better for Rufus if he had followed his daddy into the printing business instead of joining the Army, Rider muttered to himself.

He let the pieces of paper dry out for a minute and then sat behind his desk while he read what Rufus had written. It didn’t take long, the remarks were fairly brief, though many words were oddly formed and misspelled. Rider couldn’t have known it, but Harms had scrawled it out in near darkness, stopping every time he heard the steps of the guards draw close. There wasn’t a trace of saliva left in Rider’s throat when he had finished reading. Then he forced himself to read the official notice from the Army. Another body blow.

“Good God!”
He sank back in his chair, rubbed a trembling hand over his bald spot, and then lurched to his feet, rushed over and locked his office door. The fear spread like a mutating virus. He could barely breathe. He staggered back to his desk and hit his intercom button again.
“Sheila, bring me in some water and some aspirin, please.”

A minute later Sheila knocked on the door.
“Mr. Rider,”
she said through the door,
“it’s locked.”

He quickly unlocked the door, took the glass and aspirin from her and was about to shut the door again when Sheila said,
“Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine,”
he replied, hustling her out the door.

He looked down at the paper Rufus wanted him to file with the United States Supreme Court. Rider happened to be a member of the largely ceremonial Supreme Court Bar, solely by virtue of the sponsorship of a former colleague in the military who had gone on to the Justice Department. If he did exactly as Rufus asked, he would be the attorney of record in Harms’s appeal. Rider could envision only personal catastrophe resulting from such an arrangement. And yet he had promised Rufus.

Rider lay down on the leather sofa in one corner of his office, closed his eyes and commenced a silent deliberation. So many things hadn’t added up the night Ruth Ann Mosley had been killed. Rufus didn’t have a history of violence, only a constant failure to follow orders that had enraged many a superior, and, at first, had bewildered Rider as well. Harms’s inability to process even the simplest of commands had been finally explained during Rider’s representation of him. But his escaping from the stockade never had. Confronted with no defense, factually, Rider had made noises about an insanity plea, which had given him just enough leverage to save his client from possible execution. And that had been the end of it. Justice had been served. At least as much as one could expect in this world.

Rider looked once more at the notice from the Army, the stark lie of the past now firmly revealed. This information should have been in Harms’s military file at the time of the murder, but it wasn’t. It would have constituted a completely plausible defense. Harms’s military file had been tampered with, and Rider now understood why.

Harms wanted his freedom and his name cleared and he wanted it to come from the highest court in the land. And he refused to entrust the prospect of freedom to the Army. That’s what Harms had said to him while the country-western music had covered his words. And could he blame him?

All things good were in Rufus’s corner. He should be heard and he should be free. But despite that, Rider remained immobile on his couch of worn leather and burnished nails. It was nothing complex. It was fear — a far stronger emotion, it seemed, than any of the others bestowed upon humankind. He planned to retire in a few years to the condo he and his wife had already picked out on the Gulf Coast. Their kids were grown. Rider was weary of the frigid winters that settled into the low pockets of the area and he was tired of always chasing new pieces of business, of diligently recording his professional life in quarter-hour increments. However, as enticing as that retirement was, it wasn’t quite enough to prevent Rider from helping his old client. Some things were right and some things were wrong.

Rider rose from the couch and settled behind his desk. At first he had thought the simplest way to help Rufus was to mail what he had to one of the newspapers and let the power of the press take over. But for all he knew, the paper would either toss it as a letter from some crazy, or otherwise bungle it such that Rufus might be put in danger. What had really made up Rider’s mind as to his course of action was simple. Rufus was his client and he had asked his lawyer to file his appeal with the United States Supreme Court. And that’s what Rider was going to do. He had failed Rufus once before; he wasn’t going to do it again. The man was in dire need of a little justice, and what better place for that than the highest court in the land? If you couldn’t get justice there, where the hell could you get it? Rider wondered.

As he took out a sheet of paper from his desk drawer, sunlight from the window glanced off his square gold cuff links, sending bright dots around the room helter-skelter. He pulled over his ancient typewriter, kept out of nostalgia. Rider was unfamiliar with the Supreme Court’s technical filing requirements, but he assumed he would be running afoul of most of them. That didn’t bother him. He just wanted to get the story out — away from him.

When he had finished typing, he started to place what he had typed, together with Harms’s letter and the letter from the Army, into a mailing envelope. Then he stopped. Paranoia, spilling over from thirty years of practice, made him hustle out to the small workroom at the rear of his office suite and make copies of both Harms’s handwritten letter and Rider’s own typewritten one. This same uneasiness made him decide to keep, for now, the letter from the Army. When the story broke he could always produce it, again anonymously. He hid the copies in one of his desk drawers and locked it. He returned the originals to the envelope, looked up the address of the Supreme Court in his legal directory, and next typed up a label. He did not provide a return address on the envelope. That done, he put on his hat and coat and walked down to the post office at the corner.

Before he had time to change his mind, he filled out the form to send the envelope by certified mail so he would get a return receipt, handed it to the postal clerk, completed the simple transaction and returned to his office. It was only then that it struck him. The return receipt could be a way for the Court to identify who had sent the package. He sighed. Rufus had been waiting half his life for this. And, in a way, Rider had abandoned him back then. For the rest of the day Rider lay on the couch in his office, in the dark, silently praying that he had done the right thing, and knowing, in his heart, that he had.

Ramsey’s clerks have been pestering me about the comment you made the other day, Justice Knight, about the poor being entitled to certain preferences.” Sara looked over at the woman, sitting so calmly behind her desk.

A smile flickered across Knight’s face as she scanned some documents.
“I’m sure they have.”

They both knew that Ramsey’s clerks were like a well-trained commando unit. They had feelers out everywhere, looking for anything of interest to the chief justice and his agendas. Almost nothing escaped their notice. Every word, exclamation, meeting or casual corridor conversation was duly noted, analyzed and catalogued away for future use.

“So you intended for that reaction to happen?”

“Sara, as much as I may not like it, there is a certain process at this place that one must struggle through. Some call it a game, I don’t choose to do so. But I can’t ignore its presence. I’m not so much concerned with the chief. The positions I’m thinking about taking on a number of cases Ramsey would never support. I know that and he knows that.”