The Touch of Treason (17 page)

Perry said, “Someone did try. Very soon after.”

“That’s very helpful. Who?”

“Our system doesn’t tell us who, just that someone is trying to get in who doesn’t know how the key works.”

“I’d like to get a layout of the wiring,” Roberts said, “and someone, either of you or someone else, could take the stand to explain to the jury the methods by which Fuller and his work were kept secure.”

Randall could have guessed what Perry then said. “Mr. Roberts, obviously we’d like to cooperate with your office in every possible way. What isn’t possible is to reveal the workings of a system that is in use elsewhere to protect other persons.”

Roberts coughed into his left hand. He was always careful to do that because people didn’t like to shake hands with a hand that had been coughed into. “I would hope subpoenas wouldn’t be necessary.”

Perry said, “You wouldn’t get anywhere. The county executive would get a call from the governor who would have had a call from the White House on behalf of the National Security Agency. Why go through the hassle? As citizens we’d like to help out any way we can in a murder case, but national security comes first.”

Roberts felt the cellophane over his composure wilting. His forehead glistened. “The people must get a conviction in this case.”

“I’m certain that if your evidence is strong enough, you will.”

Roberts reached over and touched twice one of the buttons on his intercom. He wanted to say something casual to pass the seconds but he could see that Perry was not in the mood for small talk. The door opened and a young man strode in, tall with ambition. His shoulders seemed to roll with his walk. His thick tortoiseshell eyeglasses looked as if they had been chosen to look severe. “This is Mr. Perry and Mr. Randall. Mr. Koppelman is a recent addition to the trial staff. Koppelman, we’ve been talking about the Fuller case. If you had to bet your career on the evidence in your hands right now, would you go for a conviction?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Koppelman, twelve jurors need to be convinced. George Thomassy is a very crafty defender, and these gentlemen from Washington are not inclined to cooperate on the few matters we discussed.”

Most people’s faces improve when they smile. Koppelman’s did not. He said, “That may not be as significant as we thought, sir. I think I’ve found Thomassy’s heel.”

“Heel?”

“His Achilles’ tendon, sir.”

Perry rose. “Then you won’t be needing advice from us.”

Roberts was not letting them off that easily in front of his new recruit. “I have a feeling you folks in Washington use national security as a big blanket.”

Randall was about to say something, but Perry touched his arm. Then Perry said, “It covers two hundred twenty million people, Mr. Roberts. If you ever run for national office—and make it—you’ll understand.”

They left Roberts standing behind his desk, his uncoughed-on hand unshaken, not turning to Koppelman for comfort, trying to remember who in law school had said that all the homicide corpses the entire class would have to deal with during the rest of their professional lives, laid end to end, wouldn’t cover one side of the perimeter of the cemetery in Normandy he encouraged them to visit at least once to keep local murders in perspective.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The first morning of a trial sometimes, as today, brought back memories to Thomassy of the first day of a new school year. As a boy he had viewed each upcoming semester as a body of books and lectures to be dominated so that he could go on to the following year’s dares. An affable English teacher, a man who seemed always relaxed, once said to him, “George, can’t you think of each new subject as a sport to be played, enjoyed?” “Oh I enjoy it, sir,” fourteen-year-old Thomassy had answered. “I get a kick out of tackling something new.” The teacher said, “There you go, tackling.” And Thomassy had said, “I can’t help it, sir. My father said that if an Armenian doesn’t figure out how to win, he’ll learn to lose.”

Lawyers like Francine’s father, judges like Drewson, could afford the WASP stance:
Beneath our orderly surfaces, we sit first in judgment of others and only then of ourselves.
Thomassy felt the need to prospect a landscape, to investigate circumstance. You never knew behind what boulder a Turk lay in waiting. You never wanted to become a prisoner of anyone because you knew what the French as well as the Algerians did to their prisoners. Civilization was not a saving grace. He understood the terrors of a tribal world.

“George,” his father had gone at him again in the year before he died, “you lawyer for who? Crooks, cheats, bad kids? You a toilet for everybody?”

In that last year Thomassy had learned to respond to Haig Thomassian’s railings without anger. “Pop,” Thomassy had said, “in the old country, the lawyer for the guy who’s accused is more interested in what the government wants to happen than in getting his guy off.”

“The people you work for, they stink!”

Not always. I would defend you, Pop.

“All rise!” the sergeant-at-arms suddenly shouted, and Thomassy had the sense of the whole crowded courtroom struggling to its feet. The sketch artists in the front row of the press section were the last to get up, putting down their lap boards and crayons for the ritual rise of respect to the man in the black robe who would be one of their models. Drawing judges was easier than drawing witnesses; they sat still more of the time, witnesses twitched and turned. Harry Layne, who sketched for CBS-TV, was there; his drawing of a judge wearing a cellophane robe through which all was visible was probably the most famous unused sketch of this new craft that bypassed most judges’ exclusion of television cameras.

Thomassy caught a glimpse of the expression on the face of Judge Drewson’s daughter as she stood for the arrival on the bench of her father. Thomassy wouldn’t have recognized her if Marion O’Connor, the court clerk, hadn’t pointed her out. The young women were getting younger. He was glad Francine had not come. Was it possible that at some point he would stop thinking about the whole female half of the human race as eligible for more than his admiration?

Standing next to him, the defendant, Edward Porter Sturbridge, looked like a boy scout. Perhaps he had been. It wasn’t the worth of the defendant’s soul, much less his innocence or guilt, that would determine the outcome. It was how well Roberts played. How well Thomassy counterplayed. And how the twelve-part audience reacted. The jury was standing too as Judge Drewson accidentally bumped the stand holding the American flag. As it teetered, the members of the jury seemed transfixed as if much depended on whether the flagstand would topple.

The flagstand, heavily weighted at the bottom, did not fall. The judge motioned everyone to sit. Thomassy noted how the jury sat first, as if the connection between them and the judge was that of soldiers and officer. Then the spectators, like a massive disorganized flutter of unconnected beings, found their seats where they had left them, underneath and behind. The press, which was reluctant to stand for anyone, was the last to sit as if that tardiness also declared its independence from the ritual.

Thomassy’s eye caught the face of one of the jurors, the one he had had second thoughts about. The man’s jacket seemed to weigh him down like a blanket. Beneath it, he was poised to bitch. Thomassy was usually wary of jurors who might try to dominate the others by whining. More people gave in to that than to reason. He hadn’t thrown a peremptory challenge at the man because Roberts had let him get by and it was late and he was only an alternate. He should have knocked the guy out. It was sloppy to have an alternate who would make you hope none of the regulars got sick.

He liked the foreman, a woman who taught anthropology at Hunter College. He’d latched on to her because when he asked her about her attitude toward young people—a question he’d put to everyone—she’d said, “I teach because I like young people. They remind me of my own time at school, when life seemed endless.” That woman had a brain one didn’t often want in jurors. But with the defendant a twenty-four-year-old perpetual student with tousled hair, she wouldn’t see Ed as someone who ought to be put away. She was a natural leader; and the others, at some prolonged long-ago period of their lives, had been students when teachers were still respected and listened to.

Thomassy leaned over toward Ed and whispered in his ear, “I hope you peed before this began.”

Ed nodded.

The judge’s eyes met Thomassy’s. He shouldn’t have spoken to Ed amidst all that silence. But the judge was merely acknowledging Thomassy’s presence. Then he turned to Roberts and intoned the usual. The play could begin.

*

Roberts touched the watch chain across his vest, the Phi Beta key to be noted.
If you have enough brains for the job,
Thomassy thought,
you don’t need to advertise.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Roberts said, his eyes on the jurors from a distance of at least twenty feet so that it wouldn’t seem unnatural for his voice to be raised—he wanted to be sure the press caught every word—“there are two kinds of crimes. Those that may attract our momentary sympathy—like crimes of passion—and those that produce a profound sense of revulsion, as in this case when a great man with a unique capability is killed by one of his own closest students, who pretended to love and admire him.”

Thomassy had to give Roberts credit. In one breath of openers, he had used the word
revulsion,
designed to create a crime not on the statute books, a crime worse than murder, a crime that didn’t come down from the Grand Jury but had just been invented. And in the same first breath, Roberts had pulled a rug from under Porter’s case,
pretended
to love and admire him, Roberts had said. Maybe he’d been too complacent about Roberts. It wasn’t Thomassy Roberts had to convince, it was—as always—the jury of nonpeers who now had
revulsion
and
pretended
implanted in their heads. At least the anthropology professor wouldn’t go for that. Or would she, too?
Hey Roberts,
he wanted to yell,
tell us what you’re going to prove.

Roberts made the mistake of glancing in Thomassy’s direction, and as if he could imagine Thomassy’s thoughts, converted to a businesslike tone. “The people will prove Professor Martin Fuller died not of natural causes or an accident, but as the result of the willful intent of another person, that person being the defendant, Edward Sturbridge, also known under the alias Edward Porter.”

Alias was a tar-brush word. Thomassy saw Ed squirm.

“The people will prove,” Roberts continued, “that the defendant had the means to cause the death of the deceased, that in the early-morning hours of April fifth Professor Fuller died a horrendous death as a direct result of certain actions taken by the defendant. The people will present proof in the form of evidence and then ask you to decide if the defendant is guilty as charged…” Roberts’s voice became nearly inaudible as he added, “…or innocent.”

Thomassy got to his feet. “Your Honor, I request a conference at the bench.”

Judge Drewson nodded.

Thomassy could see the reporters’ restlessness. A conference always shut the door in their faces. Thomassy wondered if any of the papers were smart enough to hire a lip reader.

“Your Honor,” Thomassy said
sotto voce,
with Roberts next to him, “the people, in their presentation, did not specify that they would provide evidence showing conclusively that nobody else could have committed the alleged crime. I’m prepared to move for dismissal on the grounds that the people did not make a
prima facie
case for the guilt of this particular defendant.”

Roberts’s face flushed red. Who, besides Thomassy, would fuck around like this? The man was trying to get him angry.

Judge Drewson admired Thomassy’s ability to keep a straight face.

He leaned toward both men. “Mr. Roberts,” he said, “your opening certainly elided the issue of other possible suspects. However, Mr. Thomassy, if you move for a dismissal, I will rule against. The court has it in its discretion to permit Mr. Roberts to continue his opening to correct his omission, or we can get on with this case. What do you say, gentlemen?”

Roberts looked relieved.

When Thomassy returned to the defense table, Ed asked him, “What was that about?”

“About forty seconds.”

“I have a right to know.”

“You’re supposed to sit still, smile, and look confident, not ask questions.”

“Mr. Thomassy,” Ed said, “you are working for me, and I expect an answer.”

The kid was right. “I was about to move for dismissal on a technical ground, but the judge turned us down.”

“Us?” Ed asked.

“You.”

The judge, his face a fixture of fairness, said, “I can understand the defendant wanting to consult with counsel, but I would appreciate if such consultations could be kept to a necessary minimum. Mr. Thomassy, your opening statement, please.”

*

Judge Drewson had never presided over a trial worked by Thomassy. He watched with curiosity as Thomassy stood in front of the jury box.
He is letting them get a good long first look at him so that when he starts to talk, they will listen instead of dividing their attention between taking him in and hearing what he says.