The Touch of Treason (44 page)

“I said are you ready for your summation!”

I have been giving my summation!
“No, Your Honor,” he said aloud. And not aloud,
Francine, I love you.
Then Thomassy turned to the courtroom in which every seat was filled, his gaze on the doors at the back, trying not to see the more than a hundred pairs of eyes looking at him.

Through his paralysis he could hear the murmur of the spectators and then the judge’s gavel.

“The court will stand in recess,” the judge said. “Mr. Thomassy, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Will you step into chambers, please.”

Why was the gray-uniformed guard holding the door to the judge’s chambers open for him, did the man think he couldn’t open it himself? The back of his scalp felt wet. Thomassy touched his forehead with the back of his left hand; it came away damp. How clearly he remembered losing his patience with the students, snapping
There’s nothing that says you have to take on a client, but once you take him on, it’s like giving birth, the case is yours until the client doesn’t need you anymore.
And the young, tall, shy boy way back in the lecture hall had held up his hand and said, “Sir, how do you know ahead of time it’s a case you want?” And Thomassy had replied, “Because you have the perception of a god!” which got a laugh, but was a lie, so he added, “Sometimes you get stuck!”

Where did he get that crap about children? He had been a child. If he felt helpless now, where was
his
Thomassy to rescue him?

Judge Drewson, sitting opposite him at the end of the long walnut conference table, hadn’t said a word.

Thomassy took out his handkerchief and carefully wiped his forehead and then the palms of his hands. But he couldn’t meet the judge’s eyes for fear he would betray the banging terror in his chest.

At last the judge said, “Mr. Thomassy, I’ve had counsel unprepared for summations before this but I’ve never heard one admit it.”

Thomassy said nothing.

“Are you ill?”

A loud, distracting knock on the door was followed by Roberts entering. “Your Honor, I was wondering—”

“Come in, come in and sit down, Mr. Roberts. I was not discussing anything relevant to the case with defense counsel. I was inquiring about his health.”

Thomassy shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m okay, Your Honor. I apologize.”

Why the hell was Roberts staring at him like that?

“Nothing like this has happened to me before,” Thomassy said to the judge. “I’m sorry. I’ve been under a strain.”

“I understand your fiancée was in a bad auto accident.”

“It’s not Miss Widmer, Your Honor. I had a very difficult conversation with my client yesterday…” How could he talk with Roberts present?

There was another brief knock on the door. When it swung open, Thomassy could see the court attendant trying to block Jackson Perry from entering the room.

“Your Honor,” Perry was saying, trying to get the guard to lower his arm, “I was concerned that—”

Judge Drewson interrupted him. “Mr. Perry, do you understand plain English?”

The guard lowered his arm.

Perry nodded.

“Then stay the hell out of here!” snapped the judge. Then he turned to Roberts and said, “I think you’d better leave too. You have my word that nothing affecting the evidence will be discussed between us.”

Roberts, his face flushed, rose. “Your Honor, I must protest—”

“All you like, to whomever you like, but I want to have a few words with Mr. Thomassy in private. Understood?”

When Roberts left, the judge, his voice calmed, said, “I’m not a doctor, but you looked a bit out of it in the courtroom as if you had suddenly been taken ill…” He spoke slowly, choosing words carefully. “Or were having a garden-variety anxiety attack. In how many murder cases have you acted for the defendant?”

“Sixty-one, Your Honor. This would be the sixty-second.”

“Let me hazard something. I believe you accepted this case not in your normal routine but at the instigation of others, that you expected to be defending, as you have in the past, a defendant accused of murder. I could make an educated guess and suggest that in the course of this trial you have yourself formed an indictment different from the one handed down by the Grand Jury. Please don’t acknowledge by word or even headshake whether I am correct. There are some attorneys who shirk no case that produces income for them. You are in the unusual position of having elected to defend a man whom you have turned against on knowledge of the nature of his actual crime. Mr. Thomassy, to desert that defendant now, for any cause, would be an act of treason.”

The word reverberated in the room like a curse.
I know,
Thomassy wanted to say,
I know.

Judge Drewson was saying, “When I was a young man I was in love with a woman who was aspiring to be an actress. We went to the theater a lot, upstairs in the cheaper seats. I remember how one night we managed to get to the theater in a snowstorm because we didn’t want the tickets to go unused. I really couldn’t afford to buy them again. We got there ten minutes late, wet and cold, but the curtain wasn’t up because the star had canceled, ostensibly over illness. The audience was thinned out, but of those that had gotten to the theater, not one person believed the star was ill. We thought she had chickened out. There are certain roles in life that require our appearance no matter the weather outside. Or inside.”

Judge Drewson suddenly seemed embarrassed by his turn of phrase. “It wouldn’t be like you to quit,” he said.

Thomassy looked at Drewson and saw the man behind the courtesy.
Even if he made up that story about the theater, it was an act of kindness.
Thomassy had always thought of judges as the people up there, politicians, hacks willing to be bored in exchange for the mantle of authority.
Not this man. He is civilizing me, like Francine.

“I’m sorry,” Thomassy said, his voice a shroud.

“I will not find you in contempt if you walk out of this courtroom,” the judge said, “but I believe that you will find yourself in contempt of yourself for the rest of your career as a lawyer if you don’t get out there and do the kind of job you have a reputation for. The only tolerable decision is that of the jury. And you and I and the defendant will have to live with their determination. Now, if you want some time, I’ll recess till this afternoon.”

Thomassy felt shame for the wetness in his eyes.

“You can use my bathroom to wash up,” the judge said, pointing.

*

The white ceramic glare of the immaculate bathroom blinded Thomassy for a moment as he tried to focus on his face in the mirror, the red deltas of his eyes, the streaked cheeks of boyhood tears. Despite the sweet bullshit of the judge, he heard himself thinking
1 can’t do it,
and then, plucked from memory were the same words.

He’d been eleven. His father, before heading for the stables, had said to his mother and himself,
When a man breaks leg, they fix cast. When horse breaks leg, finish. What kind of God sins against horses?
He’d slammed the door so hard the dishes on the table rattled.

“Go to him,” Thomassy’s mother said.

Thomassy didn’t want to be with his father when he was railing.

“Go,” his mother ordered.

In the farthest stable, away from the whinnying of the other horses, he found his father sitting on the ground with his arms around the mare’s neck. The mare’s huge right eye betrayed its fear.

Thomassy saw the pistol lying near his father’s knee. He wanted to run back to the house.
Can you do it?
his father had asked.
You put the gun against the side of the head behind the ear and pull the trigger just once.

Thomassy ran from the barn, and his father had run after him, the gun in his hand. When Haig Thomassian caught up to his son, he held the gun pointing heavenward for safety, and said to the quivering boy,
When I am dead and you are the man, you will have to do what is necessary. God is a coward. Do you understand?

Thomassy had stood rooted in the field, watching his father walk back to the barn in the moonlight, and then, after an endless time, he’d heard the shot.

He’d gone closer to the barn, and when his father finally came out, he remembered his father put his arm around his shoulders and Thomassy had instinctively put his arm around his father’s waist, and the two had walked in mourning together back to the house where Marya waited.

When Thomassy emerged from the bathroom, his hands and face and eyes were dry. He said, “You are a very understanding man, Your Honor.”

The judge said, “We’ve all been touched by the same thing.”

Not quite the same.

“I will do what is necessary,” Thomassy said, grateful that in the carnival of the law, he did not have to pull a trigger.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Thomassy, facing the twelve rapt jurors behind their wooden barrier, felt like a man who had come out of a terrible fever. He was back in his world.

He began his summation with the words he always started off with. “I wonder if you and I couldn’t talk this thing out.”

The jurors strained to hear him. That meant the judge and the spectators would be straining even more. Straining helps the attention.

With his eyes he was saying to the jurors:
This is between you and me.

“When I got out of law school,” he said, “I did a lot of civil liberties work because I was interested in justice and I saw a lot of injustice around to older people, black people, Spanish-speaking people, people people. I learned that there are a few individuals with a lot of power, most of them working—when they’re working—for the government. Since 1776 we don’t have a king, we have a lot of little kings who get their kicks out of coming after the people who don’t have power. Looking at you I’d guess your parents came from a lot of different backgrounds. My parents were Armenians. They came to this country because here you can fight back. The law here doesn’t let the little guy get beat up in some back room and thrown into the jug to rot the way they do today in a lot of places. The law gives us this big room so what we do is in public view. And we pick twelve citizens who are as clean of prejudging other people as we can find and let them know that they are the sole judges of the facts in this case.”

Before this trial he had always enjoyed what he thought of as
jury bullshit,
building their egos, palsying, flirting, pretending, talking down, telling them what to think, and they loved it. But as he walked along the front of the box, looking at each one of them, making sure they knew each one was under the tent he had erected to seal them and him off from the others, he knew he no longer loved it.

Even lawyers can grow up, George.

Go away, Francine. I’ve got a job to do.

“There is much about this case that is confusing, even how it got here in the first place. We all know the biggest growth industry in this country is violent crime. We all know that billions of dollars of hard drugs come into this country, that kids the defendant’s age and younger get hooked on hard drugs to the point where they have to steal and rob and commit violence to support their expensive habits. The government admits they get only about ten percent of the drugs coming in, and you’d think with our concern about the violence that results from just this one habit that the government would go after the ninety percent like gangbusters. But they don’t. The government is going after an accomplished young man, a scholar with two graduate degrees at the age of twenty-four, and a respected book to his credit. And what do they go after him with? Circumstantial evidence. Not real hard eyewitness evidence—I saw him do this or I saw him do that—but what I call ‘maybe’ evidence.”

Thomassy turned his back on the jurors and looked directly at Roberts. “The prosecution,” Thomassy said, “has the burden of proof of every issue that’s been raised in this trial. In New York—and that’s what we’re operating under here, New York law—Section three eighty-nine of the Code of Criminal Procedure says that if anyone is accused of a crime, the presumption is in favor of his innocence. No ifs and no buts. The defendant is entitled to rest upon the presumption of innocence in his favor unless the prosecutor offers evidence that so far outweighs the presumption of innocence that each and every one of you without exception is convinced of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

“The easiest way to understand reasonable doubt is that if you are a hundred percent sure of someone’s guilt, okay, but if you’re only ninety-nine percent sure, the other one percent is reasonable doubt.”

The judge may hang me for that definition but the jurors will remember it.

“You’ve probably been in a lot of situations in your life where you felt your opinion didn’t count for all that much. But here it’s different. If eleven other people are one hundred percent sure and you’re not so sure, that’s enough reasonable doubt for an acquittal. This is one election in which your personal vote can be as important as everyone else’s put together.”

Francine, this is the first time in an exemplary legal career that I am delivering a summation with half my mind. I have to work. Take your hands off my thighs. Stop kissing my arms. Stop making me need you so much!