The Unnamed (11 page)

“Done,” said Fritz.

“There’s something else.”

He brought out a copy of the artist’s rendering of the man he encountered on the Brooklyn Bridge. In some way or another, he told Fritz, this man was connected to the murder of R.H.’s wife. He might even have the murder weapon in his possession. Tim believed R.H. was innocent but that he might nevertheless be sentenced to a punishment he didn’t deserve. His fading hope was that Fritz might find the man in the sketch.

“This is all you got?” said Fritz.

“That’s it.”

Fritz made a fleeting face of doubt, big eyes and a twisted mouth, and then took a deep breath. “That’s not a whole hell of a lot, Tim.”

“I know.”

“I’ve got people at the NYPD who will let me have a look at the case file,” he said. “But this, man…” gesturing with the sketch, “this is thin. I’ll be looking for one man among eight million.”

Tim asked him to do the best he could.

Jane woke Becka up before she left for work and Becka hung around all day while her dad watched nonstop television in his bicycle helmet. Her mom paid her as much as she would have been paid at Starbucks or wherever, and now she didn’t have to get a crappy part-time job for the summer. She just had to hang around waiting for him to leave and to follow him if he did. Her mom hadn’t quit her job to follow him around but she still picked him up and took care of him when she wasn’t working. But she still wanted someone to look after him during the day, so when the summer came around, she offered to pay Becka to keep an eye on him.

“How come he doesn’t just hire somebody? Like a bodyguard or something. It’s not like we don’t have the money.”

“He doesn’t want that.”

“Why not?”

“He’s too independent.”

“He doesn’t seem independent when he calls you at three in the morning and you have to pick him up in Queens.”

“Do you want the job or not?” asked Jane.

Her mom told her not to be too obvious about it, because it was more or less like she was babysitting him. And it was a little weird to babysit your dad, the man who makes you do chores and punishes you and tells you over and over again all the ways there are to be happy. He told her about more ways to be happy than you could ever try out even if you had twenty lives. But watching him was better than some crappy part-time job. Except that, day after day, he stayed on the couch and never moved. The whole point to the helmet was to record his brain waves or whatever, the whole point to babysitting him was to follow him wherever he went, but he wasn’t going anywhere but the couch and his brain waves weren’t doing anything but watching TV. Becka still thought her dad was mental. She didn’t want to think of it that way but who ever heard of what he had? Not even the Internet.

She couldn’t be downstairs with him all the time. Sometimes she took little breaks, as you would at Starbucks or wherever, and went upstairs to lie on her bed or check her email or play the guitar. She checked on him from time to time to make sure he was still there. Sometimes she found him dozing on the sofa with the bicycle helmet gone a little cockeyed. She thought if he wasn’t mental he was at least really strange.

One morning she woke up and he was sitting on the edge of her bed holding her DVD box set of the first season of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Can I take this?” he asked.

“What for?”

“To watch.”

“You?”

“There’s nothing else.”

He took it away with him, and a few minutes later she headed downstairs in her hoodie, David Bowie tee and black sweats, on her feet a pair of Sylvester the cat slippers, a holdout from childhood, in which she shuffled across the kitchen floor. Her father was in the middle of the first episode. She put two Pop-Tarts into the toaster and fixed herself a cup of coffee with cream and sugar. She placed the Pop-Tarts on a paper towel and walked over to the recliner and sat down. She ate her breakfast during the concluding five minutes of episode one and the opening minutes of episode two. She had seen the episode a thousand times but happily watched it again, surprised to be watching it with him and pleased to be getting paid for it. At one point he said, “What’d she just say?” and she repeated the line for him, and then they sank back into silence.

He forwarded through the opening credits and they watched the next three episodes. When they were through she got up to use the bathroom. He got up to change discs. She came out and he was waiting for her before starting the next episode. It was a favorite of hers and she wondered how well she knew the lines so she decided to repeat out loud a brief exchange between Buffy and her friend Willow, which caused him to look over. She continued to repeat their lines perfectly all the way to the opening credits and he continued to look at her as the theme song came on.

“My God,” he said. “How many times have you watched this?”

They finished another episode. Around one, he asked if she wanted lunch. They ate their sandwiches in front of the TV and when they were through she took the plates without disturbing him and put them in the dishwasher. She returned to the recliner as he got up to resettle the bedsheet under him and fluff up his pillow and then he started another episode.

“How many do we have left?” he asked.

“Like, five,” she said. “But I have the second season upstairs.”

“How many seasons are there?” he asked.

“Seven,” she said.

They repeated the routine the next day and the day after that. She watched the show, but she also watched him watch it, looking for signs of his nodding off or standing up. But he did neither. Except to replace the DVD or work the remote, he remained on the sofa. When he got off the sofa to replace yet another disc, she finally asked him, “What made you want to watch
Buffy,
Dad?”

Growing up, she had had all the posters on her walls. She bought every offer of merchandise, the comic books and the novelettes and the magazines, the T-shirts and patches, the notebooks, pens, and pencils. She belonged to the fan clubs and ordered autographed eight-by-ten headshots of the actors. He once sat on the edge of her bed when she was in the eighth grade and asked if there was anything, anything at all, that he could do to make her happy, and she said the only time she was maybe happy was when she was watching
Buffy
.

“I was curious about it,” he said to her now.

Within the week they had finished the second season. He asked her if she had the third. Between the third season and the fourth he didn’t need to ask. She just got off the recliner and brought the next season down from her bedroom.

They were in the middle of the sixth season when he unexpectedly sat up mid-episode and turned away from the TV. He looked straight ahead, toward the fireplace. He set the remote down on the coffee table. He unbuckled the chin strap and peeled the bicycle helmet from his shaved head. It was startling to see him bald. It was almost like he suffered from a real disease like cancer or something. He placed the helmet and its portable device next to him on the sofa.

“Should you really be taking that off, Dad?” she asked.

“Why am I not walking?” he asked, more to himself than her. “Where has all the goddamn walking gone?”

It was the very thing she had been asking herself for weeks.

Mike Kronish drove to the courthouse every morning with R. H. Hobbs in the back of a tinted SUV. He reassured his client, who had taken to calling him at home late at night, about the previous day’s proceedings, and then prepared him for what would likely happen during the day ahead. The driver let them off at the foot of the courthouse steps, which they climbed in the hundred-plus heat. By the time R.H. entered the grand echoing foyer and joined the line to go through security, perspiration was pouring down his face and he was panting. Mike Kronish had started to fear his client wouldn’t make it through trial without suffering a heart attack. He had appealed to the judge to give them a continuance on that basis, but the judge ordered a physical and reviewed the results and the motion was denied. He would grant it, he told Kronish, when R.H. was admitted to the hospital for chest pains.

They made it through security, where the marshals took away their cell phones and BlackBerrys, and they entered the courtroom together. The judge began the day’s proceedings promptly at nine thirty. Kronish and his client walked through the gate separating the gallery from the well at exactly twenty-two after. Peter was already present, managing the work of two junior associates and three paralegals. They were assembled now no differently from the way they had been every morning since the trial began, with one exception: to the right of Peter in Kronish’s chair sat a man in a gray suit with a bicycle helmet on his head. When the two men came into view, Tim turned and greeted them. He stood up and shook hands with Kronish and R.H. awkwardly, with his left hand. Though it was now summer, the effects of Tim’s frostbite lingered. Kronish asked him what he was doing there.

“I’ve just been getting the rundown from Peter,” he replied. “I’m ready to help any way I can.”

Kronish set his briefcase on the table. “What do you mean, the rundown?”

“I’m all caught up. Peter and I talked.”

“About what?”

R.H. interrupted them. “I thought you were supposed to be at the hospital,” he said. “If it was important to be at the hospital, why aren’t you at the hospital?”

Tim didn’t look at R.H. He looked at Kronish and reiterated that Peter had caught him up and that he was ready to get to work. He also wanted Kronish to know that he’d been reading the transcripts nightly and, frankly, no disrespect intended, they could use his help. Kronish did not want R.H. to know that they had just walked in on the greatest breach of professional protocol he could remember in all his years as a trial lawyer, but he was having difficulty seeing straight. He asked R.H. to have a seat.

“Why is he here?” R.H. demanded. Tim’s reappearance could mean only one thing to R.H.—that his trial was going worse than he suspected, and that they had had to call a man away from his wife’s deathbed in order to salvage it. “Where were you three weeks ago?”

“Have a seat, R.H.,” said Kronish.

“Why haven’t you been here from the beginning?”

Kronish gave Peter a look and Peter understood immediately. Peter jumped up, took gentle hold of R.H.’s arm and started coaxing him into his chair. R.H. went reluctantly.

“What is he doing here?” he asked Peter.

Kronish would have preferred to talk to Tim privately, away from R.H., the prosecution team, and all those looking on from the gallery, but the judge was expected in less than five minutes and would not be pleased to find the defense team’s lead counsel absent from the courtroom. He remained standing, as did Tim, and spoke to him in a soft whisper.

“What the hell? What the fuck? What the fuck what the fuck what the
fuck?
”

“Hey, Mike, go easy. I’m here to help.”

“Help how?”

“Any way I can.”

“There is no way you can.”

“Come on, Mike. I was the architect of the strategy, Peter’s got me all caught up—”

“Fuck caught up, Tim! We’re three weeks into trial. You’re the architect of a strategy that’s radically changed. Do you not see? Do you not understand the delicate dynamic? Look at the man. Look what you’ve done. The fucking protocol, man!”

“Hey, Mike—”

“You arrogant bastard,” said Kronish. “This has nothing to do with R.H. and everything to do with you. And why are you wearing that fucking helmet?”

“Read this,” he said.

He handed Kronish a photocopy of an article from
The New England Journal of Medicine
. “John B.” was the pseudonym the authors had assigned him. The article detailed his condition and debated its causes. The psychiatrists believed his situation came from a physical malfunction of the body, something organic and diseased, while the neurologists pointed to the scans and the tests that revealed nothing and concluded that he had to be suffering something psychological. Each camp passed the responsibility for his diagnosis to the other, from the mind to the body back to the mind, just as they had done in private over the course of his endless consultations.

Kronish flipped through the pages he had been handed. “What’s this?”

“I’m John B.,” said Tim.

“Who?”

“The subject of that article.”

Kronish looked at him in disbelief. “Are you unaware of the fucking protocol, man?”

Just as he said this, the judge walked through the chambers door and the marshal called out for all to rise. Kronish was caught holding the article Tim had given him.

“Please be seated,” said the judge.

When Tim sat down, Kronish realized he intended to stay. He had no choice but to sit as well, if he wished not to draw attention to himself. As he did so, he considered rising again and asking the judge for permission to approach. He would ask for a fifteen-minute recess in which he would take Tim outside the courthouse and beat him behind a dumpster. But he preferred not to request permission to approach because R.H. worried about conversations he didn’t participate in. He was also loath to ask the judge for a recess before the day had even begun. Kronish was momentarily paralyzed. He was never paralyzed. He turned to Tim, who was sitting next to him, awaiting the resumption of a trial he’d been absent from since day one.

“Take that helmet off,” he whispered.

“What?”

“That goddamn bicycle helmet on your head. Take it off.”

“I can’t.”

Kronish stared. “Take that ridiculous fucking helmet off your head, Tim, before the fucking judge notices.”

“I won’t,” said Tim.

For a moment of blinding discomfort, the two sides of Kronish battled for primacy—reason, which knew any sudden movement would be bad for his client, and rage, which wanted to rip the helmet off Tim’s head and Tim’s head with it.

“When I get back this evening,” he said, “I’m calling an emergency caucus among the partners and I’m recommending that you be stripped of partnership.”

“I have a right to be here,” said Tim.