Time's Witness (74 page)

“Is that man in the courtroom now?”

“Yes.” And George pointed to ex-Sargent Charles Mennehy. Fanshaw had then brushed George off in a hurry, told him to forget the whole thing, that he’d take care of it. “I looked in his eyes, Mr. Fanshaw's eyes, and I felt like he was lying. It was a real strong feeling. So I just went home. Nobody was there. Later I went on over to Smoke's. And Moonfoot came, sat down, kept at me about don’t be crazy, don’t cross these white cops.”

Their talk had ended sometime before midnight, when Robert Pym had walked into Smoke's and “begun to hassle people about the
jukebox and all.”

Isaac asked, “Were you surprised to see Pym in there?”

“Yes, I was. But I didn’t think right off it was due to me. He was loud, acting up like he was drunk. I went over to him, said how I was shutting off the jukebox ’cause this man was trying to play his music up there. I said why didn’t Pym get out right now. He give me a shove, said, something like, ‘Nigger, you don’t ever talk to a white man like that.’” George squeezed his hand around his fist.

Isaac nodded. “That's when the fight began? And then he pulled the gun out from his belt and rammed it into your nostril and said, ‘Buddy, your ass is grass’?”

George shook his head. “I can’t say I remember those exact words.”

“All right.… Now, when you managed to get the gun away from him, and Pym ran, and you followed him, did you run out onto that sidewalk intending to kill him?”

“No. I just saw him running off, and I went after him. But then I saw him sort of scrambling around at that blue car, and I knew how Winston Russell had a blue Ford, and it hit me, just like that, maybe they were
coming
for me, ’cause of what I’d seen. So when Pym wheeled back, I thought he had a gun. I just fired at him. Just fired.” George stopped suddenly with an intake of breath and lowered his head.

Now Isaac moved around the table toward George. “You said, you
thought
Robert Pym had a gun. You didn’t
see
he had a gun?”

George pointed at his glasses, took them off. “It was pretty dark. And my glasses must have come off in the fight. I couldn’t see too good.”

Isaac limped nearer the witness stand. “Why didn’t you pick your glasses up, put them back on, before you gave chase to Pym?”

“I didn’t think to.”

“Then you simply fired blind, hoping to stop him from killing you?”

The State objected to this, as leading the witness, and was sustained. Isaac offered to rephrase. “When you fired the shot, did you think your own life was in danger?”

George carefully replaced his glasses. “I can’t say I
thought
, like
you said. You do it quicker than thinking. And you still maybe aren’t quick enough. In combat, I knew a lot weren’t quick enough.”

“You knew soldiers who didn’t act quickly enough in their own defense and so lost their lives?”

“I knew a lot of men where quickness didn’t do them any good.”

Isaac's hand touched the arm of the chair beside the defendant's. “George, why didn’t you tell the court at your first trial the story you’ve now told us? Why did you never mention the smuggling?”

George's face tightened. “Winston Russell came to me here at the jail that first night. He said if I let his name come up, or about the Fanshaw trucks, well, it’d just make things harder on me in the trial. He said they’d never ask for murder one, not if they figured Pym and I didn’t know each other. He said since I’d already told them about the Ford, just say I thought it was Pym's.”

Nodding, Isaac asked, “And you agreed because you were persuaded that his approach would best serve your defense?”

“No.” A deep rush of breath pushed through George's chest. “He said if I told any of it, he said, I’d wish my family dead and buried, compare it to what he’d do to them. He said he’d use a knife and it’d take them a long time to die.”

“Those were his exact words?”

He nodded. “Those words I know for sure.”

“By your family, he meant your mother, your sister, and your younger brother?”

“Yes.” George looked over at his mother; her hands covered her face.

“He said their names to you?” “Yes.”

“Did you believe he would carry out this threat to use a knife to mutilate and murder your family?”

“Yes.”

“Was this threat ever repeated?”

George said that after his death-penalty conviction, Winston visited him again at the county jail and told him that he knew where George's sister lived with her two small children in Greensboro, and that the same “promise” held for them all. Still
later, when George was already on death row, he was approached by a lifer-trusty named Gary Fisk. Fisk told him he had a message for him from Winston Russell. The message was, “I keep my promises. You keep yours.”

“And you believed this message.” Isaac was facing the jury now. “And you never told anyone?” The answer was no. “And the night before your scheduled execution, when they had shaved you, and given you the clothes you were to wear to your death, and moved you to the cell beside the gas chamber, and brought you your minister,
you never told anyone?
”

George looked up quietly. “I just said, Mr. Rosethorn. I believed the man would do what he said.…And I believed if I didn’t talk…he wouldn’t…” He took off his glasses, and stared down at them in his hand. “But Cooper's dead anyhow.”

The assistant A.G. could not badger George into changing his story; I don’t think he tried as hard or as long as Mitch would have. But they didn’t let Mitch try.

Some people assumed George Hall would be the last witness. But Isaac Rosethorn often said that at the end of a trial, it was effective to bring in somebody nobody’d ever heard mentioned so far, and to make it clear that they’d come from a long way off, driven by an overwhelming impulse to see justice done. Friday morning, he brought in three such mysterious travelers. The first, a young red-haired woman, introduced herself as Mandy Schwerner, née Katz, of St. Louis, Missouri. She sat in a pretty pink suit, handbag on her lap, and told the jury that seven years ago she’d been employed by the city comptroller, Otis Newsome, as his secretary. She said that on the Monday after the shooting of Pym—she recalled quite clearly having the newspaper with the story about it on her desk—that Winston Russell (a frequent visitor) had stormed past her into Mr. Newsome's office while Mr. Dyer Fanshaw was in there, and that while there, the men had yelled at each other for some time. She distinctly remembered being curious about why Mr. Newsome was so angry with Mr. Russell, and why Mr. Russell kept yelling, “Hall's not going to talk!” and telling Mr. Newsome things like “calm down” and “keep your mouth shut, and your friends’ too.” Then Mr. Russell had left, slamming the door so hard a print fell off the wall and the glass smashed.

Somewhat at a loss, Neil Sadler asked Mrs. Schwerner whether she still worked as a secretary. She said she didn’t. Why, because she’d been fired from her job? She pleasantly replied that no, she’d quit to marry Reverend Schwerner, now minister of the United Lutheran Church in St. Louis.

The second of the out-of-towners wasn’t really from that far away. Gary Fisk was an inmate at Dollard Prison. He was very happy to be out of there, even for a morning. Apparently Mr. Fisk had damaged his vocal cords while behind bars, because he spoke in a rattling whisper, and Hilliardson had to ask him twice to repeat the message Winston Russell had told him to pass along to George Hall. Fisk added that he’d never had any idea that “I keep my promises” was a death threat, or naturally he would have said something about it to the warden.

Isaac's final witness was a very old man, frail of limb but very rosy in the cheeks and perky in manner. He said his name was Lem Trelease, and that he lived in St. Petersburg at the Merrymount Retirement Center, which he endorsed, on the record, as quite merry indeed.

Isaac laughed, promising to send for a brochure immediately. “Now, Mister Trelease—I should say, Sergeant Trelease—you served with the Hillston police for forty-three years, retiring nearly seven years ago. Is that correct?”

“Yes, it is. They made me quit.”

“Um hum. And seven years ago, at 1:00 A.M. on Sunday, July twelfth, were you on duty at the headquarters of the Hillston Police, here in this building?”

Trelease looked around, just to check to be sure he was in the right place. “Yep. I was night-shift desk sergeant right here at HPD. I was at the desk.”

“And on that night, the night when George Hall was arrested for the shooting of Robert Pym, did anyone come into the station and speak to you at the desk, and ask you to give something to George Hall?”

“Yes, sir.” Trelease sat up straighter, smoothing his unfashionably wide tie. “A black teenaged boy came in that A.M., asked me if he could talk to George Hall. Said he was his brother. Well, I said I
was sorry, but Hall was in the holding cell, and, well, I couldn’t let him go back there. So then he wanted to know if I’d take Mr. Hall this little thing he had wrapped up in a plain handkerchief, and well, of course, I said I’d have to check it.” Trelease spotted Miss Bee and waved at her.

“And did you?”

“Yep, yes, sir, I did.”

“And what was in the handkerchief?”

“Just a regular pair of eyeglasses. The boy said he’d gone to this bar where the shooting was, to find out what had happened, and somebody there said they’d found these glasses under a table, and the boy’d recognized them. He said his brother needed these glasses to see by. And so, well, would I please take them back to the suspect.”

Isaac nodded. “And the boy was George Hall's brother, Cooper?”

“He said he was. I wrote it down. You could look in the log if they still have it around.”

Isaac said, “I did look in the log.…What did you do then?”

“Took the glasses back to the cell, gave them to the suspect.”

“And what did George Hall do?”

“Said thank you. Put ’em on.”

“Thank
you
, Sergeant Trelease. No further questions.”

When the judge asked Mitch Bazemore if he had any questions, he rubbed his wedding ring for a moment, then shook his head.

Isaac Rosethorn walked slowly back to his chair. “Now,” he said quietly. “Now the defense rests.”

The assistant attorney general had obviously decided that Mitchell Bazemore could deliver his summation without any prompting, because during the break, he left the courtroom and didn’t return.

Mitch stood by the jury box like he always did. He rocked back and forth on the heels of his polished shoes like he always did. But he didn’t begin the way he always began—by calling the defendant a liar, and his lawyer a charlatan. He clamped his hand over his mouth, then suddenly ripped it away, and said, “The great British jurist Blackstone wrote long ago that all the principles of civilized
law could be summed up in one simple code. One simple code. That we should live honestly. That we should hurt no one. And that we should render to everyone his due.

“Remember that, and forget everything else you’ve heard in this courtroom. Remember that, and forget me.” He jabbed his fist in his breastbone, then shook it at the defense table. “Forget Mr. Rosethorn. He's a brilliant man. A brilliant man and a magnificent lawyer. But he is utterly and absolutely irrelevant now. I am utterly and absolutely irrelevant now. Set us aside. Set aside sympathy. And prejudice. And personalities. Set aside
politics and politicians.
They are, as the Good Book says, ‘dragons in their pleasant palaces.’ They have no power here.” Mitch waved both arms in all directions, as if there were no telling where the dragons might be lurking. Isaac put down his pencil and stared at him.

His arms tensed, the D.A. leaned over the jury rail. “Cast out of your mind
everything
but that simple code. And ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
ask yourselves
, do you believe that George Hall lived honestly? Did he hurt no one? Did he render to Robert Pym his due? Whatever Robert's sins may have been, did he deserve to bleed to death on a sidewalk, shot through the
eye?!
Ask yourselves, ‘Do I really believe this preposterous tale told by Mr. Newsome, a delirious dying man, under indictment himself, and desperate to shift blame on dead associates unable to protest?’ Yet even if his tale were true, it does not alter the fact of the crime you sit here to judge. If you secretly planned to kill me, but before you did so, I separately determined to kill you, and I
did
kill you, then I would be guilty of murder. If I killed you because I
found out
about your plan to kill me, and it so enraged me I decided I had a
right
to kill you, then I would be guilty of murder. If I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so it was just
luck
I shot you in the eye instead of someplace else,’ I’d still be guilty of murder!” By now, Mitch's face was so dark with blood, he looked as if he
might
have murdered someone.

He began his old military pacing, from one end of the jury box to the other. “Would a man governed by Blackstone's simple code act as George Hall undeniably acted when he ran out to that side-walk,
after
the fight had ended, and shot and killed Robert Pym? If
we all felt free to act as George Hall did, what kind of America would we be living in? The America of gunslingers and gangsters. A howling wilderness. And what would
we
be? Animals of will and appetite recklessly preying on one another. ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’” Mitch paused, then rubbed his signet ring into his chin as he stalked the length of the bar rail, circling the table where the assistant A.G. had sat.

“If we do not punish George Hall's act of murder, if we do not see it as our civic duty to punish his act, what are we saying both to this nation's law
breakers
and law
makers?
Are we not saying that nothing holds firm, nothing holds true? What are we saying to our children? Are we not saying there is no right and wrong? And what are we saying to
ourselves?

“We are not a nation of thrones or armies. Our throne is our Constitution. Our armies are our laws. And they can protect us only if we
enforce
them.” Without a glance, the D.A. strode past his ostensible assistant, Neil Sadler, seated at the prosecutor's table, and paused in front of Isaac.