Defense, p.2
Defense, page 2
I made my way to the counsel table and went about my business without a conscious thought. A not guilty plea was entered and bail was set at $100,000. The defendant was remanded to the custody of the county sheriff. I glanced sideways at Morel and said I would see him in a day or two. Before he could say anything, I picked up my briefcase and walked away.
I stopped at the district attorney’s office on my way out. The police reports, hospital records, photographs, fingerprint results, forensic examinations—everything the defense was entitled to see—were waiting for me. That evening, after I had dinner in town, I sat in my study, nursing a scotch and soda, and read about a twelve-year-old girl who had been taken into protective custody after her mother had been beaten by her husband.
The police report was written in an anonymous prose that conceals the brutality of violence behind a lifeless recitation of observable facts. Years of reading these bloodless descriptions of human depravity had all but deadened my emotional response to them.
The girl, Michelle Walker, told a caseworker from the social service agency that she had been abused by her stepfather. The caseworker called the police. Detective Petrie arranged to interview the girl, who was described as “quite hyper.” The detective noted that it was hard for her to talk about a single subject or to sit still for very long. She kept straying from the point, and when she did answer a question she did not supply much detail. She told him that what he wanted to talk to her about “bored her.”
Bored her. Was it apathy or the workings of some instinctive defense mechanism? Whatever it was, it did nothing to diminish her candor. She loathed her stepfather. He had abused her physically, and had repeatedly used cocaine in her presence. She knew all the places in the house where he kept it hidden. The detective asked her if she had had any other problems with him. “Johnny did it to me,” she said.
The detective asked her what she meant. “He stuck his penis in me,” she answered. He was careful. He asked her where she had learned about things like this. She said she had been shown sex education films at school.
I made a check mark in the margin and penciled a shorthand note. Almost every movie made in America has more graphic sex than the films they show in schools to protect kids from sexual predators. Adults are always the last to know. These kids learn about sex on television before they go to school. The movie she had seen in school would not have taught her anything she did not already know, except perhaps how to get rid of a stepfather she did not like. I was already thinking of the ways in which what she had been shown at school to protect her could be used in court to discredit her.
She had been sitting in the living room. It was Saturday morning and she was still wearing her pajamas. Her mother had gone shopping, and she was watching television. Her stepfather yelled at her from the bedroom and told her to come in. He was standing there, stark naked. He threw her down on the bed so hard that she hurt her back on the metal frame. He pulled her pajamas off and “put his penis inside of me.”
Detective Petrie asked her to describe what Morel did then. He “pushed it in and out,” she said, and “it hurt.” When he got off her, she added, there was something hanging down from the end of his penis. The detective concluded that her stepfather had used a condom.
Morel, she said, removed a knife from under his pillow and placed the blade against her chest. “You better not tell,” he threatened. Petrie asked her to describe the knife. Based on what she told him, he assumed it was some kind of hunting knife with a serrated blade. It was big enough, and lethal enough, to convince her, according to the detective, that “she would die if she told anyone about this.” She ran away as soon as she could and hid in a park blocks away. Hours later, when she saw her mother come to the house, she went back. She was too afraid to tell her mother anything about the incident.
This was, she told the detective, the only sexual contact she had ever had with her stepfather. Petrie noted however that Michelle Walker had been the “victim of several sexual contacts in the past which had been reported to the authorities.” That was all. Nothing about when these things had happened, nothing about what they were, and nothing at all about who had done them. The only thing that was certain was that this twelve-year-old girl had accused her stepfather of rape, and that this was not the first time allegations of sexual misconduct had been made in which she was the victim.
I finished Detective Petrie’s report and put it back in the file folder. A twelve-year-old girl had been raped and the details summarized in less than three pages of a handwritten report. That was the way the system worked. The criminal courts were full of cases like this, and the jails were full of people like Johnny Morel. The girl would have to live the rest of her life with the consequences of what had been done to her. All I was concerned with was how to get an acquittal for the man who had raped her if the case went to court, and, if instead of a trial there was a plea bargain, what I could do to get him the best deal possible. I was a lawyer and that was what I was supposed to do.
ii
Leopold Rifkin was very rich. His grandfather had come to Portland from New York just after the First World War and opened a small store. At the end of the Second World War it was the largest department store in town, and twenty years after that, it had expanded into the largest chain in the Northwest. Leopold’s father had inherited everything. When he died, ownership was divided between Leopold and his sister, Sarah. The company went public a few years later, and Leopold Rifkin, who had never been poor, was suddenly one of the wealthiest men around.
It was the only reason my girlfriend, Lisa, had agreed to go. She loved money even more than she disliked lawyers, and she disliked them a lot. She had it all figured out, the same way she had most other things figured out. Everything was divided into categories. In the case of lawyers there were only two: the ones who never went to court and were duller than accountants, and the ones who went to court and would represent Jack the Ripper if they thought they could make a buck. She knew she was right because everyone she knew thought the same thing.
“Everyone you know?” I asked her. “The physicians and staff of that hospital you run?”
“What’s wrong with them?” she demanded. “They help people. They save lives. What do lawyers do? They ruin people’s lives and then, as if that wasn’t enough, they take their money for doing it.”
At thirty-two, she was the youngest hospital administrator in the city, but she had been working in medicine since she was eighteen. It was all she knew, and, as I knew too well, all she wanted to know.
“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m a lawyer.” As soon as I said it I was sorry I had. It was a request for an exemption and she was in no mood to grant me favors.
“How could I ever forget that?” she replied, as if the knowledge of what I did was a burden she had to bear.
Rifkin’s home on the Palatine Hill was just a few minutes away. I slowed the car down, glanced across at the woman with whom I had been living for nearly a year, and wondered if it would last another month.
“If your world is so much better than mine,” I remarked, looking back at the road, “maybe you should start dating a doctor.”
She moved closer and rested her elbow on my shoulder. “Maybe it would be better if I did.” She said it with a kind of amused defiance, but we both knew that there was nothing playful about it.
At the top of the circular drive, two hundred feet from the iron gate below, Leopold Rifkin’s rambling two-story house blazed with light. Couples clustered together on the long verandah that swept across the front. A white-coated waiter was carrying a silver tray crowded with glasses of champagne. As I stepped out of the car, I was engulfed in the raucous, charming, incoherent sounds of life lived for the sheer fun of it.
I opened the passenger-side door and held out my hand. Lisa kept my hand in hers as I closed the door behind her. “I love you,” she whispered.
She was standing right in front of me, her mouth half open, teasing me with her long-lashed dark eyes. When we first met, it had taken an act of will for me to stop looking at her. I could not remember when it had happened, when I first stopped looking at her as if she were the only woman I would ever want. All I knew was that another romance that would never end was over. We were going through the motions.
I slipped my arm around her waist and kissed her lightly on the lips. “I love you, too,” I replied. For a single, lingering moment, I almost thought I meant it.
Rifkin greeted us at the door. “Joseph, I’m so glad you could make it.” Before I could say a word, he turned to Lisa. “And I’m even more glad you could come. If you don’t mind,” he added with a mischievous smile as he took her hand, “I may just spend the rest of the evening simply staring at you.”
It was instinctive. “If you don’t mind if I stare back.”
He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “And I thought you had a way with juries!”
He took her by the arm and led her inside. Just before they disappeared into the crowd, he called back to me: “I don’t suppose you would consider representing me on a kidnapping charge?”
I edged my way through the throng of laughing faces and boisterous voices to the bar that had been set up just inside the open glass doors that led to the verandah. The bartender, his forehead already beaded with sweat, looked at me as he handed a drink to someone else. With a scotch and soda in my hand, I elbowed my way through and went outside. Far beyond the broad expanse of well-tended green grass, beyond the lines of fir trees that marched across the hills, the last light of sunset lit up the western sky with scarlet smoke.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Even before I heard the voice that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s, I knew who it was. We had been adversaries for so long I could not remember when we first became friends.
“How are you, Horace?”
He was huge. Six foot three and well over 250 pounds. My hand was lost in his enveloping grasp. He could have broken it and never noticed.
“I hear Leopold asked you to take the Morel case.” His voice was the kind that gave comfort to children and confidence to everyone else. It echoed with distant traces of both solace and hope.
“Yes,” I nodded. I was not surprised he knew. There were no secrets at the courthouse. “I read through the police report last night. I’m not sure why he asked.”
Horace shrugged, and began to grin. “Maybe he just wants to see me beat you once.” He stood next to me, watching the light fade away into the growing darkness of the inevitable night, thinking about something only he could see.
“I saw a lot in Vietnam. Kids getting killed. Women. Awful. But, you know, it was a war. Bad things happened.” He paused for a moment. “This stuff,” he said abruptly, turning his head toward me, “makes me sick. Guys like this,” he said and paused. “A twelve-year-old kid, for Christ sake!”
It was a generic judgment. There were a lot of twelve-year-old victims, and a lot who were not even as old as that. They seemed to get younger all the time.
The smooth ebony-colored face of Horace Woolner seemed to withdraw into the shadows that crowded onto the porch. “Why are you taking it?”
It was my turn to shrug. “He asked.”
Woolner understood. “Best reason I can think of. Maybe the only reason,” he added. “Never knew anyone quite like him.”
He stared into his glass, watching the ice cubes knock against each other as he turned the glass slowly in his massive hand, like some general studying the violence of battle.
“You know what he did for me?” he asked, raising his thick eyebrows. “He made sure I became DA. I never told you that, did I? I never told anyone.”
There had been rumors. The last district attorney, who believed that the electorate only voted against incumbents to whom they had taken an active dislike, had followed a calculated and precisely executed policy of benign anonymity. No one knew who he was, and for nearly twenty years vast majorities were perfectly content to let him remain where he was. He would perhaps have derived a certain pleasure had he known that upon his sudden death several days passed before anyone really noticed. It made no difference in the district attorney’s office, where cases were still prosecuted, and it made no difference in the courts, where his only appearances had been at the kind of public celebrations where there would be a crowd in which he could easily pass as a stranger.
“Did you ever meet him?”
Horace looked at me as if I had lost my senses. “Who? Leopold?”
“No, not Leopold,” I laughed. “Thornton. Your predecessor. The late Benjamin F. Thornton.”
Woolner’s eyes narrowed. A conspiratorial grin darted across his wide mouth. “Let me tell you a secret. Benjamin Thornton was a figment of the imagination. He never existed. The county understood that the DA was just a figurehead anyway. But the law said there had to be one. So they just made one up. Anyway, that’s my theory. Now, it’s true that about once a year a guy who said he was Benjamin Thornton would stick his head into my office and wish me a Happy New Year, but no one ever actually verified that he really was Benjamin Thornton, you understand.”
There was a lesson about the workings of the great American democracy in there somewhere, but it was more than I could follow. “You were going to tell me what Rifkin had done,” I reminded him.
“Thornton died. I was chief deputy, and so it was natural I’d become acting DA. The election was only a few months off. I was sure Gilliland-O’Rourke was going to run. And you know what that would have meant.”
I knew all right. Everyone knew. Gwendolyn Gilliland-O’Rourke, with her remorseless green eyes and curly red hair, had become a district court judge before she was thirty without ever having tried a case of her own. The court was only the first step. District attorney would have been the logical second step. It would have been the perfect place. She could have run for governor before she was forty.
“You would have beaten her,” I said, wondering whether he could have.
“Yeah, right,” he drawled. “The only child of the most powerful political family in the state married into one of the richest families in the state. They would have spent a fortune!”
“You would have had certain advantages.”
He smiled quickly. “You mean that people always like to vote for a middle-aged black guy who ain’t really too pretty, instead of for a young, good-looking white woman who went to Yale!”
He was laughing good-naturedly, enjoying a black dialect that had never been his own. He knew what I meant, and he always tried to avoid talking about it. Horace Woolner had won the Congressional Medal of Honor after he had his legs blown off above the knee rescuing three wounded soldiers in a rice paddy in Vietnam.
“Anyway,” he went on, “we’ll never know. Leopold stopped it. When he heard she was going to run, he told her ‘Horace has been here a long time. He deserves it.’”
That was not all he had told her. According to Horace, he told her that though he had never endorsed anyone for anything, he would break this self-imposed rule and make a public statement in behalf of Horace Woolner if she entered the race. It was enough.
“That’s what Leopold did for me. And it cost him.”
Horace placed his hand on my arm and shook his head in disbelief. “The Gilliland family.… Man, you know, they’re great haters. They couldn’t stand the fact that little Gwendolyn might have to wait a few more years to get to the governor’s office or wherever the hell she wants to go. So they got even. When Rogers retired before the end of his term, Leopold was supposed to be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Old man Gilliland made sure it didn’t happen.”
“Then you did Rifkin a favor,” I said. “If they had asked him to go on the court, he probably would have felt an obligation to accept. But he would much rather be where he is, a trial court judge. It’s the way he stays in contact with the world. I think maybe it’s the only way he stays in touch with the world.”
Horace looked at me the way he did whenever he was sizing someone up, measuring them against his own sense of the truth. He always seemed to know when someone was lying. “I’d like to think you were right.”
Suddenly, it occurred to me. “How do you know all this? Rifkin wouldn’t have said anything.”
“Nope. Never said a word about it. Gilliland-O’Rourke told me.”
Gwendolyn Gilliland-O’Rourke, of the thin privileged nose and long, slim fingers with manicured nails, had, with graceless imprudence, told Horace Woolner that he would become district attorney through her sufferance. Rifkin’s endorsement, she stated categorically, would not have changed the result, but it would have been divisive. She had learned the first lesson of politics in the cradle and confused it with the only principle worth carrying to the grave. Friends were to be rewarded, enemies punished. Rifkin would be punished.
“What did you say to that?” I asked as we moved across the porch.
“I told her to consider it a favor that I was only going to tell her to go to hell.”
As soon as we were inside someone came up and began to talk in great earnest about the next judicial election. It was the kind of thing Horace could listen to for hours. With a parting nod, I moved away. Under the overheated cacophony of dozens of conversations I wandered through the crowded house, stopping to exchange casual disconnected remarks with anyone who seemed to know me. I stayed longer with women, and when I talked with men I glanced around, waiting for someone I had never met who with a single look would tell me all I needed to know. I was always waiting for something to happen.
She stood on the far side of the library, her hand touching the edge of the fireplace, talking with flushed excitement, dwarfed by the immense stacks of books that towered to the ceiling. Her eyes drifted over, met mine, and then turned back. The dismissive smile of Gwendolyn Gilliland-O’Rourke, which seemed to threaten the intrepid with extinction, was like learning that the only thing you had ever wanted was the only thing you could never have. It was a smile that had been the beginning of more than one seduction. That much I was sure of.
