Defense, p.20
Defense, page 20
“My wife, Estelle, died many years ago. During the first few months after her death I thought frequently about taking my own life. We had loved each other deeply when we first married. We lost our only child when he was only four years old. He drowned. Neither of us could have survived that alone. I was dependent on her in ways I was not even aware of until after she was gone.
“She lived a perfectly blameless life, and she suffered more than anyone ever should. Her illness was long and painful, but she never complained. She had lost a child, and she died an agonizing death. But, still, Estelle always thought she had been blessed. We had a child, she used to console me, a child we loved and who loved us. We loved each other, always and completely, and we have nothing to feel bitter about, she told me just before she died. She was a wonderful person, Joseph, the most wonderful person I ever knew.
“Gradually, I adjusted to living alone. All the emotions, everything connected with what I had lost were put aside, kept safe in a place which, while never forgotten, was seldom visited. After a fashion, I became almost content. My work occupied my days, and in the solitude of the evenings I resumed the habits of a scholar. I began to study the classics again, and I managed to remember enough of my Greek to begin the sometimes arduous but always interesting process of learning more. I lived like this for years. Then something happened.
“A young woman appeared in my court on a charge of drug possession. I was about to appoint someone to represent her, when she began to cry. It was at the very end of the docket. There was no one left in the courtroom. She seemed so vulnerable, so lost, so entirely alone. I did something I had never done before. I had the bailiff bring her around to my office, and I sat with her for over an hour, listening to her story.
“It was a typical story, a story we’ve both heard more times than we can remember. Her parents were divorced. Her mother lived with various men through her childhood. Before she was twelve she was sexually molested by one of her mother’s boyfriends; before she was thirteen she ran away and never went back. She survived, living on the streets, selling herself and anything else that would bring a price. She began using drugs and was an addict almost as soon as she started. No one cared what she did or what became of her. She was just another one of the countless children we lose through our own negligence and indifference.
“No one had ever done anything to help her. I decided I would try. I took her in. She came to live with me, or more precisely, she came to work for me. That was the bargain we made. In return for board and room and a little spending money she agreed to become my housekeeper. She would clean and cook and do the shopping. There were other conditions. She agreed to enroll in adult education classes and get her high school equivalency. She agreed not to use narcotics or to associate with anyone who did. Though nothing was ever done to formalize it, we essentially agreed that she would become my ward. She would live in my home, and I would help her every way I could.
“She did everything she was supposed to do. She kept the house immaculate and learned to cook with admirable skill. She began to take a discernible pride in herself. She did well in the classes she began. She listened attentively when I described books I thought she should read. She became healthy and her appearance began to improve. She became a very pretty young woman.
“I grew fond of her and even began to think of her as the daughter I never had. At dinner she listened to me recount the events of the day, and after she finished the dishes, she would sometimes join me in my study where she would read something or listen to classical music while I worked. She was never bored, or if she was, she never complained. I had been alone for nearly seven years and had grown used to my solitude. But when she entered my life, Joseph, I was suddenly important again, important to someone real, someone alive.
“Sunday was her day off. She would be gone all day, and would usually come back by six or seven in the evening. Then, one Sunday, she was late. Finally, I went to bed, and then the next thing I knew it was the middle of the night and she was standing over me, crying. I reached up and pulled her down next to me. I held her in my arms and tried to give her what comfort I could. In short, breathless bursts she told me just enough to make me understand.
“She had a child, five years old. She and the child’s father had never married. The girl lived with him because she had no way to take care of her. Every Sunday afternoon she went to visit the child. This time, when she brought her back, the father was upset because she was a little late. He called her names, vicious names, and then he began to hit her in front of the child. She managed to pull free and run away and she wandered around for hours, not knowing what she should do.
“I told her the child could come to live with her, in my house. She thanked me. And then she kissed me.
“The next morning at breakfast, I started to explain what we would have to do to get custody of her daughter. We could worry about her daughter later; she told me we’d better find out how we did together first. Before I left that morning, she asked me if I could let her have some money. She needed some new clothes.
“Her appetite for money was insatiable. She always needed something, and it was always something I had no right to refuse, because, you see, I had so much and she had so little. No matter what I gave her, it was never enough.
“Everything changed. She was no longer my companion, she was now my mistress, and she became demanding. Some days she would disappear and not return for several nights. She refused to tell me where she had been or what she had been doing. Her irritability became chronic. She could not sit still, and she could not keep quiet. She started to lose her temper. Then she would apologize and become contrite, always promising never to do it again.
“Then things I had owned for years began to vanish. At first, I was not sure. My gold cuff links were gone, but I thought I might have mislaid them. Then other things, too many things to blame on my own absent-mindedness. Finally, the watch my wife had given me on our twenty-fifth anniversary disappeared. The girl I had befriended, the girl I had saved from the streets, was a thief.
“She laughed at me when I accused her. She did not even bother to deny it. She just laughed and dared me to do something about it. What was I going to do? Call the police? She knew I would never do anything about it. She left my house that day, and I did not see her again for a long time.”
As he talked, I remembered Johnny Morel and the trial, but most of all I remembered her, the mother who sold herself for drugs and anything else she needed. She had told Leopold one story and me another. She had invented herself so many times that by the time she got to the end of one version of her biography she must already have been thinking about how to begin the next one. But though the details varied, the pattern never changed. With me, she had been the loving mother who forgave her daughter for lying about her husband. With Myrna Albright, she had been the kind, understanding friend. With Leopold Rifkin, she had been the helpless young victim of an unforgivable neglect. With her own daughter, she had been … Well, it was too awful even to think about. With all of us, and with God knows how many others, she betrayed trust and even love, and did it with such exquisite cruelty she could have given lessons to the Marquis de Sade.
I knew the rest. “She showed up again after her husband was accused of raping her daughter.”
He looked at me, and nodded glumly. “I hope you can forgive me. You’re right, of course. She came to me, right here, the same way she came last night. She just knocked on the door. I did not recognize her at first. It had been more than seven years. She began by apologizing for not coming before. She had wanted to tell me how sorry she was for what had happened. She explained that she had gotten back on drugs, and she was very ashamed of what the drugs had made her do.”
Rifkin paused. He was thinking about Denise and what might have been, years earlier, when she lived with him, when she was the great, unexpected joy in his life.
“It was only a matter of time,” I said. “She would have gone back to that stuff,” I went on. “It’s possible she was never really off it.”
“Yes, I know. You’re right,” he sighed. “Well, anyway, it’s much too late now. It was too late then, when she came that night. She told me she had gotten her daughter back and was married. And then she told me what had happened to her husband.”
Leopold shook his head. “She had been in court that afternoon, my courtroom, when her husband was arraigned on the rape charge. She was in my courtroom, and I had not even noticed her.” It seemed to amaze him, that she had been right there, in the same room where he spent most of his waking hours, and he would never have known it had she not told him.
“She insisted he was innocent. She told me that her daughter had been molested a few years before, and that she hated her stepfather.”
The words came back like the lyrics of a song you never liked and could never quite forget. “She hated him because he disciplined her and made her go to school,” I said, as I pushed the plate away. I had been too engrossed in what Leopold had been saying to even think about eating.
“Yes, exactly,” he said, nodding his small head thoughtfully, as he waved his finger back and forth. “She knew her daughter. She knew nothing had happened. But her husband had a record, and she was afraid he’d be convicted for something he didn’t do. That day, when she came to court and discovered the case had been assigned to me, she knew he would be all right. She said she was certain I would never let them convict an innocent man. She said she knew she could trust me because she knew I trusted her.”
“She knew you trusted her?”
“Yes,” he replied, narrowing his eyes. “She knew I trusted her because, she explained, she had never told anyone about us. You see, it was all quite plain. The threat was unspoken but real. If I didn’t help her husband, then…”
“But it would have been her word against yours!” I regretted the words before I finished saying them. “No, of course not. You wouldn’t have lied about it, would you?”
“I didn’t want to find out. She wanted me to tell her that I would take care of her problem. I asked her if she had ever heard of Joseph Antonelli. It was curious, really. She had come to blackmail me into fixing her husband’s case. But, you know, Joseph, when I told her I thought you might be willing to represent her husband without a fee, she forgot all about fixing anything. Perhaps she just assumed that with you as his attorney the verdict was a foregone conclusion, but I think it was something else. I think the chance of being associated with someone like you—someone famous—was more important to her than whether or not her husband was going to be acquitted. It’s odd, isn’t it, the effect fame has on people?”
There was one more thing to tell, and I was pretty certain I knew what it was. “She came to you again, when she was charged with murder.”
“Yes. And you can guess what she wanted. I refused. Categorically. She could say whatever she wanted. It did not matter. I had asked you once, and I could justify that. There is nothing wrong with the act, even if there is something questionable about the motivation, of asking the best lawyer you know to defend someone who cannot afford to hire the best. But I would not ask again. Instead, I told her I would pay for any lawyer she could get.”
“You did what!?”
“I paid for her defense.”
“But, good God, why? She couldn’t have said anything about you. She was accused of murder. No one would have believed her!”
“But it would have been true, what she said about me, wouldn’t it? And, besides, it was partly my fault. I had taken her in, and I had failed her in some way.”
“No, that’s crazy! You did everything—more than everything. No one would have done what you did!”
Rifkin wagged his finger. “No, I failed. But I did something worse. I yielded to her threats. I persuaded you to defend her husband, a rapist of children. No one else could have done what you did. No one else could have gotten him off. And if he had been in prison, Joseph, where he belonged, there would have been no murder, and she would never have needed a lawyer.”
I started to protest, to argue with him. I wanted to make him understand that he had done nothing wrong, that neither one of us had done anything wrong.
“Yes, yes, I know—none of this is anyone’s fault. But, Joseph, don’t you see the long chain of consequences I set in motion years ago when I took her in? There are consequences, Joseph, for everything we do. Everything! And now, after all this time, there is one more murder, and neither one of us can know even now if the chain has reached its end.”
xvii
Horace Woolner sank into the heavily upholstered chair that had moved with him from the office of the district attorney to the chambers of a circuit court judge. He stared at me, eyes wide open, his mouth twisted downward, scowling defiance.
“I never even knew he had a child. He never spoke about it, not once in all the years I’ve known him, not one word. How awful that must be, to lose your only child.”
He turned away and fell into a dark, brooding silence. His eyes drifted down to his shiny black shoes, both meticulously laced around his wooden feet. As if suddenly remembering he was not alone, he glanced up and shook his head. “Losing a child is worse, a lot worse.”
Bracing himself with both hands on the arms of the chair, Horace pulled himself up and, resting his elbows on the desk, looked right at me. “What else did he say? Why did she go there last night?”
I started to answer, but he cut me off. “No, what I mean is, why last night? Why not some other night? I found out a few things. I told you I’d make a few calls. Denise Morel was released nearly three months ago, after she served four and a half years of her twenty-year sentence.”
His head began to bob from side to side, the way it did whenever he started to describe one of the more astonishing insanities of the criminal justice system.
“Four and a half years on a twenty-year sentence for murder in the second degree. Half the sentence is normal, a third is almost unheard of. She gets out in less than a quarter. How do you think she managed that?”
I could not guess, but there was no surprise in what he told me.
“She was the model prisoner. She took every kind of class, every kind of therapy they offered. She was in Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous. If there was a meeting, she was there. She finished her high school equivalency and started college classes. She worked at any job she could get. And she took complete responsibility for everything that had happened. She told her counselor that Morel had been beating her for years, but she could have walked away, and she should have. Instead, she killed him. She wasn’t going to deny it, and she wasn’t going to try to ‘minimize’ it. Interesting, how quickly they pick up on what works.
“She told him about her daughter. She admitted she knew what Morel had been doing to her, and she admitted she had lied in court about it. She said she did it because she was an addict, but she blamed herself for her addiction, and blamed herself even more for the things she did—the things she let him do—while she was using.”
The large, graying head of Horace Woolner stopped moving. “She was the perfect prisoner,” he grunted, “the perfect candidate for rehabilitation. She did all the right things, said all the right words. ‘She refused to minimize her responsibility.’ That is a direct quote from the psychologist’s last report on her, the one in which he recommends early release.”
Horace bent forward. “Now, as it turns out, the perfect prisoner was also giving the good Dr. Harrison Burt, the esteemed prison psychologist, a little additional incentive to consider her case favorably.”
Why would she have changed what had worked so well before? It was more than the only thing she knew; it was, really, the only thing she was. “How did they find out?” I asked.
“Denise couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She told a couple of her girlfriends what she and Burt were doing. After she got out, one of them decided she’d try the same thing. Burt turned her down, and when he did, she threatened to tell what he had been doing with Denise.”
Horace raised his eyebrows. “You have to give Burt credit. He did the right thing. He went right to the warden and told her everything that had happened with Denise. He said none of it had influenced his professional judgment.”
He paused and, staring down at the desk, slowly shook his head. “There’s more,” he said, raising his eyes just far enough to see me. “The poor bastard was in love with her. He’s forty-five years old, divorced and lives alone. He thought they were going to get married. She moved in the day she was released. A week later, she borrowed his car. Said she had to find someone. He never saw her again.”
“Or the car, either, I’ll bet.”
“Right. Well,” he went on, “it’s all over now. She was a real piece of work.”
“What happened to Burt?” I asked, interested in the degree to which she had managed to destroy yet another life.
“It’s been kept quiet. He resigned from his position with the prison. He still has his license. He can still work in private practice. He told the warden—well, you can guess what he told the warden.”
“That he was going to get counseling?”
“Yeah, you know, it’s the trap of their profession. No problem that can’t be solved by talking about it.”
With one hand on the desk and the other on the arm of the chair, Horace raised himself up. With the slow, rolling motion of his hips that pulled first one lifeless leg forward and then the other, he walked to the window. He leaned his shoulder against the casement and shoved his hands deep down into his pockets.
“Tell me. What did Leopold say? About why she came there last night?” His eyes were fixed on something outside and far away.
“He said he didn’t recognize her at first. When she told him who she was, he asked what she wanted. He wasn’t going to invite her in, but she said she had to talk to him about her daughter. It was only an excuse, at least that’s what he thought then. Now, he’s not so sure.”
