Defense, p.26
Defense, page 26
I could think of nothing to say. Silently, I helped him clear the dishes and when we were done I started to go. He asked me to stay a little longer. There were a few more things he wanted to talk about. We went back to his study and sat down, surrounded by the thousands of books in which, Rifkin had once explained, the best minds that had ever lived had recorded the results of their arduous struggle to see things a little more clearly.
Without looking, Rifkin reached behind him and pulled a single, slim, green, leather-bound volume off a shelf. Unerringly, he opened it to the page he wanted and, barely glancing at it, read out loud: “‘For most people think they sufficiently understand a thing when they have ceased to wonder at it.’”
He closed the book and held it in his lap. “That is what Spinoza said. Spinoza was right. And not just about what we might call the large metaphysical questions. I mention this now because, given what you’ve told me, and given what I know—about Denise and about her husband—I believe you are wrong, and that your lovely friend, Alexandra, is right.”
I did not grasp his meaning immediately. “Wrong about what?” I asked.
He did not answer my question, not directly. “Spinoza was right. We stop wondering and we assume we know. You and I think we know about criminal behavior. It is what we both work with every day. And we know, don’t we, because our experience has taught us, that men are much more likely than women to commit acts of violence? That same experience has also taught us that when a woman does commit an act of violence it is almost always an act of rage or an act that, as in the case of a woman subjected to a long history of abuse, is a form of self-defense. A woman may be driven to kill; only a man plans it in advance. Now, there are exceptions; there are occasionally women who commit calculated murders, though even here there is usually—not always, but usually—a motive involving some emotional connection with the victim. You think Myrna Albright may be one of these exceptions. But now consider the logic that led you to this conclusion.”
I understood where he was going and I was not eager to follow. “You think the girl…?”
He did not hesitate. “Yes, I do. Alexandra’s instinct is sound. The girl was brutalized beyond belief. And we now know what we never knew before.”
“What do we know now?” I asked, with the strange sensation that I was being pulled down into the vortex of a whirlpool.
“That she is remarkably intelligent. What did Myrna Albright’s mother tell you? That she was gifted? Gifted and in need of therapy? Deeply in need, I should say. How else could she be after what was done to her, and after,” he added solemnly, “they both got away with what they did to her?”
Though Rifkin was twenty years older, I was the one who felt old and tired and lost beyond any possibility of redemption. I was going to lose this case, and I was going to lose it knowing that none of this would have happened if I had refused to represent Johnny Morel or if I had simply gone through the motions of putting on a defense and let justice take its course. Because Johnny Morel had won—because I had won—Leopold Rifkin was going to lose. I felt like someone who has just fallen off the top of a building: for a split second he believes—has to believe!—that he can go back in time, back to where he was before he slipped.
I tried not to believe it. I did not want to believe it. “She was just a child.”
Rifkin ignored me. “There’s something else,” he said. “How do you think Denise came to be here that night? Who could have made sure she would come on that particular night, the date of the verdict, the date Johnny Morel was killed? Would she have come here with Myrna Albright? She must have come with her daughter.”
I was still not convinced. “We have to find them both,” I said glumly, staring down at the floor.
I heard his voice like the distant sound of a dream half remembered. “You’ll never find the daughter. But she may find you.”
I looked up and found myself caught in the searching look of Rifkin’s penetrating eyes.
“She killed her stepfather, and she did it in a way that her mother would be blamed. Then, when her mother was out of prison, she killed her in a way that would place the blame on me, the judge who presided over the trial of Johnny Morel, the judge who, I have no doubt she knows, arranged to have you represent him. Can you imagine what she must think about me? Can you imagine the things she must have heard her mother say about me? She must believe that in my own way I’m every bit as bad as Johnny Morel.”
“No,” I objected, “that’s not possible.”
“Of course it is. After what her mother did to her, what else could she think about someone her mother had been with? Her mother had been with Johnny Morel and she had been with me. No, in her mind I’m afraid the only difference would be that Johnny Morel never pretended to be something he was not,” Rifkin said, staring off into the distance, a sad, rueful look in his eyes.
“She killed them both in a way that leaves her signature. She wants us to know it’s her, and she wants us to know we can do nothing about it,” he said, shifting his gaze back to me. “I believe she wants us to know what it was like for her to have been under the control of people who cared nothing about what happened to her. When you think about it, it is really quite an extraordinary piece of work. She is gifted all right, extremely gifted, I should say.”
Rifkin got up from behind his desk. “I’ll be right back,” he said as he passed by me on his way out of the room.
He returned a few minutes later holding two glasses, a wine glass with something as dark and turgid as blood and a short, square glass filled with ice and the light yellow transparency of good scotch.
“Port. I drink a glass of it now and then. It’s very good, but I thought you’d prefer what you usually drink.”
He sat down again behind the desk where I knew he must have spent the better part of every evening for the last thirty or more years. For an instant I felt a surge of something like a sense of loss, of an opportunity missed, of a life I could have had if only I had realized it before it was too late. Leopold Rifkin had sat here long into the night and sometimes, I was certain, through the night and into the morning, reading things I could only barely begin to understand, engaged in a conversation with the people who had written them. He had been completely serious when he announced that most of the people with whom he spent his most enjoyable hours had been dead for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Now, as I watched him slowly sip port, I knew he lived in a world I could enter only as a stranger, a guest who was made to feel welcome, but who would always have to leave.
“What I am about to say,” he began in an even, methodic voice, “is something which, I’m sure you’ll agree, should never be spoken about outside this room.”
Caught off guard, I said, “I’d never divulge anything you…”
“Yes, I know that. What I want to say is this. I believe the girl must have been the one who did these things. I may of course be wrong about this. You and I have both seen enough of criminal law to know that the logical explanation is more often than anyone would believe not the true explanation. But if I’m not wrong—if the girl killed Johnny Morel and then killed her own mother—then I must tell you I do not believe she did anything that is morally wrong.”
He saw the look in my eyes. “Morally wrong,” he continued. “Not legally wrong. Of course she broke the law. And she has none of the excuses the law allows. But she was right and the law is wrong. Who knows better than the girl what happened? Who knows better than she that Johnny Morel raped her, and that her own mother helped him, and helped others as well, to do unspeakable things to her? Who has more right to punish those who tortured her?”
He held up his hand as if to anticipate an objection. “The law says no one can take the law into his own hands. Why does the law say that? Because it is convenient. If we let people take the law into their own hands we would have to deal with problems one at a time and on their own merits, instead of imposing some uniform rule. It is easier to have a rule—not better, not more just—easier.”
“But,” I objected, “if everyone could take the law into his own hands, you’d have people killing one another for minor transgressions.”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, of course not. The punishment has to fit the crime. If you kill someone it has to be because they killed someone. And you don’t allow just anyone to go around doing this. You limit it to those who have suffered the most because of what the killer did, the close friends, the family of the person killed.”
“That would start an endless cycle of vengeance and retribution, would it not?”
He brushed this aside. “No. Why would it? Ask yourself this: Can you think of anyone who might have given so much as a single thought to avenging the death of Johnny Morel? I have to make a confession. This thought is scarcely original with me. The Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws recommends a system of punishments that includes the right of the victim’s closest relatives to take the life of the murderer. Doesn’t that make infinitely better sense than reforms designed to—what do they call it?—help the victim’s family get ‘closure’ by allowing them to make statements at sentencing?”
“What if the one they killed didn’t do it?”
Rifkin shrugged his shoulders. “Then it’s murder. But, you know, I think that would not happen very often. You would find that those who were entitled to ‘take the law into their own hands’ would do so only in the clearest case, only when there was no doubt about who did it, and, moreover, only when the crime was particularly vicious. In the case of a child, for example. In a case just like this one. And remember, Joseph, what we have here is not even the family of the victim,” he said, raising his wispy eyebrows as high as they would go. “It is the victim herself. Now, can you really look me in the eye and tell me that if she killed them she did something that was, not legally, but morally wrong?”
“I fail to see how blaming you for the murder of Denise Morel could be morally right.”
He looked at me and nodded slowly. He did not say another word. I finished my scotch and got up to go.
“I almost forgot,” he remarked as he walked me to the door. “I’m supposed to be in your office Tuesday morning at ten. I think you wanted to go over my testimony.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” I said half apologetically, “but it’s something we have to do.”
“No, of course not. I understand. But I wonder if we could schedule it a little later in the day. I have a doctor’s appointment I had forgotten about.”
I stopped and turned toward him. “Are you all right?”
Leopold patted my arm. “Sound as a dollar,” he replied.
It had been years since I had heard that expression. When I was a boy, waiting for my father after school while he finished with his last patients, I would see him walk out of the examining room, his stethoscope dangling around his neck, pat a child on the head and smile at the mother. “Sound as a dollar,” he would say, and the child’s mother would smile back.
I walked out the door and then stopped again. “You’re sure?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. The doctor likes to check my blood pressure. He’s nearly as old as I am. As long as he can find my pulse he knows he’s still alive.”
It was nearly midnight when I returned home. All the lights were out and Alexandra’s car was gone. I had told her I might not be back before Sunday night or even Monday, but she had not said anything about leaving. I remembered distinctly that she told me that if I had to stay over to call her, no matter how late. Unlocking the door, I switched on the kitchen light, dropped my overnight bag on the linoleum floor, and hurried upstairs.
The bed was neatly made. Propped against the lamp on the night-stand was an envelope with my first name written across the front. A strange, sickening sense of panic surged through me. I picked up the envelope, stared at it, and sat down on the edge of the bed. My heart was beating fast, my forehead felt wet and clammy. I kept turning it around in my fingers, afraid of what it might mean, and certain I knew exactly what it said.
Carefully placing it back against the lamp, I went downstairs, threw my coat on the kitchen table, and poured myself a large scotch. In the black silence of the night, I sank against the cushions on the living room sofa and conjured each of the infinite explanations of her absence. They were the countless variations on a single, irrevocable theme. It was the central thread of my existence. I had been spending every day and half of every night getting ready for trial. It did not matter that, as I had told Alexandra time and time again, the trial of Leopold Rifkin was the most important trial of my life. Every trial, she had been quick to remind me, had always been the most important trial of my life. Alexandra was the only woman I had ever really loved, and yet the only time I would give her was whatever time I could spare from my work. I should have known that she would never settle for second in anything.
Slowly sipping the scotch, I peered into the darkness. Random recollections of things that did not matter and that I could not change crowded my mind. I held the glass in front of my eyes and studied the ice as if it held a secret worth knowing. It had been dark like this the night Alexandra came. I could see her, standing at the door, the rain beating down on her smooth, upturned face, a flash of distant lightning illuminating her eyes.
A shaft of light swept through the room, and then I heard the low hum of a car coming up the driveway. Alexandra was home, and all the wretched feelings of abandonment and loneliness fell away like leaves blown by an autumn wind. Sitting up at the end of the sofa, I listened as she shut the car door and walked to the back door. When she turned on the kitchen light, her shadow slid across the dining room floor. As quietly as I could, I went toward the kitchen, stopping just inside the doorway from the dining room. Alexandra was emptying the contents of a leather tote bag onto the countertop next to the sink. She unscrewed the cap from a metal thermos and started to run the water.
When she finished rinsing it out, she reached for the faucet. Her eyes caught my reflection in the window above the sink. Her mouth dropped open, her eyes grew wide, and she whirled around suddenly, as if she had seen the face of a stranger come to harm her.
“You scared me!” she laughed, flushed with excitement. She threw her arm around my neck and tugged at the hair on the back of my head. “You’re still dressed.”
For a moment I held her tight and did not say anything. “I got home about half an hour ago,” I said as I let go. “And where have you been?”
She seemed perplexed. “Didn’t you see the note? I put it right next to the lamp. Upstairs.”
“Oh.” I nodded, as if that explained everything.
Noticing the empty glass in my hand, she remarked: “So you made yourself a drink as soon as you came in and waited for me.”
“Something like that,” I admitted.
“Well, anyway,” she said, “I left you a note. I needed to get out of the house so I decided to drive over to the coast. I would have been back earlier, but it was hard to leave,” she said gently, looking at me with eyes that seemed vulnerable. “I wish you had been with me. I stood on the beach watching the sun dissolve into the sea. It was the kind of sunset that makes you want to live forever! The kind that makes you feel that while you see it you are living forever! Do you know that feeling?” she asked.
Taking me by the hand she led me to the kitchen table. She picked up my coat and set it on a chair. “What happened in Vancouver? I didn’t really think you’d be back before tomorrow.”
I told her about everything, including my conversation with Rifkin. She was fascinated. “He really said that?” she asked, staring at me, not quite willing to believe it. “He really said that if the girl did it, she was morally right? What about you? Do you think she was right?”
“Leopold thinks she did it,” I replied. “I’m still not convinced. But if she did, then no, I don’t think that she was right, morally or any other way.”
Alexandra was sitting sideways to the table, one leg crossed over the other. She was wearing jeans, a pink polo shirt, and she had a dark blue sweatshirt thrown over her shoulders. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked like a college girl with nothing more serious to worry about than the next exam.
“Why do you refuse to believe she did it? Because you think that if she did, you’re somehow responsible because you defended her stepfather?”
“That’s a little glib, isn’t it?” I replied sharply. “Sorry,” I added immediately, embarrassed by my reaction. “Look, I know what you said before, but do you really believe she could have?”
“Yes, of course I do,” she responded without hesitation.
“But why?”
“Because I know how I would feel. Anger can make you desperate.”
“But if it had happened to you,” I insisted, “you wouldn’t have done what you think she did. You wouldn’t have killed them.”
“How do you know? How can you be sure of that?”
“Because I know you.” Before she could say another word, I took her hand and led her out of the kitchen and upstairs to the bedroom. Like a rumor of infidelity, the unread note that had made me doubt everything, still leaned against the lamp.
xxii
The search for Myrna Albright went nowhere. If she had ever come back to Oregon after her mother asked her to leave home, she left no trace. She might have died of an overdose in an alleyway in any city in North America, or she might be living within a few blocks of the courthouse, reading the newspaper stories about the murder she committed.
Emma Gibbon did learn a little more about Michelle. Under her adopted name she had, as Myrna Albright’s mother told me, enrolled at McGill. Four years later Michelle Albright had graduated with honors. The alumni office had nothing more current than the Montreal address where she had lived during her last year in school.
Sitting in a chair on the other side of my desk, Emma looked at me, disappointment written all over her face. “I’m sorry, Joseph,” she said dolefully. “I’ll keep trying.”
