Chill of Night

19

St. Louis, 1988

Justice seldom slept. His life had become as fragmented as his thoughts. Even if he took a sleeping pill, within a few hours he was awake, his mind darting and exploring like that of an insect confined in a matchbox. During the day, exhausted, he found himself dozing off when he least expected. Not only was it embarrassing, but the increasing lack of control he had over his life was terrifying. Time lost all but its literal meaning. Day was like night to him. Night became his day.

He lay in the night beside April in the bedroom of their shabby south side apartment and wondered if they both might be better off dead. Overhead, a slow moving ceiling fan, almost invisible in shadow, ticked dreamily as it turned. His wife’s breathing was shallow and labored, and he couldn’t be sure what kind of drugs were in her body. She’d become devious in her addiction, lying to him skillfully, and artfully concealing her stash made up of old prescription vials and hoarded pills.

How did it come to this? How did it happen? Will…

Her breath caught like a blade in her throat and she woke suddenly, staring over at him as if surprised to find him beside her. Seeming, in fact, not to recognize him at first.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Why are you awake?” Her hair was wild, her tone accusatory.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“You were watching me.”

He propped himself up on an elbow, leaned over, and kissed her forehead. “Because I love you.” What you were, what you are…

“People don’t spy on people they love.”

“I wasn’t spying.” She’d lowered her head and he couldn’t see her face clearly enough in the dim room to know its expression, but he imagined her heavy-lidded eyes, the dull, barely comprehending look of the seriously medicated, the genuinely hopeless. It was like his heart being cleaved sometimes, seeing that expression. “I was watching you, that’s all. To make sure you were okay.”

“Neither one of us is okay and we both know it.”

He dropped his head back on his pillow, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling that was like a gray sky with no stars. The hate, the fear, the agony, combined to create a sour, distinctive odor that permeated the sheets and April’s sweat-damp nightgown. Sometimes he could smell the odor briefly when she was near him during the day. He had smelled something like it in hospital wards for the dying.

“We can’t go through the rest of our lives like this,” he said.

“I’ve come to the same conclusion.”

“We’ve got to change things.”

“Things have changed us.”

“I’m tired of these goddamned word games, April.”

She laughed low in her throat in a way that horrified him-almost a death rattle. “I’m just goddamned tired,” she said.

Justice lay still in the warm, humid bedroom that stank of mortality, hoping that if he said nothing she’d remain silent.

After a while her breathing evened out, then slipped into its familiar shallow rhythm. He was the only one awake and alone again in their dark world.

Their bright world had been shattered, but began its complete and irreparable disintegration when Elvis Davison, the rapist and killer of their son Will, walked smiling from the courtroom a free man, and soon dropped out of the news. The trial was over; he had his life back.

Justice and April would never have their lives back, because Davison had taken away their son.

“If someone killed Davison, we’d be the first people the police would suspect,” April said.

It startled him that she was awake, and it frightened him. Is she privy to my thoughts? My night thoughts?

“I don’t want to kill him,” he lied.

“You do. We both do.”

“It isn’t Davison, anyway. It’s the system.”

“System?”

“Judicial. The judges, the juries-especially the juries. They didn’t have to find him not guilty.”

“They were following the letter of the law. Or thought they were.”

“Juries are the law,” Justice said. “They can do what they want. They had to know Davison, what he…” His voice failed him. Neither of them could speak directly about what Davison had done to Will. “They knew he was guilty.”

“Reasonable doubt,” April said wearily.

“Do you have any?”

“No.”

“Then how could they?”

“I would like to kill each and every one of them,” April said. “Only it wouldn’t bring Will back, and it would put us at the mercy of juries.”

“I simply don’t understand their reasoning, their lack of understanding.”

“They were led. They got into that damned jury room and somebody took charge and led them to their verdict.”

“The jury foreman? You think he’s responsible?”

“He was part of the system we know was responsible.”

“The jury foreman…” Justice said. He remembered the man, a wiry redheaded CPA named Coburn. He’d always worn the same brown suit to court; probably had it cleaned and pressed on weekends. Maybe April had something. Maybe as jury foreperson, Coburn bore a disproportionate responsibility for the verdict. A disproportionate amount of guilt.

“If we killed Coburn,” April said, “It’d be like we killed Davison. The police, the system, would know who did it. Then they’d kill us. I wouldn’t care.”

“I would. I don’t want you to die. I don’t want to be alone.”

“Be honest.”

“All right, I don’t want to suffer alone. I don’t think I could bear it.”

“You’re a coward,” she said. “You’d be able to bear it if you weren’t a coward.”

“I’m hearing pills talking,” Justice said, turning on his side to face away from her. There was a burning in his belly that drew up his knees. “I hear somebody who wants to pick a fight to rid herself of her rage. Pills talking.”

“I’d like to pick a fight with the system that allows a monster to walk freely away from the pain he caused.”

“We can’t kill the monster without losing our own lives,” Justice told her.

“I don’t mean the monster Davison. He isn’t part of the system.”

“You mean Coburn? He’s not much of a monster.”

“Oh, he is. But we couldn’t touch him or anybody else involved with Davison’s trial without arousing suspicion. So I’m generalizing. Maybe I’ll blow up the goddamn courthouse.”

“Pills talking.”

He hoped.

“Pills’re going to sleep now,” April said, and fluffed her pillow.

She would be asleep soon. She could find refuge in sleep for hours at a time and escape her agony. Sometimes he envied her, but the cost of her ability to escape was her addiction to her medication, and if she didn’t get it under control, it would kill her.

Staring hard at the shadowed ceiling beyond the rotating fan blades, Justice knew April was right. If Davison were killed, they’d be prime suspects. But the truth was that Davison wasn’t the problem-it was the system. April was right about that. The system didn’t know how rotten it was, didn’t seem to understand that an act like Davison’s created poisonous ripples that seemed never to end and became all the more toxic as they spread. And if the perpetrator escaped justice, the ripples became wider and spread more destruction with each passing day, month, year.

The secondary victims, the survivors of the slain, simply died more slowly.

That was what April knew, and what Justice was learning.

“You awake?”

April, awake again herself.

“I’m asleep,” Justice said.

He wondered how many other people were out there suffering the same way he and April suffered. The obviously guilty too often went free, but the families of their victims would never again be free.

The wrongness of it overwhelmed Justice, and he lay beside April and wept.

April heard him but didn’t make a move to comfort him. He had to suffer so he would come to understand what she already knew.

It seemed he never would fully comprehend. There was only one way for April to make sure that he might.

One final duty.