The Judgment

Fifteen

Howard Flynn might be early, but he was never on time. I knew that as well as I knew anything, but when he asked me to meet him outside my building at two-fifteen it never occurred to me that I could be late. It was now two-thirty and there was still no sign of him.

Loosening my tie, I unbuttoned my shirt collar while I searched up and down the sidewalk. The sky was a harsh white glare and the air had the smell of something burning. It was the first hot day of the year, the day that made you believe that this might be the year when you did not have to endure yet another month of rain before the clear dry days of summer came to stay. I kept watching the sidewalk, hoping by an act of will to make Flynn appear. I concentrated so hard I could almost see him, his red face dripping with sweat as he lumbered up the street.

“Over here,” someone yelled.

Absently, I turned around. Flynn was in his car, stopped in the middle of traffic, waving at me while the drivers behind him leaned on their horns.

“You were supposed to meet me in front,” I complained after I tumbled in.

“This is the front,” he muttered between his teeth as he bolted through a red light. He swerved just in time to miss a car that had started through the intersection when the light changed.

“Learn to drive!” he shouted when the driver of the car shook his fist.

“Your window is up,” I reminded him, rolling my eyes. “He can’t hear you. You’re wasting your breath.”

With both hands on top of the wheel and his eyes focused straight ahead, Flynn slowed down, content to follow the traffic ahead of him. A jaded smile flickered at the edges of his mouth.

“It doesn’t matter he can’t hear me. That’s not the point.”

I knew that look and the twisted logic that usually accompanied it. “Well, then, what is the point?”

“The point is, I can hear me. And, frankly, I thought I sounded pretty good. What did you think?” he asked with a sideways glance.

“I could have given him the finger, but, hell, everybody does that these days. I could have screamed an obscenity, but everybody does that, too. Besides, those things just show anger. I was trying to be helpful,” he explained. “I said, ‘Learn to drive.’ It was my civic duty and I did it,” he said with mocking pride. “And just what the hell have you done for your country lately, counselor?” he asked with a ruddy grin.

Ignoring him, I stared out the window at the passing buildings.

“Where we going anyway?”

“There’s someone I want you to meet. He was one of the lead investigators in the Jeffries murder. He interviewed the guy who did it. He heard his confession.”

Flynn had told me when he called that there was someone who knew something about the murder of Calvin Jeffries that I ought to hear. He had not told me it was a cop.

“But I know about the confession,” I said, trying not to sound as agitated as I felt. “The only thing I don’t know is whether the confession was true, and I won’t know that until I know the results of the DNA test.”

“I forgot to tell you. The blood on the knife belonged to Jeffries.”

“The DNA results prove it? Then that’s it. You were right.

Whoever killed Griswald was a copycat.”

“That’s why I thought you might want to talk to this fellow.

It may not be that simple after all.”

“It wasn’t a copycat killing?”

His eyes on the road, Flynn shook his head. “No. I still think that’s what happened. It’s the Jeffries murder that isn’t so simple.”

We had left the city and were going south on the freeway.

“Why aren’t we meeting him at the police station?”

He let go of the wheel with his right hand and rubbed his shoulder while he moved his head from side to side, stretching out the muscles in his neck. “He didn’t want to have to explain what he was doing having a private conversation with a defense attorney.”

I was pretty certain I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

“How do you happen to know him?”

Flynn shrugged. “Meetings.”

That was how Flynn had met most of the people he knew, the meetings he attended sometimes seven nights a week where alcoholics took turns telling the stories of their addiction. It was surprising how many lawyers, judges, and cops went to those meetings. Or perhaps it was not surprising at all. Most of the people I met, after you got to know them, had problems of their own, whether it was alcohol or drugs, errant children or unfaithful wives. Madness comes in all shapes and sizes.

A few minutes later we were off the freeway, winding along a narrow blacktop road. Large brightly painted wooden signs propped up from behind by long two-by-fours announced one new development after another. Two-story houses in various stages of construction with wood shake roofs and massive stone fronts stood so close together that each seemed to trespass on the other. They were everywhere, on both sides of the road and as far ahead as the eye could see, new houses for new families, with enough bedrooms for each of the children and enough garage space for all of the cars. There was something vaguely depressing about the sameness of it all, which only deepened my growing sense of annoyance.

“This isn’t something you could have told me?” I asked as the car hit another teeth-rattling bump.

“What are you complaining about? Don’t you think it’s a nice day for a ride in the country?”

“I’m not involved in the Jeffries case.” I winced as soon as I said it. I was not involved, but neither was he, and I was the one who had asked him to find out what he could. Flynn paid no attention to what I had said, and I felt even worse. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

We passed the last development with its dozen red banners flying from a dozen white-painted poles, and followed the road as it curved under the branches of an oak tree and then out into an open field. A half mile farther on, Flynn turned into a dirt driveway that ran down to a small ranch-style house near a river at the back of a fenced five acres.

At the end of the driveway, opposite the house, inside a small corral next to a two-stall barn, someone was rubbing down a spirited chestnut-colored horse. In his early forties, with short black hair parted on the side, the man was dressed in dark jeans and boots. He was not very tall, but he was muscular across his shoulders and upper arms. When he heard the car, he patted the nose of the horse and then, stepping back, slapped his open hand on its flank. The horse snorted, tossed its head, and bounded away, dust flying up behind its hooves. Shutting the gate to the corral behind him, Flynn’s friend waited while we got out of the car.

I recognized him right away. When Flynn started to introduce us, I stopped him. “Detective Stewart and I are old friends.”

“But it’s probably the first time we’ve ever shaken hands,” he remarked pleasantly. He moved slowly and spoke quietly and had about him a certain understated authority that made you think he was someone you could trust.

“We’ve been in a few trials together,” I explained to Flynn.

“A few I’d rather not remember,” Stewart remarked, chuckling to himself. “Let’s get something to drink,” he said as he slapped me on the shoulder.

We sat at a wooden picnic table in front of the house, drinking lemonade. A breeze stirred the branches of the oak tree overhead, and shadows ran back and forth across our hands as we talked about the way things had changed and tried to remember the first trial in which he had been a witness for the prosecution and I had been the attorney for the defense. After a few minutes there was a long silence. I looked across the table at Stewart and waited.

“Howard tells me you’re interested in the Jeffries case.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure why,” I admitted.

Stewart laughed. “If he’d thrown me in jail for contempt, I’d be interested in his murder.”

Was there anyone who did not know what Jeffries had done to me? Stewart read my eyes. “Everyone thought Jeffries was a hero when he did that.”

“I didn’t.”

“Every cop,” he explained, though he knew he did not have to. I understood the way cops-most cops-thought about defense lawyers. “Every cop who had not spent much time in his courtroom,” he added. He looked at me with a knowing smile and then shook his head. “I used to feel sorry for the lawyers. He had to have been the meanest man alive. That’s what makes his murder so difficult to understand.”

“I should have thought it was the other way around,” I said without thinking. He was not speaking about the fact Jeffries had been killed but, as I now realized, something else altogether.

“With all the people who hated him and no doubt wished him dead, it seems a little strange that the one who killed him had no reason to hate him at all.” He pondered the meaning of what he had just said and then added, “At least no reason we could find.”

“Are you saying it was random after all, a robbery gone bad?”

He hesitated and then shook his head. “No, it wasn’t random.

He meant to kill Jeffries.” Again he hesitated. “He meant to kill someone, anyway. He was waiting in the parking garage, hiding behind Jeffries’s car.”

We were sitting in the mid-afternoon sun, the scent of hay and horses in the air, swatting away an occasional fat fly, but our conversation still fell back into the old habits of lawyers and witnesses: I broke everything he said into new questions I wanted to ask. “He was hiding behind Jeffries’s car. Did he know it was Jeffries’s car?”

“I don’t know. It might have been a coincidence. At that hour there were only a few other cars there. He might have been hiding there, waiting for Jeffries; or he might have been hiding there, waiting for the first person to show up.”

“That was the section though where only court staff were allowed to park, right?”

Stewart nodded. “He wanted to kill someone connected with the court, and from a couple things he said, I’m pretty sure he wanted to kill a judge. But whether he intended to kill Jeffries in particular…” His voice trailed off, and he gazed across at the small corral where his horse was munching on a bucket of oats.

“He had no reason to kill Jeffries,” he said presently.

“Jeffries had never sent him to prison?” I asked, repeating the assumption that had seemed to explain everything.

“No, and if he was ever inside Jeffries’s courtroom it was not as a defendant. That much we know for sure.”

“But he confessed. He didn’t say whether he intended to kill him?”

“He said he meant to kill who he killed.” Stewart watched me, waiting to see if I took it as literally as he meant it. “That’s what he said, almost verbatim. ‘I meant to kill who I killed.’ He must have said it a half dozen times before I started to wonder if he had any idea who the victim was.” With his index finger, Stewart drew a face in the condensation that had formed on the glass pitcher filled with lemonade and ice. “I don’t think he did it,”

Stewart said, as he carefully retraced the circle he had drawn.

“But you just said he intended to kill someone, whether it was Jeffries or not.”

His finger stopped moving and he looked up. “No, I think he did it, all right.”

“You think he did it, but you don’t think he did it?”

He followed his finger as it began to move again, broadening the outline of the face he had drawn until it disappeared. “That’s exactly right,” he said, as he picked up the pitcher and refilled our glasses. “He did it, but he didn’t do it.” When he finished pouring, he put the pitcher to the side, out of reach. “Everything fits. There’s no question that Whittaker killed Judge Jeffries. None at all. We found him and he confessed. He described every detail of what he had done: where he was; how he held the knife; how he waited until Jeffries opened the door to his car; how he slipped up behind him and grabbed him around the throat while he plunged the knife into his gut. The way he described it was like watching a movie: You could see everything, just the way it happened.”

Stewart raised his eyebrows. “It was like he was watching, too; watching himself, observing everything, making sure he did not miss any part of it. He talked about the way the knife went into Jeffries’s stomach, straight to the hilt, as if he had been standing in front, watching it happen, instead of holding on to Jeffries from behind. He told us details only the killer could have known.

It was not just what he said, either: He had the knife. He did not even try to hide it. Hide it! He had not even tried to wipe it clean! He was found living under the Morrison Street Bridge, one of the homeless. He was surrounded. There was no way for him to get away. But he acted like he was expecting us. There were a dozen cops, weapons drawn, every one of them trained on him, or rather trained on a group of four or five homeless men sitting around a small fire they had built to keep warm. Any one of them could have matched the description we had been given by an anonymous informant. You know what he did-as soon as his name was called out? He stood up, raised his arms, and…

smiled. Smiled! Can you believe it? It was as if he had been waiting for someone to find him-not like a fugitive, but like somebody who got lost in the woods waiting for a rescue party. As soon as they had the handcuffs on him, he told them where to find the knife. They had not asked him anything. He just nodded his head toward a greasy bedroll a few feet away. ‘The knife is in there.’ Just like that. It’s the only piece of evidence that can link him to the crime and he gives it up without being asked.”

Flynn, who since we sat down had listened in silence, had a question. “If he was that eager to be helpful, why didn’t he just turn himself in?”

“I don’t know, Howard. Nothing about him made much sense.

Maybe it was part of the game.”

“The game?” I asked.

He acknowledged the question with a nod as a way of post-poning an answer. Once he started following a train of thought he did not want to lose it. Flynn had the same habit, born, I suppose, out of the fear that unless they concentrated on one thing at a time they might forget something important, the way they had forgotten things when all they thought about was the next drink and the one after that.

“Everything fit. He had the knife-his fingerprints were the only ones on it. The blood-and we know it for certain now-

belonged to Jeffries. And he described things about the crime no one else could have known.”

“And then he killed himself,” I interjected.

Stewart gave me a strange look. “If you believe what the junkie in the cell across from him said.”

“What are you suggesting? That he didn’t kill himself? That someone else…?”

He was careful. “I’m not suggesting anything. But all we know for sure is that he was found in his cell with the top of his skull caved in, and the only eyewitness is a barely literate drug addict who couldn’t remember the last time he told the truth about anything.”

“Are you saying you think the police, or someone-?”

He held up both hands and turned his face to the side. “I’m not saying anything, but it’s a real strange way to kill yourself.”

He drew his jaw back and made a clicking noise as he tapped his teeth together. “Why I should find anything about this case stranger than anything else is a kind of mystery in itself,” he said, thinking out loud. He leaned forward, resting his folded arms on the table. “I’ve interviewed thousands of suspects, listened to hundreds of confessions, but this was different. There was no remorse.

I don’t mean just about what he had done, killed another human being. There was no remorse, no regret, about anything: not about getting caught, not about being locked up, not about what he had to know was going to happen to him. I’ve sometimes wondered whether-if he really did kill himself-he had already decided to do that while he was talking to me. He was-or at least he seemed-completely indifferent to everything. No, that’s not right. He was not indifferent, not the way we normally mean it.

He was pleased. Yes, that’s right: pleased, satisfied-more than content, almost serene.

“I asked him why he had done it, and he said: ‘I really can’t say.’ He said it each time I asked, always that same phrase: ‘I really can’t say.’ But the meaning seemed to change. It was not clear whether he did not know why he had done it, or-and I know this must sound incredible, but it is what I started to think at the time-he knew exactly why he had done it, but for some reason thought that he was not supposed to tell.

“As soon as I understood that his words could be taken in two different senses, I realized that he was aware that the phrase had a double meaning and that he had chosen it deliberately. I began to watch him more closely. At first I thought he was playing a game with us, laughing at us. There were two other investigators in the room, and we took turns asking him questions. His basic expression never changed, that same look of self-contentment, the look of someone who knows something you do not-something so incredibly important that he actually feels sorry that he can’t tell you what it is, something he knows you’ll never figure out on your own.”

Biting his lip, Stewart narrowed his eyes and shook his head, struggling to catch hold of a thought so elusive that it slipped farther away each time he was sure he had it. With one last shake of his head, he gave up. “I’d seen that look before.” Turning his shoulders, he waved his arm toward the oak trees scattered over the open space around us. “My wife loved it out here. Twenty years ago, this was the country. There wasn’t anything else, just trees and green grass, and the river. You could ride your horse for miles and not see a house or a car. It was a wonderful place to live, a great place to raise kids.” He exchanged a glance with Flynn. “Then I started drinking. The more I drank, the more involved she became with her church. I became a drunk; she became a born-again Christian. That’s when I first saw that look, on my wife’s face, a kind of light in her eyes. Whether it’s peace or joy, I don’t know; but whatever it is, it’s there, it’s real, and it used to make me crazy.”

He clenched his teeth, mortified by the thought of what he had once been like. “I did some pretty bad things,” he said presently. “But I think I could have killed her and with her last breath she would have forgiven me. That’s what made me crazy, this absolute certainty she had that she knew the truth and felt sorry for me because I did not. That was kind of the look he had.”

He stopped, and in the same way he had before, bit his lip, shook his head, and narrowed his eyes. “You know how most of these people are, the ones who wind up in the system: dull, sullen, lethargic, only roused to rage. He was not like that at all. He moved around a lot, animated, lively. His eyes never stayed still: They jumped all around. His face was full of expressions, all of them colored by that same look of-what shall I call it?-cheerfulness? It seems a strange thing to call the look on the face of a murderer, but that’s what it was. He had no regret about what he had done and no fear at all about what was going to happen to him. In that sense at least he was like someone born again, all his sins washed away, and heaven waiting with open arms.”

Stewart searched my eyes. “The difference is that I’m convinced he did not think what he had done to Jeffries was a sin. I believe he thought he had done something commendable, something he was supposed to do. And I’ll tell you something else,”

he said, raising his chin. “If he had not died in jail, he never would have been convicted of murder in a court of law.”

It was irrational. There was no logic to it. None of it made sense. I reminded him of what he had just finished telling me: The police had a confession and all the physical evidence a prosecutor would need.

Stewart’s eyes had an inner light of their own. There was something he had not told me yet. I remembered what he had said at the beginning, that seemingly paradoxical remark about being both guilty and not guilty at the same time.

Flynn shifted his gaze from me to his friend. “Tell him about the other murder.”

“The other murder?” I asked.

Stewart nodded. “This wasn’t the first time he killed someone; Jeffries wasn’t his first victim.”

I was confused. This seemed to supply the very motive Stewart claimed he had not been able to find. “Are you sure-absolutely sure-that Jeffries wasn’t the judge who sent him to prison for the first murder?”

Stewart looked at me without expression. “He never went to prison,” he said evenly.

“He murdered someone, and he never went to prison?” I asked skeptically.

“When he was eighteen, he killed his father. The father was a drunk,” he said, exchanging another glance with Flynn. “Whenever he got really drunk he used his wife-the boy’s mother-as a punching bag. He put her in the hospital a couple of times.

One night, the boy came home, found him kicking the hell out of her-literally kicking the hell out of her-and he killed him.

He didn’t just kill him, either. He did to his father what his father had been doing to her, just beat the hell out of him. And then, when he had him down on the floor, barely conscious, he started kicking in his face. By the time he was through there was nothing left.

“They charged him with manslaughter and they did a psychiatric. Something had broken inside him, whether because of what he had seen his father doing to his mother, or because of what he had done to his father-who knows? Whatever the cause, he wasn’t competent to stand trial.”

I knew what had happened next. “And so they shipped him off to the state hospital. When did he get out?”

“A few weeks before the murder. He escaped. It would have all come out of course. But when he died in jail, there didn’t seem to be any point in telling anyone that Jeffries had been murdered by a mental patient.”

“How many people know about this?” I asked.

“Just a couple of us. We didn’t know anything about him when he was picked up. By the time we ran his prints and were able to check his records, he was already dead. The investigation was over.”

“But you’re sure it was him? He couldn’t have confessed to something he didn’t do? The physical evidence could have been planted, and if he was that far out of his head…”

“No,” he said emphatically. “He described how he killed him.

Only the killer knew that. We never released those details.”

“Jeffries was stabbed to death,” I said, repeating what everyone knew from the published reports.

“Stabbed him, then disemboweled him.”

I could not believe it. “You’re telling me that Jeffries somehow managed to crawl back to his office with his intestines hanging out?”

We finished what was left of the lemonade and said goodbye.

As we drove off, I turned around and watched Stewart stroke the nose of his horse and then lead him into the barn.

“What happened to his wife?” I asked Flynn as we jolted down the dirt drive and onto the main road.

“I don’t know. She left him a long time ago. Took the kids and moved away. He stopped drinking after that.”

We drove past the same new development we had come by before, and the same brightly painted signs, some of them with pictures of happy-faced families about to take possession of their share of the American dream.

“Tell me,” I said as Flynn stared ahead at the road. “Do you think Elliott Winston would appreciate the irony that after what Calvin Jeffries did to him, the great judge was murdered by a mental patient?”