The Judgment

Twenty

When I told Flynn what I had found, and what I thought, he looked at me as if I were the one who should be in the state hospital. “What are you suggesting: that Elliott Winston killed Jeffries and then Griswald?”

“No,” I objected. “I’m not suggesting that at all. I’m saying that the two murders seem to be connected somehow. All I know for sure is that Jeffries managed to drive Elliott over the brink, and Griswald was the judge who sent him away.”

“To the state hospital,” Flynn reminded me. “Not to prison.

The guy tried to kill you. Griswald did him a favor.”

“Did he?” I wondered aloud. “Elliott didn’t have a criminal record. He thought I was having an affair with his wife, and I would have testified that he only meant to scare me. The gun went off during a struggle. Even if he had been sentenced to prison-instead of probation-he would have been out years ago.”

Unconvinced, Flynn shook his head. “Griswald was just doing his job. He didn’t have any choice. When someone gets sent to the state hospital, it’s all according to the statute.”

We were standing in front of the county jail, a few minutes past four in the afternoon, waiting to see John Smith. The trees in the park across the street cast their shadows on the sidewalk as the sun slipped down the western sky. With a purse slung over her shoulder and a child clutching each hand, a stocky young woman, her legs stuffed into her jeans, hurried down the steps.

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Flynn went on, narrowing his eyes.

“We already know who murdered Jeffries.” I was not sure we knew that, or anything else. “All right,” he said, beginning to get ex-asperated, “let’s say we don’t know who killed Jeffries; let’s say we ignore the confession, the suicide, everything. Elliott Winston is locked up tight in the forensic ward of the state hospital. It sounds like a pretty good alibi to me.”

“I told you,” I said more sharply than I intended, “I’m not suggesting Elliott killed anyone. I’m not suggesting he had anything to do with it.”

He stared at me, a puzzled expression on his face. “Then what are you suggesting?”

I was not quite sure. I had that helpless feeling of grasping at something vague and indefinable, something you thought for a moment you understood, but that suddenly, as soon as you have to explain it, vanishes from view.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, still trying to think of what it was.

“You’re right. Elliott couldn’t have done it, but it doesn’t seem possible that it’s all just a coincidence.”

Flynn peered down at his shoes and stroked his chin. “What else could it be?” he asked, raising his eyes until our gazes met.

“The one who confessed to killing Jeffries-the one who killed himself-was a mental patient.”

“And?”

“And it would be interesting to know if Elliott knew him.”

“The hospital has hundreds of patients. But even if he knew him, so what?”

“Then we have another coincidence, don’t we?”

Flynn put his hand on my shoulder as we began to walk toward the front entrance. “All you have then is that a mental patient who once knew someone who got killed happened to know another mental patient who happened to kill him. Go to the hospital; talk to the doctor-talk to Elliott: Find out everything you can about Jacob Whittaker. Maybe there is a connection between the death of Jeffries and the death of Griswald; maybe there is a connection between the two killers… But Elliott Winston? If you didn’t know what Jeffries had done to him-if you didn’t know what his wife had done to him-you wouldn’t even be thinking about it.”

He was right of course, and at least on a conscious level I knew it. I put aside all my vague imaginings and dim suspicions and tried instead to concentrate on the reason we were there.

“Did the psychologist agree to see Smith?” I asked as we got to the door.

“He will,” Flynn replied confidently. “I haven’t called him yet.

I wanted to see what we could do first.”

We could not do much. John Smith was brought into the small, windowless conference room. His head hung down between his shoulders and swayed from side to side, while his eyes, glazed over, remained fixed on the same point. The jailer walked him to the table where Flynn and I sat waiting, helped him into the chair, then knelt down beside him and removed the handcuffs. Powerfully built, with a square jaw and broad straight shoulders, the deputy gently patted him on the back.

“You’ll be all right here,” he said in a soft voice. “This is your lawyer, Mr. Antonelli. He was in court with you today. Remember?”

The head stopped moving. A shy smile started onto his mouth and then floated away. He looked at me a moment longer and then, as he lowered his eyes, his head drooped down and began to sway slowly first to one side, then the other.

I spoke to him in the tone of voice I would have used with a child. “John, this is Mr. Flynn. He’s going to help us with your case. Would you like to say hello?”

If he heard, he gave no sign of it. His head swung like a pen-dulum, a long, looping motion that when it reached full extension at one end, hesitated for just an instant, and then fell away, speeding backward through the same trajectory until, at the other end, it stopped again.

Flynn seemed to grow nervous. Though it was against the rules, the guard had gone. He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and with his thumb flipped open the cover of a matchbook. It was barely audible, but at the sound of it, John Smith’s head froze. I turned to Flynn, but it was too late. He struck the match, and as it burst into flame, John Smith jumped away, knocking over the metal folding chair. “No!” he cried. “No! No fire! Don’t hurt!

Don’t hurt!” he screamed. He sank down in the far corner of the room, as far away as he could get, his arms crossed in front of his face, cowering with fear.

Flynn was on his feet, the unlit cigarette stuck in his mouth, the burning match still held in his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to appear calm. He took the cigarette out of his mouth. “See?

I was just going to light this. I wasn’t going to hurt you.” Cautiously, he took a step forward. The boy-and he was only that-

drew his knees farther up and tightened his arms around them.

Flynn took another step forward and went down on one knee.

He held the match in front of him. “Look,” he said. “I’ll put it out.”

Words meant nothing. At the sight of that match, he screamed,

“No, please no!”

Flynn held it there, the flame grown larger, and then slowly closed his thumb and forefinger around it and crushed it out. It must have hurt, but you could not tell it from the expression on Flynn’s face. The boy’s eyes widened in amazement and the shaking began to stop.

“I’m sorry,” Flynn repeated. He got to his feet and reached down to help him up. The boy watched him but kept gripping his knees.

“That’s all right,” Flynn told him in a quiet voice. “Take your time. Come on your own when you’re ready,” he said as he straightened up. “No one is going to hurt you. We’re going to try to help you.”

Smith’s eyes followed Flynn as he came back to the table, and stayed on him even when he stood up, picked up the chair, and sat down on it.

I have seen people, gifted in ways I could only imagine, com-municate with dogs and cats and even horses, but until now I had never seen anyone do something like that with another human being. Howard Flynn sat across the table from that unfortunate soul and something passed between them, some ineffa-ble thing that made the boy respond-not with words or even a gesture-just a look, but a look which, had you seen it, you would never forget. It was the look of someone who has no knowledge-

no conscious knowledge-of himself, the look of someone who has not, like the rest of us, permanently divorced himself from the world around him. Clear your mind of every thought, rid yourself of every felt emotion, every seeming instinct of fear, until all that is left is that essential part of yourself that is yourself, and you will begin to understand what happened. The unspoken word, the thought that is silent even to itself-the thought that does not need expression to know what it is-that was the com-munication that was taking place right in front of my eyes.

“What can you tell us about Billy?” Flynn asked finally.

“Friend,” was the one-word answer.

“Billy gave you the knife?”

Smith nodded, and Flynn asked, “Where did Billy go?”

“Away. Billy went away.”

“Where did he go?”

“Away.”

“But where away?”

“River.”

I glanced at Flynn, but he was concentrating too hard to notice. With his arms folded together on the table, he leaned forward, cocked his head, and smiled. “What is your name?” he asked simply.

The boy smiled back. “Danny.”

“What’s your last name, Danny?”

It was so still in that room I thought I could hear my own heartbeat. Without any change of expression, he looked at Flynn and said, “Danny.”

Flynn nodded patiently. “Danny is your first name. You have another name, too. My first name is Howard.”

“Howard,” the boy repeated.

“That’s right. My first name is Howard. My last name is Flynn.

Your first name is Danny. Your last name is?”

There was a flash of recognition in his eyes, the look someone gets when they first realize that something is not where it is supposed to be and that they might have lost it. He shook his head.

“Danny,” he said again. It was the only name he knew, and perhaps the only name he had.

For half an hour I watched, an interested observer, while Howard Flynn did his best to learn where Danny had come from and what he knew about the man who had given him the knife.

Flynn was as gentle, as patient, as it was possible to be, but it made no difference: Danny seemed to know nothing about his past. As innocent as the child he was, he lived in the moment, a moment that for him had no beginning and no end. He remembered me, and he remembered we had been together in a room, but he could not have said whether it had happened that morning or a year ago. When Flynn had lit that match, it did not just remind him of when he had been burned all over his body with a cigarette: It was the same event. Time did not exist.

Everything that happened-everything that happened to him-

was now.

Though none of our other questions had been answered, we had gotten his name, and that at least was a start. We had gotten something else as well: the knowledge that this was a case we had to win. It was always more difficult to defend someone you were certain was innocent: You could not comfort yourself with the thought that justice had been done if you lost. But this was worse. Danny was not just innocent, he was helpless. We were all he had. It hit Flynn harder than it hit me. When we left he was as angry as I had ever seen him.

“They should hang people like that!” he growled as we made our way to the front entrance. “And I don’t mean by the neck, either!”

I thought I knew whom he meant, but just to be sure, I asked,

“The people who burned him with cigarettes?”

“Yeah,” he muttered under his breath. His arm shot straight out in front of him and hit the door with such force I was afraid his hand was going to go right through the glass. At almost the same spot where we had stood talking together before, he stopped still. “Forget about that son of a bitch Jeffries. Forget about the guy who killed him,” he said, shaking his head impatiently. “Forget about whether he might have known Elliott Winston. Forget about the state hospital. Unless we find out who gave the kid the knife, we haven’t got anything.” He paused and stared hard at me. “You have to find out, and there’s only one way left to do it.”

People were swarming all around us. It was a few minutes past five and the sidewalks were filling up as civil servants walked quickly to the parking lots where they had left their cars or headed a few blocks across town to catch the light rail.

“You think the psychologist can get more out of him than you did?”

Flynn nodded, but his mind was on something else. “He’ll learn some things from him. He may learn quite a lot.” He worked his jaw back and forth, then he stopped and scratched his chin, a distant look in his eye. “He won’t learn that, though. The kid doesn’t know.”

“Then who?”

His eyes came back into focus. “The people he lived with.”

“Under the bridge?”

“Exactly.”

“Well,” I said skeptically, “we can try. But half of them are probably mentals and the rest are probably addicts or drunks.”

On the other hand, we had nothing to lose. “All right,” I agreed,

“if you think it’s worth the chance. When do you want to go?”

For the first time since we had left the jail, Flynn seemed to relax. He greeted my question as if I had just broken my own world record for stupidity. It was all he could do not to roll his eyes or laugh in my face. “Sure, why not? Let’s just go down there right now, two guys in coats and ties.”

Now I realized what he had in mind-or I thought I did. “You want to go undercover: pretend you’re one of the homeless-one of them?”

“No,” he said, looking away as he dragged out the sound. “Not exactly.”

For a few moments we did not say anything, and then I knew.

“You want me…?”

“I can’t do it,” he said, turning to me. Earnestly, he shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t spend three or four nights-I can’t even spend one night-by myself with people who are drinking. I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it.” He looked down at the sidewalk and sighed. “But I will if you want,” he said, lifting his head.

He meant it, and I knew it, and I could never let it happen.

“All right,” I said with a rueful glance, “I’ll do it. But only after the psychologist sees Danny.”

“He’ll do it first thing tomorrow.”

“You said you hadn’t talked to him yet.”

“I haven’t,” he replied as if that was an answer. “This will be a great experience for you,” he said cheerfully. We turned and began to walk and he again put his arm around my shoulder. “You remember that time Jeffries put you in jail for the weekend? Look at it like that: You might not like it much, but think of all the stories you’ll have to tell.”

I thought about that after I left him at the corner and headed back to the office: not what it would be like to pass myself off as one of the homeless, but what it had been like spending three nights in the county jail. Three nights-and I had never forgotten it! One weekend all those years ago, and as vivid as if it had happened last week or the week before. Three nights! How many nights are there in twelve years, the length of time Elliott Winston had already spent locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane? I could list the numbers and make a rough estimate of the result, but I could not do the multiplication, not in my head, not without a calculator or at least a pencil and paper. If I had been at the state hospital I could have asked Elliott’s friend, the former high school history teacher somehow given the gift for mathematics by his own insanity.

Somewhere behind me a voice called my name. I stopped and turned around, but I did not see anyone I recognized among the crowd of faces that moved past me on the sidewalk. The voice called again, but I still could not find who it was.

“Here,” Jennifer said, laughing. She was sitting in her car, parked at the curb just a few feet away. The top was down. “You looked like you were in a trance. Have you been sleepwalking?”

“No,” I replied, embarrassed. I took a step toward the car, then stopped and looked back over my shoulder. We were directly in front of my building. If she had not called out to me, I might have walked right past it.

“You told me to pick you up in front at quarter past five,” she said as I got in. “Did you forget?”

“No, I didn’t forget. I was thinking about something.” As we drove off, I remembered the look-that trancelike look-Elliott had on his face when I first saw him at the hospital. “You ever do that?” I asked her. “Think about something and forget where you are?”

Jennifer glanced across at me, a puzzled expression on her face.

“I don’t mean when you were sick,” I said, touching the back of her neck. But I realized that that was exactly what I meant.

“Is that what it’s like-you don’t know where you are?”

She looked straight ahead, steering through the downtown traffic. Dressed in a white short-sleeve blouse and a green and blue cotton skirt, she looked young and pretty, eighteen years old all over again, and both of us certain that nothing bad could ever happen. A faint smile flickered across her mouth. She lifted her head and bit her lip; and then she turned to me and her eyes seemed to beg forgiveness. “I can’t,” she murmured.

She stared ahead at the road, and with a quick turn of her wrist shifted down to the next gear and gunned the car through a yellow light at the intersection just before the bridge.

I tried to get her mind off the past. “We’re passing over my new home,” I said brightly.

She passed the back of her hand over her eyes and cleared her throat. “What?” she asked, forcing herself to smile.

“Yeah, it’s true,” I said with a cocky grin. “It’s my new home.

Right down there,” I added, jabbing my finger in front of her.

“Under the bridge. It’s Flynn’s idea.”

Jennifer listened intently while I explained what I was going to do and why there did not seem to be any other choice. I was not quite prepared for her response. Instead of trying to talk me out of it; instead of telling me how much she was going to worry about me; instead of reminding me that I was a lawyer and not a private detective; she thought it was a perfectly wonderful idea and tried to invite herself along.

“If you just suddenly show up-I don’t care how much of a homeless person you make yourself look-you’re still a stranger and they’re not going to trust you. But if there are two of us-a homeless couple-that makes sense. It happens all the time. You see couples holding up cardboard signs saying they’ll work for food. We could be like that,” she said eagerly.

On the other side of the bridge, her eyes darting all around, she merged into the freeway traffic and then crossed over into the lane that, a little farther on, connected to the highway that led east along the Columbia.

It was out of the question. She was not going with me. “It’s too dangerous,” I said quietly, and then started to laugh at the way I sounded, all self-assured and protective, as if it had been my idea instead of Flynn’s.

She waited until I stopped. “So you rather I went alone?”

“Flynn told me I had to do it. By the way, where are we going?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought maybe we could drive out along the river, maybe go a ways into the gorge.”

We drove along the shore of the great slow-moving river as it cut its way through the tree-covered cliffs of the gorge, changing color from gray to silver and then, finally, as the sun slanted in the stillness of dusk across the far edge of the horizon, a deep purple mixed with gold. The river ran forever, through the rough red rocks of the high windblown desert; through wheat fields that flowed under a yellow sun and cloudless skies and clear starry nights in places where a tree had never grown; through high mountains that had risen from the earth thousands of years after the river had already begun to run out to the sea; through the flatlands and lowlying hills where another river joined and where a city had been built and a handful of generations had lived their lives and died their deaths. Always changing and always the same, the river carried us back and carried us forward, and gave us the feeling that though we could never quite put it into words, we knew something important, something that had value.

We stopped at a restaurant with a view of a narrow steel suspension bridge and the green black hills of Washington on the other side. We ate hamburgers that came in red plastic baskets covered with white wax paper and slapped ketchup over the French fries and drank Cokes out of Coke glasses with straws.

Every few minutes, Jennifer would reach across and wipe my mouth with her paper napkin.

“You sure you want to do this? Get married in a year?”

Holding it with both hands, her teeth had just sunk into the hamburger. “Why?” she asked, almost choking as she swallowed hard and tried not to laugh. “Are you having second thoughts?”

“Second thoughts? I haven’t had first thoughts. I’ve been in love with you all my life, but until you came back I didn’t think about it very often. It’s like breathing. Most of the time you don’t know you’re doing it.”

Her hands were in her lap under the table, and she was looking up at me, making fun of me with her eyes, while she drank Coke through a straw. She finished what little was left in the glass and kept sucking on it, laughing with her eyes at the sound she made, waiting to see my reaction. I signaled the waitress to bring her a new one.

“Got a quarter?” Jennifer asked. I found one in my pocket and she went to the old-fashioned jukebox that stood against the wall on the other side. I watched her tap her foot as she searched for something she wanted to hear. She came back to the table and held out her hand. I looked around, hesitant. “Come on,” she insisted.

” ‘Chances Are’?” I asked, laughing quietly as we began to dance on the linoleum floor in front of the jukebox.

We moved together to the music, a few steps one way and a few steps back. She let go of my hand and wrapped both arms around my neck, and both of mine went around her waist. At a booth a few feet away, two teenage boys nudged each other. The girls they were with first scolded them with their eyes so they wouldn’t laugh and then, because they were young and sentimental and still dreamed that love could last, turned and watched themselves.

When it was over, Jennifer went to the cash register, got change for a dollar, and played it again. She wanted to do it a third time, but I pulled her away and we went back to our table and she drank some more Coke and teased me again with her wide laughing eyes.

“It wasn’t like breathing for me,” she said, peering down at the glass as she twisted the straw through crushed ice. “I thought about you much more often than that. I thought about you a lot when I was in the hospital.” She raised her eyes until her gaze met mine. “I tried to think of why I was there. They told me it was because of some chemical imbalance in the brain, that it was something physical, that it could happen to anyone. But it didn’t happen to anyone: It happened to me-and I kept thinking maybe it wouldn’t have happened if my life had been different, if I’d been married to someone I was in love with. How could I have been depressed if I had been happy?” She paused and, reaching across the table, ran her fingertips down the side of my face. “I kept thinking I wouldn’t be there, in that awful place, if I’d been married to you.”

Slowly, her head came up straight and she sat perfectly erect, and perfectly still. “Is that what you want, Joey?” she asked, measuring each word. “After all this time. Are you sure that’s what you want-just to be with me?”

I nodded toward her nearly empty glass. “Drink your Coke. We have to get out of here. It’s a long drive home.”

I waited until she bent her head over the glass and took the tip of the straw in her mouth.

“I’m going to ask you this just once. Will you marry me? Not next year, or next month. Just, will you marry me?”

Her eyes still on the glass, she began to smile. Then she looked up.

“Yes.”

That is all that was said, all that had to be said. We sat there for a few more minutes while she finished her Coke and I wondered why marriage, as opposed to simply living together, had assumed such an importance in my mind. We were past the age when marriage meant children. Perhaps it was a way to show defiance to the long years we had been apart. I suppose it would also put a period to the sentence that would seem to strangers to explain our lives: “We fell in love, and then we were married.”

Jennifer finished her Coke, and I helped her up from the table.

“We can always tell people we had a very long engagement,” she said with a smile. Suddenly, her head shuddered and her eyes flashed with pain. She gripped my hand with all her strength.

“I’m all right,” she said, trying to apologize. “I’m just tired, and it hit me kind of fast.”

By the time we got to the car, she seemed fine, but when I insisted on driving she did not object. As we drove through the darkness, she curled up beside me and was fast asleep before we had gone more than a mile.

The next morning, Helen, as usual, followed me into my office, a high-heeled tap dance accompanied by shouted instructions about what I was supposed to be doing.

“I finally reached Dr. Friedman’s office down at the state hospital. He’s out of town this week and won’t be back until Monday. I said we’d call back.” Helen looked at her notebook and found the next item on her list. “The records clerk called from the courthouse. The file on the Elliott Winston case came over from Archives. You can look at it anytime you want.” Her eyes went back to the notebook.

“I’m getting married, Helen.”

“Somebody named…?” She looked up, puzzled, and for a moment searched my eyes. The tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and the lines at the corners of her mouth seemed to fade away.

She dropped into the chair and put her hand on her heart.

“Really?” she asked. Her eyes sparkled and a huge grin spread across her face. “To the girl you wanted to marry, years ago, the one you went to high school with?”

I could not remember ever having told her about that, but it did not surprise me that she knew. She started to say something and then, changing her mind, came around the desk and kissed me on the cheek. There was an awkward silence, and then, because that kiss had said everything there was to say, she offered a few words of congratulations and I replied with a few words of thanks.

“I have a lot to do today,” I said finally. “I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to see that file or not. Would you call the records clerk back and ask if they would hang on to it for a while.”

A few minutes later, I heard Helen on the phone. There was one thing I could find out without going to the courthouse and reading it in the file. I picked up the line and asked the records clerk to tell me the name of the attorney who had represented Elliott Winston. She told me and I asked once more to make sure I had heard her right, and one more time after that because I still did not believe it.

“But Asa Bartram never practiced criminal law in his life,” I said, as if this was something the clerk would either know or have reason to care about.

“Sorry,” I said, more baffled than ever by what had happened, and more certain than ever that it was somehow the answer to everything.