The Judgment

Thirty

Iwas at the courthouse a half hour early. An old man with sharp-edged shoulders and a sunken chest hobbled into the courtroom ahead of me, a newspaper folded under his arm. He sat on the aisle in the last row, just inside the door. He was a fairly frequent visitor, sometimes the only spectator in the routine trials no one remembered the moment they were over. I had never known his name, but I had been told that he had spent a long life as a lawyer and did not know what to do with himself after he retired.

“Interesting case,” he remarked as I went past him.

I kept going, pretending not to hear, but then, perhaps because I felt something-a memory of something that had not yet happened to me-I stopped and turned around.

“You were a lawyer, weren’t you?” I asked, trying to seem interested.

His gray wispy eyebrows uncovered clear, fully lucent eyes.

“Until I was seventy-five, when a cabal of notorious and incompetent doctors conspired to deprive me of the only reason I had left to live.” With a bony finger he tapped his chest. “Heart,” he explained. “That was ten years ago,” he said. “I think the doctors are all dead now.”

He got to his feet and leaned on the bench in front of him.

“Now I just come and watch. I like trials. Every one of them is a different story; every one of them has an ending and you find out what happened.”

He was eager to talk to someone, another lawyer, someone who knew what he meant.

“Life isn’t like that. You don’t know when it’s going to end, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. In the trial, you know if you’ve won or if you lost. How do you ever know that outside a courtroom?”

A troubled expression in his eyes, he thought about his own question. Then, pulling himself up, he patted my arm. “Better get ready,” he said with an encouraging smile. “Interesting trial,” he added as I turned away and walked to the front of the otherwise empty courtroom.

From my chair at the counsel table I glanced back over my shoulder, but the old man was lost in his newspaper, reading perhaps the obituaries of just a few of the people he had managed to outlive. He was right in what he had said: Trials were stories, stories about other people’s lives, told in a way that made each part fit with every other, as if they had from the very beginning followed a single design and had come at the end to form a single, coherent whole. That is what I was: a storyteller who made sense out of the lives of other people and could not make any sense out of his own. I was the storyteller who had no story of his own to tell.

The door at the back of the courtroom squeaked open and I heard the sound of shuffling feet as someone else found a place on the spectator benches. A few minutes later the door opened again. It was Harper Bryce, notebook in hand, getting ready to jot down anything he thought essential for the story he was going to write for the readers of tomorrow morning’s paper. Five minutes later, at twenty past one, the first juror, careful not to glance in my direction, made her way to the jury room. The bailiff, an amiable deputy sheriff with a gray mustache, caught up with her and opened the door. The courtroom began to fill up, and the court reporter, getting ready for the afternoon, put a new spool of paper into her machine.

My mind was a blank, and I felt nothing, not even a vague curiosity about what was going to happen. I listened to the sounds made by the courtroom as it gradually came back to life, and the only thought I had was that like the old man who sat watching somewhere behind me this was what my life had always been and would always be, the endless repetition of one trial, one story, over and over again.

The courtroom was full, and the last juror had returned. The defendant had been brought in and put in the chair next to me.

Cassandra Loescher was sitting at the other end of the long, mahogany table, busily making notes to herself. The clerk, a generous-hearted woman waiting for retirement, took the place she had filled for the last twenty years. Everyone was where they were supposed to be. Like an old soldier, the bailiff drew himself up straight and tall and then issued the only command he knew.

“All rise,” he said. Before the words were out of his mouth, everyone was on their feet, waiting while Morris Bingham, eyes straight ahead, walked to the bench. Calvin Jeffries had walked that way as well, never looking around, but he had moved more quickly, like someone always in a hurry, trying to do two things at once.

Bingham nodded at the jury. “Good afternoon,” he said in his pleasant, muted-tone voice.

“Is the defense ready to call its next witness, Mr. Antonelli?”

he asked, turning his attention to me.

“Yes, your honor,” I said as I stood up. “The defense calls Elliott Winston.”

I stared at the double doors at the back of the courtroom, wondering if they would open and whether, if they did, Elliott Winston would walk through them. I waited, and I kept waiting, but there was nothing, not a sound. He had escaped, just as I had thought he would, and was perhaps right now alone in the elevator, on his way up to where the woman he hated had lived with the man he had killed. I turned around, ready to explain that my witness was missing and that in his absence the defense would now call the defendant himself.

“Your honor,” I began, but Bingham was looking over my head.

“I believe your witness has just arrived, Mr. Antonelli.”

Elliott Winston stood just inside the door while one of the two well-muscled orderlies who accompanied him removed the handcuffs that pinned his wrists behind his back. Elliott was dressed exactly the same way he had been the first time I saw him at the hospital: the threadbare suit that fit too tight, the frayed white shirt held together at the throat by the knot of the same off-center tie. The two orderlies leaned against the back wall while Elliott, rubbing his wrists, walked up the aisle with slow, methodical steps, gazing intently from side to side. His eyes never stopped moving, not when the clerk administered the oath, not when he first sat down on the witness chair. It was as if he was trying to impress on his mind the lasting image of every visible square inch of that courtroom and everything and everyone who was in it.

“Would you please state your name and spell your last for the record,” I asked.

He looked at me, but just for an instant, and then, with a flash of impatience, commenced another circuit of the room. When his eyes came back around they settled not on me, but on Cassandra Loescher.

“You’re the prosecutor in this case?” he asked, bending slightly toward her.

Startled at first, she quickly changed her expression to one of annoyance and looked to the bench for help.

“Mr. Winston,” Judge Bingham informed him in a quiet but firm voice, “witnesses answer the questions directed to them; they don’t ask them. But, yes, Ms. Loescher is the prosecutor in this case. Now please, answer the question Mr. Antonelli asked you.

Please state your full name and spell your last for the record.”

Elliott sat stiff and straight, an imperious look on his face. He treated Bingham’s request like the suggestion of a servant: something he might listen to but would under no circumstances acknowledge. He turned to me, propped his right elbow on the arm of the chair, placed his thumb under the side of his chin, and set both his index and his middle fingers against his cheekbone. A thought raced through his mind and left behind it a smile that darted over his mouth.

“My name is Elliott Lowell Winston,” he said finally, and then slowly spelled the last.

I glanced down at the file that lay open on the table.

“I believe the next question is ‘How are you employed?’ “

My head snapped up. The smile on his face, meant to appear officious, could not quite hide a certain sentimentality nor completely mask a kind of nostalgia.

“I’m not employed. I’m a member of the leisure class, which, as you know, is always, one way or the other, supported at state expense.”

“You’re an inmate at the state hospital.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“How long have you been there?” I asked as I closed the file.

“Twelve years, five months, three weeks, four days,” he said, in a harsh, almost brutal voice. He seemed to be proud of it, and ready to defy anyone who thought to disagree.

I worked my way along the back of the table, passing the defendant-poor, mystified Danny, who seemed amazed by this strange creature on the witness chair; passing Cassandra Loescher, who, despite herself, could not keep her eyes off Elliott Winston.

“Twelve years, five months, three weeks, four days,” I repeated aloud to myself as I paused at the far side of the counsel table and looked back across the oblique angle to the witness stand.

“How have you survived it all these years, knowing there was nothing wrong with you, nothing so serious that it could not have been cured with a little rest and a little weekly counseling with a good psychologist?”

He made no reply, and I could sense that he wondered what I knew.

“We know all about it, Elliott.” I leaned back against the front of the table and clasped my hands together. “We know that Calvin Jeffries arranged to have you sent to the state hospital; we know you were sent there without a psychiatric evaluation. And we know why he did it. We know he wanted you out of the way-

in a place where you could not do anything about it when he took your wife and took your children. What we don’t know is when you first figured it out, first understood that you weren’t going to be there for just a few months. That’s what he promised you, wasn’t it? That you’d go to the hospital and with the same kind of influence he used to get you there, get you out again, didn’t he?”

Dark with rage, his eyes burrowed into me. “I always knew I could trust the honorable Judge Jeffries!”

“When did you first understand that you had been deceived, that you weren’t going to be getting out of the hospital, not for twenty years or more?”

His hand came down from the side of his face and rested on his knee. He bent forward, his back still straight, a half smile, more enigmatic than any look I had ever seen, slashed across his face.

“I understood it the first time I saw him look at my wife; I didn’t know I understood it until I had been in the hospital for nearly half a year.” Not without a certain satisfaction, he noted the puzzled expression on my face. “When I realized she was never going to come to see me; when I was sent a copy of her divorce decree; when I was served with a notice that my rights as a parent were being terminated; when I found out that she had married Jeffries and they were going to give my children his name.

When I realized what they had done to me, then I saw everything in a different light. Looks, words, gestures took on a whole new meaning. The way they kissed each other when we said goodbye, the way he touched her-things I thought showed how fond he was of her-now showed me, when I remembered them, how much they wanted each other, how hard it was for them to keep their hands off each other.” His mouth curled down in disdain.

“I discovered, you see, that the past was not what I had thought it was. They changed it,” he added, as he moved his hand from his knee to the arm of the chair and again sat straight up.

“And what did you do then, when you realized that you had been betrayed?”

His eyes were cold, hard, mocking. “I thought about it.” He paused and inclined his head slightly to the side. “Does that surprise you? That I thought about it?” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “What else was I going to do?” He leaned forward again and with a riveting glance suddenly beat his open hand on the wooden arm of the chair. “What else could I do?”

he shouted. “I’d been declared insane-I was living in an asylum, for God’s sake-what else was I going to do but think about it?

That’s all I’ve done for twelve years-think about it!”

“About what they had done to you?”

“Yes.”

“About what you were going to do to them?” I asked, trying to goad him into an admission I could use.

His head, rigid and erect, began to shudder and his eyes flashed with contempt. Then it stopped. “I thought about a lot of things,”

he said, the only expression left a smile so small I could barely see it just under his mustache at the corner of his mouth. “It did occur to me, I must admit,” he said, his voice hoarse and gut-tural, “that by having me declared insane they had also conferred upon me absolute immunity for any otherwise criminal acts I might care to commit.”

For the first time since he had taken the stand, he turned his head and looked at the jury. “I was a lawyer once,” he explained with a polite smile that was so close to the way Judge Bingham habitually acknowledged their presence, I wondered if it was deliberate.

He seemed to forget what he had wanted to say. “Gave you absolute immunity,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes coming back around to me. “As you can imagine, with that thought I began to imagine all sorts of things. I was insane-the state said so-and no one would ever be able to hold me responsible for anything I did.” A shrewd glint came into his eyes. “In that sense-and maybe not just in that sense-I was like Calvin Jeffries, wasn’t I? Above, or at least outside, the law. Isn’t that what everyone wants? To do anything they want and not have to face any consequences for it?”

Pausing, he started to look around the courtroom again. “Do you still like doing this?” he asked, a pensive expression on his face. “Being a lawyer, trying cases in court? I should have listened to you when you tried to warn me about Jeffries,” he said, biting his lip while his eyes flared open. His mind was starting to wander back to the beginning of what had happened to him. “This was always where I wanted to end up,” he said, looking at me as he narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “In court, trying to convince a jury that I was right.”

He seemed to draw into himself. I moved down the length of the counsel table and stood at the end of it, closest both to the jury box and the witness stand. I pointed at Danny.

“Elliott,” I said quietly, “you’ve never seen him before, have you?”

He did not hear me, or if he did, he chose not to answer.

Whatever was going on in his tortured mind, he was now a prisoner to it. His eyes grew larger and even more intense, his neck bulged, and his shirt collar, too tight as it was, cut into his throat and his face turned red.

“Insanity confers immunity, but immunity is irrelevant when it is a question of self-defense,” he said, the words tumbling rapidly out of his mouth. “You’re entitled to take another’s life when they’re trying to take yours, aren’t you?” he asked, challenging me to disagree.

“Do you know him? Have you ever seen him before?” I asked insistently, pointing again at Danny.

Elliott glanced at the defendant, then looked back at me. “No, I’ve never seen him before,” he said impatiently. “It would be self-defense, wouldn’t it?”

“No,” I replied, keeping my voice low. “It could not be self-defense. No one tried to kill you. But even if they had, it was twelve years ago.”

It was an odd sensation. For a moment I thought we were repeating a conversation we had had before, one of the hundreds we had had when he was an associate in the firm and we talked about the criminal law and the various and sometimes inventive defenses that could be raised to a charge of murder.

“Self-defense has to be contemporaneous with the attack. Otherwise there’s nothing to defend against. You can’t just take the life of someone who injured you at some point in the past. That’s nothing more than revenge.”

He could barely wait for me to finish. “Are you sure?” he asked, his eyes ablaze. “What if, as soon as he was attacked, he started to defend himself-but moved slowly. What if,” he continued, thrusting his head forward, “the attack itself went on-day after day-for years? What if someone was crushing the life out of him, strangling him, a little tighter all the time, with the thought of what he was doing with his wife, with his children? And then, years after it started, he finally makes it stop. Are you so certain that would not be self-defense?”

I refused to concede anything. “No, it isn’t self-defense and you know it. You’re talking about the way you felt, about the effect of what Calvin Jeffries did to you. It wasn’t self-defense, because it was too late-far too late-to prevent him from doing what he did, and because you can’t change the past. All you could do was try to take your revenge. And that’s what you did, wasn’t it, Elliott?”

He was beside himself. “Can’t change the past? Don’t you understand anything? The past is the only thing you can change!”

His eyes were growing wider and his voice was becoming louder, more violent, with every word he spoke. He was close to going completely over the edge. I had to get him to admit what he had done now or it was going to be too late. I took a step toward him.

“You thought by having Calvin Jeffries killed, by having Quincy Griswald killed, you could change the past?”

“Of course!” he insisted. “They changed my past, didn’t they?”

His eyes darted toward the jury. “My wife-the woman I loved-

became the woman who betrayed me. My children-the children I loved-became the children who forgot me. Don’t you see? My past was that of a man who was loved; it became that of a man who was hated and abandoned.”

His head jerked back around until he was again staring straight at me. “Can’t change the past? What would my past be now if I had just lived all those years in the asylum, a patient in the hospital for the criminally insane? What would you see, looking back on my life? A lunatic. And what would you have seen,” he asked, bristling, “when you looked back at the life of Jeffries and Griswald and the mother of my children? Whatever you would have seen, it isn’t what you see now, is it? Can’t change the past? They did it to me, and I did it to them. They tried to write the history of my life, but I wrote theirs instead!” he shouted, rising from the chair.

The judge exchanged a quick, worried glance with the bailiff, who immediately started to move toward the witness stand.

“It’s all right, Elliott,” I said, trying to calm him as I moved another step forward. The bailiff looked at me, then looked at the judge. Bingham hesitated, then held up his hand to let him know he could stop.

I was not through with Elliott yet. There was something more I had to have.

“How did you do it? How did you get Jacob Whittaker to kill Jeffries? How did you get Chester-Billy-to kill Griswald? How did you talk them into doing it?”

He looked at me like I was a fool. “I gave them something to live for. I gave them something to die for. I gave them something to believe in.”

“What did you give them to believe in, Elliott? What did they believe in so much they were willing to kill for it?”

“They believed that evil really exists, that evil people really exist, and that if you don’t stop them they’ll keep doing evil things.” He paused and a smile crept across his mouth. “They’re insane, remember?”

Our eyes were locked together. I took another step toward him.

We were now not more than an arm’s length apart.

“You admit you ordered them to kill Jeffries and Griswald?”

He laughed. “Ordered them? I didn’t order anyone to do anything. We had a trial, just like you’re having now.” He looked around the courtroom. “Or perhaps more like the court proceeding they held when they had me committed. I made my case the way any good lawyer would: I was clear, logical, and persuasive, just the way you are. And then, at the end of it, they reached a verdict, and after they reached a verdict they passed sentence.

They carried it out. I had nothing to do with it.”

His eyes glittered with self-satisfaction, but he was not finished yet. There was something more he wanted to say, something important.

“So you see,” he began, “I did change the past.”

That is when it happened, that dreadful, pathetic beating together of same-sounding words, worse-far worse-than when I had heard it before.

“I did change the past… last… fast… mast.” The words came in short staccato bursts, faster and faster. He began to choke, and he tore at his collar, pulling it away from his throat as if that was what was blocking his breath. His eyes bulging, he tugged at his collar harder and harder as he staggered off the witness chair, stumbled and started to fall. I caught him with both hands and as I fell back under his weight the bailiff rushed in to help.

He must have dreamed about it, seen it in his sleep, gone over it a thousand times in his mind, planning every motion of his hands, every movement of his feet, until it had all become as instinctive as a dance. I was right there, holding him, trying to help him, and I never saw it happen. Suddenly, I was clutching at nothing and Elliott was standing free, waving the bailiff’s gun.

“Quiet!” he demanded as the courtroom dissolved into chaos.

“Quiet!” he shouted again, but panic had taken over. People who had come to watch were trying to hide, throwing themselves onto the floor between the benches, some on top of others who had gotten there first. Elliott aimed the gun toward the back and fired off a round. Everyone froze.

“Now,” he said, holding the gun steady, “I want everyone to listen to me very carefully.” His voice was surprisingly calm. “Very slowly, and starting with the first row, I want everyone to leave-

everyone sitting out there,” he said, nodding toward the spectators’ benches. “Now,” he said. “Very slowly, just like you were leaving church after a wedding or a funeral. One row at a time.”

They did as he told them, one row at a time, looking back at him, afraid he might change his mind before they got out the door. When they were all gone, he turned to the twelve terrified people in the jury box. Gesturing with the gun, he ordered them into the jury room.

“You go with them,” he said, nodding at both the court clerk and the court reporter.

When they were out of the room, he turned to the bailiff and ordered him to take the defendant back to the jail.

“Go with him, Danny,” I said when he appeared reluctant to leave me alone.

There were only three of us left: Bingham, Loescher, and me-

the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney.

Elliott moved across the front of the courtroom and leaned against the empty jury box, the gun dangling down from his hand.

“Shall we bring the jury back in and have a trial of our own?”

Elliott asked, looking at Loescher. “Or do you think I’ve ade-quately prosecuted the case against Calvin Jeffries and my wife?”

Cassandra Loescher was one of the few who had not panicked when Elliott began brandishing the gun. She had risen straight to her feet and stayed there, glaring at him as if he had offered an insult instead of a threat to her life. She refused to answer, and when he repeated the question her only response was to look at him with even greater contempt.

Her silence made him angry and I tried to get his attention.

“What do you want, Elliott?” I asked, taking a tentative first step in his direction. He warned me away with his eyes.

“You can’t get out of here,” I told him, trying to sound calm and self-assured. “And even if you could, what then? Would you go kill your wife? Is that what this was all about-to get out of the hospital so you could kill her yourself?”

“Kill her?” he exclaimed feverishly. “I don’t want her to die; I want her to live forever. I told you all before,” he cried, as he waved the gun in the air, a dark, menacing look in his eyes. “I came to court to make the record, the record of what happened, the way you do when you want to appeal a case you should never have lost. Kill her? I want her to live knowing that everyone knows what she is and what she did!”

I was too angry, too tired, too worn out by everything that had happened to feel any fear.

“Then why are you doing this? You made your record-you changed the past. Everyone knows. What else is left to do?”

His eyes were on fire. “To finish what I started twelve years ago.”

“What you started…?”

“When I came to your office that day, when I was going to…”

Then I knew, not just what he was going to do, but what he had always intended to do, and in a strange way it made sense.

“Don’t,” I said reflexively, but I knew there was nothing I could do, nothing that was going to make him change his mind. It was too late. It had always been too late.

He pointed the gun right at me. “It’s time for you both to go,”

he said, glancing up at the judge and then across to the prosecutor.

Loescher turned to go, but Bingham refused to leave. “It’s my courtroom,” he insisted.

Elliott seemed surprised. “Jeffries would already be out the door,”

he remarked. He looked at me to see if I agreed and then looked back at Bingham. Stretching his arm straight, until the gun was as close to my head as it would go, he asked him again to leave.

“I would be very grateful if you would go.” He said it with a kind of respect, the way he must once have thought every judge was supposed to be addressed.

Bingham, still reluctant, looked at me.

“It’s all right,” I assured him. “I’ll be fine. You better go.”

We were alone, and Elliott took a position in front of the bench, just below where Bingham had been sitting. Gesturing with the gun, he had me move to the far end of the counsel table, closest to the empty jury box and farthest from the double doors at the back. We stood like that, facing each other, and for what seemed like forever did not say anything at all. Everything in that quietest courtroom was now so quiet I could have sworn I could hear the thoughts that were passing through Elliott Winston’s mind.

“There’s no reason to do this, Elliott.”

He looked up at the clock. “Four forty-four. We’ll wait one more minute: four forty-five.”

I stood there, helpless, staring at the barrel of the revolver, and from somewhere deep in my subconscious recalled the story Anatoly Chicherin had told me about Dostoyevsky waiting in front of a firing squad, waiting for the order to fire, knowing with absolute certainty it would be the last word he would ever hear.

“Don’t do it,” I begged. “What happened twelve years ago was an accident. It wasn’t a crime.”

For an instant he looked like the Elliott Winston I had known at the beginning, the bright, eager young man with the wife he loved and the children he adored, his whole life in front of him, certain that nothing bad would ever happen.

He shook his head. “It wasn’t a crime?” He smiled. “It wasn’t what I intended.”

I heard the clock strike four forty-five. “Don’t,” I begged again.

The gunshot exploded in my ear, and then there was nothing but silence, silence everywhere. Then I heard it: the sound of feet running, rushing, and the sound of voices, a huge, animal roar, and then the sound of the door at the back of the courtroom behind me crashing open.

I looked up just in time to see Elliott, tranquil and unafraid, smile at me as he lowered the gun which he had just fired into the air.

“Don’t,” I begged again, turning toward the door as the police began their assault. No one heard me, but it would have done no good if they had. The sound of that single gunshot had been the signal for Elliott’s own execution. He lay there, at the base of the bench, his eyes open, blood trickling past that strange smile that was still on his mouth.

Two police officers tried to help me out of the courtroom.

“Elliott Winston didn’t come to my office to kill me,” I told them. “He came to kill himself. This time he let someone else do it for him.”

The two officers exchanged a glance. Neither one of them had any idea what I was talking about.