The Wrong Man

16

“Tom,” I said. “Tom, we have to talk about this.”

I’d spent the last ninety minutes with my client, trying in vain to get him to consider the list of witnesses we planned to call at trial. Thus far, I had obtained from him an in-depth recitation of the entire week of meals served by the Department of Corrections, including last night’s disappointing chili-disappointing, in his eyes, because it had onions, but probably disappointing in several other respects, too-and blow-by-blow descriptions of two Seinfeld episodes he’d watched.

Tom was wearing nothing but a T-shirt on top in a room that was set in the mid-sixties at best. It reminded me of what our shrink, Dr. Baraniq, had said, that Tom avoided any sensation of heat because it reminded him of the war.

“I don’t care about witnesses,” he said, motioning to my file. “I just want this over.”

Dr. Baraniq had also complained to me yesterday that he’d spent an entire day with Tom without gaining any insight whatsoever. My expert was going to be left with nothing more than a hypothesis of what might have happened.

“It’s going to be over soon, Tom. Whether you look at this witness list or not. Don’t you want it to be over in a way that we win?”

Tom did what he always did, avoiding eye contact and wiggling his fingers and licking his lips with violent tongue thrusts. The skin around his mouth was chapped so badly that he vaguely resembled Heath Ledger as the Joker.

“I’m not gonna win,” he said.

“We can win, Tom. Just-”

“Don’t wanna.”

“You don’t wanna what? You don’t wanna win?”

Tom looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Then he started laughing. First time I’d seen that emotion from him. Dr. Baraniq had said inappropriate emotional reactions were a symptom of disorganized schizophrenia.

“Win? Win? How’m I supposed to win?”

“You win,” I said, “by showing that you were suffering from your illness when you shot that woman.”

Tom shook his head furiously. “That’s not… that’s not… winning. No, no, no.” He got up from his seat and started walking toward the door.

“What is winning to you?” I called out. “Tom-”

“There’s no winning. I can’t win.” He stood facing the wall, his head shaking more quickly with each passing minute. “I can’t… It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t go away.”

“Hey,” I said.

Just like that, Tom dropped to the floor and began mumbling to himself. The words were inaudible but delivered with violence, with anguish.

“Tom,” I said.

But he wasn’t listening. He rocked back and forth on the floor, lost within himself.

A guard entered the room and looked at me with a question.

“Go ahead,” I said, and sighed. Tom was gone for now. He was probably gone for good.

I had to find a way to help him. But I couldn’t do it without him helping me first.

When I got back out to the registration desk, they handed me my cell phone. I saw three messages from the cell phone of Joel Lightner. When I got out of the elevator, I dialed him up.

“I found something,” he said to me, breathless. “Get ready to be happy.”