Waley’s cross-examination was brief. One of the signs of a great cross-examiner is knowing when not to do it, as here. Perlsteiner was a strong witness and a sympathetic one. To try to grind him down would invite unwanted comparisons with the Gestapo. So Waley took only a few artistic cuts. Dr. P. was how old? Seventy-four. Not on the American Board of Psychiatry? Not a member of the New York Psychiatric Institute? No promotions in the past fifteen years? Few publications? Why was that, Doctor? Waley drew a brief sketch of a distinguished doctor who might have been great once but was clearly past it, out of step with modern psychiatry. Karp thought it was the right move for Waley; it was what he himself would have done. How much the jury would discount Perlsteiner’s testimony and how much they would rely on the presence, wit, and character of the dueling shamans, a contest in which Karp thought Perlsteiner was unbeatable, was at present unknown, but Karp thought, from his observation of the jurors, that the good guys had picked up a few points. Perlsteiner stepped off the stand. The evidentiary phase of People v. Rohbling was finished.
Karp now required a police escort to carry him home. A blue-and-white preceded his usual unmarked car to the Crosby Street loft, and the two cops in it made a lane through the pickets and news crews to the door of the newly installed elevator. He summoned it with a key and rode up, carrying the usual take-out dinner, tonight a bucket o’chicken.
In the loft, gloom prevailed. No one had been in or out for days. The twins were cranky. Zak had a rash, Zik some undefined ailment inclining him to clingy weeping. Posie was keeping them minimally cleaned and fed, but the rest of the loft was starting to resemble the East Village crash pad that was her natural habitat. A burnt pot sat on the stove, and the kitchen was full of its rank scent. Lucy was glum. Her efforts to maintain some vestige of normal home life-setting the table, making a crude salad-broke Karp’s heart.
“Is this going to be over soon, Daddy?” she said in a small voice. She had eaten enough to maintain a starling, and pushed her plate away.
“Yeah, real soon, baby,” he said. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“I miss Mommy.”
“Me too.”
She sighed. “I need a break. This is just like jail.”
Marlene came back from the pool and showered and washed her hair, although the soap did not reach where she really felt dirty. She put on a thick terry-cloth robe she found hanging on a hook, wrapped a towel around her head, put zoris on her feet, grabbed her straw bag, and went downstairs.
She sat in an Adirondack chair on the lawn in front of the house. She lit a cigarette, but crushed it after a few puffs. She felt full enough of toxins. The dog came trotting out from the back of the house, and came up to her and placed his massive head on her lap, looking up at her worshipfully. Marlene stroked the dog’s head and closed her eyes. She tried to remember St. Teresa’s famous chapter on resistance to evil, but the words of the saint were useless to her, too far away in time and situation. Marlene was not a contemplative nun. She wished devoutly for a lap on which she could place her own head and be stroked and told that everything was all right. She missed her family. She wept briefly, and then let her mind go empty. Bees buzzed, sparrows twittered in the rafters, a gull called, the wind came soughing through the grass and the pines off the shining Sound. In the house, the cello began to play, something elegant, classical, full of confidence in the ultimate order of the universe, Haydn perhaps, or Boccherini. Music, nature, her peculiar brand of religion: these performed their usual blessings. Marlene took the towel from her head and let the breeze dry her hair. She slept for little over an hour.
Later, dressed, she ran up and down the rough beach with Sweety, until she was tired and hungry. Meals at the big house were taken, democratically and en famille, in the huge tiled kitchen with the Marneys. Tonight: tomato soup, crab salad, and cold asparagus, ice cream-WASPy, bland, but nourishing food. Neither Marlene nor Edie had much to say, and table talk was dominated by domestic trivia and commentary on food and weather. During the meal they heard the sound of a heavy engine starting up away in the direction of the boathouse.
“That’ll be Ginnie and her friends with Bonito,” said Marney. “She told me to get it ready. Some kind of party. Said she’d be gone most of the night and not to lock the boathouse.”
Marlene recalled that Bonito was the big yacht and became conscious of a mild relaxation around the table, which she shared, provisionally, if she assumed Robinson was off the island for the night. Conversation became lighter, Marlene trotted out some horror stories from her speckled past that seemed amusing now, and Edie described the foibles of a number of famous people. After dinner, Edie spent a good hour on the phone, speaking with her agent and people in various world capitals. Marlene phoned home and spoke to Posie and Lucy. Daddy was taking a nap, should we wake him up? No, honey, let him sleep. I’m coming out to see you, okay, Mom? Sure, honey, pretty soon.
Marlene and Edie chatted after dinner, both politely avoiding the big subject. Marlene mentioned Lucy and how much the child wished to see a house on an island, and Edie extended an invitation, at some vague date in the future, when the current unpleasantness had (presumably) been resolved. At ten-thirty, Edie went off to bed. Marlene prowled around the immediate grounds with Sweety and found all quiet.
She woke from her usual light sleep in the small hours to a creaking, scraping sound. Steps? She waited, but there were no further noises. She could hear the dog snuffling and pacing the hallway, as she knew he did several times in the night. He was clearly not concerned, and therefore there was no one in the house who should not be. She drifted back to sleep.
Just after dawn she was jerked awake by a shrill cry. She raced into Edie Wooten’s bedroom, where she found her client, sitting in bed, her face white as the lined counterpane, staring at the foot of the bed, on which lay a single dark red rose. The note attached to it read, “Soon.”
TWENTY-ONE
Karp listened to Lionel Waley’s closing statement for the defense in Rohbling rather as a great operatic tenor might listen to another one reaching for the high note and hitting it just right-that is, with a mixture of admiration and bile. The State of New York favors those who represent it by providing that the closing arguments for the defense precede those of the prosecution, and there is no rebuttal allowed. Karp would have the last word. Waley had therefore not only to make his own argument but to predict what language Karp would use and discount it in advance. Which he was doing, or trying to. Karp took notes, and adjusted in his impossibly crowded brain the phrases and sequence of presentation of his own closing so as to counter these preemptive strikes. Waley was saying, in effect, “The prosecution will say blah-blah, but you know that wah-wah is true.” Karp would have to do the opposite, but retrospectively. This is one reason why the closing arguments in major criminal trials, although written-out and outlined, are not memorized speeches but are given extempore. Another is that as he speaks, the lawyer is reading the jury, seeing what cuts sharply, what moves the listening faces, and what does not.
Waley was expatiating on the law as it applied to the case and interpreting, in a way favorable to his client’s cause, the charge that the judge would give to the jury when the closings were finished. He could do this because jury instructions in criminal trials are almost entirely boiler-plate exercises, pinched by actual statute and acres of precedents, besides which, Judge Peoples’ instructions were notable for balance and fairness.