“The law assumes competence, it assumes rationality,” Waley was saying, “but it allows for tragic cases where rationality and competence do not exist. A criminal act requires a criminal actor, that is, someone who understood what the law required and made a conscious and knowing decision to break it. It is the burden of the prosecution to show beyond a reasonable doubt, ladies and gentlemen, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jonathan Rohbling, at the moment of committing the crime with which he is charged, did not lack substantial incapacity to comport his conduct to the requirements of law. In simple language, it is for you, the jury, to decide on the basis of the evidence you have heard whether there is a reasonable doubt that Jonathan Rohbling was in his right mind on the evening of April twentieth in Jane Hughes’s apartment. If you have such a doubt that because of his mental disease he did not know what he was doing, or that it was wrong, then you must find him not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Karp made a note. Not that great, Lionel, he thought, all those negative constructions are confusing. But he knew that in the course of his speech Waley would repeat that essential argument many times, with many illustrations. He would try to demonstrate that the testimony of his shrinks constituted reasonable doubt. If a trio of top psychiatrists testify the guy’s crazy, well, then …
The argument was standard and specious, and Waley was presenting it as well as Karp had ever heard it done. He wondered briefly if Waley really believed that Rohbling was insane under the law, and decided that he did. That was his art, his genius as a defense attorney: he could manipulate his beliefs to suit his case. He was stricken by the tragedy of J. Rohbling, madman, and if he could make the jury believe it along with him, he had won. Karp took notes, listened, waited. It would be some hours yet before his last licks.
“He must have tossed it in,” Marlene was saying, “from that window. He climbed up the ivy, your window was open, and he flipped it in. You’re on the west side of the house and the wind was from the east-it still is-”
“I thought the dog was supposed to stop anyone from getting in,” Edie Wooten protested. She had stopped crying, but her eyes were still moist and red. She was hunched in bed like a kid with the chicken pox, dabbing her face with tissues and then tearing them into shreds.
“Nobody got into the house, Edie, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. If he had tried to open the window enough to climb in, the dog would’ve heard him. As it was, I heard something in the night and so did Sweety. He must have tossed the rose and note and run off.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Same as before, only now I think we’ll put Sweety in your room at night.”
“You think he’ll come back?” She bit her lip, hands to face, classic terror.
“Of course. He was to. He’s obsessed. And we’ll get him.”
“So … what? I’m the bait?”
“Afraid so. Unless you want to spend your life running, this is it.”
Edie wailed and pulled the covers over her head.
Marlene left her then and walked around the house with Sweety. She checked the ground under Edie’s window, but found little disturbance. Robinson must have been particularly careful, or maybe he had sent Ginnie.
In the boathouse, she saw that Bonito, the big Chris-Craft, was in its berth, looking tatty, with lines tangled and bottles and articles of clothing strewn on its decks. There was a noise from below decks. Sweety gave his warning growl.
A young man Marlene did not recognize staggered out of the main cabin hatchway. He was wearing nothing but white tennis shorts and a gold razor blade on a chain around his neck. His face, tanned and handsome though it was, showed the signs of a bad hangover. He stared at Marlene and her dog blankly for a moment, then groaned and said, “Jesus shit! Where the hell is everybody?”
“Probably back at Ginnie’s house?” Marlene offered.
“Oh, Ginnie! She took off with Vince. Hell if I know where she is.” He blinked at her. “Do I know you?” “I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t fuck you last night, did I? No, it was somebody … you got anything on you? Uppers? No? Coke? Fuck! I am flicked up! Started in Danceteria, somebody said, Ginnie Woo’s on a fucking boat, now where am I? Some place on the Island. These aren’t my shorts.”
“Vince knows how to throw a party, hey?” said Marlene.
“Oh, fuck, lady! The guy is out of his mind. I say that, I’m fucking out of my mind and I’m my father compared to Vince. Last Thanksgiving? Twenty of us, private seven-two-seven, Marrakesh. Jesus shit! Four days. Fucking Arabs never saw anything like it.”
“On Thanksgiving I thought he would’ve taken you to Turkey, not Morocco.”
“Turkey? What the fuck’s in Turkey? Nah, forget it! Fuckin’ Turks’re real down on fun, man … Christ, you got any aspirin, Empirin, Darvon … shit! You don’t got shit.”
The man staggered back below. Marlene left the boathouse and went around to the dock. She wondered where Robinson and Ginnie had taken off to last night, and there was something else in what the jerk had said that disturbed her, but she couldn’t quite locate the itch. She went back to the house.
Waley’s closing statement took up the whole morning, and at the end of which only the most wideawake observer would have known who the victim was in the case. For Waley the “real” victim was clearly the defendant. Unloved. Abused. Insane. Jane Hughes might just as well have been hit by a runaway truck. Waley ended with an impassioned rendition of his original theme: don’t compound this tragedy by punishing a young man who needs medical help.
Karp went on in the afternoon. He fixed with his eye a juror in the first row, Mr. Domingo Corton, welding-machine operator, fifty-four, whom Karp had noticed nodding in agreement during Waley’s performance. He would speak like this directly to each juror in turn, giving each one that portion of his argument he thought would tell the most, based on his assessment of that juror’s personality and the extent to which he thought they favored either side.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this case is not about the sad life and personal troubles of Jonathan Rohbling. This case is about the brutal murder of Mrs. Jane Hughes, the beloved mother of five children, the grandmother of seven. You have heard a great deal of testimony from distinguished psychiatrists, which Mr. Waley has just ably recalled for you, as to the defendant’s mental state at various times in his life. This testimony may be interesting or not, but it is important that you realize that it is not the critical evidence in this case. Judge Peoples will instruct you that you must convict Mr. Rohbling of murder unless you find that owing to a mental disease or defect he was substantially incapable of comporting his conduct to the requirements of the law. That’s a fancy way of saying that you have to find that when he killed Jane Hughes, he did not know what he was doing or that it was wrong. How would he know this, what the defendant’s mind was like at the moment when he killed Mrs. Hughes? Well, with all due respect to the psychiatric profession, no test or method has ever been devised that will tell you what is in someone else’s head at a particular time. It is beyond the ability of science.”
Mr. Corton was now nodding well enough for Karp too. He shifted his gaze to Mrs. Bertha Finney, sixty-four, retired postal worker, the jury’s lone female black elder.
“So how do we tell? Members of the jury, this is no great mystery requiring years of graduate school, medical school. You know from your own lives that the major evidence indicating mental state is behavior-facial expression, speech, both tone and content, and action. We don’t need a psychiatrist to tell us if a loved one is upset or our boss is angry. Human society depends on our native ability to determine what is going on inside a person from the way they behave. Now, sure, there are frauds, there are cheats, there are con men in the world, but these people also depend on our ability to read mental states from behavior-they are skilled at imitating such behavior so as to give us the wrong idea of their sincerity.”