I dial Rainey’s number.
“This’ll take her mind off her self,” I say, hoping she won’t go through the roof. When she answers, I say, unable to keep a smile off my face, “I’ve got a little favor to ask you….”
When I get off the phone with Rainey (as I suspected, she had no problems 1 didn’t quite tell her everything), Sarah is slamming doors all over the house. “You’re horrible!” she screams at me when I track her down in her room. “All you do is manipulate people just so you can win a case! You don’t care what happens to the others just as long as you get your client off!”
I stand under her doorway watching her glower at me from her bed where she is seated, her knees drawn up under her chin like two iron bars. Beside her, Woogie cowers as if this lecture were intended for him.
“That’s what I’m paid to do,” I say, already beginning to worry that Charlene is being followed. Rainey is supposed to call me the moment she gets there.
Like a child throwing a tantrum, Sarah kicks out angrily at me as I start to sit down beside her.
“You’re not paid to use people, and that’s what you’re doing and don’t pretend you aren’t! You’re using this woman; you’re using Rainey!
You’d use me if you thought it would help!”
I lean against her chest of drawers. Ugly beyond belief (it looks like a project from high school shop with its knobs and handles of different sizes and uneven brown stain), it was mine when I was growing up in eastern Arkansas, and I can’t seem to throw it out.
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say automatically, but I wonder. This case has begun to seem like a war in which no prisoners will be taken.
“I’m sorry, Sarah. The dirty work usually gets done at the office.”
She throws a pillow at me and begins to cry.
“No, you’re not! You like this! You should have seen your face when you called Rainey! You get off on it!”
I lay her pillow beside her and retreat from her room to wait alone in the kitchen for Rainey’s call. I sit down and begin to go over my questions for my Mississippi expert.
There is no sense in lying to her. A part of me loves this crap. In thirty minutes the phone rings.
“She made it,” Rainey says, a little breathless.
“Gideon, she’s just a child!” “I know,” I say, a little breathless, too. I want absolution, but now is not the time to ask for it. Maybe I’m right though.
Rainey hasn’t mentioned her lump tonight.
“Can you see that she gets down to the courthouse tomorrow morning?” I ask.
Rainey sighs.
“I guess,” she says.
After a few minutes I get off the phone but decide not to chew this bone with my daughter any longer tonight. Sarah will forgive me. She always does.
The morning, at least, starts out all right. Though he is clearly not happy about it, Andy has decided to attend the rest of his trial. Before I went to bed, I had tried to call him, but either he wasn’t answering or Morris had taken him out for his last night on the town. Dressed defiantly in his Moby Dick suit, he glares at me as we enter the courtroom as if he is about to testify against me at an ethics hearing to revoke my license.
Morris, who looks as if he spent the night drinking to blot out the nightmare he is having to pay for, whispers across me to his brother, “You keep looking this mean, and there won’t be enough left of you for a barbecue sandwich.”
Having already notified the judge that my client has decided to play the game by its normal rules, I am content to let Morris scold his brother, since I’m afraid Andy will change his mind if I start in on him. Andy responds with a curt nod, and I will be satisfied if we can get through the rest of the trial without his coming out of his chair at me. I would pay part of my fee to know what finally changed his mind.
The rest of Jill’s witnesses roll by quickly. Dr. Beavers, the emergency-room GP on duty who pronounced Pam dead, substantially repeats his testimony from the probably cause hearing. Stubbornly, on crossexamination, he won’t admit that he can’t say to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Pam’s death was caused by the cattle prod.
“Everything I know about this situation convinces me she died as a result of the electric shock,” he says smugly as though he were a world-famous pathologist instead of a small-town primary care physician.
“For all you know, she could have had a heart attack unrelated to the electric shock since there was no autopsy, isn’t that correct?” I ask, knowing the question is pointless. It’s not as if the jury doesn’t have any common sense.
“It doesn’t seem like much of a possibility to me,” Dr.
Beavers says, his tone implying that I have asked him a question similar to one about the chances of my being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“But I suppose it could have happened.”
Jill’s last witness is David Spath. If I had any lingering hopes that Andy’s former administrator would suddenly come forward and shoulder some of the responsibility for what happened to Pam, they are smashed thirty seconds into his testimony. Spath, whose English accent delights the jury, must be fighting to save his job, because he acts as if Andy were a rogue elephant who had totally disregarded written policies and procedures that might well have been part of the Ten Commandments. His bird wing of a mustache almost napping with indignation, Spath turns on Andy with the fury of a petty tyrant. If he knew Andy was going to try shock, he will take the secret to his grave.
On crossexamination, I can’t even get Spath to admit that Andy cared about the persons he was supposed to be helping.
“The way a true professional shows his concern,” Spath says in reply to a question, “is by the way he works with his staff on the most difficult cases. I can’t stress enough that highly aversive procedures are never used without exhaustive debate first. In every institution I’ve worked in that has been the rule, and Dr. Chapman was well aware of that.”
They teach you in the trial advocacy course in law school to end any crossexamination with at least some concession, but Spath is so adversarial and difficult to shut up after a while I sit down abruptly, hoping the jury will realize Spath wouldn’t publicly say anything good about Andy even if he had been his own father.
“Can you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if you hired Dr. Chapman?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all. Your Honor,” I say, taming my back on him.
With Spath through, Jill rests her case. After the briefest of recesses in chamber Judge Tamower, pleasant again now that Andy is acting the part of a typical defendant, perfunctorily denies my motion for a directed verdict, and immediately we begin Andy’s defense.
As I have feared, my Mississippi expert is a disaster, since he comes across in person like a former Nazi labor camp guard. Shock is simply not a technique easily justified by even the most distinguished-sounding of experts, and Goza, talking out the side of the mouth, begins to sound more like Jill’s witness than my own. After his direct testimony in which he said in his crablike fashion that Andy’s use of shock was appropriate, Jill gets Goza to admit on crossexamination that he has not even read of a cattle prod being used on a person in at least fifteen years. He admits his own research has just been published in a journal that is so obscure it hasn’t even been abstracted. Human Rights Committees, he concedes, his lips barely moving, are routinely consulted before decisions about procedures like shock are used.
When Goza doggedly defends Andy’s decision, Jill, dressed in a dark blue suit today instead of a black dress, asks, “Dr. Goza, would you agree that you’re an expert on the amount of pain required to stop a child from hurting herself?”
Forced to answer whether he is the Dr. Joseph Mengele of the Nazi death camps, Goza stared at Jill with the squint of a man who has just been released from a long stretch in prison.
“I’m a psychologist,” he says, blinking rapidly, surely knowing he has been mortally wounded by this question