“I’m no hero, Calvin.”
“You saved a man’s life.”
“Who?” This was the last thing I wanted to talk about. “Basque? He deserved to die. Sikora deserved to live. How does that make me a hero?”
Calvin thought for a moment. He chose not to reply, and I felt his silence to be some sort of refutation.
“I was proud of you today,” he said at last. “Proud to have been your teacher.”
His words sounded conclusive, as if he were wrapping up one of his lectures rather than simply commenting about the day. It made me uneasy. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
Once again he chose not to reply, which was uncharacteristic of him. Now, he definitely had my attention.
A dump truck in front of us spit up a plume of sour exhaust.
Calvin pulled into the left lane to pass.
Silence stretched between us, and finally, when I realized he wasn’t going to answer my question, I tried to guess what he’d been hoping to talk to me about. “Was there something I said on the stand that…” I searched for the right word. “That you felt was inaccurate or unrepresentative of-”
He swept his hand through the air dismissively. “Don’t be ridiculous, my boy. Of course not. Nothing like that.” I waited for him to continue, but once again I received only silence.
I’d never met anyone who chose his words more carefully or more precisely than Dr. Calvin Werjonic, but now he was being evasive. I didn’t want to pressure him, but I did want to find out what was going on.
“Patrick, governments daily break international laws and treaties to look after their nation’s best interests. And this is necessary because laws are established to serve something greater than themselves.”
“Justice,” I said.
“Yes.”
I considered his words in light of the day’s events. “But Calvin. Justice is a matter for the courts to decide.”
“Yes, yes, of course. The right answer. The textbook answer.”
I hadn’t noticed earlier, but now in the cloud-darkened day, I saw that he looked frail and tired, like a mighty cliff finally eroding with time. “But not your answer?”
“The quest for justice leads not to an answer but to a dilemma: how far is one willing to go to see it carried out?” Calvin merged back into the right lane.
I was beginning to see how his words might be related to the trial. I hoped I was wrong. “Don’t we vow to tell ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’? Justice isn’t served when truth is censored.”
“Yes, precisely.”
Another surprising answer. “But?”
“But have you noticed that the attorneys for both the prosecution and the defense are not required to take the same oath? Rather than being bound to tell the whole truth, they are, I dare say, expected not to. Their legal obligation is to tell only the version of truth that supports their case. Only the witnesses, not the lawyers, have to vow to tell the whole truth. And yet, as you just noted a moment ago, justice is not served when truth is censored.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Thick traffic closed in on us. Rush hour.
“We’ve lost sight of the goal, Patrick. Our justice system is concerned more with prosecutions and acquittals than it is with either truth or justice. You know it’s true. It’s just that we’re reticent to admit it.”
He was right on both counts: it was true, and I didn’t like admitting it. Both the prosecution and the defense stick to the evidence and witnesses that support their case. If they discover evidence that would help the other side, they don’t submit it to the trial-even if it might mean keeping an innocent man from going to prison or making sure a brutal killer gets locked away. That’s what happens when a legal system values individual rights above the search for truth or the administration of justice.
Calvin went on, “But seeing justice done, isn’t that why we entered this field in the first place? Isn’t that more important than winning a case?”
“You’re not justifying-”
A tired sigh. “I’m seventy-six years old, my boy. I don’t have time left to either justify or condemn, only to reason and, while I’m able, to act.”
It felt strange hearing Calvin say these things. Over the years, I’d questioned aspects of the judicial system myself but had never articulated my misgivings to anyone.
“Yes,” I said, returning to his question. “That’s why I entered this field.”
We were nearing the exit for O’Hare airport, and I sensed that we hadn’t yet made it to the crux of our conversation. “Calvin, at the courthouse you said you wanted to ask me a question.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Now, please understand that I mean no disrespect whatsoever when I make reference to your stepdaughter in my hypothetical example.”
“Go ahead.”
“Imagine that a man is on trial for first degree sexual assault. You are called in as a witness and you know that he is guilty and that your testimony will make the difference in the verdict.”
I began to feel a little uneasy. “All right.”
“However, the evidence is not sufficient for a conviction and you know that if you relate only the facts of the case, he will be acquitted and will sexually assault Tessa, or perhaps another girl her age. However, if you shade the truth in your testimony toward his guilt, he will be convicted. What would you do?”
His hypothetical situation left me very little wiggle room.
“Assuming my testimony was the only deciding factor.” I felt my throat tighten. “I would lie to protect her.” Finally, like a lens slowly coming into focus, I realized what Calvin was saying and how it related to the events earlier in the day.
“Yes.” He nodded gently. “Because protecting the innocent matters more than anything else.”
He turned his head and gazed at me. Despite his age, his eyes were as piercingly observant and incisive as ever, and this time he cut straight to the point. “Do you believe Richard Basque is guilty of those murders?”
There was no question in my mind. “Yes, he is. And probably more that we don’t know about.”
“I’ve reviewed the case, as you know. And I am convinced of it as well.”
We came to the airport exit. Calvin took it.
A thought.
No, it couldn’t be.
But maybe it was.
“Calvin, you loaded the gun, didn’t you?”
He shook his head. “Sorry to disappoint you. There must be someone else out there thinking the same things as I am.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have believed him, but I did. After all, someone else had killed Heather and Chris and had left the taunting message in the mine. So then, Calvin’s comments could mean only one thing: “You don’t think I should have stopped Sikora.”
He was quick with a reply. “No, no. I’m not questioning anything you did. I think you did the noble thing, the heroic thing.”
“But not the right thing?”
“If you hadn’t reacted as swiftly as you did, two people would be dead instead of one. They would not have taken Mr. Sikora alive, you know that.”
I noticed he hadn’t answered my question. “But if you’re not questioning what I did, what are you doing?”
“Explaining myself.”
He stopped the car in front of Terminal 1.
“What are you talking about?”
Calvin let the car idle. “For more than five decades I have told the truth and then watched as people whom I knew to be killers and rapists and pedophiles were set free.” His fingers shook slightly. He laid them on the steering wheel, probably so that I wouldn’t notice. But I did.
“And they molested again,” he said. “They raped again, they murdered again. So many lives have been destroyed because I trusted that if I related the facts, justice would be carried out. But it wasn’t. And now, the suffering of the innocent weighs heavily upon my conscience.”
He looked at me, a gray fire burning in his eyes, a single terrible teardrop trailing down his cheek. “Perhaps I could have done more to help them.”