Emma thought of it as drab.
Matthew’s partner thought of it as tacky.
Matthew wondered if they’d ever exchanged views.
“The trial went on for three weeks,” Emma was telling him. “We’ve got 1,260 pages of transcript here, are you sure you want to read them all?”
“If it’s no trouble,” Matthew said.
“Long as you carry ’em over to the desk, it makes no difference to me,” she said.
Emma was a stout woman with grey hair and a faint limp. She’d had the limp ever since Matthew had known her. He supposed it was from a childhood injury. Or perhaps undetected polio; he remembered with something like surprise that polio had once been the scourge of the earth. He followed her between rows and rows of filing cabinets marked in a system only Emma herself could fathom. The cabinets were of the old oaken style, heavy, sturdy-looking; he remembered with additional mild surprise that once upon a time many things had been fashioned of wood rather than metal or plastic. It goes by too fast, he thought. Where was the kid with hair in his eyes who played sandlot baseball in Chicago, Illinois? Where were the sandlots anymore?
“Transcript’d be in the People Versus section,” Emma said. “Have you got the names of them three? They were tried together, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” Matthew said.
The defense team, of course, had tried to obtain separate trials, sever each defendant out, present each individually as a confused young man in ill-fitting clothes, a poor put-upon immigrant, sitting at the defense table with his eyes wide in bewilderment. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you, could this shy, unassuming creature possibly have committed rape? Skye Bannister had prevailed. The three had been tried together. But the state had lost the case anyway.
“Ngo Long Khai,” Matthew said, reading from the slip of paper in his hand. “Dang Van…”
“Hold it, hold it,” Emma said. “Let me see that, willya, please?”
He handed her the slip of paper. She studied it in consternation, shaking her head all the while, and then limped down the aisle between the rows of cabinets. “Let’s try the Ho one,” she said. “I have a feeling I filed it under the Ho.”
Matthew could only imagine why.
But sure enough, she found the transcript filed under Ho Dao Bat, People vs. and flagged for reference to Ngo Long Khai and Dang Van Con, co-defendants.
“Can’t even lift it,” she said.
An exaggeration, even if it was a thick file — or rather files, in that the 1,200 some-odd pages of transcript had been separated into four more easily handlable bundles, each packaged between pale blue, stiff board binders secured with brass paper fasteners. Matthew took the binders out of the drawer one at a time, stacking them on top of the cabinet, and then closed the drawer and hoisted the stack off into his hands and his arms.
“Thank you, Emma,” he said.
“Call me when you’re done, okay?” Emma said. “I’ve got to sign ‘em back in.”
He followed her down the aisle. She snapped out the fluorescent lights behind them. The old oaken cabinets vanished in a wink, as if dismissed again to a remote and silent past. Ahead was a room with long windows and a high, beamed ceiling, another throwback to the turn of the century, when the courthouse was built. A long oaken table stood on stout, round legs. A furled American flag was in one corner of the room. A framed picture of George Washington was on the wall beside it. Early-afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows, burnishing the tabletop’s golden finish. Dust motes lazily climbed the slanting shafts of sunlight. The room was utterly still. Matthew suddenly remembered why he’d become a lawyer.
Alone, he sat at the table and opened the first of the binders.
It is four days before Christmas.
The weather here in Calusa, Florida, is wonderful for this time of year. No one can complain about temperatures that hover in the mid-seventies during the daytime and then drop to a good bedtime low of fifty-two or — three. No need for air conditioning, you simply throw open the windows and let the prevailing winds blow right on through. During the day, the sun smiles down beneficently, and Calusa’s miles and miles of white sand beaches are littered with the bodies of toasting tourists, the waters of the Gulf sprinkled with bobbing heads. Not a single native is in the water; to Floridians, this is the winter and only madmen go swimming in December.
The downtown streets, the parking lots of the malls, are all hung with Christmas decorations that seem out of place here in this climate. What is Santa Claus doing on a sleigh down here where there has never been snow? Why are there antlered reindeer in a climate better suited to alligators? Why doesn’t Frosty the Snowman melt?
But the neo-Floridians who have migrated from distant places north perhaps still remember the bite of a clear December day with a hint of snow in the air, and those who were born and bred here have heard tall tales of fabulous Christmas blizzards, the family snowed in while the turkey roasts and the fire crackles on the grate, and suddenly at the door, arriving with his arms laden with gifts… “Son! We knew you’d make it! Merry Christmas!”
And so there is the same frantic shopping mania here in the subtropical Southland as there is away up north in frigid Eagle Lake, Maine. So what if the Christmas trees are sprayed white? So what if the shoppers are wearing shorts and T-shirts? In only four days, it will be Christmas morning. And peace on earth will come to men of good will.
Women, too.
Maybe.
There will be no peace on earth for Jessica Leeds tonight.
Tonight, Jessica Leeds will be raped.
“The mall closed at ten o’clock. I…”
A transcript consists of cold type, the words of questioner and witness reduced to something less than conversation, a dialogue lacking inflection or nuance. Matthew can only guess at the fury underlining Jessica Leeds’s testimony, the anger she is controlling.
She describes a Chinese restaurant adjacent to the mall.
Cold type.
The restaurant is still open at ten… a little after ten, actually, by the time she reaches the car. She has parked it behind the restaurant, which is shaped like a pagoda, and which in fact is named The Pagoda. The car is an expensive one, and this is four days before Christmas. With all the traffic in the mall’s lot a dented fender is a distinct possibility, and so she has chosen this deserted spot behind The Pagoda, alongside a low fence beyond which is undeveloped scrub land. As she walks toward the restaurant, the mall’s parking lot is rapidly emptying of automobiles, except for those parked row after row outside the movie-theater complex at the far end. It is ten minutes past ten, she supposes, when she places in the trunk of her Maserati the several Christmas gifts she’s bought.
There are lights here behind the Chinese restaurant. It is not what anyone would call brightly lighted, but there is illumination enough to provide a sense of security. And besides, there’s a moon. Not quite full, just on the wane. Anyway, it is only a little after ten, this is not the dead of night, this is not a town where a woman alone needs to be afraid of unlocking the door of her automobile in an adequately lighted parking space behind a brilliantly lighted restaurant on a moonlit Thursday night four days before Christmas. Besides, there are three men standing behind the restaurant, smoking. All of them in shirtsleeves. Wearing long white aprons. Restaurant help. She unlocks the door of the car, closes and locks it behind her, turns on the lights, starts the engine, and is backing away from the low fence when she realizes she has a flat tire.