The final case, p.2
The Final Case, page 2
He was in the habit, and had been for years, of buying a pint of milk, a cup of coffee, and a banana around ten, and then eating breakfast at a table in an underground concourse.
For now, though, he shut his breakfast supply drawer, slid his reading glasses from their case, sat down, and started paying bills. He wrote checks, put stamps on envelopes, licked and sealed envelopes shut, returned his pen to its place against his shirt pocket protector, got up, and strode to a cabinet. “I don’t want to be in your way,” I said. “You have work to do.”
“No,” said my father. “I don’t have work to do. I haven’t really had work to do in years. Every once in a while something comes in, but, basically, I just mill around here.”
He smiled as if bemused by his geriatric absurdity. There were three windows in his office, two with louvered blinds shut, but through the third I could see that it was getting light outside. “What I do,” my father confessed, while standing by his file vaults, “is look at the newspaper or read a book.”
He filed his invoices, returned to his desk, and sat down across from me breezily, in his element. “From 1958 until about 1998,” he said, “I had anywhere from thirty to forty cases going all the time, but since then, it’s tailed off, which is understandable, because I’m almost eighty-four.” He shook his head. “In years past,” he said, “I never had the kind of time I have now. In years past, I had not just dozens of misdemeanor cases on any given day but also felonies, homicides, rapes, kidnappings—serious matters, life-and-death matters, cases where people could get very long sentences. I don’t want it to be like that anymore, I don’t want to be as busy as I used to be, but I wish I was a little bit busier than I am right now, because I’d like to have a justification for coming here every day.”
My father reclined and put his thumbs through his suspenders. He had long combed his hair straight back so that it lay in regularly spaced rows over the top of his head, but at the moment a single lock, shiny with Vitalis, lay curled incidentally across one temple. “What I’d like,” he said, “if it isn’t asking too much, is to go on for as long as possible working. I’ve always said that when the time comes I’d like to drop dead in the middle of a closing speech to a jury, but the odds are against that. It probably won’t happen. No, one of these days, my verdict will come in, and then I’ll be sentenced to whatever I’m sentenced to.”
His phone rang. He had its volume set at piercing. He looked at it, then at me, then at his watch, and said, “Well, well, well. Just a minute.”
* * *
—
My father, after picking up his receiver, swiveled his desk chair toward his windows, the better to speak privately, while I sat looking at a framed photograph on his desk—one I’d given him on his seventy-fifth birthday—of the two of us in Bunker Tower on Mount Cheaha, the highest point in Alabama. We’d gone to Alabama because I’d been invited to read from one of my books in Birmingham and had asked him to come along, and for the most part we’d floated around in a rental car, doing things that tourists do. At the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, for example, we’d followed a group of children from exhibit to exhibit. It was one thing to learn more about Rosa Parks, Brown v. Board of Education, bus boycotts, and lunch-counter sit-ins, another to do it surrounded by seventy fourth-graders. Eventually, the procession of exhibits led to a wide-screen video of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Laid out before my father, me, and the tightly bunched children—who’d mostly gone silent—was the deep panorama of the National Mall, with its mass of fervent listeners and long, shimmering pool. “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” pronounced King, and when I turned toward my father he whispered, “In some ways, but not entirely.”
My father and I, while in Birmingham, had also attended a soirée at the home of a couple introduced to us, in their foyer, as supporters of the reading series that had brought me to Alabama. I thanked them. We shook hands. Then they told us where the bar was. My father and I got drinks. As soon as we had them, our host clinked his glass with a spoon until the room fell silent, said words of welcome, pointed toward me, called me “our writer of the hour,” thanked me and my father for “coming down here all the way from Seattle, Washington,” proposed a toast to us—which was undertaken by the gathering—and then that part of things was over and we milled. There were a lot of rooms in the house, all well appointed. This soirée had been cobbled together out of the benefactors and contributors who, like our hosts, made an author reading series possible, and so in attendance there were benefactors, contributors, reading-series committee members, faculty and students from the creative-writing program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a university administrator, a municipal arts administrator, a novelist not associated with the university, and a couple who owned a bookstore where, that afternoon, I’d signed stock, as it’s said. I was told that some version of this soirée was held three times yearly in rotating homes so that people could meet and greet writers from out of town, told this by a man in a cummerbund and bow tie who cornered my father and me by a fireplace, aided by a woman with a gamine charm—auburn lipstick, lustrous pageboy—both aglow, casual, and jaunty in a way bordering on reckless. They introduced themselves as Loren and Lauren, with Lauren adding that, for thirteen years—the span of their marriage—they’d been explaining to people just met the difference in spelling between “Loren” and “Lauren,” and that they were used to amusement about it. “Exactly right,” Loren said. Loren and Lauren, he explained, almost always elicited a “What?” or a “Come again?” or a “Maybe one of you should have a nickname.” “But we don’t use nicknames,” he said, “because, as it turns out, ‘Loren and Lauren’ is a great conversation starter!”
They laughed. My father swirled his whiskey-and-water. One thing about him: for as long as I’d been in a position to notice, I’d noticed that he spurned the body language of male contest, as well as its forms of utterance and expression; he might joust a little, offering up light banter and repartee, but his purpose was always accord. My father was disarming. There were few chinks in his armor of self-effacement. Unassuming, devoid of pretension, he challenged you not to like him; in his bargain-basement suits and clip-on ties, and with his silver hair laid back across his pate in combed striations, he charmed all comers. He put women at ease because—ironically—women made him nervous; in their presence he was assiduously on guard against flirtation; he would do or say nothing that might be construed as interest in the fact that they were female. Men, too, were lulled by someone with so little alpha-desperation. My father didn’t seem in the game to win it, though at the same time he didn’t exactly want to be on your team; what he’d like to do, if you would let him, is graze without calling attention to the fact. That called for deflection. And so, with a hand in his pocket and a whiskey-and-water, my father carefully orchestrated his badinage with an eye on escaping unfriendly judgment. Maybe he felt he’d been too earnest; that could be balanced with a little measured cynicism. Maybe he’d gone too far at your expense; that could be fixed with self-deprecation. My father’s gibes at his interlocutors sounded genial—he meant to say that you and he were of a piece, that he shared and understood your discomfiture, that he invited you to insult so long as it was amiable, that his intimacy extended its embrace in your direction, and that irony and wit have a place in things, though modestly. His barbs weren’t poisonous—their purpose was to bring you to the ground uninjured. Too much dignity was as bad as too little, and maybe had less utility.
“The onerous burden of names you describe,” my father said now to Loren and Lauren, “that’s something I know about, because my parents gave me a strange name, Royal. That’s right, Royal. Over and over, I get people saying, ‘What? I never heard that name before. How did you get a name like Royal?’ Which is a question I asked my parents, too. Did I ever get a decent answer? Not really. They claimed they’d pulled it out of a hat. My mother was a Dust Bowler from North Dakota who got waylaid in Seattle when she ran into my father. My father was an able-bodied seaman, then a short-order cook, then an elevator man, and then he took a course in elevator repair and maintenance and got licensed and went to work for Otis. If you ask me, my parents had aspirations. They wanted me to be a big deal, and my brother, too, because they didn’t have much money, so they named me Royal and they named my brother Thorndike, thinking we’d come off upper-class and aristocratic. That’s just how it is sometimes, although I guess, if you wanted to, you could legally change your name, in your case from Lauren to Laurie maybe, which would solve the problem, but then you wouldn’t have your conversation starter. I’ve thought of a name change every time some guy says to me, ‘Your name’s Royal? Royal what? Royal pain in the ass?’ ”
After he hung up his telephone receiver, my father told me what the call was about. He’d put his name on a list of lawyers willing to take cases free of charge if it developed that all the public defenders were busy, and now someone wanted him. “And here I was just telling you I had no work,” he added. “It’s serendipity.”
The call was from the Public Defender’s Office in Skagit County, north of Seattle. That office had been contacted by a woman in the Skagit County Jail who needed an attorney. The afternoon before, she and her husband had been arrested on homicide charges. Her husband had gotten the last public defender the county could find. “I promised I’d go up there right away and have a talk with this lady,” my father said. “Which means—and I’ll get the gas—could you give me a ride?”
I said, “Sure,” rose, and pulled my car keys from my pocket. My father nodded, then opened his cereal drawer and retrieved his bran flakes, a paper bowl, and a plastic spoon. He plucked his raincoat from the seat back he’d thrown it over, and we walked down the hall single file, he in front and I behind.
* * *
—
I drove toward Skagit County. The city traffic waned, and we came down onto the Skagit River floodplain. I was familiar with this area, chiefly because I’d lived nearby my whole life, and so, for one reason or another, had been there before. It was quiet country, rural and serene, but it made the news now and then because the Skagit River breached its banks periodically, cutting off roads and rising into houses. Dikes and levees loomed at the edges of fields, and behind these were barns, milking parlors, bunker silos, loafing sheds, tall poplar windbreaks, and homes on elevated foundations. The ground here often looked black and wet, as if freshly exposed by receding water.
When it wasn’t flooded, Skagit County felt serene. The most notable event of the past few years was the collapse of the I-5 freeway bridge in 2013. A truck with an oversize load hit a sway strut, the trusses gave way, the support members failed, and the deck and superstructure fell into the river. Otherwise, Skagit County was bucolic, and well known in western Washington for its miles of spring tulip fields.
I left the interstate at Mount Vernon, the county seat, which sits beside a river bend behind a flood wall. It’s a bit of bad luck, or a cruel piece of planning, that I-5 was situated here so close to the river that downtown Mount Vernon is squeezed between the two. The freeway also looms like a wall between the town’s business core and most of its residential neighborhoods, so that they seem unrelated. Finally, in another example of curious town planning, a railway moves freight through Mount Vernon so regularly that it’s common to have to wait downtown for long trains, as my father and I did on Kincaid Street.
The jail was conveniently across from the courthouse, in a building easy to imagine as a jail—impregnable, with the merest of windows. It was windy in Mount Vernon, but not raining at the moment. A density of gray cloud streamed eastward steadily.
We made a plan. My father would talk to his potential client. I would walk around Mount Vernon, return to my car, and wait inside of it until he was ready to go to the nearest grocery store, buy milk and a banana, and eat his cereal. We split up then without ado, and I walked westward aimlessly. The river ran wide, I saw, above the town’s flood wall. The pavements were well swept, and the flowers in the municipal planter barrels well tended. Mount Vernon felt, to me, quiet, charmed, and modest. I soon discerned, though, that there was an old town and a new. A diner and a grocery store were remnants of the old. A coffee lounge, more than one bistro, more than one brewpub, and a food co-op with an extensive salad bar were all evidence of change. Over everything rose the three-story courthouse, which I passed on my return to the jail parking lot. Outside of it, a cannon sat mounted between wooden carriage wheels, long barrel facing south. There was no plaque or placard that I could find explaining its provenance or purpose.
I sat in my car, listening to the radio, until my father returned from the jail. “Sad case,” he said. “Very sad.”
I drove to the Red Apple. This is the grocery store I mentioned earlier as a remnant of an earlier Mount Vernon. My father found a banana there, and a pint of milk, and we bought coffee and sat at a deli table in a corner. My father hunched over his bowl of cereal, wiping his chin now and then with a napkin, and told me about the woman under arrest, whose name was Betsy Harvey, née Huber.
She was forty-one, he said, and had seven children. She was very conservative and a fundamentalist Christian. She’d grown up in Garden Grove, California, which produced—or at least used to—a lot of strawberries. Her parents had come to Garden Grove from West Plains, Missouri, where her father had worked as a sheriff’s deputy. Before that he’d been with the U.S. Marshals. In California, he’d worked for the Highway Patrol. Her father’s family, Betsy told my father, was originally from Haywood County, Tennessee, but her father had moved to Missouri when he was seventeen to take a job at a meatpacking plant. Her mother’s family, on her grandfather’s side, was from Yell County, Arkansas, and on her grandmother’s side from Oklahoma.
The Hubers moved to Seattle when Betsy was twelve so that her father could work in security for a truck manufacturer. Five months after graduating from high school, she met Delvin Harvey at a church social. They dated for seven months, married, bought a house, and started having children. Eventually, they bought five acres in Skagit County, cleared one, left the other four in brush, and built a house, or, rather, had it built by a contractor, even though, as Betsy assured my father, Delvin was good at a lot of things demanding tools, a millwright who could wire, plumb, frame, pour concrete, and put up drywall. Delvin, added Betsy, had been in the air force. Since discharge, he’d worked at Boeing.
Betsy, my father said, was slight, but her eyes simmered with potent outrage. She reminded him of women he’d seen in Depression-era photos—hard-bitten, down on their luck. At the same time, though, she was trenchant in speech and volatile in manner. She was wound up, said my father, and couldn’t stop talking. Her elaborations tripped over one another, her clarifications demanded clarification, her supplements rushed toward more supplementing, and her magnifications compelled further magnifying, but the net effect of all of this was to highlight her confusion (and his). He didn’t know what to make of her. It was alleged, he said, that she and her husband had killed a girl they’d adopted from Ethiopia—that they’d abused the girl until she’d died in their yard.
“They did what?”
“They abused a girl they adopted from Ethiopia until she died from it,” said my father. “That’s what they’re accused of in the charging documents.”
In the Red Apple, over cereal, my father sized me up. “What?” he asked.
“Terrible,” I answered.
“That woman over there in the jail did terrible things,” my father said. “There’s no doubt about that. I guess I could tell myself that what she did just fills me with so much abhorrence that I can’t represent her. I could say to myself, ‘Let some other lawyer defend someone who has without a doubt abused a child and without a doubt been responsible for her death. Let someone else be her voice in the courtroom, let someone else act in court on her behalf. I’m not going to be that voice, because I’m at odds with what she did and can’t bring myself to represent her. No, let someone else do that—it won’t be me, as a matter of principle.’ On the other hand,” my father continued, “since the homicide-by-abuse statute came on the books in this state, eighty-five people have been charged in accord with it, and every single one of them went to court with a lawyer, even though they’d done things you don’t want to know about—things that would sicken you—to children, including infants. Why did those lawyers take those cases? Including me, because I’ve taken three? And now four, because I’m taking this one, too? Because they thought those defendants were wonderful people? Is that what it takes to deserve a lawyer? Every day, people are charged with heinous crimes because they’ve done heinous things, and every day, lawyers take their cases so the law can get on with what the law is about. I’ll tell you something. Most of the time in my life, I’ve lost. I’ve lost a lot more cases than I’ve won. And, frankly, I’ve never been surprised when I’ve lost. I’ve known from the beginning that I’m going to lose. The evidence is entirely against my client. The evidence is completely and utterly overwhelming. You could say that, this being the way it is, why don’t I throw in the towel from the start, enter a guilty plea, and save everyone time and trouble? Not to mention the drain on taxpayers. Why plead innocent when you think someone’s guilty? But, look, it doesn’t matter if I think my client’s guilty. What matters is what jurors think. So let them hear everything and let them decide. Air it all in the light of day. And another thing,” said my father. “It’s not like in the movies. In the movies, it turns out that A didn’t pull the trigger, B did. They had the wrong person all along! The lawyer is a hero because his client was innocent! He revealed the real killer! Someone else did the terrible deed! Do you know how often, in the real world, it’s like that? Almost never. Almost always, the person charged is the right person to charge. So what you have to do, you have to figure out exactly what they did—if you can, which is another question—and then compare that to the language of the crime they’re charged with. They might have done the most evil things you can imagine, and you can abhor them for it, but if what they did doesn’t conform to what they’re charged with, then they’re innocent. And that’s important. If you convict someone because they’re abhorrent, and not because they broke the law, you might as well live in a dictatorship. And who wants that? I don’t. And another thing. I play my role according to my lights and I’m at peace with myself.”
