The Laws of Our Fathers Read online

  I'd often explained my differences with my parents to June and I was in no mood to go over the subject now. But Eddgar's look lingered. I sensed, as I often had, the special reprieve for Eddgar in moving about in someone else's life.

  'So if someone wanted to kidnap you, you'd go?' he asked.

  'I don't think they'd believe it.'

  'I would think not,' June said. She was drinking bourbon and smoking. Sitting at the sofa's edge, she flicked ashes from the end of the cigarette more often than necessary, flipping her thumbnail against the filter. For whatever reason - practicing perhaps for the demeanor she'd affect in the hearing room - she'd taken on more of a subdued, girlish appearance, a bit of the homespun country gal. Her hair was pulled back and secured with bright rings of yarn. She wore a little sundress, and the length of her smooth legs, without hose, glowed as she sat there. Leaning toward the ashtray, she jerked a bit on her hem, in response to my inspection. 'They'd certainly have suspicions,' she said.

  Eddgar held his jaw. A sign might as well have lit up on his chest, reading, I am scheming.

  'What if there was ransom?' he asked. 'Can your father afford it?'

  'Afford it? Sure. He could probably afford a lot. But knowing my father, he wouldn't pay it.'

  June laughed. 'Seth, you remind me of Eddgar when you carry on about your father.' Eddgar's father was a physician by training, but he made his living as a tobacco planter. If you could credit their descriptions, he was a man of ruthless temper, rigid, unforgiving, a hard-shell Christian more excited by the damnation of the wicked than the eternal grace of the saved. June and Eddgar both referred to him in an act of academic derision as 'The Mind of the South.'

  For the moment, Eddgar ignored June, struck by my prediction that my father would refuse any ransom request. He threw up his hands.

  'Then you're free!' For an alarming, split-brained instant, my liberty seemed to dwell in the tender field between Eddgar's open palms. Then the dreary misery of a better-known reality reclaimed me.

  'Well, then he'd pay it to spite me.'

  They both laughed again. Clapping her hands to her thighs, June said she was exhausted and I headed down. Kidnapping. I laughed at the thought. Outside, as I neared the foot of the wooden stairwell, I heard Eddgar speak my name. He'd come out to the landing above, and stood in the intense beam of the floodlight.

  'Would they call the FBI?' he asked quietly.

  'My parents?' I was startled he was still on the subject, but I shook my head. Given their history, my parents were terrified by encounters with the police. I had been in the car on more than one occasion when even a routine traffic stop had crashed my father into disorder and panic. His hands shook so fiercely he could not hand the copper his license, and it required half an hour at the curbside afterwards for him to regain his tenuous hold on the present. There was no prospect he - or my mother - would ever involve law enforcement. 'No chance,' I told Eddgar.

  Standing a floor above me, he smiled. Amid the mounting anxieties of his own situation, this notion had become a diversion. He tapped a single index finger on his temple to show that he was going to keep it in mind.

  Four days after I received my draft notice, Sonny told me she was moving out. It was the middle of April.

  'It's no good, Seth,' she said. ‘I have to do it. We're going to end up hating each other.' We were fighting all the time, bloody battles in which I spoke of love and she of independence.

  'So you'll desert me now, rather than later?'

  Sonny shivered to show she was exerting self-control. She had to make the point, she said. The 'point' was never specified, but I understood. I couldn't have her. I was on my own. If she remained in the apartment, I'd keep hoping, keep putting off departure, instead of facing what was now inevitable.

  ‘I have to find something else, anyway,' Sonny said. ‘I can't afford the rent here by myself.'

  'Where will you go?'

  She hitched a shoulder as if she hadn't thought about it much. 'I'll stay with Graeme for a while. He's been trying to find someone to take a room.'

  This was a hammer blow, worse than mere desertion. He'd be in her bed within a week, I realized, if he hadn't been already.

  'Not what I think, right?'

  'It isn't,' she said. 'And it's none of your business anyway.' We went at it again, of course.

  In the end, I helped her move. It was just as easy for me to load a few boxes every morning into the Bug. I mailed her books to her aunt's from the post office. The other items I dropped outside Graeme's door as I was on my way to After Dark. I watched her disappear from the apartment in stages, like something melting.

  On the last morning, a Monday, we filled the Bug and put on the portable rack to load the roof. Even so, a couple of boxes remained that I'd have to drop offlater. Then I drove Sonny across the Bay Bridge, out of sunshine and into the fog. She hugged me on the street, although I refused to return any visible sign of affection. So this is how it is, I thought, this is how it turns out. An epic moment in my own life, which I would always recount - how could it simply be happening, like any other moment in the ever-present is? There was only fog, carried like smoke on the ocean winds, and seagulls whose hoarse cry could be heard even though they were lost from sight. I noticed, marking him for life, a slender bearded fellow in bell-bottomed trousers and a V-neck sweater moving down the steep hill in the usual heavy-footed way, his weight back to the heels. I had a sudden vision that I'd accost him on another street someday: I saw you when I said goodbye.

  'Call me,' she said. 'All the time. Promise I'll see you before you go.' I took her hands from my face and studied them - broad sturdy hands sculpted with working grace. I figured I would leave for Canada by the end of the week. My draft board had obliged me in my last tactical move by transferring the site of my induction to Oakland. May 4 was the day, but there was no point in waiting now.

  'People don't just walk out of each other's lives,' I said. I wasn't sure if this was a protest or a response.

  'It's just another phase, baby. We're both going to survive. And nobody says it's forever.' Sonny often talked vaguely of getting together again in the future - after the Peace Corps, after I was able to come home. This notion - the hopes it raised and my certainty that it was cruelly false - brought the unwanted impact of a sob halfway through my throat every time the subject came up.

  'Thank you.'

  'For what?'

  For uttering enough intolerable bullshit, I had been about to say, that I actually had some desire to leave. But I had no control over myself and the words emerged hollowly. By accident, I'd found the note I wanted to strike.

  'Just thanks. I love you. It's been a gas.'

  I drove away. I had always known, I told myself. Some shock-proof, inner apparatus, a black box near the heart that invariably registered what was true, had never lost account of the fundamental facts: she did not care for me, not in the abandoned, soaring way I cared for her. I'd known but trudged on anyway, dumb and hopeful, and now I was paying the price. Was there anything in life more painful than that inequality? A few blocks on, suffering miserably, I stopped the car across from the enormous rolling park near Mission Dolores. I knew I was back to where I'd started, to the unendurable agony of the young. I could not have put words to it then, but through time I can make out that inner cry: Who will love me for myself? Whose love will let me know myself? I looked at the palm trees rising starkly above the median while I wept.

  DECEMBER 7, 1995

  Sonny

  'The testimony is irrelevant,' says Molto, standing before the bench.

  This guy. He has an unerring capacity to aggravate me.

  'Mr Molto, you're the one who offered to bring in Tactical Officer Lubitsch. We had a discussion at sidebar and, as I recall, you ended it by volunteering.'

  'Judge, we've had time to think. There was no polygraph. So there's no discovery violation. And the testimony is irrelevant.'

  'Mr Molto, we've had sworn testimony
that there was a polygraph, and if the witness is mistaken, I'd think the prosecution would be delighted to establish that fact.' I turn to Hobie, who's beside Rudy. 'Mr Turtle, do you still want to explore this area?'

  Mum to this point, Hobie offers nothing but a solemn nod.

  'Call the witness.'

  'Judge -'

  'Enough, Mr Molto.'

  Tommy starts away, then wheels back. 'By the way, Judge, this business of not turning over scientific reports? He told us yesterday-' Tommy uses a finger to indicate Hobie; he's too aggravated to speak his name. 'He told us he was going to test that money for blood or gunpowder and have a report this morning.'

  Hobie cuts him short, avoiding a diversion. 'There's no gunpowder, there's no blood. I'll give them the money back right now.'

  'There's your answer, Mr Molto. No gunpowder, no blood. Who's putting on Lubitsch? It's your motion, Mr Turtle.'

  Tommy, with his dark, beaten-up face, stares at me, sulkily. He's been doing this twenty years, but he still can't roll with the punches.

  'We'll call him, Judge,' says Tommy. 'This will take one second.' He motions to Rudy.

  Fred rolls in, spoiling macho attitude. He's wearing his cowboy boots and a huge silver buckle on his jeans, an open-necked print shirt, and a tweed sport coat. Word is he was really something when he was younger, always looking for it on the street, with that imposing physique that strains his uniform and a challenging eye. Among the State Defenders the rep lingers that he's a hitter, a cop who'll smack an arrested defendant around. But Marietta, the unimpeachable source, says he's different since he married. His wife, Angela, is another bodybuilder, whom he first encountered at one of those contests where they oil themselves up and pose. She was a champion, famous in those circles, and - Lubitsch boasts about her now and then in an openly admiring way I find endearing. They have one child. Like Marietta, I regard him as one of those people who has improved with age.

  'Hey, Judge,' he says when he arrives before the bench. A bit too familiar.

  'Do you swear to tell the truth?' I answer.

  Fred's testified here before. Given the cultural limitations of police testimony - every defendant has received his Miranda rights, even though few do these days; every cop has seen whatever his partner has observed - Fred strikes me as more or less a truth-teller, less freewheeling than some others. As he takes the stand, I notice he has his reports rolled up in one hand.

  Tommy waits for Lubitsch to settle himself, then Molto positions himself right before the bench. He goes for dramatic effect. A single question. Not even state your name. He lifts a reddened, nail-bitten hand.

  'Officer Lubitsch, on September 12, 1995, or any other date, did you use a polygraph machine on Lovinia Campbell, either at Kindle County General Hospital or elsewhere?'

  'No, sir,' he says.

  Tommy heads back to the prosecution table. 'Excuse the witness,' he says over his shoulder.

  I smile at the gambit. This is, in all phases, a game which two must play.

  'Mr Turtle, do you want to cross?'

  Hobie sits in his chair for quite some time, studying Lubitsch. His lips are rolled into his mouth, virtually lost in the grey-shot muff of beard. He's stumped. For the first time since these proceedings began, he does not rise to address a witness.

  'Ms Campbell testified she had a polygraph. Did you know that, Officer?'

  'I heard that.'

  'And she's lying?'

  'She isn't right, I know that much.'

  'She's lying?'

  'Objection,' says Tommy from his seat. He's fussing with his pad, but he reels off a number of valid exceptions to Hobie's question. Asked and answered. Calls for an improper opinion. Hobie stares at Lubitsch.

  'Are you saying, Officer, maybe the witness made a mistake?'

  'It might be.'

  'She misperceived something?' 'Maybe.'

  The courtroom is still. Hobie finally stands, taking the time to secure the front flap of his double-breasted suit jacket, a chalk stripe of soft grey wool.

  'Did she think she was getting a polygraph?' Molto objects to Lubitsch testifying to Lovinia's thoughts. Hobie rephrases: 'Did someone tell her they were going to give her a polygraph?'

  'Yes, sir, that coulda happened.'

  'And who was "they"? Who told her she was going on the box?'

  Lubitsch wiggles a bit in his swivel chair. ‘I believe I did.'

  ‘I see. But you didn't actually do it?'

  'No.'

  'But she changed her story anyway? I mean, that's what happened, right? This girl was tellin you one thing when you got there and something else when you left?'

  'Sometimes with these people -' Fred stops. 'With an offender sometimes -' He wipes his mouth with both fingers. 'An experienced officer, sometimes I think I know pretty well when someone's giving me a line.'

  'Yes?'

  'We don't always want to take them down to the Hall for the box.'

  'The lie box?'

  'Right. Here we couldn't. She's laying there with tubes coming out of everywhere.'

  'So what did you do, Officer?'

  'We tell them we're giving them a box, only we don't' 'You created that impression?' 'That's it.'

  'And how did you do that?' 'We put something on her head.' 'What?'

  'Something we borrowed from one of the nurses.' 'What?'

  'That strap-like, you know, for the heart test?'

  'EKG?' 'Right.'

  'And you put that around her head? So you could test what she was thinking?'

  Lubitsch doesn't answer. His eyes roll up to Hobie and fix him with a dark look meant for the street.

  'And was it just the pressure strap? Was that the entire apparatus?'

  'No. It had a piece of telephone cord attached.' 'Attached to what?' 'The thing on her head.' 'And what else?'

  'A machine.' Lubitsch looks hard at Hobie. Obviously there's no point. 'A copying machine.' 'A photocopying machine?' 'Right. We borrowed that from the nurses, too.' 'Then what did you do?' 'Asked a question.' 'And?'

  Lubitsch shrugs. 'Then we pressed a button on the machine.' 'For what?' 'The answer.'

  'You get the answer from the machine?'

  'That's what we say.'

  'Is that what you said to Bug?'

  'Right.'

  Hobie doesn't speak. Instead, he simply beckons for more with the back of his hand.

  'See, we put a piece of paper in the machine before we start. Okay? Then when we press the button, it comes out and we show it to her. Okay?'

  'And what was written on the piece of paper?'

  ' "She's lying." ' There is laughter, of course, a rippling chorus loudest from the jury box.

  'So you had this young woman sitting there with a rubber strap

  on her head and a piece of telephone wire that was attached to a Xerox machine, and then you pressed a button and it produced a piece of paper that said she's lying and you showed that to her, right?' 'Right.'

  'And she believed it?' 'Because she was lying.'

  Hobie looks to me, without even bothering to voice the objection. I strike Lubitsch's last answer and Hobie expels a magnificent sigh of disgust as he walks back to the defense table, winding his head. Cops.

  'Are we done?' I ask.

  Hobie argues vociferously that Lovinia's testimony has to be suppressed. He calls the police 'deceptive' and 'exploitative,' as if the Supreme Court hadn't long ago decided to tolerate such conduct in the name of effective law enforcement. When Molto comes to the podium to respond, I greet Tommy with a dour look. He was running changes on me this morning. One of the iron rules of my courtroom, especially for the prosecutors, is that you pay the price when you mess with the judge. The P As will run you over if you let them, and as a woman, I feel the need to be particularly firm. I'm frosty enough with Tommy to scare him. But I deny the motion in the end. No right of Nile's was violated by what the police did to Lovinia. Bug, especially as a juvenile, would have a pretty strong argument tha
t the statements she made to Lubitsch and Wells can't be used against her. In fact, now that I think about it, I see how Hobie persuaded Bug - and her lawyer - that she could ignore Molto's threats to throw out Bug's deal if she came off her prior statements. Given this monkey business, there's no way Tommy could risk reprosecution, since Bug might walk completely. Hobie, the pro, does not miss a beat when I rule.

  'In the alternative, Your Honor,' he says, 'I'd like to make the officer's testimony part of my case. So I don't have to recall him.' Relieved, Molto ventures no objection, but says in that case

  he'd like to ask a few more questions of his own. He stands at the prosecution table.

  'Officer Lubitsch, after Ms Campbell admitted she was lying -'

  'Objection. He told her she was lying.'

  'Rephrase the question.'

  'After this mock-polygraph,' says Tommy, 'Ms Campbell made a statement, correct? And is it fully set forth in your report?'

  Lubitsch testifies that each of his reports is an accurate rendition of what Lovinia said.

  'And returning to September 12 in the hospital, did you ever tell Ms Campbell what Hardcore had previously told the police?'

  ‘I didn't know what Hardcore had said. It wasn't my case. Montague asked me to talk to Bug because I knew her. That's all. She told me a story, we did our lie-box thing, and she made her statement.'

  'You didn't tell her what Hardcore said?'

  'Nope. That's not my s.o.p.'

  Tommy nods. He's just made up a great deal of ground. Sorting through it all, the critical issue in evaluating Bug's testimony is whether what she said to the cops in the first place was true. I could believe she told them what they wanted to hear, not so much because she seems easily cowed - even at fifteen she isn't - but because she's clever enough to deal that way. But if Bug didn't know what Core had said, there' s only one way, realistically, her sworn statements to Lubitsch could match Hardcore's version of events: because that's what happened out on the street. At least, that's the way I add it up. Tommy does, too. He's gone back to his seat with an unbecoming little swagger, enjoying the fact that he's finally put Hobie in his place.