Decision (42 page)

Chapter 7

An hour before, when he had telephoned Cathy from a public booth in the courthouse lobby, he had wondered aloud whether he could go through the ordeal of public testimony along the lines he knew Regard would pursue.

“I’m one of the sympathy witnesses,” he told her with some bitterness. “Moss and I are supposed to reduce the jury to tears.”

“Will it be hard?” she asked quietly. “I shouldn’t think so after what you’ve just told me about Janie.”

“No,” he agreed, instantly sobered. “I didn’t mean to sound like that. I just resent—”

“You resent everything right now,” she said, “and why shouldn’t you? The world is not a happy place for Taylor Barbour at the moment. I’d be resentful too. But it has to be done if that individual is to be convicted and given what he deserves.”

“They’ll give him death.”

“So?” she demanded with a sudden fierceness. “What else does he deserve, for what he has done to you?”

“Do you mean that?” he asked, genuinely shocked. “I thought you were opposed to—”

“Oh, I was, I was. But I find that when it’s my man that is involved—”

“Oh, is that what I am?” he inquired, a sudden small but persistent happiness beginning to grow in his heart in spite of everything. “Is
that
what I am?”

“I’m thinking about it,” she said. “Anyway, it makes it all different when it’s somebody you love. Somehow all the smart, fashionable objectivity goes out the window.”

“Yes,” he agreed, not daring to push it further at the moment. “I suppose that’s true.”

“You know it’s true. I don’t see how you can look at your daughter and not know it’s true.”

“It’s very hard not to feel that way,” he admitted.

“Don’t you feel that you would just like to abandon all your earnest civilized ways and literally tear him limb from limb? I do.”

“Of course I do,” he said gravely, “but I can’t afford to let myself feel that way. I don’t dare even start down that road. That isn’t what I’m here for. I’m here to keep a level head, if I can. I’m here to keep the balance. I’m here to provide justice. And that,” he said quietly, “is the ideal I have to cling to, no matter what the provocation.”

“You’re almost too noble,” she remarked. “Hate a little. It might do you good.”

“Oh, I hate,” he said grimly. “I hate. But what good does it really do me? What good does it do Janie? It might satisfy something in me but it can’t bring her back. At least I don’t see how it can.”

“Strong emotion can sometimes do remarkable things.”

“Yes, but not that kind of emotion. Love, maybe, which God knows I feel for her; but not hatred for somebody else. He’s of a nature that might be destroyed by compassion and pity, because he isn’t capable of them and doesn’t understand them. But hate he understands. He thrives on hate. He
is
hate.”

“And shouldn’t he be removed from the world, then? Wouldn’t it be a much better place without him?”

“There you challenge the concepts of a lifetime. It isn’t that easy to overcome them.”

“Mine, too,” she said. “But I find I’m managing to overcome them, as this thing unfolds. I’m coming pretty close to abandoning them permanently, which is something some of my friends will howl me down for when they find out. But they don’t know what it means to suffer what you’re suffering and what the Pomeroys are suffering. Basically, like many of that type, they have no imagination; and since it hasn’t yet happened to
them,
God help them, they can still afford to be arch and all-knowing about it. But now it’s happened to me—or to you, which is close enough so it’s almost the same thing—and I’m not arch and all-knowing anymore. I hurt inside. I feel savage inside.”

“God!” he said. “You think I don’t? But I can’t afford to give in to it, Cathy. I just can’t afford it.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she sighed.

“No, I suppose you can’t. So, my dear, what now?”

“We’ll bring Janie home as soon as possible and then we’ll see. Mary wants her at home; I think she should be where she can have proper full-time care. I also,” he said, took a deep breath and decided to be completely honest, “think it would be too much of a strain to have her at home. It would be a constant wearing, a constant hopelessness and helplessness, a constant—”

“A constant distraction from the law,” she interrupted, “which is your wife, mistress, friend, love, lover, obsession and curse, I suspect. Is that right?”

“Do you love me?”

“I said, ‘Is that right?’” she replied harshly.

“And I said, ‘Do you love me?’” he said, his heart pounding so hard it hurt, but determined to find out once and for all.

Again she was silent for what seemed an infinity to him, though it could not have been more than half a minute or so.

“It’s defeated Mary,” she said at last. “How do I know it wouldn’t defeat me?”

“Because you don’t resent it, I think,” he said carefully. “You don’t regard it as competition, but as something I have to do to justify my life and make me happy … and to serve my country, as I have been selected to do, which also makes me happy.”

“I love you,” she said slowly, “but whether I can love the law too, that much, even for your sake, I don’t know, Tay … I just don’t know. We’ll have to talk about it some more when you get back. Maybe I’ll have had time to do some more thinking by then.”

“It will probably be sometime next week,” he pointed out, more lightly. “Think fast.”

“Yes,” she said, her tone lightening in response to his. “I’ll try… And now,” she said, suddenly brisk, “good luck with the testimony today. I know it will go well. After all, you just have to tell the truth.”

And the truth, he could sense now as he took the oath and seated himself in the witness chair, was what Regard was after: the truth about Janie, which was not yet public knowledge, and which Regard obviously hoped would stun, shock and enrage the jury. He had no doubt that Regard was right, and testified as fully and matter-of-factly as he could: because after all it
was
the truth, and hate, though nobly denied, is not all that easy to suppress.

“Mr. Justice,” Regard said respectfully, “I shall try to make my questions brief because I know this is a very painful matter for you and for all of us. Or at least,” he added thoughtfully, turning to stare at the defendant, “most of us.”

Debbie made as though to rise but with a wry little smile Earle put a hand on her arm and pulled her back.

“Mr. Justice,” Regard said, “I believe you arrived in South Carolina after the bombing of Pomeroy Station?”

“I did.”

“Why did you come here at that time?”

“Because my daughter Jane,” he said in a tone as level and unemotional as he could make it, “had been injured in the explosion. She had severe lacerations and bruising of the body.”

“Principally in what area?”

“The cranial area.”

“How did the severity of the injuries display itself?”

“She was in a coma when her mother and I arrived,” he said, and there was a clucking of sympathy from the jury and throughout the room. He caught Moss’ eyes and received a sad but encouraging look.

“She did not know you.”

“No, sir, she did not.”

“How long was it before she emerged from the coma?” Regard asked. “Or,” he added quickly, “did she?”

“Oh, yes,” Tay said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “A week ago last Saturday.”

“Did she know you and her mother at that time?”

“Yes.”

“Was she fully comprehensive of your presence?”

“Yes.”

“And of her surroundings?”

“Yes.”

“And of what had happened to her?”

“She knew that something bad had occurred.”

“Was she responding normally, would you say, except for some understandable weakness and drowsiness from sedation?”

“Yes,” he said, reflecting that Regard had certainly done his homework and bracing himself for the next question. It was exactly what he expected.

“And is she now?”

The room became deathly still.

He hesitated for a second, glanced again quickly at Moss, who nodded his head almost imperceptibly, looking both sad and grim. He took a deep breath and said clearly,

“No, she is not.”

Again the sympathetic sounds, the shocked, horrified reactions.

“Would you care to tell us what has happened, in your own words, Mr. Justice,” Regard asked gently, “or would you like me to elicit it with further detailed questioning?”

“Oh, no,” he said, though it cost him much, “I will tell you… She lapsed back into coma after our short initial conversation with her and then roused again, three times, during the course of Saturday afternoon and evening. On Sunday, believing everything to be progressing well, and being assured by the doctors of this, I accepted an invitation to visit Justice and Mrs. Pomeroy at their home outside the city. Shortly before I was preparing to return to the hospital I received a call from my wife, who had remained with our daughter.”

“What did she say?” Regard asked.

“‘
Come back, oh, come back!’”
he said, and despite his firm intention to keep it unemotional, something of the terror of Mary’s anguished cry crept into his voice. His audience became, if possible, even more hushed.

“And you did so.”

“As fast as Justice Pomeroy could drive me,” he said, “which was very fast… At the hospital”—he stopped, mastered himself with a visible effort that made his recital even more moving—“at the hospital I found that my daughter had—had suffered a massive seizure—”

There was a sympathetic cry of “Oh,
no!”
from somewhere in the room, but he ignored it though sorely tempted to cry out savagely, “Oh,
yes!”

“—and had again lapsed into coma, this time—this time, so the doctors have told her mother and me—for—for good.”

He paused and heard some woman, possibly Mrs. Holgren, actually sob.

“Do you mean to say,” Regard said gently, “that your daughter—”

“I mean to say,” he said, and this time the savage desire to shock, in some sort of blind impotent protest against fate, did come out in his voice, “that we are informed on the best of medical authority that our daughter Jane has permanently lost all mental capacity and for the remainder of her life will never be more than a—a living corpse. A human vegetable. A nothing. A
nothing!”

And his eyes, filled with the rage and horror of it while the audience burst into shocked incoherent sounds of sympathy and protest, came to rest at last squarely on the defendant, who stared back defiantly. But for the first time his face was white, his defiance was obviously and unmistakably an act of sheer will, and his eyes, after holding Tay’s for a moment, shifted and looked desperately—or as close to desperation as he would allow himself—away.

“Your honor,” Regard said softly, “I have no further questions of this witness. Counsel—” he added with grim politeness and gave Debbie a slight, sardonic bow.

She stood up and a low, rumbling boo swept through the audience, echoed a hundredfold outside. Judge Williams rapped his gavel sharply and spoke in a voice that showed a little tension but was, as ever, reasoned and firm.

“The audience has been warned,” he said. “I want no further disturbances or demonstrations of any kind.
Stop that!”

And crashed down his gavel a second time, so hard that it seemed it might break. Absolute silence ensued. He let it run on for a good long time before he finally said:

“Counsel, do you wish to question the Justice?”

“Yes, your honor,” she said in a low voice. “Just two questions. First, Justice Barbour: do you believe in, or do you oppose, the death penalty?”

“Your honor,” Regard began, “I must object to that kind of philosophical question in this proceeding. It has no place—”

“Oh, yes it does!” Debbie cried, even as Perlie Williams turned upon his old friend and said firmly,

“Counsel is overruled. The question is entirely legitimate, in the court’s estimation. Your honor, would you care to answer?”

“Yes,” Tay said, voice still tense but relatively back to normal after his bitter outburst. “Philosophically and in principle, I am opposed to it and always have been. However—” he said, holding up a hand as there was again an uneasy stirring in the audience despite Judge Williams’ dictum, “however, I would not now, or ever, prejudice my judgment of future matters that might come before me as a jurist. Nor would I foreclose myself arbitrarily from whatever judgment the facts of an individual case might call for.” And there, Cathy, he told her in his mind,
I
am meeting you halfway, at least, and I hope you appreciate it.
“Does that answer your question, counsel?”

“If that is the best you can do, Mr. Justice,” she said. He looked straight at her and replied quietly, “It is.”

“Very well,” she said. “My second question is: If the matter here should ultimately come before the Supreme Court of the United States and you should not disqualify yourself, will your daughter’s condition affect your judgment concerning this defendant?”

“Your honor,” Regard said, “now I really must object. Will counsel and her client never cease tormenting these poor people who have in the one instance lost a child from life, and in the other lost a child from all sentient being? Will they never have the common decency, your honor, to refrain from—”

“Counsel!” Perlie Williams said sharply, in his first show of real anger in the whole trial, the tensions surrounding the case apparently getting even to him at last, “I will rule you both out of order, and I so do. Counsel for the defense asks an impossible question which should bring its own reward and create exactly the prejudice she claims to be fearful of. Counsel for the prosecution is indulging in maudlin self-serving. You will both be in order or we will have a recess and let you think about it. Justice NOW!” he added sarcastically, “or no Justice NOW!”

For several moments after that the courtroom was again very quiet. Hardly anybody dared cough, move, whisper or even look directly at the judge. Finally, he shifted position a little and sat back slowly in his chair.

“Justice Barbour,” Regard ventured to say in a very quiet, circumspect voice. “I believe you may be excused, sir, if that is agreeable to opposing counsel—?”