Reversible Errors (29 page)

By entering the courtroom, she had risked this confrontation, and knowing that, she had told herself more than once to leave. But there might as well have been a padlock on her seat, until Ernos last word had been spoken. What impelled her to stay rather than turn her back, as she'd so often sworn she wanted to do? She had so many mistakes to rue. Thousands of them. How could she be focused so single- mindedly on this one? But she had scoured the paper this morning, even sat in front of Duffy's TV last night, while the late news played over his horsey snores. She was hooked, as she had been at some level since the day she'd gone with Arthur to Rudyard. Were these the excesses again of a conscience always starving for shame? Yet there was no further fooling herself. Whatever the truth was here, it was, somehow, a truth about her.

Dubinsky had passed from overweight to porcine. The face she had known him by years ago was still there, but had sunk like a relief into a puddle of blubbery abundance. Stew had never been her favorite. He was unreliable in virtually every regard, habitually late, sometimes cavalier with facts, and often underhanded in gathering them. Several years ago he'd lost his courthouse press card for a while, when he'd been found with his ear pressed to a jury-room door.

In a few words, she explained to Dubinsky why she'd been present. It was plain, however, that he saw her as an angle his competitors wouldn't have. He found his recorder in his jacket pocket. Instinct told her that if she remained the object of reports like this morning's, her job would soon be in jeopardy, but she was afraid that putting Dubinsky off would make him more determined. She said several times that she had to go, but Stew kept promising he had just one more question. By now he'd ventured past Rommy Gandolph's case to inquiries she had no interest in answering about her present life.

"Here you are," someone said and took firm hold of her elbow. It was Arthur. "We have to go right now, Judge, if I'm going to drive you back. I just got a page. I have a client who's been arrested and I need to bail her out." He was pushing Gillian down the hall.

Dubinsky stayed on their heels, but with Arthur here, Stew shifted his focus. He wanted Raven's reactions to virtually every point Muriel had raised. Arthur stopped walking at one juncture to see if Dubinsky could be shaken, but he ended up following them to the roof of the small parking structure across from the courthouse where Arthur's new automobile waited.

"Hey, private practice looks all right," said Stew, touching a fender.

"It's not from this case," Arthur assured him. He helped Gillian inside and quickly drove down the ramp.

"You're my hero." Eyes closed, Gillian put a hand to her chest. "Has Stew gotten worse or am I just out of practice? You don't really have a client in lockup, do you?"

"Unfortunately. My sister."

"Your sister!"

"It happens all the time, Gillian. But I need to get over there."

"By all means. Just drop me on a corner."

"Where are you going?"

"Please, Arthur. Attend to your sister. I work in the store in Nearing this evening. I'll take the bus."

"Well, I'm going to West Bank Two. You may as well ride along. You can take a bus from there, if you want."

She couldn't see what problem she would cause him by riding as far as the police station, and she had unfinished business with Arthur. She still held some hope of smoothing over the awkwardness of yesterday's parting, and she also was curious about his reactions to today's proceedings. As it turned out, he asked her first what she'd made of Erno.

"I think Muriel's a very good lawyer," said Gillian. "She raised a lot of dust."

"Did you believe him?"

She had not really pondered that. To believe or not had somehow seemed secondary. It was not her decision, for one thing. Moreover, she could feel now how much the spectacle itself had drawn her in. She had not been inside a courtroom since she'd been sentenced. But it had enlivened her today in a way she had refused to imagine. The lawyers, the judges; the way the sound carried; the flash of emotion that exceeded even what took place in a theater because it was so resoundingly real. When Erno had spoken about his oncoming death, it was like a sustained lightning strike. She half expected to smell ozone in the large room.

Gillian was not all that surprised to experience a measure of envy. She'd always cherished the courtroom. Yet what had shocked her was how near at hand it remained -the calculation and reflection that went into each question, the effort to read through the judge's inscrutable responses. She realized only now that she had dreamed of it all every night.

"Very frankly, I'm not sure I want to believe him, Arthur. But I thought your redirect was quite brilliant, as effective in its own way as Muriel's cross."

"Hardly," said Arthur, although he could not contain a smile. Nor was Gillian being polite. Arthur had been first-rate. Cross-examination required flourish, as the interrogator became the visible embodiment of disbelief. Redirect had an artistry of its own, far more subtle, in which the lawyer, a bit like a parent asserting a gentle influence over an unruly child, indiscernibly steered the witness back into a flattering light.

"I suppose, at this stage, I have an open mind about Erno," she said. "Can you corroborate him somehow?"

"I can't figure out how. Not with the physical evidence. If he said he'd assaulted her, maybe there would be a pubic hair, DNA, but there's nothing."

"Why do you think he denies that? The sexual assault?"

"From the day I went clown there with you, he's insisted Painless got it wrong. I actually think it counts in his favor. If he were really trying to tailor his testimony to the evidence, he'd have admitted that, too."

They were advancing slowly in the dense afternoon traffic. Gillian mulled. At this stage, merely raising doubts about the conviction would not be enough to get Gandolph off death row. Ten years along, it was far too late for that. But there was a chance Muriel would want to get the litigation out of the spotlight.

"Muriel might talk to you about a deal, you know," she told Arthur.

"You mean a deal for life? Even if he's innocent?"

"What would your client say?"

"That's the equivalent of trial by ordeal. Offer him life. If he's guilty, he'll jump at it. If he's innocent, he might say yes, too, just to live."

"His choice, isn't it?" Gillian asked, but Arthur shook his head.

"I want him to be innocent. I'm as bad as Pamela now." He glanced at her with a trace of little-boy bashfulness. "This is better than being a prosecutor. You do right as a prosecutor. But not like this. I have to take on the entire world. This is the first time in years I haven't felt beaten down when my feet hit the ground in the morning." Arthur, never one to hide his feelings, briefly bore the pure light of exhilaration.

Gillian smiled, but she again felt herself wandering where she no longer had the right to go. Instead, she asked Arthur about his sister, and he briefly recounted Susan's history in one of those deadened tones that suggested not true detachment but rather that all hope had finally been run over by pain. It was a common story: periods of stability, then crashing relapses and hospitalization. Susan had disappeared several times, awful stretches when Arthur and his father had hunted for her on the streets, and in which, the last time, she'd turned up in Phoenix, strung out on speed -the worst thing imaginable for a schizophrenic -and three months pregnant. For Arthurs father in particular, who had remained ever hopeful that the beautiful girl of glimmering promise would somehow be returned to him, the cycles of her illness had been crushing.

"Do drugs help?" Gillian asked.

"They help a lot. But sooner or later she refuses to take them."

"Because?"

"Because the side effects of some of them are awful. She gets the shakes. Tachycardia. Her neck gets sort of paralyzed with her head tilted to one side. One reason for the group home is so we can watch her get a shot of Prolixin once a week. She did better on the Risperdal, but that's ever)- day, which never works out. This stuff just sort of tames her. And she hates it. With all of them, I think the worst thing for her is that life is drab, compared to what's in her head when she's not taking anything. You're talking about somebody with an IQ of 165. I can't even imagine what's going on in there. But I know it's vivid, wild -electrifying. She's still a genius. To her the outside world is about as relevant as the Middle Ages, but she reads three papers every morning and never forgets anything."

Arthur said that for several years now, a childhood friend of Susan's, now Senior V
. P
. at Faulkes Warren, the mutual-fund house, had arranged jobs for her-keypunching, collating, sorting industry reports. She'd actually shown skill as an analyst. If she didn't have to sit in a room by herself, or be hospitalized twice a year, Arthur said, Susan might be making a quarter of a million dollars. Instead, her behavior always left her on the verge of dismissal. As a result, he had struck a deal with Susan's employers. When his sister went into a paranoid spin, they would simply call the police to remove her. Arthur had an old friend at West Bank Two, Yogi Marvin, a sergeant, who dispatched a squad car. Susan usually welcomed the police, certain they'd arrived to quell whoever she was sure had done her wrong.

"Shit," said Arthur as they came down the street toward the station now. "There she is." West Bank Two was a functional contemporary structure, the shape of a shoe box made out of brick. In front of its glass doors, two women appeared to be arguing, while a uniformed officer stood to the side. Arthur parked in a space only a few feet from them and dashed forward. Gillian left the car and waited by its radiant fender, uncertain if it was more impolite to stay or to slip away.

"I need my cigarettes," Susan was saying. "You know I need my cigarettes, Valerie."

"I do know you need your cigarettes," said Valerie, "and Rolf knows that, too. That's why we wouldn't take them." Valerie, Gillian took it, was a social worker in the assisted living home where Susan resided. Arthur had said one of them was on the way over. If a lifetime's experience was any guide, Gillian would guess Valerie was a nun. Her patience, as she attempted to talk Susan down, was otherworldly, and her attire was only slightly more chic than a habit-a shapeless jumper and thick shoes. Valerie's face was round and pleasant and appeared not to have been touched for years by any chemical agent, even cold cream.

"You told me not to smoke at work," said Susan, "and you thought I was ignoring you and so you took them."

"Susan, I think you know that I wasn't at work with you. What I told you was that Rolf is asthmatic and that because he's in the next space, you should follow their rules and smoke in the lounge. That doesn't mean that I would take your cigarettes. Or that Rolf would."

"I know Rolf took my cigarettes."

Arthur asked if it would help if he went to the store and bought another pack for Susan.

"But why won't they make Rolf give back the cigarettes he took? I want to smoke a cigarette now."

Catching sight of Gillian at the curb, Arthur gave her a desperate look. She had left Alderson hoping never to witness another screaming battle about cigarettes, a daily event in prison, and largely on impulse she reached into her purse.

"1 have one," she said.

Susan recoiled and her hands shot up protectively. Although Gillian had been no more than a few steps away, Susan had plainly missed her. Arthur introduced Gillian, calling her a friend. Gillian's hope to end the dispute over cigarettes was quickly fulfilled. Susans suspicions now focused on her.

"You don't have any friends who smoke," Susan said. She was addressing her brother, but looking toward Valerie rather than having to turn in Gillian's direction again.

'Tou can see Gillian has cigarettes," Arthur said.

"You don't like me to meet your friends."

"I don't like it when my friends aren't nice to you."

"You think I don't know I'm schitzy."

"I know you know that, Susan."

She took the cigarette without ever quite facing Gillian's way, but muttered a meek thank you. On the bench, Gillian had seen her share of acute-phase schizophrenics. There were also at least half a dozen women in Alderson who clearly suffered the same illness and should have been hospitalized rather than imprisoned. Given that experience, Susan's appearance was something of a surprise. She could have been a suburban housewife on her way for groceries, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She was pudgy and pale and surprisingly neat, hair trimmed short and showing quite a bit of gray. She was older than Arthur, early forties, Gillian supposed, and strikingly pretty, with even features. But she was entirely detached from her external self. Accepting the cigarette, her hand shot at full length from her, as if she were a tin man. Her eyes were dull and her face was rigid, seemingly acknowledging that regular emotion of any kind presented an untenable risk.

"Is she a shrink?" Susan asked her brother. "No."

Susan blinked spasmodically, wincing whenever she began to speak, and for the minutest time, her light eyes flashed toward Gillian.

"You're a Compliant, aren't you?"

Tm sorry?" Gillian turned to Arthur, who looked pained. The word, he said, was Susan's coinage. Schizophrenics who refused drug therapy were commonly referred to as noncompliant. It took Gillian an instant to register what Susan was suggesting about her.