Small Sacrifices

Ill

There is no more idyllic spot in May than the Willamette Valley that cradles Eugene and Springfield, Oregon. Sheltered by the Cascade Range to the east and the steel-blue and purple ridges of the coastal mountains on the western horizon, the valley was an oasis for pioneers more than a century ago. It remains an oasis today. Rivers thread their way through Eugene and Springfield: the Willamette, the McKenzie, the Mohawk, the Little Mohawk-nourishing the land. Eugene and Springfield are sister cities--but far from twins. Eugene, with a population of 100,000, is bigger, brighter, and far more sophisticated. Eugene has the University of Oregon and the prestigious Hult Center for the Performing Arts. Eugene is the runners' mecca of the world--spawner of champion after champion; it has been estimated that one out of three of its citizens run regularly. Not jog--run. Eugene is fitness personified, with bicyclists'

paths emblazoned along the edges of even the busiest y?

downtown street, sacrosanct. Eugene is the successful sister of " the paired cities, cool and slender, professional. Her restaurants serve artichoke and ricotta pie, salads with raspberry vinegar, Brie and pate and wild mushroom and sorrel soup, and vie with one another to discover ever more obscure spices.

Springfield, half Eugene's size, is the sister who never graduated from high school, who works for Weyerhaueser or Georgia-pacific, and no longer notices the acrid smell. People in Spring"eld

work a forty-or fifty-, or sixty-, hour week and, if they still ^ed exercise, they go bowling or to a country-western dancing Bvern. The appetizers in a good Springfield restaurant are carrot ^icks, celery, pickled beets and soda crackers; the entree is xcellent chicken-fried steak or prime rib. The main street is ailed Main Street and it wears its neon signs in proud prolifera

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tion. Excepting Portland, Springfield is the largest industrial region in Oregon, and yet pioneers' descendants cling to tradition even as factories threaten to obliterate the old days. It is a city unpretentious and homey.

A long time back, Clint Eastwood lived in Springfield for a while.

The dipping, curving Belt Line freeway connects Eugene and Springfield, and their boundaries merge into one another. Some citizens live in Eugene and work in Springfield--or commute to Eugene from neat ranch houses in Springfield. Both cities have wonderful parks and spectacular scenery. Between the two, everything that anyone might seek--barring tropical temperatures--is available.

Willamette Valley winters are long and dismal for rain-haters, clouds hanging so low that they obscure even the huge buttes looming north and south of Eugene. In May when the sun glows and the rivers have absorbed the rain storms, it is as if the gray days never were. Oaks and maples leaf out, brilliant against the darker green of fir and pine. The air is drenched with the sweetness of fresh-cut rye grass, wild roses, strawberries, and a million bearded irises. Beneath this sweetness: the pungent lacing of onions, sawdust, cedar, and the fecund smell of good red earth, furrowed and waiting for seed.

May, 1984.

It was ironic that it should be May again. Four seasons had come and gone since it happened. May to May. Neat. Some

slight sense of order finally after months of chaos and uncertainty. Oregon has good springs and bad springs, depending on the point of view. This May was not good. The wind that whipped around the Hilton Hotel and the Lane County Courthouse was as sodden as a handkerchief drenched with tears. Rain pelted and slashed and dripped, finally trapping itself in small torrents in the gutters at Oak and Eighth Streets. The first day of the trial so many had waited for was a day to stay at home, light a fire, and read a good book.

And still the parking lot across the street from the courthouse was full, and the Hilton had dozens of rooms reserved for out-oftown media.

The carnival began where the elevator doors opened onto the courthouse's third-floor lobby. Cameras and lights and reporters and microphones. Technicians laying cable along the floor, cov-

ering it carefully with silver duct tape. Photographers leaning nrecariously over the "No pictures beyond here" barrier, pressins their luck for a forbidden candid shot. The hall was filled--not with sadness, but with excited expectancy.

The would-be gallery lined up--a hundred, two hundred peonie shivering and drenched, women mostly, hoping to be admitted'

to the inner sanctum of Courtroom Number Three, to pass

beyond the double oak doors whose two tiny windows were covered with butcher paper blocking even so much as a peek inside. Uniformed deputies and a thick rope attached to a heavy steel stanchion held them back. The women, and a sprinkling of embarrassed-looking men, carried raincoats and lunches in precisely creased brown bags. Those first in line had been there for hours. Occasionally, necessities of nature forced one or another to dash around the corner to the restrooms, a neatly folded raincoat left to save a place in line. The fabric marker was always honored.

Oregonians, all Northwesterners, are a civilized breed. Even so, when the doors finally opened, there was a stampede. Two little old ladies were carried along in the surging tide of human bodies, their black, laced shoes inches above the floor. Unruffled, they sailed in, and found two narrow spots on the long benches, hats still firmly planted on their heads.

The long wait promised to be worthwhile. Advocacy both for and against the defendant was passionate. The gallery murmured and twittered; spectators half-rose to crane their necks for a closer look at the principals--mostly at the defendant.

Few eyes lingered long on Fred Hugi, the lone assistant g district attorney who would be prosecuting this case for the State. Thirty-nine years old, his dark hair already salt-and-peppered, Hugi had shouldered the final responsibility for bringing the defendant to trial. Tall, lean (or downright skinny, depending . . .), tough as whipcord, he wore a moustache that gave him the look

°f a man from another, earlier century--some frontier lawman or ^dge, maybe, peering solemnly from a browning tintype.

From time to time, Hugi's brown eyes swept over the court-^om. They seemed to fix on no one, and they revealed nothing. rL^ glanced over his notes on the long yellow legal pad. Behind hls tightly capped facade, he was champing at the bit, eager to get on with it. He was neither pessimistic nor elated; he was "^mensely relieved to find himself at last in court. By avocation a

°ng-distance runner, Hugi saw the weeks ahead as a marathon-L

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steady, determined pacing after meticulous training. Brilliant and stubborn--no, tenacious--Fred Hugi never gave up on anything he set out to do, even though his singlemindedness had been known to irritate the hell out of people around him.

The words before him blurred. No matter. He was ready. He knew it all by heart; he could make his opening statement in his sleep. He'd lain awake too many long nights, worrying this case-seeing it from one angle, and then reversing it, turning it in his mind like a Rubik's Cube. Sometimes he suspected he knew more about the defendant than he did about his own wife after almost two decades of marriage. It was a good thing Joanne understood him, accepted that her husband had to do what he had to do, and left him alone, unquestioning; he'd been obsessed with this case for a year.

The defendant sat so close to him now that with the slightest extension of his right elbow, their arms would touch. Hugi caught the scent of jail soap and a faint whiff of acrid perspiration. He was accustomed to the peculiar economy of space in Lane County courtrooms. The prosecutor, the defendant, and the defense attorney sat adjacent to one another along one nest of tables. Normally, the State and the Defense in a major trial have their own space, but these battle lines were only imaginary, drawn in the air--as thick and impenetrable as iron walls. Fred Hugi sat on the far left, the defendant sat in the middle, and Jim Jagger, attorney for the defense, sat on the far right. They composed the triangle around which everything else would revolve.

Hugi saw that the accused seemed confident, rolling--as

always--with any punch, leaning over often to whisper and laugh in Jagger's ear, ignoring the prosecutor. That was fine with him. He had taken infinite pains to be seen as only "a dopey guy," an unknown factor. The defendant clearly viewed him as negligible. No threat. That was exactly the way Hugi wanted it.

He, on the other hand, had tremendous respect for his opponent. Smarter than hell, a quick study, and, through the defense's rights of discovery, aware of his whole case going in. The worthiest of adversaries, armed with a clever attorney, and backed, seemingly, by a huge fan club.

It was bizarre that the crimes the defendant was accused of defied credulity. Their very nature threatened to turn the tide

against the State. Too cruel to believe.

Fred Hugi had waited so long for this moment. Days had

become weeks, and weeks months--months that had promised to _________________ SMALL SACRIFICES 7

stretch into a lifetime. This was the case that appeared initially to he simple--even ordinary in a macabre way--and easy to adjudicate. He'd been hoping to be entrusted with a murder case that might demand much more of him. Something interesting. Something that would challenge him, push him to the wall, and hone his trial expertise. When the Downs case came along, he had made the erroneous assumption that it would be over in a day or so, that it would take just long enough to clear to make him lose his place in the long line of assistant DA's waiting for a "good" homicide. ^:

Easy. It had been hell. There was every indication that it would continue to be hell. There had never been a single moment when this somber, intense prosecutor had shouted "Aha! Now we've got it! From here on, it's a shoo-in."

H A year in Vietnam had tested Fred Hugi severely; a year jousting with this media-savvy defendant, and with at least half the population of Eugene and vicinity, had been worse. Prosecuting a defendant like this--for particularly heinous crimes--scraped roughly across the grain of middle-American mores. Fred Hugi knew he was sniping at traditions as entrenched as Mom and apple pie. His eyes slid again over the packed gallery and he winced at the row upon row of "concerned" citizens. He figured they sure as hell weren't there for him. Solid support for the accused. If he recognized this outpouring of sympathy, he knew the jury would see it too. It did not occur to him that some of the spectators might be there simply to hear the juicy details of the defendant's purportedly promiscuous sex life, or even that some of them might be his cheering section.

He felt quite isolated. That was OK; he was accustomed to it. Fred Hugi believed absolutely that what he was doing was right--that he had no other way to go. He had someone to answer to and if he lost, he would lose big.

And so would they.

He looked at the jury. Twelve jurors; three alternates. Hugi had rather unorthodox theories about juries. He considered the ^remony of voir dire to pick unprejudiced jurors basically bullshit,

easily abused, and a vehicle for influencing likely jurors to ^e a position before they heard any evidence at all. He was no

S°od at it; he knew he had neither charm nor charisma and he ^tested having to play the game.

Now Jim Jagger was good at it. Jagger and the prospective L

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jurors had chuckled and chatted. Hugi had been content to play off Jagger. As long as his opponent hadn't attempted to slant facts that might come out in the trial ahead, Hugi kept his mouth shut. But he tensed when he heard the defense attorney ask about religious affiliations and insinuate references to his own church work. Still, Hugi was relieved that it was Jim Jagger up there and not Melvin Belli, who had been scheduled to head the defense team. Belli would surely have held press parties on the top of the Eugene Hilton every night, effectively turning this bleakest of tragedies into a media circus. |

Hugi had just about had it with the press; he glanced at them, packed into the first row behind the rail. He suspected for most of them this was all headlines only—not pain and blood and tears. They were as bad as the gallery—worse, really; many of them had pandered to the suspect, dancing obligingly to whichever tune was called. Well, now they'd get their headlines all right. He couldn't stop that, but they might be in for a surprise or two. Hugi hadn't changed anything about himself for this trial. Balking at the advice of his courtroom expert—DA's Investigator, Ray Broderick—he'd refused to grow his hair longer so he'd look less rigid. Nor would Hugi consider modifying his apparel. In court he always wore a conservative, off-the-rack suit with baggy trousers, or a blazer and slacks, a regimentally striped tie, and •