The Right Mistake (21 page)

Weeks went by. The trial dragged on and Socrates spent his time studying the faces of the judge and jury. He was also intrigued by the young woman who took notes of the proceedings. The court reporter was white and pretty but she held herself like an ugly teenager shy of her appearance. Every once in a while she’d catch him staring at her and then she’d brush an imagined lock of her black hair away from her face. Socrates would smile when she did this and sometimes she smiled back.

The guards in the jailhouse liked him. Two of them had even shaken his hand.
The forensic doctor found it hard to believe that a sixty-yearold man could hit someone that hard with his fist alone. The police, however, found no weapon that could have been used.
Under oath Captain Telford Winegarten, the man in charge of the Anti-gang Tactical Division, admitted that Kelly Beardsley worked for him.
“But he was under strict orders to simply observe,” the captain said. “It was what we call non-invasive reconnaissance. He would not have broken any lock in that house. He was just there to listen and report on gang activity.”
“Did he discover any gang activity?” Mason Tinheart asked.
Winegarten did not reply.
“I have already subpoenaed your records,” Tinheart reminded him.
“No.”
“And how long had he been there?”
“Nearly six months.”
“If he didn’t find out anything then why keep him there?”
“The police have to have patience, counselor,” Winegarten said. “We don’t have the luxury of retaliation.”
Tinheart smiled and walked away.

“This is a big moment, Mr. Fortlow,” Mason Tinheart said in Socrates’ cell after the trial had gone on for six weeks. “We have to decide whether or not to put you on the stand.”

Socrates didn’t say anything to this because he didn’t know what was right.
“On the one hand you are the only witness to the killing,” Tinheart continued. “You were there. You hit him.”
“Twice,” Socrates said.
“What?”
“I hit him twice.”
“But it was a one-two punch right? You didn’t wait and hit him again later?”
“No. It was one right after the other, hard and fast.”
“So the problem is,” Tinheart said, “do we put you in the witness chair and let the jury see the man you are?”
“They already seen me,” Socrates said. “And you know I’m ugly as a mothahfuckah to most of them. Everybody got a different life but I doubt if any of them have seen a life like mine.”
“But do we dare pull back the curtain?” Tinheart asked. Before Socrates could answer he added, “Brigittta says that you should do it but I think she’s infatuated with you.”
“Maybe somebody on the jury will like me.”
“Brigitta came to see you didn’t she?” Mason asked.
Socrates nodded.
“What did she say?”
“That I shouldn’t give up. That I should keep up hope,” Socrates said, thinking about sex as hope. “But I told her that I just take life as it comes. I don’t hope its comin’ ’cause it’s comin’ still and all.”
Socrates could see that the lawyer had other questions, that he was afraid of something between Brigitta and other men. But the lawyer didn’t voice his fears.
“All we need is one juror to keep you from jail,” Tinheart said. “I think you should go on the stand.”
Maybe, Socrates thought, Tinheart wanted to destroy him because he believed that his woman had betrayed him. Maybe Socrates on the stand would give the lawyer his own private justice.
“Lemme think about it, Mason. I’ll talk to you in a few days.”
“We have to decide quickly.”
“I need to think about it.”
“We have to plan our approach.”
“Should I get me a new lawyer? Maybe Cassie?”
“No. I understand,” Mason said. “I’ll come by day after tomorrow.”
“Two days after,” Socrates said.
Cassie Wheaton, after hearing the full explanation of Socrates’ fears, agreed to sit with Tinheart at the defense table. She said that she didn’t know if his testimony would help or hurt his case.
“Tinheart is right about one thing,” she’d said. “You have to expect that the jury will be mostly against you even if your case is strong.”

“I’m a bad person to ask, Socco,” Billy Psalms had said. “You know me, my hands just itchin’ for some dice to throw. An’ you cain’t make a bet wit’ yo’ mouf shet.”

It just so happened that during the time that Socrates was deciding about his answer to Tinheart Chaim Zetel came to visit. The tinkerer liked to visit and play a game of chess on a stone board that he’d found rooting through the trash in Beverly Hills.

But that day Socrates didn’t want to play.
“I got a problem, Chaim.”
The old man smiled at the irony of the statement. Socrates laughed.
“Tinheart wanna put me on the witness stand an’ I don’t

know if I trust him.”
“Because of the woman?”
“How you know that?”
“Strong women like strong men. They like to push up against

them.”
“What do you think I should do?” Socrates asked. “The one thing, the only thing they cannot ask of us is silence,

my friend,” the old man told the killer. “We all die. We are all dragged away. But we do not have to go quietly. We owe it to our children and our friends and even to our enemies to speak out.” “Why the enemy?”
“He needs to hear the truth too.”
“But what if I’m not sure about what is true?” “Even if you are not the truth is still there.”

That night Socrates had a dream about himself when he was six years old. He had stolen a ballpoint pen from a 5 and 10 on Garner Street. He took the pen to his Aunt Bellandra and said it was for her birthday. She took the present from him and smiled at it. The smile lasted for more than a minute and then she handed it back to the child.

“It’s very lovely, Socrates,” she said. “Now I want you to go back to the people you stole it from and give it back. That will be the best gift you evah give me.”

At the last moment Tinheart decided to let Cassie represent the defense in examining Socrates. He provided a list of questions but she discarded them.

“I was in the kitchen lookin’ for a sandwich but we had given them all away,” Socrates remembered. “And it was like I saw somethin’, a shadow or somethin’ like that in the corner of my eye. At first I didn’t think anything of it but there wasn’t supposed to be anybody in the house and it started botherin’ me. So I went upstairs and I saw that the door to my office was closed. Now I knew I had left it open and so I went in . . .

“Kelly was there lookin’ in the top drawer of my file cabinet. I knew that he had to have broken the lock because my file cabinet locks automatically and only me and Billy Psalms have the keys. And the drawer got a counterweight on it so I couldn’t have left it open.

“I asked Kelly what he was doin’ but he just walked past me out into the hallway. I went out aftah him and called his name but he just kep’ on goin’. I raised my voice and he turned and at the same time was pullin’ a pistol from his pants. I moved up on him real quick an’ hit him two times. He went down and I checked him out but he was dead. I called 911 but the cops got there before the ambulance.”

“You asked for medical care?”
“Yes I did.”
“Not just for the police?”
“No, ma’am. I knew the police had to come but, but I didn’t

want anybody to say that I didn’t try to help Kelly aftah hurtin’ him like that.”
“What happened after that?” Cassie Wheaton asked.
“Cops come in with their guns out. They put me in chains and took me off to jail.”
“Did you intend to kill Mr. Beardsley?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why didn’t you try to grab his gun hand and disarm him?”
“Might as well try an’ grab a viper by his fangs,” Socrates said flatly.
“Were you aware that Mr. Beardsley was a police spy?”
“Objection,” Marlene Quest ejaculated. “Prejudicial language.”
“Mr. Beardsley was a police agent who pretended to be a member of the Big Nickel group,” Wheaton said. “He secretly gathered information on the people in that institution and reported his findings to Mr. Winegarten. In everyday parlance he was a spy.”
“I’m going to have to agree with the defense on this point, Ms. Quest,” Judge Tanaka said, almost apologetically. “Objection overruled.”
“I repeat the question, Mr. Fortlow,” Cassie Wheaton said. “Did you know that Kelly Beardsley was a spy?”
“When I saw that he broke into my file I knew that he was after something that he thought was a secret. I didn’t know if he was a cop or not but I didn’t think he was just a thief neither.”
“So you didn’t know.”
“Not before I saw him in my file.”
Socrates saw that Cassie was unhappy with his answer but he had already decided that he was going to tell the truth with every word he uttered in that witness chair.

“So you knew he was gathering information on you?” Marlene Quest asked at the beginning of her cross-examination. “And that’s why you killed him?”

“Hard enough to break his jaw and his neck,” Quest said as if she were reminding him of something he forgot.
“I was movin’ fast, counselor. A man was moving a gun muzzle in my direction. How hard I hit him had to do with how fast I was movin’.”
“But what about the pistol?” the prosecutor said with the leer of satisfaction in her tone.
This question came as no surprise. The handgun that had Kelly Beardsley’s prints on it was at the other end of the hall when the police got there. It was one of the central points of the prosecution that the gun was either a plant or a red herring placed by Socrates to hide his crime.
Cassie and Mason had told him to say that he had no idea how the gun got there.
Might as well not open up a can of worms
, Tinheart had said.
“What about it?” Socrates asked.
“How did it get over fifteen feet away from the corpse?”
“I kicked it there.”
“Kicked it?”
“Argumentative,” Cassie Wheaton and Mason Tinheart announced as one.
“When Kelly hit the floor the pistol fell at his side. I didn’t know if he was dead or even unconscious. I sure didn’t want him to grab the gun an’ start shootin’ so I kicked the pistol.”
“You didn’t take it from his pocket and move it away from the body?”
“No.”
“You didn’t sneak up on Officer Beardsley and strike him down out of jealousy?”
“Jealousy?” Socrates asked. He was surprised for the first time during the trial. “Jealous of what?”
“I have it on authority that Mr. Beardsley and the mother of your child, Miss Luna Barnet, had dated more than once. I have detailed affidavits from the restaurant and bar staffs.”
The laughter that came from Socrates was honest and pure. He sat back in the witness chair, comfortable in that seat.
“Lady, you don’t know my Luna if you think she gonna be messin’ ’round on me in a place where you could get a affidavit. She just about the onlyest person I know done had it harder than I did. She know how to keep her secrets quiet. You go to restaurant to eat, a bar to drink. But if you wanna fool around it’s the back alley all the way.”
For a moment the prosecutor lost her bearings. The last thing she expected from a murderer was friendly laughter. She shuffled her
affidavits
and then looked up.
“Ms. Wheaton tells us that Kelly Beardsley was a spy. Why would anybody spy on you, Mr. Fortlow?”
“Same reason I’m on trial, Ms. Quest.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There’s bad blood down around where I come from, ma’am—a lotta bad blood. It’s like Detective Brand and Captain Winegarten say, there’s gangs and drugs and murders and prostitution on every block. And if somebody wanna do somethin’ about it he got to shove his hands in all the way to his elbows. You cain’t stop a gang member from killin’ unless you have him in. You cain’t help a drug addict or a prostitute unless you sit down with ’em. At least that.
“And if you a man like me, a man that already went to prison over a crime that was terrible, then the cops and the judges and the juries and the prosecutors got to get together and see if that man is frontin’ or what.
“I don’t like spies. I don’t like it when the police come into my house every other day because I got a record and they got a job. But I accept those things. That’s the life I live. If I was to go out and murder people because’a things like that L.A. wouldn’t have no population problem. I’d be killin’ twenty-four seven.”
Marlene Quest had a faint smile on her face. Socrates could tell that she thought he was doing her work for her.
“One last question, Mr. Fortlow,” she said. “We know you killed Mr. Beardsley, a policeman in the execution of his duty, what we want to know, the reason you’re here, is to know if you murdered him.”
Socrates had refused to practice his answer to this inevitable question. The truth would be his only protection and the truth could not be rehearsed.
“I don’t think so, Ms. Quest. I have thought about it ever since that day and—”
“Yes or no, Mr. Fortlow,” the prosecutor said.
“I’m answerin’ your question, counselor.”
“Yes or no.”
Socrates turned to the judge but didn’t speak. Their eyes met.
“This is his day in court, Ms. Quest,” Tanaka said. “We’ll allow him the leeway to explain himself.”
“Thank you, your honor,” Socrates said. “It’s not complex but there’s points about it. I knew Kelly was grabbin’ for a gun before I saw it, I saw it before I hit him but I was already movin’ fast. Now if he didn’t have a gun I might’a hit just as hard anyway. I was goin’ on my instinct but instinct coulda been wrong. It wasn’t but it coulda been. I saw the gun before I hit him and so when I think it all through I don’t think I murdered him but that I only killed him outta the instinct of self-defense.”

After the last arguments were given it was the end of the day and so the jury was sequestered for the night.
Socrates went to his cell and was visited by Cassie and Mason.
“Number seven and number eleven are on your side, Socco,” Tinheart said. “Older black woman and black man. They had sympathy for you when you testified.”
“Seven come eleven as Billy would say,” Socrates said, trying to keep up his lawyers’ spirits.
“They’ll probably take a month to decide,” Cassie added. “Our only problem is if someone else on the jury wants to wear them down.”
Tinheart nodded sadly.
“Why’ont you two go home and get a good night’s sleep,” Socrates suggested.
“I brought some sleeping pills if you need them, Socco,” Mason offered.
“I like it in jail, Mason. I sleep like a baby behind locked doors.”