“‘And were you given that check in exchange for your testimony?’”
During the entire exchange between lawyers and bench, the maharishi had maintained the bland and imperturbable façade of a man who has mentally absented himself from a world he found both petty and vulgar. He seemed to Bill to be in a trance or, rather, on a different plane from the others and either failed to hear or chose to ignore the clerk’s question.
“The witness will answer the question,” Judge Langley sharply ordered.
Still the veil of apathy remained drawn across the maharishi’s eyes.
With a gunshot rap on his gavel, Judge Langley leaned over to the witness and barked, “Does the witness hear me?”
The sudden harshness of the hammerblow caused the maharishi to jump and awareness to flood back into his eyes. He stared up at the judge in the disoriented manner of a man just awakened from a sound sleep.
“You must answer the question,” the judge snapped.
“The question?” the maharishi repeated in a seeming daze.
The judge turned impatiently to the clerk. “Read the question again!”
“‘And were you given that check in exchange for your testimony?’”
As the full significance of the question, barbed as it was with insult and innuendo, was finally absorbed by the maharishi, his eyes became deeply aggrieved, and his face tautened with rancor, hurt, and hostility. In one sudden motion, he rose from the witness stand and proceeded to stalk floatingly out of the courtroom.
There was a collective gasp from the audience. Judge Langley had trouble finding his voice and, jerking up to his feet, finally shouted after the departing witness, “Stop! You have not been dismissed! Guard! Restrain that man! Seize him and return him to the witness stand!”
The maharishi was now through the gate railing and moving swiftly up the aisle toward the exit when the door guard sprinted toward him and collected his featherlight body in a powerful hug (later telling a reporter that it felt as if he were grabbing a bag of loose bones).
At the first wince of pain on the maharishi’s face, Elliot Hoover jumped up from his seat and bounded to the old Hindu’s rescue, clearing the railing in a sprightly jump, and, seizing the guard by the carotid artery, quickly separated the two men.
Bill, standing and watching with a helpless grin of amazement, felt a quick stab of pity for the guard, who immediately sank to the floor in a daze.
Judge Langley banged furiously with his gavel. “Order!” he shouted. “This is a court of justice! Guards, restrain the defendant!”
The two burly officers needed no admonition from the bench to join the fray and zeroed in on Hoover from opposite directions with their pistols drawn.
The reporters were all on their feet, as were the jurors—Mr. Fitzgerald, shaking his head in disbelief; Mrs. Carbone, hand at mouth, weeping in anguish and emotion, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”; Mr. Potash’s ferocious metallic laughter rising above the din of insanity in peal after peal of mindless merriment.
It was at this juncture of the pandemonium that Brice Mack, seated at the defense table, lowered his head into his hands in an effort to blot out the specter of his own ignominious defeat. What had been planned as a tasteful inquiry into the esthetics and religion of a far-flung people had turned, instead, into a rough-and-tumble street brawl. How any jury could ever be brought back to a sober frame of mind after a debacle of this magnitude was a deep and impenetrable mystery to him, one he couldn’t even bear to think of.
“I want handcuffs on the defendant!” the grating voice of Judge Langley cut through the darkness of Brice Mack’s despair. “Return the witness to the stand and see that he doesn’t leave it until he’s excused!”
The clinking of metal handcuffs added its note to the general commotion.
“Order!” The judge’s voice cracked with hysteria. “There will be order in the court or I will clear the courtroom! The spectators will be silent!”
Drawing his hands slowly from his face, the first sight to assail Mack was his client, sitting beside him in an attitude of stoic resignation, his left wrist cuffed to the chair arm, and a disheveled guard hovering vigilantly over him. Turning his gaze to the maharishi, Mack found the lean and stately form of the holy man hunched deeply into the witness chair, peering forlornly forth from a ball of rumpled saffron cloth. Two policemen stood threateningly on either side of the hapless Hindu’s chair.
“Mr. Mack,” growled Judge Langley, huffing and puffing as if he had just ran a race, “I am going to hold you responsible for the actions of your witness and your client. If you cannot control them, not only will I have them bound and strapped to their chairs, but I will hold you in contempt of court. Is that understood?”
The whipped-dog expression on the young lawyer’s face was committed to the artist’s pad as he meekly replied, “Yes, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Velie,” Judge Langley continued in a strident, no-nonsense voice, “you will ask your question of the witness.”
Scott Velie, who had been seated throughout most of the tumult and enjoying it, took his time in rising and then stood waiting for absolute silence before measuredly addressing the bench.
“Your Honor,” he said, “I withdraw the question.” And, fixing the witness with a look of monumental disdain, he added, “I have no further questions to ask the Reverend Pradesh!”
The courtroom sighed and recessed for lunch.
20
Brice Mack sat hunched over the platter of barbecued pork ribs, maintaining a sulky silence while his teeth tore at the fatty flesh, ripping cartilage from bone in quick, cruel bites. The need to tear into something, to rip and mutilate and deform was hard upon him, and Fred Hudson, the only member of the “team” to have joined him at the long table at Pinetta’s this bitter hour—having quickly gauged the boss’ manic mood—kept a wary and respectful distance between them.
Greasily sucking at a bone, Mack quietly observed Hudson and the empty chairs across and between them with eyes void of expression. He knew where the two lawyers were—still screwing around in the library, picking and scratching about in the books for precedential straws to grasp at, which at this point would be thoroughly useless. Professor Ahmanson, he knew, had gone to Washington Heights to collect James Beardsley Hancock, their next witness. Mack felt a small comfort that he’d had the foresight to order a limousine to cart the old boy down to the court-house to ensure his getting there on time. One more foul-up at this point, and Langley would throw the book at him. He was itching to do it.
Only Brennigan was unaccounted for. His last contact with the Irish sot was on Friday, just after the lunch recess, when he showed up with half a bag on and whispered to Mack that he was on to something. “Something,” he had cryptically added, “that’ll loosen Velie’s bowels, me boy.”
Slowly chewing and swallowing the crisp, pungent pork, the young lawyer’s thoughts veered back to James Beardsley Hancock, his last bright hope on a dismal and threatening horizon. Hoover’s adamant refusal to allow Marion Worthman to take the stand in his behalf had been reinforced by the Pradesh fiasco. Now only Hancock was left to lend his expertise to their case, a fact which not only failed to discourage Brice Mack, but sent an odd surge of renewed optimism coursing through him.
Having met and interviewed the old man on six separate occasions, Mack had finally come to know and truly to believe that James Beardsley Hancock would make an imposing study on the witness stand. At times, his look was Olympian; at others, Lincolnesque. His head could have graced a Roman coin or a Yankee postage stamp. His bearing transmitted respect; his leather-hard face and eagle-bright eyes conveyed honor, truth, and a fearsome integrity. In the courtroom he would seem to belong where the judge was sitting.