The passion was gone, and only the words were left. To repeat them now, without the fire, without the righteous belief in what they meant, seemed awkward and even embarrassing.
Asa saw my hesitation. “Go ahead,” he urged. “You’ll be the only one who might laugh.”
” ‘Oh where is the noble fear of modesty, or the strength of virtue, now that blasphemy is in power and men have put justice behind them, and there is no law but lawlessness and none join-’ “
Micronitis finished it for me. ” ‘And none join in fear of the Gods.’ Iphigeneia at Aulis. You really said that in court?” he asked, looking at me with a new respect.
Dragging his finger back and forth across his lower lip, Asa studied me for a moment. “That was Antonelli’s secret,” he said, with that same shrewd look in his pale blue eyes. There was a wistful tone in his voice, the nostalgia of regret. “Lawyers make the mistake of thinking they have to explain everything to jurors in the simplest possible terms. So they talk down to them, like they’re children. Antonelli always talked to them like there was at least one person on the jury who knew more about the case than he did. He talked to them the way you would talk if you were standing in front of the twelve most serious-minded people on the face of the planet. That’s why you always won, isn’t it? Because you understood that people don’t have to be smart themselves to recognize intelligence.”
I shook my head and shrugged, as if it were something about which I had never given a thought.
“I think Jeffries probably had a different interpretation.”
Asa was too old, and too clear-sighted, to indulge in a lie, even the kind we pass off in polite conversation as a concern for the feelings of other people.
“He thought you were a dangerous person, that you could persuade jurors to do things they shouldn’t, that you corrupted the system.”
Harper Bryce’s eyes widened as he looked at Asa and then at me. “How many times did you try cases in front of him?” he asked.
Asa answered for me. “Just that one time. The Larkin case.”
He turned back to me. “How long was the jury out?”
“Twenty-five minutes.”
Harper’s stomach knocked against the edge of the table as he laughed. “No wonder he thought you corrupted the system. But why was that the only time you ever tried a case in his courtroom?”
Asa had known Jeffries most of his life, and he had known me through my whole career. The story had become as much his as mine.
“It was the case that made Antonelli famous, and part of it was because of what Calvin had done. He threw him in jail for contempt; he took the side of the prosecution every time there was an objection. You heard what he said to the girl when she testified-about how if her brother wanted to get back at people it was because of what his mother had done. About the only thing he didn’t do was tell the jury they were supposed to convict. Calvin had gone too far. It might not have mattered if Antonelli had lost, but Antonelli won, and that made it look like Calvin had lost. That was one thing Calvin could never forgive.
He always had to win. Antonelli would have been a fool to try another case in front of him.”
Shoving back from the table, Asa stood up. “Well, he’s gone now,” he said. “He had a brilliant mind, one of the best legal minds I’ve ever encountered. It’s too bad he didn’t have more use for other people.” He glanced at his watch. “Why didn’t you tell me it was getting so late?” he asked, darting a glance at Micronitis before he looked back at me and winked.
After he was gone, Harper bent closer, a wry expression on his face. “Maybe that explains why Jeffries hated you, but why do you still hate him? He threw you in jail for a couple of days, but he was doing you a favor. That’s all anyone talked about, how you showed up in court right from the county jail, looking like some wino off the streets, and asked the same damn question all over again. You became a legend because of what he did. And even if you weren’t as smart as I think you are, it happened too many years ago to still carry a grudge.”
He watched me for a moment before he said, “It wasn’t the Larkin case at all, was it? There was something else, some other reason why you can’t stop hating him, even now, after he’s dead.”
Five
As soon as I saw her leading the funeral party out of the church, her face hidden behind the widow’s black veil, I knew I had to see him. I had always meant to. God knows, I had thought about it often enough, especially when it first happened, when everything fell apart, but there always seemed to be something else I had to do, another case, another trial, something that got in the way. I kept promising myself I would do it, and after a while the promise itself became enough to assure me of my own good intentions. Finally, I managed to put it out of my mind altogether, but then, every so often, I would hear a name that reminded me of his and would convince myself again that this time I would really do it.
If I did not do it now, I never would. It was not just because Jeffries was dead and that Elliott Winston had once been married to his widow. If I did not see him now I would never get over my own sense of guilt, the feeling that what happened to him was in some measure my fault. It was not really my fault, of course; I had nothing to do with it, at least not directly. But I still blamed myself for not seeing what was going on before it was too late. I knew better than almost anyone what Calvin Jeffries was capable of doing.
I think I liked Elliott Winston because he reminded me of the way I had been at the beginning, when I was young, and enthu-siastic, and convinced of the importance of what I was doing. I suppose that is not quite true. I had only looked innocent: Elliott really was. Maybe that is why I liked him so much: He reminded me of something I wished I had been.
No one wanted to hire him, at least no one in the firm of which I was then one of the senior partners. There was nothing personal about it. Elliott had clerked for me the summer before his last year of law school. Everyone liked him, and everyone thought he would become a very good lawyer, but Elliott had not gone to one of the nation’s best law schools, and that, for most of the twelve partners who had gathered in the conference room, was an insurmountable objection.
“Elliott Winston wants to be a criminal defense lawyer,” I tried to explain. “That’s what I do, and I’ve never once had a client-
or a judge, for that matter-ask me where I went to law school.”
“You went to Harvard,” one of the partners remarked.
“And when I graduated I knew less about practicing law than anyone who went to night school. I certainly knew less than Elliott.”
“Perhaps,” the partner replied, furrowing his brow, “but Harvard trained you to think like a lawyer.”
I looked at him, a wry smile on my face. “Which side of this argument are you on?”
No one thought it funny. They had all gone to the best schools, and they had all graduated in the top tenth, or the top fifth, or in the top two or three of their class. It was who they were, part of a hierarchy, a legal aristocracy bent on preserving its identity by a rigid policy of exclusion.
Pointing at the stack of resumes on the table, I challenged them. “Find me one person in there who will be a better lawyer-
a better criminal defense lawyer-than Elliott Winston.”
“There isn’t one person there who did not graduate from one of the top law schools in the country.”
“That wasn’t my question,” I insisted.
“We have a reputation to maintain,” another partner objected.
I wanted to say, “A reputation as a place where everyone sits around telling each other how great they were before they were admitted to the bar!” I seized instead on what he had said and pretended to agree.