“He has a few friends? He’s homeless and he has a few friends that can afford to hire you?”
I had had enough of this. “Have we met? Is there some reason you don’t like me, or is this just the way you talk to everyone?”
It did not faze him. He shrugged and looked away. A short while later, he sat up, pulled a file out of a metal holder on the corner of his desk, and glanced at the first page inside. “We entered a plea of not guilty,” he said as he closed it. “It won’t get to trial, though. We ordered a psychiatric. He’s not competent to stand trial,” he said with assurance. Sitting back, he crossed his ankle over his knee and laced his fingers together behind his neck. “Good thing he’s a loon,” he said with a cynical glance.
“It’s the only thing that can save him from the death penalty.”
“You think he did it, then?”
“Probably,” he said with indifference. “It doesn’t matter. As I said, we’re getting a psychiatric. There won’t be a trial. He can’t assist in his own defense,” he said, using the phrase that provides one of the standards by which a court decides upon the mental competency of a defendant.
Without waiting for another invitation, I sat down in the chair in front of him. “You know what will happen to him then, don’t you?”
His eyes flashed. “I handle more cases in a week than you do in a year. You think I don’t know what will happen? What should happen. He isn’t responsible. He has a mental disease. He should be hospitalized, not put in a cell on death row!”
“Have you talked to him?”
“John Smith? You can’t talk to him. That’s my point. He doesn’t understand anything. He has no idea what’s going on.”
“He knew enough to tell the cops that someone gave him the knife.”
Taylor just looked at me, and I knew then that he did not know anything about it. The police had apparently not bothered to include that little detail in their report.
“You didn’t know that, did you?”
“It doesn’t change anything. He isn’t competent.”
“And he isn’t guilty. Do you really think an innocent man should be locked up in a hospital because of something he didn’t do?”
“He isn’t competent,” he repeated. “And all the evidence is against him. If he went to trial, he’d be found guilty. Don’t you think he’d be better off in a hospital? Even if he wasn’t found guilty, what does he have to go back to? More nights under a bridge?”
I got up from the chair and looked down at Taylor, wondering whether, if that was the choice, he might not be right after all.
“The innocent are supposed to go free,” I said. “If he needs help, there are other ways to get it.”
Before he had a chance to ask me what they were, I heard myself announce a decision I did not know I had made. “I’m taking the case. I’ll have my office send over the substitution order.”
I paused. “If that’s all right with you, that is.”
Even if he had wanted to keep the case, he could not. The public defender could only represent clients who could not get an attorney of their own. But he was glad to get rid of this one.
Taylor did not mind losing-public defenders were used to it.
What he did mind, what he could not bear to face, was the possibility that someone he was representing might be sentenced to death when they could have spent the rest of their life in the relative comfort of the safe white sheets of an insane asylum bed.
It was a risk he would not have run for himself; it was a risk he thought me mad to run for anyone else.
Eighteen
Jennifer refused to think there was any risk at all; and even if there was, she did not see that there was any choice. “If he didn’t do it…” she said, letting the thought finish itself as she searched my eyes.
We were at the restaurant bar, waiting for a table. She was sitting on a leather stool, one long leg crossed over the other, the hem of her black dress just above her knee. I was standing, wedged in tight by the crowd that pressed two and three deep all around us. She said something, but the noise was so loud I could not hear. I bent closer, and as I did her soft, pliable hand slipped into mine. Her eyes were laughing.
“When was the last time you lost a case?”
I started to reply, forgot what I was going to say, and, unac-countably, felt my face grow hot.
“You’re blushing. That’s perfect,” she said, gently squeezing my hand.
“No, I’m not,” I replied, trying to shrug it off. “I just looked down the front of your dress and got all excited.”
She wrinkled her nose and tossed her head. “You’re such a liar.
Why can’t you just admit it? You blushed.”
She watched me out of the corner of her eye as she lifted the thin-stemmed glass of wine to her mouth and drank. We had lived our separate lives and she still knew me better than anyone ever had.
“Was I a liar then?” I asked, pretending that it was too long ago and that I had forgotten half of what had happened.
Sliding off the stool, she took my arm. The waiter was beck-oning from across the room. “Every time I said don’t, and you said you wouldn’t?” she whispered in my ear.
The waiter pulled out her chair, and I settled into the one across the small table for two. As he handed her a menu, I said, as if it were nothing more than a casual remark, “Then we were both lying, weren’t we?”
She thanked the waiter and opened the menu. “I used to wonder why it took you so long to figure that out.” Her eyes came up until they met mine. “You’re doing it again,” she said with an innocent stare. “Your face is turning red.”
The waiter returned and took our order. Jennifer sipped on her wine, a pensive look in her eyes. “What is he like?” She put down the glass. “You saw him today in jail?”
I began to tell her again how I had decided to take the case as soon as I discovered how little the public defender was going to do. She was not listening.
“I used to think that would happen to me,” Jennifer said. She was looking right at me, but she had turned in on herself. “I thought I was going to become like the people who walk around with vacant eyes pushing their shopping carts with all their belongings stacked on top, the people who sleep under blankets made out of cardboard boxes.” Gradually, her eyes came back into focus. “How long has he been like that: homeless?” she asked.
“You really thought that could happen to you?” I asked, a trace of skepticism in my voice.
“You think people are born homeless?”
“I’m beginning to think John Smith may have been,” I said almost as an aside. “No, I don’t think people are born homeless.
But I don’t think many of them started out as members of the upper middle class, either. Most of them are alcoholics, addicts, people suffering serious mental disease, people who should be in hospitals.”
“Like John Smith?”
I shook my head. “He isn’t delusional; he doesn’t hear voices…”
“I heard voices,” she said matter-of-factly. “Perhaps not in quite the way you mean. I thought things that were said by people I didn’t know-things said by people on television, for example-
had a special meaning meant only for me.”
I started to explain what I thought was the difference. “Don’t,”
she said, laying her left hand on my wrist. “You can make all the distinctions you want-but what it really comes down to is you don’t want to believe I was ever that sick…” Raising her head she turned first one way, then the other. “Look around,” she said when her eyes came back to mine. “Tell me what you see.”
The restaurant was filled to capacity, with dozens of people crowded around the bar. Men wore ties and women sparkled.
“Everything depends on how you look, how you dress, what kind of car you drive, what kind of house you own. That’s how we decide about people, that’s how we decide about ourselves: whether we’re successful or not, whether we know what’s going on or not, whether we’re crazy or not.”