Pausing, he started to look around the courtroom again. “Do you still like doing this?” he asked, a pensive expression on his face. “Being a lawyer, trying cases in court? I should have listened to you when you tried to warn me about Jeffries,” he said, biting his lip while his eyes flared open. His mind was starting to wander back to the beginning of what had happened to him. “This was always where I wanted to end up,” he said, looking at me as he narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “In court, trying to convince a jury that I was right.”
He seemed to draw into himself. I moved down the length of the counsel table and stood at the end of it, closest both to the jury box and the witness stand. I pointed at Danny.
“Elliott,” I said quietly, “you’ve never seen him before, have you?”
He did not hear me, or if he did, he chose not to answer.
Whatever was going on in his tortured mind, he was now a prisoner to it. His eyes grew larger and even more intense, his neck bulged, and his shirt collar, too tight as it was, cut into his throat and his face turned red.
“Insanity confers immunity, but immunity is irrelevant when it is a question of self-defense,” he said, the words tumbling rapidly out of his mouth. “You’re entitled to take another’s life when they’re trying to take yours, aren’t you?” he asked, challenging me to disagree.
“Do you know him? Have you ever seen him before?” I asked insistently, pointing again at Danny.
Elliott glanced at the defendant, then looked back at me. “No, I’ve never seen him before,” he said impatiently. “It would be self-defense, wouldn’t it?”
“No,” I replied, keeping my voice low. “It could not be self-defense. No one tried to kill you. But even if they had, it was twelve years ago.”
It was an odd sensation. For a moment I thought we were repeating a conversation we had had before, one of the hundreds we had had when he was an associate in the firm and we talked about the criminal law and the various and sometimes inventive defenses that could be raised to a charge of murder.
“Self-defense has to be contemporaneous with the attack. Otherwise there’s nothing to defend against. You can’t just take the life of someone who injured you at some point in the past. That’s nothing more than revenge.”
He could barely wait for me to finish. “Are you sure?” he asked, his eyes ablaze. “What if, as soon as he was attacked, he started to defend himself-but moved slowly. What if,” he continued, thrusting his head forward, “the attack itself went on-day after day-for years? What if someone was crushing the life out of him, strangling him, a little tighter all the time, with the thought of what he was doing with his wife, with his children? And then, years after it started, he finally makes it stop. Are you so certain that would not be self-defense?”
I refused to concede anything. “No, it isn’t self-defense and you know it. You’re talking about the way you felt, about the effect of what Calvin Jeffries did to you. It wasn’t self-defense, because it was too late-far too late-to prevent him from doing what he did, and because you can’t change the past. All you could do was try to take your revenge. And that’s what you did, wasn’t it, Elliott?”
He was beside himself. “Can’t change the past? Don’t you understand anything? The past is the only thing you can change!”
His eyes were growing wider and his voice was becoming louder, more violent, with every word he spoke. He was close to going completely over the edge. I had to get him to admit what he had done now or it was going to be too late. I took a step toward him.
“You thought by having Calvin Jeffries killed, by having Quincy Griswald killed, you could change the past?”
“Of course!” he insisted. “They changed my past, didn’t they?”
His eyes darted toward the jury. “My wife-the woman I loved-
became the woman who betrayed me. My children-the children I loved-became the children who forgot me. Don’t you see? My past was that of a man who was loved; it became that of a man who was hated and abandoned.”
His head jerked back around until he was again staring straight at me. “Can’t change the past? What would my past be now if I had just lived all those years in the asylum, a patient in the hospital for the criminally insane? What would you see, looking back on my life? A lunatic. And what would you have seen,” he asked, bristling, “when you looked back at the life of Jeffries and Griswald and the mother of my children? Whatever you would have seen, it isn’t what you see now, is it? Can’t change the past? They did it to me, and I did it to them. They tried to write the history of my life, but I wrote theirs instead!” he shouted, rising from the chair.
The judge exchanged a quick, worried glance with the bailiff, who immediately started to move toward the witness stand.
“It’s all right, Elliott,” I said, trying to calm him as I moved another step forward. The bailiff looked at me, then looked at the judge. Bingham hesitated, then held up his hand to let him know he could stop.
I was not through with Elliott yet. There was something more I had to have.
“How did you do it? How did you get Jacob Whittaker to kill Jeffries? How did you get Chester-Billy-to kill Griswald? How did you talk them into doing it?”
He looked at me like I was a fool. “I gave them something to live for. I gave them something to die for. I gave them something to believe in.”
“What did you give them to believe in, Elliott? What did they believe in so much they were willing to kill for it?”
“They believed that evil really exists, that evil people really exist, and that if you don’t stop them they’ll keep doing evil things.” He paused and a smile crept across his mouth. “They’re insane, remember?”
Our eyes were locked together. I took another step toward him.
We were now not more than an arm’s length apart.
“You admit you ordered them to kill Jeffries and Griswald?”
He laughed. “Ordered them? I didn’t order anyone to do anything. We had a trial, just like you’re having now.” He looked around the courtroom. “Or perhaps more like the court proceeding they held when they had me committed. I made my case the way any good lawyer would: I was clear, logical, and persuasive, just the way you are. And then, at the end of it, they reached a verdict, and after they reached a verdict they passed sentence.
They carried it out. I had nothing to do with it.”
His eyes glittered with self-satisfaction, but he was not finished yet. There was something more he wanted to say, something important.
“So you see,” he began, “I did change the past.”
That is when it happened, that dreadful, pathetic beating together of same-sounding words, worse-far worse-than when I had heard it before.
“I did change the past… last… fast… mast.” The words came in short staccato bursts, faster and faster. He began to choke, and he tore at his collar, pulling it away from his throat as if that was what was blocking his breath. His eyes bulging, he tugged at his collar harder and harder as he staggered off the witness chair, stumbled and started to fall. I caught him with both hands and as I fell back under his weight the bailiff rushed in to help.
He must have dreamed about it, seen it in his sleep, gone over it a thousand times in his mind, planning every motion of his hands, every movement of his feet, until it had all become as instinctive as a dance. I was right there, holding him, trying to help him, and I never saw it happen. Suddenly, I was clutching at nothing and Elliott was standing free, waving the bailiff’s gun.