"Had he?" she asked.
"Who knows? The guard was dead, so we certainly couldn't ask him. Smith maintained — that was his name, Orville Smith — said the guard had made things impossible for him from the moment he arrived. He was serving a life term, you see. He'd murdered his wife and daughter. Killed them with an axe." Jonah paused. "A California firm was handling the case, they called us in to see if we'd be interested. We… our firm… Raymond's and mine… had built a reputation by then and… there was a mandatory death penalty involved, you see, if Smith got convicted, that was the law."
"Did you take the case?"
"Well… it seemed to me, it seemed to me there had been provocation. After all, Smith was pretty much at this fellow's mercy, you know, and had to take his abuse and listen to his remarks. What finally caused him to crack, in fact, was a simple remark, that's all. Smith said the guard called him 'Lizzie' one day, after Lizzie Borden, and that was it. They were in the dining hall, and Smith grabbed his fork and went for the guard's throat and didn't quit until the man was dead. It took four other guards to pull him away, he was a powerful man, six-four, with arms like this."
"Did you take the case, Jonah?"
"I didn't even like the man, I couldn't possibly bring myself to like him and yet… I… I did feel he had been abused. I tried to explain this to Raymond, why I thought we should take the case. We were sitting on the porch of the guest cottage, Raymond and I, looking out at the rain and high illuminated walls of the prison, and Raymond very quietly suggested that maybe I was confusing my private life with my professional life. When I asked him what he meant, he said maybe I was equating the actual murder of a wife and child with what was only the symbolic murder of a wife and child. Now what's that supposed to mean, I said, and he said I'm talking about the divorce, and… and about Christie drinking he said, Your divorce. I'd been divorced that August, you see. Just two months before Raymond and I went to San Quentin together."
"I see."
"He'd always been very fond of Christie. My wife. My former wife."
"I see."
"So… so I could understand why he was disturbed about the divorce, and… and about Christie drinking and… and the things she was doing. He'd known her from… from when we were first married you see, when things were very different. But I couldn't understand what any of this had to do with defending Smith, so I… I tried to be very calm because Raymond was my closest friend and my partner… I… I very calmly explained that I didn't feel any guilt about the failure of my marriage, that Christie had made it virtually impossible to go on living with her, and that we'd both agreed divorce would be best for all parties concerned, including Amy. My daughter. I have a twelve-year-old daughter."
Sally nodded.
"Raymond just said, Sure, Jonah, sure, and then, all of a sudden, he said, I don't want to defend this man. So I… I asked him why he didn't want to defend him and he said because Smith is repulsive and rotten and obviously guilty, and I said, Wait a minute, and he said, No, you wait a minute, Jonah, defending that bastard would be contrary to everything I believe about law and justice.
"The rain was coming down, we sat on the porch in those big wicker chairs painted white by the prisoners, and I said, Raymond, you know this man's rights are in danger of being violated, and he said, Don't give me any more of that shit, Jonah, all you want is another newspaper headline. And… and then he… he told me I… was nothing but a self-seeking son of a bitch who had never really understood Christie, who had forced her to become what she was by totally ignoring her needs in my ruthless… he used that word, ruthless, he said… in my ruthless ambition to become the biggest and best-known lawyer in the history of the goddamn profession, that… that I was responsible for the divorce and for… for ruining a… a damn sweet lady."
Jonah's glass was empty.
He put it to his lips, discovered the brandy was gone, and then put the glass down on the table.
"I guess Smith was guilty, Sally, but… even if he had stabbed that officer in full view of God knows how many men, the thing wasn't premeditated, it wasn't malicious, it couldn't have been, it was a spur-of-the-moment act provoked by the guard. Raymond had… Raymond had no right to… to say the things he said to me.
"But they were said. They were out. And when people pass that certain line, wherever it may be…" His voice trailed. "There… there are things people say to each other that can never be retracted. Christie and I had said those things, we had hurled all the goddamn filthy words we could think of, we had accused, we had condemned, and it ended." He closed his eyes and sighed. "And then Raymond and I said all there was to say. And there was no going back." He looked up suddenly. "I keep losing partners."
"Maybe you don't need a partner, Jonah."
"Maybe not."
"Did you take the case?"
"Yes. I argued it with everything that was in me, just to prove, just to show Raymond that he was wrong, just to win it, and to show him. Mitigating circumstances, I said, provocation, your Honor, here was a man in bondage being tormented by his jailer. We could say, your Honor, we could almost say this security officer was a man seeking his own death, tormenting a convicted murderer. We could in a sense, your Honor, say this man was intent on committing suicide, your Honor, we could say he took his own life. And must we now take yet another life to justify the vagaries of this troubled mind, the labyrinthine motivation of a man intent on suicide? Must we do that, your Honor, to satisfy whatever primitive clamor for blood we recognize within ourselves? When it was all over, they sent him to the gas chamber. Period. I lost."
She suddenly knew why she would allow him to make love to her, knew it even before he said what he said next.
"I'm going to lose this one too, Sally."
"How do you know?"
"Driscoll is guilty."
"That doesn't mean you'll lose."
"Maybe I want to lose."
"Will that help?"
"He's guilty," Jonah said. "He sat in that courtroom today and constructed a totally plausible network of deceit, attempting to trace the workings of the mind, something Brackman couldn't hope to contradict. Iceman is coal man, and coal man is Colman, and Colman is death, and death is the iceman in The Iceman Cometh, expecting us to swallow a literary association test delivered with a straight face. Peter is a phallic reference, and Morley is a Negro he knew as a boy, renamed Christopher in honor of the novelist, and Major Catharine Astor is definitely not Constantine's major, and yet Driscoll knew the color of her hair and the minor incident of showing the colonel his medical record, but no this is not the basis for the letter-carrying scene. Nor was the 105th Division based on Constantine's. Then where did it come from? How in hell could he have hit upon those identical three digits, and why didn't he have a psychological explanation for them, too, the way he had for every other alleged similarity? He slipped the other day when we were having drinks together, he said, 'I won't explain that number,' and then he changed it to 'I can't explain it,' but he meant 'I won't,' goddamn it. And the reason he wouldn't is because the number stuck in his head, it remained in his head after he saw Constantine's play — he's been a theatergoer from the time he was twelve, he's probably seen every piece of garbage ever presented on the Broadway stage, he practically admitted as much to me in private. So how could he tell us where he got that number, when telling us would have sent the case straight up the chimney?