From the Chrysalis (43 page)

“I’ve seen Judge Silverton in action before. At the Wolfhounds’ trial. Isn’t it some kind of conflict of interest that he’s on this bench, too?”

Hubert Gold smiled condescendingly and shrugged. “Really? I suppose I should have known that. I’ll have a word with my assistant later today,” he said. “As for you, you’re a smart, devoted college girl, and that’s all the jury needs to know.” He gave a little queen-like wave and tried to back out a side door, hidden in the wall paneling.

Dace had to go too. One jerk on the lead chain at the front and they were all gone. Liza probably had a hundred questions to ask, but she hadn’t gathered her wits about her fast enough, so Hubert Gold had been saved. He must have known she would never follow him into the secret recesses of the courthouse.

From a back room window, Dace saw her pacing around the courthouse, a small, solitary figure in a fitted grey maxi-coat with her thin arms wrapped around herself. She wanted to stay as close to him as possible. She stopped in her tracks and looked up, straight towards him, but he knew she didn’t see him. He doubted she saw much. She looked like she had fled someplace where she couldn’t be touched.

It was November, so cold that every last leaf had fallen from the elm trees around the courthouse. The morning rain was developing into a light snow. She was humming, he could tell. In his mind, he heard her singing:
All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey … I’ve been for a walk and on a winter’s day … if I didn’t tell him, I could leave today …

She was so afraid he would be convicted of murder. She wouldn’t leave, he knew. His father hadn’t come. Norm kept saying he had too much work but maybe that wasn’t the real reason. Maybe he just couldn’t face his boy getting more time … perhaps
a lot
more time.

Christ, he wished to fuck Liza would go back to school. She could earn a degree or whatever the hell you did in the Ivory Tower.
What was she doing here in court?
he fumed. But he knew. She was here on his account. It was all too humiliating for him. For her. And where the hell was her straight shooter boyfriend anyway? Mel, the stand up guy.

The back room was a makeshift lunchroom for the prisoners and their custodians. It was dominated by a large, boardroom style table and a stack of grey plastic chairs. Dace and his co-accused sat around the table, still chained to each other. A cardboard box full of cheese sandwiches and coffee had been brought in. It was only 12:45 p.m., but they had been up since 5:00 a.m. A long day for anybody.
 

“Why’s your cousin looking so sick?” Steve, who was seated to his right, asked. “It’s not like she’s on trial.”

“I don’t know,” Dace mumbled into a paper coffee cup. The cardboard smelled less like coffee and more like stale peanuts. “Smart girl, but she needs somebody to look after her.”

“You gotta take care of yourself, man. Where the fuck are our lawyers? Alf’s was just here, that big stupid-looking guy who’s always grinning like he’s at a party.”

“Sure,” Dace said. “I’ll be noble and give her up. I already tried that. She keeps coming back.”

“A lot of men try to hang onto women who deserve more than they can give,” Steve observed sagely.

“Where did you read that? Ann Landers?” Dace asked.
 

Steve was right, he knew, but Liza had something to say about this too. She hadn’t let go, had she? There was nothing,
nothing
she could do for him. A girl like that … She would go crazy. She would end up hating him for what he had done—for what he had done
to her
. What had happened during the riot couldn’t be helped, but what had happened before …
 

Too many mistakes. How had it come to this? He’d thought it was hard to pull out of trouble before, but it was much harder now.

“Well, I’d go out for a drink if I were her. Lots of drinks.”

“Sure,” Dace agreed, anything to blunt the reason they were all there. He and Steve had both noticed a little English-style pub on the southwest corner when they’d been bussed in from the Joint. Liza was underage, though. She might push her luck closer to campus, but she wouldn’t try drinking around here, especially not in a bar with black wooden shutters where police and lawyers hung out. All those wheeler dealers, plotting and conniving.

“Goddamn inbreeds,” he muttered to no one in particular, hoping Huey Gold was just as inbred as the rest of them.
 

When Steve’s lawyer finally came to visit, Dace tried to sit straighter on his wooden chair, but the prisoner to his left was slumped over the Formica table, tearing bits of his Wonderbread into little pills. As a result, Dace had no choice but to slump, too. His right shoulder was killing him.

“What am I?” he yelled at his startled neighbour. “A fucking Siamese twin?”
 

They were all getting on his nerves. Every time the two young guys at the end of the line poked each other they yanked the whole chain. Dace picked up his half-eaten sandwich and crammed it into his mouth in an effort to fuel his body. He was so angry his hands shook, and he almost choked on the dry bread. He was going to crown somebody if he didn’t get a grip soon.

“Stop it, you stupid farts,” he growled. Both the guards and a couple of prisoners tried to intervene as Dace’s fists opened and closed, as if they were saying,
Let me at ’em.
Steve’s lawyer left, all the violence in the air evidently putting him off, and in walked Gold. Jesus, he wished Gold hadn’t talked to Liza. The stuff he’d said to her … Lawyers were always coaching family members to project a certain image. Like they were casting directors … or God.
 

“Watch your smile,” was all Gold said, keeping a wary eye on the two boys at the end of the table. They were busy pretending to fall off their chairs. Taking Dace’s nod for a yes, he backed out of the impromptu lunchroom almost as quickly as he had come.
 

A guard booted the door shut, but he must have heard Alf. “You’re the one who went back and hit him one more time, Steve. If you hadn’t, we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess. The goddamn bingo was over. We were almost home-free.”
 

“Don’t you know what that bastard did to his own children?” Steve demanded.

“I don’t fucking care! What about the rest of us?”

“You bloody rat fink! If you hadn’t squealed we’d all be playing poker.”

“The hell we would! We’ve been vacuum sealed in our drums like tuna fish for months on end. It was a fucking tactical error to take hostages in the first place, goddamn that Sandy McAllister. Then you had to go and have some fun.”

There was a loud crash, followed by a chorus of:
Shut up! Bugger off!
and
What the fuck?

Almost instantly, several armed guards burst into the lunchroom, pistols drawn, billy clubs raised. They looked like they were aching to club the prisoners, but they had their orders and they were in a court of law, so they smashed the Formica table instead. Several cracks cut through the mottled pattern, but they went unnoticed until the next day. Somebody’s fingers got in the way of one of the billy clubs—the boy who was making bread pills—and he screamed so loud everything else stopped. Somehow he was separated from the chain and within an hour he’d been hauled back to the penitentiary, along with the two pugilists. None of them came back for three days.

Almost envious, Dace watched them go. Maybe he should pick a fight, too. Even with three men in lockup, there were too many defendants and too many stories to tell. From the books Liza and the prison librarian had encouraged him to read, Dace had learned you couldn’t tell a story from too many points of view or people would lose interest. Experience had also taught him Judge Silverton wasn’t a patient man. The lawyers knew this too. Nobody was that stupid, were they? How long before they decided they’d all had enough publicity, thank you,
and everyone danced to the song of the truth be damned?

Gold said he had fifty good witnesses to tell his side of the story, and Dace knew the men. Well, sure. The sheer weight of evidence
might
work and he
might
come out smelling like a one-of-a-kind rose, an exception to his so-called co-conspirators. But what about the rest of the attention-loving, bloodsucking lawyers? His friends’ lawyers? What if everybody decided to call fifty witnesses? Could he possibly be the only person streetwise enough to do some simple math? My God, he hadn’t even finished high school and most of the people here had been in school for what—sixteen years? He almost despaired at the thought, but letting go was even scarier, so he asked for another bologna sandwich instead.
Please, sir, may I have another?
Naturally the guard, who’d already eaten three, refused. He did it because it was within his power to do.
 

Dace tried to convince himself he had a real good lawyer. Huey Gold had been his dad’s choice, so it was probably better than any decision he could have made. At least on this occasion he was an innocent man.
 

An innocent man
, he repeated. It might be a long and painful fight, but he had to trust in the fact that the truth was on his side.

Chapter 30

The Unwanted

Maitland Courthouse, December 1972:

The trial limped into an even darker December, with only nine holdouts in the prisoners’ box on any given day. One man was in Segregation because his co-accused had turned on him, two more had been transferred to Maitland Psychiatric Hospital for undisclosed reasons, and a fourth was too ill to leave the Penitentiary. A fifth man had tried to hang himself, but he was allowed back into court … wearing a turtleneck.

Green and red lights decorated the main street of Maitland, twinkling with the merriment of the season. Greeting cards flooded mailboxes, Santa lured children and their doting parents in for photos at the local Stedman’s. Housewives had scouted out the plumpest Butterball turkeys and, though it was easier to buy cannabis than aromatic spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg, their eastern aromas infused the crisp winter air. Most people had finished their Christmas shopping. Odyssey and UNO were all sold out, although a local call-in show revealed a fair number of people were still having trouble finding the Christmas spirit. The usual crap, Liza thought sourly, listening to Janice’s little transistor radio in their student residence.

Several callers mentioned they were troubled by the murder trial. The defendants were convicted felons, weren’t they? And the men who had died, who had been murdered so viciously, well, who the hell cared? For the love of Mike, why didn’t they just lock ‘em up and let them take care of their own?
Natural order, natural selection, whatever the hell it was called.
If the stupid arses wanted a trial, it should only have been about the guards.

Stuck in a motel on the outskirts of town, the closeted jurors and the out-of-town lawyers dreamed of hand-decorated balsam and spruce trees, candlelight services and Waterford glasses of spiked eggnog. Some of the accused even remembered the penitentiary usually served damn fine farm turkeys with all the trimmings on Christmas Day.

At last the Crown counsel finished presenting their cases. Over several successive days the defence attorneys began their cross-examinations. Personalities emerged and little courtroom dramas promised to unfold. Liza was rapidly losing track of the individual defences of men she had never met. The jury members looked as if they, too, were suffering from information overload.

She was constantly sweating in the overheated courtroom. When the lawyers conferred with each other and nothing else was happening, she could barely stay awake. She did, though. One of the jurors, a woman in her fifties, didn’t even bother trying. She barely stirred when the crime scene photos were passed around.
 

“I just want to smack her,” one of the lady lawyers said.
 

The man who had tried to hang himself was also a sleeper, but he had an excuse: he was heavily tranquillized. Liza wasn’t sure what the juror was on. She wore a shiny gold corsage that followed her breathing pattern. Liza was mesmerized; her mother had always bought a similar corsage at Christmas time.