Jack of Spades (5 page)

8 “I Will Have Justice”

And then, on Monday morning I could not stay away from the hearing after all.

I know, I had promised Elliot Grossman. He’d advised me expressly, more than once, to stay away. But I could not.

I was too anxious to remain at home. The fearful thought came to me that Grossman had misinterpreted the summons and
Andwer J. Rash
would be expected to be in the courtroom after all, under penalty of arrest for contempt of court.

And partly, I was obsessively curious about
C. W. Haider
. No one had ever issued a formal complaint against me for anything, let alone “theft” and “plagiarism.” I had been awake much of the night miserably anticipating the hearing.
I had to see the enemy.

Hecate County Municipal Court is a handsome old limestone building retaining most of its original eighteenth-century facade though totally renovated inside. Almost, the courthouse resembles an old church, set amid a grassy square you might expect to be a churchyard. The interior suggests a tastefully decorated private club or historic inn with mahogany-paneled walls, white-plaster ceilings, dark tile floors, recessed lighting. Unlike the abrasive and amplified atmosphere of a large urban courthouse, the atmosphere here is subdued, courteous.

Since court hearings and cases are open to the public I was not required to present ID at security. The line moved forward affably and without haste and it was a great relief,
no one recognized me
.

The courtroom in which the hearing was held was a small amphitheater the size of a moot court holding only six rows of seats which (as I rapidly calculated) could contain a maximum of seventy-two persons; by the time Judge Carson entered the courtroom, and proceedings began, this space was scarcely one-quarter filled. In the first two or three rows individuals summoned to the court and their legal counsel were seated; as hearings were adjudicated individuals left the courtroom, and others entered. Though the atmosphere was formal there was a continuous coming-and-going; those of us who’d taken spectator-seats in the last row had a clear view of the entire room.

(Trying not to appear self-conscious, or suspicious, I made it a point of not glancing around at others in my row and partially shielding my face. Indeed, like some characters created by Jack of Spades who never went out in public except in some sort of disguise, however minimal, I was wearing prescription sunglasses with heavy black frames that subtly distorted my features as well as a beige seersucker sport coat plucked from the back of my closet, which I had not worn for probably twenty years. For I was in dread of the local media “covering” this pathetic hearing, and Andrew J. Rush exposed as a thief and a plagiarist, or worse.)

Haider v. Rush
was the third case on the docket. While the first two cases were being adjudicated I had time to figure out who Elliot Grossman was—a “New York”–looking (i.e., Jewish) lawyer who might’ve recognized me from author photographs if he’d glanced around the room, which he did not. I had time to contemplate the distinctive-looking woman who was seated conspicuously by herself in the front row, directly below the judge’s bench.

No doubt, this was “C. W. Haider”—the complainant. It was uncanny how, at a first glance, she resembled a white-haired Ayn Rand, with that writer’s mannish features and jutting jaw and an air both aristocratic and aggrieved. She appeared to be in her mid- or late sixties with wild white crimped hair barely tamped down by a maroon beret, and expensive-looking though ill-fitting clothing of a bygone era: shoulders padded to give her frame a muscular bulk, a gray pin-striped pants suit with double lapels and large bone buttons, leather shoes with stubby toes. She had taken possession of more than one-third of the first row, having spread out to discourage others.

In profile, C. W. Haider resembled a predator bird. If she’d cast her gaze about the courtroom I would have shrunk away guiltily.

As the first of the cases was taken up, C. W. Haider made no attempt to disguise her impatience. Conspicuously she sighed and muttered to herself, shifting in her seat, rummaging amid her things—an ungainly large reptile-skin handbag, an even larger tote bag comprised of panels of a shimmering metallic material, a stack of manila folders and a single four-foot cardboard file. Her restlessness verged upon rudeness and drew sharp frowns of annoyance from Judge Carson; it was clear that the bailiff and other courtroom staff knew the wild-white-haired Ms. Haider though in her haughtiness she didn’t condescend to know them.

Grossman had told me, over the phone, that so far as he could determine, Ms. Haider had no attorney—“Probably, she hadn’t been able to hire anyone for such a ridiculous case”—and so would be acting as her own attorney which would be sure to further exasperate Judge Carson.

(Though I hadn’t thought initially that I knew Owen Carson, a longtime judge in Hecate County, in fact the two of us were tangentially acquainted—our wives had both served on the same Harbourton Public Library fund-raiser gala committee and were, to a degree, friends; certainly I had shaken Owen Carson’s hand more than once, and seemed to recall a gratifying remark of Irina’s, or Mrs. Carson’s—
Owen is an admirer of your work. He loves mystery fiction though he forgets it all almost as soon as he finishes reading it
!
)

By the time
Haider v. Rush
was at last called, at 10:58
A
.
M
., Ms. Haider was in a state of pent-up frustration and ire. Excitedly she rose to her feet—(she was a surprisingly short, squat-bodied and compact woman whom padded shoulders and the dull gray pants suit did not flatter)—and identified herself to the judge as the plaintiff—“The
plain-tif
f
”—as one who’d been “
stolen from for years
”—“
plagia-rize
d
”—in a petulant, nasal, childish voice immediately recognizable to me as the voice on the telephone.

It was evident that Judge Carson was acquainted with the plaintiff. When he inquired of her, carefully, courteously, if she did not have an attorney to represent her, Ms. Haider responded in a vehement outburst, “Sir,
I do not have an attorney because I do not want or need an attorney and because no one can speak for me. I have justice on my side this time as last time. You will see.
”

Through the courtroom, a ripple of surprise, amusement
.
The staid proceedings were livened as if someone had switched a TV volume on high. Coolly and courteously Judge Carson reprimanded the white-haired woman for calling him
sir
and not
Your Honor
; and the white-haired woman said snappishly, “‘Honor’ is something that must be earned, sir. We will see if your court deserves it.”

You could see at once—(I could see at once)—that Ms. Haider’s case was a lost cause, as Ms. Haider herself was a lost cause: a crank whose right to file a legal complaint against a fellow citizen was being humored
pro forma
in the courtroom but would be dismissed by the grim-faced judge as quickly as possible.

I had caught the remark—
This time as last time
. Haider had been a plaintiff in this courtroom before.

At once, I was feeling relieved. C. W. Haider was a madwoman, as I’d thought. She could not prevail over
me
.

Even Elliot Grossman, the big-city lawyer presenting the world-famous publishing house, had difficulty with Haider, who interrupted him before he could complete a sentence; several times Judge Carson resorted to using his gavel with the frustration of a TV judge trying to restore order in a comically rogue courtroom. Spectators who’d been semi-dozing through previous hearings were awake now and greatly entertained.

Indignant Ms. Haider seemed not to possess what might be called a normal or conventional sense of public behavior. The woman hadn’t a clue, or disdained such, for how grating her voice was, how annoying and exasperating her superior manner; how she was sabotaging her case by her failure to conform to courtroom procedure. Even as exasperated Judge Carson was ruling her out of order she continued to speak loudly as if making herself heard was all that mattered—as if she were appealing to a justice higher than the justice of Hecate County Municipal Court. “Sir—I mean, ‘Your Honor’—I have come here as a citizen to seek damages and an injunction against further theft, plagiarism, and invasion of privacy by that scoundrel ‘Andrew J. Rush’ who doesn’t have the courage to confront me today but chooses to
hide behind a lawyer
. I will prove my case against ‘Andrew J. Rush’ and
I will have justice
.”

It was to Judge Carson’s credit that he allowed Haider to present the rudiments of a case instead of dismissing at once as another, less gentlemanly judge might have done. With the indulgence of a slightly younger relative to an elder—(Carson was in his late fifties, perhaps: with a shiny-bald head, mild myopic eyes)—he allowed the incensed plaintiff to speak at length, and to display a battery of “evidence” she’d brought with her—yellowed, typewritten manuscripts; a dozen ledger-sized journals; several copies of books of mine, with passages annotated in red. (It was a shock, before Haider identified the books, to see the dust jacket covers at a distance, and to recognize them; to realize that these were indeed
my books
—as if a portion of my private life were being exposed in the courtroom by someone bent upon destroying me.) The typed manuscripts were identified by Haider as “not-yet-published” stories and chapters from novels of
works-in-progress
by C. W. Haider; the journals were hers, dating back to 1965, when the plaintiff was eighteen years old; the hardcover books were indeed by Andrew J. Rush, containing heavily annotated passages that, Haider was claiming, had been “stolen” from her.

In a high-pitched theatrical voice Haider read passages from her material, and then passages from Andrew J. Rush—“You see? This is ‘theft’—‘plagi-rism.’ Not only is the scoundrel stealing my words but he is stealing from my
life
.”

These wild accusations went on for some time. How painful it would have been if I’d been seated at the defense table with Elliot Grossman! As it was, my eyes filled with tears of mortification. I had heard audio books of my novels read by sympathetic professionals but I had never heard my prose read aloud in such an accusatory and derisive way; the carefully constructed phrases, the “clever” similes, the unusual words (
claustral,
sere
) selected from my battered old
Writer’s Thesaurus
now seemed to me pathetic, self-conscious preening. Not only was Haider accusing me of plagiarizing her prose but the prose itself, exposed to the bemused audience in the courtroom, was achingly bad.

Haider’s voice rose shrilly: “As these works of C. W. Haider he has pillaged have not yet been published it is clear that the scoundrel broke into my house, that is to say my late father Walter Haider’s house, at 88 Tumbrel Place, to steal them by some photocopying device . . .”

In the courtroom, ripples of laughter. What a nightmare!

Grossman was right, it had been a terrible mistake to come here. I thought—
It was Jack of Spades who brought me here.
In the future I must avoid giving in to the impulsive and anarchic impulses of Jack of Spades.

At last Judge Carson cut the plaintiff off in mid-sentence, noting that she had made her point several times. He urged Grossman to respond—“Concisely, please.”

It was Grossman’s contention that the case was absurd
prima facie
—the defendant Andrew J. Rush was a “distinguished, long-established master of the mystery genre” whose published work dated back to the late 1980s; Rush was the “bestselling author” of twenty-eight mystery novels translated into that many, or more, languages; indeed, Rush was a local citizen known for his civic involvement and his philanthropy. If there appeared to be “parallels” and “echoes” of the plaintiff’s prose in Rush’s prose, as the plaintiff had read it to the court, it was not clear that the plaintiff’s prose preceded the defendant’s prose, for the plaintiff had not published her work, and could offer no provable dates of composition. “Theft of a private life” could hardly be proven in any case, for nothing in Rush’s novels was
evidently, obviously,
or
literally
traceable to the plaintiff’s private life; if there were “coincidences” that was all that they were—“coincidences.” Thus, Grossman moved to dismiss.

Furiously Haider objected that the journals were indeed “dated”—by her; and a scientific laboratory could “date” the manuscripts if there was any doubt. Grossman retorted that the journals were only dated “in the plaintiff’s own hand”—and until a reputable scientific laboratory dated the manuscripts precisely, the plaintiff had not even the glimmering of a case. Again, he moved to dismiss the case as a nuisance suit, not worthy of serious judicial consideration.

Haider was becoming increasingly excited. The beret had slipped from her head and her air of superiority was unraveling. Judge Carson, whose courteous manner she’d taken for granted, as her due, was no longer so indulgent, interrupting her with his gavel, and ruling repeatedly against her, insisting that she allow Grossman to speak. Yet Haider seemed unable to keep from interrupting Grossman as if a demon were speaking through her: “No! No, no! This is
my writing,
sir! I am a writer, too—I am a writer of prose and poetry! He has
broken and entered
my residence—for years!”—“These are my precious memories, Your Honor, for this
happened to me
”—“The plagiarist takes my precious memories from me, and things that happened to me, and to my family, and he twists them into his fiction so that
it did not happen this way at all but is a nefarious LIE
.”

Again Grossman moved to dismiss the “utterly flimsy, insubstantial and meretricious” case and with a single rap of his gavel Judge Carson concurred. By this point Carson was florid-faced and smarting with indignation and Haider had grown so excited, and so disheveled, the bailiff and a county sheriff’s deputy hurried forward to escort her from the courtroom.