Odyssey (31 page)

“I will try my best to keep an open mind, Counselor,” Judge Lowell said. “Mr. Sutter.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“When can you have Mr. Johnson in court?”

“This afternoon at two.”

“Then we are adjourned until two.”

“Maybe we should run,” Toni suggested at a tapioca tea bar in Chinatown. “You know Lem is gonna want to get some payback for you kickin’ his ass like that. And if they told him that we’re together he’ll wanna get me too.”

“There’s a cigar box in my suitcase in the closet at the hotel,” Sovereign replied. “I got about eighteen thousand dollars in there. You could take it and run. I’ll tell the court you got sick with fear or something.”

“Where you get that money from?”

“Remember when my brother came by the other day?”

“Yeah?”

“He told me that the government is off me, that I could go home whenever I
want. I went straight to the bank and cleaned out one of my CDs.”

“Let’s take that money and run.”

“I can’t.”

“You gonna go back?”

“I have to.”

“Why? Why can’t you and me run together?”

“Because I’m not my brother.”

There was a plain walnut chair to the right of Judge Lowell’s makeshift bench. This seat was for witnesses. When the court had been reconvened, at two-oh-seven, the door opened and everyone looked.

Lemuel Johnson had no marks from the beating on his face but he’d lost at least twenty pounds and moved slowly, as if his joints were stiff.

“Oh no,” Toni whispered.

The youngish man limped, without help from the uniformed nurse who followed him, until he had reached the seat. He put out his left hand and steadied himself on the judge’s bench before lowering himself into the witness chair.

The nurse was ecru skinned and voluptuous, forty-something and stern.

Sovereign found that he approved of Lemuel’s guardian.

“State your name for the court,” Alva Sutter said to the final witness.

“Lemuel Fister Johnson.”

“Do you promise to tell the truth here today?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

Sovereign was taken by the use of the word
promise
. There was so much meaning to the word used; in this case it was like a child’s fearful request.

“Tell us what happened on the day of the attack,” Alva said.

“I met Toni when she was thirteen and I was twenty-four,” he said.

“I’m asking about the attack, Mr. Johnson,” Alva said.

“I’m tryin’ to get there,” Lemuel replied.

“Just the events as they occurred leading up to the attack.”

“Mr. Sutter,” Judge Lowell interrupted. “It seems to me that the witness is trying to give us a full picture of himself and the defendants.”

“But, Your Honor, we’re only concerned with the crime.”

“You may continue, Mr. Johnson,” Lowell said.

“Your Honor,” Alva protested.

“Sit down, Mr. Sutter.”

When the assistant district attorney obeyed the judge, she turned to Lemuel and said, “Please continue, Mr. Johnson.”

“She was thirteen and I was twenty-four,” the witness said again. “She was young but still almost a woman even way back then.”

Sovereign realized that Lemuel had been thinking very deeply about his testimony. The statement was etched in his mind and he spoke almost as if he were unaware of the words.

“… I was crazy about her and told her,” Lemuel continued. “She told me that
I was too old but I bought her a name bracelet and ice cream.…”

Toni’s grip on Sovereign’s arm eased.

“… I was like her father and brother and lover all rolled up into one. We’d fight and shit, I mean, stuff. We broke up a few times but we always come back together. I was crazy about her and proud of her and, you know …”

Lemuel’s hands were clasped together in his lap and his head was lowered. He looked to the world like a poor penitent in the back row of a wealthy church.

He looked up then and stared directly at Toni Loam.

She gasped and let go of Sovereign.

“I took her down to the West Village lookin’ for some teenager to rob,” Lemuel Johnson testified. “When I saw that man there he was blind. I hit him with my baton. I hit him once and Toni screamed. I hit him again and Toni screamed some more. I ripped out his pockets and took his money.”

“How long ago was that?” the judge asked.

“Four months. Somethin’ like that.”

“And he was blind?”

“Musta been. He turned right at me and didn’t see me swingin’.”

“And what happened in the defendant’s apartment?” the judge asked.

“Toni left me after I hit a blind man. She said that I wasn’t the person she thought I was. She was right about that. I knew it even then but I was too proud. And when I heard that she was at the blind man’s house every day I got mad. Here he was, rich and could pay her to be with him, and he couldn’t even see.

“So I got me a job and made some money, got me an apartment and went over her house. I told her that I was a new man and that I could be who she wanted me to be. It would’a been fine but then we celebrated and I got drunk.…”

Sovereign was suddenly aware of a new conflict between him and the mugger. Lemuel came out of his coma with the intention of taking Toni back. He understood that he couldn’t hurt her or Sovereign and so he would testify to that love under oath, exonerating both of them.

“… I told her to take me to the rich blind man’s house,” Lemuel went on. “I told her to let me take something of his and for her to kiss me there where she worked. We didn’t expect him to come in.”

“Was he still blind?” Judge Lowell stayed on point.

“He walked into the room, face pointed right at me, but his eyes didn’t see.”

“And did you attack him?”

“When I saw him just walk into that house as easy as you please and I knew he had been there every day with my girl I just went crazy. I lifted up my baton—that’s when Toni screamed again. The blind man could suddenly see me and we started to fight. I tried to put him down and then I tried to run. But he was real strong and … and he come after me like in one of those dreams where the giant is on your trail you runnin’ in mud.

“I really don’t remember what happened after that until I woke up in the hospital. They told me about the trial and I wanted to come here and set the records straight.”

Sovereign had the unsettling feeling that if he were alone in a room with Lemuel again, he might take up where he had left off in the street in front of his apartment building.

Sutter and Altuna questioned and cross-questioned the witness but he told the same tale over and over. He was the child molester, mugger, thief. Sovereign was blind and then he could see. Toni’s only crime was believing in him.

Somewhere near five o’clock both sides rested their arguments.

“I will consider the evidence and render my verdict by Monday,” Judge Lowell informed them.

In the hallway outside of the makeshift courtroom Lemuel was waiting with his stern-faced nurse. He limped up to Toni and said, “I’ll be in the hospital for another week. You can call me there if you want.”

On Lafayette Toni told Sovereign that she was going to her mother’s apartment for a few days.

“She been sayin’ that she missed me,” the woman-child lied. “I just need some space.”

“Are you leaving me?” Sovereign asked.

“For a few days.”

“And beyond that?”

“I’m just goin’ home to see my mother.”

“And your boyfriend?”

A feral look spread across the young woman’s face. She sneered and shivered. Before her expression could turn into words she turned quickly and ran.

Sovereign then remembered chasing Lemuel down the hall to the stairs, toward the front door of the building and out to the street. As he stood on Lafayette, his big fists hung at his sides, Sovereign’s breath came in shallow gusts. This reminded him of the desert out around Palm Springs, where his family went for vacation once a year. He wasn’t quite clear about why the desert came to mind, but the memory felt good in his mind—slow and dry.

Sovereign James walked toward his apartment from the temporary courtroom that late afternoon. On his way he wondered what would have happened if he and Toni had run away together. Their love was overwhelming and insufficient, unexpected and doomed. Their love was like his life had been. It wasn’t a new thing but a repetition of the old in a new configuration. If he had run with her, sooner or later she would have drifted off to the life she needed. That was the pattern he’d created for himself.

The big bronze doorman, Jolly, was behind the reception desk at Sovereign’s building.

“Mr. James,” the young man hailed. “Haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“Been on trial for attempted murder. The feds were after me too but that stopped.”

“What about the trial?” Jolly asked, his seemingly unsinkable mirth receding behind squinty eyes.

“Judge said she’ll give the verdict on Monday.”

“I remember now,” the young man said. “Axel said that they called him and Geoffrey to testify. I thought they meant in some kind of lawsuit.”

“No.”

“You think they’re gonna find you guilty?”

“Maybe. Probably not completely … but who knows?”

Sovereign walked through the front door of his apartment, closing it behind him. He shut his eyes and stood there—waiting for inspiration. But the feeling of blindness had gone. He no longer knew how to move in darkness.

His sun-flooded living room with its red chair and white sofa held the silent echo of Toni’s scream and the straining of the life-and-death struggle with Lemuel Fister Johnson. His whole life, it seemed, had been in preparation for that fight, when he now knew he should have been training for some other goal.

He sat in the red chair for a while and then moved to the sofa. Three hours later he went to the bedroom and lay down on the big bed. The room had been cleaned multiple times by Galeta and so the scent of Toni’s floral perfume was absent. He closed his eyes but sleep didn’t come. He imagined the dizzying swirl blindness had foisted upon him, but that too had abandoned him.

On Saturday he exercised, fried pork chops, and read
Treasure Island
, a favorite novel of boyhood.