The Soloist (28 page)

“That may be true,” Dwight said, a touch of disdain beginning to show in his voice, “but we have to stick to answering the question of whether he was sane or insane.”

“You can’t ever prove what’s in a guy’s head,” Roy shot back, looking around for support. “It seems to me we just gotta do what seems best, and what seems best to me is that this guy goes to jail.”

Dwight didn’t let anyone come to his rescue. “If we can’t decide if he’s sane or not,” he said firmly, “we have to tell that to the judge, and they’ll have to do the whole thing over. But even that’d be better than making a decision for the wrong reasons.”

“I thought we weren’t going to debate yet,” Mrs. Friedman said. “Let’s try to stay on track here, or we’ll never get through this. We’re only talking evidence now.”

When it came her turn, Maria-Teresa said, “After he killed
the guy, he got tackled to the ground and he didn’t complain. He got handcuffed and busted, but didn’t resist. He got taken to jail and talked to his lawyer and to all these doctors, and now he sits in a courthouse for a couple of weeks while people talk about how crazy he is.… All those situations are pretty stressful, right? But he was calm through all of it. If you’re insane, you’re supposed to be out of control, right? He doesn’t seem out of control to me.”

A soft voice said, “And then there’s the puzzle.” It was Grace, whose late husband had worked at the jet lab. “The one about killing the Buddha. If the puzzle talked about killing, and the boy admits that killing the teacher was his answer to the puzzle, then … he knew he was killing, right? It seems to me that this weakens the argument that he didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Fritz? What about you?”

The old janitor scratched his head. “I can’t think of anything right now. I’m trying, though.”

I mentioned the fact that he had been able to sit still, in complete silence for hours at a time, every day for nearly a year before this had happened. That struck me as something a schizophrenic might have a hard time doing.

“Betty?” Dwight asked.

“I didn’t like the fact that he didn’t testify at all. If he’s innocent, why didn’t his lawyer put him on the stand? It seems like the lawyer is trying to hide something that way.”

“Mathilda?”

All eyes turned on poor Mathilda. She fidgeted, then said in a pained voice, “All of the above, I guess. I don’t know how we’re supposed to know all this stuff by heart.” I was thankful for her confusion this time because it kept me anonymous for a while longer. I needed time to think; after an
agonizingly slow trial, the decision-making part seemed to be moving too quickly, and I didn’t feel prepared to make a final decision yet. We’d been in the jury room only a few minutes, and already it seemed that everyone but me wanted to vote guilty and go home.

“I thought of something,” Fritz said, drawing the heat away from Mathilda.

“He was a smart boy—everybody said so. It seems like he was too … regular to be crazy. Crazy people, you can tell so easy. They just … You can just see from the way they walk and talk. They don’t seem smart.”

No one else had any comments for the time being. I showed my notes to Dwight and he said, “OK, that’s a good list. Now let’s talk about the evidence that suggests he was insane. I might as well start again. Whether we think he acted like a real crazy person or not, it seems like it’s a fact that he has schizophrenia. Both doctors agreed on that. So we’re not talking about someone who just, out of the blue, says, ‘I went crazy all of a sudden.’ He was getting worse as the years went by, even though he was managing to keep out of trouble. We have to consider that he really does have this disease.… So a guy with this disease was living at this church where he had to go along with the strict discipline. And during that retreat they got very little sleep, no talking out loud, and hour after hour of sitting still. Remember what that first doctor said? Something about how that could drive even a normal person nuts?”

This time around the pauses between contributions were much longer. Jesusita was the next one to speak. “Well, I have to say … the Japanese man who was so nice—Mr. Hayashi, right? He made their religion sound peaceful, but I don’t know.… The teacher that got killed sounded kind of
weird. You hear on TV, you know, how every once in a while a kid who seems normal gets into some religion and suddenly he does crazy things. You ever heard of Santeria? They’re crazy—they kill animals, and sometimes people … So if this Philip was really sick, maybe the religion threw him off.”

After another long pause, I tried to mention casually that the fact that the defendant had been so violent with the teacher and then suddenly so calm afterward seemed curious. If he was really controlling himself, willing himself to kill for selfish reasons, he’d have had to work himself up to quite a frenzy, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t it be hard to turn something like that off all of a sudden? And not be worried or defensive or contradict himself at all during any of the aftermath? That would seem to require either superhuman planning and self-control, which he had never before shown in his life, or a mind that had become unpredictable and out of control. As I said this, I realized I was directly contradicting what Maria-Teresa had said a few minutes earlier. She gave me a vacant look, then turned her eyes away.

After another pause Rose turned to Mathilda and, sounding as encouraging as possible, asked, “What about you, Mathilda? Can you think of any other evidence that says he’s not guilty?”

Mathilda frowned and said, “If you’re going to wait till the end to call on me every time, how is there supposed to be anything left for me to say? I—”

“You aren’t the last person to be called on,” Mrs. Friedman said abruptly. She was beginning to lose patience with the hapless Mathilda. “There are still plenty of people who haven’t spoken.”

“Fine! Well, I can’t think of anything.”

People squirmed noisily in their chairs; Mathilda was really
getting them angry. They all assumed that she was the holdout, and resented her not even contributing an explanation of her position. Mrs. Friedman frowned and made a little smacking sound with her lips, but said nothing. Tension hung in the air until Grace said in her quiet voice, “Up until he killed that man, this boy didn’t seem like a mean person. Not like a killer. He wanted attention, but couldn’t get it the regular ways. He had a bad family life, what with his mother being so sick and a father who didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on in his family. When you think about all that put together, it makes you wonder.”

“Wonder what?” Mathilda asked.

“If everything was really that boy’s fault.”

“It doesn’t make me wonder,” Roy said. “He’s twenty-one years old, he lived away from home for years, he holds a job and he can put his own pants on. You can’t blame his old man for what he does now.”

When it became clear that no one else had anything to add, Dwight said, “Then let’s do the blind ballot again.”

“You mean the secret ballot?” Mathilda asked, sounding panicked.

“Blind ballot, secret ballot, whatever,” Mrs. Friedman said through clenched teeth.

I wrote down “Not guilty” this time. I’m not sure why; I wasn’t even thinking about convincing any of the others, but the more I thought about it, the more sure I felt that Philip had been insane. Dwight counted the slips again. Without registering any surprise or annoyance he said, “This time it’s ten guilty, two not guilty.” A few people sighed heavily, and Roy groaned out loud. I felt so grateful for the second vote that I had to control myself from asking whom to thank.

“Well, does anyone object if we have a show-of-hands vote at this point?” Mrs. Friedman asked. No one objected. There wouldn’t have been much point in any case, because only two people in the room would have had any reason to object. “All right, then. Who voted guilty?”

Ten hands went up. I felt my heart pound as I kept my hand on my lap. Maria-Teresa glanced at me for a second when she saw that I was one of the bleeding hearts, but looked away without showing any reaction. I leaned forward and turned to my left, looking toward Mathilda, but saw that her hand was raised higher than anyone else’s and was actually waving vigorously. I turned right and saw that the other dissenter was Dwight, the defense-plant investigator and our foreman.

I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Most of the others glanced curiously at the two of us out of the corner of their eyes, except for Roy, who shook his head and made a snickering noise, and Mrs. Friedman, who stared at me as if to say that she knew all along because it fit perfectly with everything else she knew about me.

“Do you want to start?” Dwight asked me.

“I was hoping you would—I’m not sure I can put an argument together just now,” I said. He laughed easily and said that he had the same problem. I asked to see the copy of the judge’s instructions. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for; I was really only stalling for time. I read it over, but the excruciating pressure made it impossible to think. The words jumped around on the page, so that by the time I got to the end of a sentence, I couldn’t remember how it had begun. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m having difficulty concentrating.”

“Nobody said we had to do it in ten minutes or under,” Rose said helpfully. “Should we break for a few minutes? That way you guys could have some time to think, and I know at least two of us could use a cigarette.” She smiled at Maria-Teresa.

As the others milled around or went to the rest rooms, I closed my eyes and tried to think—What is it? What was I seeing that the others weren’t? Or what
wasn’t
I seeing? Why wasn’t I just voting guilty; I could not have cared less about Philip Weber at this point. I wanted to know what made Dwight change his mind, but he’d been one of the first out of the room at the break.

I looked at the judge’s instructions again. If I wasn’t truly certain that Weber was insane, I had to go along with the others. And I wanted to go along with the others. I wanted the trial to end as much as I’d ever wanted anything. What was it, I wondered, that made me feel so strongly that Weber was insane?

The harder I tried to concentrate, the more my mind darted around uselessly. I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my forehead, then my temples and eyes. I decided to put the whole issue aside for a few minutes; I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I needed to get away from it, even if only for a short time.

Naturally, every few seconds my thoughts turned back to Maria-Teresa, and I wondered how I could have been so foolish and irresponsible as to become intimate with her in the first place. What was I thinking, trying to sleep with a married woman in her husband’s bed? It suddenly seemed a mystery to me how I’d ever reached that point, how I could ever have done something so unlike me. Thinking along those lines led me to recall that strange moment in Chicago
when I walked away from the cab—another example of a time I had not been myself. Scolding myself for indulging in a pathetic self-examination when I should have been thinking about the trial, I tried to shake myself out of it and get back to the far more important task of understanding why I felt convinced that Philip Weber was insane. However, my mind kept going back to that dreamlike episode, and slowly I began to see a connection.

When the others returned I said, “The reason I voted not guilty is that I know there have been times when I did things that I wouldn’t normally do, things that surprised even me.”

I had to make a supreme effort to keep from looking at Maria-Teresa as I said this. Even so, out of the corner of my eye, I could see her stiffen. I continued nervously, “So I look at this young man, whose mind is damaged by a disease to begin with, and I see him growing up the way he did; then I see him drifting for a couple of years and becoming more lonely and more socially inept; then I see him living in this church and trying to keep up with their discipline and their confusing philosophy … and I think it’s very believable that he could have done something like this without understanding what he was doing. I think the testimony we’ve heard adds up to say that this was a person who lost his mind, who was no longer what we would call sane.”

“Can you give us some examples? I mean of things you’ve done?” Gary teased, drawing a few chuckles out of the group. “Don’t hold back!” he said, laughing through his nose.

I declined the invitation but asked them, “Haven’t you ever said or done something that was wrong or unnecessary just because, say, you had a splitting headache that day or you were carsick? I know these are little things, but they’re examples.

Or have you ever been in a situation so awful, so stressful, that you did something that you later regretted, or could not explain to yourself? Well, I have, and so I think about a person like this Mr. Weber, who had been under stress and on drugs and mentally exhausted for years, and then put himself through that retreat … Doesn’t anyone else think it makes sense that eventually he would have cracked and lost control of himself?”

“It’s possible,” Grace said softly, “but didn’t the judge say we’re not supposed to decide on the basis of possibilities? We have to be
certain
that he was insane in order to acquit him, and what you’re saying doesn’t make me feel certain.”

I looked over at Dwight to see if he was going to back me up. He adjusted his watchband, rested his forearms on the table and turned to look at me. “Until a little while ago, I didn’t think his mental problems were an excuse for what he did. I had the feeling his lawyer was … oh, playing that up for the sake of getting him off the hook. And she just wasn’t as believable as the prosecutor to begin with. I voted guilty the first time—partly because I want the guy to be punished, you know? If a man kills another man for no good reason, you punish him. It makes sense. I was hoping that everybody else would vote that way, and my conscience would have been clear. But there was that one undecided vote, and it spoiled things for me. Now I know I have to think this through more carefully before I can convict a man of murder, and what you just said maybe makes sense to me.…”