Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red (18 page)

“What do you mean, let them go?” the district attorney asked belligerently.

“Because according to the evidence of our own expert, the medical examiner, Hendryx was killed before the bomb went off, we can’t hold them responsible for his death.”

“And he can’t make a mistake? How about the time the corpse was locked in the freezer and it threw off all of Doc Slocumbe’s calculations?”

“Put it this way. Matt, if I had presented the medical examiner’s report when they were arraigned before Judge Visconte, would he have withheld bail?”

“Maybe not, but –”

“They’re college kids. If the grand jury should refuse to bring in a true bill against them and charges are dismissed, they still will have served time and their lives will be messed up.”

“Something you’re forgetting. Brad, there’s no doubt in my mind, and I guess there was none in Judge Visconte’s, that they planted the bomb.”

“They deny it.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe it was the missing one. Ekko, who did it.” said Ames doggedly. “The others might not know anything about it.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Why is it? He was the only one who skipped.”

“Oh, I’m willing to admit that he may have been the actual perpetrator, but what grounds do you have for thinking the others didn’t know about it?”

“Because he’s different from the others, he’s a lot older, for one thing. If the defense had taken this line. I think the judge might very well have gone along and set bail and they’d be out and back at school right now.”

“School!” the district attorney echoed scornfully. “What the hell does that bunch of hippies care about school, except to cause trouble? Check it out and you’ll find they never go to class, they just hang around and smoke pot and start riots and sit-ins, and when they’re not doing that they’re busy screwing, that Ekko guy was living with that girl. Ballantine, just as open and free as you please, the hell with them!”

“You’re judging their lifestyles. Matt, not their guilt.”

“Sure. I’m taking their lifestyles into account in making up my mind about their guilt, just as every jury does in deciding on the credibility of every witness they see on the stand, and every judge does the same. What’s wrong with that?” demanded Rogers. “If we couldn’t judge on things like that, then the only people we’d ever find guilty would be those who confessed. What are you getting at. Brad? Do you want me to appoint somebody else, maybe Hogan, to this case?”

“I don’t know.” said Ames soberly, he shifted unhappily in his seat, then decided to make one last try. “Let’s just say; as a kind of exercise in logic, that Dr. Lagrange is absolutely on target.”

“All right, then I’ll tell you what follows.” said Rogers. “Lagrange says death occurred sometime between two-ten and two-forty? Let’s call it half-past two. Now that means that Hendryx didn’t go back to his apartment, but stayed there in his office, and that means that he was dead even before the committee came in to see the dean, and that means that someone had to come into his office, go around behind his desk, reach up somehow to where that statue is resting on the top shelf, and pull it down. Who can reach that top shelf? That’s an old building there, with eleven-or twelve-foot ceilings. Our mysterious assailant would have to hop up on one of the lower shelves, maybe hang on with one hand while he grabbed at the statue with the other, and all the while Hendryx just sits there? He doesn’t ask what the guy is doing?”

“What if he were asleep? What if he dozed off?”

“Then how did the person get into the office?” challenged Rogers. “It’s locked.”

“The door could have been open. I mean, the latch might not have caught when the rabbi left.”

“Possibly, but just barely.”

“And if the murderer had a long stick with a curved handle, like a cane, for example.” said Ames, “then he could just hook the statue and pull it down.”

“Sure, Brad, and then?”

“And then what?”

“And then how do you figure the pipe and the hassock and the open book in Hendryx’s apartment?”

“Well, it’s possible that the cleaning woman fibbed about that.” said Ames. “Naturally, she’d want to get out as early as she could, and if she thought Hendryx wasn’t likely to come back and check on her, she might have skimped and not done a thorough job.”

“Then why didn’t she say so?”

“Well, all I know is that if it was my cleaning woman she wouldn’t want to say, they have a kind of professional pride.”

“So question her again.” said Rogers good-naturedly. “If you can make her change her story. I’ll reconsider Lagrange’s finding on the time of death.”

At class reunions and other nostalgic get-togethers, the name of Bradford Ames always was good for intensive discussion.

“You saw Brad Ames? What’s he doing now? Still assistant district attorney? It just goes to show how money can mess up a man’s career.” Karl Fisher, like the three friends he was lunching with at his club, was in his early fifties, they were all prosperous.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, the rest of us, when we got out of law school we were all running around looking for a job.” said Fisher. “And you know how many law firms were hiring and what they were paying in those days! So you opened an office of your own with the loan of a couple of hundred bucks from your father or your wife’s father for some secondhand furniture and a Corpus Juris Cyc.”

“When I got out.” said Gordon Atwell. “I shared an office with six other guys, and let me tell you, we had to scratch between the seven of us to pay the one secretary her wages every week, and believe me, there was no chance of her getting rich on what we paid her.”

“Right.” said Fisher. “But we persisted, and gradually things got a little better, and after a while, lo and behold! we were making a living, and then it got to be a good living, and by the time we were in our forties, some of us had big practices, and some of us had become judges, and some had gone into politics and were in the legislature, and some got to be chief counsels for large corporations. I mean, most of us made good. Some of us awfully good.

“But that’s because we all had to scratch. But when you’re an Ames, and money doesn’t mean anything, you don’t think the same way, and your family doesn’t think the same way, so you’re not subject to the same kind of pressure we were, we had to go where the dough was, and we had to get cracking right away. Now/was interested in criminal law, but luckily I decided that I couldn’t afford to practice it, or else I might’ve found myself working for the mob like Bob Schenk or more likely defending two-bit criminals whose widowed mothers had to mortgage the old homestead to pay my retainer. So I’ve been practicing real estate law, and as you guys know we’ve got a pretty sizeable outfit and I’m doing all right.

“Now Brad Ames was interested in criminal law, too, But for him it was no problem. His family got him a job as assistant district attorney for the county, and he’s been there ever since, he not only practices criminal law, but he doesn’t have to worry about bleeding some poor bastard’s life savings for his fee, or worry that maybe the money he’s paying him with is the money he stole, which is why he needs a lawyer in the first place.

“Of course, the salary of assistant district attorney isn’t anything much. None of us could live on it, at least not the way we’re accustomed to live. But to Brad Ames, it’s just cigarette money anyway, he has no wife and there’s no pressure from his family to keep scratching.”

“Maybe.” said Gordon Atwell, who looked younger than the others, “and then again, maybe there’s a more personal reason.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Fisher.

“Well, you know the way Ames looks – that round head on the fat torso and the way he grins and chuckles all the time like some idiot –”

“Some idiot!” Andrew Howard laughed, he had a general practice and was the only one who engaged in criminal law. “You forgotten he made Law Review!”

“I didn’t say he was an idiot; I said he looked like an idiot. What I mean is he doesn’t make the sort of impression that’s apt to inspire confidence in a client.” Atwell looked to Fisher for support.

“Don’t let any of that fool you.” said Howard. “Maybe it’s a kind of nervousness, but let me tell you, he can turn it off when he wants to, and when he does, watch out! I appeared against him once on a rape case. My client was a clean-cut young fellow, very cool and very much at ease. I had to put him on the stand, but I figured it would be all right, that he’d be able to handle himself, he told his story well, and I could see he was making a good impression on the jury, then Brad Ames started to cross-examine, he asked his questions, and they were good-natured. You know what I mean? No pressure, and that manner of his, he looked like a grinning buddha, and always with that little giggle as though it was some kind of joke. Pretty soon my client was relaxed and grinning, too. It was a regular tea party between them. Every once in a while Ames would slip in a question that wasn’t according to Hoyle and my client would answer before I could object, the judge. Judge Lukens it was, would order it stricken, but the jury had already heard it. It went on like that for almost an hour, all nice and friendly, and then suddenly; Brad’s face tightens up and suddenly – goodbye, buddha, he holds up the girl’s dress so the jury could see how it was ripped. ‘And is this the way she took off her dress?’ he asks. My client began to stutter and stammer, and right then and there I knew he was a goner.”

“Oh, I don’t deny he’s good.” said Fisher. “But it’s still no sort of career – assistant district attorney. If he really had any drive, he would have got out of the D.A.‘s office after a few years and used it as a stepping stone to private practice in criminal law, like Clyde Bell, or Amos Mahew.”

“I don’t agree.” said Sam Curley; who had been silent until now. “I’ve had dealings with Brad off and on over the years. Our firm doesn’t handle criminal business as such, but every now and then one of our clients, or some relative of a client, gets into trouble and they expect us to act for them. If it’s anything serious, of course we’d farm it out to a Clyde Bell or somebody like that. But a lot of times, we’ll handle it ourselves, about two or three years ago. I had a case and Brad was acting for the Commonwealth. It was during the summer and when I called Brad about it, he invited me to come down to their family place in Barnard’s Crossing for the weekend, they got quite a place on the Point and the weather was nice and we did a bit of sailing, well, Sunday his older brother Stuart came down for dinner –”

“The judge?”

“That’s right, well, after dinner, we were sitting on this great big verandah they have, overlooking the water, with this telescope mounted near the railing so you can look at any boat in the harbor and see who’s aboard, and a pitcher of Tom Collins right there on the table. It was nice, and we were just talking the way you do after a good dinner, and the judge says, half-joking, something to the effect when was Brad going to realize his potential and perform the duties that were expected of him, and do you know what he meant? He meant that it was Brad’s duty as an Ames to serve society and the country, to his fullest capacity.

“Now, ordinary people don’t talk that way because – well, because they don’t think that way. I mean, normal people might say when are you going to realize your potential and be a big shot? If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? That kind of thing. But Stuart Ames wasn’t thinking of that, he was thinking that his brother had a duty to society that he wasn’t fulfilling, he actually thought that way, and the funny thing was that Brad felt the same way, too. So he started to tell about his job, half-kidding at first, like his brother, but really in dead earnest just the way his brother was. I’ll never forget it to this day, he said. ‘District attorneys come and go, the better they are, the quicker they go, too, because it’s just a stepping stone for them to the next office. But assistant D.A.‘s they stay on. Now somebody’s got to train those D.A.‘s, and I guess a lot of it falls to me, mostly because I’ve been around so long.’”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but I can see how it could be true,” said Andrew Howard.

“Then he went on to point out that it was the assistants in the D.A.‘s office that run the whole shebang, they decide who is going to stand trial and who is going to get a second chance. Not the judge, mind you, not the defense counsel, and not even the D.A., but the assistant D.A, he’s the one who decides to prosecute or not, he’s the one who makes the deals, well, you know, he made out a good case. I know I was convinced and I’m pretty sure his brother was, and it gave me a new slant on him. I’ve been thinking all along, like you, that he was doing it as a kind of hobby: that he liked criminal law and since he could afford to practice it at this level, he was indulging himself. But by the end of that afternoon. I saw him as a kind of top sergeant who does all the work and makes all the decisions, but let the lieutenant or the captain give the actual order and get the credit. What keeps the whole legal apparatus of the city running is not the judges and the defense counsel or even the cops, but the lowly assistant D.A.”

Bradford Ames unhappily stared after the departing district attorney and tried to decide what to do. In his own mind. Rogers had already tried the four students and found them guilty – of what? Of being radicals, of using bad language, of following a lifestyle he did not approve of, and for all those reasons he was determined to keep them in jail as long as he could, all the weeks and months to the day of the trial. It was those four daughters of his that were warping his judgment, ames decided, and thanked God that he was a bachelor.

Of course, once the case reached trial, the medical examiner’s report would have to come out and there would be a directed acquittal on the murder charge, however it would go with them on the arson charge. But in the meantime, the students would have remained in jail all that time, there was also the danger of a judicial backlash; if the case came up before a prima donna like Judge Harris, for example, he would have plenty to say about the suppression of evidence by the district attorney, he wondered at his chiefs blindness to the political implications and then remembered wryly that he probably was aware of them and assumed his constituency would not mind in the least if he stretched the law a bit to keep these young radicals out of circulation.