Without Prejudice (27 page)

He nodded.

‘You have to trust me, Robert,’ she said intently.

‘I’ve heard that before.’

She pursed her lips crossly. ‘I’m not your ex-wife.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of her, actually.’

XII

H
E WOULD ALWAYS
remember the morning he heard because although the 104 was usually crowded, it was rarely late. But that day he had stood by the bus stop on upper Broadway for forty minutes, half-freezing as the wind whistled in from the East Side, and by the time he got to the office it was almost ten o’clock. Unacceptable to his boss, which alarmed Robert, since three years out of college this was the first job he could truly say he liked – and didn’t want to lose.

He was working for a small, good publishing house that was owned and run by a man named Leo Nathan, an old Polish Jew who had escaped from Vichy, France, in 1940 and come to New York via Rio de Janeiro. He spoke stilted old-fashioned English, but read the language like a native. He was tight with money, and Robert was so badly paid that he struggled to afford even the grim room he rented on the Upper West Side, in a neighbourhood yet to be gentrified. But Nathan had a keen eye for a book; Robert suspected he was learning more from the old man than he would ever fully understand.

‘You’re late and you’ve had a phone call that is personal,’ Nathan said crossly that morning.

‘Sorry.’

‘Somebody saying he’s your brother asks you to call him back.’

He handed Robert a message slip. It was Mike, and Robert was alarmed. Had someone died? His father, or Lily? If it had been Merrill, Mike would have sent a cheerful telegram.

‘Where does this brother of yours live?’

‘He’s stationed in Iowa.’

‘Stationed?’ said the old man. ‘Ah, a soldier boy. Well, do me a favour, and call him back collect. Uncle Sam can afford personal calls better than I can.’

When he got through to his brother, Mike said right away, ‘Your friend Duval’s been arrested.’

Nobody’s died then, Robert thought with relief, and wondered why Mike had rung so urgently. Robert hadn’t seen Duval for more than ten years. He knew from Vanetta that he had come back to Chicago six months before, and had been working in Hyde Park, as a security guard at the university hospital.

‘What’s he done?’ he asked now, wondering if it was drugs – Aurelia, Duval’s mother, had never managed to stay clean for long.

‘They say he raped a nurse at Billings.’

He struggled to adjust his image of Duval to the news. He couldn’t. ‘When did you find out?’

‘Last night. Dad told me.’

‘How is Vanetta taking it?’

‘Hard, Bobby. You ought to call her.’

He rang that night, unwilling to risk Nathan’s wrath with another personal call from the office. He had not spoken to Vanetta for several months and hadn’t been to Chicago in two years. When he had last seen her she’d made baked chicken and sat with him in the Cloisters apartment’s dining room while he ate. He had asked about her family and noticed she’d said nothing about Aurelia, so her daughter must have been on drugs again. Duval was still living with his mother, she’d said with a sigh, and Robert could tell she was worried about him.

Now on the phone she sounded surprisingly calm, though insistent that Duval was innocent. Robert himself couldn’t imagine the easy-tempered boy he’d known being capable of such violence. Yet later that week when he got clippings sent by Mike from the Chicago papers, he realised things looked bad for Duval.

The nurse had not only been raped, but knifed so badly that it was a miracle she had survived. She’d told the police that her attacker had worn the blue blazer of hospital security, and she’d picked out Duval’s photo right away from a pile of mugshots.

The local papers played the story big, drawn no doubt partly by a white girl–black boy angle that touched a racial nerve, clichéd but persisting. Duval was being held without bail in Cook County Jail, which, as Vanetta remarked, was not a picnic for anybody – and certainly not for someone as gentle as Duval. Gentle. That was how he remembered his friend, and what made it difficult to think he’d done the crime.

Several months passed, and Duval remained locked up. Robert thought of visiting Chicago, but there was no suggestion he could do anything helpful by going there. His father told him there was talk of hiring a private attorney, but that in fact the public defenders were very good, and the one assigned to Duval’s case seemed especially competent. There was a chance, Johnny added, of what he called a
To Kill a Mockingbird
defence: Duval’s chest had been very badly scarred in the fire when he had saved a little girl, yet the rape victim had not mentioned anything unusual about her attacker’s physique. This hope proved short-lived, however, for a week later his father reported that according to Gehringer, the public defender, the girl said Duval had never taken his shirt off during her ordeal.

With no date set for trial, Robert put it on a mental back burner. He was working hard for Nathan, never leaving the office before seven at night, and with limitless reading of submissions to do outside work. He’d also, after two lonely years, met a woman who seemed to like him as much as he liked her. Cathy was from Long Island, yet absolutely mad about New York City, an enthusiasm she was determined Robert should share. In the helter-skelter manner of many young men in Manhattan, he led a frantically busy life, and Duval Morgan did not figure very often in his thoughts.

He was never certain what happened to catalyse him into action, and decide he needed to make an appearance at Duval’s trial. Perhaps it was Mike’s frequent phone calls, encouraging him in turn to call Vanetta, who though stoic-sounding on the phone was clearly suffering. Or maybe it was Lily’s disdain when he mistakenly called her in California one night, thinking she would care. Or – and very potent this – possibly it was Merrill’s remark, reported by Mike, that since Duval was facing a sentence of fifty years, then, ‘Honestly, wouldn’t it be better for him to be executed than spend his whole life in prison?’. Whatever it was (and eventually he decided it was largely his enduring sense of obligation to Vanetta), he decided he had to be there.

Leo Nathan was distinctly unsympathetic. ‘Someone you grew up with has got himself in trouble. Do I understand correctly?’

‘Yes. You see—’

But Nathan had put up a hand. ‘Spare me the details. I had not appreciated you had a law degree.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Then how will your presence be of assistance?’

‘I need to show my support. His grandmother was like a mother to me.’

‘I see. So he is like a brother then?’

‘Sort of,’ he said uncertainly.

‘You seem to have a lot of brothers. When did you last see this one?’

He started to explain, but Nathan waved it aside. ‘Tell this brother of yours you can give him a week. A week, at a busy time of the year. Anything more than that and you can ask your “brother” to give you a job. Because you won’t have this one.’

So he felt a clock was ticking when he returned to Chicago on Thursday night, catching a flight after work, a day into the trial. Merrill thought it odd that he had returned at all, and he could tell she hoped he would not be staying for long. She was cross, too, about Vanetta’s absence from work, lamenting the inadequacy of the local laundry service that was substituting. His father had voiced no opinion about his son’s return, but he let Robert use his car on Friday morning, since otherwise Robert didn’t have the faintest idea how to get to the court, at 26th and California.

When he arrived he had to park several streets away, and by the time he found the courtroom on an upper floor, the day’s proceedings had begun. As he took a seat in the back row, he was struck by how small the room was, tiny compared to the spacious sets of television drama. He saw Vanetta in the front row, sitting behind a black man at a table. That must be Duval, thought Robert, who could only see the back of his head.

In the witness box, a junior doctor from the hospital’s emergency room was describing what he’d found when called, bizarrely, to help someone hurt in the hospital itself. He gave evidence stolidly, consulting notes he had made the morning when Peggy Mohan had been found. Three times he said the victim had been so badly hurt he thought at first she was dead.

At the recess Robert followed the defence lawyer, Charlie Gehringer, out into the corridor, where he found him smoking a cigarette. Gehringer was young, not much past thirty, a dapper tense-looking man, with the physique of a rake and sharp eyes. Robert introduced himself.

‘Ah,’ he said and shook hands. ‘I was going to call you tonight. Vanetta Simms told me you were in town.’

‘How’s it going?’

Gehringer dropped his cigarette end and stubbed it out with his foot. ‘You want the truth?’

‘Of course.’

‘Okay, but don’t say anything to Mrs Simms. It’s not looking good. They found blood on Duval’s blazer that matches the victim’s blood type. Unless I can shake her ID of Duval, we’re in trouble.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘There might be. If all else fails, I’ll have to go on about Duval’s unimpeachable character, and hope that will create some doubt about Mohan’s testimony. Frankly, if she’s any good as a witness, we’re on a hiding to nothing, but I don’t see what else we can do. I’ve got a testimonial from the fire department in St Louis – Duval was a real hero down there. But I’d like to call you too if that’s okay.’

He felt taken off guard. Although he had come back to show his support for Vanetta, it had never occurred to Robert that he could be of any practical help to Duval.

‘I haven’t seen Duval in over ten years. I only knew him when I was little.’

Gehringer shrugged. ‘According to Mrs Simms, you two were close. And let me be candid – you’ve got attributes I can use right now. You’re white, for one thing, and I hear you went to Yale. I don’t get many character witnesses with those kinds of credentials.’

Gehringer watched him carefully. ‘Think about it,’ said the lawyer. ‘You’d be a friendly witness, and it might help a lot. But listen, court’s about to start again – why don’t you come with me and say hi to Duval?’

There was a policeman standing guard at the defence table, who moved aside as Gehringer approached, and then Robert saw Duval. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and tie – he looked like one of the earnest young men from the Black Muslims, who stood on street corners selling their newspaper to black passers-by, and ignored the whites.

‘Hey, Duval,’ said Gehringer cheerfully, ‘I brought somebody to see you.’

Duval looked at Robert, trying to figure out who this strange white man was. Then a smile slowly spread across his face, and he stood up. He was tall now – an inch or two over six feet, with sideburns and the shoulders of a grown man. But he still wore glasses, and his front teeth remained slightly protruding.

‘Hey, Bobby. What you doin’ here? I thought you was in New York.’

‘I came to see how you were doing.’

‘You seen Vanetta?’

‘Not yet.’ He’d tried to call Vanetta the night before, but her sister Trudy had said she was at church. ‘I will though.’

People were coming back into the courtroom and he knew he should take his seat. Duval said, ‘It’s been a long time, man. We had fun together, didn’t we?’

‘We sure did, Duval.’ He noticed that Gehringer was looking nervously at his watch. ‘Listen, I’ll come say hi again, okay?’

‘You do that.’ As Robert turned away, Duval added, ‘Look after the Secret Garden until I get out.’

The trial resumed, and another, more senior doctor described the victim’s injuries. The testimony was undramatic and clinical, full of technical medical jargon. He might have been describing the condition of a house plant.

Then Peggy Mohan was called. The gallery stirred a little as a young woman with lank, auburn hair walked down the middle aisle of the courtroom. She had a slight limp that slowed her down, and increased the anticipation in the room. As she took her seat and was sworn in, the spectators seemed to take a long, collective breath. Speaking in a quiet, neutral voice, Peggy Mohan answered the preliminary questions – her name, occupation, address.

Then the DA asked her to tell the jury what had happened on the night of March 13 in the year before. The courtroom was completely quiet.

‘My shift ended at ten o’clock. Normally I’d walk out with the other nurses, but that night I stayed a few minutes late, to write up a medication change one of the doctors on call prescribed. By the time I left, everyone else on my shift had gone.

‘My car was parked in the garage on Maryland Avenue. The quickest way there was through the west wing they’d been renovating – if I went that way I’d come out right across the street from the garage. Otherwise I’d have to walk all the way around the block. It made me nervous to do that alone.’

She gave a small, sad smile at the irony of the choice she’d made. ‘I went through into the renovated wing. I was about halfway down the corridor when suddenly the lights went out. Then I heard someone behind me. I turned around and asked who was there, and a voice said, “Security.” It was a man’s voice. He said the temporary exit had been closed. They’d opened another one downstairs, he said. He’d show me the way.’ She brought both her hands together, fingers tilted upwards in a steeple, and looked at them. ‘I didn’t like it – I couldn’t see him very well and it seemed weird that the light had gone out just when he showed up. So I said no, I thought I’d go back the way I came and leave by the side entrance. But he insisted. I could see him better now. He was wearing a pink shirt, but the security people’s blazer, so I thought he must be okay. So I . . . agreed.