A fool for a client, p.25
A Fool for a Client, page 25
“That's not what I want to see,” said Justine's mother in a voice so strong that it seemed to defy the presence of death that hovered over her.
“I can't help it,” said Justine, burying her head in her hands.
“I know I haven't got long. Let me use what little time I have left to explain a few things that I want you to understand.”
She forced herself to contain her tears. Her hand slid down from her face and she nodded.
“I'm ready,” she said.
“Justine, you once said that medicine for you is a hobby and a profession all rolled into one. There aren't many people who can say that about their work. Most people, even people who do jobs that most people think of as interesting, think of it as just a job. In time you may become like that too. I've heard that medicine is a job with a lot of stress of its own, and most doctors would quite happy to go home and put their feet up at the end of the day even they very seldom can. But as long as you've got your youthful enthusiasm, make the most of it. Don't throw it away one something less important.
“I won't give up my career for marriage–”
“You know that it's not marriage I'm talking about.” Justine's mother paused, as if challenging Justine to admit or deny the unstated accusation. Justine remained silent. “Don't waste your time on regrets Justine.”
“You had a chance to live... and some one took it away from you.”
“That's all in the past.”
“You once told me never to accept injustice as the final word, to challenge it at every turn. You said that it isn't normal to try to live in a house that's on fire, so why try to live in an unjust society. The house is still on fire. Why shouldn't I try to extinguish the fire?”
“There's nothing wrong with trying to extinguish the fire. But don't fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. Use your desire for revenge constructively, as the psychological fuel to propel you forward, not as an incendiary bomb that burns itself into destruction along with its surroundings. Murphy is a terrorist, a murderer who takes lives. You’re going to be a doctor, some one who saves lives.”
“It wasn't just your chance to live that was stolen, it was others, and all the good that they could have done.”
“You mean Srini Shankar.”
“How did you know?” asked Justine, tearfully.
“I was tidying up your room and saw the reprints of his papers from medical journals. I found the letter you got back from University College in London telling you he’d been killed.”
“I read up every paper on cancer I could get my hands on and discovered that he was the world’s foremost expert on breast cancer. I wanted you to go to Britain to have him as a consultant,” said Justine.
“You must have been shattered when they told you he was dead.”
“It was as if some one cut the last supporting girder beneath me.”
“Then I guess you’ll just have to learn to fly,” the voice still firm even through her pain.
“You’re not making this any easier for me,” Justine said defensively.
“I never said it would be easy. But you’re going to face life after I’m gone, and without self-pity.”
“Shankar was unrivalled in his field,” said Justine. “I heard one of the doctors say he wished he could consult him. And the other one nodded. Shankar might have saved you if that bastard hadn't blown him away! Well now he’s got to pay!”
“You can't waste time on what might have been. You must concentrate on what you do best. Shankar is dead, but think of all the lives you’ll be able to save! Don’t blow it all on petty revenge. Otherwise you’ll be doing something worse than Murphy. You’ll be destroying your ability to help others in the future.”
“But who's going to make him pay,” she whined like a small child. “The authorities have already had their say. Who is going to give us justice?”
Justine's mother was shaking her head slowly.
“All right I see I can't dissuade you, but at least let me make one request: whatever you do, do it well.”
Justine's mother closed her eyes and the equipment beside her gave off a high-pitched tone.
* *
The door to the cell was opened abruptly, shattering her daydream.
“The jury's back,” said the bailiff.
She wiped the tears from here eyes as she was led down the corridor and into the elevator. From there it was a short walk down another corridor back to the courtroom. Outside the courtroom Abrams was approaching the entrance from the opposite direction. He reached the door first but he paused for a moment at the entrance. He appeared to be playing the gentleman and waiting for her to enter first. As she walked passed him their eyes met for a couple of seconds and she thought she saw something there that she hadn't noticed before. Was it sympathy? Solidarity? Regret? Whatever it had been, it was gone in a moment.
He didn't look at her again when they both took up their places inside. It was as if he had said too much with his eyes already and didn't want to reveal any more of himself. It was one thing for a defendant to take the stand and let her own blood before the jury, it was quite another for the prosecutor to bare his soul before the defendant.
The jurors were filing back one by one, taking up their places. Leading them in was James Lawson, the businessman and self-made millionaire whom Justine had indicated was to be her advocate in the jury room.
Parker wasn’t so sure. Lawson was a man who had made it within the system and seemed to believe in the rules as a common guide-rail to keep people on the right track. He had set up his computer services company in the seventies, when minicomputers were beginning to get into the smaller departments of businesses and external services no longer seemed like the cash cow they had been a decade earlier. But he specialized in a lucrative niche market: matching price quotes from suppliers to the needs of companies using dummy applications. He became so strong in the field that suppliers lowered their quotes when his consultancy applied for them and his clients began paying him commissions to actually make the applications for them.
He was a firm believer in the consistency of iron discipline, whether it be the discipline of computers, or the discipline of the law: a set of rules to be drawn up with careful forethought and then rigidly adhered to thereafter, until the rules were formally changed. It was easy to see Lawson voting for guilty even while sympathizing with the accused.
The last time he had served on a jury he had voted guilty and there was nothing in his background to suggest that he would be any more willing to compromise the law on this occasion. He had made it in his chosen field without breaking the rules and he had no sympathy for those who took short cuts. Was it possible that he would make an exception now, in Justine’s case?
Parker was trying to read their faces. Conventional wisdom held that in serious cases such as murder, when jurors are going to convict they avoid looking at the defendant, especially if the defendant is looking at them, forcing those who look to make eye-contact. They were looking at Justine openly. This was a good sign. If the conventional wisdom was correct then it boded well for Justine. But when there was such a wide range of verdicts open to the jury, such as three possible lower categories of homicide, one couldn't really tell. The jury might have been planning to convict on a charge of negligent homicide or second degree manslaughter. In their eyes that would be an act of kindness and a favour, not a reason to look down at the ground as if they were finding the defendant guilty of murder.
In any case the eye-contact rule only applied rigidly in states where they had capital punishment.
Next to Lawson, sat the housewife whom Justine had first antagonized and then befriended in that strange sequence of questions during the voir dire. She looked at Justine with a look of encouragement that Parker couldn’t decipher. Was it the encouragement one gives to a person who is about to face an ordeal or the encouragement one gives to a person who has already been through one? It was a small but significant difference. And the difference could mean a verdict of innocent or guilty.
Parker knew that this woman had daughters too. Her children were talented like Justine. Did she see Justine as some one who had been victimised by life, or some one who had squandered her opportunities on something as petty as revenge?
Abrams was straightening out his papers, in preparation for any post-verdict motions that he might have to make, or to respond to any that Parker might make. There was a kind of false briskness to his actions as he quickly extracted the papers, tapped the straight on the desk, closed the case and put it on the floor beside his chair.
There was a truck driver on the jury. He was called Mulligan and was probably Irish himself. But Justine had not challenged him, and there was nothing in the look on his face to indicate hostility to Justine. On the other hand there was nothing to indicate his thoughts at all.
Whatever those thoughts may be, he kept them well hidden throughout the trial. The only thing that was clear was that he was a hard man who had no patience for weakness. Did he see Justine’s actions as a sign of weakness or of strength.
The jurors were all in place and only the judge remained absent.
“All rise!” the bailiff's voice rang out.
The judge re-entered and sat. The rest of the courtroom sat down but the tension hung in the air as they waited while a piece of paper was passed from the foreman of the jury to the judge via the Clerk of the court. The judge opened it and perused it briefly.
“Proceed Mr. Clerk,” said the judge.
“The prisoner will rise and face the jury.”
Justine rose and looked at the man whom she had singled out to represent her in the jury room.
“The foreman of the jury will rise and face the prisoner.”
The foreman rose with firm dignity.
“Mr. Foreman, in the case of the People of the State of New York versus Justine Levy have you reached a verdict on which you are all agreed?”
“We have.”
“What say you?”
The foreman of the jury stated the verdict. But before doing so, at least according to a reporter from the New York Post, he winked at Justine.
Chapter 42
Declan heard it, incredulously. The bitch had openly admitted the whole story from the witness stand, positively bragged about it, and this jury was letting her out onto the streets.
By now the spectators had broken out into pandemonium, after the initial gasp and then the pause of pregnant silence. The judge rapped with his gavel to restore order.
“Miss Levy you are an extremely fortunate young woman. You are free to go.” Then, turning to the jury he added: “Members of the jury. I thank you for your services. You are hereby discharged. Court is adjourned.”
The judge rose and the court again erupted into pandemonium. In the ensuing chaos, Declan jumped over the railing that separated the spectator's section from the front of the courtroom.
“Now you're going to die you fascist bitch!" he screamed, pulling out the Colt 45 from his pocket.
He swung gun towards her looking around to see where the bailiffs were. In the split second that he wasted, Parker leapt up and dived at him, deflecting the gun upwards just as the Irishman squeezed the trigger. The gun barked, its lethal projectile harming no one, but bringing splinters of plaster down from the ceiling as journalists and spectators ducked for cover. While Parker struggled with Declan and several more shots were fired into the air, a bailiff pulled out his handgun and managed to squeeze off a clear shot at Declan, hitting his body armour and leaving him unharmed.
In shock at having come so close to being hit himself, Parker reeled backwards, off balance. The bailiff was trying to calm a frantic middle-aged matron while Declan staggered over to Justine and met her eye to eye, holding the gun aimed at her head. She clawed at the gun in a frantic effort to deflect it upward as Declan fired. She fell backward with a red spot on her temple and cried out in pain as Parker spun round with a look of horror on his face.
For what seemed like an eternity Declan and Parker eyeballed each other, Parker with fury, Declan with what seemed to Parker like the indifference of an android. Parker knew that there was no way he could get across the space that separated them without being shot. But Abrams, who was crouched on the ground behind Declan, had seen what had happened and he was ideally poised to act. Drawing on the collegiate boxing skills which had never deserted him, he dived at Declan, spun him round with his left hand and knocked him backwards with a single, ferocious right hook. The gun fell from his hand. Without pausing Declan dived onto it, but by now he had lost the initiative. As his hand scooped up the gun a shot rang out from one of bailiffs. A spot of blood appeared in the centre of Declan's forehead, and the INLA terrorist fell dead with a powerful thud on the courtroom floor.
The panic continued all around them, but Parker looked at Abrams for a few seconds and Abrams saw the gratitude in Parker's eyes, forcing its way through the young man's tears. A few yards away, the judge was having a word with the Clerk of the Court.
Chapter 43
“I thought it might be better for you to leave this way,” the judge told Parker. He was still wearing his robes, having huddled Parker out of the room and led him to his chambers by a long and tortuous route to avoid the more tenacious members of the press corps.
“Let the police get the situation under control,” the judge continued. “And let the press deal with the public chaos, not with the your private feelings. You've earned the right to peace and quiet.”
Parker knew that the judge was being gentle with him. After what he had been through it was not unreasonable. But Parker was grateful, and relieved.
“Is there any way of getting out without the press noticing?”
“There's a rear exit where they make deliveries.”
“Thank you.”
“You know Rick, as you're a lawyer, and maybe a judge some day, I think there's something you ought to know. It's not a judge's job to preach. But – ” he jerked his finger towards the door – ”that's what happens when people start taking the law into their own hands.”
Parker nodded in quiet understanding.
“You know... it's funny...” he said.
“What is?”
“Justine told me that her mother once said to her: ”whatever you do – do it well. And you know what? She did. She did it so damn well, she made the rest of us look like fools.”
The Judge put a comforting hand on his shoulder.
* *
It was ten minutes later when the rear door opened. Parker stepped out and looked around. He held his head up to the fresh air and breathed deeply.
He looked around again. There was no one about. He looked back at the door and gave the signal. Justine stepped out, her head bandaged where the bullet had grazed her, and looked around. They exchanged conspiratorial glances and walked down the street.
“I'm glad I was of some use to you in the end,” said Parker
“You were great Rick.”
“You know it looked like you weren't even afraid.”
“I was more frightened than I looked. I just didn't show it. I guess my trouble always was I didn't like to show my emotions.”
“Were you frightened during the trial?”
“I don't know. I suppose I always knew that I might end up behind bars for life. But it was overshadowed by the image of my mother wasting away in that hospital bed and the smug face of Murphy telling me that he had the right to kill the man who could have saved her.”
“You know you could have killed Murphy without exposing your identity.
“I know... but then I wouldn't have been true to myself.”
They reached an intersection. There was no one else about. Parker pointed right.
“I left my car back there. Can I give you a ride anywhere?”
“I need to be alone for a while... just for a few hours... maybe a few days.”
“I understand,” he said, looking sad but not hurt. He realized that this was it, the parting of the ways. He felt a tinge of regret, anticipating the emptiness in his life that would follow, wondering how long it would take to get over her.
He walked off in one direction, she in the other. When a distance had opened up between them, Justine turned.
“Hey Rick!” she called out. She saw him turn and look at her across the distance. Then, without a trace of pity in her voice she added: “I'll call you tonight!”
THE END
