Middle Age (62 page)

“Adam Berendt” had been an invention of a kind: the charmingly eccentric philosopher/sculptor whom everyone in Salthill had liked, and some had loved. Never a hint of the money he was amassing, and would give away to “deserving” charities. Adam had allowed his friends to interpret him in ways that were false. He’d allowed his friends to love a man who’d never existed.

It was while looking through Adam’s file on the National Project to Free the Innocent that Roger became caught up in the Elroy Jackson, Jr., case, the most-documented of the cases in Adam’s possession. Here were more than a hundred pages of photocopied material, court documents, letters, newspaper clippings, memos. In the margins of some of these Adam had made exclamatory notations. Here was a miscellany of pathos. To read through Jackson’s case was to avidly wish not to be reading it; to push it impatiently aside, to shut one’s eyes. Yet how familiar in outline the sordid story: a black man, running from a crime scene as police command him to halt; an unarmed black man, one not involved in the crime, the armed robbery of a -Eleven store in Somerville, New Jersey, and the shooting death of a young store clerk; a black man pursued on foot and seriously wounded by police who would later “confess” to being involved in the crime, under coercion; a black man with a record of minor convictions betrayed by another, more canny black man . . . Witnesses claimed to have seen Elroy Jackson “in the vicinity” of the -Eleven store and some would claim to have seen him run away before the shooting, and some would claim to have seen him run away “at the time” of the shooting. In the confusion of eyewitnesses, what was the jury to believe? Yet Jackson hadn’t had a gun, and gunpowder residue wasn’t found on his hands or clothing.

It was his word against the actual shooter that he hadn’t been involved. It was his word against a lighter-skinned, more intelligent and craftier black man who’d known how to make a quick deal with prosecutors, to blame an innocent man and plead guilty to reduced charges. Where there has been a

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shooting death, someone must pay severely, and luckless Elroy Jackson, Jr., turned out to be that man.

Roger read and reread the file on Jackson. Jesus! Here was a clear mis-application of justice. Much of the evidence that might have spared Jackson wasn’t admitted into the trial, or Jackson’s incompetent public defender hadn’t brought it in; there were obvious inconsistencies in testi-monies, yet the Hunterdon County prosecutor’s office had managed to

“prove” its case before a jury of mostly white, retired jurors. This jury would duly convict Jackson of a capital crime, a murder committed during a felony, and he would be sentenced to death by the new, humane method—lethal injection.

The execution had been several times postponed. No one had been executed in New Jersey for more than two decades. Pressure from right-wing politicians and their constituents was being brought upon the state to resume executions, and recent rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court were making it more difficult for the condemned to appeal. As Roger read further he became incensed, frustrated. No wonder Adam felt so strongly about this . . .

The file included photographs of Jackson: the man was dark-skinned, in his mid- or late thirties, with a wide nose, thick lips, deep-set anxious eyes; he hadn’t any distinctive characteristics; it was his bad luck to look like a man whom jurors could readily imagine perpetrating the crimes he’d been charged with perpetrating. (It was worse luck that Jackson’s supposed co-defendant had Caucasian features and a less generic, more “appealing”

face. And a smarter attorney.) Roger could imagine the poor figure

“Boomer” Spires must have cut in the courtroom. The trial must have moved along swift and pitiless as a bulldozer. There was the damning matter of Jackson’s rambling, incoherent “confession” he’d made to police, which he later recanted but which remained a matter of record. And once a guilty verdict was entered into the record, the machinery of “justice”

kicked into action like a meat grinder. Appeals in capital cases were automatic in New Jersey but Jackson’s guilty verdict remained unshaken through nearly twelve years. Reading of such matters, the dark side of the law that was his life’s profession, Roger felt sickened, ashamed. He understood his daughter’s repugnance for his life’s work and for him and could not have defended himself against her.

It was late. Roger was alone in Adam Berendt’s office in the house on the River Road that would shortly become the property of the Salthill
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Arts Council. Discouraged, overcome by fatigue, Roger rested his head on his arms. Pulses pounded in his eyes. Strange to be alone in Adam’s house without Adam present. He wasn’t asleep yet there stood Robin a few feet away regarding him with—was it sympathy?
Poor Daddy
.
Daddy’s tired
.
A
matter of life and death
.
Something to be proud of, Daddy?

Almost, Roger heard the girl’s voice.



“ T   an education for you, Mr. C.”

In November, Roger and his paralegal assistant Naomi Volpe drove to Rahway, New Jersey, to interview Elroy Jackson, Jr., in the death row cell block in which Jackson had been incarcerated for twelve years. Twelve years! The intellectual knowledge of such a fact was hardly adequate to suggest the grim pitiless reality behind it. The visit was Roger’s first to a prison, let alone a maximum security prison containing death row inmates, and the experience left him shaken, disoriented. He would dream of it, and the luckless Elroy Jackson, Jr., for months afterward. As they were being led by a taciturn guard into an interview room, after having been brought through a sequence of electronically monitored checkpoints, the prison air heavy with portent as an ether-soaked rag, Naomi Volpe squeezed Roger’s arm in an unexpected gesture of—was it sympathy? Pity for the Salthill attorney’s dead-white face? As if to say
It will be all right,
I’m with you
.
I’m your friend
.

Roger would have squeezed the young woman’s hand in return, but Naomi Volpe eased out of his reach.

Always, Naomi Volpe was easing out of Roger Cavanagh’s reach.

Volpe had boasted to Roger she was no stranger to prisons, including maximum security prisons for men. She knew the protocol and took no apparent offense, as Roger was inclined to, at the brusque way in which they were treated by prison officials and guards. “They see you wearing a necktie, they register: lawyer. These guys hate lawyers. Even the lawyers on their side. But we’re here to help our client, so just accept their shit.
We
get to walk out afterward, right?” Volpe spoke with a certain zest. She was wearing a black jumpsuit and black jogging shoes and her spiky dark hair was freshly razor-cut at the back and sides: at first glance you might mistake her for a Rahway inmate, boy-sized. She hadn’t met Elroy Jackson, Jr., but she’d been corresponding with him and had spoken with him on

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the telephone so it was Volpe who introduced the prisoner and Roger to each other, explaining Roger’s mission: to prepare a motion on Jackson’s behalf, in tandem with a New Jersey ACLU lawyer, to be filed with a New Jersey federal court, requesting a retrial for Jackson, or an outright release.

This information the prisoner absorbed with little emotion, a sardonic tic of a smile. He mumbled what sounded like, “Heard that before.” Or maybe it was just a grunt, “Huh-uh.” Roger found himself playing the role, a new and untested role for him, of the resolutely upbeat suburban-Caucasian-liberal attorney.
White man to the rescue!

The interview, in a windowless cubicle glaringly lit by overhead lights, was brief and unsatisfying. Most of what Roger asked him, the prisoner had already answered in more detail, at greater length and more intelligently, in the past, according to documents in Roger’s possession. After twelve years Jackson abbreviated his account of what had happened and seemed to Roger to be reciting, in a dispirited voice, words he’d many times recited. Roger had the impression that the slack-faced, middle-aged prisoner, who resembled the Elroy Jackson of 8 as an aging, ailing father might resemble a son, recalled little of the actual incident that had sabotaged his life; he recalled what had been processed for him by others.

His eyes were heavy-lidded and bloodshot, his dark, lustreless skin looked coarse as sandpaper. His body in the prison jumpsuit was shapeless as a sack of flour. He could make the effort only intermittently to relate to his earnest white visitors, grunting and mumbling in response, his breath audible as if he were suffering from a respiratory condition. Others had come to Rahway on his account over the years, his execution had been postponed, but the sentence of death had not been commuted and his life was wearing out, like a broken towel dispenser. When Roger assured him that prospects “looked very promising” for a retrial, even a reversal of the verdict, since Roger had discovered “unconscionable errors” in the trial, Jackson grunted in bemusement and smiled with half his mouth. He regarded Roger Cavanagh in his tailored gray pinstripe suit and crisp white cotton shirt as one might contemplate a mildly annoying fly buzzing nearby. “Are you following me, Mr. Jackson?” Roger asked politely, Jackson roused himself to consciousness like a large dog preparing to shake its coat, mumbling, “You tell ’em, Mr. Spires.”

Spires!
Roger flushed with wounded pride, and even Naomi Volpe shuddered, like one who has witnessed an obscenity. She said, in reproof,

“Mr. Jackson, your new attorney is Mr. Cavanagh. And I’m Naomi Volpe,
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his assistant. We work with the National Project to Free the Innocent.

You’re a long way from ‘Boomer Spires.’ ”

Jackson mumbled what sounded like an apology, except in its midst he began laughing; or was it a coughing fit; a violent discharging of greenish phlegm into a handkerchief Roger Cavanagh had no choice but to hastily provide, out of his coat pocket. This handkerchief was white cotton, monogrammed, freshly laundered and ironed. “Please. Keep it. It’s yours,”

Roger said, with a shiver of repugnance as, in a gesture of utter sincerity that might have been a gesture of consummate irony, Elroy Jackson, Jr., offered the befouled handkerchief to its owner.

Quickly following this exchange the interview ended.

Outside, in the acrid air of New Jersey, which nonetheless tasted sweet to Roger after confinement in the prison, Naomi Volpe said with grim humor, “So, Mr. C.! How’d you like to live on death row? Not like Salthill-on-Hudson, is it?” Roger, aroused by his companion’s careless nudge, as by the visceral frustration of the past hour, grabbed Volpe’s shoulders so that she winced, and pulled her to him, and kissed her thin-lipped mouth, and told her in crude monosyllabics what he’d like to do to her, as quickly as they could find a private place. Volpe’s ferret-eyes brightened. She’d pressed against Roger’s groin when he embraced her, gripping him around the waist with as much urgency as he’d gripped her. “Right, Mr. C.! I was thinking the exact thing.”

They spent the remainder of that dismal afternoon, and after a break for a meal another several hours, in a room in a Ramada Inn off the Jersey Turnpike, and afterward Roger wouldn’t see Volpe except at a distance for weeks.

Which was fine with him, he thought. For all her sexual dexterity, the woman wasn’t his type.



You’re drifting away from Salthill
.
Where to?

Though he was spending increasingly more time in New York, and would shortly lease a one-bedroom flat on East th Street, Roger continued to live in the Village of Salthill. At the time of his divorce, when he and Lee Ann had hurriedly sold their house, he’d bought a red-brick town house originally built in  and many times renovated since then, in another “historic” district of Salthill within walking distance of Shaker

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Square. It was a tall narrow austere-looking house of aged brick with black shutters and trim and a lawn bordered by a wrought-iron fence, a house that could only belong to someone with taste and money. Approaching it, Roger never failed to feel a thrill of ownership, and of deception.
Mine!

I’m the man who lives here
.

He’d never brought Naomi Volpe to this house. He’d never brought Naomi Volpe to Salthill. He dreaded the spiky-haired young paralegal’s response to his suburban life. “Mr. C.! None of this surprises me in the slightest.”

He’d fucked the smirk off Volpe’s face, more than once. He’d fucked her until the mouthy female was wordless, moaning and sweating and clutching at Roger without knowing who he was.

Mr
.
C.!
He did resent it, Volpe’s scorn.

This was unpredicted: by early winter Roger was spending as much time working on the Elroy Jackson case, or brooding about it, as he spent on his Salthill clients. His paying clients! He’d begun to resent these individuals, for whom he couldn’t become impassioned. Their cases were solely about money and pride. Win, lose, settle high, low, in the middle—

“Who gives a shit?” It was business, and Abercrombie, Cavanagh, Kruller

& Hook were businessmen. They were multi-millionaires but not mega-millionaires and the distinction didn’t trouble them, for in Salthill their reputation was excellent, they were men of comfortable middle-age, anticipating retirement and “golden” years. Their children were mostly grown, and gone.

Every morning, checking his personal e-mail, Roger steeled himself against discovering another cryptic little poem from Robin. But she’d ceased communicating with Deardeaddad. He’d have to accept it, her dismissal of him.
To herself she isn’t your daughter
.
To herself she’s herself
.

Almost, Roger was regretting his lost youth. Squandered in Salthill-on-Hudson. He should have gone into ACLU law, civil rights law, environmental protection, antipoverty. He should have married a woman who shared these commitments. He’d have another daughter now, possibly sons.