The Closing: A Whippoorwill Hollow novel (The Whippoorwill Hollow novels) (26 page)

Nate’s arraignment was the first matter on the Selk County Circuit Court’s morning calendar. The bailiff unlocked the courtroom at eight. By eight thirty every seat in the courtroom was occupied. The bailiff set up folding chairs at the end of each aisle, but there still weren’t enough seats to accommodate the spectators. People stood along the side and back walls three and four rows deep.

Nate waited in the hall behind the courtroom with Sheriff Grundy. The sheriff didn’t require Nate to wear cuffs or manacles, and Howard had brought him a suit to wear instead of the prison garb.

At nine, the sheriff led him into the courtroom and ushered him to the defendant’s table. He looked across the sea of faces in the gallery. He knew most of them. He had indicted a few of them. Some were victims of criminals he had prosecuted. Some were witnesses in his cases. Others had served as jurors. A few were personal friends. He searched their faces. There was concern and respect. He saw no animosity.

Howard joined Nate at the defense table. Howard had negotiated a favorable plea agreement. Nate would plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter.

Wiley Rea sat at the prosecution’s table. His resentment toward Nate was palpable, yet Howard said Rea agreed to recommend no jail time. Howard whispered to Nate that Judge Blackwell reviewed the proposed plea agreement earlier that morning. “The judge didn’t say much, but I think we’re in the clear. You should be released on probation at the end of this hearing.”

The bailiff called the courtroom to order. Everyone stood as Judge Blackwell climbed the steps to the bench and eased into his chair. “Be seated, please.” The clerk called the case. There was a long silence. The judge stared at Nate. The judge’s eyes were sad and tired. “I understand, Mister Abbitt, you’re prepared to enter a plea of guilty to voluntary manslaughter.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I assume you understand the consequences of such a plea.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Very well, then. How do you plead to the charge of voluntary manslaughter?”

“Guilty, Your Honor.”

The judge turned to Rea. “I’ll hear from you concerning sentencing, counsel.”

Rea recited his part in the proceeding flawlessly, albeit without passion or conviction. He recommended that Nate receive a five-year sentence, that the sentence be suspended, and that he be placed on probation for the five years. Rea summarized the mitigating circumstances of Nate’s crime, Deatherage’s brutal attack on Christine, and Nate’s belief that Deatherage had killed her. Rea said the commonwealth was satisfied that Nate’s crime was an isolated occurrence, the product of unique circumstances, committed in the heat of passion in response to extraordinary provocation.

The judge turned to Howard Raines. Howard summarized Nate’s clean record and his contributions to the community as a former commonwealth’s attorney. Howard submitted letters from Sheriff Grundy and other Selk County civic leaders vouching for Nate’s character. Nate was surprised when Howard read a letter from Circuit Court Judge George Maupin praising Nate for exposing the Buck County corruption. Nate understood George’s letter. The letter was addressed to the court, but its message was intended for Nate. It told him to keep quiet about George’s crimes. It reminded him that George was a powerful man who could influence his future both positively and negatively.

Howard brought his presentation to a close and sat down. The gallery waited for the judge’s ruling. There was no sound in the crowded courtroom. The judge looked at Nate for a long time. There was more emotion in his face than Nate expected to find there. He and Nate had been friends for many years and recently their weekly counseling sessions had forged a close bond between them, but the judge’s expression betrayed more affection than seemed warranted. He looked grief-stricken, devastated.

“Please stand, Mister Abbitt.”

Nate stood. The judge picked up his gavel and started to pronounce Nate’s sentence, but he hesitated. He set the gavel down, put his hand over his eyes, and leaned back in his chair. He was motionless for a long time. He dropped his hand and gazed at Nate. His eyes were tortured, his emotions bared. Nate recognized something in the judge’s eyes, something unspoken but unmistakable, something Nate had only seen in the eyes of one other man in his life. At that moment, he knew the reason the judge had invested so much time and energy in his welfare and protected him and risked his own good name and freedom in the process. At that moment, Nate knew the judge’s secret, and it took his breath away. His knees buckled. Howard embraced Nate and held him up.

“I regret that I cannot rule on this matter,” the judge said. “My relationship with the defendant is too close. I am biased in his favor. My inherent conflict of interest requires me to recuse myself from sentencing this defendant. I will ask the circuit’s chief judge to transfer this case to another court for sentencing. This hearing is adjourned.” The judge rapped his gavel and descended from the bench.

Nate spent a week in the Selk County jail waiting for the assignment of his case to another circuit court judge. Howard was nervous. He said Nate’s sentence would depend on the proclivities of the new judge. The chief judge transferred the case to Judge Wigfield of Starkey County, the judge who had been assigned to the Deatherage trial.

Howard was optimistic. He thought Judge Wigfield’s familiarity with Deatherage’s crimes would work in Nate’s favor. It did not. Judge Wigfield refused to accept Wiley Rea’s sentencing recommendation. In his ruling, Judge Wigfield acknowledged the brutality of Deatherage’s crimes against Christine and Nate’s long tenure as a public servant, but he condemned Nate’s decision to take the law into his own hands. The judge said, “The defendant fired six shots at the victim while the victim was unarmed. It is undisputed that the defendant was under no imminent threat of physical danger. Even under the compelling circumstances of the immense provocation in this case, to reward the defendant’s willful violent conduct by releasing him to probation without serving a single day in confinement would be an endorsement of vigilantism and anarchy.” The judge sentenced Nate to six months in state prison and to five years’ probation.

The warden considered Nate to be at risk in the general population because Nate was a former prosecutor. Nate occupied a private cell in a cell block housing other inmates who were considered nonviolent and at risk. They came from the upper strata of Virginia society—a former member of the state legislature from Kilmarnock who sold his votes to real-estate developers for cash delivered to him in brown paper bags, a Baptist minister who embezzled a small fortune from the largest church in Virginia Beach, an ex-policeman from Norfolk who sold drugs he confiscated in the cases he worked.

Nate didn’t mix with his cellmates. He passed the time in his cell alone. The first few weeks he was physically and emotionally exhausted. He slept the days away. Those were the easiest days. After that he couldn’t sleep. There was no work to distract him. There was no whiskey to numb his pain and blur his mind. There was no escape from his memories. His thoughts were clear and vivid and brutally honest.

Nate replayed the scene of Deatherage’s death in his mind’s eye many times. He saw the look on Christine’s face when she stood on the landing pointing the gun at Nate, the agony in her eyes, the torrent of tears, the shaking of her hands as she fought the temptation to shoot him. He saw the continued firing of the gun at Deatherage after he had fallen through the window and even after the bullets were spent. He saw the vacant expression on Christine’s face when she was carried from the house on a gurney.

She killed the wrong man, Nate thought. Deatherage raped and choked and tortured her, but Nate was the source of her misery. Deatherage ravaged her body. Nate broke her heart and spirit. When Christine fired the gun at Deatherage, Nate knew she was thinking of him and all he had done to her.

During the early days of his prison sentence, Nate came to terms with Judge Greene’s advice about his marriage. The look in Christine’s hurt-filled eyes when she leveled the pistol on Nate extinguished his last spark of hope that he could ever regain her love. He finally accepted that she was lost to him forever. In the pitch-black darkness of every night in his cell, he wept for the death of his life with Christine.

Over the weeks and months that followed, Nate endlessly replayed the scenes leading up to the shots Christine fired at Deatherage, and he eventually remembered Deatherage saying he killed Joe Hitt. Nate’s memory of Hitt clarified. When Nate met with Daryl Garth, Jimmy Washington’s attorney, Garth said Washington was convicted of killing Hitt. Garth said Hitt was strangled, Deatherage’s “special pleasure,” as Eva, his mother, had said. Jimmy Washington was on death row awaiting execution for Hitt’s murder.

Nate told Howard Raines about Deatherage’s confession to Hitt’s murder. Howard told Garth, but he had withdrawn from representing Washington when he became acting commonwealth’s attorney. Howard took the case and prepared an affidavit about Deatherage’s statement to Nate, which Nate signed. It wasn’t long before Howard discovered that Deatherage and Hitt had a history of bad blood between them, dating back to days they spent together in reform school when they were teenagers. Howard submitted an application for a pardon to the governor of Virginia, and a few months later the governor granted the pardon.

The
Richmond Times-Dispatch
published a series of stories about Jimmy Washington’s wrongful conviction. The stories criticized George Maupin for prosecuting and convicting an innocent man for a capital offense based on contradictory and suspect evidence. One of the stories castigated George for ignoring the similarity between the modi operandi of the murders of Darlene Updike and Joe Hitt, strangulation by ligature and manual strangulation. The theme of the
Times-Dispatch
stories was repeated by newspapers and television stations all over the state. The unflattering notoriety besmirched George’s reputation and drained power from Buck County’s new king. Nate was glad to see it. It wasn’t enough to satisfy him, but it was a start. He hoped he would have the opportunity someday to finish the job of introducing the real George Maupin to the world.

One of the
Times-Dispatch
stories included a picture of Washington embracing his wife and children after his release from prison. The article depicted Nate as a hero for extracting a confession to Hitt’s murder from Deatherage and for saving Christine’s life. An editorial in the
Times-Dispatch
asserted that he was wrongly incarcerated and called upon Judge Wigfield to commute his sentence. He threw the editorial away, but he kept the picture of Jimmy Washington and his family.

Three months into Nate’s sentence, the Virginia State Bar’s disciplinary board suspended his license to practice law for six months, the same time as his jail term. The chairman of the disciplinary board, a defense lawyer from Richmond Nate had once opposed in an armed-robbery case, enclosed a handwritten note with the board’s formal notification. He informed Nate that the board’s sympathies ran with Nate. He said the board gave Nate the shortest suspension it could justify, given the seriousness of his felony. Nate would be able to resume practicing law as soon as he was released. The note closed with a heartfelt expression of the chairman’s admiration for Nate’s “courageous assault upon the fortress of corruption in Buck County.”

Without the distraction of a caseload or any other means to deflect his thoughts, the long empty days in the penitentiary forced Nate to confront his worst deeds. He lied to Christine, belittled her, demeaned her, and cheated on her. These were his most despicable acts. He tried hard to blame them on a mixture of overwhelming compulsions. Fear of death, fear of aging, despondency, depression, whiskey—they were the real culprits, he told himself. They robbed him of his judgment and sensibility. They crowded out all other thoughts and feelings and took control of him. He wanted to believe he wasn’t guilty of these cruel deeds, but no amount of reflection or rationalization could convince him of his innocence. Christine was right. There was no guilt-absolving compulsion that forced him to destroy her life. Scared or not, drunk or not, Nate, and Nate alone, made the decisions and took the actions that broke her heart. There was no justification for what he did, no valid reason, no good excuse. He was guilty. Open and shut. And no rehabilitation or penance could rescue him from a life sentence of remorse for what he had done to her.

He had rigged prosecutions against five defendants. He’d tried to tell himself that his motives were noble, that he falsified evidence to take violent criminals off the streets, but he knew that was a lie. His motives were entirely selfish. He wanted to escape the burdens of his job. He rigged prosecutions to free up time to drink and to pursue his affair with Rosaline. Deputy Jones’ effort to prove Nate killed Henry Crawford taught him the harsh consequences of his indifference to the rights of the accused. As with his cruel treatment of Christine, there was no justification for his crimes as commonwealth’s attorney.

The morals of other questionable actions he took were not as clear to him. He pondered the lies he’d told about Judge Herring’s death and about killing Deatherage. He told these lies to protect Clarence Shifflett and Christine from being charged with crimes that Nate’s actions had set in motion. These lies were felonious. They constituted obstruction of justice. Also open and shut. And yet, he could not convince himself they were wrong, and if presented with the same circumstances, legal or not, moral or not, he knew he would tell the same lies again.

The moral character of his decision to withdraw from Deatherage’s defense was the most difficult for him to analyze. The code of legal ethics was clear. His duty to defend Deatherage was paramount. It should have taken precedence over his personal opinion of Deatherage’s guilt. A good defense attorney would have used the spousal privilege to block Claire Deatherage’s testimony about Deatherage’s confession, and even if she had been allowed to testify, a good defense counsel would have tested her truthfulness on cross. Kenneth Deatherage beat his wife. She was afraid of him. She wanted him out of her life. Her testimony against him would keep him in jail and away from her. A competent defense attorney would have exploited these facts to attack her credibility.

Nate believed Claire Deatherage, but he knew it was not his role to judge her credibility. That judgment belonged to the jury alone. The decisions he had made as a prosecutor to circumvent judges and juries to convict criminal defendants were clearly wrong. The same should be true of decisions made in his new role as defense counsel, but in the Deatherage case, he could not ignore his firm conviction that Claire told the truth about Deatherage’s confession. At first Nate didn’t know why he could not force himself to stand by Deatherage, but during his time in the state penitentiary, the truth about his withdrawal from the case stepped forward slowly from the shadows. Darlene Updike looked like Christine. Deatherage was guilty of murdering Darlene. Nate was guilty of destroying Christine’s life. He tried to tell himself he was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing when he hurt her, but that was no excuse. Deatherage drank two jars of bootlegged alcohol the night before he murdered Updike, but she suffered greatly at his hands and died just the same. Nate thought Deatherage was right when he told Nate, “The truth is you belong in here with me,” and, “The only difference between you and me is you won’t tell the truth about yourself.”

That was true when Deatherage said it, but Nate’s time in jail changed him. He admitted the truth about himself. He couldn’t defend Deatherage because he couldn’t defend himself. He withdrew from the case to avoid the pain of reliving his own crimes, and it led to the most disastrous tragedy of his life.

Nate’s mother visited him in prison twice a week, bringing him cakes, cookies, magazines, and books. During the visits, Nate sensed a tension in her that she’d never shown him before. At first, he thought she might be stressed by his surroundings. The visiting room was a cramped gray windowless room strewn with tables and chairs. A defective fluorescent light flickered on and off. The room stank of sweat and ammonia. The inmates and their visitors were loud and profane, and Nate thought his mother was depressed to see him dressed in a khaki prison jumpsuit like the other convicts.

During one of her visits, Nate said, “Does it bother you to see me here?”

“It doesn’t please me, but it helps to know you don’t belong here.”

“I’m sorry you have to come here. I’m sorry for all I’ve put you through.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re a hero for what you did to that man. The judge was wrong to put you in jail. Everyone says so.”

“That’s not what I meant. I don’t regret what happened to Deatherage. I’m sorry for the mistakes I made before he came along. I’m sorry I drank myself into so much trouble. I’m sorry I dishonored my position as commonwealth’s attorney. I cheated on Christine and I broke her heart. I’m sorry I embarrassed you and hurt you. I’m sorry for all of it.”

His mother placed her hand over Nate’s hand. “We’ve all made terrible mistakes. I’ve done things I regret. I’ve caused grief to those I love.” She fell silent.

“Visiting me is too hard on you. You shouldn’t come here again. I’ll be okay. I’ll be out soon.”

“That’s nonsense. I enjoy my time with you.”

“No one enjoys time in this place. Don’t come here again. There’s no need.”

Her eyes pooled with tears. She clutched her purse and stood. “I’ll see you Tuesday.”

In the next few visits she filled every moment with small talk. She spoke of her intended spring garden plantings, repairs to the house, the death of her neighbor’s cat, recipes for the food she brought Nate, the weather. She talked without respite, as though a single moment of silence would break her down. In each successive visit, she talked faster and louder and seemed more anxious. A half hour into one of her monologues Nate interrupted her in midsentence. “Is something troubling you, Ma? You seem worried.”

“Of course not. Why would you say such a thing? We’re having a nice conversation and you jump in and—”

“We’re not having a conversation. You’re talking, but you’re not saying anything.”

She burst into tears. “I’m doing my best. What do you want from me?”

He waited until she regained her composure. Then he said, “These visits wear you down. You don’t need to come here.”

She left without another word.

Two weeks passed without a visit. Then a guard told Nate he had a visitor and escorted him to the visiting room. Nate’s mother appeared at the door and walked across the room with a pronounced limp. There was a bruise on her forehead, and her eyes were red from crying.

Nate helped her to a chair and sat beside her. “What happened to you, Ma?”

“I fell and sprained my ankle.”

“How bad is it?”

“It’s not bad. I can manage.”

“Did you go to the doctor?”

She nodded. “Doctor Davis said to stay off my ankle for a few days. That’s why I didn’t come to see you for a while.”

“How did you fall?”

“I missed that last step on the back stoop again. I fell into a low spot by the flower bed. Anyone but a feeble old woman would have jumped up and gone about her business, but I couldn’t get up. I squirmed around every which way but it was no use. I gave up and laid there for a long time. My head hurt and my ankle throbbed. I was too embarrassed to cry for help, but the pain overwhelmed my pride. I yelled for Clara but she didn’t come. I screamed and screamed some more.” She shook her head. “I was so helpless.”

“Your back yard is a good one hundred yards from Mrs. Templeton’s house. I’m not surprised she didn’t hear you.”

“Oh, believe me I was whooping and hollering loud enough for Clara to hear me, but she’s such a vain old biddy. She won’t wear her hearing aid. She thinks it makes her look old. If she hadn’t put it on at noon to watch the
Guiding Light
, I suppose I would have died of exposure in my own back yard.”

“I’m surprised Mrs. Templeton was able to help you up.”

Resentment darkened Nate’s mother’s face. “Clara didn’t help me up. She wouldn’t try. I begged her to take my hand, but she wouldn’t do it.” Nate’s mother spoke in a singsong voice, in mimicry of her neighbor. “‘I can’t lift you up, Abigail. I’ll fall and we’ll both be stuck out here in the garden with no one to help us.’ Clara insisted on calling the rescue squad. Don’t call anybody, I told her. Just let me take hold of the hem of your dress. But no, she wouldn’t hear of it. Stubborn old witch.”