The Judgment (32 page)

For a couple of years Ismail Carter was there at his right hand, the mayor’s trusted advisor. Yet poor old Ismail had been urban-renewed right out of the business. Black Bottom, most of it, was no more. Where once the frame houses and brick tenements stood, there were now rows of bright and shining high-rise apartment buildings, alternating with whole blocks of steel-and-glass boxes dubbed “townhomes” by the developer. They were occupied by Yuppies and Buppies who felt they owed nothing to any man, least of all to some aging reminder of the city’s past. He became a politician without a constituency, as much an anachronism in his own way as were my old pals in the Irish mafia who had formerly ruled Detroit. Ismail lost his seat on the City Council. It wasn’t long before he dropped out of sight completely.

But before he did, he and I met under rather strange circumstances. At least at first they seemed strange to me. He’d been hit with a civil rights suit by one Carol Johnson and that dated back a couple of years to when he still held his seat and kept an office in the city building. He showed me the papers he’d been served with, and maybe because I’d had my usual three or four martinis at lunch, I just didn’t get it. Why should Ismail Carter be the target of a discrimination suit? Why should he want me to defend him when every black lawyer in town was in his debt for favors and incidentals?

But then Ismail made it all clear to me in just a couple of words: “She’s white.”

Carol Johnson, a recent graduate of the University of
Michigan in political science, who also took shorthand and typed ninety words per minute, applied for a job at his Council office. After displaying her credentials and skills, and following a brief, personal interview with Councilman Carter himself, she was told that others were applying for the job, and she would hear later if her application had been successful. She never did. Later she learned that the position had gone to a Melody Martin, a black woman, who had no college degree, took no shorthand, and could barely type. “Sweet little girl,” said Ismail of Ms. Martin. “She was my barber’s niece.” Although Ms. Johnson had no difficulty finding another job, she brooded upon this injustice, and as a second-year law student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., she prepared and filed the complaint expertly with the Civil Rights Commission. Because this was back in the Seventies and was one of the first reverse discrimination suits ever brought, it got a lot of attention in newspapers all over the country, even a sound bite or two on national television. I think I tried it pretty well.

Ismail Carter himself gave me the handle I needed when, at our second meeting, he started to tell me what I didn’t want to hear, never wanted to hear from a client.

“Now, Charley Sloan,” he said to me, “I’m not one of these public servants who gets in a jam and has a sudden attack of amnesia. I’ll tell you right off I remember this girl, Johnson, very well, and if you want to know the God’s honest truth, I did discriminate against her.”

I tried to interrupt him. He poked that ever-present cigar at me and told me to shut up. He would have his say.

“Now, like I say, I did discriminate against her, but not for the reason that’s there in the complaint. It had nothin’ to do with color, or race, or any of that shit my people been puttin’ up with for more years than either of us can count. Fact is, I had a white woman work for me back in the Forties, during the war. She was a Communist and a real good liaison with the unions. She got married after three years, had a baby right away, and quit. Then, well,
there was another white woman worked for me, but she just recently died.

“But nossir, it had nothing to do with race, me not hiring that girl. What it had to do with was that she was so damn ugly I didn’t want her there every day, lookin’ her in the face. Now, Charley Sloan, I don’t know how it is with you, though I did notice those young ladies out front in your office are awful easy on the eyes, but I’ll tell you how it is with me. See, when I go into the office every morning, it cheers me up to look at those pretty female faces, specially now I’m older. And just say I venture out for a bit of information has to be looked up in the files. ‘Oh, Mr. Carter, I’ll get that for you right away,’ and then she sashays off and hunkers down because what I need is down in the bottom drawer, and I take all this in, and that gives me a serious cheer-up, makes my old pecker tingle. But this young lady, Carol Johnson, she just never would make my pecker tingle. I swear, she got up in the morning and took ugly pills every day of her life.”

I remember asking him then if he had taken advantage of any of the young ladies who worked for him. That might indeed prove a problem. But he set me straight on that.

“I have never in my life taken advantage of any woman, never made an unwelcome advance in my life—though I admit, some women have taken advantage of me.”

With that to go on, I planned my strategy. I was never able to find the white woman who Ismail had employed during the war. She’d moved to Burbank, California, in 1951 with her husband and two children, and there I lost the trail. But old city records from that era confirmed that yes, she had been employed in the councilman’s office, and yes, she was Caucasian. Exhibit A.

But I got as many men as I could on the jury—white or black, it didn’t matter—because when I called Ismail Carter’s present and former employees to the stand, one after the other, to attest to his sterling character and indifference to color, it was a regular beauty parade there in
the courtroom. The gentlemen of the jury not only enjoyed the show, they also got the point, especially when Carol Johnson came on the stand.

Perhaps Ismail had been unnecessarily cruel in his description of her. She wasn’t what I would have called ugly, but she was homely, rather, so gawky and plain that she would have passed any man unnoticed on the street. Or perhaps there was something ugly about her that came from inside. Her small blue eyes, sharp and vengeful, darted about the courtroom ceaselessly so that she seemed to be lying even when I knew she was telling the truth. The corners of her mouth turned down in an expression of disapproval whenever she happened not to be speaking in her shrill, grating voice. I had to admit to myself I wouldn’t have wanted her working in my office. The gentlemen of the jury must have admitted the same, and the ladies, too, for her suit was denied.

Of course, it helped that I got her to admit, reminding her she was under oath, that when she applied for the job in June, she had not informed Ismail Carter that she would be leaving to attend law school in Washington the following September. That more or less wrapped things up for Carol Johnson.

Ismail was delighted, of course, and paid my stiff fee cheerfully. Few do. Once out of trouble, they forget all too quickly who rescued them. And his last words to me were, “I owe you.”

Remembering all this on my drive back home puffing on one of my newly acquired cigars, I wondered why it had not come to mind earlier. All I can say is that booze does funny things to your brain. I was hitting it pretty hard in those days. There are some big blank spots in my past, territories that may be opened up to me suddenly, unexpectedly by some relevant reminder, like how the little cigars looked like the ones Ismail Carter used to smoke.

But now that I had remembered, now that I had my man, I wondered what he could do for me. He owed me. He could carry a message to the mayor. But just what would that message be?

T
here was the rest of the morning and the better part of an afternoon to kill before the AA meeting at St. Jude’s was to begin. I tried Sue on the telephone and all I got was her answering machine. Remembering the shape she was in the night before, I left a sympathetic message and asked her to give me a call when she came in. More than likely, she was down at Kerry County Police Headquarters going through the files on the three children who had been killed already. I hoped I was wrong about that. But if that’s where she was, there was no telling how long she’d be gone. Poor Sue.

I knew I had no intention of going into the office and looking once more at the Conroy file, or listening to the Mary Margaret Tucker tape, or doing anything more that day even remotely connected with the case. It had taken a while, but the horror of the night before had finally caught up with me. I kept flashing back to the gruesome images right out of some disgusting grade-B slasher movie. I kept seeing that ghastly wound in his middle, the intestines, that face clouded and sorrowful in death. I was exhausted, but I knew that sleep in such circumstances would be impossible. And so I did the only thing anyone could do in that situation. I put on a pot of coffee.

Defense lawyers are sheltered from the realities of death. I must have tried nearly a hundred cases of first-degree
murder in the course of my career. Yet I’d never been right there at the scene of the crime, viewing the remains, looking over the cop’s shoulder, not until recently. Oh, I’d looked at forensic photographs often enough, tossed them aside, and then gone on to argue what I assured the judge and jury were the important issues in the case. Whatever I had said those issues were, I was wrong, lying, perhaps, if only to myself. What was important was the victim, the fact that a life had been taken, the even more fundamental face of death.

I’d first discovered that out on Clarion Road when I’d gotten a glimpse of little Catherine Quigley, wrapped in plastic, lying in the snow. And the lesson had been rammed home to me the night before in that filthy basement on John R.

It occurred to me then to wonder how and why it was that I had reacted so much more violently to my first murder victim than to my second. There could be no doubt, after all, that what had been done to Tolliver’s “pigeon” was far more hideous to look at and contemplate, yet it hadn’t made me vomit nor had it put me immediately into some sort of spiritual crisis.

But why? Why had Catherine Quigley’s death hit me immediately harder? Was I just getting used to it? If you saw violent death frequently enough, as a cop did, did it eventually stop affecting you? That wasn’t the way it was with Sue Gillis. Or, for that matter, with Bud Billings, or even Stash Olesky.

Maybe my friend and counselor, Bob Williams, had been right. Maybe it was Catherine Quigley’s innocence that made the difference. That poor butchered bastard whose guts had been spilled over the floor, whose tongue had been cut from his mouth—he was certainly no innocent—a bagman for one of the big drug dealers, probably a murderer himself, or Tolliver wouldn’t have had the hold over him that he did. But how do you measure these things? Certainly a seven-year-old girl was the more innocent of the two, but they were both still dead. And
death, not innocence or guilt, was the problem, wasn’t it? Death was the great problem of life.

Did they know that up at St. Jude’s chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous? Maybe I ought to tell them. For whether violently, or in our sleep in a warm, comfortable bed, death would come to us all. If that was the case, why even bother to stay sober?

That was the nasty question that wormed its way into my brain at some point along the way. Or maybe it was there all the time. The day before, I’d wondered why I wasn’t happier. In a way, I’d always been happy during those drinking years. I laughed more, talked more, saw more people, lived a full life, until it all came crashing down on me, nearly burying me in the wreckage. But Ismail Carter was right. I’d done a pretty good job of it, making a comeback in Pickeral Point. I seemed to have things pretty well under control. Maybe I could ease off and enjoy myself a little. Who knows? Maybe I could even have a drink every now and then, like any other normal human being. What could it hurt?

Just about that time, of course, an alarm sounded in my head. Every alcoholic knows that line of reasoning. Every member of Alcoholics Anonymous knows from a painful process of conditioning what it could hurt: everything you’ve achieved, all the resistance and resolution you’ve built up, all the self-knowledge you’ve gained.

All this I knew more or less instinctively by now. But all I could come up with in response to all those “why bothers” and permissive “maybes” were a few of the old AA slogans and buzzwords that had been so deeply ingrained.

“Easy does it.” Sure, I knew everything I’d accomplished had been done by increments. I know that I’d discovered a lot about myself in the process and managed to discard a lot of superfluous material baggage along the way.

“One day at a time.” That’s how I’d done it. That’s how I’d been winning my cases, too, by preparation and
planning, rather than trying to think on my feet and depending on oratory, as I had when I tried cases half crocked.

“Broken shoelaces.” That’s what Bob Williams would call my ruminations on happiness, or, really, my wish for it. He’d say there was no guarantee that sobriety would make anyone happier, just that it was the only way for people like us to live. And after all, happiness wasn’t guaranteed as anyone’s inalienable right, only its pursuit. I think I’d heard him say that once.

Who knows how long all this thinking took? But before I knew it, the time had come to get ready for the Sunday matinee meeting.

I might have stayed away if I’d known in advance an open meeting had been planned. Just about every AA chapter throws open its doors from time to time to outsiders. The question is, of course, who is an outsider? Predictably, visitors fell into two categories—“heavy drinkers” who said they were “curious” about the program; and the relatives or close friends of such “heavy drinkers,” whose presence was necessary to get them there. The general rule seemed to be that if they came under their own steam, it was a pretty good bet they’d come back again and join the program/If they had to be escorted, it was anybody’s guess.

And then there were the unpredictable visitors. In a way, you never knew ’quite who might show up. In the years since I’d been coming to the meetings in St. Jude’s basement, there had been a few journalists, a couple of Ph.D. candidates, one in social anthropology and the other in social psychology, both of whom left disappointed when they learned that they would not be allowed free access to regular meetings, simply as observers. Father Phil LeClerc, the pastor of St. Jude’s, sat in from time to time at the open meetings just to make sure things were running smoothly. But when he showed up that Sunday night with Father Chuck in tow, I felt a little funny about sticking
around. But I couldn’t leave. I’d made a postsession dinner date with Bob Williams.