I
Doves wheeled above the city's winter morning, vanishing by a turn of
wings, reappearing in a silent explosion of light. Judge Terence Mann
saw smoke rising through windless cold from a thousand chimneys, and
saw, beyond a bleak acreage of city roofs, the apartment house that
contained his bachelor burrow; further on, the Veterans Hospital shone
not as a temple of sickness but a shaft of splendor in the sun. His eyes
smarted as he turned away from the brightness. That was partly from a
lack of sleep. The Judge remembered that, like this robing-room, the
detention cells also looked up across the long rise of land where, for
something like three hundred years, the city had been haphazardly
expanding, fattening on river commerce, and becoming--in the American
sense--old.
Some day, should the small gods in the state capital approve, the city
of Winchester would own a Civic Center near that hospital, with a new
county courthouse. Judge Mann had seen an architect's dream picture in
the Egypto-lavatory style, a kind of streamlined cake of
soap--optimistic in a time when Winchester's population of 80,000 was
remaining constant while suburbs oozed in heedless growth over the once
magnificent countryside. In any case this late-Victorian-Gothic firetrap
downtown would have to serve for the ordeal of _The People vs. Blake_.
He shoved the black sleeve clear of his wrist watch: 10:10. Short,
slight, his temples silvering at forty-seven; few wrinkles yet; a thin
flexible mouth suggesting kindness; in his square forehead the pucker of
certain chronic doubts. He checked his pockets for reading glasses and
aspirin while his attendant Joe Bass brushed at imaginary lint.
"Mr. Delehanty says there's quite a crowd, Judge."
"Do they need more bailiffs out there?"
"I wouldn't think so--just noisy. They all want in." Pink-faced, lightly
wrinkled, Joe could shift at will from a glorified valet to a literate
old man. "Maybe the rumors about the girl's deformity make them curious,
same as if she were a Hollywood dish."
"Oh, I understand her deformity's pretty slight. It's just the radio and
papers--sensationalism--public wants a circus. Well, I'm late."
"Technically, sir, you are. But after three years on the bench, you know
it isn't ten o'clock till you pass through that door."
"Uh-huh--Joshua never had it so good. Well, here we go ..."
"All rise!" Mr. Delehanty's tenor burbled the lusciousness of a
clarinet. "The Honorable Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and
for the County of Winchester!" Judge Mann saw them rise, for what the
tradition said he must be and therefore was. "All persons having
business before this honorable court draw near, give your attention, and
you shall be heard!" Seating himself with a twinge of annoyance at pomp
and circumstance, Mann observed a virgin scratch-pad beside his
minute-book. He suspected Mr. Delehanty of rescuing judicial doodles
from the wastebasket: to Mr. Delehanty any new judge was a potential
Great Man till the bloom wore off. "This court is now in session."
Three years a judge, less than a year in General Sessions--it had been
sure to come, the first case overshadowed by the death penalty. He had
faced the certainty and argued it out with himself, well before those
scrambled days of the election campaign two years ago which had settled
him securely in office after the uncertainty of an interim appointment.
He had supposed the answers he arrived at then were still valid: _The
law is man-made, therefore imperfect: as its servant, my function is
simply to interpret, trusting that time and natural process will permit
the law to continue growing, not petrifying, as men gradually become a
little wiser (if they do)._ And so on--respectable answers, unoriginal
but having the sanction of history, of just and generous minds. Yet last
night, after a final reading of the grand jury minutes in the Blake
case, he could not sleep. And this morning, so far, he was merely
insisting to himself that those answers had better stay valid, since the
sovereign state of New Essex was stuck with him for another twelve
years.
Perhaps, he thought, his uneasiness was not so much at the ethical
position as at the Blake case itself--too one-sided. He saw at present
no good prospects for defense counsel Cecil Warner except in delaying
actions, skirmishes, the unpredictable chances of courtroom drama, and
the doctrine of reasonable doubt--which is, to be sure, a doctrine broad
enough to take in the whole expanse of human affairs, philosophically
and not legally speaking.
He surveyed the arena, wiping his reading glasses, hoping his eyes
didn't look too bloodshot. The prospective talesmen spilled into the
rows beyond the press tables. Then the anonymous; and from outside, a
beehive snarl of the disappointed, who might dwindle away presently,
unless the papers had succeeded at blowing the case up into a sexual
circus. Portraits of the dead woman showed a pretty face, but Ann
Doherty had after all been a respectable suburban housewife, not a
glamor girl. Catering to the perennial hunger for a scapegoat, most of
the papers were writing of Callista Blake on a note of hate just inside
libel--Crippled Teen-Age Intellectual, Prodigy Girl in the Monkshood
Case. But that carried a phony note, for Callista Blake had managed to
remain so essentially unknown that so far there was really no one to
hate but a paper image. Some voices dissented, too. One sob sister had
declared Callista was a woman, with human needs, feelings, a tragic
childhood. That writer might have read an article on psychiatry--even
two articles.
There were certain letters, from Callista Blake to her lover James
Doherty, the last one written about a week before Doherty's wife was
found dead--poisoned and drowned. If those letters arrived in evidence
over the protests of Cecil Warner, they would demonstrate Callista
Blake's humanity more intensely than any journalistic gulping.
Judge Mann had read them, Cecil Warner and District Attorney Lamson
present. James Doherty, Lamson said, had handed over the first three
voluntarily. The fourth, found in Callista Blake's possession, had not
been mailed to Doherty. For Mann, to read them had been like blundering
into a private room where lovers clung together with locked loins and
tortured faces; like being compelled to watch, afterward, when the woman
was alone and wounded with loss. He had skimmed, his mind wincing aside,
knowing it was not possible to understand the letters under those
conditions. They had not been read to the grand jury. Some passages in
them might be construed as admissions of guilt--or not, as you pleased.
Warner evidently felt that this notion could be demolished.
As for beauty and glamor, the prosecution would introduce other
photographs of Ann Doherty that were no pretty portraits. Old Warner
would object routinely and be overruled; the jury would then meet the
unmitigated spectacle of a death by drowning. When Ophelia perishes
offstage you don't think of post-mortem lividity or foam on the mouth.
"Mr. District Attorney?"
Assistant District Attorney Talbot J. Hunter nodded briskly but
solemnly: he was being the man who profoundly regrets what he must do.
That had not been altogether predictable. Dealing with professional
crooks, T. J. could act downright jolly in a ferocious give-nothing way,
often sweeping a jury along. With a tiger's grace, handsome in spite of
too much chin and early frontal baldness, Hunter could have been
athlete, actor, singer. He was a near-professional with the Winchester
Choral Society, having once gone splendidly through the baritone solo in
the Brahms _German Requiem_ when the guest artist turned up with
laryngitis. Mann, himself a serious pianist, had heard that achievement,
and remembered it at times when Hunter's courtroom personality annoyed
him: the man could hardly have sung that well unless there was in him,
somewhere, the element of compassion. In the law, Mann supposed, Hunter
could use and enjoy his musical and histrionic abilities and at the same
time make a living. "Call the Blake case!" The voice, Mann observed, was
in top form, rich, melodious, and acceptably stern.
"Mr. Warner?"
"The defense is ready." Cecil Warner was standing also, heavy and old, a
man listening to other voices though capable of employing his own heavy
thunder. The other voices were conscience, tradition, books; overtones
of what witnesses and lawyers don't say. The seamed ancient face was
fat, the kindness obvious but not the strength. Mann wondered
occasionally whether Warner had ever, like Darrow, faced all the
implications of a certain pessimism that colored most of his opinions. A
fracture imperfectly set had crippled Cecil Warner's left arm in
childhood; he could not bend the elbow beyond a ninety-degree angle. And
Warner's mind, the Judge speculated, might suffer a similar limitation,
never hitting with quite all its power. He would need it all in the next
few days.
"The People of the State of New Essex against Callista Blake."
Reasonable words; but as Mr. Delehanty intoned them, the Judge's mind
perversely visualized an army of five or six million, uniformed, with
rifles, tanks, flame-throwers, advancing in ponderous wrath against one
cornered chipmunk with tinfoil helmet and paper sword. Foolish, he knew:
the individual was not alone, and faced not the People roaring and
multitudinous but merely their representative, who might be no more
powerful a champion than his own counsel. Yet the image had pestered
Judge Mann before now, and faded in the style of the Cheshire Cat.
At other times he could not avoid the impression that the adversary
system was too distressingly close in nature as well as origin to the
absurdities of medieval justice, in which truth could be determined by
the beef of a hired champion. Were prosecutor and defender today any
more concerned with truth than those bumbling muscle-men? Were juries?
And judges?
"Counsel to the bench, please." They approached, Hunter light on his
feet, Warner slow and carrying too much weight in the middle. "When we
get started, gentlemen, I intend to bear down on the formalities, some.
I think it's that kind of case. Anything more we should discuss now?"
Warner's hand rested on the bench. Mann noticed the pale freckles, the
frailty of deep-crinkled flesh, blurred rims of the irises of Warner's
melancholy brown eyes. Cecil Warner was sixty-eight. "Don't think so,
Judge, unless T. J.'s got some load on his mind."