This Day's Death Read online

  Daniels had just walked in, with Jones, the blond cop who had arrested Jim. Until then, Jim had actually forgotten what the dark cop looked like—except that he was ugly and about his age. Now he remembered the colorless eyes in the acne-pitted face topped by bland short-cropped darkish hair.

  “Cool it,” Roy restrained Jim, who had made a movement toward the cops.

  Now Steve Travis was standing next to Jim, greeting him warmly. A very goodlooking sandy-haired youngman of Jim’s approximate age, he introduced himself to Roy, who barely nodded in acknowledgment. “You think both of the officers will testify?” Steve asked Jim apprehensively. “You think they’ll bring anyone else as a witness? Maybe one of the others was a cop— . . .”

  Jim’s breathing was still so choked with rage at the sight of Daniels that he couldn’t answer Steve’s disturbing question.

  Steve had gone on: “It’s got to end soon. God, I keep having to lie to my wife; she knows I keep taking off from work. My kid was sick today—just a bad cold, but—. . .”

  Moments later they were assigned to a courtroom for the preliminary hearing.

  They sat at a long table before the judge’s bench. The court recorder, an erect, thin man as apathetic as an undertaker, sat before his stenographic machine ready to record indifferently the words that could change the course of others’ lives.

  Then Jim remembered a newspaper article he had read which told of a peculiar breed of people in Los Angeles who daily haunted courtroom after courtroom. Often carrying their lunches with them, they perched like vultures. A photograph had accompanied the article; it showed a woman sitting on a striped canvas stool among the other people waiting to enter the courtroom where a sensational murder was being tried. That woman had the look of a ravenous mouse.

  Recalling that sharply now, Jim asked Alan to request the courtroom be cleared. On Alan’s motion, it was. Even Roy had to wait outside.

  The judge looked like an Eastern farmer, a pleasant-faced, large, dark man, who looked down from his bench as if attempting to separate the defendants from the cops. Jim almost liked him—wanted to like him, was anxious to believe that this man would suddenly bring order to the legalistic anarchy, stop the relentless machinery.

  The judge had already begun the hearing:

  “This is the time and place for the preliminary examination in the case of the people of the state of California against James Girard and Steven Travis. The court presumes that at the arraignment each of the defendants was advised of the charges against him, a copy of the complaint was delivered to him, and that each was advised of his constitutional rights.”

  Jim felt an instant disappointment: The man’s voice was lifeless, pronouncing dead words whose meanings had long been buried at other court proceedings, legal wakes for countless other defendants, who tried to resurrect each dead word.

  “Nevertheless,” the judge had continued, “the court will advise each of the defendants of his constitutional rights, which are as follows: One: The right to be represented by an attorney at all stages of the proceedings. . . . Two: The right to a speedy and public trial.”

  Days. Miles of desert. Weeks. Months.

  “Three: The right to be confronted by and to cross-examine witnesses appearing against the defendants,” the judge went on flatly. “Four: The right to the compulsory process of the court to subpoena witnesses on behalf of the defendants. Five: The right to be released upon reasonable bail, pending trial. Six: The right to testify in their own behalf—but the defendants, or either of them, cannot be compelled to be a witness against themselves. However, if the defendants or either of them take the stand, they then may be cross-examined by the people. Seven: If the defendants are held to answer and an information is filed against them in the Superior Court, in addition to all the other rights I have just explained— . . .”

  (It won’t come to trial, you know it won’t: Jim reached for Roy’s earlier assurance.)

  “—then, the defendants are entitled to a trial by jury or a trial by court without a jury with the consent of the people, whichever the defendants may prefer.”

  And then, looking down at a sheet before him, searching the names of those involved in this case, this day, the judge asked: “Mr. Girard, do you have any questions regarding your constitutional rights?”

  Jim answered: “No.”

  The judge asked Steve the same question.

  “No, sir,” Steve said.

  A wiry, hawkish-looking, oldish-young man whose movements seemed to uncoil in nervous spurts, the deputy district attorney took over anxiously. “The people call Officer Daniels.”

  The cop swore to tell the truth. Jim stared so relentlessly at him that he almost felt a current between them. For those intense seconds he heard only the sounds of words, which he would connect later. Anger shut his mind as the district attorney proceeded with the first questions. And then: “You have identified a Mr. Girard. Do you see that person here in court today? If so, will you identify him.”

  Clearing his throat, Daniels uttered something, something inaudible.

  “Officer Daniels,” said the district attorney, “I don’t think the court heard you. Do you see the said Mr. Girard in court today?”

  Daniels answered: “Yes, sir, he’s the man in the blue eyes— . . .”

  “Eyes? . . . You mean— . . . ?”

  “I mean, the man wearing the blue shirt, striped jacket,” Daniels corrected himself hurriedly. He put his hand over his mouth, fleetingly; and then he cleared his throat again. He played with a ring on his finger—a gold band.

  Jim saw Alan Bryant smile.

  After those moments during which he seemed to be in a private trance, Daniels automatically answered the questions of the anxious district attorney.

  At the cop’s words, Jim felt a burgeoning anger that carried him to the edge of nausea.

  Soon it was Alan Bryant’s turn to question the cop. Cunningly he set traps which Daniels fell clumsily into each time. Alan cleverly—surely—prodded him until the cop had all but repudiated his own written report filed the day of the arrest. Though Daniels still refused to look even in Jim’s direction, Jim’s gaze hardly wavered from him— except when he glanced at the judge, who, recurrently—and this lifted Jim’s expectations again—shook his head at the cop’s awkward testimony. Jim thought: The judge knows Daniels is lying!

  Now Frank Edmondson, Steve’s attorney, took over, also impressively. Repeatedly, Daniels stumbled, rephrased himself, contradicted his own testimony. “What I meant was— . . .” he kept saying. Realizing he was compounding contradiction with contradiction, he became nervous—but the more nervous he became, the more adamant and defiant.

  “Christ, how can he lie like that?” Jim asked Alan.

  Although he whispered it, Daniels must have been aware of something, a reaction, something which caused a subtle note of near hysteria to squeeze into his voice. Almost as if he were now on trial defending himself.

  Jim knew: It was him earlier that day. But again the certainty lasted only that moment. As before, it wavered.

  When Daniels left the stand, all the practiced bravado had abandoned him.

  Jones, the middle-aged blond cop, did not testify. At least for now there was only Daniels’ fumbled testimony.

  Yet—unbelievable to Jim—the judge was saying: “It appearing to me that there is sufficient cause to believe the defendants guilty— . . .” The matter would be set for trial.

  Jim’s anger focused on the judge—an anger which fanned progressively to include a network of strangers tearing at his life: a cop—two, the Lesbiany judge, the district attorney, this judge— . . . Who next?

  Jim stood up, facing the judge. The rage and frustration of months demanded to erupt.

  But he could think of nothing to say.

  It was suddenly as if the abstract weight of these proceedings was assuming an actual physical force.

  MONTHS AGO.

  Always impeccably dressed—just this sid
e of fastidiousness—a dapper, trim, gray-haired man in his early fifties, Alan Bryant was undaunted after the preliminary hearing. “The judge had to set a trial at this stage,” he explained to Jim outside the courtroom that afternoon. “He can’t call the cop a liar—even if he knows he’s one.”

  “Why the hell not?” Jim demanded. He saw Steve, alone, disappearing into a crowded elevator. “And why didn’t we get to testify, Alan?”

  “Because at this stage we don’t want them to know what our defense will be,” Alan answered.

  Jim remembered Alan’s initial encouragement that the matter might not even reach this phase. Suddenly his anger spread to include his own attorney.

  “Look, Jim,” Alan said, “I know you’re disappointed—those trips back and forth. But we’re going to win, and I’ve got to consider the full-range of the thing; I can’t blow your case on a gamble—winning it is too important. I knew that judge would bind you over for trial. But remember: He hasn’t seen the site of the arrest. I have—and so I know Daniels is lying.”

  Jim relented immediately. Relief replaced the hungry anger, which had been ready to swallow anyone. Now he really believes me, Jim felt sure.

  Walking along with them to their cars, Roy Stuart was silent.

  “And what a liar,” Alan continued. “I can’t remember any other officer having perjured himself so clumsily—he even contradicted his own arrest report.” Despite this day’s defeat—if indeed it was that—Alan seemed confident, even jaunty. “Now we’ve got it down in black and white, he’s got to stick to what he’s testified. And as soon as the transcript of his testimony is ready, I’ll mail it to you—I’m assuming you’ll return to El Paso. I want you to go through it like you did with the arrest report; point out all the contradictions—you’d know all this better than anyone else. Send me a detailed list of them. We might even— . . . Come by my office tomorrow, Jim; I’ll tell you what I intend to do.”

  “Why are you so bleak, man?” Roy asked Jim after they had left Alan Bryant at his Jaguar convertible. “You know you’ll win.”

  “I know,” Jim said quietly. “It’s just that I’m— . . .” He was about to say “afraid”—but that was a word which didn’t come easily to him.

  In his office the next day, Alan Bryant told Jim enthusiastically: “As soon as I have your list of contradictions, I intend to confront the district attorney with them, and with our exhibits.”

  “You mean the man at the preliminary hearing?” Jim asked doubtfully.

  “No,” Alan clarified. “He’s out of it now. I mean the man who would actually try the matter. I’ll show him he hasn’t got a case, that it would be foolish to go to trial on Daniels’ testimony. . . . Jim, if I can possibly avoid your having to come back again for this, I will,” he promised.

  Once again the miracle Jim expected—and he reminded himself of this the miles back to El Paso—hinted strongly that it would come.

  It didn’t.

  By letter Alan told him he would have to return to Los Angeles once more. He had decided not to contact the district attorney yet for a while, he told him. Done too early—and if unexpectedly it didn’t work and the matter did go to trial—the maneuver could backfire by revealing their case prematurely to the other side. His considered opinion was that they should continue through the next phase, which would be the entering of their plea and their assignment to a trial judge. Armed with the prospect of a good, rational judge, he wrote, then, before trial, he would confront the district attorney about the lack of substance in the charges, and a dismissal.

  Although Jim worked for a lawyer—but a corporation and personal-injury lawyer, perhaps the best in El Paso—none of this was entirely clear to him. This was a criminal charge—in another state; and everything surrounding it had rules which at times appeared deliberately drawn to exclude the defendant. It was a hostile world, that world of criminal proceedings: Too often a defendant was reduced to a mere entity caught in opposing crosscurrents of court proceedings, as impersonal as a ball in a competitive game. What was won or lost had little to do with the instrument of the game. And as the ponderous abstract machinery of court proceedings moved inexorably, that machinery began to attain a definite threatening identity while a defendant felt his reduced, fading; finally—possibly—invisible?

  Jim relied entirely on Alan Bryant—whom he liked and trusted, despite the moments when the inevitable paranoia of one enmeshed in litigation reached out to clutch him in suspicion, too; but those were brief times, brief and illogical. Still, it was not unlike trusting a guide in an unknown, dangerous country.

  Jim had to renew his lies about the reason for returning to Los Angeles: To Lloyd: his sister’s condition had worsened, he might possibly drive her back to El Paso. To his mother: his work in Los Angeles for Lloyd was still not finished.

  Again his mother would have come along with him; but Jim assured her he would be gone only a few days, hardly worth the long trip for her. But he drew more money and placed it in her name.

  He drove back to Los Angeles—his third trip in three months. And riding with him along the familiar miles of desert: the memory of his mother—her live ghost. . . . In Phoenix, he telephoned her. “I miss you already, my Son,” she said.

  Outside this other courtroom where they would enter their plea, Jim saw—that morning—his name typed on a list tacked to a board near the stark wooden door: The People of the State of California vs James Girard— . . . (The People!) And a case number.

  He held his breath to contain the fury.

  Inside the courtroom, he saw again the lost defendant angels. Here to plead their innocence . . . or their guilt. Rebellious angels fallen from whose grace?

  Then Jim heard a mechanical rumbling, like the first tremors of a menacing earthquake.

  Behind the judge’s vacant bench and with the awful slowness of old mechanical things, heavy doors opened. As if the abstract legalistic machinery of these courtrooms had materialized to reveal just this much of itself, into the shaft beyond these heavy doors a gray elevator sank heavily. Handcuffed men in prison fatigues stood blinking against the light of the courtroom. As if they had been dredged out of some dank dungeon to be displayed in terrible warning. Their eyes seemed hollow. One man’s head, bloodcaked, was bandaged. With no money even for bail, they would be dealt out to public defenders.

  “Look—the charge could have been rape, and that’s serious, very serious; now if you plead guilty to— . . .” Jim overheard a fat, sweating lawyer nearby saying to a gaunt youngman, who kept shaking his head in bewilderment.

  Jim remembered: A girl’s dark laughter and pained moaning. Her dress tangled above her legs. And remembered: A youngman’s hand on the girl’s cunt, blocking it— . . . And Steve’s hand. A girl’s tossing head, silver lips, a tongue so red. Then: Green. . . . He closed his eyes, shutting the memories.

  “Jim!” It was Alan calling him out of the courtroom. Again he was in high spirits, warming up for the legalistic encounter. “How do you feel about a jury?” he asked Jim.

  “It doesn’t scare me,” Jim acknowledged quickly.

  “Good—because I think you’d make an excellent witness before one,” Alan said.

  “Then you do think it will come to trial?” Jim controlled his voice.

  “No. But we’ve got to go through this stage, and we have to prepare for every eventuality,” Alan explained easily. “Let’s ask for a jury trial.”

  “A jury trial!” Steve’s attorney, Frank Edmondson—who had just walked up—seemed amazed at Alan’s decision.

  Desperate in jail that night, Steve had called the telephone number printed on a board over the pay telephone, a bondsman’s referral number; he had retained the attorney the bondsman brought with him to sign the papers for release.

  Although Steve had offered to get Jim out as soon as he himself was bailed, Jim had called Roy, realizing his being from out of state might make his release complicated. (And he felt suddenly shut off from the whole worl
d.) Roy quickly called a friend of his, who in turn called someone else who knew a reliable bondsman. It was the bondsman’s friend who told Jim that Alan Bryant was one of the best, if expensive, criminal attorneys in Southern California.

  “But a jury trial would take days!” Frank Edmondson was protesting. Jim had vaguely disliked Steve’s attorney from the first. He made decisions without consulting Steve, then merely asked him gratuitously: “Right?” Afterwards, he merely waved him away. And, Jim knew, he had seen Steve only once in his office. Whether he was or not, he looked precariously like a shyster: small, bone-thin, with black, squinty dots for eyes under an awning of heavy bushy eyebrows; he had slick parted hair. Often he stood with his left hand glued firmly in his vest.

  “Jim and I want a jury,” Alan said.

  By now, Steve had joined them, as usual offering no opinion.

  Edmondson shook his head. “We ought to go for a short trial before a judge; we’d have a better chance,” he said—moving away and motioning Steve to follow him to a corner of the hall.

  Jim asked Alan what Edmondson meant.

  A defendant could opt for a trial before one of two judges whose names would soon be known. The case set for trial, such a judge would hear testimony generally restricted by tacit agreement to a certain time, Alan explained.

  “I don’t like that,” Jim said instantly. It seemed strange to place any limit, even if only tacitly understood, on the emergence of truth. But then: “You can’t go into a courtroom and just say it didn’t happen,” Alan had told Jim the first time he saw him; “your honesty has nothing to do with it—you’ve got to convince them it couldn’t have happened.” The appearance of truth, then—cleverly constructed, neat, conservatively colored—was more important than the truth itself, which was often jagged and many-hued.

  “Steve doesn’t care about testifying.” Frank Edmondson returned with Steve. “Right, Steve?”