The Privilege, page 18
“I’ve been made aware of that.”
I walked over to the counsel table, opened a file folder, found the document I wanted, and walked back to the witness stand.
“Are you familiar with this document?”
As soon as he glanced at it, his face tightened and his eyes went cold.
“How did you…? Yes, I’m familiar with it.”
“This is the report of an internal investigation into the conduct of the chancellor, Lucas Fairweather. Please read the last sentence: the recommendation that was made.”
I almost felt sorry for him. He looked like a student caught cheating, hoping he would get off with a warning, worried he would be sent home in disgrace. Fumbling through the pages, he got to the last one. When he began to read that last, damning, sentence, his voice, always so even and controlled, seemed strangled.
“‘Because of the chancellor’s repeated violation of the university’s rules against sexual exploitation of faculty or students, Lucas Fairweather should be removed from his position with as much speed, and as little publicity, as possible.’”
“And would you now go back to the first page of the report and tell the jury to whom this report was submitted?”
Merrick bit his lip. He did not need to look at the report.
“The report was submitted to the chairman of the board of trustees and to me, as vice-chancellor.”
“Is it not true, Mr. Merrick, that this investigation was begun at your insistence, that you had become so alarmed at what you knew was going on that you thought that if something was not done, Lucas Fairweather would involve the university in a scandal from which it might never recover?”
“I did what I thought I had to do.”
“One last question. What is the date on which you received this report? - Nearly three months before Lucas Fairweather was murdered; three months in which you did nothing. Why was that, Mr. Merrick? Was it because you wanted to be sure you had enough support on the board of trustees to make sure you would be chosen the chancellor’s successor?”
“No,” he insisted in a hollow sounding voice. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t about me; it was about making sure we could get him to agree to leave voluntarily, so we wouldn’t have to deal with the kind of scandal you just mentioned.”
Merrick thought he was through, that he could take literally my remark that there was just ‘one last question.’ He had his hands on the arms of the chair, ready to get up.
“‘One last question,’ about that, Mr. Merrick. You’re not done yet. In all your years as a college administrator, how often have you heard of someone on the faculty committing an act of violence on someone in the administration? I don’t just mean murder - any kind of violence?”
“I don’t remember it ever happening.”
“And how often do you imagine,” I said, emphasizing the word, “someone commits murder in this country out of jealousy, or out of a desire for revenge? How often, Mr. Merrick, do you imagine that the husband, or the boyfriend, of a woman has murdered the man his wife, or his girlfriend, was sleeping with? How often, Mr. Merrick, do you imagine, a woman who has been taken advantage of by a man in a position of authority and power has committed murder because of what was done to her? There were two people in the chancellor’s office that night between eleven and twelve, a member of the faculty and a young, attractive woman. Which of them, Mr. Merick, would you imagine might have had a reason to kill him?”
He looked at me with a blank expression; he had not heard the question. All he could think about was what had just happened to his career, the destruction of his own complacent dream as the leader of a world famous university. Alan Boe tugged my sleeve.
“You’ve done more in ten minutes than I was able to do in ten years to save the university from its own bad judgment.” His eyes filled with laughter. “Which only means that whoever they get next will probably be even worse.”
It was nearly five o’clock, and except for the hour and half recess at lunch we had been at it all day. Caught up in the action of the trial, asking questions, listening to the answers as I got ready with the next question, saying things I did not know I was going to say until I heard myself speaking the words, I could have gone on until midnight or even later, given the chance. I did not doubt that Eleanor McFarland could have done the same thing. Everyone else was tired, brought to the edge of exhaustion, by what, for most of the others in the courtroom, exceeded the limits of their ability to concentrate on a single, uninterrupted line of argument. When Judge Longstreet declared the court in recess until the next morning, only Alan Boe seemed reluctant to leave.
“I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying this, Mr. Antonelli. Its even more interesting than I thought it would be; but it confirms what I suspected: the system is essentially unfair, isn’t it?”
We were sitting at the counsel table. The judge and the jury had left. The courtroom crowd was slowly filing out the two doors in back. Eleanor McFarland was gathering up her belongings at the other counsel table a few feet away on our left. Alan Boe pushed his chair back and crossed one leg over the other. With his head bent back at an angle, he searched my eyes.
“Not many lawyers - perhaps none at all - could have done what you did today. It isn’t fair, is it? With you as my attorney, I have what seems a very good chance of being found not guilty; with someone else as my lawyer, I probably go to prison. There is nothing very reasonable in this. If you were on trial - on trial for murder, a murder you did not commit - can you think of many lawyers you would want to represent you? At least you would have the alternative of representing yourself, but think of all those other poor souls who have to settle for some one who barely made it through law school and is practicing criminal law because it was the only job he could get. We call it the adversarial system, and we make the same mistake we do when it comes to our belief that if there are no limits on free speech, if everyone can have their say, the truth will always, ultimately, triumph. What we forget, but what anyone who sits in a courtroom, or watches a political campaign, knows, is that some people are more persuasive than others, and most of those who decide which side wins are not always able to recognize the truth when they see it. And, by the way, it is not true to say that with all its faults, it is the best system possible. The British do it better. The judges takes an active part, ask questions of a witness if he thinks it necessary to bring out the truth, and then, at the end, instead of the lawyers doing it, the judge summarizes the evidence and suggests to the jury what it means.”
I kept looking at him, held a prisoner by his unrelenting gaze. There was something in that look of his, a sense that somewhere deep inside those eyes was the answer to every question you could ever think to ask.
“Would you really want Michelle Longstreet to do that?” I asked, as if I were only repeating the question he had invited me to ask.
“Yes! Why not? When you give someone something important to do, they tend to take their responsibilities more seriously, don’t you think? Why am I asking that! You know this already. Look at this jury of ours. You see the way they watch, the way they listen. They may spend most of their time doing dull things at work; they may waste too much time indulging themselves in mindless entertainment; but look what they are capable of when given the responsibility of deciding whether someone is guilty or innocent of murder. Look at how they look at you.”
He was about to say something more when, suddenly, he looked up. Someone was standing just behind me, on the other side of the low railing that ran across the courtroom in front of the spectator benches.
“Hello, Professor Boe,” said a strangely familiar voice. “It’s good to see you again.”
Boe was on his feet, his eyes shining with recognition as he eagerly greeted the man he introduced as, “the best student I ever taught.”
James Michael Redfield shook my hand as if we had never met before.
Chapter Twelve
Albert Craven was astonished when I told him what had happened.
“Redfield was Alan Boe’s best student! I had no idea. That would have been twenty - more than twenty - years ago,” he explained, as he dropped into the blue wingback chair in front of my desk. “Then that is the reason….”
He stared at me, expecting me to finish the thought, make the connection between the murder Redfield had arranged and a teacher who still, after all this time, remembered him as the most gifted student he had ever had. I had no explanation to offer, nothing beyond what had been guessed before.
“He was there, watching the trial, and you did not know it?”
“I don’t know if he was there or not; he might have come in when everyone else was leaving. You know what I’m like in the middle of a trial: I know the place is crowded, but the only people I see are on my side of the railing. He was there to see Boe; he was not there to see me.”
I loosened my tie and loosened my shirt and started to see it all over again: the sudden look of recognition on the face of Alan Boe, and something more than that: pride in his own achievement. Whatever Redfield had done, whatever he had become, he had as a young man shown the bright, shining promise that had given the extraordinary Alan Boe the hope that what he had come to know could be passed on to at least one other, remarkable, human being. The recognition had been instantaneous; there had not been the slightest hesitation. After an absence of a quarter century, Boe had known immediately that it was his former student, James Michael Redfield and no one else.
“Strange, and I don’t think he was serious, but after I told Boe that this was the second murder and trial that had been arranged by the same person, he wondered whether one of his students wanted to have the chance to know what it felt like when Socrates was put on trial.”
With his elbows on the arms of the wingback chair, and his hands laying flat against his legs, Craven rocked gently back and forth for a moment, and then, stopping, crossed his left arm over his chest and with his right hand stroked his small, fragile chin.
“It seems he was right after all. Isn’t that what has happened? Alan Boe on trial, Alan Boe who has questioned everything the university now thinks important and what nearly everyone believes, and who wants to teach students to question the same things as well. What is that, if not the trial of Socrates all over again? And who besides Boe could draw in such stark relief the deficiencies, not to say the outright fraud, of today’s higher education. Redfield may be a kind of evil genius, but he seems to know what he is doing. The document you used today - doesn’t that prove it?”
“The document…? The report of the internal investigation? How did you know about that? You weren’t there, and I just got back from court.”
“I got a phone call,” he explained, getting up from the chair; “just a few minutes ago. There is an emergency meeting of the board of regents tonight. There is a real firestorm. The vice-chancellor won’t be acting chancellor. He’ll have to resign and leave the university. The chairman of the board will have to resign as well. He saw that report, he knew what was in it, how damaging it was, and he kept it under wraps. He did not tell anyone about it. The scandal they were trying to avoid has now, thanks to what you did today in court, claimed them as its first victims. What everyone wants to know is how you happened to get hold of it.”
I tapped my fingers on the desk, remembering how easily people are deceived.
“You can tell them, what they already think: that it was the result of a thorough investigation. Don’t tell them it came in the mail, a plain manilla envelope delivered by the post office.”
“Without a return address, I presume.”
“No, it had one: it was yours.”
“Glad I could help,” he said, drily, shaking his head at Redfield’s strange sense of humor. He stood next to the chair, leaning against the side of it. “What did he say to Boe, when he came up to him? Interesting that Boe would immediately recognize him after all this time. Unless, of course, they have stayed in touch. I wonder….I mean, if he was his best student, and if Redfield is now using him for his own purposes. Did they talk for any length of time?”
“I don’t think….I’ll ask him, but, no, I don’t think Boe has seen him since he was a student. You could tell the way he looked at him. But there was something else: a bond, a closeness that time does not affect. They had not seen each other in years and after that first, initial greeting, they were talking as if they were picking up a conversation they had been having the day before. When Refield left, he said, ‘I’ll see you again, when the trial is over and we can go somewhere for a long lunch.’ Boe laughed, and said he might have to visit him instead in prison. Redfield put his hand on his shoulder and told him that there was not any chance he would be convicted. He knew that Boe had not killed anyone; he did not tell him that he also knew who the murderer really was.
Craven straightened his tie, pulled his shirt-cuffs down to their proper place below the sleeves of his dark tailored suit and, confident everything was now in order, reminded me that I had forgotten what day it was.
“It’s Friday; you have the weekend. You don’t have to stay here, getting ready for tomorrow.”
I threw up my hands, laughing at my own incompetence.
“Longstreet adjourned for the day, until ‘tomorrow morning.’ The jury probably thinks we’re back in session on Saturday. I told Boe I would see him tonight, and I told Tangerine we would have a long, leisurely dinner Friday, after the trial!”
“Have dinner with the most beautiful woman in San Francisco or see someone in jail - that would be a difficult choice!” exclaimed Craven, lifting an eyebrow. Then he became serious. “Not a difficult choice at all: you’ll see Alan Boe.”
“It’s what we do.”
“It’s what you do,” he said. “You take your clients to trial; I make sure none of mine ever see the inside of a courtroom. You get to talk about innocence and justice; I get to talk about how much cheaper it is to settle lawsuits out of court. You get to….”
“I know, Albert; I know!” I cried, waving my hand to signal that I had heard it all before. “I get to talk to interesting people - murderers, rapists, and thieves; you have to sit through endless lunches and dinners listening to rich people complain about the taxes they have to pay. You’re right: I have it much better than you do, especially when you remember that most of these so-called murderers, rapists and thieves were innocent and most of the people you represent, who have never been charged with a crime, have cheated and lied most of their lives. Good God, listen to me! First the Friedrich trial, and now Alan Boe - all I can think about is how unfair everything is!”
Springing out of my chair, I placed both hands on my desk and stared straight ahead, angry, frustrated, full of resentment and bent on revenge.
“And I am sick to death of being used! First Friedrich, now Alan Boe. Redfield pulls all the strings. Well, this is one puppet who is going to pull back! He thinks he can hide behind the privilege, that he can have me as his accomplice as he goes around proving what he wants to show the world by arranging homicides and trials, and I won’t be able to do anything about it! He thinks he has me trapped, that if I stand aside and refuse to take a case, he’ll let some innocent person be convicted for something he did!”
It was cathartic; I felt better for having given voice to the anger I felt. I dropped back into my chair and turned toward the window and the darkening sky outside and listened as Albert told me not to worry, that everything would work out; listened as he told me all the things a trusted friend invents when he has no more idea than you have how to deal with a problem neither of you has had to face before.
When I called Tangerine, she laughed when I told her I had forgotten what day it was, and told me we could have dinner later, after I was finished seeing Alan Boe in jail. “But,” she added, “you still have to take me dancing - tomorrow night will do.”
“I can’t do that,” I replied. I could see her nose wrinkle; I could see her start to laugh. “I never learned how.”
“Don’t you remember the Sinatra song - ‘dancing is making love, set to music.’?”
“You want to go someplace and dance naked?” I asked, as innocently as I could.
“I want to go someplace to dance.., and then, later, when we get home….”
“You’ll have to teach me.”
“To dance…, or the other? Or would you rather teach me? Or would you rather just have dinner and rest? Or would you…?” There was a brief, breathless pause. “Just get here as soon as you can. We have all weekend.”
Alan Boe was waiting in the same windowless room as before, but this time without a book. He did not need one to occupy his mind. The thick, steel door made a harsh, clanking noise when the jailer unlocked and pushed it open, but it did not make him so much as blink; he was that far lost in thought. I sat down on the opposite side of the table, but he did not notice I was there. I might have thought him dead had it not been for an occasional odd twitch that seized the left corner of his mouth. There seemed nothing to do but wait. I pulled a yellow legal pad out of my briefcase and reached inside my suit coat for my fountain pen.
“And you would be right to think so,” he said, suddenly, his eyes still unseeing. I thought he was, in some equivalent way, talking in his sleep. “Right to think what you were telling me before.”
He had come back to life, talking as if nothing strange had happened; as if, in the middle of a conversation, I knew exactly what he was talking about.
“You said that this trial - my trial - was the second murder and trial arranged by the same person. It is Redfield of course. I knew it when I saw him; I knew immediately that he was behind everything; I knew it without any doubt whatsoever when he told me he was sure I would never be convicted.” Reaching across the table, he placed his hand on my arm. “I’m sorry; you didn’t know him. If you had, you would know what I’m talking about. I said he was the best student I ever had; he was a good deal more than that. He was not a student at all, in the usual sense; his mind was too quick for that.”
