The Privilege, page 29
“I used to think I didn’t have that either - a heart that could be broken - and then I met you.”
Her gorgeous eyes glistened with a new vulnerability, the sense of loss you sometimes feel for something you have not lost but suddenly realize you could. She stroked the side of my face.
“Better change. We have to be in the city in an hour. We can’t be late for Giuseppe’s final performance.”
I do not remember ever feeling tired during a trial; the truth is I don’t remember feeling much of anything at all. I was always too caught up in the action, too involved in what was going on, to think about anything except the question, the answer, the question after that, all the endless dialogue that from start to finish was the only world I knew. There was not time to worry, or even be aware, of what I felt. Giuseppe Gambarini conducted the philharmonic orchestra with the same, total, concentration. The ceiling could have collapsed and he would not have heard it fall. His hands, his arms, and especially his eyes moved in the same harmony, and with the same emphasis, as the music; his baton, like the instruments of the orchestra, part of a magnificent, ordered, whole. At the end, the thunderous climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, his face glowed with the kind of triumph that only comes when perfection has finally been achieved.
“What did you think?” asked Tangerine, quietly and with genuine interest.
We were sitting at a small corner table in a bar and restaurant just down the street from the concert hall, crowded with well-dressed men and women who had seen the same performance.
“Look at their faces,” I replied. “Look at their excitement, the way everything stays, the pride, the feeling that we all somehow share in what we heard, what Giuseppe Gambarini did tonight.”
“Do you remember that night, the first time we met him and Sophia, when we had dinner at Albert Craven’s?”
“The night Lucas Fairweather was murdered.”
“That long conversation in which Guiseppe talked about the loss of all standards, the belief that one thing is as good, or as bad, as any other, that everything is a question of individual choice. He proved it tonight, didn’t he? - Proved that it is all wrong. There is a standard; there is a difference between better and worse. All you have to do is listen.”
“That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? - There is too much noise, too many voices saying too many different mindless things.” I sat back, a scotch and soda in my hand, remembering how little I had once cared for what I now thought irreplaceable. “I could not stand it as a kid. Classical music was boring. Now it’s the only thing I listen to - that, and jazz.”
Tangerine reached for my hand.
“Think how lucky you are. You may not have liked it as a boy, but you love it now. I imagine it has always been like this. Most people probably never have the chance to learn how good, how important, it is. Most people have probably always thought it boring. Especially now.”
I knew what she meant. In their different ways, Giuseppe Gambarini and James Michael Redfield had talked about the same thing: the constant, relentless barrage of modern media, the constant, changing images, the constant, discordant, hard-driving music, that had all but eliminated the ability to think; the absence of any serious sense of self-restraint, the endless craving for something new, the immediate addiction to every new impulse become the newest need. They had both, in the different ways, tried to find, not just for themselves, but for others, an escape from the modern insanity.
“Gambarini, Boe, Redfield - all three of them at war with the present and in love with the past,” said Tangerine in a calm, thoughtful voice. She glanced at the crowd packed around the silver chrome and green glass bar, the art deco look that tried to merge the present with the past in a way that symbolized the future. “Giuseppe said he had read Boe’s great book, and that every serious person in Europe had read it, too. It’s too bad they never met. Or is it? Which one would have been more intimidated by the other? That’s not what I meant,” she added, pressing her lips together, disappointed she had not been more clear. “Which of them would have been more reticent, more unwilling to express an opinion?”
“Gambarini. No question. Two reasons. I doubt there is anyone alive who could stop Alan Boe from saying what he wants. Giuseppe Gambarini, on the other hand, is too intelligent for words. What we saw tonight -”
“Part of it was sung,” she reminded me, and then realized her mistake. “But you did not need to know German to know, to understand, everything that was meant.” Her eyes were full of knowledge. “There is a third reason - Giuseppe would not say anything: he would be too busy listening, learning everything he could. That is why he is going to be there Monday, at the trial. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Albert told me. He’ll be there as well. Everyone is going to be there.” I laughed. “The whole world wants to see Alan Boe. Whatever else Redfield has done, he made Boe into a celebrity. There doesn’t seem to be anyone who hasn’t heard of him. They wanted to move his classes to a larger room to accommodate all the students who now want to get in. He refused. He said if he had known that was going to happen, he would have pled guilty and asked for life in prison.”
Tangerine smiled with her eyes at a chance missed, something she now wished she had done.
“If I had known there was someone like him, someone that alive, I would have gone to college. I would have given anything to know what it was like to sit in a classroom and listen to an Alan Boe. Instead….”
“Instead, you wee too damn good-looking, too damn beautiful to….”
“To think about anything except what I wanted, what I thought I had to have - Is that what you are trying to say?”
I might have lied if she were anyone else, if I had not been hopelessly in love with her, if she had not known, far better than I ever could, that every advantage comes with a price of its own.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I am trying to say. Everyone wanted to be with you. No one could have resisted that. There is one great difference. None of it, even what you might have wanted at the time, meant that much to you. More than that, you always had contempt for the game, contempt for the way you used what you had.”
Lowering her eyes, that same smile of forgotten regret played on her lips. She looked at me again, but did not speak. And when, finally, she did, there was something heart-breaking in her voice.
“I don’t ever want to be with anyone but you.”
I had to look away, afraid of what might happen if I did not.
“You’re not calling Alan Boe as a witness?” she asked, in a soft, reassuring voice that invited me back. “The prosecution is?”
I took a deep breath and glanced around at the shifting colors of the scene, the women sparkling in their bright jewelry and their expensive shiny clothes, their eager, incandescent smiles, the throbbing, hard-beating sound of brief, thrilling conversations, the flying hands of a bartender with slick black hair trying to keep track of a half dozen shouted orders while as carefully as possible he served someone their long awaited drink.
“Welcome to San Francisco,” I remarked, with a knowing grin. “This is what the city isa all about: expensive women and more expensive booze, glamour, glitter, great music and sometimes great romance.”
“Great music, great romance,” said Tangerine, repeating the words. “We have nothing to complain about, do we, you and I? We’re luckier than most, luckier than Cynthia Carruthers. Is it true?” She leaned close so no one around us could hear. “Did Fairweather really rape her? Was it self-defense? Was it…?” She stopped abruptly. “Sorry. I know you can’t tell me anything she….”
I was again, though in a different way, prisoner of the privilege. I could not tell her, I could not tell anyone, what Carruthers had told me.
“It will all come out. And it’s a lot more interesting than what anyone, especially the prosecution, could possibly imagine. Anthony Barnes is in a box and does not know it. Prosecutors dream of the chance to cross-examine the defendant in a criminal trial. If he knew what I knew he would be praying that I would not call her. He’s calling Alan Boe,” I added like a conspirator sharing one of the secrets to success. “He thinks he has to. Boe is the only one who can put Carruthers at the scene. Hoskins, the security guard, did not get a good enough look at her. Boe is the only one who saw her.”
“She confessed,” objected Tangerine. “The jury heard it. Why does the prosecution have to prove anything beyond that?”
“That one sentence - it’s all there is. She didn’t give any details, nothing that could be used to tie her to the murder. They have a confession, but Barnes can’t take the chance that she might recant, take it all back, insist she didn’t know what she was doing. He might still get a conviction - he probably would get a conviction - but Boe’s testimony makes any denial of hers impossible to believe. That’s what he thinks, but then he doesn’t know what I know.”
“What I don’t understand is why she let Boe go on trial, why she didn’t stop it, why she waited until now to confess.”
“Redfield. I can tell you that because she’s never said it. She hasn’t said anything about a lot of things. But it has to be Redfield.”
“But Redfield didn’t murder, didn’t arrange the murder, of Lucas Fairweather. Because if she was raped, if she was…? Why are you looking at me like that? He was behind it, he was responsible for what happened? - Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
I still did not know what, exactly, Redfield had done. It was almost as if Carruthers was bound by some privilege of her own, a limit on how much she could tell me. Or would tell me, because every time I asked I got the same answer: it would all come out at trial. She must have reminded me a half dozen times that, as she put it, “When I testify, I’ll be under oath.” It was no answer at all. It did not explain why she would not tell me.
“All I know for sure,” I replied to Tangerine, “is that Fairweather was murdered and that somehow I have found myself defending both of the people who have been accused of doing it. And in both cases the victim, Lucas Fairweather - who he was and what he did - is the central issue.”
Tangerine’s eyes flashed with inspiration.
“Lucas Fairweather the central issue - or Alan Boe?”
It was a fair question. Monday morning, when Boe was called at the prosecution’s last witness, no one was thinking about Lucas Fairweather; every eye was on the mesmerizing ugliness of a witness it was hard to believe was even possible. He had barely settled himself in the witness chair before he turned to the jury and with a beaming smile informed them, “You’re better looking than the jury I had for my trial. There were a few of them, if you can believe it, nearly as ugly as me!” I had to stop myself from laughing when Anthony Barnes, still without the faintest idea what he was getting into, tried to get the witness to remember where he was by asking him to state his full name for the record.
“Alan Empedocles Boe,” he said, in a deep, clear voice. He darted a glance at me, and then looked back at the jury. “Poor Mr. Antonelli has heard this before, but there is no second version of the truth, so he will just have to stand by while I explain once again the peculiar nature of my name.”
And then he started. He had reached the part about the name his students had given one of his courses, Al Boe’s Book of Roots, when Judge Douglas came unglued.
“You were asked a simple question: to state your name for the record. That’s all! We’re not interested in your peculiar biography!”
Sitting cross-legged the way he had before, Boe looked up to where Douglas sat glowering down at him.
“A simple question? Only for the simple-minded. A name means everything. It’s what we are called; it is how others see us, and it is how, sometimes, we see ourselves.”
Douglas stared at him as if he were not just unusual but quite probably mad.
“You, for example,” continued Boe, his eyes moving all around in a strange, manic dance. “What you’re called - ‘judge.’ It’s the reason, the only reason, you have any authority, the only reason you get to speak. And as for whether anyone is interested in my ‘peculiar biography,’ as you so generously put it, shall we have a show of hands, shall we ask the jurors what they think?”
“Why you -”
“Why me? That is of course the ultimate question, the question why any of us happens to exist at this time, or at any time. I could give you, if you like, some of the answers that have been given, though I admit there isn’t one of them that cannot be questioned. It is -”
Douglas struck his gavel with such force it was a wonder splinters did not fly.
“One more word, I’ll find you in contempt!”
“Two, then, would be all right?” remarked Boe, undisturbed. He turned back to Anthony Barnes who was standing, paralyzed, waiting, like the rest of us, to see what would happen. “I assume you have other questions.”
“Yes, of course….Yes, questions.” Barnes fumbled through a sheaf of notes he was holding. “Yes. Would you tell the jury what happened the night Lucas Fairweather was murdered?” His face flushed with embarrassment. He realized the question was too general and too broad. He looked again at this notes. “Were you walking near the administration building, where Lucas Fairweather had his office, around midnight, the night the chancellor was…?”
“Yes.”
“Did something happen that made you go toward the building?”
“Yes,” replied Alan Boe, suddenly the soul of brevity.
“Please tell the jury what the…?”
Barnes realized, almost too late, what the answer would be, that Boe had heard a woman scream and that was the reason he came running. Trained in the erroneous belief that a lawyer should never ask a question helpful to the other side, he asked a different one.
“Did you see anyone running from the building? Specifically, did you see the defendant, Cynthia Carruthers, running from the building?”
“No.”
“No?” asked, Barnes, staggered not just by the answer, but by the look of perfect certainty in Alan Boe’s uncanny eyes.
“No, I did not see anyone running out of the building.”
“You did not see the defendant, Cynthia Carruthers, there, that night, the night Lucas Fairweather was murdered? Just answer, yes or no,” he insisted, when Boe seemed to hesitate.
Alan Boe’s shoulders rocked with laughter; his eyes nearly shot out of his head.
“Yes, I did not see her; no, I did not see her. Which answer would you prefer?”
Barnes was speechless. He did not understand what Boe was saying. Finally, when he did, he looked at Boe with a new appreciation.
“Yes, I see what you mean. Let me ask it this way: Did you see the defendant, Cynthia Carruthers, the night Lucas Fairweather was killed?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Where?”
“She was coming down the stairs, just as I started up. She looked scared, she looked -”
“Yes, I understand. But, again, just to be sure: You saw - and you’re absolutely certain that you saw - the defendant, Cynthia Carruthers, coming down the stairs from the chancellor’s office?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I saw her coming down the stairs. I don’t know where she was coming from.”
“I see. Very good. When you saw her, did she have blood on her hands, on her clothes?”
“Yes, blood; but I’m not sure where it was - her hands, her clothes. She bumped into me, which is how I got blood on me. But she was moving so quickly, she was so scared, so -”
“Yes, I understand. She had blood on her. That’s all,” announced Barnes, as he started back to his chair at the counsel table. No more questions, your Honor.”
Douglas leaned back, the tall leather chair groaning under his weight. Like a gambler calculating the odds, he tapped his pudgy pink fingers together, while he watched me as I stood waiting to begin, watched me as the seconds passed, watched me with a smirk on his face, daring me to complain that he was keeping me from doing what everyone in the courtroom knew I was waiting to do. He had forgotten that I was not the only one waiting.
“As I was saying before Mr. Barnes decided he did not want me to tell you everything I saw,” remarked Alan Boe, in a voice that echoed off the walls and riveted everyone’s attention. “She bumped into me - I should probably say we nearly collided. She was scared, as scared as anyone I had ever seen. She -”
“Damn you! Stop!” shouted Douglas, in a voice like shattered glass. “You’re a witness. You answer questions - you speak - when I say you can!”
“I’m a witness, sworn to tell the truth! And I’m going to do what I’m sworn to do. You’re a judge, who swore an oath as well, an oath to do justice - You might want to remember that!”
If Douglas’s eyes had not been buried so far back in his head, they might have shot out of his skull. He was just about to shout something back, when Boe stopped him with a smile.
“Do you want me to tell the truth or not, your Honor?” he inquired, in a quiet voice that was now, suddenly, all good will and reason.
He was looking at Douglas as if he really wanted to know. Douglas, perhaps to his own astonishment, was disarmed, willing, even eager, to get back to work.
“Yes, of course; which is the reason I would ask you to wait for the attorney to ask you questions.”
Boe’s remarkable eyes moved, quick as light, to my waiting gaze. I was at the side of the counsel table, close enough to touch the jury box. My hand on the railing, I took a step toward him.
“The defendant, Cynthia Carruthers, was scared when you almost ran into her on the steps coming down from Lucas Fairweather’s office on the second floor - correct?”
“As scared as anyone I ever saw.”
“There was a reason you were there, running up those steps, wasn’t there? You had heard her screaming from the open window of the chancellor’s office, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I was walking just outside. I pass there every night on my walk across campus.”
