Rough Justice Page 6

  But Mary had to get to Steere’s quotes if she was going to have an answer for Marta. She scrolled backward, going deeper into the online archives. She was praying Steere had said something to the media in the early stages of the investigation. God knows, he gave tons of interviews. She sighed and returned to the zillionth article.

  “I am absolutely innocent of any and all crimes charged,” Steere told reporters. “It’s a sad day when a man can’t defend his own life without being harassed for it. This is a political prosecution. You know it and I know it.”

  “Mr. Steere has no further comment,” interrupted his attorney, nationally known criminal defense lawyer Marta Richter. “That’s all for now, everybody.”

  Members of the National Rifle Association protested Mr. Steere’s arraignment by picketing in front of the Criminal Justice Center. Their spokesman Jim Alonso said, “We represent every decent American’s right to defend his life and property.”

  A photo under the story showed Marta standing in front of twenty-odd microphones with a determined group of NRA types arranged decoratively in white T-shirts behind her. Each T-shirt had a red bull’s-eye on the front and read PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON. Marta had orchestrated the demonstration but she couldn’t convince the NRA guys to lose the T-shirts. Mary sipped her coffee, finally cooling. When would she work for the good guys? Or at least Democrats.

  Mary hit a key for the next article, read more quotes by Steere, then kept at it, article after article. She checked the clock. 6:15. Mary kept scrolling and reading, her heart sinking. She wasn’t finding anything and it was getting later. Her head began to thud, a caffeine hangover. Still she kept reading, skimming each article until the boldfaced Steere.

  6:31. Almost 7:00, and Mary still had no answer. She paused, rethinking the problem. Maybe she was using the wrong search. She’d been researching articles that contained the name Steere and was getting a civics lesson. Maybe she needed to approach it from a different direction. She tried to formulate a new search request, her eyes scanning her office for inspiration.

  The office was small, tidy, and efficient. An antique quilt hung on the wall next to framed diplomas from Penn undergrad and law school and some honors certificates. There were two simple chairs opposite a pine farm table she used as a desk; her law books stood upright as altar boys on wall-mounted wooden shelves. Mary had decorated her office to inspire confidence in her clients while not offending corporate sensibilities. It was designed to make no statement but “HIRE ME PLEASE, YOU COULD DO A LOT WORSE.” Which was precisely what Mary thought of her legal abilities.

  Mary’s gaze fell on her desk, atypically cluttered with papers from the Steere case, which had taken over her office the way it had taken over her life. She hated the case. A carjacking ending in death. Knives. Guns. Awful. Mary remembered the police photos with nausea and it hurt to look at the autopsy photos. Mary had seen too much death; her husband, and later. The Steere case wasn’t helping to leave those memories behind. The next person who said “healing process” to her was getting a fat lip.

  She stared at the Steere file and flashed on the photo of the dead homeless man, crumpled on the street in the fetal position. His eyes were open in death, his mouth an agonized black hole in a dense beard. Wild cords of his hair were soaked with blood. He wore baggy pants and no shirt. He’d had no ID or last known address, no friends or relations. The police had learned his name from the neighbors who lived near the Twenty-fifth Street Bridge.

  His name was Heb Darnton. Mary had done the factual investigation on him and had interviewed the neighbors. They’d told her Darnton lived under the bridge, drunk most of the time. He used to shout at the passing cars but nobody thought he’d do any harm. The black community rose up at Steere’s killing him. They demanded that Steere be charged with murder and demonstrated at the Criminal Justice Center, an inner-city counterpoint to the white suburban NRA members. Police with riot gear and German shepherds had to be called to keep order; for the cops and the press, the victim’s identity became a detail as man morphed into symbol. Heb Darnton was forgotten in the fracas, but Mary never forgot a victim and never would. Because once upon a time the victim had been someone she loved.

  The victim. Maybe that was it. Mary deleted the old search, typed in DARNTON, and hit GO.

  Your search has found 2238 articles, reported the computer.

  Ugh, no. She read the first couple, skimming for information about Darnton. The homeless man was mentioned only as Steere’s victim. She read the next five articles. Nothing. She narrowed the search and put in Heb Darnton.

  Your search has found 1981 articles, it said.

  Mary skimmed the first few. They were the same as in the earlier search, but included Darnton’s first name. Her brain was too tired to think and she drained her mug. She’d run out of gas. Christ. What kind of a name was Heb anyway? A nickname? She took a flyer, typed in HEB, and waited while the hard disk ground away. Then she caught the typo in the search request.

  EB.

  Damn it! Mary never could type. She’d tried to teach herself on that Mavis Beacon program, with no luck. She bought the software because she liked the pretty, entrepreneurial Mavis on the box cover and wanted to support her efforts. But Mary couldn’t find the time to cyberpractice and then she found out Mavis wasn’t even a real businesswoman, just a model. It was disillusioning.

  Your search has found 23 articles.

  Mary was about to delete the search request when her gaze slipped to the first article, about a farmer in Lancaster County outside of Philly, an Amish man named Eb Stoltzfus. Eb and his friends were reportedly having problems with corn borers. Real helpful. Mary thought a minute. Eb. Ebenezer. She clicked to the next article. Sure enough.

  “ ‘Ebenezer Squeezer’ was my favorite song,” said Jillian Cohen, a second grader at Gladwyne Elementary School. “I liked it the best in the whole recital.”

  Mary jolted to alertness. Eb, not Heb? Ebenezer Darnton. Maybe that was the real name of the homeless man. The only way anyone knew his name was that he had told it to the neighbors. Maybe the neighbors were hearing Heb but he was saying Eb. The cops had followed their procedures for identifying him, but Mary had been more thorough herself in her neighborhood survey. She searched EBENEZER DARNTON and pressed GO!

  Your search has found no articles.

  Shit. It was 6:50. Maybe Marta would be late. Maybe Marta would die. Think, girl. If the search is too narrow, broaden the time. Mary hit a key to search all archives from 1950 to present.

  Your search has found no articles.

  What to do? Last try. She typed in EBENEZER and punched GO!

  Your search has found 3 articles.

  Yes! Mary punched up the first article. It was the police blotter from February 7, 1965. Her heart leapt with hope until she read:

  A brown 1964 Oldsmobile was reported to be stolen from a parking lot on Joshua Road in Plymouth Meeting. Ebenezer Sherry of the Plymouth Meeting Police reported that this was the twelfth automobile stolen from township residents this year and feared that auto theft was on the rise, even in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

  News flash. Crime spreads to suburbs. Mary sighed and hit a key for the second article. Maybe this was a bonehead idea after all.

  Ebenezer Yoachim, 68, died today at Sinai Gardens Convalescent Home. Mr. Yoachim owned the Yoyo Dry Cleaners on Cottman Avenue and until his illness was a baritone in the barbershop quartet called the Troubadours. Mr. Yoachim is survived by his wife, Rachel Newman Yoachim, and his son, Samuel.

  Mary felt let down. An obit. Couldn’t be Darnton. One story left. She hit the key without enthusiasm. It was from April 12, 1965, and appeared in the business section.

  Ebenezer Darning, of Greene Street in Center City, was promoted to teller at the main branch of Girard Bank.

  Mary blinked, surprised at the similarity of the names. Darning/Darnton. She sat up straighter and scrolled down the page. Underneath the blurb was a thumbnail photo of a young man
with a confident smile and a smooth chin. EBENEZER DARNING, said the caption. The man in the news photo was black, like Darnton. It was surprising. A black man promoted in that era? That was around the time of the Civil Rights Act. Racial discrimination was rampant then. Darning must have had brains and guts.

  Mary leaned closer to the computer screen to see the bank teller’s face. She couldn’t tell what he looked like from the tiny photo, so she moved the computer mouse and clicked the cyber-magnifying glass over the man’s face. The photo blossomed into pixelated squares but was still too small. The man’s eyes looked closed, as if the shutter had been snapped at just the wrong moment. Mary clicked the mouse button again.

  My God. She stared at the enlarged photo on the screen. The sight pressed her back into her desk chair. It was a photo of a young Eb Darning, but she could have been looking at an autopsy photo of Heb Darnton, his eyes sealed in death. Without the beard, there was a clear resemblance around the eyes, a protruding of the brow and a largish nose. It looked like the same man, over thirty years younger. Was Eb Darning the same man as Heb Darnton?

  To be sure Mary needed to compare the computer image to the photos of autopsy photos in the file. Had she discovered something significant? Was this related to the evidence the D.A. had uncovered? Could everybody in the world type better than she did? Mary leapt from her desk chair and ran down the hall to the glass conference room.

  9

  The blizzard intensified as night fell outside the jury room in the Criminal Justice Center, but Ralph Merry was pleased. The jurors were going the right way, which was finding Steere innocent. Ralph believed 100 percent in the Fourth Amendment and argued that Steere was justified in defending himself when he got carjacked. Plus it would made a more upbeat ending for Ralph’s book.

  The jurors weren’t allowed to sign any deals yet, but Ralph’s wife, Hilda, had gotten calls from two literary agents in New York, who said several publishing houses were interested in the inside story of the Steere case. That’s what publishing companies called themselves — houses — and Ralph thought they could call themselves whatever they wanted if they came through with six figures. Still, he wasn’t going to make any deals with any houses until he made sure they would put his picture on the cover like they did with General Schwarzkopf’s book. Ralph’s book deal was this close, except that Kenny Manning was putting up quite a fight to convict.

  “The man’s guilty!” Kenny was saying. He had lifted himself from his seat and leaned halfway over the table on his strong arms, almost in Christopher Graham’s startled face. “The brother walks up to the car, all the man had to do was drive away. That’s it. He didn’t have to do him!”

  “Damn right,” added Lucky Seven.

  Christopher regained his composure and squared his broad shoulders as he stood behind his chair. He hadn’t had much contact with black people, but he wasn’t about to be intimidated by anything weighing less than a ton. “You can’t look at it that way, Kenny. You have to put yourself in Steere’s shoes.”

  “Fuck that, man. Steere had a SL600. Twelve cylinders! Car like that’ll climb trees.”

  “Thas’ right.” Lucky Seven nodded, though Kenny ignored him.

  “If I had a car like that and some crazy old dude come up to me, I’d take off and leave him spinnin’.”

  “If I had a car like that,” Lucky Seven added, “I wouldn’t be here.”

  Megan would have laughed if she weren’t so anxious. She’d voted to acquit Steere, but didn’t want to say so with this going on. The fighting was getting worse. She really wanted this trial over with. Her e-mail had already been deleted by AOL. Megan wondered if that guy she met in the chat room had written back. He even had his own webpage. Megan liked that in a man.

  Christopher remained focused on Kenny. “But Steere was scared. He panicked.”

  “Ain’t no call to panic!” Kenny shouted. “Dude was just drunk, is all. He wasn’t gonna hurt nobody! He was jus’ an old man talkin’ out his mouth!”

  Megan flinched at the decibel level, and Nick grew even more nervous. He couldn’t believe this was happening. The voting, the hollering. He never decided anything without Antoinetta. His stomach was killing him.

  “Gentlemen,” said Mrs. Wahlbaum, who stood up at the middle of the table, a matronly fulcrum between Christopher and Kenny. Her form was stocky in a knit dress that flattened her generous bosom, and she raised her arms as if to separate the men. “Gentlemen, please. There are two sides to every story. We have to discuss this like civilized people, sitting down at the table, not shouting across it. You’re calmer if you’re sitting, you just are. It’s your body language. I think it’s a shame that that homeless man was killed, but I can’t blame—”

  “I wasn’t talkin’ to you, teacher,” Kenny said, his smooth head snapping toward Mrs. Wahlbaum. “Backoff.”

  “Just one minute, Kenny,” Ralph said.

  “I’m fine, Ralph.” Mrs. Wahlbaum silenced him with a wrinkled hand. She knew the way to deal with bullies was to stand them down. “Why don’t you both sit down, Christopher? Kenny? Just sit right down, both of you.” She waved her arms at them, so hard she could feel the fat wiggle underneath. Hadassah arms, her sister-in-law called them, but that Yetta could go straight to hell.

  Nick was getting more worried by the minute. He ate some Tums but his stomach was still on fire. He didn’t like being here without his wife. Forty-two years he’d been married, and Antoinetta had made all the decisions. Paid the bills, cooked the meals, raised the girls. Nick wished he had something to relax him. He wished he had some milk. Milk was supposed to be good for ulcers. Or maybe some nice, cold anisette in a little glass.

  Christopher folded his large frame into the hard chair, but Kenny didn’t budge. “What?” Kenny said, with an incredulous laugh in Mrs. Wahlbaum’s direction. “Teacher, you gonna tell Kenny Manning what to do, you got a lesson to learn.”

  “Kenny, I have forty years on you. You’d better show me some respect.”

  “Respect?” Kenny said, menacing her with a smile. “Show you respect?”

  “The expert again,” muttered Mr. Fogel. “The expert in sitting. She knows all about sitting. Ask her anything.” He leaned over to Wanthida. “It’s Iraq and Iran in here, and she thinks if they sit down, they’ll make nice. Like it’s automatic.”

  “I’m ignoring you, Mr. Fogel,” Mrs. Wahlbaum snapped. Troublemakers hated being ignored. “Now, Kenny, you sit down. Sit, sit, sit!”

  “Lady, you out your fuckin’ mind?” Kenny spat out, his smile vanishing. “Who you think you are, be orderin’ me?”

  Ralph figured if he didn’t step in Mrs. Wahlbaum would be dead. “Kenny,” he said, “tell us why you think Steere is guilty. You can stand or sit, whatever you like. Make the case, like the lawyers. We’ll listen. This is supposed to be a legal-type discussion.”

  “Hey, Ralph Mouth, back off my man,” Lucky Seven said, and laughed nervously.

  Isaiah Fellers sat off to the side, silent. He had voted not guilty the first time even though Kenny would be pissed off. The way Isaiah saw it, Steere was just protecting himself and his property. Didn’t matter who was black and who was white. Steere had a right as a man.

  “It wasn’t an order, Kenny, it was a request,” Mrs. Wahlbaum soothed. “Please. We have to reason together, all of us. Discuss it. Sitting down.” Her knees were shaking slightly and she figured it was a good time to sit down. “See?”

  Kenny stood alone, still braced on his arms at the other end of the table. Damned if he would sit down just because some Jew teacher told him to. She was dissing him but his arms were getting tired. The room fell quiet, waiting. Watching.

  Nick wished he could cover his eyes. When the fighting stopped they’d have to vote again and he’d have to decide all alone. On his last visit with Antoinetta, she told him he should vote to convict. She said Mr. Steere was a crook and the Trolios had sold him their house for a song. But if Nick voted guilty he’d have to go up ag
ainst all the other white people. He didn’t know how to vote. When the paper came to him, could he write I STILL DON’T KNOW?

  In the meantime Kenny had made a decision and was pointing at Mrs. Wahlbaum. “Don’t be tellin’ me what to do, teacher. You understand what I’m sayin’?” His bicep knotted and nobody, including Nick, missed the small tattoo on his arm. It was a Chinese symbol that Nick couldn’t read, which only scared him more.

  “She understands,” Ralph said, quickly.

  Mr. Fogel shrugged his skinny shoulders. “Of course she understands. She understands everything. I bet she can predict the future.”

  “Fine, Kenny,” Mrs. Wahlbaum said, knowing Kenny had to save face. “I understand.”

  “Just so you understand,” Kenny said, a warning in his voice.

  “I do. I understand.”

  “Good.” Kenny slid into his chair almost as an afterthought. Lucky Seven didn’t meet his eye.

  Megan Gerrity glanced at her Swatch watch. Babies’ heads tumbled around the circle. The watch was barely readable, but it was so cute. “It’s almost seven o’clock. How late can we deliberate tonight? Does anybody know? Maybe we can fit in a final vote.”

  Kenny folded his arms like a musclebound child, but Christopher nodded, pleased. “We can deliberate as late as we want,” he said. “We’re supposed to call the judge and let the bailiff know when we want dinner.”

  They all wanted to vote again, except for Nick, who thought he was going to catch on fire. He sipped his water but it didn’t put out the burning in his stomach. There was like a fireball racing up his throat. Nick couldn’t keep it down. He blurted out, “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

  “What?” Christopher said, and around the table, eleven mouths dropped open.

  10