Hayford Peirce - Innocent Until Scanned Guilty

There was absolute silence in the courtroom as two hundred pairs of eyes focused on the monitor and its unchanging picture. Sam could feel his own tension building as he glanced from time to time to where Roderick Bantry sat as if carved from stone, his cheeks gaunt, his eyes smoldering. What could it be like for him, Sam wondered, as he sat there not knowing if the next thing he saw on the screen might be a picture of himself murdering his wife?

The minutes ticked by.

Sixteen minutes later the door opened and a disheveled Linda Rawlings lurched into the room. Even on the small black and white screen she radiated an unmistakable aura of acute agitation. The door behind her had remained open. Now a man came through it and pushed it shut. Sam heard Emily’s sharp intake of breath as they both leaned forward to study the monitor.

Emily let out a half-sob. The man on the screen was clearly not Roderick Bantry. He was shorter, broader, and older, with shaggy, unkempt hair that fell to his shoulders and dark, unshaven jowls. His bulky figure was jammed into an ill-fitting sweater and baggy pants that nearly hid his feet.

Linda Rawlings swung around to confront the man, her face strained and her arms swinging wildly as she appeared to shout at him. The man immediately began to shout back, his own arms working up and down as he punctuated his words with broad gestures. The argument continued for some minutes, until Linda Rawlings leapt at the man and hit him solidly on the ear with her left fist. The man staggered and half-fell against a corner table. Rawlings stood over him, her eyes distended and her mouth working furiously.

As the man climbed awkwardly to his feet, he knocked over a glass statuette that had been sitting on the table in a pile of wrapping paper. He stared at the stylized crystal owl blankly, then reached down to pick it up. He held it in both hands for a long moment, then suddenly jumped forward and swung it at Linda Rawlings. The owl glanced off her shoulder and her face contorted, first in shock, then in agony. Her assailant raised the statuette and began to rain blows upon her head and shoulders. Rawlings fell first to her hands and knees, then sprawled across the floor. Blood began to flow from beneath her.

The courtroom sat in shocked silence as the man looked down at the motionless body, his mouth slack. Slowly he backed away until he subsided bonelessly into a chair, the bloody statuette dangling unnoticed from his left hand.

For the next seven minutes he sat as if in a coma, then slowly began to stir. He dropped the owl to the floor, then fumbled beneath his sweater to bring forth a palmtop computer. He consulted it, then began to speak into his wristphone. Sam wondered what he was saying, although he was fairly certain whom he had called. It suddenly occurred to Sam that someday, if scanners never evolved to the point where they could pick up sounds, court-appointed lip readers would almost certainly become a standard adjunct to their use.

Whatever the man heard on his wristphone, it seemed to satisfy him. He rose to his feet and crossed to the door, carefully bypassing the still spreading pool of blood. He stood fidgeting by the door, one hand jammed deep into a pants pocket. Sam darted a glance at Roderick Bantry, who was staring at the monitor with single-minded attention. It was a pretty easy guess as to what was in the man’s pocket.

Even so, it still came as a shock to see the small automatic pistol being jerked from the pocket in almost the same motion as the man pulled the door open with his other hand. He took two steps backwards and then, as Roderick Bantry stepped into the room, raised the gun and fired it point-blank into Bantry’s chest.

Bantry’s face contorted and he fell to the floor. His assailant pushed the door shut and fired two more shots into the body, then vanished into the bathroom and returned with a small towel. He used the towel to wipe both the crystal statuette and the gun. When that was done, he stuffed the now-bloody towel under his sweater and bent over the two bodies. When he had finished, the automatic was in Linda Rawlings’s hand and the statuette in Roderick’s. The man contemplated his work for a moment, then used his foot to nudge Bantry’s arm forward, pushing the statuette into the pool of blood. Satisfied at last, he took a last glance around the room, then moved to the door and stepped out into the night.

An excited babble cascaded across the courtroom. Eventually Judge Johansson succeeded in gaveling the room to silence. Lips pursed, he leaned forward and cocked his head at Dolores de la Quinta. “The court will entertain any motions you may care to make, Madam Justice. Do you have any?”

In her excitement, the ancient jurist jumped to her feet from her ground effect chair and hobbled to the bench with surprising speed. “I do, indeed, Your Honor. I move that the charges against the defendant, Roderick Bantry, be dismissed and that he be freed immediately.”

“Mr. Martinez, you have something to say in response to that?”

“Your Honor, I need time to—”

“Too late, Mr. Martinez, I’m afraid that time is of the essence here, as time and tide and Federal restraining orders wait for no man.” Judge Johansson turned to where Roderick Bantry sat, apparently half-dazed.

“Mr. Bantry, the charges against you are hereby dismissed. You are free to go.” The judge tapped his gavel. “Court is dismissed,” he declared and sat back in his padded chair, a whimsical little smile on his lips. Whatever the depth of the hole he had just dug for himself with the government or the Federation, Judge Harold Johansson had firmly cemented his place in history.

“Sam, you did it, you did it!” An elated Emily threw her arms around her father and squeezed fiercely. “He’s a free man!”

Sam too was elated, but for somewhat different reasons. The scanner logjam had finally been broken; now the Congressional knuckleheads would have to live up to their responsibilities.

And Sam could finally return to his wife and kids in peaceful retirement.

“Linda’s murderer was her lawyer?” Roderick Bantry was listlessly incredulous. “That ambulance chaser Ingersoll she was always threatening me with?”

“Carlos Ingersoll the Third, to give him his complete moniker,” amplified Sam. “You never met him?”

“No. And I refused to take his phone calls. So I never even knew what he looked like.” Bantry shook his head as his thoughts traveled back to the courtroom procedures of two days before. “That’s a pretty eerie sensation, you know, watching someone you don’t even know just standing there pumping bullets into you. And knowing that he really wants to kill you.”

“Well, if you don’t start pumping some food into yourself,” declared Marianna Ferron fervently, “you’re going look like he did kill you, Roderick Bantry! Eat! You look like a corpse! And you could try smiling a bit, too. This is supposed to be a celebration!” Sam’s Brazilian-born wife, twenty years his junior, exploded with laughter. A dark and sultry beauty, she was a cheerful extrovert, totally fearless and almost entirely unmindful of what she said. She reached across the linen-covered table to push Roderick’s scarcely touched lobster tails into a more alluring position, then grimly held the bowl of homemade green mayonnaise under his chin until he served himself another portion.

“Thank you, Marianna,” said Roderick with very little of the robust vitality that up to now had always driven him. “It’s all very good. It’s just…” His voice trailed off.

Marianna grinned disgustedly, then flashed her dark eyes at Emily, who was sitting at Bantry’s right. “Well then, you just keep him here until we fatten him and get some of the old snap back into him.” She snorted. “This isn’t the Roderick Bantry I used to know, always ready to kick me in the ass if I even said boo to him!”