Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“Oh, I know what she’s after, all right.” Adele’s one useful hand stroked the covers tensely. The mattress below her right hand concealed her security needs, a secret compartment installed by Santos, a steel box with her diary, a single pill and a small revolver. “She wants the jury to think I’m a poor excuse for a mother, isn’t that what she’ll try to prove? That I’m crippled, that I can’t push a child in a swing, paddle around a swimming pool—”

“Your relationship to your son is irrelevant, Mrs. Thomson. Miss Brett may inquire only into those areas that relate to my direct examination.”

“Let her inquire then.” Adele picked listlessly at threads in the coverlet, snapping them with the thin fingers which had unaccountably escaped the vise gripping the rest of her body. “She’s never had a child, you know. She’s never had that experience.”

Her oiled face became slack, the flesh under her cheekbones sagging toward her mouth. She was like a wax figure beginning to melt, a decorative object carelessly left too close to a flame.

Thomson nodded to Davic and told him he would join him downstairs. The lawyer said good night to Adele and left.

“Today was the worst of it,” Thomson said then.

“You promised there’d never be a trial.”

“Earl will be cleared, Adele.”

“But you let her make those obscene charges. That was too much for Earl. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.” Adele’s face hardened. Her eyes were sharp again under the cap of lush blond hair. “You’ve talked with him, you know what he wants. You’d better explain that to Davic.”

“Yes,” he said. “I intend to.”

“I suggest you do before he leaves.”

A panel beside Adele’s bed controlled a TV set mounted in the ceiling. Snapping it on, she watched a smiling game show host exuberantly addressing a panel of contestants. Her eyes remained fixed on the screen as her husband left the room.

Thomson had talked to his son Earl after the day’s session in court, and its stormy conclusion. Earl had been in his room, his face flushed from jogging about the grounds. At first his mood had been ominously mild and reasonable, his emotions masked by an apparent indifference.

“I don’t blame you for not understanding,” he’d told his father. “But you can’t realize what it’s like to sit there and have to listen to the things she said. Facing that jury and hearing myself described as a degenerate and a sadist. It just got to me. I couldn’t take it any longer. Sorry.”

But then as he pulled off his sweat shirt, his voice began to quiver with anger. “A pervert, a sodomist, a goddamn unnatural animal, that’s what she kept calling me, and those morons on the jury were licking their lips over it. I know what they’re thinking, what fun it’ll be to whip my privileged ass. But you don’t care, none of you do, because you don’t have any idea of loyalty...”

It was futile to try to reason with him. Earl had usurped the role of the victim. Now it was Earl who had been damaged and vilified and so it was his right, more, his obligation, to strike back at whatever had hurt and betrayed him.

“Even if I did fuck her,” Earl had shouted, “even if I did every goddamn thing that bitch is whining about, I’d still be innocent in a way you can’t appreciate because you don’t understand about loyalty to truth, to ideas that are more real than any damned little piece of reality, so-called, of the moment. I’m taking the heat because I believe in something... in an elite society. Damn right... and I live what I believe in. There never should have been a trial. I shouldn’t be crucified for trying to live up to something special, to what I believe in, to what, by God, is right and true —”

“Goddammit, Earl, listen, ” Thomson had said. “We got problems enough already.”

“Screw it. I’ve taken all the abuse I intend to. You’re going to pay them back now, the lying bitch, her hypocrite lawyer and her goddamn righteous father. Did you see him slam me in the chest when the marshals were holding me?” Earl had stopped to draw a deep breath, trying to calm himself, but his neck and face were swollen and red with anger. “Tell that shyster you hired what I want him to do,” he’d shouted. “You tell him.”

Thomson went down the broad stairway from his wife’s suite to the foyer, where Allan Davic waited for him. The lawyer had collected his hat and gloves.

“I have an appointment in Philadelphia,” he told Thomson. “But I believe we’ve covered the events that could come up in regard to your wife’s testimony. I’m sure she’ll make an excellent witness.”

“Just one thing,” Thomson said. “Forget the talk we had at lunch yesterday.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m telling you to use the court-martial material, use every goddamn thing you’ve got or can get on Selby and the DA. And that girl.”

“Mr. Thomson, the testimony of the plaintiff today was devastating. Whether you believe her story or not, take it from me as your lawyer... those jurors did. She had the whole courtroom with her.”

“Davic, I don’t want to discuss—”

“May I finish?”

“Go ahead.”

“Earl’s emotional display in court today probably won’t hurt him. That was a reaction people can relate to and even sympathize with. In fact, it might have been the smartest thing he could have done. But make no mistake, we’re in a fight. My job is to defend your son, and I’ve got my work cut out for me. That jury — any jury — is an unpredictable beast. They’re supposed to weigh the facts impartially. But too often they believe their job is to punish someone, to take revenge. Do you understand what I’m telling you? They know there’s a victim. They’ve seen her. She sat before them today. They heard the doctor, those pictures showed the cuts in her hands, the welts on her face. They didn’t have to imagine those rope burns. Now they’re looking for a culprit . We can’t risk creating additional sympathy for Shana Shelby. There’s such a thing as legal overkill. We’ve got a case to make, our witnesses to call. But if we now drag her father into it... and with him drag the past into it... well, we may create results we can’t foresee.”

“Never mind all that... I’m doing what I have to do... I don’t intend to explain myself any further. Take the wraps off. Use ail you’ve got to hit them. That’s the way it’s got to be. Good night, Mr. Davic.”

After the sound of the attorney’s car faded from the drive, Thomson and Dom Lorso talked in the shadowed study.

“We can live with it, Giorgio.” Dom Lorso studied his cigarette. “Earl wants to protect himself, that’s normal. He’s taken a lot of shit. But you and I, Giorgio, we gotta be clear about it. Very clear between you and me, okay?”

Thomson opened a bottle of wine and filled two glasses. He snapped on a lamp and was relieved to see the shadows leap away, the light revealing shelves of books and pictures of Adele in silver frames. On a beach with Earl, on a horse in an exercise ring...

“Earl should have satisfaction,” Lorso was saying, “but we got to know what it could cost, right?”

“It won’t cost you, Dom. That’s a promise.”

“If it hurts you, it hurts me.” Lorso inhaled deeply. “Davic does what Earl wants, right? Earl calls the shots?”

Thomson nodded and sipped his wine.

Dom Lorso pointed his cigarette at him. “That’s what we got to be clear about. Something could go wrong, Giorgio. You and me, we know Earl was involved with that girl—” He held up a hand. “Hear me out. You don’t want to admit it and he probably considers himself innocent the way he looks at it. Maybe he does know more about loyalty than we do... except we must’ve been doing something right for thirty years.”