Chapter 17
Closing
I wrote the closing argument three times, and the third time I wrote it in longhand, at the kitchen table, at two in the morning, because the keyboard made it sound like someone else.
It was the night of the seventh of April. Nora was asleep. She had come home late from St. Brigid's, quiet and gray, and had stood for a moment at the kitchen door watching me with a mug of tea in her hands before saying, "Do you want company?" I had said no, and she had nodded, as though I had told her the time, and gone to bed. I heard her shut the door. Then there was only the refrigerator and the rain, and the lamp over the table, and the yellow legal pad on which I had been writing, crossing out, and writing the same sentence again for six hours.
It was a good argument. I could see that. It had everything a closing should have: a spine, a shape, an arc that rose from the particular to the general and came down gently on a single plain idea. It dealt with each of the State's pieces in turn. The neighbor, who had written a question mark. The clock, that had been seventeen minutes wrong. The plate that might have been a one or a two. The telephone, the tower, the long quiet sixteen minutes with a lawyer in Rotterdam. It said what a defense closing has to say, which is that the pieces do not fit, and that the picture the State has painted is a picture it has painted with its own hand.
And somewhere near the center of it, in the place where a lawyer puts the thing he wants them to carry out of the room, I had written a sentence. I had written it quickly, in the first hour, without thinking, in a firm round hand, and I had looked at it every hour since, and each time I had left it where it was.
It was impossible.
It was not a lie. That was what I told myself. It was a deduction. If a man is on a call at 9:44 on a mast across the city from his wife, he cannot be in her study at 9:41. If he has been on the Harbor Street mast for sixteen minutes before it, he cannot have driven there. It followed. It followed as surely as a conclusion follows from a premise, if the premise was that Victor Hale had answered the telephone.
And I did not know that he had.
I put down the pen. I looked at the sentence. The refrigerator hummed, and cut out, and the silence was enormous.
Test the evidence, I thought. That is the job. The State had presented a picture. I had shown that the picture was unreliable. The State's burden was to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Victor Hale was at that house at that time, and it had failed to do so. That was true whether he had answered the phone or not. It was true whether he was innocent or guilty. The closing did not need to say impossible. It needed only to say not proven.
But impossible was a better word. It would carry further. I knew exactly how it would sound, in the quiet, in the mouth of a man the jury had come, against their will, to trust.
It is not a lie, I thought. It is advocacy.
I took the pen up again and underlined the word. Then I closed the pad, and sat for a long time in the dark with my hand over my eyes, and did not sleep.
Whitlock went first.
She spoke for fifty minutes, without notes, in the dark green dress, and it was the best thing I ever saw her do. She did not rant. She did not appeal. She laid out the case in order, as she had in her opening, one fact beside another, but now she did it with the whole weight of four weeks behind her. She spoke of Eleanor. It surprised me. She had not, until then, made her a person. She stood at the rail of the jury box and spoke for five minutes of a woman who had restored a portrait of a stranger over three years with a brush the width of a hair, a woman who scheduled birthday cards for a niece until she was eighteen, a woman who had kept a list of what was hers and found it short. She spoke without sentiment. She spoke as one who has read the whole file, and has found, to her own surprise, that she is angry.
"The defense will tell you that it cannot be proven," she said. "That the clocks are wrong. That the neighbor was mistaken. That the plate reader confuses its ones and twos. And in each of those things, Mr. Cole is right. The evidence is imperfect. Real evidence usually is." She let her gaze travel along the two rows of faces. "But I'd ask you to notice what the defense has not done. It has not given you another explanation. It has not told you who else was in that room. It has told you, over and over, with great skill, that you cannot be sure. And it has left you with a murdered woman and an empty chair."
She turned, and looked at Victor, and her voice dropped.
"Eleanor Hale spent her last evening trying to find the courage to tell her husband something. The defendant says he does not know what it was. I think he does. I think he knew exactly what she was about to say, and I think that is why she is dead."
She stood a moment longer. Then, quietly: "She cannot speak for herself. That is what the law is for. I'd ask you to speak for her."
She sat. The silence after her was not the silence of admiration. It was the stillness of twelve people who had been told something they had been trying not to hear.
I stood at ten minutes past eleven.
I walked to the jury box and stood in front of it, close, as I had at the opening, and I did not say anything. I let them look at me. I let my eyes go along the two rows, one at a time. I held each gaze for a breath. The nurse's aide. The tester. The old schoolteacher, with her knitting laid in her lap. The baker. The bus driver, Raymond Teague, who was sitting very straight with his hands on his knees and his chin level.
I had a great many words ready. I found that I did not want to use most of them.
"I told you at the beginning that I did not know what happened to Eleanor Hale," I said. "I'd like to say that I still don't."
I saw the baker's head move, very slightly.
"I would like to know. I can say that now. I've lived with her for six months. I've read her diary and her letters. I've stood in her studio and looked at the last painting she ever worked on, half of it clean and half still under the old varnish. She was a person I would have liked, and I don't think she would have liked me, and I think that's a fair thing to carry into this room." I paused. "Ms. Whitlock is right about one thing. Eleanor Hale cannot speak. Nothing I say can make her. All any of us can do is decide whether the people who have spoken for her have shown you what they claimed."
I walked slowly along the rail.
"The State has told you a story. It's a clean story. A man, a motive, a car, a weapon. And each piece of it is a thing that someone has seen, or read, or recorded. A clock said 9:26. A neighbor said 9:48. A machine said HALE 1." I stopped in front of the exhibit stand, where the gray chart still hung, with its four colored rows. "I'd ask you to remember what you learned about each of those."
I told them. I did it without heat. I laid the clock beside the seventeen minutes, and the neighbor beside his question mark, and the plate beside the digit that might have been a one and might have been a two. I said, A machine that cannot tell you what time it is cannot tell you where a man was. I said, An honest witness who adds the face after the arrest has not seen a face. I said, The State has never asked who else drives a silver car. I felt it go in. I felt, as I have felt it perhaps a dozen times in twelve years, the room lean, very slightly, a degree, no more, like a floor settling on a house.
And then I came to the sentence.
I had known I would. I had stood on the steps of this part of the argument for nine hours, with my hand on the rail, looking down. I took a breath. Behind me the room was entirely silent. I heard the radiator knock once, and cease.
"There's a telephone call," I said. "You've heard about it. A call at 9:44. It was answered, or it wasn't, we cannot say for certain. But Mr. Hale has told you under oath that he answered it. He told you that he was at his desk, on the thirty-first floor, with the phone in his hand, at that moment. And the telephone company has told you that the phone was connected to the Harbor Street mast: the mast beside the Hale Meridian building, the mast nearest his office, nine miles from the house on Cranmoor Lane."
I looked at the bus driver. He was looking at me.
"The State says that at 9:41, Victor Hale was in his wife's study with a bronze bird in his hand. And three minutes later, the State says, he was at his desk in the city, on the telephone, in a quiet room." I let it hang. "Three minutes. Nine miles. Through a city that you have all driven, in the rain, on a Tuesday night."
I saw him nod. It was a very slow movement, a bare dipping of the chin, the movement of a man being persuaded of something he already wished to believe. Beside him the electrician looked at the floor.
"I'd ask you to ask yourselves," I said, "whether that is possible. And I'd ask you to tell me, when you've asked it, what word you'd use for a thing that cannot be done."
I let the silence stand a count of three.
"I would use the word impossible."
It was out. I heard it go from my mouth into the hush, a small, plain, perfectly round sound, and I knew that it was true, or that it would be true as soon as twelve people believed it. I knew too, and it was a cold, bright, minute knowledge, like a drop of ice water down the spine, that I was standing in front of the jury and speaking a sentence whose truth I had not tested.
I did not stop. A man who stops, in a closing, is lost.
"Impossible," I said again. "That is the State's problem. Not that we have proved Victor Hale innocent. We have not tried. The State's problem is that it has asked you to believe a thing that its own evidence cannot hold." I turned, and looked at him, my client, a big gray-haired man in a navy suit with his hands folded, looking at me with an expression of grave and total attention. "I don't know what happened to Eleanor Hale. I wish I did. I would give a great deal to be able to tell you. But I know what the law says. It says that a man may not be convicted of murder because it is probable. It says he may not be convicted because it is likely. It says that if you do not know, and you cannot know, and the State has not shown you, you must say so."
I walked back to the lectern. I put my hand on it.
"That is not a loophole. It's the only thing standing between all of us and a world where a person can be taken from his life because a clock said he was somewhere." I looked once more along the faces. "I'd ask you to say not guilty. Not because he is a good man. Not because you like him. Because the State, with all its power, has told you that it knows, and it does not."
I sat.
My hands were cold. I could feel them on the table, flat, perfectly steady, and under them the grain of the wood, and I knew that it had been very good. It was the best of my life. I knew it as one knows the weight of a coin. And I felt nothing at all that I had been taught to expect, no rush, no gladness, only a kind of deep hollow stillness, like the moment after a bell has stopped.
Victor leaned a fraction toward me.
"Thank you," he said, very low. "That was extraordinary."
"It was my job."
"No." He did not look at me. "It was more than that. It was kind." There was something in his voice that I could not interpret, a dry shadowed gratitude, and under it something that sounded, almost, like pity. "I'll remember it."
I did not answer. I was looking at the juror in the second row. Raymond Teague had not moved. But on his round, plain, careful face, as the bailiff rose to lead them out, I saw a thing I had not seen in four weeks of watching him. His lips were slightly parted. He was looking at my client with the open, uncertain, troubled expression of a man who has been given something he is not sure he deserves.
The door sighed shut behind the last of them. The sound went on in my ears long after it was gone.