Chapter 18
Verdict
Waiting for a jury is a kind of weather. You cannot do anything about it, and you cannot stop noticing it, and it changes the whole quality of the light.
They went out at eleven forty on Wednesday morning. By one o'clock the building had closed around us like a hand. The lawyers, the clerks, the bailiffs, the reporters on their folding chairs along the corridor: everyone moved more quietly, spoke in lower voices, glanced at the double doors of the jury room at the end of the hall as though they might at any moment burst. The big windows over Meridian Square had gone the white of old paper. A fine rain hung in the air without falling.
I sat on a bench in the corridor outside Courtroom 4B, with my elbows on my knees and a paper cup between my hands, and listened to the building.
I have always been able to. It is a talent, or a disease. A courthouse is full of sounds that nobody hears until a verdict is pending. The elevator cables, high in their shafts, humming. The long dry tick of the radiators. A man's heels on marble, somewhere far down a corridor, going steadily away. A door sighing shut. The faint scratch, like a mouse in a wall, of a reporter's pen. Under all of them, in the way that a note lies under music, the thin continuous tone of a roomful of people holding their breath.
Hollis sat on the bench beside me. He had come in at noon, in his raincoat, and had not said a word. He held a newspaper that he was not reading. After an hour he got up and went away and came back with two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, put one on my knee, and sat down again.
"Eat."
"I'm not hungry."
"That wasn't a question." He unwrapped his own. "I've sat on a hundred of these benches. The ones who don't eat are the ones who throw up at four."
I ate. It was ham and mustard. It tasted of nothing.
Priya had set up in an empty room down the hall, with her laptop and her gum and a stack of research on appellate standards that she had decided would be needed in the event of a conviction. She came out every forty minutes, stood at the end of the corridor with her arms folded, looked at the jury room door, and went back in. At three o'clock she brought me a cup of tea and said, They've asked for the lunch menu twice. I think that's a good sign. I asked her why. She said she had no idea.
At 3:40 the bailiff came out and the whole corridor stood.
It was a note. The jury had written it on a sheet of lined paper, in a firm, upright, schoolteacher's hand, and the judge read it aloud to us in the courtroom, with Victor beside me and Whitlock at her table and the gallery sitting on its hands. We would like to hear again the testimony of the telephone company witness regarding the 9:44 call. Specifically the word "connected."
I felt Victor stiffen.
I was aware of Whitlock turning her head, very slightly, in my direction. Her face was unreadable. I was aware, too, of the thing in my own chest: a small cold fist closing.
They were thinking about the one thing I had not wanted them to think about. And they were thinking about it in the right place.
"Madam Reporter," said Judge Teague, "would you read it, please."
The court reporter, a plump gray woman named Ida Pell with a voice like a cello, found the page and read it flatly into the hush. Q: Answered, or unanswered? A: Connected. Q: Meaning someone picked up. A: Or voicemail, sir. The log doesn't say. It records a connected state. A voicemail connection is also connected.
When she stopped, nobody moved. The judge thanked her. She told the jury, through the bailiff, that the reading was complete, and that they might resume their deliberations.
They went back in.
I did not look at Victor. I did not want to know what his face was doing.
It was twelve minutes past six when the buzzer sounded.
I had been standing at the window of the corridor, watching the lamps come on one by one along the river. The rain had thickened into a real fall, soft and steady, and the light was beginning to go, a long gray dusk, and the water in the Square was shot with red and white. I had been counting boats. I had counted nine.
The buzzer was a short, harsh, ordinary sound, like a doorbell. I heard it go through the building. Heads turned all along the corridor. A reporter said oh, softly. I heard someone's chair scrape.
"Six hours and thirty-two minutes," said Priya, at my shoulder. She had come out of the room without my noticing, holding her phone. "That's short."
"Is that good or bad?"
"I don't know," she said, and her voice was very small. "I looked it up. There isn't a pattern."
We went in.
I will try to say what the courtroom was like at that moment. It is a thing I have tried to describe to people for twelve years, and I have never done it, because the nature of the experience is that it is made of absences.
The room is full. Every seat in the gallery is taken. People stand along the back wall and in the doorways. Yet there is no talking. There is no coughing. Perhaps a hundred and thirty human beings are breathing in a room that was built for eighty, and the sound of it is a kind of low pressure, like the hush before a storm. The air is warm and slightly stale. Someone's wet coat gives off a smell of lanolin. The north windows have darkened and show only the reflection of the lights, so that the room appears to be doubled, as if a second court sat a little way out in the evening, watching the first.
At the defense table, nobody speaks. Victor sat beside me in his navy suit with his hands laid flat on the wood. His breath was slow and even. A faint dew of sweat stood at his hairline. He had not looked at me in an hour. He was looking at the door through which the jury would come.
The bailiff said, "All rise."
We stood. The door at the back of the room opened with its long, soft, pneumatic exhalation. They came in single file. Teresa Ouellette first, large and calm, with her hands in front of her. The tester. Alma Finch, without her knitting. The baker. Each of them walked slowly, eyes front. None of them looked at us.
That is the first sign, and everyone knows it: the jury that won't look at the defendant. People believe it means guilty. The folklore is that a jury that has acquitted will look at him with sympathy. It isn't true. I have seen acquittals walked in with downcast eyes and convictions walked in with a gaze so bright it hurt. They don't look because they cannot, because it is the one thing in their lives they have done that cannot be taken back.
Raymond Teague was the last. He walked as he always walked, with his head up and his hands at his sides. At the rail of the box he paused, only for a half second, and I saw him glance, once, at the gallery. At the front row. I did not turn to see whom he looked at. I knew.
"Be seated," said Judge Teague.
They sat. The judge, in her black robe, looked down at them over her rimless glasses. She did not seem moved. She had done this, I think, four hundred times. But her face, in the yellow light, looked suddenly old, and a thin line stood out between her brows.
"Madam Foreperson," she said. "Has the jury reached a verdict?"
Teresa Ouellette rose.
I had a clear, strange, entirely irrelevant thought. It was about my father. I thought of the corridor of the Harlow County courthouse in the spring I was seventeen, and a man in a borrowed suit with grease under his nails, and the public defender who said it's the best you'll get. I thought, They took twenty-two minutes. I do not know why I remembered it. I had not known I knew.
"We have, Your Honor."
"Would you hand it to the bailiff?"
The slip of paper went from the large, steady hand of the nurse's aide to the bailiff, who carried it across the well to the bench. Judge Teague unfolded it. She read it without any expression. She read it for what seemed a very long time. Then she folded it again, carefully, along its crease, and handed it back.
"The foreperson will read the verdict."
I heard Victor draw in a breath through his nose, long and thin and silent. I heard, behind me, a woman begin to pray, in a whisper, the words coming fast and soft and without punctuation. I heard the rain. It was falling, I thought, a little harder, against the glass.
"On the single count of murder in the first degree," said Teresa Ouellette, in a clear low voice, "we the jury find the defendant, Victor Augustus Hale—"
I closed my eyes.
"—not guilty."
For a moment nothing happened.
It is a thing that surprises people. They expect a roar. In the first second after a verdict there is a silence of a different texture from the one that precedes it, as if the whole room had walked off a stair that was not there. Then the sound arrives, all at once, from everywhere: a gasp, a groan, a cry. Someone in the gallery let out a wild, breaking oh. A reporter near the door was already running. A chair crashed. I heard a woman begin to sob, loudly, helplessly, without any shame at all.
And over it, from the front row, a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.
It was a scream. It was not a long one. It was short and ragged and absolutely naked, the sound that a person makes when a thing that has been holding up their world is taken away. It was Clare Voss. She had risen to her feet, a tall gray woman in a black coat with her hands at her mouth, and she was not looking at the jury or the judge or the man beside me. She was looking at me.
I met her gaze. I couldn't help it.
There was no hatred in it. I had expected hatred. What there was, was far worse: a blank, enormous, unbelieving grief, as of someone who has been shown a door she had been told was locked and finds it standing open on an empty room. She stood there looking at me for what felt like a full minute. Then the sister of Eleanor Hale turned and walked out of the courtroom, past the reporters and the deputies, with her back very straight, and the door sighed shut behind her.
"Order," said Judge Teague. "Order, please."
Beside me, Victor had not moved.
He was sitting with his hands flat on the table and his head bowed, quite still, as a man might in church. I could see the back of his neck. I could see a pulse beating in it. And then, slowly, he turned his head and looked at me, and I saw his eyes, and they were full.
"Thank you," said Victor Hale.
His voice was hardly a breath. It cracked in the middle of the word. I had known him five months and had never heard it crack.
"Mr. Hale—"
"No. Let me." His hand came out and closed on mine, hard, the big dry warm hand of a man who has never in his life been grateful for something he could not buy. "You gave me my life back. I will never be able to say what it—" He stopped. He swallowed. "I will find a way. I promise you. Whatever you want."
I did not answer. I could not have said what I felt. It was something large and slow and cold, and it had no name, and it sat at the bottom of my chest like a stone at the bottom of a river.
He had let go of my hand. He had turned to the second row of the gallery, to where a tall man in a dark suit stood with his face in his hands, shoulders heaving. Julian Hale. He had been crying for some time; I had not noticed. When Victor rose, and went to the rail, and reached over it, the younger brother seized him. He clung to him. He said something, over and over, into his brother's shoulder, that I could not hear. Victor put one large hand on the back of his head, and held it there, very gently, and looked over his brother's shoulder at the ceiling, with an expression so tired, so desolate, so entirely without triumph, that for an instant I thought I must be mistaken, and that I was looking at a man who had just been sentenced.
He is relieved, I told myself. Of course he is. He's been in a cell for six months.
It was a reasonable thought. I have had a good many of them since.
Whitlock was at my elbow, quite suddenly, a gray shape in the noise. She held out her hand.
"Adrian."
I took it. It was cool and dry.
"That was very well done," she said. Her face was pale. Her mouth, which was always firm, was a little crooked, and there were deep lines at the corners of her eyes that I had not noticed before. "I mean it. It was the best closing I've heard in this building."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." She released my hand. "I'm not."
"Dana—"
"I will tell you something," she said, very quietly. Behind her Pryce was packing the exhibit boxes with an air of numbed obedience. "I looked at that jury for four weeks, and I thought, I've got them. And then you said the word impossible. And I watched Raymond Teague's face." Her gaze held mine. "I don't know whether you were right. I think you were very careful not to know. And I'd like you to remember, Adrian, when it's quiet, that I said so."
She turned away. She picked up her raincoat and went down the aisle, tall and gray and upright, past the weeping woman and the shouting reporters, and I watched her go.
I stood for a moment in the middle of the noise.
Priya was beside me, with her arms round her laptop, white-faced and shining-eyed. "You did it," she whispered. "You did it." Hollis, behind her, put a heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezed once and said nothing. Somewhere a camera flashed. The press were at the rail, shouting my name, and in front of me, Victor Hale turned from his brother's embrace, with his eyes red and his face lit from within like a man who has stepped out of a long dark tunnel, and held out both his arms.
I let him embrace me. It was the least I could do.
His coat smelled of cedar and rain and the faint sweet laundry soap of the Detention Center. I stood in his arms with my cheek against his shoulder, and over it I could see the back of the courtroom, and the high north windows, doubled in the dark, and the double doors with their long soft exhalation, and a young man in the last row of the gallery who had stood to leave and was looking at me. He was thin, pale, nobody I knew. He stood perfectly still among the people pushing past him, with his hands in the pockets of a gray raincoat, and his face was entirely without expression.
He did not look away when he saw me see him. He nodded once, slowly, as if confirming something. Then the crowd closed, and he was gone.