Chapter 19
Victory
They put me on the cover of a magazine.
It was a weekly, glossy, national, the kind with a red border that one sees at the checkout counter of every supermarket in the country, and the photograph had been taken the morning after the verdict, on the steps of the courthouse, in a thin gold sun. I was in a dark overcoat with my collar up. I had not slept. The photographer had asked me to look less tired, and I had tried, and the result was a man staring past the lens with a clenched, searching, half-guilty expression, like someone who has heard his name called in a crowd and cannot find the voice. Beneath it, in white capitals, the headline: THE DEVIL'S LAWYER. And beneath that, in smaller type: How Adrian Cole Made the Impossible Look Easy.
Priya brought it into my office on the second Monday and laid it on the desk, face up, with an air of sober ceremony.
"Seventeen interviews are waiting," she said. "I've had three offers for a book. A man from a cable channel wants to talk about a show. There's a woman from the governor's office who wants to know whether you've ever thought about the bench."
"I haven't."
"I told her that." She paused. "The firm's phone hasn't stopped. We've had forty-one inquiries from people who'd like to retain us. Eleven of them are sitting on charges that make Terrence Boyle look like a choirboy. Gil's talking about renting the twentieth floor."
I looked at the magazine. It lay on the blotter between a stack of letters and a cold cup of coffee, glossy and absurd. I looked at the word impossible, in its neat small italic, and I felt something turn over very slowly in my stomach.
"Did you read it?"
"The article?" She tilted her head. "They say you're the best trial lawyer in the state."
"They say a lot of things."
"They're not wrong, Adrian." Her voice was quiet. "I sat at that table for four weeks. I'd have staked my life on every word you said."
"That's the trouble," I said, and I did not know what I meant.
She waited. When I did not go on, she put a hand briefly on the desk, as if to touch me and thought better of it, and went out. The door closed. The room was entirely quiet. I turned the magazine over, face down, and found that my fingers were shaking.
The letter came on the Thursday.
It was in a plain cream envelope with a handwritten address, forwarded from the courthouse. I did not recognize the handwriting. I sat with it for some time before I opened it, in the silence of the late afternoon, with the long gold light coming in sideways through the blinds and laying bars across the desk.
Mr. Cole,
My name is Ruth Rusk. You will not remember me. I was on the steps in October, with my husband and my son. My daughter was Danielle.
I watched the news this week about the Hale case. I watched you on the television, with the man you got off. I thought I would write to you, because nobody has asked me anything in a long time, and I think someone should.
Mr. Boyle is a free man. I know he was not found guilty of killing my daughter. I know the evidence was weak. I have read the transcript. I am not a foolish woman and I do not say you did anything wrong. But I have thought about what you said on the steps. "My job is to make sure the law is followed." I wrote it on a card and I put it by my bed.
I have been looking at it every night for six months.
I wanted to ask you one thing and I do not expect an answer. When it is over, and the man is out, and the cameras are gone, and you are driving home: do you ever want to know who did it?
Ruth Rusk
I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, slowly, with my finger under the lines, and when I had finished, the light on the desk had moved, and the bars of gold had gone to red.
Nora had asked me almost the same question. A man with a pencil in a church hall had asked it. A woman in a doorway in Eastgate had asked it with her eyes. Do you ever want to know? It seemed that I was surrounded by people who had been asking it for years, quietly, in different voices, while I explained to them that it was not my department.
I put the letter in a drawer. I did not answer it. I sat for a long time with my hand on the drawer's brass pull and my forehead nearly touching the desk.
The pen was beside my elbow. I did not pick it up.
The firm threw a party. I had asked them not to.
It was held on the nineteenth floor on the Friday evening, in the long reception room with the view of the river, and by seven there were perhaps ninety people in it. There were lawyers I had known for ten years and lawyers I had never met. There were judges, two of them in tuxedos. There were three journalists, who had been invited by Gil for reasons that were entirely beyond me, and a short, jovial, sweating man from the mayor's office who kept clapping me on the arm and saying marvelous, marvelous. A pianist, hired from somewhere, played something light in the corner. There was champagne. There were small, beautiful, tasteless things on trays.
I stood by the window with a glass I did not drink from and let them come to me.
It is a curious sensation. People tell you what you have done. They tell it in fragments, in toasts, in breathless sentences begun and not finished, and you stand in front of them nodding, with the smile that you have learned to put on, and the words go by like objects in a stream. The way you handled that old man. When you said impossible. I got goose bumps. A woman in a long red dress took my hand in both of hers and said, her eyes gleaming, that I had restored her faith. I thanked her. I could not have said in what.
Nora came at half past eight.
I saw her from across the room. She had come directly from the hospital. She was in her work clothes, gray trousers and a blue shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and her hair was damp, and she had a small canvas bag on her shoulder with the strap crossed over her chest. She stood just inside the door looking at the crowd, the champagne, the lights, with an expression of faint, polite, exhausted surprise. As if she had walked into the wrong building and was deciding whether to say so.
I crossed the room. People parted. She watched me come.
"You came," I said.
"I said I would."
"You look tired."
"Twelve hours. A man fell off a roof." She smiled, briefly. "He's fine. He'll walk."
"I'm glad."
"Me too." Her gray eyes moved over my face, taking inventory, and stopped. "You haven't slept."
"Not very much."
"No." She turned her head and looked at the room again, at the glittering, murmuring, self-congratulatory throng. "It's very nice. They're very pleased."
"It wasn't my idea."
"I know it wasn't. You'd have hated it." A pause. "Can we go somewhere quiet?"
I took her to my office. I shut the door. The noise of the party dropped away behind it into a muffled hum, as of a distant sea. The room was dim. Only the lamp on the desk was lit, and in its yellow circle lay the magazine, face down, and the glossy back cover advertised a watch.
She did not sit. She stood by the window, with her back to the glass and the lights of the city glittering behind her, and folded her arms.
"I went to the trial," she said.
"I didn't know that."
"I took a day off. I wanted to see." She said it quite evenly. "I sat in the back. I heard your closing."
"What did you think?"
"I thought it was extraordinary."
"Thank you."
"I mean that. You were so good that I forgot to be afraid." Her voice dropped. "Adrian, you said impossible. You said it three times."
"It followed from the evidence."
"Did it?"
"If he was on the telephone at nine forty-four—"
"If he was." She was looking at me directly. "You don't know that he was. You said so yourself. You said, answered, or it wasn't, we cannot say. And then you stood in front of twelve people and said impossible."
"It was argument."
"It was a word." She did not raise her voice. "It was a word that you chose, because it was the strongest one, because it would work. And it worked." She shook her head. "I'm not saying you lied. I know you didn't. You're far too careful for that. I'm asking something much smaller. I'm asking whether you believed it."
The lamp hummed. Out in the reception room the pianist had begun a slow, wandering, melancholy waltz.
"It followed," I said again.
"That isn't what I asked."
"It's what I can say."
She was silent for a long time. In the dim, her face was very still, the strong cheekbones, the straight mouth, the short dark hair, and I saw her decide something. I saw it as one sees a person at the end of a platform step off.
"I'm going to go home," said Nora. "I'm going to have a bath, and I'm going to sleep for ten hours. And when I wake up I'm going to think about whether I can be in a house where this is the answer."
"Nora—"
"I love you." It came out of her fiercely, and all at once. "I want you to know that. I'm not leaving. Not tonight. I'm only saying I need to think." She took her bag from her shoulder and held it in front of her like a shield. "Because I sat in that courtroom and I watched a man I love be better at something than anyone I've ever seen. And I thought: what is he for?"
She walked past me and opened the door, and the sound of the party poured in, bright and loud and glittering, and she went through it without looking back.
I did not go back to the party. I stood for a while in the office with the door ajar. Then I took my coat, and went down in the service elevator, and found my car in the underground garage, and drove through the rain to the hills.
I do not know why I went. That is not quite true. Victor Hale had called me that afternoon, in his warm, level, unhurried voice, and asked whether I would come to the house on the Friday evening for a quiet drink. Julian will be there. And Barnaby. A few words, nothing formal. I had said that I had a party. He had said that of course I did. He had said, Come afterward, then. I'll be up.
The gate was open. The drive curved up through its screen of laurels, and the stone house, long and low and gray, stood lit at the end of it, every window shining, like a ship in a harbor. I parked on the gravel. I sat for a moment with the engine ticking down. I thought of a roll of film that had been shot in an October night, fourteen frames of a bookshelf. I thought of a lamp that had burned in a carriage house for six days.
It is a strange thing, to walk through the front door of a house in which a woman has been killed. I had been in it twice. I did not know until I crossed the threshold that I had imagined it would feel different. It did not. The hall was warm and softly lit. A fire was going somewhere. There was a smell of woodsmoke and old books and, faintly, lemon oil, the smell of a housekeeper's good work. The long passage ran back toward the study with its dark framed paintings, and at the end of it a closed door.
"Adrian."
He came out of the library with a glass in his hand. He was in shirtsleeves, with the collar open, and a gray cardigan that I had not seen on him, and he looked younger than I had known him: lighter, loosened, his color high. He had had his hair cut. He crossed the hall in four strides and took my hand in both of his, and held it, and smiled, and the smile was the one from the courtroom, the one that had cracked in the middle of a word.
"You came."
"I said I might."
"I'm glad. I wasn't sure you would." He drew me in. "Come and sit. Julian's here. Barnaby's gone to see about the car."
The library was a long warm room with a fire and four deep leather chairs. Julian Hale rose from the nearest of them. He had a tumbler in his left hand, and he shifted it to the right to shake mine, and the movement was so smooth, so automatic, that I almost did not notice. His handshake was dry and brief. He looked thinner than he had in court. His eyes were very bright.
"Mr. Cole," he said. "I don't know how to thank you."
"You don't need to."
"I do. It isn't a thing you can say, though, is it? It just hangs there." He gave a quick unsteady laugh. "I've been practicing for a week."
"Sit down," said Victor. "Both of you. I'll pour." He went to a decanter on a side table. "Single malt. I'd offer you the good stuff, but I'm told the good stuff is for people who didn't just win a murder trial. It's meant to be drunk with someone you'd like to forget."
I took the glass. I did not drink.
We sat. The fire cracked. Rain ran down the tall windows in long wavering threads, and the lamps threw soft circles on the wood, and for some time the three of us said very little. Victor sat opposite me, with his long legs stretched out and the glass in both hands, looking at the flames. Julian sat beside him, rigid, upright, his left hand clenched on his knee.
"I'd like to propose something," said Victor, at last.
"Go on."
"Hale Meridian has been in a difficult position these six months. We've been run by committee. Julian's done heroic work, but he's a finance man. What the company needs is a person who understands both the law and the press. A person who can stand in front of a regulator and be believed." He turned his head. "I should like you to be our outside counsel."
I looked at him.
"Retained. On an annual basis. A figure that I'll leave to Barnaby, but I'd expect it to be somewhere in the region of two and a half million dollars. For a start." He smiled. "Gil Marsh would be on the phone to me inside the hour with a counter-offer, I imagine. I'd accept it."
"Victor—"
"I want you to think about it. There's no hurry. I'm not asking for an answer tonight." His eyes held mine. They were very steady. "I'm only saying that I would like to be on your side of the table, for once. For the rest of my life."
I turned the glass in my hand. The amber moved in it, thick and slow, like something that wanted to speak. I thought of Gil on the phone, laughing. I thought of the twentieth floor. I thought of the forty-one inquiries and the sum that two and a half million made against the margins of a firm that, in the lean years, had once been four weeks from insolvency. They were good reasons. They were the sort of reasons that would have satisfied a committee.
And I thought, quite distinctly: This is what it feels like.
I do not know how else to describe it. It was not temptation. It was something quieter. It was the sensation of a very warm room closing over one's head, softly, with no sound, a room full of firelight and money and gratitude, and a man's hand on one's arm saying you did this, you were wonderful, stay. I knew exactly what it was. I had seen it done to others. I had defended men who had done it to others. And I sat in the leather chair, in the house where she had died, with the rain on the windows and the glass untouched in my hand, and understood that the thing that frightened me was not that it was a trap. It was that I could not find the bars.
"I'll think about it," I said.
"Good." Victor raised his glass. "To Eleanor."
I looked up.
He was not smiling. His face, in the firelight, was composed and gray and rather beautiful, with the deep lines at the eyes and the straight grave mouth. He held the glass steady. Beside him, Julian had lifted his, too, and his hand was trembling very slightly, so that the whisky shivered in it, and a small bright drop ran down the outside of the crystal and onto his cuff.
"To Eleanor," said Julian, in a husky voice.
I should have drunk to it. It was a decent thing, a human one, a toast to a dead woman by two men who had loved her. I put the glass to my lips, and the whisky was sharp and peaty, and I swallowed it.
And in the long silence after, with the fire spitting and the rain going on and on against the glass, I became aware of a sound I had not heard in the house before. It came from somewhere down the passage. It was very faint. It was the sound of a door on a latch, a heavy old interior door, shifting a quarter inch on its hinge, as if a draft had touched it. As if it had been pressed from the other side.
The study door.
Victor had not moved. His eyes were on the fire. But Julian's head had turned, very slightly, toward the sound, and I watched his face, and saw it again, the thing I had seen in the courthouse corridor in March: a look of such naked, helpless, mastered fear that I felt, in the warm room, a chill pass through me from the roots of my hair to my heels.
It was gone in a second. He drank. He set down the glass.
"Draft," said Julian Hale. "It's an old house."
"Yes," said Victor, softly. "It's an old house."
I said nothing. I sat in the firelight with my hands round the empty tumbler, and the feeling that I had had in the courtroom, in the first moment after the verdict, returned and settled over me, quiet and heavy and entire. It was the feeling of a case that has been won and is not finished. A house in which every door has been opened and one room has not.