Chapter 5
Doubt
The Calder County Detention Center has a visiting room for attorneys on the third floor that smells of disinfectant and old cigarettes, though no one has been allowed to smoke in the building for twenty years. I think the smell lives in the walls. It lives in the paint, in the vinyl chairs, in the long scarred table with its steel ring bolted to the surface. I have sat at that table for something like eleven hundred hours.
I thought about my father there. I always did. It was not a thing I chose.
He had been dead nineteen years by then. He had died in a different building, in a different county, a squat brown prison in the hills north of Harlow Falls with a view of a parking lot and a strip of sky. But the smell was the same. The way the guard's keys sounded in the corridor was the same. When I was eighteen I had sat in a room just like this one, in a visitor's chair that was too small, across from a man in a gray jumpsuit who was trying very hard to look like himself, and he had said: They told me it was the best I'd get, Adrian.
I will come to that. I have to. It is the reason for everything.
For now I will say only that on the third of November, a Monday, at two in the afternoon, the door of the attorney room opened and Victor Hale was brought in wearing orange, and that I noticed I was holding my pen so tightly that the tip had gone white.
"You look tired," he said.
"I'm told it's the job."
"It's a very good job. I wouldn't want it." He lowered himself into the chair across from me, slowly, a big man in an unflattering uniform, and set his hands on the table. The jail's barber had cropped his hair close, and it made his face seem both older and strangely more open: the jaw heavier, the forehead higher, the eyes a darker brown than I remembered. He had lost, I thought, perhaps eight pounds in three weeks. "How is my company?"
"I haven't been asked to run it."
"Julian is. He tells me the board has been very decent." A faint dry note. "Boards always are, for about a month."
"How are you?"
"Considering the circumstances, I'm remarkably well." He lifted one hand and turned it over, palm up, and looked at it. "I don't sleep. But I never did. In here, at least, I have an excuse."
I opened my legal pad. I did not begin with the question I had come to ask. I have a technique, which is not a trick so much as a courtesy: I begin with something the client can answer easily, so that he is already talking by the time he reaches the thing he would rather not say. I asked him about the garage.
"I told them. I parked on the second sublevel, where I always park. I took the executive elevator to thirty-one."
"The logs show your car leaving the garage at 9:26."
"The logs are wrong."
"They show it coming back at 10:09."
"Mr. Cole." He said it quite gently. "I run a company that moves forty thousand containers a year across nine oceans. I know a great deal about what systems can and cannot do. I also know that a license-plate reader is a camera that guesses at letters. They get things wrong. They log a truck that wasn't there. They fail to log one that was. I have been told for fifteen years that these systems are infallible, by people who were selling them." He shook his head. "I never left that building."
"The cameras outside your office were down."
"For a firmware update. They had been scheduled for a month." He met my eyes. "I'm not suggesting it was a coincidence. I'm saying it was a Tuesday night, and the building management company does these updates on Tuesday nights, and I would have been at my desk with the door closed whether the cameras were on or not."
"You were alone."
"I'm alone most nights. It's what being in charge is."
I wrote it down. It was a good answer. It was the kind of answer I would have drafted for him, if he had asked me to. And that was something to be careful of, I thought, with a client who gave answers so well-shaped: that I might begin to hear my own voice in them.
"There's a call at 9:44," I said.
"Is there?"
"Incoming. Four minutes. The number doesn't resolve. It's not Singapore and it's not Rotterdam." I turned the printout around and slid it across the table and put my finger beside the line. "You told the police you made two calls that evening. This is a third."
He looked at it.
I had been watching his face for three weeks and had begun to learn its habits: the stillness, the pauses that were not quite pauses, the courteous inclination of the head that meant he was listening. I knew by now that he did not blink very often. What I saw when he looked at that line was nothing at all. No flicker. No tightening around the mouth. He read it the way a man reads a menu in a language he knows, and when he looked up, his expression was one of mild, apologetic puzzlement.
"I don't recall it."
"Four minutes is a long time not to recall."
"It was a bad night." He rubbed his thumb along the side of his index finger. "I was on the phone to Rotterdam for sixteen minutes and then I was in the middle of a memo, and someone rang. I may have picked it up without looking. It might have been a vendor. It might have been a wrong number. Do you know how many calls a man in my position gets that he never remembers?" He turned his hand over. "I'm not being evasive. I'm being honest. I don't know."
"Think about it."
"I will."
"If they find it before we explain it—"
"Then it's a four-minute call from a number nobody can trace, on a night when I was in my office." He spoke the sentence slowly, as though to hear how it sounded. "Is that really so terrible?"
It was not. It was precisely the kind of detail that, in the right light, was meaningless. And in the wrong one it was a man leaving his phone in the office to create a record while he drove across town to kill his wife. I could see both lights. I could see them very clearly. I realized that I wanted him to be telling the truth with an urgency I did not entirely like.
"Tell me about your hands," I said.
He blinked. "My hands?"
"You're right-handed."
"Yes."
"Always?"
An odd expression went across his face, and then a smile, wry and a little rueful. "That's a very peculiar question, Mr. Cole."
"I have a reason."
"I'm sure you do." He leaned back. "No. Not always. I was born left-handed. My father considered it a failing." He said it with great calm, and the calm was a kind of statement in itself. "He had a ruler. At the dinner table, when I was six or seven, if I reached for my fork with the wrong hand, he struck the back of it. He was a man who believed in correcting things. In about a year I'd learned to use the right for everything that anyone would see." He lifted the left one and flexed it, as though to show me it still worked. "I still catch a ball with it. If I'm not thinking. I throw with it. I can't write a word."
"I see."
"I don't think you do." He smiled at me, almost fondly. "It's the sort of thing that sounds like a story, doesn't it? The brutal father, the damaged son. A jury would love it. I'd ask you not to use it."
"Why not?"
"Because it would make me sound as if I had a reason."
I wrote it down. I wrote it carefully, on a new line, with the date. I did not know yet why I was writing it. It was an instinct, nothing more, the same one that makes a man pick a coin up from the gutter on the chance it is worth something. The room hummed. A guard laughed in the corridor, far off, and was quiet.
"Another thing," I said. "Your cufflinks."
"My what?"
"The police took a pair from you at booking. Gold, engraved with an H. They're on the property sheet. I'd like to know why they matter to you. You asked the booking officer about them twice."
"Did I?" For the first time, something moved behind his face. It was gone so fast I could not have sworn to it. "They were my father's. Augustus had two pairs made, in the year Julian turned eighteen, one for each of us. Same maker, same design, the family crest, such as it is, worn smooth. It was the only thing he ever gave us that wasn't a lecture." The smile was tired. "Julian has his. I'd rather mine were in my own pocket. That's all. I'm sentimental about small things."
"All right."
"Is it important?"
"I don't know yet," I said, and it was the truth.
I walked out of the Detention Center at a quarter to four, into a thin, cold, blowing rain, and sat in my car for a long time with the engine off.
There is a feeling that comes to me sometimes after a client meeting. I have never found a word for it. It is something like the moment after a performance, when the house lights come up and one is conscious of being a person again, with a body and a pulse and a sudden unaccountable fatigue. It comes whether the client is guilty or innocent. It comes especially when I cannot tell.
I had interviewed, in twelve years, perhaps four hundred people accused of crimes. I had known with certainty the guilt of about thirty of them, because they had told me, or because the evidence had left no honest door. I had known with equal certainty the innocence of perhaps eight. The rest, the great remainder, had stood in that gray middle country where I had learned to live: where a man tells you a story and the story is coherent, and every fact you can check holds up, and every fact you cannot is a place where you have to decide how much to believe.
I had learned, early, not to decide. It was the rule that kept me sane. A lawyer who tries to determine guilt is a lawyer who has begun to judge, and a lawyer who has begun to judge has stopped defending. Test the evidence, I told myself. That is the job. Leave the soul to the priests.
It was a good rule. I had built a career on it. And I sat in that car and watched the water run down the windshield in fat gray lines and thought: I believe him.
And then, almost at once, quite clearly, in the voice of a man I had last heard nineteen years before: Do you?
My father's name was Thomas Cole. He was a mechanic for the Harlow Falls school district, forty-six years old, a big, slow, kind man with grease permanently worked into the creases of his knuckles and an incurable habit of whistling off-key. He kept twenty-two buses running on a budget that would have embarrassed a bicycle shop. He did the brakes himself. He had a rule about brakes. He would not sign off on a bus until he had taken it down the hill behind the depot, twice, with a bag of sand in the aisle, and felt it stop.
On a Tuesday in March, when I was seventeen, the front brake line on Bus 14 failed on a downhill curve on Pennock Road. It hit a retaining wall at thirty-one miles an hour with eleven children on board. Nobody died. Three of them were hurt badly enough to be hospitalized, and one, a nine-year-old girl, had her spine broken in two places and would not walk again.
They charged him with criminal negligence. His maintenance logs had a signature that the district said was forged, and a gap of six days that no one could account for. A public defender with a hundred and forty open files told him, in a corridor, on the morning of the trial, that the evidence was bad and the jury would be angry. The State had offered a plea. Eight years, with eligibility in five. If he went to trial and lost, it would be twenty. They told me it was the best I'd get, Adrian.
He pled guilty to manslaughter on a Thursday. He was dead fourteen months later, of a heart attack, in the prison infirmary, on a cold morning in January, with nobody in the room.
Three years after that, the manufacturer of the brake line issued a recall. A flaw in the flexible hose, a bad batch from a single factory, and seven thousand buses across the continent. A reporter wrote the story. Someone sent a copy to my mother. The District Attorney's office sent a letter, two paragraphs long, regretting the circumstances.
I was twenty-one. I read the letter standing in my mother's kitchen, and when I had finished I folded it very small and put it in my pocket, and I did not take it out again for years. But I knew, by the end of that afternoon, what I was going to do with my life. I was going to be the person in the corridor. Not the one who said it's the best you'll get. The one who said, No. Make them prove it.
It was a clean idea, and it had the shine of a thing that has been polished by grief. I believed it with my whole heart. I believe it still.
What I did not know, and would not for many years, was how far a belief like that can travel before it begins to serve something else.
I started the car. It caught on the second try.
I thought about another case, then, one I did not often let myself think about. A man named Leon Pruitt, in my third year as a public defender: accused of attacking a woman in a parking structure on Eastgate Avenue, identified by a single witness, who had picked him out of a lineup after eleven seconds in poor light. I had gotten the identification suppressed. I had shown the jury how the lineup had been rigged, how every other man in it was a foot shorter. They had acquitted him in an hour and twenty minutes.
Leon Pruitt had shaken my hand outside the courtroom. He had held it a moment longer than I expected. You saved my life, he said. He had a pleasant, ordinary face. He had worked in a hardware store. I had never asked him whether he had done it, and he had never said.
I never saw him again. I never heard what became of him. I looked his name up once, years afterward, on an unremarkable evening, and found nothing: no arrest, no conviction, no obituary. Just the quiet blank of a man who had walked out of a courthouse and into the rest of his life.
I never found out, I told myself. That's the point. That's the whole point. It isn't mine to find out.
I pulled into traffic. The wipers beat. The radio said that the harbor tide table had been revised, that a storm was building off the coast, that a body had been found in the river near the Brennan Street bridge and police were asking anyone who had seen a man in a gray coat to come forward. I turned it off.
At the first red light I realized that I was clicking the pen against the steering wheel, and that I had been doing it for about two blocks, and that the sound was perfectly regular and perfectly empty, like a clock in a room where no one is waiting.