The Simple Truth

  “Aren’t you premising your entire argument on the fact that blacks and whites think differently? That a black raised by parents who are college professors in a well-to-do household in, say, San Francisco will bring a different set of values and ideas to a university than a white person who was raised in the exact same affluent environment in San Francisco?” Ramsey’s tone was filled with skepticism.

  “I think that everyone has differences,” Campbell responded.

  “Instead of basing it on skin color, doesn’t it seem that the most impoverished among us have a greater right to a helping hand?” Justice Knight asked. Ramsey looked over at her curiously as she said this. “And yet your argument draws no distinction on wealth or lack thereof, does it?” Knight added.

  “No,” Campbell conceded.

  Michael Fiske and Sara Evans sat in a special section of seats perpendicular to the bench. Michael glanced over at Sara as he listened to this line of questioning. She didn’t look at him.

  “You can’t get around the letter of the law, can you? You would have us turn the Constitution on its head,” Ramsey persisted after finally taking his eyes off Knight.

  “How about the spirit behind those words?” Campbell rejoined.

  “Spirits are such amorphous things, I much prefer to deal in concrete.” Ramsey’s words brought scattered laughter from the audience. The chief justice renewed his verbal attack, and with deadly precision he skewered Campbell’s precedents and line of reasoning. Knight said nothing more, staring straight ahead, her thoughts obviously far from the courtroom. As the red light on the counsel lectern came on indicating Campbell’s time was up, he almost ran to his seat. As the counsel opposing affirmative action took his place at the lectern and began his argument, it didn’t seem like the justices were even listening anymore.

  * * *

  “Boy, Ramsey is efficient,” Sara remarked. She and Michael were in the Court’s cafeteria, the justices having retired to their dining room for their traditional post-oral argument luncheon. “He sliced up the university’s lawyer in about five seconds.”

  Michael swallowed a bite of sandwich. “He’s been on the lookout for a case for the last three years to really blow affirmative action out of the water. Well, he found it. They should have settled the case before it got here.”

  “You really think Ramsey will go that far?”

  “Are you kidding? Wait until you see the opinion. He’ll probably write it himself, just so he can gloat. It’s dead.”

  “I can partly see his logic,” Sara said.

  “Of course you can. It’s evident. A conservative group brought the case, handpicked the plaintiff. White, bright, blue-collar, hardworking, never given a handout. And, even better, a woman.”

  “The Constitution does say no one shall discriminate.”

  “Sara, you know that the Fourteenth Amendment was passed right after the Civil War to ensure that blacks wouldn’t be discriminated against. Now it’s been forged into a bat to crush the people it was supposed to help. Well, the crushers just guaranteed their own Armageddon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that poor with hope starts to push back. Poor without hope lashes back. Not pretty.”

  “Oh.” She looked at Michael, his manner so intense, so mercurial. Serious beyond his years. He climbed on the soapbox with regularity, sometimes to an embarrassing degree. It was one of the elements about him that she both admired and feared.

  “My brother could tell you some stories about that,” Michael added.

  “I’m sure he could. I hope to meet him someday.”

  Michael glanced at her and then looked away. “Ramsey sees the world differently than it actually is. He made it in the world by himself, why can’t everybody else? I admire the guy, though. He sticks it equally to the poor and the rich, the state and the individual. He doesn’t play favorites. I’ll give him that.”

  “You overcame a lot too.”

  “Yeah. I’m not blowing my own horn, but I’ve got an IQ over one-sixty. Not everybody has that.”

  “I know,” Sara said wistfully. “My legal brain says what happened today was correct. My heart says it’s a tragedy.”

  “Hey, this is the Supreme Court. It’s not supposed to be easy. And by the way, what was Knight trying to do in there today?” Michael was perpetually in the loop on everything that happened at the Court, all the inner secrets, the gossip, the strategies employed by the justices and their clerks to further philosophies and points of view on cases before them. He felt behind on whatever Knight had alluded to in court this morning, though, and it bothered him.

  “Michael, it was only a couple sentences.”

  “So what? Two sentences with a ton of potential. Rights for the poor? You saw the way Ramsey picked up on it. Is Knight posturing for something down the road? A case she was trying to set up in there?”

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me that. It’s confidential.”

  “We’re all on the same team here, Sara.”

  “Right! How often do Knight and Murphy vote together? Not very. And this place has nine very separate compartments, you know that.”

  “Right, nine little kingdoms. But if Knight has something up her sleeve, I’d like to know about it.”

  “You don’t have to know everything that goes on at this place. Christ, you already know more than all the clerks combined, and most of the justices. I mean, how many other clerks go down to the mail room at the crack of dawn to get a jump on the appeals coming in?”

  “I don’t like to do anything halfway.”

  She looked at him, was about to say something, but then stopped herself. Why complicate things? She had already given him her answer. In reality, although a driven person herself, she could not imagine being married to someone with standards as high as Michael Fiske’s. She could never reach them, sustain them. It would be unhealthy even to try.

  “Well, I’m not betraying any confidences. You know as well as I do that this place is like a military campaign. Loose lips sink ships. And you have to watch your backside.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you in the grand scheme of things, but I am in this case. You know Murphy, he’s a throwback — a lovable throwback, but he’s a pure liberal. Anything to help the poor he’d go for. He and Knight would be aligned on this, no doubt about it. He’s always on the lookout to throw a wrench in Ramsey’s machine. Tom Mur-phy led the Court before Ramsey got the upper hand. It’s no fun always being on the dissenting end in your twilight years.”

  Sara shook her head. “I really can’t go into it.”

  He sighed and picked at his meal. “We’re just pulling away from each other at all points, aren’t we?”

  “That’s not true. You’re just trying to make it seem that way. I know I hurt you when I said no, and I’m sorry.”

  He suddenly grinned. “Maybe it’s for the best. We’re both so headstrong, we’d probably end up killing each other.”

  “Good old Virginia boy and a gal from Carolina,” she drawled. “You’re probably right.”

  He fiddled with his drink and eyed her. “If you think I’m stubborn, you really should meet my brother.”

  Sara didn’t meet his gaze. “I’m sure. He was terrific during that trial we watched.”

  “I’m very proud of him.”

  Now she looked at him. “So why did we have to sneak in and out of the courtroom so he wouldn’t know we were there?”

  “You’d have to ask him that.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  Michael shrugged. “He’s got a problem with me. He sort of banished me from his life.”

  “Why?”

  “I actually don’t know all the reasons. Maybe he doesn’t either. I do know it hasn’t made him very happy.”

  “From the little I saw, he didn’t strike me as that sort of person. Depressed or anything.”

  “Really? How did he strike you?”

  “Funny, smart, identifies well with people
.”

  “I see he identified with you.”

  “He didn’t even know I was there.”

  “You would have liked him to, though, wouldn’t you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that I’m not blind. And I’ve walked in his shadow all my life.”

  “You’re the boy genius with a limitless future.”

  “And he’s a heroic ex-cop who now defends the very people he used to arrest. He also has a martyr quality about him that I never have been able to get around. He’s a good guy who pushes himself unbelievably hard.” Michael shook his head. All the time his brother had spent in the hospital. None of them knowing if he was going to make it day to day, minute to minute. He had never known such fear, the thought of losing his brother. But he had lost him anyway, it seemed, and not because of death. Not because of those bullets.

  “Maybe he feels like he’s living in your shadow.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Did you ever ask him?”

  “Like I said, we don’t talk anymore.” He paused and then added quietly, “Is he the reason you turned me down?” He had watched her as she observed his brother. She had been enraptured with John Fiske from the moment she saw him. It had seemed like a fun idea at the time, the two of them going to watch his brother. Now Michael cursed himself for doing it.

  She flushed. “I don’t even know him. How could I possibly have any feelings for him?”

  “Are you asking me that, or yourself?”

  “I’m not going to answer that.” Her voice trembled. “What about you? Do you love him?”

  He abruptly sat up straight and looked at her. “I will always love my brother, Sara. Always.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Rider wordlessly passed his secretary, fled to his office, opened his briefcase and slipped out the envelope. He withdrew the letter from inside, but barely glanced at it before tossing it in the wastebasket. In the letter Rufus Harms had written his last will and testament, but that was just a dodge, something innocuous for the guard to read. Rider looked at the envelope closely while he punched his intercom.

  “Sheila, can you bring in the hot plate and the teakettle? Fill it with water.”

  “Mr. Rider, I can make tea for you.”

  “I don’t want tea, Sheila, just bring the damned kettle and the hot plate.”

  Sheila didn’t question this odd request or her boss’s temper. She brought in the kettle and hot plate, then quietly withdrew.

  Rider plugged in the hot plate and within a few minutes steam poured out of the kettle. Gingerly grasping the envelope by its edges, Rider held it over the steam and watched as the envelope began to come apart, just as Rufus Harms had told him it would. Rider fussed with the edges, and he soon had it completely laid out. Instead of an envelope, he now held two pieces of paper: one handwritten; the other a copy of the letter Harms had received from the Army.

  As he turned off the hot plate, Rider marveled at how Rufus had managed to construct this device — an envelope that was actually a letter — and how he had copied and then concealed the letter from the Army in it as well. Then he recalled that Harms’s father had worked at a printing press company. It would have been better for Rufus if he had followed his daddy into the printing business instead of joining the Army, Rider muttered to himself.

  He let the pieces of paper dry out for a minute and then sat behind his desk while he read what Rufus had written. It didn’t take long, the remarks were fairly brief, though many words were oddly formed and misspelled. Rider couldn’t have known it, but Harms had scrawled it out in near darkness, stopping every time he heard the steps of the guards draw close. There wasn’t a trace of saliva left in Rider’s throat when he had finished reading. Then he forced himself to read the official notice from the Army. Another body blow.

  “Good God!” He sank back in his chair, rubbed a trembling hand over his bald spot, and then lurched to his feet, rushed over and locked his office door. The fear spread like a mutating virus. He could barely breathe. He staggered back to his desk and hit his intercom button again. “Sheila, bring me in some water and some aspirin, please.”

  A minute later Sheila knocked on the door. “Mr. Rider,” she said through the door, “it’s locked.”

  He quickly unlocked the door, took the glass and aspirin from her and was about to shut the door again when Sheila said, “Are you okay?”

  “Fine, fine,” he replied, hustling her out the door.

  He looked down at the paper Rufus wanted him to file with the United States Supreme Court. Rider happened to be a member of the largely ceremonial Supreme Court Bar, solely by virtue of the sponsorship of a former colleague in the military who had gone on to the Justice Department. If he did exactly as Rufus asked, he would be the attorney of record in Harms’s appeal. Rider could envision only personal catastrophe resulting from such an arrangement. And yet he had promised Rufus.

  Rider lay down on the leather sofa in one corner of his office, closed his eyes and commenced a silent deliberation. So many things hadn’t added up the night Ruth Ann Mosley had been killed. Rufus didn’t have a history of violence, only a constant failure to follow orders that had enraged many a superior, and, at first, had bewildered Rider as well. Harms’s inability to process even the simplest of commands had been finally explained during Rider’s representation of him. But his escaping from the stockade never had. Confronted with no defense, factually, Rider had made noises about an insanity plea, which had given him just enough leverage to save his client from possible execution. And that had been the end of it. Justice had been served. At least as much as one could expect in this world.

  Rider looked once more at the notice from the Army, the stark lie of the past now firmly revealed. This information should have been in Harms’s military file at the time of the murder, but it wasn’t. It would have constituted a completely plausible defense. Harms’s military file had been tampered with, and Rider now understood why.

  Harms wanted his freedom and his name cleared and he wanted it to come from the highest court in the land. And he refused to entrust the prospect of freedom to the Army. That’s what Harms had said to him while the country-western music had covered his words. And could he blame him?

  All things good were in Rufus’s corner. He should be heard and he should be free. But despite that, Rider remained immobile on his couch of worn leather and burnished nails. It was nothing complex. It was fear — a far stronger emotion, it seemed, than any of the others bestowed upon humankind. He planned to retire in a few years to the condo he and his wife had already picked out on the Gulf Coast. Their kids were grown. Rider was weary of the frigid winters that settled into the low pockets of the area and he was tired of always chasing new pieces of business, of diligently recording his professional life in quarter-hour increments. However, as enticing as that retirement was, it wasn’t quite enough to prevent Rider from helping his old client. Some things were right and some things were wrong.

  Rider rose from the couch and settled behind his desk. At first he had thought the simplest way to help Rufus was to mail what he had to one of the newspapers and let the power of the press take over. But for all he knew, the paper would either toss it as a letter from some crazy, or otherwise bungle it such that Rufus might be put in danger. What had really made up Rider’s mind as to his course of action was simple. Rufus was his client and he had asked his lawyer to file his appeal with the United States Supreme Court. And that’s what Rider was going to do. He had failed Rufus once before; he wasn’t going to do it again. The man was in dire need of a little justice, and what better place for that than the highest court in the land? If you couldn’t get justice there, where the hell could you get it? Rider wondered.

  As he took out a sheet of paper from his desk drawer, sunlight from the window glanced off his square gold cuff links, sending bright dots around the room helter-skelter. He pulled over his ancient typewriter, kept out of nostalgia. Rider was
unfamiliar with the Supreme Court’s technical filing requirements, but he assumed he would be running afoul of most of them. That didn’t bother him. He just wanted to get the story out — away from him.

  When he had finished typing, he started to place what he had typed, together with Harms’s letter and the letter from the Army, into a mailing envelope. Then he stopped. Paranoia, spilling over from thirty years of practice, made him hustle out to the small workroom at the rear of his office suite and make copies of both Harms’s handwritten letter and Rider’s own typewritten one. This same uneasiness made him decide to keep, for now, the letter from the Army. When the story broke he could always produce it, again anonymously. He hid the copies in one of his desk drawers and locked it. He returned the originals to the envelope, looked up the address of the Supreme Court in his legal directory, and next typed up a label. He did not provide a return address on the envelope. That done, he put on his hat and coat and walked down to the post office at the corner.

  Before he had time to change his mind, he filled out the form to send the envelope by certified mail so he would get a return receipt, handed it to the postal clerk, completed the simple transaction and returned to his office. It was only then that it struck him. The return receipt could be a way for the Court to identify who had sent the package. He sighed. Rufus had been