It says that Thomas Hightower was seventeen when he cut school to go drinking with a fast crowd, which got him drunk and dared him to kiss the prettiest girl in school. Hightower went to her farm, where he found Sherri Gilpin in the shed. He asked her out, and she laughed at him.
“Date a nigger?” she said. Allegedly.
In a drunken rage, Hightower slapped her and she fell off balance, cracking her skull against a tractor. He tried to give her CPR, at which point her little sister Sally came in and began to cry. Hightower says he panicked. He couldn’t leave witnesses; it would have killed his mother. So he throttled the child, then, full of shame, he got back into his car and drove himself into a tree. Enter the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which saved his life, reserving for itself the honor of putting him on trial. For death.
Hightower couldn’t afford a lawyer, not that one in the small coal-mining town would represent him anyway. The county judge appointed a kid barely out of night law school to the case, and the jury convicted Hightower of capital murder. During the sentencing hearing, where the jury decides life or death, Hightower’s lawyer argued from the wrong death penalty statute, one that had been ruled unconstitutional three years earlier by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Somehow he had missed that.
The obsolete death statute, the only one presented to this predominantly white jury, said nothing about the fact that a jury could consider Hightower’s youth, his diminished capacity because of alcohol, his lack of a prior criminal record, and the remorse that he demonstrated by his suicide attempt as “mitigating circumstances” in deciding whether to impose the death penalty. The jury took only fifteen minutes to reach its decision. Death.
I set the papers down and look out the huge windows that make up the fourth wall of the office. It’s the dead of night. Orangey streetlamps stretch toward the Delaware River in ribbons. White lights dot the suspension cables on the Ben Franklin Bridge. Traffic signals blink on and off: red, yellow, green. The lights remind me of jewels, twinkling in the black night. I watch them shimmer outside the window and turn the legal issues over in my mind.
The question is whether Hightower’s lawyer was so ineffective that the trial was unfair. Strictly as a legal matter, Hightower probably deserves a new trial; what he deserves as a matter of justice is another matter. This is why I practiced commercial litigation. It has nothing to do with life or death; the questions are black and white, and the right answer is always green.
“Well,” Armen says to himself. “Well, well, well.” He stops typing and reads the last page of his draft. The office is quiet now that Bernice has stopped snoring. I feel like we’re the only people awake, high in the night sky over the twinkly city.
“Well what?”
“I think we’re going to save this kid’s life. What do you think?”
The question takes me aback. “I don’t know. I don’t think of it that way.”
“I do.” He smiles wearily, wrinkling the crows’ feet that make him look older than he is. “I wouldn’t stop if I didn’t think so.”
“Was that your goal?”
“It had to be. His lawyer was incompetent. Anybody else would have gotten him life in prison, instead he’s scheduled to die. They set him up.” He leans back in the chair. Fatigue has stripped something from him: his defenses, maybe, or the professional distance between us. He seems open to me in a way he hasn’t before.
“I didn’t think of it as saving his life. I thought of it as a legal issue.”
“I know that, Grace. That’s why I wanted you on this case. You narrowed your focus to the legalities, divorced yourself from the morality of the thing.”
It stings. “Do you fault me? It’s a legal question, not a moral one.”
“Really? Who said?”
“Holmes.”
“Fuck Holmes,” he says, stretching luxuriously in a blue oxford shirt. His shirtsleeves are bunched at his elbows; his tie is loose. He’s so close I can pick up a trace of his aftershave. “It’s both those things, Grace, law and morality. You can’t separate law from justice. You shouldn’t want to.”
“But then it’s your view of justice, and that varies from judge to judge.”
“I can live with that, it’s in my job description. Judges are supposed to judge. When I read the Eighth Amendment, I think the framers were telling us that government should not torture and kill. That’s the ultimate evil, isn’t it, and it’s impossible to check.” His face darkens.
“I don’t understand,” I say, but I do in part. Armen’s culture is written all over his olive-skinned features, as well as his chambers: the framed documents in a squiggly alphabet on the walls, the picture of Mount Ararat over his desk chair, the oddly ornate lamp bases and brocaded pillows.
“It started piecemeal with the Armenians,” he says, leaning forward. “Our right to speak our own language was taken away. Then our right to worship as Christians. By 1915, they had taken our lives. We were starved, hanged, tortured. Beaten to death, most of us, with that.” He points at a rough-hewn wooden cudgel mounted over the bookshelf.
“I didn’t know.”
“Not many do. Half my people were killed. Half a million of us, wiped out by the Turkish government. All my family, except for my mother.” A flicker of pain furrows his brow.
“I’m sorry.”
He shakes it off. “The point is, government cannot kill its own citizens, not with my help. I know Hightower did a terrible thing. He killed, but I won’t kill him to prove it’s wrong. He should be locked up forever so he never hurts another child. He will be, if I have any say in it.” He seems to catch himself in mid-lecture; then his expression softens. “So thank you, for getting involved.”
“Did I have a choice?”
“No.” He relaxes in the leather chair. “You are involved, you know,” he says quietly.
I see the city lights glowing softly behind him and feel, more than I can understand, that we aren’t talking about the case anymore. “I don’t know—”
“Yes, you do. I’m involved too, Grace. Very involved, as a matter of fact.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I feel my heart start to pound softly. “We can’t do anything about it.”
“Yes, we can. Give me your hand.” He holds out his hand to me.
I look at it, suspended between us, at once a question and an answer. This situation is supposed to be black and white, but it doesn’t feel that way inside.
“Stop thinking. Take it.”
So I do, and it feels strong and warm. He pulls me in to him, as naturally as if we’ve done this a million times before, and in a second I feel myself in his arms and his kiss, gentle on my mouth. Suddenly I hear a noise outside the office and push myself away from his chest. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“There was a noise. Maybe the door?”
“Everything’s all right,” he says. He kisses me again and shifts his weight up underneath me but I press him away.
“Wait. Stop. We can’t.”
“Why not?”
There are rules, aren’t there? “You’re married, for starters.”
He smooths my hair back from my forehead and looks everywhere on my face. “Not anymore,” he says. “My marriage is over.”
It’s a shock. “What? How?”
“It was over a long time ago. Susan asked me to stay with her until the election was over, and I did. She’s coming in the morning to sign the papers. We file tomorrow.”
“For divorce?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“It’s true.” He touches my face. “So you’re not in love? Have I been reading you wrong?”
So much for hiding my emotions. “I don’t know. I mean, I think about you, but it’s been so long.”
“How long?”
“Too long to admit.”
“That’s long enough, don’t you think,” he says, kissing me deeply. Before I can object I find myself responding,
and then I don’t want to object anymore. I lose myself in his kiss, in his warmth. His hands find their way to my breasts, caressing them as we kiss, arousing me. He begins to unfasten the buttons of my blouse, and I feel a skittishness rise, a sort of shame.
“You sure no one’s out there, in the office?” I say.
“No one.” He undoes the button above my breasts, exposing the string of pearls inside my blouse. I stop his hand and his eyes meet mine, uncomprehending. “I won’t hurt you, Grace,” he says softly. “Let me. Let me love you a little.”
“But I—”
“Shhh. I dream about this, about doing this with you.”
“Armen—”
“Let me. You have to.” He smiles and moves my hands away, placing each one on the armrests of the heavy chair. “Keep your hands there. We’re going to take this slow.”
I feel myself breathing hard, excited and scared. “We can’t do this, not here.”
“Hush.” He unfastens the next button, then the next. “Look at yourself, you’re so beautiful.”
I look down and see a flash of pearls tumbling between my breasts. The scalloped cup of a bra. My skirt hiked way up, past the opaque ivory at the top of my pantyhose. I can’t stand it, being undone like this. I look away, out the window. I expect to see the night sky, but the wall of plate glass reflects a dark-haired man and a lighter-haired woman astride him.
Strangely, it’s easier to bear this way, like in a mirror. I can watch it as if it were happening to someone else.
“It’s all right now,” he whispers.
I watch him slip the silk blouse from my shoulders, freeing one arm and the other, then reaching around and unhooking my bra. I feel my breath stop as he tugs my bra down slowly, as if he’s unveiling something precious and pure. He takes a breast in each hand and teases the nipples, and I feel an exquisite tingle as each one contracts under his thumbs. I encircle his head, this head of too-long hair that I know so well, and he burrows happily between my breasts, nuzzling one and then the other.
I hear myself moan and wrap my legs more tightly around him. He responds, rocking me against the hardness growing in his lap, sucking at one nipple and then the other. I feel wetness where he’s suckled and then a slight chill as he suddenly lifts me up and lays me gently back on his arms across the table. My legs lock around his waist and my hands reach for the edge of the table. My pearls fall to the side, the Hightower papers flutter to the floor, and God knows what else slides off the desk.
Poised over me, he stops suddenly. “You’re not looking at me. Look at me, Grace.”
I watch him in the reflection. I can’t do what he’s asking.
He turns my face to his, and his expression mingles concern and pleasure. “Why won’t you look at me?”
“Is your marriage really over?”
“Yes.”
“You swear it?”
“On my life.” He bends over and kisses me gently, pressing between my legs. “Now let it go, Grace. Let go.”
I close my eyes as my body responds to him. And then my heart.
4
The ringing of a telephone shatters a deep, lovely slumber. I hear it, half in and half out of sleep, not sure whether it’s real.
PPPRRRRRRINNNGGG!
I open my eyes a crack and peer at the clock. Its digital numbers read 7:26 A.M.; I’ve been asleep for two hours. I have four whole minutes left. The phone call is a bad dream.
PPPRRRINNNGGG!
It’s real, not a dream. Who the hell could be calling at this hour? Then I remember: Armen. I feel a rush of warmth and stumble to my bureau, cursing the fact that I don’t have an extension close to the bed like everybody else in America. I wish I could just roll over and hear his voice.
“Honey?” says the voice on the line. It’s not Armen, it’s my mother. “Are you up?”
“Of course not. You know how late I got in, you were baby-sitting. What do you want?”
“I’ve been watching the TV news.” I picture her parked in front of her ancient Zenith, with a glass mug of coffee in one hand and a skinny cigarette in the other.
“Mom, it’s seven-thirty. Did you call to chat?” I flop backward onto my quilt.
“I have news.”
I’m sure. You would not believe the things my mother considers news. Liz Taylor gained weight. Liz Taylor lost weight. “What, Ma?”
“Your boss, Judge Gregorian? He committed suicide this morning.”
I sit bolt upright, as if I’ve been electrocuted. I can’t speak.
“They found him at his townhouse in Society Hill. I didn’t know he lived in Society Hill. They said his house is on the National Register of Historic Places.”
I’m stunned.
“He was at his desk, reading papers in that death penalty case.”
“How—”
“He shot himself.”
No. I close my eyes to the mental picture forming like cancer in my brain.
“There was no suicide note,” she continues. “They called somebody named Judge Galanter, who lives in Rosemont. This Galanter gets to be chief judge now, eh?”
I shake my head. There must be some mistake. “My God,” is all I can say.
“Judge Galanter says the court will continue with its operations as before.”
I think of Galanter, taking over. Then Armen, dead. This can’t be happening.
“Galanter said the Hightower case will be reassigned to another judge. Wasn’t that the case you stayed late on?”
“Who found him?”
“His wife, when she got in from Washington. She’s the one who called the police.”
“Susan found him? Did she say anything? Did they interview her?”
Her response is an abrupt laugh; I imagine a puff of smoke erupting from her mouth. “She’s holding a press conference this morning.”
Susan. A press conference. What is going on? Why would Armen do such a thing? I close my eyes, breathing him in, feeling him still. Just hours ago, he was with me. Inside me.
“Are you there?” my mother asks.
I want to say, I’m not sure.
I’m not sure where I am at all.
5
I pack Maddie off to school in record time and barrel down the expressway into Center City, rattling in my VW station wagon past far more able cars. KYW news radio confirms over and over that Armen committed suicide. I swallow the pain welling up inside and tromp on the gas.
I can’t get to the courthouse doors because of the press, newly arrived to feast on the news. Reporters are everywhere, the TV newspeople waiting around in apricot-colored pancake. Cameramen thread black cables through a group of demonstrators, also new to the scene. There must be forty pickets, walking in a silent circle, saying nothing. I look up at their signs, screaming for justice against a searing blue sky: HIGHTOWER.
But I have to get inside.
“Would you like one?” asks an older man in a checked short-sleeved shirt. He holds a pink flyer in a hand missing a thumb; his face is weatherbeaten like a farmer’s. “It tells about my daughters.”
“Your daughters?” I look up in surprise.
He nods. “Do you have children?”
“Yes. A daughter.”
“How old?”
“Six.” I don’t want to talk to him. I can’t think about Hightower now. I want to get inside.
“Does she like Barney?”
“No, she likes Madeline. The doll.”
The deep creases at his eyes soften into laugh lines. “My little one, Sally? She liked dolls. She had a Barbie, and Barbie’s sister, too. What was the name of that sister doll?” He looks down at a pair of shiny brown shoes and scratches his head between grayish slats of hair. “My wife would know,” he says, his voice trailing off.
“Skipper.”
“Right!” He laughs thickly, a smoker. “That’s right. Skipper. Skipper, that’s the one.”
I seize the moment. “Well, I should go.”
“Sure thing
. You hafta get to work.” He thrusts the flyer into my hand. On it is a black-and-white photograph of two pretty girls sitting on a split wooden rail. The typed caption says SHERRI AND SALLY GILPIN. I glance at it, stunned for a second. I knew the way they died, but I didn’t know the way they lived. The younger one, Sally, has a meandering part in her hair like Maddie’s, a giveaway that she hated to have her hair brushed. I can’t take my eyes from the little girl; she was strangled, the life choked out of her. What did Armen say last night? We saved a life.
“You better go, we don’t want you to get fired on our account,” says the man. “God bless you now.”
I nod, rattled, and make my way through the crowd with difficulty. Several of the women in line look at me: solid, sturdy women, their faces plain, without makeup. I avoid them and push open the heavy glass doors to the bustling courthouse lobby. I slip the flyer into my purse and flash a laminated court ID at the marshals at the security desk in front of the elevator bank. Two minutes later, I plow through the heavy door to chambers.
Eletha is sitting at her desk, staring at a blue monitor with a stick-figure rendering of a courthouse made by one of the programmer’s kids. Underneath the picture it says: ORDER IN THE COURT! WELCOME TO THE THIRD CIRCUIT COURT WORD PROCESSING SYSTEM! The door closes behind me, but Eletha doesn’t seem to hear it.
“El?”
She swivels slowly in her chair. Her eyes are puffy, and she rises unsteadily when she sees me. “Grace.”
I go over to her, and she almost collapses into my arms, her bony frame caving in like a rickety house. “It’s okay, Eletha. It’s gonna be okay,” I say, feeling just the opposite.
I rub her back, and her body shakes with highpitched, wrenching cries. “No, no, no,” is all she says, over and over, and I hold her steady through her weeping. I feel oddly remote in the face of her obvious grief, and realize with a chill I’m acting like my mother did when my father disappeared; nothing has changed, pass the salt.