Chapter Twelve -Arraignment
The first time I met One-Way Goff, Public Defender, was the day of arraignment. Goff introduced himself as my lawyer and explained what would happen.
"The judge will read the charges against you. They will set bail. Do you have something else to wear? Do you have a suit?" He was frowning at the orange overalls they give you to wear in jail.
I shrugged. I didn't own a suit. The clothes I was arrested in, were now evidence. All I had that moment were the bright orange overalls. They were used and should have softened up by now but they were made of a thick stiff polyester that was almost like plastic. How many guys had worn them before me I didn't like to think about. I pictured Death Row, dead men walking in orange jumpsuits.
Goff sighed and shrugged back at me.
"At least there's no jury today. But it'll look bad in the press. Too bad we don't have time to get you something else."
Cummings, the Corrections Officer, handcuffed me and put the leg irons around my ankles connected by a chain so that I could only lift my arms to my chest. The chain between my ankles was short and I took short choppy steps as they lead me to the van. You can't run. Though where they thought I would run to, I had no idea.
The Perp Walk is the walk you take from the jail van into the court house and I hopped like a jailbird for the cameras, people shouting my name and snapping and whirring and strobe flashes blinding my eyes.
The court room was brightly lit and the tables and railings gleamed with the cleaner-rubbed grease of decades. There must have been fifty gallons of Lemon Pledge wiped over the stuff in that room. The place smelled funny.
The court room was full of people gawking at the Thrill Killer. Reporters writing on pads and electronic devices, thumbing text. No pictures were allowed in there.
A cop, or maybe he was Department of Corrections. I don't know what they have at court. Maybe the Marshall's Office like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive? Anyway, he took the shackles off and I started rubbing the blood back into my hands. Cummings always snapped the cuffs on tight. I always thought Cummings would like to hurt people if he could get away with it. Then they took us to court.
The prosecutor was already sitting at his table. He was about forty, I think, a good looking man with a great head of hair. You could tell it was his pride and joy and he took good care of it. He was wearing big gold rimmed glasses and he took them off to stare at me as I walked into court. He didn't blink once or turn his eyes away until, finally, when Goff guided me to my place, he let his eyelids slowly fall, cutting me off from his sight and he turned his head away and went back to his reading.
Goff and I were standing by the defense table when Cassie came in.
She stopped for a moment to say something to two women sitting on the aisle. They were stern looking creatures with long black hair and eyes like Cassie's. One of the women had a single shock of gray through her hair, one white stripe an inch wide as if she'd been struck with lightning and it had turned her gray just there. She felt me staring at her and she looked at me. I could feel those black, black eyes on me. Then she let a little smile leak onto her face and it felt like a drink of water, it had been so long since anybody had smiled at me.
Cassie turned away from them when the policewoman took her arm and told her to move. Cassie was wearing a dress that just reached her knees but showed me her legs. It was the first time I'd ever seen her dressed that way. She wore makeup. I had never seen her like that, although sometimes she would cut two hard lines of black pencil over her eyes, like war paint, if she was feeling mean.
This was different. She was like a magazine model. It was like an artist had come in and drawn a new face for her. She looked like a different person, younger, sweeter. Rosy. Soft. Innocent. And so beautiful. I tried to catch her eyes. She looked straight ahead, at the wall of the court room behind the judge's seat. Between the American and State flags.
Cassie's lawyer was a woman. She looked a lot more together than One-Way. She was better dressed for one thing and her whole image and the way she held herself was much more... professional? Confident? Yes. Confident.
The judge came into court and everybody stirred around and the cop or the court clerk or whoever he was shouted, "All rise" though nobody was sitting but the prosecutor. But they all shuffled respectfully, clearing their throats and trying to dignify things.
The judge was a little old man, bald as I have said. He seemed cranky and out of sorts to me. Which made my heart sink. He looked like every old man that ever yelled at me for hanging around drugstores or parking lots. Every old security guard that ever looked straight through me when they gave me directions or followed me through a store because they knew trouble when they saw it.
He stepped up on the high platform where his tall desk was perched and looked down on all of us as if we were all guilty, the only difference being, some of us hadn't got caught yet.
He took up a paper to read the charges. But I didn't listen. I was staring at Cassie willing her to look in my direction just once. But she never did. She was listening to the judge politely, a little sad that it had come to this.
"Lloyd David Harper, how do you plead?"
I didn't answer because as I said I wasn't paying attention to him, only watching Cassie, this new girl who didn't seem to know me, who would never have known me.
"Lloyd David Harper!" The judge said, raising his voice. I flinched.
"Yes, Sir!" I said.
"I would like your full attention during these proceedings, young man, today and every day hereafter. Is that clear?"
I nodded my head.
"Don't shake your head at me. You must answer out loud for the record."
"Yes, Sir! It's clear."
"Good. Young man, it hasn't yet been decided whether to try you as an adult or not, but it's very possible that you are here on trial for your life. Mr. Goff?" he said to One-Way. "I want you to have a talk with your client and impress upon him the gravity of his situation."
"I was appointed to this case just this morning you Honor."
"Did I ask you for your sad story, Mr. Goff?"
"No, You Honor."
"Then tell this young man what is at stake here and how he should conduct himself in future."
"Yes, Your Honor," said One-Way.
"Because he certainly doesn't understand it now."
"No, Your Honor. I'll talk to him."
"Good. Now, Mr. Harper. How do you plead? Guilty or Not Guilty?"
The one thing Goff had time to tell me was what to say to this.
I said that I was not guilty of the murder of Stanislaus Paul "Donny" Cioukowsky.
Then the judge quickly said, "Very well," and set the bail.
Goff began to plead but the judge was having none of it. I was afraid something had gone wrong with my mind or that my hearing had gone bad. I thought I had heard the word "Million." The judge ruled One-Way down and that was that. He turned his attention to Cassie.
Cassie pleaded "Not Guilty" in a little girl's voice but the judge set her bail at a million dollars nonetheless. Her lawyer argued but that was the way it was going to be: the Thrill Killers were not going to be bailed out for less than one million each.
Then they hustled us away and the last I saw of her she was going through one door and I was going through another.
Once Goff and I were back in Juvee, in the room where you meet your lawyer, he said, "Can you make bail?"
"A million dollars? You crazy?"
"What about your mom's house? She could put that up for collateral."
"I don't know what the house is worth, but it ain't no million bucks, for sure. I wouldn't give you ten cents for it."
One-Way was silent then. I guess he was wishing he was somewhere else, defending Kim Kardashian for attacking a paparazzi or something, instead of stuck with a young punk that everybody in town wanted to see take lethal injection.
It's a funny thing the way this works, but now that he was dead, Stan Cioukowsky, a drunk loser that nobody cared about when he was alive, had become a sad story on the local News at Eleven. A Tragic Tale of a simple working man, salt of the earth, trying to save his one and only child from bad companions, murdered in cold blood by a dangerous teenage psychopath and the feeling was I should get the death penalty. Who cared how old I was? Kill him! was what they said.
Yeah, I could hear them at the bars talking about how the world was going to hell and it was because "these young punks don't got no respect for decent working people. Think they can get away with murder now" and if some "wise-ass liberal Jew Lawyer wants to get him off" well, they just wouldn't stand for it, that's all.
Goff told me how to behave in court just the way he promised the judge. Later he brought me a suit my mother had given him. It had been left behind by my old man and it was a little too small. But they sent over a tailor from the State Prison who was doing life for murdering his wife and he let it out. The suit was still snug but the guy was a good tailor, even though a murderer, and I didn't look like a fool in it.
But from then on, I felt like I was living in dead men's clothes.