The Occupied Page 8

  The man looked positively satisfied with himself. “Obviously my date had the same blood type as Heather.”

  It struck me that this was the first time that Kamera mentioned Heather by name. So, in turn, I asked him for the name and address of the “date” he had supposedly been with.

  Kamera twitched a little. I hadn’t noticed before that he had a tic. He shot back, “Why is that important? I thought you were going to suppress the handkerchief from evidence?”

  “I hope to get it suppressed,” I replied. “But nothing is certain. Just to be safe, I’d like to interview the woman you met at the bar. The one with the nosebleed.”

  He let out a big sigh, but it came out in a series of panicked exhales. “Let’s take things . . . one . . . step at a time.”

  I blew that off and told him he’d better produce the information about his bar date, and quick, if I was going to be able to effectively represent him, particularly if the judge didn’t kick the bloody handkerchief out of evidence.

  He didn’t respond to that. At the same time he looked distracted, giving side-glances around the room, though what he kept looking for, I couldn’t tell. The room was empty except for the two of us.

  Second by second, things became very bizarre. Dunning Kamera twisted his head to the side and back again, back and forth, like it was being operated by mechanical control. Then he said something that made absolutely no sense. At least, not at the time.

  “The life is in the blood. Or so they say.” After he said that, he gurgled out something even more cryptic. “But that depends on why the blood is spilled. Right? And from what part of the body.”

  After that strange dictum, I wondered whether I had missed something in my defense strategy. Maybe my client needed a psychiatric evaluation. Perhaps I should consider a plea of not guilty by reason of mental defect or think about challenging his competency to stand trial.

  But what happened next made me wonder about myself. And whether my coffee from the courthouse vending machine had been laced with LSD. Or if I really was mentally unhinged after all.

  Because just then I was hit with that same odor. The foul stench of smoky incineration from the Manitou landfill. It filled my senses to the point of my nearly gagging.

  I quickly surveyed the holding cell. No fire could be in the room, and of course there wasn’t.

  At that point, Kamera’s hands were clasped together on the table so tightly that his knuckles were white, and his face was hard and troubled. Something was about to give way. I suppose I could have retreated at that point, but at the same time I couldn’t turn away. I had to see this through. Find out what was behind the veil. A clammy dread crept up my spine as I recalled that long-ago phrase. It hadn’t crossed my mind in more than twenty years.

  So I steeled myself and proceeded to ask my client the question that I was pretty sure would light up the fireworks, whatever those might be. “Tell me, Dunning. Answer something for me, will you?”

  His head twisted back toward me again, like an automaton’s. “Yes?”

  “Suppose you were to take Heather’s dead body. And you also take a paintbrush. The thin kind, you know, like an artist might use to paint a picture on a canvas. Are you following me?”

  No answer from my client. But his head was now slowly cranking backward with his eyes still glued on me.

  I forged ahead, ignoring the fact that my skin was crawling. “And if you were to dip that paintbrush into Heather’s blood . . . and you were to write a question on her body . . .”

  Now Dunning Kamera’s face was radically changing. From a pale sickly color to translucence, where I thought I could actually see the veins in his skull. I had to remind myself to keep breathing as my client continued to morph, with the flesh of his face becoming more and more transparent.

  Some kind of nightmare was unfolding, but I had to see it through. I quickly spat out the rest of the question. “What would you write on her dead body?”

  By then I wasn’t simply smelling the putrid presence. I was beginning to see it. Visualizing a form that was arising from within my client. Something even more transparent than Kamera, but still visible, as if two images had been laid one on top of the other, slightly askew, the way you would see if you had double vision.

  I watched as Kamera stumbled up to a standing position, knocking over the plastic chair in which he had been sitting. His head tilted back farther still, staring almost straight up. Something was pulling his strings. The creature that had emanated from his body was controlling him.

  The head of the thing looked like some kind of animal. Hideous, resembling a huge, hairless jackal. With clear, vacant eyes; they were the eyes of the dead, and its mouth was yanked wide open with an interior of absolute blackness within.

  Dumbfounded, I heard myself moan, “No, no, no.”

  Then it screamed.

  The sound was a cacophony. Like cars dumped from a great height onto each other.

  Then it spoke, and it was as if the sound of a car crash had been digitally remastered into a voice. In that voice the creature roared, “You’re doomed.”

  Both Dunning Kamera and the creature that had enveloped him simultaneously grabbed ahold of the metal table and ripped it out of the floor, pulling the large machine bolts out of the concrete, and then lifted the table up high. As if the next move would be to bring it down onto my head and to bash my brains out.

  I yelled out a plea. “God, please, no.”

  The voice of the creature was still reverberating in my ears. But Dunning and the horrid thing both seemed to be frozen momentarily in midpose, holding the table over my head.

  I lunged toward the jail cell door and started banging on it, yelling at the top of my lungs for the guard. An eternity of seconds later, he ambled up to the door, unlocked it, and said with a weary tone, “What’s the big emergency?”

  Jerking around, I spotted Dunning Kamera. He was seated at the table as if nothing had happened. Gone was the creature. The heavy metal table was back in its exact place. Kamera’s hands were folded perfectly on the surface of the table.

  The scene looked harmless. As if nothing extraordinary had occurred, and I had imagined all of it.

  15

  I was standing just outside the courtroom of Judge June Cavendish, leaning against the wall. The hearing was about to commence in five minutes. But I had to flush my brain first. Exorcise the grotesque images and plot out some kind of statement to the court. I already knew what I had to do next, once Dunning Kamera’s case was called. I just didn’t know how I was going to frame it. How to fit it into the straitjacket of the law. But who was I kidding? The law had neither procedure nor precedent for any of this.

  Instinctively, I began cooking up a clever lie so I could confidently march in there and tell it to the court. Some crafty technical reason, totally unfounded, but plausible, giving legal support to what I was about to do. But the truth about Dunning Kamera was burning a hole in my insides, and for some reason, I found the idea of falsifying the facts strangely repugnant. This new me would, if pressed, have to tell it to the judge. The whole, honest-to-goodness truth.

  Was this really me, thinking like this?

  Then a voice.

  “Don’t think so hard, Trevor. You’ll hurt yourself.” It was the prosecutor, Betty Verring, short, middle-aged, with salt-and-pepper hair and small, intense eyes that were like those ultra-white, obnoxious headlights that some cars have. She was holding her own Kamera file under one arm. “Geez, Trevor, relax. It’s only a status conference.” Then she smiled.

  But I couldn’t smile back. I just nodded.

  She came to a halt. A softer look broke over her face. “Hey, you all right?”

  I nodded again. She gave a single shoulder shrug and trotted into the courtroom. After another half minute, I followed her.

  Our case was the only one on the docket. Amazingly, the courtroom was empty except for the court reporter and the clerk, who were already in their places, and Betty, who
was sitting at the plaintiff’s table pulling a few papers out of her file. Best of all, no media.

  I made my way to the defense table, dropped my fat briefcase to the ground, and slouched in the chair. This was not going to go well, I was sure of that.

  Then Dunning Kamera shuffled in, his hands and feet manacled, with two jail guards, one on each side. One of the guards pointed to the chair next to me at the defense table. My client clumsily grabbed the back of the chair, pulled it out, and sat to my right. The word eerie seemed ridiculously inadequate to describe how it felt with him sitting next to me.

  Judge June Cavendish, a judicial dictator with reading glasses set in place just above her hairline, breezed in, her black robe fluttering around her. The few of us in the courtroom rose to our feet. The judge dumped herself into the big black judicial chair, grabbed the file from the bench in front of her, and flipped it open. The clerk called the case, Betty announced her appearance for the state of New York, I did the same as counsel for the defense, and then we all sat down.

  The judge started. “Okay. Status conference. Let’s talk about defense motions first.”

  I stood up. “Your Honor, I would like to confer with the court.” Then I added, “At sidebar.”

  The judge glanced around the room, obviously noting that there were no members of the public or the press. “Mr. Black, there’s nobody here. The courtroom’s empty. What’s so mysterious that you need to approach the bench?”

  “At sidebar,” I reiterated. “Please, Your Honor.”

  “Fine.” She waved both Betty and me up to the front. When we were standing at her judicial bench, I began with a voice dropped down to a hush. “Judge, I have to withdraw from this case.”

  “Why is that?”

  I took a second. Then, “Your Honor, I am asking that you trust me on this.”

  Judge Cavendish crossed her arms in front of her and leaned over to me, bringing her face down real low. “Don’t confuse me with one of your cocktail cronies. That would be a tragic mistake. Let’s hear it again.”

  “Sorry, Your Honor.” This time I polished it up a bit. “I am asking that I be permitted to withdraw as counsel on the grounds that my client and I have an irreconcilable conflict. It prevents me from being able to defend him zealously.”

  “What kind of conflict?”

  I was trying to construct a lawyerly response in my head that might avoid putting an end to my legal career. The judge got tired of waiting, and after ten seconds she interrupted. “Let’s get your client’s take on this . . .”

  “No,” I blurted out. “Bad idea.”

  “Look, counsel. One way or another your client, Mr. Kamera, is probably going to have to be heard on your request. Either he consents and has some new lawyer waiting in the wings, in which case I’ll probably let you withdraw, subject to any objections of the prosecution of course. Or else your client objects, in which case you’d better have a prizewinning reason that will convince me. Prizewinning, as in qualifying for the Pulitzer or the Medal of Honor. You get me?”

  “My client . . . ,” I began, wishing that I could just lay it all out—the whole insane thing—and be done with it.

  But it didn’t happen like that. Not quite that way.

  “Your client . . . what?” Cavendish sputtered. “Finish the sentence.”

  “My client has . . .” But I couldn’t finish the sentence. Betty Verring was watching the whole thing with astonishment. It struck me that I should have asked for an in camera conference with the judge in her chambers. Just her and me. It would have been a hard sell, but it would have been worth the try.

  Instead, the prosecution would now be an eyewitness to my professional dissolution.

  Judge Cavendish was moving from simmer to boil. “I am ordering you to spell this out for me, Mr. Black . . .”

  “It’s hard to explain,” I mumbled.

  She leaned back in her chair. “Are you mentally impaired in some way, counsel?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what is it you’re trying to say? Your client has . . . what?” she yelled.

  The truth couldn’t stay silent. I declared, “My client has a demon.”

  The judge winced a little as she considered what I had just said. Then a half smile when she replied, “Demon? Yeah, well, don’t we all. What’s his, a drug problem?”

  “No.”

  “Then in what possible sense do you mean that your client has a demon?”

  After taking a second, I replied. “I mean it literally, Your Honor. He is possessed by a demon.”

  Silence. I could hear the creaking of the leather on the gun belts of the guards as they shifted where they stood.

  The judge must have been feeling beneficent that day, because she gave me a second chance. “I am giving you the opportunity, counsel, right now, to retract that statement. Or else to clarify it in some way that conforms to the twenty-first century, rather than the Middle Ages.”

  “I can’t, Your Honor. I meant exactly what I said.”

  Cavendish eased back in her judicial chair and swiveled back and forth. Then she spoke. “It is always sad when this happens. Personal trauma. Or substance abuse. Whatever the reason, when a good lawyer—and you, Mr. Black, have a reputation as an accomplished defense attorney—when a lawyer unravels like this.”

  “You don’t understand,” I interjected.

  “No, you don’t understand,” she blasted back. “I am removing you from this case. I am ordering the office of the public defender to take over representation of your client, Dunning Kamera, until such time as he is able to secure private counsel.” She drummed her fingernails on the bench as she finished. “I also have no choice but to report your behavior to the ethics committee of the bar . . .”

  “Join the club,” I said.

  “What did you say?” she blurted out.

  For whatever reason, I stupidly repeated it.

  The judge gaveled me out of the courtroom. With gusto. In retrospect, I realized she could have ordered a bailiff to bundle me off to jail on contempt of court charges. But she didn’t. Small blessings. I would be searching for those, from that point onward.

  16

  It wasn’t surprising that the ethics committee of the New York Bar, after suspending me, gave me a chance to recover my law license, even after my slugging one client and calling another a demoniac in open court. The fact was, I had never suffered any discipline before and had an excellent professional reputation up to then. My partners weren’t so easily mollified, though. Hal Tobit broke the news to me that I was out of the firm via a letter on my desk. “With sadness and regret,” was how he wrote it.

  It lit my fuse that I had to endure psychiatric “treatment” as a condition of applying for reinstatement of my license, but I was reluctantly willing to give it a shot. The morning that I was to report to the psychiatrist’s office, I made myself a cup of coffee and quickly leafed through the newspaper. Something caught my eye as I flew through the arts and leisure section on the way to the sports.

  It was a blurb about a jazz festival in Newark. Listed among the performers was the Jersey Dan Quartet. That would be New Jersey Dan Hoover, one of my blues band buddies from high school in Wisconsin. He was going by the shorter, simpler moniker of “Jersey Dan,” having permanently relocated to the East Coast twenty years ago. His success didn’t surprise me, as he was a phenomenal guitar talent, even when we were teenagers. Head and shoulders above the rest of us in The Assault.

  All things being equal, I would have gone to the jazz fest just to see Dan in action. But then, I had my own miseries to attend to.

  Two hours later I was sitting in the poorly decorated office of Dr. Roland Dumfrey, the appointed shrink, who busied himself with rocking back and forth in his chair during our first session. He spent the first hour on my background and personal history. It was during the second hour when things got interesting.

  “Do you resent being here?”

  “Of course.”r />
  “Because you feel you don’t belong here?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m not psychotic.”

  “Who says you are?”

  “You didn’t have to. Neither did the ethics committee of the bar association. It’s clearly implied in everything that has happened to me up to now.”

  “Implied?”

  “If I am not delusional, or psychotic, then why was I ordered to submit myself to you?”

  “You could have chosen your own mental health professional—”

  “No, no,” I replied. “I don’t mean that. I mean that being ordered into mental health counseling presumes that I have a problem.”

  “Everyone has problems.”

  “Can everyone spot demons in the room?”

  A small smile crept over the good doctor’s mouth.

  I continued. “Visualizing evil beings from another dimension and talking to them, that presents only two alternatives. Number one, it is evidence of visual and auditory hallucinations. My drug screening in your file tells you that I don’t take drugs. So then, you’re thinking it must be a matter of psychosis or some schizoaffective disorder.”

  “Or?” he asked.

  “Or, secondly, that I really did witness some kind of supernatural event.”

  I watched Dr. Dumfrey closely, but he did a good job of acting like he was made of plastic.

  “And in that case,” I went on, “well, the supernatural realm—that’s not exactly in your wheelhouse. Am I correct?”

  He moved a little in his swivel chair. “Let’s talk about your wife.” He glanced down at the file. “Courtney.”

  “Dead. Cocaine overdose. Broke my heart. I have some guilt and much regret about our relationship and the way it ended for her. I am still experiencing grief, but I am quite functional. Oh, and one more thing.”

  “What is that?”

  “My wife and her tragic death have nothing to do with the incredulous things that I have witnessed.”