The Law

Will was tossed into a cell at the very end of Cell Block Something (he hadn’t gotten a good look at the sign when they dragged him in). The guard wordlessly pushed him in and Will spun around on his heels just in time to see the door slammed and locked. His first instinct was to run up to grab the bars and looked out with panic splashed across his face. Someone across the hall laughed at him and he whirled around to look at his cellmate for the first time.

“Hey,” said the large man, reclining on his bed with a magazine. His head had been shaved about a week ago and he looked like he had played football in high school. He was an imposing figure, even lying down. “My name is James. What’s yours?”

Will struggled to speak. He had to swallow and lick his lips a few times before he could introduce himself.

“Nice to meet you, Will. What are you in for?”

“They say I murdered my wife,” Will stuttered.

“What are you stuttering about?” James asked, obviously irritated.

“I’m just a little nervous, is all. I’ve never been in prison before.” James chuckled.

“Is that so? So what do you think I’m in for?” Will shrugged. “Big guy like me, you’d probably think some violent crime, right?” Will shrugged. “Well, you’d be right.” Will swallowed.

“What exactly?”

“Embezzlement.”

“That’s not a violent crime,” Will said, instantly afraid he had enraged the large man by contradicting him.

“Isn’t it?” James roared. “Bilking hard-working people out of their life-savings to fill my coffers? Leaving someone without enough money to pay for medicine or electricity for the month so I could buy another boat? That’s not violent?”

“I guess it is.”

“Well not technically,” James said. “Metaphorically, though, you see what I’m getting at?”

“Yes I do, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir,” James said, returning to his magazine.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” James put down his magazine and examined Will closely for the first time. “Look at you, you’re shaking like a leaf. You’re pretty terrified right now, aren’t you?” All Will could do was raise his shoulders and tilt his head. “Watched too many prison movies. This place isn’t so bad.”

“No?”

“All the things you’ve heard about this place aren’t true.”

“No?”

“By that I mean prison in general. I don’t know if they told you anything about the structure itself or the history or whatnot, but that stuff is probably true. It was built in 1912, for example. I don’t think they would lie about that. But prison in general isn’t like you’ve heard about.”

“Good,” Will sighed, letting his guard down a bit for the first time.

“Besides the homosexuality, of course.”

“The what?” Will asked, knowing exactly what James had just said.

“I’m joking, calm down.” Will laughed nervously and collapsed on his bed. “So did you do it? The murder, that is.”

“No.”

“Rough. Have you seen a lawyer yet?”

“He should be here any second.”

___________

More than an hour later, a guard walked up to Will’s cell and unlocked the door. “Your lawyer is here,” he said blankly and James saluted him as he slid off his cot and followed the guard down the hallway. Will’s eyes darted around the prison nervously, trying to tell if someone was looking at him or posing any sort of threat.

Will was brought into the visitor’s room and pointed to a stool in front of the glass with the telephones just like he had seen on TV. Only the phones here were bright yellow like bananas. He sat down in his stool across from a young man wearing a suit that was a subtle shade of purple. The man had blonde hair that was almost yellow which was parted prominently down the center. He was rubbing his temples with his eyes closed and his head against the desk in front of him. Two women sat on either side of him. They both wore matching conservative gray suits though one’s shirt was colored like a cantaloupe and the other like a honeydew. The woman with the honeydew shirt was short with dark brown hair cropped just below her ears while the other had long light-brown hair which was held together in a bun at an odd angle on the right side of her head. When Will sat down and picked up the phone, Honeydew poked the attorney with a pen and he suddenly bolted up in his seat, looking a little nauseous.

“Eric Haywood, I’m your lawyer,” he said breathlessly into the phone. He went to offer Will his hand but it slammed against the glass separating them.

“Where were you?” Will demanded. “You were supposed to be here an hour and a half ago.”

“I know, I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll be honest, I had to call a cab because I was still a little drunk from last night.” Both women whipped out legal pads and Bic ballpoint pens (one blue and the other black) and began taking notes.

“Who are they?”

“This is Sophie, she’s another attorney who will be assisting me on this case and this is Meredith who is an intern or a trainee or something.” Eric made no indication which one was which and neither lifted her head from her notes so Will decided that the short one would be Meredith and the other Sophie.

“Nice to meet you, so what are you going to do about my case?”

“God!” Eric said, massaging his temples and squinting unattractively. “I hate these surprise weekend cases. They’re the worst.”

“It’s Thursday.”

“Tell me about it. So I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

Will grunted in frustration. “Well I’m just a little concern about my impending murder trial and I was wondering if you were going to be able to help me.”

“Right, right,” Eric said. “See, here’s what I think we need to do, Meredith please take this down.” Both women, who had been writing the entire time, continued writing just as they had been. “Now first things first. How do you feel about pleading guilty?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I just ask so I know right off the bat what kind of work I need to do on this one.”

“Well no, I am not going to plead guilty.”

“Insanity?”

“No. Look. I’m innocent and I need you to get me off because I didn’t do it. Can you do that for me?” Eric groaned and lifted his left hand to his forehead.

“Have you ever mixed alcohol and pills?”

“What?”

“Don’t,” Eric said unequivocally with pained laughter. “I did a little bit of that last night and it was a pretty big mistake.”

“All right well I’m glad you had fun last night, but I spent last night in prison,” Will said. He was seething now; his hand was sweating and he was holding the phone so tightly he felt it might dissolve between his fingers.

“I had sex with this one,” Eric said, pointing at the woman Will had decided was Sophie. Her head suddenly shot up and she looked straight ahead, mortified. “Not bad,” Eric said, shrugging. “I’ve had better but then I was pretty numb so maybe I oughta give her another shot.”

“You won’t get another shot,” the woman who could have been Sophie shot back, grabbing the phone from Eric’s hand then handing it back and returning to her notes.

“I’ve got half a bottle of rum at my place that says differently. This one’ll drink anything,” Eric said, looking at his watch. “We about through here?” he asked.

“No! We haven’t done anything. How are you going to get me out of here?”

“Look. This is a complicated case and I just got the files this morning and I was going to read them in the cab but I fell asleep and I get carsick when I read anyway. Long story short I will read the files and we’ll meet again how about Tuesday?”

“That’s unacceptable!” But Eric had already hung up the phone and gestured to his companions that it was time to go. They capped their pens and followed him out of the room as Will screamed in vain at his defense team through the soundproof glass.

___________

Will had only just been returned to his cell by a tall guard with dark hair and mirrored sunglasses when a second tall guard with dark hair and mirrored sunglasses pulled him out of the cell, telling him he had a visitor. James never looked up from a scarf he was crocheting.

Will returned to the same telephone in the visitor’s room to see the wife he was accused of killing sitting across from him. She was wearing a breezy summer dress peppered with dim pastel flowers and her reddish wavy hair was clipped behind her head. She was wearing sunglasses and a fake moustache to conceal her identity.

“Sarah, where have you been?”

“Keep it down,” she hissed, looking back and forth trying to tell if anyone had heard what he’d said. “If anyone asks I’m dead, okay?”

“But Sarah, I’m in jail.”

“I know, I know. I just needed to get away for a while. I owe some people some money—it’s a complicated situation. And that’s another thing,” Sarah suddenly remembered. “Do I have to wait for you?”

“Well that would be nice.”

“Because I just think that the mature thing for you to do is to let me get on with my life and pursue other people. You could be here for years.”

“I could be out of here in ten minutes if you just told the police who you were and got me out of here.”

Sarah sighed, annoyed. “That’s clearly not an option,” she said, adjusting her moustache. “Besides, then I’d be imprisoned for filing a fake police report.”

“What? Why?”

“Well somebody had to call in my murder. Lord knows you weren’t going to do it.” Sarah had “disappeared” on Monday night at about 9:30 PM. Will had fallen asleep in front of the television and when he woke up the next morning, he assumed his wife had left for work early. When he got home that evening and Sarah was still not home, he assumed she was working late and fell asleep in front of the television again and awoke the next morning once again assuming his wife had left for work early. This went on until Thursday when Sarah (who had been observing her husband the entire time with a telescope from a ditch across the street) grew frustrated and called the police to report that she had been murdered on Monday. Her husband’s ignorance of this lie immediately aroused police suspicion. The DNA that Sarah had planted was also difficult to explain.

“Well isn’t it a little selfish to put me in jail just so you can run off on your own?” Will asked.

“Replace me with you and you with me and running off with stay out of prison and now who’s the selfish one?” Will pondered this for a second. “I don’t think I can wait for you,” Sarah said before he had taken it all in.

“You don’t have to wait for me. You can walk up to the warden now and say ‘it’s me, that Sarah woman who everyone thinks is dead, so could you please let my husband go?’ and this whole thing could be over just like that.”

“I didn’t wait for you.” Sarah shrugged her shoulders in a comical show of apology and regret. Will just stared back at her. “Sorry!” she said, stretching the R and Y sounds like children do when they don't want their parents to be angry with them.

“When did this happen? Is this what all this is about?”

“No, no not at all. I was nothing but faithful until the day I died.”

“And then?”

“Well a couple days after that, I met this really nice guy in a café and we got to talking and I think we really hit it off.”

“Is this what you came here to tell me?” Will asked angrily. “That you put me in jail and found somebody else and you’re going to let me rot in here while you run off with him?”

“I’m sorry. But that’s not why I came here,” Sarah said defensively. “I came here to ask you for a divorce.”

“A divorce?”

“Yes. I need you to divorce me so I can get married to David. David is the man I was telling you about. He’s six-foot-five and he plays basketball in an amateur league. He’s very good. I think you’d like him.”

“But if you’re dead then how can I divorce you?”

“You mean to ask how I can marry someone else if I’m dead. Divorce is the easy part. There’s not a judge in this country who wouldn’t accept murder as grounds for divorce. Just sign the papers. I’ll have Haywood bring them by the next time he drops by.”

“How do you know my lawyer?”

“Because I hired him for you.”

Will was irate again. “Why would you give me such an awful lawyer?”

“Because I need your lawyers to be incompetent so you stay in jail and nobody knows I’m still alive,” Sarah said matter-of-factly. “This guy think I’m dead.”

Will had too many questions at once and he was too frustrated and confused to express them clearly. “But what does me being in jail have to do with you getting away? And how can Haywood think you’re dead if you hired him?”

“How can a dead woman hire a lawyer?” Sarah said cleverly as if the two were sharing a secret. Will tried to speak again, but Sarah winked and put her finger to her lips to indicate that he must remain silent.

Will could only sigh. “You’ve got to get me out of here,” he said, completely resigned to a situation he couldn’t even begin to understand, silently agreeing to something he had no conception of.

“I’m doing everything I can,” Sarah said apologetically and with such sincerity that Will completely believed her and would have followed her to the ends of the earth. Sarah adjusted her moustache, hung up the phone, and left.

___________

The next day, Will was hustled from the prison to the courthouse amidst a cyclone of flashing bulbs and lenses and microphones. It seems Will’s case had become the story du jour in the media since he had left the outside world. Reporters milled around him and he guessed that the crowd went twelve or thirteen deep but it might have stretched forever as far as he could tell. Boom mics circled him like birds of prey in formation until they began jostling for position and crashed into each other. Questions bounced off each other and blended together until all Will heard were dozens of identical voices shouting words which had been chopped off from their sentences; nouns fired through the air with no verbs or conjunctions or syntax of any kind to connect them in any sort of coherence or put them in any kind of context. Will’s bewildered face was instantly shot across the globe above fragments and catch phrases which neatly summed the chaos in no more than seven words.

Will found himself in a small conference room with Eric, Sophie, and Meredith. Eric was pacing around the room nervously until he saw Will walk in, at which point he sat in a chair at the end of the table and gave off an air of composed confidence as if Will had not seen him pacing around in terror seconds before.

“William,” he said, speaking slowly. “Good morn’ to ya, how’re you feelin’?”

“I don’t know. What’s your strategy? Is my defense planned out?”

Eric tapped his fingers on his briefcase. “Well all the papers are in here,” he said, pointing, “but there are a lot of them and I haven’t gotten a chance to look at all of them yet.”

“How many have you looked at then? And what information is contained in all these papers?”

“May I answer your second question first?” Eric nodded, answering his own question. “I have not looked at any because I don’t want to look at any if I can’t look at all of them at once. I was going to last night, but these two came over, some alcohol was served, one thing led to another, you know the rest of the story, am I right?” Eric chuckled.

“How are you going to be my defense attorney if you know nothing about the case?”

“Well I’ve been watching cable news so I know a bit. You killed your wife—”

“I didn’t kill my wife.”

“No?” Eric looked at the woman to his left. She shrugged.

“I thought he did,” the shorter woman said.

“But you didn’t?” Will shouted no. “And that’s the story you’re sticking with?”

“I really don’t think you’re qualified to be my attorney, I want—”

“Hey hey HEY, I’m qualified, all right? Look. The first day is just a bunch of preliminary stuff, blah blah, if worse comes to worse the papers are arranged chronologically and I’ll just pull the ones off the top and read from those real quick, OK? I can read fast, I promise you.” Will did not look convinced. A deputy poked his head in the room and informed Will and his defense team that it was time to head into the courtroom.

“Are you absolutely sure that you’re competent?” Will asked, deadly serious. Eric did not hear him.

“It’s showtime, right?” Eric said. He adjusted his tie and opened his mouth for Sophie or Meredith, one of whom who sprayed Binaca in his mouth. Eric jumped up and down, letting his arms flop, then punched his chest and exhaled loudly. He raised his hand, asking Will for a high five. “Let’s fucking do this thing.”

___________

Will was amazed how quickly eight months could pass when one was nothing more than a passive object; being shuttled to court each morning; being defended by an incompetent; being prosecuted for the murder of a woman who watched the proceedings from a seat in the back of the courtroom every day; being convicted by a jury of one’s peers. It seemed like it was only yesterday that he was being hustled into a police car and the next thing he knew, he was sentenced to life in prison. Will spent the morning after the judgment pacing in his cell waiting for his attorney who was late for their 9 AM appointment. He spent the afternoon pacing around the cell, furious with his attorney and spent that night sleeping until a guard pulled him out of bed without bothering to wake him first and dragged him to the visitor’s room.

There, Will found Eric on the other side of the bulletproof glass. Eric was biting his fingernails and his eyes were continually darting around the room suspiciously. He was wearing a nondescript navy suit with a white shirt, a solid red tie, and makeup.

“Eric,” Will began softly, more desperate than angry at this point, hoping his attorney had some news about his appeal.

“Shhh!” Eric hissed, pressing his finger against his bright red lips. The lipstick rubbed off onto his finger and Eric distractedly wiped it against his chair. “Listen, I’m not—that—so don’t use that name anymore. I’m hiding out for a while.”

“Wait a minute, you can’t hide out, you have to work on my appeal.”

“There isn’t going to be an appeal, don’t you see? If you think the court of law had it in for you, you should see the court of public opinion. They’re wondering why you weren’t hanged months ago.”

“But I didn’t do it,” Will insisted, his voice rising an octave.

“That doesn’t matter,” Eric sighed, obviously frustrated he had to explain all this. “Look, here’s what you need to know if anybody asks. We met this morning, I was on time as I always am because I’m a punctual and responsible attorney who takes his job seriously, and you were so enraged with the result of the trial that you murdered me.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“This story is already all over the news. There’s nothing we can do now. Look, I just need to get away for a while,” Eric said running his fingers through his hair. “This trial has been hell. Do you know how hard I’ve been working?”

“Yes I do,” Will said sarcastically. Eric had not worked very hard at all. He frequently showed up at court inebriated, passed on cross-examining each of the prosecution’s witnesses and only brought one of his own: a mentally unstable man dressed in a doctor’s coat who, when quizzed on the mental competence of the defendant, grabbed an umbrella, jumped into the corner, and swung it at anyone who tried to get it away from him until he was talked down with a twelve-inch meatball sub topped with Munster cheese and lettuce. On top of that, Eric had been overheard insinuating the jury was fat and had called the honorable Judge Charles Winslow “Madame” with a French accent on no fewer than six occasions.

“So then you understand that I need a break from all this. I mean the press has been killing me. Not literally, of course, I guess they’re reserving that for you,” Eric joked. Will scowled and Eric flinched. “The point it, when I come back to life and implicate the real killer, this whole ordeal will be over.”

“What does that mean?”

“Listen,” Eric continued. “I know you don’t think I did my best job out there defending you, but you’re my client. I know you’re innocent and I care deeply about you and I will do everything within my power to make sure you get out of here.” Will thought he believed him and was suddenly filled with confidence. Eric checked his makeup in a compact and stood up to leave. “Have a nice weekend,” Eric said before he left.

___________

They lived up to their word. The next evening as Will followed a single-file line that seemed to stretch for miles and was headed God-knows-where (Will hadn’t bothered to ask), an explosion shook the prison. The old stone building shuddered and moaned. Another explosion blew a hole in the ceiling and huge chunks of stone and plaster crashed to the ground below. Prisoners and guards alike ducked for cover as a helicopter hovered just above the hole in the roof. A crude ladder fell from the helicopter and snapped when it had completely fallen and the tension allowed no more slack in the rope. Will looked up and squinted into the light that blared down from the helicopter.

He saw his wife and his lawyer waving at him, shouting as loud as they could over the screaming of the helicopter and the anarchy of the collapsing prison and its panicked denizens and employees. Eric and Sarah were urging him to grab onto the rope, desperately trying to express through pantomime that there was little time and Will could not waste a second.

Will stood at the bottom of the ladder, frozen. His first instinct was to climb out of the prison to safety and freedom but he didn’t act on it. Another helicopter with another powerful spotlight appeared just above what was supposed to be Will’s rescue chopper. Eric looked up and neither he nor Sarah seemed surprised or distressed in the least. It seemed like an easy choice and some of the other inmates were already milling around and reaching for the ladder which Eric had grabbed to dangle just above everyone’s reach until Will decided to climb it. But Will didn’t move and he didn’t know if he should. It could be another set up—but why? Would he make things worse? Was that even possible?

He wondered how long they would stay there, suspended above his head, waiting for him to make a move and he wondered how long it would be before he grabbed the ladder if he gave in and moved first. He started counting.