48
Tori and I went back to my law office and worked for most of the rest of the evening. She was doing research online while I worked through the witnesses and wrote up an outline of my closing argument at trial. A trial lawyer, after assessing the evidence, starts his case preparation with a closing argument. That’s the last thing you say to the jury, your final pitch, and you think about all the things you want to be able to say to them in that closing. Then you work backward, making sure that you put into evidence all the things you wanted to say, the individual bricks for the completed house you show them in closing.
My closing argument was now changing dramatically. This was no longer an insanity case. It was an innocence case. And most of the closing was going to be about things and people having nothing whatsoever to do with First Lieutenant Thomas Stoller. And most of it I didn’t yet know. So the whole exercise devolved into a series of questions that I had.
Which meant I was back to being pissed off and flustered at day’s end.
“I need more time,” I said to Tori as I drove her home. “I know there’s something here, but I don’t have the time to figure it out. I’m letting this kid down.”
“You’re not. You’re giving him your best, Jason.”
“It’s not enough. It’s not even close.”
She didn’t answer right away, but I sensed she was watching me.
“What?” I said, not hiding my irritation.
“A lawyer I know once said that you do your best for your client, and when you go to bed at night, you sleep, because all you can do is your best. And in the end, it’s your client, not you, that will do the time.”
“I don’t know what kind of an asshole would say that.” Again, she was quoting my words back to me. “I’m clocked out, Tori. I have a client who wants to go to prison, who wants to be punished, not for killing Kathy Rubinkowski but for shooting that girl in that tunnel in Mosul. He’s no help to me. He doesn’t remember anything about that night. So I’m left trying to convince a jury of something not even my own client will say, which is that someone else committed this murder and framed him. Isn’t that grand? My argument is my client was framed, but my client won’t even testify to it. And I have next to no proof of it. I have questions, and I have theories, but unless I can link them in some kind of tangible way, Judge Nash isn’t even going to let the jury hear about-”
“Jason, slow down. You’re feeling overwhelmed.” Tori touched my arm. “There’s still time. There’s still a chance.”
I took a deep breath and tried to relax. She was right. I was letting the situation get the better of me. It wasn’t like me. This was when I was usually at my best.
I made great time through the deserted city streets. I pulled up to her condo. Then I dropped my head against the steering wheel and closed my eyes. There had to be something I was missing.
Tori took my hand and held it. Her hand was small and warm, and it felt good to connect with her. We sat like that for what must have been ten, fifteen minutes. I was tired and wired. I needed sleep, I knew, but this case wasn’t going to give me that kind of peace. What lay ahead was nights of fitful sleep, eyes popping open in the middle of the night, tossing and turning.
“I used to be married,” Tori said to me.
I snapped out of my funk and looked at her. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me this right now. An intimate moment, I guess.
“When did it end?” I asked.
“Five years ago,” she said. “Five years ago today. November twenty-fifth, 2005. It was a Friday that year. The day after Thanksgiving.”
Funny that she’d know the date. But I guess it was tied to a holiday.
But a marriage ended with a court order dissolving the marriage. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a court open on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Tori let go of my hand and stared out the window of the car.
“That’s the day I killed him,” she told me.
I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. Other than alluding to the fact that her father was deceased, she’d never told me a thing about her family. And now she was telling me…
Did she just tell me she killed her husband?
“He was abusive,” she said mechanically. “He knocked me around for years. One day, I decided I wasn’t going to let it continue. I didn’t try to leave. I didn’t try to get him in counseling. I just bought a gun and I shot him. He’d hit me a couple of times the night before. He got drunk at Thanksgiving dinner with his family, and when we got home, he used me for a punching bag. I woke up the next morning bruised and sore, and I felt like the oxygen was sucking out of my lungs. I felt completely trapped. He’d eventually apologize to me and make me believe that he could change, and then he wouldn’t, and the cycle would repeat itself. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Something just snapped. I got my gun out of the closet and I walked downstairs into the kitchen. He yelled at me because I hadn’t made coffee. I shot him in the chest. He bled out right in front of me on the kitchen floor.”
I wasn’t sure where to start, or whether I should say anything at all. I remembered the first time I met her, when those goons were hassling her, the one grabbing her arm outside. And I remembered how she reacted when I first mentioned I was defending a man accused of killing a woman.
“If I’d called for an ambulance right away, they might have been able to save him. But I didn’t. I didn’t want him to live. I wanted him to die.”
“Tori-”
“When the police came, they took one look at little ol’ me and this bruiser of a husband, and I think they wanted to help me. They had some woman detective talk to me. She kept asking me what happened right before he shot me. I told her the truth. He was bitching about not having any coffee. And she said, ‘Is that when he hit you?’ And I started to tell her, no, he’d hit me the night before. But then I realized that nobody would understand. The only way I could get away with this would be if they thought he was beating me up right then and there. So I lied. I said he punched me that morning. I said I was in fear for my life. I lied because I was afraid they’d put me in prison otherwise.”
Slowly, she turned her head and locked eyes with me.
“So you wanted to know more about me, Jason. Now you do. Nice to meet you. Most sane men would turn and run.”
“Is that what you want me to do? Turn and run?”
She stared at me, her jaw tight and defiant, but tears formed in her eyes, the first crack in her shell. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“Then you’re going to have to push me away,” I said. “I’m not running.”
I took her hand and held it for a long time. I didn’t move toward her. She didn’t move toward me. She’d opened up to me, but it was going to come in tiny steps. That was okay. I could wait. It was, in many ways, a terrible time to confide this secret to me, given the task I had before me and my time constraints. But it was an anniversary of sorts for her and it was on her mind. And she’d been watching me moan and groan like a little boy, suffering, and that somehow made her feel sufficiently at ease to share this thing.
There was plenty of time, I thought. Once this trial was over, Tori and I had plenty of time.
Then I thought to myself, Screw that, and I said, “I’m coming upstairs with you,” and she said, “Okay.”
49
I would imagine that Tori had a nice apartment, if I saw much of it. We barely made it through the door before we were undressing each other. I’d spent many hours dreaming of unbuttoning that long white coat and running my hands inside it. Many hours imagining her naked except for those black knee-high boots, but she kicked them off as we stumbled backward together.
I went first. I like foreplay. I liked watching her become more aroused as we progressed. I liked lying next to her on the bed, not letting her touch me, as my hands ran over her body. I liked caressing the inside of her legs as she moaned with expectation, almost tickling her, before my fingers slid inside her. I liked watching her free herself,
