Robey had put the folder on the table, sat down and tapped it once.
'Just one small matter, Your Honor,' he said. 'Shouldn't take much time at all. US Attorney's got a balky witness. This grand-jury, corruption investigation he's only been hinting at discreetly to the papers for about a year or so. Guy's lawyer says if they bring his client in, he's going to tell him to claim he'll incriminate himself if he talks. The US Attorney's granted him Use immunity but he says that isn't good enough. Says if it's not Transactional, the US Attorney'll use the testimony to get leads to other evidence, then turn around and use that to cut his client's head off. So the US Attorney the assistant's Mister Warmth, Arnie Bissell wants you to give him and his guy a hearing, tell them the USA doesn't lie to people and so Use is good enough and his guy has gotta talk.'
'Bissell wants me to tell this lawyer and his client that the US Attorney's office never fibs?' she said, widening her eyes. 'I do that and God'll surely strike me dead.'
Robey laughed. 'Bissell says it shouldn't take long ten minutes at the most.'
'Ten minutes7.' she said. 'Why should it take any minutes? Just do it like always. Have him send up a written order and I'll sign the thing on the spot. Then have him threaten the guy. If he stays coy, then we'll have a hearing. What you and I want to do here this afternoon is get back to the late Mister Nick Hardigrew's Really Lousy Last Weekend.'
'Mind telling me what you thought of what got put in this morning?'
Robey said. 'When the girl said he had his hands folded in front of him, and his head down, like he's saying grace? And he stayed that way, all the way down?'
'I don't know,' the judge said. 'Either he was saying his prayers or else he'd gone into some kind of trance. Blissed-out completely. Or maybe he was paralyzed; panicked and froze when he realized what was happening. He had to've known it when his chute didn't open. And to've known what he had to do next. This wasn't his first jump. Why didn't he pop the back-up? I suppose at that velocity it's pretty hard to hear what somebody else's yelling at you, 'Pull the reserve chute, for God's sake.' So maybe he couldn't hear the others. But she said that she could hear them yelling — that's why she didn't yell herself.
Makes it seem as though he should've heard them too.'
'Unless he didn't want to,' Robey said. 'Maybe what happened was what he intended to have happen. Nobody we've heard yet seems to really want to come right out and say it, but isn't that where they're leading us? That the reason why the main chute didn't open when it should've, when he was clear of the plane, was that he'd made sure it wouldn't.
That there wasn't anything wrong with the job the packers at the jump-center did. The reason it didn't open was that sometime between the time that they packed it and checked it and said it was fine was that he'd done something to it himself. Sabotaged it. So he knew it wasn't going to open. He'd made sure of it. All he had to do was just have the will-power to keep his hands together until the ground came up and hit him. Unless he'd sabotoged the reserve too, of. course, but we've got no evidence of that either.'
'Suicide,' she said, reflectively. 'He meant it to happen. Not an accident at all. This whole on-and-off romance he'd been having with sky-diving, for how many years was it now, two or three? My notes're out on the bench.'
'I think it was three,' Robey said. 'Which was another thing that didn't add up. He seems to've been sort of casual about it. The testimony Tuesday, didn't one of the witnesses from the jump-center testify this would've been his eighth or ninth jump? Seven or eight of them uneventful, before the one that killed him. Not that many, really, considering how long he'd been at it. It wasn't an obsession with him, like it usually seems to be with people who come back after the first time they try it.'
'Yeah,' she said, 'the fellow did say that. The majority never jump twice. They're thrill-seekers, kind of people who dare each other to do things, usually while they're having several beers. Young, most of them. Try it once and say 'Oh-kay, that's it; now I've been there and done that.' And then never do it again. The real sky-divers're the ones that get hooked and stay with it, like skiers. Jump every chance they get, ten or twenty times a year. Our absent party doesn't fit either profile.
'But still, he's qualified; he's allowed to jump without a buddy close enough to try to save him in mid-air. Which he has to be able to do if he's going to be able to kill himself. The day the chute didn't open just happened to be the day that he picked to do what he had in mind all the time.
'All right, find me a motive. Why make it look like an accident? There was no incentive in his insurance. Million-dollar policy for accidental death; isn't small-change, no, but his coverage'd been in effect for over twenty years. Suicide-exemption clause expired eighteen years ago. No motive there to fake an accident.
'Did he have some kind of horrible disease? If he did he was the only one who knew about it. Family didn't; doctor didn't; none of his friends did either.
'A scandal about to break, he chooses death over disgrace? Possible, I suppose, but we've got no evidence of one.
'His business was in good shape. Nurserymen and people in the landscaping business probably felt it just about the same as everybody else does when the economy was flat, few years ago, but his seems to've come through it okay.
'So the only reason he could possibly've had to do it then would've been chronic, severe depression. Unipolar mental illness.
'You could infer that here, I guess. I suppose in any case of suicide, you almost have to think the poor bastard must've been miserably depressed. Literally out of his mind. But if Hardigrew was that far gone, wouldn't he've shown it in some way? Started drinking too much?
Become withdrawn? You'd think so, but he didn't. He spent years in a bottomless Hell, getting ready to do this unspeakable thing, and during all that time none of the people who knew him and had known him for years: not a single one of them, had the slightest hint of what he was going through?
'It doesn't make sense. So depressed you want to kill yourself, and finally you do it, but not so depressed that anyone who loves you, or sees you every day, even notices?'
'I don't know,' Robey said, 'but it does seem like that's what the defense's driving at.'
'Well, they've still got a lot of work ahead of them,' she said. 'Far as I'm concerned anyway. There would've been a clue. Something you could look at now and say: 'Hey that was kind of strange. Someone should've noticed that. Taken his car keys away from him. Had him put away, or at least put him to bed. Given him some mood- elevators; jacked him up on feel-good pills.'
'There is no such clue. He got up that morning down in Suffield, self-destruction on his mind, showered and dressed like he always did; had a good breakfast after that. Again: just like he always did. Man's almost fifty, same age I am now. By the time you've reached this stage in life, made something of yourself — this is a successful man here, came from modest circumstances and did pretty well for himself you've developed a full set of habits. A lot of the things that we do are repetitive, have to be done again every day, over and over again.
Habits simplify your life. You know what to do, it's automatic. Don't have to do so much thinking.
'That's what our Nicholas did that last day; he followed his regular habits. He seemed to be in good spirits. Showers and gets dressed and eats. He goes out of his ten-room house on an acre-plus of prime land, so we're told, got to be worth at least three or four hundred thousand dollars, in the neighborhood it's in. This looks like one happy guy.
He gets into his bright-yellow Saab convertible, drives himself up to Barnes Airport in Westfield; he's signed up for a gorgeous summer Sunday of sky-diving. Several times before he's done this without any mishap whatsoever, not even a sprained ankle. But this time it's going to be different. Today he's going to kill himself.
'If you think that, then there wasn't any accident or any negligence involved here. When he stepped out of that airplane, in his mind he was doing a perfectly normal, rational thing.
'I can't believe it. Why go to all this trouble? There're plenty of places you can drive to and walk up to and jump off and kill yourself, if that's what you want to do. Don't need any training to do that. All the lessons; the classroom instruction; the tethered training jumps from that steel tower they've got up there: what is it, three or four hundred feet off the ground, and they take you up there and you jump7.
Forget it. I'm finished right there. I wouldn't dare to climb that high, never mind jump off. You want me to conclude he did it all in order to kill himself in style? All the supervised practice jumps with the instructors: everything was preliminary to the big day when Nick Hardigrew got himself killed? Nobody was negligent? No one failed to exercise due care? It wasn't anyone's fault?'
'Well, maybe,' she said. 'I suppose we never know what hell people could be going through behind their eyes where we can't see it. What they might do to stop the pain they're in.' She shook her head. 'I can tell you one thing
