You got those rich boys in Beverly Hills shotgunning their parents. The Abuse Excuse, I seen it on Oprah. You attack the victim and then haul out some phony-baloney eggheads to mix up the jury with syndromes and traumas and irresistible impulses. They got a reason for everything 'til it seems nobody takes responsibility for their own actions.'
'Remind me not to seat you on one of my juries,' I said.
'I wouldn't do it unless I could get conjugal visits from Charlie,' Granny said, winking.
'What's conjugal?' Kip asked.
'Never you mind,' my licentious granny told him. She put a pitcher of limeade on the table, then turned to me. 'Would somebody please tell that old goat that supper's on?'
Just then Charlie Riggs appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes. 'Did I hear the word 'supper'?' he asked.
Dr. Lawrence Schein let a stream of water play against the leathery green leaves of a wild coffee shrub and said, 'Xeriscape landscaping. Environment-friendly and drought-resistant.'
After just a few moments, Schein turned the hose on a wild tamarind tree, its purple puffball flowers in full bloom. 'You don't see any palm trees, hibiscus hedges, or blooming impatiens in my yard, do you?'
Figuring it was a leading question, I could have objected, but instead I just listened.
'They just swallow up the water. You know the town of Manalapan?'
'Sure, up in Palm Beach County. Big houses, big yards, a Ritz-Carlton hotel.'
'Until they put a stop to it, that little town was using six hundred twenty-seven gallons of water a day per resident, most of it watering lawns and flowers. Can you imagine it?'
We were in the yard of Dr. Schein's ranch house in the Redlands section of southern Dade County. I had spent the night at Granny's, eating her food, drinking her moonshine, and losing to Kip in gin rummy. At one point, in the cinematic equivalent of a mixed metaphor, he told me, 'You play a mean game of gin, fat man.'
Now, on a steamy June morning, I was trying to determine just how useful Dr. Schein would be to the defense of Chrissy Bernhardt. He was a thin man in his late fifties with a shaved head and a small goatee. I had somehow pictured him in a herringbone sports coat with leather elbow patches, but today he wore bib overalls and L. L. Bean rubber boots as he watered his plants.
'You know what's happening to the Biscayne Aquifer, don't you?' Dr. Schein asked.
'Water level goes down a little every year.'
'And the salt level comes up! We're headed for a disaster unless we change our ways.'
He moved a few steps to the house and turned off the spigot, giving an extra tug to stop the dripping. Then he picked up pruning shears and clipped some dead leaves from a bright red bougainvillea vine.
'You knew the Bernhardts, Chrissy's parents,' I said, trying to move the discussion from landscaping to the law.
'I did, and I've known Chrissy since she was a child.'
'Tell me about Chrissy and her father.'
'She didn't tell you?'
'Not yet.'
'But surely you've surmised…'
'Yeah, but I need to hear it. From you and from her.'
'May I be blunt?'
'I prefer it.'
'Harry Bernhardt raped Chrissy when she was eleven. He committed incest, a crime of unspeakable ugliness.' The doctor seemed pained. He didn't look at me, but snipped a branch of the bougainvillea with such vigor, he might have thought he was castrating old Harry. 'He continued coming to her bed-oh, damn the euphemisms-he continued fucking his little girl until she was fourteen and he found her in the barn with a stableboy. He called her a dirty slut, said her mother was frigid and she was a whore, something like that.'
I tried to picture Chrissy as a child, burdened with the secret, living in fear and pain. I had to force myself to keep a professional distance. Clients need logic and clarity from their lawyers, not emotions and pity.
'During these years, you spent a lot of time in the Bernhardt home, didn't you?' I asked.
'Yes.'
'But you never suspected her father of abusing her?'
'Unfortunately, no. Looking back, of course, you see things differently. Christina in her father's lap, something that seemed so innocent, takes on a different connotation. He doted on her, was jealous of others' attentions to her. At the time, I thought he was just being overly protective, but in retrospect, that wasn't Harry's way at all.'
'What was his way?' I asked, thinking of Granny's complaint: Attack the victim.
'Harry Bernhardt was a hard man. Insensitive to Emily, Christina's mother, who was a lovely woman, as refined and sophisticated as Harry was crude. Still, who could have known, this hideous thing, incest.. ' He let the ugly word hang there a moment, then said, 'I have to confess that it caught me completely by surprise.'
He picked up a rake and smoothed some mulch around the roots of a wild coffee plant. 'Holds the moisture in, prevents evaporation,' he explained.
'So Chrissy shot her father because she remembered what he had done to her?'
'Oh, that's an oversimplification. Christina suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. I'm sure you're familiar with the term.'
'Yeah. I saw it on Geraldo.'
'Vietnam syndrome, we called it a generation ago. And that was just an offshoot of shell shock from World War I and combat fatigue from the Second World War. But psychiatry's come a long way. We know so much more now. You don't have to be a soldier to have sublimated the horror in your life.'
Dr. Schein was talking to me, but he was examining the leathery green leaves of the coffee plant. I wondered what a shrink would say about his failure to make eye contact.
'When Christina came back from Europe and I first treated her,' he said, 'she had great difficulty controlling her emotions. Her history was an encyclopedia of clues. She overreacted to stress, misdirected her anger, and had problems with alcohol, drugs, even food. Classic symptoms right down the line.'
'Classic?'
'For the survivor of incest. Migraines, nightmares, feelings of dread without reason. She had huge blocks from her childhood that were missing. She couldn't, or wouldn't, remember them, another indication that she was in denial. She simply locked out the memories.'
'And you unlocked them?'
He cocked his head and showed a little smile. 'Let's just say I handed her the key. She still had to turn it.'
I gave him back his little smile just to show my appreciation at how gosh-darned clever he was. 'You're confident the memories are real?'
'Unquestionably. The little girl in Christina, her inner child, was talking, and she had no reason to lie.'
'Could she have been mistaken?'
'Not a chance. Christina had repressed her memories of childhood incest. I helped her recover those memories, which were always there, buried under layers of shame and denial. When they returned, they were clear and vivid and real.'
'And they couldn't have been dreams or something she just imagined?'
'Counselor, you're looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. I'm handing you your defense.'
'No, you're not. You're handing the prosecution its motive. Here's how Abe Socolow will see it. Once Chrissy turned the key you handed her, she hated her father for abusing her years ago. Harry Bernhardt posed no current threat to Chrissy, so the shooting couldn't be self-defense or justifiable homicide. It was pure revenge, and that's walking straight into a first-degree murder conviction.'
'I see,' the doctor said, somewhat subdued.
'Look, maybe you could help at a sentencing hearing, but that happens only after she's been convicted, and if it's murder one, the only two options are death and life without parole, no matter what you say.'
Dr. Schein stopped fooling with the mulch and leaned on his rake. 'Would it make a difference if Christina shot her father while suffering a blackout or a flashback to the abuse itself?'
