the language of the Constitution to fit his convenient yen for a second American Revolution, why would he exaggerate the contents of this letter?”
“So if that’s the case, whatever is in that letter must be pretty bad,” I say.
“That’s what I was thinking,” says Harry. “And if this is true, the letter could be sitting in the middle of our case. The reason Scarborough wrote the book, the reason he was so far out on the limb of rhetoric, and just possibly the reason he was killed.”
For several minutes we massage the question of what to do. But no matter how we come at the issue of the missing letter, we seem to arrive at the same conclusion.
With Scarborough dead, the only one who may be able to tell us what is in the letter, and where it is, is Mr. Bonguard. Since he’s not returning phone calls and since, for the moment at least, we can’t make him come to us, all subpoenas being kept dry like gunpowder for the trial, we are left with only one alternative, and it is not one that we can put off.
“Why do you have to represent him? Why can’t somebody else do it?”
“Because his father asked me to, and his father is an old friend. You don’t always get to pick and choose your clients.”
“There must be somebody else who can represent him? Why not the public defender? He can’t have much money. Not from what I’ve read and heard.”
“Sarah, I told you, I’ve already taken the case.”
“But it’s embarrassing, Dad. People at school are saying after what he did, he doesn’t deserve a trial.”
“Then those people are living in the wrong country.”
My daughter is home from college, doing a summer internship on break. She is indignant that I’m involved in representing Carl Arnsberg and wants me to withdraw.
“Somebody who does something like that doesn’t deserve a trial.”
“Sarah! How long have you watched me try cases? What has it been, fifteen, sixteen years?”
“Dad, don’t lecture me.”
“Why? Only your professors at school can do that? Lecturing you is one of the privileges of fatherhood,” I tell her.
“Don’t start,” she says. When we have these bouts, which is not often, Sarah sounds so much like her mother that at times I can hear Nikki’s voice. Though Nikki has been dead now for nearly fifteen years, I can often see her eyes staring out at me from my daughter’s face when Sarah is angry. Sarah’s mother died of cancer when our daughter was small, and so my memories of the two of them together seem limited.
“You’re assuming that he did it.” I’m standing in my bedroom over my open suitcase, which is laid out on my bed, half filled with the items I need for my trip to the East Coast. This is a large part of the reason that Sarah is upset. She was hoping that I might take some time off while she was home on break. She is standing in the open doorway to my room, one hand on her hip, looking angry and hurt.
“Sarah, listen. The whole purpose of the trial is to determine whether he did it. And I don’t think he did. What if someone accused you of doing something like this? Wouldn’t you want me to defend you?”
“Dad, that’s not fair. Everybody knows he did,” she says.
“I’m not concerned with what everybody knows. I’m concerned with what a jury says, and then only after they’ve seen, heard, and studied all the evidence.”
“For God’s sake, Dad, he’s a neo-Nazi. Even my political science prof says so.”
“Then your political science professor can convict him of that, and on that charge I promise I won’t represent him.”
“Dad!”
“But on the charge of murdering Terry Scarborough, I am his lawyer, and on that charge he is entitled to a fair trial, just as you would be.”
I return to packing, laying out shirts and underwear on the bed before loading them into my luggage.
“My prof says that Professor Scarborough was the victim of a hate crime. He says that it was a political crime and should be punished that way.”
I’m going to have to make a note to keep my daughter away from the prosecutors. She may give them ideas.
She stands there for a moment collecting her thoughts, trying to come up with a different twist on her argument. I can smell mental rubber burning.
“Fine! How long will you be away? Can you tell me that?” The edge goes out of Sarah’s voice. She realizes that she has lost this bout, though, knowing my daughter, I realize she is not giving up.
“Three days, four at most. I have business in New York. I won’t be sure until I get there. I’ll call you every day and let you know when I’ll be home. And I’ll get back as soon as I can.”
“It’s just that I thought we could spend some time together,” says Sarah. “I was hoping that maybe we could go down to Mexico for a while, maybe Puerto Vallarta, one of the beach resorts.”
“I will make it up to you. I promise. You’ll be home again in a few months, and we can go somewhere. You can pick the spot.”
“You’ll be in trial,” she says. “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.” She turns and walks away down the hall.
I stop my packing, one of my folded shirts still hanging in the air. “Tell you what!” I holler after her down the empty hall.
“What?” She is already halfway down the stairs.
“How would you like to do some shopping in New York?”
There is a nanosecond of silence, and she appears like magic back in the doorway. “You mean it?”
“Call the office, tell them to get another ticket on the flight, and book one more room at the hotel-adjoining, if they can manage it. Then get in gear and pack. We don’t have much time.”
“Sure! Won’t take me a minute.”
3
Seven hours in the air allow me to make up for lost time with my daughter. We talk about life on Coronado Island, how the city has changed in the time we’ve lived there. We talk about Harry. Sarah spends a good bit of the flight laughing as only young girls can. Her memories of Harry are of an aging and somewhat hapless uncle, even though she and my partner are not related by blood, marriage, or anything else. They have always been close.
We dredge up old memories, some of them painful: the early years when she was a small child in Capital City, when Nikki was alive and we were a family. To my surprise, Sarah has more vivid recollections of this period than I might have credited. It is one of those imponderables, the snippets of life that engrave themselves on the mind of a small child.
Somewhere high over the flatlands of the Midwest, above the constant drone of jet engines, our conversation turns from distant memories to what she is doing at school, and finally to my practice. Sarah has always had a knack for getting me to talk, so much so that I may have to put her on the law office’s payroll when I return home in order to maintain attorney-client confidence with Arnsberg. Sarah picks my brain on aspects of the case I should not discuss.
Strangely, the question that seems to perplex my daughter the most is how, after its repeal following the Civil War, it is possible that the old language of slavery can still be visible in the Constitution today. It is this very fact that Scarborough pounced on and exploited in his book.
Sarah is reading from a Newsweek article, a story on the author’s murder and the impending trial.
“It says here that according to Scarborough this language in the Constitution represents ‘an ongoing and perpetual stigmatizing of the African soul.’ That’s a quote from his book,” she says. Then she reads on. “‘While slavery was repealed in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment, the offending words that legalized the so-called peculiar institution at the origin of the nation remain in black and white as a visible legacy of America’s principal document of state to this very day.’
