The Letter

The Letter

Image by Viewminder
I’d been standing outside of the courtroom in that suit for hours.

It was the only suit I’d owned.

I was really starting to hate that suit.

I wore it for my wedding, a bunch of funerals, too many trials and through my divorce.

I promised myself I was gonna burn it after the divorce was finalized.

I never wanted to wear that suit again.

Ditching it, I thought… it might cleanse me of the residue of this whole sordid series of events.

The whole thing made me feel so dirty.

Burning that suit would be a personal symbol of me opening a new chapter in my life.

Nobody knew who I was out there in the hallway and I was pretty grateful that it spared me from any small talk.

There were none of those courtroom artists who make pastel sketches for the news like at the first trial.

I remembered how that hit me… when I saw that there were three people sitting in the courtroom to sketch my wife’s first trial for the television news…

you know you’re in a world of shit when they come to ‘sketch’ your trial.

The media was never leaked information about this lawsuit… and against my better judgement I kept it quiet… Blake made that call… which I think was a mistake because it really was the media all along that made things happen… but it was nice not to have to deal with them right now.

I wanted to focus on what I had to say on that stand.

I wanted to stay sharp and honed like a razor for the combat I knew I was about to find myself engaged in.

This was gonna get ‘intellectually twisty.’

They were gonna try and destroy me on that stand and I knew it.

The Mole must’ve told me that a thousand times already.

My wife’s attorney was starting to see it too.

I was standing in the corridor by the big darkly stained and worn wooden doors of the courthouse when I heard the muffled words ‘the defense calls Mr. View Minder.’

A split second later my wife’s attorney Blake straight arms both doors open with a really pissed off look on his face.

I noticed that he was sweating and I’d never seen that before.

He looked nervous too.

Blake was a kick ass lawyer… he won the biggest lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department in history… for something like twenty eight million dollars… he specialized in cases of police misconduct and he was a big defender of civil rights.

The guy believed in the constitution and I really admired him.

He was always usually calm and collected… the guy was the definition of cool… I can’t remember ever have seeing him display any emotion.

Seeing him emotional right now… I guess that alarmed me.

For some reason I turned around and walked the other way… away from the doors to the courtroom.

Blake kinda caught up with me and put his arm around my shoulder…

He used his arm to slow down my flight and he stopped me there in the corridor and turned me to face him and the courtroom doors.

It seemed from the look on his face that he’d come to accept what he’d rejected for so many months in preparing for this trial.

I had told Blake that he wasn’t so much arguing a case in a lawsuit for the damages that my wife sustained in what they said was her false arrest at the Super Store that night… I told him that they were fighting what I did.

They were trying to slaughter the ‘whistle-blower.’

Blake looked me in the eyes with both of his hands on my shoulders now… the kind of grip that someone lays on you when they want to be sure that you understand what they’re saying… and he took in a deep breath.

The kind of breath somebody takes when they’re gonna give you some really bad news.

Between the grip and the breath I knew I was fucked.

Like when the doctor gives you that look right before he says ‘we’ve done all that we can do.’

I knew what he had to say was really gonna be bad and I tried to prepare myself mentally.

‘I don’t know what you did to these people’ he said as he spun me towards the doors of the courtroom… ‘but you are walking into your own execution here… you’re about to be crucified man.’

God… you never want to hear your attorney say those words to you.

It was obvious that he’d conceded the case to loss and he conceded it based on what he figured was gonna happen when I got up on that stand.

He knew what was coming.

Blake pulled open one of the big heavy doors and sort of began to push me through it…

‘Don’t fight’ it he said… ‘and it will be much easier on you’ and he gave me that wink and that look that said ‘let it go… and go peacefully… blade of grass deeply rooted.’

Fuck.

I felt like I’d just been sentenced to death.

Blake made sure that he timed the completion of that statement with his final push of my body into the courtroom so that there was no possibility of me replying.

He really pissed me off with that statement and the way that he said it.

I was mad… because all along I’d told him that the case was gonna head in this direction… I knew it… I knew these people now… I’d seen their playbook.

By the time he realized that I was right it all seemed too late.

The case seemed lost.

I took the chair in the witness stand one very pissed off man.

I wasn’t even afraid anymore.

Pure adrenaline was pumping through my veins where blood was circulating only moments ago.

Fuck Blake and his ‘don’t fight it shit’ I thought.

I wanted this fight.

I’d waited for this fight.

I waited for this fight for a long time.

I was gonna fight it.

And I was gonna fight it hard.

If the case was lost I was gonna fight even harder because I knew that in the grand scheme of things this was just the opening salvo in what was gonna be the mother of all legal battles.

And I was the guy that started it.

They didn’t care if they hadda give my wife a million bucks…

the goal was to destroy me.

That’s what would help them down the line.

I was sorry that Blake seemed to misread the whole thing but the way I figured it… now was my time to show ‘em what I was made of.

This was my time to shine.

This was my time to throw a few punches instead take ‘em like a punching bag.

I leaned forward in that seat and thought ‘bring it on.’

Slipping on my ‘mental brass knuckles’ was what I visualized.

I was ready.

I was ready to kick some ass.

When the defense brought out that letter… the one I’d emailed to the Chief of Police the month after my wife was arrested… as soon as the defense’s attorney asked me to read it to the jury from the stand, Blake objected.

He and I, the defense attorney and the judge went back into the judges chambers and discussed the legal merits of the letter I’d written and signed with my name.

I never denied sending that letter.

In fact, I was kind of proud of it.

I sent it to the Chief of Police to let him know not only how I’d felt about the whole case against my wife and what they’d done to my family, but how I knew that I had his ‘nuts in the nutcracker and I wasn’t gonna let go until he did the right thing.’

Which was to drop the bullshit charges against my wife and have those officers apologize to my kids.

That’s what I’d wanted all along was an apology.

Blake always hated when I said that.

‘I don’t work for ‘apologies’, I do this for money’ he’d say.

I wanted the police to right a wrong and make it up to my kids.

It really pissed me off that they were afraid of the cops now.

When the judge read the letter in his chambers he took a couple of those ‘oh boy’ gasps.

He seemed to be a decent guy.

He reminded me of my grandpa and in my head I liked to think that he saw the honor in what I was doing, the decency in the fight that I fought.

‘Mistuh Viewminder’ he began… almost inhaling as he spoke the words… ‘in my fifty years on the bench I have nevah… evah seen such a horrible letter written to any public official.’

‘This lettah is so bad that I’m afraid that if I allow the jury to even see it that it would only be predjudicial… that means that this lettah is so bad that if the jury were to see it I think it would make your wife lose her case’ the judge remarked with a confounded shake of his head.

Then he looked at the attorneys… givin’ them that ‘whaddaya wanna do look.’

The defense wanted the letter brought in to show that I’d contacted a witness in the case before the criminal trial against my wife.

Several of them in fact.

The Mole had ‘accidentally’ forwarded me a copy of one of those funny chain emails that just happened to have the email of just about everybody in the department on it.

So I thought I’d send a few of the officers some Christmas wishes if you know what I mean.

Some people might be inclined to call that ‘witness tampering’ but I liked to think of it as just ‘venting.’

The defense was not shy about trying to say that I was blackmailing the Chief of Police.

Maybe I was.

If telling a guy that if he doesn’t do ‘the right thing’ that you’re gonna squeeze his balls until they pop is blackmail… then indeed I was guilty.

I didn’t tell him what the ‘right thing’ to do was… I mean I knew that’d be crossing a line.

‘The right thing’ was up to him to decide… although I was pretty specific about squeezing his nuts in a nutcracker until they popped.

I preferred to think that the letter really showed just how dedicated that I was to the pursuit of justice in this case and for my family.

I swear his honor wanted to laugh as he pondered my audacity in even writing the letter but he struggled not to and he maintained the decorum of the court even though we were still in his chambers.

The judge came up with a pretty good solution.

We would black out every line of the letter… all that stuff about me squeezin’ the Chief’s balls until they popped and the like and that we’d leave the part that said ‘Dear Chief Hot Dog… and black out all of the body of the letter except for the part where I wrote ‘have a merry Christmas’ and signed it ‘View Minder.’

That way the defense could prove I’d tried to ‘tamper with a witness’ and all that juicy stuff about nutcrackin’ wouldn’t reflect poorly on my wife’s case.

Blake seemed relieved at this compromise and the defense attorney seemed pissed.

I would have really liked to have had the opportunity to have read that letter to the jury.

Even there I’d fantasized about how I would have read it with ‘feeling’ and verve.

I would have read it like I was reading the Emancipation Proclamation.

Unfortunately that was not to be.

We’d been in chambers for about a half hour and when we’d come out the jury looked sleepy and bored as hell.

The defense’s tactic was sound… bore the jury to death with technicalities, objections and conferences in the judges chambers and they’ll really begin to resent even being there.

I took my seat on the witness stand, adjusted my tie and tried to think of that ‘blade of grass deeply rooted.’

The defense attorney handed me the letter and asked if I wrote it.

I admitted that I did without hesitation.

She asked me to read the letter to the jury.

I read them the first line… ‘Dear Chief Hot Dog’… then I told them that the judge had us black out the body of the letter because he said it wasn’t relevant… and I read the signoff… ‘have a merry Christmas, Viewminder.’

The jury only returned puzzled and quizzical looks.

The defense attorney asked me if I knew that the Chief of Police was a ‘witness’ in the case.

I told her that since there was no crime commited, that there couldn’t be any ‘witness”

It went around and around and I wasn’t gonna let her corner me like that.

By the time it was over she would accuse me of ‘witness tampering’ and ‘manufacturing evidence.’

When she accused me of ‘manufacturing evidence’ I fought back hard… I almost stood up on the stand… I raised my voice and pointed right at her… I actually asked her a couple of times ‘which media outlet used those numbers?’

Blake told me over dinner that night that he’d never seen a witness get away with questioning an attorney like that from the witness stand… and the judge let it go… he really couldn’t believe it.

He admitted that before I went up there he’d figured that the case was lost.

But he was impressed by my testimony and he still saw some hope.

The defense attorney who was questioning me on the stand seemed shaken by my will to go head to head with her like that.

It seemed to get her flustered to lose her point in that way and I was excused from the stand.

‘No further questions’ she’d said.

Right at the point where her attack on me and my character was supposed to crescendo she fizzled.

My wife’s attorney was smiling and he gave me ‘the nod’ as I walked past him on the way out of the courtroom.

That the judge said that what I’d written was the worst letter he’d ever seen on his fifty years on the bench indicated to me that he’d never seen the letter that the Illinois EPA wrote to the village in 1986.

The one where they told the Old Man that the village’s drinking water well was contaminated with a very toxic cancer causing chemical called vinyl chloride.

Nor did the judge see the letter that the village wrote back to the Illinois EPA that year… the one that said ‘we will stop using this well to provide drinking water for the residents of the village and keep this well online as a backup well only.’

That letter and the lie that I exposed behind it was the worst letter I’d ever seen written.

It might not have been relevant in this case…

But it was relevant to the thousands of people in that village who had no idea that they’d been drinking poisoned water for twenty one years until I told them.

It was relevant to all those people who had unexplainable cases of cancer and other health maladies from drinking that water.

It was even more relevant to the families of those that died.

The people I believe were murdered.