Read Online Juice by Stephen Becker - Free Book Online Page B

therefore grasping? He spoke only a little English, but he was learning.” Drops of perspiration were forming on Landauer’s brow. “He loved me, and did much for me. He was a human being with whom I could make some contact on my terms, who understood nothing but felt much. So I loved him. What did it matter? Who was hurt? Who cared?” He brooded momentarily. “But then it happened. I should have known it would. Maybe I did know. Visitors came, rare visitors, and met him, and asked me to bring him to a party. I refused; word went out that he was sweet and pretty; more people came, and women, who wanted only one thing, it was like a competition, you could see them competing. And Willie was excited by it, we quarreled, and it all came out—” Landauer’s eyes were closed—“all the disgust and revulsion in me for forty years, it all came out, and even Willie was no different, and a man might as well be dead, he hangs on to life because instinct tells him to, but after a while exhaustion overcomes even the instincts. So we quarreled and I stabbed Willie. I did not mean to kill him. If we had quarreled in the living room instead of the kitchen there would have been no knife. I did not know what I was doing.” Landauer’s face was streaming; his eyes were still shut. “So I killed him. I must have been crazy.”
    Davis leaned forward; his eyes glittered; he chewed victoriously on his panatela.
    The trial was of course sensational. The prosecution opened with a blast of rhetoric. Untold degeneracy was implied. Landauer was a foreigner, an intellectual, an atheist probably; a sodomite certainly; a murderer certainly, contemptuous all his life of a society he had failed to conquer. The spectators’ benches were full; the jury was aware of its privilege, its importance.
    Davis moved coldly, making a tool of whatever the prosecution offered. He opened informally and earnestly, telling the jury that there would be no speechifying, no histrionics; he would leave that to the state’s attorney. He reminded the jury that Landauer was not on trial for sodomy, or atheism, or being foreign-born, or being an intellectual. He was on trial for murder, and for murder alone. He was, admittedly, an unusual man; but an ordinary man would not have committed this crime. It was essential that the jury understand how and why he was unusual; and to answer those questions the defense would examine the whole man, touching, where necessary, on sodomy, atheism, being European, being an intellectual—even a genius, some said. And if the defense had a duty to risk disgust by touching on all those areas, the jury had an added responsibility: to consider the facts soberly. To remember that this was not a contest between two lawyers; it was a trial, one of the better, though imperfect, ways man had devised to reach the truth of a crime. To remember that they, the jury, were intelligent citizens of the modern world, and that perversion, for example, was no longer a sensational issue: it was an issue discussed quietly in homes, doctors’ offices, magazines, newspaper columns. The day had passed when a prosecutor could raise a hand and shout vengefully, “Outcast!” (The state’s attorney had done just that.) Or “Pervert!” Or “Foreigner!” Or even “Murderer!” Murder had been committed, yes. But crime and punishment were no longer categories to be dealt with by primitive emotions. In an age of genocide; in an age of psychiatry; in an age where the value of the individual diminished daily, it was more than ever important to realize that no crime was simply a crime, that no man was simply a criminal. The defense would review the life, the emotions, the personality of the defendant, without the aid of psychiatrists. The state would doubtless prove that the defendant was now, this day, capable of performing with perfect competence all the functions of a normal