BLIND TRIAL Brian Deer (best novels for beginners TXT) 📖

“Crap.”

“It’s true. Been in the hospital, had an infection, was looking like shit, all pale and sweating on TV debating Jack Kennedy… Now, was that obvious? Was anyone in that car gonna know how that whack was gonna play out? How Nixon’s sweat would turn the tide of history?”

“What?”

“So, was that whack on that car good, or bad? Right, or wrong? Glad about it, or not? Obvious? Would the twin towers of the World Trade Center have fallen, forty years on, if Nixon had gotten out the other side of the vehicle?”

“Yeah, well, forging medical trials is a crime. It’s wrong. Killing people’s a crime. That’s murder.”

“What’s what you call ‘crime,’ but a consequence? Huh? I say the crime here’s this goddamn HIV, and what’s not been done about it in Africa, India, South America. That’s where the real murder’s going on. And it’s not one case either, like we’re talking about here. Five-thousand-dollar-a-year drugs for your Near Northside buddies. But Africa? Not too profitable for bidness.”

“If it wasn’t profitable, nobody would be doing any of this.”

“Yeah, we made that vaccine profitable. The company made it profitable. And that’s why I’ll stick with that woman in that car there, come what may. You look behind the crime, sir, and you find the real criminals.”

HOFFMAN CROUCHED. His knees felt old. He wasn’t expecting this. Funny how kids grow up. He remembered the little dude who’d climbed into his lap during poker with Tony Demarco and Marty O’Toole.

“Dymon, haar, cub, cub, cub.”

And every card in Hoffman’s hand was a spade.

“Look, son, you want me to tell you a thing here?”

“No.” The kid’s eyes were hollows.

“No, you wanna pass judgment, but you don’t want the facts. Don’t want the responsibility of knowledge.”

“And you’re so responsible?”

“Shit, what you know about me?” He reached to the asphalt—still warmer than the air. “Let me tell you something about me, yeah?”

“I know enough.”

“What? You know my name and I work upstairs. But you even take my name here, ‘Hoffman.’ Yeah?”

“Don’t want it.”

“No, but let me ask you, would you say that’s even any kind of credible Black man’s name?” He waited for an answer, but none came. “Let me tell you, ‘Hoffman’ was the name of the people that owned my people. Must have reckoned, hell, they’re our property, so we better call them ‘Hoffman.’”

“Well that’s all pretty sad and everything. And it’s got nothing to do with anything.”

Hoffman rose, pressing the wall for support. “No? You’re not even curious about how a guy from the Detroit projects came to cruise the streets with the smartest, wittiest, best-looking, biggest-dicked, most-certain-for-success-in-this-life white boy in the whole of Wayne County?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell you. My granddaddy—the first Theodore Hosea Hoffman—well, in his golden days, he was privileged to mop shit at Fort Street Depot.”

His grandson buried his knuckles in his pockets.

“I don’t care.”

“And his son—my daddy—Theodore Hosea Hoffman Jr., well, he was the boy in the US Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Michigan.”

“Land of opportunities.” Vintage Henry.

“Yes, sir. At the age of thirty-four, my daddy was the boy. Changing water coolers. Xeroxing papers. They said he was good at Xeroxing. Kept up his suntan, they said. And course, he was too dumb to make anything of what he was Xeroxing.”

Hoffman paced three steps beside the wall, spun, and stabbed a finger. “Well, I tell you, sir, my daddy read two books a week, a whole one weekends. Up there in the Jeffries Homes, eleventh floor, facing the Lodge Freeway, with Melville and Twain and James Baldwin and Richard Wright. And he sure read one of those documents he slapped down on that Xerox glass. And he’d an idea of who else might like a copy.”

“You mean he was a crook as well?”

“My daddy? No sir. Just another working guy who said, ‘I ain’t taking this shit no more.’ And I tell you that one document—eleven sheets of clean white paper—got my daddy a Firebird. And when we got that car, I knew what I wanted. I wanted out of there. Free at last.”

He knew he was ranting. He was really going at it some. He paused and leaned a shoulder against the wall. But even as he figured how to bring himself down, a red glow flashed across the lot.

The brake lights on the Sentra came on. Then off.

Then on… off… and on.

Forty-six

THE SEAT could wait. First thing’s first. Trudy yanked the gearshift out of park. The Sentra didn’t budge. Then she raised her left foot, and the car began to roll, edging back. Lights on. Right foot gas. Get this right. Get this right. She swung the wheel left, barely missing the Camaro. She cleared it by inches.

That was close.

She heaved a foot onto the brake and the other off the gas. The car pointed at the carwash. Shift to drive.

Once upon a time, she’d loved to drive. Her first lesson: on the seashore, aged nine…

The headlights snared Ben and Theodore Hoffman by the wall. They looked like naughty children caught smoking.

Hoffman ran toward her. “Stop, stop, stop.”

At school at Chapel Hill, she’d run a silver Catalina: a beast, a gas guzzling monster…

“Hey, hey, hey,” shouted Ben.

She locked the driver’s door and felt a dopamine rush. She’d leave Ukiah now, no matter what.

In her first real job, at a lab in New Jersey, she drove a Bel Air with Carol…

Ben yanked open the passenger door. “Didn’t think you drove.”

“Thought wrong.”

Later, her driving forewarned of her condition…

Hoffman banged the windshield. “Trudy please.”

Ben leaned into the doorway and brushed aside a pillow. “You can’t drive. Honestly. Let me.”

First, came a stumble in a Houston parking lot. She’d been walking on the flat, with no obstructions…

“If you don’t get in, I’ll go on my own.” She raised her left foot.

Car moving.

Hoffman stepped aside. Ben ran with the Sentra. The car rolled a lazy half-circle.

Then leaden-toe errors with gas and brake…

She stamped her left foot. The car stopped.

“You