And Leave Her Lay Dying (2 page)

Later, there were some at Berkeley Street Police Headquarters who would say the case had been practically wrapped up, the jury would have had to be deaf, blind and drunk not to convict the creep. Others would claim that it was never that solid, it would have been a touch-and-go trial that could tilt either way depending on the skills of the attorneys, the whims of the jurors or the mood of the trial judge.

But even the skeptics agreed that the prosecution had been gaining ground until Joe McGuire lost his temper and assaulted the defence attorney.

McGuire had spent the third day of the trial on the witness stand, verifying evidence presented by the prosecuting attorney in the morning and enduring an hour of intensive cross­examination after lunch. He had begun with a spectacular hangover and a desperate longing to be somewhere else, anywhere but Courtroom B. His lunch had consisted of a bowl of chowder and a bottle of Kronenbourg beer, which had helped neither his digestion nor his disposition. In fact, his headache became so intense that during the afternoon session, responding to questions from the defence attorney delivered in a rapid-fire staccato manner, McGuire frequently swept his hand through his hair, sometimes trying to ease the pain and at other times searching for a hatchet handle protruding from his skull.

It was almost three o'clock. His waistline was edging uncomfortably over the belt on his trousers; he shifted his body and crossed his legs, dangling one tasseled black loafer over his knee.

McGuire dressed in defiance of fashion, favouring tailored British woollens of no particular style which he could wear for years with white Egyptian-cotton button-down shirts and plain knit ties. His trousers were dark and pleated and his jackets Scottish tweed. It was McGuire's uniform, worn in three colour variations: blue, grey and brown. Today's was brown.

The defence attorney, a ferret-faced man named Marv Rosen, had vowed to the press before the trial began that he would not only secure an acquittal for his client but expose moral rot and decay in the Homicide Division of the Boston Police Department. Now he stood at a table shuffling papers with exaggerated drama while McGuire, the jury and the rest of the courtroom attendees waited patiently.

McGuire ran his hand over his head again. His hair, still shining chestnut brown except for silver filaments woven through the short sideburns, barely hinted at its owner's middle age. Soft curls coiled around his ears and up to a widow's peak above a broad forehead, and his surprisingly dark, piercing eyes studied the world with extremes of fierce anger or deep concern.

Above his upper lip, a white scar cut at an angle through the shadow of his beard, a trophy awarded ten years earlier by a pimp on Washington Street. Women liked the scar. McGuire himself had grown fond of it. When relaxing with a book or listening to music, he would unconsciously trace its line with his forefinger.

Joseph Peter McGuire was of average height, which made him short for a police detective. As many men do when they are smaller than those around them, he carried himself with an air of controlled aggression, a muted sense of impending explosion in his carriage, the effect either softened or made more intense by the expression in his eyes.

Now his eyes expressed only fatigue as he drew his finger over the line of the scar and let his mind wander to picture the woman he hoped to see that evening, the softness of her lying beside him and within reach . . .

“ . . . Isn't that correct, Lieutenant McGuire?”

Rosen, the defence attorney, was speaking from his desk near the jury box.

McGuire blinked. All day long he had replied to questions in the carefully phrased artificial jargon of formal police reports. “To the best of my knowledge.” And, “We observed the victim lying in a fetal position parallel with the bed, her head towards the north-side wall of the room in question.” McGuire despised using the phrases because they were devoid of emotion and caring, distant from real life. And death.

Now he spoke directly—“I'm sorry”—and stretched his neck to ease the knotted muscles at the base of his skull. “Could you repeat the question, please?”

“Repeat the question?”

Rosen lifted his head from the papers he had been studying to stare at McGuire. He stood erect, tall and lean, and echoed McGuire's words: “Repeat the question?” His close-set eyes grew wide and he stretched his arms out from his body like a man who had been challenged with a riddle to which there could be no answer. He strode around the desk, his arms still extended, his eyes moving to the jury, to the judge, to the spectators, to the bailiff, urging them to share his incredulity.

“Lieutenant McGuire wants me to repeat the question,” Rosen said in a singsong manner. “And may the court note that this is at least the third time . . .” He looked back at his assistant, a smallish man with an enormous moustache, sitting at the defence desk. The assistant held up four fingers for Rosen and everyone else to see. “Correction, the fourth time during cross-examination that the attention of the witness has wandered from this vital, critical topic at hand.”

“My attention hasn't wandered, counsellor—” McGuire began.

“
May I remind you, Lieutenant, that my client has been charged with a brutal murder of which he is totally innocent, and has suffered assault at the hands of you and your fellow officers?
” Rosen exploded.

“Counsellor, counsellor.” The soft voice of Judge Garnett Scaife sounded from above McGuire's right ear. “No need to flirt with hysterics here, Mr. Rosen.” The eyes of the judge crinkled behind rimless glasses. “I think that all that's necessary is for you to repeat the question as Lieutenant McGuire requested, and I expect this time the police officer will do his utmost to listen.”

Rosen approached the bench as though wanting to discuss a confidential legal matter. When he spoke, his voice carried far enough for everyone in the courtroom to hear without difficulty.

“Your honour,” Rosen began, “a basis of our defence is the open hostility which has been shown towards my client—”

Judge Scaife remained smiling but raised his hands to silence the lawyer. “Counsellor,” he said, in the same soft, indulgent manner, “your client has been charged with a particularly heinous murder. In my experience, police officers tend to be a touch belligerent with people they suspect of committing those kinds of crimes. Of course, if you wish to submit evidence of harm to your client's person by any of the officers, I will certainly be pleased to hear it.”

Retaining his smile, Scaife scanned the courtroom, projecting an image of a strong, kindly judge determined to show no favouritism.

Rosen tightened his stomach and straightened his shoulders. “Your honour, my client shouldn't even be in this courtroom,” the lawyer declared. “But as long as he is subjected to this procedure, he deserves respect from the prosecution witnesses and most certainly from the police officers.” As he spoke, he pulled the cuffs of his shirt beyond the ends of his jacket sleeves and the diamond chips on his gold cuff links danced in the courtroom lights for the entertainment of the spectators.

“So he does, Mr. Rosen,” Judge Scaife nodded. “So he does. Now please repeat the question. We are waiting with great anticipation.” He looked up and smiled out at the courtroom once again.

While the lawyer pleaded for justice and the judge projected wisdom, McGuire shielded his eyes and tried to hear music in his mind, a jazz tune, a chorus from a favourite Brubeck recording. Somewhere else, he pleaded silently as he recalled the music in his head. Take me somewhere else, anywhere but here.

Removing his hand from his eyes he looked up to see Rosen's client, a skinny acne-faced young man named Arthur Trevor Wilmer, slouched behind the defence desk in an ill­fitting polyester suit. The shirt collar was too large for his thin neck, the sleeves too long for his short arms. As McGuire watched, Wilmer picked diligently at a hangnail on his thumb; the concentrated effort forced the tip of his tongue to emerge from behind his stained, protruding upper teeth.

McGuire knew Wilmer's history, knew of the squalor and poverty he had been born into, knew of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother and a series of her live-in boyfriends, knew of his drifting between jobs in car washes and short reformatory terms for petty thievery. He felt pity for Wilmer: a predestined loser, a social misfit fated to die clutching a wine bottle beneath a bridge in the Public Garden.

But he felt only loathing for what Wilmer had done to a twenty-year-old Boston College student who endured three hours of rape and torture on a warm spring afternoon before Wilmer plunged a kitchen knife into her chest.

McGuire narrowed his eyes and watched Wilmer tug at the errant hangnail, finally lifting his thumb to his mouth and biting off the sliver of skin. Wilmer raised his head and caught McGuire's stare before dropping his hand into his lap and smiling—
smiling!
—at McGuire, the man who had formally arrested him and then, in the alley behind Wilmer's rooming house, lifted him bodily and thrown him into the rear seat of the squad car.

Wilmer hadn't complained about his treatment. He would never have mentioned the incident at all except in response to intense questioning by Rosen, his court-appointed lawyer. McGuire's action had been just another part of Wilmer's world, a world which had no room for pleasantries or careful deportment, where there were few expectations and fewer courtesies.

Rosen scanned the jury, ensuring that each member had absorbed his loud and passionate declaration of his client's innocence, before strolling back to the defence table where Wilmer now sat, self-consciously erect. The lawyer scooped a sheaf of papers from the desk and ambled towards McGuire.

“Lieutenant,” he said, scanning the papers as he approached, “you stated that you visited Mr. Wilmer's apartment on Tuesday, the sixteenth of May, the day prior to his arrest.” He smiled coldly at the detective. “Is that correct?”

“That's correct,” McGuire responded. “We had a proper warrant, documented and—”

“I'm not interested in the warrant, Lieutenant.” Rosen waved the idea away with a sweeping gesture of his hand. “I am interested only in what happened at Mr. Wilmer's apartment in his absence.”

McGuire frowned. “I'm not sure what you mean.”

“I mean to make two points, Lieutenant.” The expression remained frozen on the lawyer's face, less a smile than a tightening at the corners of his mouth. “Point number one. When no one answered your knock on Mr. Wilmer's door, what did you do?”

McGuire shifted in the chair. “I asked his landlady to unlock the door for me. Our warrant dearly stated—”

“Please, Lieutenant, please!” The smile broadened into something even colder and more cynical. Rosen lifted his hands to his ears as though trying to shield himself from McGuire's words. “We've heard enough about your warrant. Let's not bore everyone here with the details of your warrant, shall we?” Dropping his hands, the lawyer turned to the jury again. “Kindly tell the court exactly what Mrs. Hoskins did when you made the request.”

McGuire ran his hand through his hair again as the invisible hatchet blade worked its way deeper into his skull. He lifted his eyes to look at Rosen, who was studying the jury with an expression of pained patience, and replied in a flat voice, “She unlocked the door for us.”

Rosen snapped his head in McGuire's direction, his eyes burning. “And you entered Mr. Wilmer's room?”

“I have testified to that.”

“And what did you find?”

“A mess.”

“Is Mr. Wilmer charged with being a poor housekeeper?” Rosen asked in an icy tone.

“No, he's not, counsellor—” McGuire began.

“Then let's not treat this matter so lightly, shall we? The point is, Mr. Wilmer was not at home, was he?”

“No, he was not.”

Rosen walked casually back to his desk where he dropped the papers and thrust his hands in his trouser pockets. “We have heard that Mr. Wilmer's quarters consisted of one room with one small closet,” he said over his shoulder. “He shared a bathroom with other tenants. Is that right, Lieutenant?”

“That's correct.”

“And how long were you in Mr. Wilmer's room during that first visit?”

“Long enough to convince myself that he wasn't there.”

“More specific, please.”

McGuire shrugged. “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

Rosen turned to face the jury and the corners of his broad mouth tightened once again. But this time the eyes crinkled. This time there was warmth in the smile McGuire could not see. “Did Mr. Wilmer reside in a penthouse, Lieutenant?”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

His smile erased, Rosen looked sharply at the witness stand. “Did his residence cover several hundred square feet?”

“Hardly.”

“In fact, it was one small room, wasn't it?” Rosen took a step in McGuire's direction.

“As I have testified, yes.”

Another step. Rosen was bearing down on him like a . . . like a snake, McGuire thought. Body smoothly gliding, eyes unblinking, confident. A snake. “And you did conduct a thorough search, did you not?” Another step.

McGuire folded his arms across his chest. He breathed deeply and slowly, trying to prevent anger from inundating his voice, trying to avoid the unpardonable sin of losing his professional demeanour, his calculated and aloof coolness under pressure. “You know we did not, counsellor,” he said, hearing the edge in his voice, feeling a tightening in his larynx. “Our warrant did not cover a search. It authorized us only to arrest Mr. Wilmer or to confirm his absence in the event—”

“For the last time, Lieutenant, we
know
about the warrant you had sworn out with only the most tenuous of evidence—”

Don Higgins, the prosecuting attorney, stood and called out in a weary voice, “Objection—”