Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (24 page)

Her voice was quiet, controlled, as if she were telling a story about someone else.

“You cannot imagine the depths of his anger and hatred. He was screaming at me like I had never heard anyone scream before. I started screaming back. It was self-defense, that’s the only way I can explain it. He was accusing me of everything imaginable, terrible things, obscene things, and I was screaming back, taunting him with everything he said about me, telling him it was all true, laughing about it. He was hurting me, worse than I’d ever been hurt before, and at that moment I was every bit as crazy as he was. And that’s when I said it, that’s when I told him, that, yes, of course he was right, I was out to destroy him, I had done everything he said I had done, I was having an affair, I was sleeping with another man, I was sleeping with his great good friend, Joseph Antonelli.”

“But why?” I asked, astonished at what she had done.

“Because I wanted to hurt him back. He idolized you. He wanted to be just like you. And because I never thought he’d believe it.

I thought it would show him how insane it all was, that it was all in his mind, and that he needed help. But instead it just convinced him he was right.”

Watching her tell me with apparent sincerity a story that ex-onerated her of any blame for what had happened to her first husband, I wondered whether it was the truth or whether, after years of subtle reinterpretation, she had gradually come to believe it had happened just the way she said it had. If she was a woman who was perfectly willing to lie, she was also a woman who would never admit, not even, or perhaps especially, to herself, that she was a liar.

“You have no idea how awful I felt when Elliott tried to kill you. I kept telling him it wasn’t true. I had not been having an affair. I didn’t even know you. Despite everything that had happened up till then, I never thought he was capable of anything like that.”

She looked at me with eyes searching for sympathy. If I had never known Elliott, or perhaps if I had never known Calvin Jeffries, I might have given it.

“Elliott still thinks you were having an affair, but with Judge Jeffries.”

Her eyes turned cold. “Did you think I didn’t know that? As soon as Calvin and I were married, Elliott started sending letters, weird, scary letters, accusing me of it and threatening to get even.

After a while I started sending them back, unopened. That’s why he asked you to deliver that letter. It wasn’t because he didn’t have the address. It was because he knew I wouldn’t open it, and because he knew I’d never let the children read it.” She paused, her lips trembling. Slowly and methodically she began to beat her fingers on the arm of the chair. “Do you know what he wrote?

What he wanted the children to read? ‘Your mother is a whore, and now you’re orphans twice.’ That’s what he wrote, Mr. Antonelli. That’s the sort of thing he wants to tell his children.

That’s the reason I never allowed them to see him. That’s the reason why I sent them away to private school: So he wouldn’t have any way of finding them.”

“So it isn’t true?” I asked as I got to my feet. “You weren’t having an affair with him?”

“Of course not,” she said as she walked me to the door. “Calvin was like a father to me. He treated Elliott like a son. He tried to help him every way he could. When Elliott got sick, Calvin did everything he could. He knew what it was like for me. He had gone through something of the same thing with his wife. I don’t know what I would have done without him. If it hadn’t been for him, Elliott would have gone to prison for trying to kill you. Calvin made sure he was sent to the state hospital where he could get help.”

We were at the door. “Judge Jeffries had him sent to the state hospital?”

“He didn’t do it himself,” she said as she opened the door. “But he made sure it was done.”

I said goodbye and turned to go. “It didn’t do any good, though,”

she said. “Elliott still hates me and he’s still insane. If I didn’t know he was locked up in that place I’d swear he killed Calvin just to get even with me.”

“They have the killer, Mrs. Jeffries,” I said, looking back.

She nodded twice. “The one who killed himself? Are you sure, Mr. Antonelli? Are you sure someone like that murdered my husband?”

Fourteen

_______

Iread it in the newspaper the next morning, a front-page story under the byline of Harper Bryce. Another judge had been murdered. While I had been talking to the widow of Calvin Jeffries, Quincy Griswald, the new presiding circuit court judge, had been killed in a murder that was in all important respects virtually identical to the one before. Like Jeffries, Griswald had been stabbed to death, and, like Jeffries, Griswald had been killed in the parking structure where both of them had kept their cars. Jeffries had managed to crawl back to his office; Griswald had been found dead in the garage, slumped down next to the door of his late-model Buick.

I took the paper with me when I went into the office later that morning. Saturdays were the days I tried to get caught up with my cases. As I drove past the courthouse on my way in, I noticed that the flag had again been lowered to half-mast. No judge had ever been murdered in Oregon and now, in the space of little more than two months, two had been killed, both of them the presiding circuit court judge at the time of their death.

I remembered what Jeffries’s widow had said, the doubt that someone like her husband’s confessed killer could really have done it.

If he had not been found, and if he had not confessed, the immediate assumption would have been that both judges, Jeffries and Griswald, had been killed by the same person. But the killer of Calvin Jeffries had been found, and he had confessed, and then, as if that was not sufficient to prove his guilt, he had taken his own life. Yet I still could not get out of my mind the thought that this had to be more than sheer coincidence.

I reached Howard Flynn at home. “You’re not calling me from a bar, are you?” he asked in his usual gruff manner.

“Do you know if the police have gotten the DNA results yet?”

“From the knife the guy used to kill Jeffries? No, I haven’t heard. It’ll be a match, though. It’ll be Jeffries’s blood.” There was a brief silence and at the other end of the line I could hear Flynn’s labored breath. “You must have read the paper this morning. The guy that killed Jeffries is dead. This is someone else.”

I stared out the window, watching the leaden gray sky grow darker. “What if it isn’t a match?”

Flynn preferred to deal with tangible facts. “Then you have an interesting situation. But the Griswald killing sounds like a copycat to me. Some guy has a grudge because Griswald sent him away. He heard about what someone did to Jeffries and he figures he’ll do the same thing. These aren’t original thinkers we’re dealing with here.”

“What did they ever find out about him, the one who confessed to the Jeffries murder? Did Jeffries send him to prison?”

“I don’t know,” Flynn replied. “Do you want me to find out?”

None of it had anything to do with me. I was not defending anyone who had any connection with either the murder of Calvin Jeffries or the killing of Quincy Griswald. Besides, I had asked Flynn for quite enough already. Still, there was something missing in all this and I wanted to know what it was.

“If you can do it without too much trouble, then yes, I’d like to know what you can find out.”

After I hung up, I tried to reach Harper Bryce. He was not at the paper, and he was not at home. I left a message on his voice mail and turned my attention to the cases on which I was supposed to be working.

I began reviewing the police reports in an armed robbery case set for trial the next week. Three lines after I started, I found myself searching my memory for anything that would tie the two murders together. They were both presiding circuit court judges at the time of their death. If someone were trying to make a statement about the judiciary, or about the legal system altogether, killing two chief judges would certainly be one way to do it.

With a conscious effort I went back to the reports. Then I remembered, what after all was only obvious, that Jeffries and Griswald were both trial court judges who regularly imposed punishment on violent offenders. But every trial court judge did that, and none of the others had been killed. I looked down and found the place where I had left off, read a few words more, and looked up. There was a difference. Jeffries, because he thought he was so much smarter than everyone else, Griswald, because he was afraid he was not, would go out of their way to let a prisoner know how much they thought he deserved what he was going to get and how much they were going to enjoy giving it to him.

They were both easy to hate.

I shook my head in a futile attempt to clear it, read down to the end of the first page of the report, and then turned to the next. The words went out of focus. One murder might be explained because of a sentence one of them had given, but what were the odds that the same man would be sentenced to two different terms in prison, one by Jeffries, one by Griswald, and only decide after he had served the second one that both judges deserved to die. And even if it were possible, there was no way to explain the confession. Flynn had to be right. The only conceivable connection between the two crimes was that the first had inspired someone else to commit the second.

I put it all out of mind, at least long enough to finish reading the police reports. There was more work to be done after that, but I could not concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes at a time. I got up from the desk, told myself that it was almost time for lunch anyway, and headed out the door.

The zinc-colored sky was crisscrossed with turbulent black clouds and there was a hush in the clean damp springtime air. I felt a light sprinkle on my face and quickened my step. I was only a few blocks from where I wanted to go, but then, a moment later, the rain began to pound down, beating on the pavement in hard fast bursts, like shrapnel from an exploding shell.

People with umbrellas struggled to get them open. A woman, one hand holding down her skirt, whirled past me. I fell into the open doorway of a small corner grocery and waited for the rain to let up. The worst of it passed in a few minutes, and, staying close to the buildings, I moved on.

I spotted the bookstore on the other side of the street half a block away. Dodging the traffic, I jogged across and spent a moment in front of the window examining the sets of used books on display. In front of a clothbound set of the collected works of Pushkin, a place card listed a price which no longer seemed quite as expensive as when it had first been posted several years before. A bell rang when I opened the framed glass door.

Anatoly Chicherin was sitting on a plain wooden chair behind the front counter. Long rows of unpainted bookshelves stretched down both sides of three narrow passageways that led toward the back. The air was stagnant, heavy with the stale dust of books that had been left to molder nearly as long as the dead bones of their mainly forgotten authors.

Five foot six, with an owlish full face and a small flabby mouth, Anatoly Chicherin wore glasses so thick that, seen through their distorted refraction, his eyes seemed to bulge right out of his head.

He looked up at the sound of the bell with a smile on his face.

With surprising agility for someone his age, he leaped to his feet and came around the counter to greet me.

“You’re a little early,” he said in a voice that when you first heard it made you think it must have come from someone else.

It was resonant, rich, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside the earth.

Chicherin turned the sign that hung in the glass door so it read CLOSED instead of OPEN, and then pulled down a shade smudged with hundreds of his own fingerprints.

“This will give us a little longer for the game,” he said. “I have the board all set up.”

He led me past two rows of Russian-titled volumes toward the dimly lit storage room in back. The Cyrillic script on the spines looked to my ignorant eye like English letters seen backward through a mirror.

Two straight-back wooden chairs faced each other across a small square wooden table with a chessboard in the middle. Flecked with the minuscule remains of a dozen dead insects, a single light bulb, suspended by a cloth-covered cord, hung down from the grease-covered ceiling. When Chicherin shut the door, shadows like black curtains fell over the walls.

On the front corner of an unremarkable metal desk, next to a pile of dog-eared journals, was a dented electric teakettle, which Chicherin proceeded to plug into the wall.

“It will just take a few minutes,” he said as he sat down opposite me. Rubbing his hands together, he glanced avidly at the chess pieces. “Shall we start, or shall we wait for the tea?”

“Let’s wait for the tea,” I replied, barely suppressing a grin. “I like to delay defeat as long as I can.”

“We’ve only been playing for six months. Did you expect to win so soon?”

“I lose every time we play, and we’ve played enough that I know we could keep playing for years and I’d never be able to beat you.”

With a laborious groan, as if something dead were being forced against its will to come back to life, the teakettle began to sizzle and then, a moment later, began to boil.

“You shouldn’t think like that,” he said while he poured the boiling water into a porcelain teapot. “You’re much better now than when we started.” He put the teapot on the side of the table and then brought us each a cup and saucer. “It needs to steep for a few minutes,” he said as he sat down.

Magnified out of all proportion by the thick-lens glasses perched on the bridge of his small snub nose, his eyes seemed to draw me toward him.

“You just need to slow down a little. You see a move and you take it. But sometimes, when you focus in like that, when you concentrate on what seems to be the main line of attack, you fail to see what is coming at you from the side, so to speak. Now,”

he said as he poured the tea, “let’s begin.”

It was over almost before the tea was cool enough to drink, another in my unbroken string of defeats.