Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (53 page)

The courtroom was full, and the last juror had returned. The defendant had been brought in and put in the chair next to me.

Cassandra Loescher was sitting at the other end of the long, mahogany table, busily making notes to herself. The clerk, a generous-hearted woman waiting for retirement, took the place she had filled for the last twenty years. Everyone was where they were supposed to be. Like an old soldier, the bailiff drew himself up straight and tall and then issued the only command he knew.

“All rise,” he said. Before the words were out of his mouth, everyone was on their feet, waiting while Morris Bingham, eyes straight ahead, walked to the bench. Calvin Jeffries had walked that way as well, never looking around, but he had moved more quickly, like someone always in a hurry, trying to do two things at once.

Bingham nodded at the jury. “Good afternoon,” he said in his pleasant, muted-tone voice.

“Is the defense ready to call its next witness, Mr. Antonelli?”

he asked, turning his attention to me.

“Yes, your honor,” I said as I stood up. “The defense calls Elliott Winston.”

I stared at the double doors at the back of the courtroom, wondering if they would open and whether, if they did, Elliott Winston would walk through them. I waited, and I kept waiting, but there was nothing, not a sound. He had escaped, just as I had thought he would, and was perhaps right now alone in the elevator, on his way up to where the woman he hated had lived with the man he had killed. I turned around, ready to explain that my witness was missing and that in his absence the defense would now call the defendant himself.

“Your honor,” I began, but Bingham was looking over my head.

“I believe your witness has just arrived, Mr. Antonelli.”

Elliott Winston stood just inside the door while one of the two well-muscled orderlies who accompanied him removed the handcuffs that pinned his wrists behind his back. Elliott was dressed exactly the same way he had been the first time I saw him at the hospital: the threadbare suit that fit too tight, the frayed white shirt held together at the throat by the knot of the same off-center tie. The two orderlies leaned against the back wall while Elliott, rubbing his wrists, walked up the aisle with slow, methodical steps, gazing intently from side to side. His eyes never stopped moving, not when the clerk administered the oath, not when he first sat down on the witness chair. It was as if he was trying to impress on his mind the lasting image of every visible square inch of that courtroom and everything and everyone who was in it.

“Would you please state your name and spell your last for the record,” I asked.

He looked at me, but just for an instant, and then, with a flash of impatience, commenced another circuit of the room. When his eyes came back around they settled not on me, but on Cassandra Loescher.

“You’re the prosecutor in this case?” he asked, bending slightly toward her.

Startled at first, she quickly changed her expression to one of annoyance and looked to the bench for help.

“Mr. Winston,” Judge Bingham informed him in a quiet but firm voice, “witnesses answer the questions directed to them; they don’t ask them. But, yes, Ms. Loescher is the prosecutor in this case. Now please, answer the question Mr. Antonelli asked you.

Please state your full name and spell your last for the record.”

Elliott sat stiff and straight, an imperious look on his face. He treated Bingham’s request like the suggestion of a servant: something he might listen to but would under no circumstances acknowledge. He turned to me, propped his right elbow on the arm of the chair, placed his thumb under the side of his chin, and set both his index and his middle fingers against his cheekbone. A thought raced through his mind and left behind it a smile that darted over his mouth.

“My name is Elliott Lowell Winston,” he said finally, and then slowly spelled the last.

I glanced down at the file that lay open on the table.

“I believe the next question is ‘How are you employed?’ “

My head snapped up. The smile on his face, meant to appear officious, could not quite hide a certain sentimentality nor completely mask a kind of nostalgia.

“I’m not employed. I’m a member of the leisure class, which, as you know, is always, one way or the other, supported at state expense.”

“You’re an inmate at the state hospital.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“How long have you been there?” I asked as I closed the file.

“Twelve years, five months, three weeks, four days,” he said, in a harsh, almost brutal voice. He seemed to be proud of it, and ready to defy anyone who thought to disagree.

I worked my way along the back of the table, passing the defendant—poor, mystified Danny, who seemed amazed by this strange creature on the witness chair; passing Cassandra Loescher, who, despite herself, could not keep her eyes off Elliott Winston.

“Twelve years, five months, three weeks, four days,” I repeated aloud to myself as I paused at the far side of the counsel table and looked back across the oblique angle to the witness stand.

“How have you survived it all these years, knowing there was nothing wrong with you, nothing so serious that it could not have been cured with a little rest and a little weekly counseling with a good psychologist?”

He made no reply, and I could sense that he wondered what I knew.

“We know all about it, Elliott.” I leaned back against the front of the table and clasped my hands together. “We know that Calvin Jeffries arranged to have you sent to the state hospital; we know you were sent there without a psychiatric evaluation. And we know why he did it. We know he wanted you out of the way—

in a place where you could not do anything about it when he took your wife and took your children. What we don’t know is when you first figured it out, first understood that you weren’t going to be there for just a few months. That’s what he promised you, wasn’t it? That you’d go to the hospital and with the same kind of influence he used to get you there, get you out again, didn’t he?”

Dark with rage, his eyes burrowed into me. “I always knew I could trust the honorable Judge Jeffries!”

“When did you first understand that you had been deceived, that you weren’t going to be getting out of the hospital, not for twenty years or more?”

His hand came down from the side of his face and rested on his knee. He bent forward, his back still straight, a half smile, more enigmatic than any look I had ever seen, slashed across his face.

“I understood it the first time I saw him look at my wife; I didn’t know I understood it until I had been in the hospital for nearly half a year.” Not without a certain satisfaction, he noted the puzzled expression on my face. “When I realized she was never going to come to see me; when I was sent a copy of her divorce decree; when I was served with a notice that my rights as a parent were being terminated; when I found out that she had married Jeffries and they were going to give my children his name.

When I realized what they had done to me, then I saw everything in a different light. Looks, words, gestures took on a whole new meaning. The way they kissed each other when we said goodbye, the way he touched her—things I thought showed how fond he was of her—now showed me, when I remembered them, how much they wanted each other, how hard it was for them to keep their hands off each other.” His mouth curled down in disdain.

“I discovered, you see, that the past was not what I had thought it was. They changed it,” he added, as he moved his hand from his knee to the arm of the chair and again sat straight up.

“And what did you do then, when you realized that you had been betrayed?”

His eyes were cold, hard, mocking. “I thought about it.” He paused and inclined his head slightly to the side. “Does that surprise you? That I thought about it?” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “What else was I going to do?” He leaned forward again and with a riveting glance suddenly beat his open hand on the wooden arm of the chair. “What else could I do?”

he shouted. “I’d been declared insane—I was living in an asylum, for God’s sake—what else was I going to do but think about it?

That’s all I’ve done for twelve years—think about it!”

“About what they had done to you?”

“Yes.”

“About what you were going to do to them?” I asked, trying to goad him into an admission I could use.

His head, rigid and erect, began to shudder and his eyes flashed with contempt. Then it stopped. “I thought about a lot of things,”

he said, the only expression left a smile so small I could barely see it just under his mustache at the corner of his mouth. “It did occur to me, I must admit,” he said, his voice hoarse and gut-tural, “that by having me declared insane they had also conferred upon me absolute immunity for any otherwise criminal acts I might care to commit.”

For the first time since he had taken the stand, he turned his head and looked at the jury. “I was a lawyer once,” he explained with a polite smile that was so close to the way Judge Bingham habitually acknowledged their presence, I wondered if it was deliberate.

He seemed to forget what he had wanted to say. “Gave you absolute immunity,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” he said, his eyes coming back around to me. “As you can imagine, with that thought I began to imagine all sorts of things. I was insane—the state said so—and no one would ever be able to hold me responsible for anything I did.” A shrewd glint came into his eyes. “In that sense—and maybe not just in that sense—I was like Calvin Jeffries, wasn’t I? Above, or at least outside, the law. Isn’t that what everyone wants? To do anything they want and not have to face any consequences for it?”

Pausing, he started to look around the courtroom again. “Do you still like doing this?” he asked, a pensive expression on his face. “Being a lawyer, trying cases in court? I should have listened to you when you tried to warn me about Jeffries,” he said, biting his lip while his eyes flared open. His mind was starting to wander back to the beginning of what had happened to him. “This was always where I wanted to end up,” he said, looking at me as he narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “In court, trying to convince a jury that I was right.”

He seemed to draw into himself. I moved down the length of the counsel table and stood at the end of it, closest both to the jury box and the witness stand. I pointed at Danny.

“Elliott,” I said quietly, “you’ve never seen him before, have you?”

He did not hear me, or if he did, he chose not to answer.

Whatever was going on in his tortured mind, he was now a prisoner to it. His eyes grew larger and even more intense, his neck bulged, and his shirt collar, too tight as it was, cut into his throat and his face turned red.

“Insanity confers immunity, but immunity is irrelevant when it is a question of self-defense,” he said, the words tumbling rapidly out of his mouth. “You’re entitled to take another’s life when they’re trying to take yours, aren’t you?” he asked, challenging me to disagree.

“Do you know him? Have you ever seen him before?” I asked insistently, pointing again at Danny.

Elliott glanced at the defendant, then looked back at me. “No, I’ve never seen him before,” he said impatiently. “It would be self-defense, wouldn’t it?”

“No,” I replied, keeping my voice low. “It could not be self-defense. No one tried to kill you. But even if they had, it was twelve years ago.”

It was an odd sensation. For a moment I thought we were repeating a conversation we had had before, one of the hundreds we had had when he was an associate in the firm and we talked about the criminal law and the various and sometimes inventive defenses that could be raised to a charge of murder.

“Self-defense has to be contemporaneous with the attack. Otherwise there’s nothing to defend against. You can’t just take the life of someone who injured you at some point in the past. That’s nothing more than revenge.”

He could barely wait for me to finish. “Are you sure?” he asked, his eyes ablaze. “What if, as soon as he was attacked, he started to defend himself—but moved slowly. What if,” he continued, thrusting his head forward, “the attack itself went on—day after day—for years? What if someone was crushing the life out of him, strangling him, a little tighter all the time, with the thought of what he was doing with his wife, with his children? And then, years after it started, he finally makes it stop. Are you so certain that would not be self-defense?”

I refused to concede anything. “No, it isn’t self-defense and you know it. You’re talking about the way you felt, about the effect of what Calvin Jeffries did to you. It wasn’t self-defense, because it was too late—far too late—to prevent him from doing what he did, and because you can’t change the past. All you could do was try to take your revenge. And that’s what you did, wasn’t it, Elliott?”

He was beside himself. “Can’t change the past? Don’t you understand anything? The past is the only thing you can change!”

His eyes were growing wider and his voice was becoming louder, more violent, with every word he spoke. He was close to going completely over the edge. I had to get him to admit what he had done now or it was going to be too late. I took a step toward him.

“You thought by having Calvin Jeffries killed, by having Quincy Griswald killed, you could change the past?”

“Of course!” he insisted. “They changed my past, didn’t they?”

His eyes darted toward the jury. “My wife—the woman I loved—

became the woman who betrayed me. My children—the children I loved—became the children who forgot me. Don’t you see? My past was that of a man who was loved; it became that of a man who was hated and abandoned.”

His head jerked back around until he was again staring straight at me. “Can’t change the past? What would my past be now if I had just lived all those years in the asylum, a patient in the hospital for the criminally insane? What would you see, looking back on my life? A lunatic. And what would you have seen,” he asked, bristling, “when you looked back at the life of Jeffries and Griswald and the mother of my children? Whatever you would have seen, it isn’t what you see now, is it? Can’t change the past? They did it to me, and I did it to them. They tried to write the history of my life, but I wrote theirs instead!” he shouted, rising from the chair.