Corpus Corpus (4 page)

Goldstein drummed stubby fingers atop the stack of books. 'Johnny, I've never seen such a look of surprise on your mug."

"I don't get it," Bogdanovic said, rising again. "How can she give an award to the guy who used every dirty legal trick there was to beat her in that travesty they had the nerve to call a murder trial out there in La La Land?"

"They go back a long way. Before she became a prosecutor in"BecauseJanus defends mobsters doesn't make him one."

"There's another reason I'm against you taking part in this banquet," Bogdanovic said, wheeling around. "I don't think you should be hobnobbing with the shyster who got Morgan Griffith off with a slap on the wrist."

"Twenty-five to life without parole is a slap on the wrist?"

The lanky detective returned to his chair and flung himself into it dejectedly. "Griffith should've got the death penalty."

Both men fell silent as their thoughts turned back two years to the murder that had introduced them to a remarkable detective by the name of Arlene Flynn.

Goldstein smiled. "Bogdanovic and Flynn! You two were great together! She shouldn't be wasting all that talent in the sticks. Working for me she could earn twice what she gets with the Stone County district attorney's squad. And she'd be more challenged."

"There are people for whom money isn't all that important. And a lot of people don't share your view that New York is top of the ladder in all things, including the crime department."

After a pensive moment Goldstein muttered, "Ridiculous!"

"I'll bet that if you asked Arlene she'd agree with me that it's not going to look right if you give Janus this silly award."

"In the first place, it's not a silly award. Secondly, I am not the person who'll give him the award. I'm delivering a toast to Lily Rowan. In the Wolfe novels she is a girlfriend of Nero Wolfe's assistant, Archie Goodwin. At the banquet Lily is being represented by someone who is an expert on Wolfe. She will be the one presenting the award to Janus."

"Well she can do it without me. Wiggins can count me out."

"Not so fast with regrets, John-boy. The woman in question happens to your favorite prosecutor from the other coast."

"Maggie Dane? She is going to be there?"

Goldstein drummed stubby fingers atop the stack of books. 'Johnny, I've never seen such a look of surprise on your mug."

"I don't get it," Bogdanovic said, rising again. "How can she give an award to the guy who used every dirty legal trick there was to beat her in that travesty they had the nerve to call a murder trial out there in La La Land?"

"They go back a long way. Before she became a prosecutor in Los Angeles, she was a junior associate in his firm right here in little old New York. I met her just after I had made lieutenant. She took my deposition in a two-bit assault case that involved an up-and-coming mobster we've all since come to know as Don Carlo Perillo, boss of bosses. I couldn't help laughing when I saw that among the legal papers she unloaded from her briefcase was the new Nero Wolfe novel,
A Family Affair
. I thought it was amusing that she'd be reading it while defending a crime-family member. That puts our initial encounter in the mid-1970s. Then she got married to an actor and gave up a promising career as a criminal defender to accompany her hubby to Hollywood. When it ended in a divorce she supported her son by going back to the law as a prosecutor. So you see, she and Janus are old friends. As to the Wolfe Pack's giving the award? One word: publicity. Our friend Wiggins is keenly aware that the reunion of Maggie Dane and Theo Janus for the first time since the big trial will bring out the press in droves."

"That is my point! Do you really want to see yourself on the front pages in a picture with him all duded up in that ridiculous cowboy getup, ever present big fat stogie in his hand, smug smile on his suntanned kisser, hugging you as if he owns you?"

"If there's to be a picture in the papers, I'm sure it won't include me. Maggie Dane is much more photogenic. And newsworthy. She is also such an authority on Wolfe that Wiggins has banned her from taking part in the quiz that is a Black Orchid ritual. That's why if I'm to avoid making a fool of myself when I get up to introduce her I'd better do some brushing up on the corpus."

Bogdanovic's expression went blank. "The what?"

"The body of work by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is called the canon. Nero Wolfe stories are the corpus."

"As in delicti, no doubt."

"It's actually a tongue-in-cheek reference to Nero Wolfe's avoirdupois. In movies long before your time he was portrayed by Edward Arnold, back in the thirties. On radio he was played by Sydney Greenstreet, the fat man in
The Maltese Falcon
. On TV it was William Conrad. He was suitably chubby, though not as immense as Wolfe. Nero tipped the scale at a seventh of a ton."

Despite the disguise of a baggy pants suit, enormous black sunglasses, and a large straw hat with floppy brim meant to further conceal long red hair that she had pulled up into a knot beneath it, she found herself recognized all the way through the airport. Suddenly, after a fourteen-year career and more than a hundred successful murder prosecutions, a television camera in the courtroom had transformed her from just one more familiar face around the Los Angeles County Criminal Court into a national celebrity. Yet amid the embarrassment of being asked for autographs as she hurried toward her departure gate, she found some comfort in the unanimous opinion of those who delayed her that the outcome of the trial was nothing less than an assault against the American system of justice and an affront to common sense and decency.

At a newsstand she bought
Good Cigar
magazine with a large cover picture of Theodore Janus wreathed in a blue cloud and a provocative headline: is this man's law all smoke and mirrors?

In a bookstore she purchased the new legal thriller by John Grisham.

Although she could cite a few exceptions in crime fiction, all of them men, Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Margaret Rosemary Dane viewed the overall lack of prosecutors as principal characters as a disappointing flaw in the mystery genre. Lawyers who did solve crimes were invariably working on behalf of someone who had been mistakenly charged with a crime or, even worse, set up by the police, often in collusion with a prosecutor. In the courtroom dramas of theater, film, television, and books, the rule seemed to be that true nobility of character resided only at the tables occupied by a Perry Mason rather than a District Attorney Hamilton Berger. For every capable exception to the rule, such as the prosecutors on Law and Order, television was replete with the Perry Masons.

In detective novels the officers of the law from the cops to the prosecutors were often described as dolts or impediments to be overcome. Sherlock Holmes faced inept Scotland Yarders. Nero Wolfe had to tangle with Inspector L. T. Cramer.

With a smile, she wondered what Wolfe would have made of Harvey Goldstein. And how might Harvey respond if the weighty private sleuth stormed into his office, as he had into Cramer's, and threatened to have the police abolished?

When cases moved out of the hands of investigators and into courtrooms the drama in fiction, as in real life, lay in whether the defense could outwit and outmaneuver the prosecution and get the accused off. In cases in which Nero Wolfe had investigated, Assistant District Attorney Irving Mandelbaum, who shortened his name to Mandel, and Westchester County prosecutors Fletcher M. Anderson and Cleveland Archer had no need to worry that Wolfe's case might be undercut by a defense lawyer's histrionics.

"A trial is theater," Janus had taught her, first as student and lately as adversary. "If you want to take the measure of the social, moral, and political character of a nation's people," he said, "look at their attitude toward major criminal trials. Study the great legal shows, Maggie. You can learn more from them than you'll ever pick up in a classroom."

The first trial had grabbed the headlines from coast to coast not because the crime happened in a big city where awful things were expected to occur but in the sedate and civilized town of Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1895. Charged with taking an ax and hacking to death Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, was the sweetly mannered and demure daughter of Andrew's first marriage, Elizabeth. In an inkling of things to come, reporters rushed from all over the country to cover what headline writers trumpeted as "the trial of the century."

Faced with a weak case put on by the prosecution, the jury deliberated for one hour and returned to court to declare Lizzie not guilty. Word of the acquittal spread like wildfire through Fall River and by telegraph to newspapers across the country and around the world. In another foreshadow of what such sensational trials in the next century would produce, many who had not been in the court during the trial, but had followed the case in press coverage, were shocked by the shortness of the jury's deliberations and so outraged by the verdict that Lizzie ultimately moved from Fall River to spend the rest of her life shunned by a public that gleefully recited:

        Lizzie Borden took an ax 

        And gave her mother forty whacks. 

        When she saw what she had done 

        She gave her father forty-one.

A hundred years after her name got an enduring place in the annals of America's most famous criminal trials, another murder case was to end with the jury finding the defendant not guilty and a vast majority of the public in angry disagreement. Almost immediately, another piece of poetic public opinion went around:

        O.J. Simpson took a knife 

        And used it on his former wife; 

        And when he saw that she was dead, 

        He slashed Ron Goldman toe to head.

In the hundred years between Lizzie Borden and O.J. Simpson thousands of men and women had been charged and put on trial for murder, with most convicted, but every now and then one of these cases of homicide was vaulted into such a state of intense public interest and insatiable curiosity that it, too, became "the trial of the century."

In 1906, millionaire playboy Harry Thaw's troubled mind was obsessed with the beautiful twenty-year-old model who had become his wife, the former Evelyn Nesbitt. But neither could Harry rid his mind of Evelyn's former fatherly benefactor and lover, Stanford White. If the lurid stories she had whispered to Harry were to be believed, the country's most famous architect had been a sexual pervert. Consequently, when Thaw strode up to White while New fork's most celebrated people enjoyed late supper in White's magnificent restaurant atop Madison Square Garden, whipped out a pistol, and fired three bullets into the architect's body, then declared that he did it to save his wife's honor, defense lawyers claimed that such a deed could only be declared a justifiable act.

With the best defense his riches could buy, Thaw pleaded not guilty, dined on sumptuous meals catered in his jail cell by the city's finest restaurants and lobster palaces, and calmly waited for the trial to begin and its star witness—Evelyn—to take the witness stand. He expected her to leave the jurors with no choice but to exonerate a man who had defended her honor.

From shooting to verdict, the public doted on all the lurid details while viewing the drama as a lesson in morality. Unlike a morality play, however, the trial of Harry Thaw did not have a happy ending. The jurors proved incapable of reaching a verdict. With a mistrial declared, Harry faced a second trial at which the defense came to court with a fresh strategy. This time he pleaded temporary insanity and beat the rap.

In the decade known as the Roaring Twenties excess seemed to be an American preoccupation. In 1926 Connecticut's murder trial of Gerald Chapman (the first man to be named Public Enemy Number One) set a style for raucus press coverage of a man who had come to be regarded by the public as a kind of folk hero.

That same decade provided the press opportunity to tweak the public's passion for a sensational murder and a lively trial. Set against the vivid tapestry of the Roaring Twenties, a case that Damon Runyon called "the dumbbell murder" provided a boisterous and uninhibited decade with a show involving a brigade of free-booting reporters that Runyon called "the best show in town." Its seemingly mundane central character, Ruth Snyder Brown, became a national fixation.