Corpus Corpus (5 page)

Also on the scene was a fledgling court reporter by the name of James M. Cain, who would base his book
Double Indemnity
and the movie of the same tide in part on the case. The murderous housewife was played by Barbara Stanwyck with a sultry cunning that Ruth Snyder would have envied. In the role of the hapless helper in homicide, however, Fred MacMurray had seemed much too smart to have been patterned on Ruth's hapless paramour, Judd Gray. Ruth then claimed one more niche in criminal history. She was the last woman executed at Sing Sing.

The year she and Judd began their fateful journey into the annals of criminal trials had been a time of triumphal pageantry and spotlight for a man known for acute shyness. And in a case of life imitating art, aviator Charles Lindbergh was launched on an odyssey that would validate the words of one of the 1920s' most successful novelists. F. Scott Fitzgerald had declared, "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."

In the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnap and murder of Lindbergh's infant son the court proceedings were the first to be covered by newsreel cameras and radio.

Almost as sensational as the Lindbergh case was the "thrill killing" of a young boy by a pair of brainy young sons of wealthy Illinois families. But the central figure of the trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in 1924 was their controversial defense lawyer—Clarence Darrow—whose strategy was to introduce psychiatric evidence and to challenge the use of the death penalty.

In 1943 the murder of Manhattan socialite Patrica Lonergan and the trial of her husband, a pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force, marked the crime-journalism debut of Dorothy Kilgallen. The daughter of a respected Chicago newspaperman, "Dotty" broke the story of a homosexual relationship between Wayne Lonergan and Patricia's wealthy father. The trial provided Americans a respite from the news of the Second World War. Did Wayne really kill Patricia? A jury said he had. Many people doubted it.

Kilgallen would be at the heart of the murder trial of a handsome doctor in 1954. The case of Sam Sheppard provided the inspiration for
The Fugitive
on television and in a movie. An appeal of the guilty verdict had freed "Dr. Sam" and introduced America to a lawyer who became as famous in defense as Clarence Darrow—F. Lee Bailey. Had Dotty not been busy writing a book on the Sheppard case, had she not been in failing health, had she not been promising to reveal "the truth" behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and had she not died under rather mysterious circumstances, she certainly would have covered the 1965 trial of Dr. Carl Coppolino, also defended by Lee Bailey, and the one that had catapulted to fame another brilliant young phenomenon in the ranks of defenders—Theodore Roosevelt Janus.

The arrest of Richard Edwards for the shotgun murder of one of the guards of an armored car as it made a delivery of half a million dollars to a bank in a suburban shopping mall had led to a nest of 1960s revolutionaries. The result of Janus's portrayal of Edwards as victim of society's failings rather than a criminal was transformation of the prosecution's straightforward murder case into a political show trial. Convicted only of manslaughter, Edwards served a mere eight years.

A decade after the Edwards trial another involved a doctor. This time it was Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician serving with the U.S. Army's elite "green beret" special forces, tried for the murders of his wife and two small daughters. MacDonald's case was the subject of a best-selling book by Joe McGinnis that elevated a new style for writing about such sensational cases and fostered a profitable genre of books begun with Kilgallen's tome on the Sheppard case—True Crime.

Like readers of detective novels, Americans soon found whodunits in real life as they and their system of justice met a new kind of criminal—the serial killer—in the form of Ted Bundy, Wayne Williams, John Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

When private school headmistress Jean Harris shot and killed the famed author of the Scarsdale Diet, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the 1980 case and its entourage of women reporters put the abuse of women on trial.

The trial and subsequent legal civil-trial entanglements of subway gunman Bernhard Goetz, a popular hero, was followed in the public's attention by Robert Chambers in "the Preppie Murder Case" of 1986, the next year's Billionaire's Boys Club murders, and the trials of the Menendez brothers for shotgunning their parents to death. Excuses were offered to justify all this violence. Then came the O.J. Simpson trial with F. Lee Bailey sharing the spotlight as a "Dream Team" of defenders put the police on trial.

What was hardly ever involved in a trial that provoked such wide public absorption was a weighty matter of law or some issue of historical, social, political, or economic significance. But if a case was not important to anyone but those directly involved, what explained its notoriety?

        The personalities of the people in the case?            Occasionally.

        The temper of the times? Sometimes.

        Sex was almost always an element.

But what factor could be discerned in every instance? From Elizabeth Borden to Orenthal James Simpson what was the common denominator? What was it that exalted one murder so that it could become a part of the warp and woof of our history, even legend? That factor, Maggie believed, was the tantalizing possibility that through clever lawyering the accused could get away with it. The result was that heroes of America's system of justice were rarely the prosecutors. Glory, fame, and riches went to defenders like the one who had been summoned across the country to do battle with her in yet another trial of the century.

Janus had won the case, in the opinion of all the people who recognized her in the airport, through trickery and legalistic chicanery. And, as her flight to New York City was called and she pondered the purpose of her journey, she was certain that few of them would have approved of her acceptance of the invitation from the Wolfe Pack to honor Janus with its most prestigious award.

Even the chairman of the steering committee had told her he would understand if she chose to refuse to do it. "It certainly is going to be controversial," Wiggins had warned. "You could find yourself being pilloried by a press that has been depicting you lately as a saint."

As she replied with a laugh, she thought of a perfect answer in the form of a quotation from the Wolfe corpus: "The essence of sainthood is expiation."

During the short stroll from bookstore to subway, only three passersby abandoned the taciturn demeanor that comes with being a New Yorker to remark upon the spectacle of the huge figure made larger by a billowing gray tweed Inverness cape and the matching deerstalker cap. After all, there was nothing unusual about a fat man in New York City, even one with an ebony walking stick with a silver handle in the shape of the Maltese falcon that had been a clue in the solving of a murder. But the encountering of someone dressed like Sherlock Holmes at four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon the week before Christmas, when one expected to see several portly men in Santa Claus outfits, was more than enough to turn the heads of even the most blasé New Yorker.

The first, a gentleman with a chesterfield overcoat and a hurried expression, had muttered, "Good afternoon, Sherlock," and kept on walking.

A block farther, one of a gaggle of giggling schoolgirls had blurted, "Hey, get a look at him!"

The last, an elderly black man with a grizzled gray beard, extended the ubiquitous panhandler's paper coffee cup and said, "I don't have matches to sell like Neville Sinclair had in
The Man With the Twisted Lip
, but I could surely use whatever spare shillings you might have in your pockets, Mr. Holmes."

A dollar poorer, Wiggins descended into the subway and took up a position at the end of the platform in the expectation that the last car of the train when it pulled in would not prove to be so crowded that there was no room for a large man. Only then did he chuckle in admiration of the street begger's savvy in having quickly deduced upon encountering a man dressed up like Sherlock Holmes that reference to a classic Holmesian story concerning another panhandler would result in the windfall it had succeeded in producing.

When the train arrived and the doors of the cars opened, the Wiggins strategy in choosing to ride in the last was vindicated. Side-by-side unoccupied seats amply accommodated a posterior as formidable and expansive as the behind of Stout's brainchild, although the very idea of Wolfe taking a subway was preposterous in the extreme.

As for trains in general, Wolfe had said, "No publication either before or after the invention of printing, no technological treatise and no political or scientific creed, has ever been as narrowly dogmatic or as offensively arbitrary in its prejudices as a railway timetable."

Certainly, a suggestion that Wolfe venture down into the subway would have been dismissed out of hand. And were he to see such a thing as the subway train rumbling into the Fifty-first Street station of the Lexington Avenue line he certainly would have uttered the most extreme word in the Wolfe lexicon: "Pfui!"

Four stops and twelve minutes later as Wiggins exited the subway at Twenty-third Street and Park Avenue South, he stood two blocks from the Gramercy Park Hotel and the culmination of the months of meticulous planning required to ensure that this year's Black Orchid affair surpassed all previous gatherings of the Wolfe Pack.

Parked along Lexington Avenue opposite the hotel, vans of four local television stations and a cable network made it clear that he had been right in telling Maggie Dane that her appearance with Theodore Janus would be controversial.

He had defended murderous radicals in the 1960s as patriots akin to Minutemen standing up for liberty at the Concord Bridge. Was it not Janus who had with a straight face painted a portrait of that newspaper heiress from California who had played footsie with black radicals as a victim and not a perpetrator? Who but Theodore Janus could have gotten off the beast who had strangled so many poor old women in Boston with an insanity plea? Janus's word stretching had succeeded in redefining federal wiretaps in the case against the godfather of organized crime as outrageous intrusion of a law-abiding citizen's privacy. The exhortation had resulted in freedom for the very man heard on the tapes ordering what amounted to wholesale murder, while the one who had gone to prison had been a low-level hood who cooperated with authorities in planting the wiretaps.

Could any other lawyer have managed the deft hedging that sent Morgan Griffith to federal prison instead of death row for the murders of Jonathan Dodge and two others, as well as his proven record as a traitorous assassin?

Who but Janus could carry off such a conceit as constantly wearing western-style outfits, even in the courtrooms of New York City? Yet the clothing served as a silent reminder that he bore the name of the ultimate easterner who went west, that famous coiner of a phrase that was the bedrock of American society, "the square deal," the old Rough Rider himself, Theodore Roosevelt. At least a dozen convicted felons across the country had reaped the benefit of Janus's impassioned pleas to parole boards for a grant of clemency that invariably concluded with the words of TR:

Surely everyone of us who knows his own heart must know that he too may stumble, and should be anxious to help his brother who has stumbled. When the criminal has been punished, if he then shows a sincere desire to lead a decent and upright life, he should be given the chance, he should be helped and not hindered; and if he makes good, he should receive that respect from others which so often aids in creating self-respect—the most valuable of all possessions.

The foremost criminal defense attorney in the nation being a fan of Nero Wolfe had come as a surprise, for it was Wolfe who had said of the lawyers, "They are inveterate hedgers. They think everything has two sides, which is nonsense. They are insufferable word-stretchers."

Janus had proved to be exactly the sort of man who could read a compliment into Wolfe's condescension and live up to all the unflattering adjectives applied to him in the stern court of public opinion, as he recently had done in the sensational case in which the prosecution was led by his former protégé.

Entering the hotel lobby, Wiggins smiled gleefully at seeing them together for the first time since Janus had prevailed over her at trial. Side by side, each with an arm around the other, they beamed in the glare of floodlights.

Aglow with delight, he let his mind reel back to the tempest he had provoked in the steering committee meeting by his daring gambit in nominating Janus for the Nero Wolfe award.

Thrilled with both the outcome and himself, he also noted Janus alive, swaggering, grinning, and basking in the glories of his renown.