Gravewriter (9 page)

A waist-high mahogany rail cut the courtroom in half, separating the spectators from the participants. A similar rail, higher and chunkier, penned in the jury, which sat in two rows of chairs.

The judge's elevated bench was to the jury's right. The bench
had been made from a lighter-colored wood, and decorated with the state seal—a barbed anchor under the one-word state motto, Hope, and the date of the founding of Providence, 1636. The seal, as big as a manhole cover, had been fashioned from brass and polished like a mirror. The witness stand rode like a sidecar off the judge's rostrum.

The prosecutors and the defense team sat at heavy oaken tables, stained almost black, each with an antique desk lamp of brass and green glass.

Four rows of unpadded mahogany benches—like church pews, but less comfortable—were available to any citizen with an iron ass who wanted to see justice at work.

Billy's attention went to the chandelier, a wagon wheel suspended on a chain at the midpoint above the floor. From the rim dangled six miniature wagon wheels, each holding six silver spotlights. The light they threw seemed as bright and natural as the sun.

Back when he had been writing about trials for the newspaper, this courtroom, one of the most impressive public spaces in the state, had dazzled Billy. It was somehow more impressive from the back row of the jury box, the seat in the corner, farthest from the judge.

Billy imagined himself facing justice in such a room; what was impressive to a juror was probably intimidating to a defendant, especially a guilty one.

His fellow jurors fidgeted in their chairs, gazed around the courtroom, measuring their surroundings. The jury, including two alternates, was comprised of seven men and seven women. The youngest was a woman of barely eighteen; the oldest, a graybeard as ancient as Billy's old man. The jurors dressed in tailored suits; they dressed in blue jeans. They shopped at Nieman Marcus; they shopped at Old Navy. Billy had always been struck by the randomness of a jury trial. The lawyers dueled over excluding a handful of potential jurors, but
those arguments generally took place in the margins, to eliminate extreme candidates who might have trouble being objective, such as former prosecutors and the people who could tell you exactly why the CIA killed Kennedy. For the most part, a jury came together by chance, names drawn by lot from a stovepipe hat.

What the hell am I doing here?

Billy's recollections of that morning seemed like fragments of a dream. He had come to the courthouse as if on autopilot, answered some questions, stewed in his own cold sweat, rubbing the bruise on his rib cage where Walter had whacked him, until his name had been called and he was seated as juror number twelve.

How could anyone think that Billy was qualified to sit in judgment?

Capricorn: He's a loving God, but beware His twisted sense of humor. Your choice today is to roll with it, or let it drive you drooling mad. The stars recommend the former.

Billy felt self-conscious and transparent, as if everyone in the courthouse knew he had been fantasizing about murder and so they had concocted this elaborate trial to torture him.

A jury trial is an impressive production, and since the jury is always last to come into the courtroom, all the other actors were already there.

The production started with Judge Palumbo. Billy knew the judge by reputation. He was a sawed-off former jarhead, who had left the softer side of his nature on the Khe Sanh plateau in Vietnam. Neither law school nor two terms in the state senate had wiped away Palumbo's tough-guy squint. The judge reminded Billy of an angry man who needed to pick a fight with the biggest guy in the bar.

Seated at a table in front of the judge was his clerk, a nameless three-chinned political hack, who guided tons of paper—motions, briefs, and court files—over the judge's desk.

Next to the clerk, at her own portable station, was the court stenographer,
a trim woman in her late forties, who transcribed every word of the proceedings onto a strip of paper tape, which would eventually become the official court transcript. Perhaps two thousand pages, it would look and read like the world's longest and most tedious screenplay.

Throughout the courtroom roamed the sheriffs—black pants, blue shirts, no guns for any defendant to grab. They escorted the defendants from the holding cells and patrolled the gallery. This morning, the gallery was nearly empty. Just ten people had decided this trial was interesting enough to visit. Billy guessed that one was a reporter from the Associated Press and that another was from the local daily. Billy noticed a sketch artist but saw no TV news camera. Not surprising—trials could tie up a film crew all day without any guarantee of good film for the six o'clock broadcast. TV producers preferred to cover crime, not justice; crime was more photogenic. The other spectators were in their early twenties, and overdressed—probably law students on an assignment.

The stars of the production, the lawyers, sat side by side at their separate tables, surrounded by their props—legal pads, briefcases, and mounds of transcripts from depositions.

Seated at the defense table was the man for whom all this was taking place.

Billy was surprised at how skinny Peter Shadd looked, how feeble. Shadd rubbed his wrists. He was not handcuffed, but Billy knew from covering trials that defendants in custody arrived and left the courtroom in cuffs. Most judges agreed with defense lawyers that a jury must never see a defendant in chains—the image hurt the presumption of innocence.

Billy stared at Peter Shadd. He wanted to catch his attention, but the young man was engrossed in a legal pad dotted with scribbles.

What did Billy expect to see in the young man's eyes?

For the past thirteen months, Billy had not passed a mirror without looking into his own eyes to see what dark deeds he was capable of committing. If Billy could just look the kid in the eye …

He caught himself absentmindedly rubbing his own wrists.

“S
o what does it mean when we hear that much of the evidence in this case is
circumstantial?”
asked the prosecutor, Ethan Dillingham. His voice echoed in the corners of the giant room. “It means that nobody saw the defendant commit the crime—that's all.”

He paused in his opening statement to let the jurors digest the point.

“It means that this man”—he pointed to Peter Shadd—”was cunning enough to take a gun and shoot the victim multiple times when there was nobody around to identify him as the killer.”

Billy and the other jurors looked at Peter Shadd, who hunched over and shrank in his seat.

“So when Mr. Smothers, the defense attorney, attacks the state's case as
circumstantial,
all that means is that there's no eyewitness. What the state wants you to consider are the
circumstances
suggested by the evidence. Add it all up. All the evidence points to one man, the defendant.

“Let me tell you what the evidence will show,” Dillingham continued. He paced before the jury, his left hand resting inside his jacket
pocket, as if he were modeling his suit in a Brooks Brothers catalog. “Let's start with the defendant himself.”

Billy noted how he referred to Peter Shadd exclusively as “the defendant” to dehumanize him, a bit of subliminal psychology to undercut the jurors' instincts for compassion, and the natural reluctance of ordinary citizens to send another human being away for life.

“The defendant is a longtime heroin user,” Dillingham said. “And we know he will do anything to get heroin, including robbing people at gunpoint. At the age of nineteen, he was convicted of four armed robberies, and he was rightly sent to prison for punishment and rehabilitation. Rhode Islanders thought they were safe from the defendant's reign of terror, at least while his sentence was running.

“While incarcerated—locked up, that is—the defendant met the victim in this case, Garrett Nickel, a killer of notorious reputation, who took the defendant under his wing, so to speak. The state is alleging that this unholy alliance between the defendant and his victim broke down, and turned into murder.

“And let us not hesitate to dispense justice in this case, even though the victim was also a brutal murderer, and not deserving of our compassion.” Dillingham paused, stopped his pacing, and turned to the jury. “Because if this defendant is capable of murdering a coldblooded killer like Garrett Nickel, imagine what he could do to you. Or to your family. Or to your neighbor.” In a low voice, he informed the jury, “This is a very bad, very
dangerous
defendant.”

Several jurors shifted in their seats, shooting glances at Peter Shadd. Dillingham might have been melodramatic, but he could be effective.

“The state will prove,” he continued, “that Garrett Nickel, this defendant, and another inmate escaped together from prison. You will hear testimony from the defendant's former cell mate. You will hear how the defendant quickly returned to his old ways after their escape, and pulled a gun on his cell mate in Roger Williams Park, to
rob him of money he had hidden there. That gun was the same caliber of weapon that was used to shoot the victim in this case.

“You will hear from the medical examiner, who will tell you that Garrett Nickel was shot first in the back, no doubt betrayed by a confidant.” He pointed and his voice boomed. “Betrayed by
this
defendant.” He paced again. “You will hear about the gunpowder residue on this defendant's hands, which could only have been there if he had fired a weapon. And you will hear about his arrest, in a drug-induced stupor, in the basement of an abandoned boathouse, with his veins stuffed full of heroin, and his pockets”—he paused a beat—”stuffed full of cash.”

Dillingham looked silently to the floor for a few moments, gathering himself.

It had been an impressive opening statement.

Billy glanced to the defense table. Martin Smothers, the lawyer, was scribbling notes like a madman. His black felt-tip pen squeaked against the paper. What was he writing?

“When all the evidence is in,” Dillingham said, projecting a sense of fatigue, as if there was so much evidence that it exhausted him just to talk about it, “I'm going to ask you to return a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree.” He scanned the two rows of seven jurors, looking each person briefly in the eye.

Then the prosecutor stepped to his chair, slowly pulled it out, and sat. The jury turned its attention to the defense table, and to Martin Smothers.

Martin had scribbled furiously on his legal pad, trying to distract the jury as Dillingham brought his opening statement to its big finish. His hand was on automatic, writing, “Ethan Dillingham is a selfabsorbed prick. Ethan Dillingham is a …” His attention was tuned to the prosecutor's description of his case.

Dillingham intended to push hard on Peter's character and criminal history, which Martin had expected since the pretrial motions, when Judge Palumbo had ruled that Peter's full criminal record would be admissible at the trial. Painting Peter as a dangerous thug would camouflage the shortage of direct evidence in the case—if the jury believed Peter were
capable
of killing Garrett Nickel, well, who the hell else would have done it?

Damn,
Martin thought, listening to Dillingham,
he's got his fastball today.

If the jury had voted after Dillingham had finished, Peter would have been convicted on the spot. Martin's opening statement would have to do more than point out holes in the evidence; it would have to plant doubt about Dillingham's credibility, too.

Martin waited until Dillingham was seated before he rose to give his opening—so that the jury wouldn't see the taller prosecutor towering over him.

He stood. Mustering as much authority as he could, Martin addressed the jurors.

“When the witnesses get up on that stand to testify before you,” he began gravely, pausing to gesture to the witness box, “the judge won't permit them even to say their
names
until each has raised a hand to pledge the court's solemn oath—that under penalties of perjury and even jail, they will tell you the
whole
truth, so help them God.”

He pressed his lips closed and let them think about that setup, timing himself in his mind—
one one thousand, two one thousand
… at the fourth beat, Martin softened his stern face, and then gave them the punch line: “I'm pleased to say that we lawyers are not inconvenienced by such an onerous oath.”

He smiled.

Chuckles echoed through Judge Palumbo's courtroom. Several jurors, still intimidated by the responsibility that none of them had
asked for, hid smiles behind their hands. Two jurors laughed outright, delighted at the break in the tension.

Martin downshifted into the “aw shucks” style of a country lawyer who's smarter than he looks, a character these jurors would recognize from TV.

“Sure as heck is easier to do this job when you don't have to tell the whole truth,” Martin said. “Not that anybody's
lying
to you here, not really.” He twisted a lock of beard and paced before the jury. “See, the thing with we lawyers—if there's a piece of evidence we don't like, well, we tend to ignore it. That's not lying, is it?”

He met eyes with a juror, who gave Martin a little shrug.

“I mean,” Martin said, pacing faster and turning up the energy in his presentation, “take Mr. Dillingham's opening statement, for example.” Martin didn't look at Dillingham, though he could feel the prosecutor's eyes boring through the back of his head. “If Mr. Dillingham had been required to tell you the whole truth about my client, Mr. Peter Shadd, he would have mentioned that Peter had been physically addicted to heroin
in the womb.”

A gasp escaped a juror in the front row.

Martin spoke directly to her, “That's right, ma'am. Peter was born addicted to the heroin his mother injected into her own veins throughout her pregnancy. But Mr. Dillingham didn't have to tell you that.” He noticed jurors shooting glances at Dillingham.