Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (14 page)

"He said the fewer people who knew Quentin might be a
State's witness the better. You have to remember, I was basically
Marshall's assistant. If someone had to go get a police report, or
interview a witness, or look up a citation, I was it. There wasn't
anything unusual in what he asked me to do."

"If that's all there was to it, why did you lie to
the grand jury?"

Reaching into her purse, she removed the cigarette
case. Pensively, she took out a cigarette and tapped it against the
cover after she snapped it shut. As she lit it, she slipped the
case back into her purse. "I had to protect my husband," she said,
following with her eyes the ribbon of smoke that curled up from the
cigarette. She took one long drag and then, with a twisting action
of her hand, crushed it out.

"There wasn't anything going on between the two of
you then?"

She looked up from the crumpled cigarette, lying next
to the other one like two broken bodies.

"No," she said firmly. "He wanted there to be, but I
was engaged to someone else."

She lied to protect her husband, and she would not
sleep with one man while she was involved with another. For a
moment we just sat there, sharing the solitude of two people who
understood the truth hovering behind her lie.

"When did it start? You and Marshall?"

"That night," she said, watching me with a strange
intensity. "The night his wife was away. The night she was
murdered."

She had lied twice to the grand jury. I got up and
walked past her to the window. In the street below, strangers
crowded together in the aimless order of circumstance, hurrying
home. I could sense her turning around in her chair, watching me
from across the room. My eye still on the passing scene, I said
quietly, "When you were engaged to someone else."

Unhurried, her words drifted across, filling up the
space between us. "Yes, but by then I knew it was over between us.
What happened with Marshall had nothing to do with it." She had
been trained to make distinctions and to use them to her
advantage.

"And the reason you lied to the grand jury about
that?"

When she did not answer, I looked back over my
shoulder. She was sitting sideways on the front edge of the chair,
one leg crossed over the other, the hem of her skirt halfway up her
thigh.

"I didn't lie," she said simply. "I didn't spend the
night with him."

"But you said you spent the night with... " I knew
the answer before I reached the end of the question. "I see. You
were with Marshall, and then you spent the night with your
fiance"

I turned away and watched the thinning crowd below.
"Where?" I asked after a while.

"Does it matter?" She laughed quietly.

"It might."

"In the parking structure. In the back seat of his
car."

The lights were getting dim, and the dwindling crowd
cast shadows in the street.

"So while Travis Quentin was raping his wife,
Marshall Goodwin was with you, in the back seat of his car." I
turned around and faced her directly. "Tell me, do you think the
timing was accidental?"

Her eyes never left me. "How would I know that?"

"One way is if you were certain your husband had
nothing to do with her murder. Because if he didn't, he wouldn't
have had any idea what was happening to her in a motel room a
hundred miles away while he was so engaged with you, would he?"

Moving away from the window, I stood right next to
her. "Don't you believe in your husband's innocence?"

Her head was tilted back as she looked up at me. "He
says he didn't do it," she replied evenly.

"Do you believe him?"

"I'm his wife," she said, without emotion.

"So was Nancy Goodwin," I said. I went back to my
chair and glanced at the clock on the corner of the desk. "It's
getting late. You probably have to go."

"No," she said, shaking her head, "I don't. I can
stay as long as you want. We could have dinner, if you like."

"That's probably not a great idea," I replied.
"There's just a few more things I'd like to know. Why that night?
Nothing had gone on between you before. What happened? Or had you
been falling in love with him for a long time?"

"Love? I told you I was attracted to him. I liked the
way he took what he wanted. That night he told me he wanted
me."

"Did it bother you that he was married?"

She almost laughed. "Was it supposed to?" Beautiful
and cold, sensual and elusive. For much of my life I had found
women like this fascinating and irresistible.

"How did you feel? When you found out that you had
been making love with him while his wife was being murdered?"

"I never really thought about it," she replied, in a
voice that betrayed a certain impatience. "I really don't see what
any of this has to do with anything. I've admitted I slept with
him."

"Yes, while you were still engaged. What was his name
again—your fiance?"

"Conrad Atkinson."

"Were you in love with him?"

"Conrad was charming. Very good-looking," she added.
"And very intelligent."

"You didn't answer my question," I reminded her,
following the movement of the fountain pen I had begun to push back
and forth again. "Did you love him?"

It was nearly dark outside, and the lamplight seemed
to draw everything together until the only things visible were the
desk, the chair, and the blue Persian rug.

Her voice was smooth. "Whether I was in love with
Conrad Atkinson—or, for that matter, anyone else—is quite frankly
none of your business."

I brought the fountain pen to a stop and looked up.
Everything about her was of a piece: the defiant independence, the
belligerent smile, the taunting self-certainty about what she would
do and what she would not.

Pushing away from the desk, I stared hard at her.
"None of my business? You lied to the grand jury. You were under
oath and you lied. Now you come here and tell me that you don't
want to be indicted for something you didn't do. And then you tell
me, when I ask you whether you were in love with the man you were
engaged to marry, that it's quite frankly none of my business."

"It doesn't have anything to do with what you need to
know," she insisted.

"I'll decide what I need to know! I already know what
happened. I want to know why. I want to know why Nancy Goodwin was
killed! I want to know why your husband had her killed!"

"I don't know anything beyond what I've told you,"
she replied calmly. "I delivered an envelope to Travis Quentin when
he was released from jail, but I didn't know what was in it. I
became physically involved with Marshall the night his wife was
killed, but I didn't know she was dead until I heard about it the
next day, when they brought the news to him while we were in
court."

She knew more than that. I shot out of the chair.
"And when was the next time?"

"The next time?"

"Yes. The next time you were together. How long after
she was dead?"

She did not have an answer she wanted to give. Her
mouth opened and closed. She looked at me, without expression,
waiting for me to ask her something else.

I was leaning forward as far as I could go, resting
my weight on my hands. "Was it the next night? The night after
that?"

Whatever debate had been going on within her, she
spoke as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about what had
happened. "He told me he didn't want to be alone."

I waited for the rest, but that was all she said.

"When did he tell you that?"

Her eyes were fixed on mine. "The day of the funeral.
The day they buried his wife. That night."

My head dropped between my shoulders and I stared
down at the dark blank surface of the desk, feeling sorrier for
Nancy Goodwin than I may ever have felt for anyone in my life. A
wave of fatigue rolled over me, and I sank down into the chair,
pressing the bridge of my nose.

"I thought he was lonely," I heard her say.

It seemed strange. The thought that Marshall Goodwin
had been having sex with another woman while someone he had hired
was killing his wife had not bothered me nearly so much as the
knowledge that he did it all over again the day she was buried. Was
it because what he had done in the back seat of his car had become
a part of the overall brutality of the murder, while the second
time seemed like a gratuitous obscenity? There was a difference
between murder and desecration.

"You thought he was lonely," I said, opening my eyes.
"Do you think a jury will think that? Or do you think they'll
decide that anyone so indifferent to his own wife's death is likely
to have had some involvement in her murder?"

Chapter Ten

She floated from one guest to another, weaving her
way across the crowded living room, her eyes settling for a moment
on each person with whom she stopped to exchange a word, a laugh, a
smile. Finally, Alma was standing in front of me. She said
something I could not hear. Laughing, she repeated it, but her
words were lost in the noise around us. She rose up on her toes,
slipped her thin arm around my neck, and kissed the side of my
face.

"In the kitchen!" she shouted into my ear. Her hand
fell away, coming to rest on my shoulder, as she searched my eyes
to see if I understood. As I nodded helplessly, she stepped back,
her fingers sweeping along my coat sleeve until they reached my
hand. She squeezed it and then, letting go, moved back into the
crowd.

On the other side of the dining room, empty of
furniture except for the table, moved up against the wall, a woman
carrying a tray stacked with platters of steaming food shouldered
her way through a swinging door. She put everything down, arranging
each dish, and went back for more.

Horace was standing over the stove, an enormous gas
range with a stainless steel hood that towered up to the ceiling.
Groaning, he scraped another load of chicken wings from the grill
and, with a cautionary look, handed the hot pan to the woman I had
seen earlier.

As soon as he saw me, he set down his metal tongs and
shook my hand. The perspiration that streaked his face had run down
his neck and soaked his shirt collar. Laughing, he gathered up the
ends of the white chef's apron he was wearing and used it to wipe
his eyes.

"I didn't know you could cook, Horace," I said, as he
reached for a half-full bottle of beer on the counter next to the
range.

His eyes stayed on me while he drank. With a loud
sigh, he put down the empty bottle."Cook, sew, I have all the
domestic virtues," he remarked with a wry grin. He nodded toward
the dishwasher, which was already humming with its first load. "I
learned a long time ago to stay ahead of the game," he
explained.

The kitchen door flew open and the maid was suddenly
standing before us, clutching the empty tray. "That should just
about do it, Gloria," Horace said. "Just this last batch," he
added, swinging his eyes around to the chicken still roasting on
the grill.

"The salads, Mr. Woolner," she reminded him.

Horace rolled his eyes and shook his head. "I'd
forget my legs if they weren't strapped on."

Without a word, she followed him to the double-door
stainless steel refrigerator and held up her tray. He put two large
ceramic bowls on it and hesitated with a third bowl in his
hand.

"I can take it," she assured him.

Dropping his chin, he raised an eyebrow.

"Really." She laughed, struggling to keep the two
bowls balanced on the tray.

Horace looked over her head and caught my eye. I put
my drink down on the counter. Horace pulled the bowl he was holding
away from her. "Mr. Antonelli here is a librarian and he could use
the exercise," he explained, as he placed his hand gently on her
shoulder and turned her toward the door. She went on her way.
Horace handed me two bowls from the refrigerator and took the last
two himself.

We were an incongruous parade, a short white maid,
followed by a fairly tall white man in a dark suit, both of us
dwarfed by a black man the size of a tree. The crowd seemed to be
larger and more tightly packed together, everyone talking at the
same time. We could have walked in naked and no one would have
noticed.

As soon as I found room on the table, Horace's hand
grabbed my shirt and pulled me away. I followed him back into the
kitchen. "What'd I tell you?" he asked, as he took off the apron
and, crumpling it up, tossed it without looking inside the pantry.
"Alma's idea of a dinner party.

"Here, look at this!" he exclaimed as he led me over
to the kitchen window. The Woolners' condominium was in a high-rise
building at the southern edge of the city, less than six blocks
from the courthouse, with a view of downtown Portland and the river
that had once marked its boundary and now divided it in half.