Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (16 page)

"Conrad? Oh, he was quite upset. Who wouldn't be? But
he got over it." He went back to the case. "Goodwin actually had
his wife murdered? That's really quite unbelievable. I don't
understand that sort of thing. I've been married twice and divorced
twice. These things happen. You don't go around killing someone
because you don't want to be with her or she doesn't want to be
with you. Nothing lasts forever."

He looked up at me. "This will sound dreadful, I
know. But when Kristin broke off the engagement, I was actually
glad for both of them. I had thought she was only after Conrad's
money. When she married Goodwin, it seemed to prove that money
wasn't really the most important thing for her after all."

"What was?"

"Why, love, of course. What else?"

"Yes," I said. "Exactly. What else?"

The door swung open and the maid came in, the platter
she carried stacked with dirty dishes. I poured what was left of
the bottle into my glass, and when I turned back Gray had
disappeared. I saw him later, just before he left, standing at the
doorway, saying good night to Alma. She kissed his cheek, the way
she had kissed me, and then stood there, watching him go.

A half hour later almost everyone had gone. I helped
Horace move the dining room table back into place and then, our
work done, we sat down and made a start at finishing off what
remained to drink. While we were at it, Alma came in, a languid
look in her eyes. "That was a wonderful party," she said, and stood
next to Horace, her arms resting on his shoulders.

It was almost four in the morning when I got home,
and I had had too much to drink to sleep. I got out of my clothes,
took a long hot shower, threw on a robe, made a cup of coffee, and
went into the library. Sitting at the desk, I thought about what
Russell Gray had said, the offhand remark that nothing lasts
forever, and the easy assumption that it was true. Right in front
of me was the volume of Aristotle through which I had for months
now been making a slow, sometimes tortuous progress, trying to
follow as best I could words written more than two thousand years
ago. Some things last longer than others.

Chapter Eleven

Among other things left in the library of Leopold
Rifkin are the numerous volumes of Diodorus Siculus, a Roman
citizen born in Sicily who spent thirty years in the century before
Christ writing a universal history of the world. Somewhere near the
beginning he remarks that only the ancient Egyptians knew how to
protect the law from the scandalous conduct of lawyers. All
criminal proceedings were conducted in silence, and everything was
done in writing. At the end, when all the writings had been
examined, the judge placed a carved image of Truth upon one of the
two pleas, without ever once speaking a word. The Egyptians,
according to Diodorus, were convinced "that if the advocates were
allowed to speak they would greatly becloud the justice of a case;
for they knew that the clever devices of orators, the cunning
witchery of their delivery, and the tears of the accused would
influence many to overlook the severity of the laws and the
strictness of truth." In Egypt, perjury, like murder, was
punishable by death.

Sitting at the counsel table in a small sixth-floor
county courtroom on a bright summer day, I waited for the defense
to finish with the first juror on voir dire, wondering what the
Egyptians would have made of all this. Richard Lee Jones, who had
almost certainly never heard of Diodorus Siculus, was doing
everything he could to convince an elderly woman he had never met
that he was the most friendly, trustworthy person she would ever
know. I had spent twenty-five years of my life having this same
conversation and could only hope that it had not seemed as false
and contrived to others as it now did to me.

Jones had taken the seat at the end of the counsel
table closest to the jury box, but even that was not close enough.
He pulled his chair back from the table and, placing his elbows on
his knees, bent his lanky frame as far forward as he could. Parted
on the left, his shiny black hair fell over his forehead as
usual.

"You understand that, because this is a criminal
case, the defendant is presumed to be innocent of everything
they've charged him with?"

According to her jury questionnaire, Mildred Willis
was a seventy-four-year-old widow with three children and seven
grandchildren. She had moved to Oregon as a child and later worked
as a telephone operator. Since her marriage she had not held a job
outside the home. Painfully thin, with white hair and kindly blue
eyes, she was the only female juror wearing a dress. She took her
time when she answered a question.

"Yes, I understand that."

"And you understand that this presumption of
innocence follows the defendant"—Jones paused long enough to sit up
and glance back at his client—"Marshall Goodwin, throughout the
trial? Not just part of the trial but all of it. Right up to the
time when you go into the jury room and start deliberations. You
understand that, don't you?"

She thought about it. "Yes," she said, "I understand
that too."

The jury box was directly across from the bench,
where the quick-tempered Judge Irma Holloway was concentrating on
every word. It was an unusual arrangement. In most courtrooms, the
jury is seated to the side and the counsel table is in front of the
bench. Here, it was almost impossible to keep an eye on the jury
while you were debating an issue before the judge or examining a
witness on the stand.

For the first time in my life, I was sitting at a
counsel table during a trial alone. I had no one to worry about,
nothing to be responsible for, nothing except a woman who had been
dead for more than two years and a belief that evil should never go
unpunished.

Jones went on and on, asking questions about her
children and her grandchildren, what she watched on television and
what books and magazines she liked to read. It was like watching in
a concave mirror a distorted reflection of myself. Finally, I got
to my feet.

"Mr. Antonelli?" Judge Holloway asked in her piercing
voice. "Do you rise for the purpose of making an objection?"

I pretended surprise. "No, your Honor. I rise to get
the circulation back in my legs."

While the spectators and reporters laughed and
several jurors smiled, Richard Lee Jones wheeled out of his chair
and objected vociferously.

"Your Honor, I didn't disrupt the prosecution while
he interviewed this juror. I would think common courtesy—"

"Loses out to physical necessity," I said, under my
breath.

With a brisk nod, Judge Holloway got to her feet.

"In chambers, gentlemen."

It was not as easy as it sounded. The judge had a
private entrance through a doorway directly behind the tall black
leather swivel chair at the bench. We had to make our way past
eight rows of spectator benches to a doorway at the back corner of
the courtroom, down the grey linoleum corridor to the clerk's
office, and through the law library, to the door that finally
opened onto the private chambers of Judge Robert M. Beloit.

A garrulous, backslapping fool, Beloit had rescued
himself from a failing law practice by convincing the governor, a
former fraternity brother, to appoint him to a circuit court
vacancy. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, he
was always on the lookout for something new to kill, and his office
was decorated with just a few of what he had managed to find over
the years. An elk, a bighorn sheep, and a cougar stared straight
ahead, as if they had crashed through the wall and were only
momentarily dazed. We were meeting in chambers to discuss a legal
procedure in a murder trial, surrounded by the proud, soulful eyes
of a dead menagerie.

Irma Holloway sat straight up on the edge of the
chair. Behind her high, sharp cheekbones, large eyes, and pinched
mouth, she was a bundle of nervous energy on the verge of erupting
at any moment. She looked at us as we settled into the two wooden
Windsor chairs in front of the desk. Then her gaze lifted to the
dead-eyed animals that covered the two facing walls. She slid back
in the chair, slowly shaking her head.

"Are you a hunter, Mr. Jones?" she asked, a thin,
polite smile on her mouth.

"Yes, I am, your Honor. Most everybody out where I
come from is."

She turned to me. "And you, Mr. Antonelli?"

"No," I replied. "It was never anything I wanted to
do."

A smirk started across Jones's face, and Judge
Holloway rounded on him.

"You don't approve, Mr. Jones?"

"It's not up to me, your Honor," he said, shrugging
his shoulders. He pushed his boots out in front of him until his
legs were straight and then crossed one ankle over the other. "I
don't care if Antonelli doesn't want to hunt. Though I could have
done without that condescending tone of his. Far as I'm concerned,
Antonelli can do whatever he wants. It's a free country. Except,"
he added, a warning in his voice, "I don't think he really has any
business getting in my way while I'm talking to someone during voir
dire. All I've got to say," he went on, glaring at me through
half-closed eyes, "is that it better not happen again."

"And all I've got to say, Mr. Jones," she said,
fixing him with a lethal stare, "is that unless you want to wind up
like one of these animals, your head mounted on the wall, you'd
better never tell me what to do again!"

"I didn't—"

"You don't come in here—I don't care what lunatic
normally sits in these chambers—and start telling me what the other
lawyer in this case better do or not do. You get my meaning, Mr.
Jones? I didn't call you in here to hear what you think. I called
you in here so you'd both know," she added, shooting a glance at
me, "that in my courtroom I make the rules and you follow them, and
pity the fool who first forgets it! You understand?"

Jones stared back at her, a grudging smile his only
response.

"You both understand?" she demanded, her eyes
switching to me.

I nodded.

"Now, let's get this straight." Leaning forward, she
began to shake her finger. "This is a courtroom. It is not
Drama

One-oh-one. Leave the theatrics at home."

Jones settled back in the chair.

"I don't just mean Antonelli, here. That's the last
time he gets to his feet and pulls that kind of stunt. But let me
tell you," she went on, bending farther across the desk, "it's also
the last time you turn the examination of a prospective juror into
a miniseries on that person's life."

"I have a right to explore avenues of possible
prejudice in a juror. This isn't some drunk-drive case, your
Honor."

"You want to argue the point, Mr. Jones? Save it for
the appellate courts. I'm putting a ten-minute limit on how long
either one of you can ask questions of each prospective juror."

Jones was beside himself. "Ten minutes? That's an
impossible limitation."

"If you can't do it in the time allowed, Mr. Jones,
I'll do it for you. The court has the power to take voir dire out
of the hands of the lawyers if they're not doing it properly."

With a shudder, she cast one last disgusted look at
the heads mounted on the wall. "Somebody should shoot him," she
muttered under her breath. Her eyes came back to us. "All right.
Let's get back to work."

Jones stopped me in the hallway. Pulling himself up
to his full height, he stood close to me, backing me against the
wall. "I'm going to bury you, Antonelli. You never were as good as
me."

I moved along the wall. When I was free of him, I
stopped, reached out to him, and laid my hand on his shoulder.
"Listen, if it'll make you feel any better, I'll tell you right now
that I've never thought I was as good as you." I began to walk
toward the courtroom door. "I mean, let's face it," I said, as I
opened it and waited for him to pass. "If you were only half as
good as you tell everyone, you'd still be a hell of a lot better
than anyone else who has ever tried a case."

His face went crimson and he bit his lip. We were
inside the courtroom and everyone was watching. We moved up the
short aisle that ran between the spectator benches and the wall.
Jones stayed a step ahead of me, and when he reached the gate in
the wooden railing he held it open, nodding politely as if we were
friendly adversaries.

With a few last inconsequential questions, the
defense finished with the elderly Mildred Willis. It was now the
prosecution's turn to begin the examination of the next juror
called into the box.

Content and exhausted, Dolores Lightner, the mother
of two small children, sat with her arms wrapped around her bulging
belly, waiting patiently for her third. Whether from an instinct of
kindness or a fear that anyone that close to birth would find it
difficult to condemn someone to death, I made up my mind to get rid
of her. "I see from the form you filled out that you have two
children?"

Her smile had motherhood written all over it. "Yes,"
she replied. Though I had not asked, she added proudly, "A girl,
three, and a boy, one and a half."

From my place at the far right end of the counsel
table, I smiled back. "And you're expecting your next child how
soon?" "Eight weeks," she replied shyly.