Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (7 page)

In his will, Leopold Rifkin had left me his house and
his extraordinary library because he thought it was never too late
to begin the study of serious things. But Horace was right. Leopold
had read his books and done his work as well. He would not have
expected anything less from me.

As soon as I got home I went into the library and
picked up the phone. Waiting for Horace to answer, my eye fell on
the volume of Aristotle that lay on the corner of the desk and I
remembered how each time I opened it I was taught again the depths
of my ignorance.

Alma answered. "You made another conquest. Madame
Krupskaya keeps asking about you."

I remembered the Russian woman's bright-colored face,
made up like a painted mask. "How old is she, anyway?"

"

Well," she replied, "I don't think it's really true
that she danced for the Czar... " Her voice faded into the silence
of uncertainty.

"She was very interesting," I remarked, trying to be
discreet.

Soft laughter, like the hushed giggle of a
schoolgirl, penetrated her speech. "Are you interested, Joe?"

"Not yet."

"Not yet!" she burst out. "What does that mean, not
yet?"

"I'm too young for her," I explained.

"The age difference—whatever it is—isn't going to
change, Joe."

"No, but when I'm eighty or eighty-five it won't
matter so much."

"That's what you say now," she teased gently.

"Is Horace around?"

"You mean you didn't call to talk to me?" She waited
just long enough for me to feel awkward. "He's on his way home. He
called from court just before you did. Shall I have him call
you?"

I asked if she would and then she invited me to
dinner. "Sometime soon," she said. "Perhaps I can find someone a
little less—what shall I say?—mature than Madame Krupskaya."

"I'd love to have dinner, just the three of us."

"Or maybe the four of us," she insisted. "You really
have to get out more often, Joe. We worry about you. You need to
have a life, Joe. Everyone deserves that," she said, quietly
serious.

A half hour later, Horace got right to the point.
"How did it go with Quentin? What's he like?"

"He's a fairly powerful argument against the death
penalty, that's what he's like."

Horace read my mind. "Too good for him, huh?"

My gaze lingered on the library shelves lined with
dozens of works of moral philosophy. What good would books like
these do someone like Quentin? When you were old enough to begin
the study of ethics, it was already too late for it to have any
effect on what you were.

"Right and wrong don't have any meaning for him." I
tried to explain. "Imagine someone who does whatever he feels like
doing and then, as soon as he's done it, forgets all about it, the
way you might toss a candy wrapper out of your car."

"Did he tell you anything new?"

"I think I know who delivered the package, the one
with the information about Goodwin's wife."

"Good. Who?"

"The woman he married, Kristin Maxfield."

"You sure?" he asked, after he muttered an obscenity
under his breath.

"Quentin recognized her. He saw her in court the day
he was arraigned."

"Doesn't mean she was involved," he remarked.

"Let me ask you something, Horace. Goodwin was in the
middle of a trial when they told him his wife had been killed. It
was a murder case. Was she the one who took over for him? Was she
co-counsel in that case?"

He tried to remember. "Might have been. They usually
tried cases together."

I could see it, the two of them sitting across from
each other in the conference room, thick three-ring trial manuals
lying open on the table between them, the door to the hallway left
open. Anyone working late would have seen them there, getting ready
for another day in court. I knew what it was like, the constant
preparation, the obsession with every detail, the inability to free
your mind from it for more than a few moments at a time. On the
night Nancy Goodwin died, while they worked, was that what they
were thinking about?

"I have to know," Horace said, "one way or the other.
Are you going to do it?"

I could still get out of it. If I said no, that would
be the end of it, and Horace would never hold it against me. If I
said yes, I was in for the duration."Yes."

After a short pause, I asked, "You knew all along,
didn't you?"

"You had to come back," he said. "Sooner or later.
You needed to be away for a while, but you were never ready to quit
for good. It's in your blood. You'd miss it too much. It's like
war. Everybody grows to hate it, but when there hasn't been one for
a while, everybody forgets what it's really like and they start to
look for the first excuse to start a new one."

I hoped he was wrong and was almost certain he was
right. In trial work the only thing that mattered was whether you
won or lost. Now, after everything that had happened, I thought it
made a difference whether you deserved to win.

During the next few hectic days I dealt with the
prosaic details of beginning for the second time in my life a new
practice, limited, at least for the moment, to a single case. How
young and naive I had been the first time I looked for office
space, certain I was about to embark on a career in which every
defendant was innocent and none of them was ever convicted. How
quickly it had all passed. Before I knew it, I was staring out the
window of my corner office, a senior partner in the fastest growing
firm in the city, watching the sun set on Mount Hood, wondering how
things might have been had I remained an anonymous lawyer
conferring with a clientele of indigent defendants in a dimly lit
two-room office with a used desk and a couple of borrowed chairs.
It was, I suppose, a form of middle-age self-indulgence, the vague
regret at vanished innocence, the knowledge that the prize is never
quite what you thought it was going to be.

I had no desire to make my second beginning like the
first, however; the days of Spartan simplicity were over. I rented
a four-room suite in a modern building several blocks from the
courthouse, filled it with oriental rugs and expensive furniture,
and then realized I had no idea what to do next. Helen Lundgren, my
secretary for more than a dozen years, had always taken care of
everything. As I now discovered, my dependence had been so habitual
that I had not even thought of her until I needed her.

The telephones had just been hooked up, and the first
call I made was to my old firm.

"You could have called before this, you know," she
scolded. "You're not drinking again, are you? You haven't done
anything stupid, have you? You're not... ?"

"No, I'm fine. Just fine. I'm opening up a law
practice."

"The criminals will be glad to hear it," she said
sharply, still certain there was no such thing as a false
accusation or an honest mistake.

"I was wondering—hoping, actually. Would you be
interested in working for me again? I know you've been with the
firm a long time, but I could really use the help."

Her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. "You know
what they have me doing here? I prepare estate planning documents.
Trusts, things like that. You have any idea how dull that is?" she
asked plaintively. "You have any idea how much I miss murder and
rape and all the things we used to do? When can I start?"

"How much notice do you have to give?"

"I'll give them what they deserve. I can start
tomorrow."

Helen was waiting for me the next morning, one bony
knee crossed over the other, if anything even thinner than she had
been before. Her hair had a little more gray in it, and there were
a few more lines at the corners of her eyes.

"How's your husband?" I asked, as I sat down behind
the desk.

"Still the luckiest man alive," she replied
briskly.

"I'd sort of hoped you might have changed a little,"
I said, leaning back in the chair as I tried to suppress a
grin.

"No, you didn't," she retorted. "Shall we get to
work?"

By the end of the week it at least looked like a law
office. Someone Helen found worked all day and, it seemed, straight
through the night, constructing bookshelves on two facing walls in
the room that now became both a conference room and a library.
Without a word between us, Helen made all the arrangements to bring
out of storage the law books I owned, and the morning after the
shelves were finished she was standing on a stepladder placing each
volume of the Oregon Reporter in its proper chronological place.
Though she always treated my offers to help like an invitation to
abuse, I made one anyway.

"If you want something done right," she replied,
lifting the next volume with both hands, "you have to do it
yourself." She could retrieve every known homily at will and recite
it as if she had never heard it before.

"When it's convenient," I drawled, as I headed for my
office, "would you put a call in to the DA's office?"

The door closed and the buzzer on my console rang.
"Who do you want there?"

On the front right corner of my desk, a glass bud
vase held a single red rose. Neither the vase nor the flower had
been there the day before. "Thank you for the flower."

She ignored me. "Who do you want me to get on the
line?"

"Marshall Goodwin."

Goodwin was not in, but two hours later he called
back. "Joseph Antonelli!" he exclaimed, with the same exuberance he
lavished on perfect strangers. "Did I hear your secretary right?
Law offices of Joseph Antonelli! So you're back at it? Great! What
can I do for you?"

He seemed surprised when I invited him to lunch, and
even, I thought, a little ill at ease. Was it because of the line
that was drawn so frequently between prosecutors and defense
lawyers, a line that discouraged social contact? Or was it
something else?

"There's something I'd really like to talk to you
about," I said, when he hesitated.

"Sure, I'd love to," he replied, reverting to his
normal enthusiasm.

We met the next day at a fish restaurant a block off
Burnside and sat in a wooden booth near the back. Dressed in a
paisley tie and a neatly pressed double breasted suit, Goodwin
smiled at the waitress as he ordered a drink and kept his eye on
her while she walked away.

"Nice," he remarked, turning back to me. "Don't you
think?"

"A little young," I replied.

"So, tell me," he said, his eyes full of apparent
interest. "What made you decide to come back?"

"I thought it was time," I said, looking back at
him.

It was a strange feeling—or, rather, it was strange
that I seemed to have no feeling at all. I'm not sure what I
expected. I had defended dozens of people charged with murder, most
of them guilty, almost all of them acquitted. But a trial, even for
murder, is like watching a play, one of Shakespeare's histories, in
which all the violence takes place offstage. The victim is dead,
and no matter how depraved the manner of the death, it happened far
away from the ornate civilities of a courtroom. This seemed
different and, in a peculiar way, more real. I was face to face
with someone who might be a murderer and did not even know he was a
suspect.

"I never had a chance to tell you," I remarked
solemnly, "how sorry I was about what happened to your wife."

He looked away, as if he was not sure how he should
respond. "It was a long time ago," he said finally. Brightening, he
changed the subject. "Now, tell me," he asked earnestly. "What are
you going to do? I have a hard time imagining you doing anything as
dull as civil work. Or are you back to criminal defense?"

"I'm going to prosecute," I replied evenly.

He had just started to take another drink, and he
laughed. "You're going to what?"

"I've been appointed a special prosecutor in a murder
case," I explained. "You know the statute."

"Oh, sure, sure," he said. "When a county doesn't
have anyone with the right expertise or experience. Well, I never
thought I'd see you trying to put someone away," he went on, as he
lifted his glass. "Welcome to the club."

The waitress returned and, one at a time, dealt onto
the table the dishes we had ordered. Goodwin rattled the ice in his
empty glass and ordered another. As he raised his hand, I noticed
his watch, a thin crushed gold band and a flat jade stone face with
two narrow hands to measure the minute and the hour. It was the
simple elegance of understated luxury, and I could not take my eyes
off it.

"I bought it for myself," he remarked, pulling his
sleeve back until the watch was completely exposed. "Last year,
when I turned forty, I had it made."

"I didn't realize deputy district attorneys did so
well."

"So where is the case you've got?" he asked,
pretending to be interested. "Do you have to go out to one of those
one-horse counties where they've only got two lawyers in the DA's
office?" The smile on his face left no doubt what