Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (10 page)

"How do you know he paid you?" I repeated.

Still, he said nothing. Pushing back from the table,
I crossed my legs and let my hands dangle down along the sides of
the chair. "We have all the time in the world, Mr. Quentin. Take as
long as you like," I said quietly. "The chains won't get any
lighter."

"It hurts," he said, forcing his head toward his left
shoulder.

I looked at one of the guards and nodded. He lifted
the chain on Quentin's shoulder and moved it a few inches toward
his neck. For an instant, something like gratitude passed over his
eyes.

Again I repeated the question, and this time he
answered. Methodically, one question at a time, we traced the
formation of Marshall Goodwin's contract for murder.

"And when you were released from the county jail,
what happened then?"

He described how he was handed a package—a large
envelope—and what was inside it. I did not ask him anything about
the woman who had given it to him.

When I had asked my last question, I informed the
grand jury foreman that I was finished with the witness. The
foreman, a corpulent woman in her thirties with long black
eyelashes, looked around.

"Does anyone have any questions they would like to
ask the witness?"

It was as if she had suggested an obscene act.
Everyone looked away. Finally, an elderly woman slowly raised her
hand. I had noticed her earlier, nervously pressing her thin lips
together, when Quentin had offered his caustic remark about the
money he had made for the murder of Nancy Goodwin.

"Mr. Quentin," she asked, a troubled look in her pale
blue eyes, "I would like to know something. Do you feel any remorse
about what you've done?"

Quentin paid no attention to her while she asked her
question. His eyes followed the movement of his thumbs as they
circled back and forth along the chain draped around his waist. As
soon as she was finished, his thumbs stopped moving and his head
jerked up. His mouth was open, the words already formed, when he
saw her, a frail old woman who could never threaten anyone. His
mouth closed and, after a moment, he gazed down again at his hands,
watching while his thumbs started back into motion.

The two guards helped Quentin up from the wooden
chair. As he shuffled his manacled feet along the floor, the chains
that bent him over clanged against each other, a strange echo that
seemed to come from somewhere deep underground. No one said a word
until he was gone.

It was a few minutes past eleven-thirty, and no one
objected when it was suggested that we break for lunch before the
next witness was called. When I stepped outside the courthouse, the
air was clean and fresh, and the sky a cloudless blue. I was
meeting Horace for lunch and I had plenty of time. Across the
street from the courthouse, I sat on a green wooden bench and
watched a squirrel dart across the grass, then suddenly stop and
rise up on its haunches, an acorn clutched in its front paws, long
whiskers bristling, and then scamper up the side of a twisted oak
tree and out along a branch. On the other side of the walkway, a
young woman rested her arms on her legs while she talked to a small
boy who could only stand up by holding onto her knees.

It was the first warm day of spring. I loosened my
tie and took off my coat. The boy let go of his mother's knee,
wobbled, and then collapsed, sitting down hard on his bottom. He
had that look that only a child can have, wondering whether or not
to cry. Beaming at him, his mother began to laugh, and an instant
later he laughed too.

Stretching my arm out along the back of the bench, I
turned my face toward the sunlight and closed my eyes. When I
opened them, I saw the child grip one of his mother's fingers in
each of his outstretched hands and, marveling at his own
accomplishment, lift first one foot and then the other. How easy it
was to let life slip by. I was on the wrong side of fifty, had
never married or had a child. During the long years of my ambition,
when the only thing important was the next case and the next trial,
I had just assumed, when I thought about it at all, that those
things would take care of themselves.

With growing confidence, the boy let go of his
mother's fingers and started to take a step. To his astonishment,
his little legs buckled and he found himself once again sitting on
the pavement. This time he did not even think about crying. Rolling
over onto his knees, he pushed himself up and rested his arms on
his mother's legs, getting ready to try again.

The park was beginning to fill up with people
spending their lunch hour out of doors. My coat slung over my
shoulder, I walked past the boy and his mother and wondered for
just a moment what it would be like to have a wife and a child.
"He'll be running in a week," I heard myself say.

"Probably." She laughed. She had kind eyes and a
pleasant smile, and the boy was so much the center of her universe
that though she looked right at me, ten seconds later she could not
have described anything about me.

I found Horace waiting for me outside the restaurant.
Dressed in a tan suit, a blue and white pinstripe shirt, a large
bow tie, and a crumpled grey Irish walking hat, he looked more like
a professor of English literature than someone who had spent most
of his adult life in the coarsening atmosphere of the criminal
courts.

"You're late." He chuckled. "I figured once you were
let loose in a grand jury you'd lose all sense of time.

"Actually, we quit early. I've been sitting in the
park. Nice suit," I added as we went inside and waited for a
table.

"Alma said she'd appreciate it if you didn't put a
hole in this one," he said with a straight face. "She picked it out
herself."

"Whose idea was the bow tie?"

He measured me through half-closed eyes. "You ever
try to tie one of these damn things? It took me half the morning,"
he remarked with amazement, whether at how long it had taken or
that he had been able to do it at all, I could not tell.

We were led to a table on the side next to a window.
Outside, the street was jammed with cars and the sidewalks filled
with shoppers. Everyone had come downtown, afraid to wait for the
next good day.

"Alma buy all your clothes?"

"No," he said firmly. "I buy them. She picks them
out. You were just sitting in the park?"

"How is Alma?"

"Busy. That ballet company," he said, shaking his
head. "Sometimes I think it's too much. But she loves it. That's
the important thing. What were you doing, just sitting in the park?
Reading?"

"No, nothing at all. I was just sitting there. I
watched a young woman—a girl, really—playing with her son. Maybe a
year old, just learning to walk. He'd take a step or two, then fall
down seat first, then try again."

Horace nodded. "Made you wish you had a normal life,
right? Wife, kids, the whole thing, didn't it?"

"Made me wonder what it would have been like."

"Not too late, you know," he remarked casually, as
the waiter approached. After we ordered, Horace leaned forward.
"Tell me what it was like. You've never been in a grand jury
before, have you?"

"Once. Years ago. When I was starting out. I got
called as a witness when I was doing court-appointed work. A client
of mine didn't show up the day of his trial, so they charged him
with failure to appear. They called me in, and the DA who was
handling it asked me in front of the grand jury if I had informed
my client of the date he was supposed to be in court."

Horace was grinning. "Let me guess. You invoked the
lawyer-client privilege?"

"Yeah," I replied. "What did I know?"

"They hold you in contempt?"

"They tried," I said, with a shrug. "Rifkin saved me.
He explained to the DA that contempt required a willful refusal to
answer and that my refusal was not willful because it was obviously
based on ignorance of what the privilege was meant to cover. And
then he explained to me that it didn't prevent me from revealing
whether my client knew when he was supposed to be in court. He
suggested that I go back to the grand jury and tell them what I
knew."

"Sounds like Leopold. Only man I ever knew could tell
you to your face you were a fool and have you thank him for
it."

We were almost finished with lunch when he finally
asked the question I knew he had been wanting to ask for days.

"It's your case, and you don't have to tell me if you
don't want to, but why haven't you done anything about Kristin?
Everybody in the DA's office is treating her like some kind of
martyr. Gilliland-O'Rourke told her to take as much time off as she
needed. They think she's a victim."

I looked around to make sure no one was close enough
to hear. "Horace, I'm not sure they're not both innocent
victims."

He began to scratch a figure-eight into the
tablecloth with his fork. "You're still not sure about Goodwin?" he
asked, looking at me from under his lowered brow.

"You were right. I made a mistake. I should never
have talked to him. All I accomplished was to let
Gilliland-O'Rourke force my hand."

"You have enough for an indictment," Horace remarked,
tapping the table with the fork.

"Enough for an indictment, maybe even enough for a
conviction, but not nearly enough to convince me I'm doing the
right thing," I said, reproaching myself for what I had done.
"There's nothing on her," I added in response to his question.
"We'll see what she has to say this afternoon."

"You're calling her as a witness?"

"There are a few questions I thought I'd ask."

* * *

We left the restaurant and walked along the crowded
sidewalk on our way back to the courthouse.

"Alma wants to have you come to dinner," Horace
reminded me. He put his arm around me and his enormous hand
enveloped my shoulder, drawing me closer. Gesturing emphatically
with his other hand, he insisted with a puckish grin that I really
had no choice. "She wants to have a ' "few' " people over. You know
what that means, don't you? I'm going to have about twelve thousand
people milling around and they're all going to be talking about the
ballet and the arts and all that kind of stuff, and I'm telling
you, Antonelli, you just can't leave me alone with that crowd. So
you have to come—as a favor to me."

We were in front of the courthouse. Horace let his
hand fall off my shoulder. "A week from Saturday night. You'll
come, won't you?"

Few things seemed to give him so much pleasure as
lying about his motives to conceal his generosity. There were
dozens of lawyers he could have found to serve as a special
prosecutor, all of them eager for the chance to acquire the
notoriety a case against a chief deputy district attorney would
inevitably bring. He had asked me because he thought I needed to
come back to the law and then thanked me for taking the case. And
he knew I would never say no to Alma, so they invented occasions to
bring me back into the world and made it sound as if I was doing
them a favor.

"I'll be there," I promised. "Thanks, Horace."

"No," he said, looking at me with his deceitful eyes,
"thank you. You saved me."

We said good-bye at the elevator. "I forgot to
mention it," I said as I stepped inside, "but, nice hat, Horace."
As the door shut, he looked at me for a moment and then rolled his
eyes, trying not to laugh.

I made it back to the grand jury room right on time.
We called our next witness. Confident and intelligent, shapely and
infinitely desirable, Kristin Maxfield Goodwin sat down in the
chair recently vacated by a rapist and a murderer, a look of amused
impatience on her face.

"I realize these are difficult circumstances, Mrs.
Goodwin—"

Her head, held high, tilted slightly higher. "Ms.
Maxfield. I kept my maiden name. For professional purposes."

"Of course. Then tell us, Ms. Maxfield—"

"You realize, Mr. Antonelli," she interjected, her
large eyes flashing, "that because Marshall Goodwin is my husband,
the spousal privilege is at work here, and the privilege can be
invoked by either spouse?"

"Are you saying that your husband has invoked the
privilege and directed you not to answer the questions of the grand
jury?"

She was careful. "I'm not saying anything, Mr.
Antonelli. I'm only reminding you that the privilege exists."

"It doesn't really matter," I remarked, as I got to
my feet and moved to the side of the room opposite the assembled
members of the grand jury. "The questions I have to ask all have to
do with matters that took place before your marriage to Mr.
Goodwin. As I'm sure I don't need to remind you, the spousal
privilege applies only to conversations that take place during a
marriage." I paused, and then added, "And not always to all of
them." My shoulders against the wall, I folded my arms across my
chest.

"Tell us first, if you would, Ms. Maxfield, where you
were the night Nancy Goodwin was murdered."

"I spent most of that evening working in the district
attorney's office—in the conference room—preparing for trial."