Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (13 page)

There was no reason to tell her, and there would have
been a certain pleasure in refusing her something she wanted to
have. She was looking at me, waiting, her lips pressed together,
intent on giving away nothing of how she felt.

"We're looking into the possibility that Kristin
Maxfield may have been involved."

"I see," she said, as she rose from her chair and
walked me to the door. "I suppose we'll just deal with that when
the time comes."

The door closed behind me. Gilliland-O'Rourke did not
know any more than I did whether Marshall Goodwin was guilty, or
whether, if he was, Kristin Maxfield had been involved. And I had
the odd feeling that she did not really care.

Chapter Nine

There was one more way to tighten the screw. I told
the detectives who were in charge of the investigation to bring
Kristin Maxfield in for questioning. She was not amused.

"Would you like to have an attorney present?" she was
asked.

"I am an attorney," she reminded them. She was
sitting on one side of a small rectangular table in a room used for
interrogations. Facing her on the other side were the two
detectives, one of them, Rudy McLaughlin, just a few years away
from retirement, his partner, Mark Haskell, a good ten years
younger. I stood behind a one-way glass and watched while they took
her through a series of questions designed to suggest we knew more
than we did.

McLaughlin took the lead. "You testified in front of
the grand jury that you didn't deliver anything to Travis Quentin
the day he was released from the county jail."

She listened to the question without apparent
interest, gazing down at her hands folded in her lap. When he
finished, she looked up, her eyes glancing off his before they came
to rest on her own reflection in the glass. "Yes," she said
finally, turning her attention on the detective.

Haskell, the younger detective, jumped in. "Travis
Quentin says you did."

"I wouldn't know Travis Quentin if he walked in this
room." Her eyes drifted back to the glass.

It was McLaughlin's turn. "We know you were both in
on it together. The only thing we don't know is why."

"Why?" she asked, lifting her soft dark eyelashes.
"That's a good question. Why would I do a thing like that?"

Unfazed, McLaughlin went on. "We know your husband
did it because of money, what he would have lost in a divorce. But
we don't know why you helped him."

Before she could respond, Haskell added, "Maybe you
didn't know you were helping him. Maybe you just thought you were
taking Quentin some legal papers, something like that. Maybe you
thought it had something to do with Quentin being a witness in that
drug bust."

She denied everything, and she never once lost her
composure. Finally, she asked, "Am I under arrest? Because if I'm
not, I think I've answered all the questions I care to."

"No, you're not under arrest," McLaughlin told her.
"Tell me," he went on, when she got up to go, "do you really
believe your husband is innocent, that he didn't have anything to
do with the murder of his wife?"

She stood in front of the see-through mirror,
checking her makeup. "Any questions you have about my husband you
had better take up with his lawyer."

I went back to my office and waited for her to
call.

"Did you enjoy the little show this afternoon?"
Kristin Maxfield asked. Settling easily into the chair in front of
my desk, she fixed her eyes on mine as she crossed her legs. She
had on the same clothes she had worn during the interview, but her
blouse was no longer buttoned all the way up and her jacket was
open at the front.

I did not answer her question.

"Perhaps you could tell me why I was dragged in there
like that?"

"I was under the impression you came in
voluntarily."

"Let's not split hairs. I was told the police wanted
to ask me a few questions. Did you think I was going to refuse to
come in? Why don't you just tell me exactly what it is you're
after." Pausing, she moistened her lips with her tongue. "Then
maybe I can help you. Then maybe you'll realize you're going in the
wrong direction with all of this."

"The wrong direction? I don't think I'm going in the
wrong direction. I think your husband hired Travis Quentin to kill
his wife." I waited for an instant and then added, "And I think you
helped him do it."

Her eyes never left me, her expression never changed.
Coolly analytical, she asked, "Knowingly?"

It was a question only a prosecutor or a criminal
defense lawyer would think to ask. Anyone else would have just
denied they had done anything wrong; she wanted to draw a
distinction between things that were punishable and things that
were not.

Folding my arms, I slouched back into the corner of
my chair. "Does your husband know you're here?"

Opening her purse, she searched through it. "Do you
mind if I smoke?" she asked, as she opened a gold cigarette case. I
looked around for something to use as an ashtray. A metal tin half
filled with paper clips was the best I could do. Emptying it into
the center drawer, I reached across and put it on the desk directly
in front of her. She lit the cigarette, took one drag, and flicked
the ash into the tin."No, Marshall doesn't know I'm here." She
picked up the cigarette, took one more drag, and snuffed it out.
"And he won't, either," she added, looking at me with her large,
candid eyes.

Lacing my fingers together behind my head, I rocked
slowly back and forth in the tall leather swivel chair. "What is it
you want to tell me?"

"What is it you want to know?"

I shook my head. "I already know."

"No, you don't," she said, shaking hers. "You may
think you do, but you don't, not really."

I stopped rocking and sat still. "I know you
delivered an envelope to Travis Quentin the day he was
released."

"Let's just suppose—for the sake of argument—that I
did. It could have been completely innocent."

I brought my hands down and gently grasped the arms
of the chair. "Was it?"

"Again—just assuming it happened, and assuming it was
an innocent act—it would still be a crucial part of your case,
wouldn't it? As a matter of fact, it's only if it was an innocent
act that it could be a crucial part of your case. Isn't that
true?"

As we looked at each other in the dying light of the
late afternoon, I knew what she was doing and why she was there. My
elbow on the arm of the chair, I stroked the side of my chin while
I picked up the thread of the conversation. "Because if it was not
an innocent act you would be a co-conspirator, and no one can be
convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of another
co-conspirator."

"Assuming—for the sake of argument—that it really
happened," she said. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere far
away. Then a slight movement of her head signaled a different mood.
"Do you remember when we first met?" she asked, a subtle teasing
sparkle in her eye.

"It was right after you started, wasn't it? You were
handling misdemeanor cases in district court."

She was laughing at me with her eyes, dismissing my
feeble effort to disguise what I felt by a bare recitation of the
ordinary circumstances that had brought us together. "I wondered
why you never asked me out." Her eyes flashed and then dimmed and
then flashed again. "I would have said yes." She waited a moment,
allowing me to wonder what I had missed, before she added, "Or is
that the reason you didn't ask?"

"I thought you were a little young for me," I
lied.

It was as if she had known what I was going to say
before I said it. Her smile did not change, not by so much as a
fraction of an inch, but there was now a touch of cynicism about
it, the silent mockery of my ill-disguised duplicity. "I was older
than Alexandra."

"What do you know about Alexandra?"

"Only what they say."

"And what do they say?" I asked quietly, determined
not to look away.

"That you were in love with her, and that she left
you."

There was neither a trace of sympathy nor a hint of
understanding in her voice. She was describing something that could
never have happened to her.

"And what about you? You were engaged to one man but
you broke it off to marry another. He must have been in love with
you, and you left him."

For the first time, she laughed out loud. "Oh, I
don't think he was really in love with me, not the way I think you
were in love with her. No," she went on, her laughter fading away,
"I don't think anyone has ever been in love with me the way you
were in love with Alexandra. No one I ever left moved into a
monastery."

"Please. I just decided it was time to do something
else. I stopped practicing law and spent a year reading the kind of
things I'd never really had time for. It isn't that extraordinary,
you know. A lot of people, when they get to a certain age, take a
sabbatical, try to look at things from a different angle." I caught
myself. It had been a long time since I had been in the presence of
a woman who looked at me as if the only thing she wanted was to
listen to whatever I would tell her about myself. "I took a year
off. And now I'm back."

"As a prosecutor."

"Yes, exactly," I said abruptly. I sat straight up in
the chair. "Which is of course the reason you came to see me." In
the silence of the room the echo of my voice came back to me,
taunting me with the pretentious sound of my awkward formality.

"Yes, of course," she agreed, a cryptic smile on her
mouth. She lowered her eyes. When she looked up again, the smile
was still there, but fainter than before. "Do you know what first
attracted me to Marshall? His ambition. I don't mean his desire to
succeed. I mean how remarkably self-absorbed, how utterly selfish
he was."

"He masks it rather well," I remarked, watching the
way she moved her head just a little from one side to the other
each time she paused for breath.

"Marshall acts like he's everyone's best friend. But
he only does that because he wants to be admired," she said. "And
he wants to be admired," she added with a mocking glance, "because
he thinks he's the most admirable person he's ever known. I can
assure you, Joseph Antonelli, that Marshall is his own favorite
subject. He seldom talks about anything else."

She saw I was not entirely convinced. "The first time
I ever had dinner with him—we barely knew each other—he told me he
was going to be governor. I think he said that before we even
ordered. And he said it as if he was certain I would consider it
just about the least surprising thing I'd ever heard."

"Did Gilliland-O'Rourke know her chief deputy wanted
the same thing she did?"

"He wouldn't have cared. That's what I found so
attractive about him. He didn't care about anyone except himself.
Everyone else was simply someone to use."

I was watching her, trying to understand what she
wanted.

"Does that surprise you, Antonelli? That I liked that
about him? That he went after what he wanted and didn't give a
second thought to who it might hurt?" She looked at me, waiting for
me to answer, daring me to follow her to a place where convention
had no meaning and the rules were whatever you wanted them to be."I
thought you were like that," she said, softening her glance. "When
we first met. I still think you're like that."

Picking up my fountain pen from the desk, I held it
at both ends and began to roll it back and forth in my fingers.
"You think I'm like your husband?"

A flash of disapproval shot through her eyes. "That
isn't what I said."

I watched the barrel of the pen spin first one way
and then the other. "I heard what you said. Maybe you're right
about me, or rather maybe you were right about what I was like
then. Maybe you're still right," I said, with a shrug. "But it
doesn't really make much difference, does it?"

"It might," she said cryptically. "It sort of depends
on what you want, doesn't it?"

I put down the pen and looked at her. "No, it really
depends on what you want. Now, why don't you tell me what that is?
What do you want, Kristin?"

"I don't want to be indicted for something I had
nothing to do with," she said emphatically.

Leaning back, my elbows on the arms of the chair, I
spread my fingers apart and pressed the tips of both index fingers
against my mouth."Okay," I said finally, "it's a deal."

"A deal?"

"Yes. You tell me everything you know, and everything
you did, and you won't be indicted. And you can start by telling me
you delivered that envelope to Travis Quentin."

"All right. I did that. Marshall told me Quentin had
agreed to testify in a drug case. The envelope was supposed to
contain a copy of some of the police reports, the ones that covered
people Quentin knew something about."

"Why did he ask you to do it, instead of the police
department?"