Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (19 page)

With a look of triumph, he moved back toward the
counsel table. "And you testified that Marshall Goodwin, the chief
deputy district attorney, brought you to his office and announced
to you that he was dropping all the charges against you—not because
you agreed to be a witness in a drug case but because he might want
a little favor later on. Is that about it, Mr. Quentin?"

"No, that's not about it! He hired me to kill his
wife. He paid me ten thousand dollars to do it!" Quentin yelled
angrily. "And if you don't believe me, ask his wife, the one he's
married to now. Ask her! She's the one who brought me the envelope
the day I got out of jail!"

For an instant, Jones stared at him. Then, forcing a
smile, he turned to the jury. "That's a very good idea," he said.
He turned back to the witness, shook his head, and looked away
again.

"No further questions, your Honor," he said, as he
sat down.

The questioning of Travis Quentin had taken most of
the day, but there was still enough time left to show the jury that
Richard Lee Jones was bluffing. As soon as the guards had helped
Quentin out of the courtroom, I called the next witness for the
prosecution.

Wearing round eyeglasses, her hair pulled close to
her head and wound in back into a large round bun, she looked like
a librarian leading a life of stringent repression.

"Would you please state your name for the
record."

Her head held high, she carefully enunciated the
words. "Kristin Maxfield Goodwin." She crossed her legs, the hem of
her beige linen skirt well below her knee.

I took her through the necessary preliminaries
quickly. She answered each question directly, easily, in complete
control of herself.

"And did you, Ms. Maxfield, on the day Travis Quentin
was released from the county jail, deliver to him a sealed manila
envelope?"

She did not hesitate. "No, I did not."

Chapter Thirteen

Under a blazing sky, Harper Bryce, struggling to keep
up, followed me from the courthouse back to my office. Collapsing
in the chair on the other side of my desk, he unbuttoned his suit
coat and let his hands fall to his sides.

"How about a nice hot cup of coffee?" I asked, as I
tossed my jacket over the back of a chair. He grasped the arm of
the chair, pulled himself up, and muttered, "Thanks, anyway."

Helen had already left. I went into the outer office
and from a small refrigerator got a soft drink. I poured coffee for
myself.

Lifting his eyes in a gesture of gratitude and
partial forgiveness, Bryce held the cold can in both hands before
he snapped it open. "That was one of the more entertaining days
I've spent in the Multnomah County Courthouse," he said.

Setting the case file on top of the desk, I put my
briefcase on the floor. "Glad you enjoyed it." Crossing one ankle
over the other, I stretched my legs over the corner of the desk. I
took a long deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to clear my
mind of all the fragmentary images and discordant sounds colliding
against one another, the irrepressible memories of a trial day that
seemed as if it had gone on for a week.

Bryce thought he knew what I was thinking about. "She
surprised you, didn't she?"

His question brought my eyes back into focus. Gazing
at the scuffed tips of my black wingtip shoes, I remarked, "Now,
why would you think a thing like that?" Turning my head, I looked
at him across the desk. "Do you really think I'd call a witness if
I wasn't certain what she was going to say?"

"You call the wife of the defendant to corroborate
the testimony of her husband's chief accuser. How certain could you
be?"

"You want the truth?"

"Not if you can invent a more colorful lie." He
pulled his reporter's notebook out of his side pocket and turned
the pages until he came to a blank space on which he could write.
"You were about to tell me how surprised you were," he said,
looking up.

"No I wasn't," I replied. I took a drink of coffee.
"Remind me. What made you think I was surprised?"

Bryce took notes like a court reporter. Flipping
backward through the dog-eared notebook, he found the place he was
looking for. "All right," he mumbled to himself. "I'll skip over
all the preliminaries... Yeah, here it is," he announced, his
small, heavy-lidded eyes alert. "Question: 'And did you, Ms.
Maxfield, on the day Travis Quentin was released from county jail,
deliver to him a sealed envelope?' Answer: 'No, I did not.' He
glanced up, a suspicious look on his face. "That answer didn't
surprise you?"

I made no reply, and he looked down at what he had
written. "Question: 'Is that what you told the grand jury?' Answer:
'Yes.' Question: 'Is that the truth?' Answer: 'Yes, it is.' " Bryce
turned the page. "Question: 'When did you first become romantically
involved with Marshall Goodwin?' Answer: 'That's really none of
your business.'"

Bryce glanced at me, his eyebrows arched into a
question mark. "None of your business? As I recall, she said it
with a considerable degree of anger—righteous indignation, even.
And, if I remember, you started to get a little angry
yourself."

He went back to the notebook. "Question: 'Did you
have sex with the defendant the night his wife was murdered?'
Answer: 'No, of course not.' "

I held up my hand. "That's enough. I was there. I
remember what happened."

"I just want to know—off the record—you thought she
was going to say something else on the stand, didn't you?"

The truth was I did not know what she was going to
say, but it had not been too difficult to understand why, despite
what she had told me in private, she had continued to lie.

"Let's suppose you and I decide to commit a crime, a
murder. Let's just say we decide to kill that editor of yours."

"That's not a crime," he interjected. "That's a
public service."

"We don't want to do it ourselves, so we hire
someone. We'll call him Mr. Smith," I continued.

Bryce could not help himself. "Jones being too
obvious."

"Only, Smith gets caught and, to save himself,
confesses." I swung my feet to the floor, put both hands on the
desk, and bent forward. "Smith knows I hired him. All he knows
about you is that you gave him the envelope that told him where to
go to commit the murder and where to go to get the money. He tells
the police I hired him, and they put me on trial for murder." I
searched his eyes for a moment. "Now, tell me, what do you do?"

"You mean, what do I do when I'm called as a
witness?"

"Called as a witness by the prosecution and asked if
you in fact delivered the envelope."

"Why don't I just tell the truth and say I did.
That's all the prosecution knows about my involvement." He thought
of something else. "And if I'm Kristin Maxfield I can say it was
just part of my job. I didn't know what was inside it."

He waited for my response. "Why do you think I'd lie
about it? Why do you think she lied about it? That's what you
think, isn't it?"

I leaned closer. "Who do you have to fear? Who's the
one person—the only person—who can hurt you?"

"You are. If I help the prosecution convict you,
you're going to help them get me."

"And there's something else. By denying you made the
delivery, you directly contradict the testimony of the killer.
You're doing everything you can to help me. If I get convicted
anyway, I'm still going to remember what you tried to do for me,
aren't I? But with your testimony, I've got a pretty good chance of
winning, and if they can't convict me, what do you think the chance
is they'll ever go after you?"

Removing a white linen handkerchief from his inside
pocket, Bryce mopped the last remaining beads of perspiration from
his brow.

"That's all very interesting, but you haven't exactly
told me the truth in this little parable, have you? You haven't
explained why the prosecution would ever be stupid enough to call
me as a witness in the first place."

I turned up my hands. "Everybody makes mistakes."

"Can I quote you on that?" he asked, with casual
sarcasm. "What's the real reason?" he persisted. "Why did you call
her? She's already told the same story to the police and the grand
jury. What made you think she'd tell a different story on the
stand?"

"When the trial is over," I said, getting to my feet,
"we'll talk again."

Bryce rose awkwardly from the chair, touching the
corner of the desk to steady his balance. "It's an interesting game
you're playing with her—or she's playing with you. Whose turn is it
to make the next move?"

My hand on his shoulder, I walked him through the
outer office to the door. "You know what I've discovered I missed
most about trial work? The constant surprise. No matter how much
you work at it, no matter how much you think about it, nothing ever
goes quite the way you imagined it would. Sometimes the best thing
you can do is just watch the way things happen, wait and see what
someone does, and then decide what you're going to do."

As we shook hands, he looked me in the eye. "And have
you decided what you're going to do?"

"I'll see you tomorrow morning."

"Wouldn't miss it," he replied cheerfully.

I had said nothing to Bryce about Kristin Maxfield's
surreptitious visit and her calculated confession of what she had
done and what had happened between her and Marshall Goodwin. Nor
had I made any allusion to our private conversation when I
questioned her on the stand. Only Horace Woolner knew what had
happened that day she came to see me, and he did not understand why
I had not used it.

"Instinct," I told him. It was a little after nine
o'clock at night. We were sitting in my library.

"Instinct?" He grunted. "What do you mean, instinct?"
He spread his legs and rested his forearms on them, and stirred the
ice in his glass with the tip of his index finger.

"Did you ever play chess?"

He gave me a sidelong glance. "Yeah, a little. Not
for a long time."

"I wasn't worth a damn," I admitted, breathing in the
scotch. "I used to read about great chess masters and how they
anticipated dozens of moves ahead. I kept trying to do that, stare
at all the pieces on the board, try to envision each possible move.
I couldn't see anything, nothing, not one move. I could see what
was on the board, but I couldn't see anything else."

I made a vague gesture toward the stacks of books
that swirled up all around us. "Then I read something Napoleon once
said, advice he gave a general who had sent this long list of
possible plans he was considering. Napoleon wrote back, 'If you
want to take Vienna, take Vienna!' " I was trying to explain to
Bryce that you can't anticipate every contingency, that once you
start doing something, that move affects everything else. That's
what Napoleon meant."

Horace was thinking of something else. "Bryce? Harper
Bryce? Every time I see him, I want to imitate Peter Lorre."

I laughed. "Peter Lorre? What the hell for?"

"The Maltese Falcon. Sydney Greenstreet. He and Bryce
are about the same size. They even look a little alike, especially
sitting down. Every time I see him, I think of that, and I hear
Peter Lorre's crazy wheedling voice asking Humphrey Bogart to tell
them where that goddamn falcon is. He's a hell of a card player, by
the way."

"I've got a murder trial on my hands, and you want to
talk about Peter Lorre?"

"You've got a murder trial on your hands, and you
want to talk about Napoleon?" he countered. "Instinct," he reminded
me.

"I didn't have time to think about it, but as soon as
she denied it, I knew what she was doing and why. So I let her go
all the way with it."

"But you still haven't told me why you didn't ask her
about what she had said to you."

"I almost did. I almost said, 'Isn't it true, Ms.
Maxfield, that just a few weeks ago you told me directly that you
had in fact delivered the envelope to Travis Quentin and that you
had lied about it to the grand jury?' "

Horace nodded briskly. "Why didn't you? She would
have denied it, but that would have put her in direct contradiction
not just with Quentin's testimony but with you. The jury would then
get to decide between her credibility and yours, not just between
hers and a murderer's."

"Perhaps I should have," I conceded, "but I decided
to let Goodwin think he could still count on her. I don't think he
knows she came to see me, and even if he does, I'm pretty sure he
doesn't know what she told me."

Settling back into the deep cushioned chair, Horace
held the glass of scotch at eye level, examining the way the liquid
swirled each time he rattled the ice. His eyebrows rose and a
dubious smile appeared momentarily on his mouth. "You mean about
the sex," he remarked, lifting the glass a little higher. "See the
way these different shades of color form, twisting like threads? A
long time ago, when a man had been with a woman he didn't know very
well, the first thing he'd do when he got home was piss in a glass
and then hold it up to the light—just like this—and watch it to see
if anything like these threads started to form. It was the first
sign of gonorrhea."