Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (2 page)

"The only change, Horace, is that I'm not carrying a
couple dozen cases around in my head, trying to remember what I'm
supposed to be doing an hour from now."

Leaning forward, a shrewd glint in his eye, he got
right to the point. "Leopold never did what you're doing. He didn't
lock himself up behind those iron gates and spend all his time in
his library. He came down here every day, five days a week, year
in, year out, and did his work. He came down here every morning
because he knew he had certain obligations to the rest of us. You
have obligations too. You're a hell of a lawyer," he said firmly,
"and it's time you got back to doing it."

"We've been through this before, Horace. I'm not
coming back. I can't."

Folding his arms across his chest, he moved his hand
along the side of his face, down to the chin. In the silence, he
looked at me. "There's something else I want to talk to you about,"
he said finally. "Do you remember the murder of Marshall Goodwin's
wife?"

Marshall Goodwin was the chief deputy district
attorney. His wife had been viciously murdered, and the case had
never been solved. I had forgotten most of the details, but what I
remembered was bad enough.

"She was killed in a hotel room somewhere. Her throat
was slashed."

"That's right. Do you know Goodwin?" Horace asked. He
closed his long thick fingers into a fist and then opened them,
over and over again, like some ritual exercise.

"I tried a couple of cases against him. He was
good."

"I hired him," Horace remarked, as he watched his
hands at work. "Probably the best deputy I had. Always prepared. He
usually won, too," he added, as he looked up. "Except when he had
to go against you."

I missed the courtroom, but it was so far removed
from the way I now lived that it was like being told how good you
had been at something in high school. It no longer mattered. It was
not even viable as a form of nostalgia.

Picking up a ballpoint pen, Horace began to tap it on
the desk in a slow rhythm. "His wife's name was Nancy," he said,
with a solemn expression. "As nice a person as you'd ever want to
meet. She worked for an electronics firm. She was in Corvallis for
a conference when she died, one of the few times she ever spent the
night away from home."

Horace dropped the pen and reached inside a drawer.
He pulled out a large file folder held together with a thick rubber
band. "Three months ago, a guy was arrested for a double homicide
down in Los Angeles. Travis Quentin. Murdered a man and a woman in
their bed. The kind of record you'd expect, major felonies, armed
robbery, assault.

"They have him cold, so he offers to tell them about
another murder if they'll agree to life instead of going for the
death penalty. After what he tells them, they get hold of the
Oregon state police, who interview Quentin, and then conduct their
own investigation. This is what they've got," he said, resting his
hand on top of the file. "I'm not sure it's enough." He looked down
at the floor, a pensive expression on his face. "Or maybe I just
don't want to think it is," he said, raising his eyes.

I had been following everything Horace said, and I
understood why he did not want to believe it.

"They think Goodwin killed his wife?"

"Hired someone to do it. Goodwin was right here," he
said, nodding toward the door that led to the outer office and,
beyond that, to the hallway, "while his wife was being slashed to
death, Marshall Goodwin was in a conference room in the DA's
office, getting ready for his next day in trial, prosecuting
someone for murder. Can you imagine a better alibi?"

I remembered something. "He got married again, didn't
he?"

Horace nodded. "Yeah, about a year after his wife's
death. Another prosecutor, Kristin Maxfield. That's how they met.
Everyone thought it was the best thing that could happen to
him."

With one hand on the desk and the other on the arm of
the chair, Horace pushed himself up. Squaring his shoulders, he
adjusted his weight over the two artificial limbs that had given
him mobility for more than half his life. Out of the corner of his
eye he saw me watching. "They may not be too good for running,"—he
shrugged, grinning—"but you ought to see what I can do to a door if
I get really pissed off!"

He stood next to the window and gazed out at the sky.
"This makes me angry," he said, his voice suddenly subdued. He
pointed back toward the bulging file on his desk. "That one of our
prosecutors might actually have had his wife murdered for
money."

"Does the district attorney know yet?"

Leaning against the casement, Horace lowered his
eyes. "The state police came to me because they needed a warrant
for a wiretap, and because I used to be the DA. They figured they
could trust me to keep my mouth shut until they made an arrest."
His eyes still fastened on the floor, he brushed the side of his
face with the back of three fingers held tight together. "I haven't
told Gwendolyn yet and I'm not going to tell her."

He raised his eyes and looked at me. "What do you
think she would do with this? Do you think she'd prosecute her own
chief deputy?" His eyes stayed fixed on mine. "It doesn't get much
worse—her own chief deputy accused of murder."

"She can't just ignore it," I said, as Horace moved
across the room to his chair behind the desk.

"Can't she?" he replied, with an indulgent glance.
"The case isn't that good," he observed, tapping the file folder
with his index finger. "It's the word of a confessed murderer
against the word of one of the major law enforcement officials in
the state. She could bury this case, and believe me, that's exactly
what she'll do."

Intelligent, ambitious, and rich, Gwendolyn Gillian
O'Rourke had wanted to be governor from the day she was born;
becoming district attorney was just a stop on the way. So far as
she was concerned, the power of her office had no more legitimate
use than the advancement of her own career.

"There isn't much you can do about it, Horace. She's
still the DA."

"Yes, there is," he insisted. He put his hands on the
arms of the chair and rocked back. "There's a statute that allows
the appointment of a special prosecutor, someone from the district
attorney's office in another county, or even a lawyer in private
practice."

I was familiar with the statute. It was used when a
case required particular expertise that was not generally
available. Small rural counties sometimes invoked it to obtain the
help of an outsider in a case that was too specialized. Usually,
the request came from the district attorney's office itself.
Obviously, that was not going to happen here.

"I have the authority," Horace asserted.

"Who are you going to choose?" I asked, assuming he
already had in mind a district attorney from one of the surrounding
counties.

"I want you to do it," he replied.

"I'm a defense lawyer," I protested, astonished.

He corrected me. "You used to be a defense
lawyer."

"You're right," I agreed. "I'm not a lawyer anymore.
And I'm not going to be, either." I said it firmly. "You know what
I did," I reminded him, with a baleful look.

"You got an acquittal for an innocent man," he
replied. "Gilliland-O'Rourke would have sent him to prison for the
rest of his life." He paused for a moment, glancing away. When his
eyes came back, he was as serious as I had ever seen him. "I'm
asking you for a favor. I need someone I can trust to decide
whether Goodwin should be prosecuted or not, and if you decide he
should be, I want you to do it. This case is too big to give to
some prosecutor from another county or some lawyer in private
practice. And everybody remembers how good you are. No one can
accuse you of trying to make your reputation on this."

Reading the hesitation in my eyes, he pretended to be
sympathetic. "I know it's a big decision," he said, as he stood up.
"You don't have to decide right away. Take the file, read it over.
You can let me know this weekend." He came around the desk. "We can
talk about it at the dinner on Sunday. I already have your ticket,"
he added, before I could begin to phrase a graceful regret. "Alma
insists you come," he went on, certain this would put an end to any
thought of refusal. "And then you can tell her how bad you feel
that you accidentally tore this hole in my pants."

"And just how did I manage to do that?" I asked, as I
rose from the chair.

"Oh, hell, I don't know," he said, with good-humored
impatience. "One thing at a time. I'll think of something."

He gathered up the file and handed it to me. Placing
his hand on my shoulder, he looked me right in the eye, and I felt
the same thing the prisoner must have felt, the sense that somehow
he understood more about you than you did yourself.

"I want you to do this. It's important." Then,
without a moment's pause, he reverted to his normal lighthearted
banter. "And as a bribe," he said, slapping me on the back, "I'll
buy you lunch."

"What about your pants?" I asked, glancing at his
trousers.

Reaching across the desk, he tore off a piece of
Scotch tape and, drawing together the two sides of the tear, placed
it on top.

"That'll do for now," he announced. "Maybe after
lunch I'll find a needle and thread." He considered it as we headed
down the hallway together. "I used to be pretty good at mending.
Learned during the war. About the only thing I learned worth
remembering."

Chapter Two

Late in the afternoon, I left Portland and followed
the river road to Lake Oswego and the house where I had lived in
almost perfect seclusion for more than a year. The gray April
drizzle had stopped and the sun broke through the clouds, coating
the towering green fir trees with a silvery mist. At the bottom of
the long spiral drive, I got out of the car and shut the damp iron
gate behind me.

At the top, I parked the car and climbed the steps to
the porch that curved around the front of the rambling two-story
structure. A hardwood floorboard creaked as I walked down the hall
to the library and dropped the case file on the desk.

The artifacts of Leopold Rifkin's existence, the
photographs of his wife, a few pictures of friends taken at
different points in his long life, awards he had received for years
of honorable and largely anonymous public service—everything that
had made this room his own had been placed in storage because I
could not bring myself to throw them away.

Everything else was the way he had left it. The
bookshelves lining the walls and climbing to the ceiling were still
filled with the greatest works ever written: the dialogues of Plato
and the treatises of Aristotle; the speeches of Cicero and the
histories of Tacitus; the scientific works of Bacon, Descartes, and
Newton; the political writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke;
the astonishing creations of Nietzsche and Rousseau—all of it was
here, organized in an order that was seldom apparent and not always
chronological. Even after all this time whenever I opened one of
his well-worn books there was always a moment when I felt like a
stranger.

I went upstairs to the bedroom and changed into a
pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt. Barefoot, I went
down to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee and then slid onto the
high-backed chair at the desk in the library.

Directly in front of me, left open at the page I had
spent part of the morning trying to understand, was an English
translation of Aristotle. For months I had labored over the six
works of the Organon: the Categories, De Interpretatione, the Prior
Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical
Refutations, in which Aristotle had fixed the rules of right reason
and established the foundation of logical thought. I had struggled
on, until finally I had managed to get through most of Aristotle,
including even the Physics. Then, opening the first page of the
Metaphysics, my eye fell on the first sentence, perhaps the seven
most hopeful words ever written, a simple declaration of what had
once been an article of faith: "All men by nature desire to
know."

It was hard to imagine that many of them wanted to
know much if anything about the Metaphysics. I put down the coffee
cup and glanced across at the file folder straining against the
rubber hand. Horace had known I would not be content to just stay
here forever like a cloistered medieval monk. Placing a scrap of
paper inside the volume to mark the place, I closed the copy of
Aristotle and moved it to the side.

For the next few hours I worked my way through the
written record of the police investigation into the murder of Nancy
Goodwin. I had spent my life reading reports like this—the tedious
chronicle of an act of violence, written in a monotonous prose, the
perfect expression of the utter banality of evil. It always left me
with an oppressive sense of dull indifference, a feeling that how
the victim died was somehow more important than how she had lived.
It was the ultimate obscenity of the criminal law: not that a woman
had been killed, but that what had been done to her at the end had
become the only thing about her that mattered. The victim of a
homicide was put on public display. Whatever else it was, murder
was always an act of lewdness.