Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (20 page)

"Thank you for sharing that, Horace," I said. "I may
never drink scotch again," I added, as I got to my feet.

He stopped laughing just long enough to finish what
was left in the glass. "Why not? You didn't piss in it, did
you?"

It was time to change the subject. "Can I get you
another drink?"

"No, one's enough, thanks." He put the empty glass on
the table next to the one I had left. "So, you're going to let it
all play out and then recall her as a witness?"

"Maybe," I said, moving around to the other side of
the desk. I stood behind the chair, my arms resting on top of it.
"Then again, I may not have to. Jones may call her first."

Chuckling, Horace asked, "Tell me about him. What do
you think about the great Richard Lee Jones?"

"He's a fraud, but he's good. He talks to those
people on the jury like they're important. He makes contact with
each one of them, makes them feel unique."

Shoving the chair away from me, I put both hands on
top of the desk and stared at Horace, sitting in shadowed lamplight
across the room. "He gives them the impression that he's on their
side. When he was giving his opening, he never used the word 'you'
when he was talking about what they were going to see and hear
during the case. He always phrased things so that it came out 'we'.
It wasn't 'You're going to hear from the State's witness, 'it was '
'The State is going to try to tell us...' "

"I never tried a case against him," Horace remarked.
"I've watched him, though. I agree with what you said, but he goes
too far with it. He tries to make everything 'us against them.' He
gets away with it, because everybody is scared of him. The truth of
it is, most judges don't know enough law to stand their ground when
someone challenges them, and the only reason they're not challenged
more often is because most lawyers don't have the guts to stand up
to a judge."

Struggling to get his legs under him, Horace finally
managed to push himself up. "Maybe I will have another drink. Just
half of one," he corrected himself. "What you really have going on
out there," he observed, as I poured a little scotch into his
glass, "are a bunch of weak-willed lawyers and feebleminded judges
too scared of what they don't know to have any idea of what to do
with someone who pretends he does."

This formulation seemed to please him and he
punctuated it with a short thrust of his head, as if to say, So
there!

I sat down in the desk chair and stretched out my
legs as far as they would go. "I'm not sure ' "feebleminded' " is a
word I would have thought to apply to your friend Irma
Holloway."

The studied severity on his expressive face
shattered. Towering above me on the other side of the desk, he
crowed, "Told you, didn't I? You imagine what it would have been
like, being a kid in a class she taught?" With a visible shudder,
he went on. "By the end of the year, you wouldn't be able to close
your fingers around a pencil. She would have beaten your knuckles
black and blue, made your hand stiff as a board."

He almost seemed to regret that he had never had the
opportunity. As he spoke about her, his gestures grew more animated
and his voice seemed to rise several octaves in the scale. "She's
just a mean old witch, isn't she?"

He plopped himself happily into a chair he had picked
up with one hand and moved to the side corner of the desk,
excitement dancing in his eyes. "It's what white people forget," he
explained. "They're always talking about black crime and black
welfare and all the unwed black teenage mothers. Well, let me tell
you something. Those same black mothers demand respect, and you
better believe they get it. You ever see some black kid—tough,
mean, like as kill you as look at you? Watch that little prick with
his mother. 'Yes, Momma; no, Momma.' Show me a white woman gets as
much respect."

Horace kept talking, on and on, about black kids and
white kids and anything else that entered his mind. When he
finished the drink I had given him, I offered him another, and when
he was through with that, he helped himself to the next one. "What
about the trial?" he asked, interrupting his own monologue.

I remembered something he had said when I first
agreed to prosecute the case. "It is like war. Once it starts, the
only thing you think about is how to win. And, you're right,
Horace, when you've been away from it a while, you really do miss
it."

For a moment he searched my eyes. "Then you're sure
he did it?" he asked finally.

I had forgotten it had ever been a question. "He's
guilty, Horace. I know it." Somewhere in the summer night a single
cricket sang its lonely two-note song. A breeze kicked up, and the
air whispered around us.

Walking toward the open French doors, his shoes
echoing on the gleaming hardwood floor, Horace stared into the
night and shook his head, the way someone does who has resigned
himself to things he cannot change.

"Alma probably won't be home before midnight," he
said, turning his head just far enough to see me. "From now till
the end of summer. Damn near every night, there's something she has
to do with the ballet." He glanced at his watch. "Didn't realize it
was this late. I better go. You probably still have a lot to
do."

"Sit down. Don't go. There's nothing I have to do.
I'm ready for tomorrow."

He looked at me and scratched the back of his neck.
"A few more minutes," he said quietly. He sat down again in the
chair by the desk.

"If you know he's guilty," he asked presently, "do
you know why he did it?"

I crossed one leg over the other and began to tap the
edge of a gilded wastebasket with the heel of my loafer. "Remember
when I told you the way Kristin described him?"

Horace looked at me from under his brow. "You mean,
how he took whatever he wanted and didn't care who it hurt?"

"Exactly. And she liked that about him. A lot." I
remembered the way she looked when she told me, as if she could
still feel the thrill that had rippled through her. "That was all
that mattered—what he wanted. He wanted her, and my guess is both
of them wanted it all: money, power, fame. And to get it he did
what he had to, or what he had the chance to do. And just like
Travis Quentin, once he'd done it, he could forget about it."

There was a trace of doubt in his eyes, a decent
skepticism.

"I think that's what happened, Horace. I think he
just put it out of mind, as if he had done nothing more serious
than get a divorce." I shrugged and shook my head, in silent
commentary on what had become the widespread depravity of the world
around us, before continuing. "We don't have any trouble believing
it when someone like Travis Quentin murders and rapes. He doesn't
have a conscience. He does what he wants when he wants, and never
thinks about the consequences. It isn't that he doesn't understand
the difference between right and wrong; he doesn't believe in the
difference. He doesn't believe in anything.

"We don't want to think someone like Marshall
Goodwin, intelligent, well-educated, with a good job and a
promising future, could be involved in a murder, but when you strip
it all away he's just like Quentin. He doesn't believe in anything
either, except the importance of having what he wants. And my guess
is it's the same with Kristin." I paused, and then added, "They're
not alone, are they."

Waving at the stack of books lined up on the shelves,
I tried to explain what I meant. "There's something Nietzsche
wrote: 'The morning paper has replaced the morning prayer.' People
used to believe in God, in a moral code that never changed; now no
one believes in anything except that everything is always changing
and nothing is always either right or wrong."

Horace stared down at the floor. "Goodwin gave a
speech last year at the bar association dinner. He was talking
about making it more difficult for violent offenders to get out of
prison. Then he described what had happened to his wife. He choked
up. Everyone did." After a pause, Horace added, "It was one of the
most emotional speeches I ever heard, and even now I don't think it
was entirely fraudulent. It was worse than that. I think he
separated the two things; put his own role in her death out of his
mind completely. The only thing that was left, the only thing he
still remembered, was that someone had murdered his wife. Maybe
you're right, maybe he killed her because it was the easiest way to
get a new start with a new woman and some money from a life
insurance policy."

He nodded and rubbed his chin. "But it's not true
that no one believes in anything anymore. Some people still believe
in things like honor and duty and telling the truth."

A few minutes past midnight, I stood on the front
porch and waved good-bye to him as he drove off. Under a cloudless
sky, the headlights swept across the lawn as the car curved down
the driveway to the entrance below. The iron gate closed behind
him, and a faint echo sounded through the clear solitude of the
night. I shut the front door and had just reached the library when
the telephone rang. It was Alma.

"I'm sorry to call so late, Joe, but I was a little
worried." There was a slight pause, as if she was changing
positions or trying to find the exact words she wanted to use.
"Horace said he was going to drop by. Is he still there?"

"He just left. He should be home in a few
minutes."

She sounded relieved. "That's good," she said in a
subdued voice.

"He said he didn't expect you home much before
midnight. The ballet and all," I added.

"Well, I'm sorry to call so late," she repeated with
her customary pleasant little laugh. "I must sound like the worried
wife trying to find her husband." Alma loved what she did, and
Horace loved her too much not to want her to do it, but without her
he never seemed to know what to do with himself, and I could not
help but feel a little sorry for him. Sometimes love can be the
loneliest thing of all.

Chapter Fourteen

With a cursory nod toward the jury, Irma Holloway sat
down on the front edge of her tall leather chair. Inclining her
head to the side, she held it in place with the tips of her
fingers, and invited me to call the State's next witness.

"The State calls Bernard Quimby." Balding, with a
full round face and an odd tendency to blink nervously while he
listened to a question and stare wide-eyed while he answered it,
Quimby was with the insurance company that had paid the claim on
Nancy Goodwin's life.

Standing behind the counsel table, I took him through
the inquiry needed to establish the monetary rewards for
murder.

"How much was the life of Nancy Goodwin insured
for?"

Staring across at the jury, Quimby replied, "A
million dollars."

"And who was the beneficiary of the policy?" I asked.
His lashes beat rapidly, like the wings of a hummingbird. "Are you
nervous?" I asked sympathetically, before he could answer.

"No," he replied, with a tense shake of his head.
"Well, yes, a little, I suppose," he conceded.

"All right," I repeated, "who was the
beneficiary?"

Though it did not stop, the beating slowed."Well,
actually that's a little complicated." He began to fidget with his
thumbs. "You see, the policy was taken out on the lives of both
Mrs. Goodwin and her husband." He hesitated, then cast a brief
glance in the direction of the defendant. "The beneficiary was the
child she was expecting," he added.

I tried to help. "In other words, they took out the
policy together, to provide insurance for the child in case
something happened to them?"

He looked up. "Yes," he said, "that's right. But you
see, there were different contingencies. What happened if both
died, if one died, if both of them and the child died." He went on,
preparing an endless recitation of the infinite possibilities of
insurable misfortunes.

"Yes, I think we understand. Just tell us this. In
the event as it happened—Nancy Goodwin and her unborn child both
deceased—who was to get the money?"

"Her husband," he answered.

"You mean the defendant in this case, Marshall
Goodwin?"

He nodded. "Yes."

"And was that money—one million dollars—paid to
Marshall Goodwin?" I asked, turning toward the jury.

"Our company prides itself on paying claims
promptly."

"How promptly did you pay this one?" I asked, barely
moving my head.

"I believe within thirty days of her death."

The testimony of Bernard Quimby was the beginning of
a long march through financial details that, taken together,
supplied a motive for murder and helped corroborate the testimony
of the killer. Bank statements, credit card receipts, and
investment reports were all explained, authenticated, and entered
into the record. It was a full accounting of two years' worth of
expenditures that seemed lavish at the beginning and had become
ordinary and routine at the end.

Two weeks after the death of his wife, Goodwin traded
in their two cars, an eight-year-old Chevrolet and a three-year-old
Ford, on a new Jaguar. He sold the three-bedroom two-bath ranch
style home in a suburban development where they had lived the last
five years of their married life and leased a townhouse high on a
hill on the western edge of the city. People deal with grief in
their own way.