Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (3 page)

A motel maid found the naked body of Nancy Goodwin,
her head hanging over the corner of the bed, her hair caked with
the blood that had drained out of her knife-slashed throat. Her
mouth had been taped shut and her wrists tied behind her back.
According to the coroner she had been raped, probably more than
once.

A woman with whom she worked had driven down with her
from Portland and had the room next door. They had sat together at
the conference dinner and shared a drink afterward in the motel
bar. Around eleven they had walked back to their rooms and said
good night. The next morning the woman assumed that Nancy Goodwin
was sitting somewhere in the darkened conference hall watching the
same presentation. Two hundred people had attended the conference
that brought Nancy Goodwin to Corvallis, and none of them had
noticed anything unusual. The police found dozens of fingerprints
in her room and fibers all over the floor, but it was a motel room
used by hundreds of different strangers every year. No arrest was
ever made.

Leaning back against the corner of the chair, one leg
draped over the wooden arm, I gazed out the window. The skies had
cleared and the late afternoon sunlight drenched the budding trees
at the far edge of the lawn. Scattered between them, azaleas and
rhododendrons were already in bloom, a visible reminder that winter
was giving way to spring.

Police reports had not changed, but I found I was
reading them differently from the way I had before. Determined to
find any oversight, no matter how small, any gap, no matter how
narrow, in the chain of evidence, I had never read them just to
learn what had happened. Long before I ever began the study of
Aristotle, I had known something about the use and abuse of
analytical thought.

A hundred miles away from where she had been
murdered, Marshall Goodwin was finishing the cross examination of a
witness when he was told of his wife's death. The judge, who had
been given the task, had called him into chambers and then listened
in horrified silence as Goodwin, overcome with grief, cried out
that his wife had been four months pregnant with their first
child.

I could see him in my mind, arguing a case in front
of a jury. Marshall Goodwin was good at what he did, better than
most lawyers who made their careers prosecuting criminal cases.
Thorough and precise, he had a quick smile and an easy, relaxed
manner. There was none of the raw-eyed irritability that betrayed
the desperation of someone who could not keep up and paid the price
for it with sleepless nights and eighteen-hour work days. On the
contrary, Goodwin gave the appearance of a self assurance so
complete it would have been dismissed as arrogance had it not been
accompanied by a certain friendly civility. He was the kind of
lawyer who was the first to offer his congratulations on those rare
occasions when he lost. Whenever Gwendolyn Gilliland-O'Rourke
decided the time had come to run for governor, nearly everyone
assumed Goodwin would become the next district attorney.

Though they never admitted they were giving up, the
police eventually closed their investigation, and the death of
Nancy Goodwin became another unsolved homicide, a file folder
gathering dust, until, two years later and a thousand miles away,
the killer was caught in an unrelated murder. Faced with the
prospect of the gas chamber, Travis Quentin tried to save his life
by confessing to another murder. The transcript of the interview in
which he accused a deputy district attorney of conspiracy to murder
contained no discernible trace of remorse. He had been given a
photograph of the victim and told where she would be staying the
night. He was to kill her and then be paid ten thousand dollars for
the job. Rape had been his idea.

The lengthy criminal history of Travis Quentin
reflected the even-tempered barbarity of a sociopath and the utter
inadequacy of the systems in place to do something about it. He
committed his first murder when he was fifteen years old by
throwing a twelve-year-old boy off the roof of a ten-story
building. More disturbing than the absence of any attempt at
justification, or even a simple explanation, was his apparent
inability to understand why one was needed. Instead of a death
sentence, or even life in prison, he was confined in a juvenile
facility until he became an adult. If he learned anything from his
brief incarceration it was how to become more careful in the crimes
he committed. Thirty years of frequent arrests and occasional
convictions had done nothing to reform his character or protect his
victims. Counting Nancy Goodwin, he had killed at least six people
and, as reparation, had thus far served a total of seven years on
two convictions for manslaughter.

On the front page of the criminal history of Travis
Quentin was his photograph, a grainy black-and-white mug shot. He
had a pockmarked face, with a narrow forehead, thick eyebrows, and
a broad, bulbous nose. The back edge of his left ear bent forward
as if he had slept on it, and the lid on his right eye drooped down
at the corner. He had the look of someone who sweats profusely the
moment he begins to exert himself.

There was no serious question about whether Quentin
had really killed Nancy Goodwin. He knew everything about it,
including details that had never been released to the public. The
real question was whether it had really been a murder for hire. He
said it was, but he had a great deal to gain and nothing to lose by
implicating someone else. It was the only way he could save his own
life. He agreed to take a polygraph and he passed it, but there
were still doubts that he was telling the truth.

I got up from the desk and took my empty cup to the
kitchen. Outside, the shadows lengthened over the lawn as the last
glimmer of twilight stretched across the western sky. Through the
open window, the soft sigh of an evening breeze started up and then
died away.

With a full cup in my hand, I wandered back and gazed
at the shelves lined with thousands of cloth- and burnished
leather-bound books collected over the course of Leopold Rifkin's
long life. The library was more than the repository of what Rifkin
had read, more than a visible reminder of what he had spent much of
his life thinking about; it was a sanctuary from the changeable
inconsequence of the world. It was the place that had given him a
perspective about the things he did down in the city, inside the
courtroom, where he decided the fate and fortune of everyone who
came before him. Scattered across the desk, the fragmentary reports
of the unfinished investigation into the murder of Nancy Goodwin
and the possible complicity of her husband almost seemed to belong
here. Settling into the chair, I picked up the page where I had
left off.

According to the account of Travis Quentin, he had
first met the chief deputy district attorney while he was in the
Multnomah County jail. The police had found him parked late at
night on the side of a road less than two blocks from a fashionable
neighborhood. They claimed that when they approached the vehicle—an
old junker that no one who lived there would have been caught dead
in—he reached under the front seat. Fearing for their safety, the
two officers drew their weapons, ordered him out of the car, and
proceeded to search it. All they found under the front seat was a
small bag of marijuana, but stuffed behind the back seat they
discovered a large quantity of heroin and, inside the trunk, three
handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, and an assault weapon that could cut
a man in half with a single one-second burst.

It was a questionable search. Any decent defense
attorney would have attacked it with a vengeance. The law of search
and seizure was a shambles, in which appellate courts attempted to
give guidance to the discretion of the police by producing as many
opinions about what they should have done as there were judges to
write them. It was standard procedure to file a motion to suppress,
argue it before the trial court judge, and see what happened. If
the judge ruled that the search was valid and the evidence
admissible, you went to trial, and if your client was found guilty
you had the chance to convince an appellate court that the police
had failed to follow a rule on which they themselves had never been
able to agree.

Nothing like that happened here. Two days after his
arrest, Travis Quentin was brought to the district attorney's
office where he was interviewed alone by Marshall Goodwin. The
deputy sheriffs who took him, bound and shackled, from the county
jail thought Quentin was a potential witness in a major narcotics
case that supposedly involved some of the most prominent people in
town. After Quentin met behind closed doors with Goodwin for more
than an hour, all the charges, except for a single misdemeanor
count for possession of marijuana, were dropped.

No one thought anything about it. Plea bargains were
made all the time, and if there was anything different about this
one, it was only that it had been made so quickly. And far from
raising any suspicion, the absence of a defense lawyer only
increased the respect in which the chief deputy district attorney
was held. The police knew which prosecutors they could count on and
which ones always insisted on the letter of the law. Goodwin was
smart and tough and, most important of all, he never blamed a cop
for a case that went bad.

Shortly after his private conversation with Quentin,
Goodwin stood beside Gilliland-O'Rourke while the district attorney
announced indictments returned by the grand jury against a dozen
upper-middle-class citizens, not one of whom had ever before been
in trouble with the law, on charges of conspiring to sell
narcotics. All of them proclaimed their innocence, demanded their
day in court, and then took the best deal they could get. There
were no trials. There was no need for anyone to testify about
anything. Travis Quentin was released from county jail at the end
of his thirty-day sentence and no one gave him a second
thought.

Travis Quentin gave a more interesting account. He
claimed that when he was brought to Goodwin's office, the two
officers who were holding him by his arms were told they could wait
outside. Their reluctance to leave Goodwin alone and unprotected
was dismissed with a smile. Frowning, they pushed Quentin down onto
a wooden chair in front of the desk and turned to go.

"You can take the handcuffs off," Goodwin announced.
He was sitting on the front corner of the desk, one foot on the
floor, the other leg swinging idly back and forth. "Mr. Quentin and
I are going to have a friendly conversation," he explained. "I'll
be fine," he added as the two officers exchanged worried
glances.

As soon as the door shut behind them, Goodwin reached
inside his suit coat pocket. "Cigarette?" he asked, pulling out an
unopened pack.

Rubbing his wrists, Quentin nodded and waited for
Goodwin to open it and give him one. Instead, Goodwin tossed him
the pack.

"Keep the rest. I don't smoke," he said, as he got to
his feet and moved to his chair behind the desk.

Quentin had next to nothing in the way of formal
education, but he knew something about lawyers and the way they
worked. Most prosecutors dressed like funeral directors and talked
in flat voices with a sort of grim-faced impatience. Goodwin was
wearing a double-breasted blue blazer. Quentin remembered the shiny
gold buttons. Lounging in his chair, an ankle crossed over his
knee, he acted as if he had nothing but time and no better way to
spend it than in a long, desultory conversation about how best to
solve someone else's problem.

"You have an interesting record, Mr. Quentin,"
Goodwin remarked, without a trace of indignation.

Quentin had opened the pack and taken out a
cigarette. Reaching inside a drawer, Goodwin found a matchbook and
flipped it to him.

"Manslaughter, burglary, armed robbery," Goodwin
observed, as he glanced at the thick compilations of arrests and
convictions that constituted the only biography Travis Quentin
would ever have. "I'm afraid it's the kind of record that doesn't
leave much room for leniency. No, I should think that with these
new charges you're looking at eight to ten years, minimum."

Pausing, he leaned his elbow on the desk. "Unless
you'd just like to save everybody the time and trouble of a
trial."

Quentin was on his guard. They did not bring you to
the district attorney's office to negotiate a plea bargain. Your
lawyer did that, and he did not have one yet. After a long drag on
the cigarette, Quentin asked the only question he cared about.
"What do I get?"

Instead of casual amusement, Goodwin's eyes now
reflected a serious interest."You plead guilty to misdemeanor
possession of marijuana. You'll do thirty days in the county jail,
with credit for the time you have to wait before you're
sentenced."

Quentin had just begun to inhale. He choked on the
smoke. "Who do I have to kill?" he said, laughing.

Standing up, Goodwin shook his head. "No one right
now," he remarked. "Do we have a deal?"

It never occurred to Quentin to say no.

The day he was released, he was met outside the
county jail by a woman who handed him a large manila envelope
containing a black-and-white photograph of Nancy Goodwin, the name
and location of the Corvallis motel, and the date she would be
spending the night. There was also $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills
and a key to a bus station locker where, according to the written
instructions, he would find an additional $5,000 waiting for him
when he finished the job.