Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (30 page)

With an effort, Harper got up from the chair. "Thank
you for your time, counselor," he remarked. "It's always a
pleasure."

As soon as he was gone, I said to Helen, "I didn't
know I had a one-thirty appointment."

Holding the door with one hand, she put her other
hand on her hip. "You don't. You have a two o'clock at the other
end of town. I wasn't sure you'd want Mr. Bryce to know about
it."

"Mr. Bryce. You never called any of my clients
mister."

"Why would I? They were all crooks." She thought of
something. "I always called Judge Rifkin Judge Rifkin. And," she
added soberly, "I always say Mrs. Woolner."

The investment banking offices of Conrad Atkinson
occupied the top floor of a high-rise building on the other side of
the river. Several pairs of serious men in dark pinstripe suits
moved in different directions across the high-ceilinged lobby,
engaged in the intense whispered conversations of high finance. A
slender brunette rose from behind the reception desk and with an
abbreviated smile led me down a windowless corridor to a
glass-walled office.

It was Atkinson's firm, and he dressed the way he
wanted. I could imagine that he always wore a suit to a business
meeting and never to the office. He was dressed instead in a
double-breasted blue blazer, with a white button-down oxford shirt
and a muted yellow silk tie. He had on a pair of oxblood loafers,
not the tasseled ones that lawyers often wore to court but the
old-fashioned kind, the penny loafers high school kids used to
wear, the kind worn by middle-aged men who had gone to prep school,
men who played tennis at places with ivy-covered fences and then
cooled off with a gin and tonic in dark paneled rooms where
everyone knew each other by their first names and no one had to
explain the rules.

Atkinson looked as tanned and well rested as someone
on a summer vacation. When I commented on it, he explained that he
had just returned from a week in Barbados.

"By the way, congratulations," he said, looking at me
from behind his glass-topped desk. He sat with one leg crossed
casually across the other, swinging his foot back and forth. "It
was good you put away that bastard, Goodwin. Even better that you
did it with that baboon, Richard Lee Jones, defending him."

"Jones is good."

"I'm sure he is," Atkinson replied, glancing
away.

"You handled yourself well with him," I said,
remembering the way Jones had tried to bully him.

With an appreciative nod, he swung around and faced
me directly. "What can I do for you, Mr. Antonelli?"

"Russell Gray once told me the two of you were good
friends. What can you tell me about him?"

His brownish-blond eyebrows shot up. "We knew each
other, that's true, but I couldn't honestly tell you we were good
friends. In the first place, when you were dealing with Russell, it
wasn't always easy to know what was true and what wasn't. He had a
remarkable facility for creating rumors about himself.

Pulling himself away from the desk, Atkinson settled
back against the upholstered chair and rested his hands in his lap.
"Russell was a collector."

"A collector?"

"Yes. Art, among other things," he added vaguely. "He
probably had the largest private collection in the city. He
certainly made that claim. You couldn't have a conversation with
him without hearing about his latest acquisition." He looked down
at his hands. "But there were always rumors," he remarked, raising
his eyes. "Rumors that some of the things he had were really
nothing more than very good forgeries, and that he knew it. That
some of the things he had were unquestionably authentic and
enormously valuable, but almost certainly stolen. Russell knew what
the rumors were and would never deny any of them."

"Perhaps he couldn't," I suggested.

"I don't believe that," Atkinson said. "I don't think
any of the rumors were true at all. I think most of them were
started by Russell himself. You see, Mr. Antonelli, I believe he
wanted there to be a sense of mystery around him."

"What else did he collect besides art?"

"He liked women," he replied.

"What about men?"

He frowned, not because he regarded the suggestion as
unseemly but because, as he explained, he simply did not know.
"That might have been another rumor Russell started about himself.
On the other hand," he observed, with studied indifference, "it
might have been true."

"What about the women? Was there anyone in
particular?"

"No, I don't think so. With Russell, everything was
always temporary."

"Did he ever talk about Alma Woolner?" I asked.

His easy affability faded away, and he became
serious. "He thought she was one of the most gifted and talented
people he had ever met. And he felt sorry for her."

"He felt sorry for her? Why?"

"Why do you think?" he asked. "She's gorgeous and
gifted and so light-skinned that people who meet her think she must
be Indian or Egyptian or something else exotic, and look who she
married," he explained, his voice trailing off as he refused to put
into words the thought he was sure I would understand.

"Yes?" I prompted.

"Let's just say someone who doesn't quite fit in with
the kind of people who can really appreciate someone like her."

"And is that because he's a judge who makes less
money in a year than most of your friends make in a week, or is it
because he walks funny—having your legs blown off will do that to
you—or is it just because Horace Woolner is so damn black?"

"That isn't the way I feel," he hastened to assure
me. "But there are people, and Russell Gray was one of them, who
still have those prejudices."

"Was he having an affair with her?" I asked him
pointblank.

It caught him off guard. "I don't know," he said
tentatively. "They were together quite a lot. But she ran the
ballet company and he was chairman of the board, so there wouldn't
have been anything unusual in that."

"There's something else, though, isn't there?"

His arms rested on top of the glass desk and he
stared at his two thumbs, pressed tight together. The lines in his
forehead deepened. "It's nothing more than an impression. It just
seemed to me that whenever she was around him, she seemed
completely consumed by him."

"Do you think Gray was in love with her?"

He threw me a glance that told me I understood
nothing at all. "I told you. He was a collector. If he was ever in
love with her, it would not have been for very long. But again," he
added, "I don't know whether anything ever happened between them or
not. And even if it did, I don't see what it could have to do with
his murder."

"It could supply a motive," I suggested.

He dismissed it out of hand. "It's easier for me to
believe that Kristin was planning a murder with Goodwin while she
was living with me than that Alma Woolner had anything to do with
the death of Russell Gray."

That reminded me. "Marshall Goodwin is going to be
sentenced tomorrow morning," I told him.

"Yes, I know," he replied, treating it as a matter of
no importance. "Let me tell you about Kristin. I answered the
questions you asked me at trial, but there were other questions you
could have asked. I told you I didn't think she was in love with
me. I didn't tell you that my lawyer insisted she sign a prenuptial
agreement—and she refused."

He stroked his chin, lost for a moment in his
thoughts. "She didn't do too badly as it was," he observed, a wry
expression on his face. "I'd given her a lot of jewelry. She took
that, of course. She also took the Mercedes. I hadn't given her
that. She even had the temerity to ask me for money."

As I got up to leave, I thought of something. "If you
don't think Alma could have done it, is there anybody you can think
of who might have?"

With a lithe step, Atkinson moved around the desk and
walked me to the door. "No, not really." Grasping the door handle,
he gazed down at the carpet as if he was trying to decide how far
to go. "Despite what he told you," he said, looking up, "we weren't
that close. His best friend was Arthur O'Rourke."

I should have thought of it before. Russell Gray,
Conrad Atkinson, Arthur O'Rourke: they were all part of the same
circle, people with the kind of money that made a difference in
whether something important got done. I could still see Arthur
O'Rourke, with his gray candid eyes and friendly patrician manner,
telling me, as if it was something he would have loved to do
himself, how much he admired those who battled things out in
courtroom disputes.

They all had that—Russell Gray and Arthur O'Rourke
and Conrad Atkinson, too, for that matter— the self-deprecating
manner by which they let you believe that whatever you did was far
more interesting than anything they had done or could ever do. They
left you with the feeling that they wanted to know everything about
you, and only later did you realize that they never revealed
anything about themselves.

Perhaps it was this very insistence on privacy that
had drawn Kristin Maxfield away from Conrad Atkinson and toward
Marshall Goodwin. Kristin loved money, but she loved something else
more, and whether it was excitement or power, it required a kind of
publicity that no one in that circle would have allowed.

Kristin's now-notorious husband had more important
things on his mind the next morning, when I sat down across from
him at a small table in a windowless conference room. Silent and
morose, he sank back against the armless metal chair, glaring at me
while his lawyer patted his arm.

"He isn't going to take the deal," Richard Lee Jones
said gruffly. "We'll win on appeal." He tilted his chair back and
put one foot against the edge of the table. He was wearing his
expensive boots. We were going into court for sentencing and the
jury box would be empty.

"But only one of you will be waiting on death row to
find out," I snapped.

"I'll take my chances," Goodwin said. "I really don't
have any choice," he added, when our eyes met.

"You can agree to testify that Kristin knew what was
in that envelope she delivered to Quentin," I reminded him. "You'll
get a life sentence and a chance to get parole someday."

He was not wearing any of the tailored suits and
hundred-dollar ties he had worn to court as a defendant; he was
dressed like every other inmate of the county jail.

"I can't tell you anything about Kristin because
there isn't anything to tell," he insisted. "I didn't do it; I
didn't hire Quentin; I didn't have anything to do with killing my
wife."

I searched his eyes, trying to find something that
would tell me if what he said might possibly be true.

"If you didn't give that envelope to Kristin, that
means she did it on her own."

He shook his head.

Getting to my feet, I put my hands on the back of the
folding chair and looked down at him. "In a few minutes you're
going in there," I said, nodding toward the courtroom next door,
"and you're going to be sentenced to death. And while you sit there
on death row, waiting year after year while your lawyer files one
appeal after another until he's exhausted every legal argument to
save your life, Kristin is going to be living in your house,
driving your car, spending whatever is left of the million dollars
you got for the death of your wife and your unborn child."

I bent forward and fixed him with a cold stare. "And
I'll be very surprised if she spends any more time mourning you
than you spent mourning Nancy."

Goodwin shot to his feet, knocking over his chair.
"You don't know what you're talking about!"

Grabbing his shoulders, Jones held him back and
motioned for me to leave. "We don't have anything more to talk
about," he said.

The crowd that had waited for the verdict was not
there for the sentencing. Less than a dozen people were scattered
along the gleaming wood benches. The ubiquitous Harper Bryce sat
alone, jotting something in his ink stained notebook. Kristin
Maxfield sat in the back of the courtroom, the same place she had
occupied throughout the trial. When Goodwin, handcuffed and
shackled, was brought into court, his eye sought her out. He seemed
to draw encouragement from her affectionate glance.

Solemn and aloof, Irma Holloway peered down from the
bench. "Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?" she
asked tersely.

Goodwin's head jolted up. "Your Honor, I swear to
you, I did not have anything to do with the murder of my wife."

The judge's eyes stayed on his. "If that is true, Mr.
Goodwin, then a serious miscarriage of justice has taken place.
However," she went on, "you were found guilty by the unanimous
verdict of a jury that considered all the evidence presented during
your trial." Pausing for just a moment, she narrowed her eyes. "It
is a verdict fully supported by the evidence, a verdict which, had
this case been tried to the court alone, I would have reached
myself."

Lowering his eyes, Goodwin stared down at the floor
and did not look up while Irma Holloway sentenced him to death.