Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (32 page)

Pausing frequently, Jenkins outlined the evidence the
State would offer. It was all routine, the kind of thing said at
the beginning of every case. Resting my arm on the table, I stared
down at my hands and rubbed my thumb against first one finger, then
another, pulling the skin back from the nail. In the background,
Jenkins was saying something about the gun. I listened long enough
to hear the words murder weapon and then let my mind drift.

Listlessly, my gaze moved from Jenkins to the jury,
from the jury to the court reporter, and from the reporter up to
the bench, where Judge West had lowered his eyes to study some
papers he had brought into court. We were all the part-time
performers of a permanent play, repeating itself over and over
again, and as I watched, I felt something, the soft shudder of a
wing beating out into the dusk, and had an eerie sense of something
indefinable, a kind of knowledge just beyond my grasp, an
inexplicable certainty that everything was wrong.

"Mr. Antonelli," I heard a voice say.

Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself
standing up, facing the bench. "Yes, your Honor?"

"Does the defense wish to make an opening statement
at this time?"

I had committed to memory what I wanted to say, but
now I changed my mind. "No, your Honor. The defense would like to
reserve its opening statement." The prosecution would now have to
put on its case without having heard anything about what the
defense intended to do.

The next morning, Gilliland-O'Rourke appeared in
court as if she had never been away. Resuming her place as lead
attorney, she called the first witness for the prosecution.

His thin knees pressed together and his manicured
hands folded in his lap, Andre Barbizon settled into the witness
chair, cast an insolent glance at the crowded rows of spectators,
and waited for the first question.

"How long were you employed by Russell Gray?" Her
voice, her manner, the way she moved toward the witness, then
toward the jury, none of it had changed. Whatever she felt about
what had happened to her husband, the world was never going to know
it.

"Three years next month," Barbizon said. He seemed to
take a certain satisfaction in the precision of the answer.

"And what did your duties include?" she asked.

"I managed the household, hired staff, took care of
the accounts, and made certain everything was done in the proper
manner."

Nodding, she faced the jury. "Where were you the
evening your employer, Russell Gray, was killed?"

"That was my night off. I had dinner with friends in
town."

"Approximately what time did you return?"

Barbizon stroked the side of his nose. "Ten minutes
after midnight."

Gilliland-O'Rourke walked toward him. "Exactly?"

"It was twelve minutes past when I went into the
living room. At least that was what it said on the mantelpiece
clock."

"What did you find when you entered the living
room?"

"Russell. I mean Mr. Gray. He was on the floor. Dead.
A gun was right next to the body."

"How did you know he was dead?"

A look of disgust spread over his face. "His eyes
were wide open. There was a lot of blood. He wasn't breathing. Just
to be sure," he added, with a slight shudder, "I checked his
pulse."

"What did you do then?"

"I called the police," he said.

She was standing right in front of him, her arms
folded in front of her. "What did you do while you waited for the
police?"

He thought about it for a moment. "I went into the
kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine. I wanted something to
steady my nerves. I was upset."

"Your witness," Gilliland-O'Rourke remarked, as she
returned to her chair.

I stood at the side of the counsel table and squinted
at him. "You lived in Russell Gray's home. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"Where exactly did you stay? Did you have separate
quarters outside the main house, an apartment inside the house
itself, a room?"

"I have a two-room suite on the second floor."

Nodding, I moved across the hardwood floor to the
front of the jury box. "It's a very large stone house. Three full
stories, I believe. Correct?"

"Yes," he said, watching me carefully.

"High ceilings, solid floors, long hallways that run
off in a number of different directions?"

"Yes," he replied, a touch of impatience in his
voice.

"A house in which it would be extremely difficult to
know whether someone else was present or not?"

"If you mean, is it hard to hear people moving about,
yes, of course."

"When you're upstairs in your private quarters, for
example, people visiting Mr. Gray in the living room would not know
you were in the house, would they?"

"No, they wouldn't," he agreed. "Unless, of course,
Mr. Gray happened to mention it."

I looked at the jury, and then I looked back at him.
"You mentioned that among your other duties, you hired staff. Did
any other employee of Mr. Gray live in the house?"

"No. The rest of the staff—the cook, the maid—were
only there during the day or as needed."

"When someone came to visit Mr. Gray or called him on
the telephone, did you answer the door or answer the telephone when
the maid wasn't there?" I moved closer to him, running my hand
along the railing of the jury box.

"Yes, of course."

"So during the course of the nearly three years you
worked for Mr. Gray, you became fairly well acquainted with most of
the people he knew, didn't you?"

"Yes," he said with assurance.

"Thank you, Mr. Barbizon. That's all I have."

I took a step toward my chair and then glanced back.
He was looking at the judge, waiting to be told he could go.

"One last thing. In a house that large, how could you
be so certain after you found the dead body of Russell Gray that
the killer wasn't still somewhere on the premises?"

"I just assumed it," he stuttered. "I saw the gun on
the floor."

I held up my hand. "No further questions."

Barbizon was excused, and the judge announced that
because of another matter before the court, we would stand in
recess until after lunch. As soon as the jury left, I moved over to
where Gilliland-O'Rourke stood, closing her briefcase.

"I'm very sorry about your husband," I told her. "Is
he going to be all right?"

She finished fastening the clasp on her briefcase
before she turned to look at me. "He'll be fine," she said
tersely.

"Which hospital is he in?"

"He's in a private clinic." She swung the briefcase
off the table and held it in front of her, waiting for me to finish
whatever I had to say.

"I'm glad he's going to be all right," I said, and
started to turn away.

"If you wanted to talk to my husband," she said, with
an icy stare, "you should have talked to me first."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You've been calling his office for weeks."

"Yes, that's true. I wanted to talk to him."

"What about?" she demanded.

Her husband was in the hospital with a heart attack.
I tried to make allowances. "Look, Gwendolyn," I whispered. "This
isn't the time—"

"What did you want to talk to him about? Something
about this case?"

"He was Russell Gray's best friend."

"They barely knew each other," she said, with a
dismissive glance. "If you had asked me, I could have told you
that," she added, as she turned on her heel.

"If it's that simple," I said, sympathy exhausted,
"why didn't he just take my call and tell me that?"

She hesitated, as if she was going to stop and turn
back, but then she walked away.

Chapter Twenty Two

Andre Barbizon had found Russell Gray's body on the
living room floor. The next witness called by the prosecution
explained how he got there.

Dr. Reuben Santana walked to the witness stand in
long, brisk strides. He had close-cropped hair and a thin, slightly
off-center nose.

"You performed the autopsy on the decedent, Russell
Gray?" Gilliland-O'Rourke asked, standing at the counsel table, her
long painted fingernails resting on the edge.

"Yes," the coroner replied. His brief nod seemed to
parallel the clean, efficient movement of a surgeon's hand.

"Based upon your examination of the body, Dr.
Santana, what in your professional judgment was the cause of
death?"

Shifting his gaze to the jury, he replied, "Trauma
from a gunshot wound. The victim was shot in the chest. The bullet
essentially exploded the pulmonary artery. Death was
instantaneous."

Gilliland-O'Rourke went to an easel, where she
removed a blank sheet of paper that had been covering a simple line
drawing of a front view of the human body.

"When you examined the corpse of Russell Gray, were
you able to discover the precise entry wound?"

Santana left the witness stand. With a felt-tipped
pen, he carefully drew a small circle in the middle of the chest
area. "The bullet entered here." Standing at the side of the easel,
he waited while Gilliland-O'Rourke unveiled a drawing of the back
view.

"Were you able to find an exit wound?"

Santana drew a circle halfway across an imaginary
line running between the lower edges of the shoulder blades.

"Taking into account the location of both the entry
and the exit wounds," he was asked when he returned to the witness
stand, "what conclusions can be drawn about the trajectory of the
bullet that killed Russell Gray?"

"The line was virtually horizontal."

"Which suggests that the gun did not go off during a
struggle, for example?"

This called for speculation, but I decided not to
object.

"All I can say with certainty is that he was shot by
someone firing at neither an upward nor a downward angle."

Gilliland-O'Rourke wanted to make certain everyone
understood. "So he couldn't have been shot, for example, during a
struggle to get the gun away from the other person if the barrel
was forced either up or down as it went off?"

"No."

On the following day, Gilliland-O'Rourke took up the
same line of questioning with her next witness.

Pigeon-toed and round-shouldered, Detective Thaddeus
Oliver brushed his mustache with his fingers, waiting for the
chance to answer.

"Were there any signs of struggle when you
investigated the scene? Furniture thrown around, things broken,
anything like that?" she asked briskly.

"Nope. Everything was in the place it was supposed to
be."

"What about the victim's clothing? Anything that
showed signs of a struggle?"

"His shirt was torn where he got shot," Oliver
replied, his eyes darting toward the jury, thinking he had made a
joke.

"Nothing else?" Gilliland-O'Rourke asked, with a
glance of disapproval.

"No," he said, looking down at his feet.

Moving closer to the witness, she lifted her head.
"This is very important, Detective Oliver. Were there any powder
burns, any evidence of any sort, that would indicate that the
victim had been shot at close range?"

A well-trained witness with years of courtroom
experience, he looked directly at the jury. "There was
nothing."

"If someone had been shot while struggling for a gun,
would you expect to find such evidence?"

"Yes, we would," he replied firmly, his eyes on the
jury.

It was a preemptive strike, an attempt to prove
premeditation by eliminating the possibility of either sudden
impulse or self-defense. Gilliland-O'Rourke was thorough, but it
was all beside the point. Our defense was simple. Someone else
killed Russell Gray.

Day after day, the prosecution called its witnesses
and fastened together each link in the chain of evidence against
Alma Woolner. Lab technicians and forensic experts testified that
the bullet that killed Russell Gray had in fact been fired from the
gun found beside the body and that the only fingerprints found on
the gun belonged to the defendant. It was almost a relief when they
finally called a witness who did not spend most of her waking hours
staring down a microscope.

The old woman leaned on the silver knob of her black
lacquered walking stick and reluctantly raised her right hand while
the clerk recited the oath. When Gilliland-O'Rourke asked her to
state her full name and spell her last name for the record, she
looked at her as if she could not believe the younger woman was
really serious.

"Roberta Hope Caldwell," she said finally, each
syllable pronounced like the next note in a building chorus of
resentment. Resting her liver-spotted hands on the knob of the
walking stick, she spat out the letters of her last name:
"C-A-L-D-W-E-L-L." Mrs. Caldwell served on the ballet company board
and, though few people were old enough to remember it, had once
been one of the most beautiful women in Portland.