Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (9 page)

Lounging on the hotel bed, a sheet pulled up to my
chest, I listened to the shower running in the bathroom. She came
out with nothing on but a towel wrapped around her hair and sat
down next to me.

"I don't have long, Joe." A trace of some indefinable
regret curved along her wide, full mouth, and she leaned toward me
and gave me a perfunctory kiss. Perhaps because she had to go, I
wanted her to stay.

"We have the room. We could spend the night."

She rolled forward on her hip until I was looking
straight up into her brown lucent eyes. The scent of her breath
reminded me of a girl I could not remember, someone I had known as
a boy during a season of weekend evenings spent parked in a car.
Her fingers touched my forehead and then my hair. "You'd really
like to spend the night?" Her voice was a whisper.

"We could have dinner... "

She put her hand over my mouth and shook her head,
her eyes full of teasing skepticism as she crawled next to me under
the thin white sheet.

We lost ourselves in the trancelike delirium of sex.
When it was over I listened again to the sound of the shower, and
as I watched her get dressed never thought about asking her to
stay. She intrigued me with the way she moved—everything was
accomplished with almost mechanical efficiency. She looked at me
while she put on her clothes, her hands and legs in constant
movement.

"We could spend the night sometime," she said, as she
buttoned her blouse. "But not tonight. I have a date."

My hands locked behind my head, I asked, "Is it
serious?"

She turned away from me and, using the mirror above
the small desk, started to put on her lipstick.

"He wants to get married," she explained
indifferently.

"Is that what you want?"

She snapped the cap back on top of the lipstick and
then smacked her lips together. "I like being married," she said,
as she wheeled around, as if presenting herself for inspection.

"How do I look?" she asked, a doubtful expression on
her face. She was attractive and I told her so.

"You're sweet," she said, as she bent down and,
careful not to smear her lipstick, gave me a kiss on the cheek.
"Don't get up." She laughed as she moved away. When she got to the
door, she looked back. "Call me next week?"

After the door shut behind her, I lay there, staring
at the ceiling, without energy, without desire, lost in a vast
emptiness. After a while, I dragged myself off the bed and took a
long, hot shower.

Dressed, I tossed the room key on the small desk
below the mirror and took one last look around. Crumpled pillows
and wrinkled sheets covered the bed, and every towel in the
bathroom had ended up on the floor. The room reeked of sex. In two
hours we had turned one of the most expensive hotel rooms in the
city into a scene from a cheap motel.

As I was leaving the hotel, I changed my mind and
dropped in at the bar. It was small, with a few tables scattered
along the wall. I sat down on a leather bar stool and ordered a
scotch and soda. Through the glass window in front, lettered with
the name of the bar, the blue and red neon lights from a movie
theater down the street smeared the rain-slick pavement with their
own reflection.

At the far end, pictures flashed on a television set.
Nursing my drink, I watched for a while, amused at the changing
expression of the anchorwoman as she introduced each segmented
story, all of them no doubt matters of great urgency and none of
them lasting for more than twenty seconds.

"Would you mind turning on the volume?" I asked the
bartender suddenly. The district attorney was making a
statement.

"Sure," he replied, wiping a glass with a bar towel.
Reaching up, he turned the set loud enough for me to hear what she
was saying. Gwendolyn Gilliland-O'Rourke was getting older. The
flame-red hair was turning to a brownish rust, and her green eyes
no longer seemed quite so bright. But if she looked a little
different, she still sounded the same. Standing just outside her
office, the words OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY plainly visible,
she read from a prepared text the announcement of an arrest.

"After a lengthy investigation, conducted in the
utmost secrecy by the state police, Marshall Goodwin, chief deputy
district attorney of Multnomah County, has been arrested for the
murder of his wife, Nancy Goodwin, a murder that took place two
years ago.

"At my direction," she went on, staring straight into
the camera, "Mr. Goodwin was taken into custody this afternoon.
Because Mr. Goodwin, who was first appointed by my predecessor,
Judge Horace Woolner, has served as chief deputy district attorney,
it has been decided that to avoid any suggestion of either
favoritism on the one hand or undue severity on the other, a
special prosecutor should be appointed to bring the State's case
against the defendant. I am pleased to announce that the state will
be represented by one of the preeminent defense lawyers in Oregon,
Joseph Antonelli."

The camera left her answering the questions of
reporters and returned to the newsroom anchorwoman. "Marshall
Goodwin, chief deputy district attorney, considered the logical
choice to become district attorney next year when
Gilliland-O'Rourke makes her expected bid to become the State's
governor, has been arrested on a charge of murder. In a surprising
twist, criminal defense attorney Joseph Antonelli will serve as the
prosecutor in the case. We tried to contact Mr. Antonelli, but so
far we have been unable to reach him."

I got up from the bar and paid the bill. Outside, I
turned my collar up and hunched my shoulders, trying to keep dry in
the endless drizzle. Across the street, a few people were lining up
at the box office of the theater. For a while, I walked aimlessly,
marveling at my own stupidity. I could almost see Goodwin marching
into Gilliland-O'Rourke's office to tell her he had just learned he
was about to be charged with the murder of his wife. And I could
see her, one of the most ruthless people I had ever known, giving
him all the assurances of a friend and then, as soon as he was
gone, making arrangements to have him arrested.

I had wanted to see Marshall Goodwin's face when he
first heard what Travis Quentin had said because I wanted to be
sure that he was guilty. Instead, all I knew now was that I was
about to prosecute a case against a man who might very well be
innocent.

Chapter Seven

Like time itself, the law stops for no one. Whether
it is a drunken vagrant charged with the theft of a cheap bottle of
wine or a pillar of the legal community accused of murder, anyone
who is arrested and taken into custody has to be brought into court
within forty-eight hours. When a deputy sheriff escorted the
prisoner to the counsel table to hear for the first time a formal
statement of the charges that were being brought against him,
Marshall Goodwin seemed more embarrassed by the way he was dressed.
The expensive suits and understated ties, tapered shirts, and
tasseled black shoes had been replaced with the shapeless V-neck
blue denim top and baggy drawstring pants that made every inmate
look the same.

Goodwin did not want to look at anyone, and no one
wanted to look at him. Only the monotonous uniformity of the law
saved us from a painful silence.

"Your Honor," I began, "my name is Joseph Antonelli.
I am here in the capacity of a prosecutor under special
appointment."

Barely visible behind the bench, Judge Stanley
Roberts, a diminutive man who regularly listened with apparent
compassion to pleas for mercy before imposing sentences of
remarkable severity, studied the file in front of him. The overhead
lights glistened on the pale skin on the top of his balding
head.

He looked up. "I have the order of appointment.
Please proceed." As soon as he said it, his eyes darted away.

Though I had heard countless times before the
civilized ritual by which the state declares war against one of its
own, I had never been called upon to speak the words myself. "Your
Honor, we are here in the matter of State versus Marshall Goodwin.
He is being charged by way of an information with the crime of
murder in the first degree. Let the record reflect that I am
handing Mr. Goodwin's attorney a copy of the information."

Goodwin had gotten one of the best, and if there were
any who doubted how good he was, Richard Lee Jones was more than
willing to tell them. Tall and square shouldered, he moved around a
courtroom with flailing arms and flashing eyes, convinced that the
sound of his voice could mesmerize any twelve people who had ever
formed a jury. One of the last remaining practitioners of
old-fashioned courthouse oratory, he seldom got ten minutes into
his closing argument before his slick black hair would fall across
the corner of his forehead, the way it did in the photograph of
Clarence Darrow that he kept on his desk in La Grande, out on the
high desert plains east of the Cascades.

He held the document between his thumb and
forefinger, as if it were a venomous thing. His mouth was
irregular, settled permanently into a long sloping downward curve.
A pair of snakeskin boots peeked out from under the cuffed trousers
of a perfectly tailored three piece suit. Still clutching the paper
in his fingers, he pulled his hand back to his hip and, his other
hand on the table, bent forward at the waist.

"For the record, I am Richard Lee Jones." Pausing, he
turned his head toward me. "I'll be representing Mr. Goodwin in
these proceedings."

"Do you wish to enter a plea at this time?" inquired
Judge Roberts.

"Not guilty," he replied, his eyes still on me. "And
we'll enter another plea of not guilty to the indictment," he went
on, the faint outline of a smile on his mouth, "assuming of course
that Mr. Antonelli here can get an indictment." Abruptly, he turned
his gaze away from me and toward the bench.

"Now, your Honor, Mr. Goodwin wants nothing more than
to clear his name against this outrageous charge. And he can
certainly do more to help in his own defense once he's out of
custody. Respectfully, we ask that he be released on his own
recognizance."

"On a charge of murder, Mr. Jones?" asked the judge,
raising an eyebrow. "Bail will be set in the amount of two hundred
thousand dollars."

Jones did not seem disappointed. He whispered a few
words to his new client before a deputy sheriff put his hand on
Goodwin's arm and led him away. Dropping the information into his
tan leather briefcase, Jones snapped it shut and turned to go. He
stopped just long enough to fix me with one last stare. "I'll have
him out before the end of the day."

Despite Richard Lee Jones, I got the indictment from
the grand jury, though there were moments while they listened to
the testimony of Travis Quentin when I wondered if I would.
Gathered together in a dimly lit room on the top floor of the
county courthouse, the members, most of them middle-aged or older,
listened in silence as I elicited from the State's chief witness
the story of the killing of Nancy Goodwin.

Quentin sat on an armless wooden chair, weighted down
by the heavy chains that twisted over his shoulders and around his
legs. Two armed guards stood behind him. My place was at a small
table directly in front of him, less than ten feet away.

"You murdered Nancy Goodwin two years ago, did you
not?"

His arms fastened behind him, Quentin lifted his head
and turned it slightly to the side, so that, as was his habit, he
was looking at me, one eye lined up behind the other. "Yeah," he
grunted.

"And what was the reason that you took her life?"

His gaze drifted away and settled on one of the
members of the grand jury, seated together on his left. "I was paid
to," he explained, as his eye moved on to someone else.

"How much were you paid?" I asked sharply, trying to
draw his attention back to me.

His head swung around. "Ten thousand."

"That's not much for a human life, is it?" I asked
sternly.

"Not bad for an hour's work," he retorted.

A chair squeaked against the linoleum floor as one
juror shifted his weight around; another juror cleared his throat.
I watched their faces, but there was no visible sign of shock or
outrage or even disbelief. There was instead an almost tangible
feeling of resentment, as if, recognizing there was no common bond
of humanity that linked them to Quentin, they did not want to be
reminded that someone like this was even a possibility.

"And who paid you to murder Nancy Goodwin?" I asked
finally.

"Her husband, the district attorney."

"You're referring to Marshall Goodwin, chief deputy
district attorney for Multnomah County?"

"Yeah, that's the guy," he answered. He raised his
shackled wrists to his chest, where the chain went taut, and tried
to maneuver the iron links to a different spot on his shoulder.
"Couldn't you take these off? I'm not going anywhere," he remarked,
nodding at the guards behind him.

I ignored him. "How do you know he paid you?"

He let his hands drop back into his lap, the chains
rattling heavily against each other. Sullen-eyed, he stared at me
and said nothing.