Punish Me with Kisses (5 page)

R
obinson had terrified her. Schrader said he wasn't a class-A trial lawyer, but he had scared her anyway. Tall and grim, he reminded her of a cruel gym teacher who browbeats awkward students for the amusement of the class. He was politically ambitious, a small-town prosecutor hungry for a conviction in a once-in-a-lifetime murder case.

"You say it was foggy?" he asked her the second day of his cross-examination.

"Yes."

"And you were sleepy?"

"Yes."

"Then you heard something?"

"Yes."

"And you opened your eyes and saw this person running out, and then he disappeared?"

"Yes."

"Can you describe him, Miss
Berring
? Was he short or tall? Fat or thin?"

"I couldn't see."

"You couldn't see?"

"I couldn't tell."

"You're sure you saw someone?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm glad you're sure about
that.
" There was snickering then, a little ripple of snickers across the courtroom. She looked at the jury: Schrader had told her to do that whenever there was a pause. Some of them were smiling, the two lobstermen and the pharmacist. The postmistress was as inscrutable as ever. The farmer's wife, who worked summers as a maid, stared off into space.

"Now tell us, so we can all understand—just how did your eyes adjust so quickly to the light?"

"There wasn't any light."

"
Really
?"

"I caught a glimpse—"

"Ah! A glimpse! Earlier you told us you opened your eyes suddenly. Do you suppose you might have blinked?"

"Maybe."

"You
did
blink, didn't you, Miss
Berring
?"

"I don't remember—" She had the feeling that he was setting her up.

"Think back. You dozed off, and then you heard a noise, and then you opened your eyes, and you had to adjust to seeing in the dark. Now, to make that adjustment, didn't you have to blink?"

"I guess I blinked. I think anyone would."

"I think so, too. And that brings us to an interesting point—the miraculous disappearance of this 'intruder' who, according to your testimony, was standing there one moment and was gone the next. But now, couldn't this person have been standing there, and then, when you blinked, just stepped back inside?"

So, that was the trap. "That's not what happened," she said. "That's not what I saw at all."

"But you didn't see anything. You just told us you blinked."

"You're twisting my words."

"No. I think you really did see someone—
the defendant
."

"I didn't see him!"

"How can you be so sure? You can't describe him."

"I would have recognized Jared."

"
Oh
?"

"I knew his shape, his build."

"Yes," Robinson laughed. "I'm sure you knew his body very well, Miss
Berring
. We're quite prepared to stipulate to that."

There were more snickers then, many more than before. She looked at the jury, injured, confused. Schrader stood up. "I think Mr. Robinson can spare us his sarcasm."

But they were still snickering. The reporters were smirking and the artists who were sketching her were smiling as they drew. Robinson nodded to the judge and then turned back to her, that awful grin, the gym teacher's grin, still on his lips.

He started in on the flashlight beam and tried to befuddle her with that, but, shaken as she was, she knew that she was on firm ground, knew that she'd seen the beam and that matched Jared's story of an intruder who'd shined a flashlight in his eyes. So she stood up to him. Schrader told her later that Robinson had made a mistake—he shouldn't have given her that chance to regain her confidence. Robinson must have realized his blunder because he turned savage at the end. "Isn't it a fact, Miss
Berring
," he demanded, "that you hated your sister because she stole your boyfriend away? Isn't it a fact that you're perjuring yourself now because you still love the defendant and would do anything to help him, including lie to this court, if you thought that would get him off?"

Schrader objected. The judge instructed the jury to ignore the question. Robinson turned away, satisfied he'd made his point. But she was angry then, so angry she answered anyway. "No, those aren't facts, Mr. Robinson," she said. And then in a level voice: "Just cheap shots from a bully. That's all they are."

She couldn't believe she said it even when people started to applaud. Schrader beamed. Jared shook his head in victorious disbelief. Robinson turned, stared at her confused. Her father, who'd been sitting grim-faced in the first row like Charles Lindbergh at the Hauptmann trial, smiled at her and winked. The judge pounded his gavel as reporters rushed out to file stories. That night she saw drawings of herself on network TV, her face twisted, creased with rage.

"A dramatic turn of events at the
Berring
murder trial," the commentator said.

That had been her single heroic moment. Even now she looked back on it with pride. It made up, she thought, for all the awful things, the headlines that had brought her to tears (
SLAIN HEIRESS'S FATHER GRIM AS UGLY DUCKLING SISTER TESTIFIES
), the terrifying chases by the camera crews as they tried to outrun her to her car. The savage unsigned letters, the ghoulish stories in the national newsprint weeklies, the lurid ones about Jared and Suzie and herself, the one which speculated that she was the killer and Jared was sacrificing himself to save her from prison—even these, somehow, seemed balanced off by that time she'd stood up to Robinson.

It had been a turning point. Her father had acknowledged it. "You're doing good, kiddo," he told her. "I still think that boy's guilty as hell but I like the way you handled yourself today."

She hated the crowds, the stares, the flashbulbs popping in her eyes, the hyped-up press reports that played upon the wealth and status of her family, the sordid gossip about a "deal"—her testimony in return for Schrader's promise not to expose Susan
Berring's
"nymphomania."

It was one of those cases, people agreed, the ones that catch the country's imagination every several years. "A fancy-
schmancy
murder trial," Schrader called it, though to her it seemed more like a carnival in which she played the geek. People were fascinated by her position: sister of the victim acting as witness for the boy who everyone was certain had stabbed Suzie with the shears.

"Does defense counsel really expect us to believe," asked Robinson in his summation, "that the defendant, having engaged in numerous sexual acts with Susan
Berring
, and then heavily drugged, asleep out on the diving board, suddenly was awakened by her cries for help, swam to the
poolhouse
, burst in upon an 'intruder' in the act of stabbing her, and then simply stood there while this 'intruder' blinded him with a flashlight, threw him to the floor, and then just" —he flung out his hands—"disappeared? Does he expect us to believe this corny intruder-with-the-flashlight story even though the police found no trace of any 'intruder'—not a footprint, a fingerprint, a sign of a break-in, any sign at all—and when the defendant was himself seen by at least five other people stumbling out of the murder room with the murder weapon in his hand?

"No, Mr. Schrader wouldn't dare ask us to believe a word of this if it weren't for the so-called 'corroborating testimony' of Penny
Berring
. It's her testimony that's at the crux of this case. The question is: Can we believe Penny
Berring
? I submit that there are at least five good reasons why we cannot."

Had there really been five? She couldn't remember now. She could only remember how she shuddered as Robinson strove to show how the lonely, unattractive sister who lived pathetically in a world of imaginary characters out of books had finally managed to catch herself a boyfriend, only to have her sister steal him away.

"And what a boyfriend," Robinson said, "a slick, good-looking, clever actor who'd taken a summer job up here to, as he put it to Penny, 'hone my actor's craft.' He told her he'd acted in films, but he didn't mention what kind—disgusting, degenerate hard-core smut which I haven't been allowed to show—"

"Objection!" Schrader stood up, the tufts of gray hair on either side of his head quivering with fury. "Mr. Robinson's trying to enflame—"

As she watched and listened she pretended she was an observer, outside the case rather than at its core. It was the only way she knew to distance herself, keep from crying out.

Good characters, she thought, a classic confrontation of personalities and styles. Robinson, young and tough, playing the sarcastic brute. Schrader, subtle and urbane, the veteran warrior reveling in a hopeless cause. The judge seemed made of granite, the very personification of the State of Maine. The grim father. The opaque jurors. The eager, salivating representatives of the press. The porn-star defendant and his ally, the Ugly Duckling Sister. The case had everything—money, drama, sex.

"Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is the sister, Penny
Berring
, whose motives we must suspect. She claims she saw the elusive 'intruder' though it was the middle of the night, the fog was thick, and she was dozing beside a window a hundred-fifty feet away. She claims she saw a 'flashlight beam' though no flashlight was ever found. She tells us she just 'happened' to be watching at the exact moment when the 'intruder' just
happened
to appear. What we have here is a jealous young woman, still smarting from the rejection of the defendant, who now comes forward with a farfetched story in an hysterical attempt to win him back. But what is so
sick
in all of this is that she does it after the vicious murder of her sister, whom she always hated, and still does hate, despite the fact that Susan
Berring
is now dead, carved up, slashed to pieces, no longer in a position to compete with her for paramours—"

She found herself nodding to his rhythms. It was as if Robinson were speaking about someone else, a terrible lying envious girl who had nothing to do with her at all. She found him persuasive. She began to hate this Penny
Berring
, too. What sort of person was she to have done all those wicked things and then to have conspired with a homicidal fiend to tip the scales of Justice with her lies?

But when Schrader stood up and began to talk she found him convincing, too. His rhythms were much less emotional than Robinson's, more rational and mathematical, and his phrasings were cool and precise. They suggested he had no interest in rhetoric, in anything but the truth. The Bar Harbor police, he showed, were amateurs who'd bungled their investigation and destroyed crucial evidence. A mad killer was now loose in the country while an innocent young man, whose story was fully corroborated, was being hounded by a prosecutor out for blood.

"As for Penny
Berring
," Schrader said, "contrary to what Mr. Robinson has told you, she has every reason to hate the defendant, no possible motive to help him now. But from the start she's never wavered from her story, which, it so happens, fits perfectly with his. Despite attempts to confuse her and break her down, she's been consistent about what she saw. She has emerged from a brutal cross-examination as a totally credible eyewitness who, at the very least, raises reasonable doubt about events which at first seemed so clear, but which now we see aren't clear at all."

Which version, she wondered, would the jurors believe? She wasn't sure which she'd believe herself. As the hours went by and she waited for the verdict, she knew they were discussing her, whether she'd lied or told the truth.

Her father waited with her. They didn't speak much, just sat together side by side. He'd come to the courthouse every day, taken the same seat in the front row as if he were daring the jury not to give him justice, defying them to refuse him his revenge. His grimness, the certainty on his face, was silent testimony. Would that stern paternal silence be more convincing than her words? There was a side of her that hoped it would, that wanted to see him satisfied.

"You've showed a lot of class through this, kiddo," he said. "Must have gotten that from your mother's side." A couple minutes later he turned to her again. "They say 'class will out,' you know, but I haven't usually found that to be the case."

She could find no answer for him, couldn't imagine what was in his mind. The two of them had come to Maine for the trial—her mother had been left behind in Greenwich under psychiatric care. In Maine they had been drenched in sadness. Their tragedy seemed reflected in the ruined birds' nests in the bare-limbed trees around the house, the angry brown seas of late autumn, the chilly, pallid skies.