The Legacy (45 page)

“Yes, I believe he did.”

“And did you in turn betray Hiram Green?”

“I most certainly did not,”indignantly replied the governor.

“He says you did. He says that once you were elected, he never heard from you again—not even a Christmas card. Is that true?”

Marshall's features seemed all to soften at once. His voice became gentle and confiding.

“Governor Green is a very old man and his memory isn't what it used to be, I'm afraid. It's true we haven't always agreed on everything, but I've tried not to ignore him. I probably should have done more to make him feel that people still remember him.”

I walked back to the counsel table, picked up the piece of paper on which no list of questions had been typed, and acted as if I were trying to find something I had forgotten.

“Arthur Sieman died, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“He died just before the primary election, didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“That's the reason you won that primary, the reason you were able to run in the general election, the reason you became attorney general, the reason you were later able to run for governor—because Arthur Sieman died, correct?”

His face grew rigid; his lips were pressed tight together; he stared hard at me.

“Arthur Sieman died. No one can know what would have happened if he had not.”

I stared back at him.

“And now Jeremy Fullerton has died, and no one will know what would have happened if he had not—except that for the second time, someone you could not otherwise have defeated no longer stands in your way!”

The district attorney was on his feet; the judge had bolted forward; Marshall was halfway out of the witness chair. The courtroom was bedlam. Haliburton screamed an objection, but even when he finally heard it, Thompson seemed too dazed to know what to do. I saved him the trouble.

“No more questions, your honor,”I announced as I left Augustus Marshall sputtering with rage.

I waited at the counsel table, staring down at my hands, while Clarence Haliburton used the formalities of cross-examination to express his indignation at what I had done and his apologies for what the governor had been forced to endure. With an ingratiating smile, meant no doubt to constitute an apology of his own, Judge Thompson had already begun to excuse Marshall as a witness when I startled him by suggesting we were not quite finished.

“Redirect, your honor.”

Marshall raised his eyes and waited.

“What was the reason Jeremy Fullerton was running for governor?”

Augustus Marshall had not gotten as far as he had without knowing how to defuse a situation that threatened to blow up in everyone's face. He smiled as if despite what had happened just a few minutes before we were still good friends.

“Because he wanted my job, I imagine.”

There was an almost audible sigh of relief. An undercurrent of laughter moved through the courtroom. Everyone began to relax. I crossed one foot over the other, nodded my head, and smiled back.

“But isn't it also true that he was running because he thought it would help him to become president?”

Marshall studied me for a moment. “It was hardly a secret that the senator wanted to be president. And yes, I believe he thought that if he could defeat me, an incumbent governor of the largest state in the union, he'd be in a far stronger position if he then decided to try to take the Democratic nomination away from the president two years from now.”

“So, politically speaking, Jeremy Fullerton was a threat to both you and the president?”

“Politically speaking.”

“Is that the reason the White House offered to give you information that was damaging to Fullerton—to help you win so Fullerton would not have a chance to run against the president?”

Marshall did not hesitate for a moment. “No one from the White House ever offered me any such thing.”

He said it with such sincerity, such conviction, that I almost thought he was telling the truth.

“Does the name Andrei Bogdonovitch mean anything to you?”

He shook his head and said it did not. There was nothing more I could do, so I dropped it and went back to where we had been.

“At the time of his death, who was leading in the polls—you or Senator Fullerton?”

“He was, but it was early, and—”

“And if Jeremy Fullerton had defeated you—become governor—then two years from now, he would have tried to run against the president?”

“As I said, I believe that's what he wanted to do.”

“So it would be fair to say, then,”I asked with a polite smile, “that both you and the president had something to gain by Jeremy Fullerton's death, wouldn't it?”

Outrage loses its force by repetition. Haliburton objected; Thompson sustained the objection; but the only noise from the crowd was a subdued murmur that died away the moment the judge raised his eyes.

I had no more questions to ask and neither did the district attorney. With a half embarrassed smile, Augustus Marshall glanced one last time at the jury and then quietly left the courtroom. As I watched him go, the rush of emotion that had driven me forward, flying at him with one question after another, began to dissipate; and what had seemed so obvious to me no longer appeared quite so clear. Instead of simply pointing out that the death of Jeremy Fullerton had been an advantage to any number of powerful people; instead of suggesting that these were motives far more powerful than that which the prosecution had tried to attribute to Jamaal Washington; instead, in other words, of sticking close to the indisputable facts, I had for all practical purposes insisted that both the governor and the president were capable of murder.

The courtroom doors swung shut behind the governor. I turned back to the bench, an empty feeling in my stomach, worried that I had just made one of the worst miscalculations of my career. But if I had just started to realize it, the district attorney had known it all along. The moment he began his closing argument he tried to take advantage of my mistake.

“I have to credit Mr. Antonelli with one thing at least,”said Haliburton as he strolled toward the jury box. “From almost the first question he asked on voir dire to the last question he asked at trial, he's been nothing if not consistent in his theory of the case.”

He halted in front of the jury box, glanced briefly at me over his shoulder, and shook his head as if he still could not believe what he had heard. He tapped the fingers of his right hand on the wooden railing.

“The defendant, Jamaal Washington,”he began in a deep voice filled with derision, “did not kill United States Senator Jeremy Fullerton. Why? Because someone that important could only have been killed by 'powerful people,' political enemies, people so ambitious they're prepared to murder rather than risk defeat in the next election. I don't know what country Mr. Antonelli has been living in, but it can't have been the United States. We've had presidents killed, and we've had senators killed, but so far as I know this is the first time anyone has ever tried to accuse our highest officials of murder.”

Haliburton stepped back from the railing and looked at me again.

“You remember during voir dire,”he asked, still staring at me, “when he asked one of you who you thought killed John F. Kennedy?”

He looked around, his eyes settling on the juror I had asked.

“I wondered at the time what he meant to do with that. Well,”he went on with a shrug, “who can blame him? When your client is caught in the act—and especially when the act is murder—what else can you argue except that nothing is what it seems and that a conspiracy was responsible for the death of the victim; because, after all, we all know—don't we?—that there is a conspiracy behind everything!”

It was not enough to paint me as a charlatan; the district attorney still had to prove his case. With workmanlike precision, Haliburton condensed and carefully reviewed the testimony given by the witnesses for the prosecution. The technicalities of death had been explained by the city coroner; and no one, he reminded the jury, not even the defense, had objected to the description of the way in which the life of Jeremy Fullerton had been brought to a sudden, violent end. Fullerton had been shot to death, and the bullet that killed him had been fired from the gun that was found by the hand of the defendant when he was shot by the police while trying to escape.

Everyone, insisted Haliburton over and over again, agreed on all the essential facts. The defendant was in the senator's car: Everyone agreed. The defendant removed the senator's wallet: No one denied it. The defendant ran away as soon as the police arrived: The defendant himself admitted it. Everyone agreed that the gun was the murder weapon, and everyone, including the defendant, agreed that it was found on the sidewalk right next to his hand. The defense had no facts to argue, so the defense, he added with a withering sidelong glance at me, had decided to argue fantasy.

“Mr. Antonelli,”continued Haliburton with an exaggerated and malicious sigh, “tried to tell us, not only that 'powerful people' are behind all this, but that, in addition, the police are to blame. The defendant testified—swore—that he never touched the gun; even though, as I hope you noticed, Mr. Antonelli asked him repeatedly whether he might have picked it up while in a state of panic and then, because he had been shot, forgotten that he had done it. The defendant insists he did not touch the gun, and that means, according to the defense, that the police must have put the gun next to his hand. What we have is yet another conspiracy. First one of the officers shoots him; then the two of them conspire together to plant the gun so it will look like the officer fired in self-defense.”

Haliburton was talking faster, his face getting redder, as he paced in front of the jury box. Suddenly he stopped still and leaned across the railing.

“And what evidence are we offered to support this outrageous allegation? The testimony of the police officer herself. Are there any contradictions, any inconsistencies—are there any provable falsehoods—in anything Officer O'Leary said? On the contrary, under the insistent and sometimes almost fanatical questioning of the defense attorney, she repeats her testimony over and over again; and no matter how hard he tries, he can't get her to change a word of it. What does the defense lawyer make of his own failure? Not that she was determined to tell the truth, but that she must be lying!”

Haliburton went through everything, summarizing with subtle distortions all the evidence that had been offered on both sides of the case. Then he stepped back from the jury box and glanced quickly around the courtroom.

“When anyone dies,”he said, lowering his eyes, “especially someone with so much more life left to live, there is always enough suffering to go around without deliberately and for no good purpose inflicting more.”

Slowing lifting his gaze to the jury, he furrowed his brow, a sign that what he was about to say had been much on his mind.

“Ariella Goldman was in love with Jeremy Fullerton. After he died, all she wanted was to protect his good name. Instead, she was not only forced to admit that she loved him, and to admit that he loved her, but forced to tell you and to tell the world that he was going to get a divorce; that they were going to get married; and that she is going to have his child. She was forced to tell you all this because there was no limit to how far the defense was willing to go in its single-minded attempt to convince you that 'powerful people' had something to hide. He made his point. Ariella Goldman, as we all know now, did have something she wanted to hide. I leave it to you to decide whether any of us is really better off because she was not allowed to keep it hidden.”

I knew when I stood up that unless I could win it on closing argument, the case was lost; and I knew that the only way I could win it on closing argument was to forget all about conspiracies and talk only about what had been proven and what had not. I had to make an argument so compelling in its apparent simplicity that the jury would have to believe that there was at least some doubt, some reasonable doubt, about the guilt of the defendant. It was the last chance left.

“We've heard the same events described so many times,”I began, still in my chair, “that we start to see it as if we had been there ourselves, watching the whole thing unfold, like the narrator of a novel who knows everything about everyone.”

With both hands I pushed myself up. Standing at the table, I moved my finger back and forth across the empty page of a yellow-lined legal pad.

“We hear the noise at the party at Lawrence Goldman's apartment, where people paid small fortunes to attend. We see them, all those wealthy, well-dressed people talking, laughing, drinking champagne, smiling at each other as they lined up to have their pictures taken with Jeremy Fullerton, the bright, good-looking young senator who everyone thought might one day soon be president.”

I moved around the table into the opening between the bench, where Judge Thompson sat staring blankly at the ceiling, and the jury box.

“We watch Meredith Fullerton, the senator's wife, lashing out at her husband's mistress and then, in tears, run away. And we're not entirely surprised that the party goes on as if nothing had happened. Then, after midnight, when the party is finally over, Jeremy Fullerton and Ariella Goldman go have a drink together, just the two of them, in a quiet corner of the bar at the St. Francis Hotel. We can hear what they talk about as if we were sitting at the next table; and then, when they finish their drink, we go along with them when she drives him to his car.”

I watched the faces of the jury watching me. They were seeing it again, just the way they had before.

“We watch him get into his car, and then we watch her drive away, disappear into that thick, enveloping fog. Then, a moment later, we hear it, and we know immediately that it's a gunshot, and we know—don't we?—that Jeremy Fullerton is dead. And now we see something else: a police car, blocks away; and two police officers, Joyner and O'Leary. We watch the way they react; the way Joyner's huge hands grip the wheel; the way O'Leary's eyes move first one way, then the other as she tries to see in that impenetrable fog just where the shot must have come from. We watch the car race 'round one corner, then another; and we sit up fast and hold our breath as that unfortunate pedestrian just manages to jump out of the way.”