by D. W. Buffa
There was something strangely sympathetic in her eyes, as if she knew that Haviland’s name brought back things I did not want to remember.
“What about Jamison Scott Haviland?” I asked with a sudden sense of foreboding.
“He’s the one who is going to be indicted. He’s the one they’re going to charge with the murder of Anna Winifred Malreaux.”
“It’s impossible,” I insisted. Jimmy Haviland seemed barely able to function as it was. Just going back to the Plaza had taken everything he had. An indictment, a formal, public accusation of murder—Annie’s murder—would destroy him.
“Haviland—he was a friend of yours?” At first I did not quite hear what she said. In a softer, more sympathetic voice, she asked again.
“We were—yes.”
I could see him now, the way he had been, Jimmy Haviland, the one everyone liked, the one who, if you had had to guess which of the members of that class were most likely to go into politics and succeed, would have been right at the top of the list. Jimmy Haviland, who could always find time for someone who needed help; Jimmy Haviland, young and good-looking, who had gone out with too many girls to be serious about any of them, until he met Annie, and then did not know any other way to be.
“Then you’ll help him—defend him? Take his case?”
“What?” I asked with an absent glance. “Would I do what? Help him?”
I was still thinking, still remembering, trying to see Annie’s face, the way she looked, the effect she had, the way she changed the way other people—Jimmy, Browning, all of us—felt about themselves. I was nodding my head and did not know I was doing it.
“Yeah,” I heard myself say in a vague, distant voice. “I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Because you are a friend of Jamison Scott Haviland, or because you are a friend of Thomas Browning?”
I barely heard the question, and I did not know the answer. My mind was on something else. Where had Jimmy Haviland’s name come from? There was something troubling about it, something sinister and cruel that suggested an indefatigable resolve, a cold, iron will that would stop at nothing. And then there was the question, the question I was almost afraid to think about: that it was not just a rumor started out of nothing, that the people who were behind this knew something, that Annie Malreaux’s death had not been an accident after all. But if that were true, what did Thomas Browning know and what was he holding back?
CHAPTER 9
There is a kind of clarity that comes with the knowledge that, charged with the death of another, you may end up facing your own. The doubts, the fears, the haunted late-night regrets about the things you wish you had not done and the things you wish you had: All of it is pushed aside, dismissed as the vain imaginings of a life led too much in the past. Your only thought now is what lies ahead and how you are going to deal with it. The indictment for murder did not destroy Jimmy Haviland; it seemed to invigorate him, to give him a sense of confidence, or at least a sense of direction.
Jimmy Haviland had come to the alumni dinner in New York in a rented, threadbare tuxedo a size too large; Jamison Scott Haviland showed up for his arraignment on a charge of murder in a brand-new blue suit and a pair of black dress shoes polished to a hard, glossy shine. Surrounded by the successful and affluent members of his law school class, he had been nervous and ill at ease, with darting, furtive eyes and a rapid moving mouth that never stayed in position long enough to form a single, definable expression or give a coherent voice to a single well-considered thought. Amidst the lawyers, criminals and reporters that crowded the hallway outside the courtroom where he was scheduled to make his first appearance, his jaw was set in a firm, straight line, his gaze direct and impatient. He looked like a senior partner in one of those large downtown firms, a busy man a little short of time. I could not help but smile to myself as he came toward me down the hall.
“Browning said you wanted to represent me,” said Haviland as we shook hands, “but I’m not sure I believed him.”
He had never trusted Browning, but it still seemed an odd thing to say. “Why would he have lied about a thing like that?”
“There’s always something else going on with Browning, something he won’t tell you. Things are never quite the way he says they are.”
It was all too cryptic for me. I put my arm around his shoulders and walked him down the hallway, away from the courtroom doors and the swirling crowd that had come to watch the arraignment of someone they had never seen because the case might involve, if only indirectly, someone everyone knew. We had only a few minutes of anonymity left.
“Listen to me. It was Browning’s idea. He asked me to represent you. I didn’t know if you would want me. That’s why Browning called you—to let you know that I was willing to do it if that’s what you wanted.”
We were facing the wall, our heads bowed, my arm around his shoulders. He turned his eyes and gave me a skeptical glance. I tried to explain.
“This whole thing is an attempt to make it look like he covered up a crime, a murder. They’re trying to destroy him politically.”
Haviland’s eyes flashed with anger. “It’s always Browning. I’m going to be charged with murder, but the main thing is what they want to do to him!”
“He knows you’re innocent,” I began to protest.
“I know I’m innocent!” exclaimed Haviland, bristling. “I don’t need him to tell me that.”
“He’s the witness whose testimony is going to prove it.”
It had concentrated his mind, this knowledge that he was about to be charged formally with a murder he did not commit. He had thought about it with an intensity I could not match and in ways I could not yet begin to imagine.
“Are you sure that’s what he is going to testify? Are you sure he won’t say that he can’t be certain: that he was there, in the room, but that so were a lot of other people; that he did not actually see Annie fall; that he just assumed it was an accident?”
With a kind of knowing superiority, Haviland searched my eyes. “That gives him a way out, doesn’t it? He wouldn’t have to run the risk that a jury might not believe his testimony if he says Annie’s death was an accident and that I wasn’t even there. If he’s so anxious to help, to clear my name, why hasn’t he said anything? Why hasn’t he issued a statement? Why is he waiting for the trial?”
Haviland paused, a strange, enigmatic look in his eyes, before he added, “Don’t ever trust Browning. He doesn’t tell the truth, the whole truth, even when he isn’t telling a lie.”
The case had not started, the first formal step in a process that would go on for months was only now about to begin; yet already there was a question about what someone else should have done. It is a marvel the way an accusation, especially a wrongful accusation, places everything in a new, more narrow perspective. The rituals of politeness, the decent concern for the feelings of others, the eager willingness to subordinate one’s own desires to those of another, all the subtle arts of compromise and conciliation, the constant small adjustments by which we live with each other in a tolerable if imperfect peace, are forgotten, thrown aside, trampled upon by the urgent demand that what happens to us, our survival, our protection, come first. Marriages are destroyed, friendships ruined, because an innocent defendant begins to view as betrayal the failure to give him the kind of selfless devotion he thinks he deserves and knows he needs. There was no friendship here to ruin: Haviland already hated Browning. Nothing Browning could do would ever be enough, and there was nothing I could do to change Haviland’s mind.
“You haven’t been arraigned yet,” I reminded him. “That’s why we’re here. How long have you known you were going to be indicted? When did Browning know? Just exactly when do you think he should have made a statement? Yesterday? What good would that have done?”
Haviland started to argue again that Browning should have done something. It was willful belligerence, stupid and shortsighted, and I had had enough. I turned him around, grabbed him by th
e shoulders and backed him against the wall.
“Listen to me!” I said, warning him with my eyes. “In about three minutes we’re going to walk into that courtroom. We’re going to act as if this whole thing is beneath contempt, that it’s laughable, that we can’t wait to go to trial because we can’t wait to expose what’s really behind this. And that means that starting in about three minutes, Thomas Browning is the best friend you’ve ever had!”
Haviland pulled his head to the side and tried to break free. “The best friend you’ve ever had,” I repeated in a harsh whisper, holding him fast. “And you never use his name. If anyone asks, it’s always ‘the vice president.’ Not only that, you speak of him with admiration and respect, as a great man, as someone who ought to be president. You voted for him, remember.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t vote for…”
“You didn’t vote for the witness for the defense?—For the witness who saw what happened—who saw Annie fall—who knows it was an accident? Are you sure you didn’t? Are you sure you didn’t vote for him?”
The look in his eyes changed from naked hostility to a reluctant, grudging acceptance of the necessity of things. He began to apologize, not for what he thought about Browning—he would never change that—but for taking it out on me. I let go of his shoulders. He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of resignation.
“I’ll do whatever you say.”
He was right in front of me, less than two feet away. Perhaps because my mind had been on other things, too caught up in the emotion of the moment, it was only now that I noticed. It was not quite ten o’clock in the morning and Jimmy Haviland—Jamison Scott Haviland—about to be arraigned on a charge of murder, had been drinking. I reached inside my suit coat pocket.
“Here, have one of these,” I said as I handed him a roll of breath mints.
I did not say anything more about it as we made our way into the courtroom. I tried to tell myself that it was a one-time thing, that he had done it to fortify his courage on a morning that would have made a coward of us all. He had had a drink, that was all. You could not tell it from his speech; you certainly could not tell it from the easy, confident way he moved, with his head held high, his gaze steady, unwavering, as he walked just to my right as we entered the courtroom and went down the center aisle to the counsel table in front. He was so much better than he had been at the dinner at the Plaza; so much better than he had sounded on the one telephone call we had had; I was too grateful to be very much alarmed. But I knew about people who drank, and I knew about people who had just that one drink to get them started, that one drink to settle their nerves. I knew that without any more warning than this things could quickly get out of hand.
Haviland read my mind. As soon as we had taken our seats at the counsel table, he turned to me and with that brilliant bashful smile that had made him so likable in his first years at Harvard, assured me that it was not a problem.
“Just one. Just to make me good and alert.”
Just one. It was funny how after a while that lie began to sound like the truth.
The arraignment was scheduled for ten o’clock. I checked my watch. It was five minutes past the hour. An arraignment is a straightforward proceeding, perhaps the simplest thing that happens in a criminal case. The judge calls on the prosecutor to state the title of the case and present the formal document, usually an indictment returned by a grand jury. The prosecutor either reads the indictment, or, if the defense waives a formal reading, makes an abbreviated statement of the specific charges of which the defendant stands accused. The defendant is then asked how he pleads to those charges. There have been times when, if only to break the monotony, I would have gladly given up my fee if someone, acting on his own larcenous instinct, had replied: “Guilty as hell, Your Honor; but they’ll never prove it!” Early in my career, an aging and incompetent thief shrugged his shoulders and remarked with a cagey smile, “Kind of depends on how you look at it, Your Honor,” but that was as close as it ever got.
In the days when I was taking court-appointed cases, I might do eight or nine arraignments in the same morning, one right after the other. “Next case,” the judge would order as the clerk passed up the next file. The assistant district attorney would grab the next one on the stack on the table next to him. If we were doing in-custody arraignments, the next shackled prisoner would be brought into court by a deputy sheriff. “State v. Garcia. Burglary in the First Degree.” The judge would glance at me. The words were like a jingle in my head: “Acknowledge receipt of the indictment; waive a formal reading; enter a plea of not guilty, and ask that the matter be set for trial.” The judge would hand the file back to the clerk and announce a trial date, which the clerk entered on the record as she handed another file up to the bench. The defendant, who had no idea what had just happened, was taken back to jail. That was it. If it took more than sixty seconds, it was only because the judge had taken a few moments to remind the defendant that he remembered him from the last time he had been arrested.
It was ten minutes past ten. Next to the door through which the judge would eventually enter, a uniformed bailiff stood with his hands clasped in front of him. Well over six feet tall with broad shoulders and a short, thick neck, he had that same blank expression I had seen on the Secret Service agent who shadowed the vice president. The bailiff’s eyes did not move from side to side in a constant unrelenting search for the first sign that something was not quite right, however; the eyes of the bailiff did not move at all. He might have been asleep for all they saw as he waited with the rest of us for the routine beginning of a perfectly ordinary event. After a while, he shifted one foot ahead of the other and crossed his arms over his chest. Pursing his lips, he dropped his head and stared at the reddish beige linoleum floor. He twitched his nose vigorously, driving his upper lip violently back and forth, like someone trying to stop a sneeze. He sniffed twice with such force that his head jolted up. Then, with his hands clasped again belt-buckle high, he stared straight ahead, resuming his dull, interminable watch.
Two minutes later, the door finally opened. The bailiff took one step forward and raised his head. His mouth had opened to announce that court was now in session when a woman’s hand on his sleeve stopped him short. The court reporter carried her stenograph machine to her place on a raised platform a foot above the floor and directly below the witness stand. A woman in her late fifties or early sixties, with soft gray hair and modest, gentle eyes, she set the tripod on the floor and placed the machine on top of it. When she had everything the way she wanted it, she rose from the small leather stool and with a cursory but not unfriendly nod at the bailiff, left through the same door through which she had entered. We were going to start sometime, it just was not clear when. The district attorney had about run out of patience.
He started to rise from his place at the other counsel table. With a sulking, disgruntled expression he sank back in his chair, watching the court reporter with a kind of angry suspicion, as if it were somehow her fault that the arraignment had not started on time. When she left, he followed her with an evil stare, biting on his lower lip, trying to hold his wicked tongue. Out of the corner of his eye he saw me watching. Instead of turning away, ignoring me, he looked straight at me, a distant, grim, determined stare that reflected the narrow self assurance of a man for whom life was a series of certainties, a closed circle that did not admit a moment’s doubt or a moment’s hesitation. Once he had decided you were an enemy, it was war to the end, war without mercy. That was what everyone I had talked to had told me, the observation that with uncanny regularity worked its way into every conversation: Bartholomew Caminetti took no prisoners.
Ruthless, cunning, relentless, Caminetti was in his second term as the New York district attorney. He wanted it to be his last. Whether he ran for governor or the United States Senate—or, as one rumor had it, became the United States attorney general when the current occupant of that office was nominated to fill the next vacancy on the United States Su
preme Court—did not matter nearly so much as that he keep climbing, moving up, never stopping in one place, one office, long enough for anyone to think that that position, whatever it was, was as far as he could go. It was the single-minded ambition of the outsider, born without advantages, who had had to fight for everything he had, this refusal to tolerate even the suggestion that there might be any limit to what he could achieve.
Bartholomew Caminetti was born into a rigorously Catholic family, the youngest of eight children. Two of his sisters became nuns; his oldest brother became a priest. His favorite sister, Rosemary, the second-youngest child, went to Columbia on a full scholarship and was raped and murdered late one night in Morningside Heights on her way back from the library. Her death nearly destroyed her parents. Caminetti’s mother, whom he apparently adored, would not come out of her room except to cook dinner, and would not leave the ramshackle house in Brooklyn except for that hour each day when she went to church and with covered head tried not to question too severely the inexplicable, and in her weakest moments, the unforgivable, negligence of God. Edward Caminetti, Bartholomew’s father, buried his daughter in consecrated ground according to the rituals of the church, prayed for her soul in heaven, and never stepped inside the cathedral again.
The rapist and killer was caught. Though he had an extensive juvenile record of assault, he was only nineteen and too young to have an adult record of serious crime. The death of Rosemary Caminetti, a death that had such grievous consequences for her family, was simply another crime, another number to be added to what at the time was a murder rate of near-record proportions. An overworked assistant district attorney, trying to manage a caseload that was three times what it should have been, avoided the burden of a trial by negotiating a plea. Murder was reduced to manslaughter, and rape reduced to the lesser included crime of sexual assault. The young assistant district attorney took a certain satisfaction in knowing that with minimal time and expense a rapist and murderer was going to be off the streets for perhaps as long as ten years. Rosemary Caminetti’s father kept his outrage to himself. He quietly bought a gun and probably would have used it if he had not died a few years before his daughter’s killer was due to be released from prison.
