by D. W. Buffa
Before his sister’s death, Bartholomew Caminetti had wanted to become a lawyer; after her death he was intent on becoming a prosecutor. He graduated with honors from Fordham, and then, whether because, as some of his political enemies would later suggest, his scores on the law school aptitude test were not good enough to get into a more prestigious school like Harvard or Yale, or because, as he always insisted, he preferred to continue his Catholic education, he studied law at Georgetown. He worked summers on Capitol Hill in the offices of the congressman in whose district he had grown up.
It was quarter past ten. I watched the bailiff’s eyes, waiting for them to blink, wondering if he might be dead. Haviland nudged my shoulder.
“The judge probably decided to have a second,” he remarked with a droll expression.
Caminetti stood up, glanced down at the file that lay open on the table in front of him, studied it for a moment, then pulled a long face, shook his head with weary exasperation, closed the file and sat down. Two more minutes passed. In a single, fluid motion, Caminetti got up again, walked over to where I sat and put out his hand.
“Bartholomew Caminetti,” he said with the sharp accented voice of a native New Yorker. I stood up and shook his hand.
“Joseph Antonelli,” I said, looking him straight in the eye.
“This is a little unusual,” he said, nodding his forehead toward the closed door to chambers. “Lot of these guys get sloppy, don’t respect other people’s time. You know, make everybody wait because they’re a judge and they can. You know, you must run into that kind of stuff, different places. But him—it’s unusual. Well, give it another minute or so, then we’ll see what’s going on.”
He turned away and without another word sat down again. Slouching down in the chair, his elbows on the table in front of him, he spread open his hands and pressed his fingers together, waiting for the time to pass.
Caminetti’s handshake had been firm, decisive, quick, the same way he spoke: short bursts of sincerity delivered as if he had just run into his oldest friend instead of a stranger or, in my case, an adversary whom a moment before he had looked at with open contempt. He had the kind of iron self-confidence that would allow him to praise you one moment, berate you the next, and never wonder that you might think him either inconsistent or cruel. It was, in a way, the secret of his success as a politician, the key to his apparent popularity. He said, or appeared to say—because I could not resist the thought that there was more than a little calculation in it—exactly what was on his mind. When he first ran for district attorney, a Republican in a decidedly Democratic electorate, he told every white working-class group he could get into that his sister had been raped and murdered and that he was determined nothing like that would ever happen to a sister of theirs, but that if it did, “the punk who did it is either going to die or he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison, not the ten years they gave my sister’s killer.”
If Caminetti had not been slow to exploit the tragedy of his own sister’s death for political advantage, neither had he failed to recognize the public’s preference for elected officials willing to put themselves in the line of fire. More than once, he had gone to the scene of a crime in progress—a robbery gone bad, hostages taken, the police in a standoff—and stood out in the open, completely exposed, issuing orders about what should be done next. It was great theater and he knew it. His opponents charged that that was the only reason he did it, and that all he accomplished was to impede the work of the police. But they could not fault his courage, and they were not so quick to criticize him once he suggested that he would be glad to invite them along the next time he tried to help the police prevent innocent people from getting hurt.
With an instinct for publicity, he seemed to be everywhere at once. When he was not on camera while the crime was taking place, he was standing behind a microphone describing with lavish praise the police investigation that had led to an arrest, or announcing with stricken, haunted eyes the awful crime that had been committed in the case that his office was about to prosecute with the utmost severity. Caminetti had been in office for six years, but this was only the second case he had decided to try himself. Once it was rumored that the vice president was somehow involved, no one asked why. Everyone knew that Bartholomew Caminetti had been among the first prominent New York Republicans to support the presidential candidacy of William Hobart Walker, and everyone knew what Walker might sometime soon do for his good friend Bartholomew Caminetti. It was another question what that did for the supposedly impartial administration of justice.
It was ten-twenty. Caminetti was out of patience. With a look of disgust, he rose from his chair and began to edge his way around the table, determined to find out why he was being made to wait. Grumbling to himself, he rapped his knuckles on the corner of the table as he made the turn.
“Hear ye, Hear ye,” the bailiff, roused from a blank-eyed slumber by some sound only he could hear, began to cry. Caminetti froze in mid-step, shook his head at the thoughtless waste of time, and retreated to his place behind the counsel table where, with the rest of us, he stood waiting while the Honorable Charles F. Scarborough bustled, or rather exploded, into the courtroom.
The end of his black robe flying behind him, Scarborough stalked across the front of the room, a bundle of books and papers clutched under his right arm. He held a large white handkerchief in his left hand, pressed against his nose and mouth. His eyes were red, his round face pallid. Reaching the bench, he dropped into his chair like someone shot dead with a bullet. The bundle of books and papers tumbled onto the flat surface of the space where he worked. He mopped the perspiration from his feverish brow with the white handkerchief and then covered his mouth with it and coughed. Raising his right hand in a weary gesture meant to apologize and surrender at the same time, he scowled. “Damn hay fever,” he muttered. His face began to redden; his small round eyes became tiny slits; his short, slightly upturned nose wrinkled as his nostrils squeezed tight together. In the nick of time the handkerchief flew open like a bed sheet flapping in the wind. A tremendous wheezing noise was followed in an instant by a thunderous rush like a broken water main, as the judge buried his face in the wet white handkerchief.
“Welcome to New York, Mr. Antonelli,” he mumbled. His eyes singled me out, held me fast, as he kept rubbing. “Pleasure to have you here. Don’t you agree, Mr. Caminetti? Yes? Right,” he said, stretching his eyebrows to their highest elevation as he set about methodically folding the handkerchief.
“You agree, Mr. Caminetti, that it’s an honor—a great honor—to have someone of Mr. Antonelli’s great gifts and splendid reputation in our courts—Yes?” His eyes watched his hand put the handkerchief securely out of sight. “I thought you might.” He pulled his hand away and placed both hands together on the bench in front of him.
“I mean it, Mr. Antonelli. We’re delighted to have you with us.” A rather shy smile slipped almost unnoticed across his thoughtful mouth. “Whatever the court can do to make your stay with us more pleasant… ,” he said in a soft, somewhat tentative voice.
Slowly, and a little reluctantly, he lowered his eyes. Brooding upon something, he stroked his chin. Slumped forward in that attitude of intense contemplation, he looked like one of those immensely learned English jurists with an encyclopedic knowledge of the law who can rattle off ancient cases the way other men can recite the results of last weekend’s games; who can summarize the evidence at the end of a case without looking at a note or having to stop to remember a point; and who lies in wait for the first lawyer brave enough, or stupid enough, to try to cross swords. I did not like many judges, but I thought I was going to like him. He had not been in the courtroom two minutes, he had not yet done a thing, and I knew already that everything I had heard about him—all the stories about the legendary Charles F. Scarborough, said to be the greatest trial judge of his generation—were true.
One moment apparently lost in some private reverie, in the next he was all motio
n, his small smooth hands flying in eight different directions at once, his piercing eyes a firestorm of enthusiasm and excited incoherence. He smashed the flat of his hands on the bench and in a raucous voice bellowed at the tightly packed courtroom.
“And let me welcome all the public-spirited citizens who have decided to join me here this morning.” He let the words echo through the high-ceilinged room. A grin, proud, defiant, demanding, stretched across his blunt mouth. “I have always thought that the needed formality of the law, the seriousness with which we are obligated to approach our duties, is only enhanced by being performed under the watchful eye of a vigilant citizenry.” He paused. The smile etched farther along his lips. “You’ll notice I said ‘eye.’ You are here to see, and never—never!—to speak. That is the one rule upon which I insist with the utmost rigor.”
Scarborough had a habit, which I was now about to discover, of suddenly shifting his gaze to the side, as if he were turning to someone, an alter ego, with whom he frequently shared a confidence. The movement of his eyes was so abrupt, so definitive, that when he did it now I looked immediately to my right, toward the empty chairs in the jury box, wondering for just an instant where the person to whom he was talking could possibly have gone.
“‘Utmost rigor,’” he said, seeming to deprecate to his invisible auditor the slightly pompous way it may have sounded. His eyes flashed, caught the audience and held it fast. “By which I mean that if anyone so much as breathes a word during these or any other proceedings, I will by the power vested in me by the state of New York simply have you beaten to death. Are we clear on this point?” he asked as he bent his head to the side and drummed the fingers of his left hand.
Every face in the crowd wore a smile; no one made a sound. If he had told them to get down on the floor and do push-ups, they would have done it, grateful for the chance to share in some enterprise of which he had been the originating force.
“There is a reason we are here, Mr. Caminetti. Why don’t you enlighten us as to what it is.”
Bartholomew Caminetti was not part of the crowd. He was too busy thinking about what he had to do next to fall under the influence of anyone else. He had been standing at the counsel table, the charging document in his hand, waiting with blank-eyed indifference to get things started.
“Your Honor, we’re here today in the matter of People of the State of New York v. Jamison Scott Haviland,” said Caminetti in a dry, slightly nasal voice. “The defendant is charged with murder in the first degree.” Caminetti took a step toward me. “Let the record reflect that I am handing to the defendant’s attorney a certified true copy of the indictment returned by the grand jury.”
I glanced briefly at the indictment before I placed it on the table in front of me.
“Your Honor, the defense acknowledges receipt of the indictment, waives a formal reading, and…”
Leaning forward on both arms, Scarborough darted a glance at his imaginary confidant. “‘Waives a formal reading.’” His eyebrows shot straight up. “The court appreciates learned counsel’s efforts to proceed in an expeditious manner,” said the judge as his gaze came swiftly around to me. “In a matter so grave as this, however, I think it worth our time to have the indictment read in full. Mr. Caminetti, if you would.”
There was no exchange between the two of them. Caminetti did not so much as nod his acknowledgment that he understood what he had been asked to do. I had the feeling that there never was, that all those gestures by which we smooth out the rough edges of our spoken conversation and form a coherent whole out of the broken fragments of our everyday speech had been replaced by a stringent economy, dispensing with courtesy as a waste of energy and time. Caminetti began to read in a voice that, like the moment you turn on the radio to a program that has already started, seemed to have no beginning. Scarborough sat, trancelike, listening to every word.
“A moment,” he said, raising the index finger of his right hand. “Again.” He gave Caminetti an alert, inquisitive glance. “‘On December twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five’?”
Caminetti stared at him, without expression.
“Surely, that can’t be right,” remarked Scarborough in the tone of a gentle remonstrance. “You can’t have had the grand jury return an indictment alleging that the crime took place with that specificity. Does it not in fact read: ‘On or about December twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five?’” he asked in a voice as profoundly serious as if they were two law partners alone in a law library discussing the central point in the most important case of their careers. Caminetti looked back at the indictment.
“On or about December twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five,” he read, continuing on without any break or alteration in his voice, as if he had read it exactly that way before and had not simply rushed past the once omitted phrase.
“And how does the defendant plead?” inquired Judge Scarborough with an interested, searching glance when Caminetti had reached the end.
Haviland was standing next to me, on my left, his hands held in front of him. Under Scarborough’s inquiring glance, he did not flinch or look away. He did not fidget with his fingers or suddenly gasp for air. He was as calm, as steady, not as any defendant, but as any attorney I had ever seen in a criminal court. He was a man who perhaps for the first time knew exactly what he was going to do.
“How do you plead, Mr. Haviland?” inquired Charles F. Scarborough in a kind, thoughtful voice. “Guilty, or not guilty?”
Haviland did not hesitate. The words came clear and strong, echoing through the paneled courtroom with the concise finality of something that instead of just beginning was about to end.
“Guilty, Your Honor. Annie Malreaux died because of me.”
CHAPTER 10
Jimmy Haviland was shaking like a leaf. A ghastly grin had taken hold of his mouth, pulling it, refusing to let go, twisting it into one bizarre contortion after another. I expected to hear hideous laughter come roaring out, pronouncing a verdict of insanity on himself, but he made no sound at all. He just stood there, trembling, that stupid look of what seemed almost like relief painted on his face. I was a fool not to have seen it coming. He had been too perfect, too much in command of himself, oblivious of the courtroom, the crowd, the formal ritual by which he was charged with the murder of the girl who in the half-imagined past of his memory was the only girl he had ever loved. He must have reached deep down inside himself to find the strength to produce that impression of outward calm.
It must have surprised him and, more than that, pleased him, to learn that he could stand there like that in open court, every eye on him, everyone, if not convinced, at least ready to believe, that he must be guilty of murder. At least for these few moments everything depended on him, on how he conducted himself under the kind of pressure that no one who has not faced it can possibly understand. He had done everything right, done it with the kind of noble reserve that when we were boys had been almost the definition of bravery: face the fire of the enemy without a thought for your own safety; look death in the eye with the laughing indifference of a man who would never think to complain about what fate might have in store.
Jimmy Haviland, broken by long years of disappointment and things worse, far worse, than disappointment, had pulled himself together, shaken the dust from the faded remnant of his own dignity and self-respect, and then, at the end, when he had only that one thing more to do—enter a simple plea of not guilty—everything fell apart. It was the proof of how hard he had tried, of how difficult and painful the effort to keep himself under control must have been. I put my arm around his shoulder to steady him and discovered that instead of feeling sorry for him, I admired him, for the courage that he had shown. Facing a firing squad a man grows weak in the knees at the order to shoot—Does that diminish the bravery he showed in walking under his own power to the place of his execution?
“Your Honor?” I responded to Judge Scarborough’s worried glance. He smiled sympathetically, threw a meaningful look at the distr
ict attorney, and took matters into his own hands.
“There was a certain lack of precision, I’m afraid, in the way I asked the question. I did not mean to inquire into the reason why something may have happened. I did not mean to ask whether someone might feel some generalized sense of guilt because something happened to someone else. I mean to ask the much more narrow question whether the defendant wishes to plead guilty or not guilty to the specific charge in the indictment.”
Scarborough’s eyebrows were arched in high half circles, like the flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral. It gave him the look of someone eternally curious, someone too intelligent for either anger or fear.
“Therefore, Mr. Antonelli,” he said, looking quite deliberately at me and not at Haviland, “on the charge of murder in the first degree, how does the defendant plead—guilty or not guilty?”
I squeezed my left hand on Haviland’s shoulder. The trembling stopped. He stared down at the floor, subdued, quiet, lost.
“Not guilty, Your Honor,” I replied in a firm, confident voice. The words were barely out of my mouth when Caminetti was moving to the next order of business.
“Your Honor, the People ask defendant be remanded without bail,” he said as he began to shove his papers back into the file folder. He seemed to think that what he had asked was routine and the response automatic. I turned my head and looked right at him. He did not appear to notice.
“This alleged crime took place more than thirty years ago. Before this morning, the defendant had never been charged with a crime—any crime.”
Caminetti closed the folder. Pressing three fingers of his left hand against it, he kept his head bent, narrowing his eyes into a hostile stare. The muscles on the side of his face quivered with energy and tension. He was strung tight, ready to bolt out of that crouch and seize me, or at least my argument, by the throat.
