by D. W. Buffa
She nodded silently, then remembered she had to answer out loud. “Yes.”
“May I further assume that some of these deaths were accidental? No one pushed them or threw them, and they certainly did not do it on purpose themselves. They fell, they tripped, they stumbled, they blacked out, they had a coronary. In other words, Dr. Barnham, they fell to their death by accident. You have had occasion to examine their bodies as well, correct?”
“Yes, that’s true; and yes, I have—conducted autopsies on accident victims, I mean.”
I lowered my eyes, pausing, as if to consider quite carefully what I was going to ask next. When I raised my eyes, I cocked my head and studied her closely.
“According to the reports you mentioned—by the way, did you also review for your testimony here today the police report that was filed at the time?” I asked this so quickly she did not have time to think.
“Yes, I did.”
“Good. Now, as I was about to ask, you testified there were no indications that Anna Malreaux had suffered any injuries except those caused by the fall?”
“Yes.”
“And there was no evidence to indicate that immediately prior to her fall she had been involved in a struggle—a struggle that you might expect if someone were trying to shove you out a window and you were trying to resist—is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“In other words, Dr. Barnham, according to the evidence discovered by the coroner’s office, there is nothing to distinguish the death of Anna Malreaux from the death of any other person who has fallen accidentally out a window, isn’t that correct?”
Caminetti was on his feet, objecting. Scarborough overruled him and instructed the witness to answer.
“The coroner’s report of Anna Malreaux’s death is entirely consistent with death by accident, correct?”
“Consistent with an accident, consistent with a homicide. She died by a fall, whatever the cause of that fall might have been,” replied Alice Barnham with a grim, satisfied smile.
“Consistent with an accident,” I repeated forcefully.
“And consistent with that other report you read as well, isn’t it? Isn’t that what the police concluded, in nineteen sixty-five, when it happened: that the death of Anna Malreaux was an accident, not a homicide?”
Caminetti was again on his feet, but before he could open his mouth to object, I waved my arm and after a last withering glance at the imperturbable Dr. Barnham, announced that I was finished with the prosecution’s first witness.
Barnham’s testimony had taken all morning. During the lunch recess I wondered whom Caminetti would call next and whether it might be one of the names on that list that had been given to Gisela to give to me. The list was tantalizing, but there was nothing on it I could use.
It was no more than an anonymous record of transactions that had no more value as evidence than an anonymous call claiming that someone had committed a crime. Only if I was desperate, convinced that it was the one chance left not to lose, could I confront a witness with something like this, insist it proved bribery and demand that he confess. There had to be corroboration, a way to prove that it was real, that it meant what it said. Gisela’s friend, whoever he was, had to give me more.
When trial started again in the afternoon, Caminetti called his second witness. It was not one of those mentioned on the list, and I breathed a little easier knowing that I still had time.
“The People call Albert Cohn,” announced Caminetti without looking up from the file folder that lay open on the table below him.
I glanced over my shoulder to get a look at Cohn as he came striding down the center aisle. The door had swung shut behind him, and I started to turn away. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gisela sitting in the audience in back. She smiled at me, and before I knew what was happening I felt my cheeks begin to burn. Like an awkward, hot-blooded adolescent, afraid that someone watching might discover what was going on, I had begun to blush. It struck me as so incongruous, so wild and outlandish, such a stark departure from my worldly, sometimes cynical life, that the slight smile that had started onto my mouth broke to pieces in a gawky grin.
Embarrassed twice over, I began inexplicably to laugh.
Albert Cohn stopped in his tracks, two steps short of the clerk who was waiting to administer the oath. He looked across at me, wondering what he had done.
Caminetti gave me a puzzled, impatient glance. Judge Scarborough did not miss anything that went on in his courtroom. By his amused expression I knew that he had seen what had happened and understood what he saw.
The witness took the oath, and Caminetti went right to work.
“Name for the record,” he said, nodding quickly to set the tempo of the question and, if he could, the reply.
Albert Cohn was not the kind of man to be rushed. In his early sixties, he was just under six feet tall, with round shoulders and a head that was partially bald. His nose was long and straight, and his eyes had a definite intelligence and were evenly spaced. His mouth was generous, quick to smile, but though he might do it often, he gave the impression he never did it for very long. Albert Cohn, always civil, would not be caught playing the fool.
“How are you employed, Mr. Cohn?”
Cohn sat on the witness chair, one leg crossed over the other, both hands in his lap. He wore an expensive tan-colored suit and an understated tie.
“I am general counsel for the Stern Motor Company.”
“Your office is here, in New York?”
“That’s correct.”
“How long have you been employed by Stern Motors?”
Caminetti stood midway between the counsel table and the witness stand. Twisting his jaw a little to the side, he clicked his teeth together. It was a nervous habit, barely noticeable except for the monotonous frequency with which it was done.
“How long as general counsel, or how long with Stern Motors?” Cohn wanted to know.
Caminetti gave him a sharp glance. “Both.”
“Nearly twenty-five years with the company; almost twenty as general counsel.”
“You were hired by Thomas Browning?”
“Yes, Mr. Browning hired me.”
“Hired you, then made you general counsel?”
“Yes.”
Caminetti spread his feet apart, lowered his head into his shoulders and fixed the witness with a bellicose stare.
“In your capacity as general counsel—or, as I believe you were before, assistant general counsel—did you hire the defendant, Jamison Scott Haviland, to a position with Stern Motors?”
Under the bare shadow of a smile, Albert Cohn stared back. “No.”
Caminetti’s jaw dropped. “No?” He took a step forward, an aggressive, instinctive act. “You didn’t hire Mr. Haviland to do any work for the company?”
Pushing out his chin, Cohn snapped back, “That was not your question. You asked if I had given him a position. I did not. Then you asked if I had hired him to do some work. I did.”
Caminetti threw up his hands. “Didn’t hire for a position, but hired for work.” His eyes lit up. “I see,” he said, nodding. “Because he was put on retainer. He was not an employee, so he didn’t have a position.
Explain that.”
“Explain what?”
“Having someone on retainer. What does it mean? You’re at Stern Motors. Haviland is a lawyer in private practice. Stern Motors has him on retainer. What does it mean?”
Caminetti lowered his eyes and began to pace back and forth, three steps one way, three steps back. Cohn watched him for a moment, and then looked at the jury.
“At Stern Motors we have, like many large corporations, a general counsel’s office that takes care of any legal matter affecting the company. We have a staff of attorneys that do most of the work in-house; but, again like many large companies, we have attorneys all over the country, and in our case, all over the world, who from time to time represent the interests of the company in
legal proceedings that take place within their respective jurisdictions.”
Cohn, the seasoned professional, leaned across the arm of the chair, addressing the jury with the relaxed familiarity of one who has spent a lifetime describing complicated things in the simple, easy-to-understand language of the uninstructed. Several of the jurors leaned forward; all of them listened intently.
“To give you just one example. We recently had a case in which a woman, whose husband had unfortunately died when his car—one of ours—plunged down a hillside, sued the company for defective design. It was a rather unusual case,” he went on, a look of amusement in his eyes.
Caminetti had stopped pacing. With his hands clutched behind his back, he looked up.
“The man—the woman’s husband—was in the front seat of the car with a woman, not his wife. It was late at night. It was dark. The car was parked in a remote area at the edge of a steep ravine.” Caminetti blinked his eyes. “The two of them, the man and the woman not his wife, were apparently so engrossed in whatever they were doing that they did not notice that they had somehow managed to disengage the handbrake. On that particular model it is located directly between the two bucket seats. It was the woman’s claim—it is the wife we are now talking about—that had the handbrake been located under the dashboard to the left of the steering column, the way it is on many other models, including many of our own, none of this would have happened; and that, moreover, infidelity—that was the word her lawyer used in her complaint—being a common event and therefore a foreseeable use of the front seat of a car, the manufacturer should be liable for the damage suffered by this woman because of the loss of her husband.”
A droll smile on his lips, Cohn raised his head to a jaunty angle. “We frankly don’t have much experience of this sort of thing. But we do have a firm on retainer in Los Angeles, where this happened, and I suppose because everyone out there spends so much time in their cars, they did not seem to think it that unusual at all.”
“That’s enough!” cried Caminetti in pure frustration.
“I think we understand. You have lawyers—in private practice—on retainer. You pay them a certain amount, and then they bill against that amount—correct? But they get the money whether they do any work or not— correct?”
Clasping his hands together, Cohn faced straight ahead. “That’s correct.”
“And the defendant was one of those lawyers?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hire him on your own, or were you asked to do so by Thomas Browning?”
“Mr. Browning was the president of the company. He was also a highly trained lawyer. He approved every decision to put someone on retainer.”
Caminetti was beside himself. He looked up at the bench, then over at the jury; he stood for a moment balanced on the balls of his feet, peering out at the crowd. He shut his eyes and grit his teeth so hard his head began to vibrate. When he finally turned and faced the witness, his voice came out like a hushed high-pitched scream.
“Did Mr. Browning ask you to hire—to put on retainer—the defendant, or did he not?”
Cohn looked at him with studied indifference. “Yes, I believe he did.”
“You believe he did,” mumbled Caminetti to himself as he started all over that endless, relentless march back and forth in front of the jury box. “How many years ago? Twenty-five, or nearly that—right?” he asked, pulling himself up short.
“Yes, I believe…”
“And for all those years he’s been paid—what?—forty, fifty, sixty thousand a year?”
“Yes, I believe…”
“Whether he did anything or not?” A sly grin eased its way onto Caminetti’s angry mouth.
“There were years he did quite a lot, years in which he took on a number of cases…”
“And got paid at an hourly rate for everything that went beyond the normal retainer he received?’ Cohn bent his head sharply, raking Caminetti with his eyes. “That’s the way a retainer works.”
“I understand.” The grin became a little broader, a little more sure of itself. “The years he did quite a lot —years in which he represented Stern Motors as defense counsel in cases in which the company was being sued—cars with defective brakes that went off cliffs, that sort of thing?”
There was a titter of laughter in the courtroom. The jurors tried not to smile. Cohn did not change expression. Serious and alert, he took the question straight on.
“Mr. Haviland was the defense counsel in a number of cases for Stern Motors. He did quite well.”
“I didn’t ask you how he did,” Caminetti snapped.
“But so long as you brought it up, didn’t he lose more than he won?”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to quantify it in that way.
And besides, Mr. Caminetti, you and I both know that whether the case is won or lost isn’t always the best method of deciding who the best attorney was.”
Caminetti sneered. “The loser can call himself anything he likes. Back to why Mr. Haviland was hired.
He and Browning were in law school together—right?”
“Yes.”
Caminetti stood at the end of the jury box, his right hand on the railing. A combative look creased his sharp-angled face.
“You know why we’re here—the defendant is charged with murder. Anna Malreaux fell from a window during a party, a party that had gone on for days, a party in which the quantity of alcohol was more than what gets used in a typical bar on New Year’s Eve, a party…”
“Objection!” I thundered as I sprang to my feet.
“There has been no evidence offered to support that assertion.”
Caminetti turned on me with a vengeance. “You saying there wasn’t any liquor there, that no one drank?”
Scarborough quickly intervened. “The issue, Mr.
Caminetti, is whether the prosecution has yet introduced any evidence that anyone did. You have not, and until you do you may not ask the witness a question that assumes such evidence.”
Caminetti took it in silence and proceeded as if he had never been stopped.
“You’ve been in the company a long time, Mr. Cohn.
Isn’t this the kind of thing—a girl getting killed—that would have done incalculable harm to the company, to the reputation of the young man—the heir apparent— who threw the party, who was in charge of it, who let it get out of control? And wouldn’t that explain all those payments, payments made for years in which there really wasn’t any work, payments made even for cases he lost? Wasn’t that the reason, the real reason for those payments? To make sure that Jamison Scott Haviland would never do something stupid and start admitting what he had done—killed a woman with whom they had both been involved during some drunken orgy that Thomas Browning should have stopped?”
I was shouting my objection while Caminetti shouted all the way to the end, putting before the jury and the world the motive that had presumably made Thomas Browning first a witness to a murder and then a conspirator and a liar. He had done it despite my objection and despite the rules. The jury had heard it and so had everyone else, and nothing, not the fury of the judge who threatened sanctions for a repetition of what he did not hesitate to call “a cheap prosecutorial trick,” nor the measured instruction to the jury to ignore every word of what the prosecutor had said, was going to clear it from their minds. It was there, burning hot and deep in their collective memory, an ineradicable, permanent scar, a double badge of guilt worn not just by Thomas Browning, but by Jimmy Haviland as well.
CHAPTER 20
I lay in bed, gazing across the room, the memory of what had happened in court that day vivid in my mind.
“That was what was always missing,” I mused out loud.
“The motive, the reason why Browning would cover it up. Why would he protect someone who killed the girl he loved? If Haviland pushed Annie out the window, why would Browning let him get away with it? I did not think it through; I did not try to imagine what motive
Browning might have had to keep quiet about it.
Caminetti is no fool. By giving Browning a motive for the cover-up, everyone jumps to the conclusion that there was a cover-up and that there must have been a crime. If Browning is guilty, then Haviland must be, too.
“Caminetti is smart, as shrewd as they come. Nothing gets to him; nothing bothers him. He does what he has to and doesn’t think about it twice. Today, when it was over—after that screaming match we had at the end, when you would have thought we were ready to go after each other with our bare hands—I was closing my briefcase, getting ready to leave, when he comes over and asks me if I’d had the chance to try Carmine’s and what I thought about the food.”
Sitting on an armless chair, Gisela pulled her stockings up. Then she rose and with both hands carefully smoothed out the front of her dress. She had not heard a word I had said.
“Are you going to stay in bed all evening?”
A lush, provocative smile, a promise of more pleasure to come, slipped as easily across her mouth as the stockings had onto her long slim legs. She stood in front of the floor-length mirror, tossing her head to one side and then the other, giving herself a cool, appraising glance. The smile, suspended while she studied herself in the mirror, was back on her face when she turned around and began to laugh.
“You promised me dinner, but I think all you wanted was sex.”
My head propped up on two pillows, I felt like I was floating, caught in the slow-flowing current of a wide-awake dream. All the energy I had lost seemed to have been given to her. She stooped and gathered up my clothes and then dumped them unceremoniously on top of me.
“Get dressed,” she insisted, glancing over her shoulder as she left the room.
We had dinner at a French restaurant a few blocks away. Our table was one in a long row of tables the same size, where we were one of a dozen couples having an intimate dinner, touching elbows with strangers on each side. With the sensitive looks of an aspiring young actor, the waiter, wedged sideways between the curved wooden chairs, scribbled down our order and vanished into the noisy crowd.
