Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  “The answer is yes,” said Gisela, bending forward, her hands, folded on the table, touching mine. Her dark lashes fluttered as she looked down and then, having collected her thoughts, looked up. “If you still want me to.”

  In the dim yellow-gray light, her eyes looked more burgundy than black, and she looked less like a full-grown woman than a young girl, a girl who spoke in such low modest tones that I had to strain to catch each word.

  It seemed impossible that this was the same woman who just an hour earlier had behaved in my bed like a courtesan of vast experience and not an ounce of shame.

  I had known many women, perhaps more than I should, but Gisela was the first European. She had made me feel like an innocent with inhibitions I had not realized I had.

  I was still so mesmerized, so captivated by everything about her—the way she looked, the way she moved, the funny way she spoke and the earthy way she laughed— that I did not immediately remember what I had asked.

  “If you still want me to stay with you, at the apartment, until the end of the trial.”

  “Only until the end of the trial?” I asked, wondering in my American way why anything had to end. If the present was good, the future could only be better. When she looked at me with that dark-eyed stare, I was already hearing the words that would tell me that she wanted that too. Instead, she talked about the practical limits of what we should expect.

  “You’re not going to stay in New York, and neither am I. You’ll go back to San Francisco, and I’ll go back to Washington; or perhaps, at a time not too far away, I’ll go back to Berlin.”

  My romantic irresponsibility was still intact. I wanted her as much—no, more!—than I had wanted anyone before. I could not remember anyone but her; my memory had stopped, shut out everything, the moment we had started taking off our clothes.

  “You could come to San Francisco; I could stay in New York. Why rule out anything at the beginning? Why not let things just take their course? Why not wait and see?”

  “Why not see things the way they are?”

  I started to object, but she stopped me with a smile.

  “Yes, all right; if you wish. See how things are when the trial is over and it’s time to leave. But in the meantime, spend your days in court, and your nights with me. It’s better to live in the present, I think; not worry too much about what might happen next. It’s a problem with you Americans, you know: always worried so much about the future that by the time you get there you don’t have a past.”

  We finished dinner close to ten and started walking back to the apartment. The temperature had fallen, and a bitter wind blew down the avenues and howled through the crosstown streets. It lashed my face and whipped against my eyes. Without an overcoat I was freezing half to death. I pulled Gisela close to protect her with my arm. With her face buried against my chest, we moved bent against the wind. Gisela could not see anything and laughed as she stumbled backwards up the street. We passed a newsstand that was shutting down for the night.

  I barely saw it, the headline screaming across the front page of every paper, stacked in a bundle held in place by a metal weight. Gisela’s muffled laughter went an octave higher as I stopped and, my eyes fixed on what I had only half seen, drew her forward as I started back.

  The vendor had a fleshy, whiskered face and a red, bulbous nose. His eyes were narrow, without expression except for the tough dull glimmer that reflected the hard-paid price of staying alive. I gave him twice what the paper cost and turned away before he could make change.

  “What is it?” asked Gisela in a girlish voice, clinging to me as if she were afraid she would be blown away if she let go.

  “The chief justice. He’s in Bethesda. They think he might die.”

  We reached the apartment building. Inside the lobby, Gisela stamped her feet, took off her leather gloves and rubbed her hands against her frozen cheeks.

  “May I see?” I gave her the newspaper, which she read until the elevator opened on my floor. “There must be something on the news. Can we turn it on?”

  The facts, though fragmentary, painted a bleak picture. The chief justice had collapsed during a session of the court. He had started to challenge some assertion made by one of the lawyers during the last oral argument of the day when, according to those who were there, he stopped in midsentence, forced a smile, explained that he was not feeling well, turned to the associate justice who sat on his left, and then fell to the floor. He was taken by ambulance to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where, in a carefully worded statement, it was announced that “the chief justice is resting comfortably.” Nothing was said about what caused the collapse or how life-threatening his condition might be. It was understood—and this was how every physician asked by the various news media to comment prefaced what they said—that because the chief justice was eighty-three, whatever had happened was serious.

  “Cancer,” I said out loud. Gisela, sitting next to me on the sofa, looked up. “He’s dying of cancer.”

  “You know this?”

  Too late, I remembered how I had heard it. For a moment I was afraid that she might feel compelled to use it. We exchanged a glance, and I knew that anything I told her would stay between us.

  “Browning?” she asked, just to be sure. “Do you think the White House knows?” The question answered itself.

  “Yes, of course they must. So then, if that happens—if there is a vacancy…” Her eyes, quick and alert, caught a glimpse of the truth. “Reynolds. With Reynolds as chief justice, and with another conservative like Reynolds to take his place, the court becomes…”

  Gisela got to her feet, a determined look on her face.

  I had seen it before, that look. Once she decided there was something she had to do, there was a forcefulness, an almost brittle stiffness, in her manner.

  “I have to go back to Washington.”

  “Tonight? To cover that?” I asked, gesturing toward the flickering images on the television screen. “Go in the morning if you have to go. Take an early flight.

  There isn’t anything you can do about it now. And what about the trial? Who is going to cover that?”

  Gisela had moved next to a window that looked out over Central Park. She glanced at her watch, calculating the time it would take to get to the airport and what time a late-night flight would get her in.

  “Stay tonight; go early in the morning,” I said, thinking about what I would miss if she was not here.

  Her mind was still on the story she had to cover and what it meant. “The trial and what’s happened are both connected,” she remarked with a preoccupied look as she again checked the time.

  She caught herself. The taut, concentrated expression on her mouth fell away, replaced by an embarrassed, apologetic grin. She came over to the sofa and perched on the edge of it, her legs pressed closed together and her hands resting in her lap.

  “You’re right. I’ll go in the morning. Get an early flight.”

  “What did you mean—just now, when you said they were connected, the trial and what’s happened to the chief justice?”

  There was a slight, sideways movement of her head.

  She looked at me with a baffled expression.

  “I forgot,” she said, breaking into a smile. “You have been spending all your time either in court or in bed.” I laughed and started to reach for her, but she shook her head. “They’re connected—intertwined might be a better word. If Haviland is convicted, Browning is finished.” She gave me a searching glance. “If Haviland is guilty, then Browning covered it up. It’s what you said to me a few minutes ago, only the other way around.

  And if Browning can’t go on, then Walker will control the court—yes?” she had left something out. “But if the chief justice dies before the election, it doesn’t matter what happens to Browning. Walker can name whom he wants.” she shook her head vigorously. “No, that’s not true —or it might not be true. That’s part of the story I want to find out. There are people in the Senate— Re
publicans—who won’t vote to confirm Reynolds, or anyone like him, while there is a chance Browning might win. They’ll make sure the Senate doesn’t do anything.

  They won’t take Reynolds unless they have to; they certainly won’t take Reynolds while there is still a chance Walker might lose. That’s the story I need to write about: what will happen if the chief justice doesn’t survive this term of the court.” she suddenly thought of something. She looked at me with a different interest than she had before.

  “You could say that not only the presidency, but also what happens to the Supreme Court now depends almost entirely on you.”

  When Gisela left in the still-dark morning, she woke me long enough to say good-bye with a kiss.

  “I’ll be back Monday at the latest. Call me tonight and tell me everything that happens today.”

  That gentle request that I tell her what went on that day at Jimmy Haviland’s trial stayed with me. As I listened to each witness testify, I found myself thinking of how I could later describe it to her.

  Dressed in another of his dark, ill-fitting suits, Bartholomew Caminetti jerked to his feet when the honorable Charles F. Scarborough entered the hushed and crowded courtroom. Caminetti’s head bounced from side to side, as if without some gesture of impatience on his part, things would never speed up.

  He opened his mouth and held it there, waiting for the judge to take his place on the bench, ready to announce in a rapid-fire dull monotone the name of the next witness for the prosecution.

  “Mary Beth Chandler.”

  Scarborough seemed to take a certain twisted pleasure in slowing him down. “Mr. Caminetti?”

  Caminetti catapulted out of the chair almost before he had sat down again. “Your Honor?”

  “I assume you mean to call this person as a witness?”

  Caminetti glanced toward the double doors through which a middle-aged woman, tall and pampered, with a thin mouth and razor-sharp eyes, had just entered the courtroom. She was here, she was on her way to the stand. Caminetti looked up at the bench and shrugged.

  “You failed to mention that,” said Scarborough with a wry grin. “You said the name, nothing more.”

  “Why else would I… ?” An explanation would only waste more time. “The People call Mary Beth Chandler,” said Caminetti, staring in blank-eyed disbelief.

  A cursory nod and an occasional slight inflection of her voice the only gestures she allowed herself, Mary Beth Chandler answered each question with an economy of words that, by the end of her testimony, had even Caminetti in awe. She held herself with a cold reserve. She was not here because she wanted to be; she had no interest in what was going on. She answered each question and never once looked either at the jury or at the courtroom crowd. She had been at the party at the Plaza that Christmas Eve, and she had seen the defendant, Jamison Scott Haviland, talking with Anna Malreaux.

  “That was on the eighth floor of the Plaza Hotel, Christmas Eve—December twenty-fourth—nineteen sixty-five?” Caminetti had to establish the fact that Haviland was there.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you also see Thomas Browning there as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “The three of them—Haviland, Browning, Anna Malreaux—were in the same room at the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew that she was married to a well-known senior partner in one of the large investment houses, the private institutions that manage much of the world’s wealth; I knew that she was one of the women no one who wanted to make a mark in New York society would ever dare cross; I knew all that, but seeing her in person, sitting a few short steps away, I began to wonder if there was not something else I knew as well.

  “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” I asked as I rose in response to Judge Scarborough’s invitation to take the witness on cross. I buttoned my jacket and centered my tie. “The summer before Annie Malreaux’s tragic death.” she was not willing to admit the possibility. She looked right through me, as if I were invisible; the way, I imagine, she looked at anyone she did not know, or did not like. Smiling to myself, I insisted that I was right.

  “Sometime in June, I think it was; one evening at Maxwell’s Plum. Yes, I’m sure of it now. There were about a dozen people, all friends of Thomas Browning.

  He was sitting at the end of the table. I was the last to arrive. I was clerking that summer at a Wall Street firm.

  Browning was sitting there at the end of the table, and you were sitting either just to his right or just to his left—I don’t remember which. All I remember is that he spent most of his time talking to you.” she did not answer; she did not say a word. With bored indifference she waited for a question that had something to do with the case. I raised my head and with a thin smile let her wonder what I was going to do next.

  “You didn’t know Thomas Browning at Harvard, did you? You didn’t go to law school?”

  “No, I…”

  “And you didn’t know Anna Malreaux, did you?” I was guessing, but I would have been surprised had I been wrong. Browning had a talent for segregating his friends. “She was at Harvard; you weren’t there. That’s correct, isn’t it?” I asked with a degree of indifference to rival her own.

  “Yes, I…”

  “Yes, you knew him before that. You’ve known him, if I’m not mistaken, from sometime before he went to Harvard Law. You met him, if I’m not mistaken, when he was an undergraduate, or perhaps even before that.” I was leaning against the corner railing of the jury box, my right foot crossed casually over my left. “You were living in New York, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that’s…”

  “Well, it doesn’t really matter when you met him,” I remarked as I walked away from the jury. “The only reason you’re here today is to tell us that you saw Thomas Browning and Anna Malreaux and…” I stopped at a point equidistant from the witness stand and the counsel table where Jimmy Haviland sat alone.

  “Have you ever met the defendant, Jamison Scott Haviland? Let me rephrase that,” I said, suppressing a smile as I shot a sidelong glance at the jury. “Do you remember ever having met him?”

  “No,” she replied, decidedly unamused.

  “But you remember, after all these years, seeing two people you did not know, that you never met, talking to each other during a party at which there must have been—how many?—a hundred, two hundred people, going in and out.” Before she could answer, I made a quarter turn and looked straight at her. “Are you sure we never met?” she was not going to answer this time, either; but I did not give her the choice. “Your Honor, if you would instruct the witness.”

  “No, I don’t recall that we’ve ever met,” she said, her eyes cold and impenetrable.

  “Not at Maxwell’s Plum, that day in June?”

  “No.”

  I stared right at her, a small, triumphant smile slanting across my mouth. “And not on December twenty-fourth of that same year, at that party given by Thomas Browning, where I was as well?”

  It had no effect on her, none at all. It had become second nature to her, that look that shielded her from everything and everyone she did not want to know.

  “You testified that you saw the defendant and Anna Malreaux ‘talking.’ Did you hear what they were saying?”

  “No,” she said in a vacant, almost disembodied voice.

  “You testified that you saw Thomas Browning in the same room. Mr. Caminetti did not ask you if, when you saw them, the three of them were alone. So I will. Were there other people in the room at the time?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re not sure. I see,” I said, shaking my head at her proud defiance, at the way she limited each answer to the bare minimum of what it should be. “Humor us, Mrs. Chandler; indulge us in the perhaps vain belief that you don’t really think a court of law, in which a man is on trial for his life, is a complete waste of your time, better spent, no doubt, shopping for a new bracelet or a new pair of shoes!”

  It worked
. She came unglued.

  “How dare you!” she cried, bending forward as if she wanted to come after me with her long, sharp nails.

  “Who do you think you are to talk to me like that? Who do you…”

  “I think I’m the attorney for the defense, entitled to whatever limited attention you might deign to pay the questions I ask!” I shot back, doing everything I could to drive her mad. “You walk in here, wearing clothes that cost more than half these jurors make in a year, and you act like you’re making some kind of sacrifice.

  So the question, Mrs. Chandler, isn’t who do I think I am, but who do you think you are? Other than spend money you never earned, what have you ever done that makes you think you can treat with this kind of condescension, not just other people, but the law?”

  If she had had something close at hand—a rock, a purse, anything—I think she would have thrown it at me, so great was the rage that had taken possession of her, twisting her mouth into an ugly, hateful knot. With an angry glance, I made a dismissive gesture with my hand and walked away. At the counsel table, I turned around.

  She was struggling to hide her embarrassment at having for one of the few times in her life lost control.

  “There were a great many people there that day, weren’t there?” I asked in a voice, quiet and subdued.

  “Yes, there were,” she agreed without hesitation.

  “And from the absence of any suggestion to the contrary in your direct testimony, I take it that you, yourself, were not in the room—the suite—when Anna Malreaux fell from the window to her death.” she was sitting in the witness chair the way she had been before, but without the same air of annoyance and contempt. She answered the questions as if she had decided that they were important after all, and that she should do everything she could to make her meaning clear.

  “No, I wasn’t there when it happened. I had only come by to say hello to Thomas—Thomas Browning, that is. We were very old friends. That was the first time I met Anna Malreaux. I knew that she and Thomas were involved. I did not know how serious it was, of course.