Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  That’s not something Thomas would have confided in me about. That is also how I happen to remember Mr.

  Haviland. As soon as I walked in and saw the look on their faces, I could tell they did not much like each other. Thomas walked me outside, into the outer suite.

  He told me that he—Mr. Haviland—was in love with Ms.

  Malreaux, but that she was not in love with him.”

  For the first time, she glanced at Haviland. She smiled sympathetically, as if she understood how much that must have hurt, and then she looked back at me.

  “You said you could not hear what was said between the defendant and Anna Malreaux. Was there anything about the way they were talking that made you think that Mr. Haviland was angry, ready to do her harm?”

  “No, but he did seem quite upset with Thomas,” she said quickly.

  “Did Mr. Browning appear to be concerned for his safety?”

  “No, not at all. I think he was just waiting for Mr.

  Haviland to leave.”

  I was standing in the middle of the shaft of light that cut through the windows above the jury box. My arms folded across my chest, I stared down at the floor. At her answer, my head snapped up.

  “And so far as you know, he did. Isn’t that correct, Mrs. Chandler? So far as you know, he left right after you did, and—what was it you testified before?—that you left a long time before Anna Malreaux fell from that window to her death.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about what happened after I left the hotel that afternoon.”

  I asked a few more questions, all to the same point: She did not know what happened, but Haviland had not done anything to make her think he was angry with Anna Malreaux “When you heard that Anna Malreaux had died, you must have been shocked?”

  “Yes, of course I was.”

  The light that fell from the window struck my eyes. All that was visible on the witness stand was a gray hazy outline, and for the moment it lasted I saw Mary Beth Chandler the way she had looked that evening at Maxwell’s Plum.

  “You were sitting on Browning’s right,” I said before I knew it. I bent my head a little to the side until the light was out of my eyes. She did not say anything, but a slight movement of her mouth acknowledged it as a fact. I went back to my question.

  “You were shocked, of course. And did you at the time, or at any time until this case was brought against Jamison Haviland, ever have reason to think that Anna Malreaux’s death had been anything but what the police said it was at the time—an accident?”

  “No, absolutely not,” she said emphatically. A worried look came into her eyes. There was something she wanted to add, something she thought everyone should know. She turned to the jury, an earnest expression on her face. “Thomas was devastated, inconsolable. If it hadn’t been for Joanna—Mrs. Browning…” she started to explain. She realized that having explained that, she had to explain something else as well. “Thomas and Joanna had been close friends for years. Their families—the Brownings and the Van Renaesslers— were very close. Thomas always turned to her for comfort and advice. After the tragedy—after what happened—they were inseparable. He probably would have gotten through it on his own,” she said, biting her lip as she speculated about the past. “We were young, and the young are resilient; but I can’t believe it would have been the same without her. A year or so later, they were married. It’s strange, isn’t it?” she asked, turning her attention back to me. “What happens to us and why.”

  I started back to the counsel table, cross-examination at an end. I raised my eyes to the bench to announce that I was through; but then I remembered. I stopped and wheeled around.

  “You’ve known Thomas Browning nearly as long as that yourself—since you were still a girl in your teens, isn’t that correct?” she had her hands on the arms of the witness chair, just about to stand up. Her eyes swung across the room.

  “Yes, like the Van Renaesslers, our families were acquainted.”

  “And from what you testified, Thomas Browning was in love with Anna Malreaux—you said he was ‘devastated’ by her death, ‘inconsolable.’”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “You know Thomas Browning as well as anyone does.

  Is it possible that he could have watched someone murder this girl he loved and then told the police that it was an accident? And then spend the rest of his life covering up the crime?”

  “Objection!” thundered Caminetti as he came out of his chair. “Calls for speculation, it’s irrelevant, immaterial.

  It’s…”

  Scarborough struck his gavel hard. “Sustained!” He leaned forward on both arms and peered down at me with a worldly smile. Raising both eyebrows, he used his middle finger to scratch the underside of his chin. “I’m sure I do not have to explain the reason why Mr. Antonelli’s question—or should I say his rather lengthy commentary—has been ruled impermissible.” The smile grew a little larger, tickling the corners of his mouth.

  “Which of course raises the question why, when counsel both understand the rules so well, they seem to get broken so often.”

  Scarborough darted a glance at Caminetti, and then, sliding over until he was leaning on his hip, he stared at a point just beyond the jury box and finished with a private remark to his imaginary friend.

  “Unless—and I would hate to think this was true— they believe the only rule is whatever they can get away with.”

  His eyes came down to the jury, his face animated, eager, alive. He could not wait to let them share in the subtle pleasure of putting lawyers in their rightful place.

  “With that mild admonition, Mr. Antonelli,” he announced with a graceful nod, “please continue.”

  “No,” said Mary Beth Chandler before I could open my mouth. “He never would have done that. The Thomas Browning I know would never let someone get away with murder. It’s absurd.”

  Caminetti had automatically bounced back on his feet. Speechless, he could only roll his eyes. In what was almost a slow-motion gesture of helpless frustration, Scarborough threw up his hands. As if I had not noticed anything wrong, I made a slight bow toward Mrs.

  Chandler, thanked her for her testimony and announced that my cross-examination had now ended.

  “The witness’s last statement will be stricken from the record,” announced Scarborough in an even-tempered voice. “The jury is instructed to ignore it. You may call your next witness.”

  I could scarcely wait to tell Gisela what I had done.

  One more witness that morning and two more in the afternoon took the stand to testify on behalf of the prosecution that Jimmy Haviland had not only been at the Plaza the day Anna Malreaux died, but that he had been in love with her, obsessed with her, unwilling to accept the fact that she was not in love with him.

  “He had asked her to marry him. She had said no,”

  testified one of her law school friends, a plump moon-faced woman who seemed to radiate goodwill. She was that rare phenomenon: a lawyer who loved her work.

  “You specialize in the legal rights of women, is that not correct, Ms. Dell?” she burst into a confident, pudgy-cheeked smile.

  “And proud of it, Mr. Antonelli!”

  Clover Dell—that was her actual given name—was a legend, the groundbreaking advocate on nearly every major feminist issue in the last twenty years. Despite themselves, people who hated what she stood for could not hate her: They could not quite resist the power of the unblemished enthusiasm that never came close to fanaticism. She had walked into Scarborough’s courtroom, both arms swinging at her sides, like an owner coming home, glad to find that instead of an empty house there was a party going on, one that could only get better now that she had arrived. The moment she settled into the witness chair she looked up at Scarborough and to his immense amusement greeted him like a long-lost friend: “How are you, Judge? Keeping these two straight?” she asked with a quick glance first at Caminetti, then at me.

  “You testified that the d
efendant asked Anna Malreaux to marry him, but she did not want to marry him.”

  “I did.”

  I had to be careful: I did not know how much she knew. “Were you aware that there were other young men interested in her?”

  “Sure, but she wasn’t interested in them. I don’t mean she wasn’t interested in men. No, but she certainly didn’t have any interest in marriage. Not that she had anything against marriage, but it wasn’t something she was going to do before she had established herself in her own career. That’s what we were about, Mr. Antonelli—becoming independent women who could choose the lives we wanted.” She squared her shoulders and faced the jury with a look that suggested that they all had to agree that there could be nothing more important than that. “Anna Malreaux was one of the most independent-minded women I ever had the good fortune to know. It’s a tragedy that she didn’t live. She would have been an enormous success. Huge.”

  I wondered whether she would have thought the same thing if she had known that Annie Malreaux had decided to become Thomas Browning’s wife.

  “So she wasn’t going to marry anyone, at least not right away. In addition to her independence, would you also describe her as thoughtful and kind, perhaps unusually so?” I asked the question as if it were nothing more than innocent curiosity, and when she immediately agreed, I suggested what seemed the only logical, the only fair conclusion.

  “So when she said no, told Jimmy Haviland that she would not marry him, don’t you think it possible that she might have told him that? What you just said—that she wasn’t ready for marriage, that there were a lot of things she wanted to do first? Wouldn’t she have done something like that, both to let him down easy and because—as you yourself have just told us—it was true?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Caminetti coming out of his chair.

  “Isn’t that what she told you? I know it was a long time ago, but you remember everything else so distinctly, perhaps you remember that as well: what Anna Malreaux told you she told Jimmy Haviland when he proposed.”

  Did she remember? I do not know. But she thought she did, and she had no doubt what, knowing Annie, Annie would have done.

  “Yes, I’m almost positive she told me that. I can’t remember her exact words, but they were words to that effect.”

  “So Jimmy Haviland would still have been left with some reason to hope.” I glanced briefly at the judge, turning away before he turned his gaze on me. “No more questions, Your Honor.”

  Jimmy Haviland had not been charged with manslaughter; he had been charged with murder. The prosecution had to show, not that he caused her death through negligence, but with deliberate intent. It was not enough to argue that in a moment of anger he had shoved her and that, as a result he should have foreseen, she had fallen to her death. Caminetti had to show that when Haviland pushed her it was because he wanted her to die. That meant he had to show that that thought had been in Haviland’s mind. In the afternoon, he called two witnesses who, at least on first impression, seemed to make the case that it had. The first, Clarence Armitage, whom I vaguely remembered from school, testified that Haviland had been so upset when “Annie turned him down” that he stopped going to class, refused to eat, and seldom left his room. Caminetti pounced upon it.

  “So he spent all his time brooding on it, letting it eat away at him?”

  Armitage shook his head. “He was despondent.”

  Caminetti took the answer as if it only confirmed the worst. “In other words, depressed.”

  I was not sure I needed to, but given Caminetti’s penchant for answering his own questions when he did not like the answers he got, I decided to underscore the obvious.

  “He was despondent—I think that was the word you used—not depressed?”

  “Despondent; yes, that’s what I said.”

  “You were good friends; you were rooming together at the time, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes,” replied Armitage, bending forward as he glanced across to where Haviland sat watching. “We were good friends.”

  “He told you what happened with Annie, and you could see for yourself how he felt—Is that correct?”

  Armitage ran his fingers through gray-streaked hair.

  He was dressed in the fastidious fashion that was still expected among the senior partners in a Wall Street firm.

  It occurred to me when I first saw him on the stand that it could have been me sitting there, calm and correct, had I accepted the offer to come back to the firm where I had clerked that summer I spent in New York.

  “In other words, you knew him rather well, didn’t you? Well enough to anticipate his moods, to know what he was thinking. My question is this: During that whole period, after he proposed to Anna Malreaux and she refused, did he ever, even once, suggest that he might want to do her any harm?”

  The answer was plain, emphatic, without either hesitation or doubt. “Never.”

  With his next witness, Caminetti came at the same issue from the other side. Haviland’s friend and roommate had testified that he had been distraught, a fact that Caminetti would use to suggest that the pressure and the pain had finally built to the breaking point, and that the death of Anna Malreaux had come to be seen as the only way out. Abigail, or, as we had all known her, Abby, Sinclair testified that Anna Malreaux had been afraid of what Jimmy Haviland might do.

  “They had been going together?” asked Caminetti in his energetic, abbreviated way.

  Abby Sinclair had been sworn in, and Caminetti was standing in front of her, not more than six feet away. She sat on the edge of the chair, raising herself up until she could see over Caminetti’s shoulder. Her brown eyes sparkled with recognition the instant they caught my own. We had been friends once, and Abby was one of those people, rare enough, who never forget a friend, no matter how many years had passed. She had wanted to become a lawyer so that she could do something to help the poor; she was now the head of a large foundation that did just that. She looked at Caminetti and let him know that she was not someone he could rush.

  “‘Going together’ would not be right. They had started going out sometime in the spring—the early spring, I think—of our first year. But Annie went out with other young men as well. That summer—the summer between our first and second years—Annie lived in New York, but Jimmy wasn’t here.”

  Is that when it started—that summer in New York? I had forgotten, if I had ever known, that Annie had been there, too.

  “She saw him a few times early in the fall, after school started, in Cambridge.”

  Abby had large, generous eyes, offering comfort to whoever was fortunate enough to come under their gaze. She had that kind of gawky, bucktoothed look that made you want to laugh with sadness at how much more beauty shined out of that plain, unaltered face than you were ever likely to see in the flashing eyes of high-fashion women used to turning every head they passed.

  “But then she told him she could not see him anymore. I don’t know why,” she admitted. “I was a friend of hers, but she had other, closer friends, and perhaps she told one of them. That’s when he asked her to marry him, when she said she couldn’t see him anymore. I think he was desperate not to lose her, and maybe thought that if she knew he was that serious about her, she would think about him in a different way.”

  Caminetti was pacing the floor. “But she said no,” he interjected the moment she stopped.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Caminetti straightened his shoulders and looked directly at her. “And after she said no, she was worried what he might do?”

  “Very worried.”

  Ready with the next question, Caminetti took a step toward her. He stopped, and with a miser’s stare, reconsidered.

  “No, never mind.” He darted a glance at the bench.

  “No more questions, Your Honor,” he said, his hands trailing in the air behind him as he turned and moved steadily toward his chair.

  It was too easy, and I should have known it.<
br />
  “Annie—Anna—Malreaux was worried what he might do?” I asked this with a cautious expression, as if I were only trying to clarify a point. With my back to the jury, I looked at Abby and smiled. Then I stepped away, giving to the jury an unobstructed view. “Worried about what he might do to her, or what he might do to himself?”

  With a quick shake of her head, she dismissed any possibility that Annie had been afraid for herself. “She was worried about him.”

  Without thinking, I had given Caminetti everything he needed. On redirect, he stood in front of the counsel table and gave Abby a serious, searching glance.

  “In other words, Anna Malreaux, who knew him well, thought him quite capable of doing something violent!”

  Whether he had been born with it or learned it from the Jesuits, this instinct for changing the plain meaning of things, Caminetti could do anything with words.

  It was nearly four-thirty and I thought we were through, but as soon as Abby Sinclair had been excused, Caminetti immediately called someone else. He stood at the side of the counsel table, tapping on it impatiently with the fingers of his left hand.

  “State your name.”

  “Gordon Fitzgerald.”

  “Do you know the defendant?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Where do you know him from?”

  “We were in a rehabilitation center together.”

  “For the treatment of alcoholism?”

  “Yes.”

  “During the time you knew him, did the defendant say anything about a woman by the name of Anna Malreaux?”

  “Yes. He said he killed her; he said he was responsible for her death.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Tall, thin, all legs and arms, in a sweat suit stretched so tight she looked as if she had been painted naked, the first runner streaked by me in a blaze of grimaced pain. Seconds later, two more women grunted past, trailing bursts of vapored breath. A few yards ahead, an old man, bundled up against the morning chill, stood at the edge of the asphalt path, watching two squirrels chase each other through the yellow wind-scattered leaves. The park was coming awake. Rising above the buildings that lined Fifth Avenue, the sun hung in the hazy overcast sky, a pale silver disc barely bright enough to see.