by D. W. Buffa
Darnell looked at Summer to see if he had made his meaning clear, wondering as he did how much of what he had said was true, so much of it still vague and confusing in his mind. In a way, it did not matter: Marlowe’s fate was in the hands of the jury now. Still, it nagged at him, that after all this time, after all the things he had said and heard at trial, there was this terrible doubt about what it meant. With a helpless shrug, he started to get up. The only thing he could do now was get dressed, go the office, and wait.
Summer Blaine would not hear of it.‘You need to stay in bed. They’ll call you when the jury has a verdict.You can get to court just as quickly from here. Quicker, actually; I’ll drive you.’
Darnell waited all day, but the call never came. The following morning, Homer Maitland telephoned to tell him what he would also tell Roberts—that the jury had again worked until close to midnight and again come back at eight.
The jury worked all that day and all the next. Finally, on the fourth morning, Darnell could not take it anymore. ‘I’m getting dressed,’ he grumbled when Summer asked him what he thought he was doing. ‘I need to get down to the office.’
‘Do you think that will help the jury decide?’
‘No, but it may help to stop me from going crazy,’ he replied as he grabbed a shirt from the closet.
He was pulling on his shoes when the telephone rang. Summer took it in the other room.‘They want you back in court at ten-thirty.’
Darnell looked up. ‘They have a verdict?’ he asked, just to be sure.
‘No. The jury sent a message to the judge saying they haven’t been able to reach one.’
‘That means Maitland is going to give the dynamite instruction. I have to call Marlowe.’
Homer Maitland did exactly what Darnell had said he would. The jury was brought back into the courtroom and, with the defendant and the lawyers sitting at their places, the judge asked the jury foreman, a balding middle-aged man with gentle eyes, if it were true that they had not yet been able to reach a verdict.
‘That’s true, your Honour; we have not,’ he said in a voice that seemed to hint at exhaustion.
Maitland bent forward, a look of quiet confidence in his eye. ‘You are not to feel bad about this; it shows that you have taken your responsibilities as seriously as you should. Now, it often happens that a jury decides that it cannot decide, and when it does, the law—in all its wisdom—has a remedy.’
A smile ran across Maitland’s jagged mouth. The jurors seemed to relax when they saw it. They took it as a sign that they were not delinquent and that he was not displeased.
‘The remedy is that you try again; and that, if possible, you try harder. I am therefore instructing you to return to the jury room and resume deliberations. Each of you, without sacrificing your own independent judgment, should listen carefully to the opinions of all the other jurors and try to see things from their perspective. I am also instructing you to consider the fact that if you do not reach a verdict, this case will have to be tried again, to a different jury, and there is no reason to assume that that jury will be any more capable than you.’
With a doubtful look, the foreman said they would do their best.
As the jury headed back to the jury room,Darnell,with a lawyer’s instinct, started to offer Marlowe a few words of encouragement. One look in his eyes told him it was useless, that Marlowe was beyond the reach of human sympathy or help. Darnell patted him on the arm and they went their separate ways in silence.
The jury was out another day, and another one after that. Darnell began to feel hopeless and alone, as if the trial was over and the jury, like the Evangeline, had just disappeared. And then, finally, three days after they had been told to try again, the jury sent word they were finished. They had done what Maitland asked and reached a verdict after all.
It was always the quietest time of all, the hush that fell when the jury filed back into the courtroom with a verdict in the foreman’s hand. Darnell tried to read some meaning into their averted eyes. They did not look at the crowd of spectators and reporters; they did not look at Roberts and they did not look at him. They did not look at Marlowe; they did not look at anyone. They did not even look at Maitland; they sat with lowered eyes, listening to the silence that echoed like a final judgment through the room.
‘Has the jury reached a verdict?’ asked Homer Maitland in a formal, distant voice.
The foreman stood up, looked across at Judge Maitland and, without a word, held up the verdict form.
‘Would the clerk please hand me the verdict?’
The foreman clasped his hands together and waited while Maitland read it over.
The lines in Maitland’s forehead deepened; his eyes became intense. He looked at the foreman as if he had a question, but then he nodded slowly as if he understood, and not only understood, but approved.
‘Give this back to the foreman,’ he said to the clerk. ‘Would the foreman please read the verdict?’
The foreman stood as straight as he could. He cleared his throat and began to read: ‘It is the unanimous verdict of the jury that we cannot decide. We are not a hung jury; we are not split between those who believe the defendant is guilty and those who would vote to acquit. In that sense, we are not divided at all: we all agree that the question of guilt or innocence in the case of the defendant, Vincent Marlowe, is impossible to decide.’
The foreman stopped reading. He looked first at Roberts and then at the courtroom crowd.
‘We go further still,’ he said, reading again from the lengthy handwritten note that had been scrawled on the verdict form.‘We understand that this is no legal verdict, and that the case may be tried again. For whatever weight it may carry, we are unanimous in our feeling that it should not. Having listened to all the evidence, having heard the lawyers’ arguments, having deliberated among ourselves for the better part of a week, we are each and every one of us convinced that in this matter there is no justice in anything anyone can now do.’
Homer Maitland rubbed his chin and then leaned forward on his folded arms. He asked if all the members of the jury agreed with the statement the foreman had read.
‘Though this is the opinion of all of you, and though I cannot say the decision you have reached is wrong, the court, as you have rightly anticipated, has now the duty to declare a mistrial. The case is dismissed,’ he said as he banged his gavel.‘The defendant is free to go.’
With the crowd swirling all around them, and reporters shouting questions about what it meant and if there was going to be another trial, Darnell fought his way outside. He thought Marlowe was right behind him, but when he turned around the only familiar face he saw was that of Summer Blaine, trying to catch up.
She took hold of his hand. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.
‘It means it’s over,’ said Darnell.
He glanced across at Michael Roberts standing on the courthouse steps talking to a crowd of eager reporters. Summer turned around just in time to hear Roberts say that he would not second guess what the jury had done.
‘I imagine they came to the same conclusion most people would have come to after listening to everything that was said in that trial: that Vincent Marlowe has been punished enough,’ said Roberts.
‘Does that mean there won’t be another trial?’ someone called from the back of the crowd.
With a weary smile, Roberts shook his head. He looked beyond the circle of faces waiting with blank anticipation to where William Darnell stood with Summer Blaine.
‘I was told at the very beginning that taking this case to trial would ruin the lives of people who had already suffered enough. But there was never a choice—a crime had been committed, people had been killed; we had to prosecute.We had to bring what happened out into the open; we could not let it stay a secret. We could not allow murder to become a question of someone’s private judgment; it had to be brought to a public trial. And now it has. The jury has spoken, and their verdict should be binding on us all. So, no,
there will not be another trial. Vincent Marlowe is a free man, and if anyone thinks that this is improper or unfair— if anyone thinks we should keep after him until we find a jury that might be persuaded to convict him—ask yourself this question: do you know anyone who thinks that Vincent Marlowe is a lucky man?’
Summer took Darnell by the arm. ‘What will happen to Marlowe now?’ she asked as they started down the steps.
With a dismal look, Darnell shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly, he caught sight of a man and woman on the corner half a block ahead. The man held the woman with his arm while she sobbed against his chest.
‘That’s Marlowe,’ said Darnell in a voice as sad as Summer had ever heard. ‘The woman is Marlowe’s sister.’
Summer took Darnell home, and for the next few weeks, while he slowly recovered from the heart attack that had come so close to killing him, never left his side. She insisted that he have perfect quiet, and did everything she could to keep the world away. The telephone calls from reporters—desperate to have a comment about the trial and what the jury had done—she handled with a series of stories that, without quite lying, skirted the edges of the truth. It was easy to say that he was not available; it was more difficult to say when he would be. All she really knew was that, before he had any business doing it, he would be back in a court of law.
She had come to the conclusion that he was right when he said that his work, even if it had almost killed him, was the only thing that kept him alive. The promise that the Marlowe trial would be his last, that he would go quietly into retirement, had been only provisional, a goal set, an objective to be achieved. Its accomplishment meant only the necessity for another provisional promise, another trial that would give him a reason to live. It was something both he and Marlowe understood, something that she now understood as well, that precisely because it was inevitable, you never surrendered to death.
It was not long before the calls stopped coming, not long before the world’s attention turned to other things. The famous people whose lives had been lost or changed forever by the tragedy of the Evangeline were forgotten as other people became famous in their place. But Darnell would never forget any of them. The faces of the survivors, the faces of the witnesses who testified at the trial, remained as vivid and as real to him as they had become when he first saw them, struggling to make sense of what had happened to them—doubting, some of them, that it made any sense at all.
Some evenings Darnell would sit by the window, looking out at the bay as a ship passed under the Golden Gate. He would watch it disappear into the thick, purple night, wondering if Marlowe might be on it, seeking oblivion in the only work he knew. He never heard from Marlowe, not a word; but then he had not expected that he would. Marlowe was the very meaning of solitude.
It was nearly a year after the trial when Darnell received a letter, not from Marlowe, but from Marlowe’s sister. It was written in a fine, modest hand on a single sheet of stationery. She thanked him for what he had done for her brother; told him that though a mother’s grief was bottomless, she had known when he had first told her what he had done, that he suffered even more than she. Then she told him that she was writing now to tell him that her brother was dead, that he had been reported missing from a freighter on which had taken work as a member of the crew. He had apparently fallen overboard and was lost at sea. The ship had been in the south Atlantic, she added, close to the very spot where her son had been lost. The name of the ship was the White Rose.
Darnell put down the letter and got up from his desk. He stood at the window, staring down at the busy city street, at everyone going about their busy lives. He could see Marlowe standing alone on a moonlit night, the ocean vast and miraculous, the way it must have looked when God first touched it and gave it life. He could almost hear the quiet splash of Marlowe’s body as the sea welcomed him home.
ALSO FROM ALLEN & UNWIN
Trial by Fire
D.W. Buffa
Joseph Antonelli has never lost a case he should have won … until now.
Julian Sinclair is a brilliant young man on the path to greatness, but he is also a man with powerful emotions he tries to keep in check. When a beautiful woman, a married district attorney, is murdered, Sinclair is accused of killing her in a fit of jealous rage. He claims that she was the victim of her sadistic husband, but the media, especially television, wildly condemn Sinclair, and whip the public into a frenzy.
Antonelli does not doubt for a minute that the idealistic Sinclair is innocent. But the victim’s widowed husband, a man of wealth and privilege and a master of manipulation, is determined to destroy both this remarkable defendant and the shrewd Antonelli. This is one case Antonelli can’t win by playing fair. He has to bait the real killer out of hiding, force him to confess his crimes, even if it means putting himself in danger.
Trial by Fire is about the power of television and how an innocent man can be convicted when the media insist he is guilty.
From the author of the acclaimed Joseph Antonelli novels, Trial by Fire is D W Buffa’s seventh book in the series.
ISBN 1 74114 508 2
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
DEDICATION
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
