Fox is Framed

by Lachlan Smith

  “He tried to backtrack, carry it off like he’d only been joking. I guess it must have been that very day that he contacted Detective Shanahan. Beat me to the punch.”

  “Did you ever share with the police what Russell Bell told you?”

  “No. I didn’t think they’d believe me. Not with a case hanging over my head. Also, I was afraid how Russell might react, that I might end up with a bullet in me.” This last comment, again out of the script, addressed toward the DA’s table, where Shanahan returned Lawrence’s look dead eyed. “I had enough problems.”

  My heart sank. By implying that Bell would have put a bullet in him if Lawrence had gone to the police, he’d opened the door for Crowder to suggest that this was precisely what had happened to Bell after Bell went to the police about Lawrence. Even if Crowder didn’t spot the opportunity, Lawrence had done her work for her, planted a seed in the jurors’ minds that would inevitably germinate into suspicion once they learned of Bell’s death, as in a moment they would.

  That one comment made it much more difficult for us to keep Russell Bell’s murder out of this case, as Nina couldn’t simply trust the jurors not to speculate about why Bell wasn’t here and about Lawrence’s possible involvement. She had to draw the sting.

  With an impressive lack of reaction to Lawrence’s blunder, Nina said, “How do you feel now about not coming forward immediately with what Russell told you?”

  My father’s voice caught. “I regret it very much.”

  “When was the last time you saw Russell Bell?”

  “About a month and a half ago. He was lying dead in his coffin.”

  “Between your release from prison and Bell’s death, did you ever see him in person?”

  “No. We just talked on the phone.”

  Nina flipped through her notes one last time, then turned toward the district attorney. “Your witness,” she said to Crowder.

  My father swallowed, his eyes taking on a glazed look. His surprise testimony had opened new opportunities for the prosecution and exposed him to tremendous risks.

  And now Nina could no longer protect him.

  Chapter 19

  Standing with her hands braced on the podium, Crowder glared at Lawrence. With each second, the silence in the courtroom grew more charged. Finally, under the strain, my father did what she wanted him to do, what her look was calculated to achieve. He smiled.

  “Is something funny, Mr. Maxwell?”

  He didn’t answer, and the look was on her face again, her eyeballs popping. My father’s jaw trembled. Crowder said, “You’re smiling because Russell Bell is dead and he can’t testify against you, correct?”

  “I’m not smiling,” Lawrence said.

  “You’re smiling because Russell Bell is dead and he can’t testify against you, correct?”

  “That’s not true.”

  Crowder came at him from a slightly different direction. “It must have been very satisfying for you, seeing him dead in that funeral home.”

  Lawrence leaned forward. “Ms. Crowder, I take offense.”

  “Before Russell Bell’s death, you’d learned that he was going to testify against you?”

  “Correct.”

  “How did you learn that Bell was going to be a witness against you in this case?”

  “I guessed.”

  “You guessed?”

  Nina stood, making a brazen effort to answer the question on Lawrence’s behalf. “Your Honor, I need to advise my client not to answer any question that requires him to divulge what I may have told him. Conversations with his lawyer are privileged.”

  Crowder turned the look on Nina. Ignoring Nina’s transgression, Liu simply instructed Lawrence to answer but not to divulge any confidential conversations.

  “I learned that the DA had an informant. We didn’t have the name but I guessed who it was. It was immediately obvious to me that Russell had invented the confession.”

  “You knew this even before your preliminary hearing in this matter?”

  “I guessed that Russell was the informant before the hearing. That’s right.”

  “In fact, you even had your investigator serve Mr. Bell with a subpoena.”

  “I wanted him to testify,” Lawrence said. “I wanted him to tell his lies to my face.”

  “In any event, you never saw him again before his death, and by the time you viewed him dead in his coffin in the funeral home, you knew that he wasn’t going to testify against you at this trial as he’d planned.”

  “Obviously. He was dead.”

  “Dead men don’t tell tales. Isn’t that right?”

  Nina objected, and Crowder withdrew the question. Instead she asked, “You were relieved that Russell Bell could no longer testify in this trial because he was dead, correct?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’d rather have had him here in court so that my lawyer could cross-examine him, so that the jurors could see for themselves that he’s a liar.”

  Crowder went to the jury box, standing just a few feet from the nearest juror, her elbow resting on the rail. “You would agree with me, then, that these jurors are capable of deciding that a witness is a liar and that his testimony should be ignored?”

  “I’d agree with that.” Lawrence risked a quick glance at the jury.

  “Let me ask you this, Mr. Maxwell. Believing in this jury’s ability to detect a liar, how can you dare come into this courtroom, sit there before this jury, and tell such shameless lies?” Crowder had turned to face him.

  Lawrence’s voice rose in anger but he mastered it. “I didn’t kill my wife and I never told Russell that I had. I don’t know how to answer you other than to keep repeating that.”

  “And you know that with Russell Bell dead, all I can do to discredit what you call the truth is to stand up here and keep calling you a liar, correct?”

  “You can call me whatever you want.”

  “Are you claiming that there was some other witness, someone else present during these conversations that you say you had with Bell?”

  “Just him and me.”

  “So whatever you say he told you, you expect the jury to believe it because Russell Bell is dead and won’t be able to testify for himself and contradict you, isn’t that right?”

  “They’ll believe the truth,” Lawrence said. “I hope.”

  Nina rose and objected to this line of questioning as “harassing.” “You’ve made your point,” Liu told Crowder. “Move on.”

  Crowder returned to the podium. “Just to be clear, you claim that you never confessed to Russell Bell that you murdered your wife. You also claim that he frankly disclosed that he’d had some kind of sexual relations with the victim of the crime he’d been in prison for, that he told you he’d ‘had her again.’ Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you never did go to the police? Today in court is the first time you’ve revealed these allegations to anyone?” Including your lawyer, was the unspoken import of her question. Crowder, at least, must have picked up on Nina’s surprise.

  He tried to hold his ground, but he was slipping back before Crowder’s onslaught. I risked a glance at the jurors and saw they didn’t mind her being so rough with him. “When your office decided to reprosecute me for a crime from twenty-one years ago that I didn’t commit, that I’d already done twenty-one years of prison time for, I decided that I had enough problems, like I said.”

  “And just to be clear, there’s no other witness to any of these conversations you’ve testified about?”

  “Asked and answered,” Nina objected.

  “No other witnesses,” Lawrence admitted.

  “And you also claim that Russell Bell confessed to you when the two of you were in prison together, just as he claimed you confessed to him?”

  “He was guilty and he told me as much. T
hat’s the difference between him and me.”

  “And you had no moral qualms about helping to free a man whom you knew to be guilty?”

  “Guilty or not, he was entitled to a new trial. It was the state that set him free when Eric Gainer refused to testify in the retrial and your office decided not to retry him.”

  Again I winced at Lawrence’s efforts to outsmart Crowder. She was leading him down a treacherous path that ended at the door he’d opened. Again, I could only hope he saw the danger. “When you heard that the state had decided not to reprosecute Mr. Bell, did you offer to come forward as a witness, seeing how, as you now claim, he’d ‘all but confessed’ to you?”

  “Do you know what happens to inmates who offer to testify against other inmates, Ms. Crowder?”

  “Oh, I do, Mr. Maxwell. I’m quite familiar with what happens to snitches. Usually, they turn up dead.”

  My father paled, realizing the blunder he’d made. “That happens.”

  “Isn’t it known as the code of silence, what you just referenced?”

  I saw by the tension in Nina’s shoulders that she wanted to object and shut down this line of questioning, but she didn’t dare—for fear of calling attention to the implication that Russell Bell had met the fate reserved for snitches behind bars.

  “That might be the term you use for it. I’ve never put much stock in it.”

  “And even after you got out of prison, you didn’t come forward and offer to testify against Mr. Bell, did you?”

  “No,” Lawrence said.

  “That’s because you were afraid of what would happen to you if you broke the code, if you snitched on Bell?”

  “Like I said, I had problems of my own.”

  “You were afraid that you’d wind up dead if you told the police that Russell Bell confessed to you in prison that he’d done the crime he was in for, correct?”

  Finally Nina rose. “Objection!”

  “Sustained,” Liu said, glowering at Crowder.

  It didn’t matter. I doubted that there was a single juror who didn’t understand by now that Angela Crowder blamed my father for Russell Bell’s death.

  Crowder had scored plenty of points, and she hadn’t even gotten to the crime my father was on trial for. “You also claim that you had no knowledge of your wife’s affair until just a few years ago. Do I have that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Crowder now launched into an exhumation of my parents’ failed marriage, retracing my father’s testimony from the first trial, when he’d been forced to admit numerous incidents of domestic violence, including a few occasions when Caroline had accused him of threatening her life. Seeking to paint him as a jealous, abusive husband, Crowder succeeded.

  “And you never had any argument with her after you discovered her affair, isn’t that what you claim?”

  “I never discovered it. I told you. I didn’t know a thing about it until I saw those pictures my son, Theodore Maxwell, an attorney, uncovered just a few years ago, long after she was dead.”

  “Then you claim you didn’t unexpectedly come home late one morning or early in the afternoon and find evidence that she’d been with another man?”

  “No.”

  “You claim you didn’t beat her to death with your son’s baseball bat and leave her for the boy to find when he came home from school?”

  “No.”

  Crowder fixed him with that look of hers again. “And you expect this jury to believe you because none of these people, not your wife, not Russell Bell, none of them can come into court here today and say that you’re lying. Isn’t that true? Because they’re all dead?”

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  Again she shot him the look. Five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen. Beside me, Dot seemed to be holding her breath. Finally Crowder turned her back on Lawrence as she moved toward the DA’s table. “No further questions.”

  ~ ~ ~

  As soon as the five of us were alone in the witness room Nina’s composure cracked and she let loose. “What the hell was that?”

  “The truth,” Dot answered for Lawrence.

  I cringed, seeing Nina’s sights settle on Dot, who stood behind my father with her hands protectively on his shoulders, like she didn’t intend to let him out of her grasp now that he’d been released from his harrowing confrontation with Crowder. Dot returned her stare, clearly prepared to have it out if that’s what Nina wanted, seeming even to relish the fight. Teddy sat at the head of the table staring at his folded hands.

  “I’m supposed to know the truth before it comes out of my client’s mouth for the first time when he’s on the witness stand. That’s a pretty basic rule of trial preparation.” Nina’s gaze shifted to me, making it clear whom, ultimately, she held responsible for this failure. I’d been the one charged with preparing my father for his testimony, after all, and for telling Nina what she needed to know. “Why didn’t I know about this conversation? It changes our entire defense.”

  All I could tell her was that I was sorry, but sorry wasn’t good enough. If we lost the trial, fault was now established. The loss would be on my shoulders, for having failed to elicit this crucial information from my father before now. Seeing that no explanation was forthcoming, Nina looked again at my father. “You better not have perjured yourself.” My father and Dot started to speak at the same time, but Nina cut them both off. “I don’t want to hear another word. I don’t have time. I need to go back out there and try to pick up the pieces. But if any of you ever does something like that to me again—” She broke off, her eyes on me. “Well,” she said, turning away. “You’re not going to have the chance. Your father can find a new lawyer to defend him when they charge him with Russell Bell’s murder.”

  She went out, leaving a heavy silence in her wake. “I’m sorry, son,” my father said after a moment. “I didn’t mean to screw things up between the two of you. You’re not a mind reader. There’s no way for you to have known about this. I didn’t tell you.”

  I couldn’t meet his eyes. “You should have told me,” I said. “You should have just told me from the beginning what he said to you.”

  “I thought you’d blame me for not coming forward sooner,” Lawrence answered. “And, to be honest, I thought you wouldn’t believe me. You never asked, and you seemed to be making a point of not asking. I didn’t want to tie your hands.”

  “The surprise is what she’s pissed about,” Teddy said.

  “She’s one that likes it all to go according to her plan,” Dot said.

  “She’s a fine lawyer,” I told her. “She’s doing a damned good job, and it’s not her fault that she just got sandbagged by her own client. If you had any other lawyer, if it had been me, the case would have been lost, because the jurors would have seen that the lawyer was surprised and concluded that the defendant must have been lying. But Nina, she didn’t flinch.”

  “He’s right,” Lawrence said, reaching up to lay his hand on Dot’s. “If we lose, it’s not going to be her fault, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be Leo’s. It’ll be mine.”

  Dot’s face crumpled, and she turned, overcome by a mixture of fury and grief, and pushed through the door. Lawrence nodded to me and calmly went out after her, leaving Teddy and me in the witness room to wait for his testimony to be called. Once the absolute master of the courtroom, Teddy now seemed paralyzed with fear. His voice was slurred, halting, as it had been during the first few years after his injury. “Jesus, my whole leg feels dead,” he said, rubbing his thigh. At moments of stress, the physical symptoms of his injuries reappeared.

  “It’s just a matter of listening to the questions and answering them. The jurors either believed Dad or they didn’t. Nothing you say is going to tip the balance.”

  “There was a time when I could have carried a case like this on my shoulders.”

  “You’ll do
fine. It’s not going to be on you.”

  “How do you think it’s going?”

  I saw that he truly had no idea. “You’ve heard everything I’ve heard.” I didn’t want to say what I feared. The judge would later instruct the jurors that if they thought a witness had lied about an important fact, they were free to disregard all of his testimony. If the jurors thought Dad was lying about his phone conversations with Russell, it seemed likely to me that they would also assume he was lying about his ignorance of Caroline’s affair, about not having killed her, about not confessing later to Russell. About everything.

  “You know, I’ve been sitting there through the trial, watching Nina, trying to convince myself I could do this again. Try jury cases.”

  I hesitated, considering my response. “It’s remarkable to me that you’re even in a position to think of being back in that chair.”

  “How could I not? You’ve got a lifetime of trials ahead of you. I’d like to have just one of mine back.”

  I’d taken for granted that Teddy’s role in our practice would be behind the scenes, that he had no aspiration to return to the courtroom. I’d assumed that he would have realized what was obvious to everyone else: that his days as a trial lawyer ended when he caught that bullet.

  Clearly, I’d been wrong.

  “Back then, there was no room in your life for anything else. You couldn’t keep a marriage going. You had no time for a family. You’re a lawyer again. You’ve got Carly and Tam. That’s what counts.”

  “It’s just that Dad keeps looking to me like I should know what to do, and I can’t tell him anything.” He glanced up at me, lines of strain around his eyes. “Do you think he was lying about Russell telling him he’d had sex with that girl again?”

  This was a question the old Teddy would never have asked, a question that perhaps would never have occurred to him, though it certainly had occurred to Nina—and to me. And even if the question had entered his mind, the answer wouldn’t have mattered as long as it fit in with his strategy in the case.

  “I hope not. None of us told him to get up there and invent conversations. But what can we do?” I felt a pang, because hadn’t I made a point of reminding Lawrence that he was the only one who knew what he and Bell might have discussed during those phone calls? I hadn’t advised him to lie, I told myself. I’d only been pointing out the obvious fact that no one but Lawrence knew what had been said.