Crowder’s examination was brief. Without a jury to play to, she wasted little time. She asked Eric to state his name and occupation, then established he’d been Russell Bell’s employer, after which she moved immediately to the conversation he claimed to have had with Bell shortly before Bell’s death.
Eric’s personality was on display to full effect, but for once his delivery was not calculated to charm. Rather, he wore a look of seriousness and concern, the haunted look of a man who was unable to forget the prophetic words he’d once heard. “I’d once told him that if he had any trouble about his past, he should come to me and I would help him,” he said. “Well, a few days before he was murdered, he was driving me to a meeting, and he looked over at me and he said something like, ‘I’ve been having a little trouble lately.’
“He went on to say he was going to be a witness in a case against a former cell mate, a man who’d confessed to him that he’d murdered his wife, and who’d later gotten out of prison. I knew he was talking about Lawrence Maxwell, of course. He told me Maxwell had called him, and had said he’d better keep his mouth shut if he knew what was good for him. Those were his words.”
Watching Gainer testify, I felt like a man rearranging the last few pieces of a puzzle, but seemingly unable to find how they fit. I hadn’t been able to figure out what he was doing here, why he’d suddenly thrust himself into the center of a trial that held such dangers for him, unless there was some greater danger he was trying to prevent. Hearing his testimony, though, I realized that he must understand that I was close to putting the puzzle together, and that if he didn’t act to shore up the case against my father, the DA would have to cast around for other suspects. And, sooner or later, especially if more leaks emerged, their sights might settle on Jackson Gainer.
After just a few minutes, Crowder sat down, at which point Nina addressed Gainer without rising from the counsel table. She easily established that Russell Bell hadn’t told Eric of any specific threat, only that Lawrence had told him he’d better keep his mouth shut.
Then she said, working from the notes I’d put together for her, “Supervisor Gainer, do you remember a woman named Lucy Rivera?”
“Of course I do,” Gainer said. “How could I forget her?”
Nina rose to show Eric the picture from the newspaper, and asked, “This is Lucy in the picture with you, isn’t it?”
“Objection,” Crowder said. “Beyond the scope of the direct examination.”
“Sustained,” Judge Liu said, swiftly shutting Nina down without Eric needing to open his mouth.
“We have to be allowed to show that this witness has a motive to lie.”
“Credibility isn’t my concern. You can impeach him all you want if I allow Ms. Crowder to put this witness in front of the jury. But, right now, all you’re doing is trying my patience, Ms. Schuyler.”
I glanced behind me to where Jackson was sitting. He seemed not to hear the ensuing debate between the judge and the lawyers. His gaze was far away, almost sleepy.
Still Nina pushed against the judge’s warning. “Someone has been blackmailing you anonymously with this picture, isn’t that right?”
“No,” Liu said, reaching his decision suddenly. “No, this examination is finished. I’m not going to allow the jury to hear this witness. I don’t find that there’s any relevance to this testimony. ‘You’d better keep your mouth shut’ isn’t a threat. It’s not evidence of anything, certainly not of murder. I see what you’re doing, Ms. Schuyler. You’re trying to turn this trial into a sideshow, and I won’t allow it.”
Never mind that Crowder was the one who’d called Gainer to the stand, and that this was a victory for Nina. Liu left the bench without allowing argument. His decision had been angry and rash, without a reasonable basis, but neither lawyer raised a protest.
I could only guess that Liu had little appetite for allowing one of the city’s foremost politicians to be sullied on his watch.
Waiting for the judge to return, I glanced again at Jackson Gainer, who now wore a look of sullen, brutal disregard. In the judge’s absence, Eric rose from the witness stand and walked out of the courtroom, followed closely by his brother and the lawyer who’d accompanied them. Crowder’s face was somber.
Nina made her motion for a directed verdict of acquittal when Liu returned after the brief recess, but the judge denied it with obvious impatience. “We’ll go straight to closing arguments. Unless the district attorney has another rebuttal witness.”
Crowder didn’t.
“Be ready in fifteen minutes.”
I hurried out of the courtroom, to do or say what I didn’t know, but Eric was already gone.
~ ~ ~
Standing beside my father as the jurors filed back in, Nina was unruffled. But I felt sick. I realized that part of me had believed that Liu would end the case right here. Now the case hadn’t ended, and now my legs were weak and my breath was short. My father, glancing around, caught Dot’s eye, then mine, but his face was rigid. Had he decided otherwise, the judge could be taking his plea. We would be walking out of here. Instead, we were launching the final battle.
The jurors, looking both bored and irritated, resumed their seats. Nina and Crowder stood ready. Liu gave a few brief instructions to the jury, explaining the purpose of the arguments they were about to hear. Then Crowder rose and carried her heavy binder awash in notes to the podium.
She began briskly. “The vicious beating of Caroline Maxwell was not the work of a stranger. It was the act of someone whose jealousy and anger had been building for years. If criminal defendants were to be believed, the world would be full of mysterious killers who slip away without a trace. But common sense tells us that’s not how it is. Murderers don’t usually get away, and they’re not often strangers. Sadly, most murder victims are killed by the persons closest to them.”
Crowder took up the photographs that had been put into evidence and went through them one by one, showing them to the jurors, walking back and forth in front of the jury box, holding each picture up, dwelling on the viciousness of the attack. I watched the jurors’ faces as they studied the photos; most of them looked away. Whether that was a good or a bad sign I couldn’t tell, but it meant that they weren’t looking where Crowder wanted them to look, that she didn’t have them fully in her power.
“I’m asking you to return a verdict of first-degree murder, meaning that the defendant made a cold, calculated decision to kill. Willfully, deliberately, and with premeditation is what the law says. Remember the admission he made to Russell Bell: ‘it was a terrible thing but it had to be done.’ This was no crime in the heat of passion. It was murder in cold blood.”
Next Crowder walked them through the two compromise verdicts they might reach—second-degree murder or manslaughter. She went on in this technical vein, highlighting the jury instructions, trying to make the state’s burden of proof seem less onerous. She, of course, glossed over the lack of evidence implicating Lawrence in Bell’s death, instead treating the confession like an established fact. The jurors seemed to tune out as she droned on.
She ended on a note of attack. “You’ve heard Mr. Maxwell come into this courtroom and tell brazen lies. The only reason he can hope to get away with such lies is that most of those who would have contradicted him are dead, including Caroline Maxwell and Russell Bell. But his fingerprints are on the baseball bat. He has even tried to smear the character of one of this city’s elected officials, San Francisco city supervisor Eric Gainer. But you’ve heard no evidence that Eric Gainer had anything to do with the events at issue in this case, certainly not with the murder of Caroline Maxwell. Or was Eric Gainer the mysterious stranger who framed Mr. Maxwell for murder, then slipped away into the night?
“You’ve also heard Maxwell put words into the mouth of a dead man, Russell Bell, words so transparently cynical and self-serving that I’m astonished he could expect any
one to believe them. But the truth is that Mr. Maxwell confessed to Bell. Dead men do tell tales.
“It’s your job to see through the lies, to disregard the smear tactics, the distractions. This case isn’t about what happened two weeks ago, and it’s not about what happened two months ago. It’s about what happened twenty-one years ago, when the defendant, Lawrence Maxwell, brutally murdered his wife. He confessed to that crime when he thought he had little chance of ever being released from prison, and he had Russell Bell murdered to keep that confession from reaching your ears.
“All the rest is an attempt to distract you from the task at hand, to sensationalize this trial and turn the serious purpose of this court into a paranoid farce. You heard from the defense that the blood type of the man who left the semen in Caroline Maxwell’s body doesn’t match the blood type of Mr. Maxwell or of the man with whom Caroline was having an affair. You’ve also heard a lot of talk from Ms. Schuyler that Mrs. Maxwell was raped. But the defense presented not a single piece of evidence that this alleged rape in fact occurred. The only medical witness you heard from testified that the evidence of forced sex was, at best, inconclusive.
“The reason is that no rape occurred. Let’s put aside suppositions for which we have no evidence. The injuries noted in the medical examiner’s report were almost certainly left by Mr. Maxwell when he beat her to death. The most reasonable interpretation actually supported by the physical evidence is that before her death, Caroline had consensual sex with one of her lovers, then was beaten to death by her husband when he came home and discovered her in a state of undress, obviously postcoital, shortly after the man she’d been with had gone. ‘It was a terrible thing, but it had to be done.’ Unlike Mr. Maxwell, I don’t pass judgment on her.
“Put the conspiracy theories aside. Look at the facts and reach a true verdict. Mr. Maxwell murdered his wife. He’s guilty of first-degree murder. Caroline Maxwell has waited twenty-one years for justice, and you can give her that justice by swiftly returning a verdict of guilty on the first-degree murder charge against him.”
~ ~ ~
“Brazen,” Nina said thoughtfully a few minutes later, when she stood up. “That’s a good word for what you’ve just heard. Listening to the district attorney, I was reminded of a memory from my childhood. My father was a military man. He was a man who, like Gary Coles, no doubt believed that he was on the right side in every conflict, and that whatever tactics he used were justified because they were done in the name of justice and cloaked with the power of the state.”
I frowned, wondering where she was going. Normally I disapproved of lawyers telling personal anecdotes in closing statements. It never seemed to work, and always smacked to me of unpardonable vanity, drawing the jurors’ attention away from the issues at stake at the most crucial moment of the trial. Still, I’d come this far with Nina; I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Not that my father or I had any other choice. And I could see that the personal note resonated with one juror in particular, a young woman who’d told us during jury selection that she was a social worker. Nina’s eyes returned to this woman again and again.
“One day, we were on a drive in the country when our car ran out of gas. My father pulled to the side of the highway. My mother beside him, my brother and I in the backseat, each of us knew that it was not permitted to state that we’d run out of gas. Eventually my brother hitched a ride and came back with a jerry can, enough to get us to the nearest service station.”
Nina walked toward the prosecutor’s table and stood beside it, her voice taking on power and conviction, chasing my doubts away. “I look at this man, Detective Shanahan, and I see my father sitting with crossed arms, refusing to acknowledge that the wheels will not turn. Evidence is the gas that a criminal prosecution runs on. In this case, the tank is empty and it has been from the start. Just because Detective Shanahan has the power to accuse my client, that doesn’t make him a guilty man. We hold the state to its burden of proving criminal offenses beyond a reasonable doubt. When the car doesn’t run, we’re allowed to say so. We must.
“What evidence do they have? You heard the district attorney mention a baseball bat with my client’s fingerprints on the barrel. Who cares? It was his son’s bat, in his own house, an object that he’d probably touched a dozen times in the last month of his freedom, picking it up after the child had gone to bed, putting it back in its place in the closet. Who knows when those fingerprints were left? That’s not evidence of guilt, of murder. There’s no physical evidence other than what was hidden from the defense in the first trial, evidence showing that Caroline had been with another man before her death. Evidence that, if we had it today, could be subjected to DNA analysis, telling us the identity of the true killer. All we can know for certain today is that Caroline Maxwell’s murderer wasn’t her husband or her lover. The blood type of the person who left the semen doesn’t match theirs.
“It matches the blood type of Keith Locke, though. You didn’t hear from him, did you? The DA didn’t want to bring him into court.
“The DA now theorizes that it must have been a crime of passion, that my client must have killed his wife because he must have known she was having an affair and he must have known she’d been with another man that day. The DA skips over the state’s failure to produce evidence that my client knew of her affair, much less that he was there in the apartment that day. If he caught her with another man, where’s that man? He’s not dead on the floor, as you’d expect if my client were the vengeful, impassioned killer they’ve invented.
“And they have the temerity to accuse the defense of conjuring imaginary killers. Ms. Crowder went so far as to claim that the real killer didn’t leave a trace behind. Her words—you just heard her say it. A killer who didn’t leave a trace, none except for his semen in Caroline’s body, which is the evidence that Gary Coles wrongfully hid from the defense, evidence that was subsequently destroyed. Angela Crowder wants you to forget that such physical evidence existed. She wants to conjure up a mystery lover for which there is no evidence whatsoever. But doesn’t it make the most sense that the rapist who left his semen behind in Caroline Maxwell’s body was the person who killed her, that someone with that blood type is the person we’re looking for? It’s the only logical explanation, yet the prosecution refuses to consider it.
“People, this case broke down twenty-one years ago, and they’re still sitting behind the wheel with their arms crossed.” She looked squarely at the jury, waiting for this to sink in. Then she went on to discuss the confession, showing the jury just how little evidence there was that my father had killed Russell Bell.
“You heard my client tell you that this so-called confession was a lie told by Mr. Bell, that Bell panicked after realizing that he’d made at least one incriminating statement to Mr. Maxwell, and that my client was going to turn him in to the police. Detective Shanahan swallowed Bell’s lies, because they were exactly what he’d wanted to hear, coming exactly when he needed them. Those lies were what the detective knew he’d hear if he beat the bushes loudly enough.
“Mr. Maxwell’s guilty, Detective Shanahan wants you to believe, because the state couldn’t have made a mistake. Or perhaps because it would be too painful and embarrassing to admit that a mistake had been made. In his mind, it makes us weaker to admit that we were wrong. He’s like my father refusing to admit that he’d forgotten to fill the tank. I happen to think it makes us stronger to admit mistakes, even terrible mistakes like this one, a mistake that resulted in my client serving twenty-one years for a crime he didn’t commit.
“What a weak man my father was when he couldn’t bring himself to admit that he’d forgotten to fill the tank with gas. What a weak man Detective Shanahan must be, for refusing to face the obvious fact that Lawrence Maxwell should never have been convicted, should never have been charged again, that there was never evidence of guilt. Mr. Maxwell and I are asking you today to be strong for the re
st of us, to point out what should have been obvious from the start. The tank is out of gas. The car won’t go. Return a verdict of not guilty and end this ordeal for my client, his fiancée, and his sons.”
~ ~ ~
Crowder spent most of her rebuttal time on Lawrence’s confession and the evidence, scant though it was, that he’d murdered Bell, dwelling on the phone calls between them, even on Lawrence’s appearance at the funeral home. “His alibi, even if you believe it, is beside the point. We’re not saying he pulled the trigger. Remember what Bell told Detective Shanahan, that Maxwell had orchestrated reprisals before, that he had a network of associates who would do his bidding. Men who’d kill for him. And remember, also, that the only evidence of this supposed alibi comes from Mr. Maxwell’s fiancée, a woman with an obvious interest in the outcome.”
Next she focused again on the technical aspects of the jury instructions, a tactic often effective for the prosecution in straightforward cases, with the question of guilt already sewed up. Then, seeming to realize that she was losing the jurors’ attention. Crowder flipped forward in her notes, then set them aside and went on without them, speaking directly to the jury.
“Listening to Ms. Schuyler’s argument, you’d think that the state has maliciously set out to frame Lawrence Maxwell for the murder of his wife. But what motive does the state have to persecute an innocent man? He’s not innocent. He confessed to murder, and then he murdered the man to whom he had made that confession. Ask yourself, who in this courtroom has the most at stake? It’s not Detective Shanahan, and it’s not me. No matter what happens here, we get to go home tonight to our families, to our beds.
Fox is Framed Page 20
