Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

by Buffa, D. W.

  Horace was watching me. "Maybe she's the motive," he suggested tentatively.

  I kept staring at her, reluctant to stop. "Kristin could be the motive for a lot of things," I acknowledged, looking away. "But all he had to do was get a divorce. Why have his wife murdered?"

  "For the money," Horace replied with a shrug, as he headed back to his desk.

  Lingering next to the photograph, my hands shoved into my pockets, I asked, "You ever notice anything about her? Anything about the two of them?"

  "Everybody noticed her." Horace snorted. "Tough not to. But between them? No. In fact, if I remember right, she was engaged to somebody."

  "Someone in the office?"

  "No one I knew. Actually, I don't think I ever met him," he remarked, his face turned up toward the light that fell from the window. "She was almost too good looking. You know what I mean? Most guys wouldn't think they had a chance with her. When word got around she was engaged, I'd bet you anything everybody just assumed it was some rich guy and once they were married she'd be gone."

  Crossing one foot in front of the other, I stared down at my shoes.

  "I almost asked her out once," I confessed.

  Horace laughed. "Why didn't you?"

  "I don't really know," I said, glancing up. "Maybe because she seemed just a little too sure of herself."

  "Maybe, when it came to her, you weren't so sure of yourself. I remember some of the women you've been with. Most of them weren't all that shy."

  "I had the feeling that with her everything was a game."

  "She may have gotten herself into a pretty dangerous game this time," Horace said, frowning.

  "Maybe she just thought she was delivering a packet of information to a witness," I suggested. "She was working for Marshall, remember."

  "It's possible," he replied, without conviction. With one last glance at her face in the framed group photograph, I walked back across the room. The clouds bunched together, and the glow that had burnished the side of Horace's dark face disappeared. Dim shadows enveloped the room, and the whites of his eyes seemed to hover, ghostlike, in the air.

  For a brief moment I had the strange, disquieting sense of being watched by someone I did not know. I started to sit down again and changed my mind. It was getting late and I had to go. "I need a little more time. There are some details I'd like the police to follow up on."

  The sun shot through again, and Horace turned toward the light, slowly rubbing the tips of his fingers back and forth against each other. "It might be too late," he said. "Gilliland-O'Rourke called late yesterday. I haven't returned it yet."

  As he motioned for me to sit down, Horace picked up the phone. "Why don't we find out what our old friend wants...

  "Gwendolyn!" he exclaimed, as if the sound of her voice was the best thing that had happened to him all day. "How nice of you to call. Should have called you back before this, but I've been in court all day, and you know how that goes."

  He pulled the telephone away from his ear and rolled his eyes."There's no reason for you to get so upset," he said, wincing. "There was no way they were going to take that chance... It wasn't a question of whether anyone trusted you.

  You have to understand—" His mouth still open, he looked at me and then, shaking his head, hung up the phone. "It's like I was saying, some things never change."

  "She was upset?"

  His head bobbed back and forth, his eyes filled with amusement. "Let's just say she was a little annoyed. Goodwin told her, two days ago, right after he had lunch with you. He had to."

  I had not thought about it, but as soon as Horace said it, I knew he was right. If Goodwin had waited until he was formally charged, it would have looked like he had tried to hide something. Whatever the reality, by going to her right away, he could keep up the appearance of outraged innocence. And now Gilliland-O'Rourke was outraged as well.

  I looked at Horace. "What do you think she's going to do?"

  With a caustic grin, he replied, "You know as well as I do what she's going to do. She's going to do something so far beyond the pale, something that after she does it is going to seem so obvious, we're going to wonder why we hadn't thought of it before. Right?"

  "There isn't anything she can do," I objected.

  With his eyes opened as wide as they would go, Horace looked at me and started to laugh. "You think?"

  It was nearly five o'clock and I was already late. I left the courthouse wondering what Gilliland-O'Rourke could really do, and by the time I arrived at the hotel I had almost convinced myself that she would try to turn things around by charging me with subornation of perjury in the murder trial of Leopold Rifkin.

  * * *

  Old habits die hard, and some habits do not die at all. I lived alone, but I had not yet acquired any serious interest in celibacy. In the year since Alexandra left me, I had begun to keep occasional company with a woman for whom sex was too exciting ever to be diluted by anything as generous as love. A tall, lanky blonde with a shallow chest, she once told me that from the time she entered college until the day she filed for her third divorce, she had slept with hundreds of different men and had found none of them entirely satisfactory. We used each other for pleasure, and because there were never any expectations, there were never any disappointments. We became, in our fashion, something more than casual acquaintances and something less than good friends.

  Lounging on the hotel bed, a sheet pulled up to my chest, I listened to the shower running in the bathroom. She came out with nothing on but a towel wrapped around her hair and sat down next to me.

  "I don't have long, Joe." A trace of some indefinable regret curved along her wide, full mouth, and she leaned toward me and gave me a perfunctory kiss. Perhaps because she had to go, I wanted her to stay.

  "We have the room. We could spend the night."

  She rolled forward on her hip until I was looking straight up into her brown lucent eyes. The scent of her breath reminded me of a girl I could not remember, someone I had known as a boy during a season of weekend evenings spent parked in a car. Her fingers touched my forehead and then my hair. "You'd really like to spend the night?" Her voice was a whisper.

  "We could have dinner... "

  She put her hand over my mouth and shook her head, her eyes full of teasing skepticism as she crawled next to me under the thin white sheet.

  We lost ourselves in the trancelike delirium of sex. When it was over I listened again to the sound of the shower, and as I watched her get dressed never thought about asking her to stay. She intrigued me with the way she moved—everything was accomplished with almost mechanical efficiency. She looked at me while she put on her clothes, her hands and legs in constant movement.

  "We could spend the night sometime," she said, as she buttoned her blouse. "But not tonight. I have a date."

  My hands locked behind my head, I asked, "Is it serious?"

  She turned away from me and, using the mirror above the small desk, started to put on her lipstick.

  "He wants to get married," she explained indifferently.

  "Is that what you want?"

  She snapped the cap back on top of the lipstick and then smacked her lips together. "I like being married," she said, as she wheeled around, as if presenting herself for inspection.

  "How do I look?" she asked, a doubtful expression on her face. She was attractive and I told her so.

  "You're sweet," she said, as she bent down and, careful not to smear her lipstick, gave me a kiss on the cheek. "Don't get up." She laughed as she moved away. When she got to the door, she looked back. "Call me next week?"

  After the door shut behind her, I lay there, staring at the ceiling, without energy, without desire, lost in a vast emptiness. After a while, I dragged myself off the bed and took a long, hot shower.

  Dressed, I tossed the room key on the small desk below the mirror and took one last look around. Crumpled pillows and wrinkled sheets covered the bed, and every towel in the bathroom had ended up on the
floor. The room reeked of sex. In two hours we had turned one of the most expensive hotel rooms in the city into a scene from a cheap motel.

  As I was leaving the hotel, I changed my mind and dropped in at the bar. It was small, with a few tables scattered along the wall. I sat down on a leather bar stool and ordered a scotch and soda. Through the glass window in front, lettered with the name of the bar, the blue and red neon lights from a movie theater down the street smeared the rain-slick pavement with their own reflection.

  At the far end, pictures flashed on a television set. Nursing my drink, I watched for a while, amused at the changing expression of the anchorwoman as she introduced each segmented story, all of them no doubt matters of great urgency and none of them lasting for more than twenty seconds.

  "Would you mind turning on the volume?" I asked the bartender suddenly. The district attorney was making a statement.

  "Sure," he replied, wiping a glass with a bar towel. Reaching up, he turned the set loud enough for me to hear what she was saying. Gwendolyn Gilliland-O'Rourke was getting older. The flame-red hair was turning to a brownish rust, and her green eyes no longer seemed quite so bright. But if she looked a little different, she still sounded the same. Standing just outside her office, the words OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY plainly visible, she read from a prepared text the announcement of an arrest.

  "After a lengthy investigation, conducted in the utmost secrecy by the state police, Marshall Goodwin, chief deputy district attorney of Multnomah County, has been arrested for the murder of his wife, Nancy Goodwin, a murder that took place two years ago.

  "At my direction," she went on, staring straight into the camera, "Mr. Goodwin was taken into custody this afternoon. Because Mr. Goodwin, who was first appointed by my predecessor, Judge Horace Woolner, has served as chief deputy district attorney, it has been decided that to avoid any suggestion of either favoritism on the one hand or undue severity on the other, a special prosecutor should be appointed to bring the State's case against the defendant. I am pleased to announce that the state will be represented by one of the preeminent defense lawyers in Oregon, Joseph Antonelli."

  The camera left her answering the questions of reporters and returned to the newsroom anchorwoman. "Marshall Goodwin, chief deputy district attorney, considered the logical choice to become district attorney next year when Gilliland-O'Rourke makes her expected bid to become the State's governor, has been arrested on a charge of murder. In a surprising twist, criminal defense attorney Joseph Antonelli will serve as the prosecutor in the case. We tried to contact Mr. Antonelli, but so far we have been unable to reach him."

  I got up from the bar and paid the bill. Outside, I turned my collar up and hunched my shoulders, trying to keep dry in the endless drizzle. Across the street, a few people were lining up at the box office of the theater. For a while, I walked aimlessly, marveling at my own stupidity. I could almost see Goodwin marching into Gilliland-O'Rourke's office to tell her he had just learned he was about to be charged with the murder of his wife. And I could see her, one of the most ruthless people I had ever known, giving him all the assurances of a friend and then, as soon as he was gone, making arrangements to have him arrested.

  I had wanted to see Marshall Goodwin's face when he first heard what Travis Quentin had said because I wanted to be sure that he was guilty. Instead, all I knew now was that I was about to prosecute a case against a man who might very well be innocent.

  Chapter Seven

  Like time itself, the law stops for no one. Whether it is a drunken vagrant charged with the theft of a cheap bottle of wine or a pillar of the legal community accused of murder, anyone who is arrested and taken into custody has to be brought into court within forty-eight hours. When a deputy sheriff escorted the prisoner to the counsel table to hear for the first time a formal statement of the charges that were being brought against him, Marshall Goodwin seemed more embarrassed by the way he was dressed. The expensive suits and understated ties, tapered shirts, and tasseled black shoes had been replaced with the shapeless V-neck blue denim top and baggy drawstring pants that made every inmate look the same.

  Goodwin did not want to look at anyone, and no one wanted to look at him. Only the monotonous uniformity of the law saved us from a painful silence.

  "Your Honor," I began, "my name is Joseph Antonelli. I am here in the capacity of a prosecutor under special appointment."

  Barely visible behind the bench, Judge Stanley Roberts, a diminutive man who regularly listened with apparent compassion to pleas for mercy before imposing sentences of remarkable severity, studied the file in front of him. The overhead lights glistened on the pale skin on the top of his balding head.

  He looked up. "I have the order of appointment. Please proceed." As soon as he said it, his eyes darted away.

  Though I had heard countless times before the civilized ritual by which the state declares war against one of its own, I had never been called upon to speak the words myself. "Your Honor, we are here in the matter of State versus Marshall Goodwin. He is being charged by way of an information with the crime of murder in the first degree. Let the record reflect that I am handing Mr. Goodwin's attorney a copy of the information."

  Goodwin had gotten one of the best, and if there were any who doubted how good he was, Richard Lee Jones was more than willing to tell them. Tall and square shouldered, he moved around a courtroom with flailing arms and flashing eyes, convinced that the sound of his voice could mesmerize any twelve people who had ever formed a jury. One of the last remaining practitioners of old-fashioned courthouse oratory, he seldom got ten minutes into his closing argument before his slick black hair would fall across the corner of his forehead, the way it did in the photograph of Clarence Darrow that he kept on his desk in La Grande, out on the high desert plains east of the Cascades.

  He held the document between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were a venomous thing. His mouth was irregular, settled permanently into a long sloping downward curve. A pair of snakeskin boots peeked out from under the cuffed trousers of a perfectly tailored three piece suit. Still clutching the paper in his fingers, he pulled his hand back to his hip and, his other hand on the table, bent forward at the waist.

  "For the record, I am Richard Lee Jones." Pausing, he turned his head toward me. "I'll be representing Mr. Goodwin in these proceedings."

  "Do you wish to enter a plea at this time?" inquired Judge Roberts.

  "Not guilty," he replied, his eyes still on me. "And we'll enter another plea of not guilty to the indictment," he went on, the faint outline of a smile on his mouth, "assuming of course that Mr. Antonelli here can get an indictment." Abruptly, he turned his gaze away from me and toward the bench.

  "Now, your Honor, Mr. Goodwin wants nothing more than to clear his name against this outrageous charge. And he can certainly do more to help in his own defense once he's out of custody. Respectfully, we ask that he be released on his own recognizance."

  "On a charge of murder, Mr. Jones?" asked the judge, raising an eyebrow. "Bail will be set in the amount of two hundred thousand dollars."

  Jones did not seem disappointed. He whispered a few words to his new client before a deputy sheriff put his hand on Goodwin's arm and led him away. Dropping the information into his tan leather briefcase, Jones snapped it shut and turned to go. He stopped just long enough to fix me with one last stare. "I'll have him out before the end of the day."

  Despite Richard Lee Jones, I got the indictment from the grand jury, though there were moments while they listened to the testimony of Travis Quentin when I wondered if I would. Gathered together in a dimly lit room on the top floor of the county courthouse, the members, most of them middle-aged or older, listened in silence as I elicited from the State's chief witness the story of the killing of Nancy Goodwin.

  Quentin sat on an armless wooden chair, weighted down by the heavy chains that twisted over his shoulders and around his legs. Two armed guards stood behind him. My place was at a small table direct
ly in front of him, less than ten feet away.