Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

by Buffa, D. W.

  "You murdered Nancy Goodwin two years ago, did you not?"

  His arms fastened behind him, Quentin lifted his head and turned it slightly to the side, so that, as was his habit, he was looking at me, one eye lined up behind the other. "Yeah," he grunted.

  "And what was the reason that you took her life?"

  His gaze drifted away and settled on one of the members of the grand jury, seated together on his left. "I was paid to," he explained, as his eye moved on to someone else.

  "How much were you paid?" I asked sharply, trying to draw his attention back to me.

  His head swung around. "Ten thousand."

  "That's not much for a human life, is it?" I asked sternly.

  "Not bad for an hour's work," he retorted.

  A chair squeaked against the linoleum floor as one juror shifted his weight around; another juror cleared his throat. I watched their faces, but there was no visible sign of shock or outrage or even disbelief. There was instead an almost tangible feeling of resentment, as if, recognizing there was no common bond of humanity that linked them to Quentin, they did not want to be reminded that someone like this was even a possibility.

  "And who paid you to murder Nancy Goodwin?" I asked finally.

  "Her husband, the district attorney."

  "You're referring to Marshall Goodwin, chief deputy district attorney for Multnomah County?"

  "Yeah, that's the guy," he answered. He raised his shackled wrists to his chest, where the chain went taut, and tried to maneuver the iron links to a different spot on his shoulder. "Couldn't you take these off? I'm not going anywhere," he remarked, nodding at the guards behind him.

  I ignored him. "How do you know he paid you?"

  He let his hands drop back into his lap, the chains rattling heavily against each other. Sullen-eyed, he stared at me and said nothing.

  "How do you know he paid you?" I repeated.

  Still, he said nothing. Pushing back from the table, I crossed my legs and let my hands dangle down along the sides of the chair. "We have all the time in the world, Mr. Quentin. Take as long as you like," I said quietly. "The chains won't get any lighter."

  "It hurts," he said, forcing his head toward his left shoulder.

  I looked at one of the guards and nodded. He lifted the chain on Quentin's shoulder and moved it a few inches toward his neck. For an instant, something like gratitude passed over his eyes.

  Again I repeated the question, and this time he answered. Methodically, one question at a time, we traced the formation of Marshall Goodwin's contract for murder.

  "And when you were released from the county jail, what happened then?"

  He described how he was handed a package—a large envelope—and what was inside it. I did not ask him anything about the woman who had given it to him.

  When I had asked my last question, I informed the grand jury foreman that I was finished with the witness. The foreman, a corpulent woman in her thirties with long black eyelashes, looked around.

  "Does anyone have any questions they would like to ask the witness?"

  It was as if she had suggested an obscene act. Everyone looked away. Finally, an elderly woman slowly raised her hand. I had noticed her earlier, nervously pressing her thin lips together, when Quentin had offered his caustic remark about the money he had made for the murder of Nancy Goodwin.

  "Mr. Quentin," she asked, a troubled look in her pale blue eyes, "I would like to know something. Do you feel any remorse about what you've done?"

  Quentin paid no attention to her while she asked her question. His eyes followed the movement of his thumbs as they circled back and forth along the chain draped around his waist. As soon as she was finished, his thumbs stopped moving and his head jerked up. His mouth was open, the words already formed, when he saw her, a frail old woman who could never threaten anyone. His mouth closed and, after a moment, he gazed down again at his hands, watching while his thumbs started back into motion.

  The two guards helped Quentin up from the wooden chair. As he shuffled his manacled feet along the floor, the chains that bent him over clanged against each other, a strange echo that seemed to come from somewhere deep underground. No one said a word until he was gone.

  It was a few minutes past eleven-thirty, and no one objected when it was suggested that we break for lunch before the next witness was called. When I stepped outside the courthouse, the air was clean and fresh, and the sky a cloudless blue. I was meeting Horace for lunch and I had plenty of time. Across the street from the courthouse, I sat on a green wooden bench and watched a squirrel dart across the grass, then suddenly stop and rise up on its haunches, an acorn clutched in its front paws, long whiskers bristling, and then scamper up the side of a twisted oak tree and out along a branch. On the other side of the walkway, a young woman rested her arms on her legs while she talked to a small boy who could only stand up by holding onto her knees.

  It was the first warm day of spring. I loosened my tie and took off my coat. The boy let go of his mother's knee, wobbled, and then collapsed, sitting down hard on his bottom. He had that look that only a child can have, wondering whether or not to cry. Beaming at him, his mother began to laugh, and an instant later he laughed too.

  Stretching my arm out along the back of the bench, I turned my face toward the sunlight and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I saw the child grip one of his mother's fingers in each of his outstretched hands and, marveling at his own accomplishment, lift first one foot and then the other. How easy it was to let life slip by. I was on the wrong side of fifty, had never married or had a child. During the long years of my ambition, when the only thing important was the next case and the next trial, I had just assumed, when I thought about it at all, that those things would take care of themselves.

  With growing confidence, the boy let go of his mother's fingers and started to take a step. To his astonishment, his little legs buckled and he found himself once again sitting on the pavement. This time he did not even think about crying. Rolling over onto his knees, he pushed himself up and rested his arms on his mother's legs, getting ready to try again.

  The park was beginning to fill up with people spending their lunch hour out of doors. My coat slung over my shoulder, I walked past the boy and his mother and wondered for just a moment what it would be like to have a wife and a child. "He'll be running in a week," I heard myself say.

  "Probably." She laughed. She had kind eyes and a pleasant smile, and the boy was so much the center of her universe that though she looked right at me, ten seconds later she could not have described anything about me.

  I found Horace waiting for me outside the restaurant. Dressed in a tan suit, a blue and white pinstripe shirt, a large bow tie, and a crumpled grey Irish walking hat, he looked more like a professor of English literature than someone who had spent most of his adult life in the coarsening atmosphere of the criminal courts.

  "You're late." He chuckled. "I figured once you were let loose in a grand jury you'd lose all sense of time.

  "Actually, we quit early. I've been sitting in the park. Nice suit," I added as we went inside and waited for a table.

  "Alma said she'd appreciate it if you didn't put a hole in this one," he said with a straight face. "She picked it out herself."

  "Whose idea was the bow tie?"

  He measured me through half-closed eyes. "You ever try to tie one of these damn things? It took me half the morning," he remarked with amazement, whether at how long it had taken or that he had been able to do it at all, I could not tell.

  We were led to a table on the side next to a window. Outside, the street was jammed with cars and the sidewalks filled with shoppers. Everyone had come downtown, afraid to wait for the next good day.

  "Alma buy all your clothes?"

  "No," he said firmly. "I buy them. She picks them out. You were just sitting in the park?"

  "How is Alma?"

  "Busy. That ballet company," he said, shaking his head. "Sometimes I think it's too much. B
ut she loves it. That's the important thing. What were you doing, just sitting in the park? Reading?"

  "No, nothing at all. I was just sitting there. I watched a young woman—a girl, really—playing with her son. Maybe a year old, just learning to walk. He'd take a step or two, then fall down seat first, then try again."

  Horace nodded. "Made you wish you had a normal life, right? Wife, kids, the whole thing, didn't it?"

  "Made me wonder what it would have been like."

  "Not too late, you know," he remarked casually, as the waiter approached. After we ordered, Horace leaned forward. "Tell me what it was like. You've never been in a grand jury before, have you?"

  "Once. Years ago. When I was starting out. I got called as a witness when I was doing court-appointed work. A client of mine didn't show up the day of his trial, so they charged him with failure to appear. They called me in, and the DA who was handling it asked me in front of the grand jury if I had informed my client of the date he was supposed to be in court."

  Horace was grinning. "Let me guess. You invoked the lawyer-client privilege?"

  "Yeah," I replied. "What did I know?"

  "They hold you in contempt?"

  "They tried," I said, with a shrug. "Rifkin saved me. He explained to the DA that contempt required a willful refusal to answer and that my refusal was not willful because it was obviously based on ignorance of what the privilege was meant to cover. And then he explained to me that it didn't prevent me from revealing whether my client knew when he was supposed to be in court. He suggested that I go back to the grand jury and tell them what I knew."

  "Sounds like Leopold. Only man I ever knew could tell you to your face you were a fool and have you thank him for it."

  We were almost finished with lunch when he finally asked the question I knew he had been wanting to ask for days.

  "It's your case, and you don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but why haven't you done anything about Kristin? Everybody in the DA's office is treating her like some kind of martyr. Gilliland-O'Rourke told her to take as much time off as she needed. They think she's a victim."

  I looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear. "Horace, I'm not sure they're not both innocent victims."

  He began to scratch a figure-eight into the tablecloth with his fork. "You're still not sure about Goodwin?" he asked, looking at me from under his lowered brow.

  "You were right. I made a mistake. I should never have talked to him. All I accomplished was to let Gilliland-O'Rourke force my hand."

  "You have enough for an indictment," Horace remarked, tapping the table with the fork.

  "Enough for an indictment, maybe even enough for a conviction, but not nearly enough to convince me I'm doing the right thing," I said, reproaching myself for what I had done. "There's nothing on her," I added in response to his question. "We'll see what she has to say this afternoon."

  "You're calling her as a witness?"

  "There are a few questions I thought I'd ask."

  * * *

  We left the restaurant and walked along the crowded sidewalk on our way back to the courthouse.

  "Alma wants to have you come to dinner," Horace reminded me. He put his arm around me and his enormous hand enveloped my shoulder, drawing me closer. Gesturing emphatically with his other hand, he insisted with a puckish grin that I really had no choice. "She wants to have a ' "few' " people over. You know what that means, don't you? I'm going to have about twelve thousand people milling around and they're all going to be talking about the ballet and the arts and all that kind of stuff, and I'm telling you, Antonelli, you just can't leave me alone with that crowd. So you have to come—as a favor to me."

  We were in front of the courthouse. Horace let his hand fall off my shoulder. "A week from Saturday night. You'll come, won't you?"

  Few things seemed to give him so much pleasure as lying about his motives to conceal his generosity. There were dozens of lawyers he could have found to serve as a special prosecutor, all of them eager for the chance to acquire the notoriety a case against a chief deputy district attorney would inevitably bring. He had asked me because he thought I needed to come back to the law and then thanked me for taking the case. And he knew I would never say no to Alma, so they invented occasions to bring me back into the world and made it sound as if I was doing them a favor.

  "I'll be there," I promised. "Thanks, Horace."

  "No," he said, looking at me with his deceitful eyes, "thank you. You saved me."

  We said good-bye at the elevator. "I forgot to mention it," I said as I stepped inside, "but, nice hat, Horace." As the door shut, he looked at me for a moment and then rolled his eyes, trying not to laugh.

  I made it back to the grand jury room right on time. We called our next witness. Confident and intelligent, shapely and infinitely desirable, Kristin Maxfield Goodwin sat down in the chair recently vacated by a rapist and a murderer, a look of amused impatience on her face.

  "I realize these are difficult circumstances, Mrs. Goodwin—"

  Her head, held high, tilted slightly higher. "Ms. Maxfield. I kept my maiden name. For professional purposes."

  "Of course. Then tell us, Ms. Maxfield—"

  "You realize, Mr. Antonelli," she interjected, her large eyes flashing, "that because Marshall Goodwin is my husband, the spousal privilege is at work here, and the privilege can be invoked by either spouse?"

  "Are you saying that your husband has invoked the privilege and directed you not to answer the questions of the grand jury?"

  She was careful. "I'm not saying anything, Mr. Antonelli. I'm only reminding you that the privilege exists."

  "It doesn't really matter," I remarked, as I got to my feet and moved to the side of the room opposite the assembled members of the grand jury. "The questions I have to ask all have to do with matters that took place before your marriage to Mr. Goodwin. As I'm sure I don't need to remind you, the spousal privilege applies only to conversations that take place during a marriage." I paused, and then added, "And not always to all of them." My shoulders against the wall, I folded my arms across my chest.

  "Tell us first, if you would, Ms. Maxfield, where you were the night Nancy Goodwin was murdered."

  "I spent most of that evening working in the district attorney's office—in the conference room—preparing for trial."

  "You were with Mr. Goodwin, correct?"

  "Yes. We were co-counsel."

  "Was this the first time you had served as his co-counsel, or was this something you had done rather frequently?"

  "We had worked together a number of times, usually in murder cases."

  "Did he seem any different that night? Anything seem to be bothering him?"

  "No, I don't remember anything. We worked until sometime close to midnight, and then we left."

  "Together?"

  "We left the building together, if that's what you mean."

  "No, that isn't what I mean," I said brusquely, and took a step toward her. "What I mean is: did you—the two of you—spend the night together?"

  With a withering glance, she declared, "We did not!"

  "Did you spend the night with anyone?"

  "Yes, I did."

  "With your fiance?"

  She searched my eyes. "Yes, that's correct."