Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

by Buffa, D. W.

  "And his name was?"

  She looked down at her lap and then, licking her lip, looked up. "Conrad. Conrad Atkinson."

  "About how long after the death of Nancy Goodwin did you end your engagement to Mr. Atkinson?"

  "Two or three months, I think."

  "And was this because you had become involved with Mr. Goodwin?"

  "No," she insisted. For the first time she looked away from me and toward the members of the grand jury. "I had worked with my husband—Marshall Goodwin—for several years. We had become very good friends, but there was nothing else between us. After his wife died—that was such an awful thing for him to go through—he needed all his friends. I spent as much time as I could, trying to help. It was only much later, after my engagement was broken off, after he had had time to get over the death of his wife, that we first began to go out. Until then, I don't think we had even had dinner together."

  "During the time you were working together, did he ever mention to you anything about Travis Quentin?" I moved back to the small table directly in front of her.

  "No," she replied, without hesitation.

  Draping one arm over the corner of the rickety metal chair, I sat back, crossed my legs, and swung my foot back and forth.

  "You ever laid eyes on Travis Quentin?" I asked, watching the pendulum-like movement of my shoe.

  "Not that I'm aware of."

  I looked up. "Not that you're aware of? Are you saying you didn't deliver to Travis Quentin a sealed manila envelope on the day he was released from the county jail?"

  If she had had more time to think about it she might have said, I remember being asked to deliver some legal documents to a potential witness who was just being released. Instead, with only an instant to make up her mind, she denied it.

  "No, I did not."

  I fixed her with an incredulous look and let her wonder how I had found out and how much more I knew.

  Chapter Eight

  Before night fell on the day of his first appearance, Marshall Goodwin posted bail and walked out of the county jail, not exactly a free man but free enough. He could go where he wished, so long as he did not leave the state, and he could do anything he liked except break the law. The only real limitation imposed by his release agreement was the obligation to maintain contact with his attorney and make his scheduled court appearances.

  Arraignment on the grand jury indictment had been scheduled for nine-thirty. When I arrived at nine-fifteen, the corridor outside was filled with television crews setting up their equipment. Inside the courtroom, where cameras were not allowed, dozens of carelessly dressed journalists filled the benches that during most criminal proceedings held a handful of spectators, if they held anyone at all.

  Right at nine-thirty, Judge Stanley Roberts entered from a door behind the bench and, arranging his robe, took his accustomed place. The subdued cough, the whispered word, the shuffle of feet sliding over the floor, the crinkling sound of a turned page in a reporter's notebook—everything came to a sudden final stop. "Good morning, gentlemen," he said, without expression. His gaze drifted briefly to the vacant chair between us. "Is there anything you would like to tell me, Mr. Jones?"

  "I'm sure Mr. Goodwin will be here any moment, your Honor," Jones replied, calm and confident.

  We waited like the members of a wedding, wondering if the bride had changed her mind. Standing at the counsel table, I held my hands in front of me and stared down at the floor while I used my thumb to push my shirt cuff above my wristwatch. On the bench, Stanley Roberts rested the side of his round head in the hollow of his hand and methodically tapped the end of a ballpoint pen against a legal pad: two quick beats, followed by a slight pause, and then two more, over and over again, like the sound of a human heart filling up the silence of a lonely life. Below him, the court reporter, hunched over her machine, reached down to rub her ankle while she stifled a yawn.

  The tapping stopped. Richard Lee Jones, both hands shoved down into his pants pockets, looked up, a raised eyebrow the only expression on his otherwise blank face.

  "I don't imagine you thought it necessary to impress upon your client the importance of punctuality?" Roberts asked, irritation written all over his small mouth.

  "I'm sure he'll be here, your Honor," Jones replied, evading a direct answer.

  Ominously, the two-beat tapping began again. A moment later, the judge glanced down at his watch. "We were scheduled to start at nine-thirty, Mr. Jones. It's now nine-forty. How much longer do you suggest we wait?"

  Any answer he gave would be wrong. In a gesture of uncertainty, Jones shook his head and lowered his eyes.

  "In that case, I think we have all waited long enough," Roberts announced. Just as he started to get up, the door at the back of the courtroom swung open. It was as if Goodwin had been waiting outside, determined to push things every bit as far as he could. Dressed in a dark blue suit and a red and gold striped tie, he strode up the aisle.

  "Sorry I'm late, your Honor," he said breezily, as he stood next to his attorney. "Traffic," he explained with a brash smile.

  Biting the inside of his lip, Roberts studied him. "How many times have you appeared in my court?"

  The averted eye, the downcast look, the hopeless aspect of the prisoner who stood, wretched and trembling, in the drab uniformity of oversize clothes, had vanished entirely. Dressed like a lawyer, he acted like the one we all remembered. With a jaunty grin, he replied, "Only once as an inmate, your Honor!"

  The anger in the judge's eyes abated. Whatever he might say, he was not going to do anything. Goodwin had won.

  "You know better than to be late," he said, while Goodwin nodded dutifully. "If it happens again, you might find yourself back in the county jail. And I'm sure you've had enough of that," he added.

  Chin up, Goodwin agreed. "I certainly have, your Honor."

  "All right, then," Roberts remarked, mollified. "Let's get to the business at hand. Mr. Antonelli?"

  "Your Honor, we are here once again in the case of State versus Marshall Goodwin. The grand jury has now returned an indictment charging Mr. Goodwin with the murder of Nancy Goodwin."

  Laconically, Jones extended his hand and announced that the defense would waive a formal reading of the indictment. I handed him the copy, and he put it face down on the table without looking at it.

  "The defense enters a plea of not guilty, your Honor, and requests that the case be set for jury trial."

  Roberts made the requisite notations in the court file. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Goodwin exchange a wink with the court clerk, a cheerful, kindhearted woman who had worked at the courthouse longer than most of the judges.

  Clearing his throat, Roberts put the file to the side and, leaning forward, folded his hands together. He had written something on a piece of paper. "It is a very serious matter when anyone is accused of a crime," he began to read, "especially one as serious as this. The defendant in this or any other case has the right— the absolute right, I might add—to a fair trial and to the presumption of innocence. The public, on the other hand, also has a right—the right to the impartial administration of justice. We have an obligation to avoid even the appearance of partiality. The defendant in this case holds a position of great public trust and in that position has worked on a daily basis with every judge in this county. For that reason, we have all agreed that someone from outside the county, someone from outside the judicial district, should preside from this point forward with all proceedings relating to this case, including, of course, the trial itself."

  With the court file under his arm, Roberts got to his feet. "As soon as a judge has been chosen, counsel will be informed."

  He started to turn away, then stopped. Looking directly at Goodwin, he said, "I trust it will not be inappropriate for me to say that I hope everything will come out the way it should."

  It would be difficult to invent a more neutral statement of goodwill.

  As slowly as I could, I gathered up the documents
I had brought with me and methodically placed them in the proper order inside the case file. When I was finished, I sat down and jotted some meaningless notes on a blank legal pad. I was killing time, waiting until Goodwin and his lawyer had left. As far as possible, I wanted to avoid the press, but I also wanted to see how Richard Lee Jones was going to try his case to the public.

  For more than a decade, Jones had given shameless self promotion a bad name. How much of what he said he really believed, and how much of it was a conscious attempt to attract attention, was a question that perhaps not even he could have answered. Like every young lawyer who has to start out on his own, Jones had taken every case he could get. It was his own unique achievement, from the first, to lose nearly every case he had. Juries hated him. He called witnesses for the prosecution liars and prosecutors negligent incompetents; he routinely accused the police of either losing evidence that would have helped the defense or manufacturing evidence that helped the state. Before he had tried a half-dozen cases, he was already famous for closing arguments that seemed to take longer than the trial itself.

  His record of consecutive losses might have continued to accumulate, had it not been for a remark by the district's only circuit court judge. One Monday afternoon, as the court was about to begin work on the criminal docket, the judge looked out over the courtroom. "Those of you who are here today to be arraigned on criminal charges are entitled to be represented by an attorney. If you can't afford an attorney, the court will appoint one. We have several fine attorneys in private practice who have made themselves available for that purpose. When your name is called, you'll come up here"—he nodded toward the long wooden table inside the bar—"and Mr. Davies, the district attorney, will recite the charges that have been brought against you. If you want to enter a plea of not guilty, if you want to go to trial, I'll appoint someone to represent you.

  "But if you decide you would like to plead guilty and get it over with, you still have a right to have a lawyer help you get the best deal possible. In that case, I'll appoint Mr. Jones over there," he said, tossing his head toward the side of the courtroom where young Richard Lee was sitting alone. "Mr. Jones, I can assure you, is about as good at making sure that the guilty get what they deserve as anyone I've ever seen."

  It was a story that Jones told about himself. Whether it was true or just part of the legend he had tried to create about himself, no one could deny that, from then on, Richard Lee Jones began to treat everyone with at least a formal show of respect. His string of losses stopped, and he began to win. But underneath it all, he never stopped believing that he could take any side and win any argument, and that if he lost it was only because someone had cheated.

  Everyone who had tried a case against him was willing to concede he was a very good trial attorney; Jones himself insisted he was the best there was. Everyone else was a pretender, a charlatan, a fool. In almost every trial followed by the national media, Richard Lee Jones would appear on camera and, with the solemn regret of a parent who has to reprove a recalcitrant child, offer his opinion that the lawyers in the case had failed to do their job.

  Closing the courtroom door quietly behind me, I moved as unobtrusively as I could along the outer edge of the crowd that swarmed around Jones and his client and his client's wife. Caught in the hot glare of the television lights, their three faces reflected all the self confidence of instant celebrity. They were the center of attention, and they knew it.

  As he listened to a reporter's question, Jones readied himself. "You ask me what kind of case the State has against my client? I'll tell you in a word: none. There is no case," he continued, rolling his head from side to side, as if he still could not understand how anyone could have done something so shameful as charge his client with murder. "A man confesses to the murder of Marshall Goodwin's wife, Nancy Goodwin. Does he make this confession because he can't live with himself anymore? Because of the guilt he feels for doing such a terrible thing? No. He confesses only after he's killed a few more people and he's trying to find a way to stay out of the gas chamber."

  Another reporter yelled out, "But he says Goodwin paid him to do it!"

  "He says a lot of things," Jones replied, with a dismissive wave of his hand. "If you were facing the death penalty, you'd probably get pretty inventive yourself. He's a confessed murderer, and there isn't any evidence of any sort to back up anything he said."

  The same reporter shot back, "If there isn't any evidence, how come your client has been indicted?"

  A knowing look creased Jones's closed mouth. "It's curious, isn't it," he said, with an expression that hinted darkly at something. "I mean, it's curious that with nothing else than the self-serving statement of a killer, they would think to bring a case against anyone, much less someone as respected as the chief deputy district attorney of the largest county in the state."

  Tilting his head, his eyes darted from one television camera to the next. "Now, I don't know why they did it. But isn't it a little strange that instead of turning this over to the present district attorney, the police went to a sitting circuit-court judge who just happens to be the former district attorney? I wouldn't want to suggest that there might be something political going on here, but it does seem a little odd, doesn't it?"

  "Are you saying that Judge Woolner is trying to get Gilliland-O'Rourke by charging her chief deputy with murder?" an anonymous voice shouted from somewhere deep within the densely packed throng of reporters.

  Jones denied any improper intention. "I can only recite the facts. I'll leave it to you to figure out what they mean."

  While Jones answered questions, I kept my eye on Kristin, watching the way she reacted to each thing that was said. She was the perfect audience, quick, responsive, sharing the mood of those around her before they knew themselves exactly how they felt. Holding her husband's hand, she gazed out over the crowd, laughing with everyone else at something Jones had just said. Then she saw me, and in a brief moment of uncertainty her laughter stopped.

  "If that's true," someone asked, directing the question to Goodwin, "why did the district attorney issue the order for your arrest?"

  Taking a half step forward, Marshall answered, "She was just doing her job. As soon as I learned I was going to be charged, I told her." He lowered his eyes, and then, wearing an even more serious expression, looked up and insisted it had been his idea. "I told the district attorney that the only way to preserve our reputation as a completely impartial office was to have me arrested herself. The last thing I wanted," he said, looking straight into the camera, "the last thing either of us wanted, was to have anyone think we play favorites among the people the law requires us to prosecute." He made it sound as if he had arrested himself.

  I had started to head down the corridor toward the door when someone whispered my name, and a hand grasped my arm. "Well, Antonelli, did you ever think you'd have a chance to try a case against the greatest lawyer the world has ever known?"

  With a round, smooth face, piercing black eyes, and a waistline that wobbled when he walked, Harper Bryce looked like a snowman beginning to melt. Folding up his reporter's notebook, he tucked it into the pocket of his sports jacket and put his pencil above his ear. "Haven't seen you in a while," he said, when I did not answer.

  We reached the door and stepped outside. "I haven't been around for a while."

  "Why did you come back?"

  I was careful. "It was time."

  He nodded as if the words meant something. "You want to tell me what's really going on with this thing? You don't want me to just write what that egomaniac just said, do you?" His voice was deep and fluid and came at you in short, abbreviated bursts, as if he threw out a few words at a time and then waited to see how they worked before he tried again.

  "Aren't all lawyers egomaniacs?" I asked. It was something he had once written.

  "That's right." He snorted. "Some more, some less."

  "Richard Lee Jones?"

  He laughed. "The common measure does not ap
ply."