Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

by Buffa, D. W.

  "I thought you were a little young for me," I lied.

  It was as if she had known what I was going to say before I said it. Her smile did not change, not by so much as a fraction of an inch, but there was now a touch of cynicism about it, the silent mockery of my ill-disguised duplicity. "I was older than Alexandra."

  "What do you know about Alexandra?"

  "Only what they say."

  "And what do they say?" I asked quietly, determined not to look away.

  "That you were in love with her, and that she left you."

  There was neither a trace of sympathy nor a hint of understanding in her voice. She was describing something that could never have happened to her.

  "And what about you? You were engaged to one man but you broke it off to marry another. He must have been in love with you, and you left him."

  For the first time, she laughed out loud. "Oh, I don't think he was really in love with me, not the way I think you were in love with her. No," she went on, her laughter fading away, "I don't think anyone has ever been in love with me the way you were in love with Alexandra. No one I ever left moved into a monastery."

  "Please. I just decided it was time to do something else. I stopped practicing law and spent a year reading the kind of things I'd never really had time for. It isn't that extraordinary, you know. A lot of people, when they get to a certain age, take a sabbatical, try to look at things from a different angle." I caught myself. It had been a long time since I had been in the presence of a woman who looked at me as if the only thing she wanted was to listen to whatever I would tell her about myself. "I took a year off. And now I'm back."

  "As a prosecutor."

  "Yes, exactly," I said abruptly. I sat straight up in the chair. "Which is of course the reason you came to see me." In the silence of the room the echo of my voice came back to me, taunting me with the pretentious sound of my awkward formality.

  "Yes, of course," she agreed, a cryptic smile on her mouth. She lowered her eyes. When she looked up again, the smile was still there, but fainter than before. "Do you know what first attracted me to Marshall? His ambition. I don't mean his desire to succeed. I mean how remarkably self-absorbed, how utterly selfish he was."

  "He masks it rather well," I remarked, watching the way she moved her head just a little from one side to the other each time she paused for breath.

  "Marshall acts like he's everyone's best friend. But he only does that because he wants to be admired," she said. "And he wants to be admired," she added with a mocking glance, "because he thinks he's the most admirable person he's ever known. I can assure you, Joseph Antonelli, that Marshall is his own favorite subject. He seldom talks about anything else."

  She saw I was not entirely convinced. "The first time I ever had dinner with him—we barely knew each other—he told me he was going to be governor. I think he said that before we even ordered. And he said it as if he was certain I would consider it just about the least surprising thing I'd ever heard."

  "Did Gilliland-O'Rourke know her chief deputy wanted the same thing she did?"

  "He wouldn't have cared. That's what I found so attractive about him. He didn't care about anyone except himself. Everyone else was simply someone to use."

  I was watching her, trying to understand what she wanted.

  "Does that surprise you, Antonelli? That I liked that about him? That he went after what he wanted and didn't give a second thought to who it might hurt?" She looked at me, waiting for me to answer, daring me to follow her to a place where convention had no meaning and the rules were whatever you wanted them to be."I thought you were like that," she said, softening her glance. "When we first met. I still think you're like that."

  Picking up my fountain pen from the desk, I held it at both ends and began to roll it back and forth in my fingers. "You think I'm like your husband?"

  A flash of disapproval shot through her eyes. "That isn't what I said."

  I watched the barrel of the pen spin first one way and then the other. "I heard what you said. Maybe you're right about me, or rather maybe you were right about what I was like then. Maybe you're still right," I said, with a shrug. "But it doesn't really make much difference, does it?"

  "It might," she said cryptically. "It sort of depends on what you want, doesn't it?"

  I put down the pen and looked at her. "No, it really depends on what you want. Now, why don't you tell me what that is? What do you want, Kristin?"

  "I don't want to be indicted for something I had nothing to do with," she said emphatically.

  Leaning back, my elbows on the arms of the chair, I spread my fingers apart and pressed the tips of both index fingers against my mouth."Okay," I said finally, "it's a deal."

  "A deal?"

  "Yes. You tell me everything you know, and everything you did, and you won't be indicted. And you can start by telling me you delivered that envelope to Travis Quentin."

  "All right. I did that. Marshall told me Quentin had agreed to testify in a drug case. The envelope was supposed to contain a copy of some of the police reports, the ones that covered people Quentin knew something about."

  "Why did he ask you to do it, instead of the police department?"

  "He said the fewer people who knew Quentin might be a State's witness the better. You have to remember, I was basically Marshall's assistant. If someone had to go get a police report, or interview a witness, or look up a citation, I was it. There wasn't anything unusual in what he asked me to do."

  "If that's all there was to it, why did you lie to the grand jury?"

  Reaching into her purse, she removed the cigarette case. Pensively, she took out a cigarette and tapped it against the cover after she snapped it shut. As she lit it, she slipped the case back into her purse. "I had to protect my husband," she said, following with her eyes the ribbon of smoke that curled up from the cigarette. She took one long drag and then, with a twisting action of her hand, crushed it out.

  "There wasn't anything going on between the two of you then?"

  She looked up from the crumpled cigarette, lying next to the other one like two broken bodies.

  "No," she said firmly. "He wanted there to be, but I was engaged to someone else."

  She lied to protect her husband, and she would not sleep with one man while she was involved with another. For a moment we just sat there, sharing the solitude of two people who understood the truth hovering behind her lie.

  "When did it start? You and Marshall?"

  "That night," she said, watching me with a strange intensity. "The night his wife was away. The night she was murdered."

  She had lied twice to the grand jury. I got up and walked past her to the window. In the street below, strangers crowded together in the aimless order of circumstance, hurrying home. I could sense her turning around in her chair, watching me from across the room. My eye still on the passing scene, I said quietly, "When you were engaged to someone else."

  Unhurried, her words drifted across, filling up the space between us. "Yes, but by then I knew it was over between us. What happened with Marshall had nothing to do with it." She had been trained to make distinctions and to use them to her advantage.

  "And the reason you lied to the grand jury about that?"

  When she did not answer, I looked back over my shoulder. She was sitting sideways on the front edge of the chair, one leg crossed over the other, the hem of her skirt halfway up her thigh.

  "I didn't lie," she said simply. "I didn't spend the night with him."

  "But you said you spent the night with... " I knew the answer before I reached the end of the question. "I see. You were with Marshall, and then you spent the night with your fiance"

  I turned away and watched the thinning crowd below. "Where?" I asked after a while.

  "Does it matter?" She laughed quietly.

  "It might."

  "In the parking structure. In the back seat of his car."

  The lights were getting dim, and the dwindling crowd cast shado
ws in the street.

  "So while Travis Quentin was raping his wife, Marshall Goodwin was with you, in the back seat of his car." I turned around and faced her directly. "Tell me, do you think the timing was accidental?"

  Her eyes never left me. "How would I know that?"

  "One way is if you were certain your husband had nothing to do with her murder. Because if he didn't, he wouldn't have had any idea what was happening to her in a motel room a hundred miles away while he was so engaged with you, would he?"

  Moving away from the window, I stood right next to her. "Don't you believe in your husband's innocence?"

  Her head was tilted back as she looked up at me. "He says he didn't do it," she replied evenly.

  "Do you believe him?"

  "I'm his wife," she said, without emotion.

  "So was Nancy Goodwin," I said. I went back to my chair and glanced at the clock on the corner of the desk. "It's getting late. You probably have to go."

  "No," she said, shaking her head, "I don't. I can stay as long as you want. We could have dinner, if you like."

  "That's probably not a great idea," I replied. "There's just a few more things I'd like to know. Why that night? Nothing had gone on between you before. What happened? Or had you been falling in love with him for a long time?"

  "Love? I told you I was attracted to him. I liked the way he took what he wanted. That night he told me he wanted me."

  "Did it bother you that he was married?"

  She almost laughed. "Was it supposed to?" Beautiful and cold, sensual and elusive. For much of my life I had found women like this fascinating and irresistible.

  "How did you feel? When you found out that you had been making love with him while his wife was being murdered?"

  "I never really thought about it," she replied, in a voice that betrayed a certain impatience. "I really don't see what any of this has to do with anything. I've admitted I slept with him."

  "Yes, while you were still engaged. What was his name again—your fiance?"

  "Conrad Atkinson."

  "Were you in love with him?"

  "Conrad was charming. Very good-looking," she added. "And very intelligent."

  "You didn't answer my question," I reminded her, following the movement of the fountain pen I had begun to push back and forth again. "Did you love him?"

  It was nearly dark outside, and the lamplight seemed to draw everything together until the only things visible were the desk, the chair, and the blue Persian rug.

  Her voice was smooth. "Whether I was in love with Conrad Atkinson—or, for that matter, anyone else—is quite frankly none of your business."

  I brought the fountain pen to a stop and looked up. Everything about her was of a piece: the defiant independence, the belligerent smile, the taunting self-certainty about what she would do and what she would not.

  Pushing away from the desk, I stared hard at her. "None of my business? You lied to the grand jury. You were under oath and you lied. Now you come here and tell me that you don't want to be indicted for something you didn't do. And then you tell me, when I ask you whether you were in love with the man you were engaged to marry, that it's quite frankly none of my business."

  "It doesn't have anything to do with what you need to know," she insisted.

  "I'll decide what I need to know! I already know what happened. I want to know why. I want to know why Nancy Goodwin was killed! I want to know why your husband had her killed!"

  "I don't know anything beyond what I've told you," she replied calmly. "I delivered an envelope to Travis Quentin when he was released from jail, but I didn't know what was in it. I became physically involved with Marshall the night his wife was killed, but I didn't know she was dead until I heard about it the next day, when they brought the news to him while we were in court."

  She knew more than that. I shot out of the chair. "And when was the next time?"

  "The next time?"

  "Yes. The next time you were together. How long after she was dead?"

  She did not have an answer she wanted to give. Her mouth opened and closed. She looked at me, without expression, waiting for me to ask her something else.

  I was leaning forward as far as I could go, resting my weight on my hands. "Was it the next night? The night after that?"

  Whatever debate had been going on within her, she spoke as if there were nothing out of the ordinary about what had happened. "He told me he didn't want to be alone."

  I waited for the rest, but that was all she said.

  "When did he tell you that?"

  Her eyes were fixed on mine. "The day of the funeral. The day they buried his wife. That night."

  My head dropped between my shoulders and I stared down at the dark blank surface of the desk, feeling sorrier for Nancy Goodwin than I may ever have felt for anyone in my life. A wave of fatigue rolled over me, and I sank down into the chair, pressing the bridge of my nose.

  "I thought he was lonely," I heard her say.

  It seemed strange. The thought that Marshall Goodwin had been having sex with another woman while someone he had hired was killing his wife had not bothered me nearly so much as the knowledge that he did it all over again the day she was buried. Was it because what he had done in the back seat of his car had become a part of the overall brutality of the murder, while the second time seemed like a gratuitous obscenity? There was a difference between murder and desecration.

  "You thought he was lonely," I said, opening my eyes. "Do you think a jury will think that? Or do you think they'll decide that anyone so indifferent to his own wife's death is likely to have had some involvement in her murder?"

  Chapter Ten

  She floated from one guest to another, weaving her way across the crowded living room, her eyes settling for a moment on each person with whom she stopped to exchange a word, a laugh, a smile. Finally, Alma was standing in front of me. She said something I could not hear. Laughing, she repeated it, but her words were lost in the noise around us. She rose up on her toes, slipped her thin arm around my neck, and kissed the side of my face.

  "In the kitchen!" she shouted into my ear. Her hand fell away, coming to rest on my shoulder, as she searched my eyes to see if I understood. As I nodded helplessly, she stepped back, her fingers sweeping along my coat sleeve until they reached my hand. She squeezed it and then, letting go, moved back into the crowd.

  On the other side of the dining room, empty of furniture except for the table, moved up against the wall, a woman carrying a tray stacked with platters of steaming food shouldered her way through a swinging door. She put everything down, arranging each dish, and went back for more.

  Horace was standing over the stove, an enormous gas range with a stainless steel hood that towered up to the ceiling. Groaning, he scraped another load of chicken wings from the grill and, with a cautionary look, handed the hot pan to the woman I had seen earlier.

  As soon as he saw me, he set down his metal tongs and shook my hand. The perspiration that streaked his face had run down his neck and soaked his shirt collar. Laughing, he gathered up the ends of the white chef's apron he was wearing and used it to wipe his eyes.

  "I didn't know you could cook, Horace," I said, as he reached for a half-full bottle of beer on the counter next to the range.

  His eyes stayed on me while he drank. With a loud sigh, he put down the empty bottle."Cook, sew, I have all the domestic virtues," he remarked with a wry grin. He nodded toward the dishwasher, which was already humming with its first load. "I learned a long time ago to stay ahead of the game," he explained.