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Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

Page 16

by Buffa, D. W.

"I've got a murder trial on my hands, and you want to talk about Peter Lorre?"

  "You've got a murder trial on your hands, and you want to talk about Napoleon?" he countered. "Instinct," he reminded me.

  "I didn't have time to think about it, but as soon as she denied it, I knew what she was doing and why. So I let her go all the way with it."

  "But you still haven't told me why you didn't ask her about what she had said to you."

  "I almost did. I almost said, 'Isn't it true, Ms. Maxfield, that just a few weeks ago you told me directly that you had in fact delivered the envelope to Travis Quentin and that you had lied about it to the grand jury?' "

  Horace nodded briskly. "Why didn't you? She would have denied it, but that would have put her in direct contradiction not just with Quentin's testimony but with you. The jury would then get to decide between her credibility and yours, not just between hers and a murderer's."

  "Perhaps I should have," I conceded, "but I decided to let Goodwin think he could still count on her. I don't think he knows she came to see me, and even if he does, I'm pretty sure he doesn't know what she told me."

  Settling back into the deep cushioned chair, Horace held the glass of scotch at eye level, examining the way the liquid swirled each time he rattled the ice. His eyebrows rose and a dubious smile appeared momentarily on his mouth. "You mean about the sex," he remarked, lifting the glass a little higher. "See the way these different shades of color form, twisting like threads? A long time ago, when a man had been with a woman he didn't know very well, the first thing he'd do when he got home was piss in a glass and then hold it up to the light—just like this—and watch it to see if anything like these threads started to form. It was the first sign of gonorrhea."

  "Thank you for sharing that, Horace," I said. "I may never drink scotch again," I added, as I got to my feet.

  He stopped laughing just long enough to finish what was left in the glass. "Why not? You didn't piss in it, did you?"

  It was time to change the subject. "Can I get you another drink?"

  "No, one's enough, thanks." He put the empty glass on the table next to the one I had left. "So, you're going to let it all play out and then recall her as a witness?"

  "Maybe," I said, moving around to the other side of the desk. I stood behind the chair, my arms resting on top of it. "Then again, I may not have to. Jones may call her first."

  Chuckling, Horace asked, "Tell me about him. What do you think about the great Richard Lee Jones?"

  "He's a fraud, but he's good. He talks to those people on the jury like they're important. He makes contact with each one of them, makes them feel unique."

  Shoving the chair away from me, I put both hands on top of the desk and stared at Horace, sitting in shadowed lamplight across the room. "He gives them the impression that he's on their side. When he was giving his opening, he never used the word 'you' when he was talking about what they were going to see and hear during the case. He always phrased things so that it came out 'we'. It wasn't 'You're going to hear from the State's witness, 'it was ' 'The State is going to try to tell us...' "

  "I never tried a case against him," Horace remarked. "I've watched him, though. I agree with what you said, but he goes too far with it. He tries to make everything 'us against them.' He gets away with it, because everybody is scared of him. The truth of it is, most judges don't know enough law to stand their ground when someone challenges them, and the only reason they're not challenged more often is because most lawyers don't have the guts to stand up to a judge."

  Struggling to get his legs under him, Horace finally managed to push himself up. "Maybe I will have another drink. Just half of one," he corrected himself. "What you really have going on out there," he observed, as I poured a little scotch into his glass, "are a bunch of weak-willed lawyers and feebleminded judges too scared of what they don't know to have any idea of what to do with someone who pretends he does."

  This formulation seemed to please him and he punctuated it with a short thrust of his head, as if to say, So there!

  I sat down in the desk chair and stretched out my legs as far as they would go. "I'm not sure ' "feebleminded' " is a word I would have thought to apply to your friend Irma Holloway."

  The studied severity on his expressive face shattered. Towering above me on the other side of the desk, he crowed, "Told you, didn't I? You imagine what it would have been like, being a kid in a class she taught?" With a visible shudder, he went on. "By the end of the year, you wouldn't be able to close your fingers around a pencil. She would have beaten your knuckles black and blue, made your hand stiff as a board."

  He almost seemed to regret that he had never had the opportunity. As he spoke about her, his gestures grew more animated and his voice seemed to rise several octaves in the scale. "She's just a mean old witch, isn't she?"

  He plopped himself happily into a chair he had picked up with one hand and moved to the side corner of the desk, excitement dancing in his eyes. "It's what white people forget," he explained. "They're always talking about black crime and black welfare and all the unwed black teenage mothers. Well, let me tell you something. Those same black mothers demand respect, and you better believe they get it. You ever see some black kid—tough, mean, like as kill you as look at you? Watch that little prick with his mother. 'Yes, Momma; no, Momma.' Show me a white woman gets as much respect."

  Horace kept talking, on and on, about black kids and white kids and anything else that entered his mind. When he finished the drink I had given him, I offered him another, and when he was through with that, he helped himself to the next one. "What about the trial?" he asked, interrupting his own monologue.

  I remembered something he had said when I first agreed to prosecute the case. "It is like war. Once it starts, the only thing you think about is how to win. And, you're right, Horace, when you've been away from it a while, you really do miss it."

  For a moment he searched my eyes. "Then you're sure he did it?" he asked finally.

  I had forgotten it had ever been a question. "He's guilty, Horace. I know it." Somewhere in the summer night a single cricket sang its lonely two-note song. A breeze kicked up, and the air whispered around us.

  Walking toward the open French doors, his shoes echoing on the gleaming hardwood floor, Horace stared into the night and shook his head, the way someone does who has resigned himself to things he cannot change.

  "Alma probably won't be home before midnight," he said, turning his head just far enough to see me. "From now till the end of summer. Damn near every night, there's something she has to do with the ballet." He glanced at his watch. "Didn't realize it was this late. I better go. You probably still have a lot to do."

  "Sit down. Don't go. There's nothing I have to do. I'm ready for tomorrow."

  He looked at me and scratched the back of his neck. "A few more minutes," he said quietly. He sat down again in the chair by the desk.

  "If you know he's guilty," he asked presently, "do you know why he did it?"

  I crossed one leg over the other and began to tap the edge of a gilded wastebasket with the heel of my loafer. "Remember when I told you the way Kristin described him?"

  Horace looked at me from under his brow. "You mean, how he took whatever he wanted and didn't care who it hurt?"

  "Exactly. And she liked that about him. A lot." I remembered the way she looked when she told me, as if she could still feel the thrill that had rippled through her. "That was all that mattered—what he wanted. He wanted her, and my guess is both of them wanted it all: money, power, fame. And to get it he did what he had to, or what he had the chance to do. And just like Travis Quentin, once he'd done it, he could forget about it."

  There was a trace of doubt in his eyes, a decent skepticism.

  "I think that's what happened, Horace. I think he just put it out of mind, as if he had done nothing more serious than get a divorce." I shrugged and shook my head, in silent commentary on what had become the widespread depravity of the world a
round us, before continuing. "We don't have any trouble believing it when someone like Travis Quentin murders and rapes. He doesn't have a conscience. He does what he wants when he wants, and never thinks about the consequences. It isn't that he doesn't understand the difference between right and wrong; he doesn't believe in the difference. He doesn't believe in anything.

  "We don't want to think someone like Marshall Goodwin, intelligent, well-educated, with a good job and a promising future, could be involved in a murder, but when you strip it all away he's just like Quentin. He doesn't believe in anything either, except the importance of having what he wants. And my guess is it's the same with Kristin." I paused, and then added, "They're not alone, are they."

  Waving at the stack of books lined up on the shelves, I tried to explain what I meant. "There's something Nietzsche wrote: 'The morning paper has replaced the morning prayer.' People used to believe in God, in a moral code that never changed; now no one believes in anything except that everything is always changing and nothing is always either right or wrong."

  Horace stared down at the floor. "Goodwin gave a speech last year at the bar association dinner. He was talking about making it more difficult for violent offenders to get out of prison. Then he described what had happened to his wife. He choked up. Everyone did." After a pause, Horace added, "It was one of the most emotional speeches I ever heard, and even now I don't think it was entirely fraudulent. It was worse than that. I think he separated the two things; put his own role in her death out of his mind completely. The only thing that was left, the only thing he still remembered, was that someone had murdered his wife. Maybe you're right, maybe he killed her because it was the easiest way to get a new start with a new woman and some money from a life insurance policy."

  He nodded and rubbed his chin. "But it's not true that no one believes in anything anymore. Some people still believe in things like honor and duty and telling the truth."

  A few minutes past midnight, I stood on the front porch and waved good-bye to him as he drove off. Under a cloudless sky, the headlights swept across the lawn as the car curved down the driveway to the entrance below. The iron gate closed behind him, and a faint echo sounded through the clear solitude of the night. I shut the front door and had just reached the library when the telephone rang. It was Alma.

  "I'm sorry to call so late, Joe, but I was a little worried." There was a slight pause, as if she was changing positions or trying to find the exact words she wanted to use. "Horace said he was going to drop by. Is he still there?"

  "He just left. He should be home in a few minutes."

  She sounded relieved. "That's good," she said in a subdued voice.

  "He said he didn't expect you home much before midnight. The ballet and all," I added.

  "Well, I'm sorry to call so late," she repeated with her customary pleasant little laugh. "I must sound like the worried wife trying to find her husband." Alma loved what she did, and Horace loved her too much not to want her to do it, but without her he never seemed to know what to do with himself, and I could not help but feel a little sorry for him. Sometimes love can be the loneliest thing of all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  With a cursory nod toward the jury, Irma Holloway sat down on the front edge of her tall leather chair. Inclining her head to the side, she held it in place with the tips of her fingers, and invited me to call the State's next witness.

  "The State calls Bernard Quimby." Balding, with a full round face and an odd tendency to blink nervously while he listened to a question and stare wide-eyed while he answered it, Quimby was with the insurance company that had paid the claim on Nancy Goodwin's life.

  Standing behind the counsel table, I took him through the inquiry needed to establish the monetary rewards for murder.

  "How much was the life of Nancy Goodwin insured for?"

  Staring across at the jury, Quimby replied, "A million dollars."

  "And who was the beneficiary of the policy?" I asked. His lashes beat rapidly, like the wings of a hummingbird. "Are you nervous?" I asked sympathetically, before he could answer.

  "No," he replied, with a tense shake of his head. "Well, yes, a little, I suppose," he conceded.

  "All right," I repeated, "who was the beneficiary?"

  Though it did not stop, the beating slowed."Well, actually that's a little complicated." He began to fidget with his thumbs. "You see, the policy was taken out on the lives of both Mrs. Goodwin and her husband." He hesitated, then cast a brief glance in the direction of the defendant. "The beneficiary was the child she was expecting," he added.

  I tried to help. "In other words, they took out the policy together, to provide insurance for the child in case something happened to them?"

  He looked up. "Yes," he said, "that's right. But you see, there were different contingencies. What happened if both died, if one died, if both of them and the child died." He went on, preparing an endless recitation of the infinite possibilities of insurable misfortunes.

  "Yes, I think we understand. Just tell us this. In the event as it happened—Nancy Goodwin and her unborn child both deceased—who was to get the money?"

  "Her husband," he answered.

  "You mean the defendant in this case, Marshall Goodwin?"

  He nodded. "Yes."

  "And was that money—one million dollars—paid to Marshall Goodwin?" I asked, turning toward the jury.

  "Our company prides itself on paying claims promptly."

  "How promptly did you pay this one?" I asked, barely moving my head.

  "I believe within thirty days of her death."

  The testimony of Bernard Quimby was the beginning of a long march through financial details that, taken together, supplied a motive for murder and helped corroborate the testimony of the killer. Bank statements, credit card receipts, and investment reports were all explained, authenticated, and entered into the record. It was a full accounting of two years' worth of expenditures that seemed lavish at the beginning and had become ordinary and routine at the end.

  Two weeks after the death of his wife, Goodwin traded in their two cars, an eight-year-old Chevrolet and a three-year-old Ford, on a new Jaguar. He sold the three-bedroom two-bath ranch style home in a suburban development where they had lived the last five years of their married life and leased a townhouse high on a hill on the western edge of the city. People deal with grief in their own way.

  They had waited nearly a year to marry, but Goodwin and Kristin had started making plans for their life together almost immediately. They acquired a secluded half acre with rock outcroppings, a stand of ancient fir trees, and a distant view of the nighttime lights of the city. The architect first visited the site three months after the murder. He remembered they were as excited as a pair of newlyweds, pestering him with questions about how long it would take to build.

  Designed for constant alteration, the house was a masterpiece of contemporary innovation. Enormous glass walls let in the changing light, and by the use of temporary partitions, the rooms inside could be expanded or diminished or made to disappear altogether whenever there was a desire for something different.

  Various charitable organizations had preserved copies of receipts that had been given to Goodwin for clothing he had given away, as he replaced one wardrobe with a much larger one. The closet in the master bedroom of his new house was nearly as big as the bedroom he had shared with his first wife in the old one.

  These revelations of Marshall Goodwin's self-indulgent excess were treated by his attorney with a show of indifference. Each exercise in cross-examination was a variation on a single theme. Stretching his hands far apart, Richard Lee Jones would bunch up his lips, narrow his eyes, and shake his head in endless bafflement.

  "So, what you're saying," he asked the architect, a slightly built man with a high forehead, a straight, thin nose, and intelligent blue eyes, "is that Mr. Goodwin commissioned you to design a new house. Is that about it?"

  "Yes, that's right," the architect replied, a
trace of uncertainty in his eyes as he tried to understand where this was going.

 

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