by Buffa, D. W.
"I'm afraid I can't comment, either, Harper."
He had been around the courthouse too many years not to know what was going on. "You made him that offer, and he hasn't made up his mind?"
"What do you think happened, Harper? You were there through the whole trial. You take almost verbatim notes."
He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. "Remember the testimony of her former fiance? What was his name?"
"Atkinson," I reminded him. "Conrad Atkinson."
"Remember what he said? He was in love with Kristin Maxfield, but she wasn't in love with him. I think that was the reason he was in love with her, and I think that's the reason Goodwin was in love with her," he said.
"All right," I said. "And?"
"They both knew—with a woman like that you'd have to know—that they could never really have her, which made them want her even more, and that made them willing to do whatever they had to do to get her. You could see it on Atkinson's face when he testified, a sense of relief that he'd been saved from his own madness." He paused. "What I'm trying to say is, whether she knew what was inside that envelope or not, she's the reason Goodwin killed his wife."
I tried to make it sound like a casual observation, a chance remark. "What if it was the other way round? What if she knew what was inside the envelope because she put it there herself? What if Goodwin didn't know anything about it?"
Sitting immobile, he stared down at the floor, frowning. "Are you afraid you convicted the wrong one?" he asked, glancing up.
Looking out the rain-streaked windows, I watched the traffic crawl over the steel bridges. The door in the outer office opened. Helen was back from lunch. "Tell me something, Harper," I said, locking my fingers together behind my head as I leaned back in the chair. "You must have thought about becoming a lawyer at some point in your life. Why didn't you?"
He snorted. "Legal technicalities would have made me suicidal. Besides, they don't let you in law school if you haven't graduated from college."
"You didn't graduate?"
"I didn't go." His eyes rolled around his head. "And I didn't go because they won't let you in unless you graduate from high school first." He gave a shrug of nostalgia. "I was sixteen years old, a little on the precocious side, certain I knew everything worth knowing. I got a job on a small-town weekly and worked my way up from there. Couldn't do it today. Nobody would take a chance on a kid."
Helen stuck her head inside the door. "Good afternoon, Mr. Bryce," she said, flashing a smile at Harper. "Can I get you anything?"
Harper shook his head. "No, thank you. I need to get going."
"It's no trouble," she assured him.
Reluctantly, he declined again. She turned to go, and then, almost as an afterthought, glanced back and said to me, "Don't forget, you have someone at one-thirty."
With an effort, Harper got up from the chair. "Thank you for your time, counselor," he remarked. "It's always a pleasure."
As soon as he was gone, I said to Helen, "I didn't know I had a one-thirty appointment."
Holding the door with one hand, she put her other hand on her hip. "You don't. You have a two o'clock at the other end of town. I wasn't sure you'd want Mr. Bryce to know about it."
"Mr. Bryce. You never called any of my clients mister."
"Why would I? They were all crooks." She thought of something. "I always called Judge Rifkin Judge Rifkin. And," she added soberly, "I always say Mrs. Woolner."
The investment banking offices of Conrad Atkinson occupied the top floor of a high-rise building on the other side of the river. Several pairs of serious men in dark pinstripe suits moved in different directions across the high-ceilinged lobby, engaged in the intense whispered conversations of high finance. A slender brunette rose from behind the reception desk and with an abbreviated smile led me down a windowless corridor to a glass-walled office.
It was Atkinson's firm, and he dressed the way he wanted. I could imagine that he always wore a suit to a business meeting and never to the office. He was dressed instead in a double-breasted blue blazer, with a white button-down oxford shirt and a muted yellow silk tie. He had on a pair of oxblood loafers, not the tasseled ones that lawyers often wore to court but the old-fashioned kind, the penny loafers high school kids used to wear, the kind worn by middle-aged men who had gone to prep school, men who played tennis at places with ivy-covered fences and then cooled off with a gin and tonic in dark paneled rooms where everyone knew each other by their first names and no one had to explain the rules.
Atkinson looked as tanned and well rested as someone on a summer vacation. When I commented on it, he explained that he had just returned from a week in Barbados.
"By the way, congratulations," he said, looking at me from behind his glass-topped desk. He sat with one leg crossed casually across the other, swinging his foot back and forth. "It was good you put away that bastard, Goodwin. Even better that you did it with that baboon, Richard Lee Jones, defending him."
"Jones is good."
"I'm sure he is," Atkinson replied, glancing away.
"You handled yourself well with him," I said, remembering the way Jones had tried to bully him.
With an appreciative nod, he swung around and faced me directly. "What can I do for you, Mr. Antonelli?"
"Russell Gray once told me the two of you were good friends. What can you tell me about him?"
His brownish-blond eyebrows shot up. "We knew each other, that's true, but I couldn't honestly tell you we were good friends. In the first place, when you were dealing with Russell, it wasn't always easy to know what was true and what wasn't. He had a remarkable facility for creating rumors about himself.
Pulling himself away from the desk, Atkinson settled back against the upholstered chair and rested his hands in his lap. "Russell was a collector."
"A collector?"
"Yes. Art, among other things," he added vaguely. "He probably had the largest private collection in the city. He certainly made that claim. You couldn't have a conversation with him without hearing about his latest acquisition." He looked down at his hands. "But there were always rumors," he remarked, raising his eyes. "Rumors that some of the things he had were really nothing more than very good forgeries, and that he knew it. That some of the things he had were unquestionably authentic and enormously valuable, but almost certainly stolen. Russell knew what the rumors were and would never deny any of them."
"Perhaps he couldn't," I suggested.
"I don't believe that," Atkinson said. "I don't think any of the rumors were true at all. I think most of them were started by Russell himself. You see, Mr. Antonelli, I believe he wanted there to be a sense of mystery around him."
"What else did he collect besides art?"
"He liked women," he replied.
"What about men?"
He frowned, not because he regarded the suggestion as unseemly but because, as he explained, he simply did not know. "That might have been another rumor Russell started about himself. On the other hand," he observed, with studied indifference, "it might have been true."
"What about the women? Was there anyone in particular?"
"No, I don't think so. With Russell, everything was always temporary."
"Did he ever talk about Alma Woolner?" I asked.
His easy affability faded away, and he became serious. "He thought she was one of the most gifted and talented people he had ever met. And he felt sorry for her."
"He felt sorry for her? Why?"
"Why do you think?" he asked. "She's gorgeous and gifted and so light-skinned that people who meet her think she must be Indian or Egyptian or something else exotic, and look who she married," he explained, his voice trailing off as he refused to put into words the thought he was sure I would understand.
"Yes?" I prompted.
"Let's just say someone who doesn't quite fit in with the kind of people who can really appreciate someone like her."
"And is that because he's a judge who makes less money in a
year than most of your friends make in a week, or is it because he walks funny—having your legs blown off will do that to you—or is it just because Horace Woolner is so damn black?"
"That isn't the way I feel," he hastened to assure me. "But there are people, and Russell Gray was one of them, who still have those prejudices."
"Was he having an affair with her?" I asked him pointblank.
It caught him off guard. "I don't know," he said tentatively. "They were together quite a lot. But she ran the ballet company and he was chairman of the board, so there wouldn't have been anything unusual in that."
"There's something else, though, isn't there?"
His arms rested on top of the glass desk and he stared at his two thumbs, pressed tight together. The lines in his forehead deepened. "It's nothing more than an impression. It just seemed to me that whenever she was around him, she seemed completely consumed by him."
"Do you think Gray was in love with her?"
He threw me a glance that told me I understood nothing at all. "I told you. He was a collector. If he was ever in love with her, it would not have been for very long. But again," he added, "I don't know whether anything ever happened between them or not. And even if it did, I don't see what it could have to do with his murder."
"It could supply a motive," I suggested.
He dismissed it out of hand. "It's easier for me to believe that Kristin was planning a murder with Goodwin while she was living with me than that Alma Woolner had anything to do with the death of Russell Gray."
That reminded me. "Marshall Goodwin is going to be sentenced tomorrow morning," I told him.
"Yes, I know," he replied, treating it as a matter of no importance. "Let me tell you about Kristin. I answered the questions you asked me at trial, but there were other questions you could have asked. I told you I didn't think she was in love with me. I didn't tell you that my lawyer insisted she sign a prenuptial agreement—and she refused."
He stroked his chin, lost for a moment in his thoughts. "She didn't do too badly as it was," he observed, a wry expression on his face. "I'd given her a lot of jewelry. She took that, of course. She also took the Mercedes. I hadn't given her that. She even had the temerity to ask me for money."
As I got up to leave, I thought of something. "If you don't think Alma could have done it, is there anybody you can think of who might have?"
With a lithe step, Atkinson moved around the desk and walked me to the door. "No, not really." Grasping the door handle, he gazed down at the carpet as if he was trying to decide how far to go. "Despite what he told you," he said, looking up, "we weren't that close. His best friend was Arthur O'Rourke."
I should have thought of it before. Russell Gray, Conrad Atkinson, Arthur O'Rourke: they were all part of the same circle, people with the kind of money that made a difference in whether something important got done. I could still see Arthur O'Rourke, with his gray candid eyes and friendly patrician manner, telling me, as if it was something he would have loved to do himself, how much he admired those who battled things out in courtroom disputes.
They all had that—Russell Gray and Arthur O'Rourke and Conrad Atkinson, too, for that matter— the self-deprecating manner by which they let you believe that whatever you did was far more interesting than anything they had done or could ever do. They left you with the feeling that they wanted to know everything about you, and only later did you realize that they never revealed anything about themselves.
Perhaps it was this very insistence on privacy that had drawn Kristin Maxfield away from Conrad Atkinson and toward Marshall Goodwin. Kristin loved money, but she loved something else more, and whether it was excitement or power, it required a kind of publicity that no one in that circle would have allowed.
Kristin's now-notorious husband had more important things on his mind the next morning, when I sat down across from him at a small table in a windowless conference room. Silent and morose, he sank back against the armless metal chair, glaring at me while his lawyer patted his arm.
"He isn't going to take the deal," Richard Lee Jones said gruffly. "We'll win on appeal." He tilted his chair back and put one foot against the edge of the table. He was wearing his expensive boots. We were going into court for sentencing and the jury box would be empty.
"But only one of you will be waiting on death row to find out," I snapped.
"I'll take my chances," Goodwin said. "I really don't have any choice," he added, when our eyes met.
"You can agree to testify that Kristin knew what was in that envelope she delivered to Quentin," I reminded him. "You'll get a life sentence and a chance to get parole someday."
He was not wearing any of the tailored suits and hundred-dollar ties he had worn to court as a defendant; he was dressed like every other inmate of the county jail.
"I can't tell you anything about Kristin because there isn't anything to tell," he insisted. "I didn't do it; I didn't hire Quentin; I didn't have anything to do with killing my wife."
I searched his eyes, trying to find something that would tell me if what he said might possibly be true.
"If you didn't give that envelope to Kristin, that means she did it on her own."
He shook his head.
Getting to my feet, I put my hands on the back of the folding chair and looked down at him. "In a few minutes you're going in there," I said, nodding toward the courtroom next door, "and you're going to be sentenced to death. And while you sit there on death row, waiting year after year while your lawyer files one appeal after another until he's exhausted every legal argument to save your life, Kristin is going to be living in your house, driving your car, spending whatever is left of the million dollars you got for the death of your wife and your unborn child."
I bent forward and fixed him with a cold stare. "And I'll be very surprised if she spends any more time mourning you than you spent mourning Nancy."
Goodwin shot to his feet, knocking over his chair. "You don't know what you're talking about!"
Grabbing his shoulders, Jones held him back and motioned for me to leave. "We don't have anything more to talk about," he said.
The crowd that had waited for the verdict was not there for the sentencing. Less than a dozen people were scattered along the gleaming wood benches. The ubiquitous Harper Bryce sat alone, jotting something in his ink stained notebook. Kristin Maxfield sat in the back of the courtroom, the same place she had occupied throughout the trial. When Goodwin, handcuffed and shackled, was brought into court, his eye sought her out. He seemed to draw encouragement from her affectionate glance.
Solemn and aloof, Irma Holloway peered down from the bench. "Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?" she asked tersely.
Goodwin's head jolted up. "Your Honor, I swear to you, I did not have anything to do with the murder of my wife."
The judge's eyes stayed on his. "If that is true, Mr. Goodwin, then a serious miscarriage of justice has taken place. However," she went on, "you were found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a jury that considered all the evidence presented during your trial." Pausing for just a moment, she narrowed her eyes. "It is a verdict fully supported by the evidence, a verdict which, had this case been tried to the court alone, I would have reached myself."
Lowering his eyes, Goodwin stared down at the floor and did not look up while Irma Holloway sentenced him to death.
"My only regret," she said sternly, "is that Oregon law does not provide a penalty for the death of an unborn fetus. As far as I'm concerned, you're guilty of two murders, not just one." And rising from the bench, she disappeared through the door behind the bench.
