by D. W. Buffa
I paused and, with both hands on the railing, leaned forward and searched the eyes of the jurors.
“When you hear him testify, you’re going to think the same thing. He talks funny. His speech isn’t always clear. Some of the words seem to take forever. He rolls his eyes and his mouth sometimes sags at the corner. I have even seen him drool a little.”
I spun away and looked across at where he sat, watching me, his head tilted back, his mouth hanging half open, an eager, trusting expression in his pale eyes.
“But kill somebody?” I asked, turning back to the jury. “No, that’s the last thing you’re going to think him capable of. Not after you hear the things he was put through; not after you hear the scandalous, heart-wrenching tale of physical torture and sexual abuse to which he was subjected from the time he was an infant, an unwanted child no one, not even his mother, cared anything about or did anything to protect. No one ever did anything for him: They did not send him to school; they did not even give him an identity. There is no record of his birth; there is no record of him at all. He does not exist. He does not have a name.”
I glanced at him over my shoulder and then looked back. “John Smith? That’s the name he was given by the police when they arrested him and charged him with murder and discovered there was no record of his fingerprints. His real name is Danny. If he ever had a last name, Danny doesn’t remember it, and because there was never any record made of it, he’ll never know it. For all intents and purposes, Danny was born an orphan. It might have been better if he had never been born at all. No,” I said, changing my mind, “it would have been better if the people who did these things to him had never been born.”
Clinically and without emotion, I described a few of the things that had been done: the way he had been chained to his bed, the way his body had been covered with welts and burned with cigarettes.
“The prosecution will insist that these terrible things turned him into an animal without a conscience, someone who could kill without a reason. You can judge for yourself when you listen to him testify whether he is the vicious killer they claim, or one of the most harmless human beings you have ever seen.”
Shoving my hands into my pants pockets, I began to pace back and forth in front of the jury box. Then, frowning, I stopped and looked up.
“They charged him with one murder. It doesn’t make sense.
They should have charged him with two.”
The silence was complete; there was not a sound in the courtroom. It was as if everyone was holding his breath, waiting to hear what came next.
“The defendant is charged with the murder of Quincy Griswald, but whoever killed Quincy Griswald killed once before. There were two murders, not one; two circuit court judges have been killed, not one. In nearly a hundred fifty years, no one has ever murdered a sitting judge, and now, in the space of just a few months, we have had two judges killed, and killed in exactly the same way. Calvin Jeffries, the presiding circuit court judge, was stabbed to death in the structure behind the courthouse where he parked his car. Quincy Griswald, who became the presiding circuit court judge when Jeffries died, was stabbed to death in the very same place. The defendant has been charged with the one, but not the other. Why? Because they know he did not have anything to do with the murder of Calvin Jeffries. But let me repeat again: Whoever is responsible for the death of Calvin Jeffries is responsible for the death of Quincy Griswald. John Smith—
Danny—did not kill Calvin Jeffries, and he did not kill Quincy Griswald.”
I moved to the end of the jury box, next to the witness stand, and looked out over the packed courtroom, every eye on me, every face a study in concentration. In the very back, in the last row, Jennifer was watching, serious, intent, following every word.
“You remember the murder of Calvin Jeffries,” I said, looking back at the jury. “It was all we read about, all we talked about.
Everybody from the governor on down seemed to get involved in that case. Whatever the police did, it was never enough. We demanded results; we demanded an arrest; we demanded that the killer be brought to justice.”
I stood still and stared across the counsel table to where Cassandra Loescher was taking notes. When I stopped talking, she raised her head, catching my gaze in her own.
“They never caught the person responsible for the murder of Calvin Jeffries; the police don’t know who the killer is; the district attorney’s office doesn’t know who he is.”
It took a moment before she realized what I was doing, and even then she could not quite believe it.
“Your honor,” she said, as she sprang to her feet. “May counsel approach?”
I pretended outrage. “Your honor, this is the second time the prosecution has interrupted my opening statement. I didn’t do that to Ms. Loescher—no matter what I thought of what she was saying!”
Bingham did not say a word. Instead, he gestured with his hand that he wanted a private conversation. He got up from his chair and stepped down on the side of the bench farthest from the jury.
“What is your objection, Ms. Loescher?” he asked. As always his tone was civil, but he could not completely disguise his irritation. He liked things to move smoothly, and already he could sense signs of trouble to come.
“He’s making a patently false statement,” Loescher insisted. “He knows as well as I do that what he said isn’t true. The police made an arrest in the Jeffries case. The killer confessed. And it’s more than that, your honor,” she whispered forcefully. “He’s trying to bring in the Jeffries case just to confuse the jury. That case doesn’t have anything to do with this one.”
Staring down at the floor as he listened, Bingham pinched the middle of his upper lip between his forefinger and thumb. When she was finished, he looked at me.
“I’m allowed to offer my own theory of the case, your honor—
any theory that explains the facts of the case. Ms. Loescher should listen more carefully: I didn’t say the police did not make an arrest, I said they never caught the person responsible.” We were standing inches apart. I shifted my gaze and looked directly at her. “If you think they did—”
She was livid. She stared at the judge, who was again looking down at his shoes. “He knows I don’t have a chance to offer rebuttal to his opening.”
“Of course you do,” I interjected. “It’s called closing argument.”
Bingham raised his head. “The defense has a right to offer an alternative theory. The prosecution has a right to offer any relevant evidence which contradicts that theory.” He looked at me, then looked at her. “You’re both fine attorneys. You’ve both done very well to this point.” With a brief nod and an even briefer smile, he added, “Let’s not let that change.” It was as stern a warning as he knew how to give.
Loescher went back to her chair, and Bingham went back to the bench. “Mr. Antonelli,” he said as he settled into place,
“would you please continue.”
I nodded at the judge and turned to the jury. “First Calvin Jeffries was murdered, then Quincy Griswald. Both of them were killed in the same way and both of them were killed in the same place. But why were they killed at all? And who would have had a reason to kill them both, not just Calvin Jeffries, but Quincy Griswald as well?”
With one hand on my hip, I rubbed the back of my neck.
“That’s the great difficulty in this case: trying to understand why anyone would want to kill Quincy Griswald. Everyone who ever knew him could understand why someone would want Calvin Jeffries dead: He was one of the worst people who ever lived.”
It was instinct, pure and simple. If there had been time to think about it, she might have let it go. Whether it was her own sense of decency, or her belief about what the rules did and did not allow, Cassandra Loescher, acting on impulse, jumped to her feet.
“Objection, your honor.”
This time he agreed with her. “Mr. Antonelli …”
Wheeling around, I glared defiance. “The
character of Calvin Jeffries supplies the motive not only for his murder, but for the murder of the victim in this case. Everything I say about the late Judge Jeffries will be proven by the testimony of witnesses, your honor, witnesses the defense fully intends to call.”
Pursing his lips, he tapped his fingers together. “Very well,” he said presently. “But try to keep this within reasonable bounds.”
It struck me as gratuitous, and I turned back to the jury, an incongruous smile on my face, amused at how angry it had made me. I respected Bingham as much as anyone on the bench, but he was as much a prisoner of convention as anyone else. We were not supposed to speak ill of the dead.
“I spoke ill of Judge Jeffries when he was alive,” I explained to the jury. “I spoke ill of him to his face. He threw me in jail once because I told him during a trial exactly what I thought of him. I should probably not have done that. I may even have deserved what he did to me because of it. But whether I did or not, what Calvin Jeffries did to me was nothing compared to what he later did to someone I knew, someone I liked, someone I thought would eventually become one of the finest lawyers in the city.
His name was Elliott Winston, and what Calvin Jeffries did to him was worse than murder.
“The law is the collective wisdom of the community, the attempt to live in accordance with the rules of reason, the effort to control our impulses and conduct ourselves as civilized human beings. No one carries a higher burden of responsibility than those men and women who put on black robes and apply the law without fear or favor to the people who come before them for judgment. It would be impossible to think of anyone who came to the bench with greater ability, or with a more brilliant mind, than Calvin Jeffries; and it would be impossible to think of anyone who less deserved to be called honorable. Calvin Jeffries was a disgrace. He cared nothing about the law; he cared nothing about justice. He cared only about power and how he could use it to get what he wanted. And what he wanted, ladies and gentlemen, wanted more than anything else, was the wife—and not just the wife—of Elliott Winston.
“Elliott was young, and bright, and hardworking and ambitious, with a wife he loved and two children he adored. He met Calvin Jeffries and was flattered at the attention he received. He became one of the judge’s few friends, someone to whom Jeffries talked about the law, someone Jeffries wanted—or claimed he wanted—
to help. Elliott trusted him completely, and he had no reason to doubt him when Jeffries told him things—things that were not true—about his wife. Elliott began to suspect his wife of infidelity, but it never occurred to him that she was being unfaithful with the man he revered, this man without children who treated him like a son.
“They worked on him, the two of them, his trusted friend and his trusted wife. They fed his suspicions, twisted his mind with false rumors and terrible lies until they drove him over the edge.
Elliott was charged with attempted murder and was sent away, and while he was away, his wife divorced him and married the judge; and then the two of them together had him declared an unfit parent so the good Judge Jeffries could adopt Elliott’s children and call them his own.”
I put my hand on the railing and leaned closer to the jury.
“And what does this have to do with John Smith, now on trial for murder? The judge who, acting on instructions from Calvin Jeffries, made certain Elliott Winston would be put in a place where he could not interfere with anything his former friend and former wife wanted to do, was Quincy Griswald.”
I looked from one end of the jury box to the other. “Who do you think wanted both Calvin Jeffries and Quincy Griswald dead?
Who do you think had a motive to kill them both? There is only one answer to that question, and it isn’t John Smith,” I said, shaking my head as I turned away and walked to the counsel table.
It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when I finished, and Judge Bingham decided to wait until morning before the first witness was called for the prosecution. The jury filed out of the courtroom and as the spectators behind us crowded into the aisle and shuffled a step at a time out the double-doors at the back, Cassandra Loescher waited patiently until it was quiet enough for the judge to hear.
“Yes,” he said, a pleasant, if formal, smile on his face.
“Could we meet in chambers, your honor?” she asked, including me in her glance. “I have a matter for the court.”
Judge Bingham’s chambers consisted of a single narrow room.
Two large windows took up most of the space on the wall behind his blond wood desk. There were no curtains and the venetian blinds were pulled all the way up. Light-colored bookshelves held the full collection of all the state court cases that had been the subject of an appellate opinion. On the opposite wall, next to the door that led to the clerk’s office, a small, three-shelf credenza held a picture of his wife and pictures of the young families of his grown children. On the bottom shelf, out of view in the corner, was a tarnished bronze statue of a tennis player, racket raised overhead, a trophy from some long-forgotten country club tournament. In the corner behind his desk, where he could reach it without getting up, was a pewter-colored putter. Old and often used, the tape around the handle had begun to unravel.
Bingham removed his robe, hung it carefully on a hook behind the door, and put on his suit coat. He was not five foot nine, but he was of slight build, trim and fit, with a spring to his step, and looked taller. His hair was short and brushed close to his scalp. His face and hands had a clean, scrubbed look, and his teeth were straight and white. He was one of those people who could have slept in his suit and still looked neat and pressed the next morning.
He sat down and pulled first one and then the other shirt cuff into its proper position below his suit coat sleeve. He looked at Loescher and raised his eyebrows, waiting for what she had to say. Then, suddenly, he glanced across at me.
“Congratulations,” he said with a slight inclination of his smooth forehead. “I only just heard about it.” He turned to Loescher. “Mr. Antonelli is engaged to be married,” he explained.
“When is the wedding?” the judge asked pleasantly.
“In a few weeks,” I replied. “As soon as the trial is over.”
We barely knew each other, but Cassandra Loescher put her hand on my arm and with a huge grin immediately added her congratulations. Then, almost in the same breath, she went back to the business of trying to destroy me.
“Your honor,” she said, the outlines of a smile still traceable on her mouth, “Mr. Antonelli has raised some issues during his opening statement that, quite frankly, the state did not anticipate. For that reason, we find it necessary to ask leave to amend our witness list. Specifically, I want permission to call someone from the police department to testify regarding the results of their investigation into the murder of Judge Jeffries.” She paused, and sat back in her chair. “We didn’t intend to do this, your honor.
It will certainly lengthen the time required to try this case. But after what happened in there today, I don’t see that we have any choice.”
Bingham nodded, and then turned to me. “I’m prepared to agree with that—unless you want to try and convince me otherwise.”
“Who are you going to call?” I asked her.
She shrugged her shoulders. “One of the lead investigators. I don’t know which one yet.”
“It’s fine with me, your honor,” I said, trying to sound as indifferent as I could.
He looked at Loescher, then he looked at me. “Well,” he said, standing up, “it seems like we’re going to have an interesting few weeks.”
The courtroom was empty. Danny had been taken back to his cell. I gathered up the notepads and the documents scattered over the table and slipped them into my briefcase. Gingerly, I lifted it up, hoping the restitched leather handle would hold. In the hallway outside, Howard Flynn was leaning against the wall, reading a section of the paper. When he saw me, he folded it up, shoved it into his coat pocket, and walked beside me to
ward the elevator.
“That was quite a performance. You think you can prove Elliott committed both murders?”
“Prove it? Of course not! All I want to do is get them to think he might have done it. Prove it? I wouldn’t know where to start.”
We rode the elevator to the first floor. As we went around the area where everyone who entered passed through metal detectors, a scuffle broke out. A gaunt, broad-shouldered man, with long dirty hair and a scraggly beard, dressed in the filthy clothes of the homeless, flailed away with his arm as two uniformed officers wrestled him to the ground.
“Let me in, let me in,” he shouted hysterically, as they locked his arms together behind his back and managed to handcuff his wrists.
Outside, at the bottom of the courthouse steps, a grocery cart loaded with plastic bags and metal junk was lying on its side, the wheels still spinning. Someone said he had tried to get in, had been thrown out, and had then come crashing back through the door. No one seemed to know why. Flynn and I exchanged a look.
“Nothing,” he said, twisting his mouth around. “Just a crazy.”
I nodded halfheartedly. “Are you going to a meeting tonight?”
I asked as we walked away.
“Yeah,” he replied. A sly grin spread over his face. “Unless you’d rather go out and get drunk.”
“Will Stewart be there?”
