by D. W. Buffa
Detective Stewart, like any other witness, may testify about things he knows—that is to say, facts about which he has knowledge. The conclusions which are to be drawn from whatever facts are established during this trial, including whatever facts Detective Stewart has to offer, are to be drawn, not by the witnesses themselves, certainly not by the lawyers, and not by me. That job is for you, the jury, and only for you. Therefore, I now instruct you that you are to ignore what Mr. Antonelli said, and you are not to infer from it, either that the witness believes the defendant to be innocent of the charge of murder or guilty of that charge. Do you understand?”
When the twelve of them nodded dutifully in unison, Bingham’s eyes came back around to me. “You may continue.”
It did not hurt if the jury thought I was zealous; it would be the end of me as a lawyer if they thought I was too chastened to keep fighting. It was the judge’s courtroom, but it was my case.
“You were present during the police interview of the defendant, correct?”
“Yes, I was.”
“When he was asked a question, did he look away?”
“No.”
“Did he fidget nervously with his hands?”
“No.”
“Did he spend a lot of time thinking about his answers before he gave them?”
“No.”
“Did he do anything at all that, based on your experience, you could label as an indication of deception?”
“No.”
“He denied he killed Quincy Griswald?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Your honor—!” Loescher cried.
“Mr. Antonelli,” Bingham began.
“Withdrawn,” I announced with a wave of my hand as I left the witness and headed back for my chair.
Twenty-seven
_______
As soon as I saw him I started to smile. Howard Flynn had on his best suit, the one he wore to weddings and to funerals and to any other formal event to which he was on occasion invited. It was the only suit I had ever seen him wear, and so far as I knew, the only suit he owned. There was not a wrinkle anywhere on the dark blue coat and the matching pants were creased tight down the front. With a starched white shirt and burnished black shoes, a solid gray silk tie and a breast pocket handkerchief to match, he looked like the prosperous and successful attorney he should have been. It was not hard to figure out why he had gone to so much trouble.
“It’s nice to see you, Howard,” Jennifer said as she held out her hand.
Flynn was standing at the table, clutching a white linen napkin. “It’s nice to see you, Jennifer,” he said, gently taking her hand in his thick fingers.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” she said as he pulled a chair out for her.
“It’s my fault. It took me a little longer to get ready than it should have.”
It was a rare performance, one I would not have missed for anything. Flynn had not only been on time, he had actually arrived a little early. To make sure we got a good table, he explained as if it were the kind of thing he did all the time or something he would have done had he been dining alone with me.
The waiter, a balding middle-aged man with round, chubby cheeks and a small, thoughtful mouth, brought menus. Jennifer ordered a glass of wine and Flynn asked for a Diet Coke.
“And what would you like?” the waiter asked, glancing at me over the top of his notepad.
“Scotch and soda.” Jennifer darted a worried glance at me. “It’s all right,” I assured her. “I’m just going to have one.” Then I realized that was not what concerned her. “Howard doesn’t mind.”
His face reddened slightly when he told her it did not bother him at all. “Just as long as he doesn’t enjoy it too much,” he added, trying to put her at ease.
The waiter brought our drinks and took our order. Stirring the ice, I remembered the last time we had come here, the two of us, that Saturday night she had to go home early, the night I called Flynn to get me out of the bar. As I sipped on the drink, I watched them chatting amiably, and knew that whatever else happened I could always count on them both. I was glad they liked each other, though I would have been surprised if they had not.
While they talked, I started thinking about the case, or rather the case, which had taken over my life, pushed its way back into my mind. I had left the courtroom quickly, jubilant about what I had been able to achieve during the cross-examination of Stewart. It was the vanity of performance, and the farther away I got from the courtroom, the less impressive it became. What had I actually accomplished? An agreement that there was something odd about the mental patient who murdered Calvin Jeffries and something unusual about the similarities of the two crimes. I had raised questions, but I had not supplied any answers, at least none I could prove.
“I’m going to lead with the psychologist tomorrow,” I said out loud. Jennifer and Flynn stopped their conversation and looked at me. “Then I’m putting Danny on the stand.” I sat with my hands in my lap, the chair pushed back from the table far enough so I could cross one leg over the other. “You think he can handle it? You see him every day, talk to him …”
Jennifer looked at Flynn, then back at me, a question in her eyes.
“Howard goes to see him at the jail every day after court. He tries to explain to him what happened that day and what’s going to happen next.”
“I see,” she said, looking at Flynn with a new sense of appreciation.
“I try to talk to him in court when I have the chance, but he just looks at me with those trusting eyes of his, and smiles, or says yes or no, but not much else. I don’t think he knows half the time what I’m talking about.”
“He knows more than you think,” Flynn replied as the waiter began to serve dinner.
“All I’m going to ask him is what his name is, how old he is, who gave him the knife, and did he kill Griswald. He’ll understand those questions?”
“We’ve been over it a dozen times,” Flynn reminded me.
I was irritable, impatient, and I knew it. “Sorry.”
Jennifer’s hand slid onto my wrist and then along my arm.
“You’re going to win,” she said with an encouraging smile.
I peered into her eyes for a moment and then shook my head.
“You’re about to find out what a fraud I really am. I hate this work. I hate doing this. I hate not being able to think about anything except what I have to do to win. God, I hate it when they’re innocent.”
She had an instinct for the essential. “Would you like it better if that boy was actually guilty?”
“No,” I said with a sigh. “But it would make things a lot easier.”
Flynn put down his fork. “Did you ever think that maybe the problem is that it’s actually been a little too easy?”
“No,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “I have to confess that’s one thought I haven’t had.”
He was serious. Moving his plate aside, he put his forearms on the edge of the table and bent forward. “If Elliott Winston is really behind both murders, why didn’t he make it more difficult?
Why did he make it so easy?” He folded his broad, light-haired fingers together. “Why do everything the same way—not just the way Jeffries and Griswald were both killed—why the same anonymous call, the same place each time as the location where the killer could be found?” He pulled back his head as if to get a better look at me. “Why did he want them found? Why would he want Jacob Whittaker to confess? Why would he want anyone to know that Whittaker was a mental patient locked up in the same hospital? He might just as well have signed his name.”
Jennifer had stopped eating. “But you’re missing something,”
she blurted.
Startled, Flynn sat up and, perhaps not even aware he was doing it, smiled at her as she tried to apologize.
“I’m sorry.” She laughed, embarrassed, holding up her hand.
“That just came out.”
&
nbsp; “What did Howard miss?” I asked.
“You,” she said, her eyes glittering. “You’re the only one who knew—no, you’re the only one who could have known of the connections. There are two of them, aren’t there?” she asked, looking at Flynn and then back at me. “The one between Elliott Winston and Whittaker, and the one between him and the two murdered judges. And if you didn’t know about the second connection, the first would have no meaning at all, would it? And who besides you would have had any reason ever to look for it?”
Nodding, I looked at Flynn. “What do you think?”
“I think it will be good for you to be married to someone so much smarter than you are.”
Jennifer got up from the table and put her hand on Flynn’s shoulder to keep him from getting up as well. “I won’t be long,”
she said as she picked up her purse.
“She’s right, you know,” I said as soon as Jennifer had left. “I agree with what you said: If Elliott really is behind all this, he put a signature to both crimes, but there’s no reason to think he wanted anyone to know it was his signature.”
As I listened to myself I wondered if I really believed it. The last time I had seen Elliott had I not taunted him with the impotence of doing something that no one will ever know you’ve done? Was I now simply resisting the possibility that I had been wrong and that he had somehow foreseen how it would all work out while I was still struggling to understand how he had done it in the first place?
Flynn moved his jaw from side to side and then bobbed his head back and forth. He draped one arm over the corner of his chair, crossed his ankle over his knee and held it there with his hand.
“This guy has been sitting there for twelve years. Whether he’s crazy or not: You think he hasn’t thought through every angle of this? Consider that for a minute: twelve years before he does anything. Maybe it took him that long before he found someone like Whittaker, before he found whoever killed Griswald—maybe it took that long to talk them into it—but after twelve years he still wants his revenge.”
There was something left unspoken. “Wants his revenge?” I asked. “You think he wants more than Jeffries and Griswald?”
He did not answer, not directly. “Jennifer was right: You’re the only one who could have made the connection between Whittaker and Elliott, but there are a few other people who could make the connection between Elliott and the two judges.”
I could think of at least two others. “His wife,” I said. “And Asa.”
“Right. Now, if he was ready to have Quincy Griswald murdered when all the judge did was preside over the hearing that sent him to the state hospital, what about the lawyer that was supposed to look out for him?—and what about the wife who betrayed him? Twelve years he’s waited. Do you think he’s going to forget about them? Do you think that just maybe he wants them to see the connection between the first two murders so they can worry about when it’s going to happen to them?”
“But they wouldn’t have figured it out,” I objected. “Neither Asa nor Elliott’s wife. They wouldn’t have had any reason to think it was anything more than a terrible coincidence—if they thought about it at all. Jennifer’s right. I’m the one who put it together. I brought out the fact that Whittaker was a mental patient. I’m the one who accused Elliott of being behind both murders.”
“Which may be exactly what Elliott wanted you to do.”
Before I could express any doubt, a doubt about which I was myself not quite certain, Flynn shook his head and slid closer to the table. “Look, we know two things, don’t we? He left a trail you were able to follow.”
“But how could he know I’d follow it?” I interjected. “How could he have known that I’d get involved? How could he have known I’d end up defending the kid who got charged with the murder?”
Flynn’s rust-colored eyebrows lifted up and he clicked his teeth.
“The first killer confesses and then kills himself. The second killer does what?—gives the murder weapon to someone else and disappears.”
“Thrown in the river,” I reminded him.
He shrugged it off. “Doesn’t matter. The point is he gives up the weapon. And remember,” he added, again raising his eyebrows, “he first wipes it clean so only the kid’s prints will be found on it. Why?”
I tried to sound more skeptical than I felt. “So someone innocent will be charged and I’d take the case?”
The more Flynn talked, the more certain he was that he was right. He swept over my halfhearted objection. “He waited twelve years to have Jeffries killed; he only waits a couple months to have Griswald murdered.”
He said it as if it explained everything; I was not sure it explained anything.
“In twelve years he doesn’t have a visitor he’s willing to see.
In twelve years you don’t try to see him, and then, after all that time, Jeffries is murdered and you show up. He knows you’ve been thinking about it, all of it, the way anyone would: what he had been like when you first knew him, the way you brought him into the firm, the kind of man and the kind of lawyer you thought he was going to be. We all think about that, don’t we?—the way things could have been and the way they didn’t turn out. He knows you’ve been thinking about Jeffries, too—what an evil bastard he was and the terrible things he did to people.”
Flynn took a long drink from his water glass and looked around at the well-dressed couples having a quiet dinner on a weekday night, the kind of people who were used to good food and did not think twice about what it cost. How many nights, I wondered, had Elliott Winston stared at the blank wall of his asylum cell and driven himself a little more crazy thinking about his beautiful young wife having dinner with Calvin Jeffries in a place like this?
“He knows all this,” Flynn went on, “and what does he do with it? He tells you what they did to him—Jeffries and his wife—how they made him crazy with jealousy and how he almost killed you because of it. He lets you know—doesn’t he?—that he has every reason in the world to hate them both. And then what happens—
after your visit? Griswald is killed in exactly the same way as Jeffries. He knows you’ll think about it; he knows that sooner or later you’ll figure it out. And he knows something about you.
Don’t forget that. He knows he can trust you and he knows you won’t let an innocent man be convicted.”
“Trust me? What makes you think that?”
A wry smile creased his mouth. “He shot you, didn’t he? No,”
he said when I started to protest, “I mean it. He tried to kill you, and you told him that you don’t believe he really meant it. Besides that, he knows you think you’re in some way responsible for what Jeffries did to him.”
Jennifer had not yet come back to the table. I turned around and looked across the dining room toward the hallway in front that led to the rest rooms.
“There’s something else,” Flynn said as I searched for a sign of Jennifer. “If the Griswald murder wasn’t enough—if that didn’t tell you what was going on—there was always Asa Bartram. There would not have been any doubt then that they were all connected.”
I spun back around. “I’m calling Asa as a witness. I haven’t told him why. But we better warn him about this. Asa is old. He may not have heard about what happened in court, and I doubt he put the two murders together on his own. First thing in the morning would you call his office? Talk to Jonah Micronitis. He’ll know what to do,” I said, looking over my shoulder, expecting at any moment to see Jennifer.
“You said there were two things we knew,” I said. “The first: that he left a trail we could follow. What’s the second?” I asked, wondering what was taking Jennifer so long.
Flynn sat still, staring at his hands. “For the first time in twelve years Elliott Winston is going to get out of the state hospital,”
he said, slowly raising his eyes.
“To testify in court,” I added.
Flynn cocked his head. “If he gets to court.”
<
br /> “His wife?” I asked as I got up from my chair. “Do you think that’s what he wanted all along—to get out so he could … ?”
“Because she’s the one person he wants to kill himself?” Flynn wondered aloud, one thought leading to another, each more sinister in its ultimate implications.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I explained, thinking about two things at once. “I just want to check on Jennifer.”
There was no one in the hallway near the rest room. I knocked on the door to the women’s room. There was no answer. I knocked again, this time more insistent, but there was still no response.
“Excuse me,” I heard someone say behind me. A woman with gray, silver-tinted hair was looking at me with annoyance, waiting for me to get out of her way.
I apologized but did not move away from the door. “I’m a little worried about my fiancee,” I explained to her. “Would you mind seeing if she’s all right?”
The annoyance vanished. “Of course,” she said. “I won’t be a moment,” she promised as I stepped aside and she pushed open the door.
“Oh, my God!” I heard her shout, the sound muffled by the door that had swung shut behind her. I nearly knocked her over as I bolted inside. Behind her, curled up on the white tile floor, Jennifer had her arms wrapped around herself, clutching hard as her body shuddered in violent convulsions. Her mouth was shut tight, her teeth clenched with such force that the color had drained out of her face. Her eyes were fixed on the wall in a rigid, deathlike stare. I got down on my knees next to her and pulled her into my arms, rocking her back and forth, telling her she was all right. When she finally turned her head and looked at me, she tried to pull away, to fight me, and I held her with all my strength to keep her from hitting me or hurting herself.
“It’s all right,” I repeated over and over again. She stopped resisting, and a moment later I felt her go limp.
