02 - The Guilty Plea

by Robert Rotenberg

  The only break in the relentless pressure was this evening—Friday night. For a few hours at least she could forget about the case. I deserve it, she thought, putting her cheek up close to the bathroom mirror and taking a pad to what remained of her make up. Most of it had worn off from the sweat and tension of another long day.

  She brushed her teeth, turned the light out, and crawled into bed with Gordon, who she had to admit had been supportive through all this. Raglan was still keyed up, in need of release, distraction. And horny as hell. Sex had become part of her nightly routine as well.

  What was it? Maybe living full out like this, maybe dealing so closely with murder and death, but she found she had a near desperate need for sex. Every night. This had the additional benefit of keeping Gordon calm and happy, and on her side while he carried the extra workload.

  He clicked off the night-light by his side of the bed and they were engulfed in wonderful darkness. Men are so easy, she thought as she reached down for him. It didn’t take much to get Gordon ready. Good. She didn’t want to wait.

  She thought about the trial so far. The evidence had gone in well, except Dr. Burns. DiPaulo had cut the arrogant little prick down to size, but what had he really proved? That Samantha Wyler had accidentally killed her husband? What, while they were making sushi together? And then carved him up six more times for the fun of it? Raglan couldn’t see it.

  Gordon was rolling on top of her. She pushed his shoulder back and, feeling playful, climbed on top and growled in his ear.

  The case all depended on her next witness. Brandon Legacy, Samantha’s eighteen-year-old “friend.” What was the jury going to think of a woman in her thirties having sex with a teenager?

  Gordon liked to say that he had strong fingers because he pushed a pencil all day. That it was the best thing about being an accountant. His hands were strong, she had to admit, and his fingers knew her body.

  But Legacy was the wild card in her deck. Raglan and Greene had talked about not calling the kid to testify. If the defense put him up there as an alibi witness, then she’d have the advantage of cross-examining him. But if she didn’t call Legacy, the defense might not call him either and the jury would never hear any of his evidence. It was too big a risk.

  Raglan put her hands on Gordon’s hips and rotated him around. She felt like lying down and the pillow felt good under her head. Last year, after they split up, Gordon started going to the gym. He felt firmer around the waist. She liked that.

  Then there was Wyler’s last comment to Legacy before she left his house: “I know how to settle this once and for all.” That alone should secure a conviction for manslaughter. At least.

  Defense lawyers were always being asked how they could defend someone if they knew they were guilty. But when he was her boss, Ted DiPaulo taught her to look at the other side of the equation. How could you prosecute someone you know is innocent? Or to be more subtle, not guilty of the crime they are charged with, but something less serious?

  In the summer when Raglan moved back home, as a gesture of reconciliation, she’d gone shopping with Gordon for a new bed. It amazed her how many styles there were. They settled on one that had separate controls for both sides. Right from the start she hated the stupid thing, but her husband loved it. And at least it didn’t squeak like the old one, she thought as she felt the weight of Gordon’s body.

  There was one other reason Legacy had to testify, even if he hurt the Crown’s case. He provided direct evidence that Samantha was angry when she went over to Wyler’s house. Add into the mix the evidence DiPaulo had extracted from Dr. Burns—that the fatal stab wound could have been accidental—and it would be easy for the jury to conclude she stabbed Terrance in a fit of rage, not really meaning to kill him. A manslaughter verdict. This was going to end up as a manslaughter verdict, she’d bet on it. Especially if Wyler didn’t testify.

  Gordon rolled off beside her. His breathing soon leveled out and she felt him twitch, then go slack with sleep as he started to snore. Great, she thought. We’ve gone through all this, just to end up at the same place.

  57

  The date was, literally, set in stone. It had been written on Ari Greene’s personal calendar for months, a constant in his unpredictable world, hovering in the distance and ever closer day by day. It was the unveiling of his mother’s grave, a Jewish tradition that saw the closest family members return to the cemetery when the headstone was in place, covered by a sheet. Because Saturday was the Sabbath, unveilings were performed on Sundays.

  Greene stood beside his father at the grave. The headstone was large enough to cover two spaces, and the one beside his mother’s was empty. Reserved for his dad. As he anticipated, a few men and women from the synagogue had come, as well as some people who had worked with his mother at the factory. He hadn’t expected the chief of police, Hap Charlton, and Officer Daniel Kennicott to show up like this on a Sunday morning. Both stood respectfully off to the side.

  The one person he didn’t want here was Rabbi Climans. The man had been at the synagogue for more than a year and he annoyed the hell out of Greene’s father, who’d nicknamed him Rabbi Cliché. There was a fake sincerity about him, like a politician running for office. His sermons tended to be long on time, short on depth. Worst of all, Rabbi Cliché had a standard-form eulogy, especially for elderly Jewish women, that made Greene and his dad gag: “For Mrs.—fill in the blank with any woman’s name—family always came first. Her beloved husband, her beautiful children, her treasured grandchildren were everything to her.”

  The idea of Rabbi Climans speaking at his mother’s grave was revolting to Greene. He had tried to get the older cantor, who sometimes stood in for Mr. Zero Mostel, Jr.—another of Greene’s father’s nicknames for Climans—to do the service. But last week his dad told Greene, “Don’t worry about it. I took care of the rabbi.”

  “What did you do?” Greene asked.

  “I told him if he gave the same ‘family always came first speech,’ I’d jam the stone I was supposed to put on your mother’s tombstone down his throat.”

  “Dad.” Greene arched his eyebrows at his father.

  “I said it in a nicer way.”

  “That might work,” Greene said.

  The grave was in a modest row of monuments, close to the neighboring backyards. A low fence circled the cemetery. Greene saw a mother, who looked to be Somali, with a round, beautiful face, holding a child and watching them with great dignity.

  He thought about Kennicott and the funerals the young officer had been forced to attend. Both his parents, killed by a seemingly random drunk driver. Then his brother, Michael, murdered. Now there were questions about the driver, a guy named Arthur Frank Rake. He’d turned up in Gubbio, a hill town in Italy where Michael was headed the night he was killed. Daniel’s trip there this summer hadn’t been very successful. Rake had disappeared.

  After Rabbi Climans chanted a few prayers, Greene and his father each put a hand on the thin veil covering the stone and broke the light strings that held it in place. The cloth was light, and it felt comforting. Greene had thought long and hard about the inscription for the headstone, and in the end chose the words CHANA GREENE—SHE LIVED.

  For his whole life Greene had heard his parents referred to as survivors. He’d grown to loathe the term. Yes, they’d survived the camps, horrors Greene could never fully understand or know. Yes, his mother had lost her parents, both sets of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and her little brother. But there was more to her than survival. She had lived a life. Not the life she deserved but, until the last few years, a good life, an important life.

  Climans tucked the prayer book under his arm and stepped forward. “It’s an important ritual for the family members to come back to the grave of a loved one with a few close friends. This visit is quieter, more intimate than the funeral. Why do soldiers go back to battle-fields? It’s a fundamental human need we all have.”

  Greene looked at the rabbi and thoug
ht, How many times have you said that before?

  “When I first came to Toronto, I decided to go see some of the congregants who were most ill.” When Climans said the word “Toronto,” he had a way of emphasizing the first syllable that was annoying.

  “I never told anyone this until last week, when I spoke with her husband, Mr. Greene,” the rabbi said. “I visited with Chana Greene many times. It was difficult. A woman who had lived through so much, forced in her last years by Alzheimer’s to relive the horrors of her youth. She had, of course, no idea who I was. One day she thought I was a Nazi guard and threw her bedpan at me. Another day she thought I was her brother, Chaim, and hugged me so hard I had to call a nurse to help me break free without hurting her. I remember her screaming, ‘Where is Chaim? Where is Chaim?’”

  Seven years earlier, the disease had come upon Chana Greene with cruel speed. Within months she didn’t know who her son was and soon didn’t even recognize her husband. That Greene’s mother was forced to spend the rest of her life in a helpless fight against these living nightmares made him dark with rage. The endless power of the past to destroy the future.

  “One day I started singing an old Yiddish song my grandmother had taught me.” Climans was speaking louder, not that soft-focus tone he used most of the time. “We held hands like children in kindergarten and sang the song over and over. Twenty, thirty times. I lost all track. It didn’t matter. It was beautiful. I can’t comprehend the life of Chana Greene. There was a courage in her that touched me, and I pray that will bring a measure of comfort to her family.”

  In so many ways his mother had died years ago. But something in the rabbi’s brief speech brought her back to life, for a moment at least.

  Greene looked down and saw that he still had in his hand the piece of the cloth that had covered her grave. It was time, he knew, to let it go.

  58

  Sunday nights were the worst time of the week for trial lawyers. Ted DiPaulo had spent the entire weekend barricaded in his office, getting ready for the upcoming five long days in court. Exhaustion loomed, and yet there were still too many items left to cross off his to-do list.

  The boardroom turned war room looked more like a university dorm than an office. Pens, pencils, and highlight markers were scattered about. Two garbage cans overflowed with take-out pizza boxes, Coke cans, and coffee cups. The air was stale.

  Samantha Wyler looked exhausted. Nancy Parish had just put her through a rigorous mock cross-examination. Although she’d done quite well as a witness, DiPaulo could see that being grilled like this had shaken Wyler’s confidence. People who weren’t used to being in court always found cross-examination intimidating.

  This is what he’d hoped would happen. He was still riding two horses in this case. Thanks to Samantha’s research, his cross-examination of Dr. Burns meant that there was still time for her to drop her story about walking into the house and finding the dead body. It was time to make a final decision about her defense.

  “Samantha, let’s go talk in my office,” he said.

  She flopped down in her usual chair nearest the door, which DiPaulo left open. He sat beside her.

  “You see how tough cross-examination will be,” he said.

  She bit her lip.

  “There’s one other alternative,” he said. “Maybe you went to see Terrance and you two had a fight. Like you said in your family law affidavit, Terrance had another side no one else saw. He became angry. Perhaps he turned on you with the knife in his hand. You struggled. He was stabbed by accident.”

  She didn’t say a word.

  “The jury hated Dr. Burns. It’s a story they could believe.”

  She stared at him. “Let’s say ‘theoretically,’ I told you Terry was cutting up some fruit for Simon’s breakfast when I came in.”

  DiPaulo could feel the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. This was it. “‘Theoretically,’ he attacked you first,” DiPaulo said. “You acted in self-defense. After he was already fatally stabbed, in anger and rage, you kept cutting him.”

  Wyler was silent.

  DiPaulo didn’t know where to look. He bent his head down and made a tent with his fingers.

  “That makes me sound crazy,” she said at last.

  “Not crazy. Just angry.” It will be a relief for her to finally get this off her chest, he thought, looking at her. “I know how tough this is.”

  “No you don’t.” She smiled. “I was testing you. It’s a nice theoretical discussion, but it’s not what happened. As I told the judge, I’m not pleading guilty, because I didn’t stab him. He was dead when I arrived.”

  So much for the Dr. Burns defense, DiPaulo thought. “Well, who did?”

  “I don’t know.” She put her hands on her forehead. “I keep thinking and thinking, and I don’t have the answer.”

  DiPaulo stood up. “I’m sorry. I sound like a Crown. It’s not our job to solve their case. They bear the burden of proof. Okay. I ask every client the same question when we get to this point: What haven’t you told me? There’s always something.”

  He’d expected her to be angry. Instead, she looked back to the boardroom. “Can we look at the list of witnesses for next week?”

  They walked across the hall. DiPaulo felt oddly relieved. It was all or nothing now with Samantha’s story. He had only one horse left to ride. He’d line up two other witnesses. A psychologist who would testify that Wyler’s reaction to seeing Terrance dead on the floor—grabbing the knife, going to see Simon, walking for hours with no memory of what she’d done—was possible, especially in someone like Samantha, who’d experienced a similar trauma when she was a teenager. And Lillian Funke, the librarian from New Liskeard. She’d put a more human face on Samantha, talk about her love of books, her teaching adults to read.

  “Are they calling all these people, for sure?” Samantha asked, running her hand down the Crown’s witness list.

  “No. The list is a courtesy. They can change their mind at any time.” She flipped over to the second page. “What if we want them to call someone. Can we make them do that?”

  DiPaulo chuckled. “The opposite. If they think we want them to call someone, they won’t. We have to put them on the stand, and they get to cross-examine.”

  Her thumb stopped at a name. She smiled at DiPaulo, her eyes clear. “You were right. There’s something I didn’t tell you. No matter what, make sure that Raglan puts this witness up there. And I’ll tell you why.”

  59

  Margaret Kwon watched young Brandon Legacy walk, his flared jeans making a swish-swish noise, from the back row of the courtroom to the witness-box. Now, this is juicy stuff for a Monday morning, she thought. And what amazing headline potential for the next issue of Faces magazine. She started writing some titles in her notepad: “Sam’s Boy Toy Testifies,” “Brandon Baby Babbles.”

  Kwon was still hot on the hunt for April Goodling. The actress had disappeared and no one had been able to find her for months. Kwon convinced her editor in New York that Goodling might turn up at the trial. She put her secret Toronto contacts on high alert, especially Goodling’s regular limo driver. All last week the actress never showed, and Ari Greene was so busy with the trial they only had time for dinner one night. He took her to Little India on Gerrard Street and they ate at a wacky restaurant under a big tent—the Lahore Tika House. No tablecloths. Plastic cutlery, paper plates. Half the women wearing saris. And great food. Perfect for Greene.

  “State your name, please,” the registrar said to the kid.

  Legacy cocked his head and a shock of blond hair fell across his eyes. He didn’t bother to brush it away. Boy, is he surly, Kwon thought. And yummy.

  “Brandon Legacy.” His voice was deeper than she’d expected.

  “Do you wish to swear on the Bible or affirm?”

  The teen looked at the Bible in the registrar’s hand as if it were some ancient artifact found in a museum.

  “Uh, affirm,” he said.

  Jennifer Ragla
n rose to her feet and fiddled with some papers on her desk. She didn’t seem to have the same confidence about this witness that she did with the others.

  “Brandon, have you ever testified in court before?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been in a courtroom before?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “School trip.”

  Wow, Kwon thought. Brandon was really breaking out with a two-word sentence. She was enjoying watching Raglan get frustrated.

  Raglan spent a few minutes asking Legacy about his family—he was an only child; about his school—film studies was his best subject; about his favorite activities—skateboarding, computer games. He looked totally bored.

  “I want to ask you some questions about your relationship with the accused, Ms. Wyler,” Raglan said.

  “We were friends,” Legacy answered before she had time to ask a real question.

  “I see,” Raglan said. For the first time in the trial, she was staying put behind her desk. Kwon could see that Raglan was wary of Legacy, like a cowgirl who’d spotted a rattlesnake in her path. “Brandon, I don’t want to embarrass you—”