by Buffa, D. W.
She ran the back of her fingers a last time across her tear-stained cheek.
“What about me?”
“You said you had known about other women. Had you started seeing other men? Nelson seemed to think so, from what he told me.”
She did not ask me what Nelson had said, but launched instead into a bitter attack on his lawyer.
“Did I do what Rufus Wiley is going to say I did? – That evil little bastard with his greedy eyes. He should know all about that pre-nuptial agreement! He’s the one who insisted we have one. Nelson did not care. He was embarrassed; he didn’t like the way it made him look, like he wasn’t sure of what he was doing – or that he wasn’t sure about me. He blamed it all on Rufus; or tried to, because in the next breath he was telling me that Rufus was only doing his job, that he had been hired to do what was in Nelson’s best interests even if Nelson objected. Nelson could explain away anything. That was part of his charm, the way he made whatever he wanted sound like something you thought he should have.”
The tears were gone, her eyes were dry, and there was nothing missing of their former clarity and force. She might have killed her husband, and given all the consequences she had already had to endure she might have felt some regret about that, but there was certainly no remorse. She talked about him and his lawyer as if they were a pair of ruthless conspirators whose only aim in life had been to take advantage of her.
“Rufus knew how to look after Nelson’s interests, all right; because he knew how quickly, once Nelson had what he wanted, Nelson could change his mind. The pre-nuptial agreement might have been Rufus Wiley’s idea, but he knew that Nelson would eventually thank him for it.”
She shook her head, but not in anger, or even disappointment. There was more to the story, a final chapter that would nullify what the two of them, Nelson St. James and his lawyer, had tried to do.
“That agreement isn’t as important as that Mr. Franklin seems to think it is,” she said as she rose from the chair and prepared to leave. “He doesn’t know about the changes to the will.”
“The will?” I asked, realizing that it was not just the prosecution that was in the dark. “What about the will – what changes?”
But she was already thinking about other things.
“I have to go; I have to get back to the hotel. It’s three hours later in New York and I have to call Michael to say goodnight.”
It was only after she left that I remembered that she had not answered my other question. The one about other men.
CHAPTER Nine
Robert Franklin was hunched over the counsel table a few feet to my left, holding a pencil with both hands, testing it with his flat thumbs to see how much pressure he could apply. His thumb nails dug in opposite directions two irregular grooves into the yellow sides. The pencil began to bend, ready to splinter in half, but as if he knew its exact tolerance, he stopped, let go of one end of it and starting tapping the eraser in a sharp staccato.
It was quiet. Courtrooms, even one as packed as this one with cynical reporters and thrill seeking spectators, usually were; but never as quiet as when someone was on trial for murder and the likely punishment was death. A trial at this level, murder, a capital case, brought with it a sense of solemnity, a reminder of finality, the feeling you might expect to have if, somehow, you could watch someone’s funeral in advance. I had not thought about it before, but now it came to me all at once, the way all these strangers, men and women who had never met her, would glance at Danielle, sitting next to me, and then immediately look away. It was not what Franklin had done, look way because he was afraid what his look might show; it was not that at all. They looked away for the same reason we find it hard to look at someone we know is going to die. Death is the one obscenity we still avoid.
Franklin kept tapping the eraser, beating time, measuring the wait. Philip Conrad, the court reporter, sat at his machine like a well-trained and proficient musician just before the moment when, the orchestra ready, the conductor walked on stage and, with a single motion of his baton, started everything into motion. Danielle, in the chair closest to the jury box, not ten feet away, stared straight ahead, lost in thoughts of her own.
I leaned back in the curved wooden chair, chipped and scuffed from years of use, turned away from Franklin and the murderous rhythms of his impatience and looked out at the sea of faces on the chance there might be someone I knew. I was not sure whether it happened to other lawyers, but it was always easier, when I had a trial, to be in the courtroom than home at night worrying about what was going to happen the next day or the day after that. It started the first trial I had. I had not been able to sleep, my mind full of a thousand different possibilities - questions I could ask, answers that might be given – nothing ordered, nothing in its proper sequence, just the jumbled noise of my own helpless incoherence. In the morning, when it was time to go, it got even worse. I had to force myself to get dressed, force myself to leave the safety of home. When I climbed the courthouse steps I learned what it felt like to attend your own execution. And then I opened the door to the courtroom and entered a different world. All the thinking stopped; everything slowed down, everything was easy. I knew what I was doing and, though it may sound strange and even demented, watched myself do it. I did not know what I was going to say before I said it, everything happened on the instant, and there were no second chances. I was like an actor in a play, and though all the lines were different, scarcely ever room for repetition, they came - the way, I’m told, they come to someone on stage - as if of their own volition. I could not get enough of it; the only thing I did not like was the fact that at the end of every day we had to quit.
Franklin stopped tapping the eraser end of the pencil. Holding it between his hands, his fingers pointing forward, he twisted it back and forth, the way campers without matches use the friction from a twig to start a fire. Suddenly, the door at the side flew open and the wraithlike figure of Alice Brunelli blew into court.
Other judges might take their time, look around the courtroom, nod at the clerk or the bailiff or some other familiar face, climb the few short steps onto the bench with slow, deliberate effort, and then settle into the heavy leather chair like someone getting ready to watch a movie; Alice Brunelli came in like a whirling dervish, a tornado, a harsh, bitter wind. The court clerk, out of habit, placed her hand on the stack of papers on her desk when Brunelli passed to keep them being blown onto the floor, and then touched the back of her head to make sure her carefully combed hair was still in place. Alice Longworth Brunelli did not hold her head high - that was not the kind of pride she had - she held it in the way of a prize fighter who cannot wait to get in the ring. She bounded up the three steps to the bench and almost before she hit the chair flashed a quick, razor thin smile and welcomed the jury back to court. Then she glanced at me, but only for a moment, and only to let me know she knew I still existed, and turned immediately to Franklin at the other table.
“You may call your first witness.”
Franklin shot straight to his feet. The much abused pencil flew out of his hands, struck the table, ricocheted onto a floor bent and misshapen under the weight of a thousand useless arguments, and then rolled under his abandoned chair. Franklin did not notice. With his shoulders thrown back, he stood there, his gaze squarely focused.
“The People call….”
He hesitated, and everyone remembered what had happened yesterday when, asked to do the same thing, call the first witness in the trial, he had drawn a blank and made to seem a fool. He stared down at the case file, and the needed witness list, open on the table in front of him.
“The People call….”
A sly look, a smile that grew broader and more confident across his face, and suddenly everyone, and especially the jury, knew he was doing it on purpose, reminding them of what he had done, showing that, like them, he could laugh at his own mistakes. There were not many lawyers who could have pulled it off, made a temporary weakness into a permanent st
rength, taken a minor error and turned it into a major advantage.
“The People call Mustafa Nastasis,” he announced in a clear, powerful voice.
The captain of the Blue Zephyr, the captain who, when I first met him, the morning I watched Danielle leave with her husband, had struck me as somehow out of place – What was he going to testify?
Instead of moving close to the witness, from where he could ask questions in a conversational tone, Franklin stood in front of the counsel table, nearly twenty feet away. He had a good voice, moderately deep and unusually vibrant, and, more importantly, a voice that carried into every corner of the room, a voice that held your attention from the sheer sound of it. And he knew it. You could tell from his eyes, the look of pleasure each time he spoke. Too much pleasure, as it seemed to me.
“Mr. Nastasis, you’re employed as the captain of the yacht owned by Nelson St. James – Is that correct?”
I was on my feet before the witness could answer.
“I wonder if Mr. Franklin would mind repeating the question, your Honor? I could not quite understand what he said.”
Franklin clenched his teeth. In a louder, and slightly rigid, voice, he asked again, “Mr. Nastasis, you work as the captain of the St. James Yacht – correct?”
I bounced back up.
“Objection! Leading.”
Alice Brunelli did not look up from what she was reading.
“Sustained.”
Franklin was fuming. He knew what it meant to lead a witness, but what difference did it make with a question as routine and commonplace as this? Rolling his eyes to show the jury that the defense lawyer’s objection was not only time consuming but stupid, he asked the same question the proper, textbook, way.
“How are you employed, Mr. Nastasis?”
Mustafa Nastasis sat on the witness stand calm and alert, his manicured hands folded in his lap. A shrewd smile stole across his mustached lip, as he watched the brief exchange between the lawyers. His dark, hooded eyes widened with a kind of grudging admiration at the way the judge, a woman, took control. He waited, in no hurry, after Franklin asked the question, glancing past him to see if I was going to again object.
“I am the captain of the yacht – Blue Zephyr – owned by Mr. St. James before his death,” he replied finally in a smooth, even cadenced voice.
I remembered his voice, the way he pronounced each word with grammar book precision, and I remembered what he had told me, that strange, enigmatic remark that wherever else they might go, Nelson St. James and his wife always came back to Blue Zephyr. Now St. James was dead, but Nastasis, still vague and unfathomable, did not give the impression that he was burdened with any great grief over the loss.
“Would you tell us what happened that night, what you saw when you were out on deck, the night that Mr. St. James -”
Objection!”
Franklin wheeled around. “Objection?”
“Yes, that’s what I said,” I replied, returning his look of incredulity with a brief smile of massive indifference.
Alice Brunelli removed her glasses and bent forward, a slightly puzzled expression on her rather long, angular face.
“Objection, Mr. Morrison?”
I raised an eyebrow, as if the point were obvious.
“He asked the witness how he was employed.”
“Yes, and…?”
“He asked him how he was employed at the present time; he did not ask him how he was employed then. It may be interesting to know that Mr. Nastasis is today the captain of the St. James yacht; it tells us nothing about how he was employed the night in question and how he happened to be out on deck.”
Alice Brunelli did not change expression. Her eyes moved to Franklin. First one interruption, then another; he could barely contain himself.
“It’s implicit!” he insisted with ill-concealed contempt.
“What is implicit?” I questioned with all the innocence I could pretend.
“That he was employed then the same way he is now, that he was working there, that he went out on deck, that - !”
“All that because he works there now? That was months ago.” With a sidelong glance at the witness, I continued, “Maybe Mr. Nastasis was on board as a guest; maybe he liked it so much he decided he wanted to be there all the time and hired on. Maybe – well, maybe a lot of things,” I said, looking Franklin right in the eye, “but we’ll never know unless you ask.”
Franklin was about to shout that this was mindless, a complete waste of time, but he saw from the stern expression in Brunelli’s watching eyes that when it came to the rules of evidence it was not going to be a question of convenience. He threw up his hands in frustration.
“Okay, I’ll ask. Tell us, Mr. Nastasis, how were you employed the night you went out on the deck and found the defendant, Danielle St. James, holding a -”
“Objection!” I cried, springing at once to my feet. “The prosecution is again leading the witness.”
I could have stopped there, but I wanted to do more than state my objection: I wanted to annoy Franklin, harass him every way I knew, do anything I could to throw him off, make him lose his temper. I had to attack his vanity, lecture him on the finer points of the law, treat him as I knew everything and he knew nothing. I had to drive him crazy, if I could.
“The witness has to describe what, if anything, he found,” I explained in a tone that suggested this must be news to the prosecution. “It isn’t the prosecution’s place to tell him.”
Franklin began to protest, but Brunelli had had enough. She waved him off and in almost the same motion crouched forward so she could better see the witness and the witness could see her.
“Mr. Nastasis,” she began, “were you employed as the captain of the St. James yacht on the night in question?”
The Greek captain with the Turkish mother seemed to enjoy it, the way a woman had put a man in his place; but only, I suspected, because it proved that Franklin was not the man he ought to be.
“Yes, your Honor; I was.”
“On the night in question,” she went on with measured efficiency, “approximately what time did you go out on deck?”
“It was a few minutes past midnight.”
“And what was the reason you went out on deck at that hour?”
“I heard loud voices – screaming – and then I heard what sounded like a gunshot,” replied Nastasis, speaking slowly and with precision. “I found Mrs. St. James standing there, with a gun in here hand. There was blood on the deck, on the railing, blood where Mr. St. James -”
Brunelli held up her hand and stopped him there.
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Nastasis.”
She drew back from the front corner of the bench and turned to Franklin whose face had turned seven shades of red. It did not matter that he was prosecuting the case, it did not matter that he had prosecuted hundreds of cases before; trial was combat, even if words were the only weapons, and in her courtroom you had only yourself to blame if you thought the rules too formal, or too antiquated, and that you could pick the ones you wanted. If you could not ask the right questions of your own witness, thought you could trifle with the rules of evidence, then, by God, she would do it for you and let the jury draw its own conclusions about whether you should be trying cases in a court of law. When she gave the witness back to Franklin she looked at him as if she wondered how he had ever gotten through law school, much less become a member of the bar.
Franklin was not going to take it. He turned to face the witness but his eyes never left the woman who had just humiliated him.
“I’d ask you a question, Mr. Nastasis,” he said with cold, deliberate indifference to what he knew would be the consequences, “but I’m not sure I know one that the defense attorney would not object to and the judge would not sustain!”
Alice Brunelli shot out of her chair.
“Are you suggesting collusion between the court and a party to this case?” She fixed with him a lethal stare that would have made a weak
er man tremble, but only seemed to increase Franklin’s defiance. “If I were you, Mr. Franklin, I would think very seriously about my answer.”
Alice Longworth Brunelli had finished near the top of her class at Yale; Robert George Franklin had gone to night school and finished somewhere in the great amorphous middle of his class. She could have joined any law firm in the city; he could not have gotten so much as an interview. They came from completely different worlds and they knew it. Without meaning to, she looked down on him, a night school lawyer who, from her perspective, cared only about winning and nothing about the law; while he, on the other hand, resented the way she and all the other Ivy League lawyers thought what was taught at Yale or Harvard was more important than what he had learned on the streets. He put up with her because he had to, but he did not have to like it. He had had his moment of revenge; he knew what he had to do next.
“I apologize, your Honor,” he said in a voice that fairly bragged an absence of conviction. “I can assure you that it wasn’t -”
With a brusque motion of her hand, so quick it might have caught a fly, she cut him off.
“Take the witness, Mr. Franklin. Let’s move on – we haven’t got all day.”
But before he could ask a question, she cut him off again.
“Mr. Morrison,” she rasped impatiently, “I trust that you’re not going to raise objections just for the sake of objecting?”
“No, your Honor,” I replied. “I’ll only object to questions that are objectionable.”
She raised an eyebrow and lifted her chin, the preface to a warning, notice that if I made another objection it better damn well be one the rules of evidence would support.
“Mr. Franklin, please continue.”
Franklin had a whole set of questions; not one of them, he was certain, leading or otherwise objectionable.
“Mr. Nastasis, would you please describe to the jury what you did when you saw the defendant standing there with the gun in her hand, after she had shot and killed her husband.”
