Corpus Corpus

by H. Paul Jeffers

  "In the first place, it's not a silly award. Secondly, I am not the person who'll give him the award. I'm delivering a toast to Lily Rowan. In the Wolfe novels she is a girlfriend of Nero Wolfe's assistant, Archie Goodwin. At the banquet Lily is being represented by someone who is an expert on Wolfe. She will be the one presenting the award to Janus."

  "Well she can do it without me. Wiggins can count me out."

  "Not so fast with regrets, John-boy. The woman in question happens to your favorite prosecutor from the other coast."

  "Maggie Dane? She is going to be there?"

  Goldstein drummed stubby fingers atop the stack of books. 'Johnny, I've never seen such a look of surprise on your mug."

  "I don't get it," Bogdanovic said, rising again. "How can she give an award to the guy who used every dirty legal trick there was to beat her in that travesty they had the nerve to call a murder trial out there in La La Land?"

  "They go back a long way. Before she became a prosecutor in Los Angeles, she was a junior associate in his firm right here in little old New York. I met her just after I had made lieutenant. She took my deposition in a two-bit assault case that involved an up-and-coming mobster we've all since come to know as Don Carlo Perillo, boss of bosses. I couldn't help laughing when I saw that among the legal papers she unloaded from her briefcase was the new Nero Wolfe novel, A Family Affair. I thought it was amusing that she'd be reading it while defending a crime-family member. That puts our initial encounter in the mid-1970s. Then she got married to an actor and gave up a promising career as a criminal defender to accompany her hubby to Hollywood. When it ended in a divorce she supported her son by going back to the law as a prosecutor. So you see, she and Janus are old friends. As to the Wolfe Pack's giving the award? One word: publicity. Our friend Wiggins is keenly aware that the reunion of Maggie Dane and Theo Janus for the first time since the big trial will bring out the press in droves."

  "That is my point! Do you really want to see yourself on the front pages in a picture with him all duded up in that ridiculous cowboy getup, ever present big fat stogie in his hand, smug smile on his suntanned kisser, hugging you as if he owns you?"

  "If there's to be a picture in the papers, I'm sure it won't include me. Maggie Dane is much more photogenic. And newsworthy. She is also such an authority on Wolfe that Wiggins has banned her from taking part in the quiz that is a Black Orchid ritual. That's why if I'm to avoid making a fool of myself when I get up to introduce her I'd better do some brushing up on the corpus."

  Bogdanovic's expression went blank. "The what?"

  "The body of work by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is called the canon. Nero Wolfe stories are the corpus."

  "As in delicti, no doubt."

  "It's actually a tongue-in-cheek reference to Nero Wolfe's avoirdupois. In movies long before your time he was portrayed by Edward Arnold, back in the thirties. On radio he was played by Sydney Greenstreet, the fat man in The Maltese Falcon. On TV it was William Conrad. He was suitably chubby, though not as immense as Wolfe. Nero tipped the scale at a seventh of a ton."

  "I can see why Wiggins fits right in with that group. He's got to weigh at least three hundred."

  "You're going to fit in, too, once the Wolfies learn your name. Wolfe was of Balkan ancestry. Same as you."

  Bogdanovic looked up interestedly. "He was Croatian?"

  "Montenegrin, actually. Now, please bring me up to speed on the Paulie Mancuso situation."

  "The DA's people are stashing him until trial, months away." He made a sour face. "Evidently, they don't trust us enough to tell us where they've put him."

  "I trust you're endeavoring to find out the hiding place."

  "I already have. He's at the Hotel Radcliffe."

  "That's pretty upscale. The district attorney's office must have gotten a sizable increase in its budget."

  "Maybe Paulie's dipped into his ill-gotten gains so he can live in comfort before the wizards who run the witness protection program give him a new identity and ship him off to some town in the Midwest."

  "You've done an excellent job in locating him, John. Archie Goodwin couldn't have done a better job of ferreting."

  Despite the disguise of a baggy pants suit, enormous black sunglasses, and a large straw hat with floppy brim meant to further conceal long red hair that she had pulled up into a knot beneath it, she found herself recognized all the way through the airport. Suddenly, after a fourteen-year career and more than a hundred successful murder prosecutions, a television camera in the courtroom had transformed her from just one more familiar face around the Los Angeles County Criminal Court into a national celebrity. Yet amid the embarrassment of being asked for autographs as she hurried toward her departure gate, she found some comfort in the unanimous opinion of those who delayed her that the outcome of the trial was nothing less than an assault against the American system of justice and an affront to common sense and decency.

  At a newsstand she bought Good Cigar magazine with a large cover picture of Theodore Janus wreathed in a blue cloud and a provocative headline: is this man's law all smoke and mirrors?

  In a bookstore she purchased the new legal thriller by John Grisham.

  Although she could cite a few exceptions in crime fiction, all of them men, Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Margaret Rosemary Dane viewed the overall lack of prosecutors as principal characters as a disappointing flaw in the mystery genre. Lawyers who did solve crimes were invariably working on behalf of someone who had been mistakenly charged with a crime or, even worse, set up by the police, often in collusion with a prosecutor. In the courtroom dramas of theater, film, television, and books, the rule seemed to be that true nobility of character resided only at the tables occupied by a Perry Mason rather than a District Attorney Hamilton Berger. For every capable exception to the rule, such as the prosecutors on Law and Order, television was replete with the Perry Masons.

  In detective novels the officers of the law from the cops to the prosecutors were often described as dolts or impediments to be overcome. Sherlock Holmes faced inept Scotland Yarders. Nero Wolfe had to tangle with Inspector L. T. Cramer.

  With a smile, she wondered what Wolfe would have made of Harvey Goldstein. And how might Harvey respond if the weighty private sleuth stormed into his office, as he had into Cramer's, and threatened to have the police abolished?

  When cases moved out of the hands of investigators and into courtrooms the drama in fiction, as in real life, lay in whether the defense could outwit and outmaneuver the prosecution and get the accused off. In cases in which Nero Wolfe had investigated, Assistant District Attorney Irving Mandelbaum, who shortened his name to Mandel, and Westchester County prosecutors Fletcher M. Anderson and Cleveland Archer had no need to worry that Wolfe's case might be undercut by a defense lawyer's histrionics.

  "A trial is theater," Janus had taught her, first as student and lately as adversary. "If you want to take the measure of the social, moral, and political character of a nation's people," he said, "look at their attitude toward major criminal trials. Study the great legal shows, Maggie. You can learn more from them than you'll ever pick up in a classroom."

  The first trial had grabbed the headlines from coast to coast not because the crime happened in a big city where awful things were expected to occur but in the sedate and civilized town of Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1895. Charged with taking an ax and hacking to death Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, was the sweetly mannered and demure daughter of Andrew's first marriage, Elizabeth. In an inkling of things to come, reporters rushed from all over the country to cover what headline writers trumpeted as "the trial of the century."

  Faced with a weak case put on by the prosecution, the jury deliberated for one hour and returned to court to declare Lizzie not guilty. Word of the acquittal spread like wildfire through Fall River and by telegraph to newspapers across the country and around the world. In another foreshadow of what such sensational trials in the next century would produce, many who had not
been in the court during the trial, but had followed the case in press coverage, were shocked by the shortness of the jury's deliberations and so outraged by the verdict that Lizzie ultimately moved from Fall River to spend the rest of her life shunned by a public that gleefully recited:

  Lizzie Borden took an ax

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  When she saw what she had done

  She gave her father forty-one.

  A hundred years after her name got an enduring place in the annals of America's most famous criminal trials, another murder case was to end with the jury finding the defendant not guilty and a vast majority of the public in angry disagreement. Almost immediately, another piece of poetic public opinion went around:

  O.J. Simpson took a knife

  And used it on his former wife;

  And when he saw that she was dead,

  He slashed Ron Goldman toe to head.

  In the hundred years between Lizzie Borden and O.J. Simpson thousands of men and women had been charged and put on trial for murder, with most convicted, but every now and then one of these cases of homicide was vaulted into such a state of intense public interest and insatiable curiosity that it, too, became "the trial of the century."

  In 1906, millionaire playboy Harry Thaw's troubled mind was obsessed with the beautiful twenty-year-old model who had become his wife, the former Evelyn Nesbitt. But neither could Harry rid his mind of Evelyn's former fatherly benefactor and lover, Stanford White. If the lurid stories she had whispered to Harry were to be believed, the country's most famous architect had been a sexual pervert. Consequently, when Thaw strode up to White while New fork's most celebrated people enjoyed late supper in White's magnificent restaurant atop Madison Square Garden, whipped out a pistol, and fired three bullets into the architect's body, then declared that he did it to save his wife's honor, defense lawyers claimed that such a deed could only be declared a justifiable act.

  With the best defense his riches could buy, Thaw pleaded not guilty, dined on sumptuous meals catered in his jail cell by the city's finest restaurants and lobster palaces, and calmly waited for the trial to begin and its star witness—Evelyn—to take the witness stand. He expected her to leave the jurors with no choice but to exonerate a man who had defended her honor.

  From shooting to verdict, the public doted on all the lurid details while viewing the drama as a lesson in morality. Unlike a morality play, however, the trial of Harry Thaw did not have a happy ending. The jurors proved incapable of reaching a verdict. With a mistrial declared, Harry faced a second trial at which the defense came to court with a fresh strategy. This time he pleaded temporary insanity and beat the rap.

  In the decade known as the Roaring Twenties excess seemed to be an American preoccupation. In 1926 Connecticut's murder trial of Gerald Chapman (the first man to be named Public Enemy Number One) set a style for raucus press coverage of a man who had come to be regarded by the public as a kind of folk hero.

  That same decade provided the press opportunity to tweak the public's passion for a sensational murder and a lively trial. Set against the vivid tapestry of the Roaring Twenties, a case that Damon Runyon called "the dumbbell murder" provided a boisterous and uninhibited decade with a show involving a brigade of free-booting reporters that Runyon called "the best show in town." Its seemingly mundane central character, Ruth Snyder Brown, became a national fixation.

  Also on the scene was a fledgling court reporter by the name of James M. Cain, who would base his book Double Indemnity and the movie of the same tide in part on the case. The murderous housewife was played by Barbara Stanwyck with a sultry cunning that Ruth Snyder would have envied. In the role of the hapless helper in homicide, however, Fred MacMurray had seemed much too smart to have been patterned on Ruth's hapless paramour, Judd Gray. Ruth then claimed one more niche in criminal history. She was the last woman executed at Sing Sing.

  The year she and Judd began their fateful journey into the annals of criminal trials had been a time of triumphal pageantry and spotlight for a man known for acute shyness. And in a case of life imitating art, aviator Charles Lindbergh was launched on an odyssey that would validate the words of one of the 1920s' most successful novelists. F. Scott Fitzgerald had declared, "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."

  In the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnap and murder of Lindbergh's infant son the court proceedings were the first to be covered by newsreel cameras and radio.

  Almost as sensational as the Lindbergh case was the "thrill killing" of a young boy by a pair of brainy young sons of wealthy Illinois families. But the central figure of the trial of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in 1924 was their controversial defense lawyer—Clarence Darrow—whose strategy was to introduce psychiatric evidence and to challenge the use of the death penalty.

  In 1943 the murder of Manhattan socialite Patrica Lonergan and the trial of her husband, a pilot of the Royal Canadian Air Force, marked the crime-journalism debut of Dorothy Kilgallen. The daughter of a respected Chicago newspaperman, "Dotty" broke the story of a homosexual relationship between Wayne Lonergan and Patricia's wealthy father. The trial provided Americans a respite from the news of the Second World War. Did Wayne really kill Patricia? A jury said he had. Many people doubted it.

  Kilgallen would be at the heart of the murder trial of a handsome doctor in 1954. The case of Sam Sheppard provided the inspiration for The Fugitive on television and in a movie. An appeal of the guilty verdict had freed "Dr. Sam" and introduced America to a lawyer who became as famous in defense as Clarence Darrow—F. Lee Bailey. Had Dotty not been busy writing a book on the Sheppard case, had she not been in failing health, had she not been promising to reveal "the truth" behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and had she not died under rather mysterious circumstances, she certainly would have covered the 1965 trial of Dr. Carl Coppolino, also defended by Lee Bailey, and the one that had catapulted to fame another brilliant young phenomenon in the ranks of defenders—Theodore Roosevelt Janus.

  The arrest of Richard Edwards for the shotgun murder of one of the guards of an armored car as it made a delivery of half a million dollars to a bank in a suburban shopping mall had led to a nest of 1960s revolutionaries. The result of Janus's portrayal of Edwards as victim of society's failings rather than a criminal was transformation of the prosecution's straightforward murder case into a political show trial. Convicted only of manslaughter, Edwards served a mere eight years.

  A decade after the Edwards trial another involved a doctor. This time it was Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician serving with the U.S. Army's elite "green beret" special forces, tried for the murders of his wife and two small daughters. MacDonald's case was the subject of a best-selling book by Joe McGinnis that elevated a new style for writing about such sensational cases and fostered a profitable genre of books begun with Kilgallen's tome on the Sheppard case—True Crime.

  Like readers of detective novels, Americans soon found whodunits in real life as they and their system of justice met a new kind of criminal—the serial killer—in the form of Ted Bundy, Wayne Williams, John Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

  When private school headmistress Jean Harris shot and killed the famed author of the Scarsdale Diet, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the 1980 case and its entourage of women reporters put the abuse of women on trial.

  The trial and subsequent legal civil-trial entanglements of subway gunman Bernhard Goetz, a popular hero, was followed in the public's attention by Robert Chambers in "the Preppie Murder Case" of 1986, the next year's Billionaire's Boys Club murders, and the trials of the Menendez brothers for shotgunning their parents to death. Excuses were offered to justify all this violence. Then came the O.J. Simpson trial with F. Lee Bailey sharing the spotlight as a "Dream Team" of defenders put the police on trial.

  What was hardly ever involved in a trial that provoked such wide public absorption was a weighty matter of law or some issue of historical, social, political, or economic significance. Bu
t if a case was not important to anyone but those directly involved, what explained its notoriety?

  The personalities of the people in the case? Occasionally.

  The temper of the times? Sometimes.

  Sex was almost always an element.

  But what factor could be discerned in every instance? From Elizabeth Borden to Orenthal James Simpson what was the common denominator? What was it that exalted one murder so that it could become a part of the warp and woof of our history, even legend? That factor, Maggie believed, was the tantalizing possibility that through clever lawyering the accused could get away with it. The result was that heroes of America's system of justice were rarely the prosecutors. Glory, fame, and riches went to defenders like the one who had been summoned across the country to do battle with her in yet another trial of the century.

  Janus had won the case, in the opinion of all the people who recognized her in the airport, through trickery and legalistic chicanery. And, as her flight to New York City was called and she pondered the purpose of her journey, she was certain that few of them would have approved of her acceptance of the invitation from the Wolfe Pack to honor Janus with its most prestigious award.

  Even the chairman of the steering committee had told her he would understand if she chose to refuse to do it. "It certainly is going to be controversial," Wiggins had warned. "You could find yourself being pilloried by a press that has been depicting you lately as a saint."

  As she replied with a laugh, she thought of a perfect answer in the form of a quotation from the Wolfe corpus: "The essence of sainthood is expiation."

  During the short stroll from bookstore to subway, only three passersby abandoned the taciturn demeanor that comes with being a New Yorker to remark upon the spectacle of the huge figure made larger by a billowing gray tweed Inverness cape and the matching deerstalker cap. After all, there was nothing unusual about a fat man in New York City, even one with an ebony walking stick with a silver handle in the shape of the Maltese falcon that had been a clue in the solving of a murder. But the encountering of someone dressed like Sherlock Holmes at four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon the week before Christmas, when one expected to see several portly men in Santa Claus outfits, was more than enough to turn the heads of even the most blasé New Yorker.