Westfarrow Island

by Paul A. Barra

  “I guess Jack’s expensive lawyers have been retained but not yet paid,” Agnes Ann said in an aside.

  Her husband nodded in what he hoped was a sage manner. He knew he should have smiled at her witticism but was too apprehensive to do so. The sheriff’s office had just finished up a long investigation, but the results seemed tenuous to him. Tagliabue was anxious about the prosecutor’s case. Jack Brunson was up to something, that was certain.

  More people pushed in through the oak doors of the courtroom, filling the old space to capacity. A buzz of murmuring swarmed high to the dusty ceiling and back down to the shiny pews in a constant ebb and flow of voices. The room was fusty with the smell of wet clothing.

  Into it all strode Jack Brunson, resplendent in a fur-collared greatcoat and merino wool felt fedora. Two bailiffs rushed up to him as spectators looking for seats moved to let him pass. He patted the bailiffs on their shoulders and smiled at them, saying their names. They apparently could not refrain from returning the smile, even though their boss, Judge Andrew Conyers, was waiting in his chambers with ill-concealed fury at the delay to proceedings. The guards led the defendant to the defense table as though they were escorting the prince consort to the altar.

  Jack was folding his overcoat on his chair when everyone’s attention shifted to a commotion in the front of the courtroom. The judge burst into view with a flourish of bellowing robes and waving arms. Someone spoke loudly, people clattered to their feet, and sat just as abruptly. Judge Conyers took the dais.

  “Are we ready to proceed while it’s still light out, ladies and gentlemen?”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  “Then let’s get at it. I got me a hot date waiting on me.”

  People tittered at the idea of this old curmudgeon with the glistening bald head going out dancing at one or more of the supper clubs squatting in the dust of Portsmouth’s Tan Town, where slick-haired trumpet players wailed the kind of jazz that had been popular in Manhattan a half-century ago. Judge Conyers was a known aficionado of the late Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong.

  Daniela Martin presented the case for the prosecution. She was a brassy public servant whose ringlets bounced as she barked out the state’s case against one John C. “Jack” Brunson: “Murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, felonious assault using a deadly weapon, conspiracy to smuggle and/or sell a regulated substance without a license to do so, and transporting an injured person without providing medical care. The state will prove each charge, your honor, with an array of credible witnesses and forensic evidence to authenticate their testimony. We intend to put this rogue attorney away for the rest of his natural life.”

  Martin’s heels clacked back to the prosecution table and one of Brunson’s team slouched up to the podium. He stood there, shuffling a few papers in the folder he held in one manicured hand but saying nothing. The judge’s head began to redden.

  “You have an opening statement, counselor, or are you going to stand there posing for a picture?”

  The lawyer looked up slowly, maybe even insolently.

  “I am rendered speechless by the eloquence of Assistant District Attorney Martin’s statement, Judge. I thought you might want to let it seep in, so to speak.”

  “Well, you thought wrong, Meathead. Proceed, or one of these fine bailiffs will provide your sleeping accommodations for the evening.”

  The lawyer smiled, and brushing an imaginary hair from his forehead with one hand, he held up a few papers in the other. The judge glared at them.

  “In that case, your honor, we ask the court to accept this filing, outlining our demand that this fishing expedition against our client be dismissed without prejudice.”

  “On what grounds, if I may be so bold to ask?”

  The lawyer ignored the sarcasm and spoke plainly. “On the grounds that the state no longer has any witnesses to its overreaching charges. Moses “Red” Fowler and Peter D’Annunzio have just advised this legal team that they will not testify against Mr. Brunson.”

  The courtroom burst into an excited collage of chatter. Conyers banged his gavel. Without Red and D’Annunzio verifying that Jack wanted to disable Maven and take from her the bales of hay that contained the drugs, the DA’s case against him would be no more than Tagliabue’s sighting of Brunson on his Hatteras with Carlos’s dying body. The state had no hard evidence. Cuthbert was dead and the Russian defector was off in the bowels of official Washington and would never be allowed to testify against Brunson. His knowledge of Russian communications was too valuable to expose him to any court proceedings. Brunson could be placed on the Hatteras by fingerprints and DNA traces, but the boat belonged to him at the time, so that forensic evidence meant only that Brunson had been aboard his boat at some time in the past. The state’s accusations against Jack Brunson were reliant on the testimony of the men who had been in the room when he and the Magpie plotted to disable Maven and steal the cargo of hay bales. Red and Peter had been granted immunity for their testimony, but apparently that was no longer enough. The district attorney’s case had just fallen apart, and the look on Daniela Martin’s face indicated that she was suddenly aware of that reality. She looked as if she had just discovered the head of a toad in her Starbucks cup. Then she looked down at Tagliabue and whispered, “I was afraid of this. They were starting to become uncooperative with us.”

  Over at the defense table, contrariwise, smugness was the order of the day. The lawyers managed not to smile broadly, but Brunson could not prevent a thin grin from brightening his tanned face. He might have money difficulties in the short term, but he was about to be released as a free man.

  The judge turned his stare at the prosecution. It took the prompting of another DA office lawyer to haul Martin’s attention to his unstated question: Do you have enough left to continue trying Jack Brunson? She stood stiffly, rummaging fitfully through the papers in front of her.

  “Well, uh, your honor, I, er, am caught off guard by this sudden turn of events. Er, we request an overnight stay.”

  “I guess you do,” Conyers growled. “Okay folks, we’re going to pause these proceedings until tomorrow at nine A.M. We will continue to conduct this case then. If the state of Maine cannot mount a stout prosecution at that time, I intend to dismiss all charges against the defendant.”

  He banged his gavel once, hard, and fled the room in a flurry of black robes and shiny head. By the time the chief bailiff called for everyone to rise, the judge was gone from sight. A roar of voices filled the courtroom once the door to his chambers banged closed. People were on their feet talking to each other and gesturing. Brunson and his team held an impromptu press conference at their table. The prosecution team alternatively rubbed their foreheads and thumbed their smartphones madly. Martin had hers to her ear and was working her mouth rapidly.

  “This must be what’s known as a study in contrasts,” Agnes Ann said.

  Tagliabue sighed. “Somebody got to Red and Peter. We should have anticipated that.”

  “Who could it be?”

  “I’m thinking it’s probably the people who financed the drug deal. They wouldn’t want Jack to cop a plea, which he might have done if Red and Peter agreed to testify.”

  Sheriff’s Deputy Johnny Coleman made his way over to their seats and suggested a meeting at Tagliabue’s apartment. Once there, he apologized to the Tagliabues for the collapse of the state’s case against Jack Brunson.

  “We had Red and D’Annunzio sewed up, but something happened. Some new players got involved, some group with enough juice to make Red and Nunz more afraid of them than they are of us.”

  “It’s got to be the mob, don’t you think, Johnny?” Tagliabue asked. “They’re afraid if Jack senses he’s going down, he’ll strike a deal with the prosecution to save his own backside. Jack’s drug deal probably leads back to them.”

  “No doubt. The Portland mob don’t want Jack Brunson pointing any fingers. Shit.”

  They sat in silence around Tagliabue’s kitc
hen table, letting cups of coffee grow cold as the heat leached from their own energy. They could feel themselves deflating. Coleman spoke again, in a voice that sounded as hopeless as a treed coon’s cry.

  “I don’t guess there’s any chance the feds might bail us out, is there?”

  Tagliabue thought about Giselle and her Russian defector, Alexis. She had what The Clemson Project wanted, and they were probably gathering data as fast as they could translate it. She might be willing to help Tagliabue in what to her was a local matter, but never at the risk of compromising her source. He already knew he wasn’t even going to ask her to assist.

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen, Johnny. We’re on our own.”

  “I kinda knew you were gonna say that.”

  The prosecutor from the DA’s office, Daniela Martin, met with Tagliabue, Agnes Ann, and Detective Johnny Coleman at eight the next morning in a gritty-floored conference room in the old courthouse. Jack Brunson’s trial was due to reconvene in sixty minutes, but Daniela was not hopeful that it would last long.

  “I’m afraid ol’ Satch Conyers is going to throw out the case when I tell him that we have not been able to convince either Peter D’Annunzio or Red Fowler to testify against Brunson after all.”

  Agnes Ann asked into the mournful silence, “Why do you call the judge Satch?”

  The prosecutor smiled, relieved to be able to say something that wasn’t pure pessimism. “The judge plays trumpet in juke joints all over the northeast. Can you believe that shit?”

  Tagliabue could not envision Conyers, who seemed devoid of a sense of humor, playing jazz in his spare time. Detective Coleman seemed not to hear the explanation.

  “Somebody get to D’Annunzio and Fowler?” he asked.

  “Looks that way. They both told me and my investigator again last night that they could not remember anything about any meeting or collusion between Brunson and Marv Harris. They had a lawyer with them. Joel Blanton.”

  The detective reacted to the name with a groan. Tagliabue looked at him with his eyebrows raised in a question.

  “Blanton is Alphonso Delgado’s main lawyer, his consigliere, if you will. For your information, Mrs. Tagliabue, Delgado is suspected of being the crime boss of Portsmouth, maybe of all Maine. We’ve never been able to nail him on anything serious, mainly because of guys like Blanton. He’s got legal representation on everything his syndicate touches. Delgado is better protected than the pope.”

  A uniform from Coleman’s office handed some papers to the detective as the rest of them sat in the plastic chairs, Agnes Ann working on a sticky spot in front of her with a tissue from her purse. After a minute of depressed silence, Tagliabue asked, “We have nothing without the testimony of those two mutts?”

  Martin’s face was fallen, her mouth a thin line curving down into the sag of her cheeks. She shrugged her shoulders. “You got anything, Detective?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do have something.”

  They all looked at Coleman in surprise. He looked half his age when he smiled sheepishly. He was holding a few papers in his hand like an offering to a goddess.

  “Over at the stationhouse just now, the forensic department had left me a report. They actually got two partials and one whole fingerprint from the pills Anthony found in the bales of hay. They’re one partial of Magpie, and the other two are Brunson’s.”

  The room erupted in noise.

  “My word, there were thousands of them,” Agnes Ann exclaimed. “You folks looked at every pill?”

  “Musta’ been a slow month in the lab,” Coleman said around his grin.

  Prosecutor Martin was transformed into a new vision of herself with the detective’s news. Her posture straightened and she had a glint back in her eye. Coleman handed her the forensic report. After looking it over, she said, “Let’s get back into court and unload our surprise on Jack Brunson.”

  When she told Judge Conyers she had verified that D’Annunzio and Fowler were suddenly reluctant witnesses, the old man growled. Brunson and his legal team sat back in their chairs, trying hard not to look overly satisfied. Jeffrey Magnusen got to his feet. He was the second of Brunson’s lawyers, not the one who had infuriated the judge with his attitude the day before. Apparently the team had decided overnight not to press their luck any further with Conyers.

  “I’m sorry to hear that the prosecution’s case has collapsed, your honor, although we never thought they had enough to commence this trial in the first place. We ask the court to dismiss the charges against our client and let us all go home to our families.”

  Conyers looked at the lawyer as if he was surprised that the man had a family to go home to, but he directed his next question to the state’s attorney.

  “Do you have anything to prevent me from agreeing to that request, counselor?”

  “I have forensic evidence that will place Mr. Brunson in contact with the confiscated drugs, your honor. We may not be able to prove the other charges against the defendant, but we believe we have more than enough to convict the defendant on conspiracy to smuggle and/or sell a regulated substance without a license to do so.”

  Magnusen jumped to his feet.

  “This is the first we’ve heard of this evidence, Judge. We need time to process it and arrange our defense.”

  “Have you never heard of discovery, Ms. Martin?”

  “We just now heard of this evidence, your honor. The sheriff’s office released its forensic report last night on the drugs they seized and I received this report before court this morning. I haven’t even had time to make copies yet.”

  Conyers rubbed his face and spoke to the jury. “We will suspend proceedings now and reconvene on the day after tomorrow, Thursday. We will complete the trial expeditiously then. I’m sorry for these delays. I know you have lives to get back to, ladies and gentlemen. There will be no more delays, I promise.”

  Before the judge could vacate the courtroom, Jack Brunson walked up to the dais quickly and spoke to him. Conyers’s eyes popped open at this breach of court etiquette. His two lawyers were in the process of leaving the courtroom themselves; they reversed and got to the bench just as Conyers nodded to whatever Brunson had said. The three stood with their heads together in earnest conversation as the judge beckoned to a bailiff and spoke to him. The bailiff hustled after Daniela Martin and asked her to meet in the judge’s chambers with his honor and the defense team. Martin shrugged at Agnes Ann and Tagliabue and went off with the bailiff. They waited for her on the courthouse steps.

  When she returned ten minutes later she was smiling.

  “Jack wants to cop a plea. I agreed to accept unlawful possession with intent to distribute for fifteen months in the state pen, revocation of his license to practice law, and that he agree to be a witness against the crime boss Alphonso Delgado as party to the transaction.”

  “I can’t imagine his lawyers are happy about that deal,” Coleman said.

  “They didn’t find out until after Jack told the judge he wanted to plead out. They are, to coin a phrase, pissed off to beat the band. When I heard what he told Conyers, I made a plea offer.”

  The four of them laughed and agreed that the bargain Martin had offered was a good one. She told them she would meet with the defense team and the judge in his chambers on Thursday morning.

  “I’ll call you on the island and let you know what ensues. I think Jack will take it. He could be out of prison in less than a year.”

  The Tagliabues stayed in Bath overnight, treating Johnny Coleman and his wife to dinner to celebrate their win in court, and took the early plane out to Westfarrow. They caught up on farm chores in the afternoon and went to bed early, Ethyl curled at their door. Daniela Martin called them at lunchtime the next day. Agnes Ann listened and put the receiver down gently.

  “Bad news, Aggie?”

  “Jack was a no-show at court this morning. No one has seen or heard from him.”

  They sat and cogitated. Was Brunson changing his
mind about his plea bargain? Had he decided not to risk any prison time and gone to ground? Skipping a criminal court proceeding is a serious offense for the defendant. The sheriff’s office was no doubt out hunting for him. Agnes Ann was worried about his legal system truancy; her husband was more sanguine.

  “He probably cached his remaining funds somewhere offshore and is lounging on an island in the Caribbean getting ready to spend them. I can understand why he wouldn’t want to be behind bars for even a year.”

  “I know you’ve been around the block a time or two, Tony, but you don’t appreciate the evil nature of Jack Brunson like I do. He will want to get even with us. I guarantee it.”

  Her frown disfigured her face and her shoulders sagged. She shook her bent head slowly from side to side, her hair framing it in a curtain of concern. Tagliabue was pained by the look of her, wanted to ease her worry.

  “Look, Aggie. We have the dog. We go around carrying. And I’m sort of a protection expert.”

  She looked up at him, folding her hair behind her ears.

  “I’ve never shot at anything or anybody. I’m not sure my little gun will do me any good if he comes seeking his revenge.”

  “Well, we stay together until this is settled. After lunch, let’s go out and shoot a few magazines in the ravine. The more you shoot, the more confident you’ll become. I promise. And I promise not to leave you alone.”

  She offered a mellow smile to her husband. “I know you want to be my hero, Tony. My protector. But you can’t spend your life looking after me.”

  “I can—and will—until this deal with Brunson is finished.”

  “When I go to the bathroom, you will not stand outside at attention.”

  “I’ll be hiding behind the shower curtain.”

  They took the Jeepster in four-wheel mode down into a small basin, reversing it at the bottom and opening the tailgate to lay out their ammunition and weapons. The side of the ravine opposite their entry path was a pronounced rise, ensuring that bullets fired at it could not escape the perimeter. Tagliabue had fixed a strip of chicken wire between two trees. He clipped paper targets to the wire with clothespins.