by D. W. Buffa
“Never been charged with anything before now,” I went on, becoming more intense as I watched Caminetti react. “The defendant has lived in the same town, practiced law in the same office, for years. He served his country in the armed forces of the United States. He’s a decorated veteran. And Mr. Caminetti wants him sent to jail!—To wait for trial, charged with a crime that not only did the defendant not commit, but that never happened, a phantom crime, a death by accident that certain people have for purposes of their own decided to call murder. If there is anyone who should sit in jail waiting for trial, it ought to be…”
Caminetti’s head jerked up. His face was red with anger; his small calculating eyes flashed with contempt and a kind of malice, a dark warning of things to come.
“‘It ought to be,’” he repeated in an ominous tone. “Let me tell you what ought to be…”
“Gentlemen, I believe the question at issue is whether the defendant should be remanded, granted bail, or released on his own recognizance,” interjected Scarborough as he dragged the wrinkled white handkerchief out from beneath his robe.
His eyes began to water; his head raised up in small, abrupt movements; he spread the handkerchief over his face, veiling from his audience the regrettable explosion. With his mouth and nose still covered, he gestured with his free hand, picking up the thread of his remarks as if there had never been an interruption.
“Mr. Caminetti, precisely what are the grounds for the request that the defendant be remanded to custody?”
He finished wiping his nose, and with a look of mild disgust, folded the handkerchief and placed it back inside the black cotton robe. He inclined his head to the side and with the back of three fingers scratched his left cheek.
“Specifically, is there anything that Mr. Antonelli has just said—the absence of a criminal record, his background, his position in the community—that you care to challenge?”
As shrewd as the streets on which he had been raised, Caminetti knew better than to agree with things he could not deny. Everything I had said about Haviland was true; Caminetti ignored them as if they did not count.
“We ask for remand, Your Honor, because this heinous crime was not only committed by the defendant, but because for more than thirty years he has covered this heinous crime up.”
Everything about Bartholomew Caminetti was tenacious; not just the way he looked, but the way he spoke, spitting out the words in short, staccato-like bursts, practiced words carefully chosen to express his indignation and rage. Heinous had always been a prosecutorial favorite. It was not easily mistaken for any other. It had the vaguely obscene suggestion of something twisted and perverse. Each time Caminetti used it, there was a flash of something furtive in his eyes, as if it conjured up some memory of his own of things he would rather forget, of temptations he had not quite been able to resist.
Resting his head in his left hand, Scarborough listened with a kind of amused astonishment as the district attorney described the cruel cowardice of a young man who had been allowed to live the life of a free man well into middle age instead of being locked up for life.
“This heinous crime has gone unpunished for too long,” concluded Caminetti, drawing his eyes together in a piercing stare, as if he could through his own formidable powers of concentration force the ruling he wanted.
Scarborough stroked his chin. “The defendant will be released on his own recognizance. However, I will order that he surrender his passport to the court pending the outcome of the trial.” He took a deep breath, pressed his lips together and wrinkled his nose. After a pensive moment, he let out his breath in a long sigh. “We have remaining the matter of a trial date.” He looked toward the court clerk and was about to ask a question when he seemed to think better of it. “Before we do that, I wonder if I might see counsel in chambers.” He rose from the bench, hesitated, sniffed to hold back a sneeze, and then looked out across the crowd that filled the courtroom. “Court will be adjourned,” he said with a sly, mischievous smile before he disappeared through the side door.
I followed the district attorney through the same door through which the judge had vanished just moments before. A narrow corridor wound through stacks of cardboard boxes and metal file cabinets. A door on the right was wide open to the jury room. A table, double the width of a normal rectangular dining room table, caught my eye. It seemed strange to find it back here, in this warren of cubbyhole offices for court personnel, but then everything in the courthouse was like this: cramped, congested, things shoved into any place they would fit. Built before the war, the courthouse had grown dull, gray, dreary, with dead air and grimy walls, broken toilets and shattered sinks. When the corridors were crowded and the courtroom benches were packed— even then, if you stepped back from it a moment, let your gaze move slowly down past the elevators with their scratch-marked metal doors to the unwashed windows, or along the scuffed linoleum floors to the knicked-up wooden chairs and the splintered bottoms of the wooden doors, there was that nagging sense of a vast emptiness, a silent screaming loneliness, a sense that what was done here was a kind of charade, a secret no one wanted to admit, that what happened here was always too late.
The courtroom itself was a large rectangular room with wooden wainscoting as high as a man’s head and, above it, dull grayish white plaster walls. At the top, where the walls joined the ceiling, square pieces with one-inch gaps between them formed a molding of faintly classical design. The wall on the right as you faced the bench contained four sets of double narrow windows that afforded a partial view of the Gothic exterior of the courthouse wing opposite. There were two sets of seven spectator benches, separated by a broad center aisle that led from the entrance, two sets of double doors at the back, to a raised wooden railing fastened on an eight-inch marble base, in front. There was no gate, nothing to push through, nothing to shove ahead with your hand as you made your way into that privileged place where only those who had business before the court were allowed to enter. There was a blue velvet rope hooked at each end to the side posts of the wooden railing. I half expected a maître d’ to open it, and I wondered in my western ignorance whether, because it was New York, I was supposed to tip the bailiff.
Caminetti rapped lightly on an unmarked door and let himself in. I caught the door as it swung shut in my face. For an instant, I thought I had stumbled into a room somewhere in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of those period rooms done with the eye of an experienced and slightly demented collector willing to spend all the money in the world to achieve a single flawless representation of a long-vanished time and place. The walls, and not just the walls—the ceiling— were paneled in carved mahogany. The floors were carpeted wall to wall in a thick beige-colored rug on top of which were scattered in luxurious profusion oriental carpets in brilliant reds and blues. At the end of the room farthest from the door was a desk with elegant curved legs. It looked as if a medieval map of the partially known world should be spread out across it. The desk was set at an angle below the only window, situated in such a way that the light that passed through it would pass directly over the right shoulder of the judge when he sat, hunched over, reading from a law report or setting forth in writing a ruling he was about to make.
The walls that met in the corner near the window were lined with rows of oil paintings produced by the best-known of the Flemish and Florentine schools of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The other two walls were filled with bookshelves painted to a hard finish, a kind of burnished reddish black. There was, so far as I could tell, not a single law book, not a single volume of reported appellate cases, not a treatise, not a compilation, not a digest; not one of the learned commentaries on the law, any law, that sit unread on the shelves of jurists everywhere. There was nothing but leather-bound books with gold lettering on the spines, grouped not by subject or author, or even by size, but by color: tan, red, green. However old the contents might have been—and on the volumes nearest my eye, I read the name of a Latin author—the leather
bindings were shiny and new, not a line, not a crack, in them. It was the library of a man proud of his possessions, someone who wanted something to show for what he wanted others to think went on in his mind.
“Quintilian,” said Scarborough as he saw my eye drift toward the title. “Have you read him?”
He greeted my admission that I had not with a benevolent sigh.
“I thought Quintilian’s lectures on rhetoric were more for politicians,” I remarked, as I threw a short glance at Caminetti. “I read Cicero because he tried cases in court,” I added, looking back at Scarborough. “Not in Latin, however.” I smiled and shook my head, disparaging my ignorance. “Though I probably would have understood as much of it that way as I’m afraid I did in English.”
The civil expression on Scarborough’s imperturbable face did not change. He smiled with his eyes, nodded wisely, and turned to Caminetti, waiting with bored impatience to find out why he was wasting his time here, listening to this, when he could be doing something important.
Scarborough stood next to a blue brocaded chair, resting his left arm on the top. He invited us to sit on the sofa just to the other side, but Caminetti, eager to make this visit as brief as possible, shook his head. Scarborough greeted the district attorney’s refusal with a kind of amused neglect, shifting his attention to me in a way that suggested that his only concern was that we both be comfortable. His manner was polished, impeccable, adept at the subtle adjustments by which everyone is made to feel that they have been treated fairly, listened to with respect, their opinions taken into account, measured, considered and made a part of whatever settlement the issue requires. He had the brilliant temperament of a man who can make you think that only after agonizing over it for hours has he, reluctantly and with the greatest regret, concluded that he cannot do what you have asked; it was like the capacity of the courtier who never reveals a thing about himself and carries a stiletto inside a velvet glove.
“An interesting case, don’t you think?” asked the judge, arching a single eyebrow.
“Interesting case,” said Caminetti mechanically. Scarborough smiled and waited. Caminetti waited. “Interesting case,” repeated Caminetti, wondering why he had to. Scarborough stroked his chin with his right hand and turned to me, a question in his eye. I had no idea what the question was. I waited. Scarborough raised both eyebrows, pursed his pink lips, turned and walked away, heading toward the desk on the other side of the enormous room. He took three steps and turned around, studying first Caminetti, then me, searching our eyes for something he obviously did not find. Shaking his head, he turned and, moving quickly, reached his desk. He picked up a newspaper and waved it in the air.
“Have you read this?” he asked calmly. “The column in this morning’s paper that says this is a political trial?—That the only reason this case was brought—the only reason an indictment was sought in the first place—is to embarrass the vice president? That this whole thing has been orchestrated by people close to the president, people who want to get rid of Browning so someone else can be put into the vice presidency? That this… ?”
Scarborough placed the newspaper back on the desk and for a brief, reflective moment stared out the window. With a quick movement of his wrist, he unfastened the clasp on his black judicial robe. He slipped it off, hung it on a rack in the corner, and put on the coat of a Savile Row suit.
“I’m not concerned with anyone’s motivations,” he remarked in a casual tone of voice. He pulled each shirt cuff to the proper length beyond the suit coat sleeves. “I’m only concerned with questions of evidence and the orderly conduct of the trial.”
His eyes were fixed on a cuff link that had slipped back beneath the outer slit in the French cuff sleeve. He tugged at it, pulling it through. When he had it in place, he rubbed the flat onyx surface with the side of his thumb, polishing away a tiny smudge mark. He looked up, but he could not yet let it go: He had to do it again, make sure that small, nearly invisible imperfection on the shiny surface of the stone was gone. Finally satisfied, he lifted his eyes and looked directly at the district attorney.
“Do you intend to call the vice president as a witness for the prosecution?”
Caminetti seemed to hesitate, but only for an instant. “Not at this time, Your Honor.”
The answer did not please Scarborough. His round, smooth face, blotched and irritated by sneezing one moment and blowing his nose the next, quivered with just the slightest impatience.
“We’re not in court now,” he reminded Caminetti with a frosty smile. “And the question wasn’t what you were planning to do at the moment. What I want to know is whether the vice president is on the list of witnesses the prosecution intends to call at trial.”
Bartholomew Caminetti listened carefully. Without moving a muscle, or blinking an eyelash, he concentrated on each word. He stood there, stiff as a board in a plain black suit that went a little too far straight across his shoulders, a suit with sleeves that covered his shirt cuffs and pants that sagged over the laces of his shoes. Without apology, he repeated the same answer.
“Not at this time, Your Honor.”
The judge’s head and eyebrows snapped up simultaneously. “I see.” He came back across the room and sat down in the chair next to the sofa. “Sit down,” he said in that practiced, untroubled voice, gesturing toward Caminetti with his hand while his eyes turned to me. He placed both wrists on the front edge of the arms of the solid upholstered chair and crossed his right leg over his left.
“Assume for the moment that the prosecution does not call the vice president. Will the defense?” Before I could answer, he added, “According to the stories—or perhaps I should say rumors—I’ve been reading, the vice president was there when it happened, when the girl fell from the window.” He held up his hand as if to stave off an objection from Caminetti, who had dutifully taken a seat at the other end of the sofa. “However she happened to fall. If that’s true, and if he was a witness to what happened, then I would assume…?”
I had assumed that the prosecution would never call Browning as a witness. You do not put someone on the witness stand you know is going to testify for the other side. But then why would not Caminetti just say so? He had to give me a witness list; he could not keep it a secret. I was thinking as fast as I could, trying to figure out what might be behind his apparent reluctance to commit himself one way or the other. Whatever Caminetti knew, whatever his own involvement may have been, there was not any doubt that the newspaper column Scarborough had mentioned had it right: Jimmy Haviland was indicted for murder, but they were after Thomas Browning. That meant they had to show that Haviland had committed a murder and that Browning had helped cover it up. The best way to do that, the best way to make that accusation and make it stick, was to have Browning testify to something that you could prove was not true. It was a setup, a scheme to force Browning to testify for the defense so that he became fair game for the kind of lethal cross-examination that a cunning and relentless prosecutor dreamed about. It was the chance to destroy someone famous and powerful, the chance to strip naked someone who until that one decisive courtroom exchange had lived the life of privilege and immunity enjoyed by wealthy men of influence and prestige. Then why this reluctance? What was I missing? I decided not to give away anything. I turned it back on Caminetti.
“I haven’t seen a witness list,” I replied with a half glance at the district attorney. “I haven’t seen anything, nothing except that piece of paper charging my client with murder.”
“Discovery is ready,” remarked Caminetti. He shoved himself forward, getting ready to rise from the sofa. “You can pick it up this afternoon.” He paused, placed both hands on his knees, and leaned forward, a put-upon look of annoyance on his otherwise expressionless face.
Scarborough pulled his ankle across his knee and sank farther back into the overstuffed chair. “Quintilian is worth reading,” he said as he bent his head toward me with the apparent intention of pursuing a subject that from th
e apologetic smile he darted briefly toward the district attorney he knew would not interest him at all. He let that utterly superfluous thought hang in the air, a delicate and malicious reminder that he would decide when things ended and when they did not. Pulling his hands from the arms of the chair into his lap, Scarborough appeared to study the back of his manicured nails, one after the other, a long slow march that went on without purpose or point until Caminetti’s hands began to slide back from his knees. In a complete show of surrender, he pulled his knee up onto the sofa.
“Yes, the reason I ask about whether the vice president might be called as a witness is that, as perhaps you know, I am a longtime acquaintance of his. We were in law school together.”
Scarborough caught the look of surprise that shot across my eyes. He had been waiting for it.
“I was a year ahead.” That was all he said, the only reason he offered to explain why he and I had never met. “We didn’t know each other very well,” he added. He looked across at Caminetti. “We got to know each other better later on, here, in New York. That is all I wanted to let both of you know: that I’m acquainted with someone who I thought might be called as a witness, but who neither one of you is apparently yet in a position to say will be called as a witness.”
He paused, his eyes still on Caminetti, giving him a chance to amend his answer. Caminetti opened his palms in a gesture of puzzled indifference.
“I doubt very much that it would be grounds on which to recuse myself from hearing the case in any event, but I want it plainly understood by both of you,” he added with a cursory, sidelong glance at me, “that once you leave this room you cannot decide that, yes, you are going to call the vice president as a witness, and that, because of my personal acquaintance with the witness, you would prefer that I step aside.” He rose from the chair. “Do we understand one another on this point? Good. Now, before you leave—one other thing.”