by D. W. Buffa
With the portable phone pressed against my ear, I got up from the sofa and wandered over to the windows and stared out at the city burning pale yellow under a thick blanket of fog. I could not see the Golden Gate, and there was nothing on the farther shore.
“You’re going to announce next Friday? You don’t want to wait until after the trial?”
There was a kind of caution, a kind of hesitancy—not in his voice—that was still the same: calm, quiet, confident, almost too confident, as if he knew in advance, not just everything that was going to happen, but when it was going to happen and how it would affect everyone else who had an interest in the game that was being played. No, not in his voice, but in the silence that filled the space between the end of my question and the beginning of his answer.
“Nothing will happen at the trial,” said Browning presently. “Nothing. You’ll win; you’ll show them for the liars they are.”
“Jimmy made some statements,” I said with a certain reluctance. “He said some things that could be taken as admissions.” I had not told anyone this; I had not even discussed it yet with Haviland. “He made them a long time ago, while he was in therapy—for alcoholism.”
Browning dismissed it with almost brutal contempt.
“Haviland is a drunk. It doesn’t matter what he said.
None of it matters. Don’t let it bother you. It doesn’t mean anything,” he said impatiently.
“The prosecution will argue that it means a great deal,” I retorted, showing a little impatience of my own.
“These are statements he made to other people, statements that they now remember he made all those years ago! You mean that someone asked these people, not just what they might remember about Haviland, but if they remembered whether he ever said anything about some girl he knew in law school; not just had known in law school, but a girl he might have pushed out a window! That’s what they would have asked, isn’t it? That they were investigating a murder, a murder that happened back in the winter of nineteen sixty-five; a murder in which a girl Haviland had been involved with was pushed out a window at the Plaza Hotel in New York. And then they would ask whether they ever heard Haviland say anything about it. Isn’t that what they would have done, and doesn’t that suggest something about the difference between what someone remembered and what he now starts to think that maybe he remembers? And besides, isn’t it perfectly obvious that Haviland must have said things that, looking back on it, start to sound as though he had admitted doing something? Good God, you were there—what he said in court at his own arraignment: tried to plead guilty because he’s ‘responsible’ for Annie’s death. My God, Antonelli, he’s just a mess, isn’t he?” he had not told me anything I did not already know, and I rather resented him for thinking he could.
Browning had not argued a case in his life, and so far as I knew had never spent a moment inside a court of law.
I did not pretend to know anything about politics, yet he was explaining to me how to try a case. I was getting a little angry, but Browning, always a step ahead, understood immediately what he had done. He knew before I had said a word what I felt.
“You know that a lot better than I do. You’re the best there is. You aren’t going to have any trouble showing a jury all the problems in the way someone remembers what he thinks someone else meant.”
There was fog everywhere. All I saw in the window was my own reflection, drifting in space, an image as insubstantial as the gray mist on which it floated.
Browning was talking about the trial that had not started, encouraging me; but I was not thinking about any of that.
“I saw Vivian Malreaux, Annie’s mother.”
There was a sudden, immediate silence. “She’s still alive?” inquired Browning after a long pause.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone more alive,”
I replied, watching in the window the way my eyes, staring back at me, seemed to acknowledge the truth of it. “She’s still at Chicago, still teaching, still writing out lectures months in advance. Do you remember her? She sent me a couple of photographs, one of them of you and Annie. You both look very serious.”
Browning lapsed into a long, brooding silence.
Finally, he asked, “Do you think I could have it?” There was a pleading, bittersweet quality in his voice, a sentimentality, a vulnerability, I had not heard before. It had the same effect as if in my presence he had begun to cry. I lowered my eyes and stared down at the floor.
“Yes, of course,” I mumbled. “Consider it done.”
It was then, after I understood far better than I had before how much she still meant to him, that I knew I had to tell him.
“Annie was going to marry you. She was going to tell you that day—Christmas Eve, the day she died.”
Words can lie, but silence almost always tells the truth, at least that part of the truth it is given to us to know. I had the feeling that he was not completely surprised; that, despite what he had told me before, he had in some sense known it all along.
“Did her mother tell you that?” he asked in a voice devoid of emotion.
“No, she never knew. Helen Thatcher. Remember Helen—Annie’s friend? She told me. She lives here—in San Francisco. I saw her today. Annie told her that you had asked her to marry you, and that she had decided to say yes.”
There was no reply, nothing, not a word; only a prolonged silence that started to become awkward.
“Helen turns out to be a famous writer,” I said in the hope of getting some kind of response. “She writes under the name Rebecca Long. I had no idea. She…”
“It isn’t true,” said Browning. He sounded almost angry. “She’s lying. No,” he added immediately, “I shouldn’t say that. She may think it’s true, but it isn’t. She doesn’t remember it right. Maybe Annie told her that I’d asked her to marry me—I think I told you that; I know I told you I would have married her. Maybe Annie even told her that she might think about it, but she never told her that she was going to say yes.”
How could he be so certain? And why had he felt the need to be so emphatic? “I believed her. I think she remembers it perfectly.
Annie was going to say yes. She wanted to marry you.
Why don’t you want to believe that?”
The silence was palpable. I had the feeling that he could barely control himself, that he was right on the edge, ready to abandon all restraint; that he would have given anything to be able to tell someone all the things that he had kept private. But that was one thing he could never do. It was a form of weakness to which he would never yield; a point of honor, like that malformed foot he had with such constant, excruciating pain kept hidden from public view.
“Why don’t you believe that?” I asked again, insisting on a reply, not because I needed one, but because I thought he needed to say it, to get it out.
“Because that makes what happened hurt even more,” he said in a distant voice. “You won’t forget that picture?” he asked, suddenly tired and subdued. “Bring it with you, if you would. I’ll see you next week in New York.”
CHAPTER 16
Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen. For at least the third time, Bartholomew Caminetti glanced at his watch, grimaced with disgust, leaned back in his chair and tapped on the counsel table an impatient lament. Seconds later, he stopped drumming his fingers. He crossed one leg over the other; with a sullen sigh he threw his arm across the back of the wooden chair. His foot picked up the left-off rhythm of his hand. He started biting the inside of his lip, gave it up, placed both arms on the table below him and both feet solidly on the ground. Hunching forward, he narrowed his eyes into a murderous stare.
The bailiff stood with his arms crossed, listening half consciously for the sound that would start him talking before he knew he had opened his mouth. The court reporter sat in front of the blank abbreviated keyboard of the stenotype machine, her mouth set at a dreamy angle, gazing into the distance through half-closed eyes.
The court
room was packed, a silent, breathless audience, as eager as a Broadway crowd waiting for the show to begin.
It was only the second time I had been in Room 1530 on the fifteenth floor of the courthouse, the courtroom with the narrow high windows through which, like one of those forward-looking drawings of the 1930s, a steep-angled shaft of light caught the witness stand and seemed to bring it closer to the eye. Only the second time I had been here, and I felt as if I had never left.
That was the serious side of what I did, this feeling that the case, the trial, no matter how much time might pass between the next proceeding and the last, was all of a piece: with a beginning, a middle and an end. Each trial is like a life reconsidered, when everything has a meaning after all, because each thing that happened shaped and changed everything else.
The bailiff’s eyes shot wide open, his head snapped up, his arms flew down to his sides. He stepped forward, the words, sharp as brass as he cried into the brittle silence, “Hear ye, Hear ye. The Superior Court in and for the city and county of New York is now in session, the Honorable Charles F. Scarborough presiding.”
Split asunder, the silence echoed back, followed an instant later by a single voluminous shudder as a hundred people stood straight up, rigid and attentive, as the door on the left swung open and Charles F.
Scarborough came wheeling into court.
He took three quick steps, paused, and sneezed. “Hay fever, colds, flu,” he began, shaking his head in misery.
He raised the handkerchief to his nose, held it there a moment, and then, as a wry grin began to make its way onto his mouth, put it away. He cast a cheerful glance around the crowded courtroom. “Last week I had to sentence a man to prison for a very long period of time.
The whole time, he kept coughing. He was sick; now I am. I think it was deliberate.” He stroked his chin, laughing silently as he led his audience on, winning them over by the open insincerity of what he claimed.
“They do that, you know—try to get even,” he insisted, nodding his head in agreement with the charge while he held back another sneeze.
“Yes, well, the reason we are here—other than to make Mr. Caminetti a little crazy with what I am sorry to report was an unavoidable delay—is to begin the trial in the matter of People of the State of New York v. Jamison Scott Haviland. The charge is murder; the plea is not guilty; trial is scheduled for today. Mr. Bartholomew Caminetti, I am delighted to say, is here on behalf of the state of New York. And Mr. Joseph Antonelli, I am equally delighted to say, is here on behalf of the defendant.
“Before we begin—before we begin jury selection— there are a few things I wish to say about the somewhat unusual circumstances of this case and the rather extraordinary measures that must be taken because of them. I find it regrettable that a number of people have decided for reasons of their own to parade back and forth in front of the courthouse, waving placards demanding a verdict before the trial has begun; I find it astonishing that some of these same people think to further their cause by shouting insults and invective at court personnel. They have of course the right to assemble peaceably and make their views known, but three persons were arrested this morning for assault, and I can assure you that anyone who attempts to interfere with what goes on in this courthouse will find themselves prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Scarborough dragged his handkerchief across his nose as he took a long look at the crowd.
“I understand of course the great public interest in this trial; I certainly understand how eager those of you are whose business it is to report on these proceedings to get as much information as you possibly can. You need to understand that the court will not tolerate even the slightest breach of the integrity of this trial. I have already denied the request to televise the trial. This morning I have issued a further order banning all cameras from the courthouse. This is not a television show, ladies and gentlemen. This is a trial, a trial in which the defendant has been accused of a homicide.
This is a serious, solemn event; not some sideshow to which you can sell tickets, or commercials.”
With his elbows planted on the bench, Scarborough bent forward and with a severe expression began to shake his forefinger.
“Let me be extremely clear about this. Until the trial is over, until the jury has rendered its verdict and been dismissed, the jurors are not allowed to discuss the case with anyone, not even among themselves, until the evidence has been submitted, all the witnesses called, closing arguments have been given and they have retired to the jury room to begin their formal deliberations. And if they are not allowed to discuss it with each other, they are certainly not allowed to discuss it with the members of the press. If, despite that, some venturesome reporter attempts to talk to a juror while the trial is still in progress, that reporter will not only be barred from this courtroom, but should expect to face criminal charges for jury tampering.”
The judge glanced around the courtroom. The look on his face suggested that he would not mind at all the chance to show them that he meant what he said.
“There is an important public right at issue here: not that doubtful and imaginary thing, the self-serving invention of the people who exploit it for their own commercial purposes—the public’s supposed right to know—but the real and substantial public right to the impartial administration of justice. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a right upon which this court insists.”
Having said what he had to, Scarborough became again the soul of affability, the generous host whose only concern is for the comfort and well-being of his guests.
“I’ll hang you if I have to,” he said, breaking into a smile of profound and cheerful regret, “but I’m sure you won’t let it come to that. I’m sure that you’ll find the trial itself sufficiently interesting not to have to go asking questions where you should not. I think we can depend upon Mr. Caminetti and Mr. Antonelli to keep things lively.”
With a formal nod to the crowd, he turned to the bailiff and asked him to bring in the jurors.
Until they walked into Room 1530 and saw the crowd, all they knew was that their names had been drawn from among the much larger number waiting in the dull silence of the assembly room; that they were being taken upstairs for a trial; that they would sit in the courtroom while twelve of their names were called to sit in the jury box where they would be asked questions; that some of them would be dismissed and others called to take their place until the lawyers were satisfied or had no challenges left and had to take what they had. There was a chance, of course, that they might end up on the jury in the trial that involved Thomas Browning—that was how, before it began, the trial was generally known: the murder trial that involved one of New York’s most famous citizens—but there were perhaps a dozen other trials scheduled to begin that week, and the odds were much better that their names had been called for one of them.
You could see it in their eyes, an immediate recognition that this was different, that this was not some minor civil case, an accident victim seeking damages, or one of those criminal cases which, no matter how grievous the crime, were tried routinely and without publicity every week of the year. This was important.
They knew that, and they knew it right away. This was something that those who served on the jury, the people who decided the case, would be talking about for the rest of their lives. They filed into the two rows of spectator benches that had been kept empty for them in front. They sat there, bunched together, while the court clerk, a wiry, middle-aged man in a gray suit, pulled at random a dozen of their names and sent them, one by one, into the jury box.
Bartholomew Caminetti sat at the counsel table closest to the jury box, directly in front of the witness stand.
Lawyers tend to like that position, as close as possible to the jury, closer than the other lawyer, the close physical proximity of a friend, someone who wants you to see him for who he is: someone who has nothing to hide, someone you can trust. When I first started practicing, I would come early to g
et that table for my own; now I came to court not much sooner than I was supposed to and took the table that was left. Perhaps I had gotten lazy, or perhaps I wanted the other side to think that I was too confident of what I could do with a jury to have to depend on small tactics and cheap tricks. Caminetti understood the game. When I arrived and settled into my chair, he asked if I would rather have the one he had taken first. If there had ever been a danger that I might underestimate Bartholomew Caminetti, that single gesture taught me that that would be a fatal mistake. I returned his smile with one of my own and told him that, no, it did not matter to me where I sat, this table was fine.
“I don’t mind,” he said ; in part, I think, so we could lie to each other again.
With each juror called into the box, Caminetti, hunched over with angled intensity, scribbled a brief note to himself, the name, and perhaps something that caught his eye from the jury questionnaire he consulted with each person summoned. I sat at the other counsel table, with Jimmy Haviland sitting on my right, watching from across the room the faces of the dozen prospective jurors, wondering which of them I wanted to keep and which to let go.
As I examined those waiting, watchful faces, darting glances not at each other but around the room, at all the faces watching them, I worried about their age. I did not know if I wanted them older, or younger, or somewhere in between. There was a kind of shock, almost a warning of mortality, of time running out, when I stared into the faces of those twelve jurors and suddenly grasped the otherwise prosaic fact that Annie Malreaux had died before four of them had been born.
They had no memory, no memory of their own, that reached that far back; nothing to remember in their own lives that would establish a connection between what had happened in the Plaza Hotel that Christmas Eve afternoon and themselves.
“There are certain—what shall I say?—novel aspects about this case,” said Judge Scarborough with a courtly bow after the last of the twelve jurors had taken her chair.