by D. W. Buffa
“It makes no difference that Anna Malreaux was murdered in nineteen sixty-five. It would not change anything if she had been murdered just last week. As Judge Scarborough told you yesterday, there is no statute of limitations on murder. Murder is the one crime we can never forgive. It is the one crime that we prosecute however long it takes to catch whoever is responsible for another person’s death. Life is precious,”
continued Caminetti as he let go of the railing and with his head bowed again began to pace the floor. “Life—it’s the one thing no one has a right to take away.” He came to a stop, his left foot a full stride ahead of his right. His face swiftly turned. “We have laws against suicide: You’re not allowed to take your own life; you’re certainly not allowed to take the life of someone else.”
With a stern glance, he turned away, resuming that endless back-and-forth half-circle march. He did not say another word until he reached the far end of the jury box. Below the raised platform of the witness stand, he turned back, squared his shoulders and spread his feet.
“The People will call a number of witnesses to establish first the manner and cause of the victim’s death, and then the defendant’s motive for committing the crime.”
Caminetti could not stay still for long. He pulled his feet closer together. With the hands that had been held behind his back, he began to gesture first with one, then the other, as he entered upon a brief recitation of who each witness was and what the jury could expect that witness to say. The sleeves of his suit coat, a size too large, slapped against his wrists, as he waved his arms in short bursts of enthusiasm for every piece of evidence, every word of testimony, he was going to marshal against the defense.
“Anna Malreaux was in her second year of law school.
She was here, in New York, during the Christmas break that year. She was at a party on Christmas Eve, a party held on the eighth floor of the Plaza Hotel.”
Caminetti wrapped his arms across his chest and took a step forward. His eyes narrowed, pinched together, creasing the bridge of his nose.
“She was pushed out a window, pushed to her death from the eighth floor. Pushed by the defendant, Jamison Scott Haviland.”
Caminetti’s head jerked up. His eyes flared open.
“Why? Why did he do that? Why did he push her through that window? Why did he push her to her death?”
Caminetti’s head moved like a ratchet from one end of the jury box to the other, looking at each juror, waiting while they each in turn wondered about what he had asked.
“Jealousy—jealousy and pain,” he said finally in a hard, dry voice that insisted there could not be any doubt. “Maybe some people die when their own heart is broken, but a lot more die because they broke the heart of someone else. Anna Malreaux broke Haviland’s heart. He wanted to marry her; she said no. He was hurt, he was angry; he could not stand the pain. He came to New York because he knew she would be here. He went to the Plaza Hotel. Maybe he was going to give her one more chance, one more chance to say yes. He was in love with her, obsessed with her: He could not leave her alone. He went to the Plaza Hotel, he found her at that party up on the eighth floor. He was hurt, he was angry; he was not going to let her get away. If she would not belong to him, she was not going to belong to anyone.
If she would not live with him, Anna Malreaux was going to die.”
His head bent in a thoughtful pose, Caminetti moved in small, slow steps halfway across the front of the jury box. He looked at the jury, shaking his head at the foolish weakness to which the flesh is heir.
“And so he killed her, shoved her out that window, watched her fall eight stories to her death on the sidewalk below. He could not have her, and now no one ever would.”
For a moment longer, Caminetti shook his head in that same mournful way. Then, with a sudden step forward, he seized the jury box railing with both hands.
“Someone must have seen it happen, seen the whole thing; seen him shove her out the window, push her through it to her death! Why didn’t they say anything about it? Why didn’t anyone tell the truth about what happened that day? Why did they let it get reported as an accident when they knew it was murder and not an accident at all?”
Caminetti pulled his hands out of his pockets and folded his arms across his chest. He stood straight, sliding one foot cautiously ahead of the other, as if he were testing the ground to see how solid it was before deciding whether to go any farther than he had. His eyes darted back and forth around the jury box; then he looked back over his shoulder, taking in with a single glance Haviland and the courtroom crowd as it sat watching, waiting to hear what he was going to say next.
Something started echoing in my mind, and I could not get it to stop. Someone must have seen it happen.
That is what he had said. He was talking about Thomas Browning. But then why had he kept asking why they had not told the truth about what they had seen? Was it just a figure of speech, something said in that abbreviated manner of his? Was it just my own nervous suspicion that there was more to the prosecution’s case than what I had been able to learn, more than what I had been told? He was not supposed to keep anything concealed, but I did not trust him not to hold anything back.
Caminetti eyed the jury with knowing confidence.
“Before this trial is over, you will know how that happened and why.”
Judge Scarborough, sitting sideways to the bench as he followed the prosecution’s opening statement to the jury, waited until Caminetti returned to the counsel table and took his chair. From underneath his robe, he pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose. Waving his right hand in a languid, desultory fashion, he moved his head barely an inch or so in my direction, inviting me to give the opening for the defense. I did not move; I did not say a word. Perplexed, he put the handkerchief away, and then turned his head, or rather let it fall to the side.
“Do you wish to reserve your opening, Mr. Antonelli? To deliver it at the conclusion of the state’s case and at the beginning of yours? The court will permit that, should that be your preference,” he said in his rich, cultured voice, coarsened by the residual effects of what I had begun to suspect were the habitual symptoms of a largely imaginary disease. The handkerchief was a prop, begun as an affectation, done for show, become with time and habit a necessary, if only dimly conscious, part of the drama by which to make the courtroom the interesting place he wanted it to be. It was just a bit of cloth, but in its own way as effective as the silk gown and white wig by which a British magistrate holds the attention of the crowd.
“No, Your Honor,” I replied in a voice that suggested a vague and continuing uncertainty. I stayed where I was, sitting in that chair, my right hand resting on the edge of the table, three fingers tapping soundlessly against it, the counterpoint to the quiet emptiness of my mind.
With growing amusement, Scarborough let the handkerchief dangle from his hand as he bent closer across the bench.
“That would seem to narrow the choice to making an opening statement now, before the prosecution calls its first witness, or, as is your right, not making one at all.”
“Yes,” I replied. Caught up by his manner, I began to smile.
“Yes?” Scarborough’s thick gray eyebrows shot straight up. He turned to the jury box, a cheerful expression glowing on his face, but instead of looking at any of the jurors, he looked just above them. “Yes?” he repeated, speaking to that imaginary alter ego of his that had, once the jury was impaneled, been moved to another place. “Yes?” he repeated for the third time, gazing now right at me with an irrepressible grin. “Yes, what, Mr. Antonelli? Yes, an opening? Or yes, you agree that, in a way like Hamlet, to give one or not to give one, exhausts the known alternatives?”
As quick as one of Caminetti’s sudden moves, I was on my feet, walking toward the jury box, nodding briefly toward the judge.
“That was the line—that line from Hamlet—on which all the action of the play depends: ‘To be or not to be.’ If we know no other line of
Shakespeare’s, we have all heard of that. To be—being—to be part of what is, part of the chain of being that connects the generations, the chain that stretches back to the beginning, the very beginning, the first humans, Adam and Eve; and from them down to us, the present time; down to us, and after our brief turn, to the next generation and all the generations that come after that. Annie Malreaux was part of my generation, or perhaps I was part of hers: a generation that came into being during the war, the Second World War, and that lived through wars of its own. Some of you were not alive when Annie Malreaux fell to her death from a window at the Plaza Hotel, late one snow-filled winter afternoon. You had not yet come into being. She died before you were born. You never breathed the same air she did; you never, without knowing it, passed each other on a crowded New York street; you never stood on a corner together, waiting for a light, exchanging a few brief anonymous words.”
I searched their faces, faces that were almost anonymous to me. “And those of you who were born sometime before Annie Malreaux died, how much do you remember about what it was like, that December, all those years ago? How much do you remember about what you did—or even where you were—not just that Christmas, but anytime that year? Memories fade and disappear, vanish forever because so much of the little time we have is taken up by the current necessities of our lives. We forget everything, and what we do remember, we may not always or even very often remember the way we once did, a few hours, a few days, a few weeks after it happened.”
With my hands in my pockets, I gazed for a moment down at the floor in front of the jury box, smiling to myself. When I raised my eyes, I looked at each of them with a kind of innocent curiosity, the way you do when you are first introduced.
“I remember where I was that day, the day Annie Malreaux died. There are some things you never forget.
I remember that day because I was there, at the Plaza Hotel, when it happened, when Annie Malreaux fell to her death. I knew her,” I said, placing a hand on the jury box railing. “I knew Annie Malreaux, and not just her: I knew them all.” I looked back at the counsel table on the far side of the courtroom. “I knew Jamison Scott Haviland—Jimmy Haviland—and I knew Thomas Browning as well. We were friends, or at least we knew each other. We were in school together: That is where we all met, Jimmy Haviland, Thomas Browning, Annie Malreaux and I—where it all began, years ago, when we were young and just starting out, eager to make our mark and certain that we would. We were at the Harvard Law School when we met—Jimmy and Thomas and Annie and I—and we took ourselves very seriously indeed.”
I took them back, as best I could, to that time when things were so much closer to the beginning than they were to the end, and tried to make them see what we had been instead of what we had become. The time raced past, moving more quickly the more I talked about what had happened in the past. I told them what I remembered, how bright and beautiful, how strange and different, Annie Malreaux had been. I told them about her mother and the remarkable way her daughter had been raised. I told them what Jimmy Haviland had done, when he learned what happened, the sobbing, choking phone call in which Vivian Malreaux first heard that her daughter, her only child, was dead, and how he had gone to Chicago and tried to do what he could to help and how she had done what she could to take care of him.
“Does that sound like someone who had pushed the girl he loved to her death?” I asked and then hurried on, turning to Thomas Browning and how, like Jimmy Haviland, he had been in love with Annie Malreaux and what her death had done.
I spoke for an hour, two, remembering with each thing I said something I had forgotten, something that made more vivid what had happened and why it had now been tortured into something it had never been.
Two hours, three, I talked to those twelve jurors as if they were the only friends I had ever had.
“I knew them all, Browning, Haviland, Annie Malreaux—and in their different ways they of course knew each other. If they had not known each other, none of this would have happened. If Annie Malreaux had not gone to Harvard, had not met Jimmy Haviland, never known Thomas Browning, she would not have been in New York, she would not have gone to that party at the Plaza, she would not have gone looking out that window and there would not have been that accident, that fall.”
Pausing, I searched their eyes, measuring their willingness to believe me when I told them what I believed.
“And if Jimmy Haviland had not known Thomas Browning, if they had never met, he would not be sitting here today, a middle-aged man dressed in a suit, accused of a crime that not only did he not commit, but that never took place. He knew Thomas Browning; they knew each other at school. That is the reason—the only reason—he has been accused of a murder: not because of what happened to Annie Malreaux, but because of what happened to Thomas Browning instead.”
With a quarter turn, I looked long and hard at Bartholomew Caminetti. His face was a blank sheet, the only expression the quiet calculation in his eyes. He was listening to what I said, thinking about how he could use it, how he could take it apart, bend it to his own advantage. I turned back to the jury.
“If Thomas Browning had been just another law student, another young man of that generation who later, like Jimmy Haviland, went off to war; or, like me and others we knew, stayed out of it and, safe from the violence, made careers in the law, there never would have been a prosecution, because there never would have been a crime. The only reason Jamison Scott Haviland is on trial for murder is that Thomas Browning ran for president in the last election and may be about to do it again. Yes, I remember,” I said, waving my hand with impatience, “I remember what Judge Scarborough said at the beginning, that this is a trial on the single question of whether the defendant, Jamison Scott Haviland, did or did not take the life of Annie Malreaux, and that you are not to be influenced by what effect your verdict might have on Thomas Browning or anyone else. But I’m not talking about the effect: I am talking about the cause.
Remember what Judge Scarborough told you? Not about your obligation to decide the case on the evidence, but what that evidence was going to be, the witnesses that were going to be called. One of those witnesses is Thomas Browning, but who is going to call him? Not the prosecution. Mr. Caminetti told us who his witnesses are, and Thomas Browning’s name is not among them.”
I paused long enough to direct an interrogating glance at the district attorney. He returned the look with a blank stare, a show of unflappable indifference.
“Why isn’t it there? Why isn’t Thomas Browning on the prosecution’s list? Why isn’t Thomas Browning the first name—the only name—on that list?” I asked, my voice charged with emotion. “Thomas Browning was there—he was in the room! Thomas Browning saw what happened. Thomas Browning alone could convict the defendant—if the defendant had done anything wrong.
But the prosecution is not going to call him, this witness who saw Annie Malreaux fall.”
Knitting my brow, I tried to puzzle it out. “Why? Because Thomas Browning is a liar. That’s what the prosecution now insists; that is what you were told earlier today: that Thomas Browning did not ‘tell the truth about what happened that day.’ Those are the words that Mr. Caminetti used. He charged—you remember—that what happened to Annie Malreaux was reported as an accident when Thomas Browning ‘knew it was not.’ It doesn’t matter that Thomas Browning’s name was not used; Thomas Browning was there. The whole world must know that by now. The prosecution knows it, too.
But they are not calling him as a witness, and it is because they cannot. It is extraordinary, inexplicable, that the only witness to the death—the accidental death—of Annie Malreaux has to be called by the defense.”
I began to pace, a few short steps; then I stopped. I narrowed my eyes and clenched my teeth, angrily shaking my head. Throwing out my hand, I began to jab the air, emphasizing over and over again that single, solitary, all-important point.
“The defense is calling Thomas Browning so that Thomas Browning can take the oa
th, swear to tell the truth, and tell you and tell everyone what he saw that terrible day, Christmas Eve, nineteen sixty-five. The prosecution won’t call him as a witness. In its complete and thorough investigation, in its exhaustive and painstaking reexamination of the evidence in a case officially ruled an accident when it happened,” I went on, becoming more sarcastic with each word, “with all the witnesses they must have interviewed, all the people they had to track down and find, all the enormous resources expended on this massive effort to solve a crime, it was, I suppose, nothing more than a minor oversight, a small failure, an understandable mistake, that no one—no police officer, no detective, no investigator, no assistant district attorney, no, not even Mr.
Caminetti himself, ever so much as asked to speak to Thomas Browning. They took no statement; they asked no questions. They did not invite him to appear before the grand jury; they did not even give him the courtesy of a telephone call to inquire whether he might have anything to say. And now, the district attorney, in open court, makes his opening statement to the jury and with what I must confess was theatrical brilliance tells you, and through all the reporters gathered in this courtroom, tells the world—what was it?—oh, yes, ‘Someone must have seen it happen, seen the whole thing. Seen him push her out the window, push her through it to her death.’ “The prosecution’s entire case rests upon the proposition that Thomas Browning is a liar, a conspirator in a crime. That is why it is not quite right— why I must in some manner dissent from the view so ably espoused by Judge Scarborough. This case is not only about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. The defendant is being used: He is a pawn in a dangerous game, a game played by powerful and ambitious people out to destroy Thomas Browning, people who do not mind for a minute that they might in the process destroy Jamison Scott Haviland as well.”
I had been talking for hours. It was the longest opening statement I had ever made. There was sweat on my forehead, some of it rolling into my eyes, burning them with salt. My hair was damp; my shirt was drenched.