by D. W. Buffa
Half an hour after I turned off the television, half an hour after I began to wonder about how I was supposed to conduct a trial in which nothing less than the future of the presidency, and perhaps the country, hung in the balance, there was a knock on the door.
It seemed strange, not that someone would come by on a Sunday morning, but that the doorman had not called first.
“Well, did you see it?” asked an ebullient Thomas Browning as he marched past me and took up a position in the middle of the marble foyer. He bent his head first one way, then the other, as if he were there to inspect the premises.
“It isn’t too bad, is it?” he asked with a hopeful glance as he took a half step to the side. With a vague gesture of his small, baby-like hand, he included the enormous living room that looked out onto the park.
“I’m not sure I needed all fourteen rooms,” I remarked as we took a couple of chairs on either side of the French doors that led to a small balcony. “And I don’t have any idea what I’m supposed to do with the cook.”
Browning sat with his elbows on the arms of the chair, both feet planted on the floor. A wry smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
“I just thought that while you were here you ought to live as other people do in New York. Now,” he went on with an eager look, “what did you think? You saw it, didn’t you—what I said about the trial? Haviland can’t fault me for that, can he? I said he didn’t do it; I said that Annie’s death was an accident.”
His eyes were excited, intense, as if he could not wait to hear what I was going to say, what my reaction had been. A moment later his expression changed. He bolted out of the chair and with his hands behind his back began to pace rapidly around the room, weaving along in a series of consecutive half circles, starting, stopping, going first in one direction, then another.
“Everything depends on you now.” He stopped abruptly, looked up from beneath his brow, searching my eyes to make sure I understood the importance, the monumental importance, of what I had to do. “Everything,” he repeated, drawing his eyes inward. “Haviland will be a hero at the end of this: the innocent victim of a malevolent conspiracy.” he said this with such certainty, such confidence, that for a moment I almost thought he believed that Jimmy Haviland should be grateful for what had happened to him; that he was not a victim at all, but in some manner a beneficiary, of the attempt to discredit Thomas Browning.
“It’s a terrible thing, of course; to go through something like this: to be accused of something you did not do. But it will turn out in the end. You’ll see.”
His eyes swept past the French doors, and then came back, caught by something he had seen, or something he had remembered.
“Were you there?” he asked with sudden interest. “Or were you still in court?”
“No, I wasn’t there. I wish I had been,” I admitted.
Browning nodded. “I wish you had been, too. I thought about that, about you being there. You told me once that you had been in Ann Arbor, that night in October, just weeks before the election, when Kennedy spoke. You told me how ‘electric’ it felt. That was the word you used. That was what it felt like—over there— at the edge of the park, thousands of people in the streets: electric. All the energy from the crowd, the way it starts to belong to you, and then you know you can do anything you want with it, take it in any direction you choose; but you don’t—unless you’re one of those two-bit demagogues that only know to get the blood up, turn the crowd into some senseless mob. No, you feel the force of it, all those people waiting to be told something that will let them become better than they have been, better than they have been allowed to be; and it makes you better than you were, that demand that you give them the best of what you have, that you appeal to what is best in them.
That is really what they are waiting for, you know—the chance to do something brave and noble and worth remembering; something important, something of value, something that will last.”
Browning leaned against the door, and for a moment he appeared to be listening to himself, caught in the tumultuous noise of the vanished crowd. When his eyes came back around to mine, his look was sober, restrained.
“There is a chance I won’t survive this,” he said in a very matter-of-fact way. “There are people out there who think that Walker and all his right-wing friends are doing the work of God. In their demented minds I’ve become the Antichrist. You should see some of the letters. Makes your skin crawl.”
“The Secret Service?” I asked, referring to the security detail assigned to protect him.
Browning shrugged. “Some. Not as much as when I was vice president, but some. I’m not worried about it.
You can’t be. You do what you have to. You certainly don’t run off and hide somewhere because some mindless fanatic thinks that God came to him in the night and told him he had to put a bullet in the devil. But at the same time, you can’t pretend that it could never happen. That’s the reason why I want you to have this.” he reached inside his jacket for a sealed envelope that had my name typed on the front.
“If something happens to me, if they stop me, use what you find inside this any way you choose. But,” he added with a cautionary glance, “it’s only to be opened in the event of my death. Are we agreed?”
Browning shook my hand and started for the door.
“I’m going to be quite busy,” he remarked in a voice now filled with brisk efficiency. “Barely a moment to spare from here on out. But I’m always available for you.
Anytime you like.” With his hand on the door, he paused. “I assume you’ll want to go over my testimony,” he remarked, nodding gravely. “Just let me know.” he thought of something.
“You remember Elizabeth Hartley? You can always find me through her. She’s involved in the campaign.
You should have seen her face when I told her and the rest of them that I was going to resign. It took everything she had to hide her astonishment.” He slowly shook his head, a glint of nostalgia in his eyes. “I suppose it’s important when you’re that age to believe that you have all the experience you need and that you have nothing important left to learn.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Is that what we were like then, always so certain of ourselves?” he seemed genuinely interested, as if he could not quite remember. Before I could answer, or think what it was I could answer, he shrugged his shoulders. A look of weary resignation burdened his eyes.
“I suppose we had to be. If you wait long enough, you discover that you can’t really be certain of anything, can you?”
CHAPTER 19
Outside the building, waiting for the private car that picked me up each morning so I would not run the danger of being late, I felt a sudden foreboding, a kind of panic. The prosecution was about to call its first witness and I still did not have a sense of the case, a sense of what Caminetti thought he could prove. More than that, I could not stop wondering what was inside that sealed envelope I had promised not to open except in the event of Thomas Browning’s death.
The car, a large four-door Mercedes, a somber, understated black, pulled up to the curb. Despite the crushing traffic, it was right on time. With the engine running, the driver, an African from Namibia, bolted out the front and hurried around to open the door.
“’Morning, Mr. Antonelli,” he said in a husky, even-cadenced voice. He bounced on the balls of his feet while I got in, drawing a deep breath of the autumn air as if he were out in the country instead of parked at the edge of a congested, slow-crawling city street.
In the quiet luxury of the leather-cushioned ride, I asked a few listless questions and then let him tell me for the third or fourth time the great mysterious secret of American finance and how capitalism would eventually conquer the world. I liked hearing him talk, the strong, assertive way he made his point; the way his eyes flashed with the shrewd enthusiasm of a man who believed he had found the promised land, and that it was not America, but the idea America had put inside his mind.
“Al
l my business is here in Manhattan, because Manhattan is where the rich people are. I don’t live in Manhattan; I live in the Bronx because its cheaper there than Queens. I have a wife and a couple of kids.
Two-bedroom place; it’s pretty nice. I work where things are expensive; I live where things are cheap. Maybe I could live a little better—live over in Queens; but I need to save money so I can go back home and have a business of my own. There is a big difference between my country and here.” He caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Borrowed money.” he said it as if that two-word phrase was a talisman, a magic chant that, repeated with the proper gesture and the proper respect, would produce all of what you could ever want.
“Borrowed money—that’s the reason you’re rich and we’re poor. I want a business: buy things made in China and sell them in a store. Costs thirty, maybe forty thousand to start. But no one has anything—I don’t have anything—and with no collateral, no loan. But here I drive around in this expensive car and make a lot more money than I could at home. How do I have the car? I borrow the money! How do I borrow the money without collateral? The car. I make the payments, I pay the interest, and if I don’t, the bank takes back the car.
Same thing with a house. They loan you money here because they can always take back the house. Borrowed money, it’s the best thing there is.”
“But you’re going to go back?” I asked, fascinated by the way he saw the world. “When you have enough to start that other business?”
With a huge white glittering smile, he threw back his head and laughed. “Too damn crowded here; too damn cold in the winter; everything costs too much. In my country, fifty cents buys you a good meal. A dollar? A rich man’s feast! It’s all a question of finance,” he added in the confidential tone of a man used to giving advice.
The street in front of the courthouse had been cordoned off. Police in riot gear, nightsticks at the ready, had formed a double line along the bottom of the courthouse steps. Protesters marched back and forth, shouting and waving placards, denouncing with self-righteous fury the blatant immorality of the things, whether gay rights or abortion, Thomas Browning refused to oppose.
“I’ll take you ’round to Columbus Park,” said the driver with a worried glance. “You can go in the back.”
“No, it’s all right,” I said with false bravado. “I’ll get out here.” he stopped the car and turned around. “Look at those people. Look at their faces; look at their eyes.
People like that, doesn’t take much to get the blood up.
I’m taking you around back.”
Pushed back by the police, the crowd surged into the street, bodies flying everywhere. Twisted faces pressed against the glass; fists began pounding against the doors. Ducking his head down between his shoulders, the driver hit the gas. The car shot forward, straight to the corner where, with tires squealing, we turned up the street.
“Call me when you’re finished,” he said when he dropped me across the street from the courthouse, in front of Columbus Park. With a tremendous grin, he added, “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a very good rate.”
In contrast to the violent commotion outside, the courtroom on the fifteenth floor was all civility and quiet. Sitting next to Jimmy Haviland, I tried not to daydream through the tedious and mechanical testimony of the prosecution’s first witness, a woman who knew nothing about the crime. A man was on trial for murder; the prosecution had the burden of proving that the woman he was accused of killing was actually dead. Dr. Alice Barnham worked in the coroner’s office.
She had reviewed the files.
“And as determined by the coroner’s office, Dr.
Barnham, what was the cause of death?” Caminetti turned away from the witness and looked at the jury.
Alice Barnham was a heavyset woman in her early fifties. She was not fat or round; there was no extraneous flesh hanging from her arms or wattled around her neck. She was simply large, with broad shoulders, wide hips and thick, muscular hands. Her eyes were cold and gray. She was all business.
“Massive injuries to the head.”
Caminetti’s eyes stayed on the jury. “Consistent with a fall?”
“Yes,” replied Alice Barnham in the gravelly voice of a woman who had once smoked several packs of cigarettes a day. She could not sit demurely on the witness stand, one leg crossed over the other; she bent forward, her elbows, wedged close to her sides, resting on the arms of the chair “There is no question that the decedent, Anna Malreaux, died from the fall. None whatsoever.”
Stern and implacable, his eyes fixed on the jury, Caminetti asked whether there had been any wound or injury on the body that might have been sustained before the fall. Bartram answered that there had been no stab wounds, no gunshot wounds, nothing to suggest that there had been a violent fight.
“And was anything found on the victim’s body—skin under her fingernails—anything that suggested that there had been any kind of struggle before she fell?”
“No, there was not.”
Caminetti looked away from the jury. With a cursory thin-lipped smile, he signaled to the witness that he was through.
“Were you in the coroner’s office when the autopsy was done on Anna Malreaux?” I asked as I rose from my chair.
Caminetti leaped to his feet. “Your Honor, she already testified she’s been in the office for eight years.” A jackal-like smile cut across his mouth. “I don’t know about Mr. Antonelli, but I think the rest of us can do the math.”
“This is cross-examination, Your Honor…” I gave Caminetti an evil smile of my own. “I don’t know about Mr. Caminetti, but I think the rest of us know what that means.”
Judge Scarborough rolled his eyes, drew the ever-present handkerchief swiftly across his nose, and grinned at the jury as if he had been called upon to referee a fight between two overgrown, unruly boys.
“If you wish to make an objection, Mr. Caminetti, rise and make one. If you wish to comment on the way the other side is conducting its examination of a witness…
Try not to, or we will be here all year. Now, do you wish to make an objection, Mr. Caminetti? Or were you simply, with your usual goodwill, trying to help Mr. Antonelli move things along?”
Plunging his hands into his pants pockets, Caminetti moved his closed mouth back and forth across his teeth.
His eyes narrowed into a pensive stare.
“Mr. Caminetti?” the judge insisted.
Caminetti shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t decide.”
Scarborough’s right eyebrow shot up. “You can’t decide?”
Caminetti’s hands came out of his pockets; he began to wave them in the air as he took one quick step forward and then, just as quickly, one step back. “I can’t decide.
I’d like to be helpful, but I think I have to object.”
“Then you wish to object?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“You object to Mr. Antonelli’s question?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“On what grounds, Mr. Caminetti?”
“The question was already asked, already answered.”
“But that objection can only be raised when the question has been asked by the same party who asked it before. The party asking it is compelled to take the answer given. But here…”
“Are you overruling my objection, Your Honor?” asked Caminetti, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Astonished, then amused by the sheer temerity of the district attorney’s impatient demand that he, the judge, get to the point, Scarborough eyed him with suspicion.
“Yes, Mr. Caminetti, I am indeed. Objection overruled.”
“In that case, Your Honor, I’ve changed my mind.”
“You’ve changed your mind?” asked Scarborough, more than puzzled, intrigued. “About what, Mr.
Caminetti?”
“About what I want to do. I don’t want to object; I want to be helpful. Thank you, Your Honor.” Caminetti smiled to himself as he sat down
and waited for what I was going to ask next.
The jury seemed to enjoy Caminetti’s little show.
They liked the good-natured banter, the way he took center stage; they liked the fact that he was not the least intimidated by the judge, the other lawyer, or anything else that went on in court. Then, before they could decide that on second thought he had gone too far, he again got to his feet.
“Sorry, Your Honor. I got a little carried away. No disrespect intended. Not to the court, certainly not to Mr. Antonelli.”
One innocent insignificant question, and Caminetti had turned everything upside down; one stupid question had become one short step to a trapdoor. I tried to ignore it. With earnest curiosity, I repeated the question.
“No, I was not with the coroner’s office then.”
“Your testimony concerning the cause of death is based on your review of the records kept by the coroner’s office in that case?”
“Yes.”
“In the years during which you have been with the coroner’s office, have you conducted autopsies of your own?”
“Yes, of course.” Her square chin came up a bare fraction of an inch. She conducted a kind of inquisition with her eyes, searching for the first hint that I might be about to question her competence.
“Have any of those autopsies included deaths like this one, where someone died from a fall?”
“Yes.”
I was standing directly behind my empty chair. The morning light fell through the window high above the jury box and lit the gray floor between us, making the distance from the counsel table to the witness stand seem even greater than it was.
“I assume some of these were victims of homicide, pushed, or thrown, from some lethal height, murdered as surely as if the killer had used a gun or a knife?”
“Yes,” she replied in a tentative voice. She was too intelligent not to suspect that I had something else in mind, that I had a reason to ask this otherwise trivial question.
“Should I also assume that some of these deaths were suicides: someone jumped off a bridge, or a building perhaps?”