by D. W. Buffa
I wanted to get off the telephone: There were calls I wanted to make; but Haviland was desperate to talk.
Everyone else might be thinking about what had happened that morning, but none of them were facing Jimmy Haviland’s long ordeal. When you are accused of murder, put on trial for your life, there is nothing else you can think about. It is as if the day the police came to arrest you they ordered every other thought out of your head.
“What did you think about Abby Sinclair?” he asked.
“She hasn’t changed a bit, has she? Have you ever met anyone more genuine in your life?”
Haviland paused for a moment. When he started talking again his voice seemed to come from somewhere far away.
“I guess that was the difference, the reason you couldn’t help liking Abby Sinclair and couldn’t help wanting Annie Malreaux: Abby was always the same; Annie was always becoming someone else. You could see it behind her eyes.”
We talked for a long time, or rather he talked and I listened. I wanted him to talk, to purge himself of the doubt and uncertainty that had built up inside him. He had a gift for description. I marveled at the shrewd perception with which he could single out the dominant trait that defined who and what someone was.
“If Cesare Borgia had married Mary Beth Chandler,” he remarked, full of his own narrative, “he would have stopped killing others and poisoned himself.”
Our muted laughter faded into a long silence as we came back to the bleak and solemn reality of our lives.
“I don’t want a plea.”
“I know.”
“I’m glad Browning is all right; I’m sorry about Agent Powell.”
In my stocking feet, I padded across the thick, luxurious carpet and pushed open the narrow French door. Down below, the pathways twisting through the park were filled with people moving under the pale November sun, each of them thinking thoughts of their own.
“You coming back tonight?” I asked quietly. I leaned my shoulder against the casement, overcome with nostalgia for the days when Central Park was a place I went to spend time instead of a place I cut across.
“I haven’t left; I’m still in New York.”
“Why?” I asked vaguely. I followed the crenellated line made by the stone buildings on the other side of the park.
In an odd way, it reminded me of what it must be like, coming back from a long voyage and catching sight of New York, waiting, still unchanged, on the farther shore.
“Why didn’t you go home? It’s just a couple of hours by train.”
“It’s easier to stay in New York. I don’t have to answer any questions, and no one looks at me twice.” There was a slight hesitation: I could hear it in the silence between the words. “It isn’t because I wanted to drink. I haven’t had a thing.” He knew I believed him and that that was the reason I made no reply.
When I hung up, I checked the messages. Gisela had called while I was on the phone. I called her back, but she had already left. The White House had scheduled a press conference in which the president, after expressing outrage at the attempt on the life of his friend and former vice president, was expected to announce the formation of a federal task force to track down the assassin. In her message Gisela said she was glad I was all right and that she would call later that night.
The pain in my arm and shoulder began to throb. I took a dose of the medication I had been given and stretched out on the sofa. I must have lain there for an hour, trying to sleep, my mind racing from the shooting to the trial, from how much zealous hatred there was in the country to how important it was that Haviland be acquitted and that Browning go on. Restless, tired of being alone, I changed my clothes and went outside, across the street to the park.
The shots fired that morning had left no visible traces on the faces of the people I passed, but all the voices I heard were quiet and remote, and, except among the smallest children, there were no sounds of laughter. My eye caught sight of an older man bent down on one knee, helping a small boy launch a toy sailboat on the pond below. A woman in her early thirties, tall, gorgeous and proud, stood a few feet off to the side. From the look in her eyes, I knew she was the boy’s mother and that she had married a man her father’s age. It was a scene I had witnessed before. It was all part of New York: beauty and money and the lovely, eager-eyed children their merger made. I decided that life in Manhattan had not changed at all.
The boy’s father looked up at his wife with a sad, pensive smile, as if to tell her that she and the boy were the two most important things in his life. If he had looked up the path and seen me, Charles F.
Scarborough would not have remembered who I was.
He was used to seeing me only in court; and after what had happened this morning to his friend Thomas Browning, he had doubtless other, more troubling thoughts on his mind.
Seeing him there with his young wife and child changed my mood again. It gave Scarborough a life outside of being a judge, and seemed to give me less of one. A lawyer, a trial lawyer, was all I was. Other than the few antic evenings I had spent with Gisela Hoffman, it was the only life I had. With my hands plunged into my pants pockets I trudged back across the park, restless and depressed. The wind kicked up, and the autumn leaves swirled around my legs and ankles and crunched beneath my feet. I pulled my jacket close around my throat. Winter was coming, and I could not remember where the summer had gone.
I stayed up late, waiting for Gisela to call. I wanted to talk to her, to hear her voice; but more than that I needed to tell her that I had to talk to her anonymous friend. After what happened this morning, I could not take the chance of waiting any longer to get whatever he had. Sometime after midnight, I turned out the lamp and tried to sleep. Hours later I was still awake.
This would be the critical week at trial. Caminetti had two more witnesses, and then it was all up to me. I planned to lead with Annie’s mother, Vivian Malreaux. I wanted the jury to know what Jimmy Haviland had done after her daughter had died. I wanted them to wonder whether he could have committed a murder and then become such a source of comfort and support. I wanted them to hear from Vivian Malreaux what Jimmy Haviland had done in the war. But mainly I wanted that jury to see her, to see through the mother something of what the daughter must have been.
I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, watching the trial unfold. Vivian Malreaux first, Jimmy Haviland next.
Normally, I would put him on last and let the jury begin deliberations with the defendant’s adamant denials still fresh in their minds; but as everyone knew, this was not a normal trial. I was aware that there was a certain cruel irony in what I was going to do, that even at Jimmy Haviland’s trial for murder, Thomas Browning would have the last word. There was no choice. Browning was the witness to what really happened to Annie Malreaux and that it happened only after Jimmy Haviland had left.
Those were my witnesses. I had one surprise.
Whether I could get anything more from Gisela’s mysterious source, I had to do something with what I had. If I could not prove what those names and numbers meant, I could still force someone who worked for the President to explain to a skeptical jury why two witnesses for the prosecution appeared together on a White House list. There was the chance that it was false information; that Gisela’s friend, working for the White House, had taken advantage of her—or that someone inside the White House had taken advantage of him— that it had been given to me so that I would accuse two witnesses of taking White House bribes and then have it shown that they were just names and numbers and nothing close to proof. But I could play that game as well. I did not have to accuse anyone of anything; all I had to do was suggest that something was not right. I would show the list to one of the president’s own men and ask him if he did not find it a little odd that what looked like a record of financial transactions involving witnesses in this trial should have come from a computer that only someone inside the Executive Office of the president could have used. Let him explain it; all I had to do was ask th
e question. The more I thought about it, the more convincing it became. When I finally fell asleep, sometime after three, I had thought about it so often, seen it so often in my mind—question and answer, then question and answer again—that I had completely forgotten that the people who were behind all this might have thought about it as well.
I woke with a start and for a moment did not know where I was or if I was really awake. It was pitch-black; I could not see a thing. A shattering, strident sound ripped through the night, piercing straight into my brain. It was a gunshot! No, it was a fire alarm! I jumped out of bed and started for my clothes. But it stopped, and then, as I began to see the gray outline of the room, it came again. Muttering at my stupid, irrational fear, I reached down and picked up the phone. The clock on the bedside table read seven forty-five. I had overslept.
“Did I wake you?” asked Gisela after I murmured hello. There was a crisp energy to her voice.
“I tried to call you last night, but you weren’t home. I left a message to call whenever you got in,” I mumbled incoherently.
I sat on the edge of the bed, running my hand through my disheveled hair, as I tried to remember where I was supposed to be. My arm began to hurt, and for a moment I could not figure out why. I could hear her soft breath as she cradled the telephone under her chin so she could use both hands.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.
“I thought it was too late. I knew you were all right; I knew that you had been released from the hospital; but I thought you should sleep. Are you really all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, wincing at the sharp pain that shot through my arm. “Are you coming back this morning, to cover the trial?”
I was on my feet, prowling the room, moving my arm a little each way as I tried to think.
“Don’t come back today. Stay there. I’ll get a flight down late this afternoon, as soon as I get out of court.
Can you meet me at the airport?”
“Yes, of course; but why… ?”
“I have to see your friend. You have to arrange it.
Promise whatever you have to. I won’t reveal his name; I won’t do anything he doesn’t want. But I have to talk to him. Tell him that after what happened yesterday, he doesn’t have any choice. None of us does.”
I stopped, caught my breath and then said more easily, “We can have dinner together tonight. Then, tomorrow, in the morning, you can come back to New York with me.”
It took longer to dress with my bandaged arm, but I made it outside just as the car pulled up. There was a kind of solace in the easy cheerfulness of the driver’s eyes and the rhythmic song-like banter of his voice. He talked all the way down Central Park West, through the street choking traffic, all the way to Foley Square. He dropped me at the front of the courthouse, instead of the back.
After what had happened, all the protesters were gone, the only placard left held by a frail determined old woman, asking that God bless the United States. It seemed, under the circumstances, a brave and decent thing to do.
“I need a ride to the airport later today, but I don’t know when.”
With two fingers bunched together, he tapped the cell phone he carried in his shirtfront pocket. “Anytime you like.”
“And I’ll need a ride back from the airport first thing in the morning.” he could calculate a profit faster than any banker I knew.
“You’ll be wanting then to go from the airport to the apartment, then from there to here. I understand this right? Good. Always a pleasure to do such good business with you.”
I was early, but Haviland had already arrived. He had acquired the habit of getting there before anyone else, so in the safety of the counsel table reporters could not badger him with the same questions he had been asked a hundred times before. Haviland and I had just begun to talk, when Caminetti tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could have a word.
“I got calls this weekend from the White House and… ,” he said .
“Who in the White House?”
We were standing between the two counsel tables, our backs to the crowd. With his shoulders hunched forward, he was staring down at the floor. He did not like being interrupted. He turned his head just far enough to give me an irritated glance.
“The White House…”
“Someone tried to kill Browning; the Secret Service agent who was there to protect him was shot in his place.
What do I care what the White House wants?”
Caminetti shook his head and turned up his palms.
“I’m sorry about what happened. I’m glad you’re all right. But we’ve still got this trial, and the White House keeps calling. They don’t know what’s going on, and neither do I. What are you doing? You dropped a subpoena on… ?”
“What about it? Are they going to move to quash it? Is the White House going to let everyone think they’ve got something to hide?”
“You don’t understand. They don’t know anything about…”
Before he could say anything more, the bailiff’s booming voice announced that court was in session.
Caminetti and I both moved back to our places. Charles F. Scarborough greeted the jury with a long, thoughtful glance.
“As all of you know,” he began, “there was an attempt yesterday morning on the life of Thomas Browning. Mr.
Browning is scheduled to be a witness in this case. It is even more imperative now that you not let your personal feelings influence in any degree whatsoever your judgment about the credibility of this or any other witness in the case. That is your duty. You must do no less.”
Without another word, he turned to Caminetti and invited him to call his next witness. We were back in court. No matter what might happen outside, the rules never changed.
“The People call Ezra Whitaker,” announced Caminetti as he busied himself with a file.
It took a moment before it registered, then I was on my feet. I did not know anything about this witness: He was not on the prosecution’s list.
“May counsel approach?” I made it sound as if there was nothing particularly wrong, that it was just some minor matter that needed to be addressed.
The three of us huddled together on the far side of the bench, out of the jury’s view. “He’s not on the list,” I complained.
“That’s right, Your Honor,” admitted Caminetti without apology. “He’s new. We just learned about him.”
“This is Monday morning. You learned about him this weekend?” I asked with a skeptical smile.
Caminetti’s eyes were on Scarborough. “We didn’t have court Friday. That’s when I first learned about the witness and the evidence he had.”
“You learned this on Friday, but Mr. Antonelli didn’t know anything about it until now—here—in court?”
Scarborough got right to the point. “What evidence does he have?”
“A signed statement from a woman who witnessed the victim’s death.”
“From a witness?” I asked, incredulous. “Without any notice you suddenly produce a witness, not to what happened, but to what some other witness supposedly said?”
“Wrote,” corrected Caminetti, dropping his eyes from Scarborough to the floor. “Wrote. It is a signed statement.”
Scarborough fixed Caminetti with a profoundly inquisitive gaze. Beyond the immediate question, it sent a warning that he had better be careful, that he was on dangerous ground.
“I assume there is some reason why you propose to put Mr. Whitaker on the stand rather than the person who authored the statement you wish to offer into evidence?”
Raising his eyes before Scarborough finished his question, Caminetti listened with the same rigid impatience that he did to everything that made him wait.
“The written statement—that witness is dead.
Whitaker was her lawyer. She had left…”
Scarborough cut him off. “In chambers.”
Caminetti followed Scarborough, and I followed him.
Scarboroug
h threw open the door to his chambers, Caminetti caught it and with a short jab with the heel of his hand sent it flying back a second time. With a sideways step, I slipped in behind him and let the door slam shut.
“You would be well-advised, Mr. Caminetti, not to try my patience too much more than you already have.”
Scarborough stood in the middle of that richly appointed room, his feet planted on a thick silk carpet, surrounded by thousands of gleaming leather books and a dozen luxurious, priceless paintings. His hands on his hips, he glowered at the New York district attorney as if Caminetti were a servant in danger of being dismissed.
With the instincts of the street, Caminetti, ready for any challenge, spread his feet and glared right back.
“I have a witness. What’s the problem?”
“Problems, Mr. Caminetti. There are several. First, this witness is not on your witness list. The defense was not given notice. Second, you want to offer into evidence the statement of a witness who is not available to testify, which means the witness cannot be subject to cross-examination by the defense. A defendant has the right to confront the witnesses against him. Third, if the statement is offered as a ‘dying declaration’ exception to the hearsay rule, there first has to be a showing that the declarant was aware that she was dying or knew she was in imminent danger of death when she made it.
Fourth, and most important of all, I have the feeling, Mr. Caminetti, that you are playing fast and loose not just with the rules of evidence, but with the rules of the court. I am not going to allow it.”
Caminetti bit hard on his lip. He blinked three, four times in rapid succession. His whole body seemed to tense.
“This witness has evidence crucial to the prosecution.
This witness…”
“Let me see the document,” demanded Scarborough, stretching out his hand.
“It’s in the courtroom.”