by D. W. Buffa
“This is from him,” she said, handing it to me.
“‘National Cathedral. Alone. Park the car across the street and wait,’” I read out loud.
“He was here,” she explained. “While we were at the Lincoln Memorial, he was here. He must have come down the alley in back.” she went to the back door. The chain that locked it from the inside hung loose. The metal plate that held it had been pried off.
“He must have wanted to make sure no one was following us,” I remarked, wondering what made him so cautious and afraid.
I borrowed Gisela’s car. A few minutes before one in the morning I parked across the street from the cathedral where official Washington gathered for a final farewell whenever someone died for whom the whole nation would mourn. In a few days, or perhaps a week, it would be the chief justice’s turn.
There were other cars parked on the street, and there was traffic on the road. A few lights flickered from windows in the neighborhood. The headlights of a car flashed in the rearview mirror. I raised my hand to shield my eyes. The car sped past and I took a deep breath, wondering how long I was going to have to wait. Then, suddenly, something cold and hard was pressed against the base of my skull. He had opened the door, slipped inside the back seat, and I had not heard a thing.
“Don’t turn around.”
It struck me funny: With a gun pressed against my head, I was too scared to move.
“Drive.”
“Where?” I asked, a stupid stammer in my voice.
“Anywhere. Just keep your eyes straight ahead on the road.”
I pulled away from the curb and within a few blocks was completely lost. Gisela had given me directions to the cathedral; beyond that I did not know where I was or how to get from one place to the next.
“Why didn’t you use the list? What are you waiting for? Don’t you know what’s at stake?”
Once I began to drive, he sat back against the seat, not directly behind me but in the middle, behind the split between the two front bucket seats. Despite his warning, I glanced in the mirror. The gun was now held in his lap, pointed almost casually to the side. I caught in the shadows a brief glimpse of his face. He was in his forties, I thought, with heavy lines in his forehead and troubled, anxious eyes. He did not seem like someone eager to be out at one in the morning, involved in a clandestine meeting with someone he did not know and about whose competence he clearly had doubts.
“You’re a friend of Gisela’s, and Gisela is a friend of mine. Why did you think you needed a gun?”
“Do you know who I am?” he asked in a voice that surprised me. It had the texture of a well-read man. “You don’t even know my name,” he went on. “Gisela would not tell you anything about me I did not want her to tell.
I don’t know why I trust her, but I do. You’re fortunate, Mr. Antonelli. I wish I had…” he stopped in midsentence. He did not need to say another word. It was all there, in the space between and after the words, that sense of something you know you can never have. I had heard it before, in Haviland’s voice and in Browning’s voice as well, when they talked about Annie Malreaux.
“She has not told me anything. Until tonight I thought you worked inside the White House. I thought…”
“The White House?” he interjected with a short, rueful laugh. “Now listen to me. I haven’t got much time. I’m only going to tell you this once. This is dangerous, more dangerous than you know. Everyone is being watched. The case against your client was fabricated; it’s all lies and half-truths, it’s…”
“I know that; I know that’s what they’ve done. But I need proof.”
“They bought Fitzgerald,” he went on, appearing to pay no attention to what I had said. “He wasn’t in treatment with Haviland. He’s never seen him in his life. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Fitzgerald wasn’t there. But you won’t be able to prove it.
They changed the records, added his name and a medical file. You think the government can make people disappear? They can create witnesses who don’t exist; they can make them be places they have never been.”
“Witnesses who don’t exist… ? Evelyn Morgan? They made her up? But Whitaker wasn’t on the list.”
“Whitaker isn’t involved. Evelyn Morgan is what he said she was. She knew Browning. She was probably at the Plaza the day Anna Malreaux died. The rest of it— the statement—that’s what I meant.”
I started to ask a question, but he placed his hand on my right shoulder and told me to make the next right turn.
“Pull up at the next corner and let me out.” He reached over and on the passenger-side seat dropped a zippered black plastic bag, the size a slim laptop computer would fit inside. “It’s all there, everything you’ll need. No,” he cautioned me when I reached toward it.
“Not now.”
“But there might be something I need to ask, I…”
“I’ve taken too big a chance as it is. Now pull over and let me out.”
I kept driving. There were too many things I had to know.
“I said pull over.”
“The name—used by whoever kept track of the payments, the routing of the money—Lincoln Edwards.
Who is it?”
“It’s all there,” he repeated.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I took an oath to protect and defend the United States. Nobody gets to go around trying to convict somebody of a murder he didn’t commit just because it’s the only way they’ve got to destroy the only person they might not be able to defeat. One of the problems with doing something like that,” he added with a kind of grim satisfaction, “is that someone finds out about it, and then all you’ve done is give them the chance to get you first. It’s like chasing someone in a circle, thinking you’re sneaking up on him, only it turns out he’s sneaking up on you.” he pointed to a vacant curb half a block ahead. “Pull over there.”
“You’re not in the White House. How did you get all this?” he placed the gun inside his jacket. I stopped the car and with the engine still running turned off the lights.
“You understand that we’ve never met? This ride never happened. Whom do I work for? You’ve heard of the CIA—the National Security Agency? You haven’t heard of us.”
“What about the assassination attempt? Was the White House involved?”
“You were there. What do you think? What did he look like to you? Some lunatic with a cause? Or a cold-eyed assassin who could come right at you, get close enough to feel your breath and then, after he pulled the trigger, walk away? “Don’t trust anyone: These people are everywhere.
Your best friend could be working for them. Look what they’re doing to your client. Do you think it stops with him?” he left and I sat there a minute with the lights out, so that no one would see him go. When I was sure he was safely away, I pulled out from the curb and headed down the street, my mind full of what he had said.
It took me a while to find my way back to Georgetown and to Gisela’s house. She greeted me barefoot at the door, dressed in a blue silk nightgown. Her eyes, dark and mysterious, as intimate as the night, made me forget everything except how lovely she was. All I wanted was to crawl into bed with her and never leave.
She noticed the zippered bag I held under my arm.
“You have it, then—what you need?” She took my hand and led me down the narrow hallway, through the dining room, to the kitchen in back. “You’ll need to work—yes? I’ll make some coffee, then I’ll go to bed so you won’t be disturbed.”
“What can you tell me about him—your friend, the man I just talked to, the one who gave me this?”
Gisela bent her head a little to the side. “I promised I wouldn’t.”
“He said he did not trust anyone, but that he trusted you. He’s still in love with you, you know.” she accepted it as a fact of existence, that men fell in love with women, and women fell in love with men, not always with each other and not always at a time when it could work.
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�If there is one person who would always do the right thing, even if it would cost him everything to do it…” she gave me a long, searching look. “Did he tell you how dangerous this is—what you’re doing? Is it worth it?” she made the coffee, poured me a cup and kissed me briefly on the side of my face. “We’re on the plane together at seven. Maybe you can sleep for an hour or so.”
I pulled her down onto my lap and she nestled her face against my neck while I held her close.
“This is going to be over soon,” I said. “Why don’t we go away somewhere for a while, before we decide what we’re going to do next?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?” I asked, laughing quietly, not only at her charming, funny voice, but also at how much I had wanted her to say that, to tell me that there was something to look forward to, that the end of the trial did not have to be the end of us. When I was young, when I thought I might be falling in love with Joanna, I did not think much about when things would end. Now, it was almost the first thing on my mind, the fear that happy endings were tales told by idiots to strangers and to fools.
“Yes, we’ll go somewhere, anywhere you like,” she whispered before she slipped her arm from around my neck and went upstairs to bed.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to have her alone and not worry about what was going to happen next. It was the dream I might have had with Joanna, if I had not been so full of my own ambition, and so foolish as to think that things always, or even very often, turned out for the best.
I was losing time. In six hours I was going to be back in court. I emptied the contents of the zippered pouch onto the table and went to work.
On our way to the airport and again on the plane, I barely spoke a word. I was still concentrating on what I had learned, reviewing it, organizing it, reorganizing it in my mind. On a reporter’s notebook borrowed from Gisela, I jotted down the questions that had to be asked and the answers I hoped to elicit. I listed them in the order they should be asked, looked at them, then tore up the list and wrote another; looked at that, and then did it again. It still was not right; I started all over. In the car from La Guardia, I crumpled up the last list I wrote and tossed it on the floor. We were coming into Manhattan, crossing the bridge; there was no time to try again. But it did not matter now; I had reviewed it so many times, thought about it in so many ways, that when it counted, when I had to face the witness, the questions would organize themselves. It was like being back in law school, pulling an all-nighter, getting ready for an exam. When we had a class together, Browning and I would go over the material so often that, at the end of it, when the dawn was breaking and we were both giddy without sleep, instead of tossing questions at each other and getting answers back, we would do it the other way around: give an answer and get the question. I would have studied for days to get to that point; Browning could do it even when he had not started until the night before.
The courtroom was empty; I was the first to arrive.
The maroon leather chairs in the jury box had a sedate, elegant look, as if they were going to be used for the board meeting of a rich and powerful corporation instead of by a dozen average strangers called from their normal anonymous existence to decide whether someone should live or die. A deputy came in from the side entrance, the same one through which the bailiff, the clerk, the court reporter and the judge would eventually come. Wearing dark blue pants and a black leather belt, a shiny white shirt stiff with starch and a blue tie, he had three blue stripes on his sleeve. I had seen him every day in court, a big, burly man who went about his business quietly and quickly, but he had been a part of the background, not someone to whom I had paid any serious attention. I was tempted to ask him what the stripes meant, whether they referred to his rank, but the door opened again and the court reporter came in and began to set up her machine, and a few moments after her, the clerk. The pale yellow sun slanted through the narrow windows high above the jury box, daybreak in what was, now that I thought about it, the only world I knew.
The double set of double doors in back swung open with growing regularity as the stream of reporters and spectators began to swell. Sitting beside me, Haviland drummed his fingers against the hard surface of the table that, from the look of it, had not been cleaned or polished in years.
“Are we going to have a good day?” he asked in an even-tempered voice.
I had come to admire Jimmy Haviland, more every day, more than I had ever thought I would. He was the one accused of murder, the one whose reputation, even if he was acquitted, would never be the same; but throughout the trial his emotions had been more closely guarded, kept more under his own control, than I had been able to keep my own. I gave him a confident look, which this time was real.
“A very good day.”
The bailiff let out a sudden cry. Everyone sprang to his feet, but nothing happened. The eyes fixed on the door shifted with a kind of wrathful fury to the bailiff, expecting some show of contrition. A slight movement of his eyes warned us that we had better stay where we stood. A smile of vindication quivered briefly at the side of his mouth as, not two seconds later, the door flew open and Charles F. Scarborough bustled across the front of the courtroom.
“Bring in the jury,” he bellowed, rubbing his hands as he greeted the courtroom crowd with a cheerful grin.
“Mr. Antonelli,” he fairly shouted, swiveling around to face me after the jury had filled the box and he had welcomed them back. “How would you like to proceed? Do you wish to begin with a cross-examination of the prosecution’s last witness, or do you wish to begin the case for the defense by calling the first witness of your own?”
“I have a few questions for the prosecution’s last witness, Your Honor.”
“Very well. Would the bailiff ask Mr. Whitaker to return to the witness stand?”
Ezra Whitaker was admonished that he was still under oath. As I approached the witness, Scarborough leaned forward to watch.
“Yesterday you testified that the statement of Evelyn Morgan implicating the defendant, Jamison Haviland, in the death of Anna Malreaux, was among her private papers. You found it when, as I believe you put it, you started going through her papers for probate. Is that correct, Mr. Whitaker?”
Whitaker sat with one leg crossed over the other and his head held high. “Yes,” he said in a deep slow drawl.
“That is correct.”
“And that document was signed in her hand?”
“I handled Mrs. Morgan’s legal affairs for a great many years. I was quite familiar with her signature.”
“And she apparently signed this document three years ago.”
“Again, that’s correct.” Whitaker tugged at his left lapel and then, with the back of two fingers, brushed lint from off his tie. He looked up. “Yes, that’s correct,” he repeated, puzzled why I had not immediately moved on.
“When exactly did Evelyn Morgan die?”
“Six weeks ago.”
“Six weeks?”
“Yes.”
“And when did you first see it? What was the date on which you first saw this document, this signed statement of Evelyn Morgan?”
Whitaker stroked his chin. “Let me see. Two weeks ago tomorrow.”
“That is the first you knew about this? This woman you had known for so many years had never mentioned anything about it to you before?”
“No. I was quite stunned when I read it. Mrs. Morgan was a very gentle woman, a refined woman, from one of the best families around. The idea that she would have had any knowledge of a crime, that she could have been involved in keeping that crime a secret, is, I must say, completely foreign to everything I knew about her.”
“I understand,” I remarked with a certain detached sympathy. “Were there any instructions concerning what you were to do with it?” Before he could answer, I asked, as if the question had just occurred to me, “Was it even directed to you? I mean, was it inside a sealed envelope, with your name on it, with some language to the effect that it was
to be opened only in the event of her death?”
Whitaker shook his head. “No, my name was not on it. I first…”
“Had it been left with you for safekeeping, or was this document simply found among her other personal papers?”
“It was never given to me.”
“It was not under your control? It was not locked up in your office safe, or at least kept under lock and key?”
“No, as I say, she did not give it to me.”
“But you were her lawyer. You had drafted her will?”
“Yes.”
“You had that in your office, didn’t you?”
“Yes, of course. She had a copy, of course, but…”
“But though she understood that you had her will, and that you would be handling her estate, she never thought to entrust you with this very important document that she apparently wanted no one to see while she was still alive. Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”
“I can’t say why she did what she did. All I can tell you is that, again, it was among her private papers.”
“In an envelope?”
“Yes.”
“Among her private papers which she kept…
where?”
“In her desk at home.”
“Locked in a drawer?”
“I don’t believe the drawer was locked—no.”
“She died six weeks ago, and you discovered the document two weeks ago. About how long had you had her private papers before you discovered the document?”
“I suppose I must have had them for a week or so,” he said with a vague smile on his lips.
“So for two or three weeks after her death, those papers, including that signed statement, were still there, in that unlocked desk drawer in her home?”
“Yes, of course. Her sister brought them to me. She had gone through Mrs. Morgan’s things.”
“The envelope it was in—you say it was sealed?”
“Yes.”
“So until you opened it, no one—not her sister, not anyone—could have known what was inside. Would that be correct?”