by D. W. Buffa
“It’s too bad I could not have stopped him in the middle of what he was saying and told the jury and the courtroom packed with reporters how the same man he was now so eager to prosecute, he just a few months ago refused to charge with a crime of which I was the principal witness; made a full confession, repeated all the reasons he had given me about all the ‘constituencies’ he had to represent and how when it came to someone like Driscoll Rose the only law that mattered was what my brother-in-law, Roger Stanton, decided. That would have changed the story everyone is there to report; that would have been a headline to remember: The prosecutor and the judge both responsible for the murder of Gloria Baker. Instead, I sit there, the way I always do, the silent observer of the play; the difference this time that the play I am condemned to watch is the play I wrote. Hector Alfonso, as great a hypocrite as I am myself, both of us there to make sure Driscoll Rose goes to prison for murder.
“And yet, despite all that, I cannot help but admire Michael Harlowe more each time I see him. Unlike Hector Alfonso, who never thinks of anything but his own future, Harlowe never thinks beyond the case he is trying, and, except for the Atkinson trial, never really believes he is going to lose. He may know his client is guilty – his client may have told him everything he has done – but once he starts, once the trial is underway, he manages to convince himself that, given what the prosecution can actually prove, no jury could possibly convict.
“What he did with the first juror, and then with all the others, was really wonderful to watch. There was one juror - the third or fourth to be examined – a man in his fifties who had been almost too eager to give Alfonso every answer he wanted to hear. But then, when Harlowe started to ask him questions, his whole demeanor changed; he held his arms across his chest and stared at Harlowe like he was the devil incarnate. Any other lawyer would have asked a few meaningless questions and then, later, when it was time to use his peremptory challenges, had him excused. But what did Harlowe do? – He looked at him the way a teacher might at a sullen child, with a wry smile full of sympathy.
“‘You’re convinced he’s guilty. You probably think anyone charged with a crime must be guilty of it. That’s okay,’ he said before that unfortunate juror could protest; ‘I like having honest people on a jury. But let me ask you, ‘Do you think everyone should obey the law?’ What could the poor man say? Of course he thought everyone should obey the law. And then, as fast as you can blink, Harlowe hit him with the next question, as simple, and as lethal, as they come. ‘Even you?’ The juror was startled, stunned that anyone could even ask; a little embarrassed, and a little offended, at what seemed to raise questions about his honesty. He forgot about the trial, forgot why he was even there; all he wanted was to make sure no one thought for a minute that he might in any way ever break the law. He almost choked himself in his hurry to insist that of course the law also applied to him. Harlowe could not have been more delighted. ‘Then you won’t hesitate to follow the law as Judge Bannister tells you to do?’ Of course he would not. ‘Even when he tells you that the law requires you to find the defendant not guilty unless and until the state has proven him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?’ He asked this question with just a touch of skepticism, but it was enough to give that juror one more incentive to insist that he would follow to the letter whatever instruction the judge might give. ‘Even if at the end of the trial, after you have heard all the evidence, you think the defendant is probably guilty, but that the state hasn’t proven it beyond a reasonable doubt, the law requires you to find him not guilty?’ This was hard, but Harlowe had left him no way out. Either you were willing to obey the law or you were not. And so he said he would, and just to be sure, added that he would do so ‘without hesitation.’ Hector Alfonso sat alone at the counsel table, grinding his teeth.
“Astonishing how simple and effective it seems when Harlowe does it. He looks at them with his Irish good looks and that easy way he has and even though they don’t know it, they want him to win. The case is everything to him, part of who he is; maybe all of who he is. That is the secret that all those lawyers who see things only from the outside will never understand. The case is who you are. When I look at Hector Alfonso, I can see him in all sorts of other situations; he seems like a visitor in court. When I see Michael Harlowe, I cannot imagine him anywhere other than in a court of law, trying a case in front of a jury. I wonder if he ever regrets, the way I regret, becoming so completely identified with what he does. Does he sometimes wonder what it would be like to be one of the people, one of the criminals, he represents? He would not for a moment have wanted to be like Daniel Lee Atkinson; he has too much intelligence, too much style, for that. But Driscoll Rose, the tragic comedy of a life like that – I wonder.”
“His opening statement was a masterpiece of understatement and reserve. After Alfonso was finished with his practiced histrionics, Harlowe got to his feet and for a moment, with an eyebrow slightly raised, a silent emblem of his own distaste for what he had just heard, he stood still as a stone. He did not move, but gradually the expression on his face became more severe, and more dismissive. The jurors, still affected by the emotion of Alfonso’s performance, began to notice, and, as Harlowe intended, started to forget Alfonso as they acquired a new interest: the question what, with that expression, Harlowe was going to say. He did not say much, but what he said could not have been more damaging to the prosecution. It destroyed the effect of what Alfonso had done, and it came close to destroying Alfonso.
“‘It’s usually better to have a trial before you hang someone, no matter how much easier it is to do it the other way round.’
That was it, all it took, that short reminder of what a trial was all about. Suddenly, it was the defense, not the prosecution, that was on the side of the law; the defense, not the prosecution, that insisted that you needed evidence to prove your case. Harlowe appealed to what was best in them, and all twelve of those jurors nodded in agreement. The bailiff, who had spent twenty years in the army, went rigid, and I swear if he had not remembered where he was might actually have saluted.
“Harlowe is a genius at this sort of thing, finding ways to make it seem that it is the defense, and not the prosecution, that stands for the country and the flag. Hector Alfonso, who, flushed with his own achievement had just taken his seat, almost went white with anger and embarrassment. If it were any other case, any other murder, I would be sorry to see Harlowe lose. If this trial proves anything, it will be that the best attorney does not always win. A lot depends on this. Tomorrow the prosecution calls its first witness.”
Chapter Fifteen
During the first several days of the trial Michael Harlowe did not ask a single question. Other than an occasional note jotted down for later use, he listened to the witnesses for the prosecution like a student sitting through a lecture he had heard before. Shifting position in his chair, drumming his fingers on the table, or staring straight ahead with the bleak expression of someone for whom minutes seem like hours, he rather rushed to his feet each time Hector Alfonso finished his direct examination and he had once again to answer in the negative Judge Banister’s question whether he wished to cross-examine the witness.
There was nothing to dispute, nothing to argue about. Gloria Baker had been murdered, her death the result of multiple stab wounds. Harlowe would have stipulated to that - he said in open court that the defense had no doubt that the victim had died like that – but the prosecution wanted all the bloody details. Gloria Baker, the woman everyone had seen and thought they knew, had died of stab wounds, but how many times had she been stabbed, and how much pain had she been forced to endure. The fact of death was not enough; it was necessary to show, and to make the jury feel, that how she died was more important than death itself might have been. This was to make the artful murderer, one who kills his victim while his victim sleeps or through the kind of slow poisoning that goes unnoticed, somehow less blameworthy than the murderer who kills by a sudden violent assault, but that was a
distinction the defense could scarcely draw and the prosecution would never notice.
The details of death and what it looked like - the testimony of those who examined the body and the photographs taken of the body at the scene – had their inevitable, and from the prosecution’s point of view, desirable effect. Death was no longer an abstraction; it was something real and, more than that, a cause, a matter about which it was necessary to take sides. Gloria Baker had been murdered, slashed to death from the testimony the jury had heard and the pictures they had seen, and sitting just a few feet away from them was the man the police had arrested and the district attorney had all but sworn was responsible.
Harlowe knew what he was up against; he had faced it often enough before. Forget all the talk about reasonable doubt and the presumption of innocence; once a jury felt a connection with the victim, once they began to see her as a woman whose murder could not go unpunished, they start to believe that the greatest danger was that they might let a murderer go free, and no one wanted to do that. The lead detective, the one who had been in charge of the investigation, gave him the first chance to repair the damage.
Wilson Patterson was used to testifying in court. He knew how to wait until Alfonso finished his question, and then wait just a moment longer as if he wanted to make sure he had not misunderstood. Only then would he turn to the jury and describe what he had seen when he arrived at the scene of the murder.
“The victim, Gloria Baker, was lying on the living room floor. There were gashes in her abdomen and the t-shirt she was wearing was ripped to shreds. It was obvious she had been stabbed repeatedly.”
With three fingers of his right hand touching the railing, Hector Alfonso stood at the end of the jury box, a look of intense surprise, fraudulent and convincing, on his face.
“Stabbed repeatedly,” he said, shaking his head. “Describe to the jury, if you would, what else you saw. There was blood on her body; was there blood anywhere else?”
“Yes; some, on the wall, several feet away; and some on the carpet just below it.”
“And that told you…?”
“That she had first been assaulted a short distance from where we found her body. There must have been a struggle. A pillow from the sofa was on the floor next to her head. The killer must have used it to stifle her screams.”
Patterson turned away from the jury, ready for the next question; but Alfonso waited while the last words ‘stifle her screams’ echoed in the hushed silence of the room. Then he repeated them, said them himself, again shaking his head, but this time with horror at what everyone was now forced to imagine.
Patterson, in his early forties, had too much experience to show emotion or even a change of expression. He sat with folded hands, the only movement, and that a cautious one, a slight shifting of his eyes as he measured the reaction to Alfonso’s studied repetition of what he, the witness, had just said. He wondered at the cheap theatrics of it, whether things like that really worked. As far as he was concerned, Hector Alfonso was a fraud, a politician who would not remember the name of a murder victim five minutes after he had convicted the killer. Facts were facts - that is what they were there to prove – but Alfonso had to have his circus.
“To stifle her screams,” said Alfonso one last time. A look of angry disgust framed his dark, piercing eyes. “So she tried to fight back, to get away, but he covered her mouth with that pillow and kept stabbing her with that knife he had. Is that how it looked to you?”
Harlowe was on his feet, but he did not say anything. He just stood there, as if dazzled by the sheer enormity of what he had just seen.
“Mr. Harlowe?” asked Bannister. “Is there something you would like to say?”
“I’m not sure where to start, your Honor. Leading the witness isn’t the half of it. Perhaps instead of calling any more witnesses, the district attorney should just call himself, take the stand and make the testimony come out just the way he wants it to. Why bother calling anyone else when all he wants is to ask them if they agree with him?”
Walter Bannister enjoyed this and did nothing to disguise it. He leaned forward, a smile on his lips.
“And that way, I suppose, instead of a trial we could have a contest in rhetoric, each of you giving speeches. I’m not prepared to say that might not be more entertaining, but there is some question whether it would really get us any closer to the truth. But to your specific point, that Mr. Alfonso is leading the witness. Is that your objection?”
“Yes, your Honor, it is.”
Bannister leaned back, the smile gradually fading away. “Sustained.”
As a gifted politician, Alfonso had an appreciation for a well-turned phrase and, more than that, a keen sense of when something worked and when it did not. Harlowe had scored, but not as much as he would have if Bannister had not changed the perspective and made it seem that Alfonso was not the only one playing a lawyer’s game.
“Thank you, your Honor,” he remarked with a quick, friendly glance toward the jury. “I’ll try to do better. Now, Detective Patterson, based on what you observed and your experience as a police detective, would you describe what you believe to have been the sequence of events as they happened during the fatal assault?”
Patterson knew what was expected; they had gone over it often enough, the two of them, alone in Alfonso’s office, getting ready for trial. He said all the right things, and said them in the right order. Gloria Baker had been stabbed the first time approximately ten feet from where she ended up; then, during the struggle, the killer had grabbed a pillow from the sofa, probably to cover her face, and stabbed her several times before she fell to the floor where she was found, lying dead, the next morning.
“Found by whom?”
“Her personal assistant, Yolanda Ross.”
“And she’s the one who called the police?”
“Yes, she was. She was very upset, almost in a state of shock.”
“But still able to answer your questions?”
“Yes; she was very clear about everything. She said that -”
“No, Detective Patterson; Ms. Ross will be testifying later. She can tell us what she told you.”
Alfonso stepped away from the jury box, went back to the counsel table and glanced at his notes. He nodded twice as if to emphasize the importance of what he had just read.
“Gloria Baker was stabbed to death. According to the forensic evidence she was stabbed with a knife, the kind commonly called a butcher knife. Did you find a knife like this – did you find any knife – on the floor or anywhere near the body?”
“No; we didn’t find the murder weapon. There was no knife near the body or anywhere else.”
“Was a search made of the house, of the area around the house?”
“We searched everywhere, in the house, all up and down the street, outside along the beach. There was nothing.”
“And what conclusion did you draw from that?”
“Conclusion? I’m not sure I understand.”
Alfonso started to betray his irritation, but caught himself in time.
“All I mean,” he said in a kind, tolerant voice, “is if she was stabbed with a knife and the knife was not there, doesn’t it mean that the killer must have taken it with him?”
“Or her!” cried Harlowe as he shot out of his chair.
“Yes, all right,” said Alfonso, not bothering to turn around and look. “Does it mean that the killer took it?”
“Yes, the killer must have taken it.”
“But he didn’t bring it there, did he? The knife didn’t belong to him, did it? It belonged to her, to Gloria Baker, didn’t -”
“Objection! Leading, as leading as any question ever asked,” insisted Harlowe, throwing up his hands as a smile slipped effortlessly across his mouth.
Again, Alfonso did not take his determined eyes off the witness, and he did not wait for Bannister to rule.
“I’ll rephrase the question. Was a knife missing from Gloria Baker’s home?”
/> “In the kitchen, which is just off the living room, there was one of those wooden blocks that hold a set of knives. One of them – the butcher knife – was missing.”
“The same kind of knife used to murder Gloria Baker?”
“Yes, the same kind.”
Alfonso shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and, rolling his shoulders forward, fell into a long, brooding silence. He kicked his right foot softly against the courtroom’s dull wooden floor and pressed his lips tight together, struggling, as it seemed, with the question he wished he did not have to ask.
“We know she was murdered, and we know from the testimony of the coroner that there was no evidence of sexual intercourse, but that doesn’t tell us if her killer tried to rape her first. Did you observe anything that might suggest that? Her t-shirt was torn from the stab wounds, but what about the other clothing she was wearing?”
“There’s no evidence of an attempted rape. She was wearing a pair of shorts and they were still in place, had not been torn at all. Ms. Baker wasn’t killed by a rapist; she wasn’t killed resisting a sexual attack. That wasn’t the reason she was murdered.”
Patterson said this in a way that suggested that he knew precisely why Gloria Baker had been murdered, knew it with as much certainty as he knew his own name. Everyone sitting in the courtroom knew what the next question would be. Harlowe knew it, and had already shoved his chair back, ready to object to what he and Alfonso both knew was completely inadmissible.
“What was the reason, Detective Patterson – the reason Gloria Baker was murdered?”