“Put your newspapers under your seats,” Tramm roared at the two hundred spectators. “No reading materials, no food or beverages, no cell phones, no talking among yourselves.
“All rise,” Tramm continued, “the Honorable Frederick Gertz presiding.”
The door from his robing room opened and the stern-faced Gertz, five foot six, strode into the well and climbed the three steps to his bench.
“Good morning, Ms. Cooper, Mr. Howell.”
“Good morning, Your Honor,” we both answered.
Jonetta Purvis, the court clerk, was standing at her desk close to the defense table.
“The defendant and his lawyer are present, the assistant district attorney is present. Shall we bring in the jurors, Your Honor?”
“You both ready to go forward? Any housekeeping to attend to?”
“Ready,” I said. I pushed the indictment aside-the written instrument that charged Brendan Quillian with “Murder in the Second Degree and Conspiracy to Commit the Crime of Murder in the Second Degree”-and reached for the thick purple folder beneath it.
Artie stood by the door next to the judge’s bench and opened it. “Jurors entering.”
The group of sixteen-the first twelve chosen and four alternates-filed in, taking their seats in the two rows closest to my desk. They fidgeted as they settled down, some staring at Quillian and Howell, others focusing on me and the full shopping cart behind me.
It was impossible to imagine how jurors had been able to obey the judge’s instructions not to listen to television accounts or read stories about the case. I stifled my desire to scan the group to see what reading materials each had brought along. Last evening’s news had led with a summary of the opening-day arguments, and this morning’s New York Post banner-DIAL M FOR MOGUL: HUBBY HIRES HITMAN-would have been visible on every subway and bus route that carried these folks downtown.
I lifted the flap of the folder and squinted at the bright yellow Post-it note stuck to my punch list of questions. It was in Lem’s handwriting, slipped onto the file when he had stepped over to greet me minutes ago. Alex-take your best shot. If you remembered half of what I taught you, you wouldn’t be leading off with Kate. Beneath the warning he had scrawled another word: SHOWTIME.
Gertz’s eyes swept the courtroom, making sure he had everyone’s attention before he pointed his gavel in my direction. “Call your first witness, Miss Cooper.”
My voice caught in my throat as I stood, and I coughed to clear it as I started the People’s case. I didn’t need to look over at Lem to let him know he had scored his first hit.
2
“Would you please state your full name for the jury?”
“My name is Katherine Meade. I’m called Kate.”
I was standing against the rail at the end of the jury box, trying to draw Kate Meade’s eyes in my direction. “How old are you, Ms. Meade?”
“Thirty-four. Thirty-four years old.”
The jurors had watched Artie Tramm lead her into the courtroom and onto the witness stand. They had all scrutinized her appearance while she stood, fidgeting slightly, facing the clerk as she was administered the oath. Most of them had probably seen her bite her lip and flash a glance in the direction of Brendan Quillian, who returned it with a broad smile.
“Are you single or married?”
“Married. I’ve been married for twelve years. My husband is Preston Meade. He’s a banker.”
There was little about Kate Meade that these jurors would relate to. The nine men and three women who’d been impaneled were a mix of working- and lower-class New Yorkers-white, black, Hispanic, and Asian-ranging in age from twenty-seven to sixty-two. The four alternates-three men and one woman-were equally diverse. The business clothes most of them had worn during the selection process had been replaced by T-shirts and cotton blouses, chinos and jeans and capri pants.
“Where do you live, Mrs. Meade? In which county?”
They stared at her well-made-up face, auburn hair pulled back and held securely in place with a tortoiseshell hairband. The pale pink suit-with its short-collared jacket and pencil-thin skirt-seemed as rigid as my witness. I tipped my head toward the jury box, a signal I’d arranged to make her remember that it was to the people sitting in it that she had to tell her story. I wanted her to warm up to her audience and speak more naturally, but her expression was frozen and her anxiety was palpable.
“In Manhattan. New York County. On the Upper East Side,” she said, turning to Judge Gertz. “Do I have to say exactly where-?”
“No, no. No, you don’t.”
Kate Meade exhaled as though relieved not to have to tell anyone who wasn’t a member of the Knickerbocker Club what her address was.
“Do you have any children?”
“We do,” she said, smiling at the foreman for the first time. “We have three children, all in elementary school.”
“Do you work outside the home?”
“No, ma’am. I mean, I volunteer on several boards, but I haven’t been employed since I married Preston.”
I extended my right arm in the direction of the defense table. “Do you know the defendant in this case, Brendan Quillian?”
“Yes, I do. For a very long time.”
“For how long, if you can tell us exactly?”
“I met Mr. Quillian-Brendan-when I was sixteen. He was seventeen at the time.”
“Would you tell us where you met?”
“Certainly.” Kate Meade was comfortable with this part of the story, and she shifted her body to face the jury box to talk. “I was in high school, here in Manhattan. Convent of the Sacred Heart.”
Some of the jurors would know that Sacred Heart was the city’s premier private school for Catholic girls, promising an education that intertwined intellect and soul. They might have some idea of what it had cost to educate Kate Meade and her friends if they knew that the current tuition was upward of twenty-five thousand dollars a year at the old Otto Kahn mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-first Street.
“I attended Sacred Heart from kindergarten through high school. It’s where Amanda Quillian-well, Amanda Keating then-and I became best friends, since we were five years old. We were together, Amanda and I, the day we met Brendan. It was at a game, a football game. He was a junior at Regis, and we were sophomores.”
The all-male Jesuit high school was also on the Upper East Side, and because of the largesse of its original founders, it offered tuition-free college-prep education to Roman Catholic young men who passed rigorous tests for admission.
“You were present when Amanda and Brendan Quillian were introduced to each other?”
“Yes, I was. It was my brother who brought Brendan over to meet her.” Kate Meade smiled again at the jurors. “He had seen her across the field and asked who she was.”
I handed a photograph, pre-marked as People’s Exhibit #1, to Willy Jergen, the court officer standing beside the witness box. “Would you look at that photograph, please, and tell me if you recognize it?”
Jergen passed the picture to Kate Meade. “Yes, I do. I gave it to you several months ago, Ms. Cooper.”
“What does that photograph represent?”
“It was taken the afternoon Amanda and Brendan met. It’s a picture of them talking with my brother, who was on the team, after the game. It’s from our yearbook.”
“Your Honor, I would like to offer the photograph into evidence at this time.”
“Any objection?”
Lem Howell didn’t bother to rise. “No, sir.” He wasn’t objecting to anything at this point. He knew the benign-even romantic-backstory of the young Quillians wouldn’t do anything but reinforce his client’s good character.
“Entered into evidence then,” Judge Gertz said, starting to make notations in his leatherbound log that would grow to record the dozens of police and medical reports, photographs, and diagrams that both Howell and I planned to introduce during the trial.
“Mrs. Meade, I’m go
ing to come back to that time period shortly, but I’d like to jump ahead for a few minutes. I’d like to direct your attention to a more recent date, to Wednesday, October third, of last year. Do you recall that afternoon?”
The young woman angled her body away from the jury, her eyes widening as though she’d been frightened by an apparition. “I do,” she said, her voice dropping.
“What happened on that day?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained. Ms. Cooper, you can’t-”
“I’ll rephrase my question.” Kate Meade was nervous again. I could hear the sound of her thumbnails as she picked at one with the other. “Did you see Amanda Quillian that day?”
“Yes, yes, I did. I did. I had lunch with Amanda on October third. I had lunch with her an hour before she died-before she was murdered.”
Howell didn’t like the answer my question elicited, but he was too smart to keep objecting to information that he knew I would get before the jury anyway. All twelve, and even the alternates, were leaning forward in their seats. They obviously wanted to know what occurred in the last hours of the victim’s life.
“I’d like you to take a look at another picture, please. People’s two.” I reached to the bottom level of the cart and removed an enlarged photograph-two feet square-mounted on posterboard. Again, I passed it to Willy to hand to the witness. “Do you recognize this?”
Meade inhaled audibly and lowered her head. “Of course I do. I took it.”
“When did you take it?”
“October third. About two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Where?”
“At a restaurant called Aretsky’s-on Madison Avenue at Ninety-second Street. It was an unusually warm day, so we sat outdoors, Amanda and I. I had just shot a roll of film on a disposable camera at my daughter’s class play. She’s also at Sacred Heart now. I had one exposure left, so I snapped a photo of Amanda.”
“Your Honor, I’d like to offer this into evidence as People’s two.”
Gertz pointed a finger at Howell, who smiled and nodded his head.
“It’s in evidence, Ms. Cooper.”
“At this time, I’d like to display both of these to the jury.”
Lem Howell had not been quite as passive as he was now when we’d argued a week ago, before voir dire, about the last photograph taken of Amanda Quillian. Irrelevant, prejudicial, and prosecutorial overkill, he’d maintained, sparring with Judge Gertz over and over.
But the snapshot of Amanda Quillian was ruled admissible. This was the only case I’d ever handled in which a picture had been taken an hour before the murder occurred, showing the long, bare neck of the victim-the exact focal point of the injury that caused her death-without a mark on it.
While the jurors were circulating the two photos among themselves, I asked Artie Tramm to set up the stand with the easel that was leaning in the corner. Day in and day out, Brendan Quillian would sit before these jurors. He’d been coached by Howell to put on his best game face-smile at them and bond with them in every way that did not involve direct communication. I had seen too many trials in which the prosecution never brought the deceased to life in the courtroom, never allowed the twelve people making the most important decision about her life to feel her presence and understand that the murder victim had as much at stake in this trial as did Quillian himself. For any semblance of justice to be achieved, I needed jurors to see Amanda Quillian vibrant and cheerful and alive, mere hours before she was posed on the steel gurney for a different camera in the autopsy room.
Willy returned the exhibits to me. I put the small photo on my table and helped him mount the blowup of the smiling Amanda Quillian on the easel between the witness stand and the jury box.
“Let’s go back now, Mrs. Meade. I’d like to return to the story you started to tell us, when Amanda began to date the defendant.”
“They went out together for the first time a week after they were introduced. I saw them at a movie theater the very next Saturday.”
“Did you have occasion to spend time with them during the rest of your high school years?”
“Constantly. Neither my parents nor Amanda’s wanted us dating alone at that age, so we usually went out in groups, or at least two couples. Since she was my best friend, we were together a great deal of the time. Amanda never dated anyone else seriously. Not during high school, not when she went away to Princeton. I mean, you can see how attractive she was, so she had lots of offers. But she was mad for Brendan-he’s the only guy she ever cared about.”
The jurors were taking it all in. Some were watching Kate Meade as she testified, a few stared at the face in the photograph while Kate talked about her friend, and many were glancing over at Quillian, hoping for a reaction to the testimony but getting none.
“And the defendant, do you know where he attended college?”
“Yes. Brendan went to Georgetown. In Washington, D.C. He had a full scholarship there.”
“Were you present for the marriage of Amanda to the defendant?” For every time that a witness-or my adversary-would personalize the man on trial by using his Christian name, I would refer to him instead by his status in these proceedings.
“Yes, of course. I was Amanda’s maid of honor.”
“When did that take place?”
“The week after her college graduation, twelve years ago this month. Amanda had just celebrated her twenty-second birthday.”
Through Kate’s narrative I got much of the pedigree information about my victim and her husband before the jury. I had structured the direct exam carefully to avoid Howell’s hearsay objections by eliciting facts my witness knew firsthand.
Amanda’s father was the sole owner of a real estate empire started by her grandfather more than forty years earlier. Keating Properties had been responsible for much of the development of Manhattan’s SoHo district, transforming vast commercial space into fashionable residential lofts and apartments. Then they repeated that trend in TriBeCa and on into Dumbo, restoring the charm of the streets and old buildings in the part of Brooklyn “down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.”
Because Amanda was the only one of the three sisters to marry someone interested in the family business, her father had welcomed Brendan Quillian into the company. After he completed his studies at Georgetown and received an MBA from New York University, Brendan learned the art of the deal from Richard Keating himself. By the time the Quillians celebrated their tenth anniversary, shortly before Keating succumbed to a chronic and severe case of congestive heart failure, he had made Brendan his partner in all his real estate ventures.
“Did Amanda Quillian work, Mrs. Meade? Did she have a job?”
“For the first three years after her wedding, she was also employed at Keating Properties. She handled some public relations matters for her father. But once Brendan was promoted to a management position, she wanted to get out of his way. Sort of take the pressure off him, the attention from other employees that he was the boss’s son-in-law.”
I knew the answers to the questions I was asking as well as Kate did. What I didn’t know, what distracted me now with the persistence of a small hammer pounding inside my brain, was the warning that Lem had laid out for me, the land mine I was certain to encounter as Kate and I moved forward together.
“What did she do after that?”
“Volunteer work, mostly. Four days a week. She was on one of the hospital boards, and she devoted a lot of her time to a project for literacy.” Kate came through with a smile. A forced one, perhaps, but several jurors responded in kind.
“Did Amanda have any children?”
“No, she didn’t. They didn’t.”
“To your knowledge, was she ever pregnant?”
“Yes, she was. Amanda had three miscarriages, Ms. Cooper. I was with her at the hospital when she had the third one, just about four years ago.” Any trace of that smile was now gone. Kate’s lips tightened around her teeth and she drew in a deep breath. “It was a
-a very painful time for her.”
“How often did you and Amanda speak, Mrs. Meade?”
“Every day. Well, practically every day,” she said, smiling at juror number three, an elementary-school teacher in her forties. “Some days we talked two or three times. And I saw her several times a week. She’s the godmother-she and Brendan are the godparents of my oldest daughter. She was often at our house.”
“Did she confide in you?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
“Ms. Cooper knows better than to characterize, to lead, to-”
“I’ll take your reasons at the bench, Mr. Howell,” Judge Gertz said. “Not in open court. I’ve already ruled in your favor.”
I turned my back to the judge and walked to the railing behind me, pausing before I returned and continued questioning Kate Meade.
“After Amanda married the defendant, did she ever spend the night at your home?”
“No, no, she did not,” Kate said, looking down at her lap and again nervously clicking one thumbnail against the other. “Not until shortly before her father died. Then there was a time-several times-that she did.”
“Can you tell us why she came to stay with you?”
“Objection. Hearsay, Your Honor,” Lem said, rising to his feet and circling his right hand in the air, catching the light with his gold pen. “It calls for-”
“Sustained, Mr. Howell. I don’t need three of your arguments when one suffices.”
Lem grinned broadly as he sat down, claiming his victory to the jurors.
“Well, Mrs. Meade, the first time Amanda Quillian came to spend the night with you, was it at your invitation?”
“No, it was not. Certainly not.”
“Can you tell us when this visit occurred?”
“It was about five years ago, in April, I believe. On a weeknight. One o’clock in the morning, to be exact.” Kate was emphatic about the hour, as if no person of manners would confuse the time of night with a social invitation.
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