Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

by Buffa, D. W.

  He stood next to the window and gazed out at the sky. "This makes me angry," he said, his voice suddenly subdued. He pointed back toward the bulging file on his desk. "That one of our prosecutors might actually have had his wife murdered for money."

  "Does the district attorney know yet?"

  Leaning against the casement, Horace lowered his eyes. "The state police came to me because they needed a warrant for a wiretap, and because I used to be the DA. They figured they could trust me to keep my mouth shut until they made an arrest." His eyes still fastened on the floor, he brushed the side of his face with the back of three fingers held tight together. "I haven't told Gwendolyn yet and I'm not going to tell her."

  He raised his eyes and looked at me. "What do you think she would do with this? Do you think she'd prosecute her own chief deputy?" His eyes stayed fixed on mine. "It doesn't get much worse—her own chief deputy accused of murder."

  "She can't just ignore it," I said, as Horace moved across the room to his chair behind the desk.

  "Can't she?" he replied, with an indulgent glance. "The case isn't that good," he observed, tapping the file folder with his index finger. "It's the word of a confessed murderer against the word of one of the major law enforcement officials in the state. She could bury this case, and believe me, that's exactly what she'll do."

  Intelligent, ambitious, and rich, Gwendolyn Gillian O'Rourke had wanted to be governor from the day she was born; becoming district attorney was just a stop on the way. So far as she was concerned, the power of her office had no more legitimate use than the advancement of her own career.

  "There isn't much you can do about it, Horace. She's still the DA."

  "Yes, there is," he insisted. He put his hands on the arms of the chair and rocked back. "There's a statute that allows the appointment of a special prosecutor, someone from the district attorney's office in another county, or even a lawyer in private practice."

  I was familiar with the statute. It was used when a case required particular expertise that was not generally available. Small rural counties sometimes invoked it to obtain the help of an outsider in a case that was too specialized. Usually, the request came from the district attorney's office itself. Obviously, that was not going to happen here.

  "I have the authority," Horace asserted.

  "Who are you going to choose?" I asked, assuming he already had in mind a district attorney from one of the surrounding counties.

  "I want you to do it," he replied.

  "I'm a defense lawyer," I protested, astonished.

  He corrected me. "You used to be a defense lawyer."

  "You're right," I agreed. "I'm not a lawyer anymore. And I'm not going to be, either." I said it firmly. "You know what I did," I reminded him, with a baleful look.

  "You got an acquittal for an innocent man," he replied. "Gilliland-O'Rourke would have sent him to prison for the rest of his life." He paused for a moment, glancing away. When his eyes came back, he was as serious as I had ever seen him. "I'm asking you for a favor. I need someone I can trust to decide whether Goodwin should be prosecuted or not, and if you decide he should be, I want you to do it. This case is too big to give to some prosecutor from another county or some lawyer in private practice. And everybody remembers how good you are. No one can accuse you of trying to make your reputation on this."

  Reading the hesitation in my eyes, he pretended to be sympathetic. "I know it's a big decision," he said, as he stood up. "You don't have to decide right away. Take the file, read it over. You can let me know this weekend." He came around the desk. "We can talk about it at the dinner on Sunday. I already have your ticket," he added, before I could begin to phrase a graceful regret. "Alma insists you come," he went on, certain this would put an end to any thought of refusal. "And then you can tell her how bad you feel that you accidentally tore this hole in my pants."

  "And just how did I manage to do that?" I asked, as I rose from the chair.

  "Oh, hell, I don't know," he said, with good-humored impatience. "One thing at a time. I'll think of something."

  He gathered up the file and handed it to me. Placing his hand on my shoulder, he looked me right in the eye, and I felt the same thing the prisoner must have felt, the sense that somehow he understood more about you than you did yourself.

  "I want you to do this. It's important." Then, without a moment's pause, he reverted to his normal lighthearted banter. "And as a bribe," he said, slapping me on the back, "I'll buy you lunch."

  "What about your pants?" I asked, glancing at his trousers.

  Reaching across the desk, he tore off a piece of Scotch tape and, drawing together the two sides of the tear, placed it on top.

  "That'll do for now," he announced. "Maybe after lunch I'll find a needle and thread." He considered it as we headed down the hallway together. "I used to be pretty good at mending. Learned during the war. About the only thing I learned worth remembering."

  Chapter Two

  Late in the afternoon, I left Portland and followed the river road to Lake Oswego and the house where I had lived in almost perfect seclusion for more than a year. The gray April drizzle had stopped and the sun broke through the clouds, coating the towering green fir trees with a silvery mist. At the bottom of the long spiral drive, I got out of the car and shut the damp iron gate behind me.

  At the top, I parked the car and climbed the steps to the porch that curved around the front of the rambling two-story structure. A hardwood floorboard creaked as I walked down the hall to the library and dropped the case file on the desk.

  The artifacts of Leopold Rifkin's existence, the photographs of his wife, a few pictures of friends taken at different points in his long life, awards he had received for years of honorable and largely anonymous public service—everything that had made this room his own had been placed in storage because I could not bring myself to throw them away.

  Everything else was the way he had left it. The bookshelves lining the walls and climbing to the ceiling were still filled with the greatest works ever written: the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle; the speeches of Cicero and the histories of Tacitus; the scientific works of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton; the political writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the astonishing creations of Nietzsche and Rousseau—all of it was here, organized in an order that was seldom apparent and not always chronological. Even after all this time whenever I opened one of his well-worn books there was always a moment when I felt like a stranger.

  I went upstairs to the bedroom and changed into a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt. Barefoot, I went down to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee and then slid onto the high-backed chair at the desk in the library.

  Directly in front of me, left open at the page I had spent part of the morning trying to understand, was an English translation of Aristotle. For months I had labored over the six works of the Organon: the Categories, De Interpretatione, the Prior Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Refutations, in which Aristotle had fixed the rules of right reason and established the foundation of logical thought. I had struggled on, until finally I had managed to get through most of Aristotle, including even the Physics. Then, opening the first page of the Metaphysics, my eye fell on the first sentence, perhaps the seven most hopeful words ever written, a simple declaration of what had once been an article of faith: "All men by nature desire to know."

  It was hard to imagine that many of them wanted to know much if anything about the Metaphysics. I put down the coffee cup and glanced across at the file folder straining against the rubber hand. Horace had known I would not be content to just stay here forever like a cloistered medieval monk. Placing a scrap of paper inside the volume to mark the place, I closed the copy of Aristotle and moved it to the side.

  For the next few hours I worked my way through the written record of the police investigation into the murder of Nancy Goodwin. I had spent my life reading reports like this—the tedious chronicle of an ac
t of violence, written in a monotonous prose, the perfect expression of the utter banality of evil. It always left me with an oppressive sense of dull indifference, a feeling that how the victim died was somehow more important than how she had lived. It was the ultimate obscenity of the criminal law: not that a woman had been killed, but that what had been done to her at the end had become the only thing about her that mattered. The victim of a homicide was put on public display. Whatever else it was, murder was always an act of lewdness.

  A motel maid found the naked body of Nancy Goodwin, her head hanging over the corner of the bed, her hair caked with the blood that had drained out of her knife-slashed throat. Her mouth had been taped shut and her wrists tied behind her back. According to the coroner she had been raped, probably more than once.

  A woman with whom she worked had driven down with her from Portland and had the room next door. They had sat together at the conference dinner and shared a drink afterward in the motel bar. Around eleven they had walked back to their rooms and said good night. The next morning the woman assumed that Nancy Goodwin was sitting somewhere in the darkened conference hall watching the same presentation. Two hundred people had attended the conference that brought Nancy Goodwin to Corvallis, and none of them had noticed anything unusual. The police found dozens of fingerprints in her room and fibers all over the floor, but it was a motel room used by hundreds of different strangers every year. No arrest was ever made.

  Leaning back against the corner of the chair, one leg draped over the wooden arm, I gazed out the window. The skies had cleared and the late afternoon sunlight drenched the budding trees at the far edge of the lawn. Scattered between them, azaleas and rhododendrons were already in bloom, a visible reminder that winter was giving way to spring.

  Police reports had not changed, but I found I was reading them differently from the way I had before. Determined to find any oversight, no matter how small, any gap, no matter how narrow, in the chain of evidence, I had never read them just to learn what had happened. Long before I ever began the study of Aristotle, I had known something about the use and abuse of analytical thought.

  A hundred miles away from where she had been murdered, Marshall Goodwin was finishing the cross examination of a witness when he was told of his wife's death. The judge, who had been given the task, had called him into chambers and then listened in horrified silence as Goodwin, overcome with grief, cried out that his wife had been four months pregnant with their first child.

  I could see him in my mind, arguing a case in front of a jury. Marshall Goodwin was good at what he did, better than most lawyers who made their careers prosecuting criminal cases. Thorough and precise, he had a quick smile and an easy, relaxed manner. There was none of the raw-eyed irritability that betrayed the desperation of someone who could not keep up and paid the price for it with sleepless nights and eighteen-hour work days. On the contrary, Goodwin gave the appearance of a self assurance so complete it would have been dismissed as arrogance had it not been accompanied by a certain friendly civility. He was the kind of lawyer who was the first to offer his congratulations on those rare occasions when he lost. Whenever Gwendolyn Gilliland-O'Rourke decided the time had come to run for governor, nearly everyone assumed Goodwin would become the next district attorney.

  Though they never admitted they were giving up, the police eventually closed their investigation, and the death of Nancy Goodwin became another unsolved homicide, a file folder gathering dust, until, two years later and a thousand miles away, the killer was caught in an unrelated murder. Faced with the prospect of the gas chamber, Travis Quentin tried to save his life by confessing to another murder. The transcript of the interview in which he accused a deputy district attorney of conspiracy to murder contained no discernible trace of remorse. He had been given a photograph of the victim and told where she would be staying the night. He was to kill her and then be paid ten thousand dollars for the job. Rape had been his idea.

  The lengthy criminal history of Travis Quentin reflected the even-tempered barbarity of a sociopath and the utter inadequacy of the systems in place to do something about it. He committed his first murder when he was fifteen years old by throwing a twelve-year-old boy off the roof of a ten-story building. More disturbing than the absence of any attempt at justification, or even a simple explanation, was his apparent inability to understand why one was needed. Instead of a death sentence, or even life in prison, he was confined in a juvenile facility until he became an adult. If he learned anything from his brief incarceration it was how to become more careful in the crimes he committed. Thirty years of frequent arrests and occasional convictions had done nothing to reform his character or protect his victims. Counting Nancy Goodwin, he had killed at least six people and, as reparation, had thus far served a total of seven years on two convictions for manslaughter.

  On the front page of the criminal history of Travis Quentin was his photograph, a grainy black-and-white mug shot. He had a pockmarked face, with a narrow forehead, thick eyebrows, and a broad, bulbous nose. The back edge of his left ear bent forward as if he had slept on it, and the lid on his right eye drooped down at the corner. He had the look of someone who sweats profusely the moment he begins to exert himself.

  There was no serious question about whether Quentin had really killed Nancy Goodwin. He knew everything about it, including details that had never been released to the public. The real question was whether it had really been a murder for hire. He said it was, but he had a great deal to gain and nothing to lose by implicating someone else. It was the only way he could save his own life. He agreed to take a polygraph and he passed it, but there were still doubts that he was telling the truth.

  I got up from the desk and took my empty cup to the kitchen. Outside, the shadows lengthened over the lawn as the last glimmer of twilight stretched across the western sky. Through the open window, the soft sigh of an evening breeze started up and then died away.

  With a full cup in my hand, I wandered back and gazed at the shelves lined with thousands of cloth- and burnished leather-bound books collected over the course of Leopold Rifkin's long life. The library was more than the repository of what Rifkin had read, more than a visible reminder of what he had spent much of his life thinking about; it was a sanctuary from the changeable inconsequence of the world. It was the place that had given him a perspective about the things he did down in the city, inside the courtroom, where he decided the fate and fortune of everyone who came before him. Scattered across the desk, the fragmentary reports of the unfinished investigation into the murder of Nancy Goodwin and the possible complicity of her husband almost seemed to belong here. Settling into the chair, I picked up the page where I had left off.

  According to the account of Travis Quentin, he had first met the chief deputy district attorney while he was in the Multnomah County jail. The police had found him parked late at night on the side of a road less than two blocks from a fashionable neighborhood. They claimed that when they approached the vehicle—an old junker that no one who lived there would have been caught dead in—he reached under the front seat. Fearing for their safety, the two officers drew their weapons, ordered him out of the car, and proceeded to search it. All they found under the front seat was a small bag of marijuana, but stuffed behind the back seat they discovered a large quantity of heroin and, inside the trunk, three handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, and an assault weapon that could cut a man in half with a single one-second burst.

  It was a questionable search. Any decent defense attorney would have attacked it with a vengeance. The law of search and seizure was a shambles, in which appellate courts attempted to give guidance to the discretion of the police by producing as many opinions about what they should have done as there were judges to write them. It was standard procedure to file a motion to suppress, argue it before the trial court judge, and see what happened. If the judge ruled that the search was valid and the evidence admissible, you went to trial, and if your client was found guilty you had the
chance to convince an appellate court that the police had failed to follow a rule on which they themselves had never been able to agree.

  Nothing like that happened here. Two days after his arrest, Travis Quentin was brought to the district attorney's office where he was interviewed alone by Marshall Goodwin. The deputy sheriffs who took him, bound and shackled, from the county jail thought Quentin was a potential witness in a major narcotics case that supposedly involved some of the most prominent people in town. After Quentin met behind closed doors with Goodwin for more than an hour, all the charges, except for a single misdemeanor count for possession of marijuana, were dropped.