by Buffa, D. W.
I could not resist. I stopped and looked at him. "Me?"
Tugging on his tie, breathing heavily, he seemed to think about it. With a shrewd smile, he studied me for a moment and then shook his head. "I never could figure you out. Sometimes I thought you had more ego than Emperor Jones himself. Other times you seemed so lost in what you were doing, I wondered if you had any ego at all.
"There are people, you know," he went on, as we strolled along the sidewalk, "who get so wrapped up in what they do, they lose themselves in it, forget themselves completely. Wish I was a little like that," he added wistfully.
But Harper Bryce was like that; he was forever losing himself in whatever story he was trying to tell. He had been covering the courthouse for longer than I could remember and had watched more trials than any lawyer I knew. A frequent visitor to the half-empty courtrooms where most litigation takes place, Bryce was fascinated by the way ordinary people, confronted with the loss of either their money or their liberty, could eschew the truth so completely. It was a fault from which he himself was not entirely free. Whenever he reported on one of my cases, the facts were often wrong, the testimony of witnesses was often embellished, and yet, when you looked at it as a whole, the impression it conveyed was usually right. Perhaps there was more of the artist in him than he cared to admit.
We continued walking and did not say anything more until we got to the next corner and waited for the light to change. "What did you think of that performance back there?" he asked.
The light turned green. "I'm not going to comment on anything," I said, as we stepped off the curb together. "Not on the record, anyway."
"Agreed," he said, with a chuckle. "Everything off the record." He was starting to have trouble keeping up. Pulling on my sleeve, he stopped. "If you don't mind my asking, where are we going?"
"I'm going to my office," I replied. "You want to come along?"
"How far is it?"
"Just another block."
He seemed relieved. "You have a few minutes to talk?"
"You mean, off the record?"
"Is there any other way?"
When we walked in, Helen was standing barefoot on a chair, hanging a framed picture on the wall next to her desk. It was something by Monet, a laser reproduction that supposedly duplicated perfectly each brush stroke on the original. Embarrassed, she hopped down and put on her shoes. I introduced her to Bryce, and her mind filed him in the proper category.
"Harper Bryce, reporter and columnist," she said, as her fingers disappeared into his plush, uncallused hand. Bryce had a certain courtly charm, and in the presence of women you almost expected him to pronounce his carefully chosen words with the slow grace of a Southerner.
As it was, Helen forgot her usual cheerful cynicism and began to buzz around, trying to be helpful. She brought us two fresh cups of coffee and shut the door to my office. I tried to explain her eagerness. "You're one of the few people she's ever seen me with who isn't accused of a crime."
"I suppose that means I'll have to wait another week before I murder my editor," he said, and sipped his coffee.
We talked for more than an hour, and when I read the paper the next morning I had what I needed. The story of Marshall Goodwin's arraignment on a charge of arranging the murder of his wife was treated almost as a preface to the revelation that, "according to sources close to the investigation," the chief deputy district attorney had not acted alone. "A second person, whose identity has not yet been disclosed, faces almost certain indictment as a co-conspirator with Marshall Goodwin in the murder for hire scheme. Joseph Antonelli, appointed as special prosecutor in the case, would neither confirm nor deny these reports."
After reading what Bryce had written, I was not entirely surprised to receive a call telling me that Gwendolyn Gilliland-O'Rourke wanted to see me. When I arrived, the receptionist ushered me right in. I had not been in the DA's office since Horace Woolner had resigned to become a circuit court judge. The room had a completely different look about it. With his obsessive fear of disorder, Horace had made certain nothing was ever out of place; the jacket Gilliland-O'Rourke had left draped over the arm of the sofa would never have been found anywhere except on the hook behind the door or the coat rack in the corner. Horace worked on one file at a time and kept all the others stacked neatly at the front of his desk; documents were littered all over Gilliland-O'Rourke's varnished antique writing table, some of them spotted with petals that had fallen from a vase filled with cut flowers.
The most striking change, however, was the difference in what they wanted to remember. Horace had kept a picture of his wife on his desk; among the gallery of photographs that now covered the walls I could not find a single one of Arthur O'Rourke. They were all of Gwendolyn next to someone else, a governor, a senator, a member of the state legislature, the last defeated candidate for county clerk, anyone who had ever held an office or thought about running for one.
Standing next to the writing table, she gave me her hand and then, gesturing toward the brocaded chair on the other side, took it away."Congratulations," she remarked as she sat down. "You've managed to go from defending the guilty to prosecuting the innocent. Not many lawyers can make that claim."
Except for the ballet dinner, where I had watched her move from table to table, intent on greeting everyone in the room, I had not seen her in person since the day the jury brought back its verdict in the case of Leopold Rifkin. She watched me as I sat back against the chair, her eyes, usually inviting and often flirtatious, filled with ice-cold anger. Picking up the newspaper that had been lying, folded in half, on the corner of the table, she tossed it toward me.
"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded to know. "You're going to indict someone besides Marshall?"
Ignoring her, I let my eye wander around the room until it came to rest on one of the photographs grouped together on the wall immediately to my right. Only a few years out of law school, Gwendolyn was wearing a black judicial robe, her right hand raised, taking the oath of office as the youngest district court judge in the state. She looked as if she could hardly wait to get started.
I looked back at her.
"It was a long time ago," she said curtly. "You haven't answered my question. Are you planning to indict someone else?"
"So because it was a long time ago, you'd prefer we both pretend nothing ever happened between us?"
Her green eyes flashed. "I'm the DA. Horace Woolner had no business doing what he did, and you have no business trying to keep me in the dark. You might regret it."
Raising my chin, I stared back at her. "You care to explain that?"
"I don't think I need to. We both know what you did in the Rifkin trial."
"I got an acquittal for a man we both know was innocent."
"You got a small-time thief to claim he witnessed a murder he never saw," she replied, with a show of defiance.
"If you thought you could prove that, you would have," I retorted.
"I'm sorry," she said, her voice less strident, if still far from friendly. "I shouldn't have said that."
"You should never have prosecuted him," I said, my own voice less hostile. "He wasn't guilty. You had to have known that."
She looked away, a slight twitch at the side of her mouth. Then, a moment later, her eyes came back around.
"Do you really think that you have more evidence against Marshall Goodwin than I had against Leopold Rifkin?"
"I knew Leopold wasn't guilty. Are you convinced Goodwin is innocent?"
"Are you convinced he's guilty?" When I did not answer, she went on. "Marshall has a clear track to become district attorney. Why would he take a chance like that, risk everything?" She had spent her life calculating her own advantage, and she assumed everyone else did the same thing. Everything, even murder, was a matter of measuring the benefits against the costs.
"I notice you didn't say he must be innocent because he'd never do such a thing."
"Either way," she said with a shrug.
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I put one hand on the arm of the chair and bent toward her. "Either way—if you don't think he did it—why did you have him arrested?"
Her explanation parroted part of Goodwin's. "This office can't afford to have people think we treat anyone differently from anyone else." Glancing away, she added, as something strictly between ourselves, "It's bad enough that it looks like the chief deputy was a murderer and we didn't know it." Drawing herself up, she took a deep breath, as if bracing herself for more bad news. "Now tell me, who else do you think was involved?"
There was no reason to tell her, and there would have been a certain pleasure in refusing her something she wanted to have. She was looking at me, waiting, her lips pressed together, intent on giving away nothing of how she felt.
"We're looking into the possibility that Kristin Maxfield may have been involved."
"I see," she said, as she rose from her chair and walked me to the door. "I suppose we'll just deal with that when the time comes."
The door closed behind me. Gilliland-O'Rourke did not know any more than I did whether Marshall Goodwin was guilty, or whether, if he was, Kristin Maxfield had been involved. And I had the odd feeling that she did not really care.
Chapter Nine
There was one more way to tighten the screw. I told the detectives who were in charge of the investigation to bring Kristin Maxfield in for questioning. She was not amused.
"Would you like to have an attorney present?" she was asked.
"I am an attorney," she reminded them. She was sitting on one side of a small rectangular table in a room used for interrogations. Facing her on the other side were the two detectives, one of them, Rudy McLaughlin, just a few years away from retirement, his partner, Mark Haskell, a good ten years younger. I stood behind a one-way glass and watched while they took her through a series of questions designed to suggest we knew more than we did.
McLaughlin took the lead. "You testified in front of the grand jury that you didn't deliver anything to Travis Quentin the day he was released from the county jail."
She listened to the question without apparent interest, gazing down at her hands folded in her lap. When he finished, she looked up, her eyes glancing off his before they came to rest on her own reflection in the glass. "Yes," she said finally, turning her attention on the detective.
Haskell, the younger detective, jumped in. "Travis Quentin says you did."
"I wouldn't know Travis Quentin if he walked in this room." Her eyes drifted back to the glass.
It was McLaughlin's turn. "We know you were both in on it together. The only thing we don't know is why."
"Why?" she asked, lifting her soft dark eyelashes. "That's a good question. Why would I do a thing like that?"
Unfazed, McLaughlin went on. "We know your husband did it because of money, what he would have lost in a divorce. But we don't know why you helped him."
Before she could respond, Haskell added, "Maybe you didn't know you were helping him. Maybe you just thought you were taking Quentin some legal papers, something like that. Maybe you thought it had something to do with Quentin being a witness in that drug bust."
She denied everything, and she never once lost her composure. Finally, she asked, "Am I under arrest? Because if I'm not, I think I've answered all the questions I care to."
"No, you're not under arrest," McLaughlin told her. "Tell me," he went on, when she got up to go, "do you really believe your husband is innocent, that he didn't have anything to do with the murder of his wife?"
She stood in front of the see-through mirror, checking her makeup. "Any questions you have about my husband you had better take up with his lawyer."
I went back to my office and waited for her to call.
"Did you enjoy the little show this afternoon?" Kristin Maxfield asked. Settling easily into the chair in front of my desk, she fixed her eyes on mine as she crossed her legs. She had on the same clothes she had worn during the interview, but her blouse was no longer buttoned all the way up and her jacket was open at the front.
I did not answer her question.
"Perhaps you could tell me why I was dragged in there like that?"
"I was under the impression you came in voluntarily."
"Let's not split hairs. I was told the police wanted to ask me a few questions. Did you think I was going to refuse to come in? Why don't you just tell me exactly what it is you're after." Pausing, she moistened her lips with her tongue. "Then maybe I can help you. Then maybe you'll realize you're going in the wrong direction with all of this."
"The wrong direction? I don't think I'm going in the wrong direction. I think your husband hired Travis Quentin to kill his wife." I waited for an instant and then added, "And I think you helped him do it."
Her eyes never left me, her expression never changed. Coolly analytical, she asked, "Knowingly?"
It was a question only a prosecutor or a criminal defense lawyer would think to ask. Anyone else would have just denied they had done anything wrong; she wanted to draw a distinction between things that were punishable and things that were not.
Folding my arms, I slouched back into the corner of my chair. "Does your husband know you're here?"
Opening her purse, she searched through it. "Do you mind if I smoke?" she asked, as she opened a gold cigarette case. I looked around for something to use as an ashtray. A metal tin half filled with paper clips was the best I could do. Emptying it into the center drawer, I reached across and put it on the desk directly in front of her. She lit the cigarette, took one drag, and flicked the ash into the tin."No, Marshall doesn't know I'm here." She picked up the cigarette, took one more drag, and snuffed it out. "And he won't, either," she added, looking at me with her large, candid eyes.
Lacing my fingers together behind my head, I rocked slowly back and forth in the tall leather swivel chair. "What is it you want to tell me?"
"What is it you want to know?"
I shook my head. "I already know."
"No, you don't," she said, shaking hers. "You may think you do, but you don't, not really."
I stopped rocking and sat still. "I know you delivered an envelope to Travis Quentin the day he was released."
"Let's just suppose—for the sake of argument—that I did. It could have been completely innocent."
I brought my hands down and gently grasped the arms of the chair. "Was it?"
"Again—just assuming it happened, and assuming it was an innocent act—it would still be a crucial part of your case, wouldn't it? As a matter of fact, it's only if it was an innocent act that it could be a crucial part of your case. Isn't that true?"
As we looked at each other in the dying light of the late afternoon, I knew what she was doing and why she was there. My elbow on the arm of the chair, I stroked the side of my chin while I picked up the thread of the conversation. "Because if it was not an innocent act you would be a co-conspirator, and no one can be convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of another co-conspirator."
"Assuming—for the sake of argument—that it really happened," she said. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere far away. Then a slight movement of her head signaled a different mood. "Do you remember when we first met?" she asked, a subtle teasing sparkle in her eye.
"It was right after you started, wasn't it? You were handling misdemeanor cases in district court."
She was laughing at me with her eyes, dismissing my feeble effort to disguise what I felt by a bare recitation of the ordinary circumstances that had brought us together. "I wondered why you never asked me out." Her eyes flashed and then dimmed and then flashed again. "I would have said yes." She waited a moment, allowing me to wonder what I had missed, before she added, "Or is that the reason you didn't ask?"