Prosecution: A Legal Thriller

by Buffa, D. W.

  Jones exchanged a few words with his client as the jailer approached. "I didn't do it," Goodwin insisted, his eyes burning into mine, as the guard helped him to his feet and led him away.

  When I turned to leave, I looked for Kristin. She was already gone. In the corridor outside, Harper Bryce, notebook in hand, started to ask me a question.

  "Not now, Harper. Not today," I said, as I walked away. Three steps later, I changed my mind. "I'm sorry," I said, as I waited for him to catch up. "That was rude of me."

  His shoulders hunched forward, Harper looked at me with a sympathetic eye. "Doesn't matter how much someone deserves it, I've never yet seen anybody come out of a death sentencing feeling good about it."

  Nodding, I put my hand on his shoulder as we started to walk toward the elevator. "I never had anyone sentenced to death."

  "That's one of the benefits of winning all the time: you don't have to worry that because you made a mistake, an innocent man... " His voice trailed off. The elevator door opened and we stepped inside.

  "I don't know," I said, rubbing my eye with the heel of my hand. I was tired to the bone, and all I wanted was to go home and go to bed and try to forget everything that had happened. "I never used to worry about that and now it seems to be all I think about." The elevator doors opened on the ground floor.

  "Did you believe him?" I asked abruptly.

  "They all say that," he replied. "They're all innocent. No one ever did anything."

  "He could have gotten life," I said, not convinced.

  Outside, on the courthouse steps, we stood facing the park. "Let it go," Harper counseled. "You did your job. That's all anybody can do. That sort of thing can eat you alive if you dwell on it. The system usually works."

  I listened to him repeating all the well-worn words of comfort and was grateful for the lie.

  "Spend your time worrying about what's going to happen in the Woolner trial."

  "That reminds me," I said, as we moved down to the sidewalk. "What do you know about Gilliland-O'Rourke's husband?"

  He stopped and looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face. "Arthur O'Rourke?" he asked. "One of the wealthiest men in town. Some say it was a marriage of convenience. More like a merger of money and power, if you ask me."

  "Yes, but what do you know about him?" I asked, as we started to walk again.

  "Not much. Why? What do you think you've got?"

  "Just questions." I sighed.

  "Questions have answers," he drawled. "I'll take a look into this." I left him at the corner, wondering what I was after, and went the rest of the way to my office alone. My client was waiting for me.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Alma Woolner sat in the blue wingback chair on the other side of the desk and told me the same story she had told me at least half a dozen times before. She assured me she had told the truth: there had been nothing between her and Russell Gray.

  "The prosecution has your fingerprints on the murder weapon. They have to show motive. If you were having an affair with him and he tried to break it off and that made you angry," I tried to explain. "Or if you tried to break it off "—this seemed to me a more plausible alternative—"and he got angry, tried to force you, and you shot him in self defense."

  "There was nothing between us," she repeated. After Alma left, I wondered if she had been telling me the truth. I had no reason to doubt her, except for a rumor passed on by people who did not know if it was anything more than that. There was only one person I could think of who might know. I asked Helen to place a call to Arthur O'Rourke. A few minutes later, she opened the door to my office.

  "I called Mr. O'Rourke's office," she informed me. "He's on a business trip and won't be back until sometime next week. Shall I make a note to call then?"

  "Yes, you better," I replied. "I need to talk to him." On Saturday morning, two days before the start of her trial, I had one last session with Alma. I was surprised when she walked in alone. Each time before, Horace had come with her and waited in the outer office while we talked. A certain distance had opened between us, and his manner had become formal and at times almost abrupt. He said hello and good-bye and that was it. I stopped joining him in his chambers, and I was not invited to their home. As nearly as I could tell, they kept to themselves and did not go out at all.

  A dove-gray sweater was thrown around her shoulders. She tilted her head to the side and watched me through small round glasses as I sat behind my desk in my shirtsleeves. "Am I really going to have to testify?"

  I bent my head and rubbed the back of my neck. "I've told you every time you've asked. You have to. You're the only one who knows what really happened. You're the only one who can tell the jury."

  Alma seemed to shrink into the chair. Tucking her legs beneath her, she pulled the sweater closer around her throat. "Horace says I don't have to testify."

  I sat straight up. "Technically, that's right. You don't have to testify. No one can make a defendant in a criminal case take the stand. You're the only one who can make that decision." I paused, then added, with as much encouragement as I could, "But you have to do it."

  "Horace says I don't have to," she persisted.

  "Horace is right," I agreed. "You don't have to if you don't want to, but the jury needs to hear you explain why you stayed behind after everyone else left." I hesitated, and then asked, "Why are you worried about testifying? What are you afraid of?"

  "I'm afraid I'll make a mistake," she said simply.

  I changed the subject. "What can you tell me about Arthur O'Rourke?" I was still not convinced she was telling me the truth. If the question surprised her, or if she was worried about anything he might know about her, she did not show it.

  "He was a friend of Russell's."

  "Did you see him very often?"

  "Hardly at all. He wasn't involved with the ballet company."

  When she got ready to go, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of the sweater and cast a sympathetic glance at me. "Everything is going to be fine," she said. It was the kind of thing a lawyer says to a client when things are not going well at all.

  Late into the night and all the next day, I went over everything, making certain that I had not missed something that might make a difference in the trial. I was thinking like a defense lawyer again. They would put on their usual line of witnesses; they would make their case. Russell Gray was killed by a bullet fired from a gun covered with the fingerprints of the defendant. But if she shot him, what was her motive? That was the question the prosecution would have to answer. I was left with a question too. If she did not shoot him, who did?

  I was in my office before dawn on Monday morning, going over everything one last time. I made it to the courthouse with barely a minute to spare. The court reporter bent forward, holding his tie in place with one hand, and opened the four-legged metal stand under the stenotype machine with the other. Alma sat in a wooden chair at the counsel table, gazing at the empty jury box.

  "Are you all right?" I asked, as I put my briefcase down on the floor between us.

  "Fine," she replied softly, turning her gentle eyes on me.

  At the far left side, a door opened and the clerk entered the courtroom, followed by the judge. Settling into the narrow black leather chair, William West looked down from the bench and invited the prosecution to open the proceedings.

  Gilliland-O'Rourke, her red hair piled on top of her head, stood next to a young man in his early thirties wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a dark blue suit. "Your Honor," she explained in a formal voice, "I wish to advise both the court and defense counsel that Mr. Victor Jenkins of my office will he serving as co-counsel."

  The deputy DA had a piercing stare that conveyed an attitude of conscious superiority. His voice was a high pitched effeminate lisp; I looked again to confirm that the sound came from him.

  Within an hour we started voir dire and did nothing else for the rest of the week. Watching Richard Lee Jones talk to jurors about reasonable doubt, I
had thought he was a fraud; now, listening to myself, I did not question my own sincerity.

  With ruthless affability, I engaged prospective jurors, one after another, in a gentle wide-ranging interrogation designed to test their neutrality and encourage their bias. Gilliland-O'Rourke took less time and went right to the point. She limited her questioning to the obvious issue of whether they were willing to follow the law.

  "No matter how much you may like or even admire the defendant," she asked one juror, "would you be able to enter a verdict of guilty if the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that she did it?"

  I asked the same juror if he would return a verdict of not guilty even if he thought the defendant did it, if the prosecution had failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. His answer was yes to both questions.

  Precise and orderly, with little of her old flamboyance, Gilliland-O'Rourke asked her questions and listened without expression to the answers. At times she seemed not exactly bored or even indifferent, but preoccupied. When we were finished, we had a jury evenly divided between men and women. Raising their right hands, they stood in the box and swore to the oath administered by the clerk. An all-white jury would now decide whether a white man had been murdered by a black woman.

  At the end of each day of voir dire, Alma would tug on my sleeve and say good-bye, and I would not see her again until the next morning. I never saw Horace at all. He went about his business as if nothing had changed. Alma rode in with him in the morning and left with him in the afternoon, but that was all I knew. He stayed away from the trial, and he stayed away from me.

  On the morning both sides were to give opening statements, I sat next to Alma in the courtroom a few minutes before nine as the last juror, a heavyset woman, struggled past the gate in the wooden railing and across to the jury room. At the other end of the counsel table, farthest from the jury box, Victor Jenkins concentrated on a stack of three-by-five cards covered with handwritten notes. Gilliland-O'Rourke had not yet arrived.

  The door at the side swung open and the court clerk walked in. I looked back at the door, waiting for Judge West. He never came. Halfway to her place at the side of the bench, the clerk changed direction and headed toward the counsel table.

  "Judge would like to see counsel in chambers," she said, bending forward so no one else could hear.

  Holding a cup of coffee in his hand, William West was sitting sideways to his desk, listening to jazz on the radio. Turning down the volume, he motioned for us to take chairs. "I understand that the district attorney won't be here today," he said, looking at Jenkins. "You're prepared to go forward?"

  "Yes, your Honor," he replied. "I was called last night."

  "Illness," West explained, glancing at me. Pursing his lips, he thought about what to do next. "I'm not going to give the jury a reason for her absence. I'll just indicate that she won't be with us today and that you will be making the opening statement for the prosecution. Fair enough?"

  It was not a question.

  "Mr. Antonelli," he called out, as I followed Jenkins out the door. "May I see you for a moment?"

  I turned around and let the door close behind me.

  "Gwendolyn's husband had a heart attack."

  "When did it happen?" I asked. "Is he all right?"

  "All I know is that it happened sometime yesterday and that he survived it. He's in intensive care." West frowned. "At his age, I suppose things like this are to be expected. Still, it must be very difficult for Gwendolyn."

  I barely listened while West informed the jury that Victor Jenkins would give the opening statement for the prosecution. We had been trying to reach Arthur O'Rourke for the last two weeks. Helen had called again yesterday and had been told he was still out of town and was not expected back before the end of the week. But he had not been out of town at all, or, if he had, he had returned. Why would Arthur O'Rourke go to so much trouble to avoid my call?

  Victor Jenkins was standing in front of the jury box, and right from the beginning he had their undivided attention. It was an oddly arresting combination, a look of masculine severity and that effeminate lisp. What was strange about him became the mark of his own authenticity as the opposite extremes canceled each other out. The lisp became less noticeable because of the way he looked, and his features softened because of the way he sounded. The longer he talked, the more likable he seemed.

  Pausing frequently, Jenkins outlined the evidence the State would offer. It was all routine, the kind of thing said at the beginning of every case. Resting my arm on the table, I stared down at my hands and rubbed my thumb against first one finger, then another, pulling the skin back from the nail. In the background, Jenkins was saying something about the gun. I listened long enough to hear the words murder weapon and then let my mind drift.

  Listlessly, my gaze moved from Jenkins to the jury, from the jury to the court reporter, and from the reporter up to the bench, where Judge West had lowered his eyes to study some papers he had brought into court. We were all the part-time performers of a permanent play, repeating itself over and over again, and as I watched, I felt something, the soft shudder of a wing beating out into the dusk, and had an eerie sense of something indefinable, a kind of knowledge just beyond my grasp, an inexplicable certainty that everything was wrong.

  "Mr. Antonelli," I heard a voice say.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself standing up, facing the bench. "Yes, your Honor?"

  "Does the defense wish to make an opening statement at this time?"

  I had committed to memory what I wanted to say, but now I changed my mind. "No, your Honor. The defense would like to reserve its opening statement." The prosecution would now have to put on its case without having heard anything about what the defense intended to do.

  The next morning, Gilliland-O'Rourke appeared in court as if she had never been away. Resuming her place as lead attorney, she called the first witness for the prosecution.

  His thin knees pressed together and his manicured hands folded in his lap, Andre Barbizon settled into the witness chair, cast an insolent glance at the crowded rows of spectators, and waited for the first question.

  "How long were you employed by Russell Gray?" Her voice, her manner, the way she moved toward the witness, then toward the jury, none of it had changed. Whatever she felt about what had happened to her husband, the world was never going to know it.

  "Three years next month," Barbizon said. He seemed to take a certain satisfaction in the precision of the answer.

  "And what did your duties include?" she asked.

  "I managed the household, hired staff, took care of the accounts, and made certain everything was done in the proper manner."

  Nodding, she faced the jury. "Where were you the evening your employer, Russell Gray, was killed?"

  "That was my night off. I had dinner with friends in town."

  "Approximately what time did you return?"

  Barbizon stroked the side of his nose. "Ten minutes after midnight."

  Gilliland-O'Rourke walked toward him. "Exactly?"

  "It was twelve minutes past when I went into the living room. At least that was what it said on the mantelpiece clock."

  "What did you find when you entered the living room?"

  "Russell. I mean Mr. Gray. He was on the floor. Dead. A gun was right next to the body."

  "How did you know he was dead?"

  A look of disgust spread over his face. "His eyes were wide open. There was a lot of blood. He wasn't breathing. Just to be sure," he added, with a slight shudder, "I checked his pulse."