Degree of Guilt

by Unknown

  ‘What we think,’ Sharpe replied, ‘is that the truth is hidden in some part of the story Ms Carelli cannot tell us, for fear of admitting guilt. My own theory is that Mr Ransom struck her when she pulled out the gun. But the heart of the matter is this: Ms Carelli cannot use one unexplained fact to avoid trial on a charge of murder.’

  Sharpe paused for a moment, peering at Judge Masters to see if she was satisfied. Masters looked back at her in silence; when Sharpe resumed again, the awkward interlude had leeched some certitude from her tone.

  ‘With so little to say for herself,’ Sharpe told Masters, ‘Ms Carelli has tried to portray Mark Ransom as a man too despicable to merit justice, or even our concern.

  ‘“Why bother with the evidence of murder,” her tacit message goes, “when the man I murdered was such a swine.”

  ‘Ms Carelli says Mark Ransom tried to blackmail her into having sex. But she said that only after we found the tape – after Ms Carelli was committed to a defense built on rape.

  ‘How can we believe Mary Carelli about anything?’

  Mary’s face did not change. But her eyes, fixed on the table in front of her, bespoke her hopelessness and despair. Paget imagined her memories – undressing for Ransom, posing for him naked on the couch – as she heard Marnie Sharpe call her a liar.

  ‘So they offer Marcy Linton,’ Sharpe went on, ‘to try to persuade us of what Mary Carelli cannot.

  ‘Without Marcy Linton, Mary Carelli would have no defense at all.’

  But there could have been Melissa Rappaport, Paget thought, and Lindsay Caldwell. He wondered if Caroline Masters could dismiss them from her thoughts as easily as she had swept them from the case.

  Compassion had crept into Sharpe’s voice. ‘None of us who saw her,’ she said, ‘will forget Marcy Linton. Nor is there any cause to forgive Mark Ransom for what he did to this young woman. But we are not here to prosecute a dead man for the rape of Marcy Linton.’

  Sharpe paused again. ‘Indeed,’ she went on quietly, ‘it seems that Mark Ransom had already prosecuted himself. For that, Dr Bass explained to us, is why this man was impotent.

  ‘Impotent,’ she repeated. ‘Impotent from the moment he raped Marcy Linton to the day that Ms Carelli shot him.’

  Her voice rose for the first time. ‘That,’ she said with new assurance, ‘is the only truth Mary Carelli ever told us – that she shot him. And the truth of that shooting is that it was murder.’

  But the truth of the shooting, Paget knew, lay in the moment that Mark Ransom had pressed Mary Carelli against the wall with his penis in her mouth and watched himself turn soft; the moment when Mary Carelli became the focus of his rage. Assuming, of course, that Mary had finally told the truth.

  ‘Everything else,’ Sharpe went on, ‘is false. The story Mary Carelli spun to excuse that shooting is a web of lies. And now, at last, it has hopelessly entangled her.

  ‘That is just. Paget may use words like “miscarriage of justice.” But the only result worthy of those words would be to free Mary Carelli on the basis of her testimony.’

  There was a passion is Sharpe’s voice now. She grasped the podium, as if to rein in her emotions. ‘This is not a feminist cause, Your Honor, and Mary Carelli’s lies were not an accident,’ she said. ‘Mary Carelli told these lies because she is a murderer. We ask the court to enter a finding of probable cause.

  ‘Thank you, Your Honor.’

  As she turned from the podium, Paget felt the complex skein of his own emotions – fatigue, deep anger at Mary, admiration of Sharpe’s effort, disquiet at the hidden injustice of what she had said. And then he saw McKinley Brooks nod toward Sharpe, as one lawyer to another who had done all she could, and done it well.

  When Caroline Masters spoke, Paget realized that moments had passed while he sat unmoving in his chair. He felt Mary turn to him in mute appeal, Terri’s hand on his arm.

  Masters’s tone was ironic, but there was puzzlement beneath it. ‘Mr Paget,’ she said, ‘perhaps you would care to say a few words on Ms Carelli’s behalf.’

  Paget looked up at her. There were no notes in front of him; he had prepared none.

  ‘Perhaps a few,’ he said.

  Walking to the podium, Paget faced Judge Masters.

  It was a strange moment: Caroline Masters must have sensed that she had not yet heard the truth, but Paget alone knew what it was. As if she read his thoughts, the judge said coolly, ‘What really happened here, Mr Paget?’

  He paused for only a moment. ‘Mark Ransom abused Mary Carelli,’ he answered.

  The judge leaned forward as if to scrutinize him. ‘I admit that Ms Sharpe can’t cover all the bases. It even strikes me that something may have happened in that hotel suite other than premeditated murder. But really, Counselor, Ms Carelli’s account is nearly as flawed as Ms Sharpe suggests. Diaphanous, one might even say.’

  All at once, Paget felt the hearing move to a new level of reality: the judge was less offended by lies than interested in a truth she had yet to hear. Tell me, she seemed to be saying, why finding for Mary Carelli would be right.

  It was just as well, Paget thought, that he had nothing prepared. But it took him a moment to find somewhere to start: he would not lie to Caroline Masters, or ask her to believe the lies that Mary had told in court.

  ‘Mark Ransom beat Mary Carelli,’ he began. ‘We know that.

  ‘Mark Ransom beat and raped Marcy Linton. We know that.’

  Paget paused, looking from Sharpe to Masters. ‘No one here doubts Ms Linton. But the prosecution has ignored the striking parallels between Mark Ransom’s treatment of Marcy Linton and of Mary Carelli.

  ‘First, he used whatever leverage he had to get them alone – in Ms Linton’s case, the reading of a manuscript; in Ms Carelli’s, the playing of a tape.

  ‘Second, he used alcohol to dull their reactions.

  ‘Third, he used psychological abuse to make them vulnerable.’

  Paget’s gaze fixed on Caroline Masters. ‘And fourth,’ he finished quietly, ‘he used physical abuse. Because that’s what excited him.’

  His voice rose. ‘Every one of these elements had happened to Ms Linton. Every one of them was part of what Ms Carelli told Inspector Monk. And yet, until this hearing, Mary Carelli had never heard of Marcy Linton.’

  Caroline Masters folded her hands, gazing fixedly from the bench. Paget had Masters’s attention now, he sensed, and that of everyone in the courtroom. Feeling the dense silence behind him, he searched for where to take this: away from Mary, he decided, to the man she killed.

  ‘Marcy Linton,’ he said quietly, ‘had told no one. It’s a tragedy repeated across this country, countless times a year. We can never know how many women let sexual abuse go unpunished, fearing the shame we visit on them. So that we never know who these men are.

  ‘But now, because Mary Carelli shot Mark Ransom, Mary Linton came forward. And so at last we know just who and what Mark Ransom was.

  ‘In Mark Ransom’s twisted world, there was no room for any woman to be a person, rather than a projection of his fantasies.

  ‘For Mark Ransom, women had no thoughts, no feelings, no life apart from his need for them.’ Quiet scorn entered Paget’s voice. ‘And once one understands that, how fitting it is that his ideal woman had been dead for twenty years.

  ‘For Laura Chase there can be no questioning, no hope, no awareness of all that women have perceived. Nothing, in short, to mar Mark Ransom’s image of compliance.’

  Paget’s eyes locked on Caroline Masters. ‘Mark Ransom died because, in the end, he could not turn Mary Carelli into Laura Chase.’ Paget paused once more, letting the thought sink in. ‘And that is the deeper truth that George Bass left with us.’

  Paget nodded to Marnie Sharpe. ‘Ms Sharpe called Dr Bass to testify to impotence. But what he stayed to give us, based on intimate knowledge, was an indelible portrait of the man Mary Carelli encountered in that suite.

  ‘The man,’ Paget repeated, ‘whom M
arcy Linton has described to us.

  ‘A rapist.

  ‘A man obsessed by Laura Chase.

  ‘A man who derived pleasure from beating women.

  ‘A man who blamed Marcy Linton for his supposed impotence.

  ‘A man determined to reassert himself sexually.

  ‘A man who, armed with the Laura Chase tapes, was searching for a victim in the hope that abuse and fetishes would make him the “man” he used to be.

  ‘A man who, by the time he fixed on Mary Carelli, had become a sexual psychopath.’ Paget paused, adding quietly, ‘A tinderbox, waiting to explode.’

  Behind the bench, Caroline Masters shifted. It was time, Paget knew, to return to Mary Carelli. ‘But that man,’ he added quietly, ‘met the wrong woman. Or, one might say, the right one.

  ‘The only question is whether Mary Carelli acted in self-defense.

  ‘Ms Sharpe says that Ms Carelli is unworthy of belief. We can debate the niceties of circumstantial evidence. But all that we can determine, where none of us but Ms Carelli knows the truth, is all the different theories that trial lawyers can evolve.

  ‘So let us look at the essence of what Ms Carelli says.

  ‘Ms Carelli says that Mark Ransom beat her. She has the bruises to prove that.

  ‘Ms Carelli says that Mark Ransom abused her sexually. We have Marcy Linton, and Dr Bass, to say that is the truth.

  ‘That much we know.

  ‘Ms Carelli says that, at some terrible moment of violence and abuse, she shot Mark Ransom out of fear for herself.’ Paget stood straighter. ‘Ms Sharpe would say that we have only Ms Carelli’s word for that. But who among us is the better judge?

  ‘Can we now stand here in this room and pass judgment on her judgment at the moment that she killed him? We cannot.

  ‘Mary Carelli faced that moment alone.

  ‘Now Mary Carelli has come before you to claim selfdefense. Ms Sharpe says that Ms Carelli cannot be believed. But the most credible thing Ms Carelli says – the central truth of this case – is that Mark Ransom was an abuser of women.

  ‘Because Mary Carelli met him, he changed her life forever. But because he met Mary Carelli, hers is the last life Mark Ransom will ever change.’

  Paget stopped to look at Caroline Masters. ‘I cannot consider that a tragedy. Except, perhaps, for Mary Carelli.

  ‘Nor, Your Honor, should this court find it to be a crime.’

  Caroline Masters gave him a querying, troubled look. ‘The law,’ she said, ‘defines what is or is not a crime. And this is a court of law, not an outlet for our passions or beliefs. Yours, mine, or anyone’s.’

  Paget nodded. ‘True, Your Honor. But at its best, this is also a court of justice.’ He hesitated; the law was against him, and there was no point in evading that. ‘When this proceeding began, you said that probable cause was not a daunting standard. I acknowledge that. And therefore I must acknowledge that as a matter of law, this court can find against Mary Carelli and there is nothing I could do.’

  Paget raised his head. ‘But that would not be justice.

  ‘It would not be just to condemn Mary Carelli to a further trial. Because what we have proven here is that this is not a case where the prosecutor can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They do not have the evidence.

  ‘Instead they rely on the law of probable cause to induce the court to let them go to trial. And there, amidst the passions of a jury trial, they hope to win a conviction they cannot support.’

  Caroline Masters remained impassive; how was he to reach her as a person, Paget wondered, without offending her as a judge? ‘This court is bound to apply the law,’ he said. ‘But this court is not required to measure out the law like some apothecary. For the law is meant to be not a dry prescription but an expression of what is just and moral.

  ‘On this evidence, the just result – the moral result – is to let Mary Carelli go free. For in the end, there is too much to say that the Mark Ransom she describes is the man that she encountered, and nothing to say that he was not.’ Paget paused for the last time, speaking slowly and clearly. ‘As terrible as it was, what Mark Ransom brought upon himself in that hotel suite was justice. This court cannot improve on it.’

  Without more, Paget sat down.

  Of the next few moments he had only impressions: Caroline Masters’s gavel cracking; a softening in Carlo’s face; Mary’s murmured thanks; Masters leaving the bench; the crowd releasing its tension in a cacophony of sound.

  None of it seemed real; he knew only that he believed what he had said. For now, that would have to be enough.

  It was Terri, touching his arm, who brought him back. ‘You can go on now,’ she said.

  He turned to her. For a moment, he watched her face, as if searching for something more to believe in. ‘To where?’ he asked.

  Chapter 6

  It had been some time since Christopher Paget had thought about Andrea, who once had been his wife.

  In the chaos of the courtroom, his bewildered words to Terri had been swallowed by sound. The media had converged before he and Carlo could speak; all that Paget could do was begin pressing toward the hallway, with Mary, Terri, and Carlo carried by the throng that followed. On the steps of the Hall of Justice, Johnny Moore had managed to tell him that he was taking Carlo to school; Paget had time only to suggest that Terri leave with them. Reporters had shouted questions from all sides.

  It had seemed wrong that he was not with Carlo. But he was not yet sure what either of them would say, and this was not the place to say it; part of him was simply glad that Johnny could get Carlo away from this. The boy had disappeared in the crush, and Paget and Mary Carelli had faced the cameras alone.

  Mary had been uncharacteristically subdued. All that Paget recalled her saying was that she was grateful for what he had done and that the rest was in Judge Masters’s hands; she did not proclaim her innocence or even ask for understanding. Then she had disappeared into a limousine, giving Paget a last backward glance, and he was alone with them.

  He had said almost nothing; his closing argument, he told them, was what he meant people to remember. He did not add that he himself could hardly remember what he had said. Their faces were a blur.

  He had driven home by instinct.

  The quiet house had felt deserted, like a place preserved as a museum to some life no longer lived there. Climbing the stairs to his bedroom, he had stopped at the sight of the canopied bed.

  Andrea had chosen it. The bed was not to his taste, but when she had gone to Paris, leaving Paget and Carlo in a third-floor flat not suited to a child, she had not taken it. In the semidaze that followed, Paget had kept it; there was a boy to worry about, too many other things to brood on for Paget to replace a bed. The bed had remained until getting rid of it seemed a reaction to pain and disappointment Paget simply wished to put aside; since then, there had been no woman in his life so permanent as to see Andrea’s presence in it, or express tastes of her own. The bed had become an artifact.

  Now the memory of Andrea was clear and sharp.

  Paget stood there in the doorway, staring at the bed until he understood his thoughts.

  It was the tape: Mary’s voice, telling him that Carlo was not his son, had taken him back to the moment in time when he had decided that the boy needed him, no matter what. Now, pausing in the doorway, he felt himself standing on that threshold again. Time changed for him: Mary Carelli was seven years in the past; Andrea Lo Bianco was his wife again; some other life, now unlived and irretrievable, was still possible for him. Perhaps when Andrea’s career was over, and they could look at things anew, they might decide to have a child. There were still times between them that seemed so good.

  The moment passed.

  He had no idea where Andrea was now; he had let her vanish from his life without a trace. It made him feel shallow and unreal. He had loved her enough to envision a life with her; now she could die without his knowing. He saw her in his mind, a dancer who carried her
self so much like Mary, the mother of the son he had not then known.

  Except that it was eight years later; Andrea was gone, and Carlo – the boy he now knew well – was not his son at all.

  He walked to his dresser, opening the top drawer.

  The tapes were inside. It was where he had hidden them, minutes before Carlo had found him downstairs, drinking alone in the darkened library. He still did not know what to do with them.

  About this he could not talk to Terri. He could not tell her what he feared: that if the tapes were traced to her, and Paget had destroyed them, Terri would share his culpability. Only by putting Terri at risk could he ensure that Carlo would never hear the tape.

  He no longer controlled his life, Paget thought, or even how he felt about it.

  He slowly shut the drawer.

  Where would he go? he had asked Teresa Peralta.

  Paget found himself staring at his calendar. He had always kept it on top of his dresser, to remind him of his schedule, and Carlo’s. But he had never flipped it to February; gazing at January, he saw that it was checkered with Carlo’s basketball games. Paget had recorded them in December, when the schedule first came out, to remind himself. Now January read like a trail of broken promises; Paget had not seen a game since Carlo’s mother shot Ransom.

  How would Caroline Masters rule? he wondered.

  Tomorrow, at two o’clock, Masters would announce her decision. He did not try to guess what she would say; he knew only that as of today, he had made his final argument as Mary Carelli’s lawyer.

  Today, February 20th. The first morning he had awakened knowing the truth about himself and Carlo.

  He flipped the calendar to February.

  February 20th was Carlo’s final game.

  Had Johnny taken him there? he wondered.

  It did not seem likely; how could the boy make himself play basketball? And yet, this morning, he himself had argued Mary’s innocence. Every age has its own terrors; often we respond as we are taught. If Paget had made himself go to court, then Carlo, seeing this, might force himself to play. Or perhaps, long ago, the boy had started to respond like Paget. For better or for worse.