Red Mass

by Rosemary Aubert

  I watched the juror’s face. Because he was looking at Nicky, I could concentrate on his eyes, his jaw. As Nicky said Stow’s name, the juror’s expression tightened. It was almost imperceptible, but it reminded me of when I’d hunted for my food in the valley. Wild animals have facial expressions that tell the hunter whether to pursue or give up.

  I got rid of that juror, then turned back to Stow to see whether he approved of my decision. His face had closed again. No clue for the hunter there.

  Chapter 10

  Waiting for me outside the courtroom was Aliana, who had continued to scratch on her little pad throughout the last two days. She had witnessed juror rage, judge rage and Crown rage. “Got time for a coffee?” she asked, disarmingly. I expected her to wink at me.

  I began to fit my face into a frown.

  “I’ve got what you asked for,” she said. Her voice was sharp, and something told me that what she had I shouldn’t ignore.

  “Can you walk with me?” I said, heading toward the escalator. She went first, and I stared at the top of her head all the way down to the main floor. No gray hairs.

  The minute we got outside, I stopped. “Please, Aliana,” I said, “could we skip the coffee? Could you just tell me what ...”

  “You asked me to check on Stow’s finances,” she said, looking around rather dramatically. Nobody near us, neither my daughter, who had left in a huff, nor my assistant, who had a date. “He’s clean as far as I can tell. No unreported accounts. No lawsuits outstanding, either against him or initiated by him. All his assets appear to be in his own trust. And Harpur’s are in her own account, which is held in trust for a family member.”

  “A family member of Harpur’s?”

  “No,” Aliana said, “a family member of Stow’s.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But how could you find out that it was a family member of his without knowing the name?”

  She gave me one of her looks, as if I should know better than to ask her anything about her sources. “That’s all I got, Ellis,” she said, “and you’re lucky I’ve even got that, considering how unfriendly you are.”

  “We’ll have coffee next time, Aliana. Thanks for the info.”

  I left her standing there looking as annoyed as Ellen. But her irritation didn’t stop her from being in court bright and early next day, scribbling away as usual.

  That was the day Ellen opened her case. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she began, glancing down at her neatly typed notes, “it is my duty and my privilege to address you today.”

  As she began to carefully lay out the evidence against my client, it sounded hopelessly damning. Despite the weeks Nicky and I had spent combing her disclosure material, Ellen’s alleged facts stood out with surprising brutality. I imagined I saw disgust on the faces of the jury, those so-called peers of John Stoughton-Melville. Stow, however, surveyed the court with the expressionless calm of a man who considers himself peerless even in the dock.

  In spite of our differences, I listened to Ellen with pride—until I homed in on what she was actually saying.

  “There is no more sacred trust than the trust between a husband and a wife. No matter what life might throw into the path of either, loyal spouses know that each has a champion, sometimes even a savior.”

  “What’s with the sermon?” Nicky silently slid a scrap of paper across the polished oak table.

  I shrugged, hoping McKenzie was looking at Ellen and not at us.

  “In times of trouble, to whom do we turn first? On whom do we lean most?” Ellen’s eyes scanned the twelve, whose intense faces bore the expression of people about to chop the legs off an idol.

  “And who do we least expect to be our betrayer, indeed, our executioner?”

  At the use of that word, two of the jurors flinched.

  “No,” Ellen said, “no matter what our creed, we believe that a husband and wife are there for each other. That is what Harpur Blane Stoughton-Melville believed. She believed it all her married life—the better part of three decades.” Ellen paused, moved a little to make sure she was not preventing any juror from looking at the accused as she spoke, not that anyone did so overtly. It was rare to catch a juror looking directly at the accused, rare for anyone in the courtroom to do so. But everyone could be expected to sneak peeks at Stow incarcerated in his glassed-in box.

  “Men and women, you will hear that poor Harpur Blane Stoughton-Melville was wrong to place her trust in her husband. Dead wrong.”

  She let the pun sink in. No one sniggered. She was lucky. “Motive,” she went on, “is not one of the elements of this case that must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. You may discover that you need to know how Harpur was killed, but you need not know why in order to render a verdict in the matter before you.”

  This was elementary stuff, made interesting only by Ellen’s grandstanding, which was beginning to annoy me. I wished I could turn around to check out Anne and Aliana. Was Anne staring at Ellen? Nicky sure was. I didn’t like the look on his face. Was he falling for all this nice-nice junk about husbands and wives?

  “Over the course of this trial,” Ellen said, “I believe you will ask yourself why a man like John Stoughton-Melville might kill his wife.” She paused, looked up. Now every eye was on her, including McKenzie’s. She slowly turned a page of her notes without looking at the paper. Good touch.

  “To begin,” she said, “let us be kind in our theories. You will hear from medical professionals that Mrs. Stoughton-Melville was not a well woman. That she was suffering. In fact, that she was declining daily. You will learn that on some days, she had no idea who she, herself, was, let alone knowing clearly who anyone else might be. She had once been a brilliant and beautiful woman. Now, all she had to look forward to was a mindless and embarrassingly premature old age. I think you might want to ask yourself whether someone who loved her might have wanted to spare her the shame of such decline. Might he kill her in order to save her from the humiliation of becoming nothing more than the empty shell of her former bold and lovely self?

  “Or,” Ellen said, pausing again and rising onto the toes of her small feet, “should we be less kind? You will hear, ladies and gentlemen, from several bookkeepers, accountants and bankers that Mrs. Stoughton-Melville was a very wealthy woman, a woman whose illness, even her confinement in a private institution—Riverside Hospital— made barely a dent in her fortune. These witnesses will tell you as well that she was a childless woman with no living parents. That she died without siblings, nieces or nephews.”

  The jurors pondered this information, and Ellen not only paused to let them consider the implications of what she was saying, but also let them see her search each of their faces for her cue to continue. So solicitous! I glanced up at McKenzie, wondering how he took this rather intimate communication with the jury. He looked pleased. I was beginning to feel defeated before I even began.

  “You will hear,” Ellen repeated, shaking her head almost imperceptibly at the odious notion, “that the accused is a man of very expensive tastes. You can see for yourself the fineness of his clothes, his jewelry. You will be given the opportunity to consider whether such a man might be led by greed to double—even triple—his own holdings by adding the inherited holdings of his wife.”

  Nicky was scribbling furiously throughout all this, preparing notes for our cross-examination of the witnesses Ellen was planning to call. I listened, waiting for her strategy to become clear to me. She needed more than motive.

  “I don’t wish to mislead you, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “A person can have every reason to do a thing, yet still never think of carrying out the act. So I will not ask you to weigh reasons as to why the accused would kill his wife—at least, I would not ask you to do that without showing you how such an act was carried out.”

  I leaned closer, eager to see how Ellen would put her knowledge of Stow’s movements before the jury.

  “On the night of Dec
ember 26, approximately five years ago,” she recited, “Chief Justice John Stoughton-Melville entered Riverside Hospital with the intent to deceive. He arrived in a rented car, rather than his own. You will hear witnesses testify to seeing him in the neighborhood, in the hospital lobby and on the stairs leading up to the floor on which his wife’s room was located.”

  But not in her room. No witness could place Stow anywhere near Harpur’s room that night. Ellen had disclosed the existence of no such witness. Nicky had found no such person.

  Like everyone else, my daughter didn’t seem to know that I had been in Harpur’s room, and I was under no obligation to inform her. Not that it mattered. I had seen no one that night. I had been alone with Harpur. And she had been safely asleep when I left.

  I had gone over my final moments with her again and again. Now I retraced them in my mind. The ride to the hospital. The cold wind blowing up from the valley that lay beneath the northern wall of the great building, a building shaped like half a circle with its round side looking down onto Riverdale Park and the Don River. Then the walk through the lobby of the hospital, where the same carols that had played cheerily all month had begun to sound tinny and stale, just as the green bows and red and white poinsettias had lost luster.

  Then the long trek up to Harpur’s room.

  I remembered that the elevator bank was being repaired and that three of the four elevators were out of service. A man waiting for the fourth elevator commented that he’d been there forever.

  So I take the stairs. I begin to climb. I seem to be the only person in the stairwell, but when I get to the first landing, I stop, startled, hearing noises behind me. The sounds stop, too, and I soon understand they are my own echo. As I resume my ascent, I think about how the crowds of people who visited the sick before Christmas have disappeared.

  The staircase leads to a glass door on each landing. I climb past a few more floors. When I get to Harpur’s floor, I open the door, slip through and peer down the long hall. At the farthest reaches, a hunched old woman labors at her walker, coming toward me a centimeter at a time. She makes so little progress that she seems to have moved not at all by the time I turn a corner into the hallway where I figure Harpur’s room must be. I’m uncertain because I’ve never walked up before.

  “... walked up before.”

  Ellen’s voice cut into my reverie. I looked up in alarm. In my daydreaming, I had missed a significant portion of what she’d been saying.

  What was wrong with me? I had never let my mind wander when I had been a young man before the bench or an older man on it, but now, as an even older man, I found myself too often out of it, lost in my own interior world. I concentrated vigorously to analyze Ellen’s every word, necessary if I were to catch her or her witnesses in some inconsistency.

  “The evidence will show that the accused deliberately broke into a secure vault, first distracting the nurse who guarded it and then manipulating the lock. He shamelessly stole several items from that vault, including about two dozen prepackaged doses of Somatofloran, any three of which would have been sufficient to place a woman of Harpur’s size into a coma. A larger number of doses might possibly have been capable of killing her, which was, you will be shown, exactly what John Stoughton-Melville intended.”

  I longed to rise and object to this shocking display of bravado: the sappy references to husband and wife, the standing on tiptoes when an especially important point was to be made, the use of silence to frame the Crown’s most important pronouncements. Pause. “He left behind ...” Pause. “As every thief does ...” Pause. “A silent witness ...” Pause. “To his nefarious act.” Pause. “In fact ...” Pause. “He left three fingerprint... Pause. “Three silent witnesses.” Pause. Cough. Longer pause.

  “And he left behind something else,” Ellen said, surprising me. There had been no disclosure about Stow leaving anything on the scene.

  “He left behind a shocked country. A country that had put its trust in him. A country that was counting on Chief Justice John Stoughton-Melville not only to uphold its laws, but even, when necessary, to correct them.

  “How can any trust be greater than that? I’ll tell you, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll tell you of a greater breach of trust than that of a judge who is a disgrace to the nation he serves. I’ll tell you of a greater breach of trust than that of a husband who fatally betrays his beloved and long-suffering wife. I’ll tell you of the greatest breach of trust here. When John Stoughton-Melville turned from being an esteemed judge to become a petty thief and a common murderer, he breached the trust he should have had in himself. He fouled his integrity. He blotted his own spotless record.”

  The jurors stirred in their padded but uncomfortable seats. Someone among them coughed. The matron hastened to pour a plastic tumbler of water from a jug she kept nearby. I could see that the chosen twelve were moved by the eloquence of this young woman. I was moved myself. “Now,” she said, “I am bound by my duty as an officer of this court to remind you that what I have told you today is not fact. It’s not even my personal opinion—which counts for nothing in this case, or any case. What I have told you, as Judge McKenzie will explain, is nothing but the theory of the Crown. Something which remains to be proven. You will hear a great deal of testimony in the days to come. I trust you will listen carefully. And if you exercise the common sense that is the mark of a jury of twelve citizens, I believe you will be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused who sits before you—”

  She turned and glared at Stow. I had never seen a Crown make a face of loathing at an accused. I expected McKenzie to intervene, but he, like everyone else in the courtroom, waited in silence. I slid around in my seat to check on Stow. He was glaring right back at my daughter. Powerful negative energy leapt between Ellen and my client. I felt afraid for both of them. Of both of them.

  Was it my imagination, or did Stow make a fist? I saw the guard beside him edge closer to the prisoner’s box. I heard Nicky sigh. And I saw Ellen glance for an instant past Stow and toward the body of the court where, though I couldn’t see her, I was sure Anne was sitting. Ellen seemed almost to falter, but only for a moment. She found the power of her full voice, and she let it rip. “That the accused who sits before you, despite his rank, his influence and his wealth, mercilessly slaughtered his defenseless wife.”

  Chapter 11

  “Can you slaughter someone with a plastic vial?”

  I wasn’t amused by Nicky’s question about Ellen’s choice of the word “slaughter.”

  “I think she may damage her case with excessive dramatics,” I said, worried about my girl using techniques I myself would never stoop to.

  Nicky shrugged as we walked quickly away from the courthouse. “You’ll change your mind,” he said. “She’s a smart lady. She’s got everybody in that courtroom in the palm of her hand already.”

  At 5 p.m., University Avenue was busy. Across the street from the court, a steady stream of rush-hour cars sped by the U.S. Consulate. No traffic had been allowed to stop in front of it since 9/11. My car was a couple of blocks west near the art college on Dundas. Nicky seemed determined to follow me all the way there.

  “She’s going for the husband-wife betrayal angle,” he said. “She’s playing on the sympathy of those old ladies we picked.” He nodded as if in approval. I was going to have to talk to him.

  “They’re not that old.”

  “Not as old as you, anyway.” Nicky smacked my back in a gesture of camaraderie that made me stumble. “Tomorrow she’ll call her first witness,” he went on, oblivious that he had practically knocked me off my feet. “It’ll be the police officer who handled the crime scene.”

  We dodged a convoy of white cube vans, court vehicles full of prisoners headed back to jail after the day’s trials. Stow was in one of them. All by himself.

  “We’re ready for that cop, of course,” Nicky said. “You’ve got the copies of his memo books and ...”

  “Nicky,” I interrupted, “let’
s give it a rest. I don’t want to carry too many preconceived ideas into court. I want to concentrate on his actual testimony. It’s the only way to cross-examine. Word by word. I need to clear my head.” As Nicky got the idea I wanted to be alone, he looked crestfallen. “Anyway,” I added, postponing the moment of his departure, “I don’t know how long Ellen will be in her chief examination of that police witness. I may not even get to the officer tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, well, if you do ...”

  “If I do, I’ll be ready. Why don’t you just leave it to me?”

  We said goodnight at Dundas and University, the sidewalk thick with people leaving the office towers, courthouses, government buildings and banks that lined University Avenue. The fickle late-winter sun was remarkably warm, and a soft breeze carried a hint of spring freshness, incongruous against the exhaust of the cars jamming the intersection.

  “All right, I’ll leave it to you,” Nicky said. “Ciao, then.” He waved, but when he had gone a few yards, he turned back and glanced at me doubtfully, as if he wondered if my confidence was not misplaced. True, except for practice in the classes and moot courts of my retraining, I had not cross-examined a witness in almost twenty years. Either it was like riding a bicycle and would come back to me the minute I got on, or else I was about to make a total fool of myself.

  Predictably, I found myself heading east toward the clinic and Queenie because I had a problem I wanted to talk about.

  “Have you got time for a quick supper?” I asked as I found her sorting through a huge pile of file folders.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Because you’re still angry with me?”

  “How’s the big case?” she asked, not responding to my question, but not unfriendly, either. “I went there one day, but I didn’t see much.”