Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment

by D. W. Buffa

  I was still thinking of the confessed killer of Calvin Jeffries, trying to make it fit into what Chicherin was telling me. “How does that explain someone who confesses to a crime he did not do and then commits suicide?”

  “It’s what Bukharin did; it’s what my father did,” he reminded me. “This book,” he went on, nodding toward the volume in my hand, “has some extraordinary things about the way in which people who no longer believe in religion or morality, who feel betrayed by those beliefs, have nothing left but the desire to destroy everything connected with them. Dostoyevsky understands the emptiness of the soul; but he thinks it can only be filled again by a belief in a Christian God. Anything else is nihilism. And, who knows, perhaps it is, but the same thing that leads some people to Dostoyevsky’s God leads others to believe in other things, things for which they are sometimes willing to die.”

  Chicherin sat down on the chair behind the counter and sighed.

  Removing his glasses, he blew his breath on them until they clouded over and then wiped them clean on the arm of his gray long-sleeve shirt.

  “Consider Dostoyevsky himself. He had the unique experience of being a witness to his own execution. Arrested in his youth for radical activity with organizations advocating a socialist society, he was sentenced to death. He was lined up against a wall and blindfolded. He could hear the order being given to the execution squad to raise their rifles, then the order to take aim. In the stillness of that early morning he could hear the sound of the rifles being cocked.”

  Chicherin looked at me. “What do you think must have passed through his mind? Do you think it was what people so often say about the last few seconds before you’re about to die: that his whole life passed in front of his eyes?” He folded his arms and crossed his legs and began to rock back and forth. “There was a time in my life when I used to think about that: what it would be like, waiting for your own execution.” He gave me a reassuring glance. “I was in Russia then, and it was never anything imminent, just an occasional possibility. But when I did think about it, and when I’ve thought about what Dostoyevsky went through and some of the things he later wrote, I think it’s more likely that it would seem as if your whole life had been nothing—had no meaning at all—except as the prelude to this one moment, this last moment you’ll ever know.”

  He looked down at his pale hands, pondering another thought.

  “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” he asked, tilting his head toward me.

  “The way someone who knows he will be executed stands and waits, as if, even at that last moment, he cares for nothing so much as how he looks and what others—the people who are about to take his life—will think of him. He doesn’t fall on his knees—

  at least not very often—he doesn’t grovel, try to beg for mercy.

  He may have thought himself a coward all his life, but now, when there is no alternative but death, he looks it calmly in the eye.

  Who knows what it is? Courage, defiance, or nothing more than good manners, the belief that this is how he is supposed to act, no different in principle than knowing what to say to your host when you take your leave. Even in death we don’t want to make a bad impression.” A look of disgust spread over his face. “My father of course was not given this opportunity. They shot him in his prison cell, in the back of the head.”

  He stared straight ahead for a moment and then his expression changed again. When he looked at me, his eyes, or what I could see of them through those thick lenses, seemed cheerful and alive.

  “I’ve sometimes wondered what my father thought about, when he felt the cold hard steel of the revolver push against the back of his head. Did he think about my mother, about me? Did he try to let us know his last thought was for us? And what of Bukharin—was his last thought for that revolution he loved so much he was willing to tell the world he had betrayed it?

  “The rifles were cocked and aimed, and the only order left was the order to fire. Dostoyevsky knew that the next word spoken would be the last word he would ever hear. It never came. There was no order to fire. The prisoners stood there, blindfolded, their hands tied behind their backs, waiting, wondering, trying not to let themselves begin to hope. Then, gradually, they knew that it was over, that there would be no execution, that they had been put out there to teach them what it would be like if they were ever sentenced to death again. Some of them went mad; the rest went to Siberia. Dostoyevsky became a deeply religious man. Instead of revolution, he now believed in the importance and the power of redemption.”

  Scratching his chin, Chicherin opened a drawer and took out a ragged sheet of stationery. With slow, tedious strokes he guided the blunt point of the dark blue fountain pen back and forth across the page.

  “The crucial thing to notice about Dostoyevsky,” he remarked as he wrote, “is this astonishing capacity to believe, this need to believe in something that made sense of the world.”

  When he finished, he removed the cap from the end of the barrel and slid it down the nib until it clicked into place. He folded the sheet in half and, gesturing for the book I was holding in my hand, placed it inside and then handed it back.

  As we shook hands, he nodded again toward the book. “All I’m suggesting is that it is by no means impossible that someone could confess to something they did not do and then commit suicide. It is not impossible at all.”

  It was only when I was a few blocks away that I remembered the sheet of paper Chicherin had placed inside the book. I thought he had given me the book on loan, but when I read what he had written I knew he had made me a gift of it.

  “For Joseph Antonelli, who has learned that sooner or later everyone has to lose. From his good friend, Anatoly Chicherin.”

  There was a sudden chill in the air. I put the sheet of paper back inside the book and hurried down the street.

  Fifteen

  _______

  Howard Flynn might be early, but he was never on time. I knew that as well as I knew anything, but when he asked me to meet him outside my building at two-fifteen it never occurred to me that I could be late. It was now two-thirty and there was still no sign of him.

  Loosening my tie, I unbuttoned my shirt collar while I searched up and down the sidewalk. The sky was a harsh white glare and the air had the smell of something burning. It was the first hot day of the year, the day that made you believe that this might be the year when you did not have to endure yet another month of rain before the clear dry days of summer came to stay. I kept watching the sidewalk, hoping by an act of will to make Flynn appear. I concentrated so hard I could almost see him, his red face dripping with sweat as he lumbered up the street.

  “Over here,” someone yelled.

  Absently, I turned around. Flynn was in his car, stopped in the middle of traffic, waving at me while the drivers behind him leaned on their horns.

  “You were supposed to meet me in front,” I complained after I tumbled in.

  “This is the front,” he muttered between his teeth as he bolted through a red light. He swerved just in time to miss a car that had started through the intersection when the light changed.

  “Learn to drive!” he shouted when the driver of the car shook his fist.

  “Your window is up,” I reminded him, rolling my eyes. “He can’t hear you. You’re wasting your breath.”

  With both hands on top of the wheel and his eyes focused straight ahead, Flynn slowed down, content to follow the traffic ahead of him. A jaded smile flickered at the edges of his mouth.

  “It doesn’t matter he can’t hear me. That’s not the point.”

  I knew that look and the twisted logic that usually accompanied it. “Well, then, what is the point?”

  “The point is, I can hear me. And, frankly, I thought I sounded pretty good. What did you think?” he asked with a sideways glance.

  “I could have given him the finger, but, hell, everybody does that these days. I could have screamed an obscenity, but everybody does that, too. Besides, those thing
s just show anger. I was trying to be helpful,” he explained. “I said, ‘Learn to drive.’ It was my civic duty and I did it,” he said with mocking pride. “And just what the hell have you done for your country lately, counselor?” he asked with a ruddy grin.

  Ignoring him, I stared out the window at the passing buildings.

  “Where we going anyway?”

  “There’s someone I want you to meet. He was one of the lead investigators in the Jeffries murder. He interviewed the guy who did it. He heard his confession.”

  Flynn had told me when he called that there was someone who knew something about the murder of Calvin Jeffries that I ought to hear. He had not told me it was a cop.

  “But I know about the confession,” I said, trying not to sound as agitated as I felt. “The only thing I don’t know is whether the confession was true, and I won’t know that until I know the results of the DNA test.”

  “I forgot to tell you. The blood on the knife belonged to Jeffries.”

  “The DNA results prove it? Then that’s it. You were right.

  Whoever killed Griswald was a copycat.”

  “That’s why I thought you might want to talk to this fellow.

  It may not be that simple after all.”

  “It wasn’t a copycat killing?”

  His eyes on the road, Flynn shook his head. “No. I still think that’s what happened. It’s the Jeffries murder that isn’t so simple.”

  We had left the city and were going south on the freeway.

  “Why aren’t we meeting him at the police station?”

  He let go of the wheel with his right hand and rubbed his shoulder while he moved his head from side to side, stretching out the muscles in his neck. “He didn’t want to have to explain what he was doing having a private conversation with a defense attorney.”

  I was pretty certain I knew the answer, but I asked anyway.

  “How do you happen to know him?”

  Flynn shrugged. “Meetings.”

  That was how Flynn had met most of the people he knew, the meetings he attended sometimes seven nights a week where alcoholics took turns telling the stories of their addiction. It was surprising how many lawyers, judges, and cops went to those meetings. Or perhaps it was not surprising at all. Most of the people I met, after you got to know them, had problems of their own, whether it was alcohol or drugs, errant children or unfaithful wives. Madness comes in all shapes and sizes.

  A few minutes later we were off the freeway, winding along a narrow blacktop road. Large brightly painted wooden signs propped up from behind by long two-by-fours announced one new development after another. Two-story houses in various stages of construction with wood shake roofs and massive stone fronts stood so close together that each seemed to trespass on the other. They were everywhere, on both sides of the road and as far ahead as the eye could see, new houses for new families, with enough bedrooms for each of the children and enough garage space for all of the cars. There was something vaguely depressing about the sameness of it all, which only deepened my growing sense of annoyance.

  “This isn’t something you could have told me?” I asked as the car hit another teeth-rattling bump.

  “What are you complaining about? Don’t you think it’s a nice day for a ride in the country?”

  “I’m not involved in the Jeffries case.” I winced as soon as I said it. I was not involved, but neither was he, and I was the one who had asked him to find out what he could. Flynn paid no attention to what I had said, and I felt even worse. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  We passed the last development with its dozen red banners flying from a dozen white-painted poles, and followed the road as it curved under the branches of an oak tree and then out into an open field. A half mile farther on, Flynn turned into a dirt driveway that ran down to a small ranch-style house near a river at the back of a fenced five acres.

  At the end of the driveway, opposite the house, inside a small corral next to a two-stall barn, someone was rubbing down a spirited chestnut-colored horse. In his early forties, with short black hair parted on the side, the man was dressed in dark jeans and boots. He was not very tall, but he was muscular across his shoulders and upper arms. When he heard the car, he patted the nose of the horse and then, stepping back, slapped his open hand on its flank. The horse snorted, tossed its head, and bounded away, dust flying up behind its hooves. Shutting the gate to the corral behind him, Flynn’s friend waited while we got out of the car.

  I recognized him right away. When Flynn started to introduce us, I stopped him. “Detective Stewart and I are old friends.”

  “But it’s probably the first time we’ve ever shaken hands,” he remarked pleasantly. He moved slowly and spoke quietly and had about him a certain understated authority that made you think he was someone you could trust.

  “We’ve been in a few trials together,” I explained to Flynn.

  “A few I’d rather not remember,” Stewart remarked, chuckling to himself. “Let’s get something to drink,” he said as he slapped me on the shoulder.

  We sat at a wooden picnic table in front of the house, drinking lemonade. A breeze stirred the branches of the oak tree overhead, and shadows ran back and forth across our hands as we talked about the way things had changed and tried to remember the first trial in which he had been a witness for the prosecution and I had been the attorney for the defense. After a few minutes there was a long silence. I looked across the table at Stewart and waited.

  “Howard tells me you’re interested in the Jeffries case.”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure why,” I admitted.

  Stewart laughed. “If he’d thrown me in jail for contempt, I’d be interested in his murder.”

  Was there anyone who did not know what Jeffries had done to me? Stewart read my eyes. “Everyone thought Jeffries was a hero when he did that.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Every cop,” he explained, though he knew he did not have to. I understood the way cops—most cops—thought about defense lawyers. “Every cop who had not spent much time in his courtroom,” he added. He looked at me with a knowing smile and then shook his head. “I used to feel sorry for the lawyers. He had to have been the meanest man alive. That’s what makes his murder so difficult to understand.”

  “I should have thought it was the other way around,” I said without thinking. He was not speaking about the fact Jeffries had been killed but, as I now realized, something else altogether.

  “With all the people who hated him and no doubt wished him dead, it seems a little strange that the one who killed him had no reason to hate him at all.” He pondered the meaning of what he had just said and then added, “At least no reason we could find.”

  “Are you saying it was random after all, a robbery gone bad?”

  He hesitated and then shook his head. “No, it wasn’t random.

  He meant to kill Jeffries.” Again he hesitated. “He meant to kill someone, anyway. He was waiting in the parking garage, hiding behind Jeffries’s car.”

  We were sitting in the mid-afternoon sun, the scent of hay and horses in the air, swatting away an occasional fat fly, but our conversation still fell back into the old habits of lawyers and witnesses: I broke everything he said into new questions I wanted to ask. “He was hiding behind Jeffries’s car. Did he know it was Jeffries’s car?”

  “I don’t know. It might have been a coincidence. At that hour there were only a few other cars there. He might have been hiding there, waiting for Jeffries; or he might have been hiding there, waiting for the first person to show up.”

  “That was the section though where only court staff were allowed to park, right?”

  Stewart nodded. “He wanted to kill someone connected with the court, and from a couple things he said, I’m pretty sure he wanted to kill a judge. But whether he intended to kill Jeffries in particular …” His voice trailed off, and he gazed across at the small corral where his horse was munching on a bucket of oats.

 
“He had no reason to kill Jeffries,” he said presently.

  “Jeffries had never sent him to prison?” I asked, repeating the assumption that had seemed to explain everything.

  “No, and if he was ever inside Jeffries’s courtroom it was not as a defendant. That much we know for sure.”

  “But he confessed. He didn’t say whether he intended to kill him?”

  “He said he meant to kill who he killed.” Stewart watched me, waiting to see if I took it as literally as he meant it. “That’s what he said, almost verbatim. ‘I meant to kill who I killed.’ He must have said it a half dozen times before I started to wonder if he had any idea who the victim was.” With his index finger, Stewart drew a face in the condensation that had formed on the glass pitcher filled with lemonade and ice. “I don’t think he did it,”

  Stewart said, as he carefully retraced the circle he had drawn.

  “But you just said he intended to kill someone, whether it was Jeffries or not.”

  His finger stopped moving and he looked up. “No, I think he did it, all right.”

  “You think he did it, but you don’t think he did it?”

  He followed his finger as it began to move again, broadening the outline of the face he had drawn until it disappeared. “That’s exactly right,” he said, as he picked up the pitcher and refilled our glasses. “He did it, but he didn’t do it.” When he finished pouring, he put the pitcher to the side, out of reach. “Everything fits. There’s no question that Whittaker killed Judge Jeffries. None at all. We found him and he confessed. He described every detail of what he had done: where he was; how he held the knife; how he waited until Jeffries opened the door to his car; how he slipped up behind him and grabbed him around the throat while he plunged the knife into his gut. The way he described it was like watching a movie: You could see everything, just the way it happened.”