by D. W. Buffa
Stewart raised his eyebrows. “It was like he was watching, too; watching himself, observing everything, making sure he did not miss any part of it. He talked about the way the knife went into Jeffries’s stomach, straight to the hilt, as if he had been standing in front, watching it happen, instead of holding on to Jeffries from behind. He told us details only the killer could have known.
It was not just what he said, either: He had the knife. He did not even try to hide it. Hide it! He had not even tried to wipe it clean! He was found living under the Morrison Street Bridge, one of the homeless. He was surrounded. There was no way for him to get away. But he acted like he was expecting us. There were a dozen cops, weapons drawn, every one of them trained on him, or rather trained on a group of four or five homeless men sitting around a small fire they had built to keep warm. Any one of them could have matched the description we had been given by an anonymous informant. You know what he did—as soon as his name was called out? He stood up, raised his arms, and …
smiled. Smiled! Can you believe it? It was as if he had been waiting for someone to find him—not like a fugitive, but like somebody who got lost in the woods waiting for a rescue party. As soon as they had the handcuffs on him, he told them where to find the knife. They had not asked him anything. He just nodded his head toward a greasy bedroll a few feet away. ‘The knife is in there.’ Just like that. It’s the only piece of evidence that can link him to the crime and he gives it up without being asked.”
Flynn, who since we sat down had listened in silence, had a question. “If he was that eager to be helpful, why didn’t he just turn himself in?”
“I don’t know, Howard. Nothing about him made much sense.
Maybe it was part of the game.”
“The game?” I asked.
He acknowledged the question with a nod as a way of post-poning an answer. Once he started following a train of thought he did not want to lose it. Flynn had the same habit, born, I suppose, out of the fear that unless they concentrated on one thing at a time they might forget something important, the way they had forgotten things when all they thought about was the next drink and the one after that.
“Everything fit. He had the knife—his fingerprints were the only ones on it. The blood—and we know it for certain now—
belonged to Jeffries. And he described things about the crime no one else could have known.”
“And then he killed himself,” I interjected.
Stewart gave me a strange look. “If you believe what the junkie in the cell across from him said.”
“What are you suggesting? That he didn’t kill himself? That someone else … ?”
He was careful. “I’m not suggesting anything. But all we know for sure is that he was found in his cell with the top of his skull caved in, and the only eyewitness is a barely literate drug addict who couldn’t remember the last time he told the truth about anything.”
“Are you saying you think the police, or someone—?”
He held up both hands and turned his face to the side. “I’m not saying anything, but it’s a real strange way to kill yourself.”
He drew his jaw back and made a clicking noise as he tapped his teeth together. “Why I should find anything about this case stranger than anything else is a kind of mystery in itself,” he said, thinking out loud. He leaned forward, resting his folded arms on the table. “I’ve interviewed thousands of suspects, listened to hundreds of confessions, but this was different. There was no remorse.
I don’t mean just about what he had done, killed another human being. There was no remorse, no regret, about anything: not about getting caught, not about being locked up, not about what he had to know was going to happen to him. I’ve sometimes wondered whether—if he really did kill himself—he had already decided to do that while he was talking to me. He was—or at least he seemed—completely indifferent to everything. No, that’s not right. He was not indifferent, not the way we normally mean it.
He was pleased. Yes, that’s right: pleased, satisfied—more than content, almost serene.
“I asked him why he had done it, and he said: ‘I really can’t say.’ He said it each time I asked, always that same phrase: ‘I really can’t say.’ But the meaning seemed to change. It was not clear whether he did not know why he had done it, or—and I know this must sound incredible, but it is what I started to think at the time—he knew exactly why he had done it, but for some reason thought that he was not supposed to tell.
“As soon as I understood that his words could be taken in two different senses, I realized that he was aware that the phrase had a double meaning and that he had chosen it deliberately. I began to watch him more closely. At first I thought he was playing a game with us, laughing at us. There were two other investigators in the room, and we took turns asking him questions. His basic expression never changed, that same look of self-contentment, the look of someone who knows something you do not—something so incredibly important that he actually feels sorry that he can’t tell you what it is, something he knows you’ll never figure out on your own.”
Biting his lip, Stewart narrowed his eyes and shook his head, struggling to catch hold of a thought so elusive that it slipped farther away each time he was sure he had it. With one last shake of his head, he gave up. “I’d seen that look before.” Turning his shoulders, he waved his arm toward the oak trees scattered over the open space around us. “My wife loved it out here. Twenty years ago, this was the country. There wasn’t anything else, just trees and green grass, and the river. You could ride your horse for miles and not see a house or a car. It was a wonderful place to live, a great place to raise kids.” He exchanged a glance with Flynn. “Then I started drinking. The more I drank, the more involved she became with her church. I became a drunk; she became a born-again Christian. That’s when I first saw that look, on my wife’s face, a kind of light in her eyes. Whether it’s peace or joy, I don’t know; but whatever it is, it’s there, it’s real, and it used to make me crazy.”
He clenched his teeth, mortified by the thought of what he had once been like. “I did some pretty bad things,” he said presently. “But I think I could have killed her and with her last breath she would have forgiven me. That’s what made me crazy, this absolute certainty she had that she knew the truth and felt sorry for me because I did not. That was kind of the look he had.”
He stopped, and in the same way he had before, bit his lip, shook his head, and narrowed his eyes. “You know how most of these people are, the ones who wind up in the system: dull, sullen, lethargic, only roused to rage. He was not like that at all. He moved around a lot, animated, lively. His eyes never stayed still: They jumped all around. His face was full of expressions, all of them colored by that same look of—what shall I call it?—cheerfulness? It seems a strange thing to call the look on the face of a murderer, but that’s what it was. He had no regret about what he had done and no fear at all about what was going to happen to him. In that sense at least he was like someone born again, all his sins washed away, and heaven waiting with open arms.”
Stewart searched my eyes. “The difference is that I’m convinced he did not think what he had done to Jeffries was a sin. I believe he thought he had done something commendable, something he was supposed to do. And I’ll tell you something else,”
he said, raising his chin. “If he had not died in jail, he never would have been convicted of murder in a court of law.”
It was irrational. There was no logic to it. None of it made sense. I reminded him of what he had just finished telling me: The police had a confession and all the physical evidence a prosecutor would need.
Stewart’s eyes had an inner light of their own. There was something he had not told me yet. I remembered what he had said at the beginning, that seemingly paradoxical remark about being both guilty and not guilty at the same time.
Flynn shifted his gaze from me to his friend. “Tell him about the other murder.”
“The other murder
?” I asked.
Stewart nodded. “This wasn’t the first time he killed someone; Jeffries wasn’t his first victim.”
I was confused. This seemed to supply the very motive Stewart claimed he had not been able to find. “Are you sure—absolutely sure—that Jeffries wasn’t the judge who sent him to prison for the first murder?”
Stewart looked at me without expression. “He never went to prison,” he said evenly.
“He murdered someone, and he never went to prison?” I asked skeptically.
“When he was eighteen, he killed his father. The father was a drunk,” he said, exchanging another glance with Flynn. “Whenever he got really drunk he used his wife—the boy’s mother—as a punching bag. He put her in the hospital a couple of times.
One night, the boy came home, found him kicking the hell out of her—literally kicking the hell out of her—and he killed him.
He didn’t just kill him, either. He did to his father what his father had been doing to her, just beat the hell out of him. And then, when he had him down on the floor, barely conscious, he started kicking in his face. By the time he was through there was nothing left.
“They charged him with manslaughter and they did a psychiatric. Something had broken inside him, whether because of what he had seen his father doing to his mother, or because of what he had done to his father—who knows? Whatever the cause, he wasn’t competent to stand trial.”
I knew what had happened next. “And so they shipped him off to the state hospital. When did he get out?”
“A few weeks before the murder. He escaped. It would have all come out of course. But when he died in jail, there didn’t seem to be any point in telling anyone that Jeffries had been murdered by a mental patient.”
“How many people know about this?” I asked.
“Just a couple of us. We didn’t know anything about him when he was picked up. By the time we ran his prints and were able to check his records, he was already dead. The investigation was over.”
“But you’re sure it was him? He couldn’t have confessed to something he didn’t do? The physical evidence could have been planted, and if he was that far out of his head …”
“No,” he said emphatically. “He described how he killed him.
Only the killer knew that. We never released those details.”
“Jeffries was stabbed to death,” I said, repeating what everyone knew from the published reports.
“Stabbed him, then disemboweled him.”
I could not believe it. “You’re telling me that Jeffries somehow managed to crawl back to his office with his intestines hanging out?”
We finished what was left of the lemonade and said goodbye.
As we drove off, I turned around and watched Stewart stroke the nose of his horse and then lead him into the barn.
“What happened to his wife?” I asked Flynn as we jolted down the dirt drive and onto the main road.
“I don’t know. She left him a long time ago. Took the kids and moved away. He stopped drinking after that.”
We drove past the same new development we had come by before, and the same brightly painted signs, some of them with pictures of happy-faced families about to take possession of their share of the American dream.
“Tell me,” I said as Flynn stared ahead at the road. “Do you think Elliott Winston would appreciate the irony that after what Calvin Jeffries did to him, the great judge was murdered by a mental patient?”
Sixteen
_______
The death of Quincy Griswald had in a certain sense been the unfortunate imitation of his life. He had spent years under the intellectual dominance of Calvin Jeffries, constantly reminded of his own shortcomings as a judge, never allowed to forget the distinctly second-rate qualities of his mind. Finally freed of the burden of this invidious comparison, he was murdered barely two months after Jeffries was killed. If the order had been reversed, and Griswald had been murdered while Jeffries was still alive, the search for his killer would have been the one conducted with intense public scrutiny and a relentless demand for immediate results. Instead, though no one was willing to come right out and say it, after one judge had been murdered there was nothing unique about the murder of another. Even in the manner of his own murder, Quincy Griswald had not been able to escape the enveloping shadow of Calvin Jeffries.
The press treated it as a copycat killing, and I had no reason to disagree. Both had been killed the same way, or rather both had been killed the way the police had told everyone Jeffries had been killed. Both had been stabbed to death, but Jeffries had also been eviscerated. The crimes were too much alike for the similarity to be coincidental, and too different to support a suggestion that the two together had been the work of co-conspirators taking turns in a private war against the judiciary. It seemed clear that whoever had killed Griswald had read about the murder of Jeffries and decided for reasons of his own to do the same thing.
There were no more stories about possible conspiracies, none of the vague allusions to powerful enemies that had been made during the investigation of the first murder of a state court judge.
The public could breathe easily. Quincy Griswald had been killed by someone without originality, and Calvin Jeffries by a man of no consequence. It might as well have been a random act of violence, which, because it could happen to anyone, was no more to be feared than any other chance event. It might have been a little more disconcerting had the public been told that Jeffries had been murdered by a mental patient who had murdered once before. It might have raised a question about how he had managed to escape. It might have raised a question about how many of the homeless men who slept in the alleyways and under the bridges, how many of these ruined creatures whose presence among us we tried so hard to ignore, had at one time or another been institutionalized because of a mental disease or, a question even more uncomfortable, should be institutionalized now instead of left free to wander the streets without proper care or, for that matter, any care at all.
In only one place did the murder of Quincy Griswald have a more dramatic effect than the murder of Calvin Jeffries. So long as only one judge had been murdered, it was an exception, an extraordinary event that, precisely because it was extraordinary, required no serious alteration in the way things were done inside the courthouse where he had worked and where he had been killed. The murder of a second judge meant that no one could feel safe. Almost overnight, the parking structure was fenced off with a steel screen and only people with the proper official iden-tification were allowed to go in or out. Security inside the courthouse was tightened as well. Everyone who entered had to empty their pockets, open their briefcases, and pass through metal-detecting devices. Uniformed guards roamed the corridors, and floors where the public had no business were sealed off. Now, for the first time, when a stranger walked into a courtroom, everyone noticed. You could see it in their eyes, that sudden, barely concealed fear, the fear that it might be Quincy Griswald’s killer come back for more.
There were other, more subtle changes. The clerk who checked my name off the list of those who had a matter before the court that morning actually looked at me and said hello. When a deputy sheriff brought my client, shackled at the ankles and wrists, into the courtroom, he seemed to move more slowly, as if time was no longer quite so pressing. The deputy district attorney who was there to argue the state’s position on my motion to suppress nodded politely when I took my place at the counsel table. When the judge invited me to begin, his voice was calm, subdued, a bare whisper in the somber stillness of the room.
It was a straight legal argument on a disputed point in the Byzantine case law on search and seizure, and as I went through it, summarizing what I had written in my ten-page brief, I knew the judge would rule against me, and I knew he knew it, too.
The defense made the motion; the state opposed the motion; the judge, after both sides had filed their written briefs and made their oral arguments, denied the motion. That was how you set
into motion the legal machinery by which one day, perhaps five or six years from now, the Supreme Court of the United States would decide that the existing law, or the way in which that law had been interpreted, was in some respect invalid. It was what held the whole thing together, this knowledge that whether you practiced in downtown New York or in some dusty, windblown town in the high desert of eastern Oregon, no one had the power of final judgment. You could appeal and appeal again, appeal until you finally had the chance, a chance that might come once in your life, to argue a case in front of the nine justices of the only court from which there could be no appeal.
If you were serious about your work, if you were serious about yourself, you wrote every brief, and you made every oral argument as if you were already there, in front of the Supreme Court itself. You stood in an empty courtroom, in front of a judge you sometimes suspected had not bothered to so much as glance at the written brief you had submitted, a judge who might be a friend or an enemy, someone you might play cards with in your spare time, and you always began, “May it please the court.”
It went like clockwork. I argued, the state argued, and I argued again. The judge had no questions he wanted to ask and, passing the file to his clerk, announced in a cool, deliberate manner that, in the phrase uttered so often it had become engraved in my mind, “Having listened to the arguments of counsel, and having been advised of the premises, the court finds that the defendant has failed to show why the evidence alluded to should be suppressed. The motion is therefore denied.”
Gathering up my papers, I dropped them into my briefcase, and then, putting it behind me, turned to go. It was like stepping into a hole. The weight that was supposed to be at the end of my hand was not there. Half the leather handle had ripped away from the briefcase and was dangling from my hand like a fallen climber clinging to a rope. Reaching down, I scooped it up and with my hand around the bottom held it next to my side.