by D. W. Buffa
“He always is.”
“You going to be at the bar afterward?”
“We always are.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“You going to be there?”
“You never know. I might.”
Twenty-four
_______
Jennifer was waiting for me when I got back to the office. Sitting in the chair opposite my desk, staring out the window, she did not hear me when I came in. I could see her lips barely moving, like the silent motions of a child beginning to grasp the meaning of an unfamiliar word. In the still half-light of the room I bent down and kissed her forehead just below the line made by the sweep of her soft fine hair. Her eyes stayed where they were, concentrating on something only she could see. Her mouth stopped moving, and she took my hand and pressed it against her cheek.
“Where’s Helen?” I asked as I dropped my briefcase on top of the desk and fell into my chair. Exhausted, I put my hands behind my neck and slouched farther down.
Jennifer gave me a quizzical look, and then, as if she had only just understood, nodded quickly. “She had to run an errand. She’ll be back in a minute. I answered the phone while she was gone,”
she said, her voice becoming more lively. She leaned forward, resting her hands on a large package she held in her lap. “Law offices of Joseph Antonelli,” she said with marked formality. Alert and playful, she lifted her head. “Law offices of the soon to be married Joseph Antonelli,” she said with a sly grin. “That was for anyone who called who was female and sounded young.”
She was about to say something else, something she was already laughing about, when her hand shot to her temple, her eyes slammed shut, and a violent tremor shook her head. Before I had time to react, she raised her hand, forced a feeble smile, and carefully opened her eyes.
“I’m all right,” she insisted. “It’s just a headache. I get them once in a while,” she explained. “It’s okay now.” She bit on her lip and her eyes opened wide, sorry she had made me worry.
“I bought you a present,” she exclaimed excitedly, as if she had only just now remembered. She removed a gift-wrapped box from the large package she had been holding on her lap and handed it to me. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said as she watched me struggle with the ribbon. Her voice was quiet and subdued, but throbbing underneath it was the eager certainty that she had done exactly the right thing.
I think I knew what it was before I opened it, but I did not know how much it was going to mean to me until I saw it: a gleaming leather attache case, my name inscribed on a small brass plate below the handle.
“I know you’ve had the other one a long time, but I thought …”
Her voice started to fade into the vast obscurity of what might have been, but then she remembered—we both remembered—
that nothing was going to make us regret our second chance.
We had an early dinner in town and when we got home she curled up with a book while I tried to outline the story I would attempt to tell through the state’s own witnesses. The prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial, but if left unchallenged completely convincing. There would be testimony from the woman who first found the body, the two security guards she brought to the scene, the first police officer who arrived and took charge of the initial investigation, all of them describing what they saw and what they did. The coroner would testify that he had examined the body and determined that death had been caused by one or more wounds from a sharp instrument. Another police officer would tell the jury that the defendant had been found holding a knife that still had on it visible traces of blood.
An expert on DNA would be called first to explain the procedure by which the blood on the knife was matched to the blood of the victim, and then with various charts and graphs calculate the nearly infinitesimal chance that it might have belonged to someone else.
“Do you remember T. E. Lawrence?” I asked Jennifer, stretched out on the sofa on the other side of the library, engrossed in a paperback novel. “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”
She put the book down on her stomach and turned her head.
“I remember T. S. Eliot. Murder in the Cathedral. “
“No, T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.”
“I saw the movie. Why? Are you thinking of running away to the desert?”
“You know how you do something for a long time without quite knowing why, and then, all of a sudden, you finally figure it out?
There are supposed to be two rules of cross-examination: Don’t do it unless you have to, and never ask a question unless you already know the answer. I almost never follow the first and I frequently break the second. Years ago, I read Seven Pillars of Wisdom—it’s a beautiful book, beautifully written—and I learned something I never forgot: The way to win is to turn the greatest strength of the opposition into its greatest weakness. The greatest strength of the Turkish army was a string of fortresses from which it controlled the Arab tribes. Lawrence went around blowing up railroad tracks and as many trains as he could. Then, while the Turks concentrated on how to keep open their supply lines, Lawrence and his Arab irregulars simply left them alone, prisoners in their own fortresses, and marched around them. It’s the same thing on cross-examination: Let the other side concentrate on making the strength of their case stronger still, and while they’re doing that, attack them in a way they haven’t had time to think about.”
Jennifer swung her legs over the side of the sofa and sat up.
With her elbows on her knees she rested her chin on the heel of her hand.
“Do you work this hard on all your cases? You work past midnight every night and you’re up every morning before six.”
I closed the thick case file and shoved it to the side. “I’m worried about this case. I know the kid didn’t do it. I can’t afford to lose, and I’ve already made one mistake: I didn’t bring in that homeless man, kept him safe somewhere, so I could produce him at trial and he could testify he saw someone give Danny the knife.
I may have made another one today. The jury expects me to back up what I said about the same person being responsible for the death of both Jeffries and Griswald.”
“And you don’t think you can?”
“A lot depends on what I can do with Elliott.” As I said it, I suddenly realized that it was really the other way around. “Or, rather, on what Elliott decides he wants to do with me.”
Glancing at the clock, I remembered where I had to be. “I have to meet Flynn,” I explained as I got to my feet.
I was in the hallway, throwing on my jacket, when I thought of it. “What did you say when I asked you about Lawrence?” The paperback dangling from her hand, Jennifer was leaning against the door to the library. “The T. S. Eliot book. Murder in the Cathedral?”
“Yes. Did you read it, too?”
“A long time ago,” I said as I kissed her on my way out the door. Before it shut behind me, I leaned my head inside. “I promise I won’t be late,” I said with a mocking smile, meant to signal my abject surrender to married life and all its mundane formalities.
“I’ll wait up,” she replied with a smile of her own.
It was raining hard outside and I could barely see as I drove toward town. Water rushed through the gutters on the side of the street and splashed over the hood of the car at each low spot in the road. The lights of the city streaked the windshield with a multicolor blur, and the few pedestrians I could see on the sidewalks when I stopped at an intersection were vague black shadows that quickly vanished from view. The steady muffled drum-beat of the windshield wipers was the only sound I heard, that and the lonely, desolate noise of wave after wave of falling rain, sweeping down from the overburdened sky, as if it was the beginning of the rain that would fall forever until there was nothing left but water, endless water everywhere.
I parked down the street from the bar and bent the umbrella into the wind, holding my jacket close to my throat with my other hand as I struggled forward, a f
ew steps at a time. Under the neon sign in front of the bar, I closed the umbrella and shook it out and tried to wipe my face dry with the back of my sleeve.
Huddled on the pavement against the brick wall, a baseball cap shoved low on his forehead, a drunk rocked back and forth without any apparent awareness that it was raining, or even that it was night instead of day.
Inside, an old man with wrinkled hands and a solitary stare sat at the far end of the bar. A woman in her forties with black lacquered hair and dark red fingernails locked her high heel shoes on the bottom rung of the leather stool around the corner toward the middle. She watched in the mirror behind the bar while I made my way through the dim yellowish light toward the booth in the rear. The billiard balls were racked in the wooden trian-gle on the pool table, ready for anyone who wanted to play. Tired and bored, the bartender raised his eyes from a glass he was rubbing with a towel.
“A beer,” I said over my shoulder as I slid into the booth next to Flynn.
They were slouched forward, nursing their coffee, Flynn and Stewart, grinning cynically while they watched each other through world-weary eyes.
“Guy comes into a bar and orders booze,” Flynn said to Stewart. Then he looked at me and asked, “What kind of place do you think this is?”
My face was still wet and my shirt collar was soaked. Water ran down my neck.
“I get here too late to watch you throw somebody into a wall?”
He shook his head and shrugged. “It’s still early.”
The bartender brought a bottle of beer and a small, dirty glass.
I took a short swig on the bottle, then put it down and looked at Stewart.
“I need a favor. I need you to testify.” When he made no response, I reminded him what he had offered before. “You said if I did this, you’d help.”
He remembered, and he had no intention of going back on his word. “But what can I testify to? I wasn’t part of the investigation. I sat in when they questioned him because, like I told you before, I thought there might be some connection between the two murders.”
“That’s what I told the jury today: that there is a connection between the two murders, and that the same person responsible for the death of Jeffries is responsible for the death of Griswald.”
“Howard was telling me about that. How are you going to prove it?” he asked.
“I don’t have to prove it, I just have to show that it’s possible,” I replied, impatient to get back to my point. “I told them that the police didn’t know who killed Jeffries and neither did the district attorney. Now Loescher has to bring in a witness to tell the jury that the police found the man who murdered Jeffries and that he confessed. She’s going to call one of the lead investigators. It has to be you. I don’t want you to testify for the defense; I want you to testify for the prosecution.”
All his training, all his experience, everything he knew had taught him never to trust anything a defense lawyer said. His head snapped up and an ominous look came into his eyes. “Look,”
he warned, “if you think I’m going to—”
“Lie? I don’t want you to lie,” I insisted, as I bent forward and grabbed his arm. “I want you to tell the truth. You know: the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.”
“All right,” he said, mollified, “but what difference does it make if it’s me or one of the other people who headed up the investigation?”
I let go of his arm and sank against the wooden back of the booth. “All the difference in the world,” I said after I took another drink from the brown beer bottle. “The question is: Can you arrange it so you’re the one the prosecution calls?”
He thought about it for a moment, his head moving from side to side. “Yeah,” he said finally. “There were three of us. I’ll make sure I’m the only one available.” He looked down at his hands, and then looked up at me. “Just so long as you understand: I’ll answer any question they ask and I’ll answer every one of them as truthfully as I know how.”
“And I expect you to answer the questions I ask exactly the same way.”
I took one more drink and then held the bottle in front of me, examining the label, before I put it down. “I’d love to stay here and drink great liquor and chase beautiful women,” I said, nodding toward the woman at the bar with the red lipstick smeared across her mouth. “But I have to get home.”
As I slid out of the booth, Flynn glanced at Stewart. “I didn’t think it would ever happen, but Antonelli got himself engaged to be married.”
I knew him scarcely better than I knew Cassandra Loescher, but just like her, he seemed genuinely pleased. “That’s wonderful,” he said as he stood up and shook my hand. “Congratulations.”
I left them alone to finish their coffee and continue that long conversation, made up mainly of a companionable silence, by which they every night gave each other the encouragement to get through just one more day without a drink.
The wind that had lashed my face had stopped, and the rain, still heavy, fell straight down, surrounding the senses with a dull endless roar. The drunk on the sidewalk had fallen on his side, an empty pint of whiskey protruding from his coat pocket. I hesitated, then reached down and dragged him by the collar into the doorway under the neon sign. His eyes opened, and he looked at me, and then his head swung down onto his chest, and with water dripping off his cap and onto his face he started to snore.
I drove along the deserted streets and across the Morrison Street Bridge, wondering who was living under it tonight and where they went when they left, moving from one place to another, searching, I suppose, like the rest of us for something a little better, and finding, more often than not, something worse. A sense of the futility of it all started to close in on me. I picked up the car phone and called home, but when Jennifer did not answer by the third ring, I hung up, certain she had fallen asleep.
I was out of the city, driving along the tree-lined shore of the river, a few lights twinkling through the darkness. The rain began to let up, replaced by a murky gray drizzle. The headlights of a car appeared out of nowhere and a wave of water crashed against the windshield as it sped by. Then, as I left the river behind and followed the narrow lane that twisted through the hills and tun-neled under the trees, everything was covered with the still, black solitude of a starless night.
I came around the corner, anxious to get home, and thought at first I was having the first real hallucination of my life. At the top of the knoll, at the end of the gated drive, the house looked like it had been set on fire. Every light in every room, upstairs, downstairs, must have been turned on. Then, as I tried to convince myself I was seeing things, I heard it, sweeping down across the dancing shadows on the rolling green grass lawn, the hard-beating, pulse-pounding music of a jazz piano player, his fingers flying, crashing, on the keys. When I reached the door, the music was deafening, and when I got inside I had to hold my hands over my ears.
Barefoot, wearing only a pink nightgown, Jennifer was pushing the vacuum cleaner across the living room rug, her head bobbing up and down in time with the music. I dashed to the CD
player and turned it off. The noise of the vacuum cleaner filled the room and at first Jennifer did not seem to notice the difference. Then, she pulled up straight and looked around. A huge smile flashed on her face when she saw me standing there watching her. She switched off the vacuum cleaner.
“I thought I’d do a little housework while you were gone,” she explained, holding the black cord in her hand as if she meant to continue. “I cleaned the bathroom; I cleaned the kitchen; and after I vacuum in here …” she said, looking past me toward the dining room.
“It’s a little late to be doing this, isn’t it?” I asked as gently as I could. I took the cord out of her hand and hung it over the handle. “Why don’t we go to bed now.”
Her eyes were wild with a kind of eager excitement, as if there was something she could not wait to tell me. She put her hand on the side of my face and then reached ar
ound my neck and rose up on her toes. “I’m so happy,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m so glad we found each other again. I’ve never felt this good in my life.” She let go of my neck and took hold of my hand. “Come on,” she said, as she led me toward the stairs. “Let’s go to bed.
“Carry me,” she said as we got to the top of the stairs. “Make love to me,” she said when we got to the bedroom door.
We tumbled down on the bed together, pulling and tearing at each other’s clothes, and lost all separate sense of ourselves in the white-hot act of love. At the end, when there was nothing left of me, I collapsed in her warm, smooth arms and staring into the darkness drifted into a wordless dream that had neither a beginning nor an end.
I woke up with a start and thought I had overslept, but it was still dark. Pulling the covers over my shoulder, I turned on my side and reached out to put my arm around Jennifer. She was too far away, and I moved closer and reached again. My hand fell across her pillow and then down across the sheet. She was not there.
I found her downstairs in the library, her legs tucked under her, curled up at the same end of the sofa, reading the same paperback novel she had been reading before. As soon as she heard me, she jumped to her feet.
“What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
She was wide awake. “A little after three. I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? I tried to be quiet.”
I cinched tighter the terry cloth robe and squinted at the clock on the fireplace mantel to see if it was really the middle of the night.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said as she took my hand in both of hers.
For some reason, it struck me funny. “You couldn’t sleep? After what we did? I slept like a dead man. When I woke up and it was all dark I thought at first I must have slept straight through the day.”
We sat down next to each other on the sofa. An empty cup with a damp tea bag on the saucer was on the coffee table.
“Did you sleep at all?”
She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, wearing a blue silk robe, her hands in her lap. Her eyes darted around the room, staring first at one thing, then another. Her mouth twitched nervously at the corners and she started to rub her hands, stroking each finger in turn, over and over again.