Blood Royal

by Harold Robbins

  “We understand that, but our duty is to make the argument, not guarantee results. You are deliberately antagonizing the judge. You have to go back in there and offer a sincere apology.”

  She took a deep breath to calm her voice. “I understand that you have to live with the man after this trial and I don’t. I respect judges, but I also know when I’m being torpedoed by one. This one is out to sink me. I’m not going to apologize. You can offer your apologies and tell him for me that if he comes down on me again when he should be on the prosecutor’s back, I’m going to put his prejudicial conduct on the front pages of every paper in the country. And if I find out that you are withholding critical evidence from me, I’m going to put you next to him on the front pages.”

  Trent gaped. “You—you’re insane.” He backed away from her, then fled back into the judge’s office, his silk robes flying.

  Hall stared at her for a moment, started after Trent, and stopped when Marlowe called his name.

  “Tell the judge I want an order for this armorer to appear in court tomorrow. He’s going to be the first witness I call.”

  It was Hall’s turn to gape. “What?”

  “We have to, for damage control. We bring it out and make it part of our case, reshaping our defense. We can’t hide it, so we have to use it.”

  “How do you plan to use it?”

  “I don’t know yet, I need to talk to the princess. But I’m reminded of an expression they had in my hometown when I was a kid—if you’re being run out of town, get to the front of the mob and pretend it’s a parade.”

  She gave a great sigh. “Let’s hope it doesn’t rain on our parade.”

  * * *

  A STUFFED MANILA ENVELOPE was waiting for Marlowe at the front desk when she got back to the hotel. She had asked Hall to have a background check done on Tony Dutton. Opening the envelope in her room, she found a series of articles from a newspaper morgue going back a dozen years. The note attached to the articles called them a “sampling” and indicated there were others available if she wanted more information.

  Sergeant Kramer, who was impressed by Dutton’s virility, had been correct when she said he had been a prizewinning investigative reporter. During his time in “respectable journalism,” he had written exposés about the government, industry, and crime.

  “A man after my own heart,” Marlowe murmured as she read articles in which he crusaded against injustices against women, minorities, and poor working stiffs. The last series of articles was a crime exposé before a two-year hiatus in reporting. After the break in writing, he began to crank out hack tabloid contributions.

  She read the crime exposé first with growing interest and then horror.

  It started with Dutton being offered a line of cocaine at a party. It gave him the idea to follow the “tracks” of the drug back as far as he could. He got the name of the small-time supplier who sold the cocaine to his host, and he was off and running. From the street supplier, who never bought more than a pound of cocaine at a time and sold it to consumers in grams and ounces, he followed the crooked road to the district “distributor,” who bought and sold kilos to a “wholesaler,” who dealt in hundred-kilo units. He kept digging until he followed the trail back to Liverpool, where a “bent copper,” which from the context Marlowe realized was a crooked cop, was providing cover for shipments that came into the port from ships sailing out of Colombia.

  The investigation had taken Dutton a year. Along the way he met and began a romantic relationship with a woman in the Colombian embassy. She was a commercial attaché for her country and she fed him information on what ships she suspected were carrying contraband.

  Dutton had been careful to disguise his source in his stories, but the dopers had also been smart: They stole his phone bill out of his mailbox. It had the calls made to the woman.

  He received a message from her to meet her at her apartment. When he arrived, her door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open—and stood in shock.

  The woman was tied up, with her mouth taped. She was sitting on five gallons of gasoline.

  And pushing open the door ignited the fuse.

  The explosion mercifully killed her.

  Marlowe felt sick as she read the account of the murder. What beasts there were in this world. Her hands shook as she stuffed the articles back in the envelope.

  She had picked up one more piece of information from the news accounts. Dutton had received burns on his legs and chest from the fire. The plastic surgeon who treated him was Walter Howler.

  53

  The prisoner of the Tower stood at a window and watched the Thames go by. She was melancholy and the deep, dark, slow waters did nothing to raise her spirits.

  A message had arrived that her American lawyer was coming for another conference. She hated having to relive the past and dreaded that she might actually be called to testify. She had been told it was usually best that a defendant didn’t take the witness stand, that she would only be asked to testify if it was a last-ditch hope, but that was what her whole life had seemed to come down to, a last-ditch hope.

  She thought about the tales of other princesses held prisoner in towers and the knights in shining armor who rescued them. The one that stuck with her was a story about a romantic rescue at the Tower of London.

  It concerned the Earl of Nithsdale, a rebellious young Scottish nobleman who was captured in battle with the English and taken to the Tower to await execution with two other nobles in 1716. They were sentenced to death and scheduled to be executed in two weeks. When word of the execution sentence reached Nithsdale’s beautiful twenty-four-year-old wife in Scotland, the country had been covered with snow and travel in stagecoaches canceled. With no time to spare, the brave young woman road horseback nearly four hundred miles to London in brutal winter weather.

  Arriving two days before the execution, she went straight to the king and threw herself at his feet, begging for the life of her husband. The poor king dragged her across the room with her hanging on to his long coat until his guards grabbed her. Swooning in the arms of the guards, she got thrown out of the palace rather than tossed in the dungeon.

  She could not get into the Tower to see her husband without written permission. She lied to the guards, telling them that the king had promised a reprieve, and bribed them into letting her see her husband. Alone with her husband, she told him she would find a way to save him.

  She took lodging in the city for her and her maid, and by the next day had come up with a plan, enlisting her maid, the landlady at the lodging, and a friend of the landlady into the plan.

  With only hours to spare before the execution, she returned to the Tower with the three women. Lady Nithsdale again bribed the guards, but was only allowed to bring in one lady at a time. She took in the landlady’s friend first, a woman named Mrs. Hilton. Inside the room, Mrs. Hilton took off extra woman’s clothing she had brought for the earl. Lady Nithsdale escorted Mrs. Hilton and brought back Mrs. Mills, her landlady. Using a wig for her husband’s hair, and makeup for his dark eyebrows, she rouged his cheeks to hide the stubbles of his beard.

  She then escorted her husband out, with him dressed as a woman and holding a handkerchief in front of his face to hide weeping. Seeing him to the Tower gates, she returned to his room and pretended to carry on a conversation with him in the room to give him a chance to get away.

  Her husband escaped out of the city while his two codefendants were being executed. She joined him later in Italy.

  The princess had never heard the reason why Lady Nithsdale was never punished for her crime, but she imagined that her romantic daring brought admiration rather than scorn from the men of the era.

  The Nithsdales lived a long life together in Italy … happily ever after.

  Lord Nithsdale was lucky, the princess thought. He had a woman who loved him more than life itself.

  What sort of feeling was love that burned as bright as life itself?

  What kind of courage and imagi
nation did it take to escape from a life that you hated?

  To run off to Italy and live happily ever after with the man you loved?

  54

  “Why did you take the gun from your husband’s collection a full day before you used it?” Marlowe asked.

  The princess shook her head. “There are things that can’t be explained.”

  Marlowe paced in the Tower room, her adrenaline high.

  “That answer won’t do. When they have you under the microscope—and that’s what’s happening, not just the jury but the whole world is watching this trial—you have to fill in all the blanks. We can’t leave anything unanswered—if we do, the prosecution will provide a conclusion we don’t want. I’m not even sure the judge will permit us to argue heat of passion when you got the gun the day before. You have to tell me the truth.”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of who? What?”

  “Everything, everybody.”

  “Be more specific—why did you take the gun?”

  “To protect myself.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain. I was frightened, I took the gun.”

  “What were you frightened of?”

  “I told you: everything. I wanted the pain to go away.”

  “You planned to kill yourself?”

  “Yes, that’s right, I planned to use the gun on myself.”

  Marlowe shut her eyes. The princess’s statement that she planned to use the gun on herself resounded in her mind. And it rang false. She opened her eyes and said, “I don’t believe you. But more importantly, the jury won’t believe you.”

  “Well, they will have to believe me, it’s the truth. I was going to kill myself and at the last moment I decided to kill my husband instead. I—I had the gun already, to use on myself. But at the party, I went suddenly into a rage and used it on him instead. That still makes it sudden provocation, doesn’t it?”

  “If I thought you could sell that story to a jury, I’d say run with it, but it’s not ringing true to me. If it’s true, you should have told me and we could have built a defense around it. Now that we know you got the gun a day ahead of the shooting, you either got it as part of a premeditated plan to kill your husband … or you got it for another reason. It’s going to sound contrived when we suddenly come up with a suicide theory.”

  “As my advocate, isn’t it your duty to sponsor my story? That’s how it was explained to me, that you tell your barrister what happened and they explain it to the judge and jury. Well, I want you to say that I took the gun because I planned to kill myself and changed my mind when I was provoked by my husband.”

  “My job as an attorney is to represent you to the best of my ability, within the scope of what I have to work with. But that doesn’t include helping you concoct a story. I don’t have to believe in your story to advocate it, but I’m not a robot, either. What I saw in this room was you latching on to a version I suggested, that you took the gun to use it on yourself.

  “Let’s get down to the bottom line. I don’t care where you got your story, you’re the only person on earth who really knows why you pulled that trigger. I’m not your judge or jury, I’m here to persuade them. My only concern is whether a jury will buy it. My instincts are that the story sounds contrived, a tap dance around the truth. And it gets worse—the only way to get before the jury is for you to testify. I don’t think you can do it convincingly.”

  “I don’t want to testify.”

  “No defense lawyer wants a defendant to testify, but if it’s the only way to avoid a conviction, you will have to do it.”

  The princess turned away from her and Marlowe spoke to her back.

  “I’m getting a gut feeling that you have lied to me about exactly what brought you to the point where you pulled the trigger and killed your husband.”

  She turned around to face Marlowe. “You have lost faith in me.”

  “That’s not true. Trials aren’t based upon faith, trust, loyalty, or any other fine moral stance. They’re not even based upon the truth—they’re based upon the evidence that gets admitted. And that evidence has to be credible. Despite anything you’ve heard or read, juries are not easily fooled. When you get twelve people from different walks of life listening to the same evidence, there’s always going to be one or more who see through bullshit. When you lose credibility with a jury on one issue, you might as well pack it up, because they will not believe anything you say. Once a liar, always a liar, that’s how juries judge lawyers and their clients. If they think they’re getting a snow job at any time, you’ll lose them.”

  “And you think they will believe I am snowing them, as you put it.”

  “I think there’s something you’re holding back. You’ve talked about your fears in general, but I also get the impression that you were actually frightened about something specific, but that you won’t tell me what it is.”

  The princess got up and stood by the window, looking out at the Thames. After a moment she turned back to Marlowe.

  “I’m afraid that I have said all I plan to say about the subject.”

  Marlowe sighed. She checked her watch. “We’re due back in court in an hour. I will be giving my opening statement.” She met the princess’s eye. “All right: As they say, you’re a big girl and it’s your life. But if there are any more surprises, you had better let me in on them now.”

  The princess turned back to the window for a long moment. Without turning, she asked Marlowe, “Have they told you I once took a lover?”

  “No one’s told me about a lover.”

  “He was a man much like my husband, very well bred, he reminded me of my husband.”

  “You loved him? Had an affair?”

  “Loved him, had an affair. Later, I heard that he had told others about it.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “I’m not sure I know what love is anymore. I was lonely and needed him. I’m certain about one thing, though. Men are bastards.”

  55

  The judge called upon Marlowe to open her case.

  She stood up and placed her notes on the small podium that sat atop the bench table. She always had copious notes on hand when she began her opening and closing statements and examinations of witnesses—and rarely relied on them. It was a security blanket, but one she didn’t need because she had performed the three vital tasks any lawyer had to do prior to trial: preparation, preparation, preparation.

  “Mr. Desai was wrong when he described to you the plight of a princess as a fairy tale. As you will learn during the trial, it was a horror story, a story of torment and abuse, of a young woman swept into a nightmare, spiraling down further and further in a dark hell until she ended the abuse by striking back at her tormentor.

  “It is a tale of a marriage that was a fraud, of a domineering bridegroom who took a picture of his lover along on his honeymoon.

  “The princess was an ordinary young woman. She had been born into an old family that had money and position, but she was raised in that conservative British fashion where young ladies who take skiing vacations to the Swiss Alps also learn how to darn socks and cook plum pudding.

  “Before she entered into the royal marriage, there wasn’t much that distinguished her from most other young women in her late teens. She was something of a dreamer, a romantic dreamer whose ambitions were not in the direction of academics. She was more inclined to read a tale of love than dissect a frog.

  “That is a key thing that you have to realize about her. Her goal was to find a man who would love her and take care of her. Unlike many young women in her late teens in this day and age, she did not even experiment with sex. She was saving her virginity to give it to the man she loved.

  “The man who came into her life was not an ordinary person but a prince, a real one, one of the richest and most powerful men on earth, the scion of the First Family of the entire English-speaking world. Heir to the throne of a world power. A person of rank and privilege that is unimaginable to ordina
ry people.

  “This prince of princes pointed at the young woman and literally picked her out of a crowd and asked her to be his wife.

  “The future princess is an impressionable, inexperienced, naive, rather immature eighteen-year-old when the prince first gives attention to her. Her only experiences in life are those of a schoolgirl.

  “He is thirteen years her senior, a symbol of world power and privilege, worldly, well traveled, a veteran of the military. He has spent his entire life in the public eye. Instilled in him are centuries of both supreme privilege and a sense of duty.

  “He reaches out and asks the young girl to marry him, to become a real-life princess, to someday become the queen of a world power, a position of unparalleled power, privilege, and prestige. It meant someday she would assume an ancient throne and have the adulation of hundreds of millions of people.

  “When the news is made public, a media storm the like of which the world has never seen ignited like the burst of a supernova. And that media explosion knocks the young woman off her feet. In one fell swoop, she goes from being a rather ordinary teenage girl, living in an apartment and doing odd jobs, to being the focus of world attention.

  “To say that it was a mind-blowing experience for her would be a gross understatement. It went beyond the impossible and unbelievable, it was a soul-wrenching experience—an experience she had no training or background to deal with.”

  Marlowe’s eyes slowly swept the jurors. “It was an unimaginable turn of events. An average teenage girl was overnight turned into a worldwide media sensation—and no one offered assistance or advice on how to handle the sudden explosion of interest.

  “The world acclaimed her as their fairy-tale princess. It was not a position she sought. She was not a young woman who lacked a good sense of reality. She did not think of herself as a fairy-tale princess. It was how the world thought of her.”

  She paused to take a drink of water and let what she had said sink into the minds of the jurors. Her eyes traveled slowly from juror to juror as she continued, making sure she made direct eye-to-eye contact with each.