But the saccharine coating didn’t diminish the fact that she had been canned, sacked, dumped, and given the boot.
“Fuck you!” Marlowe threw the remote at the TV. Her aim was too good—it hit the screen with a crack, there was a flash of light, and the TV went dark.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” Watching the TV had been company, even if it depressed her. Now she had to drink alone. It wasn’t the first time she had been fired by a client. Clients came in all shapes and mental states, sometimes they were just too crazy to deal with. But her previous firings had all occurred during mutual recriminations with raised voices. This was the first time she was fired by a client with whom she’d thought she was working well—and the firing was broadcast around the world.
Now what would they think of her in Modesto?
She called the front desk and told them to have another TV brought up. “Mine is broken—no, I don’t want someone to check, it’s terminal, just send a damn TV up. You people have no problem sending murderers and rapists to my room, I’m sure you can manage a TV.”
She slammed down the phone. Then picked it up again and ordered another pitcher of apple martini.
“How the hell did it happen?” she asked herself. How did Trent and his “learned friends” get the drop on her? And pull the rug out, sending her crashing onto her tush? She had her problems with the princess, there was a clash of cultures, of attitudes, but she thought she had the situation under control. She thought she set exactly the right tone with her opening statement, making the princess the victim of an uncaring, self-centered bastard.
The phone rang and she grabbed it. “Bring that damn TV up!”
After a slight pause, a voice she recognized said, “I’m afraid the pub owner and the dozen patrons watching it might object.”
“Dutton, I don’t want to speak to you, hear from you, talk to you. You are a great big zero.”
“It’s coming over the telly now. It’s quite a stunning development, totally unexpected.”
She cringed. “What’s so unexpected about a lawyer getting fired? Happens every day.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, luv. Aren’t you watching the telly?”
“My telly had a nervous breakdown.”
“Why did she do it?”
“Who? The princess? Because I’m a shit attorney, that’s why.”
“Why’d she plead?”
“Plead?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Not anymore. The princess has pled guilty?”
“She’s copping an insanity plea.”
“What! That’s crazy, it’s the last thing she wanted to do.” She thought for a second. “I guess it’s an easy way out. She can get some psych help and in six months be back on the street.”
“Won’t happen, she’s taking a section 41 commitment.”
“What’s that?”
“You must have been really out of the loop if you didn’t know this was coming down. A Section 41 commitment isn’t something that a defendant agrees to on the spur of the moment—it would have been planned and negotiated, with psychiatric exams underlying it. I’m getting the idea that they really had you sandbagged.”
“What exactly is it?”
“My understanding is that it gives the judge the right to lock her up and throw away the key.”
“That’s insane!”
“No, she’s the one who’s admitting to be insane. Maybe you better come down here—I’m at a pub two blocks from your hotel. You can probably walk out the front door of the hotel without being hassled by reporters. I hate to break it to you, luv, but you’re yesterday’s news.”
* * *
SHE SAT IN THE pub with Dutton and watched a forensic psychologist and a barrister who specialized in criminal law being interviewed on TV about the princess’s plea agreement.
“It amounts to a complete capitulation to the prosecution’s charges,” the barrister said. “If a person is committed under Section 41 of the Mental Health Act, the commitment order from the court is without limit of time.”
“You mean life imprisonment?”
“It’s not imprisonment in a jail … she will be held in a mental health facility—a hospital, if you please—that specializes in treatment and confinement of mentally disturbed persons who are a danger. If the court makes a finding that there’s a risk that the person will commit further offenses or that there is a need for protection of the public from serious harm, he orders the person confined without a release date. It’s not a sentence of imprisonment, but what the law calls a restriction order, the power of the higher court to prevent discharge.”
“And how does the princess get out once she is put under this restriction order?” the commentator asked.
The psychiatrist said, “That’s the rub, isn’t it? The princess has agreed to the order, but it’s not in her power to undo it. As long as the court finds that she presents a danger, she will be kept in. If she is considered a danger for the rest of her life, she will be kept in custody.”
“This is utter bunk,” Marlowe told Dutton. “The very nature of a killing of one spouse by another in a heat of passion is that the perpetrator rarely commits another crime. Juries and the law are forgiving toward these offenses because the perpetrators are not a danger to society, the crimes arise from the unique relationships between the parties. This Section 41 stuff is for criminals who are schizoid.”
“That’s all good and well, but she’s not pleading to manslaughter, she’s saying she was crazy when she popped her husband and that she’s still crazy, dangerously so.”
“I can’t tell you how little sense this makes. This is exactly why I was hired: The princess was afraid that her lawyers would sell her out, that she’d end up confined forever, being stuck away as a nutcase. I’m sure she would rather be dead than in a mental ward. Why would she change her mind?”
“What did she say when she fired you?”
“Nothing. I was just handed my walking papers by Trent, a thank-you and the check’s in the mail.” Marlowe shook her head. “I just don’t understand it, things were going well in the trial, I had just given my opening statement. The armorer’s testimony wasn’t going to be as damaging as the prosecution thought, I was going to neutralize it. I had everything set to turn the case around, portraying the princess as the victim and the prince as the aggressor. I even had a good theory on how to get around the fact that there was no actual physical abuse, showing that he drove her to physically abuse herself.”
“And what did she say to that?”
Marlowe shrugged. “She would have liked to win the case without smearing her husband’s name. She wanted to know if we could do the case without attacking his character. I told her it wasn’t possible, we had to make the jury understand that he was the bad guy and she was the victim, that his royal upbringing had created a thoughtless, self-centered bastard who had no understanding of his young wife’s needs.”
“I see.” He nodded. “Yes, you walked right into it.”
“What did I walk into?”
“Tradition. As an American, you wouldn’t have understood. The princess would not have let you assassinate her husband’s reputation.”
“Excuse me, the princess assassinated her husband’s life.”
“That’s different, people kill each other all the time. But Britain has had monarchs for all of recorded history, save a few years when Cromwell was running the country. The tradition of the monarchy is ingrained in the blood of all of us. These people aren’t rock stars that rise and fall, they were there when we were born and will be there when we die.”
“There are people who oppose the monarchy and tabloid slimes like you who constantly attack it.”
“There are people who murder, rape, kill, and steal, too, but they’re not in the majority or running the country. You have to stop thinking like an American and think like the princess. From her earliest memories, on the telly, newspapers, magazines, table talk, in school, work, and
play, the queen and the Prince of Wales were honored and revered.”
“But she still killed him.”
“She attacked the man, not the institution. She believes in the monarchy. She might strike out at her husband as a man who she thinks wronged her, but she’s no more capable of attacking the monarchy than Pavlov’s dog was of keeping a dry mouth. Don’t you understand? She’s part of the monarchy, by birth, by upbringing. What would you say was the most important thing in her life, the thing she loved the most?”
“Her children—she’s devoted to her children, determined that they will have happy lives.”
“Exactly, and her firstborn is now the Prince of Wales and future king. Do you think she’s capable of sabotaging her son’s birthright?”
“No way, that would be the last thing she would do. You’re starting to make sense. It must be the booze.” She stared at the glass of beer in front of her. The barmaid had just stared at her when Marlowe asked if they could whip up an apple martini.
“Or love,” Dutton said. “If you recall, we got a head start on a roll in the hay in your hotel room, just before you savagely attacked me.”
“Don’t get yourself worked up. I’d rather make love to a monkey than a tabloid reporter, though I’m not sure there’s much difference. But I’m beginning to think you’re on to something. She’s no longer in the fog she’d been in when she struck at the prince and reached across the ocean for me. She’s thinking clearer now, less panicked, more apt to listen to those around her. You can bet that each time after I left the Tower, Trent and his learned friends snuck in and worked on her, telling her that she was going to destroy the monarchy, that she would cause her son to lose his birthright.”
“The insanity plea works out nicely,” Dutton said. “It’s no reflection on the monarchy that the princess was crazy—she was royalty only by marriage, and by pleading out, the whole issue of the prince’s behavior is avoided.”
“Nice for everyone except the princess—and me. I go home in disgrace and she ends up with a life-sized commitment to a loony bin. Fine advocate I turned out to be. I thought these stuffy British lawyers were a pushover. Now I know how you arrogant bastards managed to rule half of the world: It was done with an olive leaf in one hand—and a club to bash people with when they reached for the peace offering.”
“If you go home now, you’ll miss solving the mystery.”
“What mystery?”
“The biggest mystery of all: why the princess shot her husband.”
“Where have you been, on another planet while your news media friends covered the story from every possible—and impossible—angle? What’s your theory, Mr. Tabloid Trash Reporter? Aliens took control of the princess’s mind as part of a plot to kill off the royal family and take over the government? I think the rest of the world pretty well knows that she killed him because he mentally abused her and wronged her with another woman.”
He took a sip of beer, slowly, meeting her eyes over the rim of the glass. “Oh, you believe that public relations propaganda the princess has been selling to the press and people like you. No, luv, I’m talking about the real reason she put a bullet in the heart of her husband.”
Marlowe’s heart pumped like a steam hammer. He had hit upon a suspicion that had been lurking in her mind, one that she had been suppressing, refusing to face because it fell outside the purview of her defense of her client. “You’re not trying to tell me that I was sold a bill of goods, that the princess’s defense was a lie, are you? What is this, some kind of tabloid bullshit? You need a story, so you’re going to make it up as you go along?”
“Look me in the eye and tell me that the whole thing doesn’t stink to you.”
She looked him in the eye. “I believe every word the princess told me. She could not have made up that story—I’d know.” She saluted him with her beer. “And as we say back in Modesto, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”
“I don’t know about the horse, but we’ll be going more into the subject of coitus before the evening’s out. But getting back to whether you were lied to, she lied to you about when she got the gun.”
“She didn’t, actually—all right, she misled me, or let me mislead myself.”
“She lied. Now, here’s how I see it. The life of the princess and the prince is well documented up to the time she decided to kill him. There were servants around when she threw herself down the stairs, doctors who treated her for bulimia and depression, and so forth. But where the story goes askew is the murder plot.”
“Heat of passion.”
“That, too. The first curious thing is that she decided to strike back instead of just getting out of the relationship.”
“There’s nothing strange about that. It’s an almost universal behavior pattern in these abused-spouse cases that the woman believed she was trapped and that killing her tormentor was the only way out.”
“But it wasn’t that kind of torment, was it, luv? You can do all your fancy lawyer dance steps for the jury about how he was verbally abusing her into abusing herself physically, but this old reporter knows that’s bunk. And I don’t buy the notion that she was crazy, any more than you do. The princess is a woman who went through her own private hell, a naive girl who entered a fairy-tale marriage only to find out it was a nightmare, but she doesn’t have it in her to commit a cold-blooded murder.”
“Heat of—”
“There is only one thing that would have driven her to pick up that gun and shoot her husband. It’s something that is in every one of us, rich and poor, the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
“Which is?”
“Self-preservation.”
They drank on it and watched more television discussion as legal and psychiatric experts took on the insanity plea.
Marlowe licked beer suds from her lips and nodded. “Okay, we are back to your self-defense theory. There is a very serious flaw in your theory—you can’t shoot an unarmed person in cold blood and call it self-defense. And there is no evidence that he had a weapon or reached for something that looked like a weapon. So your theory stinks.”
“Bear with me, I get less smelly as you get to know me better. What if the princess thought she was in danger—what if she killed her husband because she thought he was going to kill her?”
Marlowe kept her eyes on the TV, but her mind was flying, analyzing his question. “If she thought she was in danger? Okay, let’s deal with that. It can’t be self defense, you have to actually be in harm’s way, you can’t just believe you’re in danger. But there is a doctrine of law called imperfect self-defense. I’m sure you have it here, we probably got it from your courts, anyway. It works this way: It’s an allowable defense if you have a reasonable belief that you were in imminent danger of being harmed by that person—even though you were wrong. A classic example would be that people told you that Joe was going to shoot you, you see Joe coming toward you with a rifle, you pull out your long-barreled .44 revolver—we’re assuming you live in Texas—and you blow Joe away.”
“Joe didn’t have a rifle.”
“Exactly, it was a toy gun. But if the jury finds that you had a reasonable belief that Joe was going to plug you, they can find you not guilty based on an imperfect self-defense theory. In the princess’s case, a jury would have to find that she had a reasonable belief that she was in imminent danger from her husband.”
Dutton said, “What if there was hard evidence that the princess had a genuine belief that her husband planned to have her killed? How would that have affected her case?”
“She could raise an imperfect self-defense and get off—if the danger was imminent. From a practical point of view, if jurors thought the princess had a reasonable belief she was going to be harmed, they would care little about the fine points of law. Jurors are more influenced by common sense than legal technicalities. But it’s all moot now—she’s taking a plea.”
“She’s agreed to a plea, but the news reports are that the plea won’t be ent
ered until next week.”
Marlowe shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, she’s still going to plead. She never brought up the subject of being afraid for her life, probably for exactly the reason you’ve mentioned before, that it would show real malice on his part and put the monarchy in jeopardy.”
Dutton put his hand on the top of her thigh and kissed her ear as he whispered, “Ah, but luv, what if you had the evidence and were able to put such a scare into the government that they offered the princess a heat-of-passion plea and probation? Or even dismissed the charges?”
Indeed, if she had the evidence and was able to pull it off, then what would they think of her in Modesto?
She gave him an appraising look. “How did you get so smart about people?”
“Osmosis working for a tabloid. Tabloid reporters, criminal defense lawyers, and morticians all have something in common—they see only the worst side of life. No news is good news, there’s a dead body in most bad news, and pretty soon there’s a lawyer. When you see enough of man’s inhumanity to man, you come to understand that there is a violent nature in humans, cruelty that goes beyond our animal instinct. Animals kill for food, we do it for sport. Sometimes we kill each other just for fun.”
“I’m impressed, quite a philosopher—”
“For a slimy tabloid hound.”
“For a prizewinning journalist. According to the last dead body you had sex with.”
He saluted her with his mug of beer. “Ah, you’ve uncovered my secret, that I had a veneer of respectability before The Fall. Like Satan and his Dark Angels, I was cast out of heaven and I’ve been floundering in a purgatory of sex, lies, and mediocrity ever since. But that’s beside the point. We have to work with the hand we’ve been dealt. We need to deal with the two matters at hand.”
He told her about tracking down Howler. “He’s being held by the Royal Protection Service, the bill’s being picked up by the palace gang. Now, what does that tell you?”
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