by James Yaffe
“You’ve got time to ruin your stomach?” she said. “Sit down, eat. There’s nobody in the world that can’t spare five minutes. Even the president of the United States eats a healthy breakfast.”
I went into the kitchen and saw for the first time that Mom had a guest, a large fat woman in her fifties whose good-humored porklike face looked familiar to me. Mom introduced her as Mrs. Cassidy, and it turned out she lived in a house two doors down.
“Julie is driving me to the supermarket in a few minutes,” Mom said. “You got nothing in your icebox, did you know that?”
“Mom, the icebox is full.”
“Nothing that a healthy person can eat. It’s very nice of you, Julie.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Mrs. Cassidy, with a hearty laugh that had a lot of chest behind it. “You can tell me more about your life as a little girl on the Lower East Side. It’s fascinating.”
“Can you believe it, Julie was never in New York?” Mom said. “She was born in this state, and got married here to a man that worked for the electric company, and now she’s a widow she hates the idea of traveling alone. I’m telling her, she should come East and visit me sometime, I’ll put her up in the spare room and show her all the sights. Maybe we’ll go out and enjoy the nightlife.”
Mrs. Cassidy’s laugh boomed out even louder. “This mother of yours, she’s got more pizzazz than my daughter, and she’s twenty-five!”
What I found most amazing was, I’d been living in this neighborhood for a year, seeing Mrs. Cassidy off and on every week, and I didn’t even know her name. In less than a day, Mom knew her whole life history, and they were bosom buddies.
Satisfied that I was eating my breakfast, Mom stood up, ready for the expedition to the supermarket. I offered to give her some money for the groceries, but she said, “Foolishness. I’m living here, I’ll pay my share.”
She came up to me and hugged me, and then the ladies left. I heard them chugging off in Mrs. Cassidy’s station wagon. I gulped some coffee—Mom did make terrific coffee—and went chugging off, too.
My office is downtown, in the courthouse, a block-long building designed in a kind of Greco-Pueblo style. It has Doric columns and a spacious portico, but these classic architectural features are painted pink to look like adobe. A small tower juts up from the middle of the roof, with an imitation mission bell in it.
This edifice was put up less than a year ago, two blocks away from the old courthouse, which was torn down to make way for an office complex. There was a lot of rhetoric at the time, from our mayor, several local judges, and the media, to the effect that our new courthouse would be a model for such structures all over the United States. The newspaper ran an editorial informing us that justice in Mesa Grande would finally be housed in a temple sufficiently magnificent and up-to-date to do it proper honor.
Our district attorney, Marvin McBride, then moved his staff and his offices into the plum areas of the new courthouse. Their rooms are twice as big as their rooms in the old building were; their carpets are twice as thick, and their air-conditioning twice as cold; and in consequence their egos have grown twice as large.
The public defender also moved into the new courthouse. Our offices—is it necessary for me to say?—aren’t nearly as spacious and splendid as those of the district attorney. Ann Swenson has one small room on the top floor, at the back of the building; her secretary has an adjoining alcove; and I’m squeezed into another adjoining room, which I suspect was originally meant to be a broom closet.
I got to the courthouse before nine that morning, but even this early it was crowded. To tell you the truth, I enjoy it like that—noisy, bustling, full of thuggish-looking types rubbing elbows in the hallways with buttoned-down bespectacled young-lawyer types. And you can’t always be sure which of these types are the lawyers and which the thugs.
At the newsstand in the courthouse lobby, I picked up an early edition of our local paper. The Bellamy murder was a headline above the masthead, but only the sketchiest account of it was given. I took the elevator up to our office, and found Ann’s secretary, Mabel Gibson, stationed in my doorway. “She wants to see you,” Mabel said. “She just sent me to get you. I think it’s about this awful murder. Oh, that poor young man! I understand his mother is still alive!”
Mabel is a sweet middle-aged lady, with a contented husband, grown and married children, a grandchild on the way, and an incurably sentimental view of life. God knows how she manages to hold on to it after all these years of working in the company of lawyers.
Ann was on the phone when I entered her office, and she waved at me to take a seat. And I thought, not for the first time, what a good-looking girl she was. Blond and willowy. You look at her, you think she couldn’t have a brain in her head. The local graveyards are planted with prosecuting attorneys who made that mistake.
Occasionally I’ve asked myself why, if I admire her so much, something never got started between us. The first answer is, she’s twenty years younger than me, I don’t believe in cradle-snatching. The second answer is, she’s such a smart woman, most likely she’s smarter than I am—like Shirley was, as a matter of fact—and the truth is I couldn’t handle that yet. But the third answer makes the first two irrelevant: Ann happens to have a perfectly good husband of her own, Joe Swenson, a local nose-and-throat specialist.
She got off the phone, and then she told me the news. Mike Russo had been arrested early this morning for Bellamy’s murder. He had asked for Ann to defend him, giving as his reason not only that he didn’t have much money but also that he had so much faith in me.
“You don’t look particularly surprised at the news,” Ann said. “You’ve got some reason to think we’ll be defending a guilty client?”
“No. Certainly not. Only—” I told her about the look of hatred Mike had darted at Bellamy before the poetry reading, and what he had said to me afterward about being on the verge of committing a murder.
Ann’s only reaction was “I hope nobody heard him saying that to you.”
Before I could answer that, the buzzer sounded and Mabel Gibson was telling her, through the intercom, that Mr. Atwater had arrived.
Bill Atwater was a junior partner in the local law firm that handled legal business for Mesa Grande College. He was in his thirties, but dressed twenty years older than that, with a dark suit and a vest. Still fairly unusual attire for this section of the country, though the infiltration of yuppiedom is increasing every day.
He assured Ann that he wasn’t here to assist us in our handling of Professor Russo’s defense; he was here strictly as an observer for the college. He didn’t look too happy about it, and I could understand why. The college’s position was certainly tricky. Was it supposed to express sympathy for its poor dead professor, struck down in the course of duty? Or was it supposed to stand by its living professor, insisting on his right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty? Somehow it had to take both lines at the same time, and Atwater had the job of stage-managing this acrobatic feat. I didn’t envy him.
“Well, what do you think?” he said to Ann. “They can’t have much of a case, can they? It’s just one of the district attorney’s usual political maneuvers, isn’t it? Getting mileage out of local hostility toward the college. I mean, college professors simply don’t go around killing one another!”
“You’re probably right,” Ann said. “They take their aggressions out on their students—at least, that’s how it was when I went to college. On the other hand, the DA must have something. He’s called a press conference for ten. He wouldn’t be letting himself in for the publicity if he thought he was going to look like a damned fool.”
“What can he have? Have you got any idea?”
“I will pretty soon. In two minutes I’ve got an appointment with the assistant DA who’s handling the case. After that, I’ll go over to the jail and talk to our client.”
“And get him out on bail, I suppose?” I said.
“If I can. I don’t kn
ow yet what position the assistant DA will be taking on that.”
“Who’s the assistant DA?”
“Well, we’ve had a bad break there. They’ve assigned George Wolkowicz to the case.”
I knew what she meant. Wolkowicz was an ambitious young barracuda who clearly had plans to move on from Mesa Grande as soon as possible. He was marking time here, prosecuting the small-fry criminals until he could grab his chance to hobnob with the big-shot criminals in some first-class city.
Ann looked at her watch, then got to her feet. “Time for my meeting. You come with us if you want, Bill. It’s important for us not to be late. Let’s not give our esteemed district attorney and his hatchet man any excuse to enjoy their favorite dish—my scalp.”
CHAPTER 8
OUR MEETING WITH Assistant DA George Wolkowicz took place in room 211. This was an ominous sign of how the district attorney’s office felt about this case.
Room 211 is a small office—nothing in it but a desk and a few hard chairs—where the district attorney or one of his deputies sometimes meets with prisoners, their lawyers, and their relatives. It’s located far away from the spacious, elaborately decorated suite of offices in which these august officials give interviews to the press, entertain community bigwigs, or do business with important allies and adversaries. Room 211 is reserved for people who, in the district attorney’s opinion, are as good as dead.
Wolkowicz was sitting at the desk when we came in. He was a short, dark, wiry man in his early thirties, and belligerence radiated from him as it does from a lot of other small objects: Pekingese dogs, bumblebees, compact cars.
He gave a sharp nod at each of us, frowning a little when he got to Atwater. “Why are you here, counselor? You know the public defender is prohibited by statute from bringing in any outside legal assistance, even if it’s only for consultation purposes.”
Atwater repeated his line about merely being an observer for the college.
This was enough to keep Wolkowicz from kicking him out of the room. The average citizen of Mesa Grande may resent “those rich college punks” and “those radical professors,” but among the people who really count in our town, the people with the money and the power, there are many who went to the college or sent their children there or contribute to it generously. Of the consortium of five millionaires who own The Richelieu hotel, for instance, two of them are on the college’s Board of Trustees.
“Oh sure, the college.” Wolkowicz managed to make “college” sound like a dirty word. He himself had been a scholarship student at a big state university. “Well, no reason why you shouldn’t sit in on this, if it’s okay with Ann. This office is happy to cooperate with the college. We’d love to save it from embarrassment—though you have to admit, that might be a little tough in this case, since it’s one of your professors who got killed and another one who killed him. The college pretty much seems to be involved at both ends, doesn’t it?”
Wolkowicz gave a little laugh, then he put on his hard-hitting assistant-DA manner. “Okay, lady and gentlemen, I’m going to level with you. If the reason you asked for this meeting is you want us to set bail for Russo, you’re wasting your time. This office is going to recommend he stay behind bars until the trial. No bail.”
“Is that your personal decision, George,” Ann asked, “or have you cleared it with Marvin?”
Wolkowicz reddened slightly. He never liked the suggestion that he had to clear things with Marvin McBride. “That’s my decision,” he said. “I’ve got full responsibility for this case, Marvin’s tied up today.”
He didn’t have to go into details. We all knew what District Attorney Marvin McBride was tied up with. The courthouse wits dub him “Sauce” McBride; according to legend, the reason why he tries so few cases personally is that trials have a way of beginning first thing in the morning and McBride never has his hangover under control before noon.
“Why are you taking such a tough line on this?” Ann said. “You’re not dealing with a hardened criminal. Mike Russo is a college professor, his job and his ties are here in Mesa Grande, he hasn’t got any criminal record. There’s absolutely no indication he’d be likely to jump bail.”
“It’s a matter of policy. We always oppose bail when the death penalty could be involved.”
“The death penalty! George, you must be kidding. Your office hardly ever asks for the death penalty.”
“That all depends on how strong a case we’ve got, doesn’t it? If it looks like we can’t miss getting a conviction on the evidence—”
“What evidence? The early edition of the paper didn’t even mention that Mike Russo’s been arrested.”
“That’s right, we won’t be giving out the story of his arrest till Marvin’s press conference in half an hour or so. We wanted to be sure of our ground.”
He gave a little grin, quietly nasty. “I don’t know if the district attorney would approve of my laying out our whole case for you, but since you’ll be reading all about it for yourselves in the paper—We’ll begin with motive, okay? We can establish without a doubt that your client had a lot to gain from Stuart Bellamy’s death.”
“What did he have to gain?”
“You know anything about the system of tenure they’ve got at Mesa Grande College?”
Ann told him she did. It’s the same system they have at most colleges. When young teachers get hired after they’ve received their doctorate, they’re on probation for six years. Then, if the college wants to keep them on, they get tenure—which means, if they don’t actually bomb one of the buildings or rape a student, they’ve got the job for life.
“What you may not know,” Wolkowicz said, “is that Russo and Bellamy were both hired at the same time, six years ago, to teach American literature. There were two tenure-track jobs then, and both of them could’ve been kept on. But a few months ago, on account of the economy and decreasing enrollments in the English department, the college decided it would have to get along with only one of them. The department had a meeting about it over the weekend, and they voted to recommend Bellamy for the job.”
“And Mike Russo knew about this decision?” Ann said.
“Damned right he did. The chairman of the department—his name is Marcus Van Horn—told him about it a couple of days ago. What’s more, he told him it was a close decision, that everybody wanted him, only they just happened to want Bellamy more. In other words, he implied that your client would get the job if Bellamy couldn’t take it.”
“But surely,” said Atwater, “you’re not contending that a man would commit murder simply in order to get hold of—of a professorship?”
What was going through his mind, of course, was that his starting salary in his law firm had been higher than most college professors were making after twenty years.
“It’s a matter of perspective, isn’t it?” Wolkowicz said. “How badly did he want the job? What would be his chances, if he got fired, of getting another one? Van Horn says the job market for college professors is pretty tight nowadays—especially in the field of English. Somebody who doesn’t get tenure, he says, might easily be forced to give up teaching altogether.”
Ann said, “Whether or not that’s a convincing motive, George, is what we’ll argue in court, isn’t it? Offhand I’d say you’d better have a lot more on our client than that, if you expect to get a jury to believe you.”
“How about opportunity?” Wolkowicz said. “We know exactly, to the minute, when the victim was killed. He was talking over the phone at five minutes to eight when the murderer attacked him. Several people heard him talking and noticed the time when he was cut off. You heard him yourself, didn’t you, Dave? And noticed the time?”
I had to admit I did.
“Russo was supposed to be at the Van Horn party at that same time,” Wolkowicz went on, “but he didn’t show up. He didn’t get there till after nine. He says he overslept, but he can’t come up with any corroboration for that.”
“Since he doesn’t
claim he was sleeping with somebody,” Ann said, “I don’t see how you can expect him to produce a witness.”
“Oh, sure. But the fact remains, he can’t prove where he was at the time of the murder.”
“Bellamy probably had a dozen other acquaintances who can’t prove where they were either.”
“Maybe so. But how many of them can we definitely place at the scene of the crime?”
Wolkowicz let us stare at him for a moment, enjoying the effect he was making. Then he went on, “Luckily for us, the ground is still wet out in that neighborhood. The police did some looking around, and they found the impressions of a car that was parked by the curb half a block away from Bellamy’s house. A funny place to park, because there’s no house there, just a vacant lot. Almost like somebody didn’t want any passersby to notice his car in front of the Bellamy house.”
“And you’re saying this parked car was Russo’s?”
“The police made plaster casts of the tire tracks, and also of the tires on your client’s car—it’s a 1981 Dodge two-door. There’s no doubt about it, it’s the same car.”
“The ground’s been wet for almost a week,” Ann said. “Russo may have parked his car near Bellamy’s house days ago. He probably went to visit him over the weekend—”
“It’s a theory,” Wolkowicz said. “The trouble is, Russo tells us he didn’t visit Bellamy over the weekend. What’s more, his front left tire got a blowout yesterday morning, and he bought a new one and had it put on late yesterday afternoon. And sure enough, the front left tire mark near Bellamy’s house matches up perfectly with Russo’s new tire. Sorry, but you can’t get around it. Your client was out there last night—and we all know what he was doing there, don’t we?”
He settled back in his chair, and nobody said anything for a while.
Then Ann said, “What about the time of death? Does it square with the phone conversation?”
“As close as it has to,” Wolkowicz said. “The medical examiner did a preliminary examination last night. Pending the autopsy, he says the deceased died from massive hemorrhaging, fracture, and concussion. He might’ve died instantaneously, or it might have taken him a while, head wounds being notoriously tricky. But in any case, he hadn’t been dead more than an hour when he was found.”