Dante's Poison

by Lynne Raimondo

  I did remember. The story had appeared under Klutsky’s byline and the headline WADSWORTH MAN ON THE HOOK FOR MURDERING WIFE. “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “The prosecutor? Adam Frost. Though he doesn’t live up to it. He looked like he was going to lose his lunch while he was publishing photos of the remains to the jury. The husband had a cooler full of them, all neatly separated into gallon freezer bags. Frost’s uncle is the head of the Waukegan Democratic Organization, which is probably the only reason he got the job. The kid has all the killer instincts of an earthworm. He won’t give you any trouble.”

  I hoped not.

  “You know the lady we’re here for?” Klutsky asked, switching topics.

  “Never met or seen her.”

  “Too bad. Beautiful woman. Think Katharine Hepburn with the same DAR pedigree. Brooks here can give you the scoop.” Brooks, it turned out, was the columnist for the Tribune who’d been drinking with Rory Gallagher on the night he died and had done a freelance article about Jane for the Chicago Bar Journal not long ago.

  “Do you want the Cliff Notes or the full-blown?” Brooks asked when we’d been introduced.

  “Cliff Notes to begin,” I said.

  “Oldest daughter of three. Father was classics professor at the University of Chicago. Mother a curator at the Oriental Institute. Family home in Kenwood. Valedictorian of her high-school class at the Lab School. Summa cum laude from Princeton. Harvard Law Review. Artist, too. Does some kind of glass sculpture.”

  “Nice résumé,” I said. “Does she have a personality to go with it?”

  Brooks leaned in and lowered his voice confidingly. “Well, that’s the thing. Though you couldn’t tell it from the interview—I mean, the woman could charm the pants off the Reverend Billy Graham—she has a reputation as a real ice princess. Only comes alive in front of a jury. And lots of enemies at the State’s Attorney’s. Matter of fact, I couldn’t find any of her old colleagues who liked her. Too much on her high horse and not shy about ripping into associates when they screwed up. I had to go easy on her in the article—some of the stories I heard painted her as a real Medusa—but the general feeling was you didn’t ever want to cross her.”

  I was surprised. “That’s not what I heard. I was under the impression she was some kind of latter-day Joan of Arc.”

  “Who, as you’ll recall, also got burned at the stake,” Brooks said.

  “Is that what you think this murder charge is about?” I asked him. “A witch hunt?”

  “All I know is, nobody shed any tears when she upped and quit the office a few years back,” Brooks answered. “And they were all as tight-mouthed as clams about the reason.”

  I was about to ask Klutsky and Brooks more questions when Hallie showed up, bringing a tall, fragrant individual whom she introduced to all around as Bjorn Dixon. He gave me his hand, and I observed he was the pinky ring type, in addition to the flowery cologne type.

  “Cheers,” Bjorn drawled, sounding like Melissa Singh’s long-lost cousin. “Glad we’re finally having this meet-up.”

  “Balliol or All Souls?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

  “Neither,” he laughed. “But it goes over well with the ladies. Here’s my card,” he said, reaching out and slipping one into the breast pocket of my jacket. He paused to finger the material like I was a store mannequin. “Nice suit.”

  “Thanks,” I said, brushing his hand off. “I’ll be sure to tell my Savile Row man that you liked it.”

  I turned my attention to Hallie. “Where do you want me?”

  “At counsel table. And we’d better get over there now. Bjorn, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here, unless you can find room in the spectator section.”

  “No worries,” Bjorn said. “I’ve always preferred dress circle to stalls.”

  “Where did you pick him up?” I hissed in Hallie’s ear while she walked me over. “He sounds like a cross between Prince Charles and Simon Cowell.”

  “I like it. And why do you care? Unless you’re planning on dating him, too?”

  I was about to say something foolish when the clerk bellowed, “All rise! The Circuit Court of Cook County, the Honorable Eugene Cudahay presiding, is now in session.”

  Hallie and I hastened to take up our positions at counsel table. The judge ascended the dais, and Jane was brought in from the lockup behind the bench.

  I’m not a believer in premonitions, at least in the mystical sense. Too often they seem like post hoc explanations for unfortunate events, a way to avoid the terrifying proposition that we really are alone in a cruel and random universe. But I do believe the subconscious “sees” more than our waking minds, and that somewhere in the primitive regions of the brain a switch gets turned on when we feel danger coming. If so, a siren had begun to wail in my head the moment Jane entered the room. Before I’d even heard her voice or pressed her flesh—in other words before I had a clue to go on besides the matinee-idol descriptions I’d been given—I knew this woman was trouble.

  She crossed the room with a deputy sheriff and sat down to Hallie’s left. I had the distinct impression her eyes were on me the whole time. Though I could have been entirely wrong, she seemed fixated on me—and not in a promising way.

  After the case name and number were called and the state had presented its verified petition in support of a no-bail order, Judge Cudahay admonished counsel to keep the hearing short and to the point. “This is a bond hearing, not a reading from the Megillah.” Everyone in the room dutifully laughed. “The only issue before me is whether bail should be denied or set, and if so, in what amount. In other words, I expect to be home in time for an early dinner.”

  “Certainly, Your Honor,” ASA Frost piped up. “We’ll be as succinct as possible.”

  “Get to it then,” Cudahay advised him.

  Everything I’d heard about Frost was right: he was greener than the grass over a septic tank.

  He led off by calling a “life and death” witness, Andrew Urquhart, Gallagher’s nephew and only living relative. I’d learned from Hallie, who loved to talk trial strategy, that the prosecution always called “life and death” witnesses in murder trials to establish the self-evident fact of the victim’s demise. Hearing from a close relative—preferably one who will break down, sob, and have to be carried out of the courtroom after being reminded of their loved one’s tragic end—puts a face on the victim and helps get the jury invested in the proceedings. There was no jury today, but Frost no doubt wanted to lead with a splash.

  It turned out to be more like a trickle.

  Urquhart was sworn and stated his name for the record. He affirmed that he was the only child of Gallagher’s sole sibling, a sister who had died with her husband in 1972 on United Flight 553, notorious for having crashed into a row of bungalows while attempting to land at Midway Airport. Urquhart was five at the time, and being without close relatives on his father’s side, had been taken in by Gallagher’s aging parents. At that point, Gallagher was already in college, but he treated the younger boy like the little brother he’d never had. When Gallagher’s parents also passed in the eighties, the journalist paid for Urquhart’s schooling and footed the start-up costs for the chain of electronics stores he now owned, scattered around the southwest suburbs. “He was like a second father to me,” Urquhart said, with a catch in his throat that sounded as genuine as paste jewelry.

  The sob story did not impress Judge Cudahay. “Counsel, what is the purpose of calling this witness?” he demanded of Frost.

  “I, uh . . . was hoping to establish that the victim was, ahem, dead and properly identified.”

  “I’m sure the defense would be willing to stipulate to that fact, isn’t that right, Ms. Sanchez?”

  Hallie rose quickly beside me. “We most certainly would, Your Honor.”

  “Then I’m sure we won’t be needing any more of Mr. Urquhart’s testimony today, will we, Mr. Frost?”

  “Well, if the court isn’t interested . . .�
� Frost sputtered. Cudahay must have glared at him because Frost’s next words were “I mean, sure.”

  “The witness is excused, then.”

  Hallie sat back down, and though she didn’t say anything—outwardly gloating over opposing counsel’s missteps was a no-no—I could tell she thought we were off to a good start.

  Frost then read into the record the sworn statement of Gallagher’s cardiologist, Dr. Catherine Climpson, who recounted that she had administered a stress test and an EKG on Gallagher the year before, after the deceased had been referred to her complaining of shortness of breath. The results were both abnormal and alarming. Climpson had advised an immediate change in diet and lifestyle to little avail. When Gallagher next visited her six months later, he was showing all the signs of advanced coronary artery disease, but except for a course of statins, was following none of her health recommendations. In accordance with her professional responsibilities, Climpson had kept the results of her examinations confidential but could not, of course, say with whom Gallagher may have shared them.

  Frost’s next witness was the medical examiner, Dr. James Lubbock. The examination was painful, proceeding in fits and starts and filled with leading questions, but except for a single hearsay objection—when Frost tried to elicit the reason for the exhumation request—Hallie was quiet, probably having surmised that she’d earn more points with the judge by letting Frost crater on his own. It ended with Lubbock’s opinion that Gallagher had died of cardiac arrest, in all likelihood brought on by his ingestion of the prescription antipsychotic Lucitrol.

  It was then Hallie’s turn to cross-examine. She got up and walked over to the witness box. When judges permitted it, Hallie liked to get as close to a potentially hostile witness as possible.

  “Dr. Lubbock, I understand that no autopsy was performed on Mr. Gallagher’s body immediately after his death. Is that common?”

  Lubbock answered, “Due to staffing shortages, our current policy is not to perform an autopsy on persons known to have suffered from heart or lung disease, or to have abused drugs or alcohol.”

  “And did Mr. Gallagher fit one or both of those criteria?”

  “The former, certainly.”

  “What about the latter?”

  “I’m not sure I’m in a position to say,” Lubbock tried.

  “Come now, doctor. Surely you examined his liver?”

  Though clearly loath to admit it, Lubbock conceded that the deceased’s liver showed signs of early-stage cirrhosis.

  “Going back to your current policy on autopsies, are there any exceptions?”

  “Yes, if the family specifically requests it.”

  “But no such request was made here?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “So his corpse was not examined by your office until almost two weeks after his death.”

  “That is correct,” Lubbock answered.

  “After the body had been embalmed by an undertaker.”

  Lubbock was again forced to agree.

  “And been buried in the ground for nearly eight days.”

  “Yes.”

  “At that point, am I correct in assuming that substantial decomposition had taken place?”

  “Yes, although the rate of decomposition was slowed somewhat by the embalming procedure.”

  “Am I also correct in assuming that embalming can interfere with toxicology samples?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “And that decomposition would also affect the quality of the samples taken?”

  “That is also correct.”

  “For example, content that may have been present in the decedent’s stomach?”

  “Yes, decomposition usually begins in the stomach and intestinal passages.”

  “Were you able, then, to draw any inferences about when the decedent took the drug you say killed him?”

  Lubbock paused here as though he wished he didn’t have to answer. “Not from the stomach contents. But given the amount present in blood and liver samples, we believe it was ingested in the thirty-six-hour period prior to his death.”

  “Thirty-six hours,” Hallie repeated for emphasis. “So you cannot say whether he took the drug just before he suffered a heart attack?”

  “No.”

  “Or earlier on the same day.”

  “No.”

  “Or even a full day before he died.”

  “That’s right,” Lubbock conceded in a pained voice.

  Having inflicted this damage, Hallie wisely didn’t challenge Lubbock’s claim that Lucitrol was the immediate cause of Gallagher’s heart attack. “No further questions,” she said, returning to her seat. I scribbled “nice job!” on the legal pad in front of her. Hallie wrote something on the pad too and passed it to Jane, who added a comment and silently passed it back. Naturally, I felt irked to be left out of the conversation.

  Frost’s next witnesses were patrons of Gene & Georgetti’s, who could attest to overhearing Jane and Gallagher arguing heatedly on the evening of August 26, mere hours before he died. First, a Mr. and Mrs. John Dwyer, suburbanites from Gurnee, who had dined at the restaurant on their way to an 8:00 p.m. performance of Les Misérables at the Oriental Theater and were just finishing up their $24.95 Filet Florentine when the fracas began. Neither one of the couple could say what it had been about, though Mrs. Dwyer was certain she had overheard the defendant hissing, “You won’t get away with it!” and the name “Lucy” repeated several times. The disturbance was sufficient to cause Mr. Dwyer severe indigestion, which had all but destroyed his enjoyment of the meal. “If you ask me, I deserve a refund.”

  Next, Walter Lasorda (no relation to Tommy), the bartender, who had watched in amusement as Jane stood and dumped the remains of a carafe of house red over Gallagher’s head before strolling over to the valet station and requesting her car. “She looked damned pleased with herself,” Lasorda chuckled. “And I was enjoying it too. Gallagher never tipped any more than a dime.” Last, the waiter, Vincent Iglesias, who had rushed over to provide a towel to Gallagher, who seemed nonplussed and was still munching contentedly on his fried calamari appetizer notwithstanding the Chianti Classico now trickling down onto the floor beside him. “Hormones,” Gallagher had remarked to Iglesias as the latter was mopping up the mess and laying out fresh table linen.

  Since she hadn’t yet interviewed these witnesses, Hallie did almost no cross-examination—on cross, she’d explained to me many times, you almost never ask a question for which you don’t already know the answer—simply eliciting the facts that Gallagher and Jane had been together at the table the whole time, that Gallagher had himself left the restaurant around 8:30 p.m., and that after being bused from the table, the glass Gallagher had been drinking from had joined hundreds of other indistinguishable containers in the restaurant’s industrial-grade dishwashers.

  Frost proceeded to read into the record the statement of Beverly Van Wagner, age sixty-seven, a retired Chicago public-school teacher and widow, who a little before 9:00 p.m. that same evening had taken time out from Storage Wars to walk Snoopy, her Bichon Havanese, just in time to observe a tall, redheaded woman entering Gallagher’s townhome on the fourteen hundred block of South Federal. Despite the woman’s attempt to hide behind sunglasses and a scarf, Van Wagner claimed to have gotten a good look at her because Snoopy had chosen that precise moment to stop and sniff at a lamppost on the adjoining parkway and thereafter decided the time was ripe to empty his bowels. Being of an advanced age and constipated from stealing a chocolate bar earlier in the day, Snoopy had required a long time to complete his business, thereby giving Mrs. Van Wagner plenty of time to observe Gallagher’s clandestine visitor. The woman removed a set of keys from her overcoat and, glancing around once or twice—“like she was afraid of being noticed”—let herself in. After reading of Gallagher’s death in the newspaper and volunteering her information to the authorities, Van Wagner had been asked to participate in a lineup at the police station and had easily picked
out Jane from among the photographs she was shown. According to Frost, Van Wagner was unable to appear in court that morning because of an urgent, last-minute call to babysit her grandchildren in Fort Myers, a thousand miles away. I didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Next, we heard from the police detective, Garrett Yanowski, who took the courtroom through his search of Jane’s office and the discovery of the Lucitrol samples and disc-wiping software, as well as his inspection of Gallagher’s townhome. On Yanowski’s cross Hallie violated her own rule, hoping to get more information out of him than could be gleaned from the bare-bones police report.

  “Detective, when you were searching the deceased’s home, was there any indication that my client was present there on the night in question?”

  “What do you mean by ‘indication’?” Yanowski asked, playing dumb.

  “Well, for example, I assume you dusted the location for fingerprints. Did you find any belonging to Ms. Barrett?”

  “A few. Mostly in and around the bedroom.” There were scattered titters across the courtroom.

  “Quiet,” Judge Cudahay growled.

  “I take it you cannot tell us when those fingerprints were left.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Were there any fingerprints belonging to Ms. Barrett in or around the deceased’s computer station?”

  Yanowski allowed as there were none. “Though she may have been wearing gloves.”

  Hallie asked that the last response be stricken from the record as nonresponsive, and Judge Cudahay so instructed the court reporter.

  Hallie next proceeded to the questions we had worked on together. “Detective, will you describe for us the procedure that the police used during Mrs. Van Wagner’s purported identification of my client?”

  “Sure. What would you like to know?” Yanowski asked, going out of his way to make this difficult.

  “Well, let’s start with who conducted the lineup. Was it you personally?”

  “Certainly. I was the principal investigating officer.”

  “Precisely,” Hallie commented for emphasis. “And at that point had you already made up your mind to arrest my client?”