by D. W. Buffa
I moved to the far corner of the second counsel table, the one where Raymond St. John was sitting wondering what I was going to do. The witness now had to turn away from the jury to look at me. The jury could look directly at me, but if they looked at the witness at all, they could see only the side of his face. I started pacing slowly back and forth, a pensive expression on my face, doing what I could to make the witness, and the jury, believe the question I was about to ask had a high order of significance. In a jury trial, everything you did, every movement, every gesture, was important. It was how a jury learned to trust you. What had started, years before, as conscious duplicity had now become second nature. There were times I even thought it real.
“Agent Todorovich, you’ve been in the Secret Service for more than twenty years, but this was your first involvement in a murder investigation, is that correct?
“That’s right.”
“You’re trained to protect the president, not investigate a crime?”
“Yes, but—”
“You picked up the knife, the knife you say had been in the hand of the defendant, didn’t you?”
“Yes; no one else was there. I wanted to make sure Senator—I mean, the defendant—didn’t try to get it, didn’t try—”
“He had put it down, the moment you told him to. Your gun was drawn. You—”
“You’re right; maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But—”
“You didn’t put on any gloves, the sort police detectives wear to avoid contaminating evidence, did you?” I asked, still pacing back and forth, but faster with each step I took. “You didn’t think to preserve the evidence—the knife, the murder weapon—in a way that would not distort, would not destroy, whatever fingerprints there might have been?”
He did not like the question. He would have taken a bullet for the president—any president.
“I’m not questioning your courage, Agent Todorovich. No one doubts that. What I’m questioning is the reliability of the evidence.”
He had an answer to that, an answer that was as obvious to me as it was to him.
“The knife was in his hand; he had blood, the president’s blood, all over him. And he confessed. So what difference does it make if—”
“The difference between evidence that is properly collected and evidence that is not should be obvious to anyone, Agent Todorovich, and not just to a trained detective. The meaning of that difference in this case remains to be seen.”
I stopped pacing, and with my right hand sliding across the front edge of the prosecution’s table, moved slowly toward the jury box. I stood right next to it, tapping my fingers on the railing, and looked directly at him.
“You were part of the president’s detail from the beginning, weren’t you, beginning when he first got the nomination?”
“That’s right. Almost two years.”
“You were in a position to observe his behavior, his conduct; you were in the room sometimes when he was talking to people, am I right?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Did you consider him stable, in complete control of his faculties?”
“Objection!” cried St. John. “The witness isn’t a trained psychologist, he isn’t a physician.”
“We make judgements about this sort of thing all the time, your Honor,” I insisted. “Your Honor isn’t a trained psychologist, you aren’t a physician, but you have, on more than one occasion told me, told everyone, that I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“That’s true, Mr. Antonelli,” remarked Patterson, leaning forward with a shrewd grin. “But I have never questioned whether you were ‘stable,’ or in ‘control of your faculties.’ Though, now that I think of it, perhaps I should have. Perhaps later in the trial. As to the prosecution’s objection, I’ll overrule it, so long as it is understood that this is not expert testimony.”
It took a moment for Todorovich to consider how he wanted to respond.
“He was always polite and straightforward with me, and with the other agents. He knew we had a job to do. He never questioned anything we did, or anything we asked him to do.”
I took a moment to let him consider my disappointment in his response.
“I’ll ask you again. As you watched him over the course of two full years, did you think he was always stable, or were there times when he seemed erratic, impulsive, not in control of himself? Let me be more specific. Did you ever see him go off into a towering rage, screaming at people?”
“That could happen,” he said, watching me with careful eyes.
“That did happen, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“More than once?”
“Yes, more than once.”
“How often?”
“I really couldn’t say; I couldn’t—”
“All the time, wasn’t it, almost every day? Isn’t that the truth, Agent Todorovich? Isn’t that what happened? Wasn’t he almost always in a rage against somebody—someone on his staff who hadn’t done what he thought they should have done, or someone he saw on television? Isn’t it true, isn’t it a fact, that on at least three separate occasions he broke a television set, threw something at it, because he was so angry at what someone was saying about him?”
“That happened,” he allowed. “He could get upset.”
I looked at him, incredulous at the way he was trying to dismiss the significance of what Bridges had done.
“Upset? Is that what you call it? Upset, when he shatters a television set; upset, when he reduces one of his press secretaries to tears because he didn’t like the way she had done her hair, didn’t like the dress she wore, when she briefed reporters after he sent out another one of his famous incoherent attacks on what he had read that morning in the New York Times! Upset—”
“Objection! Perhaps, your Honor, Mr. Antonelli might try not to become quite so upset himself,” remarked St. John with a slight, mocking smile.
“I agree,” I replied before Patterson could think to make a ruling. “I shouldn’t be upset.” Pausing, I looked from the bench to the jury. “I apologize. There is never any excuse to lose your temper, never any excuse to throw things, never an excuse to berate, to ridicule, someone who is just trying to help you. And I promise,” I said, turning back to the witness before St. John could object again, “not to get upset, so long as you simply tell the truth. You testified that when you entered the president’s cabin, he was lying on the floor, and that Senator Fitzgerald was standing next to him, correct?”
The speed with which I had moved from the issue of the president’s stability to what Todorovich had seen threw him off. His eyes widened with surprise before he was able to focus his attention on the question I had just asked. He was not sure he had heard it right.
“The president,” I repeated, “he was on the floor?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“He wasn’t in his chair, behind his desk?”
“No, he was on the floor.”
“Walter Bridges was a large man, was he not? Over six feet tall, well over, what? Two hundred thirty, two hundred forty pounds?”
“That’s about right, maybe even a little over two forty.”
“And there was blood on the body, and on the floor next to him. There was also blood—the jury has been shown the pictures—on the chair and on the desk, is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“That’s what you saw, what you observed, when you came into the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Did you then assume that the president had been stabbed to death while he was sitting in his chair and that he had then fallen forward, and that was the reason he was on the floor?”
“That’s right. It had to have happened that way.”
“Just a few questions more,” I assured him in a friendly voice. “You were with the president for two years, which means you were also in fairly close proximity to the people who were close to him, people on the staff who spent time with him every day, who tr
aveled with him when he made a trip, like the one to San Francisco, on Air Force One.” He started to answer, but I raised my hand and continued with my question. “What was the opinion of the defendant, Kevin Fitzgerald? Did the president or those around him think Fitzgerald was someone they could work with, someone who had an open mind, willing to listen to what they had to say?”
“Just the opposite. They thought—they all thought, from the president on down—that the senator would oppose anything and everything. They thought he was likely to be the candidate they would have to face in the next election, that everything he did was because he wanted to be president himself.”
The first rule of cross-examination, as every halfway decent lawyer knows, is never ask a question if you don’t know the answer the witness is going to give. But this was not a case that could be played by the rules. The question I had was too tempting to worry whether I might be wrong in what I could only guess would be the answer.
“Tell us, Agent Todorovich, isn’t it true that one of the times Walter Bridges broke the screen on a television set he was watching the defendant, Kevin Fitzgerald, say something he did not like?”
Todorovich scratched the side of his prominent, smooth shaven chin.
“I don’t know; it might have been.”
I turned and started back to my place at the counsel table, and then, as if I had just remembered something I had wanted to ask, a minor matter of no great importance, I stopped and looked again at the witness.
“In which hand was the defendant holding the knife?”
He had thought he was finished and had started to relax.
“The right hand or the left?” I insisted.
“Right hand.”
“You’re sure?”
He wondered why it was important. He looked a little worried.
“Yes, I’m sure. He had it in his right hand.”
“And was he holding it with the blade pointed up or pointed down?’
I was not asking questions just for the sake of asking them, but neither did I have a clear purpose in mind. Fitzgerald had killed the president; how he had been holding the weapon was in that sense irrelevant, but I had to find out everything I could, perhaps stumble on something that would add some force to the argument that he had been compelled to do what he did, that there were convincing reasons why, instead of murder, this was death by necessity, that Fitzgerald had acted to save the country, that it was, to use the phrase that had never been used in an American court of law, not homicide, but tyrannicide. There was almost no chance this was going to be successful, which left no alternative but to search for even the slightest flaw in the prosecution’s case, something on which to raise a doubt, something that, in closing arguments, I could use to give the jury a reason to think that a guilty verdict was not as obvious as it seemed. Had Fitzgerald been holding the knife pointed up or pointed down? I made it sound like it was the most important issue in the case, the issue on which everything else in the trial would ultimately depend. The jurors leaned forward, waiting to hear what the witness would say.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted.
“You’re not sure?” I asked, as if that one admission would cost the prosecution any chance they had at a conviction. “Not sure. But you saw him over the body, the knife in his hand, and you don’t…? Never mind. We can come back to that later on. You testified,” I said, moving back to where I had stood before, in front of the jury box, “that you then got the defendant off the plane.”
“Not alone; I had help.”
“Help? Did you need help? Did Senator Fitzgerald try to resist, try to escape?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“He did what you told him to do. That’s what you said before. He put down the knife—whichever way he had been holding it—and waited while you finished what you had to do. And then you, with the help of some others, took him off the plane. Where did you take him?”
“To a hangar, the other side of the airport. We cordoned off the area, made sure there was no one in the vicinity who was not authorized to be there. We held him there.”
“That’s where he was interrogated?”
“No, we held him there until the decision had been made where to take him.”
“And that was where—to jail in the city?”
“To an undisclosed location.”
“You can disclose it now.”
“No, I can’t. I don’t know where he was taken. I was not part of that.”
I looked at the jury.
“An undisclosed location, and you don’t know where it was. You don’t know who conducted the interrogation, who interviewed the defendant? You don’t know anything about this confession the prosecution made so much about in its opening statement?”
“Only what I’ve heard.”
“What you heard?” I asked with a glance full of skepticism.
“That he confessed to what he did, what I saw him do.”
“Bending over a body with that knife you don’t remember how he held? Yes, we all remember what you said about that. Just one last question. Did you ever hear the president, or any one around him, express any fear that Senator Fitzgerald might be a threat, someone who might commit an act of violence?”
“No, never.”
I walked back to my chair, and for the second time changed my mind. Todorovich had one hand on the arm of the witness chair, starting to get to his feet.
“You came running to the cabin because you heard the president’s chief of staff, Richard Ellison, shouting for help. He was there, in the cabin, at the same time as the defendant, Senator Fitzgerald. He was there before you. How much before: a few seconds, longer?”
“As soon as he opened the door, he started yelling and I was only a few short steps away. I dashed past him. He was still at the door.”
“I see. And you came through the same doorway, the one that opens out into the corridor, not the one on the other side, the one that connects with the president’s bedroom. Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right, the same door.”
“And when you called for help?”
“Everywhere at once.”
The moment I was finally finished, Raymond St. John was on his feet, calling his next witness. There was something clocklike in the precision with which he organized everything in the order of time. The first witness, Jonathan Reece, had told the beginning of the story, the opening chapter, how the villain of the piece, Kevin Fitzgerald, had made his first appearance on stage. The second witness, Richard Ellison, had read aloud the second chapter of the tale, what Fitzgerald had done. The next witness, Milo Todorovich, had in the third chapter given all the details of the outline given in the chapter just before. It was a simple, straightforward chronology, a story anyone could follow. The killer had come on board, and the killer had killed, and though there had not yet been a witness to say so, everyone watching, from the twelve members of the jury to the millions watching on television, the killer had admitted what he had done. The president was dead. Kevin Fitzgerald had murdered him. That would have been sufficient in other times and in other places to order the defendant’s immediate execution, but this was an American trial and even the obvious had to be proven.
Dr. Hubert Rudner was wearing a new suit. The trial was on television and he wanted to look his best. His practice may have been limited to dead bodies in the morgue, but he had friends and relatives who were sure to tune in. As the county coroner, he had testified in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of trials before, but he seemed stiff and self-conscious, every word prefaced by a hesitation. He did not want to make a mistake, say something that might be misconstrued. Slightly bald, with a large, off-center nose, and a crooked, off-center mouth, he had begun to perspire from almost the moment St. John asked his first question.
“Did you examine the body of President Bridges?”
“Yes,” replied Dr. Rudner, his gaze wandering past St. John to the crowd behind him. “I did.”
“Were
you able to determine the cause of death?”
“Yes. The president—I mean, the decedent—was killed by a stab wound to the throat. It severed the carotid artery. Two stab wounds, two to the throat.”
“Two in the same place?” asked St. John patiently. “The same side of the throat?”
“No, not exactly,” he replied.
His eyes kept moving between St. John and the courtroom crowd. Casually, with his hands on his hips, staring down at the floor as if he were thinking how best to ask the next question, St. John took two steps to his left. He was directly in front of the witness, better able to hold his attention.
“One stab wound to the artery, the other…?”
“The larynx.”
“Were there other stab wounds on the body?”
“Several others, in the stomach, in the chest.”
“Were you able to determine from the nature of the wounds the kind of weapon used to inflict them?”
“A knife, a knife with a serrated blade.”
St. John walked to the clerk’s table, below and just off to the side of the bench. The clerk, an Hispanic woman with a friendly face and soulful eyes, handed him a cellophane bag already marked as an exhibit. He handed it to the coroner.
“Is this knife consistent with your description?”
After a brief examination, the coroner agreed it was. Other witnesses would be called to establish that it was the knife found at the crime scene and that the blood found on it matched the blood of the president. And that was all. The coroner had given the prosecution what it needed, proof that Walter Bridges had actually died, proof that he had died of wounds inflicted by a knife. I was not interested in anything he had just proven.
“As part of your autopsy, you weighed the body?”
“Yes.”
“How much did Walter Bridges weigh?”
Hubert Rudner glanced down at a notebook he had brought with him. He was nothing if not meticulous.
“Two hundred forty-seven pounds.”
“He was how tall?”
Another quick glance before he answered.
“Six feet, two and a half inches tall.”