Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (43 page)

I came around the corner, anxious to get home, and thought at first I was having the first real hallucination of my life. At the top of the knoll, at the end of the gated drive, the house looked like it had been set on fire. Every light in every room, upstairs, downstairs, must have been turned on. Then, as I tried to convince myself I was seeing things, I heard it, sweeping down across the dancing shadows on the rolling green grass lawn, the hard-beating, pulse-pounding music of a jazz piano player, his fingers flying, crashing, on the keys. When I reached the door, the music was deafening, and when I got inside I had to hold my hands over my ears.

Barefoot, wearing only a pink nightgown, Jennifer was pushing the vacuum cleaner across the living room rug, her head bobbing up and down in time with the music. I dashed to the CD

player and turned it off. The noise of the vacuum cleaner filled the room and at first Jennifer did not seem to notice the difference. Then, she pulled up straight and looked around. A huge smile flashed on her face when she saw me standing there watching her. She switched off the vacuum cleaner.

“I thought I’d do a little housework while you were gone,” she explained, holding the black cord in her hand as if she meant to continue. “I cleaned the bathroom; I cleaned the kitchen; and after I vacuum in here …” she said, looking past me toward the dining room.

“It’s a little late to be doing this, isn’t it?” I asked as gently as I could. I took the cord out of her hand and hung it over the handle. “Why don’t we go to bed now.”

Her eyes were wild with a kind of eager excitement, as if there was something she could not wait to tell me. She put her hand on the side of my face and then reached around my neck and rose up on her toes. “I’m so happy,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m so glad we found each other again. I’ve never felt this good in my life.” She let go of my neck and took hold of my hand. “Come on,” she said, as she led me toward the stairs. “Let’s go to bed.

“Carry me,” she said as we got to the top of the stairs. “Make love to me,” she said when we got to the bedroom door.

We tumbled down on the bed together, pulling and tearing at each other’s clothes, and lost all separate sense of ourselves in the white-hot act of love. At the end, when there was nothing left of me, I collapsed in her warm, smooth arms and staring into the darkness drifted into a wordless dream that had neither a beginning nor an end.

I woke up with a start and thought I had overslept, but it was still dark. Pulling the covers over my shoulder, I turned on my side and reached out to put my arm around Jennifer. She was too far away, and I moved closer and reached again. My hand fell across her pillow and then down across the sheet. She was not there.

I found her downstairs in the library, her legs tucked under her, curled up at the same end of the sofa, reading the same paperback novel she had been reading before. As soon as she heard me, she jumped to her feet.

“What time is it?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

She was wide awake. “A little after three. I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? I tried to be quiet.”

I cinched tighter the terry cloth robe and squinted at the clock on the fireplace mantel to see if it was really the middle of the night.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said as she took my hand in both of hers.

For some reason, it struck me funny. “You couldn’t sleep? After what we did? I slept like a dead man. When I woke up and it was all dark I thought at first I must have slept straight through the day.”

We sat down next to each other on the sofa. An empty cup with a damp tea bag on the saucer was on the coffee table.

“Did you sleep at all?”

She was sitting on the edge of the sofa, wearing a blue silk robe, her hands in her lap. Her eyes darted around the room, staring first at one thing, then another. Her mouth twitched nervously at the corners and she started to rub her hands, stroking each finger in turn, over and over again.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.

“You’re not getting any sleep at all, are you?”

Biting on her lip, she grabbed my hand. “I’m all right,” she insisted. Peering into my eyes, she tried to convince me it was true, but before she could say anything, she started to cry.

I tried to comfort her as best I could. “Everything is going to be all right. Nothing is going to happen to you,” I promised.

She held me as tight as she could, her body tense and trembling, gasping for breath between her sobs. After a while her fingers loosened their grip around my neck and, laying her head on my shoulder, she started to breathe normally.

“Sorry,” she said as she sat up and wiped away a tear. “I don’t know why I did that. I feel fine, just fine.”

“You don’t have to lie to me about this,” I told her. “There’s something wrong, and we have to deal with it. You need to see a doctor.”

I helped her up, and with my arm around her waist we climbed the stairs and went back to bed. She lay with her arm across my chest and her face next to my neck, and until the first rose-colored light of morning I held her while she slept, listening to her soft, peaceful breath, and never once closed my eyes.

Jennifer drove me to the courthouse a little before nine under a seamless blue sky. The streets in the city were jammed with cars and the sidewalks were crowded with brisk-walking men and women hurrying to work. The air was crisp and clean, filled with the sunlit smell of summer, and Mt. Hood, miles away, seemed to be just the other side of the river.

She passed the courthouse, turned the corner, and pulled over next to the park. Whatever had happened to her during the night had to have been an aberration brought on by sheer exhaustion.

She was fine now; there was nothing wrong. She looked at me with that same mischievous self-confident sparkle in her eyes as she leaned back against the door, waiting for me to reach over and kiss her goodbye.

“You’ll see the doctor today?” I reminded her as I started to get out.

She dismissed it as unimportant, but finally promised that she would. I stood watching her drive off, and found myself wondering if she really would. It was the first time she had ever told me anything I did not quite believe.

Twenty-five

_______

The sound of his name still echoing in the hushed stillness of the crowded courtroom, Morris Bingham stepped quickly to the bench. Always pleasant, always polite, he glanced at me, and then at Cassandra Loescher. Neither the defense nor the prosecution had anything to bring before the court. A brief nod told his clerk she could bring in the jury.

While we waited, I turned to Danny and admired the way he looked, all dressed up in a dark blue suit and tie. “You’re looking very sharp today, Danny,” I assured him.

He sat with his shoulders hunched forward and his hands plunged between his legs. He looked at me with a bashful smile and took a deep breath. “Thank you,” he said, letting it out.

Under the watchful gaze of several hundred strangers, the jury came in, wearing solemn faces and a dignified air, twelve normal people who seemed to have no hesitation about deciding whether someone else would live or die. Some of them stood waiting while the others squeezed past them to get to their places in the jury box. I looked down at the table and ran the palm of my hand over the smooth leather surface of the attache case Jennifer had given me.

“It’s very nice,” said a voice on my right. “It looks brand-new,”

Cassandra Loescher said. She leaned closer. “I’ll bet I know who got it for you.”

The jury was seated and Bingham greeted them by reminding them where we had left off and what was coming next.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday, we finished with the opening statements. Let me remind you again that what the attorneys say in their opening statements is not evidence of anything. The only evidence you are to consider is evidence introduced by the testimony of witnesses. This morning, the prosecution will begin its case by calling its first witness. Ms. Loescher, who is the prosecutor in this case, will examine each witness she calls by asking that witness specific questions. This is called direct examination. When she has finished asking questions of her witness, Mr. Antonelli, the attorney for the defense, may, if he wishes, ask questions of his own. This is called cross-examination.

At the end of the prosecution’s case, the defense will have an opportunity to call witnesses of its own. The defense will then ask questions first and the prosecution will be allowed to cross-examine.”

Pausing, he tilted his smallish round head slightly to the side in the attitude of someone about to impart something of particular importance.

“There will be a time—and you witnessed several occasions during opening statements—when an objection will be made either to a question that is asked or an answer that is given. These objections raise issues of law, issues which it is my responsibility to decide. Sometimes you will hear me sustain an objection; sometimes you will hear me overrule an objection. You should not assume that these rulings mean that I have in any way formed an opinion about the merits of this case one way or the other. You certainly must not assume that I have any feelings either of an-imosity or partiality toward either of the lawyers. Just because I disagree with an argument made by one lawyer or the other does not mean that I think he or she has the weaker case.”

He let them consider the meaning of what he had said while he arranged some papers he had brought with him. “Ms. Loescher,”

he asked, looking up, “is the prosecution ready to begin?”

She was wearing a blue print dress. Her hair was pulled up from behind her neck and stacked on top of her head. “Yes, your honor,” she said as she rose straight up from her chair.

“You may call your first witness.”

She turned her head toward the door at the back of the courtroom. “The prosecution calls Sharon Arnold.”

In her early thirties, with long black hair and dark, flirtatious eyes, the first witness had worked as Quincy Griswald’s judicial assistant for a little over four years. She had found his body in the parking structure, slumped against his car.

“How did you happen to be in the parking structure at that particular time?” Loescher asked in a calm, steady voice.

One leg crossed over the other, Sharon Arnold waited until Loescher’s eyes left the jury and came around to her. “I didn’t have my car that day. I left it at the dealer’s that morning for servicing. Judge Griswald was giving me a ride.”

With her hand on the railing of the jury box, Loescher tried to fill in the gap. “Were you going to meet him at his car?”

The question was met with a blank look. Then, when she realized what she had left out, she went on as if she had not forgotten a thing. “We left the office together, but when we reached the door to the outside, he asked me if I’d go back and get something he wanted to work on that night at home.”

Quincy Griswald had not been the only judge to depend on his clerk to keep track of where everything was and to make certain everything was done on time. The clerks ran the courthouse, and after enough years doing it some of them knew more about the law than did the judges for whom they worked. It made sense that Griswald would ask her to go back for the court file he wanted: He would not have known where to look had he gone himself.

Loescher remained next to the jury box, at the end opposite the witness stand. Each time she asked a question, the faces of the jury turned toward her, and then, when she was finished, swung back to watch as Sharon Arnold gave her answer.

“And so you went back to the office to get the court file he had asked for. Approximately how long did it take from the time you left him at the doorway until you found him?”

She was used to deciding things quickly. “Just a few minutes,”

she answered immediately.

Without moving any closer to the witness, Loescher stepped away from the jury box until she was standing directly in front of her. “Please,” she cautioned, “take your time. Try to be as precise as you can. When you say ‘a few minutes,’ how many minutes do you mean?”

While she worked for Quincy Griswald, Sharon Arnold had been in court as often as the judge, sitting below him on the opposite side of the bench from the witness stand, a model of administrative efficiency. She was not used to explaining herself to anyone, and she could not quite hide her annoyance.

“Well, I don’t know—five minutes, ten minutes—something like that.”

Loescher took two steps closer, raised her head, and gave the witness a glance that was like a warning shot across the bow. This was not Griswald’s courtroom and she was a witness in a murder case, not a pampered judicial assistant who could make a lawyer’s life miserable anytime she chose to do so.

“Please consider your answer carefully,” she said, taking another step toward her. “Would you say it was closer to five minutes or ten?”

Arnold recrossed her legs and began to fidget with her hands.

She sucked in the sides of her cheeks and struck a pensive pose.

“I had to go all the way back down the hallway to the elevator. I remember it took a long time to get there. Then the office door was locked of course, and I had to unlock that. The folder was in the file drawer of the judge’s desk. Then I locked the door and … I suppose it must have been closer to ten minutes before I got to the garage and found him, lying there, all that blood all over him …”

Now in control, Loescher moved back to her preferred position next to the jury and led her witness through the story she wanted her to tell. She had found Quincy Griswald bathed in blood and knew as soon as she saw him that he was dead. She dropped the file she had been sent back to get and ran screaming into the courthouse. Two uniformed security officers followed her back to the garage and the body she had been the first to find.

I was far more interested in what she had not seen than in what she had.

“Have you ever seen this man before?” I asked as soon as it was my turn to examine the witness. Smiling at Sharon Arnold, I stood behind Danny, my hand on his shoulder.