Degree of Guilt (73 page)

Sharpe raised her head, looking only at Masters. ‘A dead man,’ she repeated softly, ‘who, when he was alive, was impotent.’

The courtroom was still. Once more, Christopher Paget felt the truth that others did not know. Unwittingly and with reason, Marnie Sharpe had strung Mary’s lies into a larger lie of her own invention: that Mary Carelli had gone to Ransom’s suite intending to kill him. Mary had gone, Paget knew now, not to commit murder but to do as Ransom wished, to protect the son she had first sought to protect by lying to Paget himself. But Sharpe continued relentlessly, telling the truth as she understood it.

‘The man who Mary Carelli swore had tried to rape her was incapable of raping anyone –’

‘How do you explain Ms Carelli’s bruise, Ms Sharpe?’

It was Caroline Masters; she had interrupted as if speaking Paget’s thoughts.

‘We don’t know
how
she got it,’ Sharpe replied calmly. ‘What we
do
know to a moral certainty is that Ms Carelli did
not
get it in the way she described to this court. And because we have been able to expose her other lies, Ms Carelli’s entire story rests on a bruise we cannot explain.’

Masters raised her eyebrows. ‘That is
not
a mere anomaly, Ms Sharpe. From the photographs, it appeared that Ms Carelli had been beaten.’

Beaten, Paget thought, in Mark Ransom’s final frenzy. Because he failed to turn hard.

‘What we
think
,’ Sharpe replied, ‘is that the truth is hidden in some part of the story Ms Carelli cannot tell us, for fear of admitting guilt. My own theory is that Mr Ransom struck her when she pulled out the gun. But the heart of the matter is this: Ms Carelli cannot use one unexplained fact to avoid trial on a charge of murder.’

Sharpe paused for a moment, peering at Judge Masters to see if she was satisfied. Masters looked back at her in silence; when Sharpe resumed again, the awkward interlude had leeched some certitude from her tone.

‘With so little to say for
herself
,’ Sharpe told Masters, ‘Ms Carelli has tried to portray Mark Ransom as a man too despicable to merit justice, or even our concern.

‘“Why bother with the evidence of murder,” her tacit message goes, “when the
man
I murdered was such a swine.”

‘Ms Carelli
says
Mark Ransom tried to blackmail her into having sex. But she said that only
after
we found the tape – after Ms Carelli was committed to a defense built on rape.

‘How can we believe Mary Carelli about
anything?
’

Mary’s face did not change. But her eyes, fixed on the table in front of her, bespoke her hopelessness and despair. Paget imagined her memories – undressing for Ransom, posing for him naked on the couch – as she heard Marnie Sharpe call her a liar.

‘So they offer Marcy Linton,’ Sharpe went on, ‘to try to persuade us of what Mary Carelli cannot.

‘Without Marcy Linton, Mary Carelli would have no defense at all.’

But there could have been Melissa Rappaport, Paget thought, and Lindsay Caldwell. He wondered if Caroline Masters could dismiss them from her thoughts as easily as she had swept them from the case.

Compassion had crept into Sharpe’s voice. ‘None of us who saw her,’ she said, ‘will forget Marcy Linton. Nor is there any cause to forgive Mark Ransom for what he did to this young woman. But we are not here to prosecute a dead man for the rape of Marcy Linton.’

Sharpe paused again. ‘Indeed,’ she went on quietly, ‘it seems that Mark Ransom had already prosecuted himself. For
that
, Dr Bass explained to us, is why this man was impotent.

‘Impotent,’ she repeated. ‘Impotent from the moment he raped Marcy Linton to the day that Ms Carelli shot him.’

Her voice rose for the first time. ‘That,’ she said with new assurance, ‘is the
only
truth Mary Carelli ever told us – that she shot him. And the truth of that shooting is that it was murder.’

But the truth of the shooting, Paget knew, lay in the moment that Mark Ransom had pressed Mary Carelli against the wall with his penis in her mouth and watched himself turn soft; the moment when Mary Carelli became the focus of his rage. Assuming, of course, that Mary had finally told the truth.

‘Everything else,’ Sharpe went on, ‘is false. The story Mary Carelli spun to excuse that shooting is a web of lies. And now, at last, it has hopelessly entangled her.

‘That is just. Paget may use words like “miscarriage of justice.” But the only result worthy of those words would be to free Mary Carelli on the basis of her testimony.’

There was a passion is Sharpe’s voice now. She grasped the podium, as if to rein in her emotions. ‘This is
not
a feminist cause, Your Honor, and Mary Carelli’s lies were not an accident,’ she said. ‘Mary Carelli told these lies because she is a murderer. We ask the court to enter a finding of probable cause.

‘Thank you, Your Honor.’

As she turned from the podium, Paget felt the complex skein of his own emotions – fatigue, deep anger at Mary, admiration of Sharpe’s effort, disquiet at the hidden injustice of what she had said. And then he saw McKinley Brooks nod toward Sharpe, as one lawyer to another who had done all she could, and done it well.

When Caroline Masters spoke, Paget realized that moments had passed while he sat unmoving in his chair. He felt Mary turn to him in mute appeal, Terri’s hand on his arm.

Masters’s tone was ironic, but there was puzzlement beneath it. ‘Mr Paget,’ she said, ‘perhaps you would care to say a few words on Ms Carelli’s behalf.’

Paget looked up at her. There were no notes in front of him; he had prepared none.

‘Perhaps a few,’ he said.

Walking to the podium, Paget faced Judge Masters.

It was a strange moment: Caroline Masters must have sensed that she had not yet heard the truth, but Paget alone knew what it was. As if she read his thoughts, the judge said coolly, ‘What really happened here, Mr Paget?’

He paused for only a moment. ‘Mark Ransom abused Mary Carelli,’ he answered.

The judge leaned forward as if to scrutinize him. ‘I admit that Ms Sharpe can’t cover all the bases. It even strikes me that something may have happened in that hotel suite
other
than premeditated murder. But really, Counselor, Ms Carelli’s account is nearly as flawed as Ms Sharpe suggests. Diaphanous, one might even say.’

All at once, Paget felt the hearing move to a new level of reality: the judge was less offended by lies than interested in a truth she had yet to hear. Tell me, she seemed to be saying, why finding for Mary Carelli would be right.

It was just as well, Paget thought, that he had nothing prepared. But it took him a moment to find somewhere to start: he would not lie to Caroline Masters, or ask her to believe the lies that Mary had told in court.

‘Mark Ransom beat Mary Carelli,’ he began. ‘We know that.

‘Mark Ransom beat and raped Marcy Linton. We know that.’

Paget paused, looking from Sharpe to Masters. ‘No one here doubts Ms Linton. But the prosecution has ignored the striking parallels between Mark Ransom’s treatment of Marcy Linton and of Mary Carelli.

‘First, he used whatever leverage he had to get them alone – in Ms Linton’s case, the reading of a manuscript; in Ms Carelli’s, the playing of a tape.

‘Second, he used alcohol to dull their reactions.

‘Third, he used psychological abuse to make them vulnerable.’

Paget’s gaze fixed on Caroline Masters. ‘And fourth,’ he finished quietly, ‘he used physical abuse. Because that’s what excited him.’

His voice rose. ‘
Every one
of these elements had happened to Ms Linton.
Every one
of them was part of what Ms Carelli told Inspector Monk. And yet, until this hearing, Mary Carelli had never heard of Marcy Linton.’

Caroline Masters folded her hands, gazing fixedly from the bench. Paget had Masters’s attention now, he sensed, and that of everyone in the courtroom. Feeling the dense silence behind him, he searched for where to take this: away from Mary, he decided, to the man she killed.

‘Marcy Linton,’ he said quietly, ‘had told no one. It’s a tragedy repeated across this country, countless times a year. We can never know how many women let sexual abuse go unpunished, fearing the shame we visit on them. So that we never know who these men are.

‘But now, because Mary Carelli shot Mark Ransom, Mary Linton came forward. And so at last we know just who and what Mark Ransom was.

‘In Mark Ransom’s twisted world, there was no room for any woman to be a person, rather than a projection of his fantasies.

‘For Mark Ransom, women had no thoughts, no feelings, no
life
apart from his need for them.’ Quiet scorn entered Paget’s voice. ‘And once one understands that, how fitting it is that his ideal woman had been dead for twenty years.

‘For Laura Chase there can be no questioning, no hope, no awareness of all that women have perceived. Nothing, in short, to mar Mark Ransom’s image of compliance.’

Paget’s eyes locked on Caroline Masters. ‘Mark Ransom died because, in the end, he could not turn Mary Carelli into Laura Chase.’ Paget paused once more, letting the thought sink in. ‘And
that
is the deeper truth that George Bass left with us.’

Paget nodded to Marnie Sharpe. ‘Ms Sharpe called Dr Bass to testify to impotence. But what he stayed to give us, based on intimate knowledge, was an indelible portrait of the man Mary Carelli encountered in that suite.

‘The man,’ Paget repeated, ‘whom Marcy Linton has described to us.

‘A rapist.

‘A man obsessed by Laura Chase.

‘A man who derived pleasure from beating women.

‘A man who blamed Marcy Linton for his supposed impotence.

‘A man determined to reassert himself sexually.

‘A man who, armed with the Laura Chase tapes, was searching for a victim in the hope that abuse and fetishes would make him the “man” he used to be.

‘A man who, by the time he fixed on Mary Carelli, had become a sexual psychopath.’ Paget paused, adding quietly, ‘A tinderbox, waiting to explode.’

Behind the bench, Caroline Masters shifted. It was time, Paget knew, to return to Mary Carelli. ‘But
that
man,’ he added quietly, ‘met the wrong woman. Or, one might say, the right one.

‘The only question is whether Mary Carelli acted in self-defense.

‘Ms Sharpe says that Ms Carelli is unworthy of belief. We can debate the niceties of circumstantial evidence. But all that we can determine, where none of us but Ms Carelli knows the truth, is all the different theories that trial lawyers can evolve.

‘So let us look at the
essence
of what Ms Carelli says.

‘Ms Carelli says that Mark Ransom beat her. She has the bruises to prove that.

‘Ms Carelli says that Mark Ransom abused her sexually.
We
have Marcy Linton, and Dr Bass, to say that is the truth.

‘That much we
know
.

‘Ms Carelli says that, at some terrible moment of violence and abuse, she shot Mark Ransom out of fear for herself.’ Paget stood straighter. ‘Ms Sharpe would say that we have only Ms Carelli’s word for that. But who among us is the better judge?

‘Can we now stand here in this room and pass judgment on
her
judgment at the moment that she killed him? We cannot.

‘Mary Carelli faced that moment alone.

‘Now Mary Carelli has come before you to claim selfdefense. Ms Sharpe says that Ms Carelli cannot be believed. But the most credible thing Ms Carelli says – the central truth of this case – is that Mark Ransom was an abuser of women.

‘Because Mary Carelli met him, he changed her life forever. But because
he
met Mary Carelli, hers is the last life Mark Ransom will ever change.’

Paget stopped to look at Caroline Masters. ‘I cannot consider that a tragedy. Except, perhaps, for Mary Carelli.

‘Nor, Your Honor, should this court find it to be a crime.’

Caroline Masters gave him a querying, troubled look. ‘The law,’ she said, ‘defines what is or is not a crime. And this
is
a court of law, not an outlet for our passions or beliefs. Yours, mine, or anyone’s.’

Paget nodded. ‘True, Your Honor. But at its best, this is also a court of justice.’ He hesitated; the law was against him, and there was no point in evading that. ‘When this proceeding began, you said that probable cause was
not
a daunting standard. I acknowledge that. And therefore I must acknowledge that as a matter of law, this court can find against Mary Carelli and there is nothing
I
could do.’

Paget raised his head. ‘But that would
not
be justice.

‘It would not be just to condemn Mary Carelli to a further trial. Because what we have proven here is that this is
not
a case where the prosecutor can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They do not have the evidence.

‘Instead they rely on the law of probable cause to induce the court to let them go to trial. And there, amidst the passions of a jury trial, they hope to win a conviction they cannot support.’

Caroline Masters remained impassive; how was he to reach her as a person, Paget wondered, without offending her as a judge? ‘This court is bound to apply the law,’ he said. ‘But this court is
not
required to measure out the law like some apothecary. For the law is meant to be not a dry prescription but an expression of what is just and moral.

‘On
this
evidence, the just result – the moral result – is to let Mary Carelli go free. For in the end, there is too much to say that the Mark Ransom she describes is the man that she encountered, and nothing to say that he was not.’ Paget paused for the last time, speaking slowly and clearly. ‘As terrible as it was, what Mark Ransom brought upon himself in that hotel suite was justice. This court cannot improve on it.’