Just Take My Heart (6 page)

'satisfactory,' I was saying that Gregg and I knew that the peo-ple seated here were going to be fair. And that's all we ask of you.

"The prosecutor just spent nearly an hour going through what she represents as the evidence in the case. You heard it the same way I did. There was no arrest in this case for nearly two years. Up until that time, all the police knew was that Gregg and Natalie, like so many other couples, were in the midst of a divorce. Like so many other people involved in a divorce, Gregg was heartbroken. I promise you that he will testify in this case. He will tell you, as he told the police long before he was arrested, that he went to Cape Cod because he wanted to know if she was involved with anyone else. He did that because he wanted to see if there was any point in continuing to seek reconciliation.

"You will hear that he saw that she was alone, then left Cape Cod and returned to New York. He never even spoke to her.

"Assistant Prosecutor Wallace told you with emphasis about the two hours that Gregg Aldrich was out of his apartment the morning that Natalie was killed. You will hear, however, that his morning jog was a matter of longtime daily routine. The prosecutor's office would have you believe that on that morning, he managed to drive in rush hour traffic to New Jersey, kill Natalie, and then return in rush hour traffic to New York all within these two hours. They would have you believe that he murdered the woman whom he knew was not involved with anyone else, and with whom he still desperately wanted to reconcile. That was pretty much the totality of the evidence until Jimmy Easton came along. This model citizen, this savior of their case--a man who has spent half of his adult life in prison and much of the rest of it on parole."

Moore shook his head and continued, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Jimmy Easton was arrested yet again while fleeing from the burglary of a house in this county. Once again he had invaded the sanctity of a family's home and ransacked it. Fortunately the si-lent alarm alerted the police and he was captured. But all was not lost for Jimmy Easton. His ticket out of a lengthy habitual-offender prison term was Gregg Aldrich. You will hear how this pathological liar, this sociopath, transformed a casual chance encounter in a bar with Gregg Aldrich, where the brief conversation was about baseball, into a sinister plot to murder the woman Gregg loved. You will hear how Gregg supposedly offered this total stranger twentyfive thousand dollars to commit this crime. You will hear how Easton accepted this proposal, then you will hear how Easton was shortly thereafter stricken with a guilty conscience, apparently for the first time in his useless life, and then backed out of the deal.

"This is the garbage the state is asking you to swallow. This is the evidence on which they ask you to destroy Gregg Aldrich's life. Ladies and gentlemen, I represent to you that Gregg Aldrich will testify and he will explain to you, and to your satisfaction, how Easton could describe his living room and why there was a phone call to him."

Turning and pointing his finger at Emily, Moore thundered, "For the first time in over twenty encounters with the criminal justice system, Easton is testifying for the state instead of being prosecuted by them."

As Moore strode back to his chair, the judge addressed Emily. "Prosecutor, call your first witness."

From the moment she found Natalie, Suzie Walsh had been a celebrity among her friends. She had told and retold the story of how she'd been sure something was wrong when she had seen both Natalie's car door and garage door still open after she left work, exactly as they had been five hours earlier.

"Something made me investigate, even though I was worried that I could be arrested for trespassing," she would relate breathlessly, "and then when I went in and saw that beautiful woman, crumpled on the floor, blood all over her white sweater, and moaning, I tell you, I almost died myself. My fingers were trembling so much that when I dialed 911, I didn't think the call would go through. And then . . ."

Knowing that the police called Natalie's husband, Gregg Aldrich, a "person of interest" in the homicide and that someday he might be indicted, Suzie had gone a half dozen times to the Bergen County Courthouse when a criminal trial was in session, just to familiarize herself with what it would be like if she was ever called as a witness. She found the proceedings exciting and took note of the fact that some witnesses talked too much and were directed by the judge to answer the questions without giving their opinions. Suzie knew that would be hard for her to do.

When after two years, Gregg Aldrich was formally accused of Natalie's murder and Suzie knew she would definitely be a witness at the trial, she and her friends had a long discussion about what she should wear to court. "You may be on the front page of the newspapers," one of them cautioned. "If I were you I'd get a nice, new black or brown pants suit. I know you love red, but red seems too cheerful for someone describing what you saw that day."

Suzie had found exactly what she was looking for on sale in her favorite outlet. It was a brown tweed pants suit with a thread of dark red running through it. Red was not only her favorite color but it al-ways brought her luck. Just having a little of it in the pattern, and the fact that the lines of the suit also made her size fourteen body look slimmer, gave her confidence.

Even so, and even though she'd had her hair colored and blown dry the day before, Suzie felt a flutter in her stomach when she was summoned to the witness stand. She placed her hand on the Bible, swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and sat down in the witness chair.

The prosecutor, Emily Wallace, is really attractive, Suzie thought, and she looked so young to be trying an important case like this. She had a nice way about her, too, and after the first few questions, Suzie began to relax. She had talked about what happened so much to her friends that it was easy to answer everything without hesitation.

In response to Emily's questions, Suzie explained that she had gone into the garage, seen Natalie Raines's pocketbook and suitcase in her car, then knocked on the door. Realizing it was unlocked, she then opened it and went into the kitchen. Suzie was about to explain that it wasn't her habit to walk into people's homes uninvited but this time, because of what she had seen, it was different. But she stopped herself. Just answer the questions, she thought.

Then Emily Wallace asked her to describe in her own words what she found in the kitchen.

"I saw her right away. If I'd taken two more steps, I'd have tripped over her."

"Who did you see, Ms. Walsh?"

"I saw Natalie Raines."

"Was she alive?"

"Yes. She was moaning like a hurt kitten."

Suzie heard someone begin to sob. Her eyes flew to the third row, where a woman, whom she recognized from newspaper pictures as Natalie Raines's aunt, grabbed a handkerchief from her purse and pressed it against her lips. As Suzie watched, the expression on the elderly woman's face became agonized, but she did not utter another sound.

Suzie described calling 911 and then kneeling beside Natalie. "There was blood all over her sweater. I didn't know if she could hear me but I know sometimes people who seem to be unconscious really aren't and are aware if someone talks to them, so I told her she'd be all right and that an ambulance was coming. And then she just stopped breathing."

"Did you touch her?"

"I put my hand on her forehead and stroked it. I wanted her to feel that she wasn't alone. She must have been so frightened, I mean lying there, hurting so much, and knowing she was probably dying. I tell you, I'd be scared."

"Objection." Richard Moore jumped from his seat.

"Sustained," the judge ordered. "Ms. Walsh, please just answer the question without additional comment. Prosecutor, repeat the question."

"Did you touch her?" Emily asked again.

"I put my hand on her forehead and stroked it," Suzie said carefully now, frightened by the defense attorney. But then when it was Moore's turn, he only asked her a few more questions and acted very friendly. It was a little embarrassing to admit to him that she almost always drove by Natalie Raines's house in the afternoon when she left work even though it meant going all around the block to get to the parkway. But then she noticed that some people in the courtroom smiled when she said she was such a fan of Natalie's that she loved to catch any possible glimpse of her.

"When was the last time you saw Natalie Raines before you entered her house?" Moore asked.

"Like I said. I saw her getting out of the car that morning."

"No more questions," Moore said crisply.

It was almost disappointing to be finished. As she left the stand Suzie made it her business to get a good look at Gregg Aldrich. He's a fine-looking man, she thought. I can understand why even someone as beautiful as Natalie Raines could fall in love with him. His eyes have such a sad expression. What a phony he is. It's enough to make a person sick.

She hoped he caught the contemptuous glance she shot at him as she exited the courtroom.

Because of his long friendship with Gregg, and because Katie's comments had stung him, Michael Gordon had expected to be drawn emotionally into the trial of the State of New Jersey versus Gregg Aldrich. However, he had not expected to feel an almost fatalistic sense that Gregg was not only guilty, but that he was going to be convicted of Natalie's murder.

As he had expected, the trial attracted national attention. Natalie had been a major Broadway star and an Academy Award nominee. Gregg, a regular at star-studded events, was a familiar figure to the avid tabloid readers whose lives revolved around those of celebrities. After Natalie's death, Gregg had been a particular target of the pa-parazzi. Every time he escorted an actress to an event, it was rumored that he was involved with her.

The headlines in the gossip magazines had also kept front and center the fact that he was a "person of interest" in Natalie's death.

Michael knew Gregg was carrying a lot of baggage into the trial. But added to that was an unexpected element: The news stories were also focusing on the young, beautiful prosecutor Emily Wallace, and the skillful manner in which she was building up the case against Aldrich.

As a former defense attorney, Michael recognized that Emily was closing the doors to the possibility that Natalie's death had been a random crime. The detectives from her office, Billy Tryon and Jake Rosen, were good witnesses, articulate and prompt in their answers to her questions.

They testified that there had been no breakin at the home of Natalie Raines. The security system had not been tampered with. A professional thief could have opened the small safe in Natalie's bedroom closet with a can opener, but there was no sign it had been touched. Evidence seemed to indicate that the perpetrator had ex-ited by the back door and run through the yard and the wooded area behind it to the next street. It had rained during the night and they believed he might have had some kind of plastic covering over his shoes since it was impossible to get a useful cast of a footprint, even though there were two specific indentations where the grass was particularly soft. The shoe size ranged between a ten and a twelve.

Gregg Aldrich wore a size eleven shoe.

The security system log was entered into evidence. The last time it was turned on was at four o'clock Friday afternoon, March 13th. It was disengaged at eleven thirty that same evening, the security installer testified, and was never reset, indicating the house was not armed over the weekend nor on the Monday morning Natalie Raines was murdered.

When she was on the stand, Natalie's mother, Alice Mills, testified that Natalie kept a spare key inside a fake rock in the backyard of the Closter house. "Gregg knew about that rock," she swore. "He bought it for Natalie. When she lived with him, she was always los-ing or forgetting her apartment key. That was why when she moved to Closter, he told her she'd better have a spare key around, or she'd find herself locked out on a cold night."

Alice Mills's next remark was stricken from the record but it had been heard by everyone in the courtroom. She had started sobbing and, looking at Gregg, had cried: "You were always so protective of Natalie! How could you have changed so much? How could you have hated her enough to do that to her?"

The next witness was a clerk from Brookstone with a copy of the sales slip showing that Gregg had paid for the rock with his credit card.

The medical examiner's testimony was unemotional and specific. From the position of the body, he believed that Natalie Raines was attacked as soon as she walked in the door. A lump on the back of her head suggested she had been grabbed and thrown down on the floor, then shot at close range. The bullet just missed her heart. The cause of the death was internal bleeding.

"If she had received immediate help after she was shot, could she have been saved?" Wallace asked.

"Absolutely."

That night the panel discussion on Courtside centered on Emily Wallace.

"The look she gave Aldrich after that last question to the medical examiner was pure theatre," Peter Knowles, a retired prosecutor, commented. "What she was telling the jury was that after Aldrich shot Natalie, he could still have saved her life. Instead he left her to bleed to death."

"I don't buy that," Brett Long, a criminal psychologist, said force-fully. "Why would he take a chance that somebody else might hap-pen to come in after he left and get help for her? Aldrich or whoever shot her thought she was finished."

That was exactly what Michael had been thinking. Why didn't I say it first? he asked himself. Was it because I don't want to offer Gregg even the slightest support? Am I that sure he's guilty? Instead of agreeing with Brett Long, he said: "Emily Wallace has the gift of making every juror feel as though she's in an intimate conversation with him or her. We all know how effective that is."

At the end of the second week of the trial, viewers were invited to register their opinions of Gregg's guilt or innocence on the Courtside Web site. The number of hits was overwhelming and seventy-five percent of them voted for a guilty verdict. When a panelist on the show congratulated him on the response, Michael remembered Katie's bitter comment that he would probably get a bonus for his coverage of the trial.

As each day seemed to tighten the web around Gregg, Michael felt a deepening sense of having abandoned his friend and even helping to sway public opinion against him. How about the jurors? he asked himself. Members of the jury were supposed to avoid news coverage of the trial. Michael wondered how many of them watched his show every night and if they would be influenced by the polls.

Was Gregg watching Courtside after he got back to his apartment? Somehow Michael was sure that he was. And he also wondered if by any wild chance Gregg was having the same reaction he was to Emily Wallace--that in an unsettling way, there was something about her that reminded him of Natalie.