Just Take My Heart (9 page)

Because he had lied to Emily that his hours at work had been changed, Zach realized it was important she shouldn't see him or his car when she got home from the courthouse. And the problem was that now that the trial was under way, and court recessed at four p.m., she was getting home to her house early, between five thirty and six p.m. That meant he couldn't go home himself when he got off from work, but had to stay out until it was dark, then hope she didn't see him drive into his garage. It was one more reason to dislike her.

Soon after he handed Emily back her key, she had installed a bolt on the door of her back porch. He had discovered that when he tried to sneak into her house, about a week after he stopped minding Bess. He had called in sick to work because he missed handling Em-ily's things. He tried to slip in her house one morning after she left, and was stopped by the new bolt. What she was too dumb to realize was that he had made a key that opened her front door, but he was afraid to try that. He knew it was very risky to be standing on her front porch. There was always the chance that a nosy neighbor might see him there.

The only real contact he had with her now was to listen to her in her kitchen in the morning when she was talking to Bess. He had considered planting a microphone or maybe even a camera in a few places in her house, but decided that was also too risky. If she had found one of them, she'd have had half the prosecutor's office swarming all over the place, and they'd have been on his doorstep in minutes. He was almost certain that she'd never notice the tiny microphone over her refrigerator. It was out of her line of sight.

Low profile, Zach reminded himself. Always keep a low profile. That means when the time comes I can do what I have to do, then disappear. It worked for me in Iowa and in North Dakota and in New Mexico. Charlotte, and Lou, and Wilma. Lou and Wilma didn't have families around when he got rid of them.

When Emily's time came, it would be necessary for him to disappear from New Jersey. He started to formulate a plan about where he might move.

One morning, toward the end of the third week of the trial, as he watched through the slats of the blinds, Zach saw Emily pour her first cup of coffee and get up suddenly.

"Bess," he heard her say, "no time to waste. This is the big day. Gregg Aldrich is going on the stand and I'll get to crossexamine him. I'm going to make mince-meat of him."

Then as she passed the refrigerator on her way to the stairs, her steps slowing, she added: "Bess, it's absolutely crazy but in a way I feel sorry for him. I must be losing it."

Richard Moore had been confident that on the day he put Gregg Aldrich on the witness stand, Emily would get to her office early. That was why he was waiting for her at seven a.m. when she arrived at the courthouse. It was Friday, October 3rd.

The minute Emily saw him, she knew the reason he was there. She invited him into her office and offered to get him some coffee. "If you get a cup when it's just made, it's not that bad," she assured him. "But if you're craving Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, take a pass on it.

Moore smiled. "With an endorsement like that, I don't know how I can resist, but no thanks, Emily." The smile was gone as quickly as it came. "Emily, what I say now stays in these four walls, okay?"

"Okay, I think. It depends on what you say to me."

"My client absolutely insists that he is innocent. He doesn't know I'm talking to you now and would undoubtedly be furious if he found out about it. But here's the question: Is an aggravated man-slaughter plea with a twenty-year sentence still on the table?"

The image of Gregg Aldrich, pale and shaken, rushed into Emi-ly's mind but she shook her head. "No, Richard," she said emphatically. "At this point, for any number of reasons, it's not. For openers, if Aldrich had taken the plea when it was offered months ago, I wouldn't have had to put Natalie's mother under all the stress and heartbreak of testifying." Moore nodded slowly, as if he'd expected this response.

Realizing how angry she sounded, Emily said, "Let me grab my own coffee. The pot is down the hall. Back in a second."

When she returned, she made sure to keep the emotion out of her voice. "Richard, you know the amount of preparation it takes to get ready for a trial. I've been working around the clock for months and now I have a lot of other cases piled up and waiting for some attention from me. At this point, I want the case to be decided by the jury."

Richard Moore stood up. "All right. I understand. And I repeat, Gregg Aldrich did not authorize this visit. He swears he is innocent and wants the jury to acquit him. Acquit?

Actually, he wants to be exonerated."

Exonerated! He must be crazy, Emily thought. He'd better hope that at least one juror believes him and he gets a hung jury. At least that would buy him a few more months of freedom before a second trial. Without a hint of sarcasm in her voice, she said, "I sincerely doubt that Gregg Aldrich will be exonerated by this jury or any other."

"You may be right about that," Moore replied, glumly. At the door, he turned back. "I admit that Easton was better on the stand than I expected, Emily. And I don't mind telling you that you've done a good job."

Richard Moore was not known to give compliments. Sincerely pleased, Emily thanked him.

"And, Emily, one way or the other, I'm glad this will be over soon. It's really been a tough one."

He did not wait for her reply.

On the morning of October 3rd, Gregg Aldrich got out of bed at five a.m. Because he was going to be on the witness stand, he had gone to bed unreasonably early and it had been a mistake. He had slept for an hour until eleven p.m., then dozed fitfully for the next six hours.

I've got to clear my head, he thought. I'll take a run in the park. I can't testify feeling this groggy and stupid. He raised the shades and closed the window. The window looked across the street to the opposite building. Park Avenue never does give much of a view, he thought. On Fifth Avenue, you looked over Central Park. On East End Avenue, you could see the river. On Park you look at a building filled with people like yourself who can afford the fancy prices.

The view was better in Jersey City, he thought, wryly. I could get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty from the old apartment. But after Mom died, I couldn't get away fast enough. Mom forced herself to stay alive until she'd seen me graduate from St. John's University. I'm glad she's not sitting in that courtroom now, he thought, turning from the window.

It was cool out, and he decided to wear a light running suit. As he dressed, Gregg realized how much he'd been thinking of his mother lately. He found himself remembering how, after she died, he'd invited a few of the close neighbors like Loretta Lewis to come into their five-story walk-up to help themselves to any furnishings they could use.

Why was he thinking that? Because Richard Moore is going to put Mrs. Lewis on the stand as a character witness to say what a "grand" son I was and how helpful to all the old people in the building. He seems to think that will create some sympathy for me. Father dead when I was nine, mother fighting cancer for years, working my way through college . . . Moore will have them in tears for me. But what has that got to do with Natalie's death? Moore says it could cre-ate doubt that I was capable of killing Natalie. Who knows?

At 5:20, after gulping a cup of instant coffee, Gregg opened the door to Katie's bedroom and looked in on her. She was fast asleep, hunched in a ball under the coverlet, only her long blond hair visible. Like him, she loved a cold room for sleeping.

But last night, after she had gone to bed, he heard her sobbing and went to her. "Daddy, why is that Jimmy Easton lying about you? she wailed.

He sat on her bed and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "Katie, he's lying because he's going to spend a lot less time in prison by spinning that story."

"But, Daddy, the jury believes him. I can tell that they believe him."

"Do you believe him?"

"No, of course not." She quickly pulled herself up to sitting position. "How can you even ask me that?"

She had been shocked. And I was shocked that I asked her that question, Gregg thought, but if I'd seen any doubt in her eyes, it would have finished me. It had taken a long time before Katie fell asleep. Now he hoped she wouldn't wake up until at least seven o'clock. They had to leave for the courtroom at twenty of eight.

He let himself out of the apartment and began to jog the two blocks to Central Park, taking the path north when he reached it. Try as he would to organize his thoughts to prepare himself for the witness stand, his mind keep hurtling back to the past.

My first job in show business was taking tickets at the Barrymore, he reminisced, but I was smart enough to hang out in Sardi's and some of the other watering holes until Doc Yates offered me a job in his theatrical agency. By then I'd met Kathleen.

Kathleen had a small part in a revival of The Sound of Music at the Barrymore. It had been love at first sight for both of us. We got married the same week I took the job with Doc Yates. We were both twenty-four years old.

Deeply immersed in the past, Gregg jogged northward, aware of neither the chilling wind, nor of the other earlv-morning runners. We had eight years together, he thought. I went up the ladder fast at the agency. Doc groomed me for his job from day one. Kathleen worked pretty steadily but the minute she got pregnant, she said, happily,

"Gregg, when our baby arrives, I'm staying home. You'll be the sole breadwinner in this family."

Gregg Aldrich did not realize that he was smiling.

Those years had been so tender, so satisfying. And then to have Kathleen diagnosed with the breast cancer that had killed his mother and to lose her so quickly, to come home from the funeral to a sobbing three-year-old Katie who was screaming for Mommy had been almost unbearable.

Work was the answer, and in those first years after Kathleen was gone, he had worked almost constantly. As much as possible, he handled things from home in the morning until Katie went to nursery school at noon. Then he arranged his hours to be with her in the late afternoon. He'd go to cocktail parties and first nights, and film openings with clients, only after they'd had a good amount of time together.

Then when Katie was seven, he had met Natalie at the Tony Awards. She was a nominee and was wearing an emerald green gown and jewelry that, she confided to him, was purely on loan from Cartier. "If I lose this necklace, promise to shoot me," she'd joked.

Promise to shoot me. Gregg felt his guts twist with pain.

She didn't win that night, and the guy who escorted her got drunk. I took Natalie back to her place in the Village, he remembered. I went upstairs for a nightcap and she showed me the play she'd been asked to read. I knew it and told her to forget it, that it had been bounced off half the major actresses in Hollywood and it was a lousy script. She told me her agent was really pushing her to sign for it and I told her in that case to drop her agent, then I finished my drink and gave her my card.

Two weeks later Natalie had called for an appointment, he recalled. And that was the beginning of a whirlwind romance that cul-minated in the Actors' Chapel of St. Malachy's Church. Three months after their first meeting, he and Natalie were married. By then he had taken over as her agent. In the four years we were together, I did everything I could to help her make her big break-through, Gregg thought. But didn't I always suspect that our marriage couldn't last?

He circled around the reservoir and began to run south. How much of trying to reconcile with her had to do with real love and how much did it have to do with obsession? he asked himself. I was obsessed with her. But I was also obsessed with the idea of recaptur-ing what I had, a wife who loved me, a good mother for Katie. I didn't want to lose Natalie and begin all over again.

I didn't want Natalie to throw away her career and it was going to happen. Leo Kearns is a good agent but he would have tried to cash in on her, do what her first agent was doing all over again.

Why did I follow her to Cape Cod? What was I thinking? What was I thinking the morning that she died?

Without realizing it, Gregg had run all the way to Central Park South and started north again.

When he got back to the apartment, he found Katie, dressed and frantically worried.

"Daddy, it's seven thirty. We've got to leave in ten minutes. Where were you?"

"Seven thirty! Katie, I'm sorry. I was thinking things through. I had no idea of the time."

Gregg rushed to shower. That's what happened the morning Natalie died, he thought. I had no idea of the time. And I didn't drive to New Jersey then any more than I drove there now.

For the first time he felt certain of it.

Almost certain! he corrected himself.

At nine o'clock Emily called the first of her two corroborating witnesses. Eddie Shea was a representative from Verizon, who testified that their records showed that a call had been made from Gregg Aldrich's cell phone at 6:38 p.m. to Natalie Raines on the evening of March 2nd two and a half years ago and a call to Jimmy Easton was made that same evening at 7:10 p.m.

The second witness was Walter Robinson, the Broadway investor who had spoken to Gregg at Vinnie's-on-Broadway and remembered seeing Easton sitting next to him at the bar.

When Robinson left the witness stand, Emily turned to the judge. "Your Honor, the state rests."

The courthouse is packed, she thought, as she took her seat at the prosecutor's table. She recognized some familiar faces in the audience, people whose names popped up on Page Six of the New York Post. As usual the proceedings were being videotaped. Yesterday she had been stopped in the corridor by Michael Gordon, the host of Courtside, complimenting her on the job she was doing and asking her to be a guest on his program after the trial was over.

"I'm not sure," she had answered, but later, Ted Wesley had told her that it would be a great boost for her reputation to make a guest appearance on a national program.

"Emily, if there's any advice I hope you take from me, it's to get any good publicity that comes your way."

We'll see, she thought, as she turned her head to look at the defense table. Today Gregg Aldrich was wearing a well-tailored pin-stripe dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue and white tie. He had more color in his face than yesterday and she wondered if he had been jogging earlier. He seemed more confident, too, than he had appeared to be yesterday. I don't know what you have to be confident about, she thought, with just a tinge of fear.

Today, his daughter, Katie, was sitting in the first row directly be-hind her father. Emily knew she was only fourteen but she seemed oddly mature as she sat there, her carriage erect, her expression grave, her blond hair soft on her shoulders. She was a very pretty girl, Emily thought, not for the first time. I wonder if she looks like her mother.

"Mr. Moore, call your first witness," Judge Stevens directed.

For the next three hours, Moore called both character and fact witnesses. The first one, Loretta Lewis, had lived next door to Gregg when he was growing up. "You couldn't meet a nicer young man," she said earnestly, her voice hoarse with emotion. "He did everything for his mother. She was never well. He was so responsible al-ways. I remember one winter when our building lost electricity, he went from one apartment to another, there were twenty in the building, knocking on doors and carrying candles so that people could see. He even made sure that everyone was warm. The next day his mother told me that he took the blankets from his own bed and brought them down to Mrs. Shellhorn because the ones she had were so thin."

One of Katie's retired nannies told the jury that she'd never known a more devoted father. "Most two-parent families don't give the time and the love Mr. Gregg gave to Katie," she testified.

She had been there four of the five years that Natalie and Gregg had been married.

"Natalie was more of a pal than a mother to Katie. When she was around, she'd let her stay up later than her usual bed-time, or if she helped her with her homework, she'd just give her the answers instead of making her work out a problem. Gregg would tell her not to do that, but he didn't get angry about it."

The new agent Natalie had hired prior to her death, Leo Kearns, was a surprising witness for the defense. He was on the witness list but Emily had not expected that Richard would call him. Kearns explained that he and Gregg differed fundamentally about the course Natalie's career should take. "Natalie was thirty-seven years old," he said. "She had received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress but that was three years earlier. Not enough people go to Tennessee Williams plays for Natalie to stay in the limelight. She needed a few well-publicized action movies. I was sure they would create a buzz for her. She was a great actress but it's pretty common knowledge that turning forty in show business can be the beginning of the end unless you're hot by then."

"Notwithstanding that you were becoming Natalie Raines's agent, therefore replacing him, did Gregg Aldrich ever exhibit any animosity to you?" Moore asked.

"No. Never. The only difference Gregg and I had was in our opinions of how Natalie's career should progress."

"Had you ever competed for a client with Gregg Aldrich be-fore?"

"In the past, two of my clients switched to him. Then one of his switched to me. We both understood the game. Gregg is a consum-mate professional."

Aldrich's secretary, Louise Powell, testified that no matter how frantic events in the office could get, Gregg never lost his temper. "I've never heard him even raise his voice," she swore. She testified about his relationship with Natalie. "He was crazy about her. I know he phoned her a lot after they broke up but he did that when they were married, too. She told me once that she loved having him so attentive. I think those calls were his way of showing her that he was still attentive to her. Natalie craved attention and Gregg knew it."

At 12:10, after Powell left the stand, Judge Stevens asked Moore if he had any further witnesses.

"My next and final witness will be Mr. Gregg Aldrich, Your Honor."

"In that case, we will recess now and resume at 1:30," the judge decreed.

The witnesses were pretty good, Emily admitted to herself. During the lunch break she brought a sandwich and coffee to her office and closed her door. She realized that she was suddenly experiencing a drop in her emotional level. I'm going in for the kill and right now I feel sorry for him, she thought. The loving son, the single father, the guy who has a second chance at happiness and then it blows up in his face.

Planning his activities around his daughter's schedule certainly doesn't match with my image of the playboy agent, she thought.

If Mark and I had ever been blessed enough to have a child, would she look at me the way Katie Aldrich looks at her father? She certainly knows him better than anyone else in the world.

Her sandwich tasted like cardboard. Is this what prison food was like? Yesterday after Jimmy was escorted back to prison, the guard had told her that Jimmy had said if he was around today he wanted a second cup of coffee and a pickle.

He'd been a fantastic witness, Emily thought now--but what a piece of work he is!

Gregg Aldrich looked as though he was going to faint when Jimmy talked about the drawer that squeaked. That piece of evidence clinched Easton's testimony. It was the first nail in the coffin, deciding the way Gregg would spend the rest of his life.

The crazy question that kept coming through Emily's mind was, why did Gregg Aldrich go so pale when Jimmy talked about the drawer? Was it because he knew he was finished, or was it because it was so incredible to him that Jimmy Easton would have remembered that detail?

Would I have remembered it? Emily asked herself, as she visual-ized Easton standing in the Park Avenue living room, contracting to commit a murder, and greedily waiting for the five thousand dollars that was about to be placed in his hands.

Impatiently shrugging off her own questions, Emily picked up the notes she would use when she crossexamined Gregg Aldrich.