The Devil's Advocate (23 page)

"What?"

"Look."

He sat up beside her and gazed down at her legs.

Just above her knees were two small black and blue marks, made by fingers squeezing too hard.

"And don't tell me it's because I lack vitamin C, Kevin Taylor. You devil, you."

He said nothing. He stared incredulously. Miriam got up and went into the bathroom, and Kevin fell back against the pillow, feeling as exhausted as he might be after making love passionately all night. But why did it all seem like a nightmare? Why was he out of his own body observing? Was he having some sort of paraphysical experience? If it continued, he would have to talk to someone, perhaps a psychiatrist.

Kevin got up, took his shower, got dressed, and had breakfast, listening to Miriam outline her activities for the day. He couldn't remember her ever being so absorbed in herself. Like anyone, she had her share of vanity, but she had always been modest and always conscious of when the conversation was leaning too heavily on her. But as Kevin left the apartment that morning, he realized she had not mentioned one thing that didn't have to do with her, whether it was how she was going to improve her knowledge of art, improve her thighs at exercise class, or look for something new to wear. He might as well have been a mirror set in the chair across from her.

That afternoon he interviewed Tracey Casewell. Rothberg had sent her to the city to come to his office. She wasn't a particularly pretty woman, but she had a very nice figure and she was only twenty-four. She had been working at the hotel for a little more than three years. She confirmed Rothberg's tale, describing how he had come to her directly after the argument with his wife to relate the details.

Her repetition of his story was too exact to be anything but memorized, Kevin thought, and anyway, the prosecution would easily get the jury to think she was part of a murder conspiracy.

Kevin questioned her quickly and as directly as he could, assuming the prosecutor's role and trying to show that she was lying to protect her lover. He caught her in two minor contradictions, one relating to the time when Rothberg was supposed to have told her about the argument. She immediately corrected herself after he pointed it out.

She appeared sincerely remorseful about the situation and confessed being uncomfortable about having an affair with Rothberg while his wife was an invalid.

She had known Maxine Rothberg before her affair with Stanley and actually liked her. If he could get the jury to buy this part of her testimony, she might help, Kevin thought, but he wasn't feeling very confident about it.

In fact, as the trial date drew closer, Kevin began to grow even more pessimistic.

He put on a good face with reporters and promised that he would prove Mr. Rothberg innocent beyond a doubt, but personally he felt the best he could do was confuse the jury and keep them from feeling certain beyond a doubt, and thus find him not guilty.

Rothberg would always be suspected of murdering his wife, as far as the public was concerned, but at least he would win the case.

Although he was surprised at Miriam's disinterest about the progress of the case, Kevin gradually conceded that he should probably follow Mr. Milton's advice. The associates talked their cases to death riding back and forth to work in the limo, anyway. It
was
good to come through the door knowing he could leave his worries and tensions outside.

They went out to dinner with Dave and Norma and Ted and Jean at least twice during the week. Paul joined them on the weekend and told them Helen was almost catatonic. He had been resisting putting her in the sanitarium, but even with a live-in nurse he didn't know how much longer he could wait.

"She won't even pick up a paint brush anymore," he told them.

Miriam wondered aloud if she and the girls should visit her, but Paul thought it would be fruitless and quite depressing for them. Kevin noticed how the mere mention of the word
depressing
put an immediate end to the idea. Miriam's tolerance of anything gray or bleak had dropped considerably since their move to the city. She didn't seem to want to do anything that involved even the slightest effort or compromise. Meeting her parents for dinner, for example, was suddenly an ordeal.

"Who wants to buck that traffic going to and from the Island?" she said. "Let them come into the city. It's so much easier."

"For us, maybe. Not for them," Kevin pointed out, but she didn't care.

Kevin noticed now that whenever they did eat at home, they usually ate microwave frozen foods. Most of the time, Miriam picked up prepared things and merely served them. Her own cooking, something she once took great pride in, disappeared. She was too busy for any of that. If Kevin wondered aloud about what made her so busy, she was more than eager to run off a list: exercise classes, shopping, shows and museums, lunch every day at a different bistro, and now vocal lessons. All of the girls were doing it, except Helen, of course.

Miriam was rarely at home if he called from the office. Instead he would get her answering service. Why did she need an answering service? he wondered. She never returned any of the calls her old friends on the Island made, and she often didn't even call her parents or his parents back. They would call later at night and complain, and when he would ask her about it, she would laugh and say something like, "Oh, I'm just so distracted these days. But I'll get organized soon."

Whenever he complained, she'd reply, "But this is the life you wanted for us, isn't it, Kevin? Now that I'm busy and we're doing things, you complain. Do you know what you want?"

He began to question himself. Sometimes, when he came home and she wasn't back yet from one of her activities, he would pour himself a scotch and soda and look out at the Hudson River and wonder. Could it be that he was indeed happier back on the Island? What was it going to be like when they had their children? Miriam was already talking about moving to a bigger apartment in the building and hiring a live-in mother's helper for their first baby.

"Norma and Jean will be doing that," she told him. "Children shouldn't cramp your style in this day and age."

"But you always hated that idea," he reminded her. "Remember how you complained about the Rosenblatts and the way they brought up their children? The kids practically had to make appointments to see their own parents."

"They're different. Phyllis Rosenblatt is a... a vapid person. She couldn't tell the difference between a Jackson Pollock and a wallpaper sample."

He didn't see her point, but if he pursued the topic, Miriam would walk away. He was getting more and more upset with her behavior, but the night before the start of the Rothberg trial, she suddenly did an about-face.

When he came home from the office that night, he found she had prepared a home-cooked meal. She had her hair brushed back and straight the way he liked it, instead of wearing it in that new crimped style. She wore little makeup, and she had put on one of her older dresses. The table was set; they would eat by candlelight.

"I thought you might be a little tense and would want to relax at home," she told him.

"Great. What smells so good?"

"Chicken in wine sauce, just the way you like it."

"The way you make it?"

"Uh-huh. I did make it, and I made an apple pie, too. From scratch," she added. "I didn't go anywhere with the girls today. I just stayed here and slaved away for you like a devoted little housewife."

He laughed, even though he thought he detected a slight undercurrent of sarcasm. There's more Norma and Jean in that sarcasm than there is Miriam, he thought.

"I love you for it, honey," he told her and then kissed her.

"After dinner," she told him, pushing him back gently. "First things first. Get comfortable."

After he showered and changed, he found she had made a fire in the fireplace and set out cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. The warm fire, the good food, the whiskey, and the wine relaxed him. He told Miriam he felt he had been returned to the womb.

After dinner, they had a cognac and she played their wedding song on the piano.

It was an old song, a song his parents loved and she had loved from the first moment she had heard it.

"I'll show you the result of my singing lessons, too," she said and began. "I'm stuck on lovin' you. Won't you say you love me too? I'm stuck on needin' you . . .

honest I am . .."

It brought tears to his eyes.

"Oh, Miriam, I've been working so hard, I almost forgot what it's all for. It is for you. None of this would have any meaning without you."

He kissed her and lifted her into his arms and then carried her to the bedroom. It was all so wonderful. All the doubts, all the questions died away. They were going to be all right. Things would be as wonderful as he had hoped and expected they would be. Miriam was still Miriam, and they were still in love. He started to undress.

"No, wait," she said, sitting up and leaning toward him. "Let's do it the way we did it Wednesday night."

"Wednesday night?"

"After we came home from dinner with Ted and Jean. Don't tell me again that you forgot?"

He kept a smile. She started to unbutton his shirt.

"I undressed you and then you undressed me," she whispered, and continued to replay an event he couldn't, for the life of him, remember.

Everyone at the firm attended the Rothberg trial at one time or another during the proceedings. Even the secretaries were permitted a few hours off to watch the court battle unfold. Oddly, though, Mr. Milton didn't attend. He seemed contented with the reports brought back to him. What bothered Kevin the most was Miriam's refusal to attend. She surprised him the morning of the first day after breakfast, when she announced she wouldn't be in court. He hoped she would change her mind before the trial ended.

Bob McKensie began the prosecution's case in a slow, methodical manner, structuring his theories, arguments, and facts on what he saw as a firm foundation of guilt. Kevin thought it was very clever of him to organize his case with a definite beginning, middle, and end, holding back the clinical and forensic evidence until the last chapter. He worked carefully and confidently and had the look of a mature, experienced attorney. It made Kevin more self-conscious of his youth and relative inexperience.

Why, he wondered, before he even began his statements, was John Milton so confident of his abilities, and why was he so determined that Kevin defend Rothberg? He began to grow paranoid about Mr. Milton's true motives for assigning him the Rothberg case. Perhaps he knew they were going to lose all along, and he wanted Kevin to take the fall, blaming it on his youth and inexperience.

"You will see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury," McKensie began, "how the seeds of this cunning murder were planted years before it occurred; how the defendant developed motive, had opportunity, and committed the unconscionable act in a cold and calculated manner, confident that his guilt would be clouded by confusion or supposed negligence." He turned toward Rothberg and pointed.

"He is depending on one word,
doubt,
and hoping that his lawyer will keep that doubt alive to prevent you, in your good conscience, from convicting him of the heinous crime."

McKensie's deliberate speech and slow movement added a somber mood to a case fraught with electricity. Newspaper and television people scribbled notes quickly. Artists began capturing the faces of jury members, as well as Rothberg's pedestrian expression. The man actually yawned at one point during the prosecutor's opening remarks.

During the first two days, McKensie brought forth witnesses to show Rothberg's despicable character. They revealed that he was a gambler who had lost a great deal of the Shapiro family's wealth and had even put the hotel into a second mortgage, this despite its national reputation and the success of the raisin bread bakery. Much of this occurred after Maxine became too sick to take an active role in the management of the hotel and the business.

McKensie went as far back as Rothberg's days working in the dining room, when at night he would play cards and gamble away the tips he had made. He worked Rothberg's history up carefully, depicting him as a lowlife, but showing him as a conniver who worked his way into Maxine Shapiro's heart. It was, he concluded, a marriage of convenience. Obviously, he married her for her money.

When Kevin objected to the characterization as unfounded, McKensie called a witness to support the accusation: a retired chef who swore Rothberg told him he would own Shapiro's Lake House one day by seducing Maxine.

Then, after a smooth transition demonstrating that

Rothberg had a history of extramarital relationships,

McKensie introduced Tracey Casewell. He called her

to the stand and quickly got her to admit she was

having an affair with Stanley Rothberg during the

time his wife had been ill.

,

The following day McKensie moved to Maxine Rothberg's illness. He called the doctor to the stand and got a clear description of her problems and the dangers.

McKensie didn't take him through his criticism of Beverly Morgan. He obviously didn't want to plant the possibility in the minds of the jury that Beverly Morgan could have accidentally killed Maxine Rothberg because she was a drinker.

Kevin's main point in his cross-examination was to get the doctor to admit that Maxine was capable of giving herself the insulin shot.

At this point, McKensie went to the police evidence, revealing the supply of insulin hidden in Stanley's closet. The pathologist brought in the autopsy report, and the implications were clearly made. To help support the contention, Beverly Morgan was finally called to the stand. McKensie got her to describe Rothberg's relationship with his wife, how infrequently he visited and asked after her. She narrated the events of the day of Maxine Rothberg's death, much the same way she had first related it to Kevin. And then it was Kevin's turn.