There is a kind of clarity that comes with the knowledge that, charged with the death of another, you may end up facing your own. The doubts, the fears, the haunted late-night regrets about the things you wish you had not done and the things you wish you had: All of it is pushed aside, dismissed as the vain imaginings of a life led too much in the past. Your only thought now is what lies ahead and how you are going to deal with it. The indictment for murder did not destroy Jimmy Haviland; it seemed to invigorate him, to give him a sense of confidence, or at least a sense of direction.
Jimmy Haviland had come to the alumni dinner in New York in a rented, threadbare tuxedo a size too large; Jamison Scott Haviland showed up for his arraignment on a charge of murder in a brand-new blue suit and a pair of black dress shoes polished to a hard, glossy shine. Surrounded by the successful and affluent members of his law school class, he had been nervous and ill at ease, with darting, furtive eyes and a rapid moving mouth that never stayed in position long enough to form a single, definable expression or give a coherent voice to a single well-considered thought. Amidst the lawyers, criminals and reporters that crowded the hallway outside the courtroom where he was scheduled to make his first appearance, his jaw was set in a firm, straight line, his gaze direct and impatient. He looked like a senior partner in one of those large downtown firms, a busy man a little short of time. I could not help but smile to myself as he came toward me down the hall.
“Browning said you wanted to represent me,” said Haviland as we shook hands, “but I’m not sure I believed him.”
He had never trusted Browning, but it still seemed an odd thing to say. “Why would he have lied about a thing like that?”
“There’s always something else going on with Browning, something he won’t tell you. Things are never quite the way he says they are.”
It was all too cryptic for me. I put my arm around his shoulders and walked him down the hallway, away from the courtroom doors and the swirling crowd that had come to watch the arraignment of someone they had never seen because the case might involve, if only indirectly, someone everyone knew. We had only a few minutes of anonymity left.
“Listen to me. It was Browning’s idea. He asked me to represent you. I didn’t know if you would want me. That’s why Browning called you—to let you know that I was willing to do it if that’s what you wanted.”
We were facing the wall, our heads bowed, my arm around his shoulders. He turned his eyes and gave me a skeptical glance. I tried to explain.
“This whole thing is an attempt to make it look like he covered up a crime, a murder. They’re trying to destroy him politically.”
Haviland’s eyes flashed with anger. “It’s always Browning. I’m going to be charged with murder, but the main thing is what they want to do to him!”
“He knows you’re innocent,” I began to protest.
“I know I’m innocent!” exclaimed Haviland, bristling. “I don’t need him to tell me that.”
“He’s the witness whose testimony is going to prove it.”
It had concentrated his mind, this knowledge that he was about to be charged formally with a murder he did not commit. He had thought about it with an intensity I could not match and in ways I could not yet begin to imagine.
“Are you sure that’s what he is going to testify? Are you sure he won’t say that he can’t be certain: that he was there, in the room, but that so were a lot of other people; that he did not actually see Annie fall; that he just assumed it was an accident?”
With a kind of knowing superiority, Haviland searched my eyes. “That gives him a way out, doesn’t it? He wouldn’t have to run the risk that a jury might not believe his testimony if he says Annie’s death was an accident and that I wasn’t even there. If he’s so anxious to help, to clear my name, why hasn’t he said anything? Why hasn’t he issued a statement? Why is he waiting for the trial?”
Haviland paused, a strange, enigmatic look in his eyes, before he added, “Don’t ever trust Browning. He doesn’t tell the truth, the whole truth, even when he isn’t telling a lie.”
The case had not started, the first formal step in a process that would go on for months was only now about to begin; yet already there was a question about what someone else should have done. It is a marvel the way an accusation, especially a wrongful accusation, places everything in a new, more narrow perspective. The rituals of politeness, the decent concern for the feelings of others, the eager willingness to subordinate one’s own desires to those of another, all the subtle arts of compromise and conciliation, the constant small adjustments by which we live with each other in a tolerable if imperfect peace, are forgotten, thrown aside, trampled upon by the urgent demand that what happens to us, our survival, our protection, come first. Marriages are destroyed, friendships ruined, because an innocent defendant begins to view as betrayal the failure to give him the kind of selfless devotion he thinks he deserves and knows he needs. There was no friendship here to ruin: Haviland already hated Browning. Nothing Browning could do would ever be enough, and there was nothing I could do to change Haviland’s mind.
“You haven’t been arraigned yet,” I reminded him. “That’s why we’re here. How long have you known you were going to be indicted? When did Browning know? Just exactly when do you think he should have made a statement? Yesterday? What good would that have done?”
Haviland started to argue again that Browning should have done something. It was willful belligerence, stupid and shortsighted, and I had had enough. I turned him around, grabbed him by the shoulders and backed him against the wall.
“Listen to me!” I said, warning him with my eyes. “In about three minutes we’re going to walk into that courtroom. We’re going to act as if this whole thing is beneath contempt, that it’s laughable, that we can’t wait to go to trial because we can’t wait to expose what’s really behind this. And that means that starting in about three minutes, Thomas Browning is the best friend you’ve ever had!”
Haviland pulled his head to the side and tried to break free. “The best friend you’ve ever had,” I repeated in a harsh whisper, holding him fast. “And you never use his name. If anyone asks, it’s always ‘the vice president.’ Not only that, you speak of him with admiration and respect, as a great man, as someone who ought to be president. You voted for him, remember.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t vote for…”
“You didn’t vote for the witness for the defense?—For the witness who saw what happened—who saw Annie fall—who knows it was an accident? Are you sure you didn’t? Are you sure you didn’t vote for him?”
The look in his eyes changed from naked hostility to a reluctant, grudging acceptance of the necessity of things. He began to apologize, not for what he thought about Browning—he would never change that—but for taking it out on me. I let go of his shoulders. He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of resignation.
“I’ll do whatever you say.”
He was right in front of me, less than two feet away. Perhaps because my mind had been on other things, too caught up in the emotion of the moment, it was only now that I noticed. It was not quite ten o’clock in the morning and Jimmy Haviland—Jamison Scott Haviland—about to be arraigned on a charge of murder, had been drinking. I reached inside my suit coat pocket.
“Here, have one of these,” I said as I handed him a roll of breath mints.
I did not say anything more about it as we made our way into the courtroom. I tried to tell myself that it was a one-time thing, that he had done it to fortify his courage on a morning that would have made a coward of us all. He had had a drink, that was all. You could not tell it from his speech; you certainly could not tell it from the easy, confident way he moved, with his head held high, his gaze steady, unwavering, as he walked just to my right as we entered the courtroom and went down the center aisle to the counsel table in front. He was so much better than he had been at the dinner at the Plaza; so much better than he had sounded on the one telephone call we had had; I was too grateful to be very much alarmed. But I knew about people who drank, and I knew about people who had just that one drink to get them started, that one drink to settle their nerves. I knew that without any more warning than this things could quickly get out of hand.
Haviland read my mind. As soon as we had taken our seats at the counsel table, he turned to me and with that brilliant bashful smile that had made him so likable in his first years at Harvard, assured me that it was not a problem.
“Just one. Just to make me good and alert.”
Just one. It was funny how after a while that lie began to sound like the truth.
The arraignment was scheduled for ten o’clock. I checked my watch. It was five minutes past the hour. An arraignment is a straightforward proceeding, perhaps the simplest thing that happens in a criminal case. The judge calls on the prosecutor to state the title of the case and present the formal document, usually an indictment returned by a grand jury. The prosecutor either reads the indictment, or, if the defense waives a formal reading, makes an abbreviated statement of the specific charges of which the defendant stands accused. The defendant is then asked how he pleads to those charges. There have been times when, if only to break the monotony, I would have gladly given up my fee if someone, acting on his own larcenous instinct, had replied: “Guilty as hell, Your Honor; but they’ll never prove it!” Early in my career, an aging and incompetent thief shrugged his shoulders and remarked with a cagey smile, “Kind of depends on how you look at it, Your Honor,” but that was as close as it ever got.
In the days when I was taking court-appointed cases, I might do eight or nine arraignments in the same morning, one right after the other. “Next case,” the judge would order as the clerk passed up the next file. The assistant district attorney would grab the next one on the stack on the table next to him. If we were doing in-custody arraignments, the next shackled prisoner would be brought into court by a deputy sheriff. “State v. Garcia. Burglary in the First Degree.” The judge would glance at me. The words were like a jingle in my head: “Acknowledge receipt of the indictment; waive a formal reading; enter a plea of not guilty, and ask that the matter be set for trial.” The judge would hand the file back to the clerk and announce a trial date, which the clerk entered on the record as she handed another file up to the bench. The defendant, who had no idea what had just happened, was taken back to jail. That was it. If it took more than sixty seconds, it was only because the judge had taken a few moments to remind the defendant that he remembered him from the last time he had been arrested.
It was ten minutes past ten. Next to the door through which the judge would eventually enter, a uniformed bailiff stood with his hands clasped in front of him. Well over six feet tall with broad shoulders and a short, thick neck, he had that same blank expression I had seen on the Secret Service agent who shadowed the vice president. The bailiff’s eyes did not move from side to side in a constant unrelenting search for the first sign that something was not quite right, however; the eyes of the bailiff did not move at all. He might have been asleep for all they saw as he waited with the rest of us for the routine beginning of a perfectly ordinary event. After a while, he shifted one foot ahead of the other and crossed his arms over his chest. Pursing his lips, he dropped his head and stared at the reddish beige linoleum floor. He twitched his nose vigorously, driving his upper lip violently back and forth, like someone trying to stop a sneeze. He sniffed twice with such force that his head jolted up. Then, with his hands clasped again belt-buckle high, he stared straight ahead, resuming his dull, interminable watch.
Two minutes later, the door finally opened. The bailiff took one step forward and raised his head. His mouth had opened to announce that court was now in session when a woman’s hand on his sleeve stopped him short. The court reporter carried her stenograph machine to her place on a raised platform a foot above the floor and directly below the witness stand. A woman in her late fifties or early sixties, with soft gray hair and modest, gentle eyes, she set the tripod on the floor and placed the machine on top of it. When she had everything the way she wanted it, she rose from the small leather stool and with a cursory but not unfriendly nod at the bailiff, left through the same door through which she had entered. We were going to start sometime, it just was not clear when. The district attorney had about run out of patience.
He started to rise from his place at the other counsel table. With a sulking, disgruntled expression he sank back in his chair, watching the court reporter with a kind of angry suspicion, as if it were somehow her fault that the arraignment had not started on time. When she left, he followed her with an evil stare, biting on his lower lip, trying to hold his wicked tongue. Out of the corner of his eye he saw me watching. Instead of turning away, ignoring me, he looked straight at me, a distant, grim, determined stare that reflected the narrow self assurance of a man for whom life was a series of certainties, a closed circle that did not admit a moment’s doubt or a moment’s hesitation. Once he had decided you were an enemy, it was war to the end, war without mercy. That was what everyone I had talked to had told me, the observation that with uncanny regularity worked its way into every conversation: Bartholomew Caminetti took no prisoners.
Ruthless, cunning, relentless, Caminetti was in his second term as the New York district attorney. He wanted it to be his last. Whether he ran for governor or the United States Senate—or, as one rumor had it, became the United States attorney general when the current occupant of that office was nominated to fill the next vacancy on the United States Supreme Court—did not matter nearly so much as that he keep climbing, moving up, never stopping in one place, one office, long enough for anyone to think that that position, whatever it was, was as far as he could go. It was the single-minded ambition of the outsider, born without advantages, who had had to fight for everything he had, this refusal to tolerate even the suggestion that there might be any limit to what he could achieve.
Bartholomew Caminetti was born into a rigorously Catholic family, the youngest of eight children. Two of his sisters became nuns; his oldest brother became a priest. His favorite sister, Rosemary, the second-youngest child, went to Columbia on a full scholarship and was raped and murdered late one night in Morningside Heights on her way back from the library. Her death nearly destroyed her parents. Caminetti’s mother, whom he apparently adored, would not come out of her room except to cook dinner, and would not leave the ramshackle house in Brooklyn except for that hour each day when she went to church and with covered head tried not to question too severely the inexplicable, and in her weakest moments, the unforgivable, negligence of God. Edward Caminetti, Bartholomew’s father, buried his daughter in consecrated ground according to the rituals of the church, prayed for her soul in heaven, and never stepped inside the cathedral again.
The rapist and killer was caught. Though he had an extensive juvenile record of assault, he was only nineteen and too young to have an adult record of serious crime. The death of Rosemary Caminetti, a death that had such grievous consequences for her family, was simply another crime, another number to be added to what at the time was a murder rate of near-record proportions. An overworked assistant district attorney, trying to manage a caseload that was three times what it should have been, avoided the burden of a trial by negotiating a plea. Murder was reduced to manslaughter, and rape reduced to the lesser included crime of sexual assault. The young assistant district attorney took a certain satisfaction in knowing that with minimal time and expense a rapist and murderer was going to be off the streets for perhaps as long as ten years. Rosemary Caminetti’s father kept his outrage to himself. He quietly bought a gun and probably would have used it if he had not died a few years before his daughter’s killer was due to be released from prison.
Before his sister’s death, Bartholomew Caminetti had wanted to become a lawyer; after her death he was intent on becoming a prosecutor. He graduated with honors from Fordham, and then, whether because, as some of his political enemies would later suggest, his scores on the law school aptitude test were not good enough to get into a more prestigious school like Harvard or Yale, or because, as he always insisted, he preferred to continue his Catholic education, he studied law at Georgetown. He worked summers on Capitol Hill in the offices of the congressman in whose district he had grown up.
It was quarter past ten. I watched the bailiff’s eyes, waiting for them to blink, wondering if he might be dead. Haviland nudged my shoulder.
“The judge probably decided to have a second,” he remarked with a droll expression.
Caminetti stood up, glanced down at the file that lay open on the table in front of him, studied it for a moment, then pulled a long face, shook his head with weary exasperation, closed the file and sat down. Two more minutes passed. In a single, fluid motion, Caminetti got up again, walked over to where I sat and put out his hand.
“Bartholomew Caminetti,” he said with the sharp accented voice of a native New Yorker. I stood up and shook his hand.
“Joseph Antonelli,” I said, looking him straight in the eye.
“This is a little unusual,” he said, nodding his forehead toward the closed door to chambers. “Lot of these guys get sloppy, don’t respect other people’s time. You know, make everybody wait because they’re a judge and they can. You know, you must run into that kind of stuff, different places. But him—it’s unusual. Well, give it another minute or so, then we’ll see what’s going on.”
He turned away and without another word sat down again. Slouching down in the chair, his elbows on the table in front of him, he spread open his hands and pressed his fingers together, waiting for the time to pass.
Caminetti’s handshake had been firm, decisive, quick, the same way he spoke: short bursts of sincerity delivered as if he had just run into his oldest friend instead of a stranger or, in my case, an adversary whom a moment before he had looked at with open contempt. He had the kind of iron self-confidence that would allow him to praise you one moment, berate you the next, and never wonder that you might think him either inconsistent or cruel. It was, in a way, the secret of his success as a politician, the key to his apparent popularity. He said, or appeared to say—because I could not resist the thought that there was more than a little calculation in it—exactly what was on his mind. When he first ran for district attorney, a Republican in a decidedly Democratic electorate, he told every white working-class group he could get into that his sister had been raped and murdered and that he was determined nothing like that would ever happen to a sister of theirs, but that if it did, “the punk who did it is either going to die or he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison, not the ten years they gave my sister’s killer.”
If Caminetti had not been slow to exploit the tragedy of his own sister’s death for political advantage, neither had he failed to recognize the public’s preference for elected officials willing to put themselves in the line of fire. More than once, he had gone to the scene of a crime in progress—a robbery gone bad, hostages taken, the police in a standoff—and stood out in the open, completely exposed, issuing orders about what should be done next. It was great theater and he knew it. His opponents charged that that was the only reason he did it, and that all he accomplished was to impede the work of the police. But they could not fault his courage, and they were not so quick to criticize him once he suggested that he would be glad to invite them along the next time he tried to help the police prevent innocent people from getting hurt.
With an instinct for publicity, he seemed to be everywhere at once. When he was not on camera while the crime was taking place, he was standing behind a microphone describing with lavish praise the police investigation that had led to an arrest, or announcing with stricken, haunted eyes the awful crime that had been committed in the case that his office was about to prosecute with the utmost severity. Caminetti had been in office for six years, but this was only the second case he had decided to try himself. Once it was rumored that the vice president was somehow involved, no one asked why. Everyone knew that Bartholomew Caminetti had been among the first prominent New York Republicans to support the presidential candidacy of William Hobart Walker, and everyone knew what Walker might sometime soon do for his good friend Bartholomew Caminetti. It was another question what that did for the supposedly impartial administration of justice.
It was ten-twenty. Caminetti was out of patience. With a look of disgust, he rose from his chair and began to edge his way around the table, determined to find out why he was being made to wait. Grumbling to himself, he rapped his knuckles on the corner of the table as he made the turn.
“Hear ye, Hear ye,” the bailiff, roused from a blank-eyed slumber by some sound only he could hear, began to cry. Caminetti froze in mid-step, shook his head at the thoughtless waste of time, and retreated to his place behind the counsel table where, with the rest of us, he stood waiting while the Honorable Charles F. Scarborough bustled, or rather exploded, into the courtroom.
The end of his black robe flying behind him, Scarborough stalked across the front of the room, a bundle of books and papers clutched under his right arm. He held a large white handkerchief in his left hand, pressed against his nose and mouth. His eyes were red, his round face pallid. Reaching the bench, he dropped into his chair like someone shot dead with a bullet. The bundle of books and papers tumbled onto the flat surface of the space where he worked. He mopped the perspiration from his feverish brow with the white handkerchief and then covered his mouth with it and coughed. Raising his right hand in a weary gesture meant to apologize and surrender at the same time, he scowled. “Damn hay fever,” he muttered. His face began to redden; his small round eyes became tiny slits; his short, slightly upturned nose wrinkled as his nostrils squeezed tight together. In the nick of time the handkerchief flew open like a bed sheet flapping in the wind. A tremendous wheezing noise was followed in an instant by a thunderous rush like a broken water main, as the judge buried his face in the wet white handkerchief.
“Welcome to New York, Mr. Antonelli,” he mumbled. His eyes singled me out, held me fast, as he kept rubbing. “Pleasure to have you here. Don’t you agree, Mr. Caminetti? Yes? Right,” he said, stretching his eyebrows to their highest elevation as he set about methodically folding the handkerchief.
“You agree, Mr. Caminetti, that it’s an honor—a great honor—to have someone of Mr. Antonelli’s great gifts and splendid reputation in our courts—Yes?” His eyes watched his hand put the handkerchief securely out of sight. “I thought you might.” He pulled his hand away and placed both hands together on the bench in front of him.
“I mean it, Mr. Antonelli. We’re delighted to have you with us.” A rather shy smile slipped almost unnoticed across his thoughtful mouth. “Whatever the court can do to make your stay with us more pleasant… ,” he said in a soft, somewhat tentative voice.
Slowly, and a little reluctantly, he lowered his eyes. Brooding upon something, he stroked his chin. Slumped forward in that attitude of intense contemplation, he looked like one of those immensely learned English jurists with an encyclopedic knowledge of the law who can rattle off ancient cases the way other men can recite the results of last weekend’s games; who can summarize the evidence at the end of a case without looking at a note or having to stop to remember a point; and who lies in wait for the first lawyer brave enough, or stupid enough, to try to cross swords. I did not like many judges, but I thought I was going to like him. He had not been in the courtroom two minutes, he had not yet done a thing, and I knew already that everything I had heard about him—all the stories about the legendary Charles F. Scarborough, said to be the greatest trial judge of his generation—were true.
One moment apparently lost in some private reverie, in the next he was all motion, his small smooth hands flying in eight different directions at once, his piercing eyes a firestorm of enthusiasm and excited incoherence. He smashed the flat of his hands on the bench and in a raucous voice bellowed at the tightly packed courtroom.
“And let me welcome all the public-spirited citizens who have decided to join me here this morning.” He let the words echo through the high-ceilinged room. A grin, proud, defiant, demanding, stretched across his blunt mouth. “I have always thought that the needed formality of the law, the seriousness with which we are obligated to approach our duties, is only enhanced by being performed under the watchful eye of a vigilant citizenry.” He paused. The smile etched farther along his lips. “You’ll notice I said ‘eye.’ You are here to see, and never—never!—to speak. That is the one rule upon which I insist with the utmost rigor.”
Scarborough had a habit, which I was now about to discover, of suddenly shifting his gaze to the side, as if he were turning to someone, an alter ego, with whom he frequently shared a confidence. The movement of his eyes was so abrupt, so definitive, that when he did it now I looked immediately to my right, toward the empty chairs in the jury box, wondering for just an instant where the person to whom he was talking could possibly have gone.
“‘Utmost rigor,’” he said, seeming to deprecate to his invisible auditor the slightly pompous way it may have sounded. His eyes flashed, caught the audience and held it fast. “By which I mean that if anyone so much as breathes a word during these or any other proceedings, I will by the power vested in me by the state of New York simply have you beaten to death. Are we clear on this point?” he asked as he bent his head to the side and drummed the fingers of his left hand.
Every face in the crowd wore a smile; no one made a sound. If he had told them to get down on the floor and do push-ups, they would have done it, grateful for the chance to share in some enterprise of which he had been the originating force.
“There is a reason we are here, Mr. Caminetti. Why don’t you enlighten us as to what it is.”
Bartholomew Caminetti was not part of the crowd. He was too busy thinking about what he had to do next to fall under the influence of anyone else. He had been standing at the counsel table, the charging document in his hand, waiting with blank-eyed indifference to get things started.
“Your Honor, we’re here today in the matter of People of the State of New York v. Jamison Scott Haviland,” said Caminetti in a dry, slightly nasal voice. “The defendant is charged with murder in the first degree.” Caminetti took a step toward me. “Let the record reflect that I am handing to the defendant’s attorney a certified true copy of the indictment returned by the grand jury.”
I glanced briefly at the indictment before I placed it on the table in front of me.
“Your Honor, the defense acknowledges receipt of the indictment, waives a formal reading, and…”
Leaning forward on both arms, Scarborough darted a glance at his imaginary confidant. “‘Waives a formal reading.’” His eyebrows shot straight up. “The court appreciates learned counsel’s efforts to proceed in an expeditious manner,” said the judge as his gaze came swiftly around to me. “In a matter so grave as this, however, I think it worth our time to have the indictment read in full. Mr. Caminetti, if you would.”
There was no exchange between the two of them. Caminetti did not so much as nod his acknowledgment that he understood what he had been asked to do. I had the feeling that there never was, that all those gestures by which we smooth out the rough edges of our spoken conversation and form a coherent whole out of the broken fragments of our everyday speech had been replaced by a stringent economy, dispensing with courtesy as a waste of energy and time. Caminetti began to read in a voice that, like the moment you turn on the radio to a program that has already started, seemed to have no beginning. Scarborough sat, trancelike, listening to every word.
“A moment,” he said, raising the index finger of his right hand. “Again.” He gave Caminetti an alert, inquisitive glance. “‘On December twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five’?”
Caminetti stared at him, without expression.
“Surely, that can’t be right,” remarked Scarborough in the tone of a gentle remonstrance. “You can’t have had the grand jury return an indictment alleging that the crime took place with that specificity. Does it not in fact read: ‘On or about December twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five?’” he asked in a voice as profoundly serious as if they were two law partners alone in a law library discussing the central point in the most important case of their careers. Caminetti looked back at the indictment.
“On or about December twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-five,” he read, continuing on without any break or alteration in his voice, as if he had read it exactly that way before and had not simply rushed past the once omitted phrase.
“And how does the defendant plead?” inquired Judge Scarborough with an interested, searching glance when Caminetti had reached the end.
Haviland was standing next to me, on my left, his hands held in front of him. Under Scarborough’s inquiring glance, he did not flinch or look away. He did not fidget with his fingers or suddenly gasp for air. He was as calm, as steady, not as any defendant, but as any attorney I had ever seen in a criminal court. He was a man who perhaps for the first time knew exactly what he was going to do.
“How do you plead, Mr. Haviland?” inquired Charles F. Scarborough in a kind, thoughtful voice. “Guilty, or not guilty?”
Haviland did not hesitate. The words came clear and strong, echoing through the paneled courtroom with the concise finality of something that instead of just beginning was about to end.
“Guilty, Your Honor. Annie Malreaux died because of me.”