I lay in bed, gazing across the room, the memory of what had happened in court that day vivid in my mind.
“That was what was always missing,” I mused out loud. “The motive, the reason why Browning would cover it up. Why would he protect someone who killed the girl he loved? If Haviland pushed Annie out the window, why would Browning let him get away with it? I did not think it through; I did not try to imagine what motive Browning might have had to keep quiet about it. Caminetti is no fool. By giving Browning a motive for the cover-up, everyone jumps to the conclusion that there was a cover-up and that there must have been a crime. If Browning is guilty, then Haviland must be, too.
“Caminetti is smart, as shrewd as they come. Nothing gets to him; nothing bothers him. He does what he has to and doesn’t think about it twice. Today, when it was over—after that screaming match we had at the end, when you would have thought we were ready to go after each other with our bare hands—I was closing my briefcase, getting ready to leave, when he comes over and asks me if I’d had the chance to try Carmine’s and what I thought about the food.”
Sitting on an armless chair, Gisela pulled her stockings up. Then she rose and with both hands carefully smoothed out the front of her dress. She had not heard a word I had said.
“Are you going to stay in bed all evening?”
A lush, provocative smile, a promise of more pleasure to come, slipped as easily across her mouth as the stockings had onto her long slim legs. She stood in front of the floor-length mirror, tossing her head to one side and then the other, giving herself a cool, appraising glance. The smile, suspended while she studied herself in the mirror, was back on her face when she turned around and began to laugh.
“You promised me dinner, but I think all you wanted was sex.”
My head propped up on two pillows, I felt like I was floating, caught in the slow-flowing current of a wide-awake dream. All the energy I had lost seemed to have been given to her. She stooped and gathered up my clothes and then dumped them unceremoniously on top of me.
“Get dressed,” she insisted, glancing over her shoulder as she left the room.
We had dinner at a French restaurant a few blocks away. Our table was one in a long row of tables the same size, where we were one of a dozen couples having an intimate dinner, touching elbows with strangers on each side. With the sensitive looks of an aspiring young actor, the waiter, wedged sideways between the curved wooden chairs, scribbled down our order and vanished into the noisy crowd.
“The answer is yes,” said Gisela, bending forward, her hands, folded on the table, touching mine. Her dark lashes fluttered as she looked down and then, having collected her thoughts, looked up. “If you still want me to.”
In the dim yellow-gray light, her eyes looked more burgundy than black, and she looked less like a full-grown woman than a young girl, a girl who spoke in such low modest tones that I had to strain to catch each word. It seemed impossible that this was the same woman who just an hour earlier had behaved in my bed like a courtesan of vast experience and not an ounce of shame. I had known many women, perhaps more than I should, but Gisela was the first European. She had made me feel like an innocent with inhibitions I had not realized I had. I was still so mesmerized, so captivated by everything about her—the way she looked, the way she moved, the funny way she spoke and the earthy way she laughed— that I did not immediately remember what I had asked.
“If you still want me to stay with you, at the apartment, until the end of the trial.”
“Only until the end of the trial?” I asked, wondering in my American way why anything had to end. If the present was good, the future could only be better. When she looked at me with that dark-eyed stare, I was already hearing the words that would tell me that she wanted that too. Instead, she talked about the practical limits of what we should expect.
“You’re not going to stay in New York, and neither am I. You’ll go back to San Francisco, and I’ll go back to Washington; or perhaps, at a time not too far away, I’ll go back to Berlin.”
My romantic irresponsibility was still intact. I wanted her as much—no, more!—than I had wanted anyone before. I could not remember anyone but her; my memory had stopped, shut out everything, the moment we had started taking off our clothes.
“You could come to San Francisco; I could stay in New York. Why rule out anything at the beginning? Why not let things just take their course? Why not wait and see?”
“Why not see things the way they are?”
I started to object, but she stopped me with a smile.
“Yes, all right; if you wish. See how things are when the trial is over and it’s time to leave. But in the meantime, spend your days in court, and your nights with me. It’s better to live in the present, I think; not worry too much about what might happen next. It’s a problem with you Americans, you know: always worried so much about the future that by the time you get there you don’t have a past.”
We finished dinner close to ten and started walking back to the apartment. The temperature had fallen, and a bitter wind blew down the avenues and howled through the crosstown streets. It lashed my face and whipped against my eyes. Without an overcoat I was freezing half to death. I pulled Gisela close to protect her with my arm. With her face buried against my chest, we moved bent against the wind. Gisela could not see anything and laughed as she stumbled backwards up the street. We passed a newsstand that was shutting down for the night. I barely saw it, the headline screaming across the front page of every paper, stacked in a bundle held in place by a metal weight. Gisela’s muffled laughter went an octave higher as I stopped and, my eyes fixed on what I had only half seen, drew her forward as I started back.
The vendor had a fleshy, whiskered face and a red, bulbous nose. His eyes were narrow, without expression except for the tough dull glimmer that reflected the hard-paid price of staying alive. I gave him twice what the paper cost and turned away before he could make change.
“What is it?” asked Gisela in a girlish voice, clinging to me as if she were afraid she would be blown away if she let go.
“The chief justice. He’s in Bethesda. They think he might die.”
We reached the apartment building. Inside the lobby, Gisela stamped her feet, took off her leather gloves and rubbed her hands against her frozen cheeks.
“May I see?” I gave her the newspaper, which she read until the elevator opened on my floor. “There must be something on the news. Can we turn it on?”
The facts, though fragmentary, painted a bleak picture. The chief justice had collapsed during a session of the court. He had started to challenge some assertion made by one of the lawyers during the last oral argument of the day when, according to those who were there, he stopped in midsentence, forced a smile, explained that he was not feeling well, turned to the associate justice who sat on his left, and then fell to the floor. He was taken by ambulance to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where, in a carefully worded statement, it was announced that “the chief justice is resting comfortably.” Nothing was said about what caused the collapse or how life-threatening his condition might be. It was understood—and this was how every physician asked by the various news media to comment prefaced what they said—that because the chief justice was eighty-three, whatever had happened was serious.
“Cancer,” I said out loud. Gisela, sitting next to me on the sofa, looked up. “He’s dying of cancer.”
“You know this?”
Too late, I remembered how I had heard it. For a moment I was afraid that she might feel compelled to use it. We exchanged a glance, and I knew that anything I told her would stay between us.
“Browning?” she asked, just to be sure. “Do you think the White House knows?” The question answered itself. “Yes, of course they must. So then, if that happens—if there is a vacancy…” Her eyes, quick and alert, caught a glimpse of the truth. “Reynolds. With Reynolds as chief justice, and with another conservative like Reynolds to take his place, the court becomes…”
Gisela got to her feet, a determined look on her face. I had seen it before, that look. Once she decided there was something she had to do, there was a forcefulness, an almost brittle stiffness, in her manner.
“I have to go back to Washington.”
“Tonight? To cover that?” I asked, gesturing toward the flickering images on the television screen. “Go in the morning if you have to go. Take an early flight. There isn’t anything you can do about it now. And what about the trial? Who is going to cover that?”
Gisela had moved next to a window that looked out over Central Park. She glanced at her watch, calculating the time it would take to get to the airport and what time a late-night flight would get her in.
“Stay tonight; go early in the morning,” I said, thinking about what I would miss if she was not here.
Her mind was still on the story she had to cover and what it meant. “The trial and what’s happened are both connected,” she remarked with a preoccupied look as she again checked the time.
She caught herself. The taut, concentrated expression on her mouth fell away, replaced by an embarrassed, apologetic grin. She came over to the sofa and perched on the edge of it, her legs pressed closed together and her hands resting in her lap.
“You’re right. I’ll go in the morning. Get an early flight.”
“What did you mean—just now, when you said they were connected, the trial and what’s happened to the chief justice?”
There was a slight, sideways movement of her head. She looked at me with a baffled expression.
“I forgot,” she said, breaking into a smile. “You have been spending all your time either in court or in bed.” I laughed and started to reach for her, but she shook her head. “They’re connected—intertwined might be a better word. If Haviland is convicted, Browning is finished.” She gave me a searching glance. “If Haviland is guilty, then Browning covered it up. It’s what you said to me a few minutes ago, only the other way around. And if Browning can’t go on, then Walker will control the court—yes?”
She had left something out. “But if the chief justice dies before the election, it doesn’t matter what happens to Browning. Walker can name whom he wants.”
She shook her head vigorously. “No, that’s not true —or it might not be true. That’s part of the story I want to find out. There are people in the Senate— Republicans—who won’t vote to confirm Reynolds, or anyone like him, while there is a chance Browning might win. They’ll make sure the Senate doesn’t do anything. They won’t take Reynolds unless they have to; they certainly won’t take Reynolds while there is still a chance Walker might lose. That’s the story I need to write about: what will happen if the chief justice doesn’t survive this term of the court.”
She suddenly thought of something. She looked at me with a different interest than she had before.
“You could say that not only the presidency, but also what happens to the Supreme Court now depends almost entirely on you.”
When Gisela left in the still-dark morning, she woke me long enough to say good-bye with a kiss.
“I’ll be back Monday at the latest. Call me tonight and tell me everything that happens today.”
That gentle request that I tell her what went on that day at Jimmy Haviland’s trial stayed with me. As I listened to each witness testify, I found myself thinking of how I could later describe it to her.
Dressed in another of his dark, ill-fitting suits, Bartholomew Caminetti jerked to his feet when the honorable Charles F. Scarborough entered the hushed and crowded courtroom. Caminetti’s head bounced from side to side, as if without some gesture of impatience on his part, things would never speed up. He opened his mouth and held it there, waiting for the judge to take his place on the bench, ready to announce in a rapid-fire dull monotone the name of the next witness for the prosecution.
“Mary Beth Chandler.”
Scarborough seemed to take a certain twisted pleasure in slowing him down. “Mr. Caminetti?”
Caminetti catapulted out of the chair almost before he had sat down again. “Your Honor?”
“I assume you mean to call this person as a witness?”
Caminetti glanced toward the double doors through which a middle-aged woman, tall and pampered, with a thin mouth and razor-sharp eyes, had just entered the courtroom. She was here, she was on her way to the stand. Caminetti looked up at the bench and shrugged.
“You failed to mention that,” said Scarborough with a wry grin. “You said the name, nothing more.”
“Why else would I… ?” An explanation would only waste more time. “The People call Mary Beth Chandler,” said Caminetti, staring in blank-eyed disbelief.
A cursory nod and an occasional slight inflection of her voice the only gestures she allowed herself, Mary Beth Chandler answered each question with an economy of words that, by the end of her testimony, had even Caminetti in awe. She held herself with a cold reserve. She was not here because she wanted to be; she had no interest in what was going on. She answered each question and never once looked either at the jury or at the courtroom crowd. She had been at the party at the Plaza that Christmas Eve, and she had seen the defendant, Jamison Scott Haviland, talking with Anna Malreaux.
“That was on the eighth floor of the Plaza Hotel, Christmas Eve—December twenty-fourth—nineteen sixty-five?” Caminetti had to establish the fact that Haviland was there.
“Yes.”
“Did you also see Thomas Browning there as well?”
“Yes.”
“The three of them—Haviland, Browning, Anna Malreaux—were in the same room at the same time?”
“Yes.”
I knew that she was married to a well-known senior partner in one of the large investment houses, the private institutions that manage much of the world’s wealth; I knew that she was one of the women no one who wanted to make a mark in New York society would ever dare cross; I knew all that, but seeing her in person, sitting a few short steps away, I began to wonder if there was not something else I knew as well.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” I asked as I rose in response to Judge Scarborough’s invitation to take the witness on cross. I buttoned my jacket and centered my tie. “The summer before Annie Malreaux’s tragic death.”
She was not willing to admit the possibility. She looked right through me, as if I were invisible; the way, I imagine, she looked at anyone she did not know, or did not like. Smiling to myself, I insisted that I was right.
“Sometime in June, I think it was; one evening at Maxwell’s Plum. Yes, I’m sure of it now. There were about a dozen people, all friends of Thomas Browning. He was sitting at the end of the table. I was the last to arrive. I was clerking that summer at a Wall Street firm. Browning was sitting there at the end of the table, and you were sitting either just to his right or just to his left—I don’t remember which. All I remember is that he spent most of his time talking to you.”
She did not answer; she did not say a word. With bored indifference she waited for a question that had something to do with the case. I raised my head and with a thin smile let her wonder what I was going to do next.
“You didn’t know Thomas Browning at Harvard, did you? You didn’t go to law school?”
“No, I…”
“And you didn’t know Anna Malreaux, did you?” I was guessing, but I would have been surprised had I been wrong. Browning had a talent for segregating his friends. “She was at Harvard; you weren’t there. That’s correct, isn’t it?” I asked with a degree of indifference to rival her own.
“Yes, I…”
“Yes, you knew him before that. You’ve known him, if I’m not mistaken, from sometime before he went to Harvard Law. You met him, if I’m not mistaken, when he was an undergraduate, or perhaps even before that.” I was leaning against the corner railing of the jury box, my right foot crossed casually over my left. “You were living in New York, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, that’s…”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter when you met him,” I remarked as I walked away from the jury. “The only reason you’re here today is to tell us that you saw Thomas Browning and Anna Malreaux and…” I stopped at a point equidistant from the witness stand and the counsel table where Jimmy Haviland sat alone. “Have you ever met the defendant, Jamison Scott Haviland? Let me rephrase that,” I said, suppressing a smile as I shot a sidelong glance at the jury. “Do you remember ever having met him?”
“No,” she replied, decidedly unamused.
“But you remember, after all these years, seeing two people you did not know, that you never met, talking to each other during a party at which there must have been—how many?—a hundred, two hundred people, going in and out.” Before she could answer, I made a quarter turn and looked straight at her. “Are you sure we never met?” She was not going to answer this time, either; but I did not give her the choice. “Your Honor, if you would instruct the witness.”
“No, I don’t recall that we’ve ever met,” she said, her eyes cold and impenetrable.
“Not at Maxwell’s Plum, that day in June?”
“No.”
I stared right at her, a small, triumphant smile slanting across my mouth. “And not on December twenty-fourth of that same year, at that party given by Thomas Browning, where I was as well?”
It had no effect on her, none at all. It had become second nature to her, that look that shielded her from everything and everyone she did not want to know.
“You testified that you saw the defendant and Anna Malreaux ‘talking.’ Did you hear what they were saying?”
“No,” she said in a vacant, almost disembodied voice.
“You testified that you saw Thomas Browning in the same room. Mr. Caminetti did not ask you if, when you saw them, the three of them were alone. So I will. Were there other people in the room at the time?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure. I see,” I said, shaking my head at her proud defiance, at the way she limited each answer to the bare minimum of what it should be. “Humor us, Mrs. Chandler; indulge us in the perhaps vain belief that you don’t really think a court of law, in which a man is on trial for his life, is a complete waste of your time, better spent, no doubt, shopping for a new bracelet or a new pair of shoes!”
It worked. She came unglued.
“How dare you!” she cried, bending forward as if she wanted to come after me with her long, sharp nails. “Who do you think you are to talk to me like that? Who do you…”
“I think I’m the attorney for the defense, entitled to whatever limited attention you might deign to pay the questions I ask!” I shot back, doing everything I could to drive her mad. “You walk in here, wearing clothes that cost more than half these jurors make in a year, and you act like you’re making some kind of sacrifice. So the question, Mrs. Chandler, isn’t who do I think I am, but who do you think you are? Other than spend money you never earned, what have you ever done that makes you think you can treat with this kind of condescension, not just other people, but the law?”
If she had had something close at hand—a rock, a purse, anything—I think she would have thrown it at me, so great was the rage that had taken possession of her, twisting her mouth into an ugly, hateful knot. With an angry glance, I made a dismissive gesture with my hand and walked away. At the counsel table, I turned around. She was struggling to hide her embarrassment at having for one of the few times in her life lost control.
“There were a great many people there that day, weren’t there?” I asked in a voice, quiet and subdued.
“Yes, there were,” she agreed without hesitation.
“And from the absence of any suggestion to the contrary in your direct testimony, I take it that you, yourself, were not in the room—the suite—when Anna Malreaux fell from the window to her death.”
She was sitting in the witness chair the way she had been before, but without the same air of annoyance and contempt. She answered the questions as if she had decided that they were important after all, and that she should do everything she could to make her meaning clear.
“No, I wasn’t there when it happened. I had only come by to say hello to Thomas—Thomas Browning, that is. We were very old friends. That was the first time I met Anna Malreaux. I knew that she and Thomas were involved. I did not know how serious it was, of course. That’s not something Thomas would have confided in me about. That is also how I happen to remember Mr. Haviland. As soon as I walked in and saw the look on their faces, I could tell they did not much like each other. Thomas walked me outside, into the outer suite. He told me that he—Mr. Haviland—was in love with Ms. Malreaux, but that she was not in love with him.”
For the first time, she glanced at Haviland. She smiled sympathetically, as if she understood how much that must have hurt, and then she looked back at me.
“You said you could not hear what was said between the defendant and Anna Malreaux. Was there anything about the way they were talking that made you think that Mr. Haviland was angry, ready to do her harm?”
“No, but he did seem quite upset with Thomas,” she said quickly.
“Did Mr. Browning appear to be concerned for his safety?”
“No, not at all. I think he was just waiting for Mr. Haviland to leave.”
I was standing in the middle of the shaft of light that cut through the windows above the jury box. My arms folded across my chest, I stared down at the floor. At her answer, my head snapped up.
“And so far as you know, he did. Isn’t that correct, Mrs. Chandler? So far as you know, he left right after you did, and—what was it you testified before?—that you left a long time before Anna Malreaux fell from that window to her death.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about what happened after I left the hotel that afternoon.”
I asked a few more questions, all to the same point: She did not know what happened, but Haviland had not done anything to make her think he was angry with Anna Malreaux.
“When you heard that Anna Malreaux had died, you must have been shocked?”
“Yes, of course I was.”
The light that fell from the window struck my eyes. All that was visible on the witness stand was a gray hazy outline, and for the moment it lasted I saw Mary Beth Chandler the way she had looked that evening at Maxwell’s Plum.
“You were sitting on Browning’s right,” I said before I knew it. I bent my head a little to the side until the light was out of my eyes. She did not say anything, but a slight movement of her mouth acknowledged it as a fact. I went back to my question.
“You were shocked, of course. And did you at the time, or at any time until this case was brought against Jamison Haviland, ever have reason to think that Anna Malreaux’s death had been anything but what the police said it was at the time—an accident?”
“No, absolutely not,” she said emphatically. A worried look came into her eyes. There was something she wanted to add, something she thought everyone should know. She turned to the jury, an earnest expression on her face. “Thomas was devastated, inconsolable. If it hadn’t been for Joanna—Mrs. Browning…” she started to explain. She realized that having explained that, she had to explain something else as well. “Thomas and Joanna had been close friends for years. Their families—the Brownings and the Van Renaesslers— were very close. Thomas always turned to her for comfort and advice. After the tragedy—after what happened—they were inseparable. He probably would have gotten through it on his own,” she said, biting her lip as she speculated about the past. “We were young, and the young are resilient; but I can’t believe it would have been the same without her. A year or so later, they were married. It’s strange, isn’t it?” she asked, turning her attention back to me. “What happens to us and why.”
I started back to the counsel table, cross-examination at an end. I raised my eyes to the bench to announce that I was through; but then I remembered. I stopped and wheeled around.
“You’ve known Thomas Browning nearly as long as that yourself—since you were still a girl in your teens, isn’t that correct?”
She had her hands on the arms of the witness chair, just about to stand up. Her eyes swung across the room.
“Yes, like the Van Renaesslers, our families were acquainted.”
“And from what you testified, Thomas Browning was in love with Anna Malreaux—you said he was ‘devastated’ by her death, ‘inconsolable.’”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“You know Thomas Browning as well as anyone does. Is it possible that he could have watched someone murder this girl he loved and then told the police that it was an accident? And then spend the rest of his life covering up the crime?”
“Objection!” thundered Caminetti as he came out of his chair. “Calls for speculation, it’s irrelevant, immaterial. It’s…”
Scarborough struck his gavel hard. “Sustained!” He leaned forward on both arms and peered down at me with a worldly smile. Raising both eyebrows, he used his middle finger to scratch the underside of his chin. “I’m sure I do not have to explain the reason why Mr. Antonelli’s question—or should I say his rather lengthy commentary—has been ruled impermissible.” The smile grew a little larger, tickling the corners of his mouth. “Which of course raises the question why, when counsel both understand the rules so well, they seem to get broken so often.”
Scarborough darted a glance at Caminetti, and then, sliding over until he was leaning on his hip, he stared at a point just beyond the jury box and finished with a private remark to his imaginary friend.
“Unless—and I would hate to think this was true— they believe the only rule is whatever they can get away with.”
His eyes came down to the jury, his face animated, eager, alive. He could not wait to let them share in the subtle pleasure of putting lawyers in their rightful place.
“With that mild admonition, Mr. Antonelli,” he announced with a graceful nod, “please continue.”
“No,” said Mary Beth Chandler before I could open my mouth. “He never would have done that. The Thomas Browning I know would never let someone get away with murder. It’s absurd.”
Caminetti had automatically bounced back on his feet. Speechless, he could only roll his eyes. In what was almost a slow-motion gesture of helpless frustration, Scarborough threw up his hands. As if I had not noticed anything wrong, I made a slight bow toward Mrs. Chandler, thanked her for her testimony and announced that my cross-examination had now ended.
“The witness’s last statement will be stricken from the record,” announced Scarborough in an even-tempered voice. “The jury is instructed to ignore it. You may call your next witness.”
I could scarcely wait to tell Gisela what I had done.
One more witness that morning and two more in the afternoon took the stand to testify on behalf of the prosecution that Jimmy Haviland had not only been at the Plaza the day Anna Malreaux died, but that he had been in love with her, obsessed with her, unwilling to accept the fact that she was not in love with him.
“He had asked her to marry him. She had said no,” testified one of her law school friends, a plump moon-faced woman who seemed to radiate goodwill. She was that rare phenomenon: a lawyer who loved her work.
“You specialize in the legal rights of women, is that not correct, Ms. Dell?”
She burst into a confident, pudgy-cheeked smile. “And proud of it, Mr. Antonelli!”
Clover Dell—that was her actual given name—was a legend, the groundbreaking advocate on nearly every major feminist issue in the last twenty years. Despite themselves, people who hated what she stood for could not hate her: They could not quite resist the power of the unblemished enthusiasm that never came close to fanaticism. She had walked into Scarborough’s courtroom, both arms swinging at her sides, like an owner coming home, glad to find that instead of an empty house there was a party going on, one that could only get better now that she had arrived. The moment she settled into the witness chair she looked up at Scarborough and to his immense amusement greeted him like a long-lost friend: “How are you, Judge? Keeping these two straight?” she asked with a quick glance first at Caminetti, then at me.
“You testified that the defendant asked Anna Malreaux to marry him, but she did not want to marry him.”
“I did.”
I had to be careful: I did not know how much she knew. “Were you aware that there were other young men interested in her?”
“Sure, but she wasn’t interested in them. I don’t mean she wasn’t interested in men. No, but she certainly didn’t have any interest in marriage. Not that she had anything against marriage, but it wasn’t something she was going to do before she had established herself in her own career. That’s what we were about, Mr. Antonelli—becoming independent women who could choose the lives we wanted.” She squared her shoulders and faced the jury with a look that suggested that they all had to agree that there could be nothing more important than that. “Anna Malreaux was one of the most independent-minded women I ever had the good fortune to know. It’s a tragedy that she didn’t live. She would have been an enormous success. Huge.”
I wondered whether she would have thought the same thing if she had known that Annie Malreaux had decided to become Thomas Browning’s wife.
“So she wasn’t going to marry anyone, at least not right away. In addition to her independence, would you also describe her as thoughtful and kind, perhaps unusually so?” I asked the question as if it were nothing more than innocent curiosity, and when she immediately agreed, I suggested what seemed the only logical, the only fair conclusion.
“So when she said no, told Jimmy Haviland that she would not marry him, don’t you think it possible that she might have told him that? What you just said—that she wasn’t ready for marriage, that there were a lot of things she wanted to do first? Wouldn’t she have done something like that, both to let him down easy and because—as you yourself have just told us—it was true?”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Caminetti coming out of his chair.
“Isn’t that what she told you? I know it was a long time ago, but you remember everything else so distinctly, perhaps you remember that as well: what Anna Malreaux told you she told Jimmy Haviland when he proposed.”
Did she remember? I do not know. But she thought she did, and she had no doubt what, knowing Annie, Annie would have done.
“Yes, I’m almost positive she told me that. I can’t remember her exact words, but they were words to that effect.”
“So Jimmy Haviland would still have been left with some reason to hope.” I glanced briefly at the judge, turning away before he turned his gaze on me. “No more questions, Your Honor.”
Jimmy Haviland had not been charged with manslaughter; he had been charged with murder. The prosecution had to show, not that he caused her death through negligence, but with deliberate intent. It was not enough to argue that in a moment of anger he had shoved her and that, as a result he should have foreseen, she had fallen to her death. Caminetti had to show that when Haviland pushed her it was because he wanted her to die. That meant he had to show that that thought had been in Haviland’s mind. In the afternoon, he called two witnesses who, at least on first impression, seemed to make the case that it had. The first, Clarence Armitage, whom I vaguely remembered from school, testified that Haviland had been so upset when “Annie turned him down” that he stopped going to class, refused to eat, and seldom left his room. Caminetti pounced upon it.
“So he spent all his time brooding on it, letting it eat away at him?”
Armitage shook his head. “He was despondent.”
Caminetti took the answer as if it only confirmed the worst. “In other words, depressed.”
I was not sure I needed to, but given Caminetti’s penchant for answering his own questions when he did not like the answers he got, I decided to underscore the obvious.
“He was despondent—I think that was the word you used—not depressed?”
“Despondent; yes, that’s what I said.”
“You were good friends; you were rooming together at the time, isn’t that correct?”
“Yes,” replied Armitage, bending forward as he glanced across to where Haviland sat watching. “We were good friends.”
“He told you what happened with Annie, and you could see for yourself how he felt—Is that correct?”
Armitage ran his fingers through gray-streaked hair. He was dressed in the fastidious fashion that was still expected among the senior partners in a Wall Street firm. It occurred to me when I first saw him on the stand that it could have been me sitting there, calm and correct, had I accepted the offer to come back to the firm where I had clerked that summer I spent in New York.
“In other words, you knew him rather well, didn’t you? Well enough to anticipate his moods, to know what he was thinking. My question is this: During that whole period, after he proposed to Anna Malreaux and she refused, did he ever, even once, suggest that he might want to do her any harm?”
The answer was plain, emphatic, without either hesitation or doubt. “Never.”
With his next witness, Caminetti came at the same issue from the other side. Haviland’s friend and roommate had testified that he had been distraught, a fact that Caminetti would use to suggest that the pressure and the pain had finally built to the breaking point, and that the death of Anna Malreaux had come to be seen as the only way out. Abigail, or, as we had all known her, Abby, Sinclair testified that Anna Malreaux had been afraid of what Jimmy Haviland might do.
“They had been going together?” asked Caminetti in his energetic, abbreviated way.
Abby Sinclair had been sworn in, and Caminetti was standing in front of her, not more than six feet away. She sat on the edge of the chair, raising herself up until she could see over Caminetti’s shoulder. Her brown eyes sparkled with recognition the instant they caught my own. We had been friends once, and Abby was one of those people, rare enough, who never forget a friend, no matter how many years had passed. She had wanted to become a lawyer so that she could do something to help the poor; she was now the head of a large foundation that did just that. She looked at Caminetti and let him know that she was not someone he could rush.
“‘Going together’ would not be right. They had started going out sometime in the spring—the early spring, I think—of our first year. But Annie went out with other young men as well. That summer—the summer between our first and second years—Annie lived in New York, but Jimmy wasn’t here.”
Is that when it started—that summer in New York? I had forgotten, if I had ever known, that Annie had been there, too.
“She saw him a few times early in the fall, after school started, in Cambridge.”
Abby had large, generous eyes, offering comfort to whoever was fortunate enough to come under their gaze. She had that kind of gawky, bucktoothed look that made you want to laugh with sadness at how much more beauty shined out of that plain, unaltered face than you were ever likely to see in the flashing eyes of high-fashion women used to turning every head they passed.
“But then she told him she could not see him anymore. I don’t know why,” she admitted. “I was a friend of hers, but she had other, closer friends, and perhaps she told one of them. That’s when he asked her to marry him, when she said she couldn’t see him anymore. I think he was desperate not to lose her, and maybe thought that if she knew he was that serious about her, she would think about him in a different way.”
Caminetti was pacing the floor. “But she said no,” he interjected the moment she stopped.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Caminetti straightened his shoulders and looked directly at her. “And after she said no, she was worried what he might do?”
“Very worried.”
Ready with the next question, Caminetti took a step toward her. He stopped, and with a miser’s stare, reconsidered.
“No, never mind.” He darted a glance at the bench. “No more questions, Your Honor,” he said, his hands trailing in the air behind him as he turned and moved steadily toward his chair.
It was too easy, and I should have known it.
“Annie—Anna—Malreaux was worried what he might do?” I asked this with a cautious expression, as if I were only trying to clarify a point. With my back to the jury, I looked at Abby and smiled. Then I stepped away, giving to the jury an unobstructed view. “Worried about what he might do to her, or what he might do to himself?”
With a quick shake of her head, she dismissed any possibility that Annie had been afraid for herself. “She was worried about him.”
Without thinking, I had given Caminetti everything he needed. On redirect, he stood in front of the counsel table and gave Abby a serious, searching glance.
“In other words, Anna Malreaux, who knew him well, thought him quite capable of doing something violent!”
Whether he had been born with it or learned it from the Jesuits, this instinct for changing the plain meaning of things, Caminetti could do anything with words.
It was nearly four-thirty and I thought we were through, but as soon as Abby Sinclair had been excused, Caminetti immediately called someone else. He stood at the side of the counsel table, tapping on it impatiently with the fingers of his left hand.
“State your name.”
“Gordon Fitzgerald.”
“Do you know the defendant?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Where do you know him from?”
“We were in a rehabilitation center together.”
“For the treatment of alcoholism?”
“Yes.”
“During the time you knew him, did the defendant say anything about a woman by the name of Anna Malreaux?”
“Yes. He said he killed her; he said he was responsible for her death.”