Bad Blood (4 page)

“Ten or fifteen minutes after I took this photograph.” Kate Meade lifted a handkerchief embroidered with pink flowers out of her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. Then balling it up in her hand, she pointed at the life-size picture of her friend on the easel beside her.

“Did you speak to Amanda Quillian again after that?”

“Yes, I called her shortly before three o’clock. Preston suggested to me that we invite her to dinner that evening since she was alone, and so I called to tell her what time to come over.”

“At what number did you call her?”

“On her cell phone. I called on her cell because I wasn’t sure whether she would have reached home yet.”

“Did she answer?”

“It went to voice mail. She picked it up a few minutes later and called me back.”

“Was that the last time you heard from Amanda Quillian?”

Kate Meade’s fingernails clipped each other more loudly than before. “No, ma’am.”

“What happened next?”

“I was opening the door to our apartment when my own cell phone rang again,” Kate said, tearing up as she hung her head. “She must have hit redial, it was so fast.”

“Objection, Your Honor. This speculation, this guesswork, this ‘must have,’ ‘should have,’ ‘could have’ business is—”

“Sustained. Keep your voice up, will you, madam?”

Kate Meade lifted her head, picked out her favorite juror — the teacher — and locked eyes with her. “I flipped open my phone and I could hear Amanda screaming. Just a long, terrifying scream.”

“Did she say anything, any words you could understand?” This excited utterance, as the law called it, was an exception to the hearsay rule. I was confident that the judge would allow Kate’s testimony about this last call.

“First Amanda screamed. That’s the only awful noise I could hear. Then she started crying and speaking to someone at the same time.”

I lowered my voice and waited for Kate Meade to stop hyper-ventilating a bit. “Do you have any idea with whom she was speaking?”

Kate shook her head.

“Did you hear what she said?”

“Very clearly. She said, ‘Brendan sent you, didn’t he? Brendan sent you to kill me.’ They’re the last words I ever heard Amanda say.”

“Did the other person ever speak while your phone line was open?”

“He didn’t speak, Ms. Cooper. He just laughed. Amanda screamed one more time and the man just laughed.”

I paused, letting the jury absorb the impact of the image Kate Meade had just re-created. “Was there anything distinctive about the laugh? Anything that you recognized or can describe to us, Mrs. Meade?”

“I remember he had a deep, gruff voice. He sounded like a madman, like he was enjoying the fact that he was torturing poor Amanda,” she said, again pressing the handkerchief to her eyes. “I could still hear her screaming — more muffled at the end. And then the phone line went dead.”

“I’m Lemuel Howell, Mrs. Meade. I’m sorry we haven’t had the opportunity to meet before today, but I have some questions to ask you as well,” he said to the witness, following a twenty-minute break given the jurors to refresh themselves. Howell wanted to make it clear to them that I had an advantage he had been denied.

He was polite and charming to Kate Meade, but whatever brief period of comfort she had achieved in recalling her friendship with Amanda during the first part of the direct examination had been wiped out by the last. Her body tensed up, and she wrung the handkerchief in her hands as her eyes darted back and forth between Brendan Quillian and his lawyer.

“So you’ve known Brendan for more than half your life, haven’t you?” Howell had been standing behind his client, hands resting on his broad shoulders, and patted him on the back before walking closer to the jury box. He was telling the panel that he not only represented Quillian, but liked him, too.

Kate smiled wanly and nodded.

“You’ll have to speak up, for the record,” Judge Gertz said.

“Yes. Yes, sir. I’m thirty-four now. I met him when I was sixteen.”

“Spent time with him during your high school days, did you?”

“Yes.”

“Saw him often throughout your college years?”

“Occasionally.”

Howell ticked off a litany of social events at which Kate Meade and the Quillians had spent time together. There were intimate family gatherings and celebrations of every variety, countless business functions in which the Meades had participated, and enough philanthropic work that both couples had engaged in that might have allowed the defendant to call on Mother Teresa as a character witness.

I had figured that Kate Meade would present the opportunity for Howell to put as much of Brendan’s pedigree before the jury as Amanda’s, and that she would establish for the defense some of his best qualities. It might even weigh in the decision that Howell would later have to make about whether to let his client testify. If he could establish enough of the defendant’s good nature through the prosecution witnesses, he might not expose him to the cross-examination I so dearly wanted the chance to do.

But I had no other choice than to use Kate in my direct case. She gave me facts — the repeated separations that occurred in the middle of the night, the revelation that Amanda had chosen to end the marriage, and the last phone call before Amanda’s death — that were among my strongest evidentiary links to Brendan’s motive and role in the murder of his wife.

“I believe that you served on several nonprofit boards over the last decade, some organizations that do great work for the people of this city, am I right, Mrs. Meade?”

“Yes, I have.”

One art museum, one major medical center, two diseases in need of a cure, and the junior committee of the best public library in America. Howell called out the name of each, his mellifluous voice investing them with even greater dignity.

“And was Brendan on any of those boards with you?”

“Yes,” she answered quietly.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Meade,” Howell said, cocking his head so that the jury could see how pleased he looked. “You did say yes to that, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“And, let me see, God’s Love We Deliver,” he said, referring to a well-regarded New York City organization that delivers meals to terminally ill people in their homes. Lem was holding out one of his well-manicured hands as he counted fingers to mark Brendan’s good works.

“No, no.”

“No, ma’am? You’re saying Brendan wasn’t involved in that very noble cause?” Howell said, pressing his arm across his chest in a false sign of distress.

“No, Mr. Howell, you’re mistaken about
me
. I’ve never served on that board.” Kate Meade was becoming flustered. She held out a hand with the crumpled handkerchief in the defendant’s direction. “Brendan did.”

“So, I am also correct that my client found time for even more community involvement than someone such as yourself, Mrs. Meade?” Howell asked, ticking off the names of four other charitable groups that Brendan helped.

“The Quillians were both very generous. It was Amanda’s way.”

Howell had made his point and moved on. “Your eldest daughter, Mrs. Meade, that would be Sara?”

Kate stiffened again, peeved that her child’s name was being brought into the proceedings. She pursed her lips and stared at the defendant. “Yes.”

“And you told us, in answer to Ms. Cooper’s question, that the Quillians are her godparents, isn’t that right?”

Her answer was another clipped “Yes.”

Howell took the witness through another list of personal duties that established the close relationship between the nine-year-old girl and her parents’ best friends — shared holidays, overnights when the Meades had other engagements, vacations together on ski trips and to beach resorts.

“In fact, with whom did Sara attend her first Yankee game last spring?”

“Brendan.”

“With or without Amanda?”

“Without.”

“And whom did you call to take Sara ice-skating in Central Park when your husband had the flu a few months before that?”

“Brendan.”

Howell was getting nothing from Kate Meade. One-word answers seemed barely able to escape from her lips before she clamped them shut again.

“With or without Amanda.”

“Without.”

“So, I take it you never said to your daughter as you sent her out the door — and we all assume you love her dearly — ‘Now you watch out, Sara, ’cause your uncle Brendan, well, he’s a murderer, did—’”

“Objection, Your Honor. Amanda Quillian was very much alive then.”

Some of the jurors were chuckling along with Howell — and with the defendant himself — always a bad thing to hear at a murder trial. The hammer in my brain had resumed its dull thud, reminding me that Lem had something in store for Kate Meade.

“I’ll allow it.”

“No.” Kate Meade was looking to me to rescue her, but there was nothing I could do.

“And by the way, you never took stock around the boardroom at the Museum of Modern Art — or when he was raising millions of dollars for Mount Sinai Hospital — you never said to any of your colleagues at either institution that your dear friend Brendan Quillian wasn’t to be trusted with your money — or your life, did you?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained,” Judge Gertz said. “Let’s move on.”

“Now, Alexandra — sorry, Ms. Cooper,” Howell said, winking at me as though to apologize for slipping into the familiar, so that the jurors would know we had a friendship outside this arena. “Ms. Cooper asked you about the night that Amanda Quillian first appeared at your door, at one a.m. You told us that you didn’t see any injuries on her face, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, did you call a doctor — that night or any day thereafter during the week?”

“No, no, I did not.”

“Did you take Mrs. Quillian to an emergency room?”

“No.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No.”

“Was your husband at home with you that night?”

“Yes.”

“And apart from him — that would be Preston Meade, am I right? — apart from your husband, did you tell anyone else about Amanda’s visit?”

“No.”

“Her parents?”

“No.”

“Her sisters?”

“I’ve told you that I didn’t,” she snapped. “No one.”

Howell was setting himself up nicely for his closing argument, three weeks away. He didn’t want to ask Kate
why
she had told no one, because he was aware that the answer would be that Amanda had pleaded with her not to. Rather, he would leave the impression that things hadn’t been serious enough to require any intervention. I made notes to try to clarify that question on my redirect of Kate Meade, hoping that the judge would think Howell had opened the door far enough to let me go there.

“Not even your nanny?” Howell asked. “Surely, Mrs. Meade, you have a nanny for your girls?”

“We do,” she said, ruffled again. “I simply forgot about her, Your Honor. I — uh — I didn’t mean to hide it.”

Howell used his softest expression to try to calm her. “I didn’t think you were doing any such thing. I’m sure your memory of those events isn’t quite as clear now as it was back then. Did you tell the nanny why Amanda Quillian was staying at your apartment?”

“No. She knew Amanda was my best friend. I didn’t have to tell her anything.”

“Because she just worked for you, isn’t that right?”

“Exactly,” Kate answered, in a way that would not endear her to most of the jurors.

Howell was clever about subtly creating even more distance between them and my young socialite witness.

“Let me understand this, Mrs. Meade. When is the very first time you told anyone — anyone at all — about the night Amanda Quillian left Brendan to come stay with you?”

Kate paused to think. “The day I met Ms. Cooper. The detectives took me down to the District Attorney’s Office the morning of October fourth. I told Ms. Cooper about it then.”

“So, that was — my goodness — that was four — no, four and a half years after the night you’ve described, wasn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

Howell wasn’t going to question her certainty about the timing. I had turned over Kate’s datebook entry that confirmed she had made a record of her friend’s brief estrangement from Quillian.

“And we all know how our memories of events, of conversations, of details — how they change over months and years.” Howell was walking in front of the jury box now, one hand on the railing and the other adjusting his tie.

“I remember everything that happened with Amanda. I have a very good memory.”

“But for telling me that your help — your nanny — was at home that week, isn’t that right?”

Kate was smart enough not to keep the battle going, and Howell knew he could weave her five-year silence into a suggestion that nothing had been more serious between the couple than an occasional lovers’ quarrel.

“Now, when Brendan came to the door of your home, that first week, more than five years ago, didn’t you ask him, Mrs. Meade — didn’t you ask him to explain what he had done to upset your best friend so?”

“No.”

“Didn’t you ask him to tell you his side of the story?”

“I didn’t need to ask him. Amanda had already told me.”

“But surely, you would agree that there are two sides to every story, wouldn’t you? Whether you wanted to hear what Brendan had to say or not?”

Howell was scoring twice. Not only was he making Kate Meade seem obstinate and small-minded, but he could later argue the same principle in the event the defendant didn’t testify on his own behalf.

“Possibly.”

“But you didn’t even bother to ask, did you?” Howell said, speaking slowly and emphasizing each of the words in that short question with obvious disapproval.

Kate Meade was pouting in silence.

“You must answer the question,” Gertz said to her.

“I did not.”

“Ms. Cooper,” Howell said, standing to my side and holding out his hand. “May I see People’s Exhibit twelve?”

I removed the pile of photographs that had been admitted during my direct exam of Kate and handed him the one he asked for.

“Would you look at this again for us, Mrs. Meade?”

“Of course.”