Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction (43 page)

“Were you embarrassed when he turned on the camera?”

Leigh ponders the question. To be consistent, she must answer yes. Instead, she answers, “It was in the privacy of our home.”

Dan nudges me.

“She’s trying to be cute. The jury has got to believe her. Jill will crucify her on closing if she doesn’t cut this out.”

“So your testimony is that,” Jill badgers her, “you weren’t embarrassed when you danced naked for your husband?”

In preparation for her testimony I have begged Leigh not to try to outsmart Jill, but even the most astute clients make that mistake. Jill will make her look as though she is incapable of presenting a consistent image to the jury.

“Art said it would never leave the house.”

Jill bores in on her.

“Isn’t it a fact that just the night before you and your husband had had a fight in which you told Art to quit ‘bad-mouthing’ your father?”

“It wasn’t a fight,” Leigh says defensively.

“And isn’t it a fact that the next morning an hour before your husband’s death,” Jill asks, “you were upset with him because of an angry conversation he’d just had with your father?”

“Just because I was upset,” Leigh says, “doesn’t mean I killed him.”

“Are you saying,” Jill asks bluntly, “your father shot your husband?”

Leigh shakes her head.

“I don’t know who shot my husband.”

Jill asks grimly, “What about you, mrs. Wallace?

You’re capable of telling repeated lies. But are you just too sweet and pretty to kill anybody?” Before Leigh can answer, Jill turns her back on her and goes to her seat.

I remain where I am. I don’t want to hear the answer.

After Grider instructs the jury on the law of the various degrees of murder, Jill begins her closing argument by summarizing the testimony of each witness and its significance, then goes to work on the crucial hour and a half between Shane’s phone call and the discovery of the body.

“What happened, ladies and gentlemen,” she asks rhetorically, standing in front of the jury rail, “after Art Wallace put down the telephone after speaking to the defendant’s father?” Jill looks back over at Leigh for an instant and then says conspiratorially, “You know as well as I do what happened. The defendant was feeling a crushing sense of guilt. Her entire life had been centered around her father. From the time she was born until this very moment, her father adored her, and she adored him. No relationship was more important in some ways to either of them. She made trip after trip with her father to foreign lands; after graduation from college she worked for him in the church. It is not too much to say that Leigh was as much inspiration to this tireless minister of the Gospel as he was to her. And why not? She was willing to try to convert the Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla group terrorizing the country of Peru. And the defendant reveled in her father’s love.

What daughter would not? Inevitably, this beautiful woman was bound to attract the attention of other men, and perhaps, understandably, she probably thought they were all as wonderful as her father.”

Jill pauses here and then says dryly, “Well, Art Wallace was not. With a persistence that bordered on the fanatical, he began to chip away at the defendant’s relationship with her father and her church until one devastating morning Leigh Wallace found herself lying to her father, lying to her friends, and dancing naked in front of a camera. Of course, we know what happened next! The police have told us there was no forced entry, no evidence of another soul coming into that house until the defendant brought mrs. Sims back with her to discover her husband’s body.”

Jill raises her voice slightly as she taps her right hand above her left breast.

“Guilt and anger, ladies and gentlemen guilt and anger are a deadly combination of emotions, and Leigh was experiencing them both when she frantically began to get ready to drive to the church so she could pretend she had been there all along. She felt guilt because of everyone she had betrayed, and she felt anger at herself and the man who had debased her.

Her husband, we know, got dressed and went into his office and sat down behind the desk and turned on his computer. What happened, ladies and gentlemen, was that Leigh took a twenty-two-caliber pistol and walked into her husband’s office and shot him through the heart and killed him. She then drove to the church, pretended she had been there all morning, and invited a friend to lunch so she could happen upon her husband’s body.

There is no evidence in this case that supports any other explanation..

..”

Leigh’s body is practically rigid beside me as she listens with her left hand placed firmly over her mouth. It is as if she is stifling a scream. Jill’s explanation is so reasonable, so obvious, that it is impossible to resist a wave of depression. As I stand to make my closing, Leigh begins to weep, hardly an encouraging send-off.

I walk quickly to the jury rail to draw attention away from her. What are her tears if not an admission of guilt?

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin hoarsely, and stop to clear my throat. I know I sound nervous and try desperately to relax. If I had not begun to feel Leigh was guilty, this would be easier. Starting again, my voice still scratchy, I say too loudly, “What the prosecutor wants so badly is to have you ignore the obvious conclusion that there is no evidence in this case at all there is no evidence whatever that Leigh Wallace shot her husband. There is no murder weapon, no eyewitness, no physical evidence at all. She has offered no motive except emotions that those of you on this jury feel every day. If there was a murder every time some one felt guilt and anger, there wouldn’t be a person in this courtroom.” I slap the rail in front of me and pretend to scoff, “Talk about making a virtue of necessity, and necessity being the mother of invention! The prosecutor has invented her theory because she has no facts.” I turn to Jill and point at her.

“What proof did the prosecutor offer that Leigh Wallace killed her husband? A magician couldn’t distort reality any better,” I say, and turn back to the jury.

“The prosecutor practically tells you that Leigh has been the victim in all of this and then, in the time-honored fashion, where there is no evidence to support it, she blames the victim!”

I back away from the rail to give the jury some time to digest what I have said, and lower my voice. The hoarseness is gone, and I almost believe what I am saying

“Who killed Art Wallace? Unlike the prosecutor, I don’t pretend to know beyond a reasonable doubt. It very well could have been an out-of-town hired gun.

Professional killers know how to slide back locks on doors; they know a well-placed twenty-two-caliber bullet makes someone just as dead as the bullet from a deer rifle. On the other hand, the murderer could have been anybody in Blackwell County. For all we know, it could have been Hector Tyndall. He lived only a few doors down and has admitted he was at home all morning. He knew the agony that Shane Norman was going through as a result of his son-in-law’s actions. And if you want to suspect someone who felt the emotion of anger toward the victim, you might as well add Shane Norman to the list of possibilities. He could have easily gone to his daughter’s house and invited himself in on the pretext of talking things out with his son-in-law and then shot him to death.”

I stop speaking and walk back to the podium.

“Do you see how easy it is?” I thunder, leaning against the lectern as if I were a world-weary veteran with a hundred murder trials under my belt.

“If the system wants to, it can make anybody appear guilty! Opportunity does not make someone a murderer! Motive does not make someone a murderer! Nor do the two together make a murderer in our system of justice, because, as we see, there is no end to the number of theoretical suspects in this case. As Hector Tyndall told you, it was common knowledge within Christian Life what was happening to Leigh. And if you ask every one of those people where they were the morning Art Wallace was murdered, and assuming they could remember, I’d bet my house that some of them would not tell the truth the first time they were asked….”

As I sit down, Dan whispers, “Chet would have been proud.” I wonder what he would have said. What he had that I lack is credibility. I have no idea whether the jury believed a word coming out of my mouth.

Jill gets to her feet and smirks at me as if I were the worst con artist in the world.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, turning to the jury, “Mr. Page wants you to suspend your common sense. He wants you to forget the facts of this case and pretend you are looking for a needle in a haystack. That is absurd and your common sense tells you it is. Where did the police tell us they discovered the victim’s body? On the floor in his office beside his computer, which was still on when the police came. Art Wallace didn’t bring his killer into his house and go back and sit down and start working again.

You’ve heard investigators tell you how they went over every inch of the house and there is no evidence his body was dragged or moved after the victim was shot….”

The last word. How I wish I had it, but even Chet told me that he had never finished a trial where he hadn’t wished to say something more after the prosecutor sat down. The fact that the computer was on when he was shot proves nothing. But people know that from their own experience. If his killer was somebody he knew, he could easily have brought that person back to his office and sat down at his desk to talk. Trials have to end somewhere though, and all the wishing in the world isn’t going to make anything different.

Leigh sighs heavily as the jury files out.

“What do you think?” she asks as the door shuts on the last one.

I slump in my seat, exhausted. It is six o’clock. Food will be brought in while they deliberate. Chet wouldn’t have made it. Maybe he knew he couldn’t have lasted long enough and simply couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to see the trial through.

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. I glance at Dan, who is quietly gathering up the papers on the table in front of him. A bad sign.

Dan volunteers to go out for hamburgers and takes Sarah with him, leaving me to visit with Rainey as the crowd dwindles rapidly. If the jury doesn’t come back with a verdict by nine o’clock, they will be sequestered over the weekend. Rainey and I sit at the defense table and watch Leigh and her mother and father talk in the back of the courtroom. I’d like to be a fly on the wall during this conversation. Pearl looks better but not by much. Rainey smooths down her flowered spring dress and says, “If they convict her, I don’t think it will be first-degree murder.”

I rub my head, which has begun to ache. If Rainey is thinking conviction, we are in trouble.

“Good,” I say weakly, wishing for a moment that Chet had been well and had tried this case. But that feeling passes quickly.

I wanted to try this case in the worst way.

“They didn’t have any real evidence.”

Rainey smiles, but it is not reassuring. Get real, I think. Men and women commit acts of violence against each other every day. Why should Leigh and Art be any different? The jury, composed of faithful believers like herself, may well decide, as Rainey undoubtedly already has, that once the bonds of her church were loosened, there were no restraints on her behavior. I kick myself again for not questioning the strategy of seeking a jury of Bible thumpers, but then Chet’s logic hits me as I stare into Rainey’s face. He was convinced that Leigh was guilty. Maybe he knew she was. In choosing a jury, he was thinking about the length of her sentence, not the question of her guilt or innocence.

“You must be exhausted,” Rainey says, smiling sympathetically.

“I’m a little tired,” I admit.

“When I signed on for this case, I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

“Poor Gideon,” Rainey says, patting my shoulder and in the process touching me for the first time in over a month. When was the last time we even kissed? I can’t remember. It is hard to believe we used to neck like teenagers on her couch. What will become of us? I have no idea. Maybe it is true that friendship is better than love, but I’d rather have both.

Dan and Sarah come back with food from McDonald’s, reminding me of the night we waited for the verdict in the Andy Chapman case. No acquittal in that case either. Dan wanders off to visit with a friend from the sheriff’s office, leaving me alone with Sarah and Rainey. My stomach is too nervous for me to eat, and I sip at the chocolate milkshake Sarah has handed me.

Standing in the doorway of the courtroom, Sarah stares at her minister, who is still seated at the back of the courtroom with his wife and daughter.

“After all this, do you really think Pastor Norman could have killed Leigh’s husband?” she asks.

“Or were you just using him as an example of the fact that just about anyone could have done it?”

I look around to see who else might be listening and say under my breath, “I’m afraid he might have.

Though I can’t prove it, I suspect there was a lot more to this case than ever came out in the trial.”

Sarah whimpers, “He couldn’t have ever done that.”

“No, you’re wrong,” Rainey agrees.

“That’s impossible.”

“I didn’t say he did,” I respond defensively, but from the looks on their faces I may have changed their lives forever. A priest at Subiaco used to warn my Christian Doctrine class that faith for some of us would be a rudderless ship subject to the strongest wind. With my words, the storm that lately has been energizing the lives of my daughter and girlfriend may have ebbed. I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that I hoped it was so.

“The jury’s coming back!” Glider’s bailiff yells at me from across the courtroom. My heart thumping, I look down at my watch. It has only been an hour, a terrible omen. The longer they’re out, the better. I hand my cup to Sarah and wave at Leigh to come down front.

Coming toward me, she looks stricken, obviously reading the fear on my face. I try to speak, but no words come out. I can hear the comments tomorrow:

the jury was barely out an hour. Maybe the Arkansas Supreme Court will reverse because of incompetence of counsel. I wonder if I can get back into social work. As the jury files back in, I have given up pretending I can read results on the faces of jurors. I scan their faces, but they merely seem anxious to get home.