Silent Witness (50 page)

‘Specifically, didn't your wife call Marcie Calder your fantasy white girl and accuse you of wanting to sleep with her?'

Stuck with his evasion, unable to turn back, Ernie Nixon summoned all the dignity he possessed. Arms folded, he answered softly, ‘People say a lot of ugly things in a marriage. It's best not to remember them.'

Tony gave Ernie the long look of disbelief he had earned. ‘Yeah,' he said with equal quiet. ‘I might not want to remember that one, either. Especially now.'

Ernie simply stared at him, his sensitive face stripped of all defenses, save the one Tony remembered from his youth, the weary fatalism of a boy taught to expect too little, whether in loyalty or in simple friendship. Suddenly Tony could not look at him.

‘No further questions,' he said to Karoly, and sat down. The last face he noticed, as he had at the beginning, was Sue's, looking at Tony with compassion.

It was a two-martini night. Midway through the second one, Tony began to imagine Ernie Nixon, pacing his empty home. What might his night be like, Tony wondered, and what might he face in the morning?

‘Shit,' he said aloud.

Saul shrugged. ‘What's a ruined life or two? You did your job.' He paused, speaking more softly. ‘I hoped you wouldn't take this one. But now you have, and Sam's your client –
our
client. So there's no help for this.'

‘And there's nothing more pathetic than a lawyer enjoying the luxury of ex post facto conscience, is there? Wallowing in what a sensitive soul he is.'

Saul looked around the smoky bar, one of several haunts he knew that, as he put it, still had patrons willing to look death in the face while they sucked it down their lungs. ‘Tell me,' he said, ‘you think there's the remotest chance Ernie did her?'

‘The very remotest. My guess is that Ernie looked bad not because he's a murderer but because there're some things he doesn't want to know about himself, and others he doesn't want anyone else to know. Which makes him like the rest of us.' Tony took another sip. ‘But it's a theoretical possibility, which is what Sam needs.'

Saul grimaced. ‘Even
he
didn't look that happy.'

‘Well, it wasn't pickup basketball, was it.'

Saul paused a moment. ‘Not hardly,' he said.

The next morning, the headline in the
Steelton Press
read: ‘Lord Attacks Key Witness as Suspect.' The photograph next to that was of Ernie Nixon leaving court, gaze averted from the camera. Tony did not buy a copy.

Arriving, he felt a different atmosphere in court. There were more reporters, including one from
60 Minutes
; another, from
Vanity Fair
wanted to interview Tony regarding Alison Taylor. Sue and the Robb children, careful dark-haired Sam junior and tall blond Jennifer, sat in the front row, ignoring the media. But the Calders had begun speaking to reporters; knowing that their outrage at his questioning of Ernie had driven them to this, Tony had the melancholy awareness that those who start to feed the press often find this hard to stop.

Sam himself said little, other than to ask Tony whether he thought that Ernie Nixon had killed Marcie Calder. Tony had a troubling sense of subtext – that Sam had asked the question much as Saul had, without belief or anger. Wondering if this thought issued from his suspicions of Sam or from his own divided conscience, Tony gazed across the courtroom at Stella Marz.

Stella had the grim intensity of a lawyer who had suffered through a sleepless night. She had not acknowledged Tony on arriving and did not do so now. Studying her, Saul Ravin murmured to Tony, ‘It's war, for sure.'

It struck Tony that Saul was faring better than he: throughout their strategy sessions, some quite late, Saul had controlled his drinking, and though his jowly face still looked tired, it was less flushed, and his brown eyes were bright and clear. Much like Sam, Tony thought to his surprise, although, unlike Sam's, Saul's renewed vitality raised no troubling questions.

‘It is now,' Tony agreed, and then Stella called Jack Seed.

The Lake City police detective was trim and courteous, with translucent gray eyes that lent a perceptive look to his face. From the first few questions, Tony saw that Seed was the perfect policeman for this jury – capable, methodical, and white, the image of authority for those who wished to trust it. The attentiveness of the jurors suggested that they did.

Quickly, Stella and Seed covered Marcie's disappearance – the discovery of Marcie's car behind the abandoned service station; the fruitless search of the nearby woods in the first light of a gray and drizzly morning; the absence of clues to Marcie's whereabouts or to the identity of the older lover described by Janice; Seed's surprise when Sam Robb, a man he had known for years, appeared at the police station to say that he had been with Marcie Calder the night before; and then, finally, the first moments in Taylor Park. Resting his arms on the table, Sam folded his hands in front of him, as though bracing for a long ordeal.

‘So we got out of the car,' Seed continued, ‘and walked in the direction Sam said Marcie Calder had been running. It was raining, and the grass was wet. But toward the edge of the cliff, where there was mud instead of grass, I found marks.'

Stella paused, resting one hand on the prosecution table. ‘Could you describe the marks.'

‘They were what appeared to be prints from an athletic shoe – a man's, judging by size and shape, leading from the grass to the edge of the cliff. Next to the footprints, running parallel in the mud, were two shallow, irregular lines. To me, they looked like marks made by something being dragged. So we stepped around the footprints and followed them to the edge.'

In the jury box, the nutritionist touched her eyes.

‘And when you got to the edge, what did you see?'

Seed gazed at Stella steadily. ‘A sixty-foot drop. Then, near the bottom of the cliff, I saw the body of a woman – lying on her back. Even from a distance, it was clear that she was young and her hair was long and straight and black, like Marcie Calder's in the picture her folks had given us.' Seed's voice became soft. ‘She was wearing a Lake City sweatshirt, just like her mom had said.'

Nancy Calder, Tony saw, wept in silence. Awkwardly, her husband put his arm around her.

‘And the defendant?' Stell a asked quietly.

‘He took one look at the body, then sat at the edge of the cliff. The only thing he said was, “That's her.”'

‘After that, what did
you
do?'

‘I put Sam in the back of the car and called the EMTs, on the off chance Marcie was still alive. Then I called our crime lab people and the county coroner, and went down to look at the body.' Seed paused, his eyes still, as if he were remembering how Marcie Calder had looked. ‘As soon as I touched her, I knew she was dead. The EMTs came, and then the crime lab folks. I directed them to mark off the crime scene – on the cliff and around Marcie's body – and then I took him back to the station.'

The way Seed pronounced him,' suddenly impersonal, seemed to reflect the moment, still clear in Jack Seed's mind, when Sam had moved from friend to suspect. ‘Did you ask him to give a statement?' Stella asked.

‘Yes, on a voluntary basis; he wasn't in custody, and we didn't know what we had here. What we needed was whatever Sam could give us.'

‘And what was his response?'

‘That he'd do anything to cooperate,' Briefly, Seed's voice betrayed a trace of sarcasm. ‘Tell us
all
he knew. So we took him to the witness room, Carl and I, and turned on the tape.'

Tony remembered it well: the eight-by-eight cubicle where, twenty-eight years before, the cops Dana and McCain had subjected him to what was at once so traumatic and yet so surreal that his memory, though vivid, was as hallucinatory as his new nightmare of Alison. Tony's skin felt clammy, and beneath this, he experienced a reflexive sympathy for Sam.

‘And what,' Stella asked, ‘was the defendant's demeanor?'

Seed glanced at Sam again. ‘Grief-struck, it seemed like, and stunned. All he wanted, I remember him saying, was to help us.'

‘And do you have the tape of that interview?'

Tony, who had listened to it many times, wished fervently that the answer could be ‘no.' When Seed identified the tape, and Stella slid it into a cassette player, Sam turned away.

Sam's voice filled the courtroom, oddly hollow on tape, yet resonant with emotion. This, Tony thought, was another reason why today might be the last time the jury heard from Sam Robb: they would remember too well the sound of his lies.

‘It was a mistake,' Sam's voice told Seed. ‘A terrible, stupid mistake. But I didn't know what Marcie wanted, and she seemed – I don't know – secretive and kind of desperate. She said no one could know what we'd talked about, or even see us . . .' Sam's voice trailed off, and he murmured, ‘God help me, Jack, I thought it might be drugs or something – or maybe anorexia, emotional problems. She'd been looking so skinny . . .'

‘So she just hadn't seemed right to you?'

Jack Seed's tone was sympathetic, accepting: Tony found that there was a certain fascination in listening to two liars feign credulity, and wondered if either man had ever believed the other. ‘Yeah,' Sam told Seed. ‘She'd missed practice yesterday, too.'

‘So she came around when practice was ending?'

‘Uh-huh. That was another thing that was weird – missing practice, then showing up. But there were other kids there, and Marcie had to get home for dinner, I guess. That was why she wanted to talk later. At night.'

‘But not in your office.'

‘No.' Sam sounded chastened. ‘She said that would look bad, and this couldn't wait. I began to think about drugs again – maybe that she knew the kids who were dealing. We've had a problem lately; I guess you know that . . .'

‘Yeah, I do . . .'

‘Shit, Jack – I just can't believe she's dead.' Suddenly Sam's voice was thick. ‘How could this have happened?'

‘I don't know, Sam. I don't know. All you can do is help us.' Seed paused a moment. ‘I guess you told Sue about all this?'

In the silence of the spinning tape, the beautician glanced at Sue; Tony imagined the woman wondering if Sue could yet believe in her husband's innocence. ‘No,' Sam's taped voice murmured. ‘I didn't, really. Only that I was working.'

When Seed said nothing, Tony imagined Sam, fidgeting across the table. ‘I
know
Sue,' Sam finally added. ‘She'd tell me it was stupid, and she'd have been right. But Marcie had this urgency . . . all she'd said is meet her at the gas station. I never imagined she'd want to go to the park, to be alone.'

Taut, Tony watched Stella Marz, listening with veiled eyes. The knuckles of Sam's folded hands were white.

‘So you met her at the gas station?' Seed was asking.

‘Yeah.' On the tape, Sam's pause for breath was audible, and there was a tremor in his voice. ‘It was so weird, Jack . . . just so weird. Marcie said she couldn't talk unless we were really alone. The way she was – tense, insistent – I thought maybe that she
was
scared of someone. Almost like she was afraid of being followed.'

As he listened, Tony's skin felt cold. What chilled him was less Sam's lies than the way he told them: the stunned pauses, the bursts of disbelief, the palpable emotion. But the emotion could be real enough – fear and perhaps guilt – just as the disbelief could come from innocence, not of an affair, but of murder. The best lies, Tony remembered Sam saying, are based on truth. Then it struck Tony that Marcie
might
have been afraid of someone following her – Ernie Nixon.

‘So,' Jack Seed said softly, ‘you drove Marcie to the park.'

‘Yeah.'

‘What happened then?'

‘Oh, man . . .'

Seed's voice was gentle now. ‘What is it, Sam?'

‘Jack, she made a
pass
at me.'

‘A pass?'

‘No. It was more than that.' Sam's voice was low, awed by the memory of where he had found himself. ‘As sweetly as you could imagine, this young girl I thought I knew said that she was in love with me and wanted to have an affair.'

The faces of the listening jurors were hard – whatever they came to believe about the murder, Tony thought, for the rest of the trial they would despise Sam Robb. In the silence of the tape, Seed pondering his response, Tony saw Sue close her eyes. Jennifer took her mother's hand and, almost imperceptibly, Sam junior moved closer. Beyond them, Marcie's parents stared straight ahead, as if they could not bear to look at Sam.

On the tape, Seed asked, ‘What did you say to her, Sam?'

‘God.' It was the astonished voice of a man recalling his own shock. ‘I was so taken aback, I don't recall saying anything right away. So she took my hand and put it beneath her sweatshirt. She wasn't wearing a bra . . .

‘It was like an electric charge, and it woke me up to everything. I was in a car at night, touching the breast of a sixteen-year-old girl who wanted me. It was like suddenly I could see myself – how stupid I'd been, how much trouble this could be, that I'd never understood her.' Sam's voice fell. ‘When I pulled my hand away, she said, “
No
– I want you.”'

Listening, Tony realized how close this was to a story only he had heard – Sam's version of his ‘seduction' by Marcie Calder, told with the same sincerity. But what unnerved Tony was not simply the question of whether this was another truth-based lie, borrowed with skill from Marcie's actual behavior, but whether, in the recesses of his psyche, Sam had a need for young girls to desire him.