“No,”said Joyner, grim and defiant as he slowly shook his head. “We did not.”
“Then if we assume—as Mr. Antonelli insisted—that the defendant was just an innocent bystander, then panic is left as the only alternative explanation as to how he happened to have the gun in his possession at the time he was shot.”
Haliburton had moved close to the jury box, grazing it with his hip as he looked ahead to the witness stand.
“Based on all your years as a police officer, is it likely—even in a state of panic—that someone would pick up a gun, a loaded gun, a gun just used in a murder, and then run into the street waving it around?”
“No, not likely at all,”agreed Joyner immediately.
“But if you didn't 'plant' the gun, and if he didn't pick it up in his 'panic,' then there is only one explanation left, isn't there?”
Joyner did not need to be told what that explanation was. “The gun belonged to the defendant. He used it to shoot the senator and he still had it in his hand when he jumped out of the car and tried to get away.”
Haliburton turned his head to the jury. “Yes, exactly. Now,”he went on, looking back at the witness, “let's get back to something else Mr. Antonelli asked you about: the time it took to get to where the shot had been fired. Mr. Antonelli said—more than once, I think—'two minutes.' But I believe I heard you say something like a 'little less than two minutes.' Which was it?”
“Less than two minutes.”
“Good,”said Haliburton, as if the truth were the only thing he was after. “Now, how much less than two minutes, do you imagine?”
“I'm not really sure,”admitted Joyner.
Head down, Haliburton started to walk toward him and then, halfway between the jury box and the witness stand, stopped.
“Have you ever been in a high-speed chase?”he asked, looking up.
“A number of times.”
“Is it like being in an accident?”
“I'm not sure I know what you mean.”
“Everything seems to move in slow motion,”explained the district attorney.
“I see. Yes, that is sort of how it is.”
“Because you're concentrating with such intensity on what you're doing. Isn't that the way it is?”asked Haliburton as he stepped closer to the witness stand. “You see things in such vivid detail that it seems like it's all taking place over a long period of time. No,”he said, suddenly correcting himself, “it's more like time stops, isn't it? And what actually takes seconds—or sometimes even a fraction of a second—seems like it takes forever. Is that what it's like?”
Joyner had started nodding his agreement with the first sentence. “Yes, exactly,”he said, remembering just in time to turn to the jury as he gave his answer.
Now less than an arm's length from his witness, Haliburton laid one hand on the arm of the chair and placed his other hand on his hip. He looked across at the jury box.
“So when you say you think it took something less than two minutes,”he said in an ingratiating tone, “could it actually have taken a lot less?”
Joyner was more than willing to agree.
“Perhaps not much more even than a minute,”suggested Haliburton, casting a meaningful glance at the jury.
Joyner now thought that was a definite possibility.
“You were driving as fast as you could,”said Haliburton, reminding him. “So fast that you came very close to hitting a pedestrian, didn't you?”
Joyner tucked his chin and let out a sigh of relief. “Too close.”
“You were driving as fast as you could—you got there as fast as you could,”prompted Haliburton. “Mr. Antonelli talked a lot about panic and the things it can make people do. Tell us, Officer Joyner, do only 'innocent bystanders' panic, or do criminals sometimes panic as well?”
“Anyone can panic,”replied Joyner knowingly.
“If someone were in a state of panic, might they lose track of time? Let me be more specific. Based on your experience as a police officer,”asked Haliburton as he turned and began to walk toward the jury box, “is it possible that in the heat of the moment, after he shot him, he started looking for the victim's wallet, fumbling through it, looking for money, credit cards, anything of value—and didn't stop to consider how much time was passing?”
“That certainly could have happened.”
At the far end of the jury box, Haliburton stopped and looked back at the witness. “In other words, Officer Joyner, if you've just murdered someone, you might be so panic-stricken that you might forget almost anything except getting something—a wallet, a watch—anything that would make what you had just done all worthwhile, isn't that correct?”
I was on my feet, angrily shouting an objection. “That question is inflammatory, calls for speculation, is—”
“Withdrawn,”announced Haliburton with a flourish as he whirled away from the jury box. “No more questions.”
Still on my feet when the judge asked if I wished to recross, I made straight for the witness stand.
“You just testified that the gun was found where the defendant dropped it after he was shot. You never saw the gun in the defendant's hand, though, did you?”
“No, but—”
“Do the police ever plant evidence, Officer Joyner?”
“Objection!”cried Haliburton from the counsel table behind me.
“The prosecution just asked this witness if either he or Officer O'Leary planted evidence, your honor,”I said, my eyes still locked on Joyner. “The witness said no. I'm entitled to ask if this is because it never happens.”
“I'll allow it,”ruled Thompson, “but be careful.”
“Officer Joyner,”I asked again, “have you ever heard of the police planting evidence in a criminal investigation?”
“Sure,”he admitted, “I've heard of it happening, but I've never—”
“Eight years ago you had a partner—an Officer Lawton— who was found guilty of doing precisely that. Tampering with evidence was the specific charge. Isn't that true?”
Shifting his weight around in the witness chair, Joyner nodded glumly. “He wasn't my partner when it happened.”
I looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You wouldn't tamper with evidence and you would never change your testimony. Yet, when I asked you how long it had taken from the time you heard the shot until the time you found Jeremy Fullerton slumped over the wheel of his car, you said it was nearly two minutes. But now, with the helpful assistance of the district attorney, you want us to think it was really not more than a minute. Tell us, Officer Joyner, were you in a state of panic that night when you heard the shot?”
The question took him by surprise. “Me! No, I don't think so.”
“So then it wasn't quite the same way someone feels when they're involved in something like a car crash, was it?”
Without so much as a breath in between, I added, “Nothing further, your honor,”and walked away.
Thompson looked around the courtroom and then turned to the jury.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly twelve o'clock. Because the court has other matters to attend to, we will simply adjourn for the day and begin again Monday morning.”
S
urrounded by the throbbing noise and swirling color of the city, my senses seemed to wake from a week-long slumber. For days I had done nothing but listen to words and try to make sense out of them: words spoken by witnesses; words, the invisible signs of intangible thoughts, grasped like ghosts caught in a net, all their first-heard clarity gone the moment you tried to remember them long enough to compare them with other words spoken by the same witness or words spoken by someone else. I was tired of hearing them, tired of using them.
I started walking, without any particular place I wanted to go and with no other aim than to get as far away from the courthouse as I could. I wanted to put the trial out of mind; I wanted to forget everything that had happened; above all, I wanted to stop thinking about what the witness had said and what the witnesses were going to say. It was a close question which was worse: going over again and again what had already been said, wondering what you could have done to make it come out better; or playing over in your mind the endless variation of questions you planned to ask, and the answers you might possibly be given, by the people who had yet to be called. The prosecution had one more witness, then it would be my turn to put on the case for the defense. All I had was the defendant; that, and the assertion, which I was in no position to prove, that someone else, someone powerful, someone whose every ambition was threatened by Jeremy Fullerton, was responsible for the murder.
I kept walking, block after block, following the crowd, without any thought where I was or where I was going. Then, suddenly, I stopped. Whether drawn there by instinct or purely by chance, I was standing directly across the street from the burned-out ruin where just a week before I had watched Andrei Bogdonovitch die in that awful blast. A temporary plywood barricade had been erected in front of it to protect the public from falling debris. Behind it, a crew was busy demolishing what was left. Dodging traffic, I crossed the street and for a while watched them work, trying to remember the way it had looked the evening I was there, when Bogdonovitch had been hiding in the shadows, waiting for me to come.
My eye traced the path we had taken to the back of the shop, to the tiny alcove next to the storeroom door. At first I could not believe it. The door was still there, hanging by a single broken hinge from a single wooden post, but there all the same. It was the only thing left, amid all that twisted steel and concrete rubble; the only thing that had somehow escaped the blast. It was like looking at a photograph of the path taken by a tornado that leveled everything flat except, unaccountably, a single brick chimney of a house no one can find.
I heard a voice shouting and realized someone was shouting at me. Standing next to a pile of broken dusty bricks, a burly man in a hard hat was pointing at the scoop of a steam shovel high up in the air and with his other hand gesturing for me to move away. I waved back, acknowledging his warning, and turned to go.
At the corner, as I waited for the light, I looked back, the way I had that evening, and saw it all over again: the reddish orange ball rising into the sky; the deafening roar that seemed for that one moment to silence forever all the noise of the city; the bone-chilling certainty that Andrei Bogdonovitch had been killed with the kind of ruthless indifference associated normally with an act of war.
Bogdonovitch was dead, and I had as little idea who killed him as I had who murdered Jeremy Fullerton. And though Bog-donovitch had been convinced that whoever had killed Fullerton wanted him dead as well, I could not be sure the same person was responsible for both murders or that, despite my suspicions, there was even a connection between the two. As I wandered down the street, I could not get rid of the vague feeling that there was something I was missing—not the fact that I had no proof of anything, but something more basic: a different way of looking at things, a different perspective, something I had not considered that would put everything in a new light and make sense of things in a way nothing else had. It was like trying to remember a face you had seen only once or a name you had not heard in years: the strange sense that you know something precisely because you cannot remember anything about it.
I was too tired to walk anymore and went back to the office on Sutter Street. I started to tell Bobby about the feeling of uncertainty that was nagging at the back of my mind, but as soon as he looked up from his desk I could see in his eyes there was something he wanted to tell me first.
“Leonard Levine is dead,”said Bobby, shaking his head in disbelief.
I sank into a chair in front of his desk. “What happened?”
Bobby leaned forward on his elbows and nodded toward the telephone. “Lenny told me to call him today. I called him after we talked. Remember? I told him what Bogdonovitch had told you about Fullerton. Lenny said he knew a few people in the White House he thought he could trust. He said he'd find out if they knew anything about it.”
My throat started to tighten up. My mouth went dry.
“Was he murdered?”
Bobby did not know. “He was hit by a car, late last night, in Georgetown, just as he was leaving a restaurant.”
“It was a hit-and-run, wasn't it?”I asked, for some reason certain I was right.
He nodded toward the telephone. “That's what they told me.”
“It was murder, Bobby. Levine called the White House, told them what he had heard about Fullerton, and now he's dead. They killed him for the same reason they killed Bogdonovitch: They can't afford to have anyone find out that Fullerton—a member of the president's own party—was a Russian spy.”
I saw the skepticism in his eyes and I could not blame him for it.
“No,”I said as I got to my feet, “I can't prove it; I can't prove any of it; but it's true, Bobby, I know it.”
Suddenly I thought of something that alarmed me. “He wouldn't have said anything about you, would he? Whoever he talked to at the White House—he wouldn't have told them who had told him about Bogdonovitch?”
“No,”replied Bobby, smiling at me because I was concerned about him. “Lenny told me he'd keep my name out of it.”
“Do you know who he was going to talk to?”
“No, just that there were a couple of people he trusted.”
We looked at each other and in the silence I knew that Bobby now realized that while someone else had betrayed Leonard Levine, it was only because he had trusted Bobby that he was now dead.
“I asked you to make that call,”I reminded him. “I'm the one who wanted to know what Levine could find out about what the White House knew.”
Bobby turned and stared out the window, his hands resting in his lap. Across the bay, under a perfect blue cloudless sky, the Berkeley hills shimmered in the early autumn light of a late afternoon.
“I didn't pay attention to him at all when we were in college together. I was too caught up in my own life to spend any time with a kid who worked in the laundry. The truth is, I didn't even know his name until years later, afte r he was elected to Congress and he reminded me who he was. I thought it was funny at first, that this guy I barely remembered, remembered so much about me. Then I started to think about the way things were then, and I started to see him, not as the kid who worked in the laundry room, but as the kid who worked his way through college on his way toward becoming someone really important, a lot more important than I ever became. But he still thought about me the same way he did then. You heard him that night,”said Bobby, glancing back at me. “You should have heard him on the phone. When I told him what Bogdonovitch had said about Fullerton, you would have thought I had done him some enormous favor. Remember what he said about Fullerton being a fake and a fraud? This proved it, and for Lenny that meant that all the resentment he felt about Fullerton was not just jealousy and his own disappointment. Fullerton was a traitor, and I don't think anything could have stopped Lenny from proving it to the world.”