A shrewd look came in his eyes. He put his arms on the desk and bent forward.
“Lawrence Goldman would have recognized immediately the advantage he had. There are two kinds of people who can run for governor or senator in this state without having run for anything before: those who can spend millions on their own campaign and those with the kind of celebrity that makes everyone think they already know them. Ariella Goldman is the first one I can remember who has both. She always had the money; and now, because of what happened today, she has acquired the kind of celebrity status money alone could never have given her.
“Think what this does for Lawrence Goldman. He decided to abandon his old friend, Augustus Marshall, because with Jeremy Fullerton he thought he could influence, and perhaps control, not only a governor, but eventually, perhaps, a president. Now his own daughter steps into the role Fullerton was supposed to play.”
We sat in the faded light of the late afternoon, the sun shielded from the narrow street outside by buildings in which the always overriding thought was money and how to make more of it, while Albert Craven, who had made his share, talked about things on which it was not so easy to set a price.
“I don't like Lawrence Goldman. I never have. Remove all morality, all sense of good and evil, as nothing more than a personal preference—everything becomes not just possible, but inevitable. There is a sense in which, like a line I once read, all of America conspired to produce Lawrence Goldman and his daughter. The murder of Jeremy Fullerton must have seemed to him almost too good to be true. Forget what it did in terms of his daughter; think what it will do for his grandson—if it's a boy. Think of the enormous advantages to which that child will be born! In the eyes of the world, the son of a martyred senator, a man thought destined to become president, murdered at the height of his powers; the child of a beautiful, gifted mother, a woman so decent, so honorable, she was willing to conceal the identity of the child's father to protect both his reputation and the feelings of the woman he was about to leave. All that, plus all the power and all the money and everything else Lawrence Goldman could do. Like his grandfather before him, Lawrence Goldman would become the father to the child.”
Craven looked at us a moment longer; then he sat back in his chair and folded his hands into his lap.
After a while, Bobby cleared his throat and asked, “Who do you think is the father?”
“I don't know,”I replied. “It could be anyone.”I thought about the way Ariella Goldman had handled herself on the stand and then added, “Anyone her father had wanted her to sleep with.”
Bobby thought of something. “You said before that if you could prove she was lying, you could use that to argue that she was trying to hide something and that that might be enough to establish reasonable doubt. Why not put Fullerton's wife on the stand? She can testify that her husband couldn't have children.”
I did not want to do it. I admired the way that, despite everything, Meredith Fullerton had never stopped loving her husband. I did not want to put her through any more embarrassment unless I had to.
“Maybe I should put her on the stand—and maybe I will— but the danger isn't just that she'll be humiliated again. The jury will think that she is so embittered by what happened that she's willing to say or do anything to get back at them both, not only Ariella, but her husband as well. The district attorney will ask her two questions on cross:
“ 'You were aware your husband was having an affair with Ariella Goldman, weren't you?' ”
“And then, after she admits she was, he'll ask: 'And that night, at the gathering at Lawrence Goldman's apartment, when you were in such a rage about it, you accused her of trying to take your husband away, and then you left—but he stayed, didn't he?' ”
It was getting late. There were other things I had to do. Wearily, with one hand on the corner of Craven's enormous desk and the other on the arm of the chair, I got to my feet.
“After seeing today just how effective a lie can be, I have to go out to the jail and convince Jamaal Washington that all he has to do tomorrow is take the stand and tell the truth.”
Craven seemed surprised. “You start tomorrow? The prosecution rested?”
“About the very moment Ariella Goldman started crying,”I said, my voice betraying the resentment I still felt. “Haliburton didn't even look at Thompson. He just looked at the jury and said, 'The People rest, your honor.' It was all he could do to keep from laughing.”
I started to say good-bye, when I noticed again the pile of documents on which Craven had diligently been at work.
“It looks like I'm not the only one who is going to be working late tonight.”
Craven was just picking up his fountain pen. “It's the estate of Andrei Bogdonovitch, poor devil. It's rather more complicated than I had anticipated,”he added as he reached for the stack of papers.
“You were his lawyer?”I asked for no other reason than to let him talk after he had spent so much time listening to me.
“Yes, well, there was never much work involved. I drew up his will—more as a personal favor than anything else. And then, because of the business he was in—import-export—we had to have a complete inventory to establish a proper basis for an accurate valuation—for insurance purposes, you understand. Well, trying to get two people to agree on the value of an Oriental rug or a Chinese vase is far more trouble than I could have imagined.”
We said good night and I followed Bobby to the door.
“Where is it going?”I asked, looking back from the doorway.
The pen dangling from his hand, Craven stared at me, a blank expression on his round face.
“The estate,”I explained. “Whatever it's worth.”
“Oh, that,”he said as he raised his wispy eyebrows and began to nod his head with animation. “Yes, well, it's worth quite a lot, as it turns out. And oh, yes, it's all going to a brother of his. Lives somewhere in Europe—somewhere in Italy,”he said absently as he began to rummage through the documents. “It's in here someplace.”
“Don't bother,”I insisted. “It doesn't matter. I just wondered. Good night,”I said as I closed the door behind me.
As soon as I left the building, I tried to think what I could tell Jamaal that would give him the confidence he was going to need. Everything depended on him now. He had to make that jury believe him; he had to make them believe not just that he did not murder Jeremy Fullerton, but that he could not have murdered anyone. By the time he was finished, they had to look at him and know that he could not possibly have done what he was accused of doing. They had to know it, the same way they would have known it about a child of their own: not by the evidence, but by an instinct, the instinct that tells us who we can trust and who we cannot. Jamaal Washington had to be as good at telling the truth as Ariella Goldman had been at telling the lie.
There had been times when I was afraid that Jamaal might be on the verge of sinking into the mind-numbing lethargy that often comes with prolonged confinement. It had been a difficult adjustment, more difficult than it would have been for someone less intelligent, less curious about the world around him. Gradually, and not without periods of depression, he had become, if not reconciled to his situation, at least willing to tolerate it for as long as he had to.
Jamaal was waiting for me in the small conference room. He was sitting at a metal table, his hands clasped together in front of him, a lively expression on his fine straight mouth.
“How long had you been practicing law before you learned to do that with a witness the way you did today?”
I looked up from the legal pad I had just taken out of my briefcase, struck not for the first time by how astonishingly quick he was.
“I don't know,”I said. I thought it was an honest answer, but he did not.
“You could do it right from the beginning, couldn't you? It isn't something you learn how to do, is it? Either you can see things coming before they get there or you can't—isn't that right?”
It was true what he said, but it was only a part of it, and perhaps not the most important part.
“I think I could do it right from the beginning, but it isn't like sitting down at a piano and without being able to read a note of music play anything you hear. You try to anticipate everything anyone—any possible witness—might say. You go over it again and again in your mind; you see it as if you were already in court. Somehow you absorb it all, so that even when something you did not anticipate happens you know what to do. You don't think about it; you don't say to yourself: 'He just said
x
instead of
y,
so now I should ask him
z.
' You just ask the question; it just happens. But it never would have happened—you would not have had a question to ask—if you had not just about driven yourself crazy going over again and again all those questions you did not ask and all those answers you were never given.”
Jamaal seemed to understand completely. “I think that must be what it's like to practice medicine. After a while you know what's wrong with a patient before they've finished describing their symptoms.”
He was only nineteen years old, but there were times I felt myself drawn to him the way I had been drawn to few other people before. Perhaps what I saw in him was a reflection of myself, what I was like when I was still as young as that and still thought that nothing could ever go wrong.
“How long did it take,”I asked, watching his eyes, “before you figured out I was taking her in a circle?”
“I don't know,”replied Jamaal modestly, “maybe when you came back for the second time about why the senator's wife had left.”
“You ever think about becoming a lawyer instead of a doctor?”I asked, laughing.
He glanced at the barred window on the door, a wry smile forming on his mouth. “I may have to live with criminals,”he said as his eyes came back to mine. “That doesn't mean I have to work with them.”
“You won't have to live with them too much longer,”I promised as we began one last time to review the testimony he was going to give the next morning.
It was nearly ten o'clock when I closed my briefcase and got ready to go. There was only one more thing I wanted to ask. I had brought it up several times before, but each time he had made it clear that it was not something he wanted to discuss. It was more than simple curiosity, though that was certainly part of it; I needed to know because I wanted the jury to know.
“Jamaal, what can you tell me about your father?”
He looked at me for a moment, hard, almost threatening, the way someone does when you have asked something you had no business asking. Then, because he knew I was only doing what I had to, his gaze softened and he nodded apologetically.
“Nothing,”he said. “I never knew him.”
I could not let it go at that. “But surely your mother must have told you something about him.”
“Never,”he insisted, but without any animosity. “When I was old enough to understand, she told me my father was someone she had known, someone she liked, but someone she could never have married.”
“And you never asked for more, later on, when you were older, than what she told you then?”
Jamaal smiled at me, as if he were certain I knew the answer myself.
“You've met my mother. She's an extraordinary person. I always knew that about her. I knew that if she wanted me to know more, she'd tell me. And I also knew that if she didn't, she had her reasons.”
He got up from his chair and banged once on the door to summon the guard.
Outside, under the clear dark sky, I stood on the sidewalk next to the street and took a long deep breath. I wanted to purge myself of the stagnant air that festered inside like a strange premonition of death. When I reached the car, I looked up and down the street. When I got inside and turned on the ignition, I checked the rearview mirror before I pulled away from the curb. If anyone was following me, they were too good at it for me to know.
A
s soon as I called his name I could feel the intensity of the crowd. Every face in the courtroom was pressed forward, straining to get a closer look. Jamaal Washington, a slender figure in a dark suit bent over a cane, dragged one leg behind him as he hobbled toward the clerk, waiting impassively just below the bench. The surprisingly delicate fingers of his left hand curled around the handle of the plain wooden cane as he held his right hand shoulder-high and took the oath. Then he lowered himself onto the witness chair and slowly looked around. His gaze came to rest on the juror who sat closest to him in the jury box, a short blond woman with deep-set suspicious eyes and a small pugnacious mouth. He glanced at the juror next to her, and then the next, and did not stop until he had looked in the eye all twelve of the strangers who were there to decide if he would live or die.
Not one of the twelve tried to look away. A few of them seemed to offer, by a nod of their head or the way they changed position in their chair, a silent form of encouragement. On an impulse, I led with the question I had told him would come only at the very end.
“Did you kill Jeremy Fullerton?”
He was one of the most intelligent people I had ever defended. I had explained to him the importance of looking at the jury when he answered my questions: “Let the jury see your face; let them see you have nothing to hide; let them see you telling the truth and that you don't have to look at me to know what that is.”We had gone over it so often, it had become an automatic, almost Pavlovian response. But now, the only time it counted, he forgot.
“No, I did not,”he said without hesitation, and without so much as a glance at the jury.
Why could he not have remembered to do that? It was something I had been able to train even barely literate defendants to do without difficulty. I started over, at the point we were supposed to have begun, with the story of how he had been raised and the difficulties he had overcome, but it made no difference. Whatever the question, whatever the answer, his eyes followed me everywhere. I moved to the end of the jury box farthest from the witness stand.