The Other Side of Midnight (40 page)

“Yes, Costa.”

Demiris stared at her, his face filling with emotion. When he spoke, his voice was husky. “Thank you,” he said. “We’re going to forget the past. It’s gone and nothing will change it.” His voice brightened. “It’s the future I’m interested in. I’m going to engage an attorney for you.”

“Who?”

“Napoleon Chotas.”

And that was the moment that Noelle really knew she had won the chess match. Check. Checkmate.

Now Napoleon Chotas sat at the long wooden lawyer’s table thinking about the battle that was about to take place. Chotas would have much preferred that the trial be held in Ioannina rather than in Athens, but that was impossible, since by Greek law a trial could not take place in the district where the crime had been committed. Chotas had not the slightest doubt about the guilt of Noelle Page, but that was unimportant to him, for like all criminal lawyers he felt that the guilt or innocence of a client was immaterial. Everyone was entitled to a fair trial.

The trial that was about to begin, however, was something different. For the first time in his professional life Napoleon Chotas had allowed himself to become emotionally involved with a client: He was in love with Noelle Page. He had gone to see her at Constantin Demiris’ request and though Chotas had been familiar with the public image of Noelle Page, he had been totally unprepared for the reality. She had received him as though he were a guest paying a social call. Noelle had showed neither nervousness nor fear, and at first Chotas had attributed it to her lack of understanding of the desperateness of her situation. The opposite had proved to be true. Noelle was the most intelligent and fascinating woman he had ever encountered and certainly the most beautiful. Chotas, though his appearance belied it, was a connoisseur of women, and he recognized the special qualities that Noelle possessed. It was a joy for Chotas merely to sit and talk with her. They discussed law and art and crime and history, and she was a constant amazement to him. He could fully appreciate Noelle’s liaison with a man like Constantin Demiris. but her involvement with Larry Douglas puzzled him. He felt that she was far above
Douglas, and yet Chotas supposed that there was some unexplainable chemistry that made people fall in love with the most unlikely partners. Brilliant scientists married empty-headed blondes, great writers married stupid actresses, intelligent statesmen married trollops.

Chotas remembered the meeting with Demiris. They had known each other socially over the years, but Chotas’ law firm had never done any work for him. Demiris had asked Chotas to his home at Varkiza. Demiris had plunged into the conversation without preamble. “As you may know,” he had said, “I have a deep interest in this trial. Miss Page is the only woman in my life I have ever truly loved.” The two men had talked for six hours, discussing every aspect of the case, every possible strategy. It was decided that No-elle’s plea would be Not Guilty. When Chotas rose to leave, a deal had been agreed upon. For undertaking Noelle’s defense Napoleon Chotas would be given double his usual fee, and his firm would become the major legal counsel to Constantin Demiris’ far-flung empire, a plum worth untold millions.

“I don’t care how you do it,” Demiris had concluded, fiercely. “Just see to it that nothing goes wrong.”

Chotas had accepted the bargain. And then, ironically, he had fallen in love with Noelle Page. Chotas had remained a bachelor, though he kept a string of mistresses, and now when he had found the one woman he wanted to marry, she was out of his reach. He looked at Noelle now, sitting in the defendant’s box, beautiful and serene. She wore a simple black wool suit with a plain, high-necked white blouse, and she looked like a Princess from a fairy tale.

Noelle turned and saw Chotas staring at her and gave him a warm smile. He smiled back, but his mind was already turning to the difficult task that lay ahead of him. The clerk was calling the Court to order.

The spectators rose as two judges in business suits entered and took their seats on the bench. The third
judge, the President of the Court, followed and took the center seat. He intoned,
“I synethriassis archetai.”

The trial had begun.

Peter Demonides, Special Prosecutor for the State, nervously rose to make his opening address to the jury. Demonides was a skilled and able prosecutor, but he had been up against Napoleon Chotas before—many times, in fact—and the results were invariably the same. The old bastard was unbeatable. Almost all trial lawyers browbeat hostile witnesses, but Chotas coddled them. He nurtured them and loved them and before he was through, they were contradicting themselves all over the place, trying to be helpful to him. He had a knack of turning hard evidence into speculation and speculation into fantasy. Chotas had the most brilliant legal mind Demonides had ever encountered and the greatest knowledge of jurisprudence, but that was not his strength. His strength was his knowledge of people. A reporter had once asked Chotas how he had learned so much about human nature.

“I don’t know a damned thing about human nature,” Chotas had answered. “I only know about
people,”
and the remark had been widely quoted.

In addition to everything else this was the kind of trial that was tailor-made for Chotas to take before a jury, filled as it was with glamour, passion and murder. Of one thing Demonides was certain: Napoleon Chotas would let nothing stop him from winning this case. But neither would Demonides. He knew that he had a strong evidential case against the defendants, and while Chotas might be able to spellbind the jury into overlooking the evidence, he would not be able to sway the three judges on the bench. So it was with a feeling of determination mixed with apprehension that the Special Prosecutor for the State began his opening address.

In skillful, broad strokes Demonides outlined the State’s case against the two defendants. By law the foreman of the ten-man jury was an attorney, so
Demonides directed his legal points to him and his general points to the rest of the jury.

“Before this trial has ended,” Demonides said, “the State will prove that these two people conspired together to cold-bloodedly murder Catherine Douglas because she stood in the way of their plans. Her only crime was in loving her husband, and for this she was killed. The two defendants have been placed at the scene of the murder. They are the only ones who had the motive and the opportunity. We shall prove beyond a shadow of a doubt…”

Demonides kept his address short and to the point, and it was the turn of the Attorney for the Defense.

The spectators in the courtroom watched Napoleon Chotas as he clumsily gathered his papers together and prepared to make his opening speech. Slowly he approached the jury box, his manner hesitant and difficult as though awed by his surroundings.

Watching him William Fraser could not but marvel at his skill. If he had not once spent an evening with Chotas at a party in the British Embassy, Fraser too would have been deceived by the man’s manner. He could see the jurors helpfully straining forward to catch the words that fell softly from Napoleon Chotas’ lips.

“This woman on trial,” Chotas was saying to the jurors, “is not being tried for murder. There has been no murder. If there
had
been a murder, I am sure that my brilliant colleague for the State would have been good enough to have shown us the body of the victim. He has not done so, so we must assume that there is no body. And therefore no murder.” He stopped to scratch the crown of his head and looked down at the floor as though trying to remember where he had left off. He nodded to himself, then looked up at the jury. “No, gentlemen, that is not what this trial is about. My client is being tried because she broke
another
law, an unwritten law that says you must not fornicate with another woman’s husband. The press has already found her guilty of that charge, and the public has found her
guilty, and now they are demanding that she be punished.”

Chotas stopped to pull out a large white handkerchief, stared at it a moment as if wondering how it had gotten there, blew his nose and replaced the handkerchief in his pocket. “Very well. If she has broken a law, let us punish her. But not for murder, gentlemen. Not for a murder that was never committed. Noelle Page was guilty of being the mistress of—” he paused delicately “—a most important man. His name is a secret, but if you must know it, you can find it on the front page of any newspaper.”

There was appreciative laughter from the spectators.

Auguste Lanchon swung around in his seat and glared at the spectators, his little piggy eyes blazing with rage. How dare they laugh at his Noelle! Demiris meant nothing to her, nothing. It was the man to whom a woman gave up her virginity that she always cherished. The fat little shopkeeper from Marseille had not been able to communicate with Noelle yet, but he had paid four hundred precious drachmas for a courtroom pass, and he would be able to watch his beloved Noelle every day. When she was acquitted, Lanchon would step forward and take over her life. He turned his attention to the lawyer.

“It has been said by the prosecution that the two defendants, Miss Page and Mr. Lawrence Douglas, murdered Mr. Douglas’ wife so that the defendants could marry each other. Look at them.”

Chotas turned to look at Noelle Page and Larry Douglas and every eye in the courtroom did the same.

“Are they in love with each other? Possibly. But does that make them plotters and schemers and murderers? No. If there are any victims in this trial, you are looking at them now. I have gone into all the evidence very carefully and I have convinced myself, as I will convince you, that these two people are innocent. Please let me make it clear to the jury that I am not representing Lawrence Douglas. He has his own counsel
and a very able fellow he is. But it has been alleged by the state that the two people sitting there are fellow conspirators, that they have plotted and committed murder together. So if one is guilty, both are guilty. I tell you now that both are innocent. And nothing less than the corpus delicti will make me change my mind. And there is none.”

Chotas’ voice was growing angrier. “It is a fiction. My client has no more idea than you do whether Catherine Douglas is dead or alive. How would she know? She has never even met her, let alone harmed her. Imagine the enormity of being accused of killing someone you have never laid eyes on. There are many theories as to what could have happened to Mrs. Douglas. That she was murdered is one of them. But
only
one. The most probable theory is that somehow she discovered that her husband and Miss Page were in love, and out of a feeling of hurt—not fear, gentlemen—
hurt,
she ran away. It is as simple as that, and for that you do not execute an innocent woman and an innocent man.”

Frederick Stavros, Larry Douglas’ attorney, gave a surreptitious sigh of relief. His constant nightmare had been that Noelle Page would be acquitted, while his client would be convicted. If that happened he would become the laughing-stock of the legal profession. Stavros had been looking for a way to hitch onto Napoleon Chotas’ star and now Chotas had done it for him. By linking the two defendants together as he had just done, Noelle’s defense had become his own client’s defense. Winning this trial was going to change Frederick Stavros’ entire future, give him everything he had ever wanted. He was filled with a feeling of warm gratitude for the old master.

Stavros noted with satisfaction that the jury was hanging on Chotas’ every word.

“This was not a woman who was interested in material things,” Chotas was saying with admiration. “She
was willing to give everything up without hesitation for the man she loved. Surely, my good friends, that is not the character of a scheming, conniving murderess.”

As Chotas went on, the emotions of the jurors shifted like a visible tide, reaching out toward Noelle Page with growing empathy and understanding. Slowly and skillfully the attorney built up a portrait of a beautiful woman who was the mistress of one of the most powerful and richest men in the world, who had every luxury and privilege lavished upon her, but who in the end had succumbed to her love for a penniless young pilot she had only known a short time.

Chotas played on the emotions of the jurors like a master musician, making them laugh, bringing tears to their eyes and always holding their rapt attention. When his opening address was over, Chotas clumsily shuffled back to the long table and awkwardly sat down, and it was all that the spectators could do to keep from applauding.

Larry Douglas sat in the witness box listening to Chotas’ defense of him, and Larry was furious. He did not need anyone to defend him. He had done nothing wrong, this whole trial was a stupid mistake, and if there was any blame it was Noelle’s. It had all been her idea. Larry looked at her now, beautiful and serene. But he felt no stirring of desire, only the memory of a passion, a faint emotional shadow, and he marveled that he had put his life in jeopardy for this woman. Larry’s eyes swung toward the press box. An attractive girl reporter in her twenties was staring at him. He gave her a little smile and watched her face light up.

Peter Demonides was examining a witness.

“Would you please tell the Court your name?”

“Alexis Minos.”

“And your occupation?”

“I am an attorney.”

“Would you look at the two defendants seated in the defendant’s box, Mr. Minos, and tell the Court if you have ever seen either of them before?”

“Yes, sir. One of them.”

“Which one?”

“The man.”

“Mr. Lawrence Douglas?”

“That’s correct.”

“Would you tell us, please, under what circumstances you saw Mr. Douglas?”

“He came to my office six months ago.”

“Did he come to consult you in your professional capacity?”

“Yes.”

“In other words he required some legal service of you?”

“Yes.”

“And would you please tell us what it was that he wanted you to do for him?”

“He asked me to get him a divorce.”

“And did he retain you for this purpose?”

“No. When he explained the circumstances to me, I told him it would be impossible for him to get a divorce in Greece.”