“I merely want to ask you a question, Mrs. Killeen.”
She unlocked and opened the door but didn’t invite him inside. Instead, she stepped out into the hall, pushing a little black dog back into the room with her foot. Before the door closed again, Donnelly had a glimpse of a steamy scene from a porn movie.
“It is precisely eleven o’clock, Mr. Donnelly. Surely you recall the terms of my contract.”
“Surely I do. I wrote it.”
“Well?”
“I went in to say good night to my wife. She was asleep. On the table beside her bed was a bottle of one-and-a-half grain Nembutal which had your name on it and the name of a doctor in Westwood.”
She was immediately on the defensive. She pulled her plaid bathrobe up around her throat, tightening the belt with a yank. She was a tall, heavyset young woman with a slight Celtic accent.
“Of course, it had my name on it, Mr. Donnelly. The capsules were prescribed for me. I pulled a muscle in my back when I was helping my sister in Westwood move and I had trouble sleeping. My sister’s doctor prescribed Nembutal.”
“How is it they were in my wife’s room?”
“She asked me if I had something to help her sleep, so I gave them to her.”
“Is that all?”
“What do you mean by all?”
“Is that all you gave her?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever, at her request, provide her with any other controlled substance?”
“I see what you’re getting at,” she said, giving her belt another quick yank. “The answer is no, I’m not her supplier. I know, the whole staff knows, that she’s on something. She acts like a lunatic.”
“That is not the proper way to refer to your employer.”
“I’m off duty.”
“If you find it offensive to work for someone who acts like a lunatic, send in your resignation and I’ll be glad to accept it.”
She recognized a bluff when she saw one and merely smiled. “Oh, I’m quite happy here. Unpredictable behavior is what one expects in domestic service.”
“Where is she getting her supplies, Mrs. Killeen?”
“Judging from the bulges in your pockets, you’ve seen the bottles. So have I. She’s getting the stuff from doctors. And if you think you can stop her, you’re wrong. Put the lid on one, she’ll find others. There are hundreds of doctors in this town. Some of them own planes and helicopters and yachts, and you don’t get those by swabbing throats and bandaging knees.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Good night, Mrs. Killeen.”
“Good night, Mr. Donnelly.”
She went back into her room, where the little black mongrel had settled in her chair in front of the television set.
“I don’t have to be nice to him if I don’t want to,” she told the dog. “I’m off duty. Anyway, these damn fags shouldn’t get married in the first place.”
III
The District Attorney
It was 10:00 A.M.
The jurors’ notebooks had been distributed, and everyone in the courtroom was in place except the judge. He remained in chambers, talking to his old friend Quentin Woodbridge. Woodbridge was a tall, spare man about sixty with a semicircular fringe of white hair surrounding his bald pate like a broken halo.
The two men played bridge together twice a week at the University Club. These games were intensely serious. Shoptalk was forbidden. Any conversation was limited to the barest essentials, opening and closing amenities and a rehashing of the game at the bar afterward.
District Attorney Oliver Owen belonged to the same club, but the two men avoided him. Owen was chatty. Silence seemed a challenge to him, a hole to be filled. And he filled it, with trivia, jokes, gossip, political comments and anecdotes about his family. If the jokes had been funny, the trivia interesting, the comments astute and the family stories less boring, he might have been excused on the grounds of his youth (he was forty) and inexperience (he was a latecomer to bridge and refused to believe anyone could take it seriously).
Woodbridge sat on the judge’s desk, keeping his hands in his pockets the way he often did, as if he were cold. The judge knew this wasn’t the reason.
He said, “Well?”
“It’s time to go in.”
“I didn’t ask you what time it was, Woody. I asked you how you were feeling.”
“Me? Fine.”
“How fine?”
“Fine enough.”
The judge was quiet for a few seconds. “Does Owen know?”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“He has a way of finding things out.”
“If he knew, he would have said something to me, also to everyone else in town. So the assumption is he doesn’t.” Woodbridge got off the desk. “The bailiff’s waiting for me in the hall. I’d better be going.”
“Take it easy.”
Eva Foster noted the time, 10:09, and the bailiff made the announcement: “All rise. Superior Court in and for the county of Santa Felicia is now in session, Judge George Hazeltine presiding.”
Quentin Woodbridge was duly sworn and took his place on the witness stand, carrying several pages of notes to refresh his memory. He consulted these notes frequently as he listed his credentials in a slow, halting voice.
Owen didn’t hurry him. He liked the sound of all those university degrees and titles and honors, as if he somehow had a share in them because the doctor was his witness.
“You are a forensic pathologist, Dr. Woodbridge?”
“Yes.”
“Would you kindly explain to the jury exactly what a forensic pathologist is, as opposed to an ordinary pathologist?”
“A forensic pathologist has degrees in both law and medicine.”
“Where did you obtain such degrees, Dr. Woodbridge?”
“My law degree is from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. My medical degree is from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.”
“Before either of those you had a Bachelor of Science degree, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you obtain that?”
“The University of Michigan.”
“The University of Michigan,” Owen said.
At her stenotype machine Mildred Noon made a note of the repetition. It was a device called echoing, used by attorneys to allow time for framing the next question. The device aggravated the difficulties of accurate court reporting, and before the trial began, Mildred had sent a friendly note to Owen and Donnelly urging them to avoid it and other annoyances like overlapping, speaking when someone else was already speaking, thus preventing the verbatim reporting required by law. Donnelly had ignored the note. Owen acknowledged it with a note of his own: “Mrs. Noon, for your information, I never echo. And if overlapping is caused by opposing counsel, it is not my responsibility.”
Owen continued. “While at the University did you receive any scholastic honors?”
“I graduated magna cum laude.”
“And were you elected to any scholastic society or fraternity?”
“I have a Phi Beta Kappa key.”
“And later at medical school did you receive any similar honor?”
“Yes.”
“And what is that called?”
“Alpha Omega Alpha. It is given only to the top graduates in medicine.”
“Are you a member of any professional organizations?”
“Yes.”
“And what are they?”
“The American Medical Association and the American Bar Association.”
“Did you ever serve in the armed forces, Dr. Woodbridge?”
“Yes.”
“What branch?”
“The United States Navy.”
“In what capacity?”
“I was an internist at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.”