He rolled his eyes. “You’re in a strange mood. I wasn’t going to ask you about the Jeffries killing. I know who killed him. I mean, I know who they arrested,” he said, remembering the supposed sensibilities of defense lawyers to the distinction between guilt and accusation.
“You know?” I asked, just as we reached the courtroom.
“You have something in there?” he asked, nodding toward the door. My hand was already on the handle. “Is it going to take long?”
“What I’ve got won’t take more than two or three minutes. Depends on how long I have to wait.”
We went in together and sat in the back row. At the front, Quincy Griswald, who had taken Jeffries’s place as presiding circuit court judge, was trying to control his temper. Griswald had nothing like the brilliance of his predecessor, and the knowledge that he could never dominate a judicial proceeding through the sheer force of his intellect had gnawed at him like a worm that was slowly and painfully eating him alive.
“What’s your name?” he asked peremptorily, a contemptuous sneer on his haggard face.
The young assistant district attorney froze in mid-sentence, hesitated long enough to be sure he meant it, and then, with a slightly bewildered look in her eyes, replied, “Cassandra Loescher, your honor.”
“I ask that,” he remarked, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “because I thought we had better start with something you might actually know.”
She stared at him in a way that made it obvious that this was not the first time she had been subject to his abuse. Dropping on the table in front of her the brief she had just begun to read, she hunched her broad shoulders, planted her feet wide apart, and put her hands on her hips. “I always look forward to the opportunity to learn,” she said with cool detachment.
Narrowing his eyes, Griswald cast a sharp glance at this self-assured show of defiance. “Then learn this,” he said in a voice full of menace. “Once I’ve made a ruling, that’s the end of it. The answer was no when you first filed this last week and it is no again today. There is not going to be a continuance. Trial begins tomorrow morning, as scheduled.”
She recognized her mistake. With a deferential smile she tried to appeal to his better nature. “But, your honor, this is an unusually complicated case, involving three different defendants, and Mrs. Hall, who has been in charge since the first arrest nearly a year ago, is still in the hospital, and-”
Griswald stopped her dead. “Prosecutors are incapacitated all the time. Some of them even practice law that way. Somebody else can take her place.” With a backward flick of his hand, he waved her off, as he looked down at his copy of the docket, ready to call the next case.
She took a deep breath and pulled herself up to her full height.
“As I was saying, your honor, the state renews its motion for a continuance on the ground and for the reason that-”
Griswald bolted forward, jabbing his finger into the air. “How many times do I have to say no? Now get out of here,” he yelled at the top of his voice, “before I have the bailiff throw you out!”
The blood rushed to her face. “Yes, your honor,” she said through tight-clenched teeth. Trembling with rage, she grabbed the brief from the table and threw him a wrathful glance. She raised her chin like a flag of battle. “Thank you, your honor,” she said, and then turned on her heel and marched out of the courtroom.
I leaned toward Harper. “What was it the governor said the other night? The law has only reason to protect it?”
While Harper rolled his eyes, I started toward the counsel table in front. Griswald had just called my case.
“Yes, Mr. Antonelli?” Griswald asked as he jotted a note on a file.
I waited until he looked up and then, with a shrug, tossed my head slightly to the side. “You’re never going to believe this, your honor, but-”
“How much of a continuance do you need?”
“A month. We have a problem with a witness. The state doesn’t oppose the motion,” I reported.
He nodded once. “The case will be continued one month per defense counsel’s motion,” he announced, passing the file over to the clerk.
As soon as we were outside the courtroom, Harper badgered me for an explanation.
“It’s simple. Griswald started out as a deputy district attorney.
There weren’t as many of them then, and they didn’t get paid nearly as much as they are now. So he thinks they’re underworked and overpaid and that none of them are as good as he was. He never misses a chance to make life difficult for them, especially if they’re as young as that one was. Why? Did you think there was some interesting legal distinction between the two cases? You’ve been around as long as I have. Do you think if there had been a distinction like that, Griswald would have known it? He hasn’t read a law book since law school, and he probably didn’t read one then, either,” I grumbled. “He probably cheated his way through.”
I had gotten so caught up in what I was saying about the new presiding circuit court judge, I had forgotten that Harper was going to tell me who had killed the old one.
“Who did they arrest?” I asked, turning so we were face-to-face.
“Who murdered Calvin Jeffries?”
Twelve
You could almost feel the simultaneous movement of a hundred thousand hands reaching for the remote control to change channels. In love with death, Americans could mourn collectively for victims they never knew when schoolchildren were slaughtered by classmates and that event became the central preoccupation of the national news. They would become overnight experts in every dull detail of a trial reported at second hand when someone famous was charged with murder. Calvin Jeffries, however, had been killed by someone no one had ever heard of, a man without a name, one of the anonymous hordes of homeless that, like other unpleasant facts of life, we train ourselves not to see.
The air had gone out of the balloon. For eight long weeks, the police had been under enormous pressure to make an arrest. It had reached the point where editorial writers had started to call for an investigation of the investigation. Quick to anticipate the ephemeral moods of the electorate, politicians lined up for the chance to offer their own assessments of who should be blamed and what should be done. The governor-belatedly, in the eyes of some-suggested it might be wise to bring in the FBI. Inside the investigation itself, where double shifts and weekends had become the normal work schedule, nerves were frayed and tempers were on edge as everyone wondered whose careers would be sac-rificed next as part of the ongoing cost of catching a killer.
Now the killer had been caught, and suddenly it no longer seemed that important. It was written on their faces as they stared straight into the vacant eye of the television camera, describing the arrest. After all the endless stories about possible conspiracies, hidden motives, and rumored revelations about powerful people, stories that seemed to make sense out of the murder of a prominent public official, it turned out not to have had anything to do with money, power, or sex. It was a random act of violence, committed by a poor pathetic human being who would not have known Calvin Jeffries from the proverbial man in the moon. Despite a long recitation of facts and figures purporting to show how incredibly exhaustive the investigation had been, the police were forced to admit that a single anonymous phone call had told them where the killer could be found.
His name, or at least the name he gave them, was Jacob Whittaker. They were using his fingerprints to get a positive identifi-cation. Whatever his real name turned out to be, there was no doubt he was the killer. They had found the knife, and the suspect, after all the proper warnings about his right to a lawyer and his right to remain silent, had made a full confession.
My legs were stretched out over the corner of my desk, one ankle crossed over the other, watching on the small television set I kept on a shelf in my office the murder of Calvin Jeffries become yesterday’s news. When the police finished their statement, the questions asked by reporters were all ordinary, routine; questions about whether blood was found on the knife and what kind of tests were going to be run if there was; questions about the condition of the prisoner and the time and place of his formal arraignment. After each answer, there was a dead silence before someone could think of what to ask next. The same reporters who had struggled into front-row seats, convinced this was only the beginning of one of the biggest stories they would ever have the chance to cover, were sitting back, an ankle crossed over a knee, an arm thrown over a chair, following what was said with a shrug and a yawn, and only occasionally jotting down a note to use in what would undoubtedly be the last front-page mention of a story that was now without interest.