“But why?” I asked, astonished at what she had done.
“Because I wanted to hurt him back. He idolized you. He wanted to be just like you. And because I never thought he’d believe it.
I thought it would show him how insane it all was, that it was all in his mind, and that he needed help. But instead it just convinced him he was right.”
Watching her tell me with apparent sincerity a story that ex-onerated her of any blame for what had happened to her first husband, I wondered whether it was the truth or whether, after years of subtle reinterpretation, she had gradually come to believe it had happened just the way she said it had. If she was a woman who was perfectly willing to lie, she was also a woman who would never admit, not even, or perhaps especially, to herself, that she was a liar.
“You have no idea how awful I felt when Elliott tried to kill you. I kept telling him it wasn’t true. I had not been having an affair. I didn’t even know you. Despite everything that had happened up till then, I never thought he was capable of anything like that.”
She looked at me with eyes searching for sympathy. If I had never known Elliott, or perhaps if I had never known Calvin Jeffries, I might have given it.
“Elliott still thinks you were having an affair, but with Judge Jeffries.”
Her eyes turned cold. “Did you think I didn’t know that? As soon as Calvin and I were married, Elliott started sending letters, weird, scary letters, accusing me of it and threatening to get even.
After a while I started sending them back, unopened. That’s why he asked you to deliver that letter. It wasn’t because he didn’t have the address. It was because he knew I wouldn’t open it, and because he knew I’d never let the children read it.” She paused, her lips trembling. Slowly and methodically she began to beat her fingers on the arm of the chair. “Do you know what he wrote?
What he wanted the children to read? ‘Your mother is a whore, and now you’re orphans twice.’ That’s what he wrote, Mr. Antonelli. That’s the sort of thing he wants to tell his children.
That’s the reason I never allowed them to see him. That’s the reason why I sent them away to private schooclass="underline" So he wouldn’t have any way of finding them.”
“So it isn’t true?” I asked as I got to my feet. “You weren’t having an affair with him?”
“Of course not,” she said as she walked me to the door. “Calvin was like a father to me. He treated Elliott like a son. He tried to help him every way he could. When Elliott got sick, Calvin did everything he could. He knew what it was like for me. He had gone through something of the same thing with his wife. I don’t know what I would have done without him. If it hadn’t been for him, Elliott would have gone to prison for trying to kill you. Calvin made sure he was sent to the state hospital where he could get help.”
We were at the door. “Judge Jeffries had him sent to the state hospital?”
“He didn’t do it himself,” she said as she opened the door. “But he made sure it was done.”
I said goodbye and turned to go. “It didn’t do any good, though,”
she said. “Elliott still hates me and he’s still insane. If I didn’t know he was locked up in that place I’d swear he killed Calvin just to get even with me.”
“They have the killer, Mrs. Jeffries,” I said, looking back.
She nodded twice. “The one who killed himself? Are you sure, Mr. Antonelli? Are you sure someone like that murdered my husband?”
Fourteen
Iread it in the newspaper the next morning, a front-page story under the byline of Harper Bryce. Another judge had been murdered. While I had been talking to the widow of Calvin Jeffries, Quincy Griswald, the new presiding circuit court judge, had been killed in a murder that was in all important respects virtually identical to the one before. Like Jeffries, Griswald had been stabbed to death, and, like Jeffries, Griswald had been killed in the parking structure where both of them had kept their cars. Jeffries had managed to crawl back to his office; Griswald had been found dead in the garage, slumped down next to the door of his late-model Buick.
I took the paper with me when I went into the office later that morning. Saturdays were the days I tried to get caught up with my cases. As I drove past the courthouse on my way in, I noticed that the flag had again been lowered to half-mast. No judge had ever been murdered in Oregon and now, in the space of little more than two months, two had been killed, both of them the presiding circuit court judge at the time of their death.
I remembered what Jeffries’s widow had said, the doubt that someone like her husband’s confessed killer could really have done it.
If he had not been found, and if he had not confessed, the immediate assumption would have been that both judges, Jeffries and Griswald, had been killed by the same person. But the killer of Calvin Jeffries had been found, and he had confessed, and then, as if that was not sufficient to prove his guilt, he had taken his own life. Yet I still could not get out of my mind the thought that this had to be more than sheer coincidence.
I reached Howard Flynn at home. “You’re not calling me from a bar, are you?” he asked in his usual gruff manner.
“Do you know if the police have gotten the DNA results yet?”
“From the knife the guy used to kill Jeffries? No, I haven’t heard. It’ll be a match, though. It’ll be Jeffries’s blood.” There was a brief silence and at the other end of the line I could hear Flynn’s labored breath. “You must have read the paper this morning. The guy that killed Jeffries is dead. This is someone else.”
I stared out the window, watching the leaden gray sky grow darker. “What if it isn’t a match?”
Flynn preferred to deal with tangible facts. “Then you have an interesting situation. But the Griswald killing sounds like a copycat to me. Some guy has a grudge because Griswald sent him away. He heard about what someone did to Jeffries and he figures he’ll do the same thing. These aren’t original thinkers we’re dealing with here.”
“What did they ever find out about him, the one who confessed to the Jeffries murder? Did Jeffries send him to prison?”
“I don’t know,” Flynn replied. “Do you want me to find out?”
None of it had anything to do with me. I was not defending anyone who had any connection with either the murder of Calvin Jeffries or the killing of Quincy Griswald. Besides, I had asked Flynn for quite enough already. Still, there was something missing in all this and I wanted to know what it was.
“If you can do it without too much trouble, then yes, I’d like to know what you can find out.”
After I hung up, I tried to reach Harper Bryce. He was not at the paper, and he was not at home. I left a message on his voice mail and turned my attention to the cases on which I was supposed to be working.
I began reviewing the police reports in an armed robbery case set for trial the next week. Three lines after I started, I found myself searching my memory for anything that would tie the two murders together. They were both presiding circuit court judges at the time of their death. If someone were trying to make a statement about the judiciary, or about the legal system altogether, killing two chief judges would certainly be one way to do it.