“They never caught the person responsible for the murder of Calvin Jeffries; the police don’t know who the killer is; the district attorney’s office doesn’t know who he is.”
It took a moment before she realized what I was doing, and even then she could not quite believe it.
“Your honor,” she said, as she sprang to her feet. “May counsel approach?”
I pretended outrage. “Your honor, this is the second time the prosecution has interrupted my opening statement. I didn’t do that to Ms. Loescher-no matter what I thought of what she was saying!”
Bingham did not say a word. Instead, he gestured with his hand that he wanted a private conversation. He got up from his chair and stepped down on the side of the bench farthest from the jury.
“What is your objection, Ms. Loescher?” he asked. As always his tone was civil, but he could not completely disguise his irritation. He liked things to move smoothly, and already he could sense signs of trouble to come.
“He’s making a patently false statement,” Loescher insisted. “He knows as well as I do that what he said isn’t true. The police made an arrest in the Jeffries case. The killer confessed. And it’s more than that, your honor,” she whispered forcefully. “He’s trying to bring in the Jeffries case just to confuse the jury. That case doesn’t have anything to do with this one.”
Staring down at the floor as he listened, Bingham pinched the middle of his upper lip between his forefinger and thumb. When she was finished, he looked at me.
“I’m allowed to offer my own theory of the case, your honor-
any theory that explains the facts of the case. Ms. Loescher should listen more carefully: I didn’t say the police did not make an arrest, I said they never caught the person responsible.” We were standing inches apart. I shifted my gaze and looked directly at her. “If you think they did-”
She was livid. She stared at the judge, who was again looking down at his shoes. “He knows I don’t have a chance to offer rebuttal to his opening.”
“Of course you do,” I interjected. “It’s called closing argument.”
Bingham raised his head. “The defense has a right to offer an alternative theory. The prosecution has a right to offer any relevant evidence which contradicts that theory.” He looked at me, then looked at her. “You’re both fine attorneys. You’ve both done very well to this point.” With a brief nod and an even briefer smile, he added, “Let’s not let that change.” It was as stern a warning as he knew how to give.
Loescher went back to her chair, and Bingham went back to the bench. “Mr. Antonelli,” he said as he settled into place,
“would you please continue.”
I nodded at the judge and turned to the jury. “First Calvin Jeffries was murdered, then Quincy Griswald. Both of them were killed in the same way and both of them were killed in the same place. But why were they killed at all? And who would have had a reason to kill them both, not just Calvin Jeffries, but Quincy Griswald as well?”
With one hand on my hip, I rubbed the back of my neck.
“That’s the great difficulty in this case: trying to understand why anyone would want to kill Quincy Griswald. Everyone who ever knew him could understand why someone would want Calvin Jeffries dead: He was one of the worst people who ever lived.”
It was instinct, pure and simple. If there had been time to think about it, she might have let it go. Whether it was her own sense of decency, or her belief about what the rules did and did not allow, Cassandra Loescher, acting on impulse, jumped to her feet.
“Objection, your honor.”
This time he agreed with her. “Mr. Antonelli…”
Wheeling around, I glared defiance. “The character of Calvin Jeffries supplies the motive not only for his murder, but for the murder of the victim in this case. Everything I say about the late Judge Jeffries will be proven by the testimony of witnesses, your honor, witnesses the defense fully intends to call.”
Pursing his lips, he tapped his fingers together. “Very well,” he said presently. “But try to keep this within reasonable bounds.”
It struck me as gratuitous, and I turned back to the jury, an incongruous smile on my face, amused at how angry it had made me. I respected Bingham as much as anyone on the bench, but he was as much a prisoner of convention as anyone else. We were not supposed to speak ill of the dead.
“I spoke ill of Judge Jeffries when he was alive,” I explained to the jury. “I spoke ill of him to his face. He threw me in jail once because I told him during a trial exactly what I thought of him. I should probably not have done that. I may even have deserved what he did to me because of it. But whether I did or not, what Calvin Jeffries did to me was nothing compared to what he later did to someone I knew, someone I liked, someone I thought would eventually become one of the finest lawyers in the city.
His name was Elliott Winston, and what Calvin Jeffries did to him was worse than murder.
“The law is the collective wisdom of the community, the attempt to live in accordance with the rules of reason, the effort to control our impulses and conduct ourselves as civilized human beings. No one carries a higher burden of responsibility than those men and women who put on black robes and apply the law without fear or favor to the people who come before them for judgment. It would be impossible to think of anyone who came to the bench with greater ability, or with a more brilliant mind, than Calvin Jeffries; and it would be impossible to think of anyone who less deserved to be called honorable. Calvin Jeffries was a disgrace. He cared nothing about the law; he cared nothing about justice. He cared only about power and how he could use it to get what he wanted. And what he wanted, ladies and gentlemen, wanted more than anything else, was the wife-and not just the wife-of Elliott Winston.
“Elliott was young, and bright, and hardworking and ambitious, with a wife he loved and two children he adored. He met Calvin Jeffries and was flattered at the attention he received. He became one of the judge’s few friends, someone to whom Jeffries talked about the law, someone Jeffries wanted-or claimed he wanted-
to help. Elliott trusted him completely, and he had no reason to doubt him when Jeffries told him things-things that were not true-about his wife. Elliott began to suspect his wife of infidelity, but it never occurred to him that she was being unfaithful with the man he revered, this man without children who treated him like a son.
“They worked on him, the two of them, his trusted friend and his trusted wife. They fed his suspicions, twisted his mind with false rumors and terrible lies until they drove him over the edge.
Elliott was charged with attempted murder and was sent away, and while he was away, his wife divorced him and married the judge; and then the two of them together had him declared an unfit parent so the good Judge Jeffries could adopt Elliott’s children and call them his own.”
I put my hand on the railing and leaned closer to the jury.
“And what does this have to do with John Smith, now on trial for murder? The judge who, acting on instructions from Calvin Jeffries, made certain Elliott Winston would be put in a place where he could not interfere with anything his former friend and former wife wanted to do, was Quincy Griswald.”
I looked from one end of the jury box to the other. “Who do you think wanted both Calvin Jeffries and Quincy Griswald dead?
Who do you think had a motive to kill them both? There is only one answer to that question, and it isn’t John Smith,” I said, shaking my head as I turned away and walked to the counsel table.
It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when I finished, and Judge Bingham decided to wait until morning before the first witness was called for the prosecution. The jury filed out of the courtroom and as the spectators behind us crowded into the aisle and shuffled a step at a time out the double-doors at the back, Cassandra Loescher waited patiently until it was quiet enough for the judge to hear.