“Your honor-!” Loescher cried.
“Mr. Antonelli,” Bingham began.
“Withdrawn,” I announced with a wave of my hand as I left the witness and headed back for my chair.
Twenty-seven
As soon as I saw him I started to smile. Howard Flynn had on his best suit, the one he wore to weddings and to funerals and to any other formal event to which he was on occasion invited. It was the only suit I had ever seen him wear, and so far as I knew, the only suit he owned. There was not a wrinkle anywhere on the dark blue coat and the matching pants were creased tight down the front. With a starched white shirt and burnished black shoes, a solid gray silk tie and a breast pocket handkerchief to match, he looked like the prosperous and successful attorney he should have been. It was not hard to figure out why he had gone to so much trouble.
“It’s nice to see you, Howard,” Jennifer said as she held out her hand.
Flynn was standing at the table, clutching a white linen napkin. “It’s nice to see you, Jennifer,” he said, gently taking her hand in his thick fingers.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” she said as he pulled a chair out for her.
“It’s my fault. It took me a little longer to get ready than it should have.”
It was a rare performance, one I would not have missed for anything. Flynn had not only been on time, he had actually arrived a little early. To make sure we got a good table, he explained as if it were the kind of thing he did all the time or something he would have done had he been dining alone with me.
The waiter, a balding middle-aged man with round, chubby cheeks and a small, thoughtful mouth, brought menus. Jennifer ordered a glass of wine and Flynn asked for a Diet Coke.
“And what would you like?” the waiter asked, glancing at me over the top of his notepad.
“Scotch and soda.” Jennifer darted a worried glance at me. “It’s all right,” I assured her. “I’m just going to have one.” Then I realized that was not what concerned her. “Howard doesn’t mind.”
His face reddened slightly when he told her it did not bother him at all. “Just as long as he doesn’t enjoy it too much,” he added, trying to put her at ease.
The waiter brought our drinks and took our order. Stirring the ice, I remembered the last time we had come here, the two of us, that Saturday night she had to go home early, the night I called Flynn to get me out of the bar. As I sipped on the drink, I watched them chatting amiably, and knew that whatever else happened I could always count on them both. I was glad they liked each other, though I would have been surprised if they had not.
While they talked, I started thinking about the case, or rather the case, which had taken over my life, pushed its way back into my mind. I had left the courtroom quickly, jubilant about what I had been able to achieve during the cross-examination of Stewart. It was the vanity of performance, and the farther away I got from the courtroom, the less impressive it became. What had I actually accomplished? An agreement that there was something odd about the mental patient who murdered Calvin Jeffries and something unusual about the similarities of the two crimes. I had raised questions, but I had not supplied any answers, at least none I could prove.
“I’m going to lead with the psychologist tomorrow,” I said out loud. Jennifer and Flynn stopped their conversation and looked at me. “Then I’m putting Danny on the stand.” I sat with my hands in my lap, the chair pushed back from the table far enough so I could cross one leg over the other. “You think he can handle it? You see him every day, talk to him…”
Jennifer looked at Flynn, then back at me, a question in her eyes.
“Howard goes to see him at the jail every day after court. He tries to explain to him what happened that day and what’s going to happen next.”
“I see,” she said, looking at Flynn with a new sense of appreciation.
“I try to talk to him in court when I have the chance, but he just looks at me with those trusting eyes of his, and smiles, or says yes or no, but not much else. I don’t think he knows half the time what I’m talking about.”
“He knows more than you think,” Flynn replied as the waiter began to serve dinner.
“All I’m going to ask him is what his name is, how old he is, who gave him the knife, and did he kill Griswald. He’ll understand those questions?”
“We’ve been over it a dozen times,” Flynn reminded me.
I was irritable, impatient, and I knew it. “Sorry.”
Jennifer’s hand slid onto my wrist and then along my arm.
“You’re going to win,” she said with an encouraging smile.
I peered into her eyes for a moment and then shook my head.
“You’re about to find out what a fraud I really am. I hate this work. I hate doing this. I hate not being able to think about anything except what I have to do to win. God, I hate it when they’re innocent.”
She had an instinct for the essential. “Would you like it better if that boy was actually guilty?”
“No,” I said with a sigh. “But it would make things a lot easier.”
Flynn put down his fork. “Did you ever think that maybe the problem is that it’s actually been a little too easy?”
“No,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “I have to confess that’s one thought I haven’t had.”
He was serious. Moving his plate aside, he put his forearms on the edge of the table and bent forward. “If Elliott Winston is really behind both murders, why didn’t he make it more difficult?
Why did he make it so easy?” He folded his broad, light-haired fingers together. “Why do everything the same way-not just the way Jeffries and Griswald were both killed-why the same anonymous call, the same place each time as the location where the killer could be found?” He pulled back his head as if to get a better look at me. “Why did he want them found? Why would he want Jacob Whittaker to confess? Why would he want anyone to know that Whittaker was a mental patient locked up in the same hospital? He might just as well have signed his name.”
Jennifer had stopped eating. “But you’re missing something,”
she blurted.
Startled, Flynn sat up and, perhaps not even aware he was doing it, smiled at her as she tried to apologize.
“I’m sorry.” She laughed, embarrassed, holding up her hand.
“That just came out.”
“What did Howard miss?” I asked.
“You,” she said, her eyes glittering. “You’re the only one who knew-no, you’re the only one who could have known of the connections. There are two of them, aren’t there?” she asked, looking at Flynn and then back at me. “The one between Elliott Winston and Whittaker, and the one between him and the two murdered judges. And if you didn’t know about the second connection, the first would have no meaning at all, would it? And who besides you would have had any reason ever to look for it?”
Nodding, I looked at Flynn. “What do you think?”
“I think it will be good for you to be married to someone so much smarter than you are.”
Jennifer got up from the table and put her hand on Flynn’s shoulder to keep him from getting up as well. “I won’t be long,”
she said as she picked up her purse.
“She’s right, you know,” I said as soon as Jennifer had left. “I agree with what you said: If Elliott really is behind all this, he put a signature to both crimes, but there’s no reason to think he wanted anyone to know it was his signature.”
As I listened to myself I wondered if I really believed it. The last time I had seen Elliott had I not taunted him with the impotence of doing something that no one will ever know you’ve done? Was I now simply resisting the possibility that I had been wrong and that he had somehow foreseen how it would all work out while I was still struggling to understand how he had done it in the first place?
Flynn moved his jaw from side to side and then bobbed his head back and forth. He draped one arm over the corner of his chair, crossed his ankle over his knee and held it there with his hand.