“Winston was a young lawyer, and Judge Jeffries had become quite fond of him.”
“Fond of his wife, too, wasn’t he?”
“Fond of both of them,” he replied.
Taking a step back, I looked over at the jury. “She eventually divorced Elliott Winston and married him, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“As a matter of fact, she and Judge Jeffries had been having an affair for some time before Elliott Winston was accused of a crime, weren’t they?”
“I don’t know,” he replied with a lawyer’s caution.
“As a matter of fact, they-Judge Jeffries and Elliott Winston’s wife-gave him every reason to suspect she was having an affair, but having it with someone else, didn’t they?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” he insisted.
“As a matter of fact,” I went on, my eyes still on the jury, “they made him so convinced of it-drove him so crazy with the thought of it-that he was charged with attempting to murder the man they made him think she was sleeping with, didn’t they?”
“I don’t know why he thought what he did.”
I stopped and turned around until we were face-to-face. “But you must have some idea. There must have been something about it in the psychiatric report, some explanation of why he did what he did?”
Asa wearily shook his head. “It was a long time ago.”
“So long ago that you’ve forgotten the name of the victim?
That certainly must have been mentioned in the report.”
“No,” he replied with a faint smile. “I certainly remember that.”
“Tell us who it was,” I said, turning back to the jury. “Who did Elliott Winston think was sleeping with his wife? Who did Elliott Winston attempt to murder?”
“You. Joseph Antonelli. You’re the one he tried to kill.”
“Yes,” I said, wheeling around. “That’s what he was accused of: attempted murder. Would it surprise you to know I never thought he really intended to kill me? I don’t think he would have fired the gun if I hadn’t tried to take it away from him. But tell us, Mr. Bartram-because you read it-what did the psychiatric report say about that? What did it say about what he thought he was doing, what he really intended to do?”
Asa turned up the palms of his hands. “As I told you: It was such a long time ago. I’m sorry, but I just don’t remember now.”
I walked quickly to the counsel table, opened a file folder, and ran my finger down a typed list.
“Would the clerk please hand the witness what has been marked defense exhibit 109?”
The clerk found the exhibit, a large manila envelope, and brought it to the witness.
“Would you please open that and remove the file folder inside.” When he had done what I asked, he looked up. “Now would you open the file and tell us what it is.”
It was the court file in the case of State v. Elliott Winston, the file that contained the official record of the proceedings that led to the official determination that Elliott Winston was insane and should be committed to the state hospital for a period not to exceed the maximum sentence which he could have been made to serve in the state prison.
“Would you please take out of the file the psychiatric report which formed the basis for the court’s finding.”
Asa fumbled through the documents until he found it. He held up another, smaller, manila envelope. “It’s under seal.”
“Open it.”
“Your honor!” Loescher protested. “It’s under seal. It can’t be opened.”
“It can be opened if the court so orders, your honor. And there is no reason not to. This is a murder trial, and whether or not that report should have been under seal in the first place, keeping it there doesn’t serve to protect the vital interests of anyone.”
Bingham considered it for a moment and then agreed.
“Go ahead,” I told Asa. “Open it.”
He hesitated, and he kept hesitating. “Here,” I said, ripping it out of his hand. I tore it open and pulled out a typed document, stapled at the corner. I shoved it in front of his face. “Read it.
Read it out loud. Read the report that was used to find Elliott Winston insane.”
He would not look at it, and I read it for him. It was the daily court docket, dated the day Elliott Winston had his hearing. There had never been a psychiatric report. There had never been a psychiatric evaluation. Elliott Winston had been adjudicated insane for no other reason than because Calvin Jeffries had wanted it that way.
Twenty-nine
What would you have done if there had been a psychiatric evaluation?” Howard Flynn wanted to know, surprised and a little troubled by the chance I had taken. “You couldn’t have known they never did one.”
I watched out the passenger-side window the river and the mountain fall farther away as we drove up the hill to the hospital. Scattered across the blue high-arching sky, great billowing clouds had turned the color of copper dust; down below in the city, reflected off the glass-walled buildings, the late afternoon sun painted everything behind it a black-edged gold as it ran reluctantly ahead, chased by the soft summer night.
“I’m sorry about what I said. It was unforgivable,” I said, looking across at Flynn.
He kept his eyes on the curving road, the only response a slight change in the way he tilted his head, a gesture meant to let me know that it was not important.
“I knew what was inside,” I remarked as the car approached the front of the hospital.
“How could you know that?”
“I read the file.”
He brought the car to a stop. “That part was under seal.”
“It’s just a little adhesive,” I said as I gathered up my attache case, the one Jennifer had given me, and opened the door.
“Then you just resealed it?” He shook his head at the sheer simplicity of it.
“It was hard to believe that even Jeffries would go that far,” I explained. “I had to be sure.” I ran my finger along the letters of my name, engraved on the narrow brass plate, as I thought about what had happened in court and what had happened twelve years before. “Makes you wonder,” I said, looking at Flynn as I started to get out, “which of them was really insane.”
I had to wait a long time to see the doctors, and I stayed with Jennifer until I was told I had to leave, but Flynn was still there, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I asked him if he had another, and without a word he reached inside his sport coat pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack. The smoke caught halfway down my throat and made me cough. I let the cigarette tumble from between my fingers and crushed it out with the heel of my shoe.
“They’re still running tests,” I reported, trying to sound encouraged. “More tomorrow.”
Flynn took one last drag on his cigarette, stomped it out with his foot, and stood up.
“Why don’t I take you home. You need to get some sleep.
You’ve been running on nothing but nervous energy.”
I did not want to go home; I was afraid to go home. All night the night before I had been chased by ghosts of my own invention, maddening thoughts about what I could have done to stop all this from happening. I had not slept at all and had not even tried.
“Listen, why don’t we get something to eat,” I suggested as we walked to where he had parked the car. “There are some things we need to talk about-to get ready for tomorrow.”
He knew it was not true, but he went along with it as if it was. We had a sandwich and a bowl of soup in a diner I had never heard of, and when he offered to take me by the house to get a change of clothes and spend the night at his place I accepted with an eagerness that surprised even myself. First we stopped at the jail.
“I told Danny I’d come by,” Flynn explained as we waited for the jailer to open the metal door. “If I didn’t show up, he might start to wonder if he could trust me.”