I sat next to him every day in court, and except when I wanted by some gesture, some apparent word of encouragement, to convince the jury I believed in his innocence, barely noticed he was there. He had neither the mannerisms of a child, nor the idio-syncrasies of an adult; his face had none of the physical features that reveal the character, the essential lines of what we are: He was a blank page on which nothing permanent had yet been written.
We did not stay long.
“Just came by to say hello,” Flynn said cheerfully when he was brought in.
Danny greeted him with a drowsy smile. “Hello, Howard.”
Flynn smiled back. “Just had dinner, didn’t you?”
“It was good,” he replied as he turned to me. “Hello, Mr. Antonelli. Do I get dressed up again tomorrow?”
“Want a different tie?”
He seemed alarmed, and I realized he thought it meant having to give up the one he had. “Then you’ll have two you can choose from.”
He brightened immediately. “Sure. I’d like that.”
When we left the jail and drove through the city to Flynn’s apartment, it was almost completely dark. Under the blue-black sky, a scarlet haze hung low on the horizon, the last light till morning.
Flynn made up a bed for me on the bulky tattered sofa in his makeshift study, while I stood in the doorway, glancing furtively at the aging picture of his long-dead son.
“I really am sorry about what I said.”
Holding a pillow under his chin, he tugged on the dull white pillowcase. “I know you are,” he grunted. “Let it go. Things get said. They don’t mean anything.”
He gave the pillowcase one last pull. “There, that should do it,” he said, plopping it into place at the far end of the couch.
A wry grin spread across his broad, heavy mouth. “What did you expect: a mint on your pillow?”
I followed him back into the kitchen. The cat heard us coming and, before Flynn could grab him, jumped off the table and ran for cover.
“Stupid cat won’t give up: thinks there has to be something to eat in that bowl,” he growled, nodding toward the wax fruit and glass grapes.
Things I had forgotten that yesterday seemed important started to come back into focus. “You must have called Asa’s office. That’s why Jonah came to court with him,” I said as we sat down at the gray Formica table.
“Strange little bastard,” Flynn observed. “When I told him Bartram’s life might be in danger, he laughed. Said he thought you were nuts. Swear to God-that’s what he said. He wasn’t happy about the subpoena. He didn’t think you had any business taking up the old man’s time to come over and testify that he’d made a court appearance for some screwball a dozen years ago.”
“That sounds like him. I wonder what he thinks now, after he heard what good old Asa helped Jeffries do.” I remembered the other call I’d asked him to make. “Did you reach Jeffries’s widow?”
“There was no answer,” he replied. “I left a message, but she never called back. Maybe she’s out of town.”
“She better be back by morning,” I said, stretching my arms.
“She’s my next witness.”
Flynn got up to get a bottle of milk out of the refrigerator.
“What are you going to ask her?”
I asked her a question a gentleman would never ask; I got an answer no lady would ever give.
“Tell me, Mrs. Jeffries,” I asked the next morning as soon as she had been sworn in as a witness, “did you and I ever sleep together?”
Jean Jeffries was not a young woman anymore, but in a gray jacket and an ankle-length skirt she was, if anything, more beautiful than when I had first met her, years before, the wife of Elliott Winston. Even then she had been a little too sure of herself.
“Why?” she asked with a taunting glance. “Don’t you remember?”
Standing at the corner of the counsel table, I stared back at her. “I’m sure I would have, Mrs. Jeffries. I take it your answer is no. Which brings me to my next question. Why did your husband-your first husband-think we had?”
“Because he was a very sick man. You of all people should know that, Mr. Antonelli. He tried to kill you, didn’t he?”
“So there was no basis in reality for his belief that you were having an affair?”
“No, of course not.”
“But he was so convinced of it, so convinced you were having an affair with me, that he tried to kill me?”
“Apparently.”
“Because he was crazy?”
“He was sick.”
“Isn’t it true, Mrs. Jeffries,” I asked, searching her eyes, “that the reason Elliott thought we were having an affair is because Calvin Jeffries told him we were?”
“No, of course not. Calvin wouldn’t have-”
“And isn’t it true, Mrs. Jeffries, that he did that because he wanted to keep him from finding out that you were actually having an affair with him?” I asked with a scathing glance.
She sat on the edge of the witness chair, her hands held rigid in her lap, her long-lashed eyes flashing, speechless anger the only answer she could give.
I walked toward the jury, my arms folded, my eyes lowered, trying to get myself back under control. “How often did you visit your husband when he was first sent to the state hospital?” I asked quietly. There was no answer, and still staring down at the floor I repeated the question.
“I didn’t visit him there,” she said, clearing her throat.
“I’m not sure everyone could hear that. Would you please say it again?”
“I didn’t visit him there,” she said more loudly, and more irritably.
“And your children-Elliott’s children-how often have they been to visit their father in the twelve years he has been locked up in that place?”
My head bowed, I listened to the silence and felt something of the loneliness Elliott must have known. Then I felt something else and turned on Jeffries’s wife with a rage I barely recognized as my own.
“You never allowed them to see their father, did you? You were afraid of what might happen-afraid of what he might tell them-
weren’t you?”
Her hands, clutched tight together, began to tremble. “I was afraid of what he might do! I’m still afraid of what he might do!”
“Afraid he might harm you?-harm your children?”
“Yes.”
“Because he’s threatened you?-written letters threatening you?”
“Yes.”
“Because of what you and Calvin Jeffries did to him?”
“We did nothing to him,” she insisted.
“You never went to see him, you divorced him, you married Calvin Jeffries, and then the two of you took away his children so Calvin Jeffries could adopt them and call them his own, but,”
I added, glaring at her, “you can say ‘we did nothing to him’? You did everything to him, and you know it, and you know what he’s done because of it, don’t you? He’s managed to kill your husband, hasn’t he? And you know who he’s coming after next, don’t you?”
Loescher was screaming an objection, trying to make herself heard over the bedlam that had broken out as the courtroom exploded in noise and confusion.
“You knew that Calvin Jeffries fixed it so that Elliott would be sent to the state hospital, didn’t you?” I shouted while Bingham was trying to quiet the courtroom.
“Calvin did it for me,” she shouted back. “I didn’t want Elliott to go to prison!”
All the noise had stopped as everyone suddenly turned to hear what she said. Her voice reverberated off the silent square walls of the courtroom and then slowly faded away. I stood a few feet from her, my hands in my pockets, and watched as her head sank down between her shoulders and she began to rub her hands together.
“So you both knew-you and Calvin Jeffries-that Elliott didn’t need to go to the state hospital, because you knew-didn’t you?-
that he was never really insane.”
She lifted her head and stopped rubbing her hands. “No, that’s not what I meant. What I meant to say was that-”