Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (44 page)

“No, I don’t think so.”

My hand fell away from his shoulder and I moved slowly to the front of the counsel table. Gripping the edge behind me, I leaned back against it, one foot crossed over the other.

“You didn’t see him in the garage when you first found Judge Griswald?” I asked casually.

“No.”

“You didn’t see him anywhere in the garage when you went back there with the two officers?”

“No.”

“You didn’t see him anywhere in the courthouse, lurking around, when you were first leaving with Judge Griswald?”

“No.”

Folding my arms across my chest, I stared down at my shoes.

“You’ve never seen him before today, have you?” I asked, glancing at her from under my brow.

“No, I don’t think so.”

I lifted my head higher. “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted Judge Griswald dead?”

It was automatic, the other side of the insistence that we never speak ill of the dead: the blind assurance that despite the fact that someone killed them, no one could possibly have wanted it to happen.

“No, of course not.”

I raised my eyebrows, then lowered my head and walked the few steps to the jury box.

“You’re aware, are you not,” I asked, turning suddenly toward her, “that a lot of people—including Quincy Griswald—wanted Calvin Jeffries dead?”

“Your honor!” Loescher shouted as she sprang from her chair.

I held up my hand before Bingham could open his mouth. “I’ll rephrase the question. You worked very closely with Judge Griswald, didn’t you?” I held her eyes in mine and refused to let go.

“Yes, I did, for four years.”

“And in the course of that time—working that close together—

you came to know quite a lot about him, didn’t you?”

She did not hesitate. “Yes.”

“And you knew quite a lot about the way he felt about other people, including other judges, didn’t you?”

Loescher was still on her feet, watching intently. Bingham had both arms on the bench, peering down at the witness.

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t like Calvin Jeffries, did he? He didn’t like him one bit, did he?”

“Your honor?” Loescher insisted.

His eyes still on the witness, Bingham held up his hand. “No, I’ll allow it.”

“No, he didn’t like him.” I started to ask the next question, but she was not finished with her answer. “I think he was a little afraid of him, to tell you the truth.”

“Afraid of him? In what way?”

“Intimidated might be a better way to put it. Judge Jeffries seemed to have that effect on a lot of people.”

“So he wasn’t sorry, shall we say, when Calvin Jeffries was murdered?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” she replied, quick to correct the impression she was afraid she might have left.

“He wasn’t grief-stricken when Calvin Jeffries was dead?”

She did not want to answer and was content to let her silence speak for itself.

Cassandra Loescher had sat down. She tapped the erasure end of a pencil while she watched, ready to object again.

“You worked for Judge Griswald a little more than four years, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So you weren’t with him twelve years ago when he handled a criminal case in which the defendant was Elliott Winston, were you?”

“Your honor—relevance?” Loescher inquired, turning up her hands.

“It’s relevant to the defense’s theory of the case, your honor,”

I said, as if that were any answer at all.

“And beyond the question of relevance, your honor,” Loescher went on, “it’s beyond the scope of direct examination.”

Bingham looked at me. “Your honor, the prosecution established the employment connection between the witness and the victim. I’m simply exploring the scope of the relationship.”

“Then please do it as quickly as possible and then move on to something else.”

“During the time you did work for him,” I asked her, “did you ever hear him mention the name Elliott Winston?”

She thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t recall that he did.”

“You’re sure?”

“Was he the one who Judge Jeffries’s wife was married to?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

A knowing smile crept over her mouth. “He did say something once, but not about him, not directly, that is. He was angry with Judge Jeffries about something. I don’t know what. And he said he wondered if Jeffries’s wife would have married him if she’d known he was as crazy as her first husband was. That’s when I think he used that name—Elliott Winston.”

“So he thought Elliott Winston was crazy?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I assumed it was just a figure of speech.”

I had no more questions, and Cassandra Loescher had nothing she wanted to ask on redirect. Sharon Arnold was excused and the prosecution called its next witness, one of the security guards who had gone with her back to where Griswald’s body had first been discovered. Short and to the point, his testimony added little to what had already been said. Certain he was dead, but afraid to touch the body, Arnold had left it to the guard to check for a pulse. The second guard followed the first and except to ask them each whether they had seen the defendant at the scene, I did not bother to cross-examine either one of them. Loescher ended the first day of testimony by calling the police photographer who had taken pictures of the body. Over my objection, the photos were entered into evidence and the jury was shown the graphic obscenities of a violent death.

Quincy Griswald, whose eyes had so often filled with anger, and whose mouth had so often been twisted with rage, had a look on his face of puzzled innocence, as if he could not understand why anyone would want to bring him harm. I looked at that picture a long time before I gave it back to the clerk. All the years that had left their mark on his deep-lined features seemed at the moment of death to have faded away, and all the disappointments of his life vanished with them. He looked almost young again.

The next morning, Loescher called the coroner, who described the cause of death, and then called Detective Kevin Crowley, who had been in charge of the investigation. I was becoming more and more impressed with the way Loescher did her job.

Each witness was called in a perfectly calculated, completely logical sequence, their testimony part of a story told according to a strict chronology. She would ask the same question three different ways if it was the only way to make the details clear. And she wanted more than to describe it to the jurors. She wanted them to know what it was like to discover someone you knew stabbed to death; she wanted them to know what it was like for the victim in that instant when he knew he was about to die.

Wearing a dark brown dress and flat shoes, she stood in front of the jury, patient and attentive, listening as Detective Crowley reported how the police had apprehended the suspected killer.

“He had the knife in his hand when you found him?”

Short and stocky, with small quick-moving eyes, Crowley was a little too eager to answer. “Yes,” he said before she had quite finished.

“I’m sorry,” she said without any apparent irritation. “What was your answer?”

This time he waited. “Yes.”

“What did you do with the knife after you removed it from the defendant’s possession?”

“I put it inside a plastic bag, sealed it, and tagged it.”

Loescher had gone to the table in front of the clerk, where she picked up a large clear plastic bag containing a kitchen knife with a black wooden handle and a six-inch blade. She handed it to the witness.

“Is this the bag?”

“Yes.”

“And is that the tag you mentioned?”

He held it up and examined it closely. “Yes, that’s my mark.”

“What did you do with it then?”

“I placed it in the evidence room at police headquarters and then had it sent to the police crime lab.”

“And what was the reason it was sent to the crime lab?”

“To examine it for fingerprints and to have it examined for DNA evidence.”

“We’ll have testimony later about the fingerprints that were found on the weapon as well as the results of the DNA testing,”

Loescher remarked as she returned to her place next to the jury box. “But let me ask you, Detective Crowley, what further steps were taken in the investigation after you learned whose fingerprints were on the handle and whose blood was on the blade?”

He glanced at the plastic bag and the knife inside it. “We closed the investigation,” he said, looking up.

Loescher cast a meaningful glance at the jury, and then, turning back to the witness, said, “Thank you, Detective Crowley. No further questions.”

“When you began the investigation,” I asked as I rose from my chair at the start of cross-examination, “were you not struck by the similarities between the murder of Quincy Griswald and the murder of Calvin Jeffries?”

“I wasn’t involved in the Jeffries investigation.”

I stared hard at him. “That wasn’t my question, detective. And, by the way,” I added almost as an aside, “if you weren’t involved in that investigation, you were the only police officer in the state who wasn’t. Let me repeat: When you began this investigation weren’t you struck by the similarities between the two murders?”

“There were some similarities,” he allowed. He sat forward, spread his legs, and rested his hands on his knees. As I began to pace back and forth in front of the counsel table, he followed me with his eyes.

“They were both circuit court judges, correct?”

“Yes.”

“They were both killed near their cars in the structure where they both parked?”

“Yes.”

“They were both stabbed to death?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me, Detective Crowley, as the lead investigator in this case, what investigation did the police make into the possible connection between the two murders? Let me be even more specific.” I stopped pacing and raised my head. “What effort was made to determine whether there was anyone—perhaps someone they had both sentenced to prison—who might have had a motive to want both of them dead?”

“The Jeffries case had already been solved. There was no connection. There could not have been.”

“In other words,” I asked impatiently, “you couldn’t conduct an investigation into that possibility because you assumed it didn’t exist?”

“Objection,” Loescher interjected before he could answer.

“That’s an assertion, not a question.”

Bingham considered it. “Perhaps you could rephrase the question, Mr. Antonelli.”

“You testified a moment ago that you weren’t involved in the Jeffries investigation, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So your knowledge of it—your knowledge of what really happened—is at best secondhand, correct?”

“I suppose,” he replied, watching me with sullen eyes.

I turned until I was facing the jury and the witness was on my right. “There’s another similarity, isn’t there? In both cases the police were told where to find the person who supposedly committed the crime. Isn’t that true, Detective Crowley?”

“We were given information from an outside source—yes.”

I kept looking at the jury. A thin smile flashed across my mouth.

” ‘An outside source.’ You mean an anonymous phone call, don’t you, Detective Crowley?”

“Yes, we received a call.”

“An anonymous call,” I said as I turned to face him. “An anonymous call in which the caller in both instances sought to disguise his voice, isn’t that true?”

He tried to turn it back on me. “The caller wanted to remain anonymous.”

I ignored it. “And don’t you think it a little strange that both times—in these two cases in which you assume there was no connection between the murders—the police were told they could find the killer in the very same place, a homeless camp under the Morrison Street Bridge?”

He jumped at it. “You forget: The killer in the first case confessed and then killed himself. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the second case, could he?”

With a bored expression, I shook my head and dismissed it with a cursory wave of my hand. “Move to strike, your honor.

The answer is nonresponsive. Besides that,” I added with a glance at Loescher, “it’s nothing but hearsay.”

Bingham instructed the jury to pretend they had never heard what they were not very likely to forget. With no more questions to ask, I sat down and waited for Loescher to call the next witness for the prosecution.

With a drooping gray mustache and disheveled gray hair, Rudolph Blensley looked more like an aging professor of mathematics than he did a police detective. Loescher first established his credentials as a fingerprint expert and then asked him whose fingerprints he had found on the knife that had been taken from the defendant.

“The only fingerprints found on the weapon,” he replied,

“matched the fingerprints of the defendant, John Smith.”

Blensley was suffering from a cold, and his words came out muffled and garbled. When Loescher sat down, he removed a large white handkerchief from his side coat pocket and blew his nose. He put the handkerchief in his pocket and with the back of his hand tried to wipe his red, runny eyes.

“Would you like some water?” I asked. We had been in court together before, and he had always answered my questions in the same straightforward manner he answered those asked by the prosecution. “Summer colds are the worst,” I remarked while he took a drink.

When he was finished, he settled back in the witness chair and waited.

“The fingerprints you found belong to the defendant, known as John Smith, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know, by the way, whether there were any fingerprints on file for John Smith, or were you given them by the police after they had taken him into custody?”

He saw where I was going. “You mean, did we take prints from the knife and then run them to find out who they belonged to, or did we compare them to the ones we had for the defendant?

We compared them to the set we were given—the ones that belong to the defendant.”

“I see. In other words, this was not an investigation in which you used the fingerprints taken from a weapon to find out who among all the millions of people out there who have their fingerprints on file might have held the knife in their hand and used it as a murder weapon?”