Bad Blood (2 page)

Lem was as strong on substance as he was on style. He had been one of my first supervisors when I’d arrived in the office as a rookie prosecutor, before he left for a lucrative partnership in the litigation department of a midtown law firm.

Lemuel Howell III had the eloquence of the great black preachers, the brain and wit of a superb trial lawyer, and the looks of a leading man in a 1940s noir film — his wavy hair pomaded into place, straight back without a part. By the end of voir dire — in this matter a four-day exercise weeding through 182 prospective jurors — he had most of them ready to eat out of his hand before they’d heard the first prosecution witness.

He opened the brass locks on the briefcase and placed a sheaf of papers on his desk before removing a thick, gold fountain pen from his breast pocket. Then he smoothed the front of his beige suit.

“And you, Michael Patrick? You’ve detected, deduced, and done Alexandra’s bidding for the better part of a year, and still no perpetrator?”

“If only your client would loosen up and let me know who he paid to do the kill, maybe I could twist Coop’s arm to cut him a deal.”

“He can’t tell you what he doesn’t know, can he?”

“Save that line of bull for the jury.” Mike slapped Lem on the back as Artie Tramm returned with the water pitcher and told us that he was ready to open the doors. “And go easy on her, Mr. Triplicate, you know how Coop hates to lose.”

Triplicate was what the courthouse reporters called Lem Howell, not for the Roman numeral III in his name, but for his habit of phrasing his descriptions in threesomes. Yesterday, in his opening remarks, Amanda’s death was “admittedly savage, barbaric, and the cowardly work of a dangerous madman”; his client was “innocent, falsely accused, and horribly distraught by his wife’s untimely demise”; and the People’s case was “dreadfully flimsy, paper-thin, a gossamer web of fabrications.”

“Both sides ready?” Artie Tramm asked.

I nodded while Lem gave him a firm “Yes, sir.”

Tramm opened the door on the far side of the judge’s bench, which led to the small barred holding pen to which Brendan Quillian had been delivered earlier this morning from his cell in the Tombs. I watched as one of the officers removed Quillian’s handcuffs and walked behind him into the courtroom, to place him next to Howell so jurors would not know he had been incarcerated pending trial.

The defendant was dressed in one of his elegant Brioni suits, probably for the first time since the day of his arrest. He was as tall as Mike Chapman but with a beefier build, and his brown hair was showing streaks of gray, despite the fact that he had just turned thirty-five. He fixed on me with an icy look as he crossed behind his table, a glare made all the more sinister by the cast of his right eye. Brendan Quillian had been blinded in that eye by a childhood accident, and I swiveled away from its glassy, dead stare as he squinted at me.

“Smart move,” Mike whispered, oblivious to the quick exchange. “Howell’s the perfect lawyer for this case.”

Quillian and Howell were animatedly talking to each other.

“He’s the perfect lawyer for any case.”

“Your middle-class white jurors won’t want to think Quillian did it — don’t understand domestic violence when it happens outside the ghetto. Your upper-class white women will think he’s too handsome to be guilty, and your upper-class white men—”

“When’s the last time you saw an upper-class white man on a Manhattan jury?” I asked. “They use every excuse in the book to avoid service.”

“And your blacks — dammit, I guess everybody in the room — will fall under the spell of the silver tongue of Lem Howell.”

“I’m ready to open the doors, Mike,” Artie said.

“My money’s on you, kid. Make ’em believe, okay?” Mike said, slapping the table and heading to the courtroom door. “See you at the break.”

He walked out against the flow of incoming traffic, while I seated myself at the table with my back to the benches. The first five reporters made a beeline for Howell. The district attorney, Paul Battaglia, had firm rules that forbade each of us from talking to the press while a case was pending. Lem Howell, however, would leak like a sieve from now until the moment of the verdict, feeding the media tidbits helpful to his client that the jury would never be allowed to hear. So I sucked it up and sat quietly in place while the officers filled the rows with curious onlookers and tried to keep order in the court.

“Put your newspapers under your seats,” Tramm roared at the two hundred spectators. “No reading materials, no food or beverages, no cell phones, no talking among yourselves.

“All rise,” Tramm continued, “the Honorable Frederick Gertz presiding.”

The door from his robing room opened and the stern-faced Gertz, five foot six, strode into the well and climbed the three steps to his bench.

“Good morning, Ms. Cooper, Mr. Howell.”

“Good morning, Your Honor,” we both answered.

Jonetta Purvis, the court clerk, was standing at her desk close to the defense table.

“The defendant and his lawyer are present, the assistant district attorney is present. Shall we bring in the jurors, Your Honor?”

“You both ready to go forward? Any housekeeping to attend to?”

“Ready,” I said. I pushed the indictment aside — the written instrument that charged Brendan Quillian with “Murder in the Second Degree and Conspiracy to Commit the Crime of Murder in the Second Degree” — and reached for the thick purple folder beneath it.

Artie stood by the door next to the judge’s bench and opened it. “Jurors entering.”

The group of sixteen — the first twelve chosen and four alternates — filed in, taking their seats in the two rows closest to my desk. They fidgeted as they settled down, some staring at Quillian and Howell, others focusing on me and the full shopping cart behind me.

It was impossible to imagine how jurors had been able to obey the judge’s instructions not to listen to television accounts or read stories about the case. I stifled my desire to scan the group to see what reading materials each had brought along. Last evening’s news had led with a summary of the opening-day arguments, and this morning’s
New York Post
banner —
DIAL M FOR MOGUL: HUBBY HIRES HITMAN
— would have been visible on every subway and bus route that carried these folks downtown.

I lifted the flap of the folder and squinted at the bright yellow Post-it note stuck to my punch list of questions. It was in Lem’s handwriting, slipped onto the file when he had stepped over to greet me minutes ago.
Alex
—
take your best shot. If you remembered half of what I taught you, you wouldn’t be leading off with Kate.
Beneath the warning he had scrawled another word:
SHOWTIME.

Gertz’s eyes swept the courtroom, making sure he had everyone’s attention before he pointed his gavel in my direction. “Call your first witness, Miss Cooper.”

My voice caught in my throat as I stood, and I coughed to clear it as I started the People’s case. I didn’t need to look over at Lem to let him know he had scored his first hit.

“Would you please state your full name for the jury?”

“My name is Katherine Meade. I’m called Kate.”

I was standing against the rail at the end of the jury box, trying to draw Kate Meade’s eyes in my direction. “How old are you, Ms. Meade?”

“Thirty-four. Thirty-four years old.”

The jurors had watched Artie Tramm lead her into the courtroom and onto the witness stand. They had all scrutinized her appearance while she stood, fidgeting slightly, facing the clerk as she was administered the oath. Most of them had probably seen her bite her lip and flash a glance in the direction of Brendan Quillian, who returned it with a broad smile.

“Are you single or married?”

“Married. I’ve been married for twelve years. My husband is Preston Meade. He’s a banker.”

There was little about Kate Meade that these jurors would relate to. The nine men and three women who’d been impaneled were a mix of working- and lower-class New Yorkers — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian — ranging in age from twenty-seven to sixty-two. The four alternates — three men and one woman — were equally diverse. The business clothes most of them had worn during the selection process had been replaced by T-shirts and cotton blouses, chinos and jeans and capri pants.

“Where do you live, Mrs. Meade? In which county?”

They stared at her well-made-up face, auburn hair pulled back and held securely in place with a tortoiseshell hairband. The pale pink suit — with its short-collared jacket and pencil-thin skirt — seemed as rigid as my witness. I tipped my head toward the jury box, a signal I’d arranged to make her remember that it was to the people sitting in it that she had to tell her story. I wanted her to warm up to her audience and speak more naturally, but her expression was frozen and her anxiety was palpable.

“In Manhattan. New York County. On the Upper East Side,” she said, turning to Judge Gertz. “Do I have to say exactly where—?”

“No, no. No, you don’t.”

Kate Meade exhaled as though relieved not to have to tell anyone who wasn’t a member of the Knickerbocker Club what her address was.

“Do you have any children?”

“We do,” she said, smiling at the foreman for the first time. “We have three children, all in elementary school.”

“Do you work outside the home?”

“No, ma’am. I mean, I volunteer on several boards, but I haven’t been employed since I married Preston.”

I extended my right arm in the direction of the defense table. “Do you know the defendant in this case, Brendan Quillian?”

“Yes, I do. For a very long time.”

“For how long, if you can tell us exactly?”

“I met Mr. Quillian — Brendan — when I was sixteen. He was seventeen at the time.”

“Would you tell us where you met?”

“Certainly.” Kate Meade was comfortable with this part of the story, and she shifted her body to face the jury box to talk. “I was in high school, here in Manhattan. Convent of the Sacred Heart.”

Some of the jurors would know that Sacred Heart was the city’s premier private school for Catholic girls, promising an education that intertwined intellect and soul. They might have some idea of what it had cost to educate Kate Meade and her friends if they knew that the current tuition was upward of twenty-five thousand dollars a year at the old Otto Kahn mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-first Street.

“I attended Sacred Heart from kindergarten through high school. It’s where Amanda Quillian — well, Amanda Keating then — and I became best friends, since we were five years old. We were together, Amanda and I, the day we met Brendan. It was at a game, a football game. He was a junior at Regis, and we were sophomores.”

The all-male Jesuit high school was also on the Upper East Side, and because of the largesse of its original founders, it offered tuition-free college-prep education to Roman Catholic young men who passed rigorous tests for admission.

“You were present when Amanda and Brendan Quillian were introduced to each other?”

“Yes, I was. It was my brother who brought Brendan over to meet her.” Kate Meade smiled again at the jurors. “He had seen her across the field and asked who she was.”

I handed a photograph, pre-marked as People’s Exhibit #1, to Willy Jergen, the court officer standing beside the witness box. “Would you look at that photograph, please, and tell me if you recognize it?”

Jergen passed the picture to Kate Meade. “Yes, I do. I gave it to you several months ago, Ms. Cooper.”

“What does that photograph represent?”

“It was taken the afternoon Amanda and Brendan met. It’s a picture of them talking with my brother, who was on the team, after the game. It’s from our yearbook.”

“Your Honor, I would like to offer the photograph into evidence at this time.”

“Any objection?”

Lem Howell didn’t bother to rise. “No, sir.” He wasn’t objecting to anything at this point. He knew the benign — even romantic — backstory of the young Quillians wouldn’t do anything but reinforce his client’s good character.

“Entered into evidence then,” Judge Gertz said, starting to make notations in his leatherbound log that would grow to record the dozens of police and medical reports, photographs, and diagrams that both Howell and I planned to introduce during the trial.

“Mrs. Meade, I’m going to come back to that time period shortly, but I’d like to jump ahead for a few minutes. I’d like to direct your attention to a more recent date, to Wednesday, October third, of last year. Do you recall that afternoon?”

The young woman angled her body away from the jury, her eyes widening as though she’d been frightened by an apparition. “I do,” she said, her voice dropping.

“What happened on that day?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained. Ms. Cooper, you can’t—”

“I’ll rephrase my question.” Kate Meade was nervous again. I could hear the sound of her thumbnails as she picked at one with the other. “Did you see Amanda Quillian that day?”

“Yes, yes, I did. I did. I had lunch with Amanda on October third. I had lunch with her an hour before she died — before she was murdered.”

Howell didn’t like the answer my question elicited, but he was too smart to keep objecting to information that he knew I would get before the jury anyway. All twelve, and even the alternates, were leaning forward in their seats. They obviously wanted to know what occurred in the last hours of the victim’s life.

“I’d like you to take a look at another picture, please. People’s two.” I reached to the bottom level of the cart and removed an enlarged photograph — two feet square — mounted on posterboard. Again, I passed it to Willy to hand to the witness. “Do you recognize this?”

Meade inhaled audibly and lowered her head. “Of course I do. I took it.”

“When did you take it?”

“October third. About two o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Where?”

“At a restaurant called Aretsky’s — on Madison Avenue at Ninety-second Street. It was an unusually warm day, so we sat outdoors, Amanda and I. I had just shot a roll of film on a disposable camera at my daughter’s class play. She’s also at Sacred Heart now. I had one exposure left, so I snapped a photo of Amanda.”