The Reservoir (20 page)

“Could we try the reservoir key while we’re at it?” Aylett says, casually, as if he had not been awaiting this moment. Since there is no objection, he inserts the heart-crowned key. It fits but the watch will not wind. “It appears to be fully wound already,” Aylett says, looking around and raising an eyebrow at his law clerks.

Crump’s belly bounces in mirth. “Must’ve been back there trying out a bunch of keys,” he says audibly to his team. “I don’t know what keys they were using.”

Aylett quickly moves on. He asks Willie if he was aware of his brother’s private life.

“I knew that on occasion he had paid to lie with a woman.”

“Did you know that he sometimes went about as Walter Merton?”

“No.”

“Did you know that he was a frequenter of Richmond taverns?”

“I object to all this,” Evans says, genuinely annoyed. But Judge Hill rules that since these points have already been testified to by other witnesses, Willie has to answer.

Willie considers. “I don’t think he went frequently anywhere, except to church and to visit his parents.”

A dog fight erupts out in the hallway, nearly drowning out the end of Willie’s statement. Evans says, “I couldn’t hear that. Would the witness mind repeating it?”

When Willie sits down he catches his brother’s eye, and there’s a faint smile between them. Willie has considered the possibility that Tommie never gave Lillian a watch key, that Tommie himself lost a gold key out there … that, in fact, he was with her at the reservoir. But the thought sickens him, so he pushes it out of his mind.

Tommie’s father has not been able to come back since that first week. Mrs. Cluverius could not be by herself for so long. She sent a message saying she would come and get up on the stand for him, but he wrote back more than once telling her not to worry—that he was innocent, had the best lawyers in the state, and that he was confident of a successful outcome. But here his father is standing up for his son on the final day of testimony. He is sparer even than three weeks ago, as though he’d been drained, his beard a scrap of Spanish moss. His suit hangs on him like a scarecrow’s—he looks like a good wind could blow him all the way back to King and Queen. Yet his face seems as unlined as on that first trip to Richmond.

Meredith wants to know about the marks on the prisoner’s hand. “We have witnesses we can bring in here who’ll swear you said he got them on a fence rail. Do you stand by that story?”

“I do,” Cluverius says, looking straight at Aylett. Tommie almost wishes his father had stayed home. Detective Wren dug up this confabulation of his father’s and the prosecution now claims they have witnesses to verify that he went around telling it. Tommie has no idea how his father came up with it, nor why, unless he felt his son guilty. Crump and Evans have offered no alternative to the prosecution’s witness, a medical examiner, who maintained the scratches on his hand were from some curved object like a curette—or a fingernail. When Crump asked Tommie about the scratches, all Tommie could say was, “I don’t remember what happened or what I said. They didn’t seem important.” Both Crump and Evans thought it all right, then, if Mr. Cluverius came out with his story.

“When did that happen?” Aylett asks, stretching his mouth so that his teeth flash beneath his waxed and curled mustache.

“The day he got back from Richmond.”

“The day he got back from Richmond? And how exactly did it happen?”

“Well sir, I met with him at the store that afternoon, and we went a little ways off to talk. Tommie leaned against a fence. He slipped and scratched his hand on a knothole.”

“What kind of fence was it?”

“A stake-and-rail fence.”

“And how was he standing?”

“With his back to the fence, arms stretched out along it.”

“How many rails did the fence have?”

Cluverius ponders this for a hidden trick. “I believe three or four.”

“How high was it?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t measure it. I reckon as high as a man.”

“And how was he standing?”

“I already told you that, with his back to the fence.”

“Did you notice the knothole then, or later?”

“What do you mean? I noticed it then.”

“Who did you tell about the accident?”

“I didn’t tell anybody, it wasn’t a big scratch.”

“Yet you saw the cuts on his hand?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You mean to tell me that you took his hand in yours and he a grown man?”

“My children are as dear to me as babies.”

“How come other people who saw him that day claim he said he caught his hand in his watch chain getting on the train?”

“I don’t know why they would say a thing like that. I never heard it.”

“Did you know he tried to hide his hands from the police and then told them he thought he had a skin eruption?”

“It was cold,” Cluverius snaps. “They gave him no gloves, he had to keep himself warm someway.” Meredith keeps pressing him for details. Finally, Mr. Cluverius has had enough. “Before I answer any more questions, I’d like to ask you some,” he says.

“Your business is to answer questions, not ask them.”

“I reckon I have as much right to ask a question as you do.”

Judge Hill, in a low, polite voice says, “Mr. Cluverius, if you wouldn’t mind just answering his questions.” Cluverius thinks about it a minute, then glances at Crump, who winks at him. Meredith softens his tone, and asks him to draw a picture of the knothole.

Aylett takes a look at the finished drawing and says, “That looks more like a rose potato than anything I can think of.”

Having called thirty-four witnesses in four days, the defense has no one left. By law, Tommie is not allowed to testify on his own behalf. The prosecution again asks that Joel be allowed to take apart the watch key. Evans objects, and Hill sustains him.

Willie touches Tommie’s back. “We’re almost there,” he whispers.

• CHAPTER NINETEEN •

J
UDGE
H
ILL INSTRUCTS
the jury: “Before you can convict the accused you must be satisfied from the evidence that he is guilty of the offense charged in the indictment beyond reasonable doubt. It is not sufficient that you believe his guilt probable. The evidence must be of such character and tendency as to produce a moral certainty. If you entertain a reasonable doubt as to whether the deceased came to her death by violence committed by herself or by the hands of another, you must find the prisoner not guilty.”

Tommie and his counsel wrote and rewrote the last sentence only that morning, adding to the draft presented by the commonwealth. It seemed fair that the final word to the jury should emphasize their responsibility—if they had serious misgivings—to let the accused go. But Tommie wanted further reassurance. How reasonable were the twelve men deciding his fate? Evans asked Crump to argue for some changes.

So when the morning session opens, Crump requests that the jury be sent out. Then he asks the judge for some clarification of the phrases “reasonable doubt” and “moral certainty.” Cannot these be made clearer? Could not the court instruct the jury to treat the evidence as though it pertains to a person they hold dear?

Hill mulls this for a moment or two, then says, “I think the phrases are clear enough. Clerk, please call the jury back for closing arguments.”

This is the theater that everyone has been waiting for, and the streets around the courthouse are again jammed. Headlines announcing “Evidence All In,” “Final Arguments Begin Tomorrow,” have brought people out in droves, hoping just to get close to the courthouse so that they can be a part of the city’s biggest spectacle in years, part of the chain that will relay the news up and down the streets even before the newspapers. Policemen have been dispatched to keep order, but with the sidewalks all but impassable the street is the only place for actual movement. Several people have sold their own tickets for a dollar, even two dollars, apiece, and now the buyers have no way to get into the building—one of them yells that he’s been defrauded.

Tommie is wearing a new dove-gray suit that Willie brought him, with a navy bow tie, ends tucked under his collar. Willie, sitting behind, puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder, leans in close, and says, “We’ll be home tomorrow, Wednesday at the latest.” He threads a white carnation bud into his brother’s buttonhole and sits back beside Aunt Jane, who is fanning furiously; Willie takes over for her.

Aylett will lead off, leaving to Meredith the job of raking the defense. He stands, and every eye is riveted, his dignified person commanding attention and respect as he waits for silence to fill the room. Suddenly it is so quiet Tommie can feel his heart jumping in its cage; his calves tighten and his arm hairs stand on end.

“May it please Your Honor and gentlemen of the jury,” Aylett says, “I approach the end of this cause with a feeling of awe. Little was I aware when I took this case on at the request of the commonwealth’s attorney and yielding to the voice of the people of my own county, where this young woman was born and lived—people to whom I owe almost everything I am—that I should see and hear what I have in the last few weeks. Nor that the faces we have seen here would become as familiar to me as those of my intimate acquaintances. For what we have witnessed, gentlemen, in these weeks is nothing short of an age-old drama of man. It is a tale of lust, seduction, and, finally, deceitful, cold-blooded murder. Thank God, gentlemen, that the hideous nightmare we have all endured will, so far as I am concerned, soon be ended.

“You are charged to return a guilty verdict only if you are convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. What is a reasonable doubt? Why, it’s a doubt you can find a reason for. If you cannot find the evidence that will remove that doubt—if you cannot tell whether it was a case of murder or suicide, then you must give the prisoner the benefit of your doubt. But if the evidence drives the doubt from your minds, then you must find him guilty.

“A moral certainty is not a mathematical certainty; it is not a proposition from Euclid. Rather, it is a certainty satisfactory to your mind and conscience. Doubt may still be there, because all human affairs are matters of doubt. People every day trust to circumstantial evidence. We may not see the rain fall at night, yet when we arise and find the streets wet we know that it rained. We act in life more on circumstantial evidence than on direct testimony.

“Gentlemen, first we must ask ourselves has a murder been committed? And secondly, who committed it? Dr. Taylor has told us that in his expert opinion the blows to Miss Madison’s head can only mean that she was struck prior to drowning in the reservoir. The footprints show that a man and a woman were at the reservoir on the night of March thirteen. The prisoner at the bar was the only man known to be a sweetheart of Miss Madison. He seduced her at his uncle’s house, and got her with child. He was already engaged at the time to a young woman of some means in King and Queen County, and as an ambitious young man he was not about to let his mistake alter his path to success. He conspired to meet with Miss Madison twice in Richmond, luring her all the way from Bath County, six hours away by train. On the second occasion, he took her with him to the most desolate place he could think of, a place where he thought his dark deeds would go unnoticed. There he struck her and threw her unconscious body into the reservoir. He may have thrown her over the picket fence, or he may have walked around to the gate and opened it and then thrown her in. Gentlemen, these are technicalities which the defense may choose to dwell on, but the fact remains that she ended up in the reservoir and drowned there …”

Aylett continues laying out the case against Tommie, who now feels himself so far away he can hardly hear the words. Most of the previous night he spent lying on his back praying, and seeing in his mind the shore at Point Comfort, where the gray-green waves keep rippling and rippling onto the sand. And now he can practically hear waves hissing across the sand, and see the sun sparkling on a limitless horizon.

At one point he hears the cries of a baby from the open windows. Aylett pauses to let the laughter die out, then plays into the moment. “Judge, have you no jurisdiction out there?” Hill says he’s afraid not, but he’ll send the sergeant out to try to quiet the crowd. “I don’t know if a baby constitutes a crowd,” Aylett says, “but it can make a lot of noise.” Having mastered the interruption, he pauses once again, stands erect, goateed chin out, as though summoning the spirit of his great-grandfather, who a hundred and ten years earlier stood up in a church a mile east and rallied his countrymen to liberty or death.

“And what does the prisoner do to defend himself against these charges? He brings in a few friends and relatives to testify to his character. Gentlemen, could not eleven men have testified to the good character of Judas Iscariot the night before he betrayed our Savior? Could not George Washington have testified to the good character of Benedict Arnold before he betrayed his country, and later came to this very city and burned it? The prisoner puts his friend Henley on the stand to testify that he saw him at the Dime Museum—at the
afternoon
performance, mind you. But that does not bring him to safe ground. Of his whereabouts between the hours of eight and midnight, when the murder took place, we are not vouchsafed a word.

“A key was discovered at the reservoir, yet the prisoner will not let Joel open it to ascertain whose key it was. Why will he not? A note in Miss Madison’s handwriting, directed to the prisoner, was found at the American Hotel, where she was registered under the name Merton, a name the prisoner used on his frequent visits to houses of ill repute—a prisoner, by the way, who was careful to maintain a saintly reputation at home. A letter in the prisoner’s handwriting was found in Miss Madison’s trunk, as well as several envelopes in the prisoner’s handwriting. But the most damning thing of all is an abominable piece of so-called poetry, in his hand, of such a lurid, despicable nature that I wish I could forget it. But I cannot, gentlemen, for it lays out in the foulest language imaginable the seduction of a young woman.

“Witness after witness has come forward, gentlemen, to say they saw the prisoner and Miss Madison here together. A trail leads directly from the American Hotel out to the reservoir. And there the trail ends for not one, but two people. For the prisoner killed two people that lonely night, leaving his unborn child there to die within its mother’s womb. Since then he has done nothing but lie about his crime.

“And they ask for mercy! Great God, gentlemen, have we not shown him mercy enough? Turn him loose for his progeny to plague and vex mankind? I have seen too many of our brave and loyal soldiers laid to rest in the cemeteries around our fair city to heed cries of mercy from such a quarter. Last night as I pondered what to say to you, I took a stroll among the peaceful graves of Hollywood Cemetery, shouting distance from the old reservoir where this horrible crime took place. And I thought about those lately tenanted soldiers who breathed their last amid the smoke and carnage of battle, young men like the prisoner before you. But unlike him, men who did not think of themselves first, but of their duty and honor to their families and the commonwealth of Virginia, and of the daughters, sisters, and mothers they protected and revered unto death.

“Do we not owe it to those brave young soldiers to stand like men and uphold the law? If the victim in this case were a strong man, killed perhaps in a fit of jealous passion, we might feel a measure of pity for the prisoner. But, gentlemen, this was a petite, defenseless woman, soon to be a mother. The blood boils at the very idea. Gentlemen, we can feel compassion toward a fellow human being, but as honorable men we must do our duty by meting out justice. We must protect the commonwealth against immorality, selfishness, and evil. To return a verdict of anything less than guilty of murder in the first degree is not to show mercy, but to perpetuate and condone the practice of evil. The greatest mercy we can grant the prisoner is to show the same mercy he showed his cousin and companion.”

Aylett stands for a moment, his thunder cracking the air, the tension building like the sudden pressure dive before the cloudburst. He waits … waits another moment … and then calls forth a ghost:

“The truth in this case, gentlemen, could not be clearer if one final witness were to burst the bonds of her grave and come before the court in her cerements, pointing and saying, ‘That is the man!’ ”

The room is hushed and strained as Aylett takes his seat. Instead of exploding in cheers, which they desperately want to do, people cough into their hands, and more than one spectator wipes away a tear. Mr. Lucas, who was given a ticket by Mr. Meade, feels himself trembling, having never heard any speech so moving in his life. Judge Hill calls for a break, and the murmuring approval of the packed courtroom spreads into the streets, where snatches of the speech dart like lightning across town.

After the noon break, Evans gets up and delivers a long, winding speech, peppered with anecdotes and legal precedents. He carefully picks apart the prosecution’s case, pointing out every inconsistency and every leap to conclusion, until the whole thing appears to be nothing but a rag held together by a few thin threads:

“A maid, Henrietta Wimbush, claimed upon the stand, and never before, that she saw them in the Exchange Hotel. That was an afterthought, probably made at someone else’s suggestion to suit the necessities of the case. It is impossible she carried the face of the prisoner in her mind from that day to this, considering the vast number of faces she encounters in a day. And so it is with the other supposed witnesses who claim to have seen the prisoner at the American Hotel in March. Witnesses have been manufactured to order.”

“Do you mean that for me, sir?” Meredith bursts out.

Evans’s voice goes up a notch as he replies, “No sir, I do not.”

“I hope you don’t mean me then,” Aylett says, an amused look on his face.

“We let you speak without interruption,” Evans rejoins. “Why won’t you let us?” Getting no reply, he goes on. “As for the unfortunate young woman, she left home at an early age, a home that was a cruelty and misery to her. It’s absurd to suggest, as my friend for the commonwealth does, that the education her aunt provided made her unfit for the home of her parents. If that were the case, no parent in Virginia should educate their children. She wrote to and received letters from numerous young men …” He continues for more than two hours, yet with less emotion than Aylett, and by the end the jurymen are shifting in their seats.

On the following day William Crump rises slowly, with much shuffling of papers and clearing of his throat. He has used this trick for years to disarm a jury, appearing disorganized and unprepared before launching into a brilliantly crafted piece of rhetorical magic. “Gentlemen, it is with great assurance in your integrity and collective wisdom that the defense is confident the prisoner at the bar will not be convicted upon argument clothed in the beautiful figures of rhetoric, roving among the vales of fancy and hyperbole with the likes of Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold. I will endeavor in the remarks I shall make not to soar aloft on wings of such plumage, but to come down upon plain and solid ground, and scratch that ground to see what those facts really mean. Nor will you find me strolling among the graves of the Confederate dead looking for reasons for a verdict in this cause. I only seek to walk with you step by step up that rugged stairway to the temple of justice, within whose vestibule Truth sits enthroned.