Defense, p.23
Defense, page 23
“I find that hard to believe,” she remarked after the waiter left. “This is such a perfect place for a rendezvous with married women.”
Our eyes were locked together, like two fighters sizing each other up. “You’re the only married woman I ever brought here.”
She laughed out loud. “God, you make it sound like you’re the champion of monogamy.” For just a moment a look of disdain flashed into her hard, calculating eyes. “Look, Joey, it was a long time ago, so let’s both admit it. I was unfaithful to my husband and you were unfaithful to whatever her name was you were living with.”
With a smile, the waiter set a hamburger down in front of each of us.
“It took me a long time to get over you, Joey,” she said after he had gone, “but it had to end. It was too dangerous. Do you have any idea what would have happened if anyone had found out?”
I knew she was not talking about her marriage. “Created some difficulties for your career?”
“Difficulties? There wouldn’t have been a career!”
With her thumb and forefinger she carefully lifted up the top bun and removed first the onion and then the tomato, and then, after thinking about it a moment, the lettuce. All that was left was the meat.
“Well, you have a career now. Or at least you did until you decided to go after Leopold Rifkin,” I said more sharply than I intended.
Her body tensed. She sat straight up. “All right. Let’s get down to it. First, I didn’t go after your good friend, Leopold Rifkin. There was a murder. All the evidence points to him.”
“What evidence? She came to his house. He goes to the other room. Someone comes in and shoots her. He calls 911. He calls the police. You have a gun that doesn’t belong to him and doesn’t have his prints on it.”
She listened with the same rigid condescension that had once made me want her almost as much as I had grown to dislike her. She had known nothing of love, but everything about sex, including a talent for refusal that made her even more irresistible.
“We have everything we need,” she began with the kind of smug smile that invites, and almost excuses, an act of violence. “We have opportunity. She was killed in his house. He admits he was there. We have means. She was killed with a gun and the gun was on the floor. And we have motive.”
“Motive? That she worked as his housekeeper fifteen or twenty years ago?”
She began to rub her chin with the tips of her fingers. “Blackmail. Denise Morel had threatened him with exposure before. Why else would he have paid the cost of her defense when she was charged with killing her husband? And,” she went on, studying me, trying to gauge my reaction, “he had paid her off before that when he got you to represent her husband when he was charged with raping her daughter. You do remember that, don’t you?”
I was not going to be the first to look away. “Let me understand this. Assume you’re right, and she went to him and asked him for help and he did what it was perfectly lawful for him to do. So then, when she shows up again, five years later, he just decides that he’s out of good deeds and kills her? Just like that?”
“No, not ‘just like that.’ She doesn’t just ‘show up again, five years later.’ She’s been writing to him, over and over again from the first day she’s in prison. She wants him to help her. When she gets out, she writes some more, telling him she wants money, and that if she doesn’t get it, she’ll tell his dirty little secret.”
She was bluffing. “I’ve seen the discovery. There aren’t any letters like that. They searched Rifkin’s house top to bottom. They didn’t find anything.”
“He destroyed them.”
“You don’t have them.”
“We have witnesses who will testify what she told them about the letters she wrote.”
“You have witnesses who have criminal records longer than the longest letter that little whore ever wrote in her life.”
She smiled, and I wanted to strangle her. “We even have witnesses who could testify what she told them about letters—and other things—she exchanged with you.”
I leaned back and took a long hard look at her. “And I have a few letters of my own. I don’t need any witnesses.”
“Letters?” she asked blankly.
“Yeah. Letters. Letters you wrote to me. Would you like me to send copies of a few of them over to your office? Just to remind you of how really good—how really graphic—a writer you can be?”
She could not disguise the surge of panic that welled up inside her. She did not even try. “You told me you got rid of those!”
“I lied.”
“You’re lying now!” she exclaimed, searching my eyes for the answer.
“Maybe,” I shrugged. “Want to find out?”
“You son of a bitch! Are you ready to face blackmail charges?”
“Blackmail,” I replied evenly, “requires a threat. I haven’t made any threat. I just suggested that a lot of people have letters. It doesn’t mean they go around killing each other about them. Or does it? Does it mean that because I have letters you wrote me a few years back that now, all of a sudden, you’re going to pull out a gun and shoot me dead?”
She was back in control of herself, ready to begin again the methodical calculation of her own advantage. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I know I can trust you. I don’t want to fight. To tell you the truth, I wanted to see you so I could tell you face to face that I think we can work this out. If he pleads to manslaughter, I’ll recommend parole.”
She saw in my eyes what she mistakenly believed to be doubt. “He’s an old man. She had a record of threatening him. And it will be more than just a promise to make a recommendation. It’ll be a structured plea agreement,” she said, referring to the procedure by which the sentencing judge agrees in advance to the sentence recommended.
“It’s a good offer,” I replied.
The lines along the corners of her mouth, which had been drawn taut, began to relax. “I was sure we could work this out,” she began.
“But I can’t take it.”
“Why not?” she asked, trying to remain calm. “It’s as low as I can possibly go.”
“Because there can’t be a plea unless the defendant stands up in open court and says he did it. Rifkin can’t do that. Rifkin didn’t do it. And one thing you need to understand, Gwendolyn, is that, unlike you and me, Leopold Rifkin never lies.”
Whether it had begun in childhood with the first temper tantrum, or later on when she learned the power that comes from caring for someone less than they care for you, she was always ready to walk away. She lifted her chin, and glared at me through narrowed eyes. Sliding out of the booth, she stood and turned to leave. Before she had taken a step, she hesitated, and turned back.
“One last thing,” she said. “The next time you talk to your client, the one who never lies, ask him about the gun. Ask him how the gun he claims he never saw before happens to be registered in his name.”
She was not bluffing, and I knew it. The gun with no prints, left on the floor next to the victim, was registered to Leopold Rifkin. It almost proved his innocence. Anyone with an IQ in double digits would know to get rid of his own gun if he had used it to murder someone in his own home. That would not stop the prosecution. They always began with the guilt of the defendant and reasoned backward. That the gun was registered to the defendant and was left in plain view would become the major and the minor premise of a syllogism, the conclusion of which was that the defendant, in the confusion and emotion of the moment, had obviously lost his senses. Once you stopped wondering who committed the crime, the crime usually solved itself.
xix
The gun had been registered in Rifkin’s name nearly seven weeks before the murder of Denise Morel, a murder, it was now obvious, that had been planned with meticulous care. But did the killer go to all this trouble simply to shield himself, or was the shooting of Denise Morel nothing more than a means by which to ruin Leopold Rifkin?
Emma Gibbon was not the only investigator I ever used, but when I had a difficult case she was always the first one I called. In her late forties, with gray-streaked hair, she had a voice that could calm a maniac and eyes that seemed to promise forgiveness. Women told her things they would never tell a man; men told her things they never meant to tell anyone. She had been a private investigator for fifteen years, since the death of her husband, a police officer killed during a liquor store holdup, left her with three children and a pension too small to support them.
The murder weapon had been purchased in Medford, 250 miles south of Portland and less than a half-hour’s drive from the California border. It was the redneck capitol of Oregon. Everyone had a gun and most had several. A pickup truck without at least two rifles in a gun rack across the back of the cab was either just passing through or had just been robbed. Asking the owner of one of the local gun stores to remember who bought a particular gun several months earlier was like asking a nymphomaniac to remember who she slept with last New Year’s Eve. But he told Emma everything he knew.
It was not much. He did not recognize Leopold when she showed him a photograph. But if he could not say Rifkin was the person who bought the gun, neither could he say he was not. He was absolutely certain, however, that the registration form with the signature of Leopold Rifkin was the form that had been signed by the person who had purchased the gun. I had seen the signature. It was a perfect forgery. All I would be able to extract from the owner was an admission that he could not recognize Leopold Rifkin. The prosecution would then ask him how many customers—people he had never seen before and would never see again—bought guns from him every day, every week, every month, every year.
Trial was only a few weeks away, and we were no closer to finding out who had really murdered Denise Morel than we had been at the very beginning. Worse yet, I had found nothing that would give me something tangible with which to create a reasonable doubt. All I really had was Leopold Rifkin himself, his character, his integrity, his reputation. But if there were people in Portland who had not heard one or more versions, each one more tawdry than the other, of his affair with the victim, I doubted very much I was going to find them among the jurors who were going to decide Rifkin’s fate.
For at least the tenth time, I pulled out the police reports, the medical reports, everything on which the prosecution had built its case, and started over. There had to be something I had missed, some small thread that would unravel the mystery and disclose the naked truth. I forced myself to read so slowly through the lifeless prose of the police reports that I caught myself moving my lips. Still, there was nothing there. It was like trying to find the faint trace of a written word on a blank piece of paper. I tossed the report on top of the desk and rubbed my eyes. When I glanced at it again, it was upside down.
In the maze of letters turned on their heads, my eye fell on the first thing my mind could make sense of, a set of numbers, the numbers that counted up the years and months and days of a date. It was curious, the way it just hung there, suddenly disconnected with everything around it. I watched it as if it had taken on a life of its own and was about to crawl across the page and vanish over the edge. I put my finger on it, the way I would have stopped some small, harmless insect. Without any thought, I knew what it was. It was the date of a death, the date of the month, day, and year when the existence of Denise Morel was brought to a sudden, violent end. And then I knew, or thought I knew, something else.
“Horace, this is Joseph,” I said rapidly as soon as I heard his voice on the other end of the line.
“Joseph,” he mumbled. “What time is it?”
I realized I had no idea. “Oh, hell,” I said apologetically as I glanced at my watch. It was quarter past midnight. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“You still working? At this hour?” He started to laugh. “No wonder you always beat me, you son of a bitch.”
“As long as I’ve already woken you up, let me ask you a question. When Denise Morel was charged with murder—do you remember the date when it happened?”
“When she was charged?”
“No, not when she was charged. The date Johnny Morel was killed.”
“That was years ago. I can’t even remember my wife’s birthday. How the hell would I remember that?”
There was a short silence, and then he asked, “Why? What are you on to? What’s it mean?”
“I’m not sure. But I need the file, your file from when you prosecuted her. The police reports will still be in it.”
“Yeah, but it’s in the DA’s office. You’d have to go through Gilliland-O’Rourke. You don’t want to do that, do you?”
The question answered itself. “Never mind,” he went on. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get what you need. All you want is the date she killed him?”
“I don’t know that she killed him, Horace. But, yes, I need the date.”
* * *
A light shone through a first-floor window when I came up the driveway. Alexandra was sitting at the side of the dining room table, law books spread open around her.
“Doing some light reading before bed?” I remarked as I dropped heavily into the chair at the end of the table.
She was too busy to look up. Her head bobbed up and down while her lips formed the final words. “There!” she exclaimed, as she put down the pencil and nodded one last time. “I didn’t think I’d ever finish.” Wearing only a loose-fitting, short-sleeved blouse and a pair of tan-colored shorts, she had nothing on her feet and her hair was tied in the back with a single black ribbon.
“What are you working on?”
“A paper for my evidence class.”
I bent over, untied my shoes, and slipped them off. “It was the worst class I had in law school,” I said, leaning back against the chair. “And probably the only one that was important.”
“Actually, I kind of like it,” she said.
“That’s probably because you understand it. I didn’t begin to learn anything about evidence until I started trying cases.”
“I think you’re supposed to know about evidence before you start trying cases,” she observed brightly, leaning her chin against the palm of her hand.
“It was too abstract for me. I couldn’t get all that interested in the twenty-one exceptions to the hearsay rule.”
“Twenty-three,” she corrected.
“Whatever. I couldn’t get interested in it until I had a case where one of them made a difference.”
“You must be tired,” she said, rising from her chair. “Want a beer? It’ll help you sleep.”
“I’ll split one with you,” I called after her as she vanished into the kitchen.
“Bottle or glass?” she asked while she poured.
“Bottle.” I took a long drink and then set it down. “I’m glad you’re still up. I don’t see much of you these days. This case…,” I started to add, but the words trailed off, echoing my own sense of futility.
“It’s not going well, is it?”
I stared down at the floor and raised my eyebrows. “You could say that. But I may be on to something. We’ll see.”
“Is this case so much different than all the others? I know you care about him.”
I was so tired I could barely raise my head. “Care about him? Leopold Rifkin is the only really innocent man I know.” I leaned my arm on the side of the table and with my other hand pushed myself forward on the chair. “Now let me tell you something they’ll never teach you in law school,” I said, staring directly into her wide open eyes. “You’re always better off defending the guilty. Always. The worst cases—the ones that eat you alive—are the ones where you know—I mean, really know!—that you’re defending someone who didn’t do it. You see,” I went on, leaning closer, “if you know they did it, then it’s only a game. There’s nothing to lose, nothing at all. If they find him guilty, so what? He was guilty. And if they find him not guilty,” I added derisively, “then, you see, you can become famous.”
“And what about the people they harmed?” Alexandra asked, searching my eyes. “This game as you call it, this game in which you say there’s nothing to lose, what about the victim? What about the people who were robbed, or beaten, or murdered, or whatever happened to them? What part do they play in this game of yours?”
“I don’t know,” I replied wearily. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway. Rifkin’s innocent. It’s not a game this time.”
Early the next morning, as I made my way to the courthouse, I remembered, as if it had been yesterday, coming across this same park on a spring day when the flowers were in full bloom. How many years had it been? Nine? Ten? It was a lifetime ago, before any of this had happened, before I had ever met Denise Morel or heard of her husband. That was the day it had all begun, the day Leopold Rifkin asked me for a favor, the only favor he could have asked that I should have refused.
“You need some rest,” Horace said as soon as he saw me. “I’m not kidding. You look awful. Sit down, I’ll get you some coffee.”
“No, never mind that. What did you find out?”
“Sit down and I’ll tell you. You’re making me nervous pacing up and down like that. What the hell you think you’re doing, addressing a jury?”
I sat on the edge of the chair directly in front of his desk.
“And stop tapping your goddamn fingers! You get any sleep at all last night?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “Couple hours, I guess. I went home right after I talked to you. Sorry, by the way. I shouldn’t have called that late. I didn’t even know.”
Horace stopped me with a wave of his huge hand. “You’re not doing this every night, are you?” he asked as he handed me a mug of coffee. “All the preparation in the world isn’t going to do Leopold any good if you’re so damn exhausted you can’t remember what you’re supposed to be doing.”
I nodded mindlessly. “What did you find out?”
Horace raised his eyebrows and tilted his head forward until he was looking at me from above his glasses. It was the gesture he used when he was about to make a point, whether to a witness, a jury, or a friend. “You do what I say. Hear? Don’t do this again. The only people who work half the night are college kids and lawyers who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
