Defense, p.27
Defense, page 27
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I replied, trying to cheer her up. “You did everything anyone could have done.”
The door to my office was wide open, but we were surrounded by silence. It was early Sunday afternoon, the day before the trial of Leopold Rifkin would finally begin. Outside, under the harsh glare of a blazing sky, the air felt like it was on fire. It was the first day of the second week in July, and the rains that had seemed never to end now seemed like nothing that could ever happen again.
Twisting around until one leg dangled over the arm of the chair and one arm draped over the back of it, I looked out the window at Mt. Hood. The snow had gone, and with it had vanished all the mystery, all the enchantment, all the changing appearances with which it attracted and seduced the imagination. Under the broiling sun it had been stripped down to a pile of naked stone.
I turned back to Emma. She was dressed in a simple, loose-fitting skirt and a pale, green sleeveless blouse. The disappointment was still in her eyes.
“How often have you seen a case,” I said, rubbing my chin, “with a defendant this good and the witnesses for the state this bad?”
She knew I was trying to make her feel better. “I’ll keep trying,” she promised as she got up to leave.
The next morning, Alexandra dropped me at the courthouse and kissed me good-bye. Wearily, I trudged up the steps. All night long, in the intervals of an interrupted sleep, I had been telling myself that during every trial something happened that no one expected, and it sometimes changed everything. Hope is always the last thing to die.
I stood behind the counsel table while a judge I had only recently met walked, shoulders hunched, eyes to the ground, toward the bench. None of the sitting judges in Multnomah County had been willing to preside over the trial of their colleague. None of them, except Horace Woolner, and Horace had barely announced his willingness to do it when the prosecution filed its objection. Horace was out, and after a search that threatened to postpone the trial, the Honorable Albert Sloper of the Umatilla County Circuit Court was persuaded to come out of retirement and perform one last act of public service.
Sloper stared out at the crowded courtroom for a moment. In the slow, desiccated drawl that seemed to echo the empty reaches of the high desert plains of eastern Oregon, he asked Gilliland-O’Rourke to call the case.
She seemed different. Her eyes did not seem quite so green, and her hair not quite so red. She had taken on the drabness of the courtroom where words and what you do with them are the only things that count. She was the prosecutor and that was all.
Voir dire went on for more than a week. Prospective jurors answered questions the way they always did: they lied. They lied to the lawyers, they lied to the court, they lied to themselves. They admitted they had heard news accounts about Judge Rifkin, they admitted they had heard about the murder of Denise Morel, they claimed they had reached no conclusions, and they insisted, in the farcical language of the courtroom, they could be “fair and impartial.” It did not matter. The point was not whether anyone in that jury pool would divulge his or her secret thoughts and private vices in front of a room full of strangers, the point was whether I could find enough jurors who would be more inclined to believe what I would tell them than what Gwendolyn Gilliland-O’Rourke would say.
When we each had only one peremptory challenge left I asked the question no judge would have let a young lawyer even finish, the question that could have sent me to jail for contempt and might even have led to sanctions by the bar.
“And tell me, Mrs. Guthrie, will it have any effect on your ability to be a ‘fair and impartial juror’ to know that the only reason Ms. Gilliland-O’Rourke is prosecuting this case personally is because, like her father before her, she wants to be governor of this state?”
I asked it without emotion and I asked it with a smile. Mrs. Guthrie, a small, rather ordinary looking middle-aged woman, smiled back and said, very politely, “No, it will not.”
Gilliland-O’Rourke blazed up out of her chair yelling her objection.
“That’s not a proper question,” Sloper said, leaning forward.
“I’m sorry, your honor,” I replied before he could say anything more. “Pass this juror for cause,” I added. With one last smile at Mrs. Guthrie, I sat back and listened to Gwendolyn try to repair the damage.
Perhaps it was simply her way of compensating for a lack of trial experience, perhaps it was the inadvertent exposure of the darker side of her own overweening ambition, whatever the cause, Gilliland-O’Rourke’s opening statement revealed a talent for venomous sarcasm seldom seen in a court of law. Nothing was beneath her notice; everything was beneath her contempt. Leopold Rifkin, she explained, had murdered Denise Morel because Denise Morel had been blackmailing Leopold Rifkin for years.
With a knowing, lascivious smile that in a different setting would have suggested the frenzied possibilities of intimacy, she described how it had all begun with a seduction. Leopold Rifkin, the respected jurist, the kindly, well-mannered, good-intentioned, compassionate judge, had taken Denise Morel, a young, remarkably attractive woman with a known and deplorable dependency on drugs, into his home. He wanted to give her a chance at a decent life—“he said.” They ended up in bed—“we know.” Denise Morel went back to her old habits, and she got the money she needed for the drugs she wanted the way she always had, through sex. Only this time she got the money by sleeping with one of the best-known and most widely respected judges in the state.
Defendants charged with serious crimes usually stare down at the table in front of them, or look at some point in the distance, trying to shut themselves off from what is being said and from the eyes that shift to them each time the prosecutor points an accusing finger in their direction. As soon as Gilliland-O’Rourke began to speak, Leopold Rifkin pushed his chair back from the counsel table and turned it until he was facing the jury.
He sat on the edge of his chair and followed Gilliland-O’Rourke with the keen eyes of a hawk. No matter what she said, how personal she became, how explicit her description of what he had supposedly done all those years ago with Denise Morel, his expression never changed. He watched what was going on with the same detached intensity with which for thirty years he had listened to every argument any lawyer before him made on a question of law.
When Gilliland-O’Rourke was through, Rifkin moved his chair back to where it had been. With his elbow on the arm of his chair, he folded his fingers into a small fist and rested his chin on top of it. “She was not too bad,” he said, looking at me thoughtfully, “though I think she would have done better without the histrionics, don’t you?”
There was no time to answer. It was my turn to tell the jury a different story about the murder of Denise Morel.
I began with an attack on the strongest part of the prosecution’s case.
“I want you all to take a long look, a very long look, at the defendant in this case,” I said, stepping back from the railing of the jury box and turning toward Rifkin. “Look at him. Is that a face you would soon forget?”
I was in front of a jury, doing the only thing I knew how to do, the only thing I had ever wanted to do. I knew their reaction before I had even asked them to look. Rifkin had one of those faces. Even if you had only seen him once somewhere in a crowd, you would never forget him. At least, that is what I led that innocent gathering of twelve credulous men and women to believe.
“No one could forget that face,” I insisted as I turned back to them, “but the prosecutor’s entire case rests on her ability to convince you that Leopold Rifkin has the most forgettable face anyone has ever seen. Because, you see, the gun that fired the bullet that killed Denise Morel, the gun the prosecutor told you belonged to the defendant, the gun he supposedly bought six weeks before the killing, was purchased from someone who will be a witness for the prosecution, someone who will not be able to testify that he has ever seen Leopold Rifkin before the day he sees him here in this courtroom. And he will not be able to testify that he remembers Leopold Rifkin, because Leopold Rifkin never bought that gun, never signed the registration that bears his name, and never even saw that gun until it was found lying next to the lifeless body of Denise Morel.”
All twelve jurors were now oblivious of everything except what I was telling them. We moved together like a single body. It was, in a way Rifkin alone would have understood, completely erotic. I began to tell them what until that moment I had planned to tell them only at the end of the trial, during closing argument, when the prosecution could do nothing about it except to argue that I had done nothing to prove it. I began to tell them about Myrna Albright and about the daughter of Denise Morel. I told them about the date of the death of Johnny Morel, the same date as the date he was acquitted for the rape of his stepdaughter, the same date as the death of his wife, the girl’s mother, the victim in this case, Denise Morel. These were facts, I told them, the prosecution could neither deny nor explain.
There was only one explanation: Whoever killed Denise Morel had killed Johnny Morel, and whoever had killed them both had done it because of something that happened, years ago, in a courtroom just down the hallway, in a trial in which the presiding judge had been Leopold Rifkin. It was, I told them, either the strangest coincidence in the history of the world, or it was the work of either Myrna Albright or Michelle, the daughter of Denise Morel, determined to pay back those who had hurt her and those who, according to the twisted logic of revenge, were responsible for letting the crimes go unpunished.
When I finished I turned away and, in the silence, walked the few short steps to my place at the counsel table. The habit of a lifetime clinging to him like an invisible judicial robe, Rifkin stared straight ahead and said nothing when I sat down next to him.
Judge Sloper turned toward the jury and cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, because it’s now nearly five o’clock, we’ll stop for the day and begin again tomorrow morning at nine-thirty. Please remember what I’ve told you before. Do not discuss the case with anyone else. And please,” he added with a sympathetic smile, “don’t read any newspaper accounts or watch any television coverage of the trial. Might be better just not to read any newspapers or watch any television at all.”
After the jury had left and the courtroom had cleared, I walked Rifkin to his car in the garage and then went to my office. Helen offered to stay, but there was nothing for her to do. There was really nothing for me to do, except worry about what was going to happen next. My desk was a shambles, buried under reports, photographs, and page after page torn from dozens of yellow legal pads and filled with handwritten notes that must have meant something at the time I made them but that now, when I looked at them, seemed the scribbling of a stranger.
It was time to put some order to this madness; besides, there was no room left to work. I stacked all the reports together and did the same thing with the photographs. Then I gathered up every note I had made and, glancing briefly at each one, either consigned it to the wastebasket or put it into a manila file folder. It gave me a certain feeling of accomplishment, tangible proof that I had done at least one thing that day that needed to be done.
I was having serious second thoughts about what I had said in my opening. It could have been a mistake to reveal this early what I thought had happened. I should have waited until the end, to the closing argument, when the prosecution would have no chance to prove me wrong.
Tomorrow morning Gilliland-O’Rourke would call her first witness. I picked up the police report, the one written by Detective Milo Todorovich the night Denise Morel was found dead in Leopold Rifkin’s study, and began to read it again.
I almost did not hear it, the soft buzz that signaled someone was calling on my private line. “Yes?” I said, concentrating on what I was reading.
It was Alexandra. She was whispering something, and she was scared.
“What is it?” I asked, sitting straight up. “What’s wrong?”
“Can you come home?” she asked with a strange, intense urgency.
“What’s wrong?” I asked again.
“Just come home. Hurry.” And then the phone went dead.
Leaving everything—my briefcase, my glasses, my suit coat—behind, I bolted out the door and ran down the hallway to the elevator. Jabbing at the down button and swearing while I waited for it to come, I glanced at my watch. It was a little after seven. Five minutes later I was in my car, wheeling out of the underground garage. I picked up the car phone, dialed the number at home, and then cradled the receiver under my chin while I held on to the steering wheel with both hands. I was racing toward an intersection. The light changed from green to yellow and then to red. The phone dropped from under my chin and crashed against the hand brake as I pushed hard on the accelerator and sped across just ahead of an oncoming car. Weaving through traffic, tires screeching on every turn, all I could think about was how scared, how desperate Alexandra had sounded.
Finally, I was there. I slammed on the brakes at the end of the drive, jumped out, ran up the steps, and threw open the door. “Alexandra! Where are you?” I shouted as I walked quickly through the kitchen, my eyes darting around, searching for the first glimpse of her. Just as I came through the dining room I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She was at the top of the stairs, just starting down.
“Are you all right?” I asked, one hand resting on the railing, relieved she was safe. “God, I thought you were in some kind of danger,” I said as I climbed the stairs toward her. I had been oblivious of everything except getting here, and now I was almost too exhausted to move. It struck me as funny. Just lifting my foot to the next step on the staircase took a conscious effort. I looked up at her and started to laugh.
Alexandra just stood there, one foot on the landing, one foot on the first step down. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice trembling with regret. “I tried, but I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what?” I asked, as I put my arm around her. I was standing on the step below, and her eyes were level with my own.
“I couldn’t keep her here. She left just a few minutes ago.”
Searching her eyes, I ran my hand along the side of her face. “Who left a few minutes ago?”
“She did,” she repeated, fear and anger struggling against each other for control. “Denise Morel’s daughter! Michelle!” Slipping out of my arms, she headed down the stairs.
She led me into the kitchen and gestured toward the table. There were two half-empty china cups, one of them on a saucer. The other saucer had been used as an ashtray. Four or five cigarettes had been ground out, disfiguring the fragile, light blue surface like the marks of a hideous pox.
I sat down in the chair nearest the makeshift ashtray. The filter of each cigarette bore traces of lipstick, a shade somewhere between light red and dark pink. It was a shade a young woman might try before she settled on something more appropriate, or the shade a young woman who was too unsettled to decide anything might use. Picking up one of the butts, I turned it around in my fingers, examining it as if it were a murder weapon. Michelle Walker had been here, sitting in this chair, at this table, in my house, as if she had a permanent invitation to drop by anytime she pleased and come and go as she wished.
“What the hell was she doing here?” I asked, surprised at how angry I had become.
Alexandra sat down and slowly ran her finger around the edge of the cup in front of her. Holding the fragile handle between her thumb and finger she brought it up to her lips and slowly drank. I put the cigarette butt back on the saucer and pressed my hand against the other cup. It was still warm.
“I’m sorry,” she said with downcast eyes. “I tried to get her to stay.”
Reaching across, I laid my hand on her wrist. “No, never mind that,” I said calmly. “Tell me what happened. From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
With a faint, brief smile, she nodded. “I’ll try. It was about six-thirty, maybe a little before. The doorbell rang.” She paused for a moment before she added, “It’s odd, really. I didn’t hear a car. But I was upstairs, changing clothes, afraid I was going to be late for class, so I suppose that’s the reason. Anyway,” she said, concentrating on what she was about to describe, “the doorbell rang and there was this woman standing there.”
“What did she look like?” I asked, eager to somehow see everything Alexandra had seen.
“Not quite as tall as I, and a little on the heavy side. A good face. High cheekbones. Powerful eyes, a surprising shade of blue and green, like looking into a kaleidoscope.”
“Anything else? What color hair?”
“Blond, sort of a dark blond. Short, almost like a man’s. And there is something else. She has a slight stutter.” Alexandra curled up her lip. “Let me get rid of that,” she said, emptying the contents of the saucer into the garbage pail below the sink, and then rinsing it off.
“Tell me what she said at the door when you answered the bell,” I insisted when she returned to the table.
“All she said was that she wanted to see you. I told her you weren’t here.” She seemed to think of something. “No, that’s not quite right. First, I asked her if you were expecting her. And she said, ‘No, but he’ll want to see me.’ That’s when I told her you weren’t here, but that I thought you would be along soon. I asked her if she’d like to come in and wait. She didn’t want to, not at first. She said she didn’t have time, that she’d call you at the office tomorrow. She seemed nervous, agitated, like she thought she’d made a mistake, that she shouldn’t have come. ‘Look, I really have to go,’ she insisted.
“‘Just come in for a few minutes. I’m sure he’s on his way,’ I told her. Then, when she came inside, I took her straight back to the kitchen and before she had time to think about it, I poured us both a cup of coffee. That’s when she opened her purse, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one. She didn’t even ask about an ashtray. She just lifted her cup off the saucer and started flicking ashes onto it.
