Defense, p.6
Defense, page 6
She bent forward, staring at me with soft, beseeching eyes. “And I would have done the same thing this time, and she knows it. She would have come to me,” she repeated insistently. “But she didn’t, she didn’t come to me, Mr. Antonelli, and that’s how I know it never happened.”
The telephone buzzed. I had another appointment. “I’m sorry,” I said as I stood up, “but I’m afraid I have someone waiting.”
I walked her to the door. She smiled and stretched out her hand. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Antonelli. I know I should have called, but I just had to see you.”
I stood at the doorway and watched her walk down the hall. Then I remembered. “Mrs. Morel, I forgot to ask. Would you mind if I dropped by sometime in the next day or two? I need to see the house.”
She stopped and turned around. “Whenever you like.”
“Helen, my secretary, will arrange it.”
There was no time to reflect on the strange and unexpected visit of the enigmatic Mrs. Morel. For the rest of the afternoon, one appointment followed another like particles of sand flowing through an hourglass. Somewhere around six or six-thirty the last one left. Helen wobbled through the door, a sandwich in one hand, a cup of black coffee in the other, and a half dozen bulging case files balanced precariously on her two thin arms and held in place by her chin.
“These are the cases you wanted to review,” she said as she lowered them carefully onto the corner of my desk. She was a frail creature with a high-pitched voice that sometimes cracked when she got excited. After nearly thirteen years we had learned certain things about each other. She detested any suggestion that she might need help with anything, and she was convinced that she knew my habits better than I did. She was not quite old enough to be my mother, but she treated me with the kind of backhanded affection she might have given a youngest son.
Too tired to move, I had slipped down in the chair after the last client left. My arms dangled over the sides, my head drooped forward. While she placed the sandwich and coffee in front of me, I nodded toward the stack of files. “Why don’t I look at those tomorrow?”
“You’re in court all morning. You won’t have time.”
She sat down on the edge of the chair opposite, her bony knees pressed together, her small, veined hands folded in her lap.
“And I’ll bet you’ve got them all arranged in chronological order,” I replied wearily. “What kind of sandwich?”
“The sandwich is tuna. The cases are in order.”
“Which one is first? I don’t like tuna.”
“You never eat anything else. The first one is Cleveland, the arsonist.”
I pulled myself up, opened the first file and bit into the sandwich. I started to laugh. “Why do you do that? Why do you always refer to my clients by what they’re charged with? It isn’t ‘Your client, Mr. Smith,’ it’s ‘Your client, Mr. Smith the wife killer.’ It’s ‘Mr. Jones the forger.’ Why do you do that?”
The tiny lines at the corners of her mouth turned down. She shook her head, a blank expression on her face. “It’s how I keep track. You do the same thing.”
“No, I don’t,” I insisted.
“Sure you do. Everybody does. You don’t just say someone is a lawyer. You call them prosecutors, judges, trial lawyers, criminal lawyers, probate lawyers, tax lawyers. There’s a whole list.”
“But that’s what they do,” I objected.
“And that’s what these people do. They murder, they rob, they rape, they…”
“All right, all right. I get it. But I still don’t like tuna.”
“Then get married, live happily ever after, have peanut butter and jelly,” she said as she got up. “You need anything else before I go?”
“No,” I said with a helpless laugh, “this should just about do it.”
“Oh, one other thing,” she said. “I’m sorry about you and Lisa. But, I have to tell you, I think you’re better off.”
“You never liked her, did you?”
She never had an opinion she refused to express. “Nope, never did. Too conceited. You can do a lot better.”
“As well as your husband did?”
She permitted herself a small triumphant smile. “Don’t set your sights that high.”
It was nearly ten o’clock before I turned out the lights and rode the elevator down to the parking garage. I clicked on the CD player in the car and shut everything out of my mind except the sound of Mozart’s 41st Symphony, the Jupiter. Among the things I was not going to miss about Lisa was her regularly announced preference for any kind of music other than classical.
There was no traffic, and fifteen minutes later I was home in the West Hills overlooking the city. I was going to have to do something about the house. Lisa had wasted no time. On Monday she had sent for her things, but her things turned out to include everything she owned before she moved in and everything she had suggested I buy while she was there. It was not worth the trouble of an argument. I had not liked much of it anyway. I only wished I had kept all the things she had made me get rid of.
I got undressed and lay down on the bed. A minute later I got up, found my robe, and wandered downstairs. There was a half-empty bottle of wine in the refrigerator. I poured as much of it as I could into a coffee mug and sat down in the only chair left in the living room. First chance I had, I was going to find an interior decorator and have the whole place done over.
In the darkness, broken only by a light from the upstairs bedroom, I started to think about Denise Morel. What did it all mean? More importantly, what would a jury make of it? Johnny Morel was a vicious lowlife, but his wife was a gorgeous woman who could look you in the eyes and tell you a story in a way that made you want to believe everything she said. Johnny Morel would never admit to anything, and his wife insisted that her daughter had made the whole thing up. Would a jury disregard what a mother told them?
The girl had been sexually assaulted and had immediately come screaming to her mother. Why would she not have done the same thing this time? Fear? But why would she have been more afraid than she had been before? She said he had threatened her with a hunting knife. The knife, if it existed, had never been found. She told the police she had hurt her back on the bed frame when he threw her down. According to her mother there was no metal frame; she and her husband slept on a mattress on the floor. She told the police that she ran away and hid in the park until her mother came home from shopping. But the park was blocks away and the house could not be seen from there. She said he always mistreated her, and she left the clear impression that he had no concern for her at all. It seemed strange then that, as her mother had now confirmed, he had taken her to school and made her agree to behave.
The prosecution would argue it was remarkable the child could remember anything at all after the horrible thing that had been done to her. The girl would be thoroughly rehearsed, and if she was still unclear about some of the details, unsure about times and places, uncertain about just how she felt about her stepfather, there would be nothing missing in the way she would describe what he did to her when he threw her down on the bed and pulled off her pajamas.
The next afternoon, I drove out to the house. Summer had come to stay. The sidewalk shimmered in the breathless heat. Ragged clumps of grass had turned to dull tufts of brown and yellow straw. A small bicycle with a twisted wheel and bent handlebar lay upside down against the side of the house. The front window was boarded up. A single faded green shutter, hanging precipitously next to it, was waiting to fall in the next stiff breeze. The matching shutter had fallen long ago. It lay flat on the ground, half buried beneath the overgrown weeds. The roof sagged abruptly in the middle, and the few remaining shingles were moldered with decay. It was hard to know what held the whole place up.
Denise Morel was sitting alone on the cement steps that led to the front door. Her hair was pulled back in a tight knot behind her head. Her face, full of the sun, glistened with a thin veneer of perspiration. She was wearing only a pair of khaki shorts and a short-sleeved blouse held together by a single beige button. A beer can, held loosely in the fingers of her hands, dangled listlessly between her knees.
Slowly, she pulled herself up and opened the door. “I wasn’t sure what time you’d get here,” she said, as she closed the door behind me.
It was dark. The shades were pulled and the only light filtered in through the thin ruffled curtains that covered the window over the kitchen sink. An old portable fan sat on the living room floor, stirring the turbid air with a creaking rumble.
“I’m trying to keep cool,” she explained as she turned on a lamp in the living room.
She was different. Yesterday she had been confident, convincing, a beautiful young woman who might have been the wife of one of my partners. Today, at home in one of the worst parts of town, she walked in a daze.
“We can go in here,” she said, leading me into the kitchen. She spoke deliberately, as if the heat had taken everything out of her.
“Should I turn on the light?” There was a strange, absent look in her eyes. I did not answer her question, and she seemed to forget that she had even asked. “Want something to drink? A beer?” The words were hollow, vacant sounds that lost their meaning as soon as they were spoken. She was looking right at me, and I was not sure she even saw me.
“What are you on?” I asked without surprise. It was just a question, no different than asking someone at a bar what they were having to drink.
A lazy smile spread across her mouth. Her eyes drew into focus. She tilted her head back. Her fingers began to play on the circular edge of the beer can on the table in front of her. “Why?” she whispered. “You want some, too?”
I shook my head. “Are you sure?” she persisted. She sipped on the beer without taking her eyes off me. Her tongue ran along the edge of her lips, licking away the froth that clung to them. “You should try some,” she insisted with a languid, teasing smile. “I don’t have any more, but I can get it.”
Now I understood. She was a junkie, and junkies would do anything to get what they had to have. She would sell herself for a quarter gram of methamphetamine and never think twice about it.
I got to my feet. “That’s not the reason I’m here. I’m here to see this place, so I’ll know what I’m talking about at your husband’s trial. You remember your husband, don’t you? The one who’s charged with raping your daughter?”
It had no effect. Like the eyes of a bird of prey, her eyes stayed fixed on mine. A strange, wistful smile danced on her soft lips. Her hand moved up to her breasts, touched each of them for a single, sensuous moment, and then began to play with the button that held her blouse together. “I thought about you last night. Want me to tell you what I thought about?”
I had never spent much time practicing resistance to temptation. But Denise Morel was an addict, even if she was a great-looking addict; even worse, she slept with Johnny Morel.
“Some other time,” I remarked.
“Any time,” she replied, a faraway look in her eyes.
v
It was always the same. It did not matter what the case was. Preparing for trial—any trial—was like waiting for your own execution. You cannot stop thinking about it. The closer it comes, the worse it gets, until you almost begin to look forward to what you feared the most because it is the only way to make it stop. Thoughts roared through my mind, arranging and rearranging themselves in an endless search for the one single persuasive order that would somehow convince the jury that the prosecution had failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Anyone who might know anything was interviewed and then interviewed again. New documents were added to old reports. Every statement was gone over again and again until I knew what the next line said before I had finished the one before it. It made no difference. There was nothing that would cast a long enough shadow over what the girl was going to say. All I had was her mother’s claim that she was lying. And if the prosecution found out she was a junkie I had nothing at all.
They already knew she had a record. Five arrests, four convictions, three of them misdemeanors, one of them a felony. The felony conviction had been for possession of a controlled substance. She had pled guilty and been put on probation for three years. The misdemeanors could not be used to impeach her credibility as a witness; the felony conviction could.
For the third time in three weeks, Denise Morel was in my office, going over everything, from beginning to end, as I tried to prepare her for what was going to happen.
“Remember, when I ask you a question, look at me when I’m asking, but then turn and look at the jury when you answer. Try to make eye contact with each one of them at different times. Show them that you have nothing to hide, nothing to conceal, that you’re there to tell the truth.”
She followed every word, listened without complaint as I went over the same ground for what must have been at least the tenth time. “Now, look, this is very important. You look at the jury when you answer my questions, but on cross—when the prosecution asks you questions—you always look at him. Okay?”
“I know,” she nodded. “You’ve explained all this before.”
“And I’m going to explain it again and again and again. The trial is the week after next. That’s no time at all. You want something? Coffee, a Coke, anything?”
“No, I’m all right. I look at you when you ask. I look at the jury when I answer. I look at the prosecutor when he asks. I look at him when I answer.”
“Right. Good. Now, remember,” I said, leaning forward, my arm resting on the top of the desk, “when he asks you a question you do two things. You only answer the question he asks. Don’t volunteer information. You tell the truth, but you only answer the question. Example. He asks you if you’re married. You tell the truth. ‘Yes.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, I’m married to Johnny Morel, the defendant. We were married on whatever the date was at whatever the place was.’ Got it? Understand?”
We had been at it for more than an hour. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sunlight through the window caught the brown skin of her face and shoulders. She tossed her head and shifted around until the light was out of her eyes. “What do I say about the drug conviction?”
I drew away and slowly sank back in my chair. For a moment I just looked at her. “You ask me that every time. Do you think the answer is going to change? It’s simple. You tell the truth. You were convicted of a crime. It was years ago. You haven’t been convicted of anything since. Tell the truth, Mrs. Morel. It may not always be the best thing to do,” I conceded, “but it does have the advantage of being the easiest thing to remember.”
She nodded the way she always did, and I knew that she thought it was just something I had to say whether I really meant it or not.
“The conviction isn’t the problem. The problem is whether the prosecution is going to find a witness, someone who is going to get on the stand and start describing your life as an addict.”
She did not look away, but ever so slightly she flinched. “All right, I use a little—not much—just a little, just enough to get me through when I need it.”
I remembered the first time she walked into my office and how self-confident she had seemed. “The first time you came to see me?” She did not say anything, she did not have to. There was nothing more either one of us could say. We went back to the beginning and once more went through her testimony, every question, every answer, until we reached the end.
“That’s enough,” I said, waving my hand in exhaustion. “We’ll do it again next week.”
She stood up to go. “Do you still want the name?”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “What name?” I asked as I got to my feet.
“You told me last time to try to remember whether there was someone who could testify about Johnny and Michelle, someone who knew how he treated her and how she behaved.”
“There is someone?” I asked.
She reached into her purse and handed me a scrap of paper. “Myrna Albright. She lives in Oregon City.”
I could not believe it. “Who is she?” I asked, studying the name and address written in a childlike scrawl on a piece of lined paper.
“An old friend of mine. She lived with me and Michelle before I married Johnny. She can tell you everything.”
“Then why didn’t you think of her before this?” I asked sharply.
There was no hesitation, nothing to suggest that she needed time to think of an answer. “I haven’t seen her in a while. I didn’t know if she was still around.”
I didn’t believe her, but it did not make a difference. I would find out for myself what Myrna Albright really knew. “And so you found her. Did you talk to her about this?”
“No. A friend of mine told me where she was. But I didn’t know if I should talk to her before you did.”
“You did the right thing,” I assured her, as I opened the door for her.
As soon as she was gone I picked up the phone and buzzed Helen. “Cancel whatever I’ve got the rest of the day. I have to go to Oregon City.”
* * *
Oregon city was a half-hour’s drive from my office. More than a hundred years ago it had marked the end of the Oregon Trail. A hundred miles to the east, the ruts were still visible from the covered wagons that year after year had managed the three-month trip from Missouri and Nebraska across the prairies and the mountains and the high, bone-bleached deserts of the West. Driven by some inexplicable impulse to find something better in a place they had never been, the settlers had come, thousands of them, leaving behind families, friends, everything they knew. They came like some remorseless force of nature until the Willamette Valley was filled up with their farms and there was no land left to take. And now they and everything they had spent their lives working for was gone, too. The last farm in Oregon City had been sold to the developers and the only thing left to remind anyone that men and women had once risked their lives to come here was a small, weather-worn statue in the public park.
The apartment house was a two-story building with asphalt-shingle siding. It was on a back street on the hill. Down below, next to the river, a cloud of gray ash rose up from the brick smokestack at the paper mill. Next to the screen door at the entrance a small wooden sign reading Avon Apartments hung down from a metal bracket. I searched the names written on the mailboxes until I found the one that belonged to Myrna Albright. Apartment 6A. I made my way down the musty corridor to the last door. I knocked gently and waited. No one answered. I knocked again, this time more loudly. There was a muffled sound on the other side. The door slowly opened a few inches. An eye peered out just above the brass chain that stretched across the narrow space.
