Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (50 page)

“Your honor,” I said, rising from my chair as I weighed all this in my mind, “the defense calls Asa Bartram.”

Wearing an expensively tailored double-breasted gray pin-stripe suit, Jonah Micronitis stepped inside the courtroom, took a careful look around, and then went back outside. A moment later, the doors opened again and with Micronitis right behind him, Asa Bartram started up the aisle. Micronitis caught my eye, nodded, and pushed his way into a seat in the first row. He turned around and faced the back, his small head moving from side to side, keeping a watch on everyone, ready for the first sign of trouble.

“Mr. Bartram,” I began, “you’ve been a lawyer for how many years?”

He cocked his head and tugged on a shank of his snow white hair. A good-natured smile creased his craggy face and his pale blue eyes twinkled. “More years than I want to remember.”

“More than forty?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of law have you practiced during that time: civil or criminal?”

“Mainly civil.”

“When you say civil, do you mean civil litigation, personal injury cases, that sort of thing?” I asked as I stood behind the counsel table.

“No, not really. I did some of that early on, but my practice is more of what you might call business law: real estate, com-mercial transactions.”

“And when you said ‘mainly civil’ did you mean to imply that you also did some criminal work?”

“Only at the very beginning. When you’re just starting out,”

he said with a nostalgic smile, “you pretty much do everything.”

I edged my way toward the front of the table. “When is the last time you took a case—civil or criminal—to trial?”

“As I say, my practice is largely a business—”

“The last time?” I insisted.

He really did not know. “Thirty years or so, I guess.”

“When was the last time you handled a criminal case—not whether you took it to trial, Mr. Bartram—the last time you represented someone charged with a crime?”

He shrugged. “I suppose about the same: thirty years or so.”

I took a step toward him. “But didn’t you represent Elliott Winston twelve years ago on a charge of attempted murder?”

He planted both feet on the floor, wrapped each of his large, heavily veined hands around the ends of the arms of the chair, and wagged his head. “No, that’s not exactly right. I only agreed to represent him for the purpose of a hearing. I never agreed to be his lawyer.”

I took another step closer. “I don’t think I understand. You represented him at a hearing, but you did not agree to be his lawyer?”

Bending forward, he laced his fingers together and pressed his thumbs. “There wasn’t going to be anything else, just the hearing. Everybody knew he was going to be sent to the state hospital. The hearing was just a formality, but there had to be one and he had to have a lawyer. I did it as a favor.”

“A favor to Elliott Winston?”

“No,” he replied, shaking his head.

“A favor to his wife?”

He looked at me, beginning for the first time to suspect that I was after something beyond the mere fact that Elliott Winston had been declared insane in a duly constituted judicial proceeding.

“No, not his wife.”

“A favor to Calvin Jeffries?” I asked, one foot on the step below the witness stand. “You did it as a favor to the judge—because he asked you to—isn’t that true?”

“Yes. Calvin—I mean Judge Jeffries—asked me to.”

“He wasn’t the judge in the case though, was he?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Do you remember who the judge was in that case?”

“Yes. Quincy Griswald.”

“At the time this happened, Calvin Jeffries was the presiding circuit court judge, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And in those days, the office of the presiding circuit court judge was in charge of assigning cases, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I believe that was how it was done then.”

“In other words, the fact that Judge Griswald and not some other judge had the case was no accident, was it?”

He looked at me, wondering how far I was going to go.

“Let’s save ourselves some time, Mr. Bartram. This case—this hearing on the question of whether Elliott Winston was insane so a plea of guilty but insane could be admitted—this case was fixed, wasn’t it?”

“Fixed?” he blustered. “No, of course not! What do you mean—

fixed?”

“You say you did this as a favor to Calvin Jeffries. Why did he ask you, instead of any one of a hundred other attorneys, any one of whom by your own admission was far more experienced in the criminal law? Why do you think he did that? Because he knew he could always trust you—his former law partner and the man who continued to take care of his financial dealings—to do what you were asked without asking any questions?”

Before he could answer, Loescher objected: “Your honor, he’s attacking his own witness.”

“Let me rephrase the question,” I said without taking my eyes off the witness. “When you were asked to do this, what reason were you given?”

“Calvin—Judge Jeffries—told me that there was no question Winston had gone out of his mind, and that he needed to be in the hospital where he could get help.”

“And just why was he so concerned with what might happen to Elliott Winston as opposed to any other defendant?”

“Winston was a young lawyer, and Judge Jeffries had become quite fond of him.”

“Fond of his wife, too, wasn’t he?”

“Fond of both of them,” he replied.

Taking a step back, I looked over at the jury. “She eventually divorced Elliott Winston and married him, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“As a matter of fact, she and Judge Jeffries had been having an affair for some time before Elliott Winston was accused of a crime, weren’t they?”

“I don’t know,” he replied with a lawyer’s caution.

“As a matter of fact, they—Judge Jeffries and Elliott Winston’s wife—gave him every reason to suspect she was having an affair, but having it with someone else, didn’t they?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” he insisted.

“As a matter of fact,” I went on, my eyes still on the jury, “they made him so convinced of it—drove him so crazy with the thought of it—that he was charged with attempting to murder the man they made him think she was sleeping with, didn’t they?”

“I don’t know why he thought what he did.”

I stopped and turned around until we were face-to-face. “But you must have some idea. There must have been something about it in the psychiatric report, some explanation of why he did what he did?”

Asa wearily shook his head. “It was a long time ago.”

“So long ago that you’ve forgotten the name of the victim?

That certainly must have been mentioned in the report.”

“No,” he replied with a faint smile. “I certainly remember that.”

“Tell us who it was,” I said, turning back to the jury. “Who did Elliott Winston think was sleeping with his wife? Who did Elliott Winston attempt to murder?”

“You. Joseph Antonelli. You’re the one he tried to kill.”

“Yes,” I said, wheeling around. “That’s what he was accused of: attempted murder. Would it surprise you to know I never thought he really intended to kill me? I don’t think he would have fired the gun if I hadn’t tried to take it away from him. But tell us, Mr. Bartram—because you read it—what did the psychiatric report say about that? What did it say about what he thought he was doing, what he really intended to do?”

Asa turned up the palms of his hands. “As I told you: It was such a long time ago. I’m sorry, but I just don’t remember now.”

I walked quickly to the counsel table, opened a file folder, and ran my finger down a typed list.

“Would the clerk please hand the witness what has been marked defense exhibit 109?”

The clerk found the exhibit, a large manila envelope, and brought it to the witness.

“Would you please open that and remove the file folder inside.” When he had done what I asked, he looked up. “Now would you open the file and tell us what it is.”

It was the court file in the case of
State v. Elliott Winston,
the file that contained the official record of the proceedings that led to the official determination that Elliott Winston was insane and should be committed to the state hospital for a period not to exceed the maximum sentence which he could have been made to serve in the state prison.

“Would you please take out of the file the psychiatric report which formed the basis for the court’s finding.”

Asa fumbled through the documents until he found it. He held up another, smaller, manila envelope. “It’s under seal.”

“Open it.”

“Your honor!” Loescher protested. “It’s under seal. It can’t be opened.”

“It can be opened if the court so orders, your honor. And there is no reason not to. This is a murder trial, and whether or not that report should have been under seal in the first place, keeping it there doesn’t serve to protect the vital interests of anyone.”

Bingham considered it for a moment and then agreed.

“Go ahead,” I told Asa. “Open it.”

He hesitated, and he kept hesitating. “Here,” I said, ripping it out of his hand. I tore it open and pulled out a typed document, stapled at the corner. I shoved it in front of his face. “Read it.

Read it out loud. Read the report that was used to find Elliott Winston insane.”

He would not look at it, and I read it for him. It was the daily court docket, dated the day Elliott Winston had his hearing. There had never been a psychiatric report. There had never been a psychiatric evaluation. Elliott Winston had been adjudicated insane for no other reason than because Calvin Jeffries had wanted it that way.

Twenty-nine

_______

What would you have done if there had been a psychiatric evaluation?” Howard Flynn wanted to know, surprised and a little troubled by the chance I had taken. “You couldn’t have known they never did one.”

I watched out the passenger-side window the river and the mountain fall farther away as we drove up the hill to the hospital. Scattered across the blue high-arching sky, great billowing clouds had turned the color of copper dust; down below in the city, reflected off the glass-walled buildings, the late afternoon sun painted everything behind it a black-edged gold as it ran reluctantly ahead, chased by the soft summer night.

“I’m sorry about what I said. It was unforgivable,” I said, looking across at Flynn.

He kept his eyes on the curving road, the only response a slight change in the way he tilted his head, a gesture meant to let me know that it was not important.

“I knew what was inside,” I remarked as the car approached the front of the hospital.

“How could you know that?”

“I read the file.”

He brought the car to a stop. “That part was under seal.”

“It’s just a little adhesive,” I said as I gathered up my attache case, the one Jennifer had given me, and opened the door.

“Then you just resealed it?” He shook his head at the sheer simplicity of it.

“It was hard to believe that even Jeffries would go that far,” I explained. “I had to be sure.” I ran my finger along the letters of my name, engraved on the narrow brass plate, as I thought about what had happened in court and what had happened twelve years before. “Makes you wonder,” I said, looking at Flynn as I started to get out, “which of them was really insane.”

I had to wait a long time to see the doctors, and I stayed with Jennifer until I was told I had to leave, but Flynn was still there, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I asked him if he had another, and without a word he reached inside his sport coat pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack. The smoke caught halfway down my throat and made me cough. I let the cigarette tumble from between my fingers and crushed it out with the heel of my shoe.

“They’re still running tests,” I reported, trying to sound encouraged. “More tomorrow.”

Flynn took one last drag on his cigarette, stomped it out with his foot, and stood up.

“Why don’t I take you home. You need to get some sleep.

You’ve been running on nothing but nervous energy.”

I did not want to go home; I was afraid to go home. All night the night before I had been chased by ghosts of my own invention, maddening thoughts about what I could have done to stop all this from happening. I had not slept at all and had not even tried.

“Listen, why don’t we get something to eat,” I suggested as we walked to where he had parked the car. “There are some things we need to talk about—to get ready for tomorrow.”

He knew it was not true, but he went along with it as if it was. We had a sandwich and a bowl of soup in a diner I had never heard of, and when he offered to take me by the house to get a change of clothes and spend the night at his place I accepted with an eagerness that surprised even myself. First we stopped at the jail.

“I told Danny I’d come by,” Flynn explained as we waited for the jailer to open the metal door. “If I didn’t show up, he might start to wonder if he could trust me.”

I sat next to him every day in court, and except when I wanted by some gesture, some apparent word of encouragement, to convince the jury I believed in his innocence, barely noticed he was there. He had neither the mannerisms of a child, nor the idio-syncrasies of an adult; his face had none of the physical features that reveal the character, the essential lines of what we are: He was a blank page on which nothing permanent had yet been written.

We did not stay long.

“Just came by to say hello,” Flynn said cheerfully when he was brought in.

Danny greeted him with a drowsy smile. “Hello, Howard.”

Flynn smiled back. “Just had dinner, didn’t you?”

“It was good,” he replied as he turned to me. “Hello, Mr. Antonelli. Do I get dressed up again tomorrow?”

“Want a different tie?”

He seemed alarmed, and I realized he thought it meant having to give up the one he had. “Then you’ll have two you can choose from.”

He brightened immediately. “Sure. I’d like that.”

When we left the jail and drove through the city to Flynn’s apartment, it was almost completely dark. Under the blue-black sky, a scarlet haze hung low on the horizon, the last light till morning.