Stealing Flowers (39 page)

On Wednesday June 1, Fats Cramer took the
stand. All our hopes were resting on him. He sat as a rather
attractive witness, and clearly at ease in the court room. I
watched as Brad gave his notes one last glance. I knew he was
nervous, but he hid it well. He rose and scanned the jurors in a
friendly manner. He laid his left hand on my shoulder. I took a
deep breath and calmed myself, but I knew that I couldn’t get the
grim look out of my eyes. With the sudden disappearance of Anna
Chapati and the back to back bad days at the trial, it was just too
hard.

“Detective Cramer,” Brad said, “you were the
homicide officer with the most experience on the case of Sally
Tappet’s murder?”

“Yes.”

The stocky Denzil Burch slid out of his
seat. “Your honor, may counsel approach?” he said in a loud
plaintive voice.

Judge Phil Anderson was often impatient,
especially with our side. He nodded and both Brad and Denzil
stepped up. After some whispering, the jurors were excused. “Your
honor,” Denzil said in open court, “our friend Brad, through the
whole trial, has been trying to bring up the lie-detector tests. We
are aware of why Detective Cramer came as a defense witness. We
strongly object to this tactic.”

“Your honor,” Brad countered loudly,
“Christian Tappet has taken three tests and passed them all. Are we
going to bury him without a chance to offer an explanation of what
we think happened? The prosecutor’s office is always arguing the
validity of the polygraph tests. They can’t have it both ways. Our
whole defense is that Christian has been set up: This has been our
intention from the beginning and there is no surprise here. Fats
Cramer is an experienced officer who worked the case and who agrees
that the scenario we are describing is a real possibility.”

The judge looked at both lawyers and spoke
in a very soft voice. “I’m sorry Denzil, I’m going to refuse
you.”

Both lawyers returned to their tables and
the court took a break. When we adjourned, Brad then stepped up to
near the witness stand. “Detective Cramer,” he said, “were you on
the homicide investigation of Sally Tappet’s murder for the
procedures from the beginning?”

“Detective Fred Newel and myself. I worked
the crime scene.”

“You thought that the accusation by the
Tappet family that Christian had been framed for Sally’s murder by
someone, held warrant?”

“There were two reasons for this. His
polygraph tests were complete–”

“Your honor, objection.” Denzil said as he
rose out of his seat, his voice booming with authority. “This is
simply not admissible and they both know it.”

“Sustained. Strike the word polygraph from
the record. The witness is advised to use the word, ‘tests’ in his
testimony.”

Brad had gotten the word in. I knew that was
his purpose. “His tests were easy passes?

“Furthermore, the evidence is what I called,
Too warm.”

“You honor, objection,” Denzil said. “This
isn’t only improper and inadmissible, it is just downright
opinionated.”

“Sustained,” the judge said, “the witness
must restate his answer.”

“Sometimes Mr. Burlington,” Fats said, “the
evidence is so good that it immediately leads to a suspect.”

“Too good to be true, you mean?”

“Your Honor, objection,” Denzil said.

“Can’t you shut the hell up,” I said under
my breath.

Brad turned and looked over at me as though
he had heard it. “I withdraw the question,” he said. “Detective
Cramer, you were also aware that there were two related murders of
Tappet executives, branch presidents in fact?”

“Your Honor, objection! There’s no proof
whatsoever that these two deaths are related to the murder of Sally
Tappet.”

“I withdraw the question,” he said.
“Detective Cramer you were also aware that The Family of Truth had
responded to Sally Tappet’s suit against them with open
threats?”

“Your Honor, objection.”

“I withdraw. Detective Cramer you were aware
that the operational executive of Tappets, Hiroyuki Nakamura was a
victim of a suspicious hit and run on March 6 this year which
killed him?”

“Your honor. This was ruled an accident by
NYPD Traffic.”

“I withdraw. Were you aware that one of the
defense’s key witnesses, a former member of The Family of Truth,
Anna Benjamin, has been reported by reliable witnesses to have been
abducted just days ago?”

“Your honor,” Denzil said, “there’s no proof
of that.”

I knew Brad was goading him, trying to make
the prosecutor look unfair so that the jury would be more
sympathetic to us. It certainly seemed to be working. “I withdraw,”
Brad said. “Would you say that you protested the fact that no one
would investigate the Tappet family’s claim of a murder conspiracy
by The Family of Truth?”

“Your Honor,” Denzil said and rose again. “I
strongly object to this line of questioning. Mr. Burlington knows
that the families of the defense can make this kind of claim,
especially in a capital case. Sometimes there are misguided police
officers, who aren’t seeing the big picture.”

Brad turned sharply to the prosecutor’s
table. “Mr. Burch, do you mean by, ‘the big picture,’ the police
budget or Detective Cramer’s future. Are you threatening him?”

“I mean no such thing.”

“Gentlemen,” the judge said, “I warned you
about this.”

“Detective Cramer,” Brad continued, turning
back, “what happened when you made your objection to the District
Attorney?”

Fats rubbed his chin. “He overruled it,” he
said softly.

After a smattering of laughter, Brad walked
to the defense table and glanced at his notes. “Is it true they
took you off the case for this?”

Denzil rose from his seat. “Your Honor,
objection.”

Again, more courtroom laughter followed and
Brad chanced a wink at me out of sight of the jury. “I withdraw the
question,” Brad said. “Your honor, I’ve seventy more questions.
Could Mr. Burch make a carte blanche objection to all of them so
that it wouldn’t take us two weeks with this witness?

“Your honor,” Denzil said and once again
rose, “he’s using a perverse way to make his case by bouncing
everything off me and then making me look like the bad guy. He
knows that Detective Cramer would be a controversial witness.”

So it went, for three days, while Fats was
on the stand. The morning after Fats’ testimony ended, Denzil Burch
asked the judge to throw it all out. He gave a dramatic and sincere
speech. The judge refused but I saw the impression made on the
jurors. They doubted the conspiracy theory and thought it was
possibly a gimmick. They thought perhaps that a New York detective
had been paid off by a wealthy family.

The following days went bad for our side,
and worse still, Susan was out of town for a whole week for a case
she was working on. That evening at home in my bedroom, the whole
shameful event of the trial came to me as an utter defeat of my
life. It rose up at me in so many paths I could hardly think: The
press, Mary and Stan, Susan, The Family of Truth, and my dreams. It
consumed me. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Dread sat on my chest and I
couldn’t console myself. To make matters more difficult, my head
pounded. I stumbled downstairs and found Una cleaning in the
library.

“I have a bad headache,” I said.

She left and returned with a glass of ice
water and some headache tablets, then she sat across from me at a
small table holding a vase of fresh red carnations and babies’
breath. She picked up the book I was currently reading, Power and
Market, by Murray Rothbard. “Sally like this fellow,” she said.

I didn’t respond. He was a libertarian and I
think Sally had been becoming one as well.

“What are you feeling right now?” Una
asked.

“Our worse day yet.”

“I thought it went okay, but we have had
better ones.”

“I could have screamed. If only Susan had
been there.”

Una took my hand and squeezed it. “We’re
there with you.”

“I know, Una, I fear the worst, but there’s
no more than two or three days until the verdict. It will be
guilty, a humiliating verdict, then I’ll lose Susan forever.”

“Christian, you can’t think like that,” she
pleaded. “Susan of all people knows it was The Family of Truth. Let
me get you something to help you sleep and then you need to get to
bed.”

She left and brought me back a crystal
tumbler of warm bourbon a few minutes later. I drank it back at
once. “You’re pale, dear,” she said. “I’d like you to take a
halcyon too and go to bed at once.”

I looked at the tiny white pill and
swallowed it with water. “I know that I sound pathetic, Una,” I
whispered, “but it’s been so bad, that stuff about Sally and me.
God, I’ve had to relive it so many times in my life. I could tell
the jury thought me a vile creature.”

“It wasn’t incest, Christian, you mustn’t
think it. Gayle mishandled it, and when it happened in the hotel,
you were both willing adults unrelated by any direct blood. There
are far worse sins.”

“The world doesn’t see it that way. And the
jury didn’t believe the conspiracy theory about the Family either.
Burch kept referring to them as a religious commune, gentle puritan
folks. Good God, they killed Rick Edwards! They didn’t really like
Fats either, they thought he had sold out the police department for
us, that we paid him off! And poor Anna too. I’m afraid for her. I
think she’s dead.” I began to cry. “I’m so sorry.”

“Go to bed, dear.”

I slept for six hours, and at five a.m.,
awoke with a self-consuming anxiety. “Where’s Susan?” I said to
myself, “I need her so badly.” Close to open panic, I knew I
wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. “She still loves me though,”
I whispered. A low grunt-like whisper escaped me. “No, she
doesn’t!” I wrung my hands.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to do anything to
revenge myself from inside a prison cell; The Family of Truth were
going to win; to steal my life even though I had never wanted
anything to do with them. I lay in bed and my mind rolled back and
forth. I rose and shaved, looking, it seemed, once again, at a
stranger in the mirror. My hands trembled uncontrollably. Once more
I began to cry. I was falling in love just at the time Susan would
be wondering if the story about me and Sally was true. Why hadn’t I
told Susan straight off about Sally and I? She knew now and would
think that if I omitted telling her the whole story, then I might
be lying about the murder. It would certainly place doubt in her
mind no matter what she thought of The Family of Truth. For the
first time since charges had been laid, fleeing came to my mind;
however, not just running away, but complete utter escape. I
pictured my body falling through the air and smashing on the
pavement, my mind in a million pieces. I’m sorry to say that this
thought brought me some comfort. Life can beat you down only so
far. If I could have run to The Family of Truth at this moment, and
killed as many as I could, evil or not, I would have. Fearful that
I was free-falling, any anchor would have done, even blind revenge.
I studied my thin frightened face. My brown hair stood thrashed up
on my head and I looked too thin, almost absurd. I glanced down the
length of the long bathroom counter, and saw on the far wall, a
picture of Sally and me together as children. We were both smiling
happily.

I dressed and quietly left before anybody in
the house woke, driving the streets of New Jersey. In under an
hour, as though coming out of a dream, I pulled up in front of The
Grand Hyatt. I gave the car-attendant my keys, and walked inside of
the hotel unfocused and vaguely lost. Without anyone seeing, I took
the elevator to the top floor and immediately tried to access the
roof. I found the door bolted. I returned to the lobby and asked
for a room on the top floor. Without a word, I gave my credit card
to the attendant, a thirty-year-old employee in a crisp navy-blue
suit. “Will you be staying long, Mr. Tappet?”

I shook my head without looking at him.
After what was to me an unbearable delay . . . an embarrassment
that stretched out into minutes, as though he knew what I was
contemplating, he passed me a room card. “You have no bags, sir?”
he asked. I shook my head again. “Are you okay, sir?”

“Fine,” I grumbled. The floor, an extension
of the hotel’s other fine settings, had a concierge station, but it
remained unmanned at this hour. I let myself into the room and
dropped the card to a small oak retainer on a hall table. From my
earliest memories after my adoption, I’d tried to ignore the luxury
which had surrounded the Tappets. The one lasting pleasant memory I
had retained about the orphanages was a life without it. It always
seemed to get in the way of my enjoyment and at some point became a
negative value. It obstructed me as a teenager, becoming important
to my self-esteem. I’d wealth while others didn’t, and then, I’d to
unlearn that evil trait, like giving up a dependency. I made myself
a rye and mineral water in a fine glass tumbler, and after checking
the time, I threw my Rolex in the garbage can, wondering if I’d see
eight a.m. I sat and reflected on how I’d arrived to this position
in my life. I’d liked it before Sally had stepped onto that bus, it
had been a good thing on the whole, notwithstanding the affair with
Sally and the dilemma of being wealthy. “But you don’t really care
about the money,” I whispered to myself.

My voice sounded desperate, and besides, I
hadn’t escaped my wealth. That’s why the cult had crossed half the
country to try and retrieve Sally; she was the daughter of
multimillionaires. I rose and splashed cold water on my face in the
bathroom. Sally being sucked in by a cult wasn’t enough punishment
for one life; no, they’d murdered her and pinned it on me. Then
they’d abducted and killed Anna so as to destroy my legal defense.
I’d gone from a sort of magical existence to this life I led now
with cops, jails, judges, court appearances, news-people, jurors,
and, I feared, a guilty verdict.