Prosecution: A Legal Thriller (28 page)

"I'm going to represent you," I said.

"He said he'd be here," she said, tightening her grip
on my arm.

Before I could say anything, Gilliland-O'Rourke began
the formal arraignment. She was willing to mislead the press, but
that was the only concession she would make. Alma Woolner was a
defendant in a murder case, no different from anyone else charged
with a serious crime. The State opposed a conditional release.

I argued what seemed obvious, that Alma had
longstanding ties to the community, was not a flight risk, and was
certainly not a threat to anyone. Standing next to me, her shoulder
rubbing against my arm, Alma stared down at the table, a startled
expression on her face, as if it had just occurred to her that she
was in the middle of something serious.

Nodding to himself, West had reached his
decision."Bail will be set in the amount of one hundred thousand
dollars."

Neither Gilliland-O'Rourke nor I had anything else
for the court. West rose from the bench, hesitated, looked at Alma
as if he wanted to say something, and then, deciding against it,
gave her a brief smile of encouragement and walked quickly out of
the courtroom.

I caught a glimpse of Horace standing next to the
double doors that led to the corridor outside. His arms were folded
in front of him and his chin was on his chest. He was looking right
at me, but his eyes were full of some private meditation.

"There's Horace," I said.

Alma looked up. "Where?"

He was gone, the only sign a slight shudder of the
door as the handle clicked back into place.

Outside in the corridor, a half dozen reporters and a
television cameraman were moving at a quick trot toward the door. I
left Gilliland-O'Rourke to deal with them while I went in the
opposite direction, hoping to catch up with Horace. I found him in
his chambers, next to the coat rack, slipping out of his suit coat
and putting on his robe.

"Bail is set at a hundred thousand," I said, catching
my breath. "You can get her out in a couple of hours."

"I can't," he said, his eyes tense, expectant.

"What do you mean, you can't?"

"I don't have a hundred thousand dollars," he
explained.

"Well, if you don't have it, Horace, go get it," I
told him. "Go to the goddamn bank, get a loan, take out a second
mortgage, do whatever the hell you have to do. Just get it!"

He shook his head. "I can't do that, either."

"You can't—or you won't?"

"I can't. I'm already mortgaged up to my neck. I
couldn't borrow ten cents if my life depended on it."

"I'm sorry, Horace," I said. "I didn't know. It's all
right, I'll take care of it. She'll be home tonight."

"I'll handle it," he insisted. "It'll take a few
days, that's all."

"You can pay me back when you have it."

Something ominous entered his eyes. "I appreciate
what you're trying to do," he said slowly, as if he had to force
himself to speak the words. "I'll have her out in a couple of
days." He put his hand on the door, ready to go into court.

"Don't worry about it, Horace," I said, trying to
give him some assurance that things would work out. "I'll have her
out this evening."

"Listen to me," he hissed. "She got herself into
this. Let her sit in jail for a few days and think about it." The
door slammed shut behind him, and I was left alone in the dimly lit
room, wondering if he believed his wife capable of murder.

Chapter Nineteen

Alma Woolner was out of custody by the end of the
day. Horace had found a way to cover bail. "She didn't do it, Joe.
She didn't do anything," he said, as if it were the first time we
had talked about it.

"I need to talk to her, Horace. As soon as
possible."

"Tomorrow soon enough? I gave her a sleeping pill and
put her to bed."

"Can you bring her down to the office?"

He hesitated. "I thought it might be good to get out
of here for a while. I thought we'd take a drive up the gorge. Why
don't you come along? There'll be plenty of time to talk."

The next morning, with Alma at the wheel, the three
of us left the city behind and drove east along the river,
following it as it broadened out, gradually covering everything
between the dark wooded high-walled plateaus on each side of the
Columbia Gorge. On the other side of the Cascades, where the river
moved through the high desert, you were in one of those places
where you begin to think that God must have became bored creating
the world and repeated himself to get it over with.

We drove deep into the gorge, following the straight
line of the road, parallel to the narrow railroad tracks. Above us,
a shallow stream plummeted over a cliff and fell like a silver
thread to a pool more than three hundred feet below. Horace sat in
the back, one long leg stretched stiffly out across the seat, and
Alma kept her attention focused on the road. Conversation was
brief, an awkward self conscious intrusion into the silence.

Alma pulled into the parking lot at the waterfall.
Passing a long line of tourist buses, we walked across to the
visitors center and down the rough stone steps to the railing that
ran around the pool at the bottom of the waterfall. Spray filled
the air around us and a fine mist settled on our faces.

We bought coffee from the concession stand and found
a place to sit at the far end of an empty table on a rock walled
landing with a view of the falls. In the branches of a fir tree
just above us, a hummingbird, buoyed on whirring wings, waited
motionless in midair and then darted away. "We haven't been here in
a long time," said Horace, as he lifted the paper cup to his
mouth.

"It's funny how that happens," I replied, though the
remark had not been addressed to me. "You live somewhere and you
never really spend that much time looking around. I haven't been up
to the lodge at Mount Hood since I was a kid."

Alma looked at me, curious. "Why not?"

Whenever she asked me a question, I felt struck by
the urge to say something interesting, something she had not heard
before.

"Maybe it's because some things should only be seen
from a distance. Maybe it's just a matter of perspective."

Her eyes, always sympathetic, watched me a moment
longer. "Is that the reason you haven't married? Because the
absence of distance might spoil the effect?"

I glanced at Horace, but his eyes were on the
waterfall.

"No," I said, turning back to Alma. "I just never met
the right woman."

Her eyes never left me. "Yes you did," she
insisted.

"The Alexandra I knew never existed. She pretended to
be someone she wasn't."

"We all do that, don't we? Pretend to be something.
Isn't that really who we are? Who we pretend to be?"

A shadow slanted across the table between us before I
realized Horace was getting up. "You two need to talk," he
announced.

As he moved behind his wife, he laid his hand on her
shoulder and then let it go. I watched him descend the stone steps,
holding on to a steel banister, placing one foot carefully before
he lifted the other. Shoving his hands into his trouser pockets, he
joined the crowd that stood at the guardrail, caught in the clean
enchantment of the water that had been falling for thousands of
years.

"We used to come out here a lot," Alma remarked,
watching my eyes follow Horace. "When we first came here, Horace
loved this place. It was like therapy for him. It helped him
forget."

Down below, Horace rested his arm on the railing,
spread his feet wide apart, and stared into the shallow
rock-bottomed pool. "Forget?" I asked, my eyes coming back to
her.

"Not forget, really," she said, trying to explain.
"Helped him realize it was good to be alive. He was still very
bitter, back then, about the war and what had happened to him."

She looked at me in a way that made me feel as if she
were older than I. "He was drafted a week after he graduated from
law school. How many twenty-five-year-olds do you think got
drafted?" she asked, an edge to her voice. "And do you think they
put him in the adjutant's office? No, they put him in the
infantry."

She glanced away, searching until she found Horace,
as if she had to be sure he was safe. "When his legs were blown
off," she went on, looking at me again, "they called him a hero and
gave him a medal, and they all felt proud—not so much of Horace,
they didn't even know him—but of themselves. It made them proud of
what a great country this was. Horace proved everything they wanted
to believe about themselves. He proved this wasn't a racist
country, because if it was, why would he have saved those white
boys when he knew he might die doing it?"

"Then why did he do it?" I asked.

"Horace never talks about it," she said, looking
away. "There was an attack, late at night, out in the middle of the
jungle, and they were surrounded. Horace's unit fought its way out,
but a lot of them didn't make it. Horace wanted to go back for the
wounded, but no one else dared. So Horace went back by himself and
brought them out, one at a time. He was shot in the shoulder when
he brought the first one back, and shot in the arm when he brought
in the second. They were still too scared to help him, so he went
back the third time and got another one out. He was going back for
a fourth when the grenade came. Even after that no one came to
help. They let him lie there, not more than a hundred feet away,
convincing themselves he was already dead."

She took a deep breath. "You want to know why he did
it? Because he was black, and he had to prove he was better than
they were."

"I don't believe that, Alma," I said quietly. "I
think Horace did it because he was better than they were."

There was something in her eyes, but whether it was a
reflection of the anger buried deep inside her over what had
happened to her husband or the first sign of the terror she must
have felt about her own impending ordeal, I could not tell.
Reaching across the table, I grasped her arm.

"We don't have to talk about this today," I said,
trying to ease her into the conversation we had to have. "But if
you feel you're up to it, why don't you just tell me what you know
about this. We have to figure out how your fingerprints got on that
gun."

She pressed her lips together, as if she were
thinking about something, and then, a moment later, pulled them
back into a wistful, almost rueful expression. "Horace told me I
should tell you the truth." Until she said it, it had not occurred
to me that she was capable of telling me anything else. "I was
there the night Russell was murdered."

"You were at the house?" I asked, wondering whether I
had heard her right. "But Horace told me you were home with him
that night."

"It was the first thing he could think of. He wanted
to protect me."

It was getting warm. Taking off my windbreaker, I
draped it over the bench. Down below, Horace stood against the
guardrail, his back to the falls, taking the late morning sun full
in the face. "Start from the beginning," I told Alma. "What were
you doing at Russell Gray's house that night?"

"We had a board meeting there for the ballet company.
Not the whole board, the executive committee. There were seven of
us, counting Russell and myself."

"What time did it start?"

"Eight o'clock. By the time everyone got there, it
was probably eight-fifteen."

"Why did you meet at his place?"

"Russell was the chairman of the board and he always
offered," she explained. "His house is beautiful, up in the west
hills with a wonderful view of the city and Mount Hood. You used to
live up there; you know what it's like."

"What time did the meeting end?" I asked. I was not
sure she was listening. Her gaze drifted away, out toward the trees
that covered the hillside and above them, to the soft white clouds
that were scattered across the sky. Quietly, I asked her again. She
looked at me and blinked, as if trying to remember what we had been
talking about.

"Ten-thirty or eleven," she said. "I stayed a while
longer. There were some things we had to discuss."

"What happened after everyone else left?"

"I was there for about an hour. I was just getting
ready to leave. It must have been close to midnight. I was in the
bathroom when I heard it."

"The shot?" I watched her as she stared straight
ahead, living it over again in her mind.

"I don't know how I could have heard it," she said,
strangely detached. "The bathroom is enormous. The door must be two
inches thick."

"Are you sure you heard it?" I asked, trying to keep
her attention on what we had to talk about.

"I wonder if I did? Maybe I just felt it, but somehow
I knew it. Anyway, I found him in the living room, where I'd left
him. He was on his stomach, in the middle of a Persian rug, his
face turned to the side. His eyes were wide open. I saw the blood
underneath him. Then I saw the gun, lying a few feet away.
Everything was so still. I could hear my own breath when I knelt
down next to him. I kept expecting him to move, say something."