Tell Me No Secrets (20 page)

“The prosecution will prove,” Jess stated firmly, turning back to the jury, “that Terry Wales regularly beat his wife. We will prove that he threatened, on more than one occasion, to kill her if she ever tried to leave him. We will prove that after Nina Wales did just that, after she worked up the courage to take her children and run, that Terry Wales purchased a crossbow in his local sporting goods store. We will prove that he used that crossbow to shoot Nina Wales through the heart as if she were a deer in a forest.

“He didn’t care about her suffering; he
wanted
her to suffer. There was no compassion here, Ladies and Gentlemen. And this was no crime of passion. This was murder, pure and simple. Murder beyond a reasonable doubt. Murder in the first degree. Thank you.”

Jess smiled sadly at the eight women and six men. Three were black, two of Spanish extraction, one Asian, the rest white. Most were middle-aged. Only two were in their twenties. One woman was perhaps sixty. All looked solemn, prepared to do their duty.

“Mr. Bristol,” Judge Harris was saying as Jess returned to the prosecutor’s table.

Hal Bristol was speaking even before he got to his feet, his voice booming across the courtroom, grabbing the jurors by their collective throat. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, Terry Wales is not an educated man. He’s a salesman, like some of you. He sells household appliances. He’s very good at it, and he makes a good living. He’s not a rich man, by any means. But he
is
a proud man.

“Like you, he’s had to tighten his belt in these recessionary times. Not so many people out there buying. Especially high-ticket items, like appliances. Not as many new houses going up. Not as many people needing new stoves and microwave ovens. Commissions are scarce. We’re living in uneasy times. Not a lot to count on.”

Jess sat back in her chair. So this was to be the defense’s approach. The killer as someone we could all identify with. The killer we could understand because his reflection mirrored our own. The killer as Everyman.

“Terry Wales thought he could count on his wife. He married her eleven years ago with the understanding that both would continue to work for several years before they started a family. But Nina Wales had a different understanding. After they got married, she decided she wanted children right away. She didn’t want to wait. She’d continue to work, she assured him. She certainly had no intention of giving up her job. But soon after their first child was born, Nina Wales quit work. She wanted to be a full-time mother, and how could my client argue with that, especially when she quickly became pregnant again?

“But Nina Wales wasn’t an easy woman to satisfy. No matter how much she had, no matter how much her husband could comfortably provide her with, Nina Wales was a
woman who always wanted more. So, of course, there were fights over the years. There were occasionally even violent fights. Terry Wales is certainly not proud of his part in them. But spousal violence can happen in the best of marriages—and does. Especially when times get tough.

“Now I don’t believe in blaming the victim,” Hal Bristol intoned, and Jess had to admire that the words escaped his mouth without the slightest trace of irony, “but we all know it takes two to tango. My client is not a violent man. He had to be pushed pretty hard to react in a violent fashion.

“And Nina Wales knew just what buttons to push.”

Jess let her eyes drift toward the rear of the courtroom, feeling the bile rise in her throat. Was that what Rick Ferguson was doing here? Pushing her buttons?

Rick Ferguson stared straight ahead, seemingly mesmerized by what the defense attorney was saying. Occasionally he nodded his head in agreement. One Everyman killer to another. Damn him, Jess thought. Why was he here?

“Nina Wales was an expert at pushing buttons,” Hal Bristol continued. “She constantly chided her husband over his sagging commissions; she berated him for failing to provide her with greater creature comforts. We have witnesses who will testify to hearing Nina Wales publicly embarrass her husband on more than one occasion. Facts, as the prosecution told you. Not just the word of the defendant. And we have witnesses who will testify that Nina Wales threatened, again on more than one occasion, to take her children and disappear, leaving him with nothing.

“Terry Wales is a proud man, Ladies and Gentlemen, although his wife made him feel as if there was little to be proud of. And nothing was sacred. Even their sex life
became a target for public consumption and ridicule. Nina Wales made fun of her husband’s performance in bed and taunted him at every opportunity about his failure to satisfy her. She even told him she’d taken a lover, and although this may not have been true, Terry Wales believed her.

“Then she left, refused to let her husband even speak to his children. She informed him she was seeing a lawyer, was preparing to take him for everything he had, for everything he’d worked for all his life. Terry Wales was distraught. Destroyed. He was no longer thinking either clearly or rationally. He was desperate. And desperate men, in desperate times, sometimes do desperate things.

“So, he bought a crossbow. A crossbow, Ladies and Gentlemen. Not a gun, even though he holds several marksman’s degrees. Even though a gun, for someone planning to murder his wife, would have been the more logical weapon of choice, much easier to use, more difficult to trace; far more likely to result in the death of the victim.

“No, Terry Wales bought a crossbow. An instrument that was far more likely to create a stir than it was to cause serious harm.

“Which was exactly what he meant to do.

“Terry Wales wanted to scare his wife. He didn’t want to kill her.

“If you were planning to murder someone, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, would you choose a weapon as old-fashioned and conspicuous as a crossbow? Would you commit that murder in the middle of the day, in the middle of a busy downtown intersection, with at least half a dozen witnesses to identify you? Would you sit down on the sidewalk afterward, sobbing, and wait for the police? Do these
sound like the actions of a rational man, a man whom the prosecution claims callously and deliberately plotted the cold-blooded murder of his wife?”

Hal Bristol strode across the courtroom to the prosecutor’s table. “The defense and the prosecution are in agreement on one thing,” he said, looking directly at Jess. “My client
is
responsible for the death of his wife.” He paused, striding purposefully back toward the jury box. “But it is our contention that Terry Wales never meant to kill his wife, that his only intention was to frighten her, bring her back to her senses, bring her back to their home. However misguided, however irrational those intentions may have been, they do not constitute cold, calculated, and premeditated murder.

“During the course of this trial, I’d like you to put yourself in Terry Wales’s shoes. We all have our breaking point, Ladies and Gentlemen. Terry Wales reached his.” Hal Bristol paused dramatically before concluding. “What would it take to reach yours?”

Jess pictured herself standing in front of the ivory lace curtains of her living room, staring out at the street below, gun in hand. Would she actually have been able to use it? We all have our breaking point, Ladies and Gentlemen, she thought, turning toward the back of the courtroom, seeing Rick Ferguson pop a piece of gum into his mouth and start to chew.

“Is the prosecution ready to proceed?” Judge Harris asked.

“The prosecution requests a ten-minute recess,” Jess said quickly.

“We will recess for ten minutes,” Judge Harris agreed.

“What’s up, Jess?” Neil Strayhorn asked, obviously caught off guard.

But Jess was already on her way toward the back of the courtroom. If she expected Rick Ferguson to jump to his feet, he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even look her way, forcing her to speak over the heads of the two people next to him. “There’s an easy way to do this,” she began, “and a hard way.”

Still, he didn’t look at her.

“The easy way is that you stand up and walk out of here now of your own volition,” she continued, unprompted.

“And the hard way?” he asked, eyes focused on the empty judge’s chair.

“I’ll call the bailiff, and have you thrown out.”

Rick Ferguson stood up, shuffled past the two men beside him to where Jess stood. “I just wanted to see what I might have been up against if that old lady hadn’t disappeared the way she did,” he said, lowering his eyes to hers. “Tell me Counselor, you as good in bed as you are in court?”

“Bailiff!” Jess called loudly.

“Hey, the easy way, remember?” Rick Ferguson turned and walked from the room.

Jess was still shaking ten minutes later when the judge called the court to order.

An armed sheriff’s deputy escorted Jess to the parking garage across from the Administration Building at almost seven o’clock that night.

She had spent the two hours after court was dismissed conferring with Neil and Barbara about the day’s events and tomorrow’s strategy, and trying to reach her ex-husband, but his office said he’d been out all afternoon and they weren’t sure what time he’d be back. (“Jess, is that you?” the
polite voice had inquired as she was about to hang up. “Haven’t heard from you in a long time. Why don’t you try him at home later? You still have the number?”)

“I’m on level three,” Jess told the deputy. Fully armed sheriff’s deputies always escorted prosecutors to their cars after dark.

“Finally got your car back,” the young man said, his blond hair peeking out from beneath his dark blue cap, his hand near his holster as he led Jess through the outdoor parking lot to the multi-storied garage. Jess told him the sad saga of her red Mustang as they waited for the elevator to arrive.

“At least they washed it,” Jess said as the elevator doors opened and they stepped inside.

“Something good comes from everything, I guess,” the deputy told her philosophically, and Jess nodded, though she was far from sure she agreed. “God, what’s that smell?” he said as they stepped out at the third level. “Stinks like an outhouse up here.”

Jess grimaced, the unpleasant odor filling her nostrils and throat, making her want to gag. She motioned to where she’d parked her car, not wanting to open her mouth, in case whatever was in the air settled on her tongue.

“Jesus, it’s getting worse.”

They turned the corner.

“My God,” the guard exclaimed, automatically pulling his gun from the holster and spinning around.

“There’s nobody here,” Jess said, surprisingly calm, staring at her car. “He’s long gone.”

“Don’t tell me this is your car,” the guard stated, though Jess was sure he already knew the answer. “Jesus, what sick bastard would do something like this?”

Jess stared at her Mustang, which only this morning had been freshly washed and as good as new. Now it stood, its windows streaked with what was unmistakably excrement, its new windshield wipers broken and twisting out from the middle of large clumps of feces. Jess felt her eyes sting, and covered her nose and mouth, turning away.

The guard was already on his walkie-talkie, radioing for help. Jess returned to the elevator and sank down onto the cement floor beside it. “Shit,” she muttered, thinking her choice of expletive remarkably apt, dissolving into peals of helpless laughter. She could laugh or she could cry, she decided.

She’d save the crying for later.

“W
alter! Walter, for god’s sake, you left the front door unlocked again!” Jess pounded on the door to the second-floor apartment of the three-story brownstone, wondering whether she could be heard over Miles Davis’s trumpet.

“Hold your horses, I’m coming,” came the darkly masculine voice from inside. An instant later, the door opened, and the short, roundish systems analyst who was her downstairs neighbor stood before her, wearing a green silk bathrobe and sipping a glass of red wine. He examined her quickly from head to toe. “Jess, you’re beautiful. And you’re hysterical. Would you like to come in for a drink?”

“I’d like you to make sure you keep the front door locked,” Jess told him, in no mood for anything as civil as a glass of red wine.

“Oh, did I forget to lock it again?” Walter Fraser appeared
resolutely nonchalant. “I was bringing in the groceries, and I had to keep making trips to the car. It was just easier to leave the door unlocked.”

“Easier, and a lot more dangerous.”

“Bad day, huh?” Walter asked.

“Just keep it locked,” Jess said again, heading up the last flight of stairs to her apartment.

The phone started ringing as soon as she opened her door. What now? She knocked against the side of the birdcage as she hurried into the kitchen to answer it, hearing the canary chirp in frightened protest. “Sorry, Fred,” she called, frantically grabbing for the phone. “Hello.” Her voice was a shout.

“Ouch! Somebody’s not happy.”

“Don, is that you?”

“My office said you’ve been trying to reach me. Something wrong?”

“Nothing that seeing your client in the electric chair wouldn’t cure.”

“I assume we’re talking about Rick Ferguson,” Don said, his voice tightening.

“Excellent assumption. How about this one? Your client shows up in my courtroom today and several hours later my car, which I’ve just spent over four hundred dollars repairing, turns up half-covered with shit. What assumptions would you make there?”

“Hold on a minute. You’re saying that your car was literally covered in …?”

“Excrement, probably human. At least that’s what the cops think it is. They’ve taken samples for analysis, and they’re trying to dust the car for prints. Not that that will
accomplish a hell of a lot. I’m sure rubber gloves were the order of the day.”

“Jesus Christ,” Don muttered.

“Just tell your client that if he ever sets foot in my courtroom again, I’ll have him arrested. I don’t care what for.”

“I’ve already warned him to stay the hell away from you.”

“Just keep him away from my courtroom.”

“You won’t see him there again.”

Jess could hear the confusion in her ex-husband’s voice despite his even tone. She knew he was fighting to keep a safe distance between his professional and personal lives, that she was making it next to impossible for him.