Bad blood

2

“Would you please state your full name for the jury?”

“My name is Katherine Meade. I’m called Kate.”

I was standing against the rail at the end of the jury box, trying to draw Kate Meade’s eyes in my direction. “How old are you, Ms. Meade?”

“Thirty-four. Thirty-four years old.”

The jurors had watched Artie Tramm lead her into the courtroom and onto the witness stand. They had all scrutinized her appearance while she stood, fidgeting slightly, facing the clerk as she was administered the oath. Most of them had probably seen her bite her lip and flash a glance in the direction of Brendan Quillian, who returned it with a broad smile.

“Are you single or married?”

“Married. I’ve been married for twelve years. My husband is Preston Meade. He’s a banker.”

There was little about Kate Meade that these jurors would relate to. The nine men and three women who’d been impaneled were a mix of working- and lower-class New Yorkers-white, black, Hispanic, and Asian-ranging in age from twenty-seven to sixty-two. The four alternates-three men and one woman-were equally diverse. The business clothes most of them had worn during the selection process had been replaced by T-shirts and cotton blouses, chinos and jeans and capri pants.

“Where do you live, Mrs. Meade? In which county?”

They stared at her well-made-up face, auburn hair pulled back and held securely in place with a tortoiseshell hairband. The pale pink suit-with its short-collared jacket and pencil-thin skirt-seemed as rigid as my witness. I tipped my head toward the jury box, a signal I’d arranged to make her remember that it was to the people sitting in it that she had to tell her story. I wanted her to warm up to her audience and speak more naturally, but her expression was frozen and her anxiety was palpable.

“In Manhattan. New York County. On the Upper East Side,” she said, turning to Judge Gertz. “Do I have to say exactly where-?”

“No, no. No, you don’t.”

Kate Meade exhaled as though relieved not to have to tell anyone who wasn’t a member of the Knickerbocker Club what her address was.

“Do you have any children?”

“We do,” she said, smiling at the foreman for the first time. “We have three children, all in elementary school.”

“Do you work outside the home?”

“No, ma’am. I mean, I volunteer on several boards, but I haven’t been employed since I married Preston.”

I extended my right arm in the direction of the defense table. “Do you know the defendant in this case, Brendan Quillian?”

“Yes, I do. For a very long time.”

“For how long, if you can tell us exactly?”

“I met Mr. Quillian-Brendan-when I was sixteen. He was seventeen at the time.”

“Would you tell us where you met?”

“Certainly.” Kate Meade was comfortable with this part of the story, and she shifted her body to face the jury box to talk. “I was in high school, here in Manhattan. Convent of the Sacred Heart.”

Some of the jurors would know that Sacred Heart was the city’s premier private school for Catholic girls, promising an education that intertwined intellect and soul. They might have some idea of what it had cost to educate Kate Meade and her friends if they knew that the current tuition was upward of twenty-five thousand dollars a year at the old Otto Kahn mansion on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-first Street.

“I attended Sacred Heart from kindergarten through high school. It’s where Amanda Quillian-well, Amanda Keating then-and I became best friends, since we were five years old. We were together, Amanda and I, the day we met Brendan. It was at a game, a football game. He was a junior at Regis, and we were sophomores.”

The all-male Jesuit high school was also on the Upper East Side, and because of the largesse of its original founders, it offered tuition-free college-prep education to Roman Catholic young men who passed rigorous tests for admission.

“You were present when Amanda and Brendan Quillian were introduced to each other?”

“Yes, I was. It was my brother who brought Brendan over to meet her.” Kate Meade smiled again at the jurors. “He had seen her across the field and asked who she was.”

I handed a photograph, pre-marked as People’s Exhibit #1, to Willy Jergen, the court officer standing beside the witness box. “Would you look at that photograph, please, and tell me if you recognize it?”

Jergen passed the picture to Kate Meade. “Yes, I do. I gave it to you several months ago, Ms. Cooper.”

“What does that photograph represent?”

“It was taken the afternoon Amanda and Brendan met. It’s a picture of them talking with my brother, who was on the team, after the game. It’s from our yearbook.”

“Your Honor, I would like to offer the photograph into evidence at this time.”

“Any objection?”

Lem Howell didn’t bother to rise. “No, sir.” He wasn’t objecting to anything at this point. He knew the benign-even romantic-backstory of the young Quillians wouldn’t do anything but reinforce his client’s good character.

“Entered into evidence then,” Judge Gertz said, starting to make notations in his leatherbound log that would grow to record the dozens of police and medical reports, photographs, and diagrams that both Howell and I planned to introduce during the trial.

“Mrs. Meade, I’m going to come back to that time period shortly, but I’d like to jump ahead for a few minutes. I’d like to direct your attention to a more recent date, to Wednesday, October third, of last year. Do you recall that afternoon?”

The young woman angled her body away from the jury, her eyes widening as though she’d been frightened by an apparition. “I do,” she said, her voice dropping.

“What happened on that day?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained. Ms. Cooper, you can’t-”

“I’ll rephrase my question.” Kate Meade was nervous again. I could hear the sound of her thumbnails as she picked at one with the other. “Did you see Amanda Quillian that day?”

“Yes, yes, I did. I did. I had lunch with Amanda on October third. I had lunch with her an hour before she died-before she was murdered.”

Howell didn’t like the answer my question elicited, but he was too smart to keep objecting to information that he knew I would get before the jury anyway. All twelve, and even the alternates, were leaning forward in their seats. They obviously wanted to know what occurred in the last hours of the victim’s life.

“I’d like you to take a look at another picture, please. People’s two.” I reached to the bottom level of the cart and removed an enlarged photograph-two feet square-mounted on posterboard. Again, I passed it to Willy to hand to the witness. “Do you recognize this?”

Meade inhaled audibly and lowered her head. “Of course I do. I took it.”

“When did you take it?”

“October third. About two o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Where?”

“At a restaurant called Aretsky’s-on Madison Avenue at Ninety-second Street. It was an unusually warm day, so we sat outdoors, Amanda and I. I had just shot a roll of film on a disposable camera at my daughter’s class play. She’s also at Sacred Heart now. I had one exposure left, so I snapped a photo of Amanda.”

“Your Honor, I’d like to offer this into evidence as People’s two.”

Gertz pointed a finger at Howell, who smiled and nodded his head.

“It’s in evidence, Ms. Cooper.”

“At this time, I’d like to display both of these to the jury.”

Lem Howell had not been quite as passive as he was now when we’d argued a week ago, before voir dire, about the last photograph taken of Amanda Quillian. Irrelevant, prejudicial, and prosecutorial overkill, he’d maintained, sparring with Judge Gertz over and over.

But the snapshot of Amanda Quillian was ruled admissible. This was the only case I’d ever handled in which a picture had been taken an hour before the murder occurred, showing the long, bare neck of the victim-the exact focal point of the injury that caused her death-without a mark on it.

While the jurors were circulating the two photos among themselves, I asked Artie Tramm to set up the stand with the easel that was leaning in the corner. Day in and day out, Brendan Quillian would sit before these jurors. He’d been coached by Howell to put on his best game face-smile at them and bond with them in every way that did not involve direct communication. I had seen too many trials in which the prosecution never brought the deceased to life in the courtroom, never allowed the twelve people making the most important decision about her life to feel her presence and understand that the murder victim had as much at stake in this trial as did Quillian himself. For any semblance of justice to be achieved, I needed jurors to see Amanda Quillian vibrant and cheerful and alive, mere hours before she was posed on the steel gurney for a different camera in the autopsy room.

Willy returned the exhibits to me. I put the small photo on my table and helped him mount the blowup of the smiling Amanda Quillian on the easel between the witness stand and the jury box.

“Let’s go back now, Mrs. Meade. I’d like to return to the story you started to tell us, when Amanda began to date the defendant.”

“They went out together for the first time a week after they were introduced. I saw them at a movie theater the very next Saturday.”

“Did you have occasion to spend time with them during the rest of your high school years?”

“Constantly. Neither my parents nor Amanda’s wanted us dating alone at that age, so we usually went out in groups, or at least two couples. Since she was my best friend, we were together a great deal of the time. Amanda never dated anyone else seriously. Not during high school, not when she went away to Princeton. I mean, you can see how attractive she was, so she had lots of offers. But she was mad for Brendan-he’s the only guy she ever cared about.”

The jurors were taking it all in. Some were watching Kate Meade as she testified, a few stared at the face in the photograph while Kate talked about her friend, and many were glancing over at Quillian, hoping for a reaction to the testimony but getting none.

“And the defendant, do you know where he attended college?”

“Yes. Brendan went to Georgetown. In Washington, D.C. He had a full scholarship there.”

“Were you present for the marriage of Amanda to the defendant?” For every time that a witness-or my adversary-would personalize the man on trial by using his Christian name, I would refer to him instead by his status in these proceedings.

“Yes, of course. I was Amanda’s maid of honor.”

“When did that take place?”

“The week after her college graduation, twelve years ago this month. Amanda had just celebrated her twenty-second birthday.”

Through Kate’s narrative I got much of the pedigree information about my victim and her husband before the jury. I had structured the direct exam carefully to avoid Howell’s hearsay objections by eliciting facts my witness knew firsthand.

Amanda’s father was the sole owner of a real estate empire started by her grandfather more than forty years earlier. Keating Properties had been responsible for much of the development of Manhattan’s SoHo district, transforming vast commercial space into fashionable residential lofts and apartments. Then they repeated that trend in TriBeCa and on into Dumbo, restoring the charm of the streets and old buildings in the part of Brooklyn “down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.”

Because Amanda was the only one of the three sisters to marry someone interested in the family business, her father had welcomed Brendan Quillian into the company. After he completed his studies at Georgetown and received an MBA from New York University, Brendan learned the art of the deal from Richard Keating himself. By the time the Quillians celebrated their tenth anniversary, shortly before Keating succumbed to a chronic and severe case of congestive heart failure, he had made Brendan his partner in all his real estate ventures.

“Did Amanda Quillian work, Mrs. Meade? Did she have a job?”

“For the first three years after her wedding, she was also employed at Keating Properties. She handled some public relations matters for her father. But once Brendan was promoted to a management position, she wanted to get out of his way. Sort of take the pressure off him, the attention from other employees that he was the boss’s son-in-law.”

I knew the answers to the questions I was asking as well as Kate did. What I didn’t know, what distracted me now with the persistence of a small hammer pounding inside my brain, was the warning that Lem had laid out for me, the land mine I was certain to encounter as Kate and I moved forward together.

“What did she do after that?”

“Volunteer work, mostly. Four days a week. She was on one of the hospital boards, and she devoted a lot of her time to a project for literacy.” Kate came through with a smile. A forced one, perhaps, but several jurors responded in kind.

“Did Amanda have any children?”

“No, she didn’t. They didn’t.”

“To your knowledge, was she ever pregnant?”

“Yes, she was. Amanda had three miscarriages, Ms. Cooper. I was with her at the hospital when she had the third one, just about four years ago.” Any trace of that smile was now gone. Kate’s lips tightened around her teeth and she drew in a deep breath. “It was a-a very painful time for her.”

“How often did you and Amanda speak, Mrs. Meade?”

“Every day. Well, practically every day,” she said, smiling at juror number three, an elementary-school teacher in her forties. “Some days we talked two or three times. And I saw her several times a week. She’s the godmother-she and Brendan are the godparents of my oldest daughter. She was often at our house.”

“Did she confide in you?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

“Ms. Cooper knows better than to characterize, to lead, to-”

“I’ll take your reasons at the bench, Mr. Howell,” Judge Gertz said. “Not in open court. I’ve already ruled in your favor.”

I turned my back to the judge and walked to the railing behind me, pausing before I returned and continued questioning Kate Meade.

“After Amanda married the defendant, did she ever spend the night at your home?”

“No, no, she did not,” Kate said, looking down at her lap and again nervously clicking one thumbnail against the other. “Not until shortly before her father died. Then there was a time-several times-that she did.”

“Can you tell us why she came to stay with you?”

“Objection. Hearsay, Your Honor,” Lem said, rising to his feet and circling his right hand in the air, catching the light with his gold pen. “It calls for-”

“Sustained, Mr. Howell. I don’t need three of your arguments when one suffices.”

Lem grinned broadly as he sat down, claiming his victory to the jurors.

“Well, Mrs. Meade, the first time Amanda Quillian came to spend the night with you, was it at your invitation?”

“No, it was not. Certainly not.”

“Can you tell us when this visit occurred?”

“It was about five years ago, in April, I believe. On a weeknight. One o’clock in the morning, to be exact.” Kate was emphatic about the hour, as if no person of manners would confuse the time of night with a social invitation.

“Did she call you before coming over?”

“Yes, from a taxicab. She was on her way to a hotel, she told me.”

“Objection!” Lem Howell was on his feet now, all business, ready to rein me in. From this point forward, he would hold me to the rules of evidence. The insidious growth of the marital conflict I wanted to lay before the jury would be difficult to show without a victim who could tell her own tale.

Judge Gertz looked down at Kate Meade on the witness stand adjacent to his bench, cautioning her against the hearsay testimony she was trying to deliver. “Don’t tell us what Mrs. Quillian said to you, young lady. You may testify about your observations and your actions, but not about conversations she had with you.”

I had prepped Kate for the manner of this examination-and for the fact that Howell would fight to keep out parts of the story-but she was visibly upset that the judge had chastised her.

“Can you describe Amanda Quillian’s appearance when she arrived at your home that night?”

“She was crying. Crying hysterically. May I say that, Your Honor? I had never seen her as upset as she was that night. I held her and talked to her, but I couldn’t get her to stop crying.”

“Don’t tell us what she said, Mrs. Meade,” I guided her, since Amanda’s words themselves would violate the hearsay rules. Kate could be cross-examined by Lem about her observations, but Amanda’s statements to her could not be offered for their truth. “But did she explain to you why she was crying?”

“Yes, she did,” Kate said, turning her head to grimace at Brendan Quillian.

“Did she appear to have any injuries?”

“No, no, she did not. Not that I could see on her face.”

“Did she spend the night at your home?”

“Amanda spent five nights with us. She refused to go out of the house. I could barely get her to eat.”

“Did you see the defendant during those days?”

“Once. Brendan came to our door two days later, first thing in the morning.”

“Did you let him in?”

“No. I talked to him in the hallway. I told him that Amanda didn’t want him there.”

“Do you remember any specifics of your conversation with the defendant?” These statements by Quillian were not considered hearsay.

“Certainly. Of course I do.”

“What did he say to you, as best you can recall?”

“He asked me to let him in. No, he begged me to let him in.”

“Once?”

“Three-maybe four times.”

“Did he ask you how Amanda-how his wife was?”

“No. No, he did not.”

“What else did he say?”

“The only other thing he wanted to know was whether Amanda had told her father that she had left home.”

“What answer did you give him?”

“I told him that she had not. Not yet.”

“And then?”

“He wanted to know if I was sure of that. He asked me to promise him that I wouldn’t let Amanda admit to her father that she had walked out on him. Brendan said he’d do anything to get Amanda back.” Kate Meade was speaking softly now, trying to hold back the tears that had formed in her eyes.

I let the jury observe her for several seconds. I was relieved to have gotten this much of the story told without the backfire that Lem had hinted at to scare me. Maybe his warning had just been a scam to unnerve me as I started my case.

“What did you say to the defendant?”

She spoke to the foreman. “I told him to get out of my building. I told him I couldn’t make any promises to him.”

“When was the next time you spoke with the defendant after that?”

“It was on the sixth day. A Saturday, I think. Amanda had spent a lot of time talking with him on the phone the night before. He convinced her to come back home. He picked her up around ten o’clock that morning.”

“Did you talk with him then?”

She shook her head from side to side before she answered. “Only to say good-bye to Amanda as they left.”

I took Kate Meade through four more years of Amanda’s sudden visits, at least one every six months. The episodes of tearful nocturnal flights made little sense without the substance of the revelations that my victim had made to her best friend over the years, but the pattern of conduct established before the jury the profound unhappiness in her relationship with her husband.

I tried to lay the foundation for the expert witness whom I planned to call later in the case, the one who would explain some of the dynamics of domestic violence. I expected her to be able to answer the question of why Amanda Quillian did not simply leave Brendan, the question I had been asked about my spousal-abuse victims more times than I could possibly count.

Kate Meade had been responding to my queries for more than ninety minutes by the time I caught her up to the last lunch the two women had together on October 3 of the previous year.

“You told us that you snapped this photograph-People’s two in evidence-at about two o’clock in the afternoon?”

“Yes, just before we paid the check.”

“And for the record, it’s fair to say that Amanda is smiling, am I right?”

“She was very happy that day.” Kate nodded to the jurors.

“If you know, Mrs. Meade, where was Brendan Quillian on October third?”

“He was in Boston, Ms. Cooper.”

Lem Howell didn’t mind that tidbit of hearsay. It helped him to have his client as far away from the scene of the crime as possible.

“Do you know why Amanda was so happy?”

“Yes, I do. I certainly do. She had made some decisions about her future, about ending her marriage. She told me that-”

“Objection.”

“Sustained. You can’t tell us what she said.”

“Sorry, Your Honor. I gave her a business card-the name and phone number of a locksmith. It was a man I’d used when my children’s nanny lost her keys the week before. I made an appointment for him to change the locks at Amanda’s house the next morning, before Brendan was due back in town.”

Kate Meade had blurted out the sentences in rapid-fire sequence, then slumped back in her chair as though satisfied she had done her best for her friend without a chance of interruption from Howell.

“What time did you and Amanda Quillian leave each other on the corner of Madison Avenue and Ninety-second Street?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes after I took this photograph.” Kate Meade lifted a handkerchief embroidered with pink flowers out of her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. Then balling it up in her hand, she pointed at the life-size picture of her friend on the easel beside her.

“Did you speak to Amanda Quillian again after that?”

“Yes, I called her shortly before three o’clock. Preston suggested to me that we invite her to dinner that evening since she was alone, and so I called to tell her what time to come over.”

“At what number did you call her?”

“On her cell phone. I called on her cell because I wasn’t sure whether she would have reached home yet.”

“Did she answer?”

“It went to voice mail. She picked it up a few minutes later and called me back.”

“Was that the last time you heard from Amanda Quillian?”

Kate Meade’s fingernails clipped each other more loudly than before. “No, ma’am.”

“What happened next?”

“I was opening the door to our apartment when my own cell phone rang again,” Kate said, tearing up as she hung her head. “She must have hit redial, it was so fast.”

“Objection, Your Honor. This speculation, this guesswork, this ‘must have,’ ‘should have,’ ‘could have’ business is-”

“Sustained. Keep your voice up, will you, madam?”

Kate Meade lifted her head, picked out her favorite juror-the teacher-and locked eyes with her. “I flipped open my phone and I could hear Amanda screaming. Just a long, terrifying scream.”

“Did she say anything, any words you could understand?” This excited utterance, as the law called it, was an exception to the hearsay rule. I was confident that the judge would allow Kate’s testimony about this last call.

“First Amanda screamed. That’s the only awful noise I could hear. Then she started crying and speaking to someone at the same time.”

I lowered my voice and waited for Kate Meade to stop hyper-ventilating a bit. “Do you have any idea with whom she was speaking?”

Kate shook her head.

“Did you hear what she said?”

“Very clearly. She said, ‘Brendan sent you, didn’t he? Brendan sent you to kill me.’ They’re the last words I ever heard Amanda say.”

“Did the other person ever speak while your phone line was open?”

“He didn’t speak, Ms. Cooper. He just laughed. Amanda screamed one more time and the man just laughed.”

I paused, letting the jury absorb the impact of the image Kate Meade had just re-created. “Was there anything distinctive about the laugh? Anything that you recognized or can describe to us, Mrs. Meade?”

“I remember he had a deep, gruff voice. He sounded like a madman, like he was enjoying the fact that he was torturing poor Amanda,” she said, again pressing the handkerchief to her eyes. “I could still hear her screaming-more muffled at the end. And then the phone line went dead.”