Shadow of Power

16

I am told that the phenomenon on the surface of the leather portfolio is sometimes called “a shadow.” It is similar to what often happens in structural fires where a book, a sheaf of paper, or some other object covers the surface of, say, a wooden table. If the table isn’t destroyed by the flames, its surface will be smoked or charred, except for areas covered by the object. There, the surface will present the precise outline of the item resting on it at the time of the fire.

The difference here is that we’re dealing not with flames but rather with the fine mist of blood cast across the room by the repeated blows of the hammer as Scarborough was beaten to death.

Harry and I have measured the rectangular shadow on the leather portfolio. The only edges that are sharply defined are the bottom-the edge closest to Scarborough’s chair, the edge that caught Harry’s eye-and the shorter right edge of the rectangle. Because of the angled trajectory of the blood, the other two edges were provided a kind of small defilade by the object resting on top of the portfolio, so that the shadow in these areas is less sharply defined. Along the bottom, the sharper and more defined edge, if you look closely, you can see a slight smear of blood. This was probably made when the killer lifted the item from the leather.

Still, when we measure the rectangle, Harry and I come to the same conclusion. The shadow on the leather matches the size of an ordinary business envelope, or perhaps letter-size sheets of paper folded in thirds, in the manner of a letter, the contents you might stuff into a business envelope. To say that this has inspired us is an understatement.

From everything we know, the information from Richard Bonguard, Scarborough’s literary agent, and Trisha Scott, the former Supreme Court clerk who lived with the victim, Scarborough possessed only a copy of the Jefferson Letter. While the original was probably larger, it is likely that a facsimile made on a modern photocopy machine might well have been reduced down to a more convenient size, eight and a half by eleven inches, modern letter-size paper, the size of the rectangle on Scarborough’s leather portfolio.

We are done for the day, finished in court. Harry and I are milling around in the office after hours, collecting our messages and trying to get a grip on what may happen tomorrow. Harry comes into my office.

“News from Herman,” he says. Herman is back in D.C. trying to chase down or get a lead on the whereabouts of Arthur Ginnis.

Harry is holding a telephone slip stapled to a page of typed notes, information I assume Herman dictated over the phone to one of the secretaries while we were in court.

“Has he found Ginnis?”

“No. Not yet.” Harry is reading as he settles into one of the two client chairs on the other side of my desk. He looks at the telephone slip. “It came in just after noon,” he says. “He has gotten the information from the investigators we hired back there, though.

“Interesting stuff,” says Harry, “but no surprises. What I expected. Aranda, full name Alberto Aranda, age thirty-two, Yale Law grad. It doesn’t say here, but I’m guessing Mr. Aranda would be at or near the top of his class,” says Harry.

“Why?”

“Because he was selected last year to become a Supreme Court clerk by Associate Justice Arthur Ginnis.” Harry looks up from the paper. “I told you so.”

What Harry means is that the e-mail from the Court to Scarborough telling him to take his inquiries away from the Court’s official e-mail domain to a numbered snail-mail box was not dealt out by some obscure tech guarding the Court’s electronic access points.

“The mailbox, the box number sent to Scarborough in the e-mail for the pursuit of private business. What we thought,” says Harry. “An address of convenience. Says here it’s one of those private parcel-and-post places that small businesses use. The box number is registered-oh, this is interesting,” says Harry, “-to ‘A. Aranda.’” He looks up again.

“So it’s not registered in Ginnis’s name?” I say.

Harry shakes his head. “Get the sense we’re dealing with a very careful man here? Now here’s something else.”

“What’s that?”

“One of the investigators Herman hired was able to glance into the postal box through the little glass window in the front. He told Herman it looked like there were a couple of items inside, but he could only read the one on top. It was addressed to Aranda.”

“Well, he owns the box,” I say. “I think we need to talk to Mr. Aranda.”

“It had a funny stamp on it.”

“What had a funny stamp on it?”

“The item in the postal box the investigator was reading,” says Harry. “According to the note, the stamp was something foreign, overseas. He couldn’t make out the entire return address, but he said the street name was very long and appeared to be more than one word. The investigator told Herman that it looked like the address was written in German.”

We regard each other with quizzical expressions.

Harry reads on. “The street named ended in the word ‘straat.’ But the man did get the country-‘Curaçao.’ Where the hell is Curaçao?” says Harry.

As he’s saying the word, I am already turning in my chair to the computer behind me. I do a Google search on the name. Harry spells it out. What pops up at the top of the screen are three small thumbnail photos, pictures of two small maps on the right and the left, what looks like the shape of the same island in each. In the center is a picture of a sugar-white sand beach lapped by azure waters, a woman in a bikini lying with her lover at the ocean’s edge.

I can see enough on the site lines below the pictures to pick out the word “Caribbean.” I tell Harry.

“Trisha Scott told me that according to the Court staff she talked to, Ginnis was down in the Caribbean.”

By now Harry is out of the chair, leaning over my shoulder looking at the center thumbnail photo, the picture of the beach and the bikini. “Yeah. Recovering from surgery, as I recall,” he says.

I open the first site on the page and try to read. It’s in Spanish. I try the second site, Wikipedia.

A few lines in, I have one answer. “That explains the street address,” I say.

“What does?” asks Harry.

“It wasn’t German. It was Dutch. It’s part of the old Dutch West Indies, the ABC islands-Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.”

“I’ve heard of Aruba,” says Harry. “Vacation island.”

“Yeah, and a young American girl disappeared down there a while back. It was all over the news.”

“That’s right.”

I have opened up a larger map. Harry is still looking over my shoulder.

“What the hell?” he says. “Is that it?”

I nod.

“That’s as far away as you can get and still be on an island,” says Harry.

He’s right. Curaçao is just off the coast of Venezuela, the absolute tail end of the Antilles.

Next morning, early court call, neither Harry nor I have time to be looking at maps. Tuchio is beginning his run for the finish, bringing out the big guns.

He starts with his fingerprint expert. For the better part of a day, using charts, magnified photographs of the full set of Carl’s fingerprints taken at the time he was booked after his arrest, and comparing them to the partial prints lifted from the entry-hall floor of Scarborough’s hotel room, the witness explains the art of fingerprint identification to the jury.

He tells them that based on studies of the millions upon millions of fingerprints classified over the last nearly one hundred years, no two sets of prints from different individuals have ever been found to be identical. In addition to being unique, they are immutable. Except in the event of physical injury, fingerprint patterns do not change over a person’s lifetime.

The witness explains that comparison between known fingerprints taken from a known individual and those found at a crime scene turn on the analysis of ridge characteristics, known as minutiae, as well as the location and proximity of these characteristics one to another.

The testimony, questions and answers, drones on for hours. Tuchio risks putting the jury to sleep with evidence of what everyone in the courtroom already knows to be fact: The fingerprints at the murder scene belong to Carl.

Asked how the small pinkie print landed on the handle of the hammer, the witness testifies that based upon photographs taken by police of the hammer’s location on the floor, it appeared that the fingerprint in question was made at the same time as the other prints on the floor. According to the testimony, the defendant’s contact with the handle caused it to move several inches away, accounting for the later gap between the print of the third finger of Carl’s right hand on the floor and the fourth finger, the pinkie print on the handle. Nonetheless, the fingerprint in question, the one on the hammer’s handle, is sufficiently clear to identify it conclusively as belonging to the defendant.

Tuchio turns the witness over to me. I pass on him without a single question. It is, after all, exactly what Carl told the police when they questioned him, the same story he told Harry and me the first time we met him.

The judge looks up at the clock on the wall. It’s approaching four. Friday afternoon, and Quinn decides that’s it for the week. He cuts some slack and allows the jury to go home early. Monday will be a big day, the intimate details of death. The state is scheduled to bring on its medical examiner.

On the way to the parking lot, Harry and I shake the last two reporters about two blocks out. By now they know we’re not going to say anything, so they take a few file shots of our backsides and retreat toward the courthouse.

Harry is holding a note delivered to us in court by one of our secretaries. It’s an e-mail from Herman back in D.C. While we don’t have a street or an address, we are now pretty sure of the general whereabouts of Arthur Ginnis.

I have sent three successive letters and left numerous telephone messages for Ginnis during the time since my meeting with Trisha Scott in Washington. I offered to converse by phone, or if he wished I would travel once more to Washington at the justice’s convenience. I told him that I was representing the defendant in the murder of Terry Scarborough and that I would appreciate it if I could speak to him just briefly. To date I have received no reply.

When Herman arrived in D.C., he made a polite phone call, got through to a clerk in Ginnis’s office, told the woman what it was about-an ongoing criminal trial in California, a capital case, an urgent matter-and requested a brief meeting with the justice. After some confusion in which the clerk thought the request involved a case on appeal and nearly hung up, she finally got it straight. Not that it mattered. Herman was told that Ginnis was on medical leave from the Court and that if Herman had a request, he should reduce it to writing and mail it in. When Herman asked for the address, he was given not the mail drop rented by Aranda but the name and address of another clerk at the Court.

Herman’s helpers, the PI’s he hired in D.C., got the nugget. One of them was sent by Herman to check Ginnis’s house in Chevy Chase. He rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. He talked to a few of the neighbors. One of them, a woman, a neighbor next door, told him that Maggie and Art went where they always went when they needed a rest, down to the islands. She said she’d gotten a postcard from them and that Arthur was coming along well, recovering from his surgery, though they were not quite ready to return home yet.

The investigator thought about asking to see the postcard, but he figured the woman might feel that this was a little too intrusive. She might go back into her house and close the door. So he simply asked, “What island?”

Ask for the time and some people will tell you how to build a clock. She explained that their old house, the one the Ginnises owned on St. Croix, a really cute little place, stone and old timbers, right on the beach-she knew this because she and her husband had been there two years ago for a short visit-was damaged in a hurricane last year. Since their place was under repair, the neighbor told the investigator, Maggie and Art had rented a place, on the island of Curaçao.

Harry and I come to the corner where we part company. We stop for a moment to talk.

“Are you going back to the office?” I ask.

He nods grimly. Harry has yet to comb through all the items Tuchio dropped on us that first day of trial. The paralegals have prioritized them the best they can, and Harry is just now finally approaching the bottom of the pile.

It seems that lately Harry and I are doing an increasing amount of our conferencing out on the street, in the halls at the courthouse, on the run, or on the phone late at night. Harry is growing bags under his eyes. I’m afraid to look in a mirror.

The opening of our case in chief is still over the horizon. If I had to guess, I would say a week, maybe ten days off. The few witnesses we have lined up are no problem. They’re either experts who are being paid or cooperative local witnesses who’ve agreed to testify and are already under subpoena.

But even with this, what we have lined up, the evidence at hand, our case in total would have to be drawn out to last much beyond two days. You can only go so many rounds beating up Detrick before the judge rings the bell. By the time we get started, Tuchio will have gathered with his forensics wizards so that he can skate on ice around the inconsistencies in his own case. The absence of little bloody prints on the tray and tablecloth will be tucked neatly into some variation on the theme of his theory, how Carl did the deed. This, along with what we already know based on discovery-that the state’s most damaging evidence is yet to come-has me deeply concerned.

“If we’re to have any kind of a case,” I tell Harry, “we need a centerpiece.”

Harry knows what I’m talking about. Some lawyers call it “the golden idol.”

In every case you look for something to fix the attention of jurors. If they can’t actually see it or touch it, they must, at a minimum, be able to hear about it. It can be virtually anything-another possible perpetrator, a business dealing that offers the prospect of an alternative motive to the one your client had, the hint of a love tryst out on the margins along with the rumor that it went bad. It helps if you can believe in this, though it is not entirely essential. Depending on the candlepower and its mesmerizing qualities, this, the golden idol, is used to dazzle the jury, while the defense flies figure eights over the box, dusting them with the magic powder of reasonable doubt.

Harry and I stand on the corner and talk, toting heavy briefcases that hit us about the knees every few seconds like the gongs in cathedral bells. We dance all around it without actually saying the words: “the letter.”

Given what we know-the information from Bonguard and Trisha Scott, the e-mails from Scarborough to Ginnis requesting the “original,” and the rectangular shadow in leather, the item missing from the scene-you might think that the gods had reached down to give us precisely what we needed, an idol of platinum with a nuclear-powered laser light. But there is a problem.

Without hard evidence, someone who actually saw the Jefferson Letter or the copy in Scarborough’s possession and who can testify to its existence, or better yet its contents and potential value, we have nothing.

Everything-the conversations with Bonguard, the agent, and Trisha Scott, both of whom claim they never saw the letter, as well as the e-mail missives between Scarborough and Ginnis’s office-it’s all hearsay. In a word, all inadmissible. As far as the law is concerned, without a solid evidentiary foundation, the Jefferson Letter becomes the product of pure speculation. Bottom line, we cannot mention it in court, not in the presence of the jury.

“So what we do have,” says Harry, “is a pregnant question. We have a shadow in blood on a leather portfolio and a concession from one of Tuchio’s witnesses that something is missing from the crime scene. It’s a start,” says Harry. “At least we have their attention. You can bet that the jury is wondering what the item was.”

“Yes, but without more we can’t connect the dots for them, and if there’s anything worse than no play at all, it’s one that has no second act. If the jury goes in to deliberate and we haven’t told them what that item was that’s now missing, they’re going to wonder why. Of course, we know the answer: because the court wouldn’t allow us to tell them. But they don’t know that.”

“So other than sign language, how do we give them the answer?” says Harry.

“As far as we know, there are only four possible sources for information to lay a foundation for the letter.”

“Ginnis, Bonguard, Scott…and who’s the fourth?” says Harry.

“Scarborough’s editor. I can’t remember his name.”

“James Aubrey.” Harry’s magnetic brain. “Herman talked to Aubrey and got the same business you did from Bonguard and Scott. He heard about the letter, but he never saw it. Strange how everybody went blind whenever the letter came out,” says Harry.

“It’s human nature,” I tell him. “If one of the goals in life is to stay free of entanglements with the law, it is often best to be blind,” I tell him.

“So you think they’re lying?”

“I can tell you that Trisha Scott didn’t want to testify.”

“And she lied about Jefferson’s letter,” says Harry. “Remember? First she told you she knew nothing about it. Then she recanted over dinner later and told you another lie.”

Harry’s right. According to Scott, Ginnis couldn’t be involved, because he hated Scarborough. Not enough to kill him, mind you, but on a professional level. The only problem is that all this ill will did not run deep enough to prevent the two men from exchanging e-mails, even if Ginnis refrained from pushing the “send” key on the computer with his own finger.

“Maybe it’s not a question of who lied as much as who told the biggest lie. The whopper,” I tell him.

Harry puts his briefcase down on the sidewalk and looks at me, a question mark.

“Bonguard.”

You would have to be Snow White to buy into the fable that the agent had tried to run past Sarah and me in New York.

“Claimed he knew nothing about the particulars of a letter that according to his own words on Leno’s show would have been the basis of another zillion-dollar book, if only the golden author hadn’t been killed.”

“I’ve been thinking about him since we saw the tape.” Harry smiles.

“On top of that, Bonguard was superglued to his client on a book tour that rivaled Sherman’s March to the Sea. This included the burning of Atlanta in miniature, according to the newspapers,” I tell him, “with torched cars, broken windows, and flaming trash cans through…what? Six states and thirteen cities? The fact that he knew about the letter, enough to attribute its origins to Jefferson, and given what he told Leno, has to make you wonder-if he didn’t know what was in it, he must have been burning with curiosity.”

“You know, the thought has crossed my mind,” says Harry, “that Bonguard wouldn’t look bad dressed up in killer clothes.”

What Harry means is in a plastic raincoat and brandishing a hammer.

“If we can’t find the letter or some way to talk about it, to get it into evidence,” says Harry, “Bonguard gets my vote for runner-up in the ‘golden idol’ awards.”

“Except why would Bonguard kill the client who was filling his coffers?”

“Maybe the letter was worth more than his fifteen percent on book sales,” says Harry.

“Even if it was a copy?”

“Okay, I’m still working it out,” says Harry, “but think about it. If the shadow on the leather portfolio means anything, it means that the Jefferson Letter was in Scarborough’s possession at the same time Bonguard was bird-dogging him out on the tour. To believe that the agent never saw it when he must have been in the same room with it on countless occasions is to believe in the tooth fairy.”

Harry has a point. Aside from Scarborough, Bonguard would have had the best access to the letter.

He reaches down, picks up his briefcase, and starts shuffling toward the garage. “What was it Scarborough called it? Then I gotta run,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“The letter. According to Scott, he had a name for it.”

“You mean the ‘infamous Jefferson Letter’?”

“Yeah. Damn,” says Harry. He’s smiling. “Forget Bonguard. Anything with a name like that, we gotta find a way to get it in. Almost begs you to fly it in front of the jury, just out of reach, keep ’em wondering what’s in it,” he says.

My partner is starting to believe in paper dragons.

“That’s a dangerous trip,” I tell him, “seeing as we don’t know what’s in it. It could be a story with no punch line.”

“You gotta have faith.” Harry is moving away from me toward the garage. “Trust me, we want to fly ‘infamous Jefferson.’ I’m betting one or more of them-Bonguard, Scott, or Aubrey-saw the copy and knows what’s in it. There’s our foundation. Of course, it’s just a guess.”

“Don’t stay in the office too late,” I tell him. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

Just when he gets to the door, he stops and turns.

“One thing is certain, though,” he says. He’s no longer smiling. The look on Harry’s face is stone sober. “Scarborough’s e-mails. If we’re tracking, if those mean what we think they do, then Ginnis has the McCoy, the real item, the original letter.”