The Judgment

Twenty-five

The sound of his name still echoing in the hushed stillness of the crowded courtroom, Morris Bingham stepped quickly to the bench. Always pleasant, always polite, he glanced at me, and then at Cassandra Loescher. Neither the defense nor the prosecution had anything to bring before the court. A brief nod told his clerk she could bring in the jury.

While we waited, I turned to Danny and admired the way he looked, all dressed up in a dark blue suit and tie. “You’re looking very sharp today, Danny,” I assured him.

He sat with his shoulders hunched forward and his hands plunged between his legs. He looked at me with a bashful smile and took a deep breath. “Thank you,” he said, letting it out.

Under the watchful gaze of several hundred strangers, the jury came in, wearing solemn faces and a dignified air, twelve normal people who seemed to have no hesitation about deciding whether someone else would live or die. Some of them stood waiting while the others squeezed past them to get to their places in the jury box. I looked down at the table and ran the palm of my hand over the smooth leather surface of the attache case Jennifer had given me.

“It’s very nice,” said a voice on my right. “It looks brand-new,”

Cassandra Loescher said. She leaned closer. “I’ll bet I know who got it for you.”

The jury was seated and Bingham greeted them by reminding them where we had left off and what was coming next.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday, we finished with the opening statements. Let me remind you again that what the attorneys say in their opening statements is not evidence of anything. The only evidence you are to consider is evidence introduced by the testimony of witnesses. This morning, the prosecution will begin its case by calling its first witness. Ms. Loescher, who is the prosecutor in this case, will examine each witness she calls by asking that witness specific questions. This is called direct examination. When she has finished asking questions of her witness, Mr. Antonelli, the attorney for the defense, may, if he wishes, ask questions of his own. This is called cross-examination.

At the end of the prosecution’s case, the defense will have an opportunity to call witnesses of its own. The defense will then ask questions first and the prosecution will be allowed to cross-examine.”

Pausing, he tilted his smallish round head slightly to the side in the attitude of someone about to impart something of particular importance.

“There will be a time-and you witnessed several occasions during opening statements-when an objection will be made either to a question that is asked or an answer that is given. These objections raise issues of law, issues which it is my responsibility to decide. Sometimes you will hear me sustain an objection; sometimes you will hear me overrule an objection. You should not assume that these rulings mean that I have in any way formed an opinion about the merits of this case one way or the other. You certainly must not assume that I have any feelings either of an-imosity or partiality toward either of the lawyers. Just because I disagree with an argument made by one lawyer or the other does not mean that I think he or she has the weaker case.”

He let them consider the meaning of what he had said while he arranged some papers he had brought with him. “Ms. Loescher,”

he asked, looking up, “is the prosecution ready to begin?”

She was wearing a blue print dress. Her hair was pulled up from behind her neck and stacked on top of her head. “Yes, your honor,” she said as she rose straight up from her chair.

“You may call your first witness.”

She turned her head toward the door at the back of the courtroom. “The prosecution calls Sharon Arnold.”

In her early thirties, with long black hair and dark, flirtatious eyes, the first witness had worked as Quincy Griswald’s judicial assistant for a little over four years. She had found his body in the parking structure, slumped against his car.

“How did you happen to be in the parking structure at that particular time?” Loescher asked in a calm, steady voice.

One leg crossed over the other, Sharon Arnold waited until Loescher’s eyes left the jury and came around to her. “I didn’t have my car that day. I left it at the dealer’s that morning for servicing. Judge Griswald was giving me a ride.”

With her hand on the railing of the jury box, Loescher tried to fill in the gap. “Were you going to meet him at his car?”

The question was met with a blank look. Then, when she realized what she had left out, she went on as if she had not forgotten a thing. “We left the office together, but when we reached the door to the outside, he asked me if I’d go back and get something he wanted to work on that night at home.”

Quincy Griswald had not been the only judge to depend on his clerk to keep track of where everything was and to make certain everything was done on time. The clerks ran the courthouse, and after enough years doing it some of them knew more about the law than did the judges for whom they worked. It made sense that Griswald would ask her to go back for the court file he wanted: He would not have known where to look had he gone himself.

Loescher remained next to the jury box, at the end opposite the witness stand. Each time she asked a question, the faces of the jury turned toward her, and then, when she was finished, swung back to watch as Sharon Arnold gave her answer.

“And so you went back to the office to get the court file he had asked for. Approximately how long did it take from the time you left him at the doorway until you found him?”

She was used to deciding things quickly. “Just a few minutes,”

she answered immediately.

Without moving any closer to the witness, Loescher stepped away from the jury box until she was standing directly in front of her. “Please,” she cautioned, “take your time. Try to be as precise as you can. When you say ‘a few minutes,’ how many minutes do you mean?”

While she worked for Quincy Griswald, Sharon Arnold had been in court as often as the judge, sitting below him on the opposite side of the bench from the witness stand, a model of administrative efficiency. She was not used to explaining herself to anyone, and she could not quite hide her annoyance.

“Well, I don’t know-five minutes, ten minutes-something like that.”

Loescher took two steps closer, raised her head, and gave the witness a glance that was like a warning shot across the bow. This was not Griswald’s courtroom and she was a witness in a murder case, not a pampered judicial assistant who could make a lawyer’s life miserable anytime she chose to do so.

“Please consider your answer carefully,” she said, taking another step toward her. “Would you say it was closer to five minutes or ten?”

Arnold recrossed her legs and began to fidget with her hands.

She sucked in the sides of her cheeks and struck a pensive pose.

“I had to go all the way back down the hallway to the elevator. I remember it took a long time to get there. Then the office door was locked of course, and I had to unlock that. The folder was in the file drawer of the judge’s desk. Then I locked the door and… I suppose it must have been closer to ten minutes before I got to the garage and found him, lying there, all that blood all over him…”

Now in control, Loescher moved back to her preferred position next to the jury and led her witness through the story she wanted her to tell. She had found Quincy Griswald bathed in blood and knew as soon as she saw him that he was dead. She dropped the file she had been sent back to get and ran screaming into the courthouse. Two uniformed security officers followed her back to the garage and the body she had been the first to find.

I was far more interested in what she had not seen than in what she had.

“Have you ever seen this man before?” I asked as soon as it was my turn to examine the witness. Smiling at Sharon Arnold, I stood behind Danny, my hand on his shoulder.

“No, I don’t think so.”

My hand fell away from his shoulder and I moved slowly to the front of the counsel table. Gripping the edge behind me, I leaned back against it, one foot crossed over the other.

“You didn’t see him in the garage when you first found Judge Griswald?” I asked casually.

“No.”

“You didn’t see him anywhere in the garage when you went back there with the two officers?”

“No.”

“You didn’t see him anywhere in the courthouse, lurking around, when you were first leaving with Judge Griswald?”

“No.”

Folding my arms across my chest, I stared down at my shoes.

“You’ve never seen him before today, have you?” I asked, glancing at her from under my brow.

“No, I don’t think so.”

I lifted my head higher. “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted Judge Griswald dead?”

It was automatic, the other side of the insistence that we never speak ill of the dead: the blind assurance that despite the fact that someone killed them, no one could possibly have wanted it to happen.

“No, of course not.”

I raised my eyebrows, then lowered my head and walked the few steps to the jury box.

“You’re aware, are you not,” I asked, turning suddenly toward her, “that a lot of people-including Quincy Griswald-wanted Calvin Jeffries dead?”

“Your honor!” Loescher shouted as she sprang from her chair.

I held up my hand before Bingham could open his mouth. “I’ll rephrase the question. You worked very closely with Judge Griswald, didn’t you?” I held her eyes in mine and refused to let go.

“Yes, I did, for four years.”

“And in the course of that time-working that close together-

you came to know quite a lot about him, didn’t you?”

She did not hesitate. “Yes.”

“And you knew quite a lot about the way he felt about other people, including other judges, didn’t you?”

Loescher was still on her feet, watching intently. Bingham had both arms on the bench, peering down at the witness.

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t like Calvin Jeffries, did he? He didn’t like him one bit, did he?”

“Your honor?” Loescher insisted.

His eyes still on the witness, Bingham held up his hand. “No, I’ll allow it.”

“No, he didn’t like him.” I started to ask the next question, but she was not finished with her answer. “I think he was a little afraid of him, to tell you the truth.”

“Afraid of him? In what way?”

“Intimidated might be a better way to put it. Judge Jeffries seemed to have that effect on a lot of people.”

“So he wasn’t sorry, shall we say, when Calvin Jeffries was murdered?”

“Oh, I didn’t say that,” she replied, quick to correct the impression she was afraid she might have left.

“He wasn’t grief-stricken when Calvin Jeffries was dead?”

She did not want to answer and was content to let her silence speak for itself.

Cassandra Loescher had sat down. She tapped the erasure end of a pencil while she watched, ready to object again.

“You worked for Judge Griswald a little more than four years, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So you weren’t with him twelve years ago when he handled a criminal case in which the defendant was Elliott Winston, were you?”

“Your honor-relevance?” Loescher inquired, turning up her hands.

“It’s relevant to the defense’s theory of the case, your honor,”

I said, as if that were any answer at all.

“And beyond the question of relevance, your honor,” Loescher went on, “it’s beyond the scope of direct examination.”

Bingham looked at me. “Your honor, the prosecution established the employment connection between the witness and the victim. I’m simply exploring the scope of the relationship.”

“Then please do it as quickly as possible and then move on to something else.”

“During the time you did work for him,” I asked her, “did you ever hear him mention the name Elliott Winston?”

She thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t recall that he did.”

“You’re sure?”

“Was he the one who Judge Jeffries’s wife was married to?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

A knowing smile crept over her mouth. “He did say something once, but not about him, not directly, that is. He was angry with Judge Jeffries about something. I don’t know what. And he said he wondered if Jeffries’s wife would have married him if she’d known he was as crazy as her first husband was. That’s when I think he used that name-Elliott Winston.”

“So he thought Elliott Winston was crazy?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I assumed it was just a figure of speech.”

I had no more questions, and Cassandra Loescher had nothing she wanted to ask on redirect. Sharon Arnold was excused and the prosecution called its next witness, one of the security guards who had gone with her back to where Griswald’s body had first been discovered. Short and to the point, his testimony added little to what had already been said. Certain he was dead, but afraid to touch the body, Arnold had left it to the guard to check for a pulse. The second guard followed the first and except to ask them each whether they had seen the defendant at the scene, I did not bother to cross-examine either one of them. Loescher ended the first day of testimony by calling the police photographer who had taken pictures of the body. Over my objection, the photos were entered into evidence and the jury was shown the graphic obscenities of a violent death.

Quincy Griswald, whose eyes had so often filled with anger, and whose mouth had so often been twisted with rage, had a look on his face of puzzled innocence, as if he could not understand why anyone would want to bring him harm. I looked at that picture a long time before I gave it back to the clerk. All the years that had left their mark on his deep-lined features seemed at the moment of death to have faded away, and all the disappointments of his life vanished with them. He looked almost young again.

The next morning, Loescher called the coroner, who described the cause of death, and then called Detective Kevin Crowley, who had been in charge of the investigation. I was becoming more and more impressed with the way Loescher did her job.

Each witness was called in a perfectly calculated, completely logical sequence, their testimony part of a story told according to a strict chronology. She would ask the same question three different ways if it was the only way to make the details clear. And she wanted more than to describe it to the jurors. She wanted them to know what it was like to discover someone you knew stabbed to death; she wanted them to know what it was like for the victim in that instant when he knew he was about to die.

Wearing a dark brown dress and flat shoes, she stood in front of the jury, patient and attentive, listening as Detective Crowley reported how the police had apprehended the suspected killer.

“He had the knife in his hand when you found him?”

Short and stocky, with small quick-moving eyes, Crowley was a little too eager to answer. “Yes,” he said before she had quite finished.

“I’m sorry,” she said without any apparent irritation. “What was your answer?”

This time he waited. “Yes.”

“What did you do with the knife after you removed it from the defendant’s possession?”

“I put it inside a plastic bag, sealed it, and tagged it.”

Loescher had gone to the table in front of the clerk, where she picked up a large clear plastic bag containing a kitchen knife with a black wooden handle and a six-inch blade. She handed it to the witness.

“Is this the bag?”

“Yes.”

“And is that the tag you mentioned?”

He held it up and examined it closely. “Yes, that’s my mark.”

“What did you do with it then?”

“I placed it in the evidence room at police headquarters and then had it sent to the police crime lab.”

“And what was the reason it was sent to the crime lab?”

“To examine it for fingerprints and to have it examined for DNA evidence.”

“We’ll have testimony later about the fingerprints that were found on the weapon as well as the results of the DNA testing,”

Loescher remarked as she returned to her place next to the jury box. “But let me ask you, Detective Crowley, what further steps were taken in the investigation after you learned whose fingerprints were on the handle and whose blood was on the blade?”

He glanced at the plastic bag and the knife inside it. “We closed the investigation,” he said, looking up.

Loescher cast a meaningful glance at the jury, and then, turning back to the witness, said, “Thank you, Detective Crowley. No further questions.”

“When you began the investigation,” I asked as I rose from my chair at the start of cross-examination, “were you not struck by the similarities between the murder of Quincy Griswald and the murder of Calvin Jeffries?”

“I wasn’t involved in the Jeffries investigation.”

I stared hard at him. “That wasn’t my question, detective. And, by the way,” I added almost as an aside, “if you weren’t involved in that investigation, you were the only police officer in the state who wasn’t. Let me repeat: When you began this investigation weren’t you struck by the similarities between the two murders?”

“There were some similarities,” he allowed. He sat forward, spread his legs, and rested his hands on his knees. As I began to pace back and forth in front of the counsel table, he followed me with his eyes.

“They were both circuit court judges, correct?”

“Yes.”

“They were both killed near their cars in the structure where they both parked?”

“Yes.”

“They were both stabbed to death?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me, Detective Crowley, as the lead investigator in this case, what investigation did the police make into the possible connection between the two murders? Let me be even more specific.” I stopped pacing and raised my head. “What effort was made to determine whether there was anyone-perhaps someone they had both sentenced to prison-who might have had a motive to want both of them dead?”

“The Jeffries case had already been solved. There was no connection. There could not have been.”

“In other words,” I asked impatiently, “you couldn’t conduct an investigation into that possibility because you assumed it didn’t exist?”

“Objection,” Loescher interjected before he could answer.

“That’s an assertion, not a question.”

Bingham considered it. “Perhaps you could rephrase the question, Mr. Antonelli.”

“You testified a moment ago that you weren’t involved in the Jeffries investigation, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So your knowledge of it-your knowledge of what really happened-is at best secondhand, correct?”

“I suppose,” he replied, watching me with sullen eyes.

I turned until I was facing the jury and the witness was on my right. “There’s another similarity, isn’t there? In both cases the police were told where to find the person who supposedly committed the crime. Isn’t that true, Detective Crowley?”

“We were given information from an outside source-yes.”

I kept looking at the jury. A thin smile flashed across my mouth.

” ‘An outside source.’ You mean an anonymous phone call, don’t you, Detective Crowley?”

“Yes, we received a call.”

“An anonymous call,” I said as I turned to face him. “An anonymous call in which the caller in both instances sought to disguise his voice, isn’t that true?”

He tried to turn it back on me. “The caller wanted to remain anonymous.”

I ignored it. “And don’t you think it a little strange that both times-in these two cases in which you assume there was no connection between the murders-the police were told they could find the killer in the very same place, a homeless camp under the Morrison Street Bridge?”

He jumped at it. “You forget: The killer in the first case confessed and then killed himself. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the second case, could he?”

With a bored expression, I shook my head and dismissed it with a cursory wave of my hand. “Move to strike, your honor.

The answer is nonresponsive. Besides that,” I added with a glance at Loescher, “it’s nothing but hearsay.”

Bingham instructed the jury to pretend they had never heard what they were not very likely to forget. With no more questions to ask, I sat down and waited for Loescher to call the next witness for the prosecution.

With a drooping gray mustache and disheveled gray hair, Rudolph Blensley looked more like an aging professor of mathematics than he did a police detective. Loescher first established his credentials as a fingerprint expert and then asked him whose fingerprints he had found on the knife that had been taken from the defendant.

“The only fingerprints found on the weapon,” he replied,

“matched the fingerprints of the defendant, John Smith.”

Blensley was suffering from a cold, and his words came out muffled and garbled. When Loescher sat down, he removed a large white handkerchief from his side coat pocket and blew his nose. He put the handkerchief in his pocket and with the back of his hand tried to wipe his red, runny eyes.

“Would you like some water?” I asked. We had been in court together before, and he had always answered my questions in the same straightforward manner he answered those asked by the prosecution. “Summer colds are the worst,” I remarked while he took a drink.

When he was finished, he settled back in the witness chair and waited.

“The fingerprints you found belong to the defendant, known as John Smith, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know, by the way, whether there were any fingerprints on file for John Smith, or were you given them by the police after they had taken him into custody?”

He saw where I was going. “You mean, did we take prints from the knife and then run them to find out who they belonged to, or did we compare them to the ones we had for the defendant?

We compared them to the set we were given-the ones that belong to the defendant.”

“I see. In other words, this was not an investigation in which you used the fingerprints taken from a weapon to find out who among all the millions of people out there who have their fingerprints on file might have held the knife in their hand and used it as a murder weapon?”

“That’s correct,” he said, reaching for his handkerchief.

I waited while he blew his nose and when he finished asked him if he wanted more water.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“If you had not been given a set of his fingerprints,” I asked, pointing at the defendant, “would you have been able to iden-tify him as the person whose prints were on the knife?”

He coughed into his hand. “No,” he said finally. “There are no prints of his on file.”

“Isn’t it true, Detective Blensley, that everyone arrested for a crime-even a misdemeanor-has their fingerprints taken?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“And those fingerprints are kept on file?”

“Yes.”

“So what you’re saying is that the defendant in this case has never before-not once-been arrested for a crime, any crime, isn’t that right?”

He lifted his arms and turned up his palms. “All I can say is what I said before: His fingerprints weren’t on file.”

I went back to the counsel table and stood next to my chair.

“Your honor, may the witness please be shown state’s exhibit number 106?”

The clerk handed the detective the clear plastic bag containing the knife.

“I won’t ask you to take it out and test it, but just looking at it, does the blade seem to have been filed sharp? In other words, does it have an edge on it?”

“No, it doesn’t have an edge.”

“In fact, wouldn’t you say it appears rather dull?”

He nodded, and waited.

“Of course even a dull knife can be used to stab someone, can’t it?”

He nodded again, and I had to remind him to answer out loud.

“Yes.”

“Now, if you would, look at the handle. Does it look to you-

the way it looked to me-worn, faded, a knife that has been used a lot?”

“Yes, I’d say so.”

“In other words, from everything you observe, you would have to say, wouldn’t you, that this is a rather old knife-certainly not a new one?”

“I would agree with that,” he said, sniffing into his handkerchief.

“Probably used by lots of different people from the time it was first sold, wouldn’t you think?”

“Yes, I would imagine.”

“And yet, if I heard you right, the only fingerprints you found on the knife belonged to the defendant. All those people-dozens, perhaps hundreds-used this knife and you only found one person’s prints. Doesn’t that suggest something to you, Detective Blensley?”

He hesitated, not certain what I meant. I drew myself up, and with a sense of urgency in my voice, asked, “Doesn’t it suggest to you that whoever had that knife before it came into the possession of the defendant must have wiped it clean?”

He started to answer, but I cut him off. “Doesn’t it suggest to you that whoever had the knife before didn’t want anyone to know? And why do you think whoever that was wouldn’t want anyone to know that he had held that knife-that knife that the prosecution tells us was used to murder Quincy Griswald-unless it was because he was the one who murdered him?”

Loescher was on her feet, shouting her objection. “Nothing further, your honor,” I said as I started to sit down.

I was back on my feet before I had touched the chair. “There is one more thing, your honor.”

Loescher looked at me, her mouth still open. Bingham looked at me, his mouth still shut.

“Detective Blensley, the fingerprints you found-the fingerprints that belong to the defendant-can you tell us if they were put there before Quincy Griswald was murdered?”

He shook his head. “No, there is no way to know that.”

“In other words, they could just as easily have been put there sometime after Quincy Griswald was murdered, correct?”

“Yes, that’s true.”