The Privilege, page 1
THE
PRIVILEGE
D.W. Buffa
The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by D.W. Buffa
Cover and jacket design by 2Faced Design
ISBN 978-1-947993-97-6
eISBN: 978-1-951709-53-2
Library of Congress Control Number: available upon request
First hardcover edition June 2021 by Polis Books, LLC
44 Brookview Lane
Aberdeen, NJ 07747
www.PolisBooks.com
Chapter One
San Francisco has always been a place without rules, where nothing is forbidden and everything is allowed. People came from all over, drawn, in that marvelous phrase of Robert Louis Stevenson’s, by “all the winds of heaven’ to a place where they could live whatever life they chose to live. In the Gold Rush, when men got rich overnight it became the new Babylon where everything was for sale. In 1906, when the earthquake leveled the city, and fire destroyed the buildings still standing, people knelt in prayer, and then lined up at a table where Gianini, who founded the Bank of Italy, which later became the Bank of America, gave out money to anyone who wanted to help rebuild. In the l940s, when movie stars wanted to have a good time, the Southern Pacific railroad, whose owner lived in one of the mansions that dominated Nob Hill, started the Starlight Express to come up from Los Angeles on Friday afternoons and go back Sunday night, so Errol Flynn, among others, could go on a weekend drunk in the most wide-open town in the country, a place where the police, for a price, could always be counted on to look the other way. When the Second World War brought sailors back from the Pacific, a lot of them decided, from their first sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, never to leave.
In the 1960s and 1970s tourists, and not just tourists, lined up around the block to get into places like Big Al’s in North Beach where the drinks were watered and the sex acts were live, where a showgirl like Carol Doda could become famous for no other reason than her gigantic silicon breasts. It was a place where by the end of the twentieth century a straight couple could be asked to leave a gay bar because they had been caught kissing. It was the world gone crazy, and enjoying every minute of it; the only thing thought shocking the suggestion that anything in San Francisco could be shocking at all. Except when it was a murder trial, and everyone tried to pretend that infidelity was an unforgivable sin, and that it must have been the reason why Justin Friedrich had murdered his wife.
“Everyone knows him,” Albert Craven assured me. “That’s why everyone is so shocked - and so intrigued.”
‘Everyone’ meant the few hundred socially connected people who formed the city’s financial and cultural establishment. The number may have been even smaller; perhaps as few as a hundred, the names listed as contributors to every important charitable appeal.
“I don’t know him; I had never heard of him,” I remarked, smiling in advance at how in Craven’s mind it was my own fault if I did not know anyone. “You know everyone in San Francisco,” I remarked, before he could say it. “You know more about them than they do themselves,” I added. “So why would I want to spend my time with people when I could learn so much more about them from you?”
With a slight, understated grin, the kind that acknowledges, without pretension, as it were, the nature of his achievement, his total grasp of the essential elements of the social world in which he moved, he pulled his shirt cuffs into their proper place below the sleeves of his dark tailored suit.
“Justin Friedrich,” he explained, sitting pin stripe straight in the wingback chair in front of my desk, “had never been arrested, much less convicted, of a crime; any crime, even a minor traffic offense. It never would have occurred to him to break the law. He never had to. Everyone can talk all they want about equality, but Justin Friedrich knew only privilege. He attended only private schools, and when he finished prep school, he enrolled at Yale like his father and grandfather before him and graduated somewhere in the middle of his class. No one thought him unusually intelligent, certainly no one confused him with a serious scholar; but neither did anyone think he wouldn’t be a great success in life. He was interested in what others were interested in; reasonably good, but not more than that, in the sports like golf and tennis and sailing that occupy the time and attention of young men of wealthy families like his own. A solid, if not a brilliant student; good, but not exceptional, at the leisure time activities of the young and well-connected rich. Exactly what you would expect. His marriage to Allison Brewster, whose family was as much a part of the city’s establishment as his own, a marriage that, two years later, ended not in divorce but murder, seemed to follow the same, predictable path.”
“The same predictable path?”
Craven stared through the rain spattered window at the leaden gray sky. He was always more cheerful when the sun was out. The dark days of winter reminded him, I think, of how much closer he was to the end, than to the beginning, of the time he had left.
“Yes, exactly,” he replied, with a brief, apologetic smile as he came back to himself. “The marriage was a disaster. The ruling passion, the cause of the attraction, what brought them together, was not love or even physical desire, but money. Difficult to believe, in one sense; perfectly understandable, if not particularly admirable, in another. They had as much money as anyone, and a good deal more than most, but it was not how much they had, it was the comparison with what others had, where you ranked in the scale, that made the difference. It was all a question of what, or in this case, who, you looked up to. Together, almost everyone looked up to them. They lived in one of the most expensive buildings in the city, up on Russian Hill with a view of the bay and the Golden Gate and almost everything else worth seeing. Their apartment took up two whole floors. They kept a sailboat - a yacht by any other name - at the Yacht Club at the Marina. They had everything, and none of it was enough. They hadn’t liked each other very much when they married; they had come to hate each other by the time, just last week, Allison Friedrich was murdered, supposedly by her husband.”
“Supposedly? She’s found shot to death on their sailboat. He’s the only one there. They had been fighting earlier in the evening, hit her hard enough to knock her down. But you don’t think he did it?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Because you know him, and he’s not the kind of person who would…?”
“We’ve met, at various social events, but I only know him because I know the family. I don’t think he did it because it doesn’t make any sense. What reason could he have had to kill her?”
“There doesn’t have to be a reason. Anger, jealousy, rage - He had been drinking, gotten quite drunk, from what I’ve read.”
Pressing his lips tight together, Craven shook his head at his failure to explain adequately what he meant.
“They hated each other too much for that.”
“They hated each other too much…?”
“It was all about the money. What I said before: not how much they had, but whether, together, they had more than the other rich, privileged people who make up the only world they know or think important. They didn’t love each other, they didn’t get married to be with one another; they got married to be a famous couple, the center of other people’s attention. Allison Friedrich was probably having an affair six months into the marriage, if not before; Justin Friedrich was guilty of infidelity with who knows how many women. Neither of them cared what the other did. They lived their own, private, lives, while they performed in public the part of the wealthiest young couple in town. Does that sound like a marriage in which the husband kills the wife out of jealousy or rage?”
“It sounds like a marriage in which either one of them might kill the other out of disgust.”
Lifting an eyebrow, Craven granted the possibility.
“Disgust with themselves, you mean. Perhaps; but that would require a depth of feeling I’m not sure either of them ever had, or was ever capable of having.”
It was that remark that kept echoing in my mind when I first met Justin Friedrich to discuss whether I would take his case. He walked into my office, as relaxed and comfortable as if he had come to talk to the family lawyer about a minor change to the family trust. His manner, if slightly formal, was polite and impeccable. He reached across my desk to shake hands and looked me straight in the eye. With his brownish blonde hair and pale blue eyes, with his finely drawn features, it was not only easy, but almost inevitable, to imagine him leaning against a white railing fence on a polo field after he had finished playing for the day, a cold drink in his hand and a Porsche convertible a few short steps away. He was young and rich and good-looking, and as ignorant of what really happens when you are accused of murder as anyone I had ever met.
“I’m innocent, Mr Antonelli. I didn’t murder Allison. I don’t know who did.”
There are no second chances in a criminal trial. You ask a question and, whatever the answer, you don’t get to ask it again. If you are not ready to live with the decisions you make, if you are not prepared to act immediately on your own judgement, there are a lot of things you can do as a lawyer, but trial work is not one of them. Three short sentences and, without being able to give a reason for my decision, I knew I was going to take his case. It was only later that I came to realize that I had made a mistake , and that someone whose innocence I never doubted was going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Most murder trials are conducted in near empty courtrooms. A prosecutor and a lawyer for the defense go about their business under the guidance and direction of a black-robed judge, while twelve citizens of varying degrees of ability and intelligence listen and observe the witnesses called by each side, and if there happens to be someone sitting on the public benches chances are that it is a lawyer with a few minutes to spare before his scheduled appearance in another courtroom just down the hall. Most murder trials involve the poor, and the victim, and the accused, everyone involved, are people whose names mean nothing to the public and, sometimes, not very much to themselves. The crime might make the late night news, but in the normal run of things that is the last anyone hears of it. The trial passes unnoticed. But money gives even death a different meaning. The Friedrich murder trial was the lead item on the nightly news and the front page story in the morning paper. The courtroom, like a successful Broadway production, was always sold out.
“They should charge admission,” suggested Albert Craven, as I dropped my briefcase on the floor next to my desk and settled into my chair.
I had just come back from court, where I had given my opening statement. Craven had come in behind me, so quietly I had not noticed he was there until I heard the bare whisper of his voice. It made everything sound like a secret, a secret he could not wait to tell you.
“They really should, sell tickets, at least for every trial in which you’re involved. Nothing else is free anymore. When I was a kid, you could go to the zoo, you could go to the aquarium, to the DeYoung Museum, to anything in Golden Gate Park, and you didn’t have to pay anything. Now, you pay for everything.”
“Even for things you haven’t done,” I remarked, with a weary cynicism that reflected perfectly what I felt.
“Your opening? It didn’t go well? I find that hard to believe.”
I shrugged it off. I had told the jury what I needed to tell them: a preview of what I suggested the evidence would show; or, rather, what the evidence would not show. That was the problem. There was no evidence I could point to that was directly helpful to the defense. All I could tell them was that the evidence the prosecution was going to present was not anywhere close to what was needed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It was all I could do, and it was not half as good as it needed to be.
“The trial hasn’t even started,” objected Craven, trying to cheer me up. “You’ve picked a jury - a good one, from what you told me. The trial starts tomorrow, when the prosecution calls its first witness.”
It would have been unkind to disagree. And so I told him he was right, that the trial had not started and that, as I must have told him at some point in every trial since I joined his firm, you never knew what was going to happen, but that something unexpected almost always happened and that, when it did, it often turned everything upside down. I felt better for telling him that, not because I believed it, but because after years of trying cases I had acquired the useful habit of convincing myself that what I knew was utterly impossible might, just this once, actually be true. Like nearly every law, even the law of contradiction has its exceptions.
The only real hope I had was the prosecutor herself. Samantha Ferguson knew what she was supposed to do, and she knew how to do it. She was methodical, relentless, no detail too small to escape her attention, and all of it organized with logical precision into a straightforward and compelling presentation. When you read the transcript of a trial - any trial - she had prosecuted, you were immediately impressed; when you sat in a courtroom and listened to her, you remembered that half the force of an argument comes from the person who speaks the words you only later read about. Samantha Ferguson was dull, lifeless, without, it seemed, emotion of any kind; her only obvious quality a stern implacability that might make you fear her but could never make you like her. Tall, five foot eight or five foot nine, she had long arms and the large, grasping hands you might see on a sharecropper’s daughter. Her eyes were large, dark, and sullen; her voice harsh and unforgiving. She called the first witness for the prosecution with her usual cheerless enthusiasm.
“Would you please state your full name for the record?” she instructed. She stood at the end of the jury box, directly in front of the witness stand.
“Edward Alan Kendricks.”
“How are you employed?”
“I’m a police officer with the San Francisco police department.”
“Were you called to the scene of a possible shooting at the San Francisco yacht harbor last New Year’s Eve?”
Kendricks was in his mid-thirties, with close cropped hair and an off-center nose that made his left eye look larger than the right. Well over six feet tall, his waist, wrapped tight by the thick black belt of his uniform, seemed ready to burst,.
“New Year’s Day, a little after two-thirty in the morning.”
“What did you find when you got there?”
“The victim, Allison Friedrich, was laying dead in the bedroom of the sailboat she and her husband owned. She had been shot, twice, once in her head, once in the heart.”
“And was the defendant also on the boat as well?”
“Yes, he was there. He said he had been asleep on the sofa in the living room. That is the first room you come into,” he explained, talking to the jury, “when you go on board and go below deck. He said he woke up when he heard the noise, and that someone then rushed past him. It was dark, and he could not see his face, but that whoever it was still had the gun in his hand.”
“What was the condition of the defendant when you arrived?” asked Ferguson, as she began to move around the front of the courtroom in long, looping strides.
“Condition?”
“It was two-thirty in the morning. He told you he had been asleep. His wife had just been murdered. Was he in a state of shock? Was he sobbing, was he angry; what, if any, emotion did he show?”
Hendricks closed one eye and left the other half open as he remembered what he had seen. He tried to be careful.
“Not in a state of shock. He was not sobbing, he did not seem angry. Dazed,” he said, brightening at the discovery of the right word. “Dazed, but I couldn’t tell you the exact cause: whether it was because of the death of his wife, or because, as he told us - my partner and me - he had had a lot to drink and had been sleeping it off. He said that was the reason he had been sleeping where he was, instead of in the bedroom with his wife.”
“What else did he tell you, officer Kendricks?” asked Ferguson, still walking back and forth. “What else did the defendant say about why he was not sleeping in the bedroom?”
“He said they had been at a party that night - New Year’s Eve - at the Fairmont Hotel and that his wife had left early, and that when he got back to the boat, where they had decided to spend a day or so sailing around the bay, she had already gone to bed, and he did not want to wake her.”
Stopping at the far corner of the second counsel table, Ferguson fixed the witness with an intense and relentless gaze.
“He told you that there was an intruder, and that the intruder had murdered his wife?”
“Yes, that’s what he said.”
“Did you find any evidence to support that claim?” she asked, taking a step forward and managing to make that single step seem important. “Was there any evidence that someone had broken in: anything left behind, anything at all?”
‘No, nothing.”
One more step, matching, as it seemed, a new link in a chain she was about to hang around the defendant’s neck.
“Did you find the gun, the weapon used to murder Allison Friedrich?”
“No, we did not.”
“How far would the defendant have had to go to get rid of it by throwing it into the bay?”
I was on my feet, shouting an objection. The question assumed that the defendant had a gun. The prosecution had not introduced any evidence to prove that he did.
Walker Nyland had been on the bench for less than a year, but thought himself too intelligent to be taught anything by experience. He batted my objection away like he might have done a fly.
