The Privilege, page 4
She looked at me, knowing there was more to it than that.
“It was not what he said, it was him. Everything about him. His voice, the way he spoke, the way he held himself, the way he moved. If you were at a dinner, or a cocktail party, and you did not know anyone, he is the one you would remember.”
“And he needs a lawyer?” she asked, lowering her dark glasses just far enough to tease me with her eyes.
“Apparently I’ve been auditioning for the part. He told me he had been watching the trial, that he had been there every day.”
“Why do you think he needs a lawyer? Do you think he murdered someone?”
She was still teasing. She could read my reaction, what I had felt in that brief meeting with the stranger who wanted to see me. Murder would have been the last thing I would have thought, and she knew it.
“If I had to guess, he doesn’t want me to represent him for anything he is accused of doing. It’s more like some government investigation into whatever business he is in. And if that’s the case, I probably can’t help him. I don’t handle white collar cases.”
“That’s where the money is,” she laughed.
“Who needs money?”
“Everyone. Except you and me.”
The wind kicked up, and the cool air snapped across our faces, and we did not mind at all. Tangerine huddled closer as we watched the city skyline draw away until it seemed to break loose and float free, an island in the water. High above the Golden Gate Bridge, glowing in the orange light of the late day sun, a thick bank of fog seemed to grow taller and taller, a dark gray wall climbing straight up to the blue dark sky.
We left the ferry in Sausalito and with seagulls chirping at our feet got into Tangerine’s car and drove through the narrow, winding streets to the chocolate shingle-sided home, high on the hillside with a view across the bay to San Francisco where everyone is a dreamer and dreams never die.
“Do you want to talk about the trial?” asked Tangerine, after we had finished dinner and were having a glass of wine.
“It’s a disaster. There’s nothing more to say.”
“It isn’t a disaster. There’s a lot more to say. You haven’t started yet. Monday? Yes?”
It was not thinking about what I was going to do Monday when I had to call my first witness. I was thinking about how little was really under my control, the limitations that, before this trial, I had always managed to ignore. I looked at Tangerine and, throwing up my hands, started to laugh. Then, as the laughter died away, I got up from the sofa and walked over to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the back deck and, shining in the distance, the city lights of San Francisco.
“I hate to lose. Do you know why? It isn’t vanity, it isn’t because winning somehow sets you apart,” I remarked, staring out across the bay. “I’m not a fool. I know that winning, especially cases I was supposed to lose, made my reputation. It’s the reason people come to me for help, the reason I’ve become well-known: Joseph Antonelli, the lawyer who never loses. It’s all nonsense. Some of the best lawyers I ever knew, great ones I watched when I was just starting out, before I had any idea about everything that was involved, did some of their best work in cases they lost. There is a limit to what you can do: you can’t make up evidence; you can’t made evidence disappear. All you can do is take the evidence, whatever the evidence is, and use it to tell the best story you can, the story that puts your client, the defendant in a criminal case, in the best light possible. You can’t save a guilty man from what he did; if he’s guilty all you can do is try to show there is still some doubt that the evidence against him is good enough to prove it. When you get right down to it, its a little like saying, ‘We all know he’s guilty, we all know he did it, but it doesn’t matter: the only thing that matters is that the prosecution can’t prove it!”
I turned from the window to Tangerine’s waiting gaze.
“That’s all I do: defend the guilty on the argument that it is the only way to make sure the innocent go free. There is a line I’ve used in so many trials I can’t remember the number. It’s a famous line from Blackstone.”
“Blackstone?” she asked, mocking her own forgivable ignorance with a gentle smile.
“William Blackstone, Commentary on the Laws of England, in four fat volumes, the first of which was published in 1776. Every lawyer used to read it; Blackstone was Lincoln’s legal education. No one remembers that anymore; no one remembers Blackstone. Take it even farther if you like: no one remembers the l8th century.”
“The line - Blackstone’s line?” taunted Tangerine. “What was it?”
“I don’t remember,” I deadpanned. “It goes like this: ‘It is better, under our system of justice, that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent man be found guilty.’ Well, damn it,” I remarked, with a quick grimace, “I’ve got the eleventh man. Justin Friedrich is innocent and he is almost certain to be convicted. Where is the justice in that?”
“The trial isn’t over,” she reminded me again.
“That’s what I told Friedrich today, just before I left. It’s interesting what has happened to him - tragic, really - the deterioration, the way he has changed. People who live privileged lives don’t always think they’re privileged. Why would they? It’s what they have always known. He assumed - he had never had any reason to think otherwise - that crime, that murder, only happened to other people. Sure, you could have told him that people were sometimes convicted for things they had not done, and he would probably have agreed. But he would have been thinking of people without money, without education, poor and unfortunate; he would not have been thinking about anyone in the circles in which he moved. If someone like that were falsely accused of something, the lawyer - the expensive lawyer they could afford - would sort it all out. And now, suddenly, after all this time in jail, after seeing for himself how the court system really works, after listening to witness after witness, some of them friends of his, people he has known his whole life, talk about him as if the fact he is on trial for the murder of his wife fits perfectly with what they know about his marriage and his character, he has come face to face with the realization that there is every chance he is going to spend the rest of his life, not on the golf course with his friends, not playing tennis, not out sailing on the bay, but in a prison cell in San Quentin. It may not seem so on the surface, he looked pretty much the same way he did when I first met him, but inside he’s aged twenty years or more. The boyish innocence is gone; he has become cynical, jaded, and as angry at the world as anyone I’ve seen.”
Tangerine came up to me, put her arm around my neck and kissed me on the cheek.
“The trial isn’t over, Antonelli. Something will happen, something will change. Isn’t that what you told me - in every trial something happens no one expected, something that changes everything?”
She was trying to make me feel better, and she did, but not about the trial and what I knew was going to happen, about her, the knowledge that whatever happened, whether I won or lost, nothing would change between us. In a world in which everything seemed to have become provisional, in which not just the old standards, but any standards, had disappeared, in which everything was measured by success and success measured by money, if I could count on nothing else, I could count on her.
“Whatever happens in the trial,” she whispered to me later that night, as she switched off the lamp in the bedroom, “I’ll still be with you - unless, of course, you lose.”
“I knew the first time I saw you, that night at Albert Craven’s place, that it would last forever.”
“The night I waited outside in my car, hoping you would run away with me; the night you thanked me for the one block ride and drove home by yourself.”
“If you keep going,” I reminded her, as I pulled her close, “you’ll get to the first night we spent together, when you told me you would always be faithful, ‘at least for a week,’
“And then, right after that, I told you, Joseph Antonelli, that, if you wanted, each week would be renewable.”
The weekend slipped by. We went for long walks in the afternoon and in the evenings had long, quiet, candlelit dinners. I tried not to think about the trial, but it was always there, just below the surface, questions I could not answer tugging at me like impatient children who think that if you only stop to listen you will understand what they are trying to tell you. Sunday night I felt like a child myself, a child who hated school. I did not want to wake up. I did not want to go to court.
It was cold and wet, a morning for umbrellas and overcoats and quick sure-footed steps on the slick steep sidewalks that ran down the city’s hills. I got out of the cab in front of the courthouse and made my way inside. Friedrich was just being brought into the courtroom. Dressed in a suit and tie, he did not look like a prisoner, but neither did he look like someone who was free to come and go. His glance was furtive, running one way then the other as if he were on his guard, afraid someone might suddenly attack him from the side. When I talked to him, quickly reminding him what we had covered when I visited him in jail two days earlier, on Saturday morning, he had to make an effort to keep his eyes on me. And even with that effort, it did not work. When the door at the back opened and the crowd of spectators and reporters rushed in, he jumped at the sudden noise.
“It’s all right,” I told him. “There is nothing to worry about. Remember what we talked about. Look at me when I ask you a question, look at the jury when you answer. Don’t worry,” I went on, bending closer and looking him straight in the eye. “It’s all right if you forget, if you look at me instead of them. You’re going to tell the truth. A jury can tell when you’re doing that. That’s all you have to remember: tell the truth, whether I’m asking the questions or the prosecutor is. If you don’t know the answer, just say so. You’ll be a little nervous at first. Don’t worry about it. Everyone is nervous.” I paused for a moment before I smiled and added with more confidence than I felt, “You have a great advantage over people who don’t tell the truth: you can’t get caught in a lie.”
The prosecutor was at her table, the judge took his place on the bench, the bailiff brought in the jury, and I had now to begin the case for the defense. I stood up, ready to call my first witness, when I noticed that the court reporter was wearing open toed shoes and, kicking one of them off, had left it laying on the floor.
“You might want to put your shoe back on,” I remarked in a voice quiet enough that the court clerk might be the only one to hear it. “This is a murder trial, not a day at the movies.”
It startled her. She threw me an angry glance, but quickly, before anyone could notice, slipped her bare foot into her shoe.
“Mr. Antonelli?” asked Nyland, wondering why I had not called a witness yet.
“The defense calls the defendant, Justin Friedrich,” I announced, in a voice that echoed off the walls.
I began with the only question that mattered and which, by itself, meant nothing at all.
“Did you murder your wife?”
Justin remembered. He turned to the jury. He did not hesitate, but neither did he rush to answer the way the guilty often do to disguise their duplicity.
“I didn’t kill Allison,” he replied in a strong, clear voice. “It’s true, what some of the prosecution’s witnesses said - I’m afraid we did not always like each other very much. But murder her? No, that would have been impossible. We never even discussed divorce.”
With my hands shoved deep in my pockets and my shoulders hunched forward, I stood in front of him, near the end of the jury box, and asked him to tell the jury in his own words what had happened that night. I did not stop with that, however. I wanted right from the beginning to shift ground, to get out in front of the jury, not what they had heard from the prosecution, but what really happened.
“Tell the jury what happened, the night your wife, Allison, was murdered, shot to death by an intruder who came onto your sailboat in the middle of the night.”
Samantha Ferguson was screaming an objection before the last words were out of my mouth.
“There is no evidence of any intruder! The defense attorney isn’t asking questions, he’s testifying, he’s -!”
Nyland ignored her, and with a quick sideways motion of his head made her stop.
“The witness may answer,” he ruled. Satisfied with his own performance, he nodded twice for emphasis and then sank back in his chair.
“We sometimes spent the night on our sailboat. As you have heard - as you could see from the photographs Ms. Ferguson showed you - there was plenty of room. It’s berthed at the Marina - the San Francisco Yacht Harbor. You heard testimony that Allison and I quarreled . That’s right, we did. We did that quite a lot, and that night, New Year’s Eve, we were at a party, a large party, at the Fairmont. There was a lot of drinking. I did a lot of drinking, and I didn’t behave well. Allison was dancing with just about every man there, and I didn’t like it very much. As I say, I had been drinking, quite a lot, and finally I just couldn’t take it anymore. I went out on the dance floor, grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away, just the way you heard. She started calling me all sorts of names, which only made me more determined. When we got back to the table, I told her if she was going to dance with everyone in the place she should start selling tickets. She grabbed a drink from the table and threw it in my face, and then she pushed me, pushed me as hard as she could and I stumbled against a chair and fell down. I knew it was my fault, and I tried to apologize, but she did not want to hear it. I was upset, angry, embarrassed. I left, but I didn’t go back to the boat, I stopped in the hotel bar and drank some more.”
Staring at the jury with the lost look of someone who wishes more than anything that he could take it all back, do things differently than he had, he took a moment to collect himself.
“I finally got back around one-thirty in the morning. Allison was asleep. I was drunk. I could barely walk straight. I left Allison alone in the bedroom and went out to the main cabin, took off my coat, loosened my tie and must have passed out on the sofa.”
“You fell asleep. When did you wake up, and why did you wake up?” I asked, as I pulled my hands out of my pockets, crossed my arms and looked at him with intense interest.
“About an hour later, around half past two. I only know that because of what happened. I heard something; I wasn’t sure what it was, but it woke me up. Then I heard a second noise, and I knew what it was. I thought I must still be drunk, that it couldn’t be what I thought it was - a gunshot. And then someone bolted past me. It was dark; I couldn’t see. All I could see were shadows. Someone was running away, outside, off the boat. Everything was moving in a kind of haze. I got up, went back to the bedroom, and turned on the light. That’s when I saw her - Allison - her head was on the pillow, blood was pouring down her face.”
That was his story, his version of what had happened, the night his wife, Allison Friedrich, had been murdered. Now I had to take him back through the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses, the case, the open and shut case, of the prosecution.
“According to the prosecution’s witnesses, you didn’t call the police when you found your wife murdered. Someone else, someone who heard the gunfire, called them. Why didn’t you?”
It was a question he had asked himself, a question to which he had never found a sufficient answer. He was honest enough to admit it.
“I don’t know,” he replied, still puzzled, not so much by the decision he had made, but by the absence of one. He had not decided anything; he had not thought about anything. “I didn’t know anything. None of it seemed real. It was like a bad dream: you know it’s a dream and you keep waiting to wake up.”
There was a change of expression, a glimmer of recognition, the memory of something that he, alone of all the people sitting in the courtroom, had experienced, different than what he, and they as well, would have expected. He turned to the jury.
“We think we know what we would do in a situation like that. We think we know because we have seen it so many times, on television, in the movies: someone discovers a murder victim, laying the floor - laying on a bed - and the first thing that happens is someone starts screaming and the police are called. Unless, of course, the murderer is standing over the body, and then he doesn’t make a sound, and he certainly doesn’t call the police. He gets away or tries to hide the body. But it isn’t like that. I just kept looking at her; I kept thinking it was all a bad dream, that any moment Allison would be wide awake and so would I. I never thought about calling the police; I never thought about anything. Then, when she didn’t move, when I started to remember someone running past me, when I started to realize that it had really happened, that I had not dreamed it, hadn’t imagined it, I heard the sirens. The police had come.”
I stood there in the silence that followed, letting the jury think about what Justin Friedrich had said, and, of equal importance, how he had said it. I let them consider what was implicit in what he said before I asked the question that would bring it out into the open.
“You didn’t call the police, and you didn’t leave?”
“No, I didn’t do anything. I just stayed there.”
“You didn’t try to run away, to escape, before the police arrived?”
“Escape? I had no reason to escape. I hadn’t done anything.”
There was one more issue that had to be dealt with.
“Your wife was murdered with a gun. You heard the prosecution’s witnesses. She was killed with a .38. Do you own a gun of that description?”
“No, or any other gun. I’ve never owned a gun.”
“Have you ever used one? On a gun range, or anywhere else, at any time?”
“No, never.”
“No gun was found at the scene; no gun was found anywhere. The prosecution insists that after you shot your wife, you got rid of the gun by dropping it into the bay. My last question, Mr. Friedrich, is this: Did you shoot your wife and then get rid of the weapon?”
