Author: D. W. Buffa
Date: 2012-11-07 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Thrillers; Legal; Political
Description: Walter Bannister had the manner that nothing could rival and no one could imitate, and with it a rare intelligence and perfect rectitude, complete self-command and not a trace of vanity or a hint of ambition for anything he did not already have. He was what every trial court judge should be. When he entered his courtroom, it was as if he had been there the whole time: one moment everything all chaos and confusion, a hundred jumbled voices, lawyers, jurors, spectators crowding the benches, the next moment, when the door at the side opened, nothing but silence. No one could remember anything exc
Publisher: Polis Books

THE LAST MAN

D.W. BUFFA

Copyright © D.W. Buffa

The right of D.W. Buffa to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Re-published in 2024 by Bloodhound Books.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

www.bloodhoundbooks.com

Print ISBN: 978-1917705547

CONTENTS

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Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

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A note from the publisher

CHAPTER ONE

The long-awaited murder trial of the infamous Daniel Lee Atkinson was over before it started. Everyone knew he was guilty; nearly everyone thought he should die. And no one knew it with more certainty than his own lawyer, Michael Harlowe, who had listened in stunned silence to a confession of moral depravity the like of which he had never heard before. It was not so much what Atkinson had done, as the absence of all remorse, the indifference to what he had done, the sense that murder could be shrugged off as no worse than speeding down a highway late at night, that was so disturbing. Harlowe had to know why.

“You murder a whole family, shoot the parents at point blank range, slit the throats of two children, and you don’t seem to feel anything about it. How is that possible?”

They were sitting across from each other at a small metal table in a dimly lit room in the county jail. Atkinson replied to the question with a trace of annoyance, the lingering resentment that he had been put to more trouble than he should have been.“They weren’t supposed to be there. They were supposed to be away that weekend. Christ, you think I’d go rob a place that had people in it? Do I look like that much of an idiot?”

“You killed four people, two of them kids. A jury isn’t going to be too sympathetic with that argument like that,” added Harlowe, studying him closely. “And neither will the judge.”

“Not my fault they changed their plans.” Atkinson raised his hands, shackled together at the wrists, to scratch the side of his face. His eyes, dull and suspicious, moved in a random circuit of the narrow room. The dawn of something like a thought brought a sudden light. “They’re the ones that changed, not me. I didn’t have any choice.”

“You killed four people, wiped out a family, because you didn’t have any choice?” Shaking his head, he got up to leave. “I’ve been doing this a long time, but that’s one defense I’ve never even thought of trying!” He shoved the chair back in place and turned away, but then, immediately, turned back. “You don’t feel anything about those people, the people you killed?” he demanded. “Nothing at all?”

Atkinson looked at him as if he were a fool even to ask. Suddenly, his expression changed, became more serious, as if there was something that he also could not quite understand. A strange sinister smile cut across his thin, dry lips. He bent forward, drawing Harlowe closer into the secret he seemed almost eager to share. “They saw me standing there, at the foot of the bed. I said I was going to kill one of them and they could choose. And you know what? – They both wanted me to kill the other one. And I did - killed them both - but I shot him first. You should have seen the look on her face: horror, but also relief.” Atkinson shrugged, and then laughed. “It wasn’t what you might call a perfect marriage.”

Harlowe knew then that Daniel Lee Atkinson was as good as convicted. It was not just that Atkinson was guilty, the evidence was overwhelming. He had been seen running down the street moments after gunshots had been heard, the gun he had used to murder Jonathan Lewis and his wife still in his possession, a gun he had then used to fire at the police during the manhunt that followed. And not just the gun, he still had the knife, the knife with which he had brutally, and without hesitation, murdered two small children, the knife caked with their blood.

The district attorey, Hector Alfonso, was sympathetic.

“I thought you weren’t going to take any more court appointed cases,” he remarked, lifting his eyebrows in mild astonishment. He glanced at the stack of files on his cluttered desk and threw up his hands. “Police reports, forensic reports, ballistics reports, crime lab reports….” He picked at a pile on the corner closest to Harlowe. “…and not one, but four different eye witness statements, people who saw him running from the house; people who saw him running down the street.” With a significant look, he added, “Statements from the two cops he took shots at. The only thing we don’t have is a confession. It’s a textbook case, everything any prosecutor could want; and that, I have to tell you, terrifies me, because the only thing that can go wrong is if I screw up.”

“I suppose that could happen,” replied Harlowe. “You might only be able to get him executed three times instead of four.”

Hector Alfonso dressed better than most other prosecutors, especially the assistant prosecutors in his own office, with their rumpled suits and wrinkled shirts and deplorable ties. His suits were always pressed, with a crisp seam down the leg, the cuff at exactly the right angle above his expensive, always polished shoes. The shirts, bright and starched, and the ties precise and symmetrical in a tight Windsor knot, he had more the look of a prosperous merchant, or a successful politician – the Hispanic mayor some in his community thought he might one day become, the mayor of that city that was not a city at all, but more a state of mind, that vast urban desert known as Los Angeles where he had been born and bred. Hector Alfonso spoke fluent Spanish, but only because he had learned it in school. He had only been to Mexico as a tourist, and his parents, like their parents before them, instead of recent immigrants had been doctors and lawyers, who had long since forgotten precisely when their ancestors had first settled here. Hector Alfonso had chosen to take a job as an assistant prosecutor after finishing near the top of his law school class at Yale, instead of joining one of the city’s high priced firms. His family already had money, and he wanted more than that.

“Seriously,” continued Harlowe with a droll expression. “If someone murders four people, why should his punishment be only what it is for someone who kills only one? Where is the justice in that?” Tapping his fingers on the corner of Alfonso’s desk, he thought for a moment and then suddenly looked up. “Figure out how to do that – hang someone for every murder – and they’ll elect you governor by acclamation.”

As he always did when someone, even someone he respected as much as Michael Harlowe, mentioned higher political office, Alfonso ignored it.

“You didn’t answer my question. Why did you take this case? You’re one of the best known criminal defense attorneys in the city. What are you doing, taking court appointed work?”

He said this with a sparkle in his coal dark eyes that seemed to admit that most of what happened, in and out of the courtroom, depended on chance.

“I was asked,” replied Harlowe simply.

“Bannister, right? Yeah, it would be hard to say no to him.”

“Anyone else, I wouldn’t have done it; but Bannister…. He didn’t even ask me himself; he had his clerk call.”

The tiny lines at the corners of his eyes tightened, spread farther out, as he searched for an explanation. Hector Alfonso caught that look, knew it as a shared experience, and understood the perplexity that went with it.

“There’s no one else like him, is there? The rest of them, they get on the bench and all they think about is how to get out of doing any work and how soon they can start collecting their pension. But Bannister –every judge should be like him.” With a quick, incisive glance, he asked, sure of the answer, “You didn’t even think about it, did you? You said yes right away, probably didn’t even know what you had said yes to until you hung up the phone.”

“Hung up the phone?” Harlowe remarked with a grudging smile. “I didn’t know what I had agreed to until I spent a wonderful hour with my client.”

Hector Alfonso reached without looking for a file folder that among all the others stacked on his desk had been held, off to the side on the right, separate and apart. A look of disgust swept across his face as he passed it to Harlowe.

“Crime scene photos,” he explained.

At the age of forty six, Michael Harlowe was not the innocent he had been when he first started practicing in the criminal courts twenty years earlier. He had become used to murder, accustomed to the graphic depiction of death, the photographs of homicide victims, all the obscenities of deliberate brutality and mindless violence. Murder was a fact of his profession, one which triggered an immediate response, an attempt to analyze it, break it down so as to tear it apart, find a way to show that the undeniable evidence of a violent death did not mean that his client was responsible. The trouble was that the more vicious the murder, the more brutal the crime, the greater the sense of urgency, the public need, to do something about it. The more savage, the more atrocious what had been done, the less chance to banish from the minds of a jury the sense of revenge.

He could not tell Hector Alfonso what the depraved and despicable Daniel Lee Atkinson had told him, how he had murdered four people, a whole family, the parents in their bed and two small children while they slept, done it not only without hesitation and without any later regret but apparently with pleasure and a perverse sense of achievement, a mad man, a dull-witted animal, whose only purpose in life was to kill. He could not say anything about what Atkinson had told him, but he told him with a look, just as he started to open the file folder, that he knew what he was about to see and that he was not going to be surprised.

But he was, and not just surprised, shocked, a shock that grew each time he turned one picture over and looked at the next. Atkinson had lied. Not about killing them, but the way he had done it. He had not said anything about the sheer butchery that had taken place. Harlowe could not have guessed at the number of crime scene photos he had seen, but nothing ever like this. He looked up and stared hard at Hector Alfonso as if he expected him to explain how something like this could happen. With something like a warning in his eyes, Alfonso shook his head. There was a danger going too far into things, a loss of all illusions about the limits of depravity.

“I can’t even offer you life imprisonment in exchange for a plea. If we didn’t have the death penalty we’d invent it just for this guy, and no one – and I mean no one – would complain.”

Harlowe did not try to disagree.

“So we go to trial, and the jury sees these.”

“Unless your client decides to save everyone the trouble, and we both know that won’t happen. So, yeah, we go to trial, and the jury may not even reach the jury room before they decide to announce they’ve found him guilty and the Honorable Walter Bannister, after presiding over a meticulously proper trial, will then sentence him to death. And you know what – those people will still be dead and then we’ll have another brutal murder and another trial and….It just never stops, does it? – And it keeps getting worse, not just more killing, but….” He glanced toward the folder, back in its place, isolated and alone, on his desk. “…but more violent, more grotesque.” He took a deep breath, as if to clear his mind, and when he spoke again his voice was calm, and not much more than a whisper in the silence. “Though nothing worse than this, the worst I ever saw, the worst I ever heard of.”

A little unsteadily, Harlowe rose from his chair. His eyes drifted toward the folder full of unspeakable photos and then, immediately, drew back.

“The strange thing is he didn’t have much of a record. Break-ins, stealing, minor assaults – that’s it; never killed anyone, never even tried.”

Hector Alfonso walked him to the door.

“Never killed anyone that we know of. You have any idea how many murders go unsolved, how many don’t even get reported? Someone, some faceless vagrant, disappears: no one knows him; no one knows he’s missing. Atkinson could have murdered dozens of people and we wouldn’t know anything about it.”

It was a question Harlowe was tempted to put to Atkinson directly, but the next time he saw him, sitting in his orange county jail jumpsuit, his wrists shackled together, with those blank, empty eyes that did not seem to register anything except his own immediate reaction to what he wanted or what he feared, Harlowe changed his mind. If Atkinson had killed a dozen other people it could not make what he had done – what those pictures showed he had done – any worse. With a man like Daniel Lee Atkinson numbers did not matter. There were no gradations of guilt, no new or different measure, when you were dealing with pure evil.

Instead, he asked Atkinson all the routine questions that had to be asked, about his background, where he had been born, about his parents, about how he had been raised, where he had gone to school and what he had done when he dropped out, whether he had been married, whether he had children. The answers were all of them vague and fragmentary, as if he had not only forgotten most of what had happened to him, but could not remember anything as uninteresting and provisional as his own existence. He did not know where he had been born; somewhere in California, he was not sure. He did not know his father, a common enough fact among those who were often in trouble with the law, but Atkinson also did not know his mother. Raised in foster homes, a different one every year as far as he could remember, he left school at an early age, probably the eighth grade, but certainly before he ever got to high school. He was sure of that. He had never been married or even lived with a woman, though he had, as it put it, “known a lot of whores.” If he had any children, no one had ever told him. He did not read the papers and had never read a book, and as near as Harlowe could tell, barely read at all. He was a predator, pure and simple, someone who would kill you for no other reason than that he felt like it and then, having done it, never think about it again. Harlowe hoped the trial would be short.

And compared to the length of most murder trials it was. But for those who were involved in it, those who had to sit there day after grueling day, it seemed an endless journey through hell. Twelve jurors, seven men and five women, most of them middle aged, tried to mask their emotions, and not always with success, through three weeks of testimony that had to shake, if not destroy, whatever confidence they may have had in the natural goodness of human beings.

They had been warned. Walter Bannister had told them that they were going to see things no one should have to see, things they would find disturbing, more disturbing than anything they could possibly imagine. He could have told them they were there to witness an execution, not one of those performed with a lethal dose of chemicals, but one full of torture and blood, a head lopped off, a body boiled in oil, and they would have thought that they would get through it without any great loss to themselves, sure that if there were any harm in it, he would not ask them to do it. Walter Bannister had that effect. He had the look, that manner that nothing can rival and no one can imitate, and with it a rare intelligence and perfect rectitude, complete self-command and not a trace of vanity or a hint of ambition for anything he did not already have.

Some people, perhaps most of us, go unnoticed when they walk into a room; others, not many, but a few, have such an immediate effect that once they enter it is as if they had been there the whole time. That was what it was like in Walter Bannister’s courtroom. One moment everything was all chaos and confusion, a hundred babbled voices, lawyers, jurors, spectators crowding the benches; the next moment the door at the side opened and there was nothing but silence. The bailiff must have called everyone to order, ordered everyone to rise, announced that court was in session, that the Honorable Walter Bannister was presiding; he must have done that, but no one heard it, or remembered if they had. No one could remember anything except what was right in front of them, the judge tall, thin, the slightest touch of gray just above the ears in the auburn hair cut short and parted on the side, moving with a scholar’s eye and the sure, gliding step of a man who had been something of an athlete in his youth. He glanced at the two counsel tables where Hector Alfonso and, closest to the jury box, Michael Harlowe stood waiting, and then, after a quick nod, looked at the jury with a simple, confident smile that made them forget whatever apprehensions they may have felt. Then he was on the bench, leaning forward, the smile become muted and quite serious, but a sparkle, a shared intelligence, the assumption that wherever they had come from, whatever their backgrounds, the jurors, and even the anonymous crowd that was only there to watch, were capable of following every instruction he gave them, glittered unmistakably in his clear, grayish green eyes.

“We are here in the matter of People v. Daniel Lee Atkinson,” he announced. Barely a whisper, his voice held you in a way that made you hesitate, wondering what made you pause, until you realized you were waiting to hear more, hear it again, that voice that seemed to hold the answer even to questions you had not thought to ask.

“Mr. Alfonso – Hector Alfonso – is here for the prosecution, and Mr. Harlowe – Michael Harlowe – is here for the defense.”

There was a sudden look of concern. He reminded himself that there was something still to explain. He turned directly to the jury.

“You will notice that the defendant, Mr. Atkinson, is dressed in a jail uniform and that both his wrists and ankles have been shackled. This has nothing to do with the issue you are here to determine: whether or not, as alleged in the indictment I read to you the other day, he committed murder. It does not matter – and it is not in any way to influence your deliberations at the end of the trial – how Mr. Atkinson is dressed. You may imagine him dressed, if you will, the way his lawyer, Mr. Harlowe is dressed, or the way Mr. Alfonso – Well,” he added, playing mischief to lighten the mood, “perhaps not like Mr. Alfonso, who dresses better than anyone I have ever seen.”

There was a murmur of laughter and approval in the courtroom. All twelve jurors glanced at Hector Alfonso who shuffled his feet and smiled down at the floor. Harlowe moved a few inches farther away from his dull-eyed client.

“Now, gentlemen,” said Bannister, turning immediately to the two lawyers. “Shall we begin?”

CHAPTER TWO

Despite what he had told Michael Harlowe, Hector Alfonso did not believe for a moment that he would make the kind of mistake that would cost him the trial. It was the reason everyone was here, why there were camera crews from all the television stations, why the papers had day after day run front page stories about what had happened that awful night, months earlier, when a normal and presumably happy American family had been slaughtered in their beds in an act of unspeakable violence. Hector Alfonso had no illusions: It was not death that brought out the crowds and that drove the public into a manic fever of hatred and revenge; it was not even murder – it was blood, the secret love of slaughter. If the Lewis family had been poisoned, left to die peacefully in their sleep, there would have been nothing like the firestorm of anger and rage, nothing like the cries for doing whatever had to be done to keep a monster like Daniel Lee Atkinson off the streets. Hector Alfonso understood this, and he understood something else as well.

Even before he started law school he had known that he did not want to be a lawyer. The law was a means, a way to position himself for higher office. Old school lawyers and law school professors could insist all they wanted that the law is a ‘jealous mistress,’ that it takes, and should take, all your time; that it takes years of study and practice to get really good at it, but Hector Alfonso knew better. A few years trying cases and everything became second nature, something he could do in his sleep. He could listen to his own opening statement and while he measured the jury’s reaction glance away for a moment, wondering whether the reporter sitting in the first row would spell his name right in the story that would appear in tomorrow morning’s paper. Still a month away from his thirty-eighth birthday, he knew what a great many prosecutors never learned: that the more outrageous the crime, the greater the need for restraint.

As he began jury selection he was formal and polite, asking questions in a tone that suggested that this was the most serious public responsibility any of the prospective jurors would ever be called upon to perform.

“This is a murder case, Mrs. Miller. Four people, two adults and their two children, were killed in their home. The defendant has been charged with four counts of murder in the first degree. This is a capital case, which means that the state is seeking the death penalty. Would you have any trouble, any hesitation, in finding the defendant guilty because of some concern you might have over the death penalty?”

The question was insidious, and Michael Harlowe knew it. This was not just another murder case, a drug dealer or a gang banger shot dead in some illicit and violent dispute. These had been respectable people, a family, children, and the defendant, sitting just a few shorts steps away, with his tattooed neck and tattooed arms, with a scornful grin pasted on a mouth filled with yellow, sometimes broken teeth, shackled to the chair and under the constant surveillance of two armed guards stationed off to the side, was going to pay for it with his life, if the prosecution had anything to say about it

Asking each question in a calm, even tempered voice, Hector Alfonso examined the first juror, thanked her for her honesty and then sat back, ready to watch while Michael Harlowe did the same thing.

“He sure as hell looks like a murderer, doesn’t he?”

Alfonso’s head snapped up just in time to see Harlowe turn his chair toward the jury and nod over his shoulder toward his client.

“Mean looking son of a bitch, isn’t he?”

A thin, jaundiced smile made a slow march across Harlowe’s tight-lipped mouth. With one hand extended behind him, held straight against the arm of the wooden chair, he searched the juror’s eyes, challenging her to disagree. Alfonso had been courteous, even deferential; Harlowe, in this first encounter, seemed argumentative and confrontational. Shelly Miller, quiet and deferential, a frail looking woman in her fifties with tired eyes, did not know what to say.

“No, I mean it,” continued Harlowe, gesturing with his hand to take in the jury as a whole. He cast a quick glance behind him at the defendant. “He looks exactly like what you thought he would, when you read about what happened, when you heard about it on television, a gruesome murder, a whole family killed. And here he is, right in front of your eyes. He looks just like what you thought he would, doesn’t he!”

Alfonso was on his feet, but he got up slowly and, as it were, reluctantly; and then, instead of shouting outrage the way most other prosecutors would have done, just stood there, waiting in patient silence until he was recognized by the judge. Walter Bannister did not have to wait to hear what Hector Alfonso wanted to say.

“I agree, Mr. Alfonso, that the question is a little unorthodox, and that choice of language is perhaps unfortunate,” he said, leaning on his elbow as he moved his index finger up and down, keeping time, as it seemed, with his thought. “But this is voir dire, not the taking of testimony under oath, and I’m prepared to allow counsel a fair amount of latitude.” He paused, and with a sudden added gleam in his eye looked directly at Harlowe who had risen from his chair. “I’m sure Mr. Harlowe won’t abuse the privilege.”

Harlowe had got what he wanted, an objection from the prosecution, and better yet, a ruling from the bench that showed that this was no ordinary trial, that things might not go as smoothly as Hector Alfonso had wanted the jury to believe. Daniel Lee Atkinson might look every bit the brutal murderer everyone thought he was, but maybe, just maybe, that was a reason to hold back, to listen and wait before sending someone to his death.

“If that’s all we did, bring him in here,” Harlowe went on, looking straight at Shelly Miller, who now looked straight back at him; “bring him in here, dressed like that, tied up in chains, and your only job was to take a long look at him and then decide if he was guilty or not; if that was all there was to it, everyone of you would find him guilty. But that isn’t what we do, is it? What do we do instead, Mrs. Miller?”

She made an educated guess. “We presume he’s innocent.”

Harlowe beamed with imagined surprise.

“Yes, exactly right; what the judge told you when you first came into court. The defendant has pled not guilty and, in that famous phrase we all pretend to believe, he is ‘presumed innocent.’ I said pretend to believe, because in a case like this it is too much to expect. The question, Mrs. Miller, isn’t whether you really believe Daniel Lee Atkinson is innocent; the question is whether you can ignore what you believe right now, push it out of your mind, and agree that, whatever you believe about his guilt or innocence, you will base your decision on nothing but the evidence presented in this courtroom in the course of this trial.”

There was a reason Michael Harlowe had become one of the first names anyone in Los Angeles thought of when they were in trouble. Juries wanted to believe him. Hector Alfonso you felt you could trust, with his polished manners and candid expression, but Harlowe, with his quick, if sometimes skeptical smile, and the occasionally irreverent way in which he spoke, was someone you liked and wanted to know. By the end of voir dire, when the twelve members of the jury had finally been chosen, both sides, the prosecution and the defense, could be reasonably certain that the verdict would be delivered without either sympathy or bias, which meant, as both Alfonso and Harlowe understood, that Daniel Lee Atkinson would almost certainly be found guilty.

Opening statements followed the pattern set during jury selection. With cool detachment, Hector Alfonso listed the elements of the crimes, the four murders, and the evidence by which he would prove the defendant guilty of each of them. Without so much as glancing at a note, with only his own memory to remind him what to say, he went on for nearly an hour, summarizing in the order he intended to call them the testimony each witness for the prosecution was expected to give.

“We have the testimony of witnesses who saw the defendant running away from the house, testimony of the police officers who, at the risk of their own lives, exchanged gun fire with the defendant before he was apprehended.”

Alfonso stood at the end of the jury box, just below the empty witness stand, the jury on his left, the courtroom crowd, including the reporters who had come from all over to cover the trial, directly in front of him. For the first time, his glance settled on Daniel Lee Atkinson, sitting with sullen eyed indifference at the counsel table next to Michael Harlowe.

“But it is the physical evidence that will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s guilty of four murders; prove beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that he murdered first Jonathan Lewis – shot him in the head at point blank range – and then Monica Lewis, the mother of two small children. Shot her as well, not in the head, like her husband, but -” Suddenly, Hector Alfonso winced as from some piercing internal pain, looked down at the floor to steady himself and then stared hard at Daniel Lee Atkinson. “Shot her, not in the head, like he did her husband, but shoved the gun into her mouth, made her hold it there, and then pulled the trigger.”

Alfonso took a deep breath and turned away. For what seemed a long time, but could not have been more than a few seconds, he said nothing in the hushed stillness of the crowded courtroom; he just stood there, looking at the jury as if the last thing he wanted to do was what he had to do next. From the look of anguish that flashed in his eyes, it almost seemed he was about to apologize for what he had to tell them, what he had no choice but to say. The side of his jaw trembled under the tension as he grabbed the jury box railing with both hands.

“There were two children, asleep in their beds, just down the hallway from their parents’ bedroom. Perhaps they woke up, - the sound of gunshots – perhaps they slept right through it. Justine, the oldest, was only six; her brother, Joshua, had just turned four. He didn’t shoot them. No, Daniel Lee Atkinson did not do that. He did not do anything that quick, that painless. He killed them, one at a time, with a butcher knife. Killed them? – Yes, eventually, after he had hacked them to pieces.

“Justine, six; Joshua, four. They can’t testify, their parents cannot testify, about what happened, what was done to them that horrific night, that night from hell, but we have all the evidence we need, all that anyone will need to prove that this was all done by the same man, the defendant, Daniel Lee Atkinson. Their blood was all over him, a perfect DNA match. The gun he used, the knife he used, both were found on him. Both of them were tested by the crime lab, and there is no doubt – no doubt whatever - that they were the weapons, the lethal weapons, used. The only question that will be left unanswered at the end of this trial, the only unsolved mystery, won’t be what Daniel Lee Atkinson did – the proof is overwhelming about that. No, the only question, and it is a question that should trouble all of us, is why! Why would anyone – how could anyone - do something like this?”

The question hung in the air, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable; a reminder of our ignorance about the dark forces that move inside us and that without warning can turn us to violence. It hung there, but only for a moment, quickly replaced, at least in the minds of most of those who had listened to the prosecution’s opening statement, with the comforting thought that the question was really about only one man, the defendant, Daniel Lee Atkinson, the one on trial, the only one who had done anything that needed to be explained.

Hector Alfonso had spoken with smooth and connected sentences for the better part of an hour; Michael Harlowe did not want to speak at all. It was not because he did not know what to say or, in the presence of a courtroom packed to capacity, was afraid he might forget something or stumble over his words. He did not want to speak because there was very little he could say that would make any difference at all. He had watched the eyes of the jurors, watched as they became more engaged and their interest more concentrated, more intense, as they listened to Hector Alfonso’s long and meticulous description of the defendant’s vicious depravity; watched while they glanced in horror stricken disbelief at the impassive and indifferent face of the defendant as the prosecutor recited with clinical precision the methods of murder employed by this bastard son of the devil. He had watched as the little uncertainty he had managed to encourage during voir dire vanished forever, the only hesitation still left whether instead of a verdict they might find some way to hang him themselves.

“Mr. Harlowe,” asked Walter Bannister in that gentle whisper of a voice, “does the defense wish to make an opening statement at this time?”

He sat there, slouched down in his chair, apparently unaware that the prosecutor had taken his seat and the judge was waiting for him to begin. Bannister bent forward, leaned on the bench with his elbows and tapped slowly together the fingers of his smooth manicured hands.

Still nothing, not a sign that he had heard, or, if he had, that it made any difference. Bannister was just about to call him for a third and final time when Harlowe suddenly seemed to come awake. There was no apology as he stood up and approached the jury box; nothing to indicate that he had done this quite on purpose, manufactured this delay, to make the jury start to think about something other than what they had heard from the prosecution, forced them to concentrate instead on the strange eccentricities of the lawyer for the defense, lost in a trance in front of hundreds of people while the trial court judge, patient and tolerant, called his name.

The difference between a courtroom trial and a playhouse drama is that the actors in a trial write their lines for themselves. If Hector Alfonso was quietly confident and analytical, building the case against the defendant with logical certainty, Michael Harlowe was the outraged skeptic, certain, if he was certain of anything, that the only certainty was doubt. Facts were blindfolded fools, meaning nothing except what someone said they did.

“Four people were killed, murdered in their home,” said Harlowe, peering at the jury through eyes full of deep suspicion. He shoved his hands deep into his pants pockets and began to pace back and forth, feeling everything a doubting skeptic should. “He has the evidence to prove it. He doesn’t need to bother. We’ll stipulate to it. Four people were killed, murdered – no, slaughtered, in their beds. But what does it mean – the awful fact of the crime? That the defendant, Daniel Lee Atkinson, did it – killed, murdered, four people?”

Harlowe stopped pacing. He pointed past the jury box to the counsel table where Atkinson now sat alone.

“He must have done it. The prosecution says he did, and Daniel Lee Atkinson certainly looks the part. No, don’t look at me – look at him, the way you did when Mr. Alfonso was telling you all the awful things Atkinson had done, and how he was going to prove it.” He slapped his hand on the jury box railing for emphasis. “We have four murders. The prosecution insists not only that the defendant did it – did those awful things – but that the evidence he is going to present is so clear cut, so overwhelming, that it won’t take you three minutes to reach a verdict.”

Nodding to himself, Harlowe ran his fingers through his curly auburn hair, and then, with a suddenly baffled expression, scratched the back of his head.

“He has so many witnesses, I frankly lost count. Police officers, detectives, crime lab technicians, neighbors of the dead family – half of Los Angeles is going to testify. They go first – the prosecution – because they have the burden, the burden of proof. They have to prove that a crime was committed and that the defendant, and no one else, committed it. The defense does not have to prove anything. We don’t have to call a witness, which is fortunate, because we don’t have any witnesses to call. No one is going to testify for the defense, because, again, there is nothing the defense has to prove. All we have to do is sit here and, like you, listen to what the witnesses for the prosecution have to say. Not exactly like you, because I get to ask questions, I get to ask the questions the prosecution doesn’t want to ask,” he added with a significant look. “The questions the prosecution might not want answered. And because this is an opening statement, and not a closing argument, because this is the time when both sides give you a kind of preview of the case, and not the time when both sides tell you how they think you should interpret what you have seen and heard, let me simply mention something – a crucial piece of evidence – that the prosecution won’t introduce because the prosecution doesn’t have it.”

Harlowe gazed out at the faces of the crowd, all of them straining forward, eager to hear what it was that the prosecution might have missed. He played with their surprised uncertainty, this sense he had now created that the outcome of the trial might not be quite as inevitable as everyone had thought. It had come to him in a flash of inspiration, an opening, if a very small one, in what had seemed a perfect chain of evidence, a missing link, something he might use.

“Everyone is going to testify, all these witnesses for the prosecution, testimony that will keep us here for weeks. They’re going to tell you what the district attorney said they would tell you. They’re going to tell you what they saw, what they heard, what they discovered, and what it meant; they’re going to tell you so much you may not be able to keep track of it all. They’re going to tell you everything, except the most important thing. Not one of them is going to tell you he was actually a witness to what the defendant is charged with doing. Not one of them – not one – is going to tell you that he saw Daniel Lee Atkinson murder anyone. They’re going to tell you a lot of things, but they’re not going to tell you that, because they can’t.”

CHAPTER THREE

The blinds on the windows in Walter Bannister’s office were opened only in the evening, when he was alone and working late. Watching the sun sink below the flat edge of the Pacific and then melt into the copper colored sea, he remembered what it had been like, years before, when he was still a boy and every summer was the one that would never end and the only thing he had to think about was how long after dark he could stay on the beach before it was time to go home. He was often there, working alone in his office, sometimes close to midnight, though it seldom had anything to do with the trial over which he happened to be presiding.

Some trial court judges, perhaps most of them, carried what little law they knew in their heads, ruled their courtrooms with a gruff voice and an iron hand, and left to the appellate courts the job of correcting any mistake they might make. They seldom kept a jury or a lawyer past five in the afternoon, and thought they were overworked; they looked forward only to retirement and complained their pensions were too small. Walter Bannister loved every minute he spent in court and never thought about quitting. He studied all the time; read books about the way the law first came into being; read about the American Constitution, how it was formed, how it was ratified; read all the most important decisions of Chief Justice Marshall, the ones that formed the basis of the union. But more than anything, he read everything he could find about the criminal law.

He had become fascinated by the way criminals behaved, why they did what they did. He wondered whether it was some sudden, temporary abandonment of all restraint, a devastating moment of unbridled rage, that made the murderer kill, or whether there was something deeper than that, a motive which went well beyond the kind of anger that everyone felt at one time or another. It was often said that the criminal, the murderer, was abnormal; that he suffered from a personality defect, though not of the sort to make him, in the legal definition, insane. The murderer was responsible for what he did. But that made the murderer sound reasonable, fully capable of measuring in advance the consequence of his actions. If that were the case, murder would be as reasonable as anything else, a choice among several, each one as good as the others. No one wanted to say that, so the experts talked about anti-social, or asocial, types, terms which, vague in themselves, indicated only that something was not quite right. It gave everyone the comfort that, whatever these people were, they were none of them like us. After more murder trials than he could count, Walter Bannister had begun to doubt if any of this was true.

The blinds were still closed shut when Hector Alfonso and Michael Harlowe walked in. A porcelain lamp on the judge’s desk and two floor lamps next to the wall behind them softened the rectangular lines of the room and made the otherwise ordinary furnishings – the plain, unremarkable desk and the stiff wooden chairs – seem almost comfortable. Behind the chair where Bannister waited, were three tall stacks of books, the only volumes to be seen. The usual metal shelves lining the walls with the endless appellate reports, the dust covered case law that stood a monument to illiteracy in the chambers of most of Bannister’s brethren on the bench were noticeable by their absence. If he needed a report, an appellate opinion, the law library was just down the hall. Instead of books, the walls were full of pictures, most of them taken in the l920s and 30s, black and white photographs of Los Angeles when the orange groves ran out to the ocean and the ranchers thought themselves fortunate to draw water from a well. It was how his family had started, large landowners when some of the land was worthless and all of it was cheap, before water was brought from the other side of the mountains and before anyone discovered oil, and when the movies were still as silent as the endless coastline was at night.

“I wanted to see you both to tell you how grateful I am to have such two fine lawyers trying this case,” said Bannister as he motioned for them to sit down. “Your opening statements were, both of them, as good as any I have heard.”

They felt, in his presence, like schoolboys praised by a teacher they revered.

“I’ll tell you how good it was.” Leaning back at an angle in his chair, he moved his index finger three times in a circle as he recalled what he had thought at the time. “You could have changed places and you would have done the same thing the other one did.” He looked first at Harlowe. “If you were prosecuting, you would have done the same thing, exactly the same thing, as Hector did. And yes,” he said, turning to the district attorney, “you would have done exactly what Michael did, if you had been the attorney for the defense.”

The two lawyers looked at each other, not quite certain what he meant. Bannister explained their confusion.

“We think too much in categories. You’re a prosecutor; you’re a defense lawyer. You build the case for conviction; you try to tear it down. That’s what you have trained yourselves to do. They don’t do it that way in England. Some days you prosecute; some days you defend. In one trial you make the case for the prosecution; in the next trial you argue against conviction. That’s why, on the average, they’re better lawyers. I spent a year there, just after law school.”

Bannister’s eyes, which turned different shades of green, a bright emerald color at one extreme, and nearly gray at the other, lit up at the memory. He wanted to get it exactly right, what he had seen, and what he had felt about it at the time. It was difficult to know precisely how to begin, or more importantly, how far he should go. There were limits to what he could say, how far he could trust anyone with the truth, especially two lawyers who practiced in his court. The lines in his forehead deepened as, slowly and methodically, he dragged two fingers across his smooth shaven chin. A smile started, and died, at the corner of his mouth.

“I had a trial last week - doesn’t matter who the lawyers were. The prosecutor was someone from your office,” he said, nodding across at Hector Alfonso. “She’s been at it for years; good, competent, knows exactly what she’s doing.” He paused, troubled and even slightly astonished at what he was about to say. “If she had been the defense attorney, the defendant would have been acquitted. He should have been acquitted. If it had been a bench trial, if it had been tried without a jury, I would have found him not guilty without any hesitation. He was innocent. There isn’t any question. But the defense attorney was in over his head, a young man barely out of law school, working in the public defender’s office; probably the only job he could get. He might be a good lawyer one day, but he certainly isn’t that now. Fortunately, it wasn’t a serious crime, simple theft….” Bannister’s eyebrows shot up, sudden emphasis for what he thought an undeniable fact. “Nothing was stolen. The woman who claimed to be the victim was lying. She wanted to get back at her boyfriend, the defendant, the one she accused, for leaving her for another woman. The jury found him guilty. They didn’t really have much choice. The defense attorney was tripping all over himself, asking questions that had no meaning and forgetting to ask the questions that did. I was able to do something, not to make it right - it was too late for that – but at least I could put him on probation and not have to send him to prison for the next ten years.”

Bannister got up from his chair and, turning around, opened the blinds a little, just enough to look outside at the sky, covered in a stagnant dusty haze. He shrugged his shoulders at the utter futility of what he had done.

“You should have seen the brazen way she told that story, told it as if she believed every lying word – and maybe she really did believe it, with all the rage and resentment that had gone into it – had lied herself into thinking that it had really happened, because she knew of course that he had stolen something from her, something far more valuable than what she reported missing, stolen all her hope and trust,” he added in a soft, lilting voice, realizing now, for the first time, what must have been her motivation.

“I was almost to the point of saying,” he remarked in a self-deprecating tone as he turned back around, “that you sometimes see things in court that make you think murder might in some cases be justified.” He banished the thought with a hurried motion of his hand. “The point I wanted to make, what I started thinking about while I watched the two of you, is how important it is, how essential for the fairness of a trial, to have the lawyers on each side fairly matched in their abilities. We ought to do what the British do – we should, but of course we won’t; we’re too much in the habit of what we do – and assign cases at random among counsel, have lawyers take whatever side the court orders them to take. You wouldn’t have what we have now, two different systems of justice, one for the rich who can afford to hire whom they choose, and one for the poor who have to take what they’re given, when what they’re given isn’t very much.”

“The poor aren’t doing too badly here,” offered Hector Alfonso, turning to Harlowe with a quick, eager grin.

“No, whatever happens, the defendant won’t be able to complain that his lawyer wasn’t up to the job,” replied Bannister in full agreement. He dropped into his chair and tapped his fingers briskly on the hard black surface of the desk. “But this is the exceptional case, a brutal murder and the public in the mood for a lynching. I can ask a Michael Harlowe to step in and help preserve the integrity of a jury trial in a criminal case. I can’t do that in the thousands of other cases that come through every year. I can’t even do it in the dozens of murder trials over which I have to preside. Though perhaps I should - a murder case like this one is easy enough to try.”

There was mischief in the judge’s eyes, a look that dared them to guess his meaning. Not that the meaning was that difficult to know, but that it was so seldom mentioned, even among those who spent their lives in court.

“It’s true, isn’t it, Mr. Harlowe – a case like this is the easiest kind to try.”

Harlowe did not even want to guess. “I’m not sure I….”

“No, don’t be embarrassed. It’s my fault; I shouldn’t…, but still. Let’s leave this case out of it. I’m certainly not prejudging anything. Just as a general proposition. Someone I know, someone I’ve known since law school, told me that the easiest cases he had as a defense lawyer are the ones where his client is guilty and the evidence against him is overwhelming. ‘Nothing to lose,’ is the way he describes it. You go to trial, you do your best, and if the jury comes back with a guilty verdict you don’t have to think twice about it. The hardest cases are the ones in which you know with as much certainty as you’ve ever known anything that your client is innocent and that if you don’t win, if you make some mistake, if you forget to ask the right question, or if you ask the wrong one, if the jury doesn’t like you, if – well, if a thousand different things – the jury finds him guilty, you have to live with that for the rest of your life, the knowledge that someone you should have saved, an innocent man, is going to spend the rest of his life in prison, or die at the hands of the executioner, for something he did not do.”

Bannister looked away, started to think of something else, and then, suddenly, turned back and with a strange intensity searched Harlowe’s puzzled eyes.

“Is that why you do it, what you like most about it? – The risk, the danger, the feeling of always being that close to having someone you’re supposed to help suffer if you make a mistake. Is it what a surgeon feels, knowing that if his hand slips just a little, if a cut he makes with his knife is not quite precise, the patient dies instead of lives? I never practiced criminal law, I didn’t try any cases in court, and so I don’t have that experience. I just sit here every day and observe,” he said, as if he felt a need to apologize, “which isn’t the same thing at all. There is no risk, no danger, no feeling what things like that are like.”

He smiled to himself, a little embarrassed at what he had done, and yet grateful that he had had someone to listen.

“I’ve sometimes even thought it would be good for judges to know what it was like to be a criminal. Before you sentence someone to twenty years in prison, it might be good if you spent just a week or so in the county jail.”

Hector Alfonso said it without thinking, the immediate response, the logical next step, as it were, to what had just struck his ear.

“Or maybe commit a crime, get taken into custody and interrogated by the police.”

“That might make sense as an abstraction, a kind of academic exercise where everyone knows nothing is going to happen,” replied Bannister in a way that suggested this was not new to him. “It is a little like going without food for a few days because you want to know what it feels like to go to bed hungry at night, what it feels like to starve. But it’s ludicrous. You don’t eat for a few days, live on bread and water, and then, all pleased with yourself that you now know what it’s like to starve, you go out and have a steak dinner. What’s missing is the knowledge – the awful certainty – that you’re always going to be hungry, that there isn’t any meal to look forward to after a few days of minor inconvenience. No, to do what you suggest, to make it real, it couldn’t be some minor offense without any harm to anyone, the sort of thing that could be excused as an interesting part of a judge’s education, a teaching exercise carried out with an entirely beneficent intent. If you really wanted to feel what it was like to be a criminal, someone who, remember, has abandoned all hope of protection from the law, you would have to commit some terrible act of violence, murder someone, so that the only alternative is escape or the most extreme penalty the law allows: life in prison or execution. You would have learned it then, what it was like to be a criminal, and you would wish you never had.”

“The second tree in the Garden,” mused Harlowe, as he crossed one leg over the other and sat back in his chair. Alfonso gave him a puzzled glance. “The tree of life and the tree of knowledge,” explained Harlowe. “There were two trees in the Garden of Eden. When they ate from the tree of knowledge they were banished from the Garden and the tree of life. The knowledge they gained gave them death.”

Deeply interested, Walter Bannister tapped his fingers together and stared into the middle distance.

“Yes, and if they had stayed in the Garden, if they had not eaten of the tree of knowledge, they – and we – would have remained as blissfully ignorant as all the other animals in God’s creation. We wouldn’t have known death, only because we had no knowledge of our own existence. Don’t you think so, Mr. Alfonso,” he added with a playful glance at the district attorney. “Which brings me back to the matter at hand: this little trial of ours, whether there is anything we need to discuss before we start calling witnesses. Because, like it or not gentlemen, we’re not in the Garden anymore, and, if this trial goes the way the prosecution says it should, we will end with one more death.”

“Yes, but the first one of the five people involved who deserves it,” said Hector Alfonso with more heat than he intended. He immediately apologized. “Sorry, your Honor; I didn’t mean to….”

Bannister held up his hand.

“If the evidence proves to be what you said it is, no one is going to disagree. The evidence is the question. I’ve seen the photographs, I’ve warned the jury about them. We’ve taken up the question of admissibility in pre-trial motions. Mr. Harlowe will object to their introduction and, as I’ve done already, I will rule against him. And I trust you, Mr. Alfonso, will let those photographs speak for themselves and not add the kind of incendiary remarks other, less competent prosecutors, might try to make. All this is clear. What I need to make clear now is that, within limits, I am going to allow the defense considerable latitude. Where there is the slightest doubt on an issue, the benefit of that doubt goes to the defense. That’s the reason I allowed Mr. Harlowe to ask questions on voir dire I normally would not allow at all. Daniel Lee Atkinson seems almost certain to be found guilty, which is all the more reason to make sure he has a fair trial.”

Bannister looked around the shadowed room like someone searching for support, an understanding of the deeper reason for things that on the surface might appear to make no sense at all.

“You both know this is no favor to the defense. The only appeal from a guilty verdict is the rulings made on the side of the prosecution. The best trial is a fair trial in which the verdict stands.”

He let them consider the significance of that singular remark, consider in all its implications the announcement in advance that any rulings he had to make would, whenever possible, go against the prosecution, and all for the purpose of producing a degree of finality for what was decided at the end by the jury. Those who were crying for blood, who thought the fact that Daniel Lee Atkinson had a lawyer proof of a perverse and misguided sympathy for the rights of murderers, rapists and thieves, would have laughed themselves into a rage at the notion that by ruling whenever he could in favor of the defense Bannister was shortening the time Daniel Lee Atkinson would be allowed to live.

“Who knows, maybe you’ll win,” said Bannister, breaking the silence. They were alone, the three of them, no one there to overhear their private conversation, what they could talk about among themselves: the way things really worked in a jury trial. “You made a good start,” he continued, smiling at Hector Alfonso, certain he would agree with his assessment of what Harlowe had done. “Telling everyone that the defendant looked like a murderer, looked just the way they must have imagined. If Hector had done that, if any prosecutor had done that – pointed to the defendant and said ‘he looks just like the murderer he is’ – you would have been on your feet demanding a mistrial, and you would have gotten it.”

A shrewd, subtle smile made its way around the back corners of his lips. Bannister had a great appreciation for the way a good lawyer worked. Anyone could learn the technical rules, the kind of evidence that was allowed, the questions one could ask a witness, but there were not many lawyers who could turn a trial into a drama, not many who could make a jury hang on every word, never knowing, and always wanting to know, what was going to happen next, and almost none at all who knew how to break the rules with impunity and effect.

“A prosecutor could never get away with what you did, and he shouldn’t. ‘He must be guilty because he looks the part!’” exclaimed Bannister with a short, emphatic laugh at the absurdity of it. “No, I don’t think so. But you can do it,” he said, turning to Harlowe, “because coming from you it has the opposite effect. It isn’t, ‘he must be guilty because he looks it; it is ‘you need to be careful what you do here, careful that you don’t convict someone of a crime because he looks like the kind of person you imagine does such things.’ He looks like a murderer, therefore you better be damn certain you give him all the presumption of innocence he is suppose to get.”

With the back of three fingers, Harlowe scratched briefly the side of his face. His pale blue eyes danced with amusement.

“It may not be the best defense I’ve ever heard of – telling a jury they should find someone not guilty because he looks like the worst nightmare they’ve ever had,” he said in a slow, deliberate drawl.

“It’s an odd thing, though, isn’t it?” asked Bannister, one thought leading to another. “That we make that association between what someone looks like and what they do, or what they are. What’s the first thing we think when someone with good manners and a decent appearance commits a particularly vicious murder? – That he doesn’t look like the kind of man who would do something like that. We’re always trying to figure this out, find some physical basis for the way we behave. Remember phrenology, what passed for psychology or science in the 19th century: explaining the criminal by the shape of his skull? We laugh about that now, but what do we do instead – look at something missing in the brain, or try to find the gene, that gives the reason why some of us commit murder and other do not. A hundred years from now they’ll be laughing about that, convinced that they’re on the track of the real cause.”

He threw a sharp look at Hector Alfonso. “And what about you?”

“Me?”

“You prosecute people for murder and other violent crimes. What makes the people who do these things different from you and me? Is it something in their physical make-up, or is it what we were taught a generation ago: that crime follows poverty as day follows night? Or is it education? We certainly don’t see many college graduates put on trial. Is it alcohol and drugs? Is it the absence of religion, a belief in something that teaches respect for others and restraint?”

These were not questions that Hector Alfonso, or, to be fair, most other prosecutors thought much about. They were too busy dealing with the things that happened to worry about the cause. In other circumstances, in front of another audience, he would have made up on the spot a response that sounded impressive and said nothing. In front of Walter Bannister he blurted out the truth.

“A lot of them steal to get money for drugs. I’m not sure I can remember a burglary that didn’t involve that. But murder – a murder like this one – I don’t think there is any explanation. Guys like this are just deranged.”

“Deranged, but not legally insane,” added Bannister, quick to show the irony in what was said. “Do you want to know what I think? – People kill, not always, but more often than we want to admit, for the sheer thrill of it, the sense of excitement it gives them. And we all approve of it, as long as it’s someone we believe ought to be dead.”

Bannister waited to see the look of surprise, bordering on something like alarm, rise to the conscious level of their minds, the stunned reaction that something crazy and barbaric had just been suggested.

“How else do you explain that we hold parades and pin medals on the chests of soldiers, men we have sent out to kill, when they come marching home from war?”

It was typical, they told each other after they left the judge’s chambers and were walking down the hall on their way out of the courthouse; typical and, in their experience, unique. Only Walter Bannister would have thought things through like that, instead of, like nearly everyone else, stopping at the obvious conclusions. Hector Alfonso emitted a low, rueful laugh.

“Spend enough time with him and you’ll never think anything is certain again.”

He said this with a breath of relief. It had been like sitting in a classroom, listening to a tightly reasoned lecture, afraid that if he missed one word he would not be able to understand anything. He was glad he had done it, and glad that it was over and he could relax.

“A judge who thinks,” said Harlowe, grinning broadly as they started down the steps outside. The air was warm and still, one of those summer evenings that make you forget the breathless daytime heat. “You don’t find many of those. He’s subtle, though, isn’t he? The way his mind moves back and forth. First, he’s going to give me all the latitude the defense is ever going to want; next, he’s only doing it so after the defendant gets convicted there won’t be anything to appeal.”

Alfonso stopped on the second step from the bottom. He made sure there was no one else around, no one who might wonder why the prosecutor in such a high profile murder case was having such a good time talking with the attorney for the accused. Hector Alfonso was always aware of the appearance of things. He rested his hand on Harlowe’s shoulder and looked past him, his gaze fixed on what they had a few minutes earlier seen together.

“He tells you that because when all the evidence is against your client you have the easiest of all possible cases. You have nothing to lose because everyone knows he’s guilty and that you can’t win. He doesn’t say a word – he doesn’t have to, does he? – about what that says about my situation: that if this is the easiest case you could have, it is, for the same reason, the hardest one for me. That’s what I learned about him a long time ago, first time I tried a case in his courtroom: with Walter Bannister it isn’t so much what he says as what he doesn’t say that is important.” Alfonso’s dark eyebrows shot up, his eyes filled first with admiration and then, the next instant, a kind of baffled wonder. “That mind of his, it’s a goddamn labyrinth. Every time you turn a corner, every time you think you know where he’s going, he’s off in a direction you didn’t even know was there. The thing is, he’s thinking all the time.”

Hector Alfonso shook his head, wishing he could explain it all better. Harlowe thought he understood.

“I know what you mean. Whenever I’ve tried a case in front of him, there’s a point when I start to think he knows the case better than I know it. It’s the way he follows everything, looks at you when you’re asking a question, looks at the witness, studies him, anticipating the answer; the way he seems to get inside everyone – including me – like he’s read their mind. He doesn’t see the police reports, doesn’t interview witness or visit the crime scene. He’s hearing it all for the first time, and yet – it’s spooky – I get the feeling that he’s trying the case all by himself.”

Alfonso began to grasp something he had not understood before. He did not quite know what it was, only that it matched his own experience, though before this moment he could not have said precisely in what that experience had consisted.

“Try the case all by himself,” he repeated out loud.

“Like no one else is there – the defense, the prosecution, even the guy on trial – he’s all of them. He thinks the way they do – the way we do – feels what they feel. Did you hear him back there, that business about what makes people kill? He means it. He wants to know; wants to know, if I followed what he was saying, what someone like this guy, Daniel Lee Atkinson – the guy we’re trying – must have been thinking, must have felt, if he did what everyone says he did.” He looked at Hector Alfonso for a moment, a friendly adversary he liked and respected. “But you couldn’t really do that, could you? – Get inside the head of someone who would do something like this, the things you told the jury – know what it was like, feel what it was like, to commit a brutal murder.”

The face of Hector Alfonso glistened in the bronze light cast by the fading summer sun. The dry heat felt good against his skin. He liked Michael Harlowe and was glad to talk to him.

“I don’t think you can know what it really feels like to do anything unless you’ve done it yourself. You can imagine it, but that wouldn’t tell you if what you imagined was true.”

He leaned closer. They were alone on the steps, but had someone been standing right next to them his voice was so low what he said could not have been overheard.

“Let me tell you a secret, something I’ve never told anyone. The sympathy people have for the victims, even of a crime like this – I don’t know anymore how much of it is real – what they really feel – and how much of it is what they think they’re supposed to feel, and, not feeling it, pretend.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“You may call your first witness,” announced Walter Bannister, looking down from the bench.

Hector Alfonso, wearing another new suit and another new tie, rose from his place at the counsel table and called out the name of the first of the long list of witnesses the prosecution intended to call.

Michael Harlowe was right when he told the jury that he did not have to do anything, that he did not have to ask a question, and did not have to call a witness of his own; right when he said that the defense did not have to prove anything, that it was up to the prosecution to prove that the defendant had done something wrong. The burden was all on the other side. He had not told them, what he sometimes added when he tried cases involving lesser crimes - what, done the right way, made a jury laugh - that it was one of the reasons he had become a defense lawyer: so he could sit all day in court and watch the other fellow work. Murder, especially one like this, was too serious for that.

Still, murder or not, Harlowe liked the advantage it gave him, not having to do anything of his own, but sit there, waiting for the other side to make an error. It did not need to be much: a simple misstatement of fact, or the hesitation, the slight uncertainty, the nervous catch in the throat, the brief, passing instant of confusion when a witness gave an answer that was not quite right. Harlowe had an instinct for it, knew almost before it happened that a witness had made a mistake, and knew as soon as that what to do with it. Convinced it must be something he read in a witness’s eyes, prosecutors he had beaten in earlier cases told their witnesses to look at the jury instead. But even when they remembered, his face was too open, too friendly and something always pulled them back.

He had become in his years of practice an expert witness of his own, a judge of prosecutors and the way they worked. Most of them were competent within the limits of the usual standards, perfectly able to present a case in the proper way, calling a witness to prove each element of the crime in question and summarizing the case at the end without a major mistake. Many of them used notes to remind them what they wanted to say. It was all quite orderly, marshalling the evidence in a logical progression that seemed to lead to only one conclusion, nothing left to chance and no place for surprise. It was textbook procedure, a check list with each blank box clearly marked, the criminal law reduced to the law of mechanics. Harlowe looked forward to trying cases against prosecutors like these. They were easy to beat, too dull and methodical to recover once they were surprised by the failure of one of their witnesses or a new and unexpected piece of exculpatory evidence. But Hector Alfonso was not like that.

If Alfonso was not in a category all his own, there were few enough others in it to make him part of a rare, and, so far as Harlowe could determine, dying breed: a lawyer for whom the rules were not so much to be followed as used, picked and chosen from until he had the one he wanted, the one that worked. That was the reason that, almost alone among prosecutors, he could smile and laugh and take you into his confidence about, among other things, Walter Bannister’s unusual ways of thinking; the reason he could shake your hand and wish you well and mean it and then, the moment you were back inside the courtroom, do everything he could to destroy you. He did not just want to win, he did not just want to beat you: he wanted you to be glad that if you had to lose you lost to him. That was the reason, strangely enough, that when he had finished with this first witness, a young black woman who had taken the 911 call reporting the gunshots, he had fairly shouted, “the gunshots that had started the slaughter, the death of four people, including two children, that the defendant –”

He did not try to finish, did not try to add the name, but wheeled around and with a broad, defiant smile waited for Harlowe to object. And then, before Harlowe could open his mouth, he turned back and as if astonished at his own misbehavior apologized to the court.

“Sorry, your Honor; this case has me a little overwrought.”

Harlowe sank down in his chair, but his eyes stayed fixed on Hector Alfonso.

“Do you wish to cross-examine the witness, Mr. Harlowe?” asked Judge Bannister after Alfonso reached the counsel table.

Harlowe’s eyes did not move from the district attorney. They stayed on him as he got up again and took two steps toward the witness stand, stayed on him as Alfonso settled into his chair and looked up, stayed on him as he asked the witness his first question.

“The gunshots that started the slaughter,” he began, repeating word for word the prosecutor’s own last inadmissible remark; “the death of four people, including two children, that the defendant - Well, actually,” he said, turning for the first time to the witness, “Mr. Alfonso did not ask, so I will. Did the caller, the person who reported the gunshots, say that she had seen who fired them?”

“No, she didn’t say anything about that.”

A smile flashed across Harlowe’s face.

“That isn’t true.”

The witness seemed to freeze. She had not meant to lie, and did not see how she had.

“I’ve listened to the tape. We could have it played for the jury. Why the prosecution did not have this done, I’m not sure. But if it will help you remember, I can….Let me remind you instead, you were told this woman had heard shots. You asked her, ‘Did you see anyone.’ You remember now. The shots had come from a house across the street. You wanted to know if anyone was outside, someone running away. She had heard shots, it could have been a murder/suicide; it could have been a lot of things. You told the woman to stay inside, to stay safe. The police would be there right away. You wanted to tell the police – the police you were sending – everything you could. Remember now? She had not seen anyone, had she?”

“No, no one,” replied the witness.

Harlowe turned and started back to the counsel table.

“I guess that’s the reason why we don’t let the prosecution ask all the questions,” he said with a caustic grin. Tapping three times on the front corner of table, he looked straight into the eyes of Hector Alfonso. “My apologies, your Honor,” he added immediately. “I’m told that in a trial like this everyone gets a little overwrought.”

Hector Alfonso tried not to smile.

It was the same thing with the next witness and the one after that, the same thing with nearly every witness the prosecution called. Whatever they said, whatever evidence they presented, whether it was the coroner testifying about the cause of death for each of the four victims, the ballistic expert connecting the bullets taken from the two gunshot victims to the gun taken from the defendant, the police officers who had captured Daniel Lee Atkinson after an exchange of gun fire, Harlowe asked the same question on cross and got the same answer.

“You testified that the bullets that killed two of the victims came from the gun found in the possession of the defendant,” he reminded the expert on ballistics, a balding, middle-aged man with sloping shoulders and an unfortunate nervous twitch at the side of his mouth. “Can you testify that the defendant was the one who fired the gun, that the defendant, and no one else, pulled the trigger?”

Still, no matter how many times the question got answered, no matter how many times a witness for the prosecution admitted that he had not seen the defendant kill anyone, the circle narrowed and grew tighter. No one had seen the murders, but it became clear, as Hector Alfonso built his case, that someone had seen everything else. Gunshots had been heard. The bullets taken from the two dead bodies had been fired from the same gun with which the defendant had tried to shoot the two police officers who had finally apprehended him. He had been seen running from the house. And that was only half the prosecution’s case. What came next made the question Harlowe kept asking begin to seem almost as obscene as what the members of the jury were now asked to look at for themselves, the photographs, the two parents draped over the blood covered sheets of their bed, the husband shot in the head, the back of his wife’s head torn away after the barrel of the revolver had been shoved into her mouth.

But it was the photographs of the two dead children, cut to pieces with a butcher knife, which removed any possibility that the absence of an eye-witness would affect the verdict. Some of the jurors, after a quick, reluctant glance at the first of the several pictures they were given, would not look at the others; two of the jurors broke down and cried. Bannister had told them at the beginning, warned them that they would be shown things no one should have to see, but there were no words in the language to prepare them for what they saw: the mangled, bloody remains of what had been two healthy, happy children, just starting out on what should have been long and happy lives, murdered in a way that went beyond all comprehension, the only thing to which their deaths could be compared the attack of a wild animal in a blood lust for food.

“How long have you been a detective?” Alfonso asked the lead detective in the case. “How many years investigating homicides?” He did not wait for an answer. “And in all that time have you ever seen anything like this? – Anything even close to this?”

Harlowe did not cross-examine the witness. There was nothing he could ask that would not make things worse. He could only sit back and watch the rest of the prosecution’s case unfold. Like the gun that had been used in the murder of the parents, the knife used in the killing of the children had been recovered. The blood on it matched the blood not just of the two children but that found on the defendant’s clothing. There had not been an eyewitness to the murders, but the prosecution did not need one, and everyone, including Michael Harlowe, knew it.

Walter Bannister knew it as well, but he had known it before the jury had even been sworn; knew it, if the truth be told, the day Daniel Lee Atkinson had been brought under armed guard into his courtroom for arraignment on four different charges of capital murder. That did not mean that he knew Atkinson would be convicted – you could never be completely certain what a jury would do – but that Atkinson had done it, murdered four people, he never had a doubt. Harlowe had been right about that: Atkinson had the look, or rather the attitude, the scornful defiance, the hostility, the open contempt for the law and every form of authority, the complete absence of any sense of morality, any notion of right and wrong. He had seen it in the jeering grin that cut across Atkinson’s heavy twisted mouth when the first charge of murder was read from the indictment, as if that were not the half of what he had done and nothing close to the full measure of his achievement. It was inescapable, and Walter Bannister understood it immediately: Atkinson was proud of what he had done and more than willing to brag about it.

While he followed closely the testimony of each witness, not only listening to what they said but observing with a practiced eye the way they said it, Bannister was also intensely interested in how the defendant reacted to the testimony given against him. There was seldom any reaction at all. Even when those dreadful photographs were being passed round the jury box, Atkinson continued to pick with his fingernail at a scab on his wrist. He was in this respect a typical sociopath, oblivious to the world around him, totally indifferent to what others thought. There was nothing to be learned that you could not find in a textbook on abnormal psychology or in a first year course in criminology. What could not be found in a book or learned in a lecture, what only someone like Daniel Lee Atkinson could teach, was what he had felt when the crime was being committed. Watching him now, it was hard to believe that he had felt anything, or could remember it if he had.

Bannister followed everything said at the trial with total concentration, but it was only toward the end of the prosecution’s case, when there were just a few more witnesses to call, that he realized that something important had been missed. It was so obvious he wondered how he could have failed to notice; but more than his own failure, he wondered at the prosecutor’s. Hector Alfonso was a first rate trial lawyer. Bannister had to believe that he had not missed it at all, that he was holding it back, waiting until the last minute to add a touch of drama to a shocking revelation that would make what Daniel Lee Atkinson was said to have done even more barbaric than what everyone already believed.

He waited, listening carefully, taking his usual meticulous shorthand notes, notes which he reviewed each night, expecting at any moment to hear Alfonso call attention to the connection of evidence that would show the real evil that had been done. But nothing happened, nothing was said, the case stayed on the same predictable course it had been on since the beginning. Bannister began to think he might be wrong, that the sequence of events had not been any different than what had been assumed. He went back through his notes, checking each known fact, not just once but several times. There was no mistake. The sequence had to have been what he thought it was; what happened that night could not have happened any other way. There had not been time.

Two weeks after he called his first witness, Hector Alfonso was ready to call his last.

“The prosecution had one more witness to call,” he announced at half past four on a Thursday afternoon.

Bannister would not have minded having cases tried long into the evening, until midnight if it was necessary, but trials were a burden for juries and, except when they were in the jury room deliberating the verdict, he seldom had them stay late. Five o’clock, or a few minutes later if a witness was on the stand and there were only two or three more questions to be asked, and the gavel would come down and the jury sent home. Alfonso read his mind.

“I imagine the testimony will take the better part of an hour, your Honor. And of course if Mr. Harlowe has questions….”

Bannister searched Alfonso’s eyes for the answer to a question Alfonso did not understand. Was this the witness who was going to make the connection everyone had missed?

“An hour, hour and a half, that’s my guess.” He glanced at the clock high on the wall opposite the jury box. “We could finish by six, if your Honor wishes.”

“No, we’ll start again tomorrow. You can call your witness then.”

The jury was excused with the usual admonition not to discuss the case among themselves or with others. Hector Alfonso gathered up his papers and got ready to leave. Harlowe waited while the two deputies without much sympathy helped the defendant to his feet, and then watched while they led him away, the rattling sound of steel chains echoing behind him as he left.

Harlowe knew he was guilty and that he deserved whatever punishment the law allowed. What made it even worse, he could find no excuse for what Atkinson had done. Some people killed out of jealousy, or in a fit of rage; some killed because of some perceived advantage that would follow from the victim’s death; some killed for money, others for revenge. These were not excuses, but they at least provided an explanation, made intelligible, what had been done. It did not mean that you sympathized with the killer, this murderer you defended, but more often than the outside world would believe, it made it possible to feel a little sorry that this murderer you were representing had taken common human failings to their ultimate extreme. What they had done was abhorrent, inexcusable, but there was still the possibility that their soul might be redeemable. That was the reason, that and the small advantage it sometimes had with a jury, to pat the defendant on the shoulder or speak to him in tones of encouragement when a witness finished testifying. Daniel Lee Atkinson, however, was a different case altogether, a murderer who killed without any reason at all, who killed without excuse. Harlowe never touched Atkinson on the shoulder and never spoke to him in court. He ignored him, pretended he was not there.

Atkinson did not seem to mind. Hour after hour, day after day, he sat slouched in his chair, his shackled ankles spread chain length apart, the heavy lids of his eyes hanging like a man half asleep, without noticeable interest in the proceedings that were almost certain to cost him his life. If his lawyer did not speak to him, he had nothing to say to his lawyer. Until today. The moment Bannister announced that the trial would resume tomorrow, Atkinson, suddenly alert, told Harlowe that he had to see him.

“Now, today, right away, as soon as they take me back to my cell.”

The harsh, grating quality of his voice sent a shudder down Harlowe’s spine. He had no choice; if his client wanted to see him he had to do it. But he did not have to do it when Atkinson said he did.

“I’ll come by this evening.”

As ignorant as anyone could be about the things most people think important, Atkinson had an instinct, not just for weakness, but for the ways it gets hidden. He looked at Harlowe with contempt. It made Harlowe furious, this knowledge that Atkinson had seen right through him, knew that the reason he would not come at once was so that Atkinson would know Harlowe was in charge.

“All right, if it’s that important,” said Harlowe as he turned away and stuffed into his briefcase the yellow legal pad on which all day he had jotted down the things he wanted to remember.

He did not go right away. He first wanted a cup of coffee, a chance to sit somewhere, quiet and alone, think over what had happened so far at trial, consider whether there was anything he had not done, any question he had not asked, anything he still might do before Hector Alfonso finally finished with the prosecution’s case. There was one day left. Not even that. One witness - that was all. An hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then the last chance gone: no more witnesses to cross-examine, no more testimony on which he might cast some doubt. One last witness for the prosecution, and he had none. Tomorrow, when Alfonso stood up to announce that the prosecution rests, when Judge Bannister turned to him to ask if the defense was ready to begin, he would stand straight as he could and in a voice filled with false confidence announce that ‘the defense rests, your Honor,’ and with those five words bring an end to the serious business of the trial.

It was not unusual to offer nothing in the way of evidence, to call not even a single witness. Most of the people he represented had criminal records. Even in that rare circumstance in which they were actually innocent, the often lengthy and lamentable history of violent crimes and dishonest acts could be introduced in evidence if the defendant was put on the stand to testify in his own behalf. He had once had a client, convicted twice of murder, put on trial for a third, a man who insisted that while he had murdered before he had not done it again. No one on that jury much cared if he was telling the truth. Appalled that after two murder convictions he had for some reason been set free, they decided that, guilty or not, he had not been punished enough.

Harlowe slowly sipped his coffee. Alone, the last customer in the courthouse cafeteria, he crossed one leg over the other and threw his left arm over the back of the wobble legged chair. He had unfastened the top button on his blue shirt and loosened his tie. He suddenly felt tired, exhausted, his face dirty and dry. The last thing he wanted to do was visit the jail to hear what Daniel Lee Atkinson had suddenly decided to say. It would not be anything interesting, and probably a complaint, a last minute demand, now that the trial was almost over, that he finally do something, work some kind of magic, pull some slick lawyer’s trick, to save him from the death penalty he deserved.

He finished his coffee, put the empty cup down on the gray plastic table and held it in both hands, trying to get himself ready for what he did not want to do. Muttering an obscenity, he pushed back from the table and headed toward the jail.

Atkinson was waiting for him in the same small dimly lit room in which they had met before. His short cropped head was bent down to the table, his wrists still shackled at his sides. He waited until the thick iron door slammed shut and Harlowe began to pull out the chair on the other side. Then, with a sudden, violent push backward with his feet, he shoved the chair around until he was sitting sideways to the table. His head jolted back and he looked down the jagged line of a broken nose at Harlowe who, not impressed, reached into his briefcase, pulled out the yellow legal pad filled, page after page, with his scrawl, and dropped it on the table in front of him.

“There was something you wanted to tell me?”

“You’re kind of an arrogant prick, aren’t you?” sneered Atkinson.

Harlowe did not blink. “It’s a little late, but if you want another lawyer, I’ll see what I can do.”

Atkinson shrugged with indifference. “I said you were an arrogant prick; I didn’t say you were a bad lawyer.”

Harlowe shoved the legal pad to the side. He bent forward on his elbow, close enough to smell Atkinson’s stale rancid breath.

“Let me tell you a secret. It doesn’t matter what kind of lawyer I am, good or bad, and it doesn’t really matter if I’m the arrogant prick you think I am. Clarence Darrow could not win this case. Tomorrow, when the prosecution calls its last witness, that’s it – it’s all over. There’s nothing I can do.”

Atkinson studied him with a curious detachment, subjecting him, as it seemed, to a shrewd appraisal. It was a show of intelligence Harlow had not expected.

“Nothing you can do,” said Atkinson, repeating the words with a skeptic’s certainty. He made it sound a secret that he had not yet decided to share.

Harlowe leaned back, eager to get away from that corrosive smell, and spread his hands, inviting him to explain.

“You can call a witness, the eyewitness you keep saying wasn’t there.”

Harlowe almost came out of the chair. There had not been any witness, at least no one left alive. Outraged that anyone would waste his time like this, he stood up.

“Yeah, let’s do that: call someone who can testify that they saw you murder four people! That should help. Everyone likes an honest witness.”

“A witness who will testify that I didn’t do it.”

Harlowe’s mouth fell open. “A witness who will…?”

“That’s right – a witness. Me.”

“You…! Jesus Christ!” cried Harlowe, slapping his forehead. Suddenly, he started to laugh, and, laughing, dropped back onto the chair. As quickly as it had started, the laughing stopped. He fixed Atkinson with a hard, cold stare. “Now you listen to me. There is no way in hell you’re going to testify. You can’t take the stand and tell the truth! You murdered four people, for Christ sake! – You’re going to get up there and tell them how you did it? You told me – remember? – the first time we met. Hell, you bragged about it! – the way you murdered them, the way you made them decide which one would die first, and then what you did. You can’t -”

“I lied.”

Caught off guard, Harlowe stared in disbelief.

“You …what – lied? What do you mean?”

“I lied when I said I did it. I didn’t do it. I tried to stop it.”

The laughter came again, not the helpless, frustrated laughter of before, but angry and resolute.

“Don’t try this with me. You think I’d believe something as stupid as that. You didn’t do it, and you only decided just now, the day before the last witness, to tell your lawyer about it!”

“Believe it, don’t believe it – I don’t give a fuck. But I didn’t do it. There was someone else there, a guy I’ve done a few jobs with. We broke into a few houses together. The asshole was all strung out that night, hopped up like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Sure, makes perfect sense,” replied Harlowe. Crossing his arms over his chest, he studied Atkinson with a jaundiced eye. “Go ahead: tell me the rest of it.”

Strangely, Atkinson did not look away, did not pause, the way most liars do, to get their story straight, remember to tell it exactly the way it had first been invented and then rehearsed. His eyes never lost contact.

“It’s what I told you before: no one was supposed to be there; they were supposed to be gone. We got in through the window in the kitchen, did it real quiet. I went into the living room to get whatever electronic stuff there was. Jerry – that’s his name, the only name I knew him by – went upstairs to see if there was any jewelry. It wasn’t more than a few seconds after he went up there I heard those goddamn shots, two or three of them, maybe four. It was so damn loud that -”

“There were four bullets fired,” Harlowe reminded him. “The trial, remember?”

“I’m telling you what I thought I heard. I was so goddamn scared, I wasn’t counting. Soon as I heard it, I ran up there; hoped he’d just gone nuts and decided to shoot up the place. No one was supposed to be there, the place was supposed to be empty. So I get there, I’m at the bedroom door, and I see what he’s done: killed them two, blew them both away. But he isn’t there. Then I heard a kind of gurgling noise, something just down the hall, another bedroom, and I can’t see anything at first, it’s all dark inside. Then I saw all right, Jerry standing there, slashing with that knife of his, blood all over, some kid laying on the floor, the other one hanging limp, Jerry holding him up, his arm under the kid’s jaw, the kid’s throat slashed wide open. I grabbed the damn knife away from him, made him give me the gun. Hell, I thought he was going to kill me next, he was that strung out. I kicked him down the stairs, kicked him right out of the house. He disappeared somewhere, probably out the back – there were a lot of trees – and I ran like hell the other way. That was my mistake. I should have gone out the back, done what Jerry did.”

It was, in an odd way, compelling, just insane enough to be true. But there was an obvious question and Harlowe asked it.

“And there’s some reason you did not want to mention this before?”

“Who would have believed me? – The cops…, you? Who we kidding? Everyone thinks I’m guilty. There wasn’t much for me to do but play the part.”

“Play the part? What are you talking about?”

“Give everyone what they’ve paid to see: the guy that would kill your mother and not just enjoy it but make you watch; rape your wife, kill your children. They’re going to give me the death penalty; might as well make them feel good about it.”

Atkinson was laughing with his eyes, but the reason remained a mystery. Was it because everything he had said was true and he enjoyed being the only one in on the joke, or because he could tell lies like this, tell them all day, and not care in the least whether anyone believed a thing he said. Harlowe did not believe him, but it was enough for Atkinson that he had created this tiny shadow of a doubt, this possibility, slim almost to the point of non-existence, but still real, that he might just be telling the truth, that he might be what every defense attorney fears more than anything: an innocent man who was certain to be convicted.

“I want to testify, and I’m going to testify. It isn’t your decision.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Walter Bannister was still thinking about the trial. The gate opened and he drove up the long winding driveway that led to the sprawling Spanish style house where he had lived since his marriage nearly twenty five years ago. He kept pondering the relative importance of what, he was now convinced, the prosecution had simply missed. It probably did not matter in terms of the ultimate result; there was scarcely any doubt what the jury would do. But it was not good work, especially from a lawyer as competent as Hector Alfonso. Perhaps the district attorney had too much of his own ambition on his mind, too much of his imagined future to see what was right in front of his eyes.

He parked the car in the usual place, on the circle just past the front doorway, and, as he often did, stood for a moment at the edge of the thick close cut grass, staring at the tall palm trees that towered overhead and the purple bougainvillea that twisted up the cream colored stucco wall that hid from view the swimming pool in back. Green birds with bright red markings called to each other in a harsh, mocking chatter. Walter Bannister told himself that he had nothing to complain about, that there was not one man in a million who would not envy the life he had. And then, as now happened more and more frequently, that thought was immediately followed by another, the knowledge that he could share their envy, be envious of himself, if he could somehow see things only from the outside, see what he had: the life of a respected judge, the home in Bel Aire, the fortunate son of a father who had become one of the richest men in Los Angeles, the husband of a woman, wealthy in her own right and just about the first person anyone would call who wanted any major charitable event, any gathering for a good cause, to become the kind of success that everyone would be talking about for months.

There was a smell of jasmine in the air, the golden scent of luxury and unreality, the scent of ancient kingdoms and moonlight adventures, the scent that reminded Walter Bannister of the movies. He was not sure if it was the place – Los Angeles and the business that made it thrive – or the movies he had watched as a boy, sitting in the darkness of a downtown theater, mesmerized by brave and reckless adventurers who never fought a fight they did not win or discovered a risk they would not take. It had all seemed so much more thrilling than what he had to do in school. It was not that he did not like school. He was good at it, very good, the best in his class, valedictorian when he graduated from high school, valedictorian of his graduating class in college, editor of the law review at Yale. He mastered all the dead abstractions, all the dry formulations, the endless definitions, all the changing rules, all the subjects of the college curriculum, and all the things law school had to teach. And every year there was more to learn, and he learned it. He could reason about anything, but – and this was the essential problem - there was no excitement in his life, no sense of adventure, nothing like what he thought he had seen in those movies of his childhood, the ones he had liked to watch.

“You’re late. Did you forget?”

The voice, a woman’s voice, seemed to float disembodied through the soft summer air. He turned to see his wife, Meredith, dressed in something new, standing in the shadows of the open doorway. The long black lashes over her eyes beat with impatience as she waited for an explanation.

It lasted just an instant, too brief for her to catch the meaning, but for a moment he was not certain who she was. She had become a forgettable part of his past, a woman with whom he had once been in love, or at least had thought he had been, a woman become a habit more than a desire. He seldom thought about her when she was not with him, and barely remembered when she was.

“Dinner at your brother’s,” he heard himself tell her, wishing as he said it that he had somehow forgotten. “And I’m not late,” he added as he brushed by her with a meaningless kiss on her powdered cheek. “It won’t take me ten minutes to change.”

He was ready in eight, changed from the suit and tie he wore every day to the courthouse, a tribute to judicial formality, into a tan sports jacket and a pair of lightweight gray slacks. It was one of the advantages of living in Los Angeles that, unless it was a black tie affair, one of those charitable events his wife was always involved with, he could dress down for dinner, get out of the structured uniform of his position into the casual clothing in which he could, at least at times, relax.

They did not say much to each other on the drive from their place in Bel Aire to her brother’s home out on Mulholland Drive. She did ask him how the trial was going, but before he could start to answer she pointed out the window at what she was quick to call another ‘garish monstrosity’ that someone with more money than taste was building on the demolished ruins of a house that, having been there for nearly fifty years, was considered in Los Angeles historic.

“I knew the people who lived there,” observed Meredith in that vague way of hers that left him in doubt whether she had actually known the people or was referring to the passing of a whole generation. “Someone new to the business,” she went on. “Made their money somewhere else and have to show everyone what they’ve got. By the way,” she said, turning to him with a look that suggested something that concerned them both, “you didn’t see Wilson when you left this morning, did you? He didn’t come home today.”

Bannister kept his eyes on the twisting road ahead of him.

“No? Well, I imagine he’ll be back. I know you didn’t want a cat, but you have to admit –don’t deny it – that you’ve grown fond of him, nearly as much as I have. Well, he’ll probably be there when we get home.”

“Cats sometimes disappear,” replied Bannister as they turned onto Mulholland Drive. “Sometimes they don’t come back at all.”

She did not hear him. Her brother’s place was just ahead, and she started talking about who the other guests were going to be.

Roger Stanton was a year and a half younger than his sister, and one of the most influential men in Hollywood. He was called a producer, but only because the title carries a certain mystic glamour in the industry. His name, or the name of his company, was among the title credits of dozens of major motion pictures, but other, lesser, names were responsible, at least in the details, for what those films were like. Stanton put things together, made the arrangements, secured the financing; in other words, he made what everyone else did possible. If you had an idea, a really good idea, for a movie, one that could make those who did it famous, or if they were already famous, more famous still, and if you believed, which was the only way to believe if you wanted to be successful in Hollywood, that you should, in that old American saying, start at the top and work your way down, you started with Roger Stanton. Or you tried to, and like nearly everyone else, you failed. Walter Bannister may have been the only person in Los Angeles who could see Roger Stanton whenever he wanted to and did not care if he ever saw him or not.

They turned into the drive and were suddenly at Roger Stanton’s rather famous house. Famous, not just because he lived in it now, but famous because of those who had lived there before: movie stars, the names that everyone had known, a whole series of them, at least six, going back to the l930s when the house was first built for a famous movie star couple who wanted to spend the rest of their lives in it and moved out two years later when their marriage ended in a scandalous divorce. Everyone who owned it had changed it, and then, having in that way made it their own, began to imagine that it had in some sense always belonged to them. They changed the colors, they changed the size of rooms; they tore down fireplaces and built new ones; they changed the shape and, when someone wanted to make it bigger, even the location of the pool; but no matter what they did, when you approached it from the front on Mulholland Drive it looked exactly the way it had that day in September all those years ago when the first owners first moved in. It was still the same two story place, the same green shutters on the windows, the same stately white square columns standing two stories straight up, the same black lacquered double doors that seemed to invite you in. It was a California, or rather a Southern California house, with short shady dark green trees and what looked an acre of grass cut close as a putting green. The doors were standing open when they arrived.

There were a dozen people gathered around the dining room and the conversation was, as usual, all about the movies: who was going to be cast in the next big blockbuster hit Roger Stanton was going to make; what was happening, what were the box office receipts, from the film released just last week. Nearly everyone there was in the business, the industry; two of them, a young woman and a much older man, were actors, film stars as they were called in all the magazines; the rest worked behind the camera or in the board room. Walter Bannister smiled and nodded when he had to and pretended an interest he did not feel.

“We should make a movie about the trial.”

Bannister had just turned to say something to Gloria Baker, the film star sitting on his left. He had not heard what his brother in law had said, but he saw the young woman’s eyes suddenly flash past him to the end of the table.

“What do you think, Walter?” asked his brother in law, Roger Stanton. “It’s all anyone can talk about, what that – what’s his name? – did: murdering all those people, a whole family, two small children.”

“Daniel Lee Atkinson,” said Bannister, filling in the name.

He was about to add that he could not discuss the case, that he was presiding at the trial and could not say a word about it, but he was bored by the trivial nature of the conversation and a little angry by the suggestion that the best thing anyone could think to do with a trial as serious as this was to turn it into a money making fiction.

“Make it into a movie? – Only if I get to play the defendant, the one on trial for murder.”

Stanton almost choked.

“You – play a killer? Good God, no one would believe it. You…! You don’t look anything like a murderer.”

“That’s the point Harlowe was trying to make,” said Bannister without thinking.

They all looked at him with puzzled faces, wondering what he meant. He tried to shrug it off, to suggest that it was not important, but it was too late. Irving Leonard, Stanton’s favorite director, would not let it go. Short, with bushy eyebrows and a tangled mop of reddish gray hair, he had a slightly demonic look and, when things did not go well, a temper to match.

“Harlowe, the defense attorney – he said something about looking like a murderer? He’s trying to tell them, tell the jury, that his client doesn’t look like a murderer? I’ve seen the pictures of this guy – Daniel Lee Atkinson – and if he doesn’t look like -”

“No, that isn’t what he was saying,” interjected Bannister, forced to correct a wrong impression. “He was saying just the opposite: That his client – the defendant – looks like a murderer; that he looks just like what they imagined a murderer must look like.”

Leonard was stunned. It did not make sense, but it also did not make sense that a lawyer as good as everyone said Harlowe was – the best defense lawyer around – would do something that stupid. There must be more to it, some reason for what on the surface seemed an obvious mistake. Bannister was ready with the answer before Leonard could think through the question.

“He had to do that, bring it out like that: what everyone was thinking the moment they saw him: that he looks like a killer – what we think a killer looks like. It was the only way to make the jury confront their own prejudice, the only way to make them realize they even had one. Now they have to think that they might be convicting someone just because of the way he looks instead of what the evidence proves. Harlowe is as good at what he does as anyone I’ve seen. He knows what he is doing, especially,” he added with a shrewd, barely visible grin at the side of his mouth, “when it looks like he doesn’t know what he’s doing at all.”

“Good, bad, or indifferent, he isn’t going to win this case,” said Leonard with perfect confidence.

Bannister leaned to the side, braced his thumb against the side of his face and with two fingers covered his mouth. He did not say a word. There was no change of expression. Leonard began to feel uncertain.

“He isn’t – I mean, he can’t, can he?”

“Walter never discusses a case, not even with me,” explained Meredith. She said this with the satisfaction, the residual pride, she felt in the reputation he had, the judge of unquestioned honesty and integrity. “He can’t; he won’t.”

But he could, and he did; obliquely and, as it were, at one remove. Resting on his elbows, he folded his hands together and as gently as he could explained what a trial was all about.

“The longer I do this, the longer I preside over cases, criminal cases, the more convinced I am that we do it all wrong. For example, no one can be forced to testify against himself.”

“The right against self-incrimination,” said one of the other guests, an executive in Stanton’s company, with a crisp, authoritative manner. Judith Charles knew Bannister’s reputation, but a trial court judge, no matter how brilliant, had no influence on anything that mattered to her. “You’re not suggesting we take that away,” she said with the same certainty with which she said most things. Her eyes glittered with impatience. She hated these abstract arguments, these dinner table disquisitions that never went anywhere.

Bannister grasped immediately the cause of her irritation and did not hesitate to irritate her even further. He raised his eyebrows in friendly challenge.

“What good does it do to have it? Why should the defendant in this trial of mine – why should anyone - have the right to refuse to tell what really happened? Forget the fact that we have that right – that’s no answer. What is the reason we have it, and is the reason all that good? The British don’t allow it; or rather, they allow it – they don’t force a defendant to testify – but they make him pay a price for his silence, something we don’t do.”

Everything about Judith Charles was tight and concentrated, from the skirts and jackets she wore to the smile that now flashed without humor across her half-closed mouth. Every inch the well-educated, professional woman, with both a law school degree and an MBA, her mind was always full of calculation.

“I don’t think we need to take any lessons from the British,” she remarked.

“Then who should we take lessons from, or do you believe we have nothing to learn?”

She was caught, and she knew it, and she did not like it. She tried to cut her losses.

“I’m not saying we don’t have anything to learn. What I am saying is that I don’t think we should start by throwing away something as fundamental as the right against self-incrimination.”

“You may be right,” replied Bannister, “but if a defendant charged with a crime like rape or murder chooses not to testify, I don’t see that he has anything to complain about if the judge then instructs the jury that they may note the fact that he could have given his version of what happened and chose not to do so.”

“But a judge couldn’t do that – you couldn’t do that – could you?” asked Leonard, sitting on the edge of his chair, intensely interested.

“Here, no; but in Great Britain, yes: the judge summarizes the evidence at the end of the trial and tells the jury what he believes are the reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from it. Here, we just preside over the trial, rule on questions about evidence and instruct the jury on the law. We don’t get to play nearly so active a part. It’s too bad, really. If we had that power – if we could interrupt and ask questions of our own, trials would not depend quite so much on which side had the better lawyer.”

Leonard ran his fingers through thick, disheveled hair and stared at the judge with manic eyes.

“But it wouldn’t make any difference in this case, though, would it?” he asked. “You showed me a few minutes ago, and you said it yourself: this guy Harlowe is pretty damn good at what he does. The thing I can’t figure out is why would he take a case like this? No one is paying him, from what I understand; and no matter how good he is, he must have known he doesn’t have a chance.”

Bannister glanced across at Judith Charles who had just picked up her wine glass.

“There are no eyewitnesses, and as you reminded us: the defendant has the right against self-incrimination. He can’t be forced to testify, and the jury will be instructed – if the defense asks for the instruction, which it will – that they may not take the defendant’s failure to testify into account, may not read anything into it whatsoever.”

“You think there is actually a chance that monster might go free?” asked the young actress, Gloria Baker, with a shudder.

“That’s a question – the guilt or innocence of the defendant – I never think, or at least try never to think about, during a trial. If he’s convicted, I have to pass sentence.” He paused, and for a moment stared down at his hands. “I do wonder, sometimes, about what makes someone do the kind of things this man is accused of doing.” Raising his eyes he looked around the table. “Most crimes are easy to understand.”

“But not murder?” asked Stanton. “Not crimes of violence?”

“No, murder is often the easiest crime to understand, easy to understand why someone did it. There is a reason someone dies. But a crime like this – there isn’t any reason.”

“But there was a reason,” insisted Judith Charles. “There was a break in, a burglary. There were people in the house. Maybe they tried to stop him; maybe he didn’t want anyone who could identify him later. It was terrible, but there was a reason why he did it.”

“No, that’s what no one seems to understand, what the prosecution missed. It’s what -” He shook his head abruptly, remembering what at all costs he must not do. “I’m sorry; I got carried away. You’re right, of course. Based on what we’ve heard in court, what all the papers have reported….But I shouldn’t be talking about this.”

Leonard bent forward, his eyes darting all around. He wanted to know what Bannister really thought.

“You were telling us something interesting. Forget the trial, forget the case: there are some crimes that can’t be explained. Isn’t that what you were saying? What are you saying, that there are some cases where the killer just does it because – because why?”

A troubled expression spread across Bannister’s face. His eyes turned inward and for a long time he did not say anything.

“Because he likes it,” he said reluctantly. “Because there is something about it he enjoys, that gives him pleasure and something more than that.”

“Something more than that,” asked Judith Charles. “Power, control, the feeling that he can do whatever he likes?”

The words had been used too often to express anything specific, anything that would explain, rather than characterize, what some predator had done. It was not that Walter Bannister disagreed with her; it was that she had made only a half step toward the truth. He tried to be diplomatic.

“Power, control – certainly there is an element of that: the feeling that the killer can, in the most extreme way possible, impose his will. But you can say that about a lot of things. Every time I sign an order I’m exercising power – control, if you will. Every time you, or someone at the studio, decide what movie you are going to make and who is going to play what part in it, you’re doing the same. But that isn’t why you do it – because if it is, you’re not the right person for the job. No, there’s more to it. Now, remember, I’m not talking about the usual case, murder for the usual reasons: money, revenge, rage over some act of betrayal – the husband who finds his wife in bed with another man - and I’m not talking about that other kind of murder, the serial killer who keeps killing until he’s caught, the one for whom killing becomes an obsession, the only thing he thinks about, the thing he cannot control.”

“But how is that different,” asked Leonard. With his elbows on the table, he held his face in both hands, studying Bannister with the same kind of concentration with which he measured the angle of a camera shot. “A serial killer – or this guy, Daniel Lee whatever his name is – what difference does it make whether they do it once or every chance they get? Either way, they have some deep psychological disturbance. They’re crazy – insane – driven by something they don’t understand. We did a movie about this, couple years ago. I read everything I could about it: what goes on in the mind of a madman like that, what kind of personality they have. There’s a pattern: narcissistic, unable to develop stable relationships, abusive childhoods.”

“I’ve read the same things,” replied Bannister, “and I still haven’t found anything that really explains it. You can tell me everything you want about the pattern, the profile, the characteristics supposedly common to those who commit multiple murders, but there are all sorts of people with all the same characteristics who never murder anyone. Forget about profiles. What makes this particular person do it? But again, I’m not talking about serial killers. The person I’m talking about may kill more often than once, but it isn’t because of a compulsion he can’t control.”

Judith Charles remembered a name, or rather two names. It surprised, and rather pleased her, that she could suddenly recall a once famous but now largely forgotten case, a case that had been made into a once famous and now largely forgotten movie. She looked at Walter Bannister with a new interest.

“Loeb and Leopold. The case in Chicago in the l920s: two students who killed a young boy just to see if they could do it. Brilliant students, they wanted to find out if they could be like one of Nietzsche’s supermen, act without morality. Clarence Darrow represented one of them, pled him guilty and argued, successfully, for life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.”

Bannister hesitated, the way he sometimes did in court, taking under advisement a question he needed time to consider. With a pensive expression, he stroked his chin for a moment before he finally replied.

“Darrow argued that they should be kept alive, these two young killers, so that perhaps something could be learned about why they did it. There had to be a reason, something wrong with them that explained what they had done, murdered that young boy. Darrow had to make that argument to save their lives, but what if he was wrong; what if the reason they did it was the one they gave? They wanted to be one of those that, at least in their surface understanding of what Nietzsche wrote, refuse to follow any rules other than the ones they make themselves. What if they murdered that boy because they wanted to know what it was like to make the rules for other people, the rules by which we decide who should live and who should die?”

“That’s monstrous,” insisted Judith Charles with some heat. “You’re not suggesting that what they did – Loeb and Leopold – was right or reasonable?”

“Right? – No, of course not; but reasonable – that’s another story. Certainly not reasonable from the perspective of what we regard as right and wrong; but if you believe that all morality is relative, a function of time and place, that it is up to you to decide the values by which you want to live – if you believe that one person’s values are as good as any other – if you follow that logic to it’s ultimate conclusion, murder becomes as reasonable as anything else.”

Judith Charles was speechless. She tapped her hard lacquered fingernails until her coffee cup began to rattle. The color vanished from her cheek.

“You’d never let anyone make an argument like that in court! You’d never let a murderer go free on the ground that murder is just as good a value as anything else!”

“No, of course not: murder is against the law,” said Bannister with a quiet smile that had its intended soothing effect. “We punish people who kill; sometimes we kill them. We kill them because the law – our law - tells us to. The question that Darrow did not address; the question that lies at the heart of what Loeb and Leopold thought they were doing; the question that, if you think it through, lies at the heart of what we are today, is: Whose law do you choose to follow?” For just an instant, he seemed to hesitate, but then, narrowing his eyes, he said what he was thinking. “The very notion that that choice is somehow ours to make is the cause of half the troubles we have.”

Whatever that meant, it escaped Judith Charles. Her mind was fixed on what he had said earlier.

“It is never right to kill. The death penalty is wrong; it should never be used, it -”

“Where do you think that comes from?” asked Bannister. Furrowing his brow, he tapped his finger on the white table cloth, not, like Judith Charles had, with hard emotion, but gently, in the way of someone trying to remember something. “This notion that killing is always wrong. No one really believes it. You’d kill someone if they were trying to kill you.”

“But that’s self-defense,” objected Leonard. Leaning back in his chair he rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not the same thing.”

“It is, if you’re the one who winds up dead.” Gloria Baker smiled in satisfaction at her own bright comment.

Judith Charles shook her head with impatience, turned back to Bannister, and continued the argument.

“But it’s the only way to save your own life. And that really proves my point: everyone has a right to live.”

“Even the murderer, the one we’ve been talking about?” Leonard reminded her with a caustic gleam in his eager eyes. “The one who kills for no reason except the experience; the one who murders someone just to know what it feels like? Even a guy like the one Walter is probably going to have to sentence to death when the trial is over?”

“It’s wrong to take a life,” repeated Judith Charles. She turned to Bannister. “Don’t you think so?”

“It doesn’t really matter what I think,” replied Bannister with a serious, thoughtful expression. “The law allows and – yes, it’s true – in the case before me, requires, the death penalty. I’ve been doing this a long time, and what seemed obvious to me in the beginning isn’t so obvious anymore. The question is always about the guilt of the defendant – whether he did it, whether it was murder – because, you’re right, killing someone is sometimes justified: self-defense or the defense of others. But what if before we put someone on trial for murder we first asked whether the victim deserved to die? Shouldn’t it make a difference whether you’ve killed a monster or a saint?”

“Murder is murder; it doesn’t…it shouldn’t - !”

“So if I murdered Hitler in, say, 1936, you would treat it the same way as if I murdered Mother Theresa today?” A sympathetic smile darted across Bannister’s mouth. “That’s a terrible comparison, and completely unfair. I was trying to make a point. Let me try to make it another way. A few years ago I had to sentence a man who had murdered someone who produced pornography. He seemed to think this was the only way to stop him, and I felt an obligation before I passed sentence to remind him that no one had the right to take the law into his own hands. He was not unintelligent, and I’ve never forgotten what he said.

“‘Whose hands, then?’ he asked. ‘What good is the law if it doesn’t protect you against the things that would make you want to kill someone, the only way to make them stop? What good is the law if it allows, and even protects those who make humans into beasts? Someone poisons the food you eat – this is a serious charge; someone poisons the minds, corrupts the spirits, of our children – we smile knowingly and extol the virtues of free expression.’

“As I say, I’ve never quite been able to get out of my head what he said that day. On its own terms, it makes a lot of sense, but of course you have to have the law: you can’t let people go round murdering just because they think it is in a good cause. But, still, it raises questions about this belief we have in the essential equality of everyone, this idea that even the worst murderer, if you will, has somehow the right to live. And I wonder sometimes where it comes from: this regret that even the worst murderer should be put to death. Perhaps it is all that’s left of the ‘soul’ in this irreligious age of ours. I’m not really sure.”

Judith Charles was sure. “If we don’t believe in life, I don’t see what else we can believe in.”

Irving Leonard was not interested in what anyone believed in or why they believed it. What mattered to him was the kind of movies he wanted to make. He turned to Roger Stanton who had known him long enough to guess immediately what he wanted to talk about.

“A picture about a murderer the audience applauds, the victim someone who needed killing. It’s been done, but that’s no reason not to do it.”

“Not exactly,” said Leonard. “What Walter was talking about before: a murderer who kills someone – maybe someone who needs killing – but does it because he wants to be different, separate and apart from everyone else; someone who doesn’t follow anyone else’s rules.”

Stanton glanced at the others at the table. “Irving always wants to make a serious movie. I keep telling him that the days of Orson Welles are over, but he never believes me.”

“I don’t know,” laughed Gloria Baker as she tossed a linen napkin on her empty plate. “Sounds just like a vampire movie, only without the vampires.”

Leonard fixed Stanton with a droll expression. “She has a point.”

The conversation was now all about the movies and how to make them, the kind of talk they all enjoyed. Their reality was all in their imaginations. Walter Bannister retreated into the public silence of the detached observer, nodding when necessary, smiling when he had to. It did not matter the subject, however awful it was, their first, and so far as he could tell, their only thought how they could show it on the screen. He could have told them that Daniel Lee Atkinson was innocent and that he, Walter Bannister, had murdered those four people, slaughtered a whole family, and after a single moment of stunned silence, they would have been thinking through the possibilities, how something so wonderfully unexpected might become an Oscar winning film.

“I’ve never heard you talk so much about what you do,” said his wife as they drove home. Bannister did not see as well at night as he did during the day, and so Meredith was behind the wheel. “Roger was impressed. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.”

“I shouldn’t have done it, not in the middle of a trial. I let them get to me, all that mindless chatter about things they know nothing about,” he said gloomily.

The silence became profound, each of them dwelling in their own, separate, world. Meredith drove along, reliving the moments when she had said something especially witty, remembering the remarks several of Roger’s guests had made about how well she looked and how much they admired the work she had been doing with the charities. She glanced across at her husband’s brooding countenance, considered that despite his age he was still handsome, and felt that surge of pleasure, that state of well-being, she always experienced at the knowledge that other women envied her for who she was and what she had.

They were just passing through the gate at the bottom of the drive, when she remembered.

“I hope Wilson comes home. I hope nothing has happened to him.”

The gardener found the cat the next morning in the bushes a few feet outside the gate. Its throat had been cut.

CHAPTER SIX

The police came by the house to tell the judge’s wife that what had happened to her cat had unfortunately happened in that neighborhood before. Several cats had been killed in the last few months and even a small dog. The two officers suspected it was some teenage kid who lived close by. The area was heavily patrolled, there was almost never any crime in that area, and an outsider, someone who obviously did not belong there, would easily be recognized.

“I’m sure you’re right,” agreed Meredith Bannister. “My husband goes for a walk nearly every evening. I’m sure he would have noticed if some stranger had been lurking about.”

Probably some kid, they told her again as they left, some kid with a twisted imagination.

“They see too much violence,” offered one of the patrolmen. “That’s all some of them do: sit in their rooms playing video games, everyone getting killed. Not too surprising some of them decide they want to try it for themselves.”

She thanked them for coming, told them that she knew her husband would appreciate it, and then called the security company and asked them to come out to make sure their system, with all its intricate electronic monitoring, was in perfect working order. When she left later that morning for a luncheon meeting downtown she asked the gardener to bury Wilson somewhere – and then, as she drove off, wondered whether when she got a new cat she should get the same kind or something different. She thought maybe something different might be better.

At almost the same moment Meredith Bannister, wearing a new dress, was handing her car keys to the parking attendant at the Biltmore Hotel, her husband was in his courtroom, a few blocks away, listening to the end of Michael Harlowe’s brief cross-examination of the state’s last witness in the murder trial of Daniel Lee Atkinson.

“The district attorney asked you a lot of questions about the family, the four victims of what everyone agrees was a brutal murder.” Harlowe did not have to pretend to sympathize with the witness, a neighbor who had often taken care of the two children. His whole manner was apologetic. “You did not make the 911 call; you didn’t see the defendant. You didn’t hear the shots – Or did you?”

Nancy Jarvis had a round, friendly, and rather shy face. She had twice burst into tears during Hector Alfonso’s direct examination. The memory of what had happened had left a permanent scar. There was a part of her that, even now, could not believe it was not just some awful dream.

“I don’t know. I mean, whether I heard shots. I woke up, and I wasn’t sure why. I heard sirens, and at first I thought it was a fire. That’s when I got up and went to the front door. That’s when I saw the police cars start to come and then there seemed to be people everywhere.”

“We understand. You woke up, you weren’t sure why, went to the front door, looked out thinking there might be a fire. My question – and you have already answered it, but I have to ask it anyway – is that you didn’t see the defendant that night, did you? You didn’t see him running away from the house, and you certainly didn’t see him doing anything inside the house – you didn’t see him…?”

Harlowe did not want to finish the question, ask her if she had seen Daniel Lee Atkinson slaughter her two friends and their two children. He did not have to ask: she understood the question. A slight, downward movement of her head, like a long, sad goodbye, was the only answer she had to give.

“Thank you,” said Harlowe in the whispered silence of the crowded courtroom. He looked at Walter Bannister who was leaning forward, ready to tell the witness that she was excused. “That’s all I have, your Honor.”

It was now only a question of the formalities required in court. Waiting until the witness, watched with wordless sympathy by everyone except the two lawyers and the defendant, walked down the center aisle and went out the double doors in back, Bannister asked Hector Alfonso if he wished to call another witness.

Alfonso was on his feet like a soldier on parade, shoulders held square, his chin pushed forward. It was the way he thought of himself at a moment like this, at the end of the case: a soldier who had done his duty and, so far as he understood what his duty was, done it well. His dark eyes full of confidence, he announced in a full-throated voice:

“No, your Honor. At this time, the prosecution rests.”

Walter Bannister betrayed no emotion of any kind. He seldom did during a trial. He concealed behind a mask of impartial benevolence his deep disappointment in Hector Alfonso’s performance. It seemed inconceivable that through weeks of testimony, dozens of witnesses, the prosecution had managed to overlook the most obvious, and the most damning, fact of all. He was tempted to ask Alfonso if he was sure there was not just one more witness he wanted to call, or perhaps one who had already testified he wanted to call back: the woman who had taken the 911 call, for example. Instead he waited, hoping the district attorney would suddenly realize what he had missed.

“Very well,” he said finally. “The prosecution rests.” The next words were so automatic they almost spoke themselves. Bannister reached for the thick case file to take with him on the lunch break. “Mr. Harlowe, is the defense ready to proceed?”

The defense had no witnesses it could call. Bannister had known that from the beginning. With all the confidence he could pretend, Harlowe would rise, face the bench and, though with a little less posturing, follow Hector Alfonso and announce that ‘the defense rests.’

“Mr. Harlowe,” he heard himself ask again. “Does the defense -”

“The defense calls the defendant, Daniel Lee Atkinson,” said Harlowe in what seemed to Bannister a hurried, almost impatient voice. He did not wonder that this was something Harlowe wanted to get through as fast as possible. He was the only one to notice. The rest of the courtroom was suddenly alive with whispered questions and puzzled glances. No one had expected this. No one had thought that Atkinson would dare testify. He was guilty and everyone knew it. What kind of story would a killer tell, what kind of lies would he invent? Only Hector Alfonso was enthusiastic.

It was all he could do not to smile. The case was airtight; he had all the evidence he needed. This was worse than desperation. He knew that Harlowe had been left with no choice; that he never would have called Atkinson to the stand if Atkinson had not insisted. There was nothing the defendant could say that Alfonso could not use against him: every fact he denied would be a new chance to throw in his face all the evidence that proved it, another opportunity to remind the jury what the prosecution’s witnesses – witnesses who did not come to court dressed like prisoners and swear to tell the truth with their wrists and ankles shackled in steel chains – had said. It was a prosecutor’s dream come true: a cross-examination that would destroy the defendant with his own lying words. Alfonso almost felt sorry for Michael Harlowe.

“It’s nearly twelve o’clock,” said Judge Bannister, making a hurried calculation. “We’ll be in recess until one-thirty. The defense can call its witness then.” He waited until the jury filed out of the jury box and the door to the jury room closed behind them. “If counsel would not mind, I’d like to see you both in chambers.”

Walter Bannister was hanging his black robe on a coat rack when Harlowe and Alfonso came in. He nodded toward the two empty chairs in front of his desk, and while they took their seats opened the blinds on the window and gazed out at the city covered in a brownish yellow haze.

“It’s supposed to hit a hundred today,” he remarked. “That won’t help with the fire up in the hills: hundred degree heat and the Santa Anna winds. Firefighters have to be the toughest people around – don’t you think?” he asked, turning sideways to the window. “They all seem to love it: the fight, the danger.”

His hands were clasped behind his back, one foot a half step in front of the other. He was nodding his head, keeping time, as it seemed, to the thought that was moving slowly through his mind. The thought, whatever it was, began to amuse him. A smile full of irony slipped across the fine straight line of his mouth.

“He’s going to deny it?” he asked suddenly, darting a glance at Harlowe.

They both knew the rules. Whatever Daniel Lee Atkinson may have told him, Harlowe would have to take it to his grave. But they both knew that it did not matter. The situation was plain as day: the defendant was going to take the stand and lie through his teeth. Harlowe gave the only answer he could.

“It’s his right to testify, whatever advice I may have given him.”

With his hands still held behind his back, Bannister turned until his back was to the window. That same subtle smile flickered at the corners of his mouth as he stared down at the floor.

“I don’t imagine Hector will mind too much,” he observed as he raised his eyes. “How long do you think this will take? Never mind. You’re not calling anyone else, are you? Then whenever we finish – assuming we finish today – we’ll quit then and have closing arguments tomorrow. Any questions?”

They were almost at the door when Bannister called them back.

“I’m going to instruct the jury to remember what I said at the beginning of the trial: that the fact that he’s shackled and dressed like an inmate has nothing to do with the question of whether he is guilty of the crimes with which he has been charged and that it is not in any way to affect their deliberations. I don’t see what else I can do. I don’t think I can take the chance and have the chains taken off. It’s really quite unfair, though, isn’t it? I tell them they can’t read anything into it, but we keep him tied up because we’re afraid of what might happen if we don’t.”

He looked at Harlowe who had not said a word. He had filed a motion before the trial started asking that the defendant be dressed in civilian clothing, but it was pro forma, something any defense attorney had to do.

“You’ve spent time with him. Do you think it would be safe now, at the end of the trial, to let him take the stand without restraints?”

Harlowe did not say anything; which would have been answer enough, but Hector Alfonso, sensing his discomfort, answered for him.

“The defense already asked for that, the motion filed before trial started. Your Honor denied the motion. And if there was reason to do so then, there is even more reason now. The trial is almost over. He’s heard the case against him. It’s a death penalty case. He knows what’s going to happen. He wouldn’t have anything to lose. There’s nothing to stop him if he tried to grab someone, take a hostage, try to grab something sharp and stab someone. We couldn’t guarantee security, we-”

“No, you’re right, of course,” said Bannister, holding up his hand. “There’s nothing for it but to keep going the way we have. Tell me, though, Hector – what would you do? I mean, if Atkinson is as guilty as you say he is – if you were in that position, looking the death penalty in the face – wouldn’t you try to escape?”

It was not a question Alfonso wanted even to try to answer. Bannister understood, and did not insist. He sat down and turned just far enough toward the window to let the light catch the side of his face.

“The law says if someone tries to escape that it is a separate crime.” He emitted a low, scornful laugh. “And Charles Dickens wrote somewhere that ‘the law is an ass.’ It should not be a crime at all, under any reasonable…,” Bannister started to say, but then suddenly stopped and shook his head. “You’ll have to forgive me. There aren’t many people I can talk with about things like this. You can imagine what most people would think about a judge who insists that a criminal who tries to escape from jail or prison shouldn’t be charged with a crime. But it’s true, you know. He’s an outlaw: literally outside the law. That’s why he’s in prison: he’s done something that made him an enemy to society and because of it he’s been made a prisoner, and, in the worst case, he’s going to be killed. At that point, doesn’t he have the right to resist, attempt to get away – the right to save his own life? I admit,” he added with a shrug, “that those who have him in their custody have the right to shoot him to prevent the escape – just like a prisoner of war – but commit a crime? I don’t think so. He’s outside the law – in a state of nature, so to speak – free to do whatever he has to do to stay alive. And if he kills someone – say a guard – trying to get away, why wouldn’t that be self-defense?”

It was impossible to know with any certainty just how much of what Walter Bannister said in the privacy of chambers he really meant, and how much was his way of getting them, two lawyers who spent their lives dealing with the law as it existed, to think about whether the law always made sense. He was an integral part of what he did – more involved in the cases tried in his courtroom than any judge they knew – but at the same time always measuring everything that happened, even the most minor points of law, by a standard that seemed to take him outside it to some world of his own where nothing was taken for granted and everything ended up a question.

“Why don’t you try that sometime,” suggested Alfonso as he and Harlowe left the judge’s office. “If you ever have a client who killed a guard trying to escape, argue self defense, and do it in front of Bannister and see what happens.”

“I know what would happen,” replied Harlowe with quick, rueful grin. “He’d tell me the argument was fascinating, a work of great imagination, and without any basis in the law. Then he’d ask me if I had any other motions I wanted to make. He meant it when he said he couldn’t talk to many people. A judge is supposed to apply the law, not think about whether it makes any sense.”

Harlowe stopped walking so suddenly that Alfonso was two steps ahead before he stopped as well.

“You know, he’s probably the only really sane man I know. The rest of us just take whatever we’re given, follow the rules and never question what they mean.”

Hector Alfonso raised a doubting eyebrow. “If everyone started questioning the rules, then you would be right: we’d all be insane; there wouldn’t be any rules, everyone would be trying to make their own.” He touched the lapels on Harlowe’s brown jacket with a smile that was half a warning. “Walter Bannister is unusual – the exception, if you will – always thinking, always trying to get to the bottom of things. How many people, how many lawyers or judges, do you know like that? But for all his questioning, he never does it in public. What you said a minute ago – if you tried the argument about self-defense in an escape case, the argument he just made. There wouldn’t be a moment’s hesitation. Whatever he might think about it, however he might act in theory, he’d never give so much as a hint that the argument had any validity.”

He tapped Harlowe on the chest twice in succession and laughed with the knowledge of a secret he has that had just occurred to him.

“What he just told us in chambers. He didn’t have to ask us to keep it between ourselves; he knows us well enough to know we will. That must be what it is like for him, presiding over a trial. He sits up there, following everything with more attention than most of the lawyers trying the cases in front of him, ruling on every motion, every objection, a perfect model of judicial restraint, and the whole time what is going on in his head is what we just heard: a razor sharp critique, in which everything he sees, everything he hears, everything he himself has to do, is found wanting, defective in all its parts and worse than useless as a whole. He may be the only sane man we know, but it must sometimes drive him crazy.”

There was no sign of that, or anything like it, when Walter Bannister, punctual as always, entered the courtroom at precisely one-thirty and took his place on the bench. In the middle of one of the most gruesome multiple murder cases taken to trial in years, he appeared completely untroubled. His gaze was clear and steady, his voice calm and even reassuring. There was not a mark of displeasure on the balanced features of his face when he glanced first at Daniel Lee Atkinson, sitting bound and shackled in his chair, and then at the bailiff, standing off to the side, and ordered him to bring in the jury. While the jurors filed into the jury box, taking, each of them, the same chair they had occupied for weeks, Bannister opened the case file. He found the brief handwritten notation he had made just before lunch, reminding himself what was going to happen next in the trial, and then closed the file and looked at Harlowe.

“The defense is going to now call its first witness, the defendant – Is that correct, Mr. Harlowe?”

There was an audible groan, a kind of unconscious protest, a collective expression of disapproval. Harlowe had just risen from his chair, but he turned his head at the noise from the crowd. Bannister stopped it cold.

“No more!” he commanded in a voice that carried so much authority that he did not need to shout. “This trial has received much attention and too much speculation. I’m not going to repeat again that the defendant, like everyone in this country charged with a crime, has a right to the presumption of innocence. If there is anyone who doesn’t think we should do that, stand up and say so. Anyone? No, all right then. We’re agreed. There will be no more outbursts. None. Am I understood?”

Hector Alfonso, who had an eye for such things, could almost feel the crowd shrink into itself, grow smaller, change from a mob with a mind of its own into a gathering of separate individuals. Walter Bannister was irresistible.

“Mr. Harlowe.”

“Yes, your Honor. The defense calls the defendant, Daniel Lee Atkinson.”

The crowd watched in grim silence as Atkinson shuffled forward, the chains round his ankles producing an eerie, hollow noise, a strange reminder of imprisonment and what that meant. Clumsily, one hand trailing the other at the end of a chain, he took the oath and settled himself on the witness stand. The jury had been able to see him clear enough during the trial, but those who had come to watch the proceeding or to report on them had seldom seen anything more than his back as he sat, day after day, at the counsel table next to his attorney. Seeing him, as it were, for the first time, he looked more the killer than they had thought. With his heavy forehead and sunken leaden eyes, with his crooked mouth and smashed up nose, he seemed the epitome of brutal passions and a sick, twisted mind. The jurors, especially those in the front row, instead of leaning forward to get a closer look, the way they had done with a number of the state’s witnesses, drew back and sat pressed against their chairs.

“Would you please state your name for the record,” Harlowe began. But Bannister did not let the witness answer.

“Just a moment. I think I need to remind the jury what I’ve told you before. Let’s be clear about this. The defendant is dressed and shackled like a prisoner because he is one. He’s being held in custody pending the outcome of his trial. It does not mean that he is guilty of anything.” Bannister bent forward, as close to the witness as he could. “Someone is charged with a serious offense – murder. He has been arrested, taken into custody, locked in a cell. That’s because of what the police have done. That’s what the police do: arrest people they believe have committed a crime. That’s what they do; it isn’t what we do. We decide – a court of law, a jury – we decide if the police are right. We decide – you decide – whether someone the police have put in jail deserves to be there. In some countries the defendant is not allowed to sit in open court. He’s put into a glass box, or some other confined space. We confine the defendant in a different way. None of this has anything to do with the reason we’re here. You need to remember that. Now, Mr. Harlowe, if you’ll begin again.”

Harlowe heard in his memory the voice of Hector Alfonso describing the double life Walter Bannister had to live, what he was compelled to say in public and what he privately thought. The judge was not the only one. He now had to do the same thing himself: pretend to believe the answers to the questions he had to ask. He began with the obvious, the question everyone had to their own satisfaction already answered.

“Did you murder Jonathan and Monica Lewis, and their two children, Justine and Joshua?”

“No, I did not,” replied Atkinson in a coarse, dull voice that fit perfectly the crowd’s preconceptions. Then he added, “I tried to stop it.”

For the first time, Bannister used his gavel. The angry, murmured protest turned to stunned silence.

“You tried to stop it?” asked Harlowe.

He had taken a position at the front corner of the counsel table. It was an unconscious reaction, nothing he had thought of before, this decision not to go one step closer, not to get any closer to the witness than he absolutely had to. He tried to mask his own disbelief, his incredulity. It took all his self-control to look at the witness and ask him to explain.

“There were two of us,” began Atkinson. He shifted in the witness chair to look at the jury. The few who looked back did so with open hostility. “The other guy – we’d done a few jobs together, breaking into houses when no one was there. We stole things, but never hurt no one. That night – those people were supposed to be gone – the other guy, Jerry, was kind of wasted, strung out on something. Coke, maybe meth – I don’t know. We got into the house. I’m in the living room. He goes upstairs. Then I heard it – shots being fired. And I run upstairs, but he isn’t there – in the bedroom, I mean. I see these two people, dead, blood all over. Then I heard something, just down the hall. That’s where I found him – the knife in his hand, the two kids he’s just killed. It was too late. I couldn’t do anything. He ran out the back and I took off the other way. He killed them, Jerry did; I didn’t do any of it. I went up there to stop it; would have, too, if I had been there in time.”

There was nothing Harlowe could do except what he would have done with a defendant he believed. He went back to the beginning and had Atkinson describe everything that happened that night, and everything that happened later. He asked him why he had not told the police about the other intruder, the one he now said was the real killer. Atkinson told the jury the same thing he had told Harlowe: that he did not think anyone would believe him. And then he added something that Harlowe had not expected: that if he had not been there, if he did not know what had really happened, he would not believe it either.

“I’d think I was lying if I heard that story. But it’s the truth, I swear it is. I swear it on my mother’s grave.”

His mother’s grave! Had he offered that last guarantee of his veracity because it was something he had heard other men in trouble say, or was it out of some twisted sense of humor, a joke that no one but he and Harlowe would understand: swearing on the grave of the mother he had never known, the woman who had given him up at birth, gotten rid of him before he even knew he was alive. Harlowe did not know and Harlowe did not care; he was past irony, his only thought the next question he had to ask.

He could have done this in his sleep, the sequential interrogation that took the defendant – any defendant – through each thing that happened at the time and place of the crime. Atkinson had in one short paragraph stated the grounds of his defense: someone else was guilty, someone else had committed murder. It was of course inconvenient that beyond the first name ‘Jerry’ he did not know anything that would help identify the killer.

“Where did Jerry live?” asked Harlowe with an expression as close to perfect neutrality as it was possible to imagine.

Atkinson shrugged; a movement which, like almost any movement he made, came accompanied with a brief, metallic rattle of his chains.

“I don’t know – on the streets, mainly.”

“On the streets,” repeated Harlowe, as if he needed time to digest the significance of this unremarkable fact. “Yes, I see. So that’s where you met him – when you got together to do one of the jobs you described?”

The defendant looked at his lawyer as if he were dense. He turned to the jury, sure they would understand.

“Guys like us, we live where we can. I’m not going to lie to you: most of what we did was to get money for drugs. Everyone knew where to go, who to see. Jerry was always around.”

It went on like this for more than an hour, each question designed to let the witness fill in the blank spots of his story, each answer producing a new doubt why that story should be believed. It was vague, confusing, at times even contradictory, but Atkinson did not seem to mind. He had gone through life bulling his way through, getting what he wanted any way he could, the only truth he knew the dull-eyed insistence on whatever was to his own advantage. He would repeat the same thing over and over again until you either believed what he told you or he knocked you senseless for questioning his word.

When Harlowe was finally finished, Hector Alfonso almost sprang out of his chair. He did not stay in close proximity to the counsel table, the one farthest from the jury box, the way Harlowe had done, but moved catlike to within arm’s length of the witness stand. He almost laughed in Atkinson’s face.

“So ‘Jerry’ did it – you tried to stop it?”

Atkinson seemed caught off guard by this bold assault. Shoving his chin down to his chest, he eyed the district attorney with suspicion.

“That’s right.”

Alfonso’s hands were in his pockets, perhaps to keep from breaking into applause; a smile stretched wide across his face as he bounced up and down on his toes.

“Of course it is! Jerry did it; you tried to stop it. And you felt so bad about it – what you weren’t able to stop – that you did everything you could to help the police, to help them find this butcher, this murderer, this criminal who slaughtered a whole family! That’s what you did – isn’t it? – stayed behind, told the police everything that had happened.”

The smile on Alfonso’s face was manic; his eyes were rabid.

“No, I forget. You didn’t do anything like that, did you? Instead of helping the police find the real killer, you tried to kill the police – two of them, the two with whom you exchanged gun fire, the two who took you prisoner. That was helpful, wasn’t it? Just what you would expect from an innocent man!”

“They wouldn’t have believed me!” growled Atkinson. A mean, knowing grin slid crooked across his misshapen mouth. “They would have shot me where I stood. I had the gun, the knife, the stuff I had taken away from that strung out lunatic. You think the cops would have asked me where I got them, who was there with me? There would have been five dead bodies instead of four.”

Alfonso matched his scornful smile with one of his own.

“That would have saved us all some trouble, wouldn’t it?”

Harlowe, with hidden reluctance, was compelled to object.

“Your Honor, that’s….”

“Sustained. Mr. Alfonso, you know better than that. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will ignore the prosecutor’s last remark.”

Hector Alfonso did not care. With the instinct of the politician, he had given voice to what everyone was thinking. With a brief nod, the only acknowledgment of the judge’s rebuke, he went back to the attack.

“You testified that there wasn’t supposed to be anyone home, that the house was supposed to be empty. Who told you that?”

“Jerry,” insisted Atkinson, jutting out his chin.

“Jerry,” repeated Alfonso with open contempt. “And who told him?”

“Don’t know.”

“Don’t know. You said you had done several jobs with Jerry – and he doesn’t tell you who told him? The truth is that you didn’t know if the house would be empty or not. The truth is that you didn’t care. You didn’t care if anyone was at home, sleeping in their beds – You had a gun, a knife: you could always kill them if they got in the way. And that’s what you did – you, Daniel Lee Atkinson, no one else; no ‘Jerry,’ no one by that name or any other. You went there that night to take what you could get and you murdered four people before you left!” cried Alfonso.

And then, before the witness could start to deny it, Alfonso threw up his hands in a show of angry frustration, turned his back on Atkinson, walked back to the counsel table and sat down.

“No further question,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Atkinson was Harlowe’s only witness. The only things left before the case went to the jury were closing arguments, and those were given the next day. Hector Alfonso started slow, a calm, dispassionate summary of the evidence presented by the prosecution’s witnesses, all of the relevant facts of death and murder: the weapons – the gun and knife – the fatal wounds they inflicted and the blood and other evidence that proved beyond any doubt who did it. Then he stopped, and went back over it again, this time with all the facts in place, this time telling the story not of what the killer did, but what the victims must have thought and felt, the horrible, unspeakable terror, the knowledge of their own death bad enough, impossible to comprehend, but then, evil topping evil, the certainty that their children would be next! The words came rushing out, a torrent of anger, hatred even, for Daniel Lee Atkinson and what he had done.

“And then, as if all the evil he had done wasn’t enough, he gets up here, in a court of law, swears to tell the truth, and not only lies, invents a story no one could possibly believe, but laughs at us – You saw it in his eyes! – laughs at us for letting him make fools of us!”

Harlowe could not match the passion of Hector Alfonso’s closing and did not try. There is a limit to how much you can pretend belief. He could not point to the defendant, the way he had in other cases, and argue sympathy for him; he could not insist, as he sometimes could, that looking at him, listening to him testify, you knew he was telling you the truth. All he could do was repeat in a reasonable voice that the evidence produced by the prosecution was equally consistent with someone else being the killer; repeat that there was no eyewitness to the crime and no one who could say with certainty that the person identified by the defendant as the real killer did not exist.

Harlowe did not believe it; no one believed it. The jury deliberated for less than an hour before coming back with the verdict everyone expected. Daniel Lee Atkinson was found guilty on all four counts of murder. Walter Bannister thought he was guilty of something even worse than that.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The jailer did not know quite what to do. Roused from his late night lethargy, surprised that anyone would think he could visit a prisoner at that hour, he was forced to acknowledge that, even this close to midnight, a judge had certain privileges that could not be ignored.

“I have to sentence this man tomorrow,” explained Walter Bannister, “and there are things I need to know.”

The jailer, balding and overweight, a deputy sheriff close to retirement, did not ask what those things might be. A judge had a reason for what he did, and if Judge Bannister wanted to see Daniel Lee Atkinson before he sentenced him to death it only proved what everyone said, that he was the most thorough, fair-minded man on the bench. Nearly midnight, the jailer told himself, as he led Bannister down the narrow hallway to the same small windowless room where inmates met their lawyers, where earlier in the day Michael Harlowe had met with his client for what was probably the last time. Nearly midnight, and instead of home in bed, a judge comes to see the murderer he’s going to send to death row. The deputy was too astonished to wonder much about the reason why.

“I’ll bring him down,” he grunted as Bannister sat down at the table.

“Thank you. And I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“No trouble, your Honor; no trouble at all,” replied the jailer, his mind suddenly clear and feeling better than he had.

Atkinson was sound asleep when the jailer banged on the iron bars of his cell. He woke with a start, shouted an obscenity and tried to go back to sleep.

The judge wants to see you,” said the jailer with a formality Atkinson had not heard from him before. “On your feet!”

Atkinson knew the drill. He walked over to the iron bars and put his hands out in front so his wrists could be shackled, and then turned back the other way while the jailer opened the cell and chained his ankles.

They passed down a long line of cells and the hoarse nighttime sounds of men sleeping. Just before they reached the door, Atkinson raised his wrists and, as hard as he could, struck with his chains the bars of a cell, then laughed at the chorus of profanity that echoed behind him as the jailer pushed him hard down the hallway to where Walter Bannister sat waiting.

He did not get up when Atkinson came in, did not so much as turn around; he sat with his back to him while he stumbled onto the plastic chair on the other side of the table. Atkinson started to say something in anger. Bannister turned and stopped him with a kindly, almost friendly look; a gentle, forgiving smile that to Daniel Lee Atkinson was more unexpected than a sudden blow on the head. Completely confused, he blinked impotently.

“I wanted to see you, Mr. Atkinson, because tomorrow I have to sentence you. I want you to know - what I’m sure you know already - that I’m going to sentence you to death.”

It was, in a way, a cruel dichotomy, one of them a wretched excuse for a human being, a murderer without any apparent redeeming qualities, a shackled prisoner with dust colored eyes and a rancid breath; the other a learned and respected judge with impeccable manners and clean cut nails dressed in an expensive tailored suit. But there was a bond between them, a strange closeness born of the fact that one of them was going to kill the other. Bannister was not going to do it himself – someone at the state prison would play the executioner – but the sentence of death came with the words only he could pronounce. They both knew it, Atkinson as well as he; understood it and what it meant, that they had become part of each other’s lives, and that each would remember the other until the day they died.

“I wanted you to know that the sentence of death is irrevocable. The law requires it. But you should also know that if I had a choice, the sentence would be the same. I want you to know this, Mr. Atkinson, because with nothing to gain by telling me lies, you have nothing to lose by telling me the truth.”

Atkinson did not know what to think, though it would be more accurate to say that he did not know how. Thought requires the ability to reason from one thing to the next, something he could not do. His mind did its work without any conscious intrusion by him; it was all instinct and reaction, which did not mean, of course, that he was without calculation. He knew he was going to be sentenced to death, he did not need to be told; but it was not like he was going to die tomorrow, or the day after that. It would be years before his execution, and his idea of the future had never been much beyond what might happen next week. He looked at the judge and blinked.

“Tomorrow, before I pass sentence, I will ask you if you have anything to say.” Measuring to a rigid standard the precise angle of exposure, Bannister pulled his shirt cuffs down below his sleeve. “You won’t have anything to say – or if you do it won’t be more than a few awkward words.” Raising his eyes until they met Atkinson’s blank gaze, he added, “You’ll say you’re sorry for what you did, or continue to insist you’re innocent. This often happens with people convicted of serious crimes. They’ve told the lie so often they don’t remember the truth. Or because they lied at trial they would rather keep lying than admit they had been dishonest. But in your case, it doesn’t matter what you say, or if you say nothing at all. Nothing will change what I’m going to do. I came here to tell you that, and to give you the chance to clear your conscience. You can tell me what you did and I’ll never tell anyone. You can make your confession and leave it safe with me.”

There was no response, nothing beyond a slight movement of his eyes, a dim awareness of what this meant, and a doubt that it was anything he wanted to do.

“Confession?”

Bannister was sitting far enough away from the table that he could cross one leg over the other and, leaning back, subject the prisoner to a kind of clinical scrutiny, the way a physician – a psychiatrist – might examine a patient he knew to be disturbed.

“Confession might not be the right word. ‘Explanation’ might be better.”

He said this as if it were a question he was taking under advisement, something he had to think about before he decided. Atkinson was not interested.

“Nothing I want to confess; nothing I want to explain. I thought you were a judge; why do you want to act like a priest? Confess? – I said what I had to say at the trial.”

“You lied at the trial,” said Bannister matter-of-factly. “There wasn’t one thing you said that was true. There wasn’t anyone with you that night; you went there alone.”

“Yeah, and how do you know that?”

It was not what Bannister said that he had done - lied under oath – that got his attention; it was the accusation itself, the challenge, that he felt a need to combat. He stared hard at Bannister, as if daring him to repeat it. Bannister smiled.

“How do I know that? Because you made the same mistake the prosecutor made, the same omission.” Bannister fixed him with a penetrating stare. “You didn’t kill the parents first, you killed the children!”

A sense of something, not fear exactly, more like the sudden vulnerability at being discovered, made a first, fleeting appearance in the eyes of Daniel Lee Atkinson. Trying to brazen it out, he pretended indifference, shaking his head at what had no obvious significance.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” said Bannister with a smile now ominous and all knowing. “And you know exactly what it means. Did you notice – were you surprised – when it was not mentioned, that no one remarked upon the fact that was right in front of everyone. I imagine your lawyer noticed it, but it was scarcely something he could have used in your defense.”

Atkinson shifted in his chair, the dull rattle of the chains echoing quietly in the shadowed confines of the small room. His mouth had gone dry and he seemed now nervous and distracted, ill at ease, and yet at the same time eager and even desperate to hear how much Bannister knew and how much was only a quick-witted guess. His eyes narrowed into tiny slits, his mouth pinched hard at the corners.

“My lawyer was a fucking idiot!”

“Your lawyer is as good as any lawyer I’ve ever seen. The jury was out an hour. If you had had anyone else, they might have reached a verdict before they left the jury box!” he snapped back. Searching Atkinson’s eyes, he leaned forward and put his elbow on the table. “And if the prosecutor had made all the right connections, they might have done it anyway – if the crowd in the courtroom had not tried to lynch you first.”

Atkinson’s eyes flew open in dumb astonishment.

“Because…?”

“They hated you for what you did – what they thought you did. What do you think they would have felt if they had known – even suspected – what you had really done?”

“What they…?”

Bannister’s gaze seemed to go right through him, burn deep inside his brain. Atkinson felt trapped, riveted with nameless terror.

“You did not go there to steal; no one told you that the house would be empty. You went there to kill. You went there to murder, to slaughter, everyone you could find: parents, children – you didn’t care! All you wanted was to murder, to feel what it was like, that moment when you took their lives.”

“But I did go there to..; no one was supposed to be there. I….” He stopped, paralyzed by the scorn and disbelief written on Walter Bannister’s gray green eyes.

“The 911 call - remember? A woman called reporting shots. Then you were seen running from the house. Shots were fired; you went running – just a few seconds later. There wouldn’t have been time to go down the hallway, to murder those two children – not the way they were butchered. You took your time with that, didn’t you? - First one, then the other. What did you do? Hold your hand over the mouth of one of them so he couldn’t scream, wake his parents, while you cut open the other one? And then, when you had finished the first – how many knife wounds did the coroner say: more than a dozen? – did the same brutal thing to the other one, cut her into pieces? You better hope there’s no heaven, Mr. Atkinson, because if there is you’re going straight to hell for what you did to that boy and girl.

“But that was only the beginning, wasn’t it?” asked Bannister, his gaze so piercing that Atkinson drew back. “You murdered the children, and then with that blood covered knife still in your hand, you woke up their parents. What did you do? – Show them the knife and tell them what you had just done; tell them while you waved the gun around, so they knew they were next and that there was nothing they could do about it? Their children were dead and they were about to die! Is that what happened? Is that why you did it: to know what it was like to have that much power? This is your chance – the only chance you’re ever going to have – to tell the truth, to explain why you – why anyone – would do a thing like this!”

“I didn’t…!” Atkinson started to protest, to deny once again that he was guilty of killing anyone. But then, suddenly, his expression changed. The tension left his body. He seemed surprised by how relaxed he felt. “I lied. It was the way you said it was. Almost. I didn’t go there to murder anyone, but, you’re right, I didn’t know if the place would be empty or not. I never thought about it. You want to know why I killed them? I didn’t like them.”

He said this with such casual indifference, as if he were telling the reason he had turned in one direction and not another, that Bannister wondered if he had missed something.

“You didn’t like them?”

“Didn’t like what they had.”

Now Bannister understood, or thought he did.

“You murdered them, two small children and their parents, because they lived in a good neighborhood and had a nice house?”

“Sure; why not? I didn’t really need a reason - did I? And that one is as good as any other.”

Bannister wanted to be sure. “You killed them out of envy, because they had things you didn’t have?”

Curiously, now that he had admitted his guilt, Atkinson seemed to go out of his way to deny contrition. He had murdered four people, but he did not feel sorry for it. More than that, he seemed to suggest by his attitude and demeanor that what he had done was perfectly understandable, if only you saw things through his eyes.

“Things I didn’t have? You mean, because they had a house, a car, that kind of stuff? No, that wasn’t it.”

“But you said you did it – that you didn’t like them – because of what they had.”

“Yeah, what they had – a life! They did things, went places, had kids,” he said, speaking with a strange defiance that seemed to grow stronger and become more pronounced with every word. “But I had something they didn’t have, something they could never have – I had the way to end it, to take it all away; and that’s what I did – took it all away. So who is better off now – them or me?”

“Them or you?” asked Bannister with the steady, clinical gaze he had used on him before, the look of a physician studying a patient with an incurable psychosis. “That is an interesting question, don’t you think? They’re dead, that’s true; but they – and especially the children – had lived blameless lives. They had friends, neighbors, who, if the trial testimony was any indication, thought the world of them. Hundreds of people came to their funeral; a whole city grieved. They’re dead and you’re alive, but do you really think anyone envies you for that, anyone who would like to take your place?”

The answer, the only answer the prisoner could think of, was to repeat what he had just said. It was the ultimate standard by which he seemed to judge everything.

“Wouldn’t you rather be alive?”

“A life in prison; waiting on death row for my execution - convicted of four murders. No, I wouldn’t.” Pausing, Bannister twisted his head to the side and looked at Atkinson with sufficient skepticism to raise a doubt whether, despite what he had said, he believed it either. He pressed the point. “You ran away, exchanged gun fire with the police. Why did you do that - risk getting killed – if staying alive was the most important thing?”

“But I didn’t get killed, did I? I’m still here.”

“Yes, you’re still here; and you’re a fool if you think anyone thinks the better of you for that. The people you murdered – they’re the ones everyone respects, not you.”

Saliva had begun to run down the corners of Atkinson’s rough, misshapen mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his arm and with cold contempt dismissed what Bannister had said.

“What the fuck do I care what anyone thinks?”

That thought, the obscenity of his defiance, filled him with a strange elation. He did nothing to hide his sense of triumph; that, far from remorse, the only feeling he had about what he had done was the merit of his own achievement: He had done what few others would have dared to do. His face wore the expression of a general who had won a battle, the difference of course that he had fought his against unarmed civilians and for no good cause at all.

“You think I give a fuck what anyone thinks?” he demanded, amused that, as he imagined, Bannister had been reduced to silence by this show of indifference to what others thought or said.

But Bannister had been thinking about something else.

“Yes, I understand you don’t care what anyone thinks,” he said in a vague, distant voice. “But you cared about what they thought, didn’t you?” he asked. His gaze now became clear and penetrating. He moved his chair so he could look straight at him. “The man and woman you murdered, after you murdered their children – you cared about what they thought. You didn’t go there to rob them, and you didn’t just go there to kill them. You wanted more than that. They had to know: they had to hear you tell them what you had done; tell them what you were now going to do to them. That’s it, isn’t it?” he insisted, searching his eyes with such intensity that Atkinson, though he wanted to, could not turn away. He sat there, mesmerized by a manic power he could as little understand as resist. “You could have just killed them, shot them while they lay asleep; but that wouldn’t have given you what you wanted, what you needed: the acknowledgement, the recognition, of who you were; the realization that everything depended on you – their future, their lives - because during those few moments, while you had them in your power, you were like God. There was nothing, there was no one, more important. They had to look to you and no one else to take care of them, protect them – decide that instead of dying you would allow them to go on living!”

Atkinson did not understand half of what Bannister was saying, but what he did grasp was enough to trigger a response. His eyes grew wide with the pleasure of remembered cruelty, a look that Bannister had seen before: the eager satisfaction on the blood smeared face of a jackal. There was the same panting breath, the same rabid, deathlike eyes. Atkinson could hardly wait to tell what he had done.

“They would have done anything – that guy and his wife! Anything at all! They would have killed each other if I had told them that it was the only way they could live.” A smile so corrosive you could smell the stink ran jagged around his thick wet lips. “You want to know what I made them do – what they were only too willing to do. I gave them the choice, said I was going to kill them both, but they could choose which one would get it first. You want to know -”

“No, I don’t!” exclaimed Bannister. “I’ve heard all I need to hear.”

“No, you haven’t,” said Atkinson with such strange assurance that Bannister was not sure if he had heard him right. “You didn’t come here to give me a last chance to confess, to ‘cleanse my soul,’ to tell you how sorry I am, how bad I feel because those four people are dead, how I wish I could take it all back. You want to know what it feels like to kill.”

It was a guess, a shrewd guess based on nothing but raw instinct and native cynicism; a guess, but surprising in how close it came to the truth. Bannister would not admit it, certainly not to Daniel Lee Atkinson, and perhaps not even to himself, but it was there, just below the surface of his mind, the question, the forbidden question that no one, especially someone with his intelligence and training, was supposed to ask: What was it like, what did it feel like, to murder.

“I’m interested in the reason you did this terrible thing, whether you even had a reason; and I think now I know what it was. You explained it, better than perhaps you even know. What you haven’t explained, what you’re still lying about, is this belief you claim to have that you’re somehow better off than the people you murdered. No,” he said when Atkinson started to interrupt, “I’m not interested in hearing again that they’re dead and you’re alive.”

Atkinson could only think one thought at a time. He paid no attention to what Bannister said because Bannister was lying.

“Are you sure?” he asked with a knowing eye and a taunting voice. “Sure you don’t want to know what it was like, the moment I drove in the knife, cut open those two kids; what it was like when I blew that guy’s head off and then shoved the hot barrel of the gun down the throat of that bitch he was married to, made her suck on it, and then blew her brains away? Sure you don’t want me to tell you; sure you don’t want to know what it felt like – all that noise, all that blood? You sure you don’t -”

“Jailer!” shouted Bannister as he jumped to his feet and banged on the door. “We’re through in here.”

Though it was nearly one o’clock in the morning when he got home, Walter Bannister went for a long walk down the deserted palm lined streets of the neighborhood where he lived. The cool night air felt good against his face and the dark silence helped clear his mind, but when he returned to the house he was still too agitated to sleep. Careful not to wake his wife, he went into his book lined study and shut the door. In the middle drawer of his desk he found a leather-bound journal and opened it to the last written page, turned to the next one and began to write.

Writing longhand with a fountain pen it was an indecipherable script. Even had it been possible to make out the words, he employed so many abbreviations of his own short hand invention that his meanings must always have been obscure. He could have left it out in the open, exposed to every wandering eye, and not felt the least alarm that anyone could actually read it. All the code breakers in the world could not have deciphered a single ink spattered line of what Walter Bannister put down on paper.

Always meticulous, he wrote not just the date, but the time, at the right top corner of the blank unlined page.

“It was a mistake to see Daniel Lee Atkinson tonight. He isn’t much more than an animal, a primitive creature, lacking in all intelligence. He chose his victims at random, and may not have chosen them at all. I don’t think he went there to kill anyone. He saw the house. He decided to try it: break in and decide what to do then. Even that isn’t right. I don’t think he decided anything. Everything was random: that house instead of another; that family instead of some other one. Then, he’s inside, looks around, and something about it – maybe just the comfortable affluence of the place – sets him off, makes him want to take revenge on a world that in his mind would not let him live like other people, like the people who lived in that house.

“Perhaps it was not a mistake to see him. If nothing else, it confirmed once again my belief that there is in each of us an instinct for murder. With some of us, like Atkinson, it is right there on the surface, ready to react, to kill at any given moment; with the rest of us, however, it’s buried deeper; held in check, not so much by the fear of getting caught as by something more powerful: the belief, that is to say the delusion, that we’re not capable of killing, the belief that we’re too advanced, too ‘civilized’ to do anything so barbaric. What is the history of the 20th century, that century of self-proclaimed scientific progress, but a history of mass slaughter. The only difference between a political leader and a criminal is the number of their victims. One gets sent to the gas chamber while the other has a building named after him. Both murder and war take place outside the law; the murderer and the so-called statesman are both of them a law unto themselves. They both decide what they want. More than that, they decide what is ‘right.’ Am I the only one to notice this?

“Killing isn’t always murder. The law allows me to kill someone if it is the only way to save my own life or to avoid ‘grievous bodily harm.’ Self-defense is always a defense to a charge of murder. Self-defense is always the most important part of the case for war. This is always seen from the perspective of the one who acted this way: forced to kill someone because that person was going to kill them. The need to survive, to continue to live, becomes the excuse, the lawful excuse, for causing the death of another. This is all black letter law. Everyone knows it. Does anyone understand what it means?

“Suppose one of Atkinson’s victims, the husband, had survived. Suppose he had been there at the trial, a witness, and then, in front of everyone, had attacked Atkinson, tried to kill him, and that Atkinson had with those strong hands of his killed him in self-defense. It seems to me that it should not be self-defense, that it should be murder. Atkinson, not the husband, started the chain of events that led, inevitably, as it seems to me, to what the husband tried to do. If the husband had somehow managed to kill Atkinson, is there anyone who would not secretly approve of what he had done?

“I am still trying to understand what others seem to find so simple. We insist murder is the exception, the inexplicable exception that we invariably explain by a motive that seems plain on the face of it or that we invent: the reason why. It may tell you why someone wanted to harm another; it does not tell you why they actually did it, why an emotion was translated into an action. The prosecution insisted that Atkinson killed because he did not want to get caught, that he had gone there to rob the place. Even if that had been true, even if he had gone there to rob and not to kill, the prosecution could never explain why he did not just leave, run away before anyone could get a good look at him. Atkinson murdered four people. That fact became, so to speak, a cause of itself. He is a brutal murderer, and that proves that he is different from you and me. That proves that he is – what? Someone who does things like this! And we think the murderer is insane!

“Self-defense is rooted in the belief in equality. In Roman law, a slave who killed his master to stop his master from killing him was guilty of murder. We find that reprehensible, but only because we reject the idea of slavery. We have millions of slaves of our own, the inmates of prisons, men who have broken the law. If one of them, on the way to his own execution, tries to save his own life by killing one of the guards, we stop the execution and put him on trial for – murder! Equality means that everyone has the right of self-defense, the right to do what is necessary to survive. This is the democratic instinct: the belief in the essential equality of everyone. But the murderer has another instinct: the drive to dominate, not to survive. The failure to understand this is the crucial mistake. It is not enough to live, to live just for the sake of living; the murderer lives to kill, to impose his will on others; to make them recognize him – to make them recognize us – for what we are: the ones whose only law is what we ourselves decide. The murderer needs his victim, depends on him, in the same way the master needs his slave. He does not want to survive; he wants to dominate. The politician needs the crowd to tell him he is important; the murderer needs a victim to tell him he has power.

“But what kind of victim? A stranger, a face in the crowd, someone of no importance, someone whose death would be as anonymous as his life? There is no pleasure in the praise of fools, no triumph in the defeat of an adversary who cannot fight back. A man like Atkinson likes killing for the sake of killing. Though he won’t admit it, he believes that everyone – everyone with a normal life – is better than he is. It wouldn’t matter who he killed: the victim would always be someone superior. But me – who would I kill where murder would be an achievement?

“There is no question now but that I am going to do it, murder someone. It isn’t just that this thing has been building up inside me to the point that I cannot control it; I don’t want to stop it. It has become plain to me, as I sit there in court, listing to all these stories, the sordid details of so many wretched, mindless lives, that the system is broken, that we do not know what we are doing, that everything is upside down. I sit there all day, wanting to scream, wishing half the time that instead of passing sentence I could be the one to carry it out. But who would I kill, and when would I do it?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

There was a dry taste of ash in the air, a dull sense of something burning. Somewhere in the San Gabriel Mountains, too far away to be seen, a fire was skipping hot through a tinder box of brittle underbrush and half-dead trees, dancing like a painted harlot to its own manic applause. Later, when night fell and the sun went searching in the west, a bright orange halo would light up the long dark shadow of the barren eastern hills. It seemed to Walter Bannister a little like Sodom and Gomorrah, Los Angeles surrounded by fire and water, everyone living there destined to be consumed by the flames or driven into the sea.

“Cecil B. DeMille,” he said without warning.

Watching out the passenger side window, his wife thought she must have missed something.

“I was just thinking, we keep talking about the earthquake, the big one that is supposed to destroy everything; but it will probably be a fire – a fire and the Santa Anna winds – a huge conflagration building on itself, burn through everything, across the whole basin, all the way to the shore. This was a desert before we brought water across the mountains; it may become a desert again."

“You said Cecil B. DeMille,” she reminded him.

Bannister kept his eyes on the road. They were on the Pacific highway, just past Ventura, heading north toward Santa Barbara. A narrow strip of beach lay like a tan ribbon between the ocean and the road.

“It’s what happens when you live all your life in L.A. The first thing that comes into your head when you think of something biblical is the kind of movies they used to make. Cecil B. DeMille,” he said, repeating the name with a kind of nostalgia in his eyes. “The Ten Commandments. Someone says Moses and you see Charlton Heston holding up a stone tablet. They made that movie, part of it – the Red Sea opening up – on the beach in Guadaloupe, a small town not far from Santa Maria, about a hundred miles up the coast. People still go out there and dig in the sand and sometimes find a wooden wheel from one of the chariots they used. They get more excited about that than if they had been archeologists digging in the sands of Egypt! Only the movies are real. Ask your brother – he’ll tell you.”

“Roger knows the difference,” replied Meredith, quick to come to her brother’s defense. “I don’t know why you always feel the need to criticize him the way you do.”

“I don’t criticize Roger. I never have. I’m just not convinced that making motion pictures is the pinnacle of human existence: that nothing is more important than keeping people entertained.”

“You know, sometimes Walter…!” She tried to stop herself, but it was too late; it all come rushing out, the frustration, the pent-up hostility. “You think watching a bunch of criminals every day is so much better? Listening to a lunatic like that child murderer, Daniel Lee…whatever his name, lie about what he did, is that - what did you say: ‘The pinnacle of human existence’?” Roger makes great movies, wonderful movies. He’s won three Academy Awards for them. I know what you do is important, but sentencing someone to death – how many people would want to do that?”

A thin smile cut across Walter Bannister’s mouth. “You mean, as opposed to making a movie about it? But I’m sure you’re right. I don’t imagine many people would want to trade places with me.”

The ambiguous nature of this last remark was lost entirely on Meredith Bannister. Before she could even wonder whether there might be some second, hidden meaning in those otherwise prosaic words, he changed the mood with another, brighter, smile. Embarrassed by her angry outburst, she smiled back, and then, in a gesture of affection she had often used before, reached across and patted his hand.

“You’re a great judge, Walter. Everyone admires you and respects what you do.”

He was not sure which he disliked more: the condescending tone and the false glittering smile or the fact that she actually thought herself sincere.

There were only a few more miles to go. He knew it all by heart: take the Montecito exit and then wind his way into the hills, follow the narrow twisting road past the high stucco walls and the private iron gates until, finally, near the very top, one of those places that instead of a numbered street address had just a name, a Spanish name, invented not that many years before by a shrewd developer who understood that the rich like nothing so much as to advertise their anonymity.

“I’m not sure why I let you drag me to these things,” he said in a light-hearted banter. It touched the surface of his discontent, but went no further. There would not have been any point. The surface was all there was, not just with his wife but, so far as he could tell, with everyone. He had tried at times to have conversations about what he thought serious things; it was hard enough to find a lawyer to talk about the law, but one of the eager blank faces invited to one of Roger Stanton’s lavish weekend gatherings in the sun drenched hills of Santa Barbara?

“Makes you wonder why we bother to have a language. A couple dozen words, half of them obscenities, and you have the full repertoire of what gets said.”

“You’re hopeless, Walter; just hopeless,” laughed Meredith. There were few things she liked as much as attending one of her famous brother’s parties. “Half of Hollywood will be there.”

“And the other half? – No, I know the answer: ‘Bitterly disappointed they weren’t invited and jealous of those who were.’”

He could tease her all he wanted, but nothing could change her good mood. She was like a schoolgirl going to her first dance.

“It’s a gorgeous blue sky day, and some of the most famous people in the world will be here.”

“I think I may have sent a few of them to jail.”

“Yes, but at least one of them, don’t forget, still writes you letters thanking you for what you did, getting him into treatment for his addiction.”

She said this with an air of triumph. There was no one more famous in Hollywood than Driscoll Rose, and no more chronicled story than his struggle with the demons of his addiction. Walter had given him the chance he needed.

“It was his third time,” replied her husband. “I wasn’t sure if he believed me when I told him that if I saw him again, instead of a treatment center I was going to send him to death row.”

For a moment, she was not sure if he was teasing or telling the truth.

“I did; that’s exactly what I told him. It was nothing but a fiction, of course; nothing I could have done. But he didn’t know that, so why not scare the hell out of him. Nothing else had worked.” He glanced across at Meredith who was looking ahead to the gated entrance at the bottom of the long drive. “I’ll make you a bet. If he’s here, this actor you think I saved, he won’t have any idea who I am; he won’t remember me at all, or rather,” he added with a shrewd glint in his eye, “he’ll pretend he doesn’t. It was just an episode, something he wants everyone to think he’s forgotten; something that wasn’t important enough to remember.”

With an impatient smile, she dismissed it as too impossible to take seriously. “He wrote you letters; he -”

“Someone wrote me letters,” interjected Walter with a wry expression. He did not need to remind her that it was the sort of thing publicity agents were hired to do. She knew how Hollywood worked better than he did. It was just that, in this instance, she did not want to believe it.

A college-aged parking attendant ran to open the driver’s side door while another one helped Meredith out of the car. There was not room to park all the cars up at the house, and so several guests at a time were shuttled up the long, winding drive in one of several limousines. The house, or rather, the villa, could be seen from the sea, dominating all the other, lesser houses, around it. A dozen gardeners worked every day tending acres of rolling lawns and terraced flower beds, walls covered with bright colored bougainvillea and a variety of ornamental trees no one had ever bothered to count. A labyrinth of stone pathways and staircases was bordered by terra cotta pots full of geraniums and marble vases full of purple orchids, while off in the distance, among an oasis of inevitable palms, a family of green and red parrots, imported from some place in South America, squawked their displeasure at being disturbed by the presence of so many people, hundreds of them, wandering around, smiles on their faces and glasses in their hands, certain they were part of something, a world which they had dreamed since childhood of entering, a world which, whatever happened, they would never give up. It had become the American obsession, the chance to be seen by others, starring in a movie in which you pretended to be someone else; the test of authenticity how well you could make fiction believable.

Or so Walter Bannister told himself as he stood next to the stone balustrade at the edge of the terrace and gazed at the crowd on the wide expanse of lawn below.

“It’s like I was telling you before, that night at Roger’s house.”

The voice was vaguely familiar. When Bannister turned around he was almost glad to see someone he knew. Irving Leonard continued talking as if instead of beginning, he was in the middle of what he had to say and that Bannister had followed every word.

“There’s no movie in it, that’s for sure,” he said, shaking his head in disappointment. Dressed in a casual tan jacket and pale blue shirt, he sipped on a scotch and soda, trying to puzzle it out. The lines on his high forehead deepened and spread wider. “There’s no dramatic element. He murders four people, gets caught, goes to trial, gets convicted and is going to die. Good. He deserves it. But no movie. Who would want to see it?”

“You mean the Atkinson murder case?” asked Bannister, just to be sure.

“I think that was his name: The guy you sentenced to death.” Leonard looked at him with his owl-like eyes, expecting him, as it seemed, to know without being asked the question he wanted answered. He sipped on his drink, watching Bannister as if the judge were some actor having trouble remembering his lines. “What was it like?” he asked finally. “Telling someone they’re going to die.”

Bannister turned his gaze toward the changing colors of the changing crowd below, small groups forming and then, one by one, drifting apart, everyone eager to find something, or someone, just a little more interesting or important than the people they were with, the endless cycle of shining expectation and faded disappointment, a lifetime’s biography told in a few hours on a golden sun drenched afternoon. Taking a deep breath, the clean, sweet taste of the ocean air on his lips, he remembered a little his own vanished youth and, for a moment, what it had felt like, years ago, when in the cool California night the only future he had to think about was that hour and the next one after that.

“You want to know what it’s like to sentence a man to death?” He turned suddenly back to Leonard who still stood waiting. “No different than any of the other papers I sign in court. A restraining order, a death sentence: a bureaucratic routine. You don’t believe that, because a man’s life is at stake? But I don’t make that decision; Daniel Lee Atkinson made it when he murdered four people. The man who murders, he’s the one who makes that decision, decides someone is going to die. A judge, a jury, all we’re really doing is finishing what he started. You’re right when you say there isn’t any dramatic element to it; the drama is in that decision: how it is made, who makes it – that someone is going to die, someone who doesn’t have to die; someone that, according to the law at least, is supposed to be safe.”

Leonard nodded the way he always did when he listened, as if, whatever was being said, he had heard it all before.

“I don’t understand: ‘according to the law, supposed to be safe.’”

Bannister saw his brother-in-law working his way toward them. Exchanging a few words with a couple eager for the privilege, he greeted Bannister with a raised eyebrow and a quick toss of his head.

“Nothing to understand,” said Bannister. “Not every killing is murder, that’s all.”

“Sure; I get it: self-defense, that kind of thing. So what you’re saying is that we should make a movie about what some guy goes through, what he has to decide, when he murders someone: a murder mystery from the point of view of the killer. But no one sympathizes with a killer, so….”

Out of the corner of his eye, Bannister watched Roger Stanton coming closer, but slowly, forced, or rather required by the fact of who he was to stop and say something to everyone he passed. Roger was good at this, playing the relaxed and affable host, always interested in what anyone wanted to tell him; always able, in ways Bannister did not so much envy as fail to understand, to find the right word by which to make others believe he thought them every bit as interesting as they thought themselves to be. You could see it on the faces of the two women he was talking to now, flushed with encouragement by something he had said and realizing only later, if they realized at all, that he had not made any commitment of his own.

They were only a few feet apart, but they might as well have been on opposite sides of the room. Stanton drew people to him. Nearly everyone who had come had come with the idea that an invitation meant an invitation to spend time with him. Proving, as if there needed proving, that a kind of delirium comes with the proximity to power, the crowd around him grew thicker and more boisterous. Women smiled and their bright eyes grew brighter; men smiled, and not only looked, but felt, more confident. Bannister, seeing this, began to back away; Stanton, seeing that, threw him a helpless look and gestured toward the house. They would see each other later.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you to a few people,” said Irving Leonard, taking Bannister by the arm in the amiable, confidential manner of a friend.

Bannister scarcely knew him. They had met a few times, but always at something Stanton had put on, and with the exception of the Atkinson trial, they had never exchanged more than the normal pleasantries of dinner table conversation. Bannister was an outsider, given entry into Hollywood’s inner circle only by virtue of his marriage. He was Roger Stanton’s brother-in-law; that he was also a trial court judge was an awkward irrelevance. No one understood this better than Bannister himself. It was a matter of intuition for Irving Leonard and others like him, a felt sense of the difference; nothing they could have explained. Bannister had the advantage of looking from the outside in, seeing everything with the eyes of the observer, someone with nothing at stake in the game. He could laugh, silently of course, at ambitions he did not share and pretensions he did not have; smile at the whole carnival of dreams, the circus of success swirling all around him, because none of it meant anything to him. But as he stood there watching, he realized with a kind of brooding melancholy that they were lucky to have the dreams they had; that it did not matter how empty, evanescent, and insecure they might be; that they were, if looked at closely, like every other dream, just an excuse for getting to the front of the line, of making everyone else look at you and know you were every bit as important as you thought you were.

He followed Leonard down the steps from the terrace to the long green grass expanse where, as his wife had put it, half of Hollywood was wandering in and out of the white silk tents in which every kind of liquor and, so far as Bannister could tell, every kind of food had been put on display. At the front of a gray stone fountain, Meredith Bannister was laughing at something said by a distinguished looking man with graying hair and a black mustache, a producer that, though Bannister could not now recall his name, he remembered having met at some point. The producer said something else, smiling at Meredith as he said it, and this time, instead of laughing, she rose up on her toes and kissed him gently on the side of his face. Bannister saw it all through the crowd and did not have any doubt what it meant: Meredith, his wife, was having an affair. It did not surprise him, and while it was not exactly surprise, he found it curious that he did not feel anything, certainly not jealousy and not even disappointment. He discovered that he simply did not care, that he was past caring what she did, and that if he needed an explanation for her behavior that was probably it: his own indifference, the absence of any feeling for who she was or wanted to be.

“Here’s someone I want you to meet,” said Leonard, a touch of eagerness in his voice. Bannister did not hear him: he was still watching his wife, trying to remember whether that was the way she had once looked at him.

“Yes, I’m sorry….” He turned back and found himself face to face with Driscoll Rose, the actor he had the year before threatened to send to death row. He shook hands with him and waited for a sign that Rose remembered him. There was something, just behind his eyes, a glimmer of recognition, and then even that was gone. The handshake was limp and cursory, the scorned duty of someone who thinks he sets his own rules.

“Judge…,” he remarked, not bothering to repeat the last name.

Bannister could not resist. “We’ve met before.”

A lot of people tried to remind Driscoll Rose of their existence. A twitch at the side of his sullen mouth was the only response. Bannister pretended not to notice.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, a couple of times. You appeared in front of me, not dressed the way you are now, in a sports jacket and slacks, but in an orange jumpsuit, property of the county jail.”

Rose shot a look of bored irritation at Leonard, but Leonard was enjoying this too much to interfere. Driscoll Rose might be the most sought after property in Hollywood, the star that guaranteed the profitability of any movie he was in, but off the screen he was as easy to dislike as anyone with whom Irving Leonard had ever had the misfortune to work.

“What a coincidence,” he fairly chuckled. “You were in Walter’s courtroom. Did you know then he was Roger’s brother-in-law? Probably not. Wouldn’t have made a difference. He just sentenced a guy to death, Walter did. Probably he wasn’t that tough on you – or was he?”

Rose ran his hand through a tangle of thick hair and dropped his eyes. He stood there like that, the way he often did in the movies when he was trying to show contempt, and then, looking up, shook his head and walked away.

“Little prick!” laughed Leonard. “Everybody wants him in their picture, and no one wants him twice. I remembered you were the one who sentenced him last time, sent him to rehab. I wanted to see how he would react. Wouldn’t even admit he remembered you. You probably saved the little shit’s worthless life, and instead of telling you what he owes you, he just walks away. Let him go screw himself. You watch, rehab didn’t do him any good; jerks like that don’t change. They think they’re God’s gift to the movie industry. He’ll get stoned one night and wrap his car around a telephone pole. And then you know what will happen,” he went on, hanging onto Bannister’s sleeve, his eyes beginning to glisten with the laughter that was forcing its way to his lips. “Every teenage girl in the country will go into mourning; same way they did when I was a kid and James Dean drove his Porsche off a cliff somewhere. The difference is that people who knew him liked James Dean.”

“Are you suggesting that what we see on the screen isn’t real?” said Bannister, laughing with him. He had not much cared for Leonard before, but he could not help but like him now, after what he had just heard. To his surprise, instead of responding in kind, some off-hand remark about the empty vanities of Hollywood, Leonard became serious.

“A few years ago, the Academy – they’re always changing things – decided to give the writers a little more attention. The only way they could figure out how to give the writers more credit was to enhance the visuals. This is Hollywood: no one noticed the irony. Anyway, what they did – maybe you saw it – they showed a page of script: the words, the dialogue, the description of what the actor is to do, and at the same time they showed the actor doing it. Well, Christ; I mean, anyone who saw it had to know that these great movie stars everyone likes to worship weren’t much more than glorified puppets, the wooden dummies on the lap of a ventriloquist. But you know what – no one noticed; I mean, no one said a damn thing about it. Everyone applauded, thought the writers got their credit – it’s what writers always want – and marveled at the great craft of the actor, able to turn the written word into something real and alive! It only proves what I’ve always known: you can sell anything in this town, anything: make even a smarmy little son-of-a-bitch like Driscoll Rose with his crooked nose and uneven teeth someone half the women in American want to go to bed with.”

Leonard paused, an awkward, self-conscious grin hanging suddenly sideways on his mouth. He looked at Bannister as if he had only just realized he was there.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Maybe because you’re Roger’s brother-in-law; maybe because you’re a judge with just about the most goddamn honest face I’ve ever seen.” He looked at Bannister with new eyes, shrewder and more analytical. “They say you’re the best there is. Roger thinks you’re a legal genius. I’ll bet criminals plead guilty just so you’ll listen to their confession. You have that kind of look.”

Bannister dismissed the suggestion with a quick, self-deprecating smile. It had no effect.

“I’m serious. You make people want to talk. You Catholic? Priests would come to you to make confession. Roger was right, what he said that night at dinner: you could never play a criminal; you couldn’t even play a judge: you look too much like what a judge is supposed to look like and never does.” He stopped himself and shook his head at the absurdity of it. “Never does! Listen to me. You do, you look exactly the way you should.”

“Thanks,” replied Bannister, rather enjoying the honest way Leonard had tried to explain himself. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should,” said Leonard, with a whimsical glance. “But now we have a serious problem and we need to solve it.” He turned first one way, then the other, searching the crowd. “We both have empty glasses; and that’s the last thing you want to happen at a party like this.”

They moved through the dense crowd, avoiding anyone they might have to stop and talk to, on the look out for a waiter. When they finally found one, they each grabbed a glass from his passing silver tray and started talking again about Hollywood and all the changing faces.

“It happens faster now than it used to. It was harder to break in, and, once you started, took longer to get to the top. Think about someone like Gary Grant, or Clark Gable, all those established stars. Gregory Peck. Seemed like they’d always been around, and always would be. There was a system in place. The studios – and you could count them on the fingers of one hand – controlled everything. Television changed all that; television and all the new technology. Anyone can make a movie now; and with hundreds of television channels, movies on the internet, all this reality T.V., no one can control anything. Pretty soon, everyone is going to be so busy making movies there won’t be anyone left to watch! I’m not kidding; trust me, I’m not. We’ll have a whole new category at the Oscars: best movie no has had time to see!”

Bannister listened to this manic discourse with the smiling attention with which he watched the performance of a gifted lawyer, one who knew his way around a courtroom. Irving Leonard had been a part of Hollywood too long to be much impressed by it, knew it too well not to have become more than a little jaded and cynical. But there was no bitterness in his judgments, none of the false lament of lost success; he was a director’s director, a survivor in the jungle ways of Hollywood, part of the established order of things, at least for those who still believed there was an order, established or otherwise. However you answered that question, there was no doubt that a sure way to destroy your own reputation was to criticize his.

“And what happens then?” asked Bannister, genuinely interested. “When everyone is so busy making movies no one has time to watch them.”

A smile, rueful and uncanny, slipped quietly across Leonard’s sagging lower lip. He stopped walking and cocked his head.

“Don’t you know? We’re about the same age. Haven’t you seen it coming?”

Bannister was not sure what he was talking about, but he had a suspicion that it was something that, when he heard it explained, would conform exactly to his own misgivings about the recent tendency of things.

“You mean, the way everything has speeded up; no one has time to think, or even understand what they see?”

“Something like that: there isn’t any dialogue anymore; everything is visual. It’s worse on television. You don’t have to listen, don’t have to follow anything; not just what you hear, but what you see. Everything is fragmentary: quick, partial shots, then another – rapid fire images. You’re right: speed and more speed, faster and faster, everything dizzy, everything falling apart. It’s a drunk man’s nightmare.”

“The slaves of what we see,” added Bannister, thoughtfully.

“Yeah, I suppose. But it’s what everyone seems to want, what they pay for. The pictures speed up, and we all slow down. Let’s face it: compared to what we used to do, we’re all dumber than hell now. At least that’s how it seems to me,” said Leonard, puzzled, as it seemed, that things had gotten to this state.

“Why don’t you make a movie about that,” suggested Bannister as they approached the dance floor that had been set up on the lower part of the lawn. An orchestra, the musicians dressed in dinner jackets, was playing a Cole Porter tune. A dozen couples of various ages were moving to the easy upbeat rhythm.

“A movie about how stupid the movies have become?” laughed Leonard. “If you can get Roger to finance it, I’ll direct it. Probably win an Oscar.” He chuckled beneath his breath. “Idealistic young director – we’ll get Driscoll Rose to play the part – battles the studios for the chance to make the kind of movie Hollywood used to make. Everyone opposes him. Somehow he does it anyway. Only the movie he makes is all about Hollywood and what he had to do: the movie is all about him. All about him: that’s a role Driscoll Rose would kill to get.”

Drawn by the music and the dancers, part of the gathering crowd, they moved closer to the dance floor and the orchestra. The dozen dancing couples were all of them well-dressed and some of them quite well-known. There were a few, the Hollywood executives the public knew nothing about, who were middle aged, but most of the others were younger and already famous, with shining faces and eager eyes, certain, in the wonderful inconsistency of their age, that nothing could be better than the life they were now living and that every day would be better than the last.

Bannister, who had not danced in years, liked watching them, the graceful, carefree way they moved, the hint of all the vagaries of romance. Without quite knowing how it got there, or even what it meant, he felt a smile on his mouth and nostalgia in his eyes, the vague memory of what he used to be, when he was still young and other, older, people stood at the edge of a dance floor watching him. The music brought it all back, all the possibilities he had known, and it seemed to him that what he had wanted but had not been able to have was as much a part of him as anything he had actually achieved, that the dreams he had had meant as much or more than the reality he had lived. There was a strange satisfaction in that, this knowledge that he had at least been capable of imagining a future more interesting than what, now that he could look back on it, his past had been.

The distant smile fading from his lips, he shoved his hands deep into his pockets and stared down at the ground, reminding himself that the regret he felt was only the misplaced sentiment of age, the knowledge that it was too late to change anything, too late to go back and start again. And if he could, if it weren’t too late, if he could do something else with his life, would it not only lead to a different regret, regret that he had not done something different than that. He kicked at the grass as he listened to the rhythm of the music trace the perfect endless circle of his mind.

Drawn by some instinct, the sense of something about to happen, he looked up. There, on the far side of the floor, Driscoll Rose was dancing with a gorgeous young woman in a half missing dress. They might as well have been on the dance floor alone: every eye was on them as he put her into one turn after another, each one more reckless than the other, each one more extreme. They started in the middle of the floor, but were soon twisting along the edge, and then, suddenly, Rose lost his balance, let go of the girl, and went flying into the watching crowd. He crashed headlong into a young Hispanic waiter carrying a tray load of glasses filled with champagne and both of them hit the ground. There was broken glass everywhere. The dark-eyed waiter, who had the quiet good looks of a well-mannered young man, started to get up and reached for Driscoll Rose to help him to his feet. But Rose was not interested in being helped. He was too enraged for that. He shoved the waiter hard in the chest and then, without warning, started to beat him with his fists, one blow after the other, beating him in the face. He was screaming at him, shouting every obscenity he knew, out of control, insane in his rage, beating him senseless, trying to kill him with his bare hands. And no one did a thing to stop him. They all stood there, afraid to get involved, afraid to get on the wrong side of the famous Driscoll Rose.

Bannister grabbed him by the wrist just as he was about to hit the waiter again, and with a strength he did not know he had, bent his arm back behind him until he could not move. Rose turned around, swearing, but when he saw the look on Bannister’s face his shouted profanity died stillborn in the air. Forcing him to his feet, Bannister with both hands pushed him back into the watching, helpless crowd.

“Get him out of here!” he demanded, without bothering to see who would do it. He did not have time to waste. He was on his knees, talking in a soft, reassuring voice, telling the young Hispanic whose face was now a bloody mask that it was going to be all right, that help was on the way. The waiter looked at him with grateful eyes and started to say something in reply, but when he opened his mouth he started to gag. Driscoll Rose had broken three of his teeth.

CHAPTER NINE

Roger Stanton was not happy about what had happened, he wanted Walter to understand that; but there were, after all, other considerations.

Bannister raised an eyebrow. “Other considerations?”

“Yes, of course,” he began to explain, a flash of irritation in his pale blue eyes. “Other considerations, things that have to….Oh, hell, Walter – I’m not defending what he did. Defending? – I wish that waiter had beaten the hell out of him. He probably could have, too, if Driscoll didn’t have him down on the ground and started hitting him first.” He shook his head, a withering look of disgust flying across his mouth. “The truth is, I wish he’d killed him; killed Driscoll, I mean: would have solved a lot of problems,” he added in a voice that, dropping to a whisper, carried the conviction of a private thought.

Having said it, spoken it out loud, Stanton swung his legs to the side and, resting the side of his face against his thumb and two fingers, stared out through the French doors of his study to the terrace. He lapsed into a long silence.

The party had been over for hours, brought to a sudden, unexpected end by the wail of an ambulance leaving the treasure dome of Roger Stanton’s west coast Kubla Kahn with the barely breathing body of Lorenzo Garcia, the latest victim of Driscoll Rose’s self-indulgent rage. In the yellow dying light of a late afternoon a few tired groundskeepers patrolled the littered grounds, bending over every few feet to pick up the miscellaneous scattered debris. The white silk tents were all empty, the temporary tables burdened with empty, lipstick glasses and dirty, half-empty plates of stale food. It was like a prodigiously expensive wedding that, half an hour later, had ended in divorce.

Here, inside Stanton’s study, nothing was out of place; nothing, with the exception of the way Stanton sat, lounging back in his chair, any different than it had always been. It was a large room, an enormous room, fifty feet across in each direction, built as a library, with dark brown smooth plastered walls and a wood paneled ceiling twenty feet above the floor. Thick prayer rugs, hand woven in some dusty Persian village two hundred years ago, when the British still controlled it, lay scattered on Italian marble tiles the color of a deep maroon with streaks of gold running through them. Shelves that could have held ten thousand books held less than a hundred volumes, all of them stacked together immediately behind the desk where Roger Stanton sometimes worked. They were, as Walter Bannister had noticed the first time he had been here, sitting in the chair opposite, the shiny leather bound editions of books without importance, purchased for what in the trade was called their furniture value: books that were never read and, in all probability, never opened, unless by some witless stranger who, bored with the usual guests at a party, had nothing better to do than discover what the great Roger Stanton read at night. It did not matter what was written in them - blank pages would have served the same purpose – it was the look that was needed: the proper visual background of a place with an important impression to make. It was not so much a study as a movie set; what an audience, come to see a picture about a famous Hollywood mogul, would expect to see. Stanton’s desk, hand carved out of rosewood and other even more exotic things, sat near the corner, back from the French doors and the outside glare, sunk in the shadows and shielded from the afternoon sun: a dark, cool refuge where Roger Stanton could, all alone, sit quietly, the casual spectator of his own achievement.

“No one tried to stop it; no one tried to help that kid,” said Bannister.

Stanton turned his head and gave his brother-in-law a friendly, but slightly puzzled, glance. “You did, Walter; you probably saved his life. From what I heard, you stopped Driscoll cold.” He sat straight up. “No one else did anything, though, did they? Well – you have to understand,” he went on with a look of derision in his eyes, “cowardice is a condition of existence here. No one wants to be on the wrong side of Driscoll Rose. He has too many friends, too much influence.”

“So they’d just let him beat some kid to death?” Bannister watched Stanton shift his gaze and look away, and he understood not just the reason, but the reluctance to speak plainly about what was on his mind. “And now you want me to help you keep it quiet, to make sure that nothing happens. Those ‘other considerations’ you started to bring up. Isn’t that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

Stanton found himself on the defensive, a position that was unusual for him, and one he did not like. Worse yet, he had been put there by one of the very few people who did not need or want anything he could give. Walter Bannister could treat him as an equal, and, given the look on his brother-in-law’s face, perhaps as someone with even less claim to respect. In all the years he had known him, he could remember only a few occasions on which he had seen him angry, and never anything like as angry as he was now. There was no point trying to make things look better than they were.

“I said it would have been better if that waiter -”

“Lorenzo Garcia. He has a name.”

“ – better if Lorenzo Garcia had beaten – No, killed! – Driscoll Rose. This is just the latest thing he’s done. I’m not talking about the drug stuff. That’s nothing. Everyone in Hollywood has that problem. He’s been in rehab – What? - half a dozen times. You sent him there….”

“The last time,” interjected Bannister when Stanton seemed to hesitate. Stanton greeted this with a cynic’s knowing laugh.

“He’s been there since. Don’t bother telling me that keeping clean was a condition of probation, that he should be back in jail; it’s what I’m trying to tell you: no one can afford that! He’s making a picture, a couple of them. Do you have any idea how much money is involved? – hundreds of millions: the cost of production, the future profits. We do what we have to do: we shove him into a private clinic out of the public eye, away from the press, and get him straight, and get him back to work.”

“And you cheat the law, which makes you and everyone involved culpable, legally liable. If he goes out and kills someone – like he almost did today – you’re looking not just at lawsuits, but even criminal prosecution.”

Stanton did not want to hear about it, not because he did not want to face facts, but because the facts were much worse than Bannister knew.

“I said the drug stuff was nothing.”

“Nothing? - Why, what’s he done, besides nearly beating to death this kid, Garcia, this afternoon?”

Like someone worn down by the all the things he had to do, Stanton pushed himself up from the chair and opened the French door closest to him. He stood there a moment, leaning against the frame, his arms crossed loosely in front of him. In the distance, a blood red sun hovered just above the far edge of the blue Pacific, waiting, as it seemed, to take one last look around, to remember what it had seen, before it turned and, dragging the day down behind it, plunged headlong into the sea. Stanton took some comfort in that, the thought that what had happened, after it happened, was gone and buried, and that other, better, things would happen the next day or the day after that. That’s what he told himself, and then he called himself a liar.

“He raped a girl, and didn’t just do it once; rather twice that I know of,” he announced, abruptly turning back. “Probably more than that; twice that I know of, because both times we had to pay.”

Bannister did not feel anything, certainly nothing close to shock. He heard this sort of thing every day in court, and after what he had seen of Driscoll Rose the only surprise was that it had not been rape and murder. Nor was he surprised by the way it had been handled. That scarcely meant he approved.

“When you tell an alcoholic that what he’s doing, drinking every day, isn’t so bad, that’s called enabling; when you cover up a crime, that’s called aiding and abetting, and people who do it go to prison. And you’re too intelligent not to know it.”

Stanton sat on the corner of the desk and began to swing his foot back and forth. He did not look at Bannister, but gazed again out the open French doors, trying to remember just how it had happened and what had led to the decision that had been made. He wanted to tell Walter the truth, but it was not any longer quite so clear what the truth about it really was.

“He raped her, that first girl; I mean there wasn’t any question: he forced her to have sex; or rather he had sex with her when she wasn’t in any condition to consent. Christ, Walter! – They were both high on something: cocaine, probably. They were at a party; they went upstairs. She was a minor actress, a bit part player, willing, probably eager, to spend time with the famous Driscoll Rose. But she was young – nineteen, twenty; I don’t remember – and she did not think things would go as far as they did. She had enough presence of mind to tell him she wanted him to stop, and when he didn’t, she started screaming. She -”

“You said it was a party. What about the people downstairs?”

Stanton turned just far enough to give him a tired, jaundiced look. “It was Driscoll Rose, remember. No one was going to interfere. This sounds awful, and it doesn’t change the fact that he had sex with her or that she tried to stop him, but it wasn’t like he broke into someone’s home, or jumped out of the bushes, and at the point of a knife or a gun raped a woman he didn’t know. Yes, I know, it isn’t the kind of thing you’re supposed to say, but it helps explain the way it all got settled. We left it up to her, the girl.”

“She didn’t go to the police?” asked Bannister, just to be sure.

“No, and I don’t think she would have whatever had happened; I mean, even if we hadn’t done what we did.”

“You paid her off.”

“Yes, all right; you can put it that way if you want, but she wasn’t paid off with money. Not directly anyway. I told you we left it up to her. We asked her what she wanted us to do. We told her she had every right to go to the police. We went so far, believe it or not, to tell her that it was probably what she ought to do. I’m not going to lie to you Walter; I’ve known you too long for that. We didn’t have to tell her - she knew as well as anyone – what a charge like that would do. Whatever happened to Driscoll, it would end any chance she had of ever having a career. She said – she is a very intelligent young woman – she didn’t want to cause trouble for anyone, that she knew it never would have happened if Driscoll hadn’t been high on drugs. For all I know, she might even have believed it; but whether she did or not, it was convenient. It made everything manageable; it put us in her debt. Someone mentioned that we had had our eye on her for quite a while, that we hoped she’d become a part of what we were doing, that if she did we were sure she would be a valuable addition, well-worth the kind of extended contract we hoped we might be able to get her to agree to.”

“And so you saved a rapist, and the girl became a star.”

“A star? – No, but a pretty good actress with all the work she can handle.”

“But she wasn’t the only one; isn’t that what you said?”

Stanton’s eyes clouded over. He got off the corner of the desk and with nervous irritation began to pace back and forth. Suddenly, he stopped still and scratched at his forehead as if trying to rid himself of something sharp and venomous that had dug its way into his scalp.

“Jesus! I don’t know sometimes. The second time, the other time I know about, the other time we paid – I should have called the police myself. I don’t know why I didn’t. It was the girl he was engaged to marry, another actress – you’ve met her; you’ll recognize her name - Gloria Baker. He didn’t just rape her, the sick bastard; he beat her worse than he beat that kid today: broke her nose, broke her ribs. I think the only reason he didn’t kill her was he thought she was already dead. She’d broken off the engagement, then he found out she had been seeing someone else.”

For all that he knew about the practiced lies, the craven duplicity, the way Hollywood protected its own when scandal was a threat to business, Bannister was still astonished at the stupidity of what had been done. It was one thing to turn a blind eye to what was going on, but to take an active part, to help someone get away with what was clearly assault and might even be attempted murder suggested a level of arrogance he had not imagined.

“Tell me something, Roger. Last week I sentenced a man to death: Daniel Lee Atkinson. You know what he did: murdered four people, two of them children. If he had come to you after he did it, what would you have done – if he had been a famous movie star, I mean – helped him cover up his crime, let someone else be convicted for murder in his place?”

“That’s unfair!” protested Stanton, the anger starting in his eyes. “The two things aren’t the same; they -”

“Not the same? Maybe not,” said Bannister with a thin, lethal smile. “One is a murderer, the other a serial rapist who would have been a murderer if he hadn’t thought the girl already dead!”

Forced to admit the logic, Stanton denied the conclusion. He might not be able to argue the point, but he could feel the difference.

“Atkinson was an animal; he killed those people – a whole family – for no reason. Driscoll didn’t….He was in a situation…things got out of hand. He didn’t start off wanting to hurt anyone.”

“Face it, Roger; the only real difference is that everyone hated Atkinson for what he had done – and they should have – and everyone makes up excuses for your Driscoll Rose.” He bent forward and rapped his knuckles hard on Stanton’s shiny, expensive desk. “There are no more excuses, Roger. It ends now. I’m not going to help you cover this up. I saw it with my own eyes; I’m the only who pulled him off that kid – remember?”

Stanton turned away. “No one is asking you to do anything,” he said quietly. There was a strange intensity in his voice, a sense of expectation that Bannister immediately understood.

“That would be convenient, wouldn’t it? I look the other way: ignore the fact that I was a witness to the most vicious assault I’ve ever seen. Ignore it, don’t report it to the police, don’t make a full statement about what I saw – what I had to do. Don’t mention any of this to the district attorney so he can bring an indictment. Listen to me, Roger: all these other people – they might all be the cowards you think they are, too afraid of getting on the wrong side of the supremely talented Driscoll Rose, but - damn it! - I’m not just an officer of the court: In case you hadn’t noticed, I am the court!” Bannister was on his feet, staring hard at Stanton, but Stanton would not look back. “As soon as I leave here, I’m going straight to the police. I assumed someone would have called them the same time the ambulance was called. I should have known better.”

“That would be a mistake,” replied Stanton, his voice cold, immediate, the nervous uncertainty all but banished from his mind. “Everyone will say that it was self-defense; that the waiter said something he shouldn’t have said, pushed Driscoll when he got close, made him fall; that Driscoll only hit back in retaliation. Maybe Driscoll hit more than he needed to, but in the heat of the moment, forced to defend himself like that….Well, everyone will understand.”

The words hung there, a plain statement of made up fact, the invented fiction that would become the reality by which to explain away what the publicity people would call a minor altercation caused by someone else.

“Look, there’s no reason why it should come to this. There’s no -”

“Come to what? – Suborning perjury, bribing witnesses to come into court and lie. Who do you think you’re talking to, Roger? – Some witless actor desperate to get a part? Let’s put it to the test. I’ll be a witness for the prosecution,” he said, glaring at him, daring him to take up the challenge, “and not just in an assault trial for Driscoll Rose, but a witness for the prosecution in your trial as well!”

Lowering his eyes, Stanton with a brief, abrupt movement, shook his head in what was unmistakably an act of contrition. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have….But it’s just so damn difficult.” Lifting his head, he stood straight up, determined, as it seemed, to put the best face on things he could. “He’s getting the best of care; he’s in a private hospital – the Garcia kid. And he’ll be well-compensated - you can be sure of that. He’ll never have to worry about anything again.”

“Well taken care of, well-compensated,” drawled Bannister with a jaundiced smile. “Yes, well I should think so. Especially if he gets the right go for the jugular lawyer and files a civil suit. Juries like to give large awards when the victim is one of the working poor and the defendant is one of the useless rich! Now, tell me, before this goes any farther: what about the girl, Gloria Baker, who had sense enough to back out of the marriage and almost got killed because of it. What possible reason – honest reason –could you have had for helping him get out of that?”

In a gesture of recovered self-respect, Stanton lifted his chin and looked straight at him in a way that said there was far more to this story than what Bannister imagined.

“She called me. I was the first person she called, the only person she called. I could barely hear her, barely make out the words. She was crying, a stifled sob, trying to tell me that something awful had happened, asking me to come right away, and begging me – and I mean pleading with me – not to tell anyone else. She had not told me anything yet - not about what had happened - only that it was awful, and that she didn’t want anyone to know. She lived out in Malibu and it took me a while to get there. And when I did, the door was wide open and I could tell – I mean, things were knocked over, broken chairs, shattered glass. I found her ….I don’t know how she had managed to call me, how she had managed to say anything: her jaw was hanging at a crazy angle, her eyes, black and blue, swollen shut. I didn’t have to ask what had happened: I knew as soon as I saw her. I called a doctor, one of the ones we use. He was there in thirty minutes.”

“Why didn’t she want you to tell anyone else?” asked Bannister. Stanton, remembering what had happened, stared into the silence. “Why didn’t -?”

“She begged me not to,” explained Stanton, his eyes suddenly coming back into focus. “It was the only thing she wanted. I think she would rather have died that night than have anyone know what he had done to her. She was that much in love with him.”

“In love with him?” asked Bannister, more than a little intrigued. He sat down again, sideways in the blue cushioned chair, his arm thrown over the back of it. “I thought she’d just broken up with him, gone out with someone else.”

A soft, rueful smile floated over Roger Stanton’s fine, sensitive mouth, the silent recognition that the things we prize the most are sometimes the most difficult to explain. He wondered if Walter Bannister, with his rare precision of mind, was not, for that very reason, lacking the one quality necessary to understand the fervent irrationalities of love.

“She was in love with him, she’s still in love with him; I suppose she’ll always be in love with him. But she knew what he was, what he was capable of; and she knew – she told me this – that if she married him, it wouldn’t last, and that when it ended he might kill her. That’s part of the reason – if there ever are reasons for the way someone feels – why she was in love with him: the sense of danger that he brings. You see it on the screen, and you think it’s an actor’s edge, the way he plays his role; but with Driscoll that part was real. He’s erratic, unpredictable - one minute you’re the best friend he’s ever had; the next minute the worst enemy he’s ever known. He changes moods faster than you can find words to describe them, and through every one of them he’s the center of attention, dominating everything around him. She was in love with him and, to the degree to which anyone that completely self-absorbed is able, he was in love with her.”

Sliding the sides of his jacket behind him, Stanton put his hands on the small of his back and crossed his right foot over his ankle, balancing the toe of his leather loafer on the tile floor. Out on the terrace, the palm trees swayed gently in the evening breeze and the shadows, having waited all day, began to dance beneath them.

“I would have called the police that night,” he said in a distant, faraway voice. “And probably I should have, but I’d never known anyone that determined to save someone she loved, and so I promised I wouldn’t, and I kept my word, and no one ever knew. You’re the only person I’ve ever told.” Folding his arms across his chest, he furrowed his brow and kicked at the floor. “The damn thing is, I had the feeling, when she told me that she thought he might end up killing her if they got married, that she was mainly worried about what might happen to him: that he’d end up a murderer and everything that would mean.”

“Everything that would mean -? His reputation, his image! Whether anyone would still want to see his movies?”

“Don’t look so surprised. What else is there for people in this business? They’re up there on the screen; they never die, as long as someone comes to watch.” Bannister was still skeptical. “Why do people have children? – To leave something of themselves behind. Why do people want to become famous; why do politicians always talk so much about what history will say? How many of the people who were here today will late tonight watch an old movie on television and tell themselves that someday, years from now, other people will be staying up late to watch them? That’s what she meant: if he killed her, he’d be a murderer, and that’s all anyone would see.”

“It’s almost funny, when you think about it,” said Bannister, leaning back with his hands behind his head. “I sentence Daniel Lee Atkinson to death and it doesn’t quite seem fair: murder four people – murder four hundred! – You can only be put to death once. But a movie star! – Murder just one person and the sentence of death keeps getting repeated every time someone sees his face on film. The whole business is insane,” he said, laughing into the gathering night.

“Maybe, but that’s what she was afraid of, why she made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone what happened, what he did to her.”

Bannister drove home alone. Meredith had gone ahead with friends who, after what had happened, had decided to have dinner somewhere in L.A. It was dark when he reached the front gates of his house, dark inside when he opened the door. It was not so much that he did not mind his wife’s absence as that he did not notice it. His mind was on other things. He made himself a drink and went into his study.

It was smaller, much smaller, than the one where he had just spent nearly two hours with his brother-in-law arguing – or rather discussing, because though they had once or twice come close to it, neither of them had raised his voice in anger – what should be done about the latest episode in a spoiled actor’s violent career. Smaller, but more impressive as a place where something got done. There were far fewer shelves but far more books, and if none of them had the glowing hard finish of Stanton’s empty collection, they had, every one of them, the look of things used and used again. Even had there been no books at all, Bannister’s study had a feel of quiet intimacy, a private room reserved for a single occupant. The cleaning lady was allowed inside to vacuum, but only once a week.

Bannister unlocked the drawer where he kept what he called indifferently his journal or his diary, the record of the sometimes strange late night musings of what in his more lucid moments he called his own dementia, the out of season thoughts of what he sometimes feared, and sometimes with a certain defiant pride acknowledged, as his own descent into madness. It was the perhaps inevitable effect of the attempt. He wanted to be completely, and even ruthlessly, honest with himself: to put down on paper what he really felt, however far that might take him from the safe conventionality of what, in the world in which he lived, he was expected to believe.

“Meredith is having an affair,” he wrote in the slow, longhand style he had learned, years before, in school. “She has probably been having it for a long time. Is this the first time, the first one she’s had? I tend to doubt it. She’s always needed the lavish approval of others, and now of course she needs to feel still young and desirable, despite her age. Will she ask for a divorce; probably not. Will I? Again, probably not. The truth is that I’m actually glad what she’s doing. Perhaps I should tell her that, that she doesn’t need to lie, worry about my finding out; that I don’t care what she does, that I haven’t cared in years, that I’m incapable of it, that the only thing I want from her is to be left alone. It makes me crazy each time I have to listen to the latest small triumphs of her Hollywood friends. We live in the kingdom of the superficial, where nothing is real and true happiness is always just around the corner. And there is always another corner.

“Daniel Lee Atkinson. He was real. Stupid beyond measure, all violence and brute instinct, but he made me wonder whether killing for the murderer, a murderer like him who kills without motive, whether violence altogether, is nothing more than a form of expression, a way to define himself against a world that wants nothing to do with him. An actor plays a murderer on the screen: the performance is judged as an artistic achievement. Is that how Atkinson, too stupid to reason it out, looks at what he has done? The actor goes through the motions, an empty pantomime, and no matter how vile the action he portrays, wins applause. Who applauds the real killer, or is the only audience he cares about the jumbled voices in his own head, not the kind of mental disease or defect by which we define insanity, but the beliefs he holds about what will prove that his own existence has meaning? Daniel Lee Atkinson wasn’t ashamed of what he had done. That means, we think, that he has no morality; but what if it only means that he has a different morality, one we might call savage, one we don’t want to understand?

“I told Roger who wants me to help him cover up, to keep quiet, what Driscoll Rose did, that it was worse than what Atkinson had done. That isn’t true, of course. Rose hasn’t killed anyone; not yet, anyway. They should both have been lined up and shot the first time they hit a woman or hurt someone who could not defend himself. There is this bizarre dichotomy the world thinks is fair: a homicidal maniac without a name or influence, a moral pariah everyone wants to kill, and a rapist who isn’t yet a murderer only because he left for dead the woman he attacked, fortune’s favorite who when he commits a crime there isn’t a mouth in Hollywood that isn’t talking excuses.

“Both of them, Rose and Atkinson, the actor and the murderer, have in common the belief that the world is made only for them, that their own impulses are the only measure of what they think right. Both are cowards, the objects of their violence always smaller, weaker, or made defenseless; but Atkinson has the strange monstrous superiority that he doesn’t shy from taking credit for the evil he has done. Rose, helped by others, hides from blame, or, worse yet, blames the victim. When I had my hands on him, when I pulled him off the boy he was beating, it was all I could do not to start beating him. I could feel the blood surge through me, feel the way everything started to go dark. The phrase ‘blind rage’ is no exaggeration. If no one else had been there – I think this is true – I don’t think I could have stopped myself. No, that’s a lie. I could have stopped myself, but I wouldn’t have wanted to, and I would have done it: beaten him to death, if I had been able. At least I would like to think I would have. Someone should.

“The monster I saw on the face of Daniel Lee Atkinson, the same thing was there on the face of Driscoll Rose. I felt the same thing in me. I know it is there: the desire for the forbidden evil knowledge of what it is like to kill. But I realized tonight, listening to Roger, that there is another knowledge, not so much forbidden as avoided: what the victim of a killer’s depraved brutality must feel. We can imagine, we are forced to imagine, what it must have been like for the four that Atkinson murdered – Did he really make the husband and wife choose who he was going to murder first? – We imagine it, listening to the testimony at trial, but we never really know. The only one who could is someone who had every reason to think she was about to be killed. The actress, Gloria Baker, the one Roger talked about, the one Driscoll Rose thought he had murdered –she would know.

“Could I kill someone without knowing that; really do it, kill someone in cold blood, plan it all from start to finish, if I didn’t know, not just the cause, what was making me do it, but the effect, not just the fact of death, but what it was like to die?”

Bannister sat there, thinking, imagining, wondering what was going to happen, whether he would ever do anything, or just go on torturing himself with his own indecision and his own growing sense of inconsequence. Sometime after midnight he shut the door to the study and, throwing on a windbreaker, went for a long walk outside. An hour later, when he got back, his wife still was not home.

CHAPTER TEN

Whatever time he went to bed, Walter Bannister was always up at six. His eyes opened, his hand reached out automatically to the clock next to the bed and the alarm was turned off just before it would have started to ring. There was really no reason to set it in the first place: he never slept late. It was part of his fastidious mind, a habit he made himself acquire, one that he had held so long he was not aware he had it: a second layer of protection against the possibility that, even if only once, he might not be the first one to court. Whatever else he did as a judge, he was there to set an example.

Ten minutes later, he was showered, shaved, and dressed. Pausing outside the door to his wife’s bedroom, he wondered what time of the night she had finally come home. He felt an unexpected sense of relief that she was there, safe in her bed. However much things had changed between them, however little intimacy there was, she was part of how he lived; part of the background, perhaps, but something he was used to and would miss if it ever disappeared. Meredith was home, asleep; he did not have to think of her again.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, he put on a pot of coffee and went out to get the morning paper. Each month he gave a handsome tip to the boy who delivered it, a reward for the dexterity with which he threw it high enough to clear the gate and far enough to land square in the middle of the asphalt drive twenty yards up from the street. Some days he went early just to watch him do it. He picked up the paper, removed the blue rubber band that held it folded in place and, walking slowly back to the house, began to glance through it. If there was anything about the near murder that had taken place at Roger Stanton’s Santa Barbara estate he could not find it.

The morning sun felt warm on the back of his neck. It was another cloudless day, with what little breeze there was coming from the west. The fires still burning in the mountains would be pushed east for a few more hours, until the winds shifted in the afternoon and the smell of smoke would start to come closer. Tucking the paper under his arm, he cut across the grass to the kitchen door. The light on the coffee maker, signaling that it was ready, had just come on.

For the next hour he sat at his desk in the study, reviewing each of the court cases on that day’s docket. There were a dozen different motions that had to be decided, decisions he had already made; decisions, as was his habit, he would consider one last time. There were briefs filed in support of motions scheduled to be heard in the afternoon. He had read them all, studied the cases cited in them, and then read the briefs again. Two defendants, one of them convicted at trial of extortion, the other ready to plead guilty to something less serious than the armed robbery charge on which he had been indicted, were scheduled for sentencing. Bannister reviewed, line by line, the pre-sentencing reports.

With his ability to concentrate, he got quickly to what was essential. It was not that difficult: most of what he read was repetitive and redundant; the slipshod product of lawyers who thought language impressive to the degree to which it was unintelligible. At seven-thirty, exactly one hour after he had begun, Bannister, without looking at the clock, pulled together the various documents and files scattered across his desk, placed them neatly inside his tan leather briefcase and turned out the lamp. With his usual quick, but unhurried step, he walked directly to the front hallway and, as he did every morning, put the briefcase down next to the door. He would not have to think about where he might have left it when he left the house and started for the car.

Once he had done that, made certain that he would not forget to take back to court the work he had brought home with him, he went to the kitchen, poured himself a second cup of coffee, sliced and then buttered a bagel, grabbed a banana from a large ceramic bowl on the counter and, spreading the newspaper down in front of him, sat at a long wooden table scarred by centuries of use in a farmhouse somewhere in the south of France and ate his brief breakfast. He had finished and was just about to leave when someone buzzed from the gate. He was surprised; it was too early for anyone he knew. He was even more surprised when he learned that it was the police.

“Sorry to bother you so early, Judge Bannister,” said the boyish young officer when Bannister opened the front door. After introducing himself, Officer Kilpatrick introduced his partner, a fresh faced young woman who also looked like she was just out of the academy. Kilpatrick flashed an embarrassed grin. “Really, I’m sorry about this, but I understand you often go for a walk late at night.”

Bannister stood there, holding his briefcase in his hand, a puzzled expression in his eyes.

“Almost every night; last night included,” he replied in the affable, understated way he often spoke to juries. “Why? Has something happened?”

“You didn’t see anything last night, did you: anything unusual; anyone who looked suspicious?”

Bannister stepped aside and was about to invite them in, but the officer apologized again for the intrusion.

“Your wife – Mrs. Bannister, I mean – she told us, when we came by a few weeks ago, after your cat was killed, that you often went for a walk before you went to bed. We thought at the time that what happened – your cat – was just some random thing, something some screwed up teenager might have done; but it’s happened several times since: cats, and even a couple of dogs. Someone is going around slashing their throats. Never happens during the day; always, so far as we can tell, late at night – after midnight. That’s why we thought we’d ask if you might have seen anything - seen anyone - that seemed odd or out of place; anyone who….”

With a look of serious concern, Bannister shook his head. “No, nothing at all, I’m afraid. I never see anyone; the streets around here are pretty much deserted that time of night, and except for an occasional car – someone coming home – I don’t see anything.”

This seemed to confirm the other officer’s suspicions. It was her belief that whoever was doing this was doing it in the hours just before dawn. If anyone heard something, she explained, they would think it was an early morning delivery, one of the different newspapers that circulated in the neighborhood, or someone leaving early for work or to catch a flight. Bannister agreed that might be a possibility, and then, nothing more to be done, walked with the two young officers as far as their patrol car.

“I hope you catch whoever is doing this,” he said, shaking hands with them both. “There’s no excuse for that kind of thing, killing animals like that. I’ve had cases like that in front of me. There seems to be some irresistible impulse at work; and it’s always a man, usually a young man – often a teenager. Once in a while it’s a woman, a young woman; but that’s rare.”

Knowing his reputation, they listened in an attitude of respectful attention, considering it a privilege that the famous Judge Bannister would spend a few minutes telling them what in his years on the bench he had observed about the kind of crime they were now investigating.

Bannister watched them drive away, waiting until the police car vanished out of sight before he went to the garage and climbed into his Mercedes. It was rather astonishing, when he thought about it, that the only one known to walk the adjacent streets late at night was the one person no one would ever suspect. He could walk into someone’s bedroom in the middle of the night and insist that he had thought he had seen a prowler, a burglar, and had only come to help. There was at least that advantage in the reputation he enjoyed.

Starting the engine, he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. He had the look - despite the hard stare now in his eyes - he had the look that people trusted, the look that told them he was serious and important; someone so intelligent that he said more with his silence than others could say with words. That was how others saw him, and all of them were deceived. What would they think if they happened to chance upon the journal he kept hidden and read even a page of what he had written! Even then they would not know the full degree of his deception and the truth of what he really was.

The freeway traffic moved, when it moved at all, in fits and starts, speeding up, and then inching along, a slow crawl to nowhere in particular. Los Angeles was a place without corners, bent back on itself and all its manufactured dreams; a journey without a destination because, this close to the ocean, there was nowhere left to go. It was one mirror held up to another, a constant, growing repetition, a blank white sky and, laying flat beneath it, a day that never changed. Bannister had taken this same route to the courthouse for so many years that he had forgotten how he got there; it was habit become an instinct, a part of his everyday routine. Unless there was an accident, he did not notice either the traffic or the buildings he passed. The car radio was set to a station that played classical music and, because that had also become part of the background, seldom entering his conscious mind, he never changed it. Walter Bannister stared out the window and all he saw was what his morning was going to be like.

That is not to say that Walter Bannister did not think about what happened each morning on his way to work. He was actually quite fascinated by what might be called the mechanics of motion: the question why, however bad the traffic, the time it took to get to the courthouse seldom varied by more than a few minutes. He always started early, and was usually one of the first to arrive at the courthouse; he was certain, based on his own experience, that if he were a practicing attorney, instead of a trial court judge, he would have been just as punctual. He tried to explain this to the unfortunate attorney who showed up six minutes late for the first order of business on the morning docket.

“What time is it, Mr. Wilkins?” he asked in an even tempered voice that, unusual for him, was accompanied by a penetrating stare. A lawyer who had appeared before him more often would have been warned of trouble.

Gerald Wilkins, a divorce lawyer who represented only wealthy clients, stroked the sleeve of his cashmere jacket, and replied without any obvious regret that he knew he was a few minutes late but that he was ready to proceed.

“Tell me, Mr. Wilkins; have you been to this courthouse before?”

“Yes, of course, your Honor,” he replied, glancing down at the notepad he had just placed on the table in front of him.

“I ask that question just to be certain that you know how to get here and hadn’t got lost, the way a first time visitor might have done. Just what excuse then do you have for being late?”

Wilkins still did not understand. Turning the page of the notepad, reviewing what he had come there to say, he shook his head with indifference.

“Traffic.”

“That is an unusual thing to have happen in Los Angeles, isn’t it?” said Bannister. With an air of expectation, he tilted his head and waited.

“I’m sorry, your Honor,” said the attorney, finally looking up. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“There’s nothing really to understand, Mr. Wilkins: you’re late; the rest of us are on time. You blame traffic, but traffic is a condition of existence, something that a lawyer of your knowledge and capacity must surely understand. This hearing was scheduled for nine o’clock; it was scheduled, moreover, at your request. You filed a motion for an increase – a substantial increase, I might add – in the amount of support your client is to receive during the period until there is a final settlement. Six minutes late, Mr. Wilkins. The question is why not thirty minutes, or even an hour. Why six minutes only?”

Wilkins was not sure if the judge was serious, but he knew now that he had to answer, and that the answer had better take the form of a more elaborate apology than the one he had given.

“I’m sorry, your Honor; as I said, the traffic this morning was unusually bad, and I’m afraid that -”

“My question was why weren’t you thirty minutes or an hour late, instead of only six minutes.”

“Because I gave myself enough time to get here, your Honor; and, as I said, if it hadn’t been for the traffic -”

“That’s my point, Mr. Wilkins. You’re wrong about that. You didn’t give yourself enough time; you tried to cut it too close. You were trying to get here on time, when you should have tried to get here early, and in that way, Mr. Wilkins, be ready to go in the time you were allotted.”

Without another word, Bannister glanced at the other attorney, who had through this whole episode stayed quiet, and with a quick, decisive nod let him know that a conclusion had been reached. Reciting by heart the title of the case and the nature of the motion that had been filed by the petitioner, Bannister announced: “The motion has been denied.”

“But, your Honor!” Wilkins, gone red in the face, howled in protest. “I wasn’t given a chance to make my argument, to -”

“That is what that six minutes was for, Mr. Wilkins.” Bannister held up his hand to shut off any further complaint, and in that same even tempered voice told the clerk to call the next case. “Time is everything, Mr. Wilkins. I’m sure that next time you won’t forget it.”

The bailiff, standing next to the empty jury box, tried not to smile. The court reporter, sitting at her place just below the bench, tried not to laugh. It was Walter Bannister’s courtroom and, taught by the friendly discipline he imposed, lawyers seldom made mistakes and almost never made the same one twice. He was the teacher you always wished you had had, the one who knew everything there was to know and did not treat you like an idiot just because your education had only just begun. He was there to help you and the only competition he cared about was the mutual effort to try to get things right. If Irving Leonard was a director’s director, the one to whom all the others looked for guidance, Walter Bannister was a lawyer’s judge, the one to whom every sane practitioner looked for the standard by which to judge the lazy habits, at times bordering on negligence, of so many of his brethren on the bench. For all the blazing anger on display as he left the courtroom, Gerald Wilkins would one day realize that had he not been forced to pay a price he never would have learned a lesson he was now unlikely to forget.

Everything came to Bannister on the instant, without conscious effort, the words he heard himself speak his own first knowledge of the thought. He was like a trained athlete who plays a game too fast to think, and, better at it than anyone, never gets tired of what he is doing. There was that about Walter Bannister, the observable fact no one could understand: he could go all day, listen with endless concentration and make decisions without a moment’s hesitation or a second thought, and seem to be as eager to go on at the end of the day as he had been at the beginning. Some attributed this to a healthy and vigorous physical condition, a man who had never missed court because of illness; had never, so far as anyone knew, been sick a day in his life. Others thought it was the other way round: the work, and the way he did it – the complete absorption in the law and its application – the source of the remarkable energy he seemed to possess. He was so lost in what he did, this world of his where he alone was responsible for whether things were right, that time flew by so quickly that it was almost as if time had ceased to exist.

The last case on the docket, a motion to suppress evidence, presented what the lawyers call an issue of first impression, a question the appellate courts had not yet resolved, was handled with Bannister’s usual orderly dispatch. An hour had been set aside for oral arguments, and after the defense and the prosecution had each had their thirty minutes, Bannister announced he would have a decision by the end of the week. It was now four forty-five. He had fifteen minutes before the meeting he had scheduled early that morning. In chambers, he got out of his judicial robe and sat for a few minutes at his desk, trying to decide how he should approach a question which should not have given him any trouble at all. It had lay there at the back of his mind all day, a problem he had been avoiding since his conversation with his brother-in-law late yesterday afternoon. Nothing should have been easier to decide. He had been a witness to a crime, a savage, and nearly murderous, assault. It had to be reported, and it should have been reported – he should have reported it – right away, a 911 call that would have summoned both an ambulance and the police.

He regretted that now, that he had not acted on his first instinct, that he had allowed himself to be drawn into a long and unnecessary conversation with Roger Stanton about what, or whether, anything should be done. This was not to deny that what he had learned about the apparently all too frequent violent misbehavior of Driscoll Rose had been interesting; the point was that it was irrelevant. A crime did not become excusable because others found it inconvenient, or even expensive, to have the criminal locked up. He had known that yesterday as well as he knew it now. Why, then, had he hesitated; why, after giving Stanton no reason to think he would do anything to help him keep private what had happened, had he still not done anything about it? Why had he left Santa Barbara without calling the police?

It was not because Roger Stanton was his wife’s brother and Stanton did not want him to; it was because he had become so intrigued by what Stanton had told him about what Gloria Baker had done – kept secret the fact she had very nearly been murdered by Driscoll Rose – that he had been drawn into the very conspiracy of silence he had said he would not be a part of; drawn in so far that when Stanton said that all he was asking was that he think about it - all the ramifications of a criminal charge in a matter that could so easily be handled to the great advantage of everyone, including especially the victim, Lorenzo Garcia, whose name Stanton had remembered not to forget - he heard himself make a promise he had never thought he would make.

And so he had not done anything, until this morning, when he made the call and scheduled the meeting at the end of the day. Under the circumstances, he told himself as he started down the long hallway, twenty four hours was not too long a delay to come forward with what he knew.

The secretary in the outer office greeted him with a bright smile and told him to go right in. The district attorney was expecting him.

“Just a minute,” said Hector Alfonso with a muffled laugh. He cast a serious, determined look at the golf ball lying at his feet. Holding the putter in his hands, he turned his head slowly toward a glass placed sideways on the thick pile carpet twenty feet away. With a stiff, even motion of his arms, he hit the ball with a firm stroke and sent it rolling toward the makeshift cup. It had the proper distance, but it hit the lip of the glass and spun a few inches off to the side.

“Not too bad,” said Alfonso to himself. With an eager expression, he turned to see if his judgment was shared, but Bannister had taken a chair in front of his desk and from the look on his face had other, more pressing, business on his mind. Alfonso buttoned the jacket on another new and expensive dark suit and moved quickly to his chair.

“I think this is the first time you have come to see me,” he remarked, as he leaned forward on his elbows. “It must be important. What can I…?” Suddenly, he remembered that they were not in chambers, and that whatever Bannister had come to see him about, they were not on the court’s calendar. “I’m sorry; can I offer you a drink? It’s after five, and sometimes, when I want to unwind….”

To his surprise, Bannister accepted, and at a cabinet on the other side of the large office, Alfonso poured a scotch and soda for the judge and a whisky and water for himself.

“Now, how can I help?” He had taken a long first drink and now held the glass in his lap as he sat back, relaxed, in the leather chair.

“I was a witness to a crime, and I want to report it. Yesterday, the actor, Driscoll Rose, assaulted a young Hispanic waiter, Lorenzo Garcia, at my brother-in-law’s place in Santa Barbara.”

At the name, Driscoll Rose, Hector Alfonso had begun to study the amber liquid in his glass. By the end of the sentence, he had begun to scratch his ear.

“I’ve heard about that,” he said without lifting his eyes from the glass.

Bannister was struck by the flat tone, the cautious, deliberate indifference of that otherwise forgettable phrase; that, and the slight nervous twitch at the edge of Alfonso’s mouth.

“You’ve heard about it? I’m not sure I understand.”

The reply was vague, and almost beside the point. “I talk to a lot of people,” was all he said. Bannister would not let it go at that.

“And some of the people you talk to, talked about this?”

Alfonso smiled into his glass, and then, with a short laugh, looked up.

“What else would they talk about? It’s the interesting thing about gossip – have you noticed? – Everyone wants to be first. I started getting calls less than an hour after it happened. We used to say that no one wants to be the bearer of bad news; the truth is that no one wants to be the bearer of old news. If you didn’t hear before dinner last night that Driscoll Rose had gotten into another fight, you have to start questioning whether anyone thinks you’re important.”

Bannister was not interested in the way rumor and gossip had its own established hierarchy. He put his glass down on Alfonso’s glass topped desk.

“Then, if you’ve already heard, what are you going to do about it?”

Alfonso shrugged his shoulders. “There’s nothing for me to do. It happened in Santa Barbara: that’s not in my jurisdiction. But even if it was….”

“You’re saying you wouldn’t prosecute?” The severity of Bannister’s expression challenged a response; demanded, as it were, an explanation. But they were not in court, and Hector Alfonso could not be forced to answer anything. “I saw what happened: Rose would have beaten that young man to death; he would -”

“But he didn’t – beat that kid to death,” said Alfonso, breaking his silence. “Thanks to you; and, from what I’m told, the injuries aren’t all that serious: cuts and bruises mainly.”

He looked at Bannister, searching his eyes in the way of someone trying to decide just how far he could go: how much he could afford to reveal and how much he had to hold back. Bannister did not much like that look. It was as if he were being measured, judged on whether he could be trusted. It was not his honesty that was in question, but whether he was in a sense too honest, too devoted to a strict application of the rules, to understand why it was sometimes necessary to make an exception, certain adjustments that were in the interest of everyone.

“Are you going to tell me that I shouldn’t bother doing anything; that Driscoll Rose is too important, that what happened to Lorenzo Garcia – that’s the young man’s name – doesn’t matter because one of them is movie star and the other one is a nobody? You’re the district attorney, Hector; you’re not the head of some studio worried about what could happen to his next picture.”

The dark eyes of Hector Alfonso became darker still, full of slow resentment and hidden malice. He respected and admired Walter Bannister as a judge and as a man, but there was something vaguely troubling and almost laughable in his attitude of moral superiority. Bannister might know more about the law than anyone Alfonso had ever met, but when it came to politics the judge had nothing to teach and everything to learn. Or so he believed until he heard the next thing Bannister had to say.

“I’ve been around a long time, Hector. Whatever you may think, I know how things work in this town. I’ve seen it happen often enough. I was told – you can guess who told me – that if I tried to do anything about this, if I testified at trial, there would be a dozen different witnesses who would swear that the waiter started it, that Rose was only defending himself, and that if the waiter got the worst of it, if he wound up in the hospital, it was only because Rose got in a couple of lucky blows. They’ll say that I stopped it, and that is the reason I did not see it quite as clearly as they did. But even if that’s true, even if a dozen people want to perjure themselves, that doesn’t change what I need to do. Would you – if you had been there, if you had seen what I saw, done what I had to do – would you just let it go, agree that as long as the kid was taken care of – ‘compensated for his trouble’ – would you, Hector? I don’t believe it for a moment.”

Ignoring the compliment to a courage he was not sure he had, Alfonso tried to play the prosecutor. He began to analyze in advance the withering cross-examination that was sure to follow if Bannister were ever to testify in a trial of Driscoll Rose.

“You know what someone like Michael Harlowe could do? ‘Where were you when it started – on the other side of the dance floor, and you didn’t even see Rose until the trouble began, did you?’ That’s just the beginning, because then he goes after you with: ‘He’s dancing with some woman and goes crashing into the crowd, and the next thing you know, Rose and this other guy are going at it, swinging at each other.’”

“I know what I saw,” insisted Bannister, as unshakeable, Alfonso had to admit, as any witness was likely to be. “And I know what I stopped: I stopped him killing that kid! What do you know about him, this Driscoll Rose? You may not have jurisdiction over what happened yesterday – which doesn’t mean you can’t pick up the phone and call the D.A. up there – but you’re the only one who has the authority to charge him with being in violation of his probation. You need to do this, Hector. He’s on probation – I put him there; suspended his sentence on a drug offense. So have him arrested; I’ll have the hearing right away. Shouldn’t take more than all of about five minutes!”

Lacing his fingers together, Alfonso started beating his thumbs. He gazed first one way then the other, growing more agitated with each passing second.

“Damn it, Walter! I can’t do that, and you know it.”

“You don’t mean you can’t; you mean you won’t!”

It was a distinction without a difference so far as Alfonso was concerned.

“Even if I wanted to, the same thing would happen. You’d have to recuse yourself; another judge would preside. And then…, well, you said so yourself: all these other witnesses, claiming Rose was only defending himself. And if you think the victim, this Garcia kid, is going to show up and tell the truth, after what they’re going to do for him….” Alfonso lurched forward, his elbows on the desk and looked straight at Bannister. “Everyone knows what they have to do; no one has to be told who is in charge. And I don’t need to tell you who that is. Forget Driscoll Rose: Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of Roger Stanton, not in this town. You may be the best judge I’ve ever seen, but when it comes to what happens in Los Angeles, what people think, he’s the one who makes the law.”

“And that includes you?” Bannister fired right back.

Alfonso slammed both hands down on the desk, rattling the two half empty glasses that sat on opposite sides.

“I’m responsible to a lot of different constituencies. I have to take account of a lot of different needs.”

With a look of the utmost severity, Bannister rose slowly from his chair.

“You wouldn’t prosecute this guy for murder, would you?”

This struck hard at Alfonso’s pride.

“That’s not so, Walter,” he protested, a wounded expression in his eyes. “I hope you know it isn’t.”

But all that Walter Bannister knew was that Hector Alfonso, sworn to uphold the law, had all the instincts of the politician, and that Driscoll Rose was safe from prosecution. The word of an honest judge meant less than a lying chorus of ambitious and frightened actors.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Walter Bannister did not want to be seen, or at least not noticed. Dressed in a blue sports shirt and a tan windbreaker he could have passed for one of the wealthy men who lived there, part of the anonymous crowd of show business celebrities who found what privacy they could in one of Malibu’s beachfront homes. He had not had any trouble finding his way to the address he wanted. It was nearly nine o’clock, and because everyone’s windows faced out toward the ocean, the only lights that could be seen from the street were the ones, and those barely visible, that lit the numbers that marked one place off from the next. Gloria Baker answered the door on the first ring.

He had sat next to her at dinner at Roger Stanton’s home on Mulholland Drive, but his mind had been on other things and he had not remembered much about her. He had seen several of her movies, and he knew that his brother-in-law thought she had a chance of becoming one of those rare actresses who brought more than her looks to what she did. Stanton had cast her in different roles to see if, as he suspected, she had that indefinable quality that made an audience look at her whatever part she played. Roger Stanton had an eye for that effect: the way in which someone who would pass unnoticed in a crowd could dominate the screen. He could not explain how he knew it, only that he did. He had known it about Gloria Baker from the moment he first saw her.

It was a mystery to Walter Bannister what Roger Stanton had seen. He had thought her, that night at dinner, no better looking than most of the other young actresses trying to make it in Hollywood; and now, opening the door, she did not look even as good as that. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she had no makeup on at all; and standing there, barefoot, wearing only a t-shirt and shorts, she looked like someone’s kid sister home from college for the summer. A screenplay she had been reading dangled from her left hand. She stared at Bannister through large, thick glasses and with obvious annoyance wondered who he was and what he wanted. Immediately, her expression changed, and she laughed in embarrassment

Oh, hell, I forgot,” she admitted with a candor he found disarming. “Please, come in. I’m sorry; I knew you were coming, but I forgot the time. I was reading this….” She showed him the screenplay and then, as she led him into the living room, tossed it onto the coffee table next to a stack of six or seven others. “Projects,” she explained waving her hand in a careless gesture. “Things we’re thinking about doing.”

She sat with her legs tucked under her in the corner of the sofa. Bannister took the easy chair at the end of the script laden table, facing at the far end of the long, rectangular room a wall of glass and, beyond it, the moonlit ocean. The sliding doors were open and the sound of rolling surf made an endless echo in the night. As he looked around, everything seemed to be glass and chrome, all the simple elegance of what, when the house was built in the middle years of the last century, was supposed to be the future.

“You look different,” said Gloria with a pleasant, friendly smile, and then laughed at the way it had come out. “I didn’t mean…. I don’t know what I mean. You seemed so serious, so formal, that night at Roger’s. But you’re a judge…, so I suppose…. I’m not making this any better, am I? What I’m trying to say is -”

“That you thought I was a stiff-necked bore, someone who only looks at things with disapproval,” he said with a modest smile. He shook his head to stop her protest. “Which is probably a pretty fair assessment: I’m afraid I disapprove of a lot of things; though I certainly don’t disapprove of you. Roger tells me you’re a serious actress, one of the best he’s ever seen.”

Her eyes lit up, and he was so taken by the honesty of her reaction that he wanted to tell her more.

“I’ve known Roger since he was in college. He’s a very cautious man, and he never says what he doesn’t mean. I’ve never heard him talk about anyone the way he’s talked about you.”

She listened, grateful for what he was saying, but without surprise. Raising her hand she pointed up to the painting that hung on the wall behind her.

“Roger gave me that; hired the artist to paint my portrait. It was a present after the first picture I starred in. He’s always been kind to me. There have been times I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

“Yes, I know,” said Bannister in a confidential tone.

“You know?” she asked, a puzzled expression in her eyes.

Bannister bent forward, trying to assure her that he was someone she could trust.

“He told me what happened…the night you were almost killed.”

“Almost killed! – What are you talking about?”

Gloria Baker seemed completely confused, and for an instant Bannister wondered if he had somehow misunderstood what Stanton had told him. But he knew he had not gotten it wrong. Was it possible that she could have forgotten?

“The night Driscoll Rose almost beat you to death,” he persisted; “the night you called Roger; the night you made him promise never to tell.”

A flash of anger went off in her eyes. Her mouth began to tremble and then abruptly clamped shut. She leaped off the sofa and vanished into the kitchen. A moment later, Bannister thought he heard her talking to someone and wondered whether she had called Roger to find out exactly what he had said. When she came back a few minutes later, more than her expression, her whole face had seemed to change. She looked older and, in a strange way, more self-sufficient, the soft vulnerability in her eyes replaced by serious calculation, a shrewd sense of her own interest. She held a wine bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other.

“I’m going to have some,” she announced, lifting her eyebrows as if to say that she needed it. “Why don’t you join me?”

She poured them each a glass and then threw down a drink.

“I wasn’t lying,” she insisted. “Driscoll didn’t ‘almost kill’ me.” She held the glass in both hands, just below her chin. With a wounded look in her eyes as if, remembering what had happened, and that, if he had not almost killed her, it had been bad enough, she appealed to Bannister’s sense of decency and honor. “But tell me, what did Roger tell you? Did he say that Driscoll almost beat me to death?”

Then she had not called Roger. Or perhaps she had, and was trying to see whether he had told Bannister more than he said he had. Bannister turned the question back on her.

“What did Roger tell you I wanted to see you about?”

She was staring in her glass, waiting for an answer. She heard the question and looked up.

“About Driscoll: what he did at Roger’s place in Santa Barbara. He isn’t as bad as you think he is, Judge Bannister, if you -”

“Walter. I’m not here as a judge; I’m here because I had to stop a fight, stop the same guy who almost killed you from killing someone else. That’s why I asked Roger to call you yesterday and ask if I could see you: so I could find out just how dangerous he really is.”

“He wouldn’t do that – kill anyone, I mean.”

It was a tepid protest at best, made without any real emotion. It struck Bannister as a kind of analytical judgment, a balancing of the probabilities: While she would not rule out the most extreme possibility - that he might kill someone - on the whole she thought it unlikely.

“Probably wouldn’t – isn’t that what you mean? I saw what he did; I saw the anger, the rage. No, if this had happened somewhere else, no one there to stop it, he would have beaten that boy to death; the same way he damn near did you. I believe you when you say you weren’t lying - I can understand why you wouldn’t want to believe it – but the only reason you’re still alive is because he thought he had killed you. He left you for dead.”

There was a long pause. She leaned the other way and with a sad, wistful expression stared through the windows, watching the moon’s slow dance on the ocean’s mirrored darkness. Suddenly, she tossed her head and laughed.

“It didn’t happen! What Roger told you – it isn’t true. Driscoll didn’t try to kill me. He didn’t leave me for dead.”

Bannister did not believe her. There was a shade too much defiance in the way she said it, as if he had no business raising questions about what she had, for reasons of her own, wanted to keep secret.

“You’re telling me that Roger lied to me? Why would he do that?”

“No,” she replied, quick to deny it. “He didn’t lie; he just didn’t tell you the truth.”

It seemed a strange distinction, not because it was illogical, but because it seemed a shade too subtle. Bannister began to wonder if he had underestimated her, had failed to see past the surface of her fame to an intelligence he had not thought she had.

“And how is not telling the truth different than lying?”

A smile started, and then vanished, on her lips; and in that moment he knew that she understood precisely what she was doing and that if her words had a double meaning the meaning was intentional.

“The story he told you was the story he wanted to hear. He makes movies – that isn’t just what he does, that’s what he is! – He sees everything through a lens. I suppose that’s what makes him so good at what he does: the ability to see everything in terms of drama – the dramatic elements in any story he hears. Look,” she went on, throwing up her hands as her blue eyes went wide with wonder, “tell Roger you saw someone step off a curb and he’ll see a car screeching around a corner and a body go flying into the street. Then he’ll start to puzzle out the question why someone committed murder. That’s how Roger thinks.”

Bannister was not convinced. If anyone was exaggerating, he thought the chances were less that it had been in what Stanton had told him, than in what she was telling him now.

“You were in love with Rose; maybe you still are. It’s probably natural that would try to protect him, try to minimize what he did, try to -”

“In love with Driscoll…?” Her eyes flashed with what almost seemed indignation. She shook her head in a tight movement of caustic dissent. “You mean that tabloid marriage that didn’t happen! In love with - ! Is that what Roger told you? Well, he might think so,” she added with some bitterness.

She lapsed into a long silence, moving in a steady rotation the glass held in her hand. The sound of the ocean rolling endlessly against the shore became constant and hypnotic, adding a rhythm to all the questions clamoring for answers in Walter Bannister’s increasingly disordered mind. He had come there for a reason and had become so distracted had almost forgotten what it was.

“You weren’t in love with Driscoll Rose? But you were engaged to him – or was that just something the publicists made up?” he asked, matching her apparent cynicism with some of his own.

She did not hear what he said; not all of it, anyway.

“I probably thought I was in love with him.” A vague expression in her eyes cast doubt on even that much sincerity of emotion. “Infatuated, I suppose; and I won’t deny there was an attraction.” She reached for the dark green bottle and for a second time filled their glasses. “There still is, if you really want to know; an attraction, I mean.”

“You’re still seeing each other?” asked Bannister with a kind of polite reluctance that made Gloria Baker smile.

“Does that surprise you?”

“There isn’t much that surprises me anymore. So you weren’t – and you aren’t – in love with Driscoll Rose, and he didn’t really try to kill you; and Roger didn’t lie, but did not tell the whole truth; and though you broke off your engagement, and again, were only infatuated and never in love, you’re still seeing the man who sent you to the hospital, because, as you put it, there has always been an attraction?”

Bannister had swung his right leg over the left, and flung his left arm over the back corner of the chair. With the wine glass in his hand, he laughed at her with his eyes, and then, bending slightly forward, fixed her with a penetrating stare. She was smart, much smarter than he had imagined, and that made it easier: he did not have to bother trying to explain; he could cut with each question.

“You were taken to the hospital that night weren’t you? – The night Driscoll Rose didn’t try to kill you.”

“He didn’t leave me here for dead. I was lying on the floor, after he knocked me down. I was looking right at him. He knew I was alive.”

“And you think that means that when he was hitting you – hitting you so hard he broke your jaw and fractured your ribs – he wasn’t trying to kill you?”

“He knew I was alive,” she said, insisting that it had to mean something. “He knew someone would come to help.”

“Are you serious? ‘Knew someone would - ’! He’d just beaten you up – by your own admission left you lying helpless on the floor – and then run away. And you think he cared - you think the thought even entered his mind – what was going to happen to you? All he was thinking about was how to get away, what he had to do to stay out of jail. He could have killed you each time he hit you, and you’re too intelligent not to know it!”

Suddenly, he remembered, or rather did not remember at all; the question, the thing that had obsessed him for days, came rushing out of its own accord.

“What was it like – what went through your mind – when he started hitting you and you knew he might not stop until he killed you? What did it feel like knowing you were about to die?”

The change in his expression, the strange eagerness of it, the nervous tension in his voice, made her uncomfortable. Bannister apologized.

“I’m sorry; it’s just that – you’ll have to forgive me – I spend every day listening to cases; murder cases, a lot of them, but it’s always from the outside. All the evidence, all the testimony, it never gets to what it was like for the victim, the murder victim, the one who gets killed. No one can know what that feels like, except someone like you, someone who almost died. Sometimes at a trial, a prosecutor will talk about the awful thing that happened to the victim, what she must have gone through, but it’s like playing a part you can only imagine; nothing that you have experienced yourself.”

The mention of playing a part caught Gloria Baker’s attention and made her ask a question of her own.

“Do you do that: try to imagine – put yourself in the place of the killer – when you sentence someone like that Daniel Lee Atkinson for murder?”

Bannister got up and walked to the open glass door and stood there a moment, watching the long thin line of white surf break gently on the sand. He had already said too much. He should not have told her anything about his desire to know what it felt like to die. Roger had been right about her, and it did not matter if she was on the screen: she drew you toward her and made you think you knew her and, more inexplicably still, made you think she knew you. That was the secret, the great unknowable but obvious fact, that made one woman a movie star and another one, who might be even more attractive, a woman you would not look at twice: this instinctive belief that everything she did, no matter who she was doing it with, was really all done for you. She was the invention of your own desperate fantasies, and she did not exist except in the way you saw her. You had never met her, but you did not need to: she belonged to you in a way no one else ever would.

From the light inside Bannister could see, reflected in the glass, Gloria Baker get up from the sofa and begin to move toward him. The fugitive thought, the dangerous question about his own original sin, flashed through his mind: what would it be like to kill her; what would it feel like to have her life, and her death, in his hands, to stab her to death with a knife, or strangle her until she fell limp and lifeless on the floor? He shut his eyes hard, banishing, if only for the moment, the strange obsession that had for so long held him in its grip and that at times he found almost impossible to resist.

“You forgot your wine.” She handed him the glass and stood next to him, looking out at the silver thread of beach that stretched out under a star covered sky. “This was Driscoll’s place. I lived here with him for a while…before what happened.”

She did not need to finish. Bannister understood. It was the beginning of an explanation, or the beginning of an excuse.

“And because he felt bad about what happened, he gave it to you.”

The simple statement of what she had done – taken something in exchange for what Rose had done to her – had no discernible effect. He might have been asking her about the price she paid for her car.

“He thought he owed me something. He knew I liked this place.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Bannister watched a tiny smile of sly conceit edge its way along the curve of her lower lip. She had not known it was there, this tell-all sign of an instinct for her own advantage.

“He probably thought he had to do something,” she went on, giving her own, different, meaning to the story Roger Stanton had told him first.

“That doesn’t tell me why you called Roger, why you asked him not to call the police.”

She turned toward him, a question in her eyes; a question that she then seemed to dismiss as unimportant. She did not say anything, but walked through the open glass door onto the deck and leaned against the railing.

“What would have been the sense in that?” she asked when Bannister came up next to her. Leaning back against the railing, she looked up at him. “I know you’re a judge, that everyone is supposed to obey the law, but what would have been the good of it – putting Driscoll in jail? He didn’t kill me; he didn’t really hurt me that much. After the first time, after he hit me the way he did – really hard – I sort of went numb. And, yes, okay, I suppose there was a moment when I thought he might not stop, that he might keep hitting me until I was dead – but it happened so fast, it was all so violent, there wasn’t any time to think about that or anything. All you do is react; try to protect yourself…and then everything went black and I didn’t feel anything. I don’t even remember being knocked down. I just remember lying there, on the floor, looking up and seeing Driscoll – how angry he was, how out of his mind angry he was – breathing hard, his eyes all crazy, swearing at me, calling me a heartless bitch, and things worse than that. I must have passed out again. I know I called Roger, but I don’t remember doing it. I just remember that he was there, talking to me, telling me a doctor was on his way.”

Bannister would remember later how much he liked listening to her talk, the thrilling bare whisper of her voice. It was not as noticeable indoors with all the lights, but out here, in the moonlit shadows, everything she said was like a private confession, each word meant only for him. It stayed with him, later, a voice he never could quite get rid of echoing in his mind.

“That moment when you thought he might not stop, that he might keep hitting you until you were dead – I know it all happened fast, but what went through your mind, what did you feel?”

“That it was all so stupid – That’s what I thought, what I remember thinking: that it was crazy to die this way; that it wasn’t supposed to end like this.”

She stepped back from the railing. In the soft glow of moonlight, her face betrayed an uncertainty, a doubt, whether any of it made sense. A smile, shy and embarrassed, slipped half unknowing across her mouth.

“No great thoughts, no profound reflection on what it means to die, no long backward look at the life I had led, nothing the least bit dramatic: just how stupid it was; stupid and pointless, and maybe some resentment. That’s the interesting part,” she said, her eyes much brighter. “The feeling – I remember now – that I was being cheated; and it didn’t have anything to do with Driscoll. No, and I know this must sound strange, but the feeling that dying was unfair because I had not been able to do all the things I wanted to. And it was separate and apart from how I was dying, what Driscoll was doing; it was only the fact of death that mattered.”

She looked at Bannister in a way that seemed to suggest that she was certain he would understand, even though she did not quite understand it herself.

“I wasn’t lying when I told you at first that I never thought he was going to kill me. That moment – the one I just described – when I thought it might happen: I think that must be different than knowing for sure that you’re about to die. I was afraid, but I’m not sure I really believed it: believed that I wouldn’t wake up later, that I’d be all right. If he had put a gun to my head or held a knife to my throat, and told me what he was going to do, murder me, it might have been completely different. There’s really no way to know, is there? Or there is, but nothing I’d care to experience. What happened that night was close enough.”

They talked for a few more minutes, or rather Gloria Baker talked and Bannister listened; but none of it was about Driscoll Rose and what he had done. She talked instead about how much she liked living there, the sound of the ocean at night, the long walks in the early morning when she had the beach all to herself and did not have to worry about running into other people. She had a childlike enthusiasm for being alone.

It was starting to get cool and she led him back inside. He noticed when she glanced sideways at the clock and guessed she had other, late night, plans. She sat on the edge of the sofa, ready to get up again to say goodbye, but Bannister stood with his hand on top of the easy chair and did not move.

“Why was he so angry, the night he almost killed you – what set him off?”

She had been looking straight at him, expecting a few last words before he left. She kept looking at him, but the trusting openness in her face was now hidden behind a wall of caution and reserve.

“I broke off the engagement. He didn’t like it.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Don’t -?”

“Lie to me. He didn’t start beating you up because you told him you’d changed your mind and didn’t want to marry him. He knew that already, didn’t he? He didn’t just find out about it that night. No, he found out something else – he found out you were seeing someone else. You went out – you were going out – with another man that night, weren’t you? Isn’t that what put him into that murderous rage? Isn’t that why he almost killed you, why he called you what he did?”

She looked at him in a way he had not expected and did not quite understand. It was as if she thought there was something else he wanted to say, something he had to say, and when he did not, when he just stood there waiting for her reply, she seemed to have to think about an answer different than the one she had been prepared to give.

“Yes, I was going out with someone else; and yes, that’s all it took. He came over here – he had moved out a few days before, after I broke the engagement – said he just dropped by to see how I was, saw that I was getting ready to leave and then….That’s all it ever took with him. You saw it yourself. Isn’t that what happened, last week, in Santa Barbara. Someone says something he doesn’t like, does something he doesn’t like, and it’s a world war.” She checked her watch and shook her head at the time. “Look, I have to….”

Bannister ignored her. “He goes off like that, doesn’t much matter the cause; he almost kills you, puts you in the hospital – but you make Roger promise not to tell anyone because – Why? You were still in love with him and you didn’t want anyone to think of him as someone who tried to murder the woman who rejected him? You kept him out of prison – you and Roger both – and now he’s done it again, beaten up someone else, and you both think that I should join this little conspiracy of silence and do nothing about it! You may have been in love with him – maybe you still are; Roger needs him for what he brings to the box office, what he means in money; but I’m afraid I don’t feel anything like the same restraint.”

“I told you I wasn’t in love with him! He doesn’t have room for anybody else’s love: he’s too much in love with himself. I might have married him. It’s probably some kind of sickness, but I could never stay away from him. I tried, lots of times; swore I’d never see him again, but a few days later – a few nights later – it would be the same thing all over again. He’s the same way, only worse. He does things, feels bad about it, swears it will never happen again – and you believe him! That’s what so sick about it: You believe him! He looks at you with those big apologetic eyes of his, you listen to that small boy’s begging voice promising he’ll never do anything to hurt you again, and you know he’s telling you the truth – what he believes at that moment, because you know he won’t remember tomorrow what he promised you today – and you shut your mind to everything you’ve learned and tell yourself the worst lie of all: that this time he means it and that things will be different now.”

There was a nervous excitement in her voice that had not been there before. She was not just talking about the past.

“He’s coming here tonight, isn’t he?”

The question, the blunt, frank way it had been stated, stopped her cold. She started to tell him it was none of his business, but his gaze seemed to go right through her and she could not do it.

“Yes, he’s coming later. There are some things I have to do first,” she added to make sure he understood it was time to go, but once again Bannister ignored the hint.

He picked up the wine glass from the coffee table and took a drink in the slow, casual way of someone prepared to make himself quite at home. He made a second, closer, inspection of the portrait, the modern, angular shaded likeness of the woman who sat below it. The arms, the legs, the neck, were all longer and more elegant in the picture, with the effect that if you had never seen Gloria Baker in real life you would think her taller than she was; taller and, from the painted expression in her eyes, more seductive and, in a strange way, more alive.

“It’s a wonderful painting.” He said this more to himself than to her, a way to remember it and to record, as it were, his own feeling at the moment.

“Thank you,” she said, as she stood up. “But now….”

He turned away and walked back across the room to the sliding glass door, opened it and listened again to the muffled roar of the ocean. He took a long, deep breath. He would remember for a long time how clean and good the night air felt against his face.

“You haven’t given me a reason why I should forget what happened, what I saw Driscoll Rose do. You haven’t even given me a reason why you did – let him get away with what he did to you. Or is it just that you get to keep the house, and now, instead of living here, he has to call ahead when he wants to come over and get laid?”

Her face went ash white. She shot him an angry stare, but he cut her off before she could shout at him to leave.

“Who you sleep with is your business, even if you’re crazy enough to sleep with someone who might murder you for no reason at all. But all that tells me is that he’s even more dangerous than I thought, and I’m going to make sure he gets what he deserves.”

“You can’t do that! You’ll ruin everything. He’s coming over here to talk about the next picture, the first one he’s ever done with me. Talk to Roger – ask him. It’ll be the biggest picture either one of us has made. Ask Roger: ask him why it has to be made, ask him why Driscoll has to be in it.”

Bannister had had enough. First Roger, and now this girl: nothing mattered – murder, rape, none of it – if a picture could be made and they could become even richer and more famous. There were no other rules, only that, money and celebrity and their two-dimensional silver screen dreams.

“What do I care about any of that?” he shouted. But she did not hear him; she could only hear herself.

“That was the reason I didn’t call the police, why I didn’t want anyone to know: the picture, the one I knew we could make. Wasn’t that enough? He almost killed me, and I let him do it, kept him out of trouble. He owes me this!”

She seized Bannister by his wrists, holding him with all the strength she had, doing everything she could to bend him to her will; insisting that he could not do what he said he was going to do, that he could not go to the police, couldn’t destroy what she had worked so hard to have. Bannister did not try to shake free. He let her cling to him, let her bang her head against his chest and cry her foolish, selfish demands. He stood there, waiting while her rage and frustration ran their course, staring across to the kitchen the other side of the living room where, on the countertop, he saw the set of butcher knives, glistening shiny silver in the light. He realized now just how easy it would be, what he had so often thought about in the dark recesses of his mind. He could almost feel the pen scratch across the paper in his private hidden journal when tomorrow or the next day he wrote down each grim detail of what, finally, he had done.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The next morning, following his regular routine, Walter Bannister walked down the winding driveway to the bottom. The newspaper, thrown with the usual careless precision, was waiting for him just inside the gate. With a wistful gaze, he looked around at the thick green shrubbery and the bright colored flowers that bordered the high brick wall on the lower end of the property. It had been his idea to build it, years before when they first moved in, and he had insisted on used brick instead of new to add to the sense of age and permanence he had hoped to create. It was the same reason he had asked the gardener to plant English ivy in front of it, this need for things that, if they changed at all, changed so slowly, so gradually over time, as to be all but imperceptible. His house, like the mind he lived in, was a place of order.

He bent down and picked up the paper, slipped off the blue rubber band and started to open it, to see what the headlines said, but decided that could wait. Tucking it under his arm, he headed back toward the house, cut across the lawn at the top of the drive, passed through the kitchen door, and got himself a first cup of coffee. An hour later, after he was finished with his preparation for the work he had that day in court, after he had remembered to place his briefcase next to the front door where he would not forget it, he poured himself a second cup and sat down at the kitchen table. Biting into a bagel, he opened the paper and quickly scanned the front page. He sometimes wondered why they called it a newspaper: it was almost always the same old litany, the daily chronicle of economic uncertainty and political disarray, distant wars and local scandals. He looked through a few more pages, but nothing caught his eye, nothing of any real interest. He finished eating, gulped down what was left of the coffee in his cup and, with his briefcase in hand, headed out the door and the long journey through snarled traffic he could have driven in his sleep.

It was now Indian summer, which in Los Angeles meant only a change of name. There were no crisp autumn days in southern California, nothing of what they know in the east of warm, mellow late September days, the memory of summer already a faded dream and the cold breath of winter only waiting for the leaves to fall. It was still hot, hot as hell as one candid weatherman had put it, pushing past eighty in the morning commute, the only question how far past a hundred it would go before the traffic reversed itself and started home in the late afternoon. Hot as hell, and getting hotter by the minute, the heat rose up from the hard black pavement in glassy, incandescent waves, as if the air itself, already yellow with dust, had caught on fire. Like all the others who drove along in quiet air-conditioned cars, lulled to mild passivity by the music in their ears, Bannister thought nothing of thirst or safety. There were other things he had to think about, or, rather, not think about at all; but it kept coming back, the look on Gloria Baker’s face, flashing in front of him; and even when he made it go away, he could still hear her voice, that strident whispered shout, drowning everything in noise. Tonight, when he got home, he would write it all down. That would stop it; the vision and the voice would disappear. It was the only way to free his mind, to banish thoughts he did not want: turn them into scribbled marks on paper. It was the catharsis of expression, something he had done often enough before, what he called confession for the unbeliever: a way to cleanse the soul even though you were not quite sure what that was or, for that matter, if you had one, something separate from both the body and the mind. He should have done it last night, pulled out that dog-eared journal of his life-long misbehavior, the secret chronicle of what he did not doubt was monstrous immorality, and written it all out, everything that happened. He would not now be going through this, watching powerless the shattered fragments of a story he did not want to see or hear again, a story he could not understand until he had a chance to write it out, to put an order on it that did not yet exist. The only good thing, he told himself as he parked his car at the courthouse, was that no one else would ever know what happened unless he told, and that was the last thing he was going to do. He would make his confession, but that confession would be private, sealed in the journal that before his death he would destroy.

Bannister went straight to chambers. Desperate to get his mind on other things, he immediately went to work. He pulled out from his brief case the files he had taken home, stacked them on his desk in their scheduled order, and for a second time that morning set about a brief review of each of them. It worked. His mind followed his eyes, the only thoughts he had the words he read; or rather, because he had read them before, words he remembered so well that, despite their undistinguished prose, he was hearing whole sentences before he saw them on the page. It went faster now than it had before, which was the method he had long since taught himself: the work got shorter and easier each time you repeated it. He had learned it first as an undergraduate: takes notes on everything – what you heard in class, what you studied in written assignment – and then makes notes on that, until the work of a whole semester was reduced to perhaps ten typewritten pages, a concise statement of the essentials. In law school he had refined the technique to the point where he could state in a short paragraph everything of importance said the day before in class. Some of the other students, watching the way his hand flew back and forth, taking notes in class, christened him ‘the machine’ and were surprised less at the fact that he invariably had the top grade in class than that he had not had a nervous breakdown. No one worked as hard as Walter Bannister, and he was the only one who did not seem to notice. The work was what he lived for; the work was who he was. His idea of hell was a long vacation or, worse yet, a round of golf.

He did not hear her when his clerk opened the door to tell him there were just a few minutes left before court was to start. Jessica Holmes rolled her eyes, the way she did every morning when she made this same, useless announcement. In her late forties, she had large drooping eyes and a mouth that sagged at the corners. A smile meant only the brief appearance of a straight line across her lips. She had a deep affection for Judge Bannister, but did not pretend to understand how he could lose himself so completely in what, to her and the other courthouse clerks, seemed the boring routine of the daily docket. Proof against experience, she seemed to think, each time she opened the door and saw him hunched over his desk, that the simple sound of her voice would be sufficient to get his attention. Every day she tried it; every day she failed.

“Judge, it’s time,” she said, patting him gently on the shoulder, the way she did every morning. The response never varied.

“Yes, I know; thank you,” he said, rising slowly from the chair.

It was such a conditioned reflex that, once, when she was out sick, and no one came to get him, he had at precisely three minutes before court was to start, made the very same remark to an empty room.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about the morning docket, the usual assortment of civil complaints and criminal charges, the same endless routine of motioned filed and motions heard, cases set for trial and, for various reasons, trial dates changed, motions amended and motions filed again. A court in session was like the river Heraclitus described: always the same and always different. The lawyers and their clients came and went as each case was called, the only spectators the lawyers and their clients still waiting their turn. Some of them, the lawyers who had not appeared in front of Bannister before, or had done so only a few times in the past, stayed after their own business was concluded, watching with the interest of those who take their profession seriously the way a courtroom should be run, and left, reluctantly, only because they had other things to do. One case after another and no time wasted; and yet no one with the feeling that they had been hurried along and not given the opportunity to say everything they needed to say. Bannister was in his element, all his attention on the matter he had to hear, the others in the courtroom nothing more than part of the background, the invisible faces of a silent audience. Then, a few minutes past eleven, something began to change.

Bannister was too engrossed in the case before him, a request for a change of venue in a criminal case set to go to trial in a few weeks, to notice when the first whispered conversations started among a couple of lawyers sitting on the back bench. The door opened and another lawyer entered, shaking her head in the way of someone troubled by something she has just heard, sat down next to someone with whom she was acquainted and whispered what she knew. Her friend shot her an astonished look, wondering whether it could possibly be true. All over the courtroom heads began to shake in surprise and sorrow as the rumor spread. Bannister began to feel it, sense that something had happened, before he looked up and noticed the change. But there were still cases to be heard and he went back to what he was doing.

By the time of the noon recess the news was all over the courthouse. Television sets were turned on, lunch plans cancelled, as everyone watched the first, sketchy reports about the death of Gloria Baker, found murdered in her beachfront Malibu home. Whatever channel you turned to, that was the story; though beyond the fact of her death no one seemed to know anything. That did not stop the coverage. Reporters with their camera crews scampered all over Los Angeles, wherever they thought they could find someone who had known or worked with her, anyone who could add the insight of an acquaintance or a friend about what she had been like off the screen and how much she would be missed. Clips from her movies were shown and shown again; pictures of her with other famous people charted the rising fortunes of the young woman who had started as a one line actress in a series of minor, forgettable films, to become, in the idiom of Hollywood that had become the language of the land, one of the moviedom’s brightest stars. What started as a breaking news story became an endless biography, and then, playing out in counterpoint, a chronicle of all the glamour and tragedy of Hollywood, told with a serious straight face that seemed to suggest that this was itself a breaking story. Old films, films that had not yet been made, films that would never be made, were mentioned in the growing litany of things Gloria Baker would, or could, have done. The statement issued under the name of Roger Stanton from the studio where she had made her best pictures and had been scheduled to make more was both the first, and in a real sense, the last word on what everyone would say and most would think. “The death of our friend Gloria Baker is a great loss to the industry and to all the people who loved her.”

By the end of the afternoon, as more details became available, television began to focus less on her life and career and more on what happened the night she died; by that evening the metamorphous was complete: the movie star Gloria Baker was now a murder victim, the way she died the only story worth telling. That did not mean that anyone knew much about the facts. If the police knew anything, they were keeping it to themselves. Forced to say something, the chief of police appeared in front of the press and tried to make the obvious seem profound. Yes, the actress Gloria Baker had been found dead in her home. Her housekeeper, whose name he would not release, discovered the body a little after eight o’clock, the time she arrived every morning. She immediately called 911. Someone asked if she had called to ask that an ambulance be sent.

“Was she still alive?”

The chief, Henry Freeman, his feet planted shoulder width apart, the muscles around his jaw bulging with suppressed tension, stared hard at the reporter.

“She was dead, then,” said the reporter, certain that the chief’s ominous silence had only one meaning. “How did she die? Is it true, what we’ve heard: that she was stabbed to death with a knife?”

It would not have mattered what question he was asked: Freeman had already decided the answer he was going to give.

“Gloria Baker was the victim of a homicide. The case is now under investigation. We will keep the public informed as the investigation proceeds.”

Freeman had said next to nothing, but the fact he said anything spoke volumes. There were murders in Los Angeles every week, but it had been a long time, more than a year, since the chief of police held a press conference to announce the beginning of a criminal investigation. Whatever was taught in the schools, whatever was engraved on the marble courthouse walls, no one needed to be told that the claim of equal justice for all meant everyone but celebrities. Gloria Baker was famous, idolized by millions, and whatever that might say about the mentality of the age, no one charged with the responsibility of finding her murderer could afford to treat her murder as no different than any other violent crime. It was a devil’s bargain, the sacrifice of whatever was unique about her, sold in exchange for becoming what an audience wanted her to be; a bargain in which a life lived on a movie screen could be followed by a death, a murder, that an even larger audience would watch on television.

The tight-lipped response of the chief of police not only emphasized, as if that were needed, the importance of the case; it also concentrated the public’s attention on the investigation, what the chief himself had called the ‘all-out effort to find the killer,’ and by doing that pushed all the other news to the side. The murder of Gloria Baker became, not just the dominant story of the day, but the only thing anyone could talk about. Because the police refused to release any details before they took the form of established facts, everyone was free to speculate, and everyone did. And not just about her murder, but about everything that had been going on in her life, as if the meaning of her death could be discovered in the way she had lived. An army of reporters camped out in front of the Hollywood Hills home of Driscoll Rose, hoping to be the first with the story of whether, as rumor had it, he and Gloria Baker had just been about to get back together again.

Driscoll Rose was not there. Devastated by what had happened, he had, according to his publicist, gone into seclusion at an undisclosed location. This was a serious disappointment to the reporters waiting to shout a question at him from the narrow winding street in front of his house. They packed up their cameras and went in pursuit of someone else sufficiently famous to have known Gloria Baker. Most of them joined the caravan parked outside the gates of the studio where they hoped to hear something further from Roger Stanton; but Stanton had issued the only statement he would make and, desperate to get away from the growing frenzy of a media gone mad, had slipped out of town to the private sanctuary of his Santa Barbara estate.

While the major television stations sent their trucks and their satellite dishes back and forth across Los Angeles, looking more and more like an army in retreat, a young newspaper reporter, just two years out of journalism school, tracked down the housekeeper who had found the body of Gloria Baker. Herbert Morgan was a night court reporter with an easy manner and a friendly smile. The cops, the ones who drove patrol cars in the more dangerous parts of Los Angeles, liked him. Part of it was the natural affinity of those who do the real work and instead of getting credit get told by those higher up the chain of command how they could be doing it better. But part of it was simply Morgan: intelligent, but eager to learn, and as certain as he was of anything that you were just the one to teach him. That was the reason he often rode with the cops at night, going where they went, getting a sense of what their lives were like. They liked him for that, and because they liked him told him things they would not have told anyone else. They told him about the housekeeper, told him her name and where she lived; and knew when they did it that they did not have to ask him to keep his sources confidential.

Yolanda Ross lived in an eighth floor condominium in a building across the street from the beach in Santa Monica. It was a place where you would expect to find young professionals with long and successful careers ahead of them and wealthy retirees from the upper Midwest who now spent their days watching the sun set from a bench in the ocean side park and every week or so sent postcards to their jealous friends from the movie capital of the world. It was not where a housekeeper was supposed to live. That was the first thing that crossed Herbert Morgan’s young mind as he parked his car and started toward the entrance. His second thought was that, why not – why wouldn’t Gloria Baker have paid her housekeeper enough to afford a place like this? She certainly had the money to do it, knocking down eight figures for each of the last few movies she made.

“Sure, why not?” he thought to himself as he trotted across the street. “What the hell! – Why not pay the cleaning lady a hundred grand a year.”

The thought of it, the easy money, the way it was thrown around, the wild unreality of how people lived out here, the comic relief of people who did not know that what they did was funny, gave a certain zany swagger to his step. With a silly, inexplicable grin on his clean shaven face, he rang the buzzer next to the name ‘Yolanda Ross’ and waited.

“Hello,” he said, trying to conceal the excitement in his voice. “My name is Herbert Morgan, and I’m a reporter with the -”

There was no response, nothing, and then, suddenly, in a plaintive whisper, ‘Oh, Christ!’ and then another long silence. But she had not shut it off; the intercom was still open, and that meant she was trying to decide what to do.

“I just want to talk to you – off the record, if you like. A lot of reporters are going to try to get your story. Talk to me, and that way you control it. Then no one will bother you again. If they know you’ve said everything you have to say, they’ll leave you alone. They’ll -”

The harsh, buzzing noise of the door unlocking cut him off.

Yolanda Ross was not her real name, and the story she often told about being the daughter – or the granddaughter, because dates tended to confuse her – of Cuban refugees was an obvious fiction from a woman who thought Cuba was somewhere around Mexico and seemed surprised when it was mentioned that Cuba was an island in the Caribbean. Herbert Morgan knew none of this when he rang the bell next to her door, but he had lived long enough in Los Angeles to know as soon as he saw her that he was in the presence of one of those women who wore as many different faces and played as many different parts as any actress seen on the screen. She had of course wanted – and probably still wanted – to get into the movies; they all did, every good looking girl with her high school dream, certain that all she had to do was come out here, get to Hollywood, and something would happen, someone would discover them and make them into the star they had always known they would be. In the meantime, they did what they had to do, got whatever work they could get, became whatever they thought they had to be. They made up names, named themselves, parents of their own ambitions, names that would set them apart, names that, heard just once, would not be forgotten; last names like ‘Moonsheen,’ a name so undeniably outrageous, so unbelievable, that anyone to whom they were introduced asked to have it repeated, afraid they had not heard it right, and even more afraid they had. Yolanda Ross rolled off the tongue like a romantic Spanish accent, the smooth sounding name of a gorgeous dark eyed woman you might expect to find in a night club somewhere in Caracas, which, as everyone knows, is just a few short blocks from Havana.

Tall and elegant, with glistening black hair and eyes that turned bright with her mood, Yolanda Ross led her visitor down a short hallway to the kitchen. A half empty coffee cup was on the table in front of the chair where she had been sitting. The morning paper lay open, a picture of Gloria Baker staring out from the middle of the front page. Yolanda Ross got the coffee pot and another cup. Morgan waited while she poured.

“You can’t use my name; you can’t say anything about me. You said ‘off the record,’” she reminded him.

She was older; somewhere in her early thirties, he guessed. Tiny crow’s feet had begun to leave their indelible traces at the outside corners of her large and expressive eyes. The skin at the base of her throat had a slightly mottled look. With a reporter’s eye for detail, Morgan noted the signs of age that after a while even makeup would not be able to cover; but he was young, and thought her one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. He had also noticed the rich surroundings of where she lived: the expensive furniture, the stylish rugs, the handful of paintings, and the silk fabric on the chairs. He had been particularly struck by the photographs that lined the hallway. In several of them, Yolanda Ross was standing next to Gloria Baker. They were not photographs of a woman and her housekeeper. It was obvious from their laughing, carefree faces that they were very good friends. Morgan guessed that they were something more.

“You were lovers, weren’t you?” he asked point blank.

A sad smile shot across her broad full mouth, but it was not just at what she remembered; she liked Morgan, the soft innocence of his face, the quiet confidence of his voice.

“Off the record?”

“Yes, of course; whatever you decide.”

“We were; lovers, I mean,” she said in a rich, husky voice. “Not all the time; once in a while. She preferred men, but there were times….She didn’t want anyone to know, and no one did; and I’m not sure why I’m telling you, except maybe I want someone to know how I felt, that I loved her, that I would have done anything….And then, that morning, when I found her like that….” She gave him an anguished look. “You won’t tell anyone? You’ll keep this between us? I’ll tell you everything I know, but you have to promise you’ll never use that.”

“You have my word. But the police are going to dig into everything. They’ll talk to everyone who ever knew her. They’re bound to hear something. They know you live here. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out you couldn’t afford this on a housekeeper’s salary.”

She shook her head abruptly and then, holding it with both hands, stared into the coffee cup, thinking back on what had happened to her long time friend and the strange convergence of their lives.

“We met at a party, one of those things where you don’t need to be invited; you just hear about it and go. Gloria had been in a couple of movies, small parts; she was anything but famous. We just sort of hit it off. I was taking acting classes, trying to get a start.” A quick smile slid sideways across her mouth. “No one knew who I was, either. We became friends, good friends; started going places together, talked about how whatever happened we’d always be friends. Then, not even a year later, her career took off, and before you know it – that’s how things work here – she was the one everyone wanted to know. But she didn’t forget about me. She hired me – not as her housekeeper; her personal assistant. The television people got it all wrong. I told the police that I came nearly every morning, which is true, but not to clean the house – there was a service that took care of that – to help Gloria with whatever she needed. What do you expect in this town! Everyone tells the story they want to hear. Housekeeper! What does everyone think: someone short and fat with three words of English.” Her eyes filled with irony, and a faint smile, the kind that conceals, and announces, a secret, danced for an instant on her lips. “Listen to me! I even made up my name. Gloria didn’t do that. That wasn’t one of the lies she told.”

His eyes still on her, Morgan flipped open his notebook and scribbled the words ‘lies she told.’

“What lies did she tell?”

She did not hear him, or if she did, paid no attention. She sipped on the coffee and then set the cup down on the table.

“What lies…?” he asked again.

“Everything: Who she was sleeping with, who she was in love with – who she wasn’t in love with.”

“Can you be a little more specific? Who she was in love with – you mean Driscoll Rose?”

Her eyes went cold. “That bastard? He’s a coward, and everyone is afraid of him. Do you know what he did to her? – No, never mind; I shouldn’t be talking about any of this. It doesn’t have anything to do with what happened, what happened to Gloria, the night she was killed, what I saw that morning when I….”

“Tell me about that; everything you can remember. What time did you get there?”

“Eight-thirty; maybe a few minutes later.”

“What was the first thing you noticed? Was the door open, was it locked, was it-”

“It wasn’t open; it was shut. It wasn’t locked, but it usually wasn’t when I got there.”

“Did you knock, did you -?”

“I never knocked. Well, that isn’t true. Sometimes, if I thought someone might be there – if someone had spent the night – I’d knock before letting myself in.”

Morgan was quick to see the significance. “But you didn’t knock that morning. You didn’t think anyone was going to be there with her, no one who had spent the night?”

“No, I didn’t think anyone was going to be there.” She said this with a certain hesitation, as if she had not been completely sure that she would find her alone. “I knew someone was coming over that night – the night before – but I didn’t think that….”

“Who? Who was coming over? Who was she expecting that night?”

“Driscoll – Driscoll Rose. They were talking about a picture they were going to make together, but it was all over between them. At least I think it was: you couldn’t always be sure about Gloria. We were good friends – I’ve already told you that – but she didn’t tell me everything. And she didn’t always know herself; and even when she did there was always the chance that she would change her mind. She did that a lot: change her mind about things.”

“Driscoll Rose – You’re sure he was there that night?” asked Morgan, holding the ball point pen just above the page.

“I’m sure she was expecting him; I’m not sure that he came.”

“But she was expecting him – correct?”

“Yes. She had me get the screenplay so she could go through it again.”

“What time was he supposed to be there?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me that. Sometime that evening; that’s all I know.”

“Was there anyone else – anyone else she expected – earlier, later?”

“If she did, she didn’t mention it.”

“All right; you got there at eight-thirty or so. You don’t knock, you open the door, and then…?”

“It seems stupid now, but I had my arms full of things, and as soon as I had it open, I turned halfway around to shut it with my shoulder. Then, as I turned back, I saw her lying on the floor – not all of her, just her legs, and I started to say something; you know, tease her about being on the floor that early in the morning, and then I saw her, all of her – the staring vacant look in her eyes – and I knew right away she was dead. And then I saw the blood, all over her stomach, the blood soaked into the carpet.”

“She was stabbed to death – she wasn’t shot?”

Yolanda Ross lowered her head and shut her eyes. Crossing her arms in front of her, she began to rock back and forth, a small, choking noise rising from her throat. Morgan did not know what to say.

“Stabbed I don’t know how many times, but over and over again,” she said, opening her eyes. “Her t-shirt was ripped to shreds and all changed color – changed color with her blood.”

“That’s what she was wearing: a t-shirt and…?”

“A t-shirt, and a pair of shorts and there was blood all over them.”

“What about the knife, the weapon? Was it there?”

“No, I didn’t see any knife. I heard one of the officers say something, that one of the knives in the kitchen – on the counter there was one of those wooden blocks knives are kept in – was missing. That’s all I know. I don’t know if they found it, or if it’s still missing…if the killer took it with him.”

Morgan made a few quick notes and then looked at what he had written.

“When you first saw her lying there like that, what else did you see? Did it look like there had been a struggle: anything knocked over, anything broken, tossed around…?”

“Some of the things on the coffee table were on the floor, and so was one of the cushions, a throw pillow from the sofa. And there were scratch marks on the wall. Whoever killed her must have dragged her across the room -”

“Maybe to grab the pillow, to shove it over her face to muffle her screams,” Morgan speculated. “Anything else – anything that was different?”

She thought for a moment. “The picture…there was something….No, I don’t know; I was in such a state of shock.”

“The picture?”

“On the wall above the sofa in the living room there was a life size portrait of Gloria. She loved it, thought it made her look more like a movie star than any of the photographs taken of her.”

Morgan had all he needed, and when his story appeared on the front page of the morning paper it was all anyone could talk about. Citing ‘reliable sources’ and ‘trustworthy first hand accounts’ he described what happened the night of Gloria Baker’s death with the kind of detail no other reporter had been able to provide and that the police had thus far refused to release or even to confirm or deny. The actress had been stabbed to death with a knife taken from the kitchen, stabbed ‘multiple times’ after being dragged across the room –her fingernails had left scratch marks on the walls – as the killer forced her close to the sofa, where he grabbed a pillow to stop her screaming.

Morgan kept his promise to Yolanda Ross. He did not use her name or reveal anything about her relationship with Gloria Baker. Instead, he wrote that the next morning, when the housekeeper arrived a little after eight-thirty, the door was closed but, as it often was at that hour, unlocked. She found the actress dead on the living room floor, the t-shirt she was wearing in shreds and blood everywhere, all over her body and all over the carpet. The knife was nowhere to be found.

If these details helped satisfy the public’s curiosity about how Gloria Baker had died, the last paragraph in Morgan’s story started a firestorm of suspicion and speculation.

“The actor Driscoll Rose, with whom Gloria Baker had in the past been romantically involved and had once been engaged, was scheduled to meet with the actress that night in her Malibu home, the home where they had for a time lived together, to discuss a motion picture in which they were both going to star. It is not known if Rose ever actually got there. Attempts to contact him have been unsuccessful.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Michael Harlowe wrapped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. He gazed around his office, taking inventory of his surroundings: the long rows of law books on the wooden shelves stacked floor to ceiling on the wall opposite; the diplomas from college and law school and the ornate certificates with their stilted language announcing his admission to practice in both state and federal courts; a dozen random photographs, most of them taken years earlier when he first started trying cases; a tarnished antique replica of the scales of justice, a gift from his wife when he opened his first office shortly after they were married and a long time before their divorce.

Everywhere he looked he found something to remind him of how much of his life he had been doing this, practicing law, trying cases in court, and how long it taken to get to where he was now, a lawyer everyone who was in trouble wanted to have. It was always a lie when someone who had achieved a certain degree of success said in so many words that they had always known it would happen; that no matter how difficult it had been in the beginning, they had never lost faith. They said it because now that it had finally happened and they were looking down instead of up, it was the only thing that seemed to make sense. Harlowe was too honest to invent a new biography for the past. He had always known that what happened had more to do with chance than anything else. You could try cases until the sun forgot to rise and nothing would change, no one notice except a few seasoned veterans of the criminal courts, which meant that only a couple of judges and one or two prosecutors would remember your name. The only way a defense attorney became a great success was to have that one case, that one trial that suddenly became the only case, the only trial, anyone wanted to talk about.

He had been in practice for fifteen years before it happened to him, a murder case in which to the astonishment of both the court and the prosecution he called as the first witness for the defense the victim, the man whose wife had supposedly killed him. He had actually simply wandered off, a victim, not of murder, but of amnesia brought on by rare virus that had attacked his brain. The memory loss was complete and, unfortunately, irreversible. He had been found only by chance, and it was chance again that led Harlowe’s private investigator to hear about it before anyone else. The effect of his sudden appearance in the courtroom had been so stunning, so profound, that no one thought to ask how long Harlowe had known he was alive or where he had been living the last several weeks of the trial; which meant that no one could ask why, if Harlowe knew he was alive, he waited until the could destroy the prosecution’s case in front of an astonished courtroom audience before revealing that fact to anyone else. That case had made his name. And now this!

Staring at the scattered remnants of his past, the memorabilia of his life in court, Michael Harlowe felt on his cheek, more than the glow of his own achievement, the rare satisfaction of what he had not yet accomplished, the trial that had not started, or even been scheduled, the case that would make his a name known by everyone and the object of envy of every well-known lawyer in the country. It was pure vanity, and he knew it; but instead of berating himself, he dismissed it as a harmless self-indulgence, a brief diversion that, given the stakes involved, he could afford to enjoy. He glanced at his watch. The appointment was for four o’clock, and it was now five minutes after. His eyes did another circuit of the room, but only to pass the time while he waited five minutes more.

“You can send him in now,” he said quietly into the private line to his secretary at ten minutes past the hour.

He removed some documents from a file folder on his desk and began to study them. When his next appointment walked in, he found Harlowe hunched over his desk, so absorbed in what he was reading, that he did not seem to notice that anyone had entered. Driscoll Rose turned around and started to leave.

“You wanted to see me, Mr. Rose. What can I do for you?”

Rose hesitated; deciding, as it seemed, whether it was worth his time to bother.

“The appointment was for four. You made me wait,” he complained.

Harlowe could not let pass the irony, and what it said about the self-absorption, of this from an actor notorious for never being on time for anything, even when he remembered to show up.

“You were here on time?” he asked in a tone of understated astonishment. “That’s a good start, anyway. Yes, you had to wait a few minutes. We got you in the same day you called, but as you can see I’m very busy.”

Driscoll Rose had a face older than his years, and in some surprising ways, older than his generation. He had wavy hair, smooth and shiny, like an actor in the days when they made movies mainly in black and white; and there were deep lines, not just across his forehead, but vertically, down his face. His eyes were close together, giving him a questioning, wary look, as if, though he could not be sure, he thought you were probably someone he would not like. His mouth was small and querulous, and when he began to open it you almost expected him not to speak real words but to snarl something guttural. He stood stiff as a board while he listened to Harlowe tell him he was lucky Harlowe had seen him at all.

“There are other lawyers,” he said with a scornful expression.

“Go see one,” suggested Harlowe, smiling pleasantly.

“Maybe I will.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” replied Harlowe, lowering his eyes to the desk. A moment passed, then another. He did not look up, and Rose did not say a thing, just stood there. More time passed. Harlowe continued reading, and Rose did not move from the spot. Finally, Harlowe looked up with an expression that suggested surprise he was still there.

“Need help finding your way out?”

“They say you’re…” He was about to say, ‘the best there is,’ but he could not do it. “They say you’re as good as anyone, and it looks like I might need a lawyer. I didn’t do anything, but everyone seems to think I did.”

Harlowe motioned toward a green wingback chair the other side of his glass topped desk. Rose seemed to take it under advisement, as if he still was not sure he wanted to stay. Harlowe gave him a sharp look.

“Make up your mind, Mr. Rose. I have plenty of other things to do.”

It was an interesting question whether the actor’s bad manners were deliberate or simply ill-breeding. Rose appeared incapable of being polite or even civil. He continued to stand where he stood, a petulant expression on his face that seemed a permanent part of his character. He was so used to getting his way, and getting it without resistance, that faced with an obstacle he froze with indecision. Harlowe did not like him, but then he did not have to.

“I just finished defending a guy who murdered four people, killed a whole family in cold blood. And you know what? – I got more respect from him than I’m ever likely to get from you. So do us both a favor, Mr. Rose: Find yourself another lawyer. I’m too damn busy to waste time on someone who can’t even decide if he wants to sit down!”

Rose’s chin snapped up, the instant angry reaction to a challenge. His eyes turned hard, filled with cold malice. Harlowe stared back with eager, almost cheerful, defiance. Rose was a skinny five foot eight, a runt who would not last a minute if he was fool enough to take a swing at Harlowe. Suddenly, Harlowe smiled.

“Sit down, Mr. Rose. There is a reason you came to see me. We can decide later whether you want me as your lawyer, and if I want you as a client.”

Rose came back to his senses. He took the chair that had been offered and began with a line that he had not needed to rehearse; a line Michael Harlowe had heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times before.

“I didn’t do it; I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill Gloria Baker.”

Harlowe had learned a long time ago that unless you knew someone quite well, or unless they tripped over their own mistake – told you one thing, forgetting they had previously told you something else – it was next to impossible to decide whether they were telling the truth, especially when they were facing the imminent prospect of death or imprisonment. With an actor, who was nothing if not a trained liar, you could never be sure of anything. Harlowe tried to turn the question back on Rose, attack his claim of innocence, not on the grounds of dishonesty, but stupidity.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I…?”

“Kill her.” Harlowe crossed his arms, bent his head to the side, and fixed him with a steady glance. “Yes, if you didn’t kill her, why didn’t you? I hear you tried to kill her before, beat her up so bad she wound up in the hospital. I understand that’s the reason she was living there, in the house you used to own.”

“How did you hear about that?” demanded Rose, visibly agitated. “All right: I have a temper; I get angry. I do things I shouldn’t do, and then I feel bad about it. One night, something happened: we got into a fight; I didn’t mean to hurt her, I didn’t even mean to hit her. But it happened, and I tried to make it right. It was my house, but she loved it there, and I didn’t care about living there anymore after we broke up. So, yeah, I gave it to her. Why not? But that’s a lie! – That I tried to kill her. And it’s a lie now when anyone says I did, says I killed her that night. She was dead when I got there. I found her there like that: stabbed to death, lying on the floor.”

Though stunned by what he heard - the admission that Driscoll Rose has actually been there that night – Harlowe reached for the pen that lay next to the note pad on his desk and looked at Rose as if he were still waiting to hear something of importance. A tight smile of pure skepticism danced across his mouth.

“You went there that night, and you found her, lying on the floor, and she was already dead. And you did – what, exactly?”

Rose seemed not to understand.

“What did you do? She’s lying there, dead – must have been plain someone had killed her. What did you do?”

“I left,” said Rose with a puzzled shrug. “What do you think I would have -?”

“Called the police, for starters. But you didn’t call the police; you just left. Why?”

“She was dead. There was nothing I could do.”

“Nothing you could do! – How dense are you? It didn’t occur to you that you should call the police, report what had happened? If what you told me is true, do you have any idea how this looks? You were there. You didn’t call the police. What do you think a prosecutor will do with that; what do you think he will tell a jury? You don’t think he might just suggest that the reason you didn’t call the police is because you killed her and didn’t want to get caught?”

“Why are you getting all worked up? I didn’t do it; I told you that.”

“Worked up?” laughed Harlowe. “Upset? Me? I’m not upset; I’m not the one who is going to be spending the rest of his life in a prison cell, if they don’t execute me instead!”

“I didn’t do it,” repeated Rose with dull insistence.

“Unfortunately, in matters of this kind, they don’t just take your word for it.” Harlowe shook his head, incredulous to the point of feeling half-sorry for him, a fool willing to play make believe with his own life. “All right, let’s go back to the beginning. I read the newspapers like everyone else. I know you were supposed to meet with her – with Gloria Baker – that night to discuss something about a movie you were going to make together. That’s what the story said. Is it true?”

“Yeah; I said I’d come over. I don’t know if I said the time,” he added vaguely. “Probably didn’t; just said sometime that night, later on.”

“She would have known what that meant – ‘later on’?”

“Yeah, sure; you know: later on – ten, eleven, midnight; sometime around then.”

“Ten, eleven, twelve….What time did you get there?”

“I don’t know. After eleven, I think.”

“After eleven, you think. You didn’t notice the time when you were driving over there, didn’t check your watch.”

“I don’t wear a watch.”

Harlowe was jotting down a note. He looked up and raised his eyebrows.

“You don’t wear a watch. That’s helpful.” He tossed the pen onto the yellow legal pad and sighed. “So, you get there, sometime that night, but you can’t say exactly when – sometime around eleven, but you can’t really say for sure – and you find her, you find Gloria Baker, dead on the floor. Terrific! Did you knock on the door when you got there?”

“Did I what -? Knock on the door? No, the door was wide open, and the lights were all on.”

“What did that tell you?”

“Tell me?”

“She was expecting you, but she didn’t know when, because you hadn’t told her. Sometime that night – ‘later on,’ remember? – ten, eleven, or maybe midnight. So why would the door be wide open?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Suddenly, he broke into the boyish sly smile that women had always seemed to find irresistible. It changed him so completely that even Harlowe, who never forgot anything, almost forgot what he had looked like before, as if by that smile alone all the surly, sullen self-indulgence had been banished to a place from which it could never come back.

“With Gloria you never knew what she was going to do. The door might be locked; it might be left standing wide open, the way it was that night. It all depended on her mood, what she happened to feel like at any one moment. Once, when we were living together, she started talking about a movie Natalie Wood made, Inside Daisy Clover. It’s about a girl who becomes a huge star. She lives on the beach and at the end of the movie, because she feels like a prisoner, she lets the oven catch fire and as she walks down the beach the house explodes in the background. And you know what Gloria wanted to do? – She wanted to go home and burn down the house, just to see what it felt like. She would have done it, too. I’m not kidding; she was crazy that way. She didn’t care what she did, just so long as it was something she hadn’t done before. One day she decided she wanted to marry me; a few weeks later she’s going out with someone else.

“You can think what you want about me, Mr. Harlowe,” he said with a shrewd look Harlowe had not expected. “I know what people say about me – and some of it is true: I am impulsive, and I get really pissed off when someone pushes me too far – but compared to Gloria and the way she was I’m a rock of stability. She was beautiful, and exciting, and when I was with her I never wanted to be with anyone else; but if she hadn’t been in the movies, been able to change all the time, always be someone else, she would have been in an asylum. No one likes to admit it, but Hollywood is the only place you don’t get locked up for being crazy.”

He said this with a growing sense of wonder, as if only now, after her death, had he begun to realize how different she had really been, and how much he had been in love with her. The smile on his mouth faded into insignificance, became inward and remote. He began to fidget nervously with his hands.

“The door was open,” he said in a hollow, faraway voice. “She was on the floor. There was a lot of blood.” He clutched one hand with the other to stop them shaking. “A lot of blood,” he repeated, staring into the middle distance.

“You were sure she was dead?” asked Harlowe, gently. “Did you check her pulse, check for a heartbeat? Did you -?”

“There was a lot of blood, goddamn it! What the hell did I just tell you?” he demanded, turning on Harlowe with a scornful, imperious glance. “Check her pulse, check for a heartbeat! Her eyes were wide open; she was all cut up. The shirt she was wearing – the damn thing was all in rags; blood was still oozing out of her -.”

“Still -? She couldn’t have been dead very long. What did you see? She was stabbed. Did you see a knife?”

“I didn’t see anything. Christ, I’d just seen her; I didn’t go looking around to see what the killer might have left.” He started grinding his jaw back and forth as the anger built up in his eyes. Clenching his left hand into a fist, he opened it, and then did it again, over and over, beating time to his own sense of rage at being caught in a trap. “She was dead, murdered, and I knew I had to get out of there.”

Harlowe had seen enough to know that Driscoll Rose was a marvel of volatility, and that anything could set him off. The real question was how much of it was his own half-demented temper and how much done for effect: a show of outrage and emotion to prove his innocence. Harlowe leaned closer.

“You say you knew you had to get out of there. Did you think the killer might still be somewhere in the house; that he – or she – might come after you next?”

This seemed to catch Rose off guard. He had not thought of it before, and now he seemed to wonder if he should have. Harlowe sensed immediately the doubt, and the caution.

“You didn’t think the killer was still there. That isn’t the reason you thought you had to get out of there as quickly as you did?”

He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from him. He had had other clients charged with murder make the same excuse, tell the same inevitable lie: blame their own panic-stricken cowardice for running away from the scene of a crime they swore they did not commit.

“Well, what’s the answer, Mr. Rose? You didn’t think the killer was still there – and of course that raises a question itself, doesn’t it? – But you knew you had to leave, to ‘get out of there’ as you put it. Why was that, Mr. Rose? Imagine you’re on trial for your life, you’re testifying – not here, in the privacy of my office where anything you tell me is a secret I have to take to my grave, but in open court to twelve people on a jury - What do you tell them, Mr. Rose? What do you say to explain why, having just found the woman you say you loved and with whom you had only recently been engaged, your only thought was to get out of there, get away as fast as you could?”

It was the actor’s genius to picture in his mind all the details of the scene he was asked to play. A jury, a courtroom packed with eager spectators, lawyers and a judge, and Rose himself on the witness stand listening to the question, all flashed in front of him the same way he would have seen a room he had just entered. Without conscious intent, he actually sat straight up and turned slightly to his left.

“I was scared, scared that I’d be blamed; that if someone – the police, anyone! – saw me like that, kneeling over her body, blood all over, they’d think I’d done it; that they wouldn’t let me explain, that because of what had happened between us before - engaged, and then the engagement broken off – that I’d killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”

Rose blinked his eyes and looked at Harlowe, waiting, as it seemed, to see how well he had played his part and whether Harlowe had some suggestion how he could do it better. Other clients, none of them actors, had done the same thing: answered a question the way they thought they should when their case came to trial, and then waited to see if their lawyer thought they should change it. There was usually a trace of disappointment in their eyes when he told them just to tell the truth. What they really wanted to know was how they should act. Driscoll Rose was in a class by himself. He could learn a line easily enough, he did it for a living, but they were just words to him: he did not understand everything that they meant.

“The knife wasn’t there,” Harlowe reminded him. Rose still did not understand. “The knife wasn’t there, Mr. Rose. Isn’t that what you just told me? You said you didn’t see it. If it wasn’t there, it had to have been taken by whoever killed her. If it wasn’t there, Mr. Rose, you had the perfect defense. You find the body, the murder weapon has disappeared. You couldn’t have taken it. You see where I’m going with this? If you had called the police, if you had not run away, no one would be accusing you of anything.”

Rose started to retreat into the shell of sullen indifference he had used before. Harlowe pulled him up sharp.

“You left – you ran away - and there are only two ways to explain it: Either you killed her, and then you ran away and took the knife with you; or you found her, the way you said you did, and the only thought you had was to run like hell because - face it, Mr. Rose - you’re a coward and you never thought about anyone but yourself! That, and the fact that you were too damn stupid to realize that doing the right thing is sometimes the only smart thing to do!”

Rose was on his feet, screaming obscenities.

“You’re not the only lawyer I can get, I - !”

“You said that before.”

“Why would I want someone who…! Who the hell do you think you are, talking to me like that?”

A broad smile shot across Michael Harlowe’s supremely confident mouth.

“Probably the only chance you have to keep off death row. But you’re right, Mr. Rose: There are other lawyers, and I suggest you find one. Now,” he said, waving his hand in a gesture of dismissal, “if you’ll excuse me, I have things I have to do.”

Rose stared at him in open-mouthed astonishment, and just stood there, with no idea what to do next.

“It’s what I told you before, Mr. Rose: Stay or go, it doesn’t matter to me what you do. But if you want to talk seriously to me about representing you, you better understand that I’m not impressed by these schoolboy antics of yours and they better stop. If I ask a question, you answer it. You get angry with me, you can go screw yourself. And don’t make the mistake a lot of people make. If I take your case that doesn’t mean – that never means – that I’m working for you. You never tell me what to do. First time you try it, is the last time you see me. I do things my way, or I don’t do them at all. Let me tell you something else. The fact you’re a movie star is the worst thing that ever happened to you. You won’t get a fair trial. It’s impossible. Everyone thinks they know you, everyone who has ever seen you in a movie, everyone who has seen your picture on the cover of some gossip magazine, has an idea about you. They may think you’re a great actor; they all know you’re the ‘bad boy’ of Hollywood.

“I’m not sure it would make sense to put you on the stand. If a jury hears what I just heard - that you found the body and ran away – after the prosecution has established that the knife wasn’t found at the scene, they’re going to think you’re either guilty or stupid beyond belief. Strange business when your only hope is that a jury thinks you’re the dumbest guy on the planet. If you don’t testify, they may not be able to prove you were even there. But if you don’t take the stand – the actor who supposedly always says what he thinks, no matter whom he might offend – they’re going to think you’ve got something to hide, that you must have done it because otherwise why wouldn’t you tell them face to face that you didn’t? And there is one other thing you better understand. This isn’t Hollywood: the innocent don’t always go free and the guilty don’t always get caught. This is America, Mr. Rose: nothing is ever really quite fair.”

Rose had settled back in the chair, listening attentively and with a kind of grudging admiration as Harlowe listed the various disadvantages anyone who defended him would have somehow to overcome. The brutal honesty of it appealed to his own disgust at the hypocrisy he saw all around him, the cringing duplicity of people who wanted to be known as his friends. Harlowe was someone he would trust in a fight.

“Does that mean you want to represent me?” Certain of the answer, a grim smile cut across the jagged line of his mouth.

“No, I’m afraid it does not.” Harlowe paused to let him feel the full weight of his refusal. He waited until the smile on Rose’s face faded away. “I won’t even consider it, unless you tell me the truth, the whole truth, about what happened that night. And let’s start with the most important question of all. Did you do it, Mr. Rose? Did you murder Gloria Baker?”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was an unconscious gesture that had become habitual. Hector Alfonso straightened his tie and only then began to speak. It was not much, a brief announcement that would ordinarily have passed unnoticed; a single addition to a list of possible witnesses, a name without significance other than that it was well-known.

“I may call Roger Stanton as a witness for the prosecution.”

They were sitting in Walter Bannister’s judicial chambers, the judge and the two attorneys: Hector Alfonso for the prosecution and Michael Harlowe for the defense. It was late on a Friday afternoon. The trial of Driscoll Rose for the murder of Gloria Baker was scheduled to start Monday morning. Though the murder had taken place early in the fall, few things move as slowly as the justice system and six months had passed before the defendant was finally going to have his day in court. It was now early in the spring, the second week of April to be exact. The days were getting longer instead of shorter, and there was a cleaner, less arid, feel to the air, but the heat was still everywhere and the traffic still relentless. There was only one season in Los Angeles.

Bannister raised an eyebrow. He seemed to meditate a question of some delicacy.

“By itself, the fact that a judge knows a witness is not a reason to recuse himself. If he did, there wouldn’t be many trials over which he could preside. Most judges have at least a nodding acquaintance with many of the expert witnesses – the coroner, the people from the crime lab, police officers – the prosecution normally calls. But a relative, that may be a different matter. What do you think, Michael? Roger Stanton is my wife’s brother. Should I recuse myself, have another judge preside?”

It was the last thing Michael Harlowe wanted. It did not matter to him if Roger Stanton was Bannister’s brother in law – if he had been his father or his son, it would not have mattered – Bannister was the most fair-minded judge he knew. And besides, Stanton was only a witness, and not a very important one at that. His testimony would be brief and straightforward. If there were an objection, it would be to the form of the question, a legal argument between the lawyers, nothing that would compel the judge to take sides in an issue that had consequences for his brother-in-law.

“This isn’t a civil case, your Honor. He doesn’t have any stake in the outcome. I don’t see any reason why you should recuse yourself. And frankly, I would not like it if you did.”

Sitting straight, his left elbow on the arm of the chair, Bannister rubbed two fingers against his thumb. All business, he looked immediately to the district attorney.

“And what about you, Hector? Do you see any conflict?”

The indifference with which Harlowe had seemed to view the announcement that Stanton might be called as a witness made Alfonso wonder whether the defense attorney understood how damaging that testimony might be. Murderers often lied to their lawyers about what they had done. It was possible that Driscoll Rose had not mentioned that just months before her murder he had beaten Gloria Baker within an inch of her life.

“No, your Honor; not at all.” Alfonso flashed a bright smile. “Michael and I agree: you’re the only judge we want.”

But Bannister appeared still to have reservations. He turned to Harlowe, but as he did he seemed to change his mind about something.

“You may wish to file a motion to limit his testimony, the way you might with any witness. I don’t think it would be right to rule on that. I suppose what I could do, should you file such a motion, is to have another judge hear and decide it.”

Harlowe ran his hand over his tousled brown hair and scratched the back of his head as he started to smile. Then, leaning in the opposite direction from Alfonso, he gave him a sly, sideways look.

“You’re going to have Stanton testify that Gloria Baker called him the night Rose broke her jaw; testify that he found her like that, called a doctor and had her taken to a private hospital. I know all that. The only thing I don’t know is why he wasn’t on your witness list from the beginning.” That first, fugitive smile turned into a broad, boyish grin. “Did you think by adding him late you could catch me by surprise, that I wouldn’t have time to prepare?”

If Alfonso felt any embarrassment, he did not show it. To the contrary, he seemed to enjoy the chance to exchange the mild accusations of friendly adversaries getting ready for a courtroom fight. He grinned from ear to ear.

“How could I catch you by surprise, when your client, honest man that he is, must have told you everything: how he beat her up one night, sent her to the hospital; and how, a few months later, he did not stop with that but -”

“Honest man that he is, he denies he did anything to her ‘a few months later.’ But back to the issue at hand: That is the reason you intend to call him, isn’t it?”

The district attorney had a duty to disclose all the evidence the prosecution had, including what he expected to be the testimony of each of the witnesses he intended to call. Harlowe was right, and he told him so. This satisfied Harlowe; it did not satisfy Walter Bannister.

“Michael is too polite to ask directly, but he alluded to it earlier: why have you just added the name now, just days before the trial is scheduled to start? Why wasn’t the name Roger Stanton on your witness list when it was first submitted as part of discovery, along with everything else you’re required to turn over to the defense?”

Alfonso looked away, past Bannister to the window behind him; and then, a moment later, he stared down at his hands as if preparing himself for an act of contrition. He was stalling for time, trying to decide how much he should reveal of what had been in reality a protracted negotiation. He did not want to admit that he had negotiated anything. It had been unavoidable given who Roger Stanton was, but it made him look indecisive and weak, and he did not like it.

“He didn’t want to testify at first. You can understand his reluctance,” said Alfonso, his eyes full of practiced sympathy, turning first to Bannister then to Harlowe. “He knew them both, the victim and the accused; and I’m sure he didn’t want to believe Driscoll Rose could really have done it, murder Gloria Baker. And perhaps he feels a little responsible for what happened.”

“Responsible?” asked Bannister with a sudden, searching glance.

“He knew what Rose could do. He was the one who found her the night Rose beat her up. He sent for a doctor, got her to the hospital – but he never called the police. Perhaps he thinks that if….”

It was incredible the way Hector Alfonso, all instinct and reaction, could draw on his own experience to talk about the failures of others. Bannister thought it an interesting question whether he even remembered that he had refused to do anything when Bannister told him what Driscoll Rose had done in Santa Barbara. And now, here he was, offering his own analysis of why Roger Stanton might have some latent sense of guilt for not having done anything to stop Driscoll Rose when he had had the chance to do so. Everyone was right about Hector Alfonso: he was a gifted politician.

This was unfair to Hector Alfonso. Had he known what Walter Bannister was thinking, he could have replied that an important distinction needed to be drawn. Bannister had come to him with the report of an incident that, given the people involved, would have been difficult to prosecute even had it happened in a place where he had jurisdiction. Roger Stanton, on the other hand, had witnessed the bloody aftermath of a brutal assault and for reasons of his own had chosen to do nothing about it. On the evidence Bannister had, Driscoll Rose would probably have been acquitted, if the case had ever actually gone to trial; what Roger Stanton had seen would have sent Rose to prison. It was easy to second guess, to talk about what others should have done, but Alfonso dealt in realities, and that meant having a provable case. He did not have one on what Bannister had told him; but he had one now and it was rock solid.

“There is of course one other matter,” said Bannister as he got to his feet and stood next to the window, looking out. It had rained the night before - not much, less than a quarter of an inch: a light sprinkle in most of the rest of the country; a significant development according to all the local television weather reports – and for a while at least the yellow brown haze had disappeared. It was one of those days when those who had lived here all their lives remembered, without quite knowing why they remembered, what it had been like before the freeways brought all the cars and there were still orange groves at the end of long dust covered roads. With a slight smile full of nostalgia, Walter Bannister gazed out at the crowded flat lands of Los Angeles, wondering why now, after all this time, he still saw everything the way it had been, and why he so much regretted the change. He was, he thought, too much in love with the past; and yet he could still feel what it had been like, his bare feet sinking into the sand on the beach, the grip of his hand on the ladder when he climbed to pick oranges from the tree, all of it gone forever, but somehow still alive, even if he was the only one to know it. There was nothing now, except a great emptiness that was sometimes unbearable, burdened as he was by a new and corrosive sense of guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he said, coming back to himself. “I forgot where I was. Oh, yes; there is one other matter. I know the defendant; I have had dealing of my own with him.”

“You sentenced him on a drug conviction; put him on probation, required treatment,” said Harlowe with a shrug of indifference.

Bannister looked at Alfonso, expecting him to say something. Alfonso was not sure what that look meant, or what it meant that Bannister had phrased his familiarity with Driscoll Rose in such general terms. Bannister had broken up a fight, pulled Rose off a young man he might otherwise have beaten senseless; he must have assumed that they both knew about it. Bannister had told Hector himself; Rose must have told Harlowe. Still, it seemed curious that he did not mention it. It did not matter, of course; and if the defense attorney did not think it a reason to ask Bannister to disqualify himself, he certainly was not going to bring it up. Walter Bannister was always scrupulously impartial, and while he might not have the best feelings toward Driscoll Rose, that would not affect how he conducted himself in court. Judges usually thought criminal defendants were guilty – nearly all of them were – but that did not stop them presiding fairly over their trials. It was not that long ago that in the privacy of chambers they had, the three of them, discussed the sickening depravity of that notorious murderer, Daniel Lee Atkinson, who, precisely because his guilt was so obvious, was given the benefit of every close question of evidence. And if Harlowe did not know, if he had not heard - again, what difference did it make?

Alfonso did the only prudent thing. In response to Bannister’s questioning look, he just shook his head and said the judge’s involvement with Driscoll Rose was a matter of public record.

“Then we’re set to go on Monday,” said Bannister. Placing his hands on the small of his back, he rose up on his tip toes and stretched. “This is a murder trial, and jury selection in cases like this can take forever. Let’s try to do it in a couple of days. You’re not going to find anyone who doesn’t know something – or think they know something – about the victim and the defendant. Everyone knew who she was; everyone knows him. So let’s not try to find the impossible. Everyone has a bias. If they’re honest about it, if they admit it, if they don’t insist they don’t have any opinion at all, that’s probably good enough.”

It was the considered, and completely private, opinion of Walter Bannister that the most dishonest people in the world were the men and women who served in juries. They did not lie about everything, only about what was most important. The first juror in the trial of Driscoll Rose was no exception to the rule. Smiling and serious at the same time, Hector Alfonso asked all the usual preliminary questions, drawing forth the bare bones biography of an anonymous citizen called out of the obscurity of her private life to pass judgment on a man she had never met but knew better than her next door neighbor. Rebecca Smart was thirty eight years old and a college graduate. Married with two teenage children, she was the manager of a downtown coffee shop, part of a national chain. She answered each question in a small, firm voice, and never let her eyes wander from Hector Alfonso’s friendly gaze. Alfonso was good at that, making people he had only just met think he had been looking forward to it all day, and better yet, would not forget them now that he had. He spoke to her, asked her questions, as if instead of a crowded courtroom they were the only two people in the room. She gave him all the answers he wanted, said exactly what was expected. She knew who the defendant was, and had seen a number of the victim’s motion pictures; and, yes, she had seen some of the television coverage of the crime and had read about it in the papers, but no, she had not formed an opinion, one way or the other, about the case. She was lying, but she did not know it. She believed it when she said it because it was what she was supposed to say, what any fair-minded person would say.

Walter Bannister scratched his ear. He had been hearing the same thing for years, the false honesty of people whose only thought was what they were afraid other people might think. You were supposed to be impartial, ready and willing to suspend all judgment until all the evidence had been heard, and the good Mrs. Smart could not imagine, and would not have been able to admit it if she had, that she was in this respect any different than anyone else. They all lied, and they all thought they were telling the truth; they all thought they were reasonable, and you could not have found more people willing to repeat what others believed if you had searched an asylum.

One question after the other, questions that, if you listened as closely as Bannister did, invited concealment of the very bias they were supposed to expose, were asked and answered, all of them leading to the inevitable and predictable conclusion that the juror had no greater interest than ensuring that the accused was given a fair trial. It was a fifth grade civics lesson given under the shrewd and seductive direction of Hector Alfonso’s approving smile.

Then it was the turn of the defense, and Michael Harlowe began with a lie of his own. His hands clasped behind his neck, he leaned back in the hard wooden chair and looked up at the ceiling as if dazzled by his good fortune. Slowly, and as it were reluctantly, he shook his head, and then, a moment later, gave the first juror a long sideways glance, full of kindness and, at the same time, suspicion.

“In other words, Mrs. Smart, you think Driscoll Rose is completely innocent: You don’t believe that he’s responsible for the death of Gloria Baker. Is that correct?”

She was used to pleasing customers. Her first reaction was to agree; her second reaction was confusion. Her mouth hung half open, voiceless.

A relaxed, if somewhat cynical, grin twisting the corner of his mouth, Harlowe got to his feet and walked slowly toward the jury box.

“I’m not here to embarrass you; I’m really not. But the district attorney was very emphatic, the way he insisted on impartiality. And one of the questions he asked was whether you would withhold judgment until you heard all the evidence.”

“Yes,” she quickly replied; “and I said I would.”

Harlowe was standing just a few feet away from her. He took a step closer, close enough that she could see in his face the mirror of her own confusion.

“You said you hadn’t formed an opinion in this case, that despite the fact that you’ve read about it in the papers, seen the coverage on television, know who the defendant is and know all about the victim, you have a completely open mind….”

“Yes, that’s true,” she insisted, sensing, and beginning to resent, a doubt about her honesty.

It was just what Harlowe had hoped for.

“No one is accusing you of anything, Mrs. Smart. But that doesn’t feel good, does it? – To be accused of something you didn’t do, forced to defend yourself when you’re innocent.” He let that thought, the possibility that someone charged with something, someone like Driscoll Rose, might actually be innocent, hang there, pregnant with all the doubt he needed, for a long silent moment before he continued. “What I’m driving at it this, Mrs. Smart: If you don’t have an opinion about the case, if you can really be impartial, if you’re going to hear all the evidence before you decide on a verdict, then – because there has been no evidence – you have to believe that Driscoll Rose is an innocent man, don’t you?”

She had only a vague idea what he was asking her. And while she thought he must be wrong, she suspected he must be right. Then she remembered.

“The presumption of innocence - Is that what you mean?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. It isn’t enough to say that you won’t make a decision until the end of the trial. You have to understand, you have to believe, that Driscoll Rose is innocent; innocent until and unless the state proves – proves beyond that famous reasonable doubt – that he isn’t.”

Michael Harlowe was good, as good as any lawyer Walter Bannister had seen. With just a few short questions, he had exposed a bias the juror had not known she had, and, even more importantly, made her think that the presumption of innocence was something in which she had always believed. Bannister admired things that were done well, especially when they had to do with what most others ignored. Every lawyer, at least every lawyer who tried cases in court, understood that jury selection was important, but there were not that many who understood why. Most of them did not even know there was a question. They assumed, like most of the public, that the whole purpose of jury selection was to discover any bias a prospective juror might have and to dismiss anyone who could not be impartial. They thought a trial only started when the jury was sworn and the first witness was called to the stand; they did not understand that the trial, and in many ways the most serious part of the trial, started with the examination of the first juror called into the box.

Anyone who watched Michael Harlowe work would have known that. It was how he had won so many cases, convincing a jury to return a verdict of not guilty for defendants no one, including the members of the jury, thought was really innocent. It was the way he talked to them on voir dire, the way he explained their obligation to hold the prosecution to the highest, most stringent standard of proof; the way he made them promise, without quite knowing that they had, never to vote to convict someone, even someone they were convinced must have done it, unless the prosecution had proven every element of its case. Harlow knew what he was doing, but he had another advantage no one can teach and no amount of money can buy. A juror might hate Harlowe’s client, the way every juror in the murder trial of Daniel Lee Atkinson had hated him, but no one who served on a jury ever hated Harlowe. He was too likeable, his face too friendly, too open, for that. Juries, forced by the sheer weight of the evidence to bring back guilty verdicts, often looked at him as if they thought they should apologize for the necessity under which they had acted.

As Bannister listened to Harlowe’s questions and then watched the response; as he followed with growing admiration the way, step by step, he established a new degree of trust with first one juror then the next; he found himself wondering whether the jury would feel that same reluctance at the end of this trial, when they brought back a verdict of guilty against Driscoll Rose, as he had no doubt they would.

Jury selection lasted the better part of a week. Finally, a jury of five men and seven women was sworn and Judge Bannister gave the first set of instructions on what they were there to do. If Michael Harlowe was good at making a jury think he was something they could trust, Walter Bannister was as good, or better, than anyone on the bench in making a jury, and not just a jury - everyone in the courtroom – believe that what was about to happen, the trial that was now about to commence, was the most important public responsibility they would ever be given. And just as Harlowe owed much of his success to how likeable he was, Bannister owed much of his to nothing more complicated than his manner. Everything about him, from the way he held himself to the look in his gray green eyes, set him apart as that rarity in the modern age: a serious man who treated others as if they were serious as well. When he walked into court, jurors without realizing it sat up and worried they might not have dressed with sufficient formality. Even Hector Alfonso, who did it often enough anyway, straightened his tie. And then there was his voice, a gentle baritone that spoke intelligence and kindness, a voice that held you in its gentle grasp and made you certain that every word he spoke was true.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you’ve now taken the oath, sworn to listen to all the evidence; sworn to be impartial, sworn to reach a just verdict based solely on the evidence offered at trial. A man’s life is at stake here. The defendant, Driscoll Rose, has been charged with the murder of Gloria Baker. The defendant has entered a plea of not guilty. That means that he denies committing the crime with which he has been charged. He has, in other words, asserted his innocence. Let me make this as plain as I know how. The defendant says he is innocent, and you must believe him. You must continue to believe in his innocence throughout the trial. That is what the presumption of innocence means.

“The prosecution will present evidence which in its judgment will prove the defendant’s guilt. You should doubt every piece of evidence the prosecution offers. You should wonder whether what the prosecution insists proves a fact proves that fact at all. You should ask yourselves what other explanation there might be. You should, in other words, constantly ask whether there might be a reason to doubt anything the prosecution says.

“I am now going to say something that will surprise you even more than what I have said already. You are not here to decide what happened the night Gloria Baker was killed. You are here to decide whether the state can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed murder. Despite what you may have read in books or seen in movies, you are here not to sit in judgment on the defendant, but on the prosecution. You are not here to decide whether you believe the defendant is guilty; you are here to decide whether the state has proven it. This distinction, ladies and gentlemen, is the most important one there is. It is the entire foundation of the criminal law.”

Michael Harlowe tried hard not to smile.

Later that day the two lawyers made their opening statements, a preview from their different perspectives of the evidence that would be presented during the course of the trial. The flamboyant and gregarious Hector Alfonso was certain that the jury after hearing all of it would have no choice but to convict; the relentless and seemingly modest Michael Harlowe was convinced they would have no alternative but to acquit. That evening, in the privacy of his journal, Walter Bannister wrote down things that would have astonished and troubled them both.

“The trial has finally started. After waiting for months, it’s finally come. Has anyone ever been in my position: presiding over the trial of a man accused of murdering a woman for whose death you are responsible. It is a strange feeling, a kind of power, knowing things about what happened that no one else knows; watching the lawyers go about their business, trying a case that should never have happened. It’s like watching a movie based on the life of someone you know, knowing that you are the only one watching who knows they got it all wrong.

“It was not difficult to make certain that the case would be tried in my courtroom and not in front of some other judge. Everything that has happened is my responsibility and I am not going to allow anyone else to finish what I started. I have to be sure of the outcome. It was almost funny, the look of relief on their faces, when I told my good friends, my honorable brethren on the bench who think only of their golf game and their retirement, that unless any of them had a strong desire to handle the case themselves, I would take the murder trial of Driscoll Rose. They were afraid of it, afraid of being caught in the middle between the district attorney, who sees this trial as just one more step on the road to becoming governor, and that part of the Hollywood crowd more concerned with what a murder conviction will do to the town’s reputation than whether one of their own is guilty.

“The trial is mine, and now I get to sit there and watch the lawyers work, the way a child watches a puppet show. I wrote the script, I decided on the story, and now, the puppets all in place, I pull the strings. It is a false analogy. There are no puppets, there are no strings. It is instead a short story by someone like Borges: each character, driven by the necessity of his situation, acting out his part, unaware that what he thinks necessity is in reality the invention of someone else, someone they would never believe could possibly be involved. Whether it is the God of revelation, or the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle’s physics, something starts the world in motion. I started this - caused one woman’s death - and now I get to watch the zealous ignorance with which everyone else grapples with the problem of how it all happened. Is that why God created the world: to marvel at the stunning stupidity of human beings?

“If I knew nothing about what happened, I wonder what I would think. It’s a trial like any other if you change the names; a young woman murdered, a rejected former lover charged with the crime. But change the names back, put in two movie stars, and suddenly no one can get enough of it. Roger tells me that the demand for the old movies of Gloria Baker is overwhelming, and that a couple of the television networks are planning to produce films about the murder. You can sell anything with murder and celebrity. Roger claims to be appalled at that, and perhaps he is, but only because he seems to have had a genuine affection for Gloria Baker and the loss of Driscoll Rose is costing him money.”

Bannister put down the black fountain pen and slowly read what he had written. He did not like it. There were too many false starts and too much indirection. He began to scratch out the offending lines, hoping in that way to become more direct and more concise. Then, suddenly, calling himself a fool, he began to laugh. No one was going to read this. Why make corrections? What dismal discipline to worry whether what would never see the light of day was well-written! It was both the strength and the failure of his character, this strange and unrelenting demand for doing nothing unless he could do it well. No one was going to read this? No one was going to pass judgment on what he had written? What difference did that make? The standards by which he judged himself had always been higher than anyone else would have thought to impose.

It was at this precise moment that he realized that there was always the possibility that someone might read it after all. If something happened to him – if he died – someone would find it wherever in the house he had hidden it. Turning in his chair he stared out the window at the moonlit back lawn and the dancing shadow of the palm trees on the smooth, unruffled surface of the pool. Would it matter, after he was dead, if the world discovered that in the most serious sense his life had been a fraud, that he had come to doubt – no, not to believe at all – all the things that as a judge he was supposed to represent; that he had spent half his time on the bench wishing he had known more than the bare abstractions of existence; wondering, in fact, what it would be like to feel in his own hands the lethal difference between life and death, to know finally, in the act of murder, what it was really like to be alive? Everyone would say that this most respected judge had in reality been a monster; but in the secrecy of their own private thoughts, what would they really think? He had not meant for this to become a public journal, a published chronicle of depravity and the long slow descent into what the world would no doubt think madness; but perhaps, in some strange way, it would do some good: a warning of how artificial and thin is the barrier we try to erect against the onrush of evil.

If he died, they might find it; but if he was still alive a year from now, or perhaps a year or two after that, when the trial was over and he had finally left the bench and no longer felt the compulsion to write the truth about what he witnessed and what he did, he would burn it, and all his secrets would then lie undiscovered among the ashes.

However unusual it might seem, there was a certain logic to this. He wrote - or tried to write, because he never felt he ever got it quite right – the truth about himself. It had started as a way to purge himself of the fugitive, and really shocking, thoughts that with growing frequency had begun coming to him, strange thoughts that took him inside the minds of the very criminals – the murderers, rapists, and thieves – on whom he had to pass sentence. At first he had wanted to understand why they had done it, what had driven them to do things that no decent civilized person would ever dream of doing; and then, quite without realizing it, he had begun to wonder whether there might be something in the act itself so compelling that punishment lost all significance. Was it possible that there was in an act of brutal violence a kind of intoxication, a feeling, an urge, so powerful that it could be as little resisted as drink by an alcoholic or drugs by an addict? He became, again without quite realizing it, the prisoner of a new compulsion; one that so far as he knew had not been explained by anyone before, the desire to know not just the law of murder, but the murderer, what it was like to take another’s life. He tried to write the truth of that, his own confession, and through that, his own catharsis.

He picked up the pen and tried to write the truth about the trial and what had happened at the beginning.

“Hector Alfonso did nothing to help me when I tried to have Driscoll Rose charged with assault. He did worse than that. He let me know that Rose had too many powerful and influential friends. He even told me that when it came to what went on in Hollywood, Roger Stanton made the law. He would not prosecute because he was afraid of the repercussions. A Hollywood star beats senseless some poor hardworking Hispanic, where is the profit in doing anything about that? But when it comes to murder, and the murder victim is a movie star, when he has no choice but to prosecute, when the trial will get the kind of coverage he could only dream about as a candidate, then suddenly Hector is the shining knight of justice and revenge. Shining is not too strong a word for it, with that glittering, incandescent smile of his; wearing, as always, another one of his endless supply of new suits. I wonder what he does with the old ones. Does he give them away, or keep them hung in his closet, a reminder of what he had done? Does he keep them, for example, organized by each type of event, different sections filled with what he wore at a particular trial? His vanity and ambition are boundless. His opening statement, which he must have written out and memorized, had all of his usual flamboyance. He almost wept, describing the way Gloria Baker was murdered; every gesture, every word, no doubt rehearsed countless times in front of a mirror at home. At what he thought the appropriate moment, he wheeled around, his face full of exaggerated rage, pointing at Rose, the ‘vicious killer of the woman the whole country loved!’ Everyone thinks themselves an actor. Where did he get it, those cheap courtroom theatrics? - Where everyone learns what to do and how to act. The movies don’t imitate reality; we imitate what we see in the movies.

“It’s too bad I could not have stopped him in the middle of what he was saying and told the jury and the courtroom packed with reporters how the same man he was now so eager to prosecute, he just a few months ago refused to charge with a crime of which I was the principal witness; made a full confession, repeated all the reasons he had given me about all the ‘constituencies’ he had to represent and how when it came to someone like Driscoll Rose the only law that mattered was what my brother-in-law, Roger Stanton, decided. That would have changed the story everyone is there to report; that would have been a headline to remember: The prosecutor and the judge both responsible for the murder of Gloria Baker. Instead, I sit there, the way I always do, the silent observer of the play; the difference this time that the play I am condemned to watch is the play I wrote. Hector Alfonso, as great a hypocrite as I am myself, both of us there to make sure Driscoll Rose goes to prison for murder.

“And yet, despite all that, I cannot help but admire Michael Harlowe more each time I see him. Unlike Hector Alfonso, who never thinks of anything but his own future, Harlowe never thinks beyond the case he is trying, and, except for the Atkinson trial, never really believes he is going to lose. He may know his client is guilty – his client may have told him everything he has done – but once he starts, once the trial is underway, he manages to convince himself that, given what the prosecution can actually prove, no jury could possibly convict.

“What he did with the first juror, and then with all the others, was really wonderful to watch. There was one juror - the third or fourth to be examined – a man in his fifties who had been almost too eager to give Alfonso every answer he wanted to hear. But then, when Harlowe started to ask him questions, his whole demeanor changed; he held his arms across his chest and stared at Harlowe like he was the devil incarnate. Any other lawyer would have asked a few meaningless questions and then, later, when it was time to use his peremptory challenges, had him excused. But what did Harlowe do? – He looked at him the way a teacher might at a sullen child, with a wry smile full of sympathy.

“‘You’re convinced he’s guilty. You probably think anyone charged with a crime must be guilty of it. That’s okay,’ he said before that unfortunate juror could protest; ‘I like having honest people on a jury. But let me ask you, ‘Do you think everyone should obey the law?’ What could the poor man say? Of course he thought everyone should obey the law. And then, as fast as you can blink, Harlowe hit him with the next question, as simple, and as lethal, as they come. ‘Even you?’ The juror was startled, stunned that anyone could even ask; a little embarrassed, and a little offended, at what seemed to raise questions about his honesty. He forgot about the trial, forgot why he was even there; all he wanted was to make sure no one thought for a minute that he might in any way ever break the law. He almost choked himself in his hurry to insist that of course the law also applied to him. Harlowe could not have been more delighted. ‘Then you won’t hesitate to follow the law as Judge Bannister tells you to do?’ Of course he would not. ‘Even when he tells you that the law requires you to find the defendant not guilty unless and until the state has proven him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?’ He asked this question with just a touch of skepticism, but it was enough to give that juror one more incentive to insist that he would follow to the letter whatever instruction the judge might give. ‘Even if at the end of the trial, after you have heard all the evidence, you think the defendant is probably guilty, but that the state hasn’t proven it beyond a reasonable doubt, the law requires you to find him not guilty?’ This was hard, but Harlowe had left him no way out. Either you were willing to obey the law or you were not. And so he said he would, and just to be sure, added that he would do so ‘without hesitation.’ Hector Alfonso sat alone at the counsel table, grinding his teeth.

“Astonishing how simple and effective it seems when Harlowe does it. He looks at them with his Irish good looks and that easy way he has and even though they don’t know it, they want him to win. The case is everything to him, part of who he is; maybe all of who he is. That is the secret that all those lawyers who see things only from the outside will never understand. The case is who you are. When I look at Hector Alfonso, I can see him in all sorts of other situations; he seems like a visitor in court. When I see Michael Harlowe, I cannot imagine him anywhere other than in a court of law, trying a case in front of a jury. I wonder if he ever regrets, the way I regret, becoming so completely identified with what he does. Does he sometimes wonder what it would be like to be one of the people, one of the criminals, he represents? He would not for a moment have wanted to be like Daniel Lee Atkinson; he has too much intelligence, too much style, for that. But Driscoll Rose, the tragic comedy of a life like that – I wonder.

“His opening statement was a masterpiece of understatement and reserve. After Alfonso was finished with his practiced histrionics, Harlowe got to his feet and for a moment, with an eyebrow slightly raised, a silent emblem of his own distaste for what he had just heard, stood still as a stone. He did not move, but gradually the expression on his face became more severe, and more dismissive. The jurors, still affected by the emotion of Alfonso’s performance, began to notice, and, as Harlowe intended, started to forget Alfonso as they acquired a new interest: the question what, with that expression, Harlowe was going to say. He did not say much, but what he said could not have been more damaging to the prosecution. It destroyed the effect of what Alfonso had done, and it came close to destroying Alfonso.

“‘Its usually better to have a trial before you hang someone, no matter how much easier it is to do it the other way round.’

That was it, all it took, that short reminder of what a trial was all about. Suddenly, it was the defense, not the prosecution, that was on the side of the law; the defense, not the prosecution, that insisted that you needed evidence to prove your case. Harlowe appealed to what was best in them, and all twelve of those jurors nodded in agreement. The bailiff, who had spent twenty years in the army, went rigid, and I swear if he had not remembered where he was might actually have saluted.

“Harlowe is a genius at this sort of thing, finding ways to make it seem that it is the defense, and not the prosecution, that stands for the country and the flag. Hector Alfonso, who, flushed with his own achievement had just taken his seat, almost went white with anger and embarrassment. If it were any other case, any other murder, I would be sorry to see Harlowe lose. If this trial proves anything, it will be that the best attorney does not always win. A lot depends on this. Tomorrow the prosecution calls its first witness.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

During the first several days of the trial Michael Harlowe did not ask a single question. Other than an occasional note jotted down for later use, he listened to the witnesses for the prosecution like a student sitting through a lecture he had heard before. Shifting position in his chair, drumming his fingers on the table, or staring straight ahead with the bleak expression of someone for whom minutes seem like hours, he rather rushed to his feet each time Hector Alfonso finished his direct examination and he had once again to answer in the negative Judge Banister’s question whether he wished to cross-examine the witness.

There was nothing to dispute, nothing to argue about. Gloria Baker had been murdered, her death the result of multiple stab wounds. Harlowe would have stipulated to that - he said in open court that the defense had no doubt that the victim had died like that – but the prosecution wanted all the bloody details. Gloria Baker, the woman everyone had seen and thought they knew, had died of stab wounds, but how many times had she been stabbed, and how much pain had she been forced to endure? The fact of death was not enough; it was necessary to show, and to make the jury feel, that how she died was more important than death itself might have been. This was to make the artful murderer, one who kills his victim while his victim sleeps or through the kind of slow poisoning that goes unnoticed, somehow less blameworthy than the murderer who kills by a sudden violent assault, but that was a distinction the defense could scarcely draw and the prosecution would never notice.

The details of death and what it looked like - the testimony of those who examined the body and the photographs taken of the body at the scene – had their inevitable, and from the prosecution’s point of view, desirable effect. Death was no longer an abstraction; it was something real and, more than that, a cause, a matter about which it was necessary to take sides. Gloria Baker had been murdered, slashed to death from the testimony the jury had heard and the pictures they had seen, and sitting just a few feet away from them was the man the police had arrested and the district attorney had all but sworn was responsible.

Harlowe knew what he was up against; he had faced it often enough before. Forget all the talk about reasonable doubt and the presumption of innocence; once a jury felt a connection with the victim, once they began to see her as a woman whose murder could not go unpunished, they start to believe that the greatest danger was that they might let a murderer go free. The lead detective, the one who had been in charge of the investigation, gave him the first chance to repair the damage.

Wilson Patterson was used to testifying in court. He knew how to wait until Alfonso finished his question, and then wait just a moment longer as if he wanted to make sure he had not misunderstood. Only then would he turn to the jury and describe what he had seen when he arrived at the scene of the murder.

“The victim, Gloria Baker, was lying on the living room floor. There were gashes in her abdomen and the t-shirt she was wearing was ripped to shreds. It was obvious she had been stabbed repeatedly.”

With three fingers of his right hand touching the railing, Hector Alfonso stood at the end of the jury box, a look of intense surprise, fraudulent and convincing, on his face.

“Stabbed repeatedly,” he said, shaking his head. “Describe to the jury, if you would, what else you saw. There was blood on her body; was there blood anywhere else?”

“Yes; some, on the wall, several feet away; and some on the carpet just below it.”

“And that told you…?”

“That she had first been assaulted a short distance from where we found her body. There must have been a struggle. A pillow from the sofa was on the floor next to her head. The killer must have used it to stifle her screams.”

Patterson turned away from the jury, ready for the next question; but Alfonso waited while the last words ‘stifle her screams’ echoed in the hushed silence of the room. Then he repeated them, said them himself, again shaking his head, but this time with horror at what everyone was now forced to imagine.

Patterson, in his early forties, had too much experience to show emotion or even a change of expression. He sat with folded hands, the only movement, and that a cautious one, a slight shifting of his eyes as he measured the reaction to Alfonso’s studied repetition of what he, the witness, had just said. He wondered at the cheap theatrics of it, whether things like that really worked. As far as he was concerned, Hector Alfonso was a fraud, a politician who would not remember the name of a murder victim five minutes after he had convicted the killer. Facts were facts - that is what they were there to prove – but Alfonso had to have his circus.

“To stifle her screams,” said Alfonso one last time. A look of angry disgust framed his dark, piercing eyes. “So she tried to fight back, to get away, but he covered her mouth with that pillow and kept stabbing her with that knife he had. Is that how it looked to you?”

Harlowe was on his feet, but he did not say anything. He just stood there, as if dazzled by the sheer enormity of what he had just seen.

“Mr. Harlowe?” asked Bannister. “Is there something you would like to say?”

“I’m not sure where to start, your Honor. Leading the witness isn’t the half of it. Perhaps instead of calling any more witnesses, the district attorney should just call himself, take the stand and make the testimony come out just the way he wants it to. Why bother calling anyone else when all he wants is to ask them if they agree with him?”

Walter Bannister enjoyed this and did nothing to disguise it. He leaned forward, a smile on his lips.

“And that way, I suppose, instead of a trial we could have a contest in rhetoric, each of you giving speeches. I’m not prepared to say that might not be more entertaining, but there is some question whether it would really get us any closer to the truth. But to your specific point, that Mr. Alfonso is leading the witness. Is that your objection?”

“Yes, your Honor, it is.”

Bannister leaned back, the smile gradually fading away. “Sustained.”

As a gifted politician, Alfonso had an appreciation for a well-turned phrase and, more than that, a keen sense of when something worked and when it did not. Harlowe had scored, but not as much as he would have if Bannister had not changed the perspective and made it seem that Alfonso was not the only one playing a lawyer’s game.

“Thank you, your Honor,” he remarked with a quick, friendly glance toward the jury. “I’ll try to do better. Now, Detective Patterson, based on what you observed and your experience as a police detective, would you describe what you believe to have been the sequence of events as they happened during the fatal assault?”

Patterson knew what was expected; they had gone over it often enough, the two of them, alone in Alfonso’s office, getting ready for trial. He said all the right things, and said them in the right order. Gloria Baker had been stabbed the first time approximately ten feet from where she ended up; then, during the struggle, the killer had grabbed a pillow from the sofa, probably to cover her face, and stabbed her several times before she fell to the floor where she was found, lying dead, the next morning.

“Found by whom?”

“Her personal assistant, Yolanda Ross.”

“And she’s the one who called the police?”

“Yes, she was. She was very upset, almost in a state of shock.”

“But still able to answer your questions?”

“Yes; she was very clear about everything. She said that -”

“No, Detective Patterson; Ms. Ross will be testifying later. She can tell us what she told you.”

Alfonso stepped away from the jury box, went back to the counsel table and glanced at his notes. He nodded twice as if to emphasize the importance of what he had just read.

“Gloria Baker was stabbed to death. According to the forensic evidence she was stabbed with a knife, the kind commonly called a butcher knife. Did you find a knife like this – did you find any knife – on the floor or anywhere near the body?”

“No; we didn’t find the murder weapon. There was no knife near the body or anywhere else.”

“Was a search made of the house, of the area around the house?”

“We searched everywhere, in the house, all up and down the street, outside along the beach. There was nothing.”

“And what conclusion did you draw from that?”

“Conclusion? I’m not sure I understand.”

Alfonso started to betray his irritation, but caught himself in time.

“All I mean,” he said in a kind, tolerant voice, “is if she was stabbed with a knife and the knife was not there, doesn’t it mean that the killer must have taken it with him?”

“Or her!” cried Harlowe as he shot out of his chair.

“Yes, all right,” said Alfonso, not bothering to turn around and look. “Does it mean that the killer took it?”

“Yes, the killer must have taken it.”

“But he didn’t bring it there, did he? The knife didn’t belong to him, did it? It belonged to her, to Gloria Baker, didn’t -”

“Objection! Leading, as leading as any question ever asked,” insisted Harlowe, throwing up his hands as a smile slipped effortlessly across his mouth.

Again, Alfonso did not take his determined eyes off the witness, and he did not wait for Bannister to rule.

“I’ll rephrase the question. Was a knife missing from Gloria Baker’s home?”

“In the kitchen, which is just off the living room, there was one of those wooden blocks that hold a set of knives. One of them – the butcher knife – was missing.”

“The same kind of knife used to murder Gloria Baker?”

“Yes, the same kind.”

Alfonso shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and, rolling his shoulders forward, fell into a long, brooding silence. He kicked his right foot softly against the courtroom’s dull wooden floor and pressed his lips tight together, struggling, as it seemed, with the question he wished he did not have to ask.

“We know she was murdered, and we know from the testimony of the coroner that there was no evidence of sexual intercourse, but that doesn’t tell us if her killer tried to rape her first. Did you observe anything that might suggest that? Her t-shirt was torn from the stab wounds, but what about the other clothing she was wearing?”

“There’s no evidence of an attempted rape. She was wearing a pair of shorts and they were still in place, had not been torn at all. Ms. Baker wasn’t killed by a rapist; she wasn’t killed resisting a sexual attack. That wasn’t the reason she was murdered.”

Patterson said this in a way that suggested that he knew precisely why Gloria Baker had been murdered, knew it with as much certainty as he knew his own name. Everyone sitting in the courtroom knew what the next question would be. Harlowe knew it, and had already shoved his chair back, ready to object to what he and Alfonso both knew was completely inadmissible.

“What was the reason, Detective Patterson – the reason Gloria Baker was murdered?”

“Objection!” shouted Harlowe at the top of his voice. “Calls for a conclusion, and that is just the beginning. There has been no evidence concerning motive, none. And -”

With a slight, but decisive shake of his head that mirrored perfectly his quick and emphatic ruling, Bannister cut him off.

“Sustained.”

It stopped the question, but it did not stop Hector Alfonso. His eyes glistened with cheerful defiance.

“We know she was murdered, and we know that she wasn’t murdered by some stranger, some intruder, some -” He shot a glance upward at the bench where he met the watchful gaze of Walter Bannister just long enough to flash a false apology. “Sorry, your Honor. I’m getting a little ahead of myself.” And just like that, his eyes were back on the witness. “This business about a stranger, an intruder: were there any signs of a break-in: windows broken, doors kicked in – anything like that?”

“No; nothing to indicate a forcible entry.”

“No one broke in; which means…?”

“She must have known him; she must have let him in.”

“She must have known him,” repeated Alfonso in a low, thoughtful voice, nodding to underscore the importance of what the jury had just been told. “She must have let him in.”

He stood there, drawing every eye toward him, enjoying every minute of it, fairly glowing with the sense of having accomplished with this witness everything he wanted. Then, suddenly, turning on his heel, he walked briskly to the counsel table.

“No further questions.”

Harlowe was on his way to the jury box before Alfonso had reached his chair. Smiling at the detective, he scratched his head.

“Or her, you mean?”

Patterson had no idea what he was talking about.

“You said she must have known him – or her, correct?”

This was to split a hair that had already been divided.

“Sure, whatever,” sighed Patterson.

“Sure, whatever? Oh, I see – you know the murderer must be man and not a woman because you know the defendant is guilty and the trial, so far as you’re concerned, is just a waste of time!”

“Your Honor!” protested Alfonso.

“Ask a question, Mr. Harlowe,” instructed Bannister in his quiet, commanding voice.

Harlowe pushed his gray suit coat back and placed both hands on his hips. He stared hard at the witness and then, unaccountably, began to laugh.

“‘She must have known him; she must have let him in,’” he mocked. “Tell me – tell the jury – Detective Patterson: what do you do, if you’re sitting at home and someone rings your doorbell. Do you peek out the window; do you hide in a corner and hope they go away? No, don’t answer. Let me guess. You go to the door, like everyone else, and you open it. Am I right?”

“Yes, I answer the door.”

“Very good. But that means, doesn’t it, that you don’t really know – you don’t have any evidence one way or the other – whether she knew the person who did this?”

Patterson tried to limit the damage.

“We know who she was expecting; we know -”

“That wasn’t my question! You testified that she must have known him because there were no signs of forced entry. But the one thing doesn’t necessarily follow from the other, does it?”

“Not in that sense, no.”

“Not in any sense, detective. But that isn’t the only thing you overlooked. The district attorney asked you – well, he didn’t really ask you; he told you – that the murder weapon, the knife, came from the kitchen; that the killer didn’t bring it, but got it there. But, again, you don’t know that, do you?”

The look of disdain on Harlowe’s face produced its own reaction. Patterson dug his fingers into the arms of the witness chair and glared back.

“Don’t know that? She was killed with a knife and the knife missing from the kitchen is a perfect match!”

Harlowe appeared to relent, to draw back and change his mind, to become unsure whether there was still truth in the accusation he had made.

“You mean because it seems to have been the same size, the same kind of knife?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Patterson with some heat.

“The same size, the same kind of blade?” asked Harlowe, just to be sure.

“The same size, the same kind of blade: it was the same -”

“Unless the knife in the kitchen had a serrated blade, or unless the blade had been chipped or broken. Because all you really know is that there was an empty place, an opening, where a knife of that size would fit. You testified you never found the murder weapon, didn’t you?”

“We haven’t found it.”

“So, again, based on the evidence – not on what you or anyone else thinks the evidence means – the knife that was used to murder Gloria Baker was never found, and no one knows what happened to the knife that might once have been part of a set kept in her kitchen. Does that about sum it up, detective?”

Patterson mumbled a response. Harlowe turned on him with a vengeance.

“You spoke loud enough when the district attorney was asking questions. What did you -? Never mind. You didn’t find the murder weapon; that was your testimony, wasn’t it?

“No, we didn’t find it.”

His arms folded across his chest, Harlowe stood a few feet from the witness stand facing the jury box. He looked sideways at Patterson.

“When you answer the district attorney’s questions you look at the jury; you never do that when you answer mine. Is that part of what they teach you in witness school?”

Alfonso was on his feet, but Harlowe waved him off.

“Never mind, that’s one question you don’t have to answer. Back to business. You testified that you – by that I mean the police altogether – made a thorough search inside and outside the house. Is that true?”

“We searched everywhere.”

“But without success. You didn’t find it?”

“That’s correct.”

Harlowe looked down at his shoes. He could feel the eyes of the jury. He looked up and with a bashful grin admitted the obvious. “I forgot to shine them.” And then, as if this had been a simple aside spoken among friends, immediately went back on the attack.

“Yes, I remember how the district attorney asked you about that search. He seemed especially eager to make certain we all understood how thorough it had been.”

“It was thorough,” insisted Patterson. “We searched everywhere.”

“Even more places than you described, if I’m not mistaken. But the district attorney didn’t ask you about that, did he?”

The question elicited only a blank expression, but Harlowe knew from the way Patterson suddenly blinked his eyes that the detective knew where this was going.

“You didn’t just search the home of Gloria Baker; you also searched the home of the defendant, Driscoll Rose. Isn’t that true?”

“We executed a search warrant at the home of the defendant, that’s correct.”

“The district attorney knew that – you didn’t keep it a secret, did you?”

“No, the district attorney knew. He -”

“He requested that search warrant, didn’t he? Yes, well, never mind. And I take it that after conducting that search – by the way, was it the same kind of thorough search you made of the home of the victim, Gloria Baker?”

“It was a thorough search,” replied the detective, watching Harlowe through narrowed, chastened eyes.

“You were looking for what, exactly? We have a copy of the search warrant, if you need to refresh your memory.”

“Evidence in the murder of Gloria Baker.”

Harlowe eyes shot wide open in a mockery of surprise.

“The murder weapon – the knife that may or may not have come from Ms. Baker’s kitchen! Did you find it?”

“No.”

“We heard testimony, we’ve seen the gruesome photos; all that blood – what kind of bloody clothing, what other evidence linking the defendant to the murder did you find in his home as a result of this thorough search you made?”

“We didn’t find any bloody clothing.”

“No murder weapon, no bloody clothing. You didn’t find any evidence, did you, Detective Patterson – nothing linking Driscoll Rose to the murder of Gloria Baker. Nothing, not one piece of evidence – isn’t that correct, Detective Patterson?”

“We didn’t find any physical evidence at his home.”

“In fact, there is no physical evidence of any kind that connects the defendant to the murder, is there, Detective Patterson?”

Patterson bent forward, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair. He spread his fingers and pressed them together. A tight smile of eager hostility creased the corners of his lips.

“Physical evidence – the murder weapon, blood-spattered clothes – no,there isn’t; but, as I’m sure you know, counselor, that isn’t the only kind of evidence there is.”

“Physical evidence, other kinds of evidence?” Harlowe looked at the witness as if he was not quite certain what he meant. Then it dawned on him. “Yes, I see what you mean now: The other evidence the district attorney will be introducing, the evidence you started to give yourself before he stopped you; what the prosecution’s next witness, Yolanda Ross, is going to say: that Gloria Baker was expecting someone that night; that she told Ms. Ross that Driscoll Rose was coming over. But of course that doesn’t prove that Mr. Rose actually went there, does it? Someone has an appointment; that doesn’t prove they kept it. Or perhaps you’re referring to the other evidence the district attorney will be offering: the testimony of a friend of his, Mr. Rose’s agent, who is going to testify that he and Mr. Rose had dinner that night and that when he left, Mr. Rose said he was going out to Malibu to see Gloria Baker about a movie project. But, again, that doesn’t prove Mr. Rose didn’t change his mind and go somewhere else instead, does it?”

Bannister looked at Hector Alfonso, expecting an objection; but Alfonso was more than content to let the defense attorney give a preview of the testimony he was about to introduce, proof that Rose had an appointment with Gloria Baker that night and that he had told the last person he saw that he was on his way.

Harlowe turned away from the witness and with his hand on the jury box railing looked directly at the district attorney.

“Save yourself the trouble. Driscoll Rose was there that night. He’s the one who first found the body.”

Hector Alfonso could not believe what he had heard. The courtroom was full of noise, everyone trying to understand what it meant. Alfonso kept staring at Harlowe, wondering if the defense attorney had lost his mind. The hardest part of his case had been putting Driscoll Rose at the scene, and now Harlowe had done it for him. Better yet, Rose was going to testify. He had to, there was no choice; he had been there; he would have to explain what had happened and why, if she was already dead, he had run away instead of calling the police. The only thing that bothered him was why Harlowe had done it. Harlowe was not sure himself.

“Sometimes you just do things,” he said, as he fell back in his chair and grabbed the scotch and soda waiting on his desk.

Driscoll Rose thought he understood.

“You have a reason, but you can’t explain it to anyone. Yeah, I know what that’s like.”

Harlowe took a long drink. Now, for the first time all day, he could indulge himself a little, remember and reflect on what had happened.

“It may have been a mistake,” he mused, moving the glass around to listen to the ice. There was something restful in the sound, an echo of evening at the end of the day when there was nothing left to do but think about tomorrow and what might happen then. “And then again, it may have been the only sensible thing to do, get it out there, let everyone know you were there, and that way remove all the drama when the other witnesses for the prosecution start testifying.”

Rose did not seem concerned. He unbuttoned his collar and loosened his tie. He looked at the glass of ginger ale he held in his hand and shook his head in disgust.

“Christ, I’m on trial for murder and all I get to drink is this?”

Harlowe gave him a warning look, meant to remind him of a promise.

“This is tough enough without you getting arrested for drunk driving, or getting into a fight in some bar. We talked about this.”

“Yeah, I know; but just one drink, what harm would that do? You’re not the only one who needs to relax. All I do is sit there, and try to look like a choir boy; not show any emotion when a guy like that jerk detective practically tells everyone he knows I’m guilty. You kind of ruined his day though, with that business about the search.”

“Ruined his day? I doubt it,” said Harlowe, staring into his glass with a rueful expression. “They didn’t find the knife, the murder weapon, at your place. It would have been easy to get rid of it – bury it, drop it in a river, drop it in the ocean. They didn’t find it at your place. What kind of fool would murder someone and then keep the murder weapon in the first place anyone would look for it? That’s what Alfonso is going to say.”

Harlowe took another drink and glanced at Rose. He put down the glass and bent forward on his elbows.

“When I finish this, I’m going to have another; then I’m going to have a cup of coffee and order in a sandwich. I’ll be here until sometime after midnight, getting ready for tomorrow. If you had two drinks, you’d have a third, and another one after that, and you would not stop. But even worse than the fact that you’re an alcoholic, the more you drink the meaner you get. You were drunk the night you damn near beat her to death and you’d been drinking the night she was murdered. That’s all going to come out. When your agent testifies – don’t think Alfonso will let him get away with saying you just had a drink or two; they’ve got the waiter on their witness list. That’s why I told you, the first time you came here to my office, that you either agreed you wouldn’t touch a drop while the trial was going on or I wouldn’t take the case. Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Rose, his voice heavy with resentment. “And I don’t give a damn what they say, I wasn’t drunk that night, the night Gloria was murdered. We had work to do and – ask anyone – I never have too much to drink when I’m working. You’re probably right – I’m an alcoholic, I’m an addict, I’m – a lot of things I shouldn’t be – but I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I got there.”

“Tell me again what you remember; what Patterson said today, when Alfonso asked him where he saw blood: on the body, on the floor near the body, on the wall a few feet away and on the carpet below it. Is that what you remember? Do you remember seeing blood anywhere else?”

Rose tried to remember exactly what he had seen, but finally had to admit that he had been too upset, too scared, to notice much of anything.

“There was blood all over her, but other places? – I don’t know. I guess there was blood on the wall, on the rug, the way he said; but – she was lying there; I’d never seen anyone dead before. It isn’t like the movies, it’s…it’s like there’s nothing there, nothing like what she was. So, no, I don’t remember much of anything, except that vacant stare on her face. Why, what difference does it make if there was blood on the wall or anywhere else?”

“It isn’t where it was that interests me,” said Harlow, as he picked up his pen and jotted down a note. “It’s where it wasn’t that might be important.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Roger Stanton picked at his salad with his fork and then pushed the plate away. He turned to his sister, sitting on his left, and listened a moment longer as she babbled with bright inconsequence about something he did not at first understand. Forcing a brief, nervous smile, he tried to remember what she was talking about, and then, giving up, threw down his napkin and stared in baffled wonder at his brother-in-law at the other end of the table.

“Why the hell did you let him out? That’s what I don’t understand. You practically told the world you think he’s innocent! He should have been in jail the whole time, instead of walking around like he doesn’t have anything to worry about. It’s a murder trial, and he’s still free?”

He glanced at his wife, Helen, to make certain she agreed, but instead of the expected reply, she lifted her wine glass and began to drink.

“He’s out on bail,” explained Bannister patiently. “I didn’t set him free, and I certainly did not tell the world I thought he was innocent. The question of bail has nothing to do with anything except whether someone charged with a crime will show up at their trial. And, as you may have noticed, he has.”

Stanton was only slightly mollified.

“It’s his arrogance. He thinks he can do whatever he wants, that he can get away with anything.”

“Even murder?” asked his wife with a smile full of ambiguity. She held the wine glass inches from her eyes, watching the candle light sparkle on the crystal.

“You seem to hope he does!” said Stanton sharply.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she replied with a sharp look of her own. “But I like Driscoll. I can’t help it. I always have. Everyone says he murdered Gloria, and perhaps he did; but I’m not going to turn on him just because everyone else seems to have done. I’m not going to believe he’s a murderer until the trial is over and the jury says he did it. Isn’t that what a trial is for?”

“That’s exactly what a trial is for,” said Bannister before Stanton made some remark he might later regret. But Helen was not listening; her eyes were still on her husband.

“I liked her, too. That’s the point, you see: I liked them both, despite all their flaws; maybe because of them: all those insecurities, all the pressure of what everyone else expected. I lived that life myself, remember? All that movie star fame, everyone wanting to know what you’re ‘really like,’ even people you’ve known all your life thinking that it isn’t really you anymore, that you’re not the same person. Everyone wants to be your friend, but only while they think you’re this made up character they’ve seen on the screen. It’s hard; it was hard for her, it was hard for him, and they both failed, and now she’s dead and everyone thinks he’s a murderer. And that, it seems to me, is nothing short of tragic.”

There was a long silence as the maid cleared off the dishes and served the next course. The conversation, when it started again, was muted and subdued, a fragmentary exchange of meaningless opinion, a dull, prosaic commentary on food and weather, words which once spoken were immediately forgotten, words without connection to what they were thinking to themselves.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” said Stanton over coffee. “What Helen said is right: the whole thing is tragic; it should never have happened. And yes, you’re right what you say about the trial. It’s just that I know Driscoll and I know what he’s capable of. I know what he did to her before….”

After a short silence, Helen asked if they still wanted to watch the movie, the one that was going to be released the next week.

“It’s the best thing we’ve ever made,” sighed Stanton. With a sudden burst of energy he slapped his hand hard on the table. “Maybe the worst damn picture anyone has ever seen,” he laughed. “Which isn’t to say it won’t break box office records.” He darted a knowing glance down the table to Bannister. “I’m serious: terrible picture, only fit for adolescents, and only stupid ones at that. We’ll make a fortune.”

“Sounds like something I’d love to watch,” drawled Helen with a mischievous grin at Meredith. “We had a lot of fun in our adolescent years, especially when we were doing really stupid things.” She was on her feet, a light teasing lilt in her voice as she threw back her head and in a stage whisper confided in Meredith, rising from her place the other side of the table, “Especially on hot nights like this in the back seat of some boy’s old Chevy!”

Stanton rolled his eyes as he watched his wife and sister leave.

“More coffee, more wine…more anything?” he said as he moved down the long line of vacant chairs to a seat next to where Bannister was sitting.

“So the studio isn’t in trouble?”

“You mean because of the murder and now the trial? No. We won’t do as well as we would have, but close enough. The picture they were going to make together, we’ve gone ahead with that. Two different actors, but everyone will know – the publicity campaign, discreet but direct, will make sure of it – that it’s ‘the picture they would have made, the last picture Gloria Baker was working on.’ In the meantime, we come out with the kind of thing Helen and Meredith are so eager to see.” Stanton tossed down what was left of his wine and reached for the bottle. “It doesn’t take any real talent to give the public what it wants.”

Bannister sipped on his coffee. This last remark made him smile.

“How does the public know what it wants if you, or someone like you, doesn’t tell them?”

Folding his arms loosely across his chest, Stanton cocked his head. He started to say something, but then laughed at his own impatience and with an effort at tolerance reminded his brother-in-law that they had had this conversation before.

“The ‘decline of standards,’ the ‘rush to mediocrity,’ all the stupidity everywhere. And you have a point, Walter. It’s an interesting question why we pay some screenwriter a small fortune for a script in which every third word is ‘fuck’ and no one says more than three words at a time. But don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the internet, and I sure as hell didn’t invent the pictures. That was really it, you know: the idea that you could tell the whole story pretty much without words. No one seems to remember how powerful that was: the silent movies, the ones we laugh at now. They changed everything; stories did not need language: emotion is universal. Anger, fear, jealousy, rage – anything you wanted to portray; it was all there, all you had to do was watch. And that’s what we’ve gone back to: silent movies with a lot of sound. There isn’t any dialogue, nothing like what there was in the movies we used to watch when we were kids. No one is interested in what anyone thinks; they go to the movies to see things happen. You remember Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep? Watch it again, listen to the lines. You know who wrote them, who one of the screenwriters was – William Faulkner.”

Stanton took another drink, staring past Bannister into the middle distance, haunted by something he could not forget. Though candles had been lit for dinner, there was still some light outside. Streaming through the windows, the dark scarlet sun seemed to deepen and make more profound the anguished nostalgia in his eyes.

“That’s what made me so crazy about her…about Gloria. The picture part,” he added, realizing that Walter could not know what he meant.“You thought there was something there: an intelligence, a meaning, behind all those graceful movements and those wonderful shining eyes; that if she could only speak there was something she could say that you had always wanted to hear.”

Stanton shook his head, trying in his mind to get it right, to put into words what he had felt every time he watched her, the effect she had had that no one else could quite rival.

“It was incredible, what she was on camera, on the screen. There was no one like her. Even when I tried, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It had been years since I had seen anyone who could do that, draw every eye to her wherever she happened to be in a scene. You’d look at her and think those eyes of her held all the secrets of everything you had ever wanted to know. They were Eve’s eyes, the mirror of the Garden. And then, when she wasn’t in front of a camera repeating a screenwriter’s lines – it was maddening – she’d open her mouth and you’d feel cheated, that it was all a fraud. She was crude, aggressive, pushy, and spoiled and intolerant. She was impossible. The sweetest face, the kind of gentle vulnerability that made you want to shelter her in your arms, and then, a moment later, when she started on one of her obscenity laced tirades, all that lethal sarcasm pouring out, that hot-tempered….You’d want to shove her away, slap her snide, all-knowing face – Hell, they deserved each other, Gloria Baker and Driscoll Rose, the only question which one was going to kill the other first!”

Bannister placed his hand on Stanton’s sleeve and smiled sympathetically.

“It wasn’t your fault, Roger. That’s what has you so upset, isn’t it? You think none of this would have happened if you had called the police the night he beat her up, or if he had been sent to jail after what he did that day in Santa Barbara. You can’t think like that.”

Stanton pulled his arm away and searched Bannister’s eyes.

“Because I didn’t call the police; because I asked you not to report what he did to that Hispanic kid.” He said this as if he were taking it under advisement. “You’re wrong, Walter; it would have changed everything, it would -”

“You can’t think like that! It’s all in the category of what might have been. You can drive yourself crazy that way.”

“He’s going to get convicted, isn’t he?” asked Stanton suddenly, and then immediately apologized. “I’m sorry. You’re the judge, and I’m going to be called as a witness in a few days. I wish I didn’t have to do that.”

Bannister was growing more concerned. Stanton was becoming nervous and erratic, driven by some kind of pent-up frustration. Bannister thought he knew what it was.

“You were in love with her, weren’t you, Roger? That’s why you’re beating yourself up like this, blaming yourself, because you think you could have prevented this from happening.”

“In love with her? No, I wasn’t in love with her. I was fascinated by her, by what she could have been,” he added with a distant smile full of ambivalence. “That picture, the portrait I had done of her – I’m not sure why I gave it to her. No, that’s a lie: I know damn well why I did it: to show her what she could be, what beneath that tarnished selfish surface she really was, or might have been, if she had ever figured out that what she did on screen had less to do with pretending than the role she played in real life.” With a look of discouragement, he shrugged his shoulders. “That portrait caught her essence, and I think each time she looked at it she realized that, and maybe thought she ought to try a little harder to change, to quit all the self-destructive things she did. It was a wonderful picture, but now, slashed to pieces, no one will ever know what she really was, deep down inside, the source, really, of that marvelous quality she had that never came out except when she was in front of a camera.”

“The picture,” said Bannister, repeating it as if he had just been reminded of something, “slashed to pieces. Yes, just as you say. People do things, don’t they, in moments of anger, of rage?”

Stanton was not listening. He wanted too much to talk, to lose in the sound of his own voice all memory of Gloria Baker and everything that had happened.

“We never talk about you, Walter. It’s always about the movies and the business and what’s going on with me. You never talk about yourself. When someone asks, you turn the question around and make it all about them. I was still in college when you married Meredith, and for reasons I can’t imagine you’re still married to her. Don’t misunderstand,” he cautioned with a quick, indulgent smile, “she’s my sister and I love her, but it must drive you crazy the way she is, always flitting from one thing to the next, desperate to be at the center of things. She’s always been that way, as long as I can remember, afraid something might happen when she wasn’t there. You must hate it, dragged to all these dinners and parties and fundraising events for all the dozens of charities with which she’s involved. You’d rather be home reading, studying the law, getting ready for whatever you have coming up in court.”

“Your sister,” remarked Bannister in a civil, forgiving voice; “thinks the world of you. She won’t hear anything against anything you’ve done, any picture you ever made.”

It was exactly what Stanton would have expected, the immediate defense of his sister, whatever Bannister really thought.

“Yes, I know; but I wonder if she’d be like that if instead of running a studio I had been a failure. You don’t have to answer that. Maybe I don’t give her enough credit. I suppose I could look at it the other way round and wonder why, given how different the two of you are, she’s stayed married to you.”

“Habit, mainly; we’ve gotten used to one another,” replied Bannister with a cryptic smile. “That’s probably the reason most marriages go on, don’t you think?”

Raising his eyes to signal his brother-in-law had a point, Stanton pushed back against the chair until his legs were stretched out straight in front of him. For a moment, he stared pensively at his hands, clasped together in his lap. When he looked up there was an embarrassed, puzzled expression on his face. A question that had not occurred to him before now seemed a mark of his own regrettable self-absorption.

“Habit, what we get used to; it explains more than marriage, doesn’t it? How long have I known you, and we really don’t know anything about each other.”

“What is it you think you don’t know about me?” he asked cautiously.

“Hell, I don’t know. Well, all right – why did you become a judge? I actually have no idea. You were first in your class in college, first in your class in law school. You joined one of the biggest law firms in town – you could have ended up running the place. And if you wanted to be a judge, why this – a trial court judge – instead of….You could have been a federal court judge, an appellate judge – maybe by now on the Supreme Court.”

“You want the truth? – I never liked the law, I didn’t like law school, and I hated the practice. It’s duller than anything you can imagine, and the firm I was in….It was all about money. That was the one real advantage I had: I didn’t need the money; I was already rich. But there I was, a lawyer, married with a house in Bel Aire. And yes, I could have become an appellate court judge, not because I had any great talent for it, but between Meredith’s side of the family and mine we contributed enough money to politicians….But that would have been to exchange one kind of paper law for another, looking at how someone else had applied the law to a case. I wanted to do something that would show me more of life, what it means to sometimes do things you’re not supposed to do. That’s the real secret, if you really want to know: a trial judge gets to watch what happens when the real secrets of other people get exposed, when they’re called to account for doing the terrible things people do.

“I thought I might like the action, the struggle when something more serious than money – life or death – is at stake; a look at how people really live. I suppose I was a kind of voyeur, protected all my life behind a wall of privilege that, I have to admit, I didn’t even know was there. I just assumed – maybe most of us just assume – that everyone has the same ambitions and wants the same things. It isn’t true, of course. We read about things in the paper, see them on television, but it all seems unreal, the kind of things that don’t happen to ordinary, normal people – people like us – whose main problem growing up was deciding where to go to college and, after we get married, where we wanted to live.”

Bannister had said more than he had intended to say, drawn on, as he now realized, by the eager curiosity shining in Stanton’s eyes, nodding in agreement as if they had in some sense led parallel lives.

“What I said about Gloria, how she was more real in front of the camera than anywhere else – It’s the same thing, don’t you see?”

Bannister did not see it at all.

“On the screen, in front of the camera, she put everything into living that one part. There’s a consistency in that. She wasn’t doing one thing one minute and something else the next; she wasn’t always changing her mood, happy without a care in the world and then, without warning, the complete bitch, demanding and resentful, full of malice. Isn’t that what you were looking for: something that let you make sense out of things: a trial, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, the action always heading to one inevitable result, even when the result is wrong.”

“Even when the result is wrong,” said Bannister slowly, repeating the words with a significance they had not had when Stanton first spoke them. “That happens sometimes in court; there’s no doubt about it.”

Stanton caught the meaning, or what he thought the meaning. He looked at Bannister with a sense of urgency.

“But that won’t happen this time, will it? Driscoll will be convicted, won’t he?”

Bannister would not violate the practiced impartiality of his position. He said nothing. The silence became awkward and uncomfortable.

“He deserves to be convicted,” insisted Stanton, inventing the certainty he needed. “And he will. Hector doesn’t try cases he thinks he might lose.”

With a cool, appraising glance, Bannister almost agreed.

“That’s always been his problem: the only thing he ever looks at is the effect something will have on him. Driscoll Rose could be completely innocent, but that would not stop him; not if a conviction will help make him governor. But then, everyone has something they want, don’t you think?”

Though always generous when it was a question of something her brother had done, Meredith had to admit that the movie she had watched with Helen had been “maybe not as good as some of the others he has made.”

Sitting in the passenger seat, watching the endless traffic on the freeway, the lights like fireflies in the night, Bannister could not help but laugh.

“That means Roger was right: it was pretty awful.”

Her eyes straight ahead, both hands on the wheel, she refused to go that far.

“Just because it isn’t something you or I might like, there is that whole audience out there that seems to like this kind of thing and -”

“We talked about that. What did Helen say – not about the movie, about Roger? He doesn’t seem himself. He seemed nervous, distracted, and what he said about the studio not being in trouble…I’m not sure I believe him. Something is bothering him.”

Meredith gave him a sharp look, and then, because she was not a very good driver and knew it, turned back to the road.

“You’d be a nervous wreck too, if you had to deal with all the things he’s had to. One of your best stars murdered, another one charged with doing it; everyone in Hollywood – all the reporters – always calling, demanding to know what’s going on; the money people worried about their investment; and at the same time still trying to run the studio, get pictures made. I wonder if you have any idea what that kind of pressure can do to someone.”

“No, I suppose I don’t,” said Bannister, watching again the endless play of light in the darkness all around him.

They drove along in silence, the same route they had taken for years, the same route they had taken every few weeks when there was a dinner or a small gathering of friends and Roger remembered how much his sister liked to feel she was part of the Hollywood crowd.

“I tried to warn him about those two,” she said, shaking her head at all the sadness that might have been averted had anyone listened. “They may have been wonderful on the screen, but….The trouble they were always in, one scandal after another; all the liquor, all the drugs.”

“Roger seems to have cared about her, seems to have thought she could have been quite special.”

“That’s what Roger does,” she said, not to dismiss the importance of this, but rather to emphasize it. “He can see things in people: what they can be - what they will be with the right kind of training and support. That’s part of his genius, why he’s so incredibly good at what he does. He’s always been gifted that way.”

The conversation, like most of the ones they had, was punctuated by long silences, a blank interval between one train of thought and another one that was often completely different. Bannister was thinking about what Roger had said about the portrait he had commissioned and how it had, more than any photograph, captured the essence of what Gloria Baker really was. It struck him as a singular insight, a strange, eerie explanation of what had happened; the difference, so much more striking in her case than in most others, between what she was and what she could have been. It was all right there in that remarkable painting that some unknown artist had done, that look she had that followed you like a promise of everything you had ever wanted. It was no wonder she had driven nearly all of those who knew her a little crazy, this knowledge they had of what she could be, what she could have been all the time and not just up there on the screen. And, as Bannister had to admit, she had had that effect on him; driven him a little crazy and made him do something he wished more than anything he had not done.

The night was everywhere. Shadows leaped across the road under wind swept trees and a block from their house a cat darted into the street and ran past the swerving headlights of the car. A strange, fugitive smile stole across his mouth

“How would you feel,” he asked in a distant voice, “if you found out tomorrow – if you woke up and read in the papers – that I had murdered someone?”

“You, Walter?”

“Yes, me. I’m serious. How would you feel, what would you think? Imagine it: you pick up the paper, or you turn on the television, and there I am, being led away in handcuffs. ‘Judge Walter Bannister arrested for murder!’”

“What would I think?” she asked in the same light-hearted irritation. “That it was a practical joke. You murder someone….I mean, who would ever believe that?”

She waited while the gate opened and then drove slowly up the long, winding drive. There was something in his voice that made her uneasy. She knew what he was doing, and she did not like it.

“I really don’t understand you sometimes. We have this awful thing going on, this terrible murder, and now the trial, and I just tried to explain to you how difficult its been for Roger – with everything he’s going through – and you want to turn this into some kind of game where you play the murderer and I get to play the astonished wife who didn’t know she was married to a killer! Good grief, Walter – is that what you do all day in court: imagine what all those awful people are really like?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted in a voice that carried a hint of resentment she was too agitated to notice. “Yes, sometimes I’ve done that, wondered what it would be like to be one of them. Sometimes. But you didn’t tell me: what would you feel, what would you do?”

“Oh, Walter, for God’s sake - !”

Still shaking her head, she parked the car and without another word headed for the house. She had just opened the door and turned on the light when she turned back.

“If you’re going for one of your late night walks, be careful. There’s a real killer out there somewhere, someone killing cats and dogs. They found another one, a dog this time, two days ago.” Her anger abated, she waited until he was next to her and then kissed him gently on the side of his face. “I mean it, Walter; be careful. If you see anyone suspicious, don’t take any chances. Someone like that…who knows what they might do.”

Bannister promised that if he saw anyone like that, he would come right home. He shut the door behind them, said goodnight to his wife and went down the hallway to his study.

Pouring himself a stiff drink, scotch and barely a splash of soda, he sat for a long time in the darkness, staring out the window as he followed in his mind the secret thread only he possessed through the labyrinth only he knew existed. He watched it roll out from the beginning to the end, from the start of the chain of events that had led with what had been only retrospective inevitability to the death of Gloria Baker; and then traced backward from the night of her murder to that first important motion picture she had made. He knew the story both ways at once, knew it now all by heart, dazzled by the clarity with which each detail, each small episode, had played its part. If tragedy is the inability to escape a fate foretold, the death of Gloria Baker had certainly been that.

He sat there for nearly half an hour, thinking back over everything that had happened. Then, driven by the harsh requirements of his disciplined, orderly mind to make a record of what he thought worth remembering, he unlocked the drawer in which he kept what he had lately come to call his journal of evil, the place where he forced confession from the dark and unrepentant part of his soul.

“‘Tonight I asked Meredith what she would do if she found out I had murdered someone. She refused to take me seriously. No one takes me seriously. I am a judge; that is all: a judge, neutral and impartial, who never shows emotion, a moral albino, an intellectual eunuch; a living, breathing abstraction; a disembodied voice of reason that people listen to and then immediately forget. I am incapable of the kind of connection that makes one person believe passionately in another. I exist only as a temporary expedient, a source of certainty in the jarring confusion of other people’s lives when through their own stupidity they have to be reminded of what they should have known already. Meredith was right: no one would believe it – not at first.

“‘I learned something tonight. Roger was in love with Gloria Baker. He claims it was more of an obsession, but that is really the same thing when you’re talking about someone as beautiful and bewitching as she was. What he said about the picture, the portrait he had someone paint, the one that hung above the sofa in the living room, told me things I would not otherwise have suspected. He was in love with her - there is no question about that - in love with what she could have been, what deep down she really was, though she may not have known it herself. Strange, and yet I suspect he probably was not far off the mark, when he said that what she was on screen involved less pretending than what she was off screen in the ‘real’ world.

“‘Roger is more intelligent than I had imagined. I think he’s right, that what we do in our work - whatever that work might be - says more about who we are than what we are when we are free to do whatever we like. She might have been playing a character empty-headed and frivolous, but doing that takes a level of single-minded concentration, a controlled energy, that we almost never bring to other things. Is that the reason so many things have become dull and uninspiring, the reason there doesn’t seem to be any great love affairs anymore? – No one knows how to devote themselves entirely to one great passion. Is that the reason this marriage of mine has for so many years been an empty shell? Is that the reason why I did what I did that night? All I have anymore are questions, all questions and no answers; none that make sense. I wish the trial was over. I wish I could forget everything. I wish I had never seen that picture.’”

Walter Bannister put down his pen and looked at what he had written and knew that none of it, nothing he could ever write, could help him solve the problem that threatened to destroy him. More tired than he could remember, he locked the journal away and went for a long walk outside in the silent starlit darkness.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Yolanda Ross wanted to make a statement. She was not quite clear what kind of statement it should be. She was a witness for the prosecution. That suggested an aggressive quest for retribution against the defendant; but the victim had been her friend and did not that require something reserved and even subdued? It was a question of what she should wear. She could not dress in bright colors, that much she was sure of, and brown in any shade was too drab. Blue was all right, but it did not bring out the dark richness of her eyes or the marvelous bronze glow of her skin. She decided on black.

Looking through her closet, she remembered what she and Gloria Baker had told each other when they had been a couple of Hollywood unknowns, that all it took was to get noticed by someone who counted. Gloria had laughed, and later, after she had become famous, laughed again, convinced they had been right, that nothing happened unless you first caught someone’s eye. Yolanda did not doubt for a minute that her friend would have laughed again when she picked out the dress that would the day she wore it to court in a murder trial make all the papers.

Hector Alfonso was on his feet, announcing with his usual serious exuberance the next witness for the prosecution. The door at the back of the courtroom swung open and in the astonished silence that followed Yolanda Ross stepped out of the pages of Vogue. Dressed in a sleek black dress that fitted like a second skin and a large black hat of the kind worn by gorgeous young women on the fashionable streets of Milan, she moved with dazzled and sad indifference, moved without effort, alive with the knowledge that every eye was on her. When she had settled herself comfortably in the witness chair, she looked at Hector Alfonso and with a soft smile let him know he could begin.

Alfonso was too stunned to speak. He had interviewed her, gone over her testimony, made sure there would be no misunderstanding and no mistakes. He had seen her in his office on three separate occasions, the last time only two days earlier. She had dressed casually, once even wore jeans, and if she had worn any makeup it was nothing he had noticed. He had told her to dress conservatively when she came to court and she made some vague remark about wearing a dark colored dress. And now this! – A beautiful exotic from somewhere south of the border, far south of the border, Argentina or Brazil, looking as if she were on her way to a movie premiere and had just stopped by to say hello!

A stupid grin took sudden possession of Alfonso’s mouth. He threw up his hands and laughed out loud.

“You certainly know how to make an entrance, Ms. Ross!”

She smiled, said nothing, and waited.

Alfonso, no fool, looked at the jury and, as if taking them into his confidence, smiled.

“I would say that I’ve seldom seen anyone walk into a courtroom and have quite that effect,” he said as his eyes moved back to her. “But this is a courtroom, and we have some serious business to take care of, some questions that have to be answered. So, let’s begin.”

He paused to give her time to get ready, and then, to make it clear to everyone that this was still a murder trial, went immediately to her reaction the moment she discovered the body.

“What did you think, what was the first thing that entered your mind, when you found Gloria Baker lying dead on the living room floor?”

“That it had finally happened, that Driscoll had finally killed her!”

Harlowe came out of his chair so fast that the pen with which he had started to make a note went flying onto the floor.

“Objection! That’s outrageous! There’s no foundation, no facts – nothing! This is sheer speculation; this is -”

“Sustained!” cried Bannister before he could finish. Bannister was angry and he did nothing to conceal it. “Be careful, Mr. Alfonso, I won’t warn you again.” He looked past the district attorney to the jury. “The jury is instructed to ignore both the question and the answer. What the witness thought at the time is of no relevance whatsoever. Now, Mr. Alfonso, perhaps you could limit yourself to a legitimate line of inquiry.”

“Yes, your Honor,” replied Alfonso, bristling. Turning to the witness, he smiled sympathetically.

“Let’s start at the beginning. What was the reason you went to Gloria Baker’s home on the morning in question?”

With this question and several more that followed it, Alfonso led Yolanda Ross through the chronology of her employment as Gloria Baker’s personal assistant.

“And so you typically came to her house in the morning. Would you describe to the jury what happened that morning, the morning you found her?”

In a rich and sometimes breathless voice, her eyes growing wider as she spoke, Yolanda Ross recited from memory what she had told the district attorney in private.

“I got there a little after eight-thirty. I knocked, the way I always did, but it was only to let her know I was there. If the door was locked, as it sometimes was, I had my own key.”

“And was the door locked that morning?”

“No; it was closed, but it wasn’t locked.”

Alfonso stood next to the jury box, touching his right hand on the railing, using it as a point of reference, part of the three-cornered conversation that included the twelve men and women on the jury as much, or even more, than the prosecutor and the witness.

“You knocked, there wasn’t any answer, and you went in. What happened next?”

“My arms were full of things, screenplays she wanted to see, and I pushed open the door with my shoulder and must have taken three or four steps inside when I saw her, lying on the floor. I wasn’t looking at her directly; I just saw her out of the corner of my eye, and I started to laugh. I thought she must be doing some exercises, stretching, that kind of thing. Then I looked at her and I saw her eyes, that awful vacant stare, and her shirt ripped to pieces and blood everywhere. I just froze, I couldn’t move, I didn’t know what to do. I remember I opened my mouth to scream and nothing came out and I was surprised at that and thought maybe I was in a state of shock, that maybe I had lost my senses. Everything slowed down. If you’ve ever been in a car accident, when you know you are about to get hit – it was like that. I don’t know how long I just stood there, probably only a few seconds, but it felt like forever. I knew she was dead, I knew there was nothing I could do, I knew….The next thing I knew I was calling 911, telling them what had happened, that Gloria had been murdered.”

Alfonso’s eyes never moved from hers. There was a danger she would become overdramatic, destroying the credibility of what she had observed.

“You had been with Gloria Baker for a number of years, and you were more than her employee, weren’t you? She confided in you, didn’t she?”

“Gloria and I had known each other for a long time. We met when we were taking acting classes...”

“And she became the famous Hollywood star we all remember. And you continued to be her very good friend, didn’t you?”

“Yes, we stayed close. Gloria was the best friend I ever had,” she replied, struggling to keep her composure. “The best friend I’ll ever have.”

“You also knew the defendant, Driscoll Rose. How would you describe their relationship?”

She looked past Alfonso to the counsel table where Driscoll Rose sat without expression next to his lawyer. She tried to look at him with hatred, to show the courtroom what she felt, but seeing him now, she suddenly remembered less about her anger at her friend’s death than what she had lost. She had meant to stare contempt and defiance; she ended up in tears.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes. “It’s all so awful, so pointless. It should never have happened, and it’s my fault it did. I tried to warn her about him, but I couldn’t make her understand. I told her he was dangerous, out of control; that when he got angry – and he could get angry at anything – there was no telling how far he would go. That night, months before the murder – that night he almost killed her, beat her so bad, broke her jaw, they had to hide her in a hospital so no one would know….And she still wouldn’t stop, still wouldn’t give him up.”

Alfonso handed her his handkerchief and waited while she dried her eyes. She looked up at him with a grateful smile and told him she was prepared to go on. Michael Harlowe wondered how much of this had been staged. It had certainly worked with the jury. Every eye was on her, and most of the jurors had moved forward in their seats.

“You knew – you had direct knowledge – that the defendant, Driscoll Rose, almost beat her to death?”

“Yes, I did. I spent time with her in the hospital; I helped nurse her back to health. She told me what he did, how he beat her with his fists until she passed out and then ran away, left her for dead. And she would have died, too, if she had not managed to make a phone call and get help.”

“They had been engaged, hadn’t they? Is that when this happened?”

“She had broken it off, told him they were through. She knew it would be a mistake, that it would never work. But no one ever says no to Driscoll Rose. He couldn’t stand it when she ended it. That’s the reason he tried to kill her that night, and that’s the reason he finally did it!” she cried, raising herself out of the chair as she pointed straight at Rose. “That’s the reason he murdered Gloria, because she didn’t want anything more to do with him!”

Alfonso expected an objection, but Harlowe did not make one. Perhaps Harlowe thought it was too late, that the jury had already heard what no instruction from the judge could remove from their minds; perhaps, suspected Alfonso, he hoped to use the anger bordering on hysteria to argue a reason to discount testimony with came with such an obvious bias. Alfonso retreated into a long silence, his gaze fixed on Yolanda Ross the way a parent might try to steady the nerves of an excitable child, waiting until the fire in her eyes started to cool, until the tension that had made her arms and shoulders rigid began to dissipate, waited until instead of vindictive contempt her expression changed into what could almost pass for contrition.

“You kept track of her schedule, made some of her appointments, made sure she had whatever materials she might need for a meeting – are those the kind of things you did as her personal assistant?”

“Yes; and I kept track of her social calendar as well.”

“So you knew who she was spending time with, who on any given evening she might be seeing?”

“It wasn’t quite like that. If she had something she had to do, an event she had to attend, or a dinner at someone’s house, I would make whatever arrangements had to be made. But if it was something about her personal life, I didn’t always know about that.”

She said this with modest reserve: there were things that Gloria Baker, like anyone else, kept to herself.

“But there were times, I take it, when she did tell you things about her personal life, about who she was seeing?”

“Yes; not always, but often.”

“The night she was murdered, were you with her earlier in the day?”

“Yes, that morning. She had a luncheon meeting somewhere in town. But, yes, that morning; the last time I saw her alive.”

“And did she happen to tell you what her plans were that night, who she expected to see?”

“Yes. Driscoll Rose was coming over. She didn’t know exactly when. I remember she laughed about it, said that when Driscoll said he was coming by in the evening the only thing you knew for certain was that it might be just after dinner or sometime after midnight.”

“And do you know why he was coming over, why he wanted to see her?”

“They were supposed to go over the movie project the studio wanted them to do together. But that was only an excuse. He wanted her back. She told me that. It was the last thing she ever said to me.”

Michael Harlowe sat back, his reading glasses halfway down his nose. Judge Bannister, with his usual polite formality, was asking if he wished to examine the witness, but Harlowe did not look up at the bench and did not reply to the question. The eager expression on his face, the look of keen anticipation in his eyes, was the only answer he needed to give. Then he seemed to change his mind. Instead of jumping to his feet, he put his elbows on the table and rested his chin on the heel of his hand. The intensity, the nervous excitement, had vanished; he appeared to be struggling with a doubt.

“Driscoll Rose was coming over, but Gloria Baker did not know when – is that what you just said?” he asked with a slight tilt of his head.

Yolanda Ross had been warned that when Harlowe asked a question it was always for a reason, and usually a different one than anyone thought. A ‘master of misdirection’ was the phrase with which to his own immense satisfaction Hector Alfonso had explained Harlowe’s method. Alfonso had not needed to tell her twice. Fully prepared, she challenged with cold reserve the validity of the question.

“That isn’t what I said. Gloria told me he was coming over that night.”

“But she didn’t know exactly what time that night. That’s all I’m trying to be clear about.” Harlowe had not moved from his chair. His hand still resting on the heel of his hand, he picked up a pencil and tapped the erasure twice on the table. “You said she told you about a lot of things she was doing – including even things about her personal life – but not everything. Is that what you said, Ms. Ross?”

Slowly, Harlowe got to his feet, but instead of moving closer to the witness or the jury box, he stood next to the back corner of the counsel table.

“Is that what you said, Ms. Ross?” he repeated when she hesitated.

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“And you said she laughed when she told you Mr. Rose was coming over because she never knew when he said something like that what time he might show up. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“So she expected him, but she didn’t know when – correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Who else was she expecting that night?”

“No one: Driscoll Rose, no one else.”

Harlowe searched her eyes in a way that suggested she might not be telling the truth. She did not understand why he would think that, but she resented that he did.

“But you wouldn’t know that, would you?”

“I wouldn’t know that? I told you what she said: Driscoll was coming over. She was expecting him, no one else.”

“You also said that while Ms. Baker told you a lot of things, she didn’t tell you everything. And that means - doesn’t it, Ms. Ross? - that she might very well have been expecting someone else that night, but for reasons of her own decided not to tell you.”

“No, not if she was expecting Driscoll; not if -”

“Because if she were with Driscoll Rose she wouldn’t want to be interrupted; because, contrary to your testimony, they were both interested in getting back together again. Isn’t that right, Ms. Ross? Isn’t it a fact that she was still in love with Driscoll Rose; that despite what may have happened between them before, they were talking about trying to make it work? Isn’t it a fact, Ms. Ross, that when Gloria Baker told you Driscoll Rose was coming over and she didn’t know exactly what time he might arrive you knew that he would be spending the night?”

“No, I didn’t know that; I don’t know what she might have done.”

Harlowe lifted an eyebrow and smiled. “Let’s go back to that other night, the one the district attorney was so eager to talk about: the night that Ms. Baker suffered those unfortunate injuries, the night -”

“The night he almost beat her to death!”

“The night he lost his temper, made a terrible mistake and did something he should never have done. By the way, Ms. Ross, the house in Malibu, the house where she was murdered – how did Ms. Baker happen to acquire it? It belonged to the defendant, Mr. Rose, didn’t it?”

“It was his house, yes,” she admitted with some reluctance.

“They lived there together for a while, didn’t they?”

“Yes, for a while; until he….”

“Until he did what he should never have done. That’s when he gave her the house, signed over the title: a gesture of contrition on his part, an attempt – perhaps not enough to make up for what he had done – but still, an attempt to show how sorry he was. That’s true, isn’t it, Ms. Ross?”

“He gave her the house, that’s true,” she replied in a sullen voice.

“Because he hit her?”

“Hit her? – Almost killed her! She was in the hospital for -”

“Yes, we know all that. The question is why he hit her: what sent him into that kind of rage?”

“She broke off their engagement, told him she didn’t want to marry him.”

“That can’t be true.”

She stared at him, incredulous. “It can’t be -?”

“She had broken off the engagement a few weeks earlier. He had already moved out of the house – his house – because she changed her mind and decided she did not want to get married. No, something else made him go crazy that night. She told you a lot of things – that’s what you told us – didn’t she tell you that? It was because she had started seeing someone else, wasn’t it?”

“She went out with a number of different people. There wasn’t….” Her voice trailed off.

“There wasn’t anyone in particular? Is that what you were about to say?”

“No; I mean, yes….I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure there was someone she had started spending time with, or you’re not sure who it was?”

“I can’t answer that. I thought there was someone – the way she was acting, like she had this big secret – but she never talked about it. And if there was someone, she was still seeing other people; nothing serious, just people she went out with. But I did think there was someone, and that whoever it was she was serious about him.”

Harlowe tapped his knuckles on the edge of the table. He bent his head to the side as if to study her from a new and different angle.

“And then she changed her mind again, didn’t she?”

Yolanda Ross did know what he meant. “Changed her mind?”

“Yes. She broke off her engagement to Driscoll Rose. He discovers that she’s been seeing someone else. He believes that is the reason she broke off the engagement: because she’s in love with someone else. He goes crazy – because of course he’s still in love with her – and in a blind rage, blind with jealousy, he hits her. But then, months later, something has happened, hasn’t it? Suddenly she’s talking about getting back together with Driscoll Rose. Don’t you see what this means? You don’t know if someone was there the night of the murder; you don’t know if, driven by the same kind of jealousy that had once made Driscoll Rose do something he should never have done, someone else, this mysterious stranger she had once been in love with, didn’t kill her instead, do you?”

Hector Alfonso was screaming in protest. “He isn’t asking questions of the witness, your Honor – He’s making a speech!”

Bannister was forced to agree. He bent forward and wagged his finger back and forth, a silent lecture on the rules of procedure.

“Cross-examine the witness, Mr. Harlowe. Limit yourself to that.”

Unlike Hector Alfonso, who tended to ignore the court when he was trying to impress the jury, Harlowe turned square to the bench and with an almost courtly bow promised to do what he had been asked. Nodding his head, as if to remind himself not to make the same mistake twice, he ran the fingers of his right hand over his tousled brown hair, trying, as it seemed, to remember exactly where he had left off.

Nothing Michael Harlowe did was ever quite perfect: there was always some hesitation, some pause to take stock, some off-hand gesture to show that something he had done had not, in his own judgment, been quite up to the mark. It made him seem modest and hard-working both; none of the slick arrogance bragging lawyers thought advertised their competence and juries really hated. He was the likable neighbor, the fellow who lived down the street, the one who would do everything he could for you and apologize because he could not do more. You would pay to hear Hector Alfonso give a speech to a partisan crowd in a packed hall; you would not mind buying Michael Harlowe a beer in a quiet bar. That the women he had married had all divorced him, that scarcely anyone who worked for him ever lasted more than a year, that the only real friends he had were the one he had known from childhood and had seldom seen since, did not change the fact that everyone else thought he was a lawyer that everyone, including lawyers on the other side, could not help but like. He lived for what he did, and what he did was often quite extraordinary, or at least unexpected.

Scratching the back of his head, a strange, enigmatic smile on his lips, Harlowe looked at the witness and then looked down at the floor. The smile became deeper and more mysterious. Then he looked up.

“Where were you that night, the night Gloria Baker was murdered?”

He could have struck her across the face and she would not have looked more astonished.

“What -?”

“Where were you the night Gloria Baker was murdered?” he repeated with a harsh, penetrating stare.

“I was home; I….”

Harlowe’s eyebrows shot up, his mouth turned down at the corners. His eyes taunted her with disbelief.

“You were home. I see. You were with her earlier that day, but you left – what time was that again?”

“A little after eleven. She had a luncheon meeting, and I -”

“You left, and you didn’t go back until the next morning when you found her dead on the living room floor. Yes, we all remember what you said.” A sharp, biting smile that seemed to call into question more than her honesty, cut across Harlowe’s mouth. “And we all remember what you said when you first took the stand, how convinced you are that Driscoll Rose murdered Gloria Baker. But if anyone had a motive, if anyone murdered her out of jealousy, wasn’t it more likely to have been you?”

“Me? Why would I -! She was my friend, my –”

“Your lover! Isn’t that true, Ms. Ross? You weren’t just her personal assistant, you weren’t just her friend. You had a relationship with her, an intimate relationship, a relationship you had had with her for a very long time. That’s why you hated Driscoll Rose! That’s why you were so upset when she told you the two of them were getting back together again. – Because it meant the end of that relationship, the end of everything you cared about. You were her lesbian lover and -”

It had started as a low din, a voiceless noise, but now, suddenly, as Hector Alfonso leaped to his feet, the crowded courtroom exploded. Bannister pounded his gavel, and when that had no effect, pounded it again, harder, more insistent. With a glance that threatened immediate retribution he ordered it to stop.

“One more word, one more sound, and the courtroom will be cleared.” He turned immediately to the district attorney. “You were about to make an objection.”

“Yes, your Honor. Defense counsel is badgering the witness, accusing her something without any proof, without -”

“The objection is sustained. Mr. Harlowe, I don’t wish to have to warn you again.”

Harlowe listened, and then, nodding in the way of someone disappointed with himself, crossed from the counsel table to the far end of the jury box. He stood there a moment, ready to make a fresh start.

“Ms. Ross, did you or did you not have an intimate relationship with Gloria Baker?”

Yolanda Ross seemed to shrink inside herself, looking for a place to hide, not because she was ashamed of anything she had done, but because she was being forced to make public, and in that sense betray, her only real possession, the love she had had.

“Yes, Mr. Harlowe,” she said with quiet dignity. “I did.”

“You were lovers?”

“And friends, too; but yes, Mr. Harlowe, we were lovers. I loved her, and she loved me.”

“You were jealous when she went out with other people, weren’t you? You were jealous when she got engaged to Driscoll Rose, jealous when -”

“No, Mr. Harlowe; you’re wrong about that. I was never jealous, never. She loved me, and I loved her, and she loved other people, and so did I. We were not – we never expected to be - monogamous. We gave each other what we needed when we needed it. That was only a part of the lives we led. I don’t expect you to understand that, Mr. Harlow, and frankly I’m rather glad you don’t. We did not – either one of us – believe anyone would. It was our secret, Mr. Harlowe. We didn’t pass judgment on other people’s lives, and we weren’t interested in whether anyone would have approved of ours. It was no one’s business what we did.”

Harlowe had wanted to show that Yolanda Ross had the same motive to murder Gloria Baker as the prosecution was trying to use against Driscoll Rose, but anyone who watched the way she responded had to know that even had she been jealous, the last thing she would have done, the last thing she would have thought of doing, was to murder her lover and her friend. There was, strangely enough, too much honesty about her, too much anguish in her voice, to allow any doubt about that. On this point Harlowe had been beaten and he knew it.

“Let’s go back to the beginning. You testified that she expected Driscoll Rose but she didn’t know what time, correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“And you testified that because she didn’t tell you everything – because there were apparently some secrets she didn’t share with you – she had been seeing someone before she broke off her engagement with Mr. Rose?”

“I said I thought she might have been. She didn’t talk about it.”

“And because she didn’t tell you everything, she might have expected someone else that night, someone besides Driscoll Rose. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“What’s possible? – That she expected someone else? Yes, I suppose.”

The questions were coming right on top of the answers. Harlowe did not give her time to think.

“So someone other than Driscoll Rose could have come – and it’s our contention that someone else did come – and that person could have murdered Gloria Baker. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

Yolanda Ross threw up her hands in frustration. “How could I know that? All I know is what I saw when I got there in the morning.”

“Yes, when you got there in the morning. The door was unlocked, you found her on the floor. There was blood on her body, blood on the floor, blood on the wall a short distance away. That’s what you saw, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I saw that – blood everywhere.”

“No, Ms. Ross, there wasn’t blood everywhere. The picture, the portrait of Gloria Baker, the one that previous witnesses have told us was slashed to pieces, there wasn’t any blood there, was there? There wasn’t any blood anywhere near that picture, was there?”

She started to deny it, to say that there must have been, but suddenly she was not sure.

“I don’t know; I don’t remember.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Hector Alfonso was not in a mood to be generous. He was angry with Yolanda Ross who seemed to think the trial was all about her, angry with Michael Harlowe for being even better than he had been before. More than anything, he was angry with Walter Bannister for this last minute summons to meet in chambers to discuss, once again, some point of law that mattered to absolutely no one except an overly cautious judge. Alfonso could not help himself: he was too much the politician not to want to get even, to go after an adversary at what he thought his weakest point. He did it, of course, with his habitual smile.

“Do you really think,” he asked Harlowe, sitting in the chair next to him, “that the jury is going to acquit your client because they think Yolanda Ross murdered Gloria Baker instead?”

Harlowe kept his eyes straight ahead on Walter Bannister who, after hanging up his robe, had just taken his chair.

“That would be unfair, wouldn’t it? – Blaming another innocent person for a murder the defendant didn’t commit.”

He said this with such serious certainty that for a moment Alfonso almost believed him.

“You think that -? No; what else could you say?”

Harlowe turned his head and with a steady, unwavering glance, let him know he was wrong.

“You didn’t hear me say anything like that the last time we tried a case together. You didn’t hear me so much as suggest that Daniel Lee Atkinson might be innocent.”

Alfonso was ready to dismiss this as nothing more than the false bravado of a defense attorney engaged in his case, but Walter Bannister seemed intrigued.

“Yes, what about that possibility, Hector? What if the defendant, what if Driscoll Rose is innocent; what if someone else murdered Gloria Baker?”

“He isn’t innocent! He killed her. There isn’t any question.”

“No question?” asked Bannister with obvious skepticism. “If I followed what your witness said today on cross, if I followed what I think the not very veiled suggestion of the defense, there may have been someone else there that night.” He turned suddenly to Harlow and asked point blank: “Do you have a witness, some evidence that this is true?”

Harlowe could barely conceal his astonishment. This was not a question a judge was supposed to ask. Then he remembered that this was Walter Bannister and that Bannister took an interest in every aspect of a trial. Things could be said, things had been said, in his chambers that could be said nowhere else.

“If you have a witness, you’re supposed to tell me,” Alfonso reminded him. “You still haven’t given me a witness list.”

“I might not call anyone,” replied Harlowe, beginning to enjoy himself. “I may not need to.”

Quick as light, Alfonso shook his head and smiled.

“The art of cross examination: turn all my witnesses into yours. I know how that works. But you have one witness you have to call. You promised the jury, a promise I doubt they’ll be able to forget, that your client would take the stand in his own defense.”

“After what happened today with your last witness, the unforgettable Yolanda Ross, I might not call anyone.”

Alfonso started to reply, but Bannister stopped him with a glance.

“I didn’t call you both in here to argue trial strategy. I need to have some idea how much longer the trial will go on. The prosecution, as I understand it, has only one more witness to call. Assuming the defense calls the defendant, are there any other witnesses you might call? I asked you before, Michael: Do you have a witness who saw someone else there that night?”

“Yes, I do. We just found him,” he quickly explained before Alfonso could start to complain. “A kid delivering pizza. He saw someone leaving, and it wasn’t Driscoll Rose.”

“Does he know who it was, can he identify this person?” asked Bannister. “Because of course if he could, then you would have another witness you might call.”

“Or one I could call,” interjected Alfonso. He was furious at what he thought Harlowe’s deliberate deception. “You just found this witness?” he asked with acid eyes. “Why do I have a hard time believing that?”

“Probably for the same reason you have a hard time believing my client is innocent: it isn’t what you want to hear!”

“He isn’t innocent!” Alfonso shot back. “He’s as guilty as - !”

“I think he’s innocent,” said Walter Bannister.

The two lawyers watched in open-mouthed amazement as Bannister got up from his chair, went over to the window and opened the blinds. For a long, silent moment, he stared out at the city that for more than a century had kept spreading out in all directions, the only boundary it could not pass the sea itself.

“I think he’s innocent,” he repeated, turning back around. “I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s found guilty - it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened - but you’ve got the wrong man on trial, Hector. I’m sure of it.”

Alfonso almost came out of his chair. “You’re sure - ? What makes you think he’s innocent?” he demanded angrily.

Bannister had no right to express an opinion about a trial. It was grounds for removal. He could ask Bannister to step aside; he could file a motion; he could compel him to have another judge take his place. But was there any need?

“How can you be impartial if you - ?”

“Impartial? – You think I’m not. You think I’ve shown bias, one way or the other? Go ahead, file a motion: charge me with bias if you want. But I don’t remember that you had any problem when the three of us were sitting here during the Atkinson trial and I made some fairly candid remarks about what I thought of his guilt! What do you think I am: some bloodless academic who never makes judgments? Who didn’t know Atkinson was guilty? Did I give him less than a fair trial? What we discuss in this room stays here. It has no effect on what we do – at least it has no effect on what I do. Let me explain this again: I don’t think Rose murdered Gloria Baker, but I think he’s probably going to be convicted.”

“Which means you think the case against him – the evidence – is enough to convince a jury. Then why do you think he’s innocent – a feeling, a hunch?” That Bannister believed Rose was probably going to be convicted had freed Alfonso’s mind from anger. Now he was simply curious. “What makes you think he might be innocent?”

Bannister shook his head. “I didn’t say I thought he might be innocent; I said he was innocent. Driscoll Rose did not murder Gloria Baker.”

Alfonso’s chin snapped up. He did not like being corrected.

“You’re sure of it,” he repeated dismissively. “What is it you know, what have you heard at trial that no one else seems to have noticed?”

A smile like a secret started onto Bannister’s mouth, and then, the secret safe, immediately disappeared.

“The answer is right in front of you. But you have to have eyes to see it.”

“That’s all you’re going to say! This is some puzzle I’m supposed to solve?” Alfonso drew himself up, ready to leave. “I’ve got things to do, Walter; so if there’s nothing else….”

“It’s the picture, the portrait of Gloria Baker. Michael knows what I’m talking about – don’t you, Michael? It was slashed, presumably with the same knife – the one missing from the kitchen, the one that was used in the murder.”

This meant nothing to Alfonso. With a blank expression he shrugged his shoulders and asked why that was supposed to be significant.

“Your witness, Yolanda Ross – what did she say at the end of Michael’s cross-examination? - That there was blood everywhere: on the body, on the floor, on one of the walls; but nothing – no blood – on the picture. That means that the killer used the knife to destroy the portrait before he used it to stab the victim. There would have been blood on the knife if he had killed her first, and then there would have been blood on the picture, but there was not.”

Harlowe was not sure he liked having part of his closing argument explained to the prosecution in advance, though it meant, as he realized, that the argument might be more convincing than he had dared hope. He sat back and listened.

“The killer only murdered her after he attacked the portrait. Shall I tell you how it happened? Do you want me to explain it in detail?” He asked this as if he had explained it before, over and over again, but like bored schoolboys they had been too dense to understand it. “Driscoll Rose, by the evidence we’ve heard, and by what we both know about him, can go off in a murderous rage: blind, unthinking hatred that makes him strike out at anyone who has done something he doesn’t like. That is his first, and maybe his only, instinct: hit, hurt, lash out. What did he do that night, that other night, when apparently he almost killed her? – Beat her up, left her for dead, and ran away. It seems he may have had some remorse, but only later, after all that anger subsided and he started to realize what he had done.”

“We know all that,” said Alfonso with some impatience. “I still don’t see your point. How does that make him innocent? It seems to me it only proves him guilty.”

“It would, if it weren’t for the picture. Let me tell you how it was done, why that portrait is so important. In the first place, it proves that whoever murdered Gloria Baker did not go there to kill her; he went there to talk to her, to convince her of something.”

“To convince her to come back to him - That’s what Rose wanted her to do,” insisted Alfonso.

“The portrait! – Try to remember that. He goes there to talk to her, but she won’t do what he wants. He gets angry, and he knows it – knows he’s getting angry. He isn’t like Driscoll Rose; he knows what he is doing. They’re arguing, he sees the knives in the kitchen, he wants to hurt her. But more than that, he wants to know what it’s like to hurt someone, what that feels like. And so he takes the knife, grabs her and makes her watch while he slashes to ribbons her portrait, the picture of what she was; makes her watch knowing that when he’s finished murdering her picture, he’s going to murder her. Does that sound like something done in a blind rage, something that Driscoll Rose could have done?”

“Sure; why not? He grabs her, sees the picture, and strikes first at that, and then kills her. And the rest of it – that business about wanting to know what it’s like to hurt someone, to murder someone – that’s nothing but speculation. How would you know if he wanted that? And what difference would it make if he did, except to make him even sicker than most murderers usually are?”

“Driscoll Rose didn’t do it,” said Walter Bannister with quiet assurance.

“Yes, he did,” replied Alfonso as he got to his feet. “And when the trial is over -”

“Sit down, Hector,” instructed Bannister as he returned to his chair. “We’re not done here. You were saying you had a witness, Michael: a delivery boy who saw someone leaving the victim’s home that night. Is there anyone else you might call, other than this young man and the defendant?”

“Not that I know of now, your Honor.”

“And you, Hector – you have only one witness left?”

“Yes. Roger Stanton, and his testimony shouldn’t take more than an hour,” explained Alfonso, settling into the routine of scheduling the last days of a trial.

“Walter is right, Hector,” said Harlowe, refusing to let it go. “I don’t know why the real killer did it – I don’t have Walter’s imagination – but Rose didn’t kill her. I’ve never said anything like this to you before, not in any of the cases we’ve tried together; but Rose is innocent. He didn’t do it, and if you convict him you’ll be sending an innocent man to prison and, almost as bad, letting someone else get away with murder.”

For a second, Alfonso wondered if Harlowe might be right. Harlowe knew every lawyer’s trick there was, but he had never said anything to him in private that he had not believed to be true. He did not think he was lying now, but that only meant that Harlowe himself had been deceived.

“He’s an actor. Did you think he wouldn’t know how to play the part of someone falsely accused?”

Alfonso had not meant for it to sound so harsh. He was angry with himself for starting to feel guilty when there was nothing to feel guilty about. He tried cases on the evidence; the jury decided whether the evidence was sufficient to convict. If an innocent man went to prison, that was unfortunate, but his conscience was clear.

“I’m sorry, Michael. I don’t doubt for a minute you believe what you said, but I have to follow the evidence and all the evidence points to him.”

They all understood the limitations within which they worked. They might in private all agree, whether they said so or not, that a defendant was probably innocent, but it would not affect – it could not affect – what they did in court. It had not mattered that along with everyone else they had known Daniel Lee Atkinson was guilty of unspeakable crimes: they did what they were supposed to do to make sure he got a fair trial. But if the situation now was fundamentally the same, the weight, the consequence, seemed radically different. Daniel Lee Atkinson was a murderer; there was never any question about his guilt. But Driscoll Rose, if he was innocent, was it enough to say that everyone was just doing their jobs, that sometimes juries make mistakes? That was the question that was on their minds as they sat in what became a long and oppressive silence.

“There’s another way to look at it,” said Bannister finally. His gaze was distant, remote, and freighted with an unexpected severity. “Even if he didn’t do it, he still should be in prison.”

Harlowe’s mouth dropped open. Alfonso stiffened, worried that the hostility in Bannister’s eyes was meant for him.

“You both know what I’m talking about. It’s a strange case – a strange argument, the one I just made – that he must be innocent because he’s too much the maniac to exercise even the little control involved in this kind of pre-meditated murder. Rose should have been sent away before this ever happened. Once, when he almost killed her with his bare hands – You could have charged him with attempted murder, Hector!”

“I couldn’t exactly charge him for a crime no one knew anything about!” retorted Alfonso, staring back. “If your brother-in-law had….”

“He’s your next witness. Why don’t you ask him about that – why he didn’t call the police. Why don’t you ask him why he didn’t want anyone to know about what Rose did that day in Santa Barbara? Why don’t you ask him - ?”

“For God’s sake, Walter – get over it! How far back do you want to go? You want to blame your brother-in-law, you want to blame me, because you think we didn’t do what we should have done? Why don’t you blame yourself? You could have gone up to Santa Barbara and filed a police report. Why didn’t you go to see the district attorney up there? It wouldn’t have done any good. This is Driscoll Rose we’re talking about! Too many people had an interest in protecting him. Anything less than murder, everyone is going to look the other way.”

Tapping his fingers together, Bannister appeared to relent, but then, strangely, his eyes filled with irony and malice.

“Everyone looks the other way when he almost kills her, and looks the other way when he might have killed someone else; but then everyone turns on him when he’s charged with a murder he did not commit.” Before Alfonso could even think to reply, he added, “But the fact remains, she wouldn’t have been murdered if Rose had been prosecuted before. Without Rose, what reason would anyone have had to kill her?”

There was nothing more to be said. Driscoll Rose might be innocent or he might be guilty, and Bannister might be right that, guilty or not, Rose was in some way still responsible, but none of that mattered now. The trial was not over, and things sometime happen in a trial that no one expects, things that change everything. Michael Harlowe tried to remind himself of that the next morning as he watched the prosecution’s last witness raise his right hand and take the oath.

Roger Stanton had a kind of genius for being self-contained. Whether it was a gift he had been born with, or something he had learned which had then become habitual, he could stand in the middle of a crowd of people, every one of whom wanted something from him, and appear so oblivious, so preoccupied with some important thought of his own, that no one dared approach him for fear they might interrupt. There were more than two hundred spectators jammed tight together on the courtroom benches and they might have been extras in a movie he was making for all he noticed. He took the stand and looked straight at Hector Alfonso. He knew Alfonso, had been with him on a number of occasions, and had contributed more than he wished he had to several of his campaigns, but there was nothing in the way he waited for the prosecution’s first question that suggested they had ever even met. And as for his brother-in-law, Walter Bannister, sitting just above him on the judge’s bench, he did not look at him once.

Hector Alfonso did not waste any time. Brushing lint from the sleeve of another new suit, he stood at the far end of the jury box and took the witness through the usual preliminary questions - his name, what he did for a living, how he happened to know the victim - and then began to ask the questions that mattered.

“Gloria Baker had become a famous movie star, and so had Driscoll Rose. Were you aware of their relationship: the fact that at one point they were living together and had then become engaged?”

“Yes.”

Alfonso had expected more, a broader explanation, but Stanton was nothing if not concise and to the point. He would have sat there all day, waiting for the next question, before he ventured out on one of those long, rambling disquisitions that in his view did nothing but breed confusion. Alfonso started over.

“You knew them both, Gloria Baker and Driscoll Rose? They both worked for you?”

“Yes – to both questions.”

“They both made movies for your studio?”

“Yes.”

Stanton was wearing a tan suit, white shirt and a pale green tie. He had on a pair of Italian loafers. At odd moments, in a habit of long standing, he would pull on one or the other of the French cuffs, making sure they were each of them at the proper length of exposure. It was just another of the ways in which he insisted on precision.

“There has been testimony that a portrait of Gloria Baker hung in the living room of her home, and that the painting had been a gift from you. Is that true: was it a gift from you?”

“Yes.”

“What was the reason you had it done, why did you give it to her?”

There was no one word answer to this. A smile full of nostalgia flashed for an instant over his closed mouth.

“It was after her first picture - the first major one, I should say; the one that made her a star. I wanted her to have something that would always remind her of that, of what she was on the screen.”

“Were you in the habit of doing things like this: giving things to someone after they made a successful picture for your studio?”

“No; but on occasion.” For the first time, he glanced toward the counsel table. “I had a sculpture done – of a horse, as I recall – for Driscoll after one of the pictures he made: a western, a very good one. He was nominated for it.”

“So you knew them both, and both had made successful pictures for the studio. You knew them off screen as well. They were both guests in your home?”

“Yes,” he said, turning to the jury. “I had great affection for them both. They were both extremely talented people, and, like all of us, both had their flaws.”

“You mean, they did things they shouldn’t have done?”

“On occasion, yes.”

“I want to take you back to something that happened more than a year ago. Do you remember getting a phone call from Gloria Baker late at night telling you she’d been hurt and needed help?”

Stanton looked down at his hands, held in his lap, and seemed to tense. Slowly, and as it were reluctantly, he raised his eyes.

“Yes, I remember.”

“What did you do when you got that call?”

“I drove over there as fast as I could. She was lying on the floor, unconscious. Her face was a bloody pulp; her eyes, especially the left one, were battered shut. At first I thought she was dead; but then I saw she was still breathing, and then, when I knelt down beside her, she opened her eyes, opened them as far as she could, which wasn’t much.”

“Did she tell you what happened, who had done this to her?”

“Driscoll. She said he tried to kill her. And he nearly had. She thought she was dying. She didn’t know why I was there. She didn’t remember that she had called me, and given how badly she was hurt, I’m now sure how she did. Instinct, I suppose; something that told her that if she didn’t get help she might not survive.”

Listening intently, his hand resting on the railing of the jury box, Alfonso nodded in the slow, measured cadence of a man deeply affected by what he had heard. He turned and with a cold, withering glance looked at the defendant.

“Driscoll Rose beat her like that and then just left her there to die?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“What did you do, after you found her there like that,” he asked, his eyes still fixed on Driscoll Rose. “Did you call for an ambulance, did you call the police? What exactly did you do?”

“I called a physician who came at once. He did what he could for her, and then he called for an ambulance and she was taken to the hospital.”

Alfonso had spent days wondering how he should handle the next set of questions, how he should ask about what had been a concerted effort to keep what had happened that night a secret. Roger Stanton could be viewed as either a helpful friend, willing to do what was best for people he cared about, or a scheming merchant whose only interest was protecting the reputation of a violent misfit who made money for his studio. Alfonso still had not decided the best way to approach this, and, as he often did when plagued by indecision, he let someone else, in this case the witness himself, decide. He fell back on the kind of question that is not so much a question as an invitation to say whatever you please. Only Hector Alfonso could have made it sound profound.

“Would you like to tell us why you did this?”

“You mean, why I called a physician, someone I knew, instead of calling 911, instead of asking for an ambulance at once?”

Alfonso’s only response was a slight nod and a brief, sympathetic smile.

“Gloria wanted it kept private. She knew what would happen if the press learned about it. There wouldn’t be any end to the stories. That was the last thing she wanted. And your next question, I imagine, is why no one called the police. But, again, you have to understand – the publicity, the coverage, would have been devastating. It would have ruined them both. What had been done had been done. The question was what to do next. She knew what Driscoll was like; she knew what happened to him when he got angry. She thought if he got counseling, treatment of some kind – if he learned to control himself….Despite what he had done to her, she didn’t want him going off to jail. You didn’t know her. She had a generous heart, perhaps too generous; she didn’t want to hurt Driscoll, or anyone else. She didn’t think like that. I don’t think she was ever really angry with anyone in her life.”

Alfonso was finished with the witness; Harlowe was not sure where to begin.

“I’m a little confused, Mr. Stanton.” Standing in front of the counsel table, he narrowed his eyes in the way of someone trying to work through a puzzle. “You say that Gloria Baker called you, but didn’t remember that she had. Is that what you said?”

“Yes, that’s right,” replied Stanton, who looked puzzled himself.

“And you said you think she must have done this, made that call, out of an instinct for survival?”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Why would she have done that? – called you, I mean. I understand why you didn’t call 911, but why didn’t she? It’s odd, isn’t it, that at a moment like that, when she could have dialed three numbers and got help right away, she called you instead?”

“I don’t know that I’d call it odd. I was the head of the studio. She knew she could rely on me.”

Harlowe jumped on it. “Rely on you? You’re not a doctor; you weren’t someone who could give her medical help. You mean rely on your discretion, rely on you to handle things in the way they needed to be handled. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Mr. Stanton?”

“She knew she could trust me.”

“That’s just what’s so odd about it. Not that she thought that – I’m sure that’s not odd at all – but that the first call, the only call she made, this woman who thought she might be dying, was to the head of the studio and not to the emergency line anyone else would have used; not to a doctor she might have known herself, not to anyone who could help keep her alive, but to you, Roger Stanton, someone she trusted! There’s only one explanation for this, isn’t there, Mr. Stanton? – She was hurt, she had been hit, she may have been in considerable pain, but her life was not in danger and she knew it. Isn’t that true, Mr. Stanton?”

“He had broken her jaw, done great damage to her eyes. He had -”

“But nothing she would have died from. There was no chance of death, was there, Mr. Stanton?”

“I’m not a doctor; I wouldn’t know how to answer that.”

“It would have been more helpful, Mr. Stanton, had you given that answer when the district attorney was asking you questions. She was hurt, she wasn’t dying, and she relied on you to take care of things. You made the decision not to involve the police, not to tell anyone what had happened – isn’t that true?”

“She asked me not to.”

“Really? Wasn’t the defendant also under contract to you?”

“Yes, he was.”

“If he had been charged, arrested – that wouldn’t have been good for the studio, would it?”

“No, it would not.”

“So you had an interest in keeping this incident to yourself, didn’t you?”

“If you want to put it like that. But I also had an interest in the future of two fine actors. A scandal like that would have hurt them both.”

“Yes, we understand,” said Harlowe as he began to pace back and forth, his mind apparently on something else. Three steps in one direction, three steps back, twice, three times the same small circuit, the silence more significant with each turn he made. Something was coming, something, as it appeared, even he did not yet know. Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks, his head flew up and he fixed the witness with an intense, penetrating stare.

“Why? Why did he hit her, why did he do that? She trusted you; she called you; she asked you to handle things, to take care of things – what did she tell you about that? What did she say, Mr. Stanton, about why Driscoll Rose suddenly went crazy and did what he did?”

“She didn’t say anything about it that night; she didn’t -”

“She never said anything to you about it?” demanded Harlowe. “That night, or anytime after?”

“Later, when she was in the hospital, she told me.”

“Told you what, Mr. Stanton?”

“That it happened because she told him that the reason she had broken off the engagement, and why she wouldn’t see him anymore, was that she had fallen in love with someone else.”

“Did she tell you who it was, who she had fallen in love with?”

“I didn’t ask. I was too shocked, too angry, at what he had done to her.”

“So you don’t know who she had fallen in love with, but you know – you’re certain – that she said it was the reason he hit her: because he was jealous, angry because she didn’t love him anymore, but loved someone else?”

“Yes.”

Harlowe nodded twice, signaling satisfaction with what had been achieved, the fact, now established, that Driscoll Rose had committed an act of violence against the victim out of jealousy and not for any other reason. The next question followed with remorseless logic.

“He hit her; beat her – whether or not he almost killed her – in a jealous rage. They were working on a picture together when she died, weren’t they?”

“We were in the preliminary stages; we were getting close.”

“We have had testimony that they were getting together the night of her death to discuss that same project. Did you know they were doing this?”

“I knew there were discussions; I didn’t know when or whether they might be meeting.”

“Did you know – you knew them both well – did you know they had also been talking about getting back together again?”

Stanton tugged at his shirtsleeve, pulling it into place. “I wouldn’t have known anything about that.”

“Does it surprise you that they were?”

“After everything that has happened – Gloria dead, Driscoll accused of murder – do you really think I’m surprised at anything?”

Roger Stanton was the last witness for the prosecution. As he left the witness stand, Alfonso announced with studied formality that “the prosecution rests, your Honor.”

Now it was up to the defense to decide if it was going to put on a case, call witnesses of its own, or whether it, too, would rest; argue that the evidence presented by the prosecution was not sufficient to sustain a conviction, that there was more than just a doubt, there was a reasonable doubt, that the defendant was guilty as charged.

Harlowe was tempted. There was no direct evidence connecting Driscoll Rose to the crime: no weapon, much less one with his finger prints on it; no eyewitness, no one who had actually seen Rose enter or leave Gloria Baker’s Malibu home. The prosecution had been able to show that Rose had been expected there that night and that he had told his agent at dinner that that was where he was going, but once he had left the restaurant no one had seen him go anywhere. So far as having a motive for the murder, it was possible to argue on the prosecution’s own evidence that Rose had less reason than anyone to kill her: instead of jealousy born of rejection, they were talking about getting together again; and, again by the prosecution’s own evidence, they were almost certainly planning to spend the night together. Could he have gone crazy again, been driven into one of his well-known violent rages? – Yes, possibly; and that was certainly what the prosecution wanted everyone to think, but that was only conjecture and could be dismissed as such.

Harlowe was tempted to announce that the defense did not think it necessary to put on a case of its own. He might have done it if he had not told the jury not only that the defendant would testify, but what that testimony would be. He regretted that now; or, rather, wondered if he had made the right choice. Harlowe understood that in a trial there are no second chances: you trust your instincts and live with whatever decision you make.

“Mr. Harlowe, is the defense ready to proceed?” asked Bannister.

“Yes, your Honor.”

Bannister glanced at the clock on the wall opposite the jury box. It was quarter to four and, with the prosecution just finished and the defense ready to begin, a good time to stop.

“We’ll begin again in the morning,” he announced, and with the usual instruction to the jury not to discuss the case, left the bench. Everyone in the courtroom stood in silence until the door to the judge’s chambers shut behind him.

Bannister’s clerk was glad he had decided to adjourn early. There were a dozen different things she had to talk to him about: hearings on motions had been postponed, not once or twice, but over and over again because of the trial; rulings on motions that had already been argued had not been made. It was so unlike Judge Bannister to let things slide like this. The trial of Driscoll Rose seemed to consume all his attention, though it was hard to know exactly why. It didn’t seem any more complicated than any of the other murder trials over which he had presided. Something was different, but she did not know what.

She waited a few minutes before she knocked on his door. He always liked to have a little time alone after he left the bench. There was no response. She knocked again, but still nothing. She opened the door and found him sitting at his desk, staring into the distance, his mouth moving as if he were trying to speak but had forgotten how.

“Judge Bannister,” she whispered.

His mouth kept moving. It reminded her of people she had seen in the nursing home where she visited her mother, old people barely able to read, sounding out the letters the way they had learned as a child. It suddenly occurred to her that the judge might have suffered a stroke.

“Judge Bannister!” she cried in alarm. “Are you all right?”

His head snapped up; his eyes came quickly around to hers.

“Jessica! What’s the matter? Of course I’m all right. I was thinking about something; I didn’t hear you come in.”

Relieved and a little embarrassed, she sat on the edge of the chair in front of his desk and began to list the various things that needed his attention. He stopped her before she had gotten through the first three.

“The trial will be over in a few days. Whatever there is can wait until then. But I’m glad you came in. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Yes, judge; what can I do?”

“Nothing; nothing at all. I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me, how much easier you’ve made my job. I don’t know how I would have handled all the work without you to sort everything out, keep track of all the things that needed to be done. I owe you a lot, and that’s why I wanted to tell you that I may not be on the bench too much longer.”

“You’re not ill, there isn’t anything wrong is there?”

“No, I’m fine; it isn’t that at all. There are things about this case, this trial, things I can’t tell you. I don’t think I had realized before this….” Suddenly, he laughed, a strange, bitter laugh, and then looked at her with anguished, rueful eyes. “I’m probably going to have to sentence someone for a murder he did not commit; and the worst part is that there is a way I could stop it, but instead I’ll probably just let what we foolishly call justice take its course. I’m a coward; worse than that, too much a coward to make a full confession.”

She had known him too long, seen too much of the way he took everything to heart, to take him seriously. He was tired, exhausted by all the responsibilities he carried on his shoulders, and she told him so.

“You need to take a vacation; go away somewhere, forget about court and all the work. You keep on like this and you’re going to start to think you’re responsible for everything. You might even start to think that you’re the murderer and the murderer is the judge. I’ve seen it happen; you can get too close to things. Just get away for a while. Things will look better then.”

He told her he was sure that was good advice, that he probably should just take a vacation. He told her what he knew she wanted to hear. And then, when she left, when the door closed behind her and she could not hear, he started laughing and could not stop.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Driscoll Rose had not slept in days. All through the trial, he had listened as witness after witness described someone who bore little if any resemblance to the person he thought he was. Violent, dangerous, someone who could not control his emotion; everything had been twisted out of proportion, made to seem much worse than it was. Twice, or perhaps a few times more than that, he had lost his temper, struck out in frustration, hit someone before he knew what he was doing; twice, just those two times - once with Gloria, once with that clumsy arrogant waiter at Stanton’s place in Santa Barbara - he had hit someone hard enough that they had to get help. But use a knife, murder someone? – He was not capable of that. And yet here he was, on trial for something he did not do and, from what his lawyer had been telling him, with no better than an even chance at getting an acquittal.

Every day, every night, for months – from the moment he was arrested - it was all he had been able to think about: the trial and what was going to happen. He watched it, the trial, start to finish before it even began; watched it over and over again like a movie he had seen a thousand times; watched it and knew every time that it was wrong. There was always something missing and it was always the same thing: the face, the name, of the one who ought to be on trial, the one who had been there inside the house, the house in Malibu, before he got there; the one who really murdered Gloria and then left her there for him to find. It drove him mad, knowing that while he was going through this agony, witnessing in advance his own destruction, someone else was watching, the only person who could save him and the only person who never would.

With an actor’s instinct, and an actor’s craft, he tried to understand the role, the precise situation of someone who commits a murder for which another man is blamed, but he could not do it, he could not pretend anymore. He realized, slowly at first but then with an overwhelming sense of finality, that he was on his own, with no one to give him direction and nothing down in writing that would tell him how it would all end. Left to his own devices, he fell back on one of the worst fictions of all.

“They can’t convict me if I just tell the truth,” he told his lawyer the night before he was to testify.

The fierce insistence that only the guilty were convicted, the sudden fanatical belief that because he was innocent everyone would know when he took the stand and looked the jury in the eye that he was telling the truth - Desperation always wore the same face. He understood that the innocent sometimes got convicted, but that did not happen very often and surely it could not happen to him. Harlowe, relying on a fiction of his own, told him, what he had told countless other defendants before, that telling the truth was all that anyone could do. And then he told him how to lie.

“The question you’re going to get, and Alfonso is going to ask it a number of different ways, is why, if she was dead when you got there, you didn’t call the police, didn’t call 911, didn’t call for help.”

They were sitting in Harlowe’s office a little after eight o’clock at night. Shop lights and traffic lights reflected off the glass-walled buildings and the western sky had turned a purple blue. Harlowe had his shirt sleeves rolled up. Driscoll Rose still had on the dark suit and tie he had worn that day to court.

“I panicked; I didn’t know what I was doing.”

With a frown, Harlowe signaled his disapproval. This was not good enough.

“Panic. That’s an easy word. People panic out of fear. What were you afraid of? She’s laying there, blood all over – she’s dead, for Christ sake – but you’re afraid? What were you afraid of?”

“That I’d be blamed for it.”

Harlowe slapped his palms on the hard surface of his desk.“Because of what you had done to her before? Alfonso will have a field day with that. By the time he’s through with it, everyone will think that what you said was that you knew you’d be blamed for it because you did it!”

“But I did panic,” insisted Rose. “I was scared. I’d never seen anyone dead before. It was Gloria; it wasn’t….”

“You were scared; you didn’t know what had happened - only that Gloria, the woman you loved, had been murdered, and that whoever had murdered her – the killer – might still be there. Isn’t that what happened? Isn’t that why you didn’t think to call the police – you didn’t have time?”

“Yes,” he agreed, suddenly realizing that that was exactly the way it had happened. “All I knew was that Gloria had been murdered and that the killer, whoever he was, might still be there.”

Harlowe’s eyes, a moment before lit with the certainty of what he described, went cold with doubt.

“Then why didn’t you call the police as soon as you were safely away?”

Rose’s mouth hung half open waiting for a hint what he should say next, but Harlowe maintained a skeptical silence. Rose could expect no help when he was under the withering cross-examination of the district attorney.

“I should have, and if I had been thinking clearly that is exactly what I would have done. I drove around for hours; I’m not sure where I drove to. I was in shock, I guess; nothing made sense. I remember thinking at one point I should go back to Malibu, back to the house; that I must have been hallucinating, must have imagined it, that Gloria wasn’t really dead, that she was still alive.”

Harlowe nodded his approval, and then, showing more confidence than he felt, told Rose he thought he would do fine.

“Just tell the truth; that’s all any of us can do,” he said, an hour later when he walked him to the door.

At three o’clock in the morning, unable to sleep, Driscoll Rose got out of bed, drove out to Malibu and parked across the street from the house he had once shared with Gloria Baker and later, as an act of atonement, given her as a gift. He tried to see himself running out the door, tried to remember what he had felt, not the panic at the thought of being blamed, but fear for his own life. Then he drove away, following the haphazard, aimless course he might have taken had he really been in a state of shock, confused by what had happened and what it all might mean. It was possible that he had imagined that it might not have happened, that Gloria had not been murdered, that she was still alive; possible that he had even turned around and started back. He did not know what had happened that night or why he had reacted the way he had. The only thing he was really certain about was that he did not kill Gloria Baker, that someone else had done it, that it was not him.

A crowd, any crowd, however big or small, takes on a life of its own. It becomes in a courtroom the spectator of the play, caught in the emotion of the moment, tense with anticipation as the last act begins. From that moment in the trial when they were promised that the defendant would testify, the crowd had looked forward to what they were now about to see, Michael Harlowe, rising from his chair and, in a bare whisper of a voice, announcing in the cathedral quiet that the defense called the defendant, Driscoll Rose.

Dressed in a dark gray suit and a dark gray tie, with an expression that seemed puzzled, and even irritated, that he was forced to be there, Rose sat on the witness chair and began to rub his hands together.

“I didn’t do it!” he cried suddenly. “I didn’t kill Gloria! I didn’t murder anyone!”

Harlowe had meant to give him a moment to get comfortable, to get used to sitting there, with the jury on his immediate left and the staring courtroom crowd right in front of him. He had not expected this.

“Mr. Rose,” said Judge Bannister before Harlowe could say anything. “Like any other witness you are here to answer questions put to you by the two attorneys.” He looked at him with a sympathetic understanding. “I’m sure Mr. Harlowe will give you a chance to say everything you wish to say.”

With an awkward smile of apology and comprehension Rose shifted position and waited for his attorney to begin. Harlowe did not miss a beat.

“You’ve already answered the most important question, but just to get it on the record, I’ll ask it again: Did you murder Gloria Baker?”

Clutching the arms of the chair, Rose held his head high and looked at the jury.

“No, I did not. I was in love with her; I wanted to marry her. We were going to try to work things out. That’s why I went there that night: so we could talk more about it.”

Harlowe stood at the side of the counsel table, just a few short steps from the jury box. His eyes stayed on the witness and, except when Rose turned to the jury, Rose kept his eyes on him. Harlowe had told him to do that, to act as if the two of them were having a private conversation that others, especially the jury, could overhear.

“So there’s no mistake about this, so I understand exactly what you are saying, you went there that night; you were there, at the house in Malibu, where Gloria Baker was murdered?”

“Yes, I was there. I got there around eleven. She knew I was coming over. We had not set an exact time. What some of the others said earlier is true: I wasn’t any good at keeping track of time. I got there, as I say, around eleven; and I found her – Gloria – dead on the floor. I knew she was dead as soon as I saw her. There was blood everywhere, and her eyes were wide open in an awful, vacant stare.”

“What did you do then, when you saw her there, lying dead on the floor? Did you call the police?”

Rose ignored the question and seemed even to ignore Harlowe. He seemed to draw inside himself and change into something different. With a strange, uncanny smile he faced the jury.

“I must have been in shock, or maybe I’m just a coward. I should have called the police, I should have called for help, but I wasn’t thinking. All I felt was fear. It had me by the throat. Gloria had been murdered. The killer might still be there, maybe in the next room. Maybe he was a burglar, looking for jewelry or something before he left. Maybe he was some lunatic, ready to kill anyone he met. I got out of there, ran as fast as I could. I got in my car and just drove, drove for hours, I didn’t even know where, the whole time going crazy because of what I’d seen. I should have called the police; I should have done a lot of things. I don’t have any excuse for that, except I was out of my mind with grief and fear.”

Rose seemed to come back to himself, as if what he had just said to the jury had come from some inner compulsion to confess fully his own failures and that, having done that, he had obtained a kind of release. Harlowe could only marvel at the effect that had been achieved. The jury believed him; at least they seemed as if they wanted to.

“The prosecution spent a lot of time trying to show that you have a violent temper. How do you explain what happened the time you hit Gloria Baker and she had to be taken to the hospital?”

“I have a temper; I can’t deny that. But I didn’t hit her because of my temper; I hit her because of the drugs.”

There was a low, rumbling noise from the crowd, registering surprise and disapproval. Harlowe was surprised as well. He knew of course – everyone knew – that Rose had at various times been treated for addiction, but Rose had never mentioned this in connection with the assault. Harlowe pretended that he had expected this answer all along.

“Would you explain that to the jury: how drugs played a part in what happened?”

“I had a drug problem. I had been in treatment. I was clean, I wasn’t using. It felt good, to be free of that vicious habit. I owed it all to Gloria. She made me do it, get treatment, get my life back in order. That was the condition she set when I asked her to marry me, when we got engaged: that I go through treatment on my own – not because I got in trouble with the law and was ordered to as a condition of probation – but because I loved her and because I had to do this for myself. And I did, and it felt good, and everything was going great, and then something happened. She began to change, became distant. I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t know what I had done. It got worse. We were living together, but she would disappear for days. There was always some excuse: there was something she had to do or she just had to get away. I was losing her and I knew it and then she told me she didn’t want to get married, that she didn’t want to live with me, that she didn’t want me around. That’s when I started again, drinking, using drugs: I didn’t care what happened to me. I felt sorry for myself. It’s inexcusable – I know that – but that’s what happened. Then I found out that she had been seeing someone else, that she was in love with someone else. She told me herself. That’s when it happened. I was on God knows what that night, the night I did that, hit her like that and then just ran away. When I realized what I had done, that I’d hurt her like that – that’s when I went into treatment, that’s when I got clean for the last time. I haven’t used anything since.”

“You haven’t used anything since,” repeated Harlowe, as if to witness the veracity of the claim as well as to underscore the significance of the fact. “You weren’t on drugs - you weren’t under the influence of anything - the night Gloria Baker was murdered, the night you found her dead in the living room of her Malibu home?”

“No, I was not,” insisted Rose, staring at the jury with all the puzzled innocence he felt. “I wasn’t on drugs; I wasn’t on anything – and I didn’t kill her, I swear I didn’t!”

Harlowe subjected him to a long, searching glance, as if the test of the truth of this all-important question was whether the defendant would shrink from the contest and look away. Satisfied, Harlowe started to turn away, apparently finished with the witness, but then, abruptly, turned back.

“She was in love with someone else when she broke off the engagement. Did she tell you who it was?”

“No; the only thing she ever told me – and that was only later, when we started seeing each other again – was that she knew it was a mistake.” Rose grasped one hand with the other and then, just as quickly, let go; and then he did it again, tighter this time, rubbing them together like someone trying to get rid of something stuck to his fingers. “She said – and I never was quite sure what she meant – that she had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people.”

The line stuck in the mind of Hector Alfonso. He stood at the middle of the jury box, ready to begin the cross-examination. The ease with which he could shift from one emotion to another, angry one moment, full of compassion the next, was not a conscious choice of tactics, a calculated decision which face to show the public, but the natural reaction of an adaptable intelligence which, without an inner moral compass to guide it, looked only to its own advantage. He was like most politicians, only quicker.

“She had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people. Is that what you said?” he asked, lifting a thick eyebrow as if he was not sure he had heard him right.

Rose looked at him with suspicion. “Yes, that’s what she said.”

“A habit of falling in love with the wrong people. That’s really quite interesting, isn’t it, that she would say that? She was in love with you – you were engaged – and then she was in love with someone else – and then she wasn’t. But she didn’t say she had fallen in love with the wrong man – she said she had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people.”

“Is there a question in there somewhere?” protested Harlowe, as he got to his feet with a much put upon expression. “Or does the district attorney intend to start his closing argument a little early?”

Bannister turned an inquiring eye on Hector Alfonso who simply ignored him.

“Had a habit of falling in love with -”

“Mr. Alfonso!” cried Bannister with a stern, unforgiving look. “Don’t ever do that again! You can give a speech somewhere else – not here. If you have a question, ask it; if you don’t, sit down and I’ll ask Mr. Harlowe to call his next witness.”

Alfonso turned slowly, and quite on purpose, as if he were about to challenge Bannister’s authority to tell him what he could or could not do when he was cross-examining not just any witness, but a witness who was also guilty of murder. His eyes were full of anger, his mouth locked tight; and then, just as his gaze met the warning on Walter Bannister’s implacable face, his look changed on the instant, became friendly, eager to avoid any misunderstanding.

“Sorry, your Honor. I do have a question, and with your permission, I’ll ask it.”

But he did not wait for permission. He wheeled around and confronted Driscoll Rose.

“Gloria Baker had fallen in love with the wrong person not just once or twice, but a number of times – Is that what you took that remark to mean?”

“I didn’t say what she might have meant by it,” countered Rose, determined not to give the prosecutor anything he did not have to give him. Alfonso continued to press the point.

“She called it a habit – falling in love with the wrong person. A habit – correct?”

“Habit; yes, that’s what she said.”

“Not something she had done once or twice, but a habit?”

“Yes,” said Rose, becoming visibly annoyed.

“Which means that there wasn’t just one other person, as your lawyer was arguing, who must have fallen in love with her, but that there were a number of people with whom she had at one time or another been involved, does it not?” demanded Alfonso with a certainty Rose was beginning to find insufferable.

“You make her sound like some whore!”

“No, not that at all: but a woman who was not ready to make a commitment. That must have made you crazy: being in love with her, knowing she did not feel that way about you?”

“But she did, damn it! She did! We were going to -”

“You thought you were going to get back together, but she didn’t want that, did she? She changed her mind again, told you she wasn’t going to try again, that it was over – Isn’t that what she told you; isn’t that the reason you murdered her?”

“No!” shouted Rose, rising up from the chair. “I didn’t kill her; she was dead when I got there!”

“Of course she was,” said Alfonso with a mocking grin. “It was just the way you said it was. You’d never do anything to hurt her. You loved her too much for that – the way you loved her too much the night that by your own admission you almost beat her to death!”

“Objection!” thundered Harlowe, flinging up his arms in angry frustration.

“Sustained!” said Bannister, banging his gavel to quiet the crowd, brought to life by the ferocity of Alfonso’s attack. “No more,” warned the judge. “And that means you, too, Mr. Alfonso. I won’t have it.”

Alfonso nodded but kept his eyes on the witness, almost daring him to come out of the chair after him if he wanted to do something about it.

“All right,” he said, waving his hand as if to signal an end to hostilities; “let’s go back to the beginning and start all over. You testified that the night you hit her you had found out she had broken off your engagement because she had fallen in love with someone else – correct?”

“Yeah, I found out.”

“But she did not tell you who it was?”

“No.”

“And then later, she still didn’t tell you who it was, only that she had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people?”

“Yeah.”

“She didn’t tell you that this person – whoever it was – had hit her?”

Rose seemed surprised. “No, she didn’t say anything like that.”

“Or that this person – whoever it was – had threatened her with any harm?”

“No.”

“And she didn’t tell you that any of the other people with whom she had fallen in love - all those ‘wrong people’ she mentioned – had ever used violence against her or threatened her in any way, did she?”

Rose began to understand where this was going. He folded his arms across his chest and sank down in the seat and with a look of incorrigible indifference gazed at his shoes.

“No, I guess not.”

“So, while she may have had a habit of falling in love with the wrong people, the only one among them who had ever done her any harm – violent, physical harm – was you. Isn’t that correct, Mr. Rose?”

“It was the drugs; it wasn’t me,” he insisted, clinging to the belief that he would never otherwise have harmed her.

With a half-turn toward the jury, Alfonso flashed a glittering smile of unqualified triumph.

“That’s an interesting excuse. The reason you could not restrain yourself is because you could not restrain yourself: The reason you could not stop yourself from almost killing her is because you could not stop yourself from using narcotics. And you could not stop yourself from doing that because you could not stop feeling sorry for yourself. That’s pretty much how it is with you, isn’t it? – You have fame, money, everything anyone could want; but if someone you want doesn’t want you back you think you’ve suffered more than anyone ever has. Gloria Baker didn’t want you, and you killed her, because if you couldn’t have her you were going to be damn certain no one else ever would!”

Harlowe was on his feet shouting an objection, but he might as well have been yelling at the sea for all the difference it made. Bannister could sustain the objection with all the stern-eyed vehemence he could summon, but nothing could erase from the jury’s mind what Hector Alfonso had said.

“You say you found her lying dead on the living room floor; you say there was blood everywhere; you say you were afraid the killer might still be there; you say that’s the reason you ran away, got in your car and drove – Where did you go?” he snapped.

“Where did I go? I don’t know. I drove all around. I think I must have been in a state of shock. I just drove, that’s all.”

“Yes, I remember: you said you were ‘out of my mind with grief and fear.’ You got there about what time? – I believe you said around eleven.”

“Yes, that’s right: around eleven.”

“Could it have been a little earlier than that, say closer to ten or ten thirty?” Alfonso asked this in an off-hand, almost casual way, as if the question had no particular importance.

Rose hesitated, turned his head slightly to the side, but kept his eyes focused on the district attorney. “No, I don’t think so. It was around eleven, maybe even a few minutes after.”

“Really! You left the restaurant where you were having dinner at nine-thirty, correct?”

“Yes, around then.”

“From there to Malibu is – what? – thirty, forty, minutes.”

“I didn’t drive straight out there. I drove around for a while, thinking things through.”

“Thinking things through! Yes, I see. You seem to spend a lot of time driving around, thinking things through. You spent how many hours in your car that night – after you found the dead body of Gloria Baker?”

“I don’t know. All night, I guess.”

“All night, you guess. And you did this because, as you told your attorney, you were out of your mind with grief and fear. How long did the fear last, how long did you have to drive before you decided you were safe, that the killer wasn’t right behind you waiting to kill you, before you called the police?”

Rose swallowed hard and rubbed his forehead. There was anguish in his eyes.

“I already said I didn’t call the police; I didn’t call anyone.”

“No one? You just drove around all night and didn’t call anyone? You loved Gloria Baker, but you didn’t call the police so they might have at least a chance to catch the killer; didn’t call the police to warn them that, as you told us when your lawyer was asking you questions, the killer might be a homicidal maniac who was going to kill anyone he could find? My, that was brave of you, wasn’t it? Not like all those heroes you play so well on the screen!”

“Your Honor, I -” Harlowe began to object, but with one last withering glance at the witness, Alfonso suddenly announced he was finished.

There was one more witness for the defense, a witness that unlike everyone else who had testified, seemed actually to enjoy the experience. William Dunsmore – Billy, as everyone called him – had dropped out of college his sophomore year. The work was too difficult, or rather, because he was not unintelligent, took too much of his time. A child of southern California, he preferred to spend his days on a beach and his nights at a party. As he had not yet turned twenty, this was not the unfortunate choice it might otherwise seem; he still had years ahead of him to learn to live according to the world’s expectations. Wearing the only sports jacket he had and a tie borrowed from a friend, he took the oath with a kind of quiet shyness and then, settling himself on the witness stand, looked around the crowded courtroom with bashful but yet confident eyes.

Michael Harlowe wanted to know only one thing.

“Did you see someone leave the home of Gloria Baker the night she was murdered?”

The witness leaned forward, nodding his head emphatically. Harlowe smiled.

“You have to answer out loud, Mr. Dunsmore.”

“Oh, yeah; okay.”

“And?”

“And?” he asked with a blank look.

“Did you see someone leave her house?”

“Oh, yeah, right; I did.”

“Tell the jury how you happened to be there. What was the reason you were in Malibu, close to Gloria Baker’s home?”

“Delivery,” he replied with a quick, nervous grin. Too late, he remembered to look at the jury. “I was delivering a pizza to one of the houses near there, maybe half a block away. That’s what I do – deliver pizzas, I mean. It’s not a regular job; just something I do part time.”

He grinned for no apparent reason and waited for some sign that the jury understood. Such was his guileless enthusiasm that several of the jurors smiled back. Harlowe tried to keep him on point.

“You were delivering a pizza to one of Gloria Baker’s neighbors. What time was that?”

“Time? Oh, I don’t know. Not exactly, I mean. A little after ten, maybe a little later than that.”

“Very good. Ten, or perhaps a little after that. Tell the jury exactly what you saw.”

They had been through this in private three different times, reviewing the questions Harlowe would ask and the answers, the truthful answers, Billy Dunsmore would give. But now, in the strange formality of the courtroom, watched by a somber faced crowd that numbered in the hundreds, Billy Dunsmore would have been hard pressed to remember his own name.

“What I saw?” he asked with a gulp.

“Yes, what you saw. Take your time,” said Harlowe in a calm, soothing voice. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Just take your time, and in your own words describe what you saw that night. Someone was leaving Gloria Baker’s house.”

Billy Dunsmore nodded with even more energy than before, and this time he remembered to speak.

“Yes, someone was leaving, leaving in a hurry, almost running – that’s what caught my eye.” He said this as if he were surprised, not at what he had seen, but that it had somehow suddenly come back to him again. This had the effect of making him speak more rapidly than normal, eager to get it all out while he still could. “He was almost running – like someone scared. Yes, that’s it! – In a hurry to get away. He didn’t look around; like he was afraid someone might see him. He just kept moving, until he turned the corner and was out of sight.”

“Could you tell who it was? Did you get a look at him at all?”

“No, it was dark, he was too far away, and he was going in the other direction.” Billy Dunsmore paused, looked at Harlowe for a moment and then looked past him to the counsel table where the defendant sat alone. “But it wasn’t him; it wasn’t Driscoll Rose.”

Harlowe had waited for this moment, had rehearsed in his mind the slow turn he now made and the long, thoughtful look with which he stared at the defendant.

“It wasn’t the defendant. You’re sure of it?” he asked, glancing back over his shoulder. “You’re sure that the man you saw leaving the home of the victim, Gloria Baker, the night of her murder was not Driscoll Rose?”

“I’m sure. I couldn’t see his face, but it wasn’t Driscoll Rose. He’s famous; everyone knows who he is. I would have recognized him anywhere.”

A smile danced on the mouth of Hector Alfonso as he rose from his chair to begin his cross-examination.

“You would recognize Driscoll Rose anywhere, even in the dark, more than half a block away, when he was running – or almost running; I don’t want to put words in your mouth – in the opposite direction; even when, as I believe you put it, he didn’t look around and you never saw his face?”

“It wasn’t him,” insisted Billy Dunsmore with an eager, lop eared grin.

“It wasn’t him. I see.” Alfonso crossed his arms and began to pace. “Had you ever seen the defendant in person before today? I mean, other than that night.”

“No, but I -”

“But you have seen him in the movies. Have you seen a lot of his movies?”

“Almost all of them, I think.”

“Does he always play the same role?”

“No, of course not; that’s why he’s so good: he can play all sorts of different people.”

“Hard to know - isn’t it? - what he’s really like, he’s so good at being other people,” asked Alfonso as if he were sharing a confidence.

“Yeah, I imagine. I mean, anyone who could be so many different….”

“Yes, you were going to say?”

Billy Dunsmore had realized that there was now nothing he could say, that he had been tricked into making something of a fool of himself. He thought hard for a moment, trying to remember just why he was so sure that, whomever he had seen that night, it was not Driscoll Rose. Then it hit him.

“He was older, a lot older – the man I saw. It wasn’t Driscoll Rose.”

“Older. I see. A lot older, you say. Can you tell us anything more about what this older man, this man a lot older than the defendant, looked like? Did he have gray hair, white hair – was he as old as that?” asked Alfonso, smiling broadly.

“Well, I don’t know,” replied Billy Dunsmore. He began to look around, not at the spectators lined up on the benches the other side of the bar, but at the people closer to hand, first at the jury box and then back the other way. “He looked a little like – I don’t know – he looked a little like you, judge!”

“I see!” laughed Alfonso. “You think the judge might be the killer! I admit that for some reason the police never included him in their investigation, but -”

“I didn’t say I saw the judge; I said I saw someone who looked a little like him from a distance. He was older, he was -” But before he could finish, Walter Bannister interrupted.

“Perhaps I can help clear this up. When you say you saw someone who looked like me, do you mean by that someone who looked older than the defendant?”

Billy Dunsmore cheek was crimson. He wanted the judge to understand that he had meant no disrespect, that it was just an example. “I didn’t say I saw you, your Honor; all I said was -”

“Yes, I know; it’s all right,” said Bannister with an understanding smile that restored Billy Dunsmore’s lost confidence. “When you say older, just how old do you mean?”

Billy Dunsmore thought about it. He liked the judge. He wanted to be precise.

“At least forty, your Honor.”

The laughter that echoed through the courtroom was friendly and sympathetic and from the baffled expression on his young face it was apparent that Billy Dunsmore had no idea the cause. Bannister bent toward him.

“That may be the nicest thing anyone has said about me in years.”

And still Billy Dunsmore did not understand.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Like most of us, Driscoll Rose saw himself in the mirror of other people’s eyes, and, like most of us, he took his bearings by what he thought other people believed. As he listened to what the district attorney said about him during his summation, as he watched the faces of a jury entranced by what they heard, he began to wonder whether he might actually have done what they said he had, murdered Gloria Baker, and then somehow blocked it out of his mind. He had heard of people doing things they later had no conscious recollection of having done; he had heard of men, and women, too, who had done something terrible in a violent, and temporary, fit of insanity. Perhaps he had gone crazy and could not remember it. Maybe it was the reason that to this day he did not know where he had gone after he left the house in Malibu and started on that long pilgrimage to nowhere. He had been out of his mind, and no memory of what he had done, except that he remembered clear enough what he had seen when he walked in and found her lying on the floor. Or was that just an illusion invented by his subconscious mind to conceal from himself what he had really done? Was it what he saw, not when he first arrived, but when he turned back for one last look before he ran away from the murder he had just committed?

No, it was impossible. He would not have murdered Gloria; he could not have killed anyone. But then why did everyone look so certain that he could, and that he had? He could see it in their eyes, those twelve anonymous men and women who held his fate in their hands, the way some of them looked at him with such deep suspicion and almost open hostility as Hector Alfonso postured in front of them, calling him a killer and a coward and someone who by his own admission had more than once almost beaten someone to death. They hated him. He was sure of it, and he did not blame them, given what they had been told. The things he had done, the few times he had lost control of himself and done something he later regretted, were magnified out of all proportion, made to seem the constant, chronic condition of his life, as if he had never done anything except look for someone to beat with his fists. His engagement, the way he had literally got down on his knees to ask Gloria to marry him, all the traditional old-fashioned laughing excitement of it, all the aching loneliness of the days and night he could not be with her, all that was forgotten, never mentioned, when the only thing that seemed to matter, the only thing that had relevance, was the fact, which he had admitted and tried to explain, that the engagement had been ended and that he had done what he should never have done as a result.

He noticed with an actor’s sensitivity that his lawyer, sitting next to him, was becoming more and more tense. Harlowe’s eyes stayed on the district attorney, but he was thinking about something else, probably what he was going to say when it was finally his turn to speak. Alfonso had gone on for nearly an hour; Harlowe, with his competitive nature, would go that long and a little more besides. He had learned certain things about Harlowe during the course of the trial, none of them quite as shocking as the fact, which was indisputable, that his lawyer did not care at all whether he was innocent or guilty. It simply did not matter. Harlowe, it is true, might feel worse if someone were found guilty of something he had not done, but not that much worse. His main concern would be that he had lost a case he had had a chance to win. That was what they were all concerned about, everyone involved in the trial, the effect it would have on them after it was over. He could see it on the face of Hector Alfonso, finishing his closing argument, the smug certainty of a man convinced he was going to win. He could see it on the face of Michael Harlowe, walking toward the jury box ready to begin his own summation, the determination that, despite the odds, he was not going to lose.

Hector Alfonso had been passionate and strenuous, sweat dripping from his smooth, shiny face before he was halfway through his summation. He described in grim, nerve-shattering detail the way Gloria Baker had been murdered, dwelling in particular on how she had been made to watch while the killer – ‘the defendant, Driscoll Rose’ – had slashed her portrait, a preview of what he was going to do to her next. Over and over again, he accused Rose of violent, aberrant behavior, a pattern of misconduct that had inevitably ended in homicide. When he was finally finished it would have been hard to find anyone in that courtroom, or anyone on that jury, who did not believe that Driscoll Rose had been born with the mark of Cain, destined to murder someone, and that if it had not been Gloria Baker it would, sooner or later, have been someone else.

Harlowe had seen the same thing Driscoll Rose had seen. That became obvious the moment the defense attorney began to speak to the jury, or rather, with his hand resting on the jury box railing, did not speak at all. He started to say something; he opened his mouth, but then changed his mind. He smiled to himself and, shaking his head, stared down at the floor. Then, quite unexpectedly, he walked away, not far, just a few steps, but far enough to make the jury wonder what the lawyer for the defense might be thinking. It was a tactic, a gesture, that Rose himself immediately understood, a way to draw the eyes of an audience, and with their eyes their thoughts, to you. He liked especially what Harlowe did next, the question that brought the jury up short.

“Do you really want to convict someone of murder because the district attorney tells you he did it, or would you rather consider the evidence and decide for yourselves whether the prosecution has proven its case?”

And suddenly, instead of a lynch mob, they were a jury again, embarrassed that they had for a moment forgotten their main obligation. Whether a deliberate adjustment, a conscious reaction to what Alfonso had done, or the style that had become second nature, what he would have done in any event, Harlowe, unlike Alfonso, was calm, cool, and at times even ironic. He made everything seem obvious, and nothing so obvious as the fact that for all the prosecution’s rhetoric about murder and guilt there was no evidence linking the defendant to the crime.

“There isn’t, not really,” insisted Harlowe with an expression like that of a schoolboy who has to his considerable amazement just discovered that a class he had been told was difficult was not difficult at all. He shrugged his hunched over shoulders and shook his head. “There isn’t anything; nothing at all. Where is the murder weapon, the knife missing from the kitchen that must have been used to kill Gloria Baker? The police searched the defendant’s home, searched everywhere. They could not find it. Where is the bloody clothing? You saw the photographs of the murder scene, you heard the witnesses – you heard Yolanda Ross – describe all the blood they saw. The murderer must have had blood all over him. But did the prosecution produce any blood stained clothing belonging to the defendant? There was nothing. They did not find the weapon in his home; they did not find any evidence of the victim’s blood on his clothing or on anything else that belonged to him. There is a reason for that. He did not kill her. He did not murder Gloria Baker.”

Harlowe did not need a script or a handful of notes; his closing argument had written itself, line by line during the whole course of the trial, a trial that had become so much a part of him that a review of each thing that had happened came as easily as a short recitation of his own abbreviated biography. He talked and, listening to what he said, talked some more. He asked a question, and then gave an answer, which gave rise to another question and another answer, a dialogue that given by someone on the street might have led to commitment in an institution, but in a court of law was essential to instruction.

“But Driscoll Rose was there that night. He took the stand and admitted that. Yes, when he did not need to. What do you mean he didn’t need to? Didn’t he have to tell the truth, explain what he knew? No, he didn’t have to testify; no one can make someone charged with a crime do that. He did it of his own free will, chose to testify, chose to face a brutal cross-examination by an experienced and relentless prosecuting attorney.” Harlowe flashed a smile at the watching Hector Alfonso. “A prosecuting attorney who showed us once again why a defendant with something to hide would have to be out of his mind to subject himself to the thorough and incisive questions he asks.”

Alfonso felt the sting of it, the compliment that only hurts you if it is true, and smiled back.

“The defendant didn’t have to testify, didn’t have to tell you he was there that night; he didn’t have to tell you that he discovered Gloria Baker, the woman he loved, lying dead on the floor. Why did he? Why didn’t he just sit there, say nothing – explain nothing – and let the prosecution’s case fall completely apart? They could not have proven that he was even there that night, much less that he murdered her. Why did he do it? Why did he testify? Maybe because, like most of us, he still believes in telling the truth. Maybe because he thought he owed it to Gloria Baker to get up there and confess in public the mistakes he has made and how he wishes none of those things had happened. Maybe because he thought that if he told the truth someone would believe him and would understand that the real killer is still out there and should not go unpunished.”

Shoving one hand deep in his pants pocket, Harlowe with the other rubbed the back of his neck. He looked slowly from one juror to the next, searching their eyes as if the only mystery was why he had to tell them what they must already know.

“Driscoll Rose was there that night. He took the stand and under oath told us what time he got there and what he saw when he opened the door. There was someone else there that night. A witness, who also testified, saw him leaving the home of Gloria Baker nearly an hour before Driscoll Rose arrived. The district attorney wants you to believe that it was the defendant, but despite being challenged on this point repeatedly, Billy Dunsmore was absolutely certain that it was not Driscoll Rose. We know two things about this person, whoever he was, two things that do more than rouse our suspicion, two things that make it almost certain that he was the killer, the man who murdered Gloria Baker: He was running away from the house and he did not testify at this trial. Consider this; think about this. If he had not done anything, if he was just visiting and when he left decided to jog down the street for a little late night exercise, why would he not have come forward? Why would he not have told the police that he was there and what he had seen: whether she was alive and well when he left or whether he had discovered her lying dead on the living room floor?”

Walter Bannister was impressed. It was, he wrote in his private journal, one of the best performances he had seen; better, he thought, than anything Michael Harlowe had done before.

“But it won’t be enough to save Driscoll Rose. He will be found guilty because they want him to be guilty; because he does not have an excuse for who he is - an actor who, now that they have seen him, listened to him, come to understand that he has all the self-discipline of a self-absorbed child, heard how easily he falls into an uncontrollable, violent rage, they find themselves embarrassed by the way they looked up to him before, a movie star with feet of clay. They are not entirely wrong. He is innocent of the crime – he did not kill Gloria Baker – but as much as anyone he is responsible for her death. No one who knew what happened that night would believe this, of course; the only thing most people are interested in is who did it, who committed what we in our ignorance call murder.

“I have written this all out before, described as best I can the series of events, each of them, if in different ways, involving Driscoll Rose or caused by something he did – the chain of events that led inevitably, as it seems to me, to her death. There is no reason to do so again, except, perhaps, as some kind of catharsis, a temporary release from the pressures that have built up inside me, all the things I know, all the secrets with which I now have to live. I wonder what they think – No, I know what they think! – the lawyers, the jurors, that crowd of eager trial watchers who come every day to court: Walter Bannister, the learned, incorruptible judge whose only purpose is to follow the law and make sure the trial is fair!

“They thought - Harlowe and Alfonso - that I was talking about the evidence when I said in chambers that Rose was innocent. It was hard not to laugh, hard not to scream, hard not to pound the desk with both hands, hard not to grab them each by the throat and tell them everything, exactly what happened and why. It would have been worth it just to see their expressions.

“It’s almost over now. The jury has their instructions. I imagine we will have a verdict sometime tomorrow. As between them, Harlowe is the better lawyer, but Alfonso knows what he is about. He will mask all the feelings of elation that will surge through him, the shameless sense of triumph at a victory he will think he achieved on his own, and deliver himself of the kind of cautionary remarks considered appropriate at the end of a murder trial. With fawning sincerity he will remind everyone that more than a trial it was a tragedy, a beautiful and gifted young woman murdered for no reason, and a talented young man driven by demons we do not understand to do something that should never have happened. He will say something about how the jury did what it was supposed to do, reached a verdict based on the evidence, and how there is some small satisfaction in knowing that this meant justice for the victim, Gloria Baker. Alfonso, as he always does, will believe everything he says, and feel it as well; and then, as soon as he is back in his office, away from the cameras and the crowd, he will busy himself with the next set of calculations on how to use what has happened to his own advantage.

“And Harlowe? He gave me a strange look when I said in chambers that I was sure his client was innocent. I do not know that he believed me when, analyzing the evidence, I tried to show what it meant that her portrait had been slashed before Gloria Baker was murdered. Harlowe has a well-developed instinct about people and the various ways all of us lie. He could sense that something was not right, but he did not know what, or rather could not be sure. I think he thought I was guessing, that the analysis of that part of the evidence had come to me only after I had decided – a decision based perhaps on nothing but intuition – that Rose was not the killer. I wanted to say more, tell them everything I knew. That is what intrigues me: why did I feel such a strong compulsion to tell them even that? Was my conscience at work? Perhaps. Or was it something more than that, something just the opposite of the desire to tell the truth, something evil, a desire to taunt them with their ignorance, taunt with the possibility – the very real possibility – that they were trapped every bit as much as I am in a story they cannot change: that the prosecution was about to convict a man for something he did not do and the lawyer for the defense would not be able to do anything about it? Was this in the strange perversity of my mind the only way I had to share the guilt for what was done? Am I – are we all – really that pathetic?”

Bannister had expected a verdict sometime the next day, but it did not happen. Two days went by, then three, and still nothing, not a word. Everyone began to get nervous, though for what reason no one could really say. Juries were unpredictable; everyone who had spent any time in court could tell you that. There were the usual explanations. The longer a jury stayed out the more uncertain they were and, for that reason, the less likely they were to convict. It was logical; it certainly made sense; and it had absolutely no basis in experience. Juries had stayed out for weeks and then brought back verdicts of guilty on all counts. No one knew anything and their ignorance made them crazy. The ancient Romans had claimed to read the future, the outcome of battles about to be fought, in the entrails of dead chickens. More civilized than that, those who worked in the courthouse, as well as those who covered the trial for the media, began to make bets, as if the combined ignorance of a larger number increased the chances of an accurate prediction. Harlowe, asked what he thought the odds of an acquittal, refused to speculate, confining himself to the deliberately meaningless remark that the jury was taking its time, as it was supposed to do, as it considered all the evidence. Alfonso, asked his opinion, would say only that he was certain the jury would do what was right.

No one asked Walter Bannister anything. A judge, especially this judge, was considered, such are the privileges of the office, unapproachable on any question having to do with the trial. In that silent dialogue with himself, that dialogue in which he considered things he could not discuss with another human being, in that dark labyrinth of his mind, he began to wonder whether he might have been wrong and that a guilty verdict was not nearly as inevitable as he had thought. It was a possibility he had not considered. He tried to imagine his reaction if the jury came back with an acquittal. It was what he had secretly wanted but had not dared hope. Rose was innocent. He had not murdered Gloria Baker. Whatever share of responsibility he had in the events that had led to her death, it did not warrant conviction for something he had not done. The more Bannister thought about it, the greater his sense of relief. He had decided what he would do – what he knew he had to do – once Driscoll Rose was found guilty of murder, but now there seemed a chance that he would not have to do anything. It was almost too good to be true. For the first time since the night of the murder, he started to think there might be a way out, a way to avoid any more evil.

Four days the jury was out, and then five, and then the question was not what the verdict was going to be but whether the jury would ever reach one; whether, hopelessly deadlocked, they would give up and go home and let another jury in yet another trial decide if Driscoll Rose was innocent or guilty. And then, eight days after they had been given their instructions, eight days after Walter Bannister had done everything he could to impress upon them the seriousness of their task, the jury told the bailiff and the bailiff told the judge that they had a verdict and were ready to announce it.

At three o-clock in the afternoon, Hector Alfonso sat alone at one counsel table and Michael Harlowe sat next to the defendant at the other, lost, all three of them, in thoughts of their own; thoughts, if the truth be known, that were entirely about themselves. The courtroom, filled to capacity, and more than capacity, by a crowd that though made up of many of the same faces that had watched the proceedings every day of the trial had, as it were, a different sensibility, a deepening of interest, a change of mood. There was none of the eager excitement of an act in progress; nothing of the keen anticipation of what turn things might take next. It was over; the trial was at an end. The jury had reached a verdict, and though no one outside the jury room knew what it was, there was a strange finality about the fact. There was nothing more to look forward to; the only thing left, learning what was already in the past. The line of Dr. Johnson – “Tell a man he is to be executed in the morning, it concentrates his mind wonderfully” – had no application. There was not that kind of tension. “The jury has reached its decision but no one knows what that decision is” – that stops the mind thinking anything. Driscoll Rose, who was not the least religious, could only pray.

One by one, with solemn, ghostlike faces, the jurors filed into the jury box and took, each of them, the same seats they had occupied during the long weeks of the trial. None of them looked at the defendant; none of them looked at anyone. The silence in the courtroom was complete. The slight sound of creaking leather when the court reporter shifted position in her chair seemed an almost obscene intrusion.

“I understand the jury has reached a verdict,” said Walter Bannister in the voice that always gave confidence to those who heard it. “Is that correct? Have you reached a verdict in the case?”

“Yes, your Honor,” said the foreman, the youngest member of the jury, a woman whose friendly, shining eyes were now filled with fatigue.

“And is that verdict the verdict of all of you? Is it the unanimous verdict of the jury?” asked Bannister. He looked at her with the serious expression of one who understands how difficult this decision, whatever it was, had to have been. She seemed grateful for that, what his eyes told her; grateful and somehow reassured that what they had done had met the measure of their responsibility.

“Yes, your Honor; we all agree.”

“Would you please read the verdict to the court.”

She lowered her eyes to the single piece of paper she held in her hand.

“We, the jury, in the above entitled case -”

“I didn’t do it!” cried Driscoll Rose, shaking all over. He stood there, with pleading eyes, his fists clenched at his sides, shouting his innocence. “I didn’t kill Gloria; I didn’t kill anyone. I -”

“Mr. Harlowe,” said Bannister without raising his voice. “Would you please…? Mr. Rose, we all understand the emotion you must feel, but you have to remain silent. You have to wait, like the rest of us, to hear what the verdict is.”

Rose stared at Bannister as if he was not sure what he had just been told or what he was supposed to do. Harlowe put his arm around his shoulder and whispered that he had to hold onto himself, that it would all be over in just a few more moments. Bannister told the foreman to continue.

“In the above entitled case, we the jury, find the defendant, Driscoll Rose….” She lowered her hands and looked straight at the defendant and with a deep sigh that seemed to speak of nothing but regret, went back five words to finish it: “…find the defendant, Driscoll Rose, guilty.”

Rose fell flat to the floor in a dead faint. Harlowe bent down next to him, trying to help. Reporters, eager to be first with the story, pushed their way out from the spectator benches. There was noise everywhere. Bannister tried to gavel the courtroom into submission, but the trial was over, the verdict had been announced, and all anyone wanted was to talk about it. The jurors were the only ones who had said all they needed. They sat in stunned silence, watching in disbelief as the courtroom gradually cleared out and, with his lawyer’s help, Driscoll Rose, whom they had just found guilty of murder, recovered his senses just long enough to collapse in his chair.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

No one went to see him, none of the people he had helped in their careers, certainly none of those whose careers he had ruined, none of the many friends he thought he had, none of the women he had known; no one came to visit Driscoll Rose while he sat in jail waiting to be sentenced. He had been forgotten, put out of mind, a name never mentioned, someone who had, in a sense, died with his last motion picture and been buried with his trial. He did get letters, dozens of them, but not from anyone he knew; crazy letters, most of them, offering everything from forgiveness to the love that Gloria Baker had not been smart enough to give him. He did not answer them, and after a while did not bother opening the new ones he received.

The days crawled by, each one duller, more tedious, than the last. He tried to read, but after a page or two his mind would begin to wander, and always to the same, maddening, inexplicable fact: He was innocent, he had not done anything, and yet here he was, locked inside a steel and concrete cell, the only question about his future how long he would be in prison if he was not there for life. He kept going back over everything that had happened, starting at first with the night of the murder, going through it, hour by hour, minute by minute, as if he was looking frame by frame at a picture he had made, certain that he must have missed something, overlooked some detail, something which at the time seemed insignificant but that, if only he could remember it, would explain everything. But no matter how often he went over it, no matter how often he tried, there was nothing, nothing that would help.

Then he started further back, the night he hit her, the night they made so much of at the trial; seeing it all over again, the things she said, the way she looked, that smug defiance in her eyes when she told him she had fallen in love with someone else. He had hated her then – he remembered that – and if he had not killed her it was not because he had not tried. He had hit her with everything he had. He had been in such a rage that he did not stop hating her, did not regret what he had done, until the next morning when he woke up and remembered that he had left her lying on the floor and wondered if he really might have killed her. Driscoll Rose thought about that now; he thought about it a lot. He did not believe in religion, and he did not believe in God, but he could not stop himself believing that he was somehow being punished for what he had done to her, not the night he killed her - he was innocent of that - but the night he almost had.

He did not go entirely without visitors. The night before he was to be sentenced, someone finally came to see him, the judge who had presided at his trial.

“I’ll be just outside,” said the jailer as he showed Walter Bannister into the small, windowless room where Rose sat waiting, his wrists and ankles shackled.

“Would you remove those, please,” Bannister asked the jailer who had started out the door.

A burly, thick faced man with large, pudgy hands, the shirt of his uniform strained against the buttons with such force that he must have sucked in his breath when he put it on. He would have refused to do what he had been asked, and in most cases not even bothered to reply, simply dismissed the request with a caustic glance, but Bannister was a different breed, more than just a judge, a gentleman, polite, well-mannered, the kind you did not see so much anymore.

“Of course, judge – whatever you say.”

Bannister waited until the jailer was gone.

“I won’t keep you long, Mr. Rose. Sentencing is tomorrow, and I wanted to have a chance to talk with you before that. There are some things that need saying.”

Rose remembered now what, because of everything else that had happened, he had forgotten, what he had not remembered since the time it took place, nearly a year ago at Roger Stanton’s place in Santa Barbara.

“You were the guy – sorry, you were the one who broke up that fight I was in. I didn’t remember. All through the trial, I’m sitting there, you’re up there on the bench, and I didn’t remember. No one told me it was you. I didn’t even get a good look at you at the time. I just remember someone pulled me off that guy I was fighting, that waiter who had said something he shouldn’t have said, who said -”

Bannister held up his hand. “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is that you’ve been found guilty of murder and tomorrow I have to sentence you.”

“Do you always wear a coat and tie?”

The question stunned Bannister by its sheer irrelevance. He watched in silence as Driscoll Rose scratched the red marks on his wrists where the handcuffs had cut into the skin. But Rose only started there. He kept scratching, first on his arms and then on his face, the nervous compulsion of someone under almost unbearable stress. His eyes, as Bannister now noticed, did not stay focused, but darted from one thing to another, the same way, it appeared, that his mind had begun to work: the ability to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds all but gone.

“I have to sentence you tomorrow,” Bannister told him again.

The soothing quality of his voice finally had an effect. Rose stopped scratching, held his hands in his lap and with sad, grief-stricken eyes waited for what Bannister had to tell him next.

“You were found guilty of murder, but I’m not going to sentence you for that. I’m going to sentence you instead for what you did to Gloria Baker before. I’m going to sentence you for assault. You’ll spend a few years in prison, then you’ll be out on parole.”

Rose stared at him. He did not understand any of it.

“I was found guilty of murder, but I’m not going to be sentenced for murder; I’m going to be…?”

Bannister crossed his arms and raised his chin. A thin, rueful smile cut across his mouth.

“The jury found you guilty; there’s nothing I can do about that. But I’m not going to sentence you for something I know you didn’t do.”

“That you know I didn’t do?” said Rose with a gaze that had suddenly become penetrating and acute. “You know I didn’t kill Gloria, you know I didn’t murder…? How do you know that?”

“I know you didn’t kill her because I know who did.” Bannister had not been sure until this moment that he would really say it, make this kind of confession; but having said it, he felt a surge of relief that was like a newfound power, a capacity he had not known he had. “I know all about the murder, and that you’re innocent.”

Rose’s eyes flew open. He reached across the table and grabbed Bannister by the wrist.

“If you know that – if you know who killed her – then get me out of here! Tell the police, tell the D.A. – for God’s sake, tell whoever you have to tell – but get me out of here! I’m innocent. You can’t send me to prison for something I didn’t do!”

“I’m not,” said Bannister as he pulled his arm away. “Listen to me!” he half-shouted. “I just told you what’s going to happen. It’s the most I can do for you. You’re going to prison, what should have happened when you went into one of those rages of yours and almost killed her. You should have gone to prison then. None of this would have happened – she’d still be alive – if you had been forced to pay the price for what you had done.”

“But I didn’t kill her –. You said so yourself. How can you…? Who killed her, who murdered Gloria?”

Bannister got up from his chair and shook his head.

“You had a trial. The jury found you guilty. The case is closed.”

“But you know who -”

“You didn’t kill her, but that isn’t the same as saying you don’t have any responsibility for her death. Consider it part of your punishment that everyone will think you’re a murderer.” Bannister paused and seemed to reconsider what he had said, wondering if it was too harsh. “No, I can’t do that. You’re not a murderer, Mr. Rose. Whatever else you are, you’re not that.”

Only Walter Bannister could have done what he did the next day and avoided a public lynching. With the utmost gravity, he announced from the bench that while the jury had returned a verdict of guilty, the court was not persuaded that the verdict was right, “and because we are under an obligation to dispense justice, we cannot in conscience sentence the defendant to a life in prison. The defendant, like everyone else accused of a crime should be punished in proportion to what he has actually done.” Without any further explanation, he sentenced Driscoll Rose to eight years in prison, the term that would have been imposed for a serious assault. Rose would be eligible for parole in less than three years.

No one knew quite what to make of it, but because of Walter Bannister’s perfect reputation for rectitude and learning, no one tried to make much of it at all. Within a few short weeks, the murder of Gloria Baker was all but forgotten, and what happened to Driscoll Rose, found guilty of a murder the judge in the case seemed to think he might not have done, had become a mystery not worth investigating.

Despite the insistence of his loyal clerk that he take a long and much deserved vacation, Bannister did not miss a day on the bench. He continued the same routine, presiding over trials, listening to legal arguments, deciding motions, as if the trial of Driscoll Rose had been no different than any of the other, countless proceedings with which he had been involved. He still took as much work home as before, and was still the first, or one of the first, to arrive at the courthouse in the morning. He still went on his regular, late night walk in the neighborhood where he lived. The only difference, if it was a difference, was that he refused the frequent invitations to accompany his wife, Meredith, to the various social events that occupied so many of her nights and weekends. He had not gone anywhere, except to the courthouse, for more than a month when, finally, he relented, and then only because it was another one of those large, anonymous gatherings at Roger Stanton’s Santa Barbara retreat.

“Why do you sigh like that?” chided Meredith as they approached the gated entrance. A long line of cars stretched in front of them, inching forward to valet parking. “It’s a gorgeous day, not a cloud in the sky. Everyone will be here. And we haven’t seen Roger since…since….”

“Since the trial,” he finished for her.

“It was all very disturbing,” she remarked, frowning at the memory of it. “Especially for Roger.”

“Especially for Roger? What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” replied Meredith with nervous impatience. She was trying to catch a glimpse of the couple just emerging from their car. They were famous, but she could not quite remember their names. “All the work he has had to do, putting things back together at the studio.”

“Yes, that must have been difficult,” said Bannister with a short, and rather weary, smile.

They waited for their turn to be ferried up to Stanton’s villa, high on the hill, and then, when they were there, they soon lost sight of each other. Meredith, as she often did, gravitated immediately toward a small crowd of people she had known for years, most of them born into the upper echelons of Hollywood life, while her husband, left to his own devices, wandered all alone down the long expanse of terraced, sun-drenched lawns, passing as he did hundreds of eager sun-tanned faces, all of them glowing in the knowledge, the shared secret, that they were important because you had to be, to have been invited to something like this, the first party thrown by Roger Stanton in more than a year.

“It’s really a strange business, isn’t it?”

Bannister felt a hand on his sleeve. The director, Irving Leonard, was standing next to him, a wry expression in his aging eyes.

“A strange business?”

“Everything. All of it. The house – more rooms than you can count, the long view out to the Pacific. A perfectly beautiful day, blue sky, green grass – Christ, this place has more lawns than a cemetery. How did your brother-in-law - how did any of us – get what he has? Making motion pictures; a strange business, if you think about it. People go into a room so dark you can’t see anything and for maybe two hours watch pictures on a screen – moving pictures – of a scene like this: people, good looking people, with smiling, cheerful faces and private, maybe not too nice ambitions and desires, on a nice sunny day that if they hadn’t decided to sit in the dark they could have been outside enjoying themselves.”

Leonard laughed in a dry, understated way. He looked out at the well-dressed crowd, and then back at Bannister.

“I’m not complaining, you understand. We all do pretty well because people like to watch other people pretend to be someone they’re not; but what the hell, you have to admit it’s a strange business. Though maybe not so strange as the business you’re in. I always try to make my pictures have an ending people can understand. What happened in that trial of yours; that sentence you gave -”

Bannister felt himself tense, not much, but enough for Leonard to notice.

“I’m sure you had your reasons,” he added quickly as he bent closer. “Everyone was upset, but only because they thought they were supposed to be – upset, I mean, that Driscoll could murder Gloria and get a sentence that meant he might be out in just a couple of years.” Leonard tightened his grip on Bannister’s arm, and then let go. “It did not last long. Someone pointed out that even if had only gotten a year Driscoll Rose was dead in Hollywood. He’d never make another movie.” A shrewd grin paraded unashamed across Irving Leonard’s mouth. “What could be more final than that? And if there was any doubt about it, now we have the party to prove it.”

“The party to prove it…?”

“You don’t know what this means? The chapter is closed, the story is over. Gloria Baker and Driscoll Rose are officially forgotten, part of the past we’re no longer required to remember. Everyone is here to have a good time – a good time: the bright sunny future we all deserve to enjoy, everyone free to dream that they’re the next Driscoll Rose, the next Gloria Baker, the next great star that next year, or maybe much sooner than that, everyone will want to know. Look at them, down there, starting to dance, where Driscoll damn near killed that kid, and would have, too, if you hadn’t stopped him. You see anyone thinking about him now, worried what he might think, worried he might on a hair trigger’s instant go from being their best friend to the worst enemy they’ve ever had? He was a bum; he deserved more than what you gave him – after what he did – but he’s gone and he won’t be coming back.”

They walked, the way they had before, down toward the silk awnings of the pavilion where a small orchestra was playing and a few couples had begun to dance. Leonard grabbed a glass from a passing waiter, took a drink, and then, with a strange, insistent look, as if nothing could stop him learning what he wanted to know, told Bannister that he knew his secret.

“I heard what you said in court: that you weren’t convinced Rose did it. You know something. What is it? You know who did it, don’t you? That would be a story worth telling.”

A sudden surge of heat coursed through Bannister’s veins. His mouth began to twitch uncontrollably. A wave of fatigue swept over him. He wondered now why he had come, why he did not just leave well enough alone. In a voice that seemed to belong to someone else, he dismissed the suggestion of some evil knowledge with an empty phrase.

“I gave the sentence that under the circumstances seemed appropriate.”

Under the circumstances! What a multitude of sins against morality that could cover: the omission of common obligations, the too cheap forgiveness of the weakness of others, the blind eye to mistakes made and crimes committed - the whole dismal catalogue of human greed and ambition, the whole dumb chronicle of human failure! Bannister turned to the dance floor, put up the night before, to be taken down late that night or early the next morning, part of the temporary permanence of things, and for a moment stared at his own regretted past, at Driscoll Rose moving closer and closer to the watching crowd, and then….If he had not done anything, if he had let the fight continue, if….He shook his head abruptly, trying to force all the imponderable ‘might have beens’ out of his mind.

He found Roger Stanton on the terrace, alone in the middle of the crowd, talking casually with whomever he had, by a turn of his head or a change of expression, allowed to come closer. It was one of the things Bannister liked most about him: the quiet dominance, the easy assumption of his own unquestioned importance. Everything came to him, and he was never surprised when it did. He saw Bannister almost before Bannister saw him. With a slight smile, Stanton moved toward him.

“Can we talk somewhere?” said Bannister as they shook hands.

“It’ll be a few minutes before I can get away. Do you mind? We can talk inside, in the study.”

It was a room that, as Bannister remembered from the last time he was in it, the day he had let his brother-in-law persuade him not to decide right away to report what Driscoll Rose had done, was somewhere the other side of the boundary between the world of senses, where there were things you could touch, and the world of dreams, where, if you tried to touch anything, your hand would pass right through it. The ceiling, twenty feet above the Italian marble floor; the endless, empty shelves, facing each other across fifty feet of cool, empty distance; the hand-carved stone where the wall had been left uncovered; the enormous carpet, woven in some village in the mountains of Pakistan, by two men who, it was said, had done nothing else for more than five years; the hand carved desk made from the hand cut timber of rare and exotic trees; all the tangible traces of opulence and a taste that, if perhaps questionable, was still a serious attempt to make a statement.. But a statement about what? – What others thought a room like this should be? A study that was actually used for the study of something serious?

Reality and the world of illusion converged, and the room became, in the sudden clarity of Walter Bannister’s mind, a coherent whole. It was precisely what the study of what an earlier generation called a movie mogul should look like, a room that, except for the absence of cameras, was what a movie set was like. The empty shelves – that was the key. The only books, the hundred or so never opened volumes on the wall directly behind Roger Stanton’s desk, seen through a camera lens, would make it seem that there were books everywhere. Everything was an illusion, an inference drawn from things that only appeared to be true. There seemed to Bannister a marvelous consistency in that: the way the fragmentary parts of a life were made to seem the whole of what a person really was.

“Sorry you had to wait,” said Roger Stanton as he walked across to the chair, close to the French doors, where Bannister sat, still and serious. Opening the door, Stanton leaned against the casement and took the distant sun full on his face, basking for a moment in the comfort of its warmth.

“I wanted to see you – I came here – to make a confession.”

“A confession?” Stanton, reluctantly, turned his face from the sun. “What could you possibly have to confess?” He leaned back, lounging, one foot crossed over the other, against the open door. There was a hint of mischief in his eyes. He refused to take at face value what Bannister had just said. “Are you finally going to divorce Meredith?”

“I’m serious, Roger; more serious than I’ve ever been about anything.”

Stanton was still doubtful. “You’ve come here to make your confession? All right; go ahead. I’ll play the priest, sit quietly, and listen to what you have to say.”

“It’s about the murder of Gloria Baker.”

The last remnant of a smile vanished slowly from Stanton’s fine, straight mouth.

“That’s all over.”

“Driscoll Rose didn’t kill her.”

“What makes you think he didn’t?” asked Stanton, looking at him with a deeper interest. “I know you had your doubts - I know what you said at sentencing – but didn’t everything come out at the trial?”

“Nothing came out at the trial! I was there that night, Roger; I know what happened! Rose told the truth. She was dead when he got there….”

With the sunlight behind him, the features of Stanton’s face became vague and indistinct, his expression impossible to see. He stood there, his arms folded across his thin chest, his mood suddenly solemn and profound.

“But she wasn’t dead when you got there?” he asked with a kind of whispered urgency.

“No, she wasn’t dead when I got there,” admitted Bannister. “I went there to talk to her about Rose. You remember I was going to do that. I had promised I wouldn’t do anything about him – what he had done that day, here, when he attacked that young Hispanic kid. I had to see her; I had to make sure she understood how dangerous, how violent, he could be. But she didn’t want to hear about any of that. I told her I didn’t have any choice: that I was going to do whatever I had to do to make sure he got sent away for what he had done. She begged me not to, and then she started screaming at me, telling me I didn’t have the right, telling me that she could take care of herself, that she could handle Driscoll, that they were getting back together. She just kept screaming, telling me it was none of my business, beating her fists against my chest, in a rage; and then I saw it, the knife in the kitchen, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. With all the strength I had, I shoved her away from me and….”

Stanton turned away, as if to avoid hearing any more, and for a long time stared out at the distant sea, shining silver blue under the high arching sky. Around the corner of the great house, down along the descending, step-like lawns, the murmured noise of a hundred different conversations rose up in a single playful chorus.

“I think she did that to everyone,” he said finally; “drive them all, one time or another, a little crazy.”

“I saw that knife; I felt that sudden urge to strike out, to kill.” Bannister got to his feet and stood there, waiting until Stanton turned around and they could see each other clearly. “If I had done what I should have done – called the police; if you had done what you should have done – called the police the night he beat her up and left her for dead – none of this might have happened. She might still be alive and we would be talking about her next picture instead of her murder.”

It seemed to strike Roger Stanton as odd. A strange, enigmatic smile cheated its way past his conscious reserve.

“Her ‘next picture.’ That was it, wasn’t it? – the picture, the portrait I had done of her. That’s when you knew.”

Bannister watched intently, listening with a heightened awareness to every word. He did not say anything. He wanted Stanton to say it first, what they both knew, what they both understood.

“You’re right, of course. The portrait – that picture of what she was; what she could have been. Do you know what she -! No, of course you don’t. But tell me first – you saw the knife, you knew what in that moment you wanted to do, and then you shoved her away from you. And then, angrier with yourself than you ever could have been with her, you left. Isn’t that what happened, Walter? – You left, you just walked out. And then you find out the next morning she’s been murdered and you blame yourself. You think that if you had only done something, made her agree to stop seeing him – Driscoll Rose – she’d still be alive. And then something happens, during the trial, and you realize that Rose didn’t kill her after all. And then I said something about the portrait – the way it had been slashed to pieces, and you knew.”

“Yes, I knew.”

Stanton walked past him, out to the private garden at the side. With his hands on the small of his back, he took a long, deep breath. The scent of bougainvillea floated in the warm, California air. Bannister stood in the open doorway, watching.

“I knew it had to be you, Roger. No one else knew anything about what had happened to the portrait. Nothing had been said about it yet at trial; nothing had been written in the papers. I knew it was you, but I still could not believe it.”

“Couldn’t believe it? Why not? You were just telling me how close you were to doing the same thing! She’s beating her fists on your chest, screaming at you. You see the knife. You know exactly what you want to do. You feel the urge, insistent, overpowering -”

“But I didn’t! And even the thought of it – the idea of killing someone – might never have entered my head if I didn’t have to listen, day after day, year after year, to all these stories of senseless, wanton violence! You begin to wonder what it must be like; you try to put yourself in the mind of the murderer; you want to know what it must feel like, what the killer must experience. I sometimes even write it down. But that doesn’t mean I could actually -”

“Doesn’t it? Why, because you think it out of character? What do you or I know about character? Who do you know who really has one - something permanent, unchanging? That’s what that damn picture was about, what it was meant to say: that this is who you really are: better, more interesting, than the way you too often behave. So look at it, my dear Gloria, and every time you do remember that this is what you really are and that I’m the one person who knows it, the only one who really understands you and what you can become, not Driscoll Rose, me, Roger Stanton!”

“You were that much in love with her?”

“More than that – or maybe not at all, because the woman I was in love with always wanted to be someone else.”

“You were the one she was seeing; you were the reason she broke off her engagement. What were you going to do – get a divorce and marry her?”

“I never thought that far ahead. When I was with her, I never thought at all.”

“What happened? She breaks off her engagement with Rose, but then she breaks it off with you -?”

“That’s why I went there, that night. She called me, told me you were there, that you knew all about what happened the night Driscoll beat her up. She wanted to know how much I had told you, how much I had said. She was in love with him; she was always in love with him, and I was a fool not to know it. She didn’t care about anything except the effect it would have on him. When she was a little sane, she knew what might happen, what he might do. That was the reason – the only reason, I think – she convinced herself for a while that she was in love with me. She knew she could trust me, that I’d take care of things. She was in love with me, but only when she was the woman in the picture.” A look of disgust flashed through Stanton’s eyes. “That’s why she did it, why she slashed the damn thing to ribbons.”

“She slashed -!”

“It didn’t happen the way you think it did. I got there – just in time to see you leave; I waited in the car until you were gone. She was furious, furious that I was there, furious that I’d ever said anything about Driscoll, furious with herself for ‘betraying Driscoll’ with me. Can you imagine! But I was worse, a schoolboy fool trying to get her to see her mistake, telling her that Driscoll was no better than some spoiled adolescent, that she was better than that, better than….And suddenly she was laughing at me, a mean, bitter, derisive laugh, pointing to that portrait of her over the sofa. ‘Better? – You mean, like that!’ And then, before I knew it, she had that knife in her hand and she was standing on the sofa, ripping into it. I grabbed her, pulled her away, down onto the floor.”

Stanton’s eyes narrowed into a somber, reflective stare as he turned over in his mind, more than what happened, the meaning of it; what, the more he thought about it, the longer the time that passed, seemed to become only more elusive, more incapable of any kind of definition.

“I didn’t go there to hurt her. I went there to plead with her to change her mind – I would have married her; divorced Helen and married her - but she was going to marry him, that phony coward. Can you imagine!- after he damn near killed her, after she called me to save her life, after she had told me when she was lying in the hospital, her face all but shattered, that she had never loved him, that she had always loved me. And now she’s telling me that she never loved me, that she only ever loved him; and she’s taunting me with that caustic smile of hers, laughing at me, while she starts tearing that portrait – the thing she always said she prized more than anything she owned – and I couldn’t let her do it and I took the knife away – tore it out of her hand – and then there was blood all over and she was lying on the floor looking up at me, a question in her eyes, like she was not sure it wasn’t all pretend, that I would tell her it was all over and she could get up. And then she wasn’t looking at me anymore; she wasn’t looking at anything.”

He walked a few steps, slowly, his lips moving in the silent way of someone listening to the echo in his mind, trying to be sure they have not left anything out, that they have it right.

“I killed her. I could tell you that I didn’t mean to, that I didn’t go there with that intention, that I’d never thought of doing such thing; I could tell you that I was out of my head – temporary insanity, isn’t that what the lawyers call it? –, that I didn’t know what I was doing. And I’d be telling the truth. It happened. I didn’t want it to happen, but it did. There’s more to it than that. I knew what I was doing when I did it. It was like sex. Does that sound obscene, talking about sex and murder as if they were the same? Maybe they are. When it happened, when it started….There’s a point when you begin to have sex with a woman, it blacks out everything. You know what you’re doing – it isn’t that. But there isn’t anything that can stop it, nothing. You’re in a blind trance, driven by something you can’t stop, that you don’t want to stop. That’s what it was like, those few short seconds, when I was stabbing at her with that knife. Once it started – once I started – it was too late. I couldn’t stop.”

He sank down on a stone bench a few feet from the open French doors and covered his face in his hands. After a while, he straightened up and forced a grim smile.

“What are you going to do? Have me arrested?”

“The only evidence anyone would have would be your own confession, and if you had wanted to do that, you would have done it already.”

“Confess – to save Driscoll Rose? Let him rot in hell. It’s all his fault anyway. If it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t been so selfish, so self-absorbed….I would have confessed if they had arrested you; if someone else had seen you leaving; if you had gone to trial and been convicted. But Driscoll Rose? Exchange my life for his? He destroyed everything he touched, everyone he got near. Besides, after what you did for him he’ll be out soon enough. You’re the only person who is ever going to know the truth of this, which means that you’ll be the only one to understand it. I don’t understand it at all, none of it, not one damn thing. To tell you the truth, I don’t even feel guilty.”

Bannister left Roger Stanton sitting alone in the private garden and made his way through the winding corridors outside to the terrace and down the steps into the crowd of shining, eager faces. He watched for a while, marveling at the glittering vanity of things, the way that so much of what seemed important at any given moment of our lives had no real importance at all. He remembered a line, though he could not remember the source, that what happened to us in this lifetime did not matter, that what mattered was how we dealt with it. It seemed to him the sum of all wisdom and he wished more than anything that he had remembered it the last time he had seen her, when he might have changed everything and saved not just Gloria Baker but his brother-in-law as well.

He was suddenly aware that his wife, Meredith, was standing next to him, pressing his hand, telling him that if he was ready, she thought it might be a good time to go.

“I thought you’d like to spend more time with your friend, the producer – what’s his name? I saw you with him when we first arrived.”

“Stephan? He’s always fun. And they asked me – Stephan and David – that’s Stephan’s partner. You’ve met him: a young musician, early twenties, curly hair, blue eyes. They asked me to come along to dinner back in L.A. but I’m just not in the mood, I’m -”

“Stephan and David. They’re partners, - you mean…?”

“Yes, of course; it’s scarcely a secret. Everyone knows.”

“I didn’t. I thought that….Never mind.”

On the drive home, Meredith wanted to know what he and Roger had been talking about.

“The two of you disappeared. You were gone more than an hour. Is something going on? Is Roger - is the studio - in some kind of trouble?”

“No; nothing like that. There were some things about the trial, things about Driscoll Rose and Gloria Baker, he wanted to talk about.”

“It’s what I was trying to tell you. It’s been hard on him. He cared about them both. That’s always been Roger’s problem. He cares too much for people, does too much for them. He tends to think people are better than they really are.”

“I suppose that has something to do with it,” agreed Bannister.

They were almost home, the gate at the foot of the drive in the headlights, when she remembered.

“If you’re going for one of your late night walks, you don’t have to worry anymore.”

“I don’t have to…?”

“I forgot to tell you. The police came by this morning. They caught the man who was killing all the cats and dogs.”

“The man? - It wasn’t some teenager, like they thought?”

“You won’t believe this: a doctor – a psychiatrist – the one who lives just down the street. That’s the problem with psychiatrists, isn’t it? They spend so much time trying to figure out what makes people do crazy things, they must start to wonder what it feels like to do something like it themselves. I’ve never met one yet I didn’t think a little twisted.”

The gate opened and they headed up the long, winding drive.

“I don’t think I’ll have time for a walk tonight,” said Bannister as she parked the car. “I have another murder trial starting in the morning and I have a lot to do to get ready. This one should be interesting. Nothing about it seems to make sense.”

THE END

ALSO BY D.W. BUFFA

The Defense

The Prosecution

The Judgment

The Legacy

Star Witness

Breach of Trust

Trial By Fire

Evangeline

Necessity

Hillary

The 45th

The Privilege

Lunatic Carnival

Helen

Julian

The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli

Neuman’s Last Concert

The Swindlers

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Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Newsletter sign-up
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Also by D.W. Buffa
- You will also enjoy:
- Newsletter sign-up
- A note from the publisher