William Deverell - Kill All the Judges

“But, you say, Carlos was caught on police video two thousand miles away from the intended murder. Of course he was! Because this was his carefully crafted alibi. Florenza’s real lover is no fool-no, Carlos took pains to be seen in a most public place, a popular Hollywood restaurant, on the night he knew Judge Whynet-Moir would die.”

He smiled upon the prosecution table. “Come now, Ms. Hitchins, surely you don’t expect the jury to believe that Carlos, with all his criminal connections, would do the deed himself. Nervous Carlos, who fled from his mistress’s side when a lawyer came sniffing about-no, he doesn’t dirty his hands with the foul business of murder, not when there’s a wealthy heiress to pay the shot. What’s a few hundred thousand dollars when it can buy the services of the finest assassin the Colombian mafia can offer? Thus saving her from the complications of an ugly, contested divorce and a costly award that would deplete her fortune.

“Who was this hired hit man? We may never know. Why would the police care to put in a lot of extra work when they had an easier target, someone so handy, so nearby? Tunnel vision, ladies and gentlemen, a known occupational hazard that besets our otherwise dedicated constabulary.”

Hank Chekoff was taking it okay, he was basically onside. The boss was getting away with murder, building a compelling structure with zero evidence, strands pulled from the air. And the jury was listening.

“When was the scheme hatched? We can’t be sure, but its details must have clicked together a few days before the fundraising dinner, when Florenza learned Cud Brown had been sent in as a late substitute. The same self-taught poet she’d heard on the radio, with his backwoods philosophies. A loquacious rebel, but a man of no great complication, unsophisticated in the ways of high society. Yes, the perfect dupe had just become available, a sap to take the rap.”

It made sense to set up the client as more dull-witted than he actually was, but Wentworth worried Arthur was putting the blocks to Cud too hard, relishing it too much. He feared to look behind him, hoped Cud was masking his reaction to these slurs.

Arthur spent the next while picking apart and scoffing at Flo’s testimony. The charade that she was infatuated with Cud. “She would have you believe the love carried on even while she sought to nail his hide to the wall of this courtroom. She could have said she saw nothing, that’s what a woman in love might say, but not such an honourable woman as Florenza LeGrand.”

She knew Raffy would be jealous, that he’d be unable to sleep, might wander about in despair, might even spy on his faithless wife-even as the lurking killer waited his chance. And just in case a witness-a neighbour, say-heard something, maybe the slamming of the door to the maid’s bedroom, wouldn’t it be clever to dress the assassin in the gear the stooge usually wore- “Like this,” Arthur said, displaying the cover of Cud’s CD, open-necked shirt, medallion, red suspenders.

Nice spin on troubling eyewitness evidence. Wentworth wished he’d come up with it.

A peroration about the risk of convicting the innocent, a softly worded plea that they deliver a verdict that would not haunt their dreams, an evocation of a sombre scene of clanging prison doors and freedom’s loss, a verse from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”: “The vilest deeds like poison weeds bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in man that wastes and withers there.”

Finally, the golden thread again, burden of proof, reasonable doubt. “ Ubi dubium ibi libertas! ” he concluded. “Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”

Professor Glass, the forewoman, nodded with approval.

Under a benign noonday sun, Arthur sat with a pizza slice by the Robson Square waterfall, thankful to be alone for a while, a chance to clear his head, relax his weary lungs, his weary soul. An hour of solace from a trial whose difficulties had accelerated exponentially day by day. Never had he known a case turn so inexorably, so unforgivingly, so quickly, from a walk in the park to a stumble at the edge of a cliff.

He was kicking himself for having got into this with such shallow preparation. Three months wouldn’t have been adequate. He’d been egged into it, seduced into it, tricked into it. To defend whom? Cudworth Brown, to whom he owed nothing, who made a pass at his wife, who played charades with his lawyers. A monkey with a buzz saw, too much to answer for had he taken the stand, he’d have been ripped apart by Abigail. But was Arthur just making excuses for keeping Cud from testifying?

Arthur hadn’t read acquittal on the jurors’ faces. Only uncertainty. They’d been responsive enough, it was clear they liked him, but did they like his client? Arthur shouldn’t have mocked and demeaned him, that was a mistake, he’d let his antipathy show.

Otherwise a good speech, though not worth the nine point six Wentworth awarded. Arthur wished his gushing junior would stop stargazing and come into his own-he had the right stuff deep down. God knows Arthur would have blown this trial ten ways to Sunday had Wentworth not been around to back and fill.

He played with his cellphone but was hesitant to call Margaret. She’d be visiting polling stations, pumping up her scrutineers. Tragically, he saw no chance he’d be at her side when the results came in. Polls close at 8:00 p.m. Kroop will take two hours with his charge. The jury will be deliberating this evening.

Here was Wentworth jogging toward him, breathless. “I won’t bug you, I know you want to be alone, but you got away before I could tell you about Brian. I hadn’t wanted to burden you earlier.”

Arthur listened with concern to the story of Brian’s attempted foray into the afterlife.

“A poorly planned job, you think?”

“Yeah, a custodian was just outside his door.”

“Then maybe it was well planned. How did Brian sound to you?”

“I don’t know. Crazy but sly. Oblique, you know the way he gets. Still talking about the trial as if it’s a book.”

“The view is always the same,” Arthur muttered. “See if you can reach Caroline; it would be useful to hear her observations. And make sure Dr. Epstein knows about this.” Wentworth made a note.

“I don’t want you spacing out when Kroop gives jury directions. We are at the point in this sorry trial where we have to anticipate grounds of appeal.”

Much of the effect that Arthur’s speech had on the jury was buried in the rubble of Kroop’s rambling charge, a mind-deadening recital of seven days of evidence embellished with legal lectures. But not weighted, surprisingly, toward the prosecution. A fair and ample direction on reasonable doubt, a slightly incredulous inflection in his voice when he recounted Florenza’s evidence.

Kroop sent the jury out and asked, “Do counsel have any exceptions?”

Arthur suggested His Lordship might wish to devote a few more words to the cover-up in the high councils of the Conservative government. The latter was for the press, an aid to Margaret’s campaign if it made the supper news.

Kroop demurred with a smile. Nothing was getting to him today. Arthur had wearied from the battle, and he supposed Kroop had too, and they’d settled into a grudging truce that suggested Arthur had been forgiven for the worst of his sins and insults.

Word was sent to the jury to begin deliberations. To satisfy Arthur’s morbid curiosity, he’d asked April to run off a copy of Pomeroy’s manuscript, his true-crime fantasy or whatever he called it. He took it to the barristers’ lounge to kill time until dinner.

“Didn’t happen in my day, these school shootings.”