William Bernhardt - Cruel Justice

“What are you trying to do? She saw him! Why do you want to suppress her testimony?” Ben walked right up to Bullock. “Unless you care more about winning than you do about seeing justice done.”

Bullock glared back at him silently.

“The motion is overruled,” Hawkins said angrily. “Please continue with the direct examination of this witness.”

Ben stepped forward until he was practically hovering over Rutherford. “You can save everyone a lot of trouble by just telling us the truth now.”

Rutherford’s eyes darted from Carlee, to Ben, to the jury. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Again, Carlee broke the silence. “My God, didn’t anyone hear me? He did it! He killed her! I saw it!”

“Your honor, I want that woman out of here!” Bullock shouted.

The judge nodded and instructed me bailiff to remove her. The jurors’ eyes were moving like Ping-Pong balls, back and forth, from Carlee to Rutherford.

“Is it true?” Ben asked.

“Of course not,” Rutherford feinted.

“There’s no point in lying anymore. Isn’t it true you told Maria Alvarez to meet you late that night in the caddyshack?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it true you wanted to meet there because you thought you’d be alone?”

“I said no!”

“Isn’t it true you grabbed a golf club, swung it over your head, and killed her?”

“No, no, no !”

“But he’s lying !” Carlee was halfway out the door, struggling with the bailiff. “Don’t you understand? I saw him!”

Rutherford jumped out of his seat. “Would you shut —” He froze, hands clutching the rail.

“Mr. Rutherford, surely you realize that if you don’t confess, the most likely suspect will be your wife.”

A tiny turn of the head.

“Is that what you want—your wife in prison? After all you’ve done to protect her?”

Rutherford gripped the railing so tightly Ben was afraid it would snap.

“It’s over, Mr. Rutherford,” Ben said quietly. “Why don’t you just tell us what happened?”

Rutherford’s large chest heaved. The trembling spread from his arms and rippled through his entire body. Finally, all the wind seemed to blow out of him, like the final gust of a hurricane. He collapsed back into his chair.

“You have to understand,” Rutherford said, in a voice so dispirited that it seemed to come from an entirely different person. “You just … have to understand.”

“Understand what?” Ben asked.

Rutherford cradled his face in his large hands. “How much Rachel wanted children. And how much I wanted to make her … happy.” He paused. “We needed a baby.”

“She told us that was all she lived for.”

“She didn’t exaggerate. Rachel is not a … strong woman. She’s a good woman. A loving woman. But not strong. When she discovered she couldn’t have children … it was like she had lost a limb.”

He inhaled, searching for words. “She couldn’t function. Couldn’t live. Tried to kill herself. Twice. Almost succeeded. She cut her own flesh. Can you imagine?” He looked down at his hands. “But even when she was alive … she wasn’t really alive. She told you everything we tried. Nothing worked. And worst of all, she had to suffer through all those cruel deceptions, all those painful near misses. Thinking she had a baby, then having it snatched away from her. She couldn’t survive that again. I knew it as certainly as I knew anything. She just would not have survived.”

Ben spoke softly. “Maria Alvarez wanted her baby back, didn’t she?”

Rutherford nodded. Tears crept out of the corners of his eyes. “My Spanish isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to understand what she wanted. She’d changed her mind. Wanted Abie back. I’m not sure she ever really consented to the adoption, at least not when she was in full possession of her senses. As soon as she got out of the hospital, she started trying to get him back. But by then, Abie had already been snatched by the merchants at La Flavita. By the time she tracked them down, he had already been sold to Pearson and taken to the United States. So she came to the United States to get her son back.” He paused again. “Our son.”

Rutherford lifted his head. “And she could’ve gotten him, too. The manner in which Ron handled the adoption was, well, less than legal. If she had raised a stink, made a complaint at the embassy or filed a lawsuit or something, she’d have gotten her baby back. Courts always favor the natural mother. I knew that.” He gazed at his wife, now seated in the third row of the gallery. “I also knew what that would do to my Rachel.”

“So you asked Maria to meet you at the caddy shack. Late at night.”

He nodded. “I had the keys to that place. All of us on the board did back then. I thought it would be deserted. Safe.” He leaned forward suddenly. “I didn’t go there to kill her. I want you to understand that. I tried to reason with her. I told her how attached Abie and Rachel had become. It didn’t matter to her. I tried to give her money. That mattered even less.”

“And then what happened?”

“She began to get loud, violent. She threatened to report us, to tell everyone we had stolen her son. She said she was going to our house right that minute to take her baby back!”

He covered his watery eyes with his hands. “Don’t you see? It would have killed Rachel! Literally killed her! It was self-defense, for Chrissake! I was protecting my wife!”

“By killing Maria Alvarez.”

Rutherford shook his head, lost, dazed. “I don’t know what came over me. I saw what she was going to do, what it would do to my wife. I couldn’t let another baby be snatched out of Rachel’s hands. Especially not after she’d spent so much time with him.”

He straightened himself and stared at the ceiling. “I just lost control. I grabbed the nearest thing—a club out of a golf bag. I swung it over my head, again and again and—”

He opened his mouth again, but no words emerged. Finally: “I really wasn’t conscious of what was happening, what I was doing, until it was all over. Then—I was horrified.”

Ben nodded.” And then you tried to cover it up.”

“Yes. But before I had a chance, I saw … him. ” He shrugged toward Leeman. “He was cowering under one of the cots, watching me the whole time. At least I assumed he was. Maybe he never saw my face; I don’t know. I tried to pull him out from under the cot, but he crawled out the other end and ran out of the caddyshack. I ran after him. Ran all over the goddamn golf course, but didn’t find him. A few minutes later I came back to the caddyshack.”

“And?”

“And, there he was. I don’t know where he’d been; must’ve doubled back on me. He didn’t see me come back in. I stepped into the shadows and watched as he gazed at the horrible mess in the corner and tried to understand what had happened to the woman. He threw himself on her body. Got blood all over himself. He pulled on the club. I think he was trying to get her down, to put her to rest. But he couldn’t do it. Then he ran out of the caddyshack again. That gave me my opportunity.”

“To frame him.”

Rutherford bit down on his lower lip. “I didn’t know that much about the kid, but I knew he was … not quite right in the head. I knew he’d have a hard time explaining himself. Figured the courts would go a lot softer on him than they would on me. So I put the golf bag in his locker, with the woman’s necklace. I’d lifted the clubs from the pro shop that afternoon—I often did that, to try out new clubs. Leeman caddied for me; that’s why his prints were on the bag. I wiped my prints off everything and left. I lived in fear the next few days, thinking that kid might be able to identify me … but he never did.”