Defense, page 13
“Sounds like you’re choking. And they say there’s no justice.” He paused, and then asked quietly. “Really. You all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I assured him. “What’s up?”
“You remember Johnny Morel?”
The name meant nothing. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Four, five years ago. You defended him. The creep raped his stepdaughter. It was the case Leopold asked you to take.”
Now I remembered. “Sure. What about him?”
“He’s dead,” he remarked without a trace of regret. “Sometime late last night.”
“What happened?” I asked. The deaths Horace was always among the first to hear of were not the ones everyone else read about in the obituaries.
“Gunshot. One bullet. Right through the heart. Close range.” He recited the essential facts of a murder with a detachment that did not quite conceal a certain grim satisfaction. “Guess who killed him?”
I did not care. “I’ll bet on suicide. He did it as an act of contrition.”
“You have a generous nature, my friend. Nope. Not suicide. His wife did it. One shot. Right through the heart,” he repeated. “Very neat.”
“You almost sound like you approve.”
“You think I don’t? Listen, this is just between you and me. But who in his right mind would mourn the passing of that depraved son of a bitch? You got him off. You did your job. But I know what he did and so do you. And we both know he would have done it to that kid again if he’d had the chance. Christ, he probably did it to other kids. But now he’s dead, and everybody is better off. Everybody.”
We danced around the edges of the truth. The hypocrisy of my profession kept me from telling him how much I agreed.
“Why don’t you include that in your closing argument when you prosecute her for the murder?”
I could almost see him shaking his head, resigned to what he would have to do. “Yeah, wish I could. She should get a reward.”
Once I remembered Johnny Morel, I remembered everything. Whatever Denise Morel should get, it was not a reward.
xi
It seems strange now, after all these years, after everything that has happened, that I was actually surprised when she called. Her husband had been charged with rape, and she knew better than anyone else just how guilty he had been. If I could get him off, think of what I could do for her.
My first reaction was not to take the call. Then, on an impulse, I changed my mind.
“Mr. Antonelli,” she began, “you probably don’t remember me.” Her voice was still the same—warm, soft, breathless, avid for the next seduction. “You probably don’t remember me,” she repeated when I said nothing in reply. “You represented my husband, Johnny Morel.”
“I remember, Mrs. Morel,” I interjected. “I remember you very well. What can I do for you?”
“Johnny’s been killed, and they think I did it,” she explained quickly. “I didn’t do it, Mr. Antonelli. I didn’t. Could I come to see you? I need a lawyer.”
I started to put her off. “The public defender’s office.”
“No,” she insisted. “I want the best. I want you, Mr. Antonelli. And don’t worry about your fee. I can afford it.”
“I don’t think you have any idea how expensive this sort of thing can be, Mrs. Morel.”
“Denise. Call me Denise. And yes, I do know how expensive this can get. But it’s worth it. You’re worth it.”
She had lied to me the first time she had ever seen me, lied about her husband and about her daughter, and she was lying now. I was sure of it. I checked my calendar. “I could see you day after tomorrow. Three-thirty.”
She was not used to waiting. “Couldn’t we do it before that? Tonight. What about tonight?” she suggested eagerly.
Denise Morel had probably spent time in every bar and tavern within a hundred miles, but I was certain the only restaurants in which she had ever eaten were fast-food joints and grease-stained coffee shops. I invited her to have dinner at one of the most expensive places in town.
“Have you been there?” I asked in a tone of voice that let her know I would have been shocked if she had.
“No,” she said, “but I’ve always wanted to.”
When I called the restaurant I was already regretting what I had done. I had wanted her to feel uncomfortable, out of place, surrounded by people she could never be like and things she could never have. It was an act of cruelty justified as an act of revenge. I was about to hang up when I realized I had forgotten to get a number where I could reach her. There was nothing else to do. I made the reservation and hoped she would change her mind and not show up. I should have known better.
* * *
I arrived a few minutes early and had the waiter give me a table in a quiet corner in the back. She was right on time. I watched her make her way through the crowd and my astonishment grew with every step she took. She seemed completely at ease, entirely at home among people who were used to nice clothes and expensive dinners. She came gliding across the room, head held high, a gorgeous woman in a stunning black dress, turning the head of every man and nearly every woman in the place. I was on my feet, pulling out her chair, waiting while, her eyes fixed on mine, she sat down.
“I’m not late, am I?”
“No, not at all. You look wonderful,” I heard myself saying.
She laughed with all the pleasure of triumph. Her large blue eyes were filled with excitement. I had never seen anyone look less like someone accused of murder.
“I had to borrow the dress,” she confessed, tilting her head to the side, her mouth parted in a teasing smile. “I hope you like it. I wore it for you.”
She was a changeling, a creature devoid of any identity of her own, able to assume in an instant the infinitely varied shades and colors of the world around her. She was a bright shiny surface, a mirror that would show you whatever she thought you wanted to watch. It would have been easy to forget who she was and what she had done five years earlier.
The waiter brought a bottle of Merlot and filled her glass. A few minutes later he returned to take our order. Denise glanced at the menu, put it down, and asked me to order for her. Her eyes stayed on me while I talked to the waiter and never once looked away.
“I didn’t kill him, Mr. Antonelli. Or may I call you Joseph?” she asked as if she already knew me well enough for that or anything else we might decide to do. “I didn’t kill him,” she repeated. “I was out that night, the night he was killed. When I came home and went into the bedroom, he was just lying there. His head was leaning against the wall. His eyes were just sort of staring at me. I thought he was stoned.”
She seemed to think it was almost funny, her husband lying there in the helpless indifference of death.
“Then I saw the blood,” she went on, without any sign of emotion, or any sense that what she had seen had any meaning at all. It was as if she were describing something she had seen in a movie, a movie in graphic color that left nothing to the imagination.
“He was dead all right,” she added grimly. “Then I saw the gun on the floor next to the bedstand. I was scared. I thought whoever did it might come back. So I took the gun, and all the cash I could find, and got out of there as fast as I could.”
I finished tracing a circle around the base of the wine glass. I crossed one leg over the other, draped my left arm over the back of my chair, and began to tap my fingers on the white tablecloth. “So, you were out that evening. And you came home, and you found him dead, and you took the gun, and you left.” It was not terribly creative.
“Yes. That’s right.”
I stopped tapping and looked up. “I see. Well, before we go on with that, there’s something you need to know. When I represented your husband five years ago there was never any doubt in my mind that he was guilty of raping your daughter.”
Her expression did not change. She was still the picture of hopeful sincerity.
“But the jury found him not guilty.”
“So they did,” I said, studying her for the first faint sign of uncertainty. “But I knew he was guilty, and so did you. You knew,” I went on before she could interrupt, “because your daughter told you all about it, and because when you confronted him, he beat you up and threatened to kill you—and your daughter—if you ever told anyone about it. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
She embraced my ignorance like a long-lost lover. It had happened just the way I said it had. Her daughter had told her the very day it happened. She had come running back from the park, tears in her eyes, and told her mother what Johnny had done to her. It was just like Michelle had said. Even the hunting knife. Johnny always kept one under his pillow.
Enthralled by her performance, I sat and listened. She had a marvelous talent for duplicity; she actually believed every lie she told. It was one of the things we had in common.
“I wanted to kill the bastard!” she whispered excitedly. “But when I told him what Michelle had said, he pulled the knife and said he’d kill us both!”
“Then why didn’t you just take Michelle and get out of there and never go back?”
“We had no place to go. I didn’t have any money. There was no one to help. And then Johnny beat me up and they took Michelle to a foster home. I was afraid if I said anything to anyone that he’d find a way to get to Michelle.”
“And Michelle said nothing about telling you what he had done because she was afraid of what he would do to you?”
It seemed to explain everything. “Yes! That’s right! That’s exactly what she did!”
“You must have really hated him for what he did to your daughter and what he did to you.”
“Yes, I hated him! I hated him with a passion!”
My voice said how sorry I was. “I’m afraid that will strike some people as a very real motive for murder.”
There is something elegant about a well-worked piece of treachery. She had told me what she thought I wanted to hear, and I had led her through the vast labyrinth of her own deception until she had lied herself into a death sentence.
She picked at her salad and said nothing. After the waiter brought her entrée, she tried again. She began with the eternal disclaimer of the dishonest.
“Everything I told you was true. But it wasn’t the whole truth. There’s more to it than that. Michelle told me and I confronted Johnny, but he denied it. And, I know this may be hard to believe, but I wanted to believe him. I tried to believe him. I knew Michelle hated him, and that she would do almost anything to split us up.”
I could see Johnny Morel’s frenzied face as he beat his callused fists against the cement-block wall, screaming that the girl hated him because he made her behave at school: “Ask her mother, ask Denise, she’ll tell you.”
“You told me he threatened you with the knife, the same way he threatened Michelle.”
She did not even blink. “Yes, he did. But he denied it. He was furious. He took the knife and told me he would kill me and Michelle if I ever told anyone what she said.”
“At the trial, you lied on the stand. You told the jury Michelle never said anything to you about it. You told them Johnny never had a knife.”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want to believe he could have done that to Michelle!”
“So it wasn’t because you were afraid of him? You lied under oath, but it was not because you thought he would harm your daughter or yourself?”
I had seldom seen a look of greater vulnerability. “No,” she said with downcast eyes, “he never would have hurt us.”
For a moment she said nothing. She just stared at her hands. When she finally looked up, she admitted, “I know you must be right. I suppose, deep down, I must have known. I must have known Michelle was telling the truth. I must have known Johnny had sex with her. But he never would have hurt us, no matter what he said.”
He could rape her daughter, but he would never hurt either one of them. The possibilities within that distinction would give a psychiatrist all he could handle, and, more to the point, would give any prosecutor all he needed.
“But you told me he beat you up. How can you then say he would never hurt you, or that you were never afraid of him?”
“You’re a lawyer. You don’t know what it’s like for people who don’t have anything. I dropped out of school in the tenth grade. I don’t think Johnny got that far. He could hardly read, and he could hardly ever get work, and he got angry a lot. And when he got angry, or when he got drunk…”
“Or when he was using coke, or meth, or heroin, or whatever the hell he could get his hands on!” I interjected, suddenly unable to stop myself.
It hit her like a cannon shot. Her mouth was still open, the words dangling on her tongue. Her eyes blinked like some mindless mechanism engineered for infinite repetition.
“He’d sometimes get into fights, or come home and beat me up,” she went on as if she had just awakened from hypnosis. “But I knew he’d never really hurt me. And as awful as it must sound, even though I probably knew he had done it with Michelle, I loved him. I had no reason to want him dead.” She looked almost devout.
“Well, it’s almost too bad you didn’t kill him. At least then you’d have a decent chance of getting off on self-defense.”
The restaurant had filled up. There was noise all around us. I put my elbows on the table and leaned so close that when I spoke my breath stirred the strands of hair that lay next to her ear.
“Suppose, for example, that you really had believed he was innocent—believed it so much that you lied at his trial. And suppose that something happened, just recently, something that told you he had been lying to you, that he had really raped Michelle, that you confronted him again, but that this time, because he had already been acquitted and they could never try him again, not only did he deny it, he admitted it, admitted it and even laughed about it! Laughed right in your face. And then, when he was through laughing, he went after you. He started hitting you, and then, when that got him all excited, he stopped hitting you and began to tear your clothes off. He held you down, and he hurt you, and he had his way with you. When it was over, because you’re not a little girl like your daughter, you waited until it was safe. And when he went into the bathroom, you got the gun he kept in the bedstand, and you shot him dead!”
She followed everything I said, and with every word she got more excited. Violence, murder—they were all aphrodisiacs.
I sat back in my chair. “But you weren’t afraid of him. And, more to the point, you didn’t kill him, did you?”
The question stopped just short of being rhetorical. She hesitated, not sure what she should say and ready to say anything, even that she had really killed him, if it would give her a way out. I did not give her the chance. “Self-defense is out. You didn’t murder your husband.”
Denise excused herself and left me sitting alone, drinking the first glass of the second bottle of Merlot. A large, square-faced man I did not recognize gawked at me from a table across the room. He waved at me and I nodded back. He nudged the small, middle-aged woman he was with, trying to get her to look. He kept after her until she finally turned toward me, and then, with a nervous smile, turned back. She seemed like a nice person; he seemed like a jerk. But then I remembered, as Denise slid onto her chair, that he was having dinner with a decent, nice-looking woman, and I was out with a whore whose only good deed may have been the murder of her own husband. I called the waiter over and sent them a drink.
“Friends of yours?” Denise asked.
“Yeah,” I lied. “I haven’t seen them in a long time.”
“You must have a lot of friends.”
She rested her elbow on the table and began to touch her hair with her fingers. She moved her other hand across the tablecloth and let it come to rest next to mine. “And a lot of women, too, I’ll bet,” she sighed.
She lowered her gaze and watched while the tips of her fingers began to move across my hand. A knowing smile floated over her mouth.
“I remember the first time I saw you, at your office, and how you looked, sitting behind your desk, wearing one of your expensive suits. I thought you were the most gorgeous man I had ever seen. And then, the next day, when you came to the house…”
She let go of my hand and leaned closer. “When we’re done here, why don’t we go somewhere else? Your place, if you like. The dress isn’t the only thing I wore for you tonight.”
She was so close I could feel her breath burning into my face with each seductive word she spoke in what became a delirium of urgent obscenities.
“You’ve just become a widow,” I remarked with an indifference that was becoming more and more difficult to maintain. “Don’t you think you might want to stay in mourning a little longer than just a few days?”
“I’m a widow,” she said, excited by the depravities she had not yet begun to describe, “but I’m certainly not in mourning.” The sultry smile dissolved into a defiant smirk. “I didn’t kill the son of a bitch, but I’m glad he’s dead. And if you really want to know, I almost wish I had done it myself!”
She drew away from me and took another drink. The red wine clinging to her lips reminded me of blood.
“You have no idea the things he did to me, the things he made me do.”
She studied me with calculating eyes, trying to decide how far she should go.
“Would you like to know? Would you like me to tell you what he made me do?”
Her eyes were locked on mine. As she talked her breathing became more rapid, more intense. She reached across and touched my hand again. Her fingers felt like fire.
“Would you like me to tell you? Tell you about the times he made me have sex with another man while he watched? About the times he made me watch while he did it with another woman?”
She was taunting me, daring me to say yes.
“Would you like me to tell you about the times we had sex with another couple? Or the times he brought someone home and sold me for drugs?” she asked, her face twisted into a half-crazed look that could have been love or hatred.
