The privilege, p.5
The Privilege, page 5
“No. I did not have a gun. I did not use a gun. I’ve never even fired a gun. I did not murder my wife. I did not murder Allison.”
I asked questions as if I were perfectly confident not only in what the answer would be, but that every answer proved beyond even the possibility of a doubt that Justin Friedrich could never have murdered his wife or anyone else. I tried to convince myself, as I listened to Samantha Ferguson begin her cross-examination, that the jury just might possibly find Friedrich’s unsupported word more compelling that all the prosecution’s undisputed evidence. Ferguson did not have to convince herself of anything.
“You were alone on the boat with your wife - correct?”
“Yes,” replied Friedrich, with an earnest innocence that Ferguson treated as a performer’s overacting.
“You were drunk, passed out, and you heard a shot - two shots - but you still weren’t sure what they were, and then someone - in the shadows, I think is how you described it - ran past you. Then you found your wife murdered, shot to death, in her bed. Is that the story you want this jury to believe?”
“It’s not a story, it’s the truth!”
With a long, calculated look of perfect disbelief, Ferguson let the jury know what she thought of that.
“But you didn’t call the police. You waited because - what was it? You thought it might be a bad dream? But it wasn’t a bad dream, was it? The police came, and they found you there, alone with your murdered wife,. But they didn’t arrive - did they? - before you had time to get rid of the gun, throw it into the bay, and then, in the drunken haze that, by your own admission, you were in, invent this bizarre and utterly unbelievable story of an intruder, the real killer, who killed your wife and for some reason did not kill you!”
“I didn’t invent it! It’s true!”
“Was anything taken, anything stolen?”
“No, not that I know of.”
“Did your wife have any enemies, anyone - besides you - who hated her so much they would want to do her harm?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Ferguson was pacing back and forth, stopping only long enough to fire the next question.
“So someone - this intruder in the shadows - comes on board your sailboat at two-thirty in the morning, not to steal anything, because he doesn’t steal anything; and not because he is some kind of homicidal maniac on a killing spree, because you’re right there, the first one he passes on the way in and the one he passes on his way out, and he doesn’t even touch you. He only murders your wife, a woman sleeping in a closed door cabin where, unless he had gone there expressly to kill her, unless he knew the layout of the boat, unless he had tracked her movements, he would not have known was there? Tell me, Mr. Friedrich - tell the jury, tell us all - does that make any sense at all?”
There was no answer to this. All Justin Friedrich could do was repeat his denial, insist again that he had not murdered his wife. The jury wanted to believe him. I could read it in their faces, the way they watched him, hoping, as it seemed, that he would find something to say that would suddenly cast everything in a new and better light. They wanted to believe him, but when he finished his testimony, they looked down at their hands, shifted position in their chairs, disappointed by his failure to explain away the prosecution’s relentless recitation of the evidence against him.
Justin Friedrich was going to be convicted of murder and there was nothing I could do about it. I knew it, and so did he. I tried to tell him that the trial was not over, that there was still a chance. He looked at me with the withering contempt of someone who has just learned that his whole life has been a fraud.
Chapter Four
“The trial isn’t over,” insisted Albert Craven, when I came back from court.
I tossed my briefcase on my desk and with my hands on the small of my back stared out the rain streaked window. It struck me as almost funny that he had chosen the same phrase to offer encouragement that, a few days earlier, Tangerine had chosen, and that less than an hour ago I had used with Justin Friedrich. It was quintessentially American, this notion that the game is never over until the clock runs out, that it doesn’t matter how far behind you are, there is always the chance that somehow, some way, you can still win.
“It is forty-eight to nothing, a minute to play. You really want to bet that the final score is forty-nine to forty-eight?”
Craven, who had followed me into my office, sat at an angle, one leg crossed over the other, one arm thrown casually across the corner of the wingback chair. He lifted a wispy eyebrow and gave me a look that was not the least bit sympathetic.
“You aren’t that far behind. You’ll pull it out. You told me Friedrich is innocent. Couldn’t the jury see that for themselves when he testified?”
I could only shake my head. He had practiced law longer than most lawyers had been alive, he had known all the great ones, had been friends with perhaps the greatest civil lawyer in the country, Melvin Belli, and he was as innocent as Justin Friedrich in his belief that only the guilty were convicted. Albert Craven had in his long career made only two brief appearances, in a courtroom and had thrown up after each of them. He sat there without the slightest doubt that because I almost always won, I could not lose.
“Friedrich did fine, better than I was afraid he might. It’s odd, really,” I said, as I sat down in my chair, “but what I told him before he took the stand was true: It’s easier to tell the truth than to lie. You don’t have to remember all the details of an invented story. He’s innocent, he didn’t murder his wife. The jury believed him, or they wanted to. You could see it in the way they looked at him, the way they accepted what he was saying. They wanted to believe him, and they did, while he was telling them what happened. But then, when Ferguson - she may not be very likable, but she is as methodical as they come - went through her cross-examination everything he had said began to seem forced, contrived, a desperate attempt to explain away what could not be explained: his wife murdered by an unknown, and unseen, intruder, a dark shadow in the night, who did not murder him. They would like to believe him. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would murder anyone. That’s what they were all thinking, but then, by his own admission, he was drunk, they had a fight, she threw a drink in his face, he fell into the chairs at the table, and all in front of a couple hundred witnesses. He’s drunk, he’s been in a fight with her, and neither one of them are what you would call normal, decent people. They cheat on each other, sleep with other people about as often as they change clothes. Of course he killed her. No other possibility makes sense. When he first began testifying, everyone on that jury was curious, interested, sympathetic, eager to hear what he had to say; when Ferguson finished with him, the sympathy was gone. They looked like twelve judges prepared to pass sentence.”
“The trial isn’t over,” said Craven, persisting in the belief that somehow innocence, even tainted innocence, would triumph in the end. His belief should have been contagious - hope is always the last thing to die - but I had become fatalistic.
“I have a few more witnesses to call, a few people who saw him that night, when he was drunk, when he argued with his wife. They aren’t going to be able to add much. He didn’t own a gun, so far as any of them knew. He did not have one on him at the New Year’s Eve party. There was security; everyone had to pass through a metal detector. He’s going to be convicted, Albert. He’s going to spend his life in prison, and I get to spend mine wondering what I could have done to stop it from happening.”
Craven got up from his chair and gave me a long, solemn look
“Something will happen,” he assured me, with the generous certainty that makes the impossible seem not only conceivable but inevitable.
He had reached the door when he remembered.
“You have an appointment. He’s waiting down the hall. Would you like me to bring him in?”
I did not know I had an appointment. My secretary took care of that. I glanced at my datebook and there it was, an appointment for six o’clock. I did not recognize the name.
“Thanks. Don’t bother.” I reached for the phone and buzzed my secretary. “I’ll have Millie bring him back.”
Craven let go of the door and stepped back inside.
“Who is he? He seems familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.”
“I don’t know. Someone who needs a lawyer.” I glanced again at the name in the datebook. “Redfield. James M. Redfield.”
“Redfield,” he mused. “He looks more European than American, and he pays a small fortune for what he wears. He bought the suit he’s wearing at Wilkes-Bashford, here in the city, or Saville Row in London. His shoes are custom made, his shirt is tailor made. Everything is understated. He doesn’t dress to make an impression. But he does - make an impression, I mean.”
Craven liked nothing more than to describe the small detail by which you could define, in advance, as it were, what someone was like. He had an eye for this sort of thing, the brush strokes which, once you noticed enough of them, revealed before you saw all of it, the full portrait.
“He holds himself with close to military precision, the way the member of an old aristocratic family would have been taught from childhood to walk and sit and stand, every movement measured, everything tightly composed. When I walked past him, he watched me as if he were judging me. He doesn’t move his eyes, they stayed fixed, straight forward; he moves his head. And yet, I must tell you, his eyes are perhaps the most interesting thing about him. They seem to look right through you.”
Suddenly, I remembered.
“I’ve met him. The other day, just outside the courthouse. He asked if he could make an appointment. Apparently he has.”
James M. Redfield - James Michael Redfield, as I learned he preferred - looked taller than he was. It was, as Albert Craven had suggested, the way he held himself, though it seemed to me not so much like a soldier as the statue of one, every part of him in perfect proportion with every other. It was the same thing when he moved. He walked from the door to the chair the other side of my desk, a distance of nearly thirty feet, and if he had put a ball the top of his head it would have been in exactly the same position as when he entered.
“It’s good of you to see me, Mr. Antonelli,” he said, after we had shaken hands and he had taken the chair. “Especially after a day like this one must have been for you.”
His voice was quiet, undisturbed, the voice of someone not easily, if ever, stirred to anger. It had, as I remembered, something of the quality of a brush drawn slowly over a smooth flat surface, or, perhaps more accurately, the brush of a jazz drummer’s drum, rich, vibrant, but still the background, if the essential background, of other, more important things, in this case the thought, the emotion, of what it helped express.
“Especially after a day like… Are you talking about the trial?”
“Yes, the trial. I was there again today, part of the crowd. As I told you before, I wanted to watch the trial; I wanted to watch you. Let me explain,” he went on, sitting with his legs crossed. He held an attache case in his lap. “I may be in some difficulty; I may require the services of an attorney. I try never to do anything without adequate preparation. From everything I was able to learn, you’re the most qualified attorney I could hope to find. I haven’t spoken to anyone else; I hope I won’t have to. I have watched you in this trial, defending Justin Friedrich, and I am as certain as I know you must be that he is going to be convicted.”
That was exactly what I thought, but it did not mean that I liked hearing it from him, someone, a spectator, who, so far as I knew, did not know anything about the law.
“Are you a lawyer, Mr. Redfield? I asked, coldly.
“No, of course not. I’m sorry, Mr. Antonelli; perhaps I should not have said what I did. Given everything I have heard about you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you somehow manage at the last minute to find a way to win after all. I wouldn’t be surprised at all. It’s just that today, watching his testimony, listening to what the prosecution did on cross-examination, it just seemed to an outsider like me that the odds are not very good.”
He was right about that as well, and there was no reason not to acknowledge it.
“It’s a difficult case. But you didn’t come to see me about the Friedrich trial. You have, as you put it, some difficulty of your own?”
“I didn’t quite say that. I said that I may be in some difficulty. It isn’t yet certain that I will be. But I don’t think it advisable to wait until it is - Do you?”
He asked this with genuine interest, but, more than that, as if the question were one of general application and not specifically about his own situation, whatever that situation might turn out to be. There was a scholarly detachment about the question, an objective aspect to his inquiry. He might have been a reporter, an extremely intelligent and well-educated one, asking about the kind of advice a criminal defense lawyer normally gives a prospective client.
“If you think there is a real, a serious, chance that you might be in trouble, then, yes, it’s generally a good idea to retain counsel.”
I closed my eyes and bit my lip to stop myself from laughing. I sounded like one of those pompous slogan spouting lawyers who give legal advice on television.
“The real question, Mr. Redfield, is have you broken the law, have you committed a crime? If you haven’t, why waste your money?”
He seemed to think this almost ironic, and, once again, he was right.
“Justin Friedrich certainly needed a lawyer.”
I was tempted to tell him that it had not done Justin Friedrich any real good. Instead, I reminded him of something.
“He was arrested and charged with murder. You haven’t been arrested, you haven’t been charged with anything, have you?”
“No, but, as I say, I may be in some difficulty, and for that reason I should think it only makes sense to be prepared.”
“What is it you think you may be in difficulty about?”
He did not seem like someone who could be led by his emotions; he never would have done something on impulse. If I had to guess, I probably would have said, what I mentioned to Tangerine after that brief meeting on the courthouse steps, some sort of intricate financial scheme that had unraveled.
“You’ll have to forgive my ignorance, Mr. Antonelli, but before I can get into that, before I can discuss any of this with any kind of specificity, I need to make sure of a couple of things. Would you tell me if I am correct in the belief that there is something called the attorney-client privilege, and that it means that nothing I tell you can ever be revealed?”
“That’s correct. Whatever you tell me, I have to keep secret. I can never tell anyone, anyone at all, unless you were to authorize me to do so. The privilege belongs to you, the client - it doesn’t belong to me, the lawyer. You also need to know what the privilege doesn’t cover. It doesn’t cover anything you might tell me about the future. If a client tells his lawyer that he is going to commit a crime tomorrow, or right after he leaves his office, or at any time in the future, that is not privileged. Not only can the lawyer reveal what he has been told, he has an obligation to do so. If you tell your lawyer you’re going to go kill the mayor tomorrow at city hall, the lawyer better call the police. Does this answer your question?”
“Yes, thank you. I have only one more. Does the privilege exist only after a lawyer agrees to represent a client?”
“It starts immediately, the first conversation someone has with a lawyer about the possibility of the lawyer taking the case.”
“The privilege covers our conversation, the one we’re having now?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So I can confess all my crimes?” he remarked, with an agreeable smile. “If I had any to confess.”
He had come to see me because he thought he might be in trouble, and he had, if you took at face value what he said, spent a considerable amount of time investigating whether I was the one he should ask to represent him in whatever trouble he might be in. There had been others who had tried to find out what they could about me before they asked if I would help. This was different. Whatever difficulty he thought he might be in, he did not seem to be especially worried about it. It felt more like a conversation I might have with another attorney, one like Albert Craven who had never practiced criminal law or tried a case in court, a conversation about the various procedural requirements that a criminal defense lawyer had to be careful never to violate. I began to wonder if he was worried at all, whether there really was some difficulty he might have to face; I began to wonder whether he had come to see me just because he thought it might be interesting to see what a criminal defense lawyer was really like.
“What do you do, Mr. Redfield? Do you live here, in the city?” I asked.
I pulled out from a desk drawer a new legal pad and jotted down his name. I thought this might get his attention and force him to tell me whether he wanted to proceed.
“No, I don’t live in the city; I live down on the peninsula, near Woodside. What do I do? - You mean, how I make a living? I own a company, a high-tech company. We produce very high end electronics used to increase the volume and speed of various kinds of communications. We do very well: billions in sales every year, with a growth rate three, and sometimes even four or five times, the rate of most of our competitors. Strictly between us, Mr. Antonelli, I am at least partly responsible for the fact that a great and growing part of our population, not just in America, but especially in America, can no longer talk with intelligible coherence.”
Astonished, I could not help but laugh.
“So far as I know, Mr. Redfield, while no doubt a serious problem, what you have just described is not a crime.”
“No, but perhaps it should be. Kill one person, they call it murder and either kill you in turn or send you to prison for the rest of your life. Destroy the language, and therewith the ability to think, of an entire generation - and who knows how many generations into the future - and they call you a genius, the savior of the planet, give you the Presidential Medal of Freedom, if not the Nobel Prize, and think it only fair that you have more money than God!”
