Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (6 page)

“If he had had a gun, I think he would have killed me. Instead, all he could do was try to ignore it. He shook his head as if I wasn’t worth his trouble and invited Goldman to continue his examination of the witness.

“When it was my turn, I attacked. ‘You never saw your wife do anything with your son, did you?’ I asked before I was halfway out of my chair.

“He was unflappable. ‘No,’ he said without expression.

” ‘Your wife never admitted to you that she had ever done anything improper with your son, did she?’

” ‘No.’

” ‘You never saw or heard anything from anyone that led you to believe that anything improper was going on, did you?’

” ‘No.’

“I stood in front of the counsel table and let my gaze wander from the witness to the bench. ‘And despite what was suggested earlier, your wife, Janet Larkin, never said or did anything that made you think she had any suspicions at all about what you were doing with your daughter, did she?’

“His head down, Jeffries pretended to be busy, though he knew full well that my eye was on him and not the witness.

” ‘So any suggestions about what your wife must have known, about what your wife must have been hiding, are nothing more than speculation. Isn’t that right?’

“Jeffries snapped his head up, an angry expression on his face.

Before he could say anything, I took a step toward the witness and asked, ‘Isn’t it true, Mr. Larkin, that your son never said anything about any of this until he came to live with you?’

“He started to answer, but I talked right over him as I moved another step closer. ‘And isn’t it true, Mr. Larkin, that your daughter isn’t the only child of yours with whom you wanted to have a sexual relationship?’

“Jeffries raised his gavel; Goldman shot out of his chair; the noise from the crowd was deafening. I never heard what Goldman said or the sound the gavel must have made. The jurors, who by hearing it so often had almost forgotten what Larkin had done with his daughter, were stunned by the enormity of what they had now been told he had wanted to do with his son. The only one who seemed unaffected by what I had charged was Edward Larkin himself. He sat on the witness chair, hands folded together, waiting impassively, as if all this commotion had nothing to do with him.

“Jeffries did not know any better than I did the objection Goldman had made. It did not matter. Over the dying tumult, he struck his gavel and shouted, ‘Sustained.’

” ‘Do you deny that you told your daughter that you had fantasies about your son?’ I asked so rapidly one word ran into the other.

” ‘Objection.’ Goldman was on his feet again, waving his arms like someone trying to stop a train.

” ‘Sustained,’ Jeffries ruled, beside himself.

” ‘Do you deny having fantasies—sexual fantasies—about your son?’

“Jeffries sustained the objection before Goldman could finish making it. I spun away from the witness. ‘Grounds?’ I demanded to know as if it was my right. For an instant, Jeffries was at a loss for words. He was not used to anyone, much less a young lawyer, talking back.

” ‘Relevance, your honor,’ Goldman managed to interject.

” ‘But it is relevant, your honor. It goes to the credibility of the witness.’

“Glowering, Jeffries told me to move on to something else.

‘The objection has been sustained.’

” ‘Tell me, Mr. Larkin,’ I said, turning back to the witness, ‘when you testified that your son told you that his mother had forced him to have sexual intercourse with her, did he explain why he had never said a word of this until he started living with you?’

“Larkin shook his head. ‘It only came out after he started therapy.’

” ‘Then tell us this, Mr. Larkin. Until your son told this story, you never once suspected anything like this was going on, did you?’

” ‘No, I didn’t.’

” ‘And wouldn’t you of all people have been alert to any sign that something like this was going on?’

“Goldman objected, and Goldman’s objections now practically sustained themselves. Without so much as a glance in Jeffries’s direction, I waved my hand, as if to signal how boring they had both become, and asked the next question.

“If I could pick a moment when my life changed, this was it.

I don’t mean the next question I asked. I’m not sure I even remember what it was. I mean this time, this point in the trial, when without quite realizing it I had taken that one decisive step that decides forever who you are. Everything up until then had been training, instinct, the combination of things that lets you react, lets you adjust to everything that is going on around you.

I had been practicing for about three years, and I was good at it—at least I had thought I was. I hardly ever lost, and that was the way everyone else seemed to measure things—did you win or did you lose. But now, really for the first time, I knew what I was doing. I was conscious of myself, of the effect I had, of the way everyone else involved in that trial was reacting to me. It was not ego, though I’m sure there was plenty of that; it was something more. I could not have explained it then, and I probably can’t explain it now, but I understood what everyone was doing and why. I understood the reason for things. I learned to trust myself in that trial and not care what anyone else might think.

It was either that, or let Jeffries help the prosecution convict a woman who had never done anything wrong of the worst crime with which any mother could ever be charged.

“Finally finished with Edward Larkin, the prosecution called the boy’s psychologist, who had believed and reported what he had been told. Then they called the police officer who had reported, and claimed to believe, what the boy had said.

” ‘How old are you?’ I asked the officer on cross.

” ‘Thirty-eight,’ he answered.

” ‘And are you married?’

“When he said he was, I asked if he had children. He had three and was obviously quite proud of it. I picked up my copy of his report off the table and turned to the page I wanted. ‘You wrote this?’ I held it up at arm’s length, a bewildered smile on my face.

“He was not sure where I was going. ‘Yes,’ he answered.

“I looked at him a moment longer, as if I was not sure whether I should believe him. ‘I see,’ I said, as I brought the document close enough to be read. After a few moments, I looked up. ‘You wrote this part? “According to the boy, the sexual intercourse with his mother usually lasted one and a half to two hours.” ‘ I lifted my hands, and shrugged. ‘Between one and a half and two hours?’ I asked skeptically.

“He seemed not to understand the question. ‘Didn’t it strike you as—what shall we say?—unusual?’

” ‘That’s what the boy said,’ the officer replied as if that had been my question.

“I looked at the jury and let my gaze settle for a moment on each of the men. ‘Between one and a half and two hours.’ I repeated the phrase like an awestruck spectator.

” ‘Do you have a question, Mr. Antonelli?’ Jeffries snarled.

” ‘Oh, I think I do, your honor,’ I said cheerfully as I walked back to the counsel table. ‘But not of this witness.’

“It was an amazing thing, the way everyone had been drawn into that boy’s story. All of us understand how something like a rape can take place. We can understand how someone, driven by the same impulses and desires that drive us all, can become so twisted, so violent, that he attacks a woman. It is much more difficult to understand how anyone can attack a child, and next to impossible to imagine how a mother could do anything like this to her own son. And that, I’m convinced, is what gave his story a strange kind of credibility. It was so utterly bizarre, so far beyond the range of anyone’s experience, everyone was afraid to express any doubt about what the boy had said. The only way they could distance themselves from an act so completely obscene was to denounce it, and the only way they could do that was to believe that it had really happened.

“The boy was the prosecution’s star witness, and from the moment he took the stand, Spencer Goldman treated him like a victim. And Goldman believed it, believed it with a passion. He looked upon himself as the boy’s protector. When I asked for the chance to interview my client’s son before trial, Goldman turned me down flat. ‘He doesn’t want to talk to you,’ he told me as if I was the one who had been accused of abuse.

“Gerald Larkin was poised—too poised—for his age. He sat straight, with his hands in his lap and his legs close together. He waited for each question Goldman asked, and then, without a moment’s pause, produced his answers, answers that were direct, to the point, not a word out of place. And each time he did it, he looked at the jury. He described the ways his mother had aroused him in bed the way any other child might have described what he had done at camp. We are supposed to like children, but I did not like him. I had believed his mother nearly from the moment I met her; I knew he was lying with the first answer he gave. All he was asked was to state his name and spell his last for the record. The way he did it told me everything I needed to know. Here he was, a child claiming that his own mother had sexually abused him, not once, not twice, but on numberless occasions over a number of years, and he walked into court like he owned the place. A child who has been sexually abused does not like to talk about it, and he will never look you in the eye when he does. Gerald Larkin was like an actor taking center stage.

“On cross, I asked him if he remembered talking to the officer and whether everything he had said to him was true. He looked me right in the eye and said it was.

” ‘You say that the first time this happened you were living in the house on Roanoke Avenue. Is that right?’

“He was never hesitant. ‘Yes.’

” ‘I see.’ Stroking my chin, I stared down at the floor. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, lifting my eyes. ‘Absolutely sure?’

” ‘Yes.’

” ‘Your family moved from that house to the one over on Ar-lington Street, right?’

” ‘Yes.’

” ‘That happened when you were just starting the first grade, when you were seven years old, correct?’

“He did not grasp the significance of this. ‘Yes,’ he replied.

” ‘So you’re telling us that you were seven years old when you began to have sexual intercourse with your mother. Is that what you’re telling us?’

“His gaze never wavered. ‘Yes.’

” ‘And it went on until you moved out of the house with your mother and sister and into the apartment with your father. Is that what you’re telling us?’

” ‘Yes.’

“I was standing a few feet in front of him. Turning away, I walked over to the jury box and put my hands on the railing.

‘And you told the officer that each time this happened, it lasted for one and a half to two hours, didn’t you?’ One by one I looked into the eyes of the jurors. ‘And did it always last that long—

one and a half to two hours—right from the beginning?’

” ‘Yes,’ I heard him answer.

” ‘When you were seven years old,’ I added, searching the last juror’s eyes.

“I went back to my chair and sat down next to the boy’s mother.

He could look me in the eye, and he could look the prosecutor in the eye; he could even look at all twelve adults in the jury box when he answered a question; but he would not, and I dare say could not, look at her.

“Shoving the chair back from the table, I bent forward, my elbows on my knees, and looked up at him. ‘What is it you really want?’ For the first time, he hesitated, and in that moment, watching his eyes, I saw a glimmer of doubt, as if he now realized that things might not work out the way he had thought they would.

‘When your father left,’ I asked, more sympathetically, ‘did he tell you that one day things would be like they were before?’

“He looked down at his hands. ‘Yes.’

” ‘When your father left, they told you it was because of things he had done with your sister?’ He did not answer, he just nodded. ‘What you’d really like, more than anything, is for everyone to be back together, and for everything to be like it was, isn’t that right?’

“He raised his head high enough to see me. ‘Yes.’

” ‘Is that the reason you said these things about your mother, because if there wasn’t any difference between them, if everyone thought they had both done the same thing, your father could come home again?’

“I thought for a moment he was going to answer. I think he wanted to. But things had gone too far, and whether because he thought it would be a betrayal of his father, or the simple fear of what might happen to him if he did, he could not bring himself to admit the lie.”

Four

_______

Why didn’t it end right there?” Asa Bartram inquired. Meditating on his own question, he furrowed his brow, a troubled look in his pale blue eyes. “You must have made the motion.

It’s almost always denied, but still, in a case like that, after what the boy said …” His voice trailed off as another thought came to mind. “Calvin denied it, didn’t he? But why?” An instant after he asked, his eyes flashed and he began to nod his head. “He thought there was still a chance you could lose, didn’t he?”

Asa knew his old friend well, and he was right. The boy could have admitted on the stand he had made the whole thing up and Jeffries would still have denied a motion for acquittal at the end of the prosecution’s case. But that was not what happened.

“I didn’t make the motion,” I admitted.

Asa thought I was making a joke. “Everybody makes that motion. You have to make that motion.”

“Ineffective assistance of counsel,” Jonah Micronitis observed, as if he had actually spent time in a courtroom.

Harper Bryce was laughing to himself. “And then the defendant—if she lost—would get a new trial.”

With a blank expression, Micronitis stared at Bryce and then looked at Asa for an explanation.

Asa appraised me with a shrewd eye. “Is that the reason you didn’t make the motion?”

I wanted to say that it was, but at the time I was not thinking that far ahead. The only thought in my mind then was simple defiance.

“As soon as the prosecution rested its case, I was on my feet, calling the first witness for the defense.