Chapter 11
Opening
Dana Whitlock did not use notes.
She stood at the lectern for perhaps four seconds before she began, with her hands resting on its slanted wood and her eyes moving slowly along the two rows of the jury box, one face at a time. It was a trick, but a good one. By the time she spoke, every person in the room had stopped shifting in their seat, and the only sound was the faint metallic ticking of the radiator under the north window and, from the front row of the gallery, the small dry click of Alma Finch's knitting needles, which went silent as though a hand had closed on them.
"On the evening of the fourteenth of October," Whitlock said, "Eleanor Hale was in her husband's study, in her own home, with a lamp on. She was forty-four years old. She was a person who spent her life restoring beautiful things that other people had damaged. And at some time between nine and ten-thirty that night, someone picked up a bronze statue from a shelf above her husband's desk, and struck her in the head with it three times."
She paused. She let it sit.
"You will hear a great deal in this courtroom about clocks and cameras and cell towers. You will hear experts. You will be asked to weigh technical evidence, and I will not pretend it is simple. But I want to begin with something very simple. I want you to keep hold of it, through all of the technical evidence, as you would keep hold of the rail on a staircase." Her voice was low and clear. "The State will prove that the person who killed Eleanor Hale was the man who had the most to gain from her death. The man whose fingerprints were on the weapon. The man whose car was seen in her driveway ten minutes before she died. And the man who, when he was first questioned, told the police something that was not true."
I did not move. I sat with my pen balanced across my knuckles and kept my face as blank as I could. At my side Victor sat in his navy suit with his hands on the table, quite still. The back of his neck was as straight as a post.
She was very good. I have never denied it. She told them the story in order, in plain short sentences, without adjectives, and every sentence landed. The prenuptial agreement: fourteen years, two million dollars, and a clause that said that if she left, that was all she would have. The policy: thirty-eight million. The quarrel: you will leave with nothing. She did not raise her voice. She did not wave her hands. She set the facts down one by one, on the rail of the jury box, like a woman laying out silverware, and when she had finished I could almost see the table.
"You will meet Gerald Pruett," she said. "He is seventy-four years old, and he cannot sleep. On the fourteenth of October, at about a quarter to ten, he was sitting at the window of his home on Cranmoor Lane, in the dark. He saw a car turn in at the gate of the house where Eleanor Hale lay. A silver Bentley. A car he had seen a thousand times. He saw the man who was driving it." She turned, slowly, and looked at Victor. "He saw that man."
I felt Victor breathe in, a small controlled intake, and out.
"You will hear that the defendant said he was at his office all night. You will hear that his office has a parking garage, and that the garage has cameras that read license plates. You will hear that those cameras recorded his car leaving the building at 9:26 and returning at 10:09. And you will hear what he said when he was asked about it." She let a beat go by. "He said it was a mistake."
She faced the jury again. Her face, in the flat north light, was fine-boned and pale and utterly composed.
"The defense will tell you that the evidence is uncertain," she said. "That machines make errors. That witnesses can be mistaken. All of that is true. Machines make errors. Witnesses can be wrong. But I would ask you, as you listen, to remember that it is a very, very long way from uncertain to impossible. A man who is innocent does not need his lawyer to explain the clocks."
She sat down.
There was a silence. In the second row, the juror I had been watching, Raymond Teague, the bus driver, was looking at the floor with his chin tucked in, not nodding. A woman at the back of the gallery blew her nose.
I stood.
I have given perhaps a hundred opening statements, and the one rule I have learned is this: never try to match the other side's drama. If a prosecutor opens with a thunderclap, you do not answer with a thunderclap. You answer with a candle.
I walked to the lectern and did not touch it. I stood beside it, slightly to the left, in front of the first row, closer than most lawyers like to be. I looked at the jury. And I let the silence go on a little longer than was comfortable.
"I'd like to begin by telling you what I don't know," I said.
Somewhere, in the gallery, a pen stopped.
"I don't know what happened to Eleanor Hale. I wasn't there. Nobody in this room was. The State has told you that it knows, and it has told you with great skill. But I'd ask you to hold on to that word, know, and test it, the way you would test a floor before you put your whole weight on it."
I let my gaze move along the row. The nurse's aide, Ouellette, with her tired, level eyes. The young software tester, with his notebook and his little frown. Alma Finch, in her cardigan, her needles still. Raymond Teague.
"Mr. Hale is not going to ask you to believe that he is a good man. I think he is a man who has made a great deal of money and has been, for the most part, unseen. I think you'll find him reserved. You may find him cold. He did not weep when the police came, and he did not weep this morning, and I imagine some of you have already decided what that says about him." I paused. "I'd ask you to think of the last time you were in a room with someone who had just learned that the person they loved was dead. Did they behave as you expected? Or did they do something strange?"
I saw Teresa Ouellette's mouth move very slightly. She had nursed a great many people through the worst night of their lives.
"The State has a story," I said. "It's a clean one. It begins with a prenuptial agreement and ends with a statue. And I'll tell you something I've learned in twelve years of doing this. The cleaner the story, the more carefully you ought to read the parts that don't fit."
I walked to the end of the jury box, slowly, and turned.
"Here are some parts that don't fit. The State says a car left the garage at 9:26. It says that the clock on the system that recorded it was correct. You will hear from an expert that it was not. That for five days before the murder, that clock had not been synchronized with any outside time source, and that it was running, by the best measurement available, between twelve and nineteen minutes fast. Between twelve and nineteen." I let the numbers stand. "The State's whole timeline depends on a minute. A minute is a very small thing. I'd ask you to consider what happens to a timeline built on a clock that cannot tell you what time it is."
A scratch of a pencil. The software tester had written something down.
"The State says the car was Mr. Hale's. The cameras that record plates are machines, and machines read letters, and sometimes they get them wrong. You will hear that the system in that garage has a documented tendency to confuse two particular digits. You will hear that there was more than one car in that garage with a plate very like Mr. Hale's." I held up a hand before the objection I could feel gathering at the other table. "I'm not going to tell you whose. I'm only going to tell you that the State never asked."
"Your Honor," Whitlock said, rising, mildly. "I'd ask that counsel not argue."
"Sustained," said Judge Teague. "Mr. Cole, it's an opening."
"I understand, Your Honor." I turned back to the jury. "I'll stop there. I'll tell you one more thing and then I'll sit down."
I walked back to the lectern and put my hand on it, finally, lightly, as one touches a chair back.
"At the end of this case, the judge is going to read you a sentence. You'll have heard it many times, in films, in newspapers, in the long drone of public opinion. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It's a very old phrase, and it's often used as if it were a technicality. It isn't. It's the whole reason you're sitting there. It is a promise that the people in this room, the ones with all the power, will not take a man's life from him unless they can show you, honestly, that they are sure." I looked at each of them. "I'm not going to tell you that Victor Hale is innocent. I'm going to ask you to hold the State to its promise. And at the end, if you find that you do not know, I'd ask you to have the courage to say so."
I sat down. My hands were steady. I looked at them on the table, long and white, with the knuckles slightly pink from gripping, and I thought, I do not know, and understood that I had just told twelve strangers a thing I had not said aloud to anyone else in five months.
Victor leaned a fraction toward me. His voice was a thread of breath. "That was very good."
"Thank you."
"You said you didn't know."
"It's true."
"Yes." He sat back. "I noticed."
At the lunch recess I stood in the corridor outside Courtroom 4B, by a window that looked down on Meridian Square, with a paper cup of coffee that tasted of the paper. The sky was pearl-colored. The pigeons were walking in dignified circles on the wet stone. Down in the Square, a vendor was selling roasted chestnuts from a brazier, and a thin blue smoke went up past the window in a thread.
"You told them you didn't know."
I turned. Clare Voss was beside me. She had come up without a sound, in her black coat, with her hair pulled back and her face very white, and she held a folded newspaper in one hand. Her eyes were red-rimmed and perfectly steady.
"I did."
"Was it a trick?"
"No."
"I didn't think so." She looked out of the window. "It's what scares me. That you meant it."
"Ms. Voss—"
"I'm not going to shout at you in a courtroom." She said it quite gently. "I wanted you to know that I heard it. I was in the front row. I thought: that's the first honest thing anyone's said in this building, and it's the man who's paid to say the opposite." Her mouth twisted. "It doesn't change anything. I wanted you to know I noticed."
She turned and walked away. I watched her go down the corridor toward the stairs, tall, straight, unhurried, and a few feet from the head of the staircase she paused beside the second bench, where a man in a dark overcoat was sitting alone with his hands between his knees. Julian Hale. He looked up as she passed. They did not speak. But for a moment his face, in the pale light from the window, was naked, and I saw what I had not seen in the hotel bar or the interview room: not grief, not anger, but something more disquieting than either. It was fear.
It was gone at once. He stood, brushing his coat, and adjusted his cuff. A small dull glint of gold showed at his wrist, there and then covered, a circle of old metal worn smooth by decades of use.
He nodded to me across the corridor. I nodded back. Then he went to the door of the courtroom and put his left hand on it, and held it open for an elderly woman with a cane, with an exquisite, practiced courtesy, and it sighed behind them both and shut.
The State's first witness was called after lunch.
I will not describe him. He was a patrol officer, thirty, thick-necked and earnest, with a haircut like a boy's, and he told the jury how he had arrived at the Hale house at 11:26 on the night of the murder and found the defendant on his knees in the hall. He said that Mr. Hale had been calm. Whitlock asked the word again. He said very calm, and somewhere in the room a person made a small sound of agreement.
I rose to cross. I asked him four questions. I asked him whether he had ever, in nine years on the force, seen a person who had just found a body who did not behave strangely. He said no. I asked him whether calm was a word he would use of a man in shock. He thought, and said he was not sure. I asked him how many times he had been the first officer at a homicide. He said three.
"No further questions."
It took ninety seconds, and I was aware as I sat of the faint, almost invisible turn of the jury's attention toward me, like a field of grass turning in a wind. I had learned something from them in that ninety seconds, as I always did. It was the thing that I loved best about the work, and which I would, in the months that followed, come to examine with a kind of horror: how easy it was. How little it took. A question, a pause, a single honest word, not sure, and twelve strangers' hearts leaned a half-inch in my direction.
I like this, I thought. I thought it quite clearly, in the clean cold light of the north windows, with my client beside me and a murdered woman's sister behind me and the pen in my hand not moving at all.
God help me, I like this.