Chapter 14
Maribel
She wore her church clothes: a navy dress with a white collar, low black shoes, a small gold cross on a chain. She had done something to her hair. It had been pinned up that morning with great care, I thought, in front of a mirror, by a woman who had decided that if she was going to be looked at she would be looked at correctly.
Maribel Santos took the oath in a voice so quiet that the clerk had to ask her to repeat it. Then she sat, and arranged her handbag on her lap, and folded her hands on top of it, and looked at the floor, and did not look up again until Dana Whitlock spoke her name.
It was the twelfth day of trial. The weather had turned. A brief hard sunshine lay across the room in long, clean, startlingly bright slabs, and the dust went up through it like smoke. I could see every fiber of the carpet in the well. I could see the grain of the witness box, and the tremor in the housekeeper's wrists.
"Mrs. Santos," said Whitlock, "how long did you work for the Hale family?"
"Seventeen years."
"In what capacity?"
"I was the housekeeper. I did the cooking, sometimes. The cleaning. I made the arrangements." Her English was careful and formal. "Madam called me the person who knows where everything is."
"Were you fond of her?"
A pause. "Yes."
"And of Mr. Hale?"
"He was a good employer." The words came out with a faint, dry stiffness, like a hinge. "He paid on time. He did not shout."
"Did you ever hear them quarrel?"
"Sometimes. Little things. Like all people."
"Did you hear them quarrel on Sunday, the twelfth of October?"
She did not answer at once. Her thumb, resting on the clasp of the handbag, had begun to move, a slow tight circle against the brass.
"Yes."
"Tell the jury what you heard."
It took four minutes. She told it as she had told me in the corridor of her sister's apartment block, haltingly, with a flat, exact, painful precision. She had been in the kitchen. It was after the evening meal. The study was at the end of the passage, and the door was closed, but the house was old and sound traveled in it. She heard a man's voice. It was raised. She had never heard it raised before.
"What did you hear it say?"
"You will leave with nothing." Her voice was almost inaudible. "I was sure. He said it twice."
"Whose voice?"
"Mr. Victor's."
"Are you certain?"
"I have known it for seventeen years."
"And what did you hear next?"
"Madam. I did not hear the words. She spoke very low. She did not shout, she never shouted." She swallowed. "Then a sound. Glass breaking. A heavy glass, a tumbler. And the door opened, and Madam came down the passage fast. Her face was white. She went up the stairs. She didn't see me."
"Did Mr. Hale come out?"
"After a time. He went into the garden. I saw him from the window. He stood by the wall for a long while."
"Thank you, Mrs. Santos."
Whitlock did not press. She had no need to. Four words, you will leave with nothing, had been spoken in a quiet room by a frightened woman, and every juror had heard them, and I watched them go in. The nurse's aide lowered her eyes. Alma Finch's hands, in her lap, had stopped.
"And on Tuesday the fourteenth," said Whitlock, "were you at the house?"
"Until four o'clock."
"Was Mrs. Hale well?"
"She was in the studio. She did not come in for lunch." The thumb stopped. "I made a tray. I took it to her. She said, Thank you, Maribel, I'm not hungry."
"How did she seem?"
"Tired."
"Anything else?"
A long silence.
"She was kind," said Maribel Santos, in a voice that was suddenly very thin. "She always was. She asked about my sister's back. She gave me an orange." She pressed her lips together. "That is all."
I looked at Whitlock. She was watching the witness with a faint, still, searching attention, and I saw her decide not to ask. It was a small mercy. I did not think she knew she was giving it.
"Nothing further, Your Honor."
I stood. I did not go to the lectern. I stood at the corner of the defense table, with my hands at my sides, and waited for a count of five before I spoke, because I had learned that a quiet witness needs more silence than a loud one.
"Mrs. Santos, I'm sorry to have to ask you these questions."
She looked at me. It was the first time since she had sat. Her eyes were large and dark and wet, and there was in them something I had seen before, in a doorway, through the gap of a chain. It was not fear of me.
"You told the jury that you heard Mr. Hale raise his voice."
"Yes."
"And that it was the first time in seventeen years."
"Yes."
"Did you ever, in seventeen years, see Mr. Hale lay a hand on his wife?"
"No."
"Did you see any bruise, any mark, anything that suggested he had?"
"No, sir."
"Did Mrs. Hale ever say that she was afraid of him?"
"Objection," said Whitlock. "Hearsay."
"It goes to state of mind, Your Honor, and to the question the State has itself opened."
"I'll allow it."
Maribel looked at the carpet. "She never said afraid." It took her some seconds. "She said it was hard. To be in a house where everything was already decided."
"Did she say she was afraid for anyone?"
I had not planned the question. It simply came, as the best of them do, out of a place I could not have named. The room went quiet. I saw the thumb start up again, round and round, a tiny brass-colored circle in the sunlight.
"For me," said Maribel.
"For you?"
"She said, if it ever got bad, I should go and stay with my cousin. That she'd pay." She shook her head slowly. "I said, Madam, why would it get bad? She said, I don't know. I only like to have a plan." Her mouth worked. "She was a person who liked plans."
I let it lie. It was not what I had meant to elicit. It was, if anything, a gift to the State, a woman preparing for danger. And yet it did not point to Victor. It did not point to anyone. It was only a woman's voice, saying a thing that she had held in her mouth for five months, and which was now out, in the sunlight, among strangers.
"Mrs. Santos, who had keys to the Hales' house?"
"Madam. Mr. Victor. Me."
"Anyone else?"
"The gardener had one for the studio. And the security company." She stopped.
"Yes?"
"The study had its own lock." She said it carefully. "It was an old one. A brass key. Madam kept hers on a ring. Mr. Victor kept his. And I had a third, for cleaning." Her hand moved on the clasp. "And Mr. Julian had one."
There was a very small silence.
I became aware of it the way one becomes aware of a stair that is not there. The room did not change. No one gasped. Alma Finch's needles did not stop. But somewhere behind me, in the front row of the gallery, I heard a breath drawn in and held, and I felt, though I did not turn, the entire attention of a man in a dark suit settle on the back of my neck like a hand.
"Mr. Julian Hale," I said.
"For when he came to see Madam about the foundation papers. She did the Foundation accounts in the study, sometimes. He would come on a Sunday, or a weekday night. She gave him a key so he wouldn't have to ring." Her eyes had come up to mine. They were very wide. "I'm sorry. You asked who had keys."
"I did."
"I'm sorry."
"There's nothing to be sorry for."
"Objection," said Whitlock, rising, and her voice had a new, cool, level edge. "Relevance, Your Honor. The question was about keys to the house. Whether other family members had one does not bear on the issue."
"It bears," I said, "on who had access to the room."
"Sustained as to the form," said Judge Teague. "But the answer will stand. Mr. Cole, I'd suggest you move on."
I moved on. I asked about the Sunday quarrel, and the glass, and the garden. I asked her whether Mr. Hale had seemed, on the Monday, to be a man with murder in his head, and she said, very low, no, he had seemed tired, and he had asked her to bring his coffee to the study and had thanked her. I asked her to describe him as an employer, and she said, with a flicker of the old stiffness, that she had never been spoken to unkindly. Three questions more. Then I said, "Thank you, Mrs. Santos," and sat down, and the sunlight on the table went out as a cloud crossed the sky.
I had not followed it. That was what I would think of later, at three in the morning, in the dark of my own apartment, with the sentence lying on my chest like a stone. And Mr. Julian had one. I had been handed it, plainly, by a frightened woman in her church clothes, and I had said thank you and sat down. I told myself it was because of what I had promised. I told myself it was because the judge had cautioned me. I told myself that a defense lawyer's duty is to his client, and that his client had said, in a flat voice, in a jail, you will not say his name.
It was all true. And it was a lie, and I knew it, and I sat there with my pen in my hand and did not look at the man in the gallery, because I could not have borne it if he had been looking at me.
The recess came at four. I went out into the corridor, and I was halfway to the water cooler when a voice said, softly, behind me, "Mr. Cole."
I knew him before he spoke. Maribel Santos had described him to me through the gap of a door chain: a man in a gray suit, very polite. He was sixty or so, with a pink, benign, well-barbered face, silver hair combed back, and rimless glasses. His suit was the gray of expensive pencil lead. His shoes were beautifully kept. He held a leather folio against his chest with both hands, like a choirboy with a hymnal.
"Barnaby Lowe," he said. "General counsel at Hale Meridian. We've spoken on the telephone."
"Mr. Lowe."
"I thought I should introduce myself properly." His smile was warm, almost fatherly. "I've been rather in the background. Company business. You'll understand that there's a great deal to look after, with Victor, ah, unavoidably detained."
"I understand."
"I wanted to say that the board is very pleased with your work. Particularly with this afternoon." The pale eyes behind the glasses were perfectly friendly. "That business about the keys was nicely handled."
"I didn't handle it. She answered a question."
"Quite." He inclined his head. "A pity about Mrs. Santos. She's a good woman, and I'm afraid she's found all this very trying. I took the liberty, in October, of arranging a small allowance for her. A sort of retainer. To make sure she was looked after."
"You gave her an envelope."
"A very modest one."
"And told her not to speak to me."
"I told her to be careful." He said it without the slightest embarrassment. "I'm sure you'll agree that when a family is in the middle of a very public ordeal, it's the part of prudence to ensure that employees don't find themselves, ah, exposed to the press. I'd have thought you'd approve."
"I'd have thought you'd consult me first."
"Ah." For the first time, the pink face showed something that might have been regret. "Yes. That was an oversight. I apologize." He tucked the folio more firmly under his arm. "I only wished to say that the company stands behind you, Mr. Cole. Entirely. And if there is anything, anything at all, that you should need, a document, a witness, a phone call, I hope you'll telephone me directly." He paused. "Not Mr. Julian. He's very distressed. I think it would be kinder to leave him out of it."
There was a very faint emphasis on the word kinder.
I looked at him for a long moment. It is a thing I do. I look at a man in silence until he has to decide whether to fill it. Barnaby Lowe held my gaze without a flicker, smiling his benign smile, and said nothing, and I understood that I was being told something in a language that was not in the words.
"I'll bear it in mind," I said.
"I'm sure you will." He nodded once, with perfect courtesy, as a man does who has completed a transaction. "Good afternoon."
He went away down the corridor, a neat gray figure in the light from the tall windows. At the far end, beside the door of the courtroom, a thin woman in a navy dress was standing with her back to the wall. She had been there, I realized, all along. Her hands were clasped on her handbag. She was looking at Barnaby Lowe's back as he passed, and her face, for an instant, in the white light, was the face of a person watching a door close on a room she has not been able to leave.
Then she saw me looking. She lowered her eyes, and turned, and went into the ladies' room, and the door swung shut behind her on its long slow hinge.
I stood in the corridor with my paper cup. The coffee had gone cold. Somewhere in the great building, a bell was ringing for the end of a session, a single clear note, and then another, and I counted them without meaning to. Seven. Eight.
I had been given a key. I had been given it twice, once by a housekeeper and once, in a different form, by a smiling man in a gray suit. And I had put it in my pocket, and I had not once asked myself what lock it was meant to open.