Necessity Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also by D.W. Buffa

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  The Defense

  The Prosecution

  The Judgment

  The Legacy

  Star Witness

  Breach of Trust

  Trial By Fire

  Rubicon

  Evangeline

  The Swindlers

  The Dark Backward

  The Last Man

  Helen

  Hillary

  IT WAS A strange case, a great case, a case that, once it got to trial, might well change forever the history of the United States. Other presidents had been murdered, but no one who had killed a president had ever been brought to trial. I did not want any part of it.

  “You have to take it,” insisted Albert Craven. “This is what you do; this is all you have ever done. Why wouldn’t you want to do it?”

  Despite his age, there was not a line on his smooth, round face, not a wrinkle in his small, manicured hands. He sat there in his expensive tailored suit and his polished shoes, shirt cuffs precisely positioned an exact half-inch below the suit coat sleeves, a kind of permanent presence in his prosperous well-being. The founder of one of the oldest law firms in the city, a lawyer who had never tried a case, he had made a career of listening with endless patience to a client’s habitual complaints, and then with sympathetic understanding assuring them that there was nothing to worry about, that most problems were solved with time and forbearance. I started to laugh.

  “Why don’t you take it, Albert? You’ve practiced law a lot longer than I have.”

  As if praying for patience, he closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. He often did that with me, but then, when he opened his eyes, he looked at me in a way I had not seen before.

  “This is serious. You’re Joseph Antonelli. How many years has it been since you came here, to San Francisco, to try a case, a case you won—”

  “A case I damn near lost!”

  “A case you won. And then you stayed, and I’m very glad you did. I admire what you do. God knows I could never do it. I’m not asking you to take the case; it has nothing to do with the firm. It has nothing to do with me. But what happened…it isn’t a question of someone’s guilt or innocence; it isn’t a question of whether someone has or hasn’t committed murder. It isn’t a question,” he went on, moving forward until he was sitting on the very edge of the blue wingback chair, “of whether or not you can win an acquittal. The question—the serious question—is what effect the trial will have on the country.”

  Picking up my fountain pen, a present he had once given me, I began to twist the corrugated black barrel back and forth between my fingers. It was ten o’clock on a Monday morning, the second week of September. Outside the window, the sky was a relentless gray, the last remnant of the lingering overnight fog.

  “Do you know why I became a defense lawyer—one of the reasons? Because a trial, a criminal trial, has a beginning and an end. You try the case, the jury brings back a verdict. That’s the last I have to deal with it.”

  “Unless you lose, and then there’s an appeal. But I forget, you never lose. But what does this have to do with—”

  “We’re still litigating the Kennedy assassination. This trial will go on forever, there will never be an end to it.”

  “There will be a verdict; there will be—”

  “Years, decades, of questions about what happened, whether there was a conspiracy, a cover-up; whether the defense attorney was part of it, whether he was in on it—whatever that ‘it’ might be. I’ve got other things to do than spend the rest of my life answering questions about what happened, or didn’t happen, at a trial. And besides,” I added with a shrug, “everyone says Fitzgerald confessed.” I put down the pen and reached for the newspaper that lay folded on the side of my desk. “Here, look at—”

  “I’ve read the paper,” he replied, becoming for some reason more determined, more intense. He did not raise his voice, he seldom did that, but there was no mistaking what he felt. “It says there are reports that he confessed.” He paused long enough to give me a look that told me he knew something. “The reports are true. Fitzgerald has confessed.” Craven did not wait for the obvious next question. “There is still going to be a trial. He wants one, and the government insists on it.”

  I had no idea how Albert Craven had come into possession of this information, but I had long since stopped being surprised at anything he had come to know. He knew everyone, and no one, it seemed, had ever kept anything secret from him. Husbands might lie to their wives, and wives their husbands, but they would confess to him everything they had done.

  “He’s confessed, but both he and the government want a trial?” I suddenly realized what was going on, or thought I did. “He wants to make the case why he was right, he wants to be a martyr to a cause, while the government wants to show that he is a murderer and nothing more. It’s a show trial, that is what it is going to be. And that is another reason why I won’t do it,” I insisted, waving my hand to stave off any more argument.

  “Well, will you at least talk to his wife, listen to what she has to say?” I started to shake my head, but Craven was already on his feet. “She’s waiting in my office. It won’t take more than a few minutes. Talk to her. If you still don’t want to do it, that will be the end of it. I promise.”

  I did not know Kevin Fitzgerald, but I knew enough about him to know I did not like him. The youngest of California’s two U.S. senators, he had been the next great hope of the Democratic party, someone who might very well become president, if not in the next election, the one after that. I did not care about his politics; it did not matter to me whether he was a liberal or a conservative. What did matter was that he did not really seem to believe in anything except whatever anyone else believed. Ambition—the desire to be recognized as someone important, the need to feel not just recognition, but the approval of vast numbers of people, the applause of the crowd, the drive to be thought of as exceptional, better than anyone else, someone others would envy and, if they could, try to imitate—was the reason for everything he had ever done. It was, according to the received wisdom of Albert Craven’s circle of privileged, wealthy friends, the reason why he had married Tricia Raintree. Ambition meant nothing without money, and she had more of it than nearly anyone else her age. Good looking, if not quite beautiful; charming in her conversation when she was talking to someone she wanted to impress; quick in her ability to calculate her own advantage; and, as I was about to discover, as determined to get her own way as any woman I had ever known.

  She did not bother to knock. She swept into my office as if I had come to see her. Had I gotten up to greet her, she would have taken my chair. I pretended to study a case file that lay open on my desk. She took the wingback chair Albert Craven had used and did not say a word. She did not move, she just waited as if she had all the time in the world, as if she did not care in the least if I ever looked up. When I finally did, there was just the hint of a smile on her lips, the knowledge that whatever else I might think, I could never think sh
e needed anything from me. It was the assumption of men with too much money and women who thought themselves irresistible; it was an assumption that, especially in this situation, had no connection with reality.

  “The answer is no, Mrs. Fitzgerald. I won’t represent your husband.”

  Tricia Fitzgerald glanced at her long, painted nails, deciding, as it seemed, whether they had been done properly or exhibited some slight imperfection.

  “My husband has been accused of murder. I wanted to talk to you about representing him. They tell me you’re the best there is. Albert—Albert Craven—is an old family friend, and…”

  She was looking past me, out the window, as if suddenly taken by something she had just remembered. Her mouth twisted at the corners, and then, as if to punish itself for this failure of control, tightened into a spiteful grimace.

  “Murder. That seems a strange way to describe it. He didn’t murder anyone. You aren’t a murderer if you acted in self-defense.”

  “Self-defense? The president tried to kill him, and he—”

  “I went to law school, Mr. Antonelli. I took criminal law. Self-defense isn’t just when you act to save yourself.”

  “He acted to save others?” I asked with a doubtful, measured smile.

  Instead of an answer, instead of an explanation of what she meant, she began to look around the room, pausing once or twice to make a more careful appraisal of what she saw.

  “You have very good, very expensive, taste, Mr. Antonelli. There isn’t anything here—not the chairs, not the sofa, certainly not the Persian rugs—that was bought off the floor. The books, law books almost all of them, though I notice you have some other things as well—first editions?” she asked, certain with all the certainty of money that she must be right.

  “No, at least not that I’m aware of. Just some old books I inherited.”

  She got up and walked across to the bookshelves, pulled out a volume from a middle shelf and opened it.

  “Aristotle!” She laughed, masking her disappointment. “No, I imagine it wouldn’t be a first edition. And why would you want one if you don’t read Latin.”

  Greek, I wanted to tell her, but there were other, more important errors with which we had to deal.

  “You’ve done very well,” she continued, putting the book back where she had found it. “I had heard that about you, that you only take cases that pay extraordinary fees.”

  I tried, with only partial success, to conceal my irritation.

  “The last case I tried, a trial that ended just last week, there was not any fee at all.”

  She moved with such a light step that she seemed not to move at all, motion nothing but the sudden exchange of one place with another. She had been standing next to the bookshelves on the other side of the room, now she was sitting in the same chair she seemed never to have left.

  “And why did you do that, Mr. Antonelli?” she asked in her breathless, lilting voice, her large, dark eyes full of laughter.

  She seemed more like a college girl on a date than a woman married to a man about to go on trial for his life. I had the feeling that, for her, the present moment was always everything. There was no past, no past that counted; the future, when she thought about it, was only the extension, the inevitable, expected realization, of what she wanted now. It was not that she felt entitled, that might have required an explanation, a reason why. It never would have occurred to her that she needed a reason for anything. The world belonged to her because the world had always been, and always would be, whatever she wanted it to be.

  “Well, why did you do it, take a case for nothing?”

  “Because the kid was guilty.”

  “Because the kid was…? That seems a little strange.”

  “It isn’t strange at all. He was eighteen years old, a black kid, goes to city college, wants to become a lawyer—just like you. His mother screamed at some drug-dealing gangster type in the neighborhood where they live and this lowlife breaks her jaw for her trouble. So the kid, my client, confronts the guy and beats the hell out of him. He gets charged with assault. The law says he should have called the police, that it’s a crime to take the law into your own hands, that it’s a crime to do physical violence to someone, no matter what the cause. The prosecution offers him a deal, a very good deal, as those things go. He pleads guilty to misdemeanor assault and gets a year probation. I told him the hell with that, we’re going to trial. The jury took maybe five minutes, and that was only because before they announced their verdict—their unanimous verdict—they asked the judge if they could ask a question: why was the district attorney’s office prosecuting someone who should have been given a medal?”

  Tricia Fitzgerald jumped on it. It proved everything, everything important, everything that was needed to show me that I should do what she wanted me to do.

  “That’s what everyone is saying about Kevin: instead of being prosecuted for murder, he should be given a medal, that he saved the country, that he—”

  I stopped her with a look.

  “Everyone is saying? I read the papers. Whatever anyone thought about the president, no one is saying your husband did what was right.”

  “Maybe not the editorial writers for the New York Times or the Washington Post. What else could they say? But if you ask them what they really think, whether the country is better off without that mindless narcissist in office… Look,” she said, leaning forward, a stern, implacable expression on her thin, high-cheek-boned face, “go on the internet, read what people are writing, read some of the blogs, turn on your television set, watch the cable channels. There is a feeling that it was all inevitable, that it was going to happen, that he brought it on himself, that he put the country in a terrible position: a man who wasn’t the least bit qualified for the office and no way to get him out of it. Everyone understands that, everyone—”

  “Not everyone,” I interjected. “And it wouldn’t matter if they did.”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure it wouldn’t matter, that it doesn’t make a difference? What did you just tell me about this last case of yours—that it didn’t matter that what the law said, everyone thought what he did was right!”

  She settled herself back in the chair and while the fingers of her left hand drummed a slow, methodical beat on the arm, studied me with a new, a different, curiosity.

  “You take some cases for free, and you can do that because of how much you make from your other cases. I know a few things about you, Mr. Antonelli. It’s odd we’ve never met. When Kevin was mayor, and even now, when he is in the Senate, there is scarcely any social event of any real significance we haven’t attended. And I’m not sure I remember going to any when Albert wasn’t there. But I don’t remember ever seeing you, even once. I asked Albert. He said you’re always too busy, that you work all the time. I don’t believe that, Mr. Antonelli, I don’t believe that at all. I don’t believe for a moment that you’re this perfect recluse who spends all his time at home or in court.”

  Leaning back, I stared straight at her. It was the habit of a lifetime, learned early in court: never look away from a witness, never let them think you aren’t giving them all your attention, waiting for the first inconsistency, the first even minor mistake, by which to discredit their testimony and destroy their credibility.

  “I’m not reclusive at all. I spend a lot of time going different places in the city. I talk to a lot of people, some of them, I confess, people I’ve never seen before and will never see again. It’s the magic of the city, the reason I stayed in San Francisco: all the familiar strangers and the mystery of their lives. And if I don’t go to the kind of social events you spend your time going to, there are two reasons for that. If you go to a hundred of them, it only means that you have had the same conversation a hundred times with the same people. The second reason is that the only time I am reasonably certain the person I am talking to might actually tell me the truth is when I have them as a witness in a courtroom and they are under oath. Not always,
you understand, but some of the time. Now, if you’re so certain that everyone thinks your husband deserves a medal for what he did, what is the real reason you want me to take this case?”

  “Why did you take that case you told me about, the one the jury took five minutes to decide? There is only one reason: you didn’t think anyone else could do it, prove him innocent when there was no question that, according to the law, he was guilty. The difference between that case and this is that what you did for free, you can do for more money than you or any other lawyer has ever earned! It isn’t my money, Mr. Antonelli, it isn’t my family’s money—though we would be glad to pay whatever you wanted, if we had to. It’s money that’s been coming in from all over the country, all over the world; so much of it we’ve had to hire people to keep track of all of it—thousands, hundreds of thousands, of small donations to a legal fund we had not even thought to set up before it started coming in.”

  Quite on purpose, I glanced around the opulent furnishings of my office, almost none of which I had paid for because, with his usual generosity, Albert Craven thought I should have a place to work almost as expensive as his own.

  “I don’t need the money, and I have never taken a case because of what I thought I could make.”

  “Then take it because we both know that if you don’t do this, if some other lawyer tries to defend him, my husband doesn’t have a chance. He confessed to what he did. That doesn’t make him guilty. I remember from law school—surely you haven’t forgotten—almost the first thing they teach you in criminal law—”

  “Self-defense, the defense of others?”

  “The law of necessity, that there are times when it is not only your right, but almost your duty to kill.”

  IT WAS NOT true that I never attended any social events that involved some of the most important, or whatever they might think of their own importance, and best-known people in the city. I was the frequent, if sometimes reluctant, guest at the dinner parties Albert Craven liked to give for a small gathering of ten or twelve from among his endless list of wealthy and socially prominent friends. I had told him that afternoon, after my meeting with Tricia Fitzgerald, that I was not going to take the case. He did not try to talk me out of it; he did not really say anything except to remind me that I was expected for dinner that evening and, at least until then, to keep an open mind. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I had known him long enough to know that, for all his surface amiability, despite the careless manner with which he sometimes dismissed something out of hand, there was always something left unsaid, some deeper meaning that would come out later.