Necessity Page 8

  “For that purpose, I’ll allow it. But get to the point, Mr. Antonelli.”

  I took another step forward. I was halfway down the jury box, just a few feet from the witness stand. With my hand on the jury box railing, I looked straight at Reece.

  “You said it’s your belief that the reason Walter Bridges was killed was because he was ‘doing everything he had told the American people he was going to do.’ But isn’t it true, Mr. Reece, that the president had not done even one of the things he had promised?”

  “No, that’s not true, that’s—”

  “He promised to change the entire American healthcare system, promised that everyone would have coverage, promised that everyone could afford it. He hadn’t done that, had he, Mr. Reece?”

  “He couldn’t get Congress to act; he couldn’t—”

  “He hadn’t done what he promised. He promised to change the whole system of taxation, to make it more fair and equitable. But there isn’t any tax reform, is there, Mr. Reece?”

  “But that wasn’t his fault. That was the fault of—”

  “He promised to keep Medicare and Medicaid and not to touch Social Security, and he did just the opposite, cutting, one way or the other, all three. Or, rather, tried to, because, as you were just trying to tell us, everything he tried to do was stopped by Congress or the courts. Stopped, Mr. Reece, because of the sheer force of numbers, the great and growing majorities that came to view Walter Bridges unfavorably. Isn’t it the case, Mr. Reece, that in the last polls taken before his death, Walter Bridges’s favorability rating had reached a new record low, not just for him, but for any president in our history? Is that true or not?”

  “He would have turned it around when the truth came out, when all the lies that were told about him were proven false, when—”

  “The point, Mr. Reece, is that no one had to stop Walter Bridges from doing what he had promised the American people he would try to do. He had no support in the country, and therefore no possibility of support in the congress. Senator Fitzgerald did not have to kill the president to stop him from carrying out his promises; Walter Bridges had already stopped himself!”

  As he left the witness stand, the sense of relief that nearly every witness felt when their testimony was over, when they could finally start to relax and let down their guard, suddenly vanished. His jaw clenched and a slight but perceptible shudder passed through his body when halfway to the railing he heard me inform the court, “The defense reserves the right to recall Jonathan Reece as a witness.” Let him, let the other witnesses for the prosecution, worry about how much I might know.

  The second witness for the prosecution nodded to the first one as they passed each other in the middle of the courtroom’s central aisle. After a few quick questions, the necessary preliminaries to the substance of his examination, Raymond St. John got down to business.

  “The previous witness, Jonathan Reece, testified that on the day of the president’s death, he brought the defendant, Kevin Fitzgerald, onto Air Force One and left him with you just outside the president’s cabin. Is that true?”

  Richard Ellison had wavy black hair that swept straight back from high on his forehead and a slightly puzzled expression in his eyes as if he were never quite sure that you really meant what you said. It was like watching your tax accountant wonder whether you had made an honest mistake or were trying to make him an accomplice in your attempt at evasion. The dark suit he wore seemed, from the way the jacket button held, just a size too large.

  “Yes, that’s true. He brought him onto Air Force One and left him there with me.”

  St. John was standing in front of his counsel table, the one farthest from the jury box, which meant that Ellison looked at him at an angle away from the jury. He moved across to a position directly in front of the witness stand, just to the side of where Fitzgerald sat. The jury could now not just hear the witness, but see clearly his expression. More importantly, the witness could now look at them each time he answered one of the prosecutor’s questions. It may not seem like much, but it is easier to trust someone who looks at you when they are talking than someone who seems to be looking off in a different direction. St. John was far too experienced to allow it.

  “This was because the president said he would see the senator for a few minutes, a brief meeting, on Air Force One?” he asked, his arms folded over his chest, glancing down at the polished hardwood floor.

  “Yes, that’s correct. It was—”

  St. John held up his hand.

  “You needn’t tell us the reason. That has already been established. Senator Fitzgerald had been asking to see the president. This was a way to get it done without taking up too much time. What I want to ask you is what happened after Mr. Reece left you with the senator?”

  Twisting his head slightly to the side, Ellison looked at him with his puzzled eyes. He did not answer. St. John rephrased the question, made it more precise.

  “Was anything said, was there any conversation?”

  “Nothing, really; just a few words,” he replied with a shrug.

  “Can you recall what those few words were, as exactly as you can?” asked St. John with the patience and indulgence of a helpful friend.

  Ellison looked out at the sea of faces in the courtroom, at the television cameras in the back, at the crouching photographers who had, over my objection, been allowed inside. He seemed ill at ease with what he saw. He was used to crowds, used to the scrutiny of television, but he was not used to court. He had answered, thousands of times, the frantic, shouted questions of reporters, answered, dozens of times, the more methodical inquiries of political analysts on the news shows; he had never testified in a criminal case, never had to face a cross-examination about anything he might have said. He answered each question St. John asked him, but almost every time he did, he looked at me, a quick, furtive glance, as if he were trying to guess what I might try to do with what he had just said. St. John sensed his uncertainty.

  “There is nothing to worry about,” he assured him. “It is perfectly understandable if you can’t remember exactly what was said. Given the traumatic nature of what happened, what you witnessed, it is a wonder you can remember anything at all.”

  “He said he was glad to see me. I remember that. And I remember I said that it was nice to see him as well, that I was looking forward to the chance to see a little of the city. He said that next time, I should come out on my own, a few days vacation, and that—I remember this—that if I did, I might have to quit my job because I wouldn’t want to leave. I remember thinking that he was a lot nicer in person than the way he seemed when I watched him on television tearing into the president.”

  He was looking at the jury, talking to them like they were old friends. He had been taught at least that much about testifying as a prosecution witness in court.

  “Is there anything else?” prodded St. John. “Anything that made you think that something was not quite right?”

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Like I said, he seemed nicer in person than what I had thought before—but his eyes, they kept moving all around, first one direction then another. He never looked straight at me. As I say, I didn’t think anything of it, but now, looking back, he must have been nervous, worried about what was going to happen if he went through with what—”

  “Objection!” I cried, flying out of my chair. “The witness can’t testify about what he thinks the defendant was thinking!”

  “Sustained!” ruled Judge Patterson with a cautionary glance at the witness. “You can testify to what you actually observed, not to what you think may have been passing through another person’s mind.”

  “Tell the jury what happened next,” said St. John. His expression was serious, troubled at what he wanted everyone to see he knew was coming. But the reply was anti-climactic.

  “I opened the door and told him he could go in.”

  I could not understand why St. John seemed so surprised. What different test
imony had he expected?

  “You opened the door and let him in. And then what happened?”

  Ellison looked at St. John, then looked at the jury, and then looked at St. John again.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I’m sorry, I don’t think you’re following me.”

  “And here I thought a prosecutor was not supposed to lead his own witness!” I remarked from my chair.

  “Enough, Mr. Antonelli. Don’t interrupt,” warned Judge Patterson.

  I got to my feet, and with a cursory bow of my head, prayed forgiveness.

  “I will, like his witness, try to follow whatever Mr. St. John finally decides he wants to say, your Honor.”

  For one brief moment, Evelyn Patterson seemed to relent, to take it as a short reprieve from the serious, and sometimes intense, business of the court. But only for a moment.

  “Enough. No more. Sit down. Mr. St. John, get on with it.”

  “You open the door and Senator Fitzgerald goes into the president’s cabin. Did you go with him?” asked St. John in a sharp, no-nonsense voice.

  “No, it was a private meeting: only the president and the senator.”

  “When was the next time you saw the senator?”

  With his eyes open wide, Ellison scratched the top of his eyebrow with the back of his thumb, still astonished by what he had seen.

  “I saw him bending over the body of the president, the knife still in his hands, the president’s blood all over him.”

  “The president had been stabbed?” asked St. John quickly as he stepped forward.

  “Yes, I don’t know how many times, but at least half a dozen; stabbed in the throat, stabbed in the stomach, in the chest. That’s what I saw, that is what I’ll never forget.”

  St. John was finished. It was my turn to ask questions. Ellison sank back in the witness chair and tightened his eyes. His mouth twitched nervously at the corners. Embarrassed, he switched positions, sat straight up and raised his chin.

  “It’s all right, Mr. Ellison,” I remarked in an affable, reassuring tone. “I have just a few questions.”

  He scratched his chin, tossed his head to the side and then look up at me with mild suspicion.

  “When you opened the door, did you check with the president to see if it was all right to let the senator come in?”

  He thought about it, and he kept thinking about it.

  “It’s a simple question, Mr. Ellison. Did you ask the president—”

  “No,” he said with sudden emphasis. “The president had said to bring him in a soon as he got there. He wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.”

  “So you opened the door, let Senator Fitzgerald in and, I assume, shut the door behind him, correct?”

  “Yes, correct.”

  “And the next time you saw Senator Fitzgerald was when you found him with a knife in his hands, bending over the dead body of the president—is that your testimony?”

  I asked this in a way that made him think I had not believed anything he had said. His answer was brief, and belligerent.

  “Yes, that’s what I said. That’s what happened.”

  “You didn’t testify—the prosecution did not ask—how long the interval was between those two events. How much time, Mr. Ellison, between the moment you let the defendant into the president’s cabin and when you found him bending over the body?”

  “Ten minutes, exactly ten minutes.”

  He said this as if it was something to be proud of, an example of proven efficiency.

  “Exactly ten minutes. That is an interesting way to put it. Exactly ten minutes. What happened to make you enter the cabin exactly ten minutes later? Did you hear something: screams, the sounds of a struggle?”

  “No, it wasn’t anything like that. It’s when the president told me to come in.”

  I threw up my hands.

  “I’m sorry. You hadn’t heard anything, and when you went in the president was dead, so how—”

  “Ten minutes. Exactly ten minutes. That is how long the president told me to wait before I came in and reminded him it was time to leave. Ten minutes, exactly ten minutes, that is how long he wanted to let Fitzgerald have. Ten minutes,” he repeated, the last words the president had ever spoken to him. “Exactly ten minutes, not one minute longer. That’s what he said.”

  “I see. That explains it. One last question. During that time, those ten minutes, where were you, and what were you doing?”

  “I stayed close, not far from the door, going through some of the things I had to get ready for later, when the president got to where he was going to be speaking.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything from inside?”

  “You can’t hear anything. It’s completely soundproof in there.”

  I was finished, for the moment. I waited until he had taken a few steps from the witness stand before, once again, informing the court that I reserved the right to recall the witness, this time as a witness for the defense. Ellison stopped in his tracks, looked back for just a moment with his puzzled eyes and then quickly left the courtroom.

  “YOU WERE THE first agent on the scene, the one who first responded to Richard Ellison’s—the president’s chief of staff—cry for help?” asked Raymond St. John as we began the second day of trial.

  “That’s correct,” replied Milo Todorovich, who had been the head of the president’s Secret Service detail. “I was maybe twenty feet away from the door to the president’s cabin when I heard Ellison start shouting.”

  “And what did you see when you got there?” asked St. John in a voice that seemed to underscore by its quiet calmness the violence of the scene the witness was being asked to describe.

  “The president was laying on the floor. The senator, the defendant,” he added, nodding toward Fitzgerald sitting next to me at the counsel table a dozen short steps away, “was standing over him, holding a knife.”

  “What did you do, Agent Todorovich? What was the first thing you did when you saw the president lying there and Senator Fitzgerald standing over him?”

  “I pulled out my gun, told the senator to drop the knife and to back away.”

  “Did he drop the knife and back away?”

  “Yes. He didn’t give me any trouble.”

  Milo Todorovich had the habit of his profession. Every movement seemed controlled, nothing sudden, nothing ever hurried; his eyes, on the other hand, seldom still, sliding constantly from side to side, everything within his range of vision under constant surveillance. You could imagine him a cowboy, a gunfighter, in an old western, leaning against a hitching post at the end of town, whittling on a stick, taking in everything that was happening with a single, lethal glance.

  “He didn’t give you any trouble?”

  “He did what I told him. He dropped the knife…” He caught himself and with a swift, sideways motion of his head berated himself for his mistake. “He didn’t drop it, he kneeled down and placed it carefully on the floor. Then he stood up and stepped away, just as I told him.”

  “And that is when you went over to the president to see if he was still alive?”

  “He was dead. No question. I checked for a pulse, just to be sure. Then I summoned everyone else, the other agents on the plane, and we sealed the room.”

  “Did the defendant say anything, did you ask him anything?”

  “No. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask. We got him off the plane. He was interrogated later.”

  There were other questions, and other answers, but none of them deviated from the central theme the prosecution was determined to pursue. The defendant had been found, with the murder weapon in his hand, kneeling over the victim’s dead body. Within those narrow confines, St. John went into painstaking detail, asking the witness to describe, as exactly as he could, the blood on the body and on the floor, the position of the victim’s body, the way the defendant had looked when he first saw him; everything, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, he had seen. It was
repetitive, tedious, and all done for the single purpose of adding color to the dull abstractions of what everyone had heard so often in the public accounts of the assassination that they had become desensitized to the grim realities of the violence with which Walter Bridges had been killed. It was only after Todorovich had gone through what was essentially the same set of facts a half-dozen times that the prosecution introduced the photographs taken at the murder scene.

  After they were marked into evidence, I watched twelve faces give expression to the horror, the disbelief, the decent revulsion they all felt as these graphic pictures of murder were passed through the jury box. It was one thing to read a story in the newspapers, one thing to listen to a well-dressed, even-voiced newscaster reporting a crime; it was something else to see the twisted features, the blank-eyed stare, the bloody throat and clothing of a man lying motionless on a blood-soaked floor. Some of the jurors glanced at the photographs and immediately looked away; some studied them more closely, trying perhaps to see if there was something, some detail, they had not expected to find. All of them, when they were finished and handed them to the next juror, became more serious, because suddenly more convinced of the gravity of their obligation.

  I approached the witness with all the solemnity of someone come to pay their last respects at a funeral.

  “It must have been quite a shock, finding the president like that. No matter how well-trained you are, still, it must have taken a moment to realize what had happened.”

  “It took a moment, that’s for sure. Even when I saw him, knew he was dead, it didn’t seem quite real. Shock? Yes, I suppose you could say so.”

  I started to ask another question, but there was more he wanted to say. He looked at the jury.

  “We’re trained to protect the president, to take a bullet if we have to. When this happened, when I heard Ellison yelling for help, I knew something must have happened, but I never thought…I thought he might have fallen down, an accident, or had a heart attack, a stroke. Because of his age, how overweight he was, we knew there was always a chance of that. But…to find him like that, murdered by someone with a knife, on the plane! It was impossible, it could never happen!”