Line of Vision Read online

  “Did you get any sense of her feelings about that? Her feelings about Marty?”

  “I wasn’t looking for that, Mr. Riley. I wasn’t investigating a murder. The patient will generally control the topics and pace.”

  “So you would say you gained no sense of her feelings about Marty.”

  “Correct.”

  “Or if she even knew him.”

  “Correct.”

  Those exchanges, I imagine, will be repeated almost verbatim at my trial. Paul studies his hands a moment. “Did she ever mention leaving her husband?”

  “We certainly discussed it. But it wasn’t an option, in her opinion.”

  “Did you suggest that she leave him?”

  “It’s not customarily my practice to tell people what to do. I usually hope that they will reach these conclusions on their own, with my guidance.”

  “Sure.”

  “But there are exceptions,” says Garrett. “This case called for one. Yes, I urged her to leave him for quite some time, and more urgently so near the end.” Garrett is emphatic on this last point; whether it’s the truth or just convenient for his professional reputation, it’s helpful.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said she couldn’t. Her husband needed her. She experienced severe guilt about his problems and her inability to help him.”

  “Even though she thought he might kill her?”

  “She didn’t really think he would do it. She wanted to try to help him.”

  “What exactly were Dr. Reinardt’s problems?”

  “He was a heart surgeon. He lost a lot of his patients. He was, in a sense, their savior, and when he could not save them, he felt he had failed them.” He paused. “That was how Rachel explained it to me.”

  “Did you ever talk to Dr. Reinardt about this?”

  Garrett crosses a leg. “No. I strongly recommended group sessions. But Rachel was adamant. Her husband could never know about our visits.”

  “When was the last time you spoke with her before Dr. Reinardt’s death?”

  “It would have been the Tuesday before. We met every Tuesday. That would make it two days before his death, I believe.”

  “Can you describe that session?”

  Garrett stares up at the ceiling. After Dr. Reinardt’s disappearance, Garrett had probably thought long and hard about his meeting with Rachel two days before. “It was one of our more troubling sessions, I would say. Mostly she just talked about how much she worried about him. I tried to steer the conversation to her and whether she was afraid. She expressed her fears about the violence, as she had for the prior few weeks. She felt like he was losing control. Apart from the violence, he was communicating with her less and less. She would reach out to him, and he would reject her. She felt he was shutting her out, losing hope. He was losing weight, drinking more, hardly sleeping.”

  He told me how he’s gonna do it.

  He’s going to rape me first. He said he’ll rape me then kill me.

  We have to do something, Rachel. Right now.

  Paul waits in silence. When he is confident that Garrett is finished, he starts again. “When did you next see her?”

  Garrett sighs. “The next Tuesday, as always.”

  “Can you tell us about that session?”

  Garrett is pensive. He wets his lips. “The best word I can use to describe her at that session is ‘lost.’ She was calm. She wasn’t afraid. But she didn’t know what to do with herself. A common enough reaction for someone who has lost a—well, a loved one. Her life was defined by his; she felt like she was on this earth for him. Without him, she felt like she had no purpose for living.”

  “He can’t be serious,” she said, apologizing again for the man responsible for the hideous road map of scars on her back.

  “He can be, Rach. You want to wait around to find out?”

  She pulled away from me. “No,” she said. “I have to help him first. If I leave him now, I don’t know what—” Her voice choked off; she wept softly. “Things will change,” she said finally. “He’ll get better.”

  “Was she suicidal?”

  “Not in my opinion. Confused, and plagued with guilt. But not suicidal.”

  “Did she tell you what happened the night of her husband’s death?”

  “Not really. All she told me was he normally wasn’t home on Thursday nights, that he typically performed surgeries that night so he could leave earlier on Fridays. But earlier that week, Dr. Reinardt had lost a patient in surgery. He was terribly distraught, as he was every time he lost a patient.”

  Garrett blinks, returning to the topic that brings my attorneys here. “But as for what happened that night, she didn’t want to discuss it. Actually, it was the first session in a long time in which she talked about herself. I saw it as a positive development; she was thinking about herself again. Over the next couple of sessions, we made tremendous progress. Not in the sense that she was happy; she was not. She missed her husband. But she was developing a sense of herself. She said to me at one point something that I thought summed up her prognosis perfectly: She wasn’t happy, but for the first time, she felt that she had the possibility of being happy. She had hope.”

  “And during these, say, two or three sessions after her husband’s death,” says Paul, “she never mentioned the events of that night?”

  “No. Not until the week the police began to question her as a suspect.”

  “The police questioned Rachel.” Paul says it like he already knows it, but he wants to know what they said to her.

  “They’d been in contact with her off and on,” Garrett says. “But then one day they said they wanted to go over a few things. One of the things they brought up was the abuse. She didn’t know how they even knew about it, but they asked her about it. And she told them.”

  Paul nods. He’s calm, but he wants more. “Rachel was a suspect?”

  The doctor shrugs. “I don’t know. I asked her that. She said she didn’t know. But then she wondered if maybe she was to blame. She didn’t pull the trigger, of course. But she wondered if maybe there was something she could have done to save him. I considered it a significant setback in her progress.”

  “What did she tell you about the events that night?”

  “She never actually gave me a chronological story. As I said, I’m not a police detective. It wasn’t my place to ask. But I can tell you what I gathered from her comments. Her husband was beating her that night. And it was different than ever before. He was striking her in the face. She ran from him, which was also unique. She usually just endured the abuse. He caught her in the den, and he knocked her to the floor. She was hardly conscious at this point. And most significantly, she believes he was about to rape her.” The doctor crosses a leg. “I say that this is significant because the rapes and the physical abuse were always kept distinct. The fact that he would combine the beating and the rape suggests to me an obvious escalation in his behavior.”

  He said he’ll rape me then kill me.

  We sit on that a moment. Paul urges the doctor to continue.

  “She recalls hearing broken glass. Someone struggled with her husband. She crawled into the living room and called the police. Then the police came, too late, it seems.”

  “What did Mrs. Reinardt think about the fact that her husband was striking her in the face?”

  Garrett pauses a moment. “She thought he was going to kill her.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Yes. It was the only time, before or after, that she acknowledged it.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “Absolutely. The things Dr. Reinardt did to Rachel were private scars. A bruised face was not private. Her husband had given up, for whatever reason.”

  Paul nods solemnly. “Rachel gave a different story to the police.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “No. In her mind, I think, she was protecting her husband. I would imagine she also f
elt ashamed that she was abused. Most battered women are. It’s a sad commentary that women are ashamed of something that isn’t their fault, but it is very much a reality.”

  “And she never mentioned Marty when she described that night?”

  Garrett looks at me briefly. “Only when he was arrested. She said she didn’t know who broke in to her house. She had no idea.”

  Paul stiffens slightly. “She said to you that she didn’t know who came through the glass door?”

  “That’s right.”

  Paul considers this, the wheels turning in his head.

  “And Rachel’s husband didn’t know she was seeing you?” Paul asks.

  “She said he didn’t know. As I said, she was adamant that he not know.”

  “Did anyone know?”

  “I’m not aware of anyone. That’s not uncommon,” he adds.

  “No, I suppose not,” Paul agrees. “I wonder, how did Rachel pay you?”

  “She paid with cash.”

  The sober face Paul wore inside Garrett’s office, the crumpled brow, the intent eyes, relaxes as soon as the elevator doors close. It’s a subtle change; he maintains his formal posture, one hand resting over the other in front of him. But there’s a twinkle in his eye now, and the sides of his mouth curl slightly upward. He is looking at Mandy, who is standing next to me.

  “This is good,” Mandy says quietly.

  Paul closes his eyes and nods slowly.

  It is not until we are inside Mandy’s Jeep that we discuss the meeting. It’s Mandy who leads. “These statements,” she says, turning to Paul with a glance back at me, “are more powerful than if they came from Rachel’s mouth. This is a man she confided in, who she bared her soul to. And they support our theory one hundred percent.

  “Dr. Reinardt had brutally and systematically abused Rachel; lately, he had been more violent with her. She was not having an affair, which undercuts the prosecution’s theory. And most important, her story of what happened that night matches our theory perfectly.”

  The revelations I have just heard in the psychiatrist’s office, the story of the suffering Rachel endured, leave me less enthusiastic than my lawyers. But the effect is not lost on me. No matter my feelings for Rachel, my instinct for self-preservation has not been turned off. Dr. Garrett will be a critical witness for me. My defense has been given new life.

  “We might have a theory here,” Paul says. Now that we have corroboration, he means. Apparently, he wasn’t ready to act on my testimony alone, though he never said that.

  “So now do we change our plea?” I ask. If we are going to argue that I committed the crime but did it to protect Rachel, we have to formally change our plea.

  “Let’s give it a while yet,” says Paul. “Let’s see if we can’t get that confession kicked.”

  28

  OUR FOUNDING FATHERS GAVE US CONSTITUTIONAL rights, such as the right against self-incrimination and the right to a lawyer during police questioning. The Supreme Court gave us the concept of a “suppression,” where the court would exclude from evidence any confession that was coerced. To stop there, in my mind, would have been sufficient. But the Court, bless their souls, took it another step. In the landmark decision of Miranda v. Arizona, the Court laid out a litany of rights that had to be explained to a criminal suspect prior to interrogation.

  In my law school classes, I had always taken the pro-police view on civil liberties, like my dad. I considered the most important liberty to be the right to be safe from people who break in to your house, or rob you, or kill you. And the Bill of Rights was abridging that liberty. I was willing to accept the remote possibility that the cops might mistakenly break down my door in the middle of the night in order to live in a safe community.

  Viewpoints change, of course.

  As my lawyers explained it to me, Miranda laid out a seemingly simple rule: If a suspect is in “custody”—and lawyers could argue for days about the meaning of that word—then they have to be told about their right to remain silent, and their right to a lawyer, before they are “interrogated.” A suspect is “interrogated” if he is asked a question that, if answered, will be likely to incriminate him. As Paul put it, if a cop asks you if it’s sunny outside, no interrogation, no Miranda warnings necessary. If a cop asks you if you killed the wife’s husband, interrogation.

  So today, Paul will try to paint me as someone whom Cummings suspected in the murder. He will try to point out all the reasons for suspecting me. Because if I was a legitimate suspect, it makes Cummings’s questions to me all the more likely “to elicit an incriminating response.” In other words, my defense lawyer is going to try with all his might to make me appear guilty in Cummings’s eyes that day, and the cop who arrested me is going to make it look like he thought I was a patron saint up until that moment when I stunned him by blurting out a confession. Our system of justice in action.

  We have filed this motion—called a motion to suppress—for two reasons. First, if we knock out the confession, the prosecution’s case is devastated. Second, even if we lose, Paul gets a preview of how Cummings will testify at trial. We discussed the possibility of my testifying, too, but Paul dismissed it. It’s not so much that he’s afraid I’ll blow the case—they can’t ask me if I killed the doctor, their questions have to be limited to the confession. It’s more that Paul hasn’t decided how I will testify about that confession, and if the judge lets the evidence in—the more likely outcome, Paul told me—we might have a surprise for the prosecution at trial.

  The judge presiding over this hearing is not my trial judge. He is Henry R. Schueler, a short man with tired eyes and white hair. He seems to be quite attentive, in part, I assume, because Paul Riley is in the courtroom. Paul is in his element here, a place where he is as big a player as there is, and he seems to live for these moments. Before we started today, he walked over to the prosecution table and shook hands with the opposition. He is their adversary, but he is also their former boss, and a legend at the Prosecutor’s Office, from what I gather. If nothing else, he will be forever remembered as the man who sent Terry Burgos, the mass murderer, to the chair.

  I get to see Roger Ogren, the prosecutor, for the first time. A pudgy, bespectacled man with watery eyes and greased hair, an unimaginative wardrobe, and a limp in his gait. We skipped formal intros and settled for one very brief moment of eye contact.

  Detective Theodore Cummings is decked out in a steel-blue suit and gray tie. His hair, what little remains on top, is well combed. Paul has already covered the preliminaries with him, the initial investigation, his first trip to my house.

  Paul is all business once the hearing begins, not playing the glad-hander, not flashy. During the examination of Cummings, he stands at the lectern that divides the prosecution and defense tables. He delivers his questions in crisp bites.

  “Detective, you had begun to suspect Mrs. Reinardt in the attack on her husband.”

  “We were investigating the possibility, yes.”

  “Based, in part, on the fact that she had been abused by her husband.”

  “That was part of it, yes.”

  “And you thought Mrs. Reinardt had a lover,” he says.

  “We thought it was possible.”

  “You had heard some talk to that effect from Rachel’s friends.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you thought this lover, if he existed, might be involved in the attack on Dr. Reinardt.”

  Cummings leans forward. “I wouldn’t go that far. We thought this person might be able to shed some light on things for us. Maybe she told him somethin’, is all.”

  “But it was also possible this lover was involved in the attack, true?”

  “True.”

  Paul drops both hands on the lectern. “Okay. Now, after your first visit with Mr. Kalish, at his house, you showed a spread of photos to the Reinardts’ maid, Agnes Clorissa.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “These were people who you thought might be t
he supposed lover?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You included Marty’s photo in there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There were ten photos?”

  “Right.”

  “How did you show them to her? All spread out on a table?”

  “No. One after the other.”

  “Do you remember the order, Detective? Which photo was first, which was second?”

  “No.”

  “Was Marty’s photo first?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Was it last?”

  “No, sir. It was somewhere in the middle.”

  “Well.” Paul holds his hand out. “How can you be so sure? You just said you don’t remember the order.”

  “I remember his photo.”

  “But not the other nine?”

  “Not offhand.”

  “Not offhand,” Paul repeats. “Well, is there any way you can remember the order? Did you make a list? Anything?”

  Cummings blinks and considers this. “No.”

  “But Marty’s photo stands out in your mind.”

  “Yeah. I put his photo in the middle of the pack.”

  “So it wouldn’t stand out?”

  “Right.”

  “So I wouldn’t accuse you of trying to bias the maid.”

  “I wanted her identification to be clean. Without any suggestion from me.”

  A nice answer, Teddy. A nice one for the trial, that is, and therefore the answer you have to give. But not so good for this hearing. I look over at the prosecutor, Roger Ogren, who is scribbling busily.

  “So you have no memory at all of the other nine photos.”

  “Like I said.”

  “But a specific memory of Marty’s photo.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because of the care you took in not wanting to bias the maid.”

  “Like I said.”

  Paul lets that linger a moment, nodding as if he’s considering his next question. He will not ask the follow-up to this line of questions—why was Marty’s photo the only one singled out for special treatment?—but will save it for his closing argument—because they had set their sights on Marty, and only Marty. He was the prime suspect, and anything they asked him at the police station should have been accompanied by Miranda warnings.