I turned in my chair to face the window, sightlessly staring at the steady flow of pedestrians and traffic outside.
“I know I screwed up.”
He took the time to tear off a piece from his croissant, dab it with some butter, and put it in his mouth. “Did you get anything out of him?” he asked.
“Alonzo? A lot of self-righteous indignation. Maybe Coffin did pull my chain, but I went up there ’cause I thought Alonzo might’ve been pressured somehow.”
Richard gave me that familiar worried look. “Pressured how? He was robbed.”
I was reluctant to feed his concerns. My theories were increasingly becoming mine alone, viewed by everyone else as paranoid ravings-not that waving guns at motorists and flying off the handle with Alonzo had helped my cause.
Wishing I hadn’t brought up the subject, I explained: “In order for this whole thing to work, that brooch had to get into my pocket before the burglary. I don’t mean slipped in there as I ducked under the tape-that would’ve been too risky. I mean earlier, like a day or more. I can’t figure out the hows or whens of it, but when Alonzo brought up that crap about Mickey Mitchell, I started thinking he might know the who.”
“But he didn’t,” Richard said.
“He held his ground.” Richard checked his watch and stood up, ignoring the rest of his croissant. “We better get going, and if I were you, I’d keep my fingers crossed that Coffin doesn’t ask the judge to toss you in jail, and that the judge doesn’t agree with him.”
Arraignments in Windham County are scheduled for one o’clock, Monday afternoons, in the courthouse across the street from where the PD has its offices. They are democratic affairs, reminiscent of some soup kitchens I’ve visited. Twenty to thirty defendants mill around the second-floor hallway outside the clerk of court’s offices, most of them without lawyers, waiting to be told what to do. They are a predictably scruffy lot, consisting of people one would expect to be lined up before a judge. Mostly men, a few of them try to spiff themselves up a bit, sometimes wearing other people’s Sunday clothes. The rest don’t bother, having been through the system often enough not to care any longer.
There is a tension in the air, although everyone’s been told most arraignments are strictly routine-the standard price of admission to the legal maze. The building, with its many locked doors, armored glass, and watchful, armed court officers, instills an element of defeat in those being serviced, and the dehumanizing routineness with which they are dealt doesn’t help.
Unless, of course, you’re on the other side.
I remembered how I’d used the bureaucratic weight of the court to my own advantage in the past, implying that by some miraculous means, talking to me early on would somehow spare the person I was questioning from a slow strangulation by python-like red tape.
Now that I was on the threshold of the same journey myself, the memories of such behavior tasted bitter. Approaching the courthouse doors, and the cluster of journalists outside them, I realized for the first time that despite my best efforts-and even because of them-the fate being designed for me might in fact become reality.
This mood was not enhanced by hearing the first reporter say, “Here he comes,” and being surrounded by a jostling herd of shouting, demanding people, some of them acquaintances, but whose friendship here mattered not at all. As we passed through the metal detectors, losing some of the crowd but picking up more on the other side, the torrent of questions fell on us like hail.
“Lieutenant Gunther, do you have any comments regarding the accusations made against you?”
“Are the charges true or false?”
“How do you feel about being here today?”
“Do you intend to plead guilty or not guilty?”
“Have you made any deals with the attorney general?”
“How do you feel about the way Fred Coffin’s been talking about you to the press?”
“What about your confrontation with Henri Alonzo? He said you were pretty rough on him.”
Richard had prepared me for this and had urged me to keep quiet. At the time, I wasn’t sure how I’d fare, but it wasn’t too difficult. Very quickly, the questions overlapped one another, blending into one long indecipherable babble. Richard pushed us through the throng, speaking for me, mostly with “No comments,” slowly defusing the excitement our entrance had stimulated.
He led us straight to the privacy of one of the tiny conference rooms lining the second-floor hallway and left to find the court officer for the prosecution’s “Information”-Vermont’s version of a written indictment. He slipped back through the door a few moments later, accompanied by a small burst of noise from outside, and handed me the packet-the Information, the affidavit, and a calendar of relevant dates. My mood continued to deaden as I read through the charges and their possible sentences, feeling the full impact of the same judicial language I’d employed so often against others.
I finally put the packet down and stared out the window.
Richard hesitated before breaking the silence. “It shouldn’t be too long. Forty-five minutes at most for any deals to be worked out by other defendants, and for the judge to review applications for public defender services. We’ll be in the first group to be called, since you’re represented by private counsel. After that, it shouldn’t take more’n ten or fifteen minutes.” He tried to make it sound like an application for an auto loan, but I didn’t have the heart to help him out. The silence swelled between us.
Finally, there was a knock on the door, a sheriff’s deputy stuck his head in and said, “Five minutes, gentlemen,” and we shuffled across the hall to the courtroom, rejoined by our phalanx of reporters.
There, the atmosphere was more controlled. All press except print reporters were restricted to the jury box, and all conversation-until the judge arrived-was kept to a dull murmur. Richard and I found seats in the gallery about halfway up.
Normally, the gallery was filled only with those waiting their turn, and maybe a few relatives or gawkers. Today, it was packed, including, it seemed, half the citizens of Brattleboro. Looking over my shoulder, I saw people standing shoulder-to-shoulder along the back wall, as if waiting for the start of a momentous event. Permeating the air was the almost constant snap and whir of cameras hard at work.
In prior times, high publicity cases like mine were given special treatment. They were processed through the back door at off hours and arraigned in something approaching privacy. Those days had vanished long since, for both appearance and efficiency, and I had been one to herald their passing. Now, I sat and watched case after case being rapidly dealt with-Judge Harrowsmith sitting high above like a hawk-nosed gargoyle. The inevitability of my turn coming up, coupled with the metronomic slowness of its arrival, made me feel increasingly stretched between numbness and anticipation.
When the moment arrived, it was thankfully undermined by the theatrical response of the press. Instead of feeling alone and exposed as I rose and walked past the bar to the defendant’s table, I found everyone’s attention was diverted by the sudden clatter of a dozen people in motion. The mechanical snap and whir of cameras rose up again like a swarm of locusts.
Harrowsmith frowned deeply as Richard, I, and Fred Coffin settled in. This was the first close-up glimpse I’d had of Coffin, who was immaculately dressed, his hair stylishly long at the collar. He was tanned and good-looking and had an arrogant way of tilting his chin up slightly and looking at people from just off center, as if ready to dismiss them. He was also young, given his position and ambitions, and had the narrow face of a hungry man. I was in no position to be lacking in prejudice, but he gave me the creeps.