Chapter 8 - The Testimony of the Cook
The grand jury met on the third floor of the Superior Courthouse in Stamford on a Tuesday that had the sharp, clean smell of sea grass after a frost.
The corridors were lined with men in three-piece suits who carried heavy leather bags with combination locks on the brass catches. They were attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell, from Davis Polk, from the small, sharp offices in Bridgeport that handled the dirty work for the shipping families. They moved in clusters of three, their shoes quiet on the rubber tile, their voices dropped into that low, continuous hum that sounds like bees in an unkept chimney.
Naomi sat on the wooden bench outside Room 302.
She had her hat on—the black felt with the small velvet bow that she wore to the Bethel A.M.E. church in Mount Vernon—and her black patent-leather handbag sat across her knees with both handles looped over her wrists.
Sergeant Miller came out of the double doors, holding two cardboard cups of tea from the deli across the street.
“They’re going to call you next, Naomi,” he said, sitting down beside her on the oak bench. The wood creaked under his holster. “The state’s attorney wants you to walk them through the timeline from the first of March.”
Naomi took the cup. The paper was hot through her cotton gloves. “They don't need a timeline, Sergeant. They need the ledger from the bank in Scotia.”
“We’ve got the ledger,” Miller said. “Julian’s lawyer is trying to get it suppressed. He’s claiming it was an illegal search because you took the key out of his desk.”
Naomi looked at him through her spectacles. “I didn't take any key out of his desk. His desk was unlocked. The only thing in this house that was locked was the box under the ham, and that belonged to Mrs. Vale. A woman has a right to look at her own papers in her own house, doesn't she?”
Miller’s mouth twitched—the nearest he ever came to a smile. “That’s what I told the magistrate.”
The bailiff opened the door—a tall man with a silver star on his lapel and the red, wind-burned face of an auxiliary fireman.
“Naomi Carter,” he called.
Naomi stood up. She smoothed the front of her skirt, checked the catch on her handbag, and walked through the double doors into the room where thirty people were sitting in tiers like choir stalls.
The prosecutor was a young woman named Sarah Chen, with hair pulled back so tight it made her eyebrows look like two black slashes above her rimless glasses. She had three cardboard boxes of Vale Meridian documents stacked beside her lectern, each marked with a yellow evidence tag.
“Mrs. Carter,” Chen said, her voice clear and carrying in the dry, heated air of the courtroom. “For the record, what was your relationship to the defendant, Julian Vale?”
Naomi sat in the witness chair. The wood was cold through her coat, but she didn't lean back against the spindles. She sat upright, her handbag resting on the shelf of her lap.
“I was his uncle’s housekeeper,” Naomi said. “And I was his mother’s friend before he was born.”
Julian Vale sat at the defense table forty feet away. He had two lawyers beside him—men with silver hair and gold fountain pens—and he was wearing an eight-hundred-dollar suit that was two inches too wide in the collar. He didn't look at Naomi. He looked at the brass water pitcher in the center of the table with the fixed, glassy stare of a man who was already measuring the width of a six-by-eight cell.
“Mrs. Carter,” Chen continued. “On the morning of April fourteenth, when you entered the master bedroom at Blackwood, what did you see?”
Naomi looked at the jury.
There were sixteen of them: an oil company clerk from Norwalk, three housewives from Darien with tennis tans, a carpenter from Stamford with sawdust in the seams of his flannel shirt, two schoolteachers, and nine men who looked as though they worked in the back offices of the hedge funds where they never saw the sun until six in the evening.
“I saw a girl trying to kill an old woman for eight million dollars,” Naomi said.
Julian’s lawyer—the taller one from Davis Polk—stood up like a jack-in-the-box. “Objection, Your Honor. The witness is stating a legal conclusion. She is not competent to testify as to intent.”
Judge Hadden didn't look at the lawyer. He was seventy-four, with the large, purple-veined nose of an old golfer, and he had gone to Yale with Marcus Vale in nineteen-sixty-eight.
“Overruled, Mr. Sterling,” Hadden said. “The witness is describing what she saw with her own eyes. Sit down.”
Naomi didn't wait for the next question.
“I saw Celeste Arden with both knees on the bed,” Naomi said, her voice dropping down into the room until every pencil stopped scratching on the legal pads. “She had the goose-down pillow from the left side—the one with the blue initials that Mrs. Vale’s sister gave her when she was married in Morristown. She had her weight over the center of it, using her forearms to keep the old woman’s chin down against her chest so she couldn't get her tongue out to catch the air. And Mr. Julian’s car was idling at the gate by the road, because I heard the exhaust on the gravel when I came through the pantry.”
Julian’s left hand twitched against the table.
“And what did you do, Mrs. Carter?” Chen asked.
“I took the tea tray,” Naomi said. “The Sheffield one with the gadrooned border that Marcus bought in England before the war. And I hit her with it.”
The juror in the front row—the carpenter from Stamford—made a short, sharp snort of air through his mustache.
“Did you consider calling for assistance first?” the lawyer, Sterling, asked from his seat, trying to look amused.
Naomi turned her face toward him. The look she gave him was the one she had used on the fishmongers on Atlantic Avenue when the mackerel had red eyes.
“Mr. Lawyer,” Naomi said. “If somebody was sitting on your mother with thirty-two ounces of down, would you go looking for a telephone, or would you take the nearest heavy thing you could find and break their arm with it?”
Sterling didn't answer. He looked down at his yellow pad and made a small, meaningless mark with his gold pen.
“Nothing further, Your Honor,” Chen said.
May you like
Judge Hadden looked at Naomi over his half-glasses. “You may step down, Mrs. Carter. And the court thanks you for your service to the community.”
Naomi stood up. She did not bow. She did not look at Julian Vale. She walked down the center aisle of the courtroom with her handbag over her arm, her crepe-soled shoes silent on the green linoleum, her back as straight as an ash spar from the timber woods in Maine.
