He began to speak, walking toward the jury box, leaning casually against it and letting his eyes rake over her. Ruth felt an urge to wrap her arms around herself. To hide her body from him.
He opened with a brief account of the children’s disappearance. The locked door, the empty room. Finding Cindy in the weed-strewn lot. The search for Frankie. Ruth swallowed down tears, kept her head high and her eyes on his.
“Gentlemen of the jury, the prosecution will demonstrate that the defendant in this case, an attractive redheaded cocktail waitress, found her role as a mother to be incompatible with her chosen lifestyle. Ultimately this led her to murder her own children, and to a succession of lies in an attempt to cover up her crime.”
Saliva flooded her mouth and her head snapped up. She turned to Scott, wanting to see her fury reflected in him, wanting him to stand up and stop this, but he merely flapped his hand and shushed her.
She took a breath, gripped the table, kept listening. The man with the ring went on to make several statements about her: she was defiant; she had refused to take a lie detector test; she had had relations with several men.
Ruth could not see what any of this had to do with her guilt or innocence. She could feel the anger rising, threatening to overwhelm her. She began to make notes on the yellow pad in front of her, trying to control it, to contain it in words. After a few moments, she gave up and wrote: SEX??? She underlined it heavily, pushing her pencil into the page, scoring the paper, almost ripping it.
Then two pictures of her children were tacked to a board by a bailiff, and the mood of the courtroom changed. The voice of the man with the ring slowed and deepened further and he half-turned so that his body was angled toward the images.
“The lives of these little angels were ended cruelly and prematurely by the one person who should have protected and cared for them. For this reason, the murder of children has been condemned down the centuries as the most heinous crime there is: it breaks not only the laws of every civilized society, but the natural law that mankind lives by.
“And so we the prosecution will therefore ask you to find the defendant guilty as charged.”
The silence that followed his words resonated around the wood-paneled walls of the room, and then a rustle of hushed whispers rose to fill it.
As Scott stood to speak, Ruth dropped her eyes and thought about Frankie and Cindy. About the pink and tender softness of them. The loudness of them: their laughter, their screams, their shouts for attention. Their fat scarred knees, their hands tugging at her. Their dimpled knuckles. Their sweet-tasting kisses.
She kept her head bowed and her eyes fixed on a knot of wood in the tabletop until she heard a name that made her feel something. And there was Devlin, on the stand, looking at her. She looked right back until he turned away.
The district attorney was on his feet again. Polite, deferential. He asked Devlin a series of questions about his experience, about notable cases he had worked before. And then:
“Would you tell us please, Sergeant Devlin, what you found in the Malones’ apartment on the morning of July fourteenth, nineteen sixty-five. In your own words.”
Devlin took them through the details of that first day. His impressions of Ruth. “She was calm. Very calm. She wasn’t crying at all. She was wearing makeup. A lot of makeup. Uh . . . revealing clothes. And she had her hair all fixed.”
“Did your men search the apartment?”
“We did.”
“And did you find anything of significance?”
“We found an empty box of pasta in the garbage, and . . .”
Scott was on his feet. “Objection, Your Honor. Pasta is not mentioned in the list of evidence found in the apartment.”
The judge looked startled and turned to the district attorney, who frowned. There was a beat of silence, when no one seemed to know what to say.
“Approach the bench, please, counselors.”
Ruth watched the men talking, Scott gesticulating at Devlin, still in the witness stand. Something had clearly gone wrong for the prosecution. Perhaps Devlin’s evidence would be discredited. Perhaps this even meant that the charges would be dismissed.
But then the judge leaned forward and said something and both men nodded, Scott expressionless, the other reluctant. As they returned to their tables, the judge addressed the jury.
“Please disregard the prosecution’s last question. The list of evidence removed from the apartment is . . . it seems to be incomplete.”
She could feel the heat of Devlin’s discomfort, had to force herself not to look at him.
“Continue, Mr. Hirsch.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. Returning to my earlier question, Sergeant, did you find anything else of significance in the apartment on the morning of July fourteenth?”
“We found a number of empty liquor bottles in the trash.”
Scott was on his feet again. “Objection! That has no bearing on the case.”