Keating then-and I became best friends, since we were five years old. We were together, Amanda and I, the day we met Brendan. It was at a game, a football game. He was a junior at Regis, and we were sophomores.”
The all-male Jesuit high school was also on the Upper East Side, and because of the largesse of its original founders, it offered tuition-free college-prep education to Roman Catholic young men who passed rigorous tests for admission.
“You were present when Amanda and Brendan Quillian were introduced to each other?”
“Yes, I was. It was my brother who brought Brendan over to meet her.” Kate Meade smiled again at the jurors. “He had seen her across the field and asked who she was.”
I handed a photograph, pre-marked as People’s Exhibit #1, to Willy Jergen, the court officer standing beside the witness box. “Would you look at that photograph, please, and tell me if you recognize it?”
Jergen passed the picture to Kate Meade. “Yes, I do. I gave it to you several months ago, Ms. Cooper.”
“What does that photograph represent?”
“It was taken the afternoon Amanda and Brendan met. It’s a picture of them talking with my brother, who was on the team, after the game. It’s from our yearbook.”
“Your Honor, I would like to offer the photograph into evidence at this time.”
“Any objection?”
Lem Howell didn’t bother to rise. “No, sir.” He wasn’t objecting to anything at this point. He knew the benign- even romantic-backstory of the young Quillians wouldn’t do anything but reinforce his client’s good character.
“Entered into evidence then,” Judge Gertz said, starting to make notations in his leatherbound log that would grow to record the dozens of police and medical reports, photographs, and diagrams that both Howell and I planned to introduce during the trial.
“Mrs. Meade, I’m going to come back to that time period shortly, but I’d like to jump ahead for a few minutes. I’d like to direct your attention to a more recent date, to Wednesday, October third, of last year. Do you recall that afternoon?”
The young woman angled her body away from the jury, her eyes widening as though she’d been frightened by an apparition. “I do,” she said, her voice dropping.
“What happened on that day?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained. Ms. Cooper, you can’t-”
“I’ll rephrase my question.” Kate Meade was nervous again. I could hear the sound of her thumbnails as she picked at one with the other. “Did you see Amanda Quillian that day?”
“Yes, yes, I did. I did. I had lunch with Amanda on October third. I had lunch with her an hour before she died-before she was murdered.”
Howell didn’t like the answer my question elicited, but he was too smart to keep objecting to information that he knew I would get before the jury anyway. All twelve, and even the alternates, were leaning forward in their seats. They obviously wanted to know what occurred in the last hours of the victim’s life.
“I’d like you to take a look at another picture, please. People’s two.” I reached to the bottom level of the cart and removed an enlarged photograph-two feet square-mounted on posterboard. Again, I passed it to Willy to hand to the witness. “Do you recognize this?”
Meade inhaled audibly and lowered her head. “Of course I do. I took it.”
“When did you take it?”
“October third. About two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Where?”
“At a restaurant called Aretsky’s-on Madison Avenue at Ninety-second Street. It was an unusually warm day, so we sat outdoors, Amanda and I. I had just shot a roll of film on a disposable camera at my daughter’s class play. She’s also at Sacred Heart now. I had one exposure left, so I snapped a photo of Amanda.”
“Your Honor, I’d like to offer this into evidence as People’s two.”
Gertz pointed a finger at Howell, who smiled and nodded his head.
“It’s in evidence, Ms. Cooper.”
“At this time, I’d like to display both of these to the jury.”
Lem Howell had not been quite as passive as he was now when we’d argued a week ago, before voir dire, about the last photograph taken of Amanda Quillian. Irrelevant, prejudicial, and prosecutorial overkill, he’d maintained, sparring with Judge Gertz over and over.
But the snapshot of Amanda Quillian was ruled admissible. This was the only case I’d ever handled in which a picture had been taken an hour before the murder occurred, showing the long, bare neck of the victim-the exact focal point of the injury that caused her death-without a mark on it.
While the jurors were circulating the two photos among themselves, I asked Artie Tramm to set up the stand with the easel that was leaning in the corner. Day in and day out, Brendan Quillian would sit before these jurors. He’d been coached by Howell to put on his best game face-smile at them and bond with them in every way that did not involve direct communication. I had seen too many trials in which the prosecution never brought the deceased to life in the courtroom, never allowed the twelve people making the most important decision about her life to feel her presence and understand that the murder victim had as much at stake in this trial as did Quillian himself. For any semblance of justice to be achieved, I needed jurors to see Amanda Quillian vibrant and cheerful and alive, mere hours before she was posed on the steel gurney for a different camera in the autopsy room.
Willy returned the exhibits to me. I put the small photo on my table and helped him mount the blowup of the smiling Amanda Quillian on the easel between the witness stand and the jury box.
“Let’s go back now, Mrs. Meade. I’d like to return to the story you started to tell us, when Amanda began to date the defendant.”
“They went out together for the first time a week after they were introduced. I saw them at a movie theater the very next Saturday.”
“Did you have occasion to spend time with them during the rest of your high school years?”
“Constantly. Neither my parents nor Amanda’s wanted us dating alone at that age, so we usually went out in groups, or at least two couples. Since she was my best friend, we were together a great deal of the time. Amanda never dated anyone else seriously. Not during high school, not when she went away to Princeton. I mean, you can see how attractive she was, so she had lots of offers. But she was mad for Brendan-he’s the only guy she ever cared about.”
The jurors were taking it all in. Some were watching Kate Meade as she testified, a few stared at the face in the photograph while Kate talked about her friend, and many were glancing over at Quillian, hoping for a reaction to the testimony but getting none.
“And the defendant, do you know where he attended college?”
“Yes. Brendan went to Georgetown. In Washington, D.C. He had a full scholarship there.”
“Were you present for the marriage of Amanda to the defendant?” For every time that a witness-or my adversary-would personalize the man on trial by using his Christian name, I would refer to him instead by his status in these proceedings.
“Yes, of course. I was Amanda’s maid of honor.”
“When did that take place?”
“The week after her college graduation, twelve years ago this month. Amanda had just celebrated her twenty-second birthday.”
Through Kate’s narrative I got much of the pedigree information about my victim and her husband before the jury. I had structured the direct exam carefully to avoid Howell’s hearsay objections by eliciting facts my witness knew firsthand.
Amanda’s father was the sole owner of a real estate empire started by her grandfather more than forty years earlier. Keating Properties had been responsible for much of the development of Manhattan’s SoHo district, transforming vast commercial space into fashionable residential lofts and apartments. Then they repeated that trend in TriBeCa and on into Dumbo, restoring the charm of the streets and old buildings in the part of Brooklyn “down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass.”
Because Amanda was the only one of the three sisters to marry someone interested in the family business, her father had welcomed Brendan Quillian into the company. After he completed his studies at Georgetown and received an MBA from New York University, Brendan learned the art of the deal from Richard Keating himself. By
