FaceOff (17 page)

This morning, on direct examination, the testimony of Terry Mirza was presented to the jury as if it were written, produced, and directed for a Broadway production with an audience of twelve. It came on smooth as silk as the nine women and three men in the jury box took notes and listened intently. There was not the slightest equivocation as Mirza identified the defendant, Ibid Mustaffa, as the man he saw in the alley that night, the one who dragged the plastic-shrouded and bloodied body of Carla Spinova from the backseat of his yellow cab.

Mirza even identified the cab number as well as the license plate number of the vehicle. He had everything but the VIN number off the engine block. When asked if he was absolutely certain that it was Mustaffa that he saw that night, he said he had no doubt whatsoever. He told the jury that he observed the defendant clearly from several different angles as Mustaffa struggled under the bright lights of a streetlamp to drag the body over to the edge of the alley, against the side of a building, where he left her and drove off.

The witness also testified that the defendant was wearing gloves. This would explain the lack of fingerprints on the plastic tarp used to wrap the body.

When the prosecutor had hammered the last nail in Mustaffa’s
coffin and turned the witness over to Paul, the jurors were looking at Madriani as if to say,
Try and get out of that one
.

Paul introduced himself to the witness. “Mr. Mirza, let me ask you, what is your first name, your given name? It’s not Terry, is it?”

“No. It’s Tariq.”

“What is the origin of the name? I mean, it’s not English or Irish or German.”

“Objection, Your Honor. What’s the relevance?”

“I think the jury has a right to know a little bit about the witness and where he’s from,” said Paul.

“I’ll allow it,” said the judge. “But keep it short, Mr. Madriani.”

“Mr. Mirza, where is your family from?”

“My parents were Bedu, Bedouins. From the desert, originally Saudi Arabia.”

“Do you have family in Saudi Arabia at the present time?”

“I have an uncle who lives there.”

“Were you born here in this country?”

“No. I came here when I was three with my mother and father and two brothers.”

“Do you have any other relatives living in the Middle East, say, outside of Saudi Arabia, at the present time?”

“Objection as to relevance, Your Honor.” The prosecutor was on his feet once more.

“May we approach the bench?” said Madriani.

The judge waved them on. Off to the side, away from the witness, Paul told the judge that the questions were intended to lay a foundation for the issue of credibility, which was always relevant. After all, it was the prosecution who put the witness on the stand.

“I will give you a little latitude, Mr. Madriani, but let’s try and tie it to something in the case.” The judge eased back in his chair.

Paul picked up where he left off.

“Yes,” said Mirza. “I have one brother and my grandparents who live in Shubra al-Khaymah.”

“And where is that?” said Paul.

“It’s a town just outside Cairo in Egypt.”

“So your family lives in the same country my client is from?”

“If you say so,” said Mirza.

“When is the last time you spoke to your family in Egypt?” said Paul.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“A month ago?”

“Longer.”

“Two months?”

“I don’t know. As I said, I can’t remember.”

“Mr. Mirza, isn’t it a fact that the testimony you have offered before this jury here today is false? Is it not true that you never saw anything that night and that, in fact, the information you have testified to here today was provided to you by outside parties who have threatened your family in Egypt unless you testify in accordance with their instructions?”

“No, that’s not true,” said Mirza.

“Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Mirza, that you received a letter, typed correspondence, hand-delivered to your home, instructing you to incriminate my client, telling you what to say, giving you details including the defendant’s taxi number, the license number of the vehicle, the location of the alley, and other specifics like the time of your supposed observations, and telling you that unless you did as the letter instructed your family members in Egypt would be killed? Is that not a fact?”

“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The discomfort level of the witness was obvious.

Madriani lifted a sheaf of papers from the table in front of him.
Beneath the papers were several large glossy photographs as well as photocopies of a letter and its envelope. Madriani handed one set to the bailiff who delivered it to the judge and another to the prosecutor.

“May I approach the witness, Your Honor?” The judge nodded as he read from his copy of the letter.

“Mr. Mirza, this is not the original but a copy of the letter in question. The original has already been examined by a laboratory employed by the defense. It was turned over to the police for their examination less than an hour ago. I should tell you that our experts have already identified your fingerprints on the original letter and its envelope. You should be advised that perjury is a serious crime. I remind you that you are under oath.”

Mirza looked at the document.

“Your Honor, we’ve never seen this before.” The prosecutor was on his feet waving his copy of the letter at the judge.

“Neither had I, Your Honor, until late yesterday morning,” said Madriani, “when, subject to a subpoena, the letter was found in a safe-deposit box belonging to Mr. Mirza at Fontana Bank in the city. It was tucked inside a large manila envelope containing some insurance documents.”

“I’ve never seen this before,” said Mirza, his hands shaking.

“We would ask for a continuance,” said the prosecutor.

Madriani ignored him. “Then perhaps you can explain to the jury and the judge how it came to find its way into your safe-deposit box with your fingerprints on it?”

“The witness will answer the question.” One thing judges don’t like is perjury.

Mirza looked up at the judge, then toward the prosecutor, and finally at Madriani. A bewildered expression spread across his face. “I don’t know! I really don’t know!”

·  ·  ·

Six days later, after the police crime lab verified Mirza’s fingerprints on the letter and its envelope, both sides made their closing arguments to the jury.

In the courtroom, crowded to overflowing, Alex Cooper sat just beyond the railing behind Madriani at the counsel table. In closing, it took little more than an hour for Madriani to shred the State’s case given that the testimony and evidence of the prosecution’s chief witness had turned to dust. Other than the bleak GPS data putting Mustaffa’s taxi in the vicinity of the body dump, Mirza’s testimony was the only real evidence tying him to the crime. Worse, it now appeared as if there was an active conspiracy afoot to frame Mustaffa.

Paul explained to the jury that while he could not defend Mirza’s conduct on the stand, he understood the unwillingness on the part of the witness to own up to his perjury. After all, his family was in jeopardy and he had reason to be afraid for them.

Mirza, to the last breath, denied ever having seen the letter in question. He claimed that, to his knowledge, no one had ever threatened his family and no one had told him what to say on the stand. He was adamant. No doubt the DA’s office would take him to its own version of the woodshed for a thrashing on the issue of perjury if the jury failed to believe him. Still, there was no way to explain the fingerprints and the letter in the safe-deposit box, all belonging to Mirza.

After retiring to the jury room for deliberations, it seemed that the headiest item on the jury’s agenda was the election of a foreman. Before the noon break they were back with a verdict. “On the count of violation of Penal Code Section 187, first-degree murder, we, the jury, find the defendant, Ibid Mustaffa, not guilty.”

There was a veritable uproar in the courtroom as Mustaffa was discharged by the judge. Madriani made plans to meet with him the following Monday at his office in San Diego. Mustaffa left to get his personal belongings that had been taken from him the night of his arrest.

Paul, Alex, and Jenny Corcoran retreated through the phalanx of reporters to a restaurant for lunch and a glass of wine. It was Friday afternoon. Alex had to fly back to New York, but Jenny was able to stay on. She made plans to get together with Paul and his girlfriend, Joselyn Cole, as well as his law partner, Harry Hinds, in San Diego for a quick visit.

After lunch, some local sightseeing, and a heavy dinner, the lawyers parted as Paul dropped Alex at the airport. She was still conflicted, she told him, about how it felt to hear that Mustaffa was acquitted when her first assumptions about his guilt in this heinous crime were so strong.

Paul headed back to his own room. He would spend one more night in the City of Angels before collecting his luggage, picking Jenny up the following morning, and heading south to San Diego and home.

As for Jenny, she was exhausted. As soon as she got to her room and showered, her head hit the pillow and she tried to sleep. But still the subconscious was at work. Something troubled her. It was the testimony of Terry Mirza.

In the true-to-form trials of the real world,
Perry Mason
endings with witnesses crumbling on the stand and admitting their guilt do not occur, except in one narrow band of cases. People who commit perjury and who are confronted on the stand with irrefutable evidence of their lies often do recant their testimony, particularly when admonished by counsel and the judge in stern language that perjury is a serious crime for which they could pay a stiff penalty,
including time behind bars, if convicted. Mirza had been told this several times and still he stuck to his testimony. He insisted that he had never seen the letter threatening his family or directing him how to testify.

The letter had still another quality to it, like a rabbit pulled from a hat. Samir Rashid somehow had acquired information about Mirza and his family in Egypt. According to Rashid, they were under a severe threat of death from the people who had raided the Cairo Museum and stolen the golden figurine, Surfing the Panther. These people had already killed Carla Spinova to get their hands on the memorandum left behind in the charred U.S. consulate building in Benghazi, the memo that identified the mastermind behind the museum theft, as well as the deal for the sale to the North Korean dictator. Rashid’s same sources had told him about the letter delivered to Mirza and the threat to his family. The Cairo thieves were desperate to convict Mustaffa for Spinova’s murder—to make her death appear to be a brutal sexual assault, staged to seem so—because it would put an end to the controversy and leave them free to do their deals with their stolen booty. Case solved. Story over. It all made sense. Sort of.

Slowly her subconscious released her and Jenny drifted off to sleep. She couldn’t tell how long the slumber lasted, minutes or hours, disoriented as she was in the dark room. But she was awakened with a start by the noise next to her head. She opened her eyes in the dark, little blinking lights in unfamiliar places and the sound of the electronic ringtone blaring next to the bed. She grabbed for the receiver and found it on the second stab.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Jenny. Paul Madriani here. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“What is it?” She looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was four thirty in the morning.

“We need to talk. The police called me ten minutes ago. Ibid Mustaffa is dead.”

“What?”

“He was killed by a hit-and-run driver at an intersection in West Los Angeles two hours ago. The police found my business card with the hotel phone number in Mustaffa’s pocket. They said he was drunk, stumbled into the street, and got nailed. According to witnesses, the driver sped off.”

Jenny’s mind, still half asleep, raced trying to absorb it all.

“Corcoran, are you there?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“Mustaffa was Islamic, devout. He prayed five times a day. More to the point, he didn’t drink.”

·  ·  ·

An hour later, the two lawyers sat bleary-eyed hunched over the table in Paul’s hotel room gulping coffee from Styrofoam cups, something from an all-night café on the corner.

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” said Jenny. “You want to know what I think?”

“What?” said Paul.

“I think Mirza was telling the truth. I don’t think he’d ever seen that letter before. I mean, you had him in a vise right there on the stand, squeezing him with hard evidence. Why not own up? After all, if your family is in jeopardy, it’s no longer a secret.”

“Then how did his prints get on the letter and the envelope?”

“Blank paper,” said Jenny. “Maybe somebody got into his house. We all stack paper in our printers. Somebody could have taken the bottom page from the feeder. Or better, somebody hands Mirza a blank piece of paper in an envelope. He opens it, looks at it. Whoever gives it to him says, “Oops, wrong envelope,” takes it
back, and gives him something else. Mirza never thinks twice about it. The contents of the letter are then typed or printed on the blank page and suddenly the witness is confronted with it in court.”

“You’re forgetting something. How did the letter get into Mirza’s safe-deposit box?” said Madriani.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. You said it was found inside an envelope with some insurance documents.”

“Right.”

“Where did the insurance papers come from?”

“I don’t know. I assume an insurance agency.”

“Yes and we, as well as the court, all assumed that Mirza either hid the letter or misfiled it with his insurance papers. Now let me ask you, who reads insurance documents?” said Jenny.

Paul looked at her. “Nobody.”

“Exactly. You receive them and you file them away somewhere safe. Anybody could have gotten to that manila envelope with the insurance documents and slipped whatever they wanted in it before it was delivered to Mirza. Look again and you might find pictures of Mirza shooting from the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza.”