Key Witness (62 page)

Thanks, you son of a bitch.

Abramowitz sneered in Wyatt’s direction. Turning to the jury, she said, “The state will prove to you that the defendant, Marvin White, was in the very places these murders took place, when they took place. An eyewitness will place him at the location of the final murder within minutes of when it happened. And you will hear his own confession, backed up by copious police reports. If any case was ever open-and-shut, this is that case. Ladies and gentlemen,” she concluded, “convicting a man of a capital offense is a difficult and painful decision to make, individually and collectively. But making those decisions is what the heart of our jury system is about. Twelve men and women, hearing the evidence presented, and making an informed judgment based on it. It is why we are a nation of laws and why we are a great country. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you are the eyes and ears and hearts and brains of this community. This city is looking to you for justice. And when all the evidence has been presented, and all the facts are known, there will be only one conclusion you will be able to reach, one decision you will be compelled to render. That Marvin White, the defendant sitting before you, is guilty of seven rapes and seven murders. And that he must be punished for those terrible crimes to the fullest extent of the law.”

C
OURT WAS RECESSED FOR
lunch. When they came back at one-thirty it was Wyatt’s turn. He strode to the edge of the lectern, rested one hand on the mantel, and stuck the other casually in his pocket. He had no portfolio in front of him, no notes. He knew what he wanted to say—he had rehearsed this speech several times—and he was going to say it. Comfortably, personably, without a trace of threat or malice.

“Good afternoon,” he began. “First of all I want to thank you for being here. For taking the time out of your lives to do your civic duty. It’s no small thing, sitting on a jury, especially when the case is as important as this one.” He paused, glancing from one juror to the next, establishing eye contact with each in turn.

“My opponent here for the prosecution”—he waved his hand behind him in the vague direction of the prosecutor’s table without turning to look at them—“made a nice speech to you. Fiery, passionate. She has this killer everybody’s been thirsting after in her sights and all you’ve got to do is pull the trigger for her and we’ll all go home happy.” He shrugged. “Pretty uncomplicated. Slam dunk.” He nodded, as if accepting the wisdom of Helena’s theses. “Except there are a couple problems with her argument.

“First off, there’ve been seven killings, spaced out over close to two years, in a large area of the city. But no one’s ever been a witness to any of them, and no murder weapon’s ever been found. No witnesses, no weapon. Now I grant you, circumstantial evidence can be a powerful tool, but that’s all it is—circumstantial. In case you don’t know exactly what the term ‘circumstantial evidence’ means in this setting, I took the trouble to look it up, because I wasn’t exactly sure myself, and I knew the state was going to base their case on it.”

He plucked a three-by-five index card from his inside jacket pocket and read from it. “ ‘Circumstantial evidence. Evidence not bearing directly on the fact or facts in dispute but on various attendant circumstances from which the judge or jury might infer the occurrence of the fact or facts in dispute.’
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary
said that.”

He put the card back in his pocket. “To me that means they don’t have any direct evidence. It’s all coming in from the sides. But no
facts
—no witnesses, no weapon, and a big one—no motive. In over ninety percent of all murders committed in this country, probably in the world, the person doing the killing knew the person they were killing. If only for a little while. But Marvin White didn’t know any of these victims. Had never met them, talked to them, had any relationship with them. Most of the victims, as you may know, were prostitutes. Streetwalkers, not the high-priced kind. Which is not to in any way denigrate or otherwise demean them. They were God’s children, as we all are. Their lives were as valuable and important as any of ours, yours or mine. But the point is, they were women that needy men paid money to for cheap, quick sex. And we will show you—I believe conclusively—that Marvin White never paid a woman to have sex with him. Never.

“So—no motive. No prior knowledge with any of the victims. No witnesses, and no weapon.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. Several of the jurors were taking notes, he noticed.

“But they do have one thing,” he continued. “A confession, all wrapped up in a pretty package with a big blue ribbon tied around it. Not a
legal
confession, of course,” he added quickly, emphasizing the word “legal.” “Not a confession on the record, to a policeman or a prosecutor or anyone in a position of
legal
authority. No—they don’t have that. They have what is commonly known as a quote ‘jail-house confession,’ unquote. You know what a jailhouse confession is? A jailhouse confession is where one bad guy bares his soul to another bad guy because he’s so overcome with remorse at the terrible things he’s done that he has to tell someone, so he tells that first bad guy, ’cause if you can’t trust another criminal, who can you trust?” He stopped for a moment. “Especially some other criminal you’ve never laid eyes on before in your life, who you don’t know from Adam. But my worthy opponent would have you believe that these so-called jailhouse confessions are carved in stone, from God’s mouth to your ears.” He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Wrong! Snitches—in the old days they were called stool pigeons—because that’s what these jailhouse informants are; informant is just a fancy name for snitch, folks, you’ve seen the old Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart movies on your cable channels—these snitches and their testimony have been discredited from coast to coast. Sometimes they’re just flat-out lying—they know one or two things and make up the rest—and other times they’ve been fed their information. By policemen, prosecutors”—this time he didn’t merely wave behind his back at the prosecution table, he turned and stared at them for a moment before turning back—“who want to get a conviction,
have
to get a conviction, for lots of reasons; but none of them are the right reason, the only reason—which is that justice should prevail.”

He could feel Abramowitz’s eyes shooting daggers at his back. Good. He wanted her to take this personally—it would help him control the flow of the trial.

“Now I’m not saying the police collaborated with the state’s key witness. Or the prosecution or anyone else. But I am telling you it has happened. And you have to know it and be on guard for it.”

He paused for a sip of water. He wasn’t thirsty, but he wanted to take a dramatic moment. Then he continued.

“But that’s their case, which we don’t have to disprove. They have to
prove
it, beyond a reasonable doubt, as my opponent told you. They have to prove their case. And while they’re trying—futilely, I suspect—we’ll be presenting our own case. You will hear witnesses who will tell you Marvin White was with them on the dates and times when those crimes were committed. And not just one date, ladies and gentlemen. We have solid, credible, honest witnesses for two of the days when these women were killed. People who will swear, and will offer real, physical proof, that Marvin White was with them on the days or nights in question, and couldn’t have—could
not
have—committed those murders, because he wasn’t there to commit them. And since the prosecution firmly maintains that one man committed all seven crimes, then if Marvin White didn’t commit two of them, we know he couldn’t have committed any of them.”

Now he leaned forward on the lectern. “They don’t have any eyewitnesses. But we do.”

He took a step back, assuming his more relaxed, user-friendly position again. “These seven murders have been horrible. We all agree with that. And we all agree that whoever committed them should stand before the bar of justice and face a severe penalty. But you can’t scapegoat someone because collectively we need catharsis. You can’t throw an innocent young man to the lions because you want blood.”

He walked around the front of the lectern and stood in front of the jury box.

“The only reason Marvin White was bound over for trial, ladies and gentlemen, was not because some snitch who’s spent his life behind bars got some unbelievable confession out of him. No. He’s here as a sacrifice. One Marvin White, served up on a plate, so a million people can rest easy in their beds. One for a million. Good trade-off. The ancient Egyptians, and Mayans and other civilizations that practiced human sacrifice would have loved those odds. They wouldn’t have thought twice. But we’re not barbarians anymore, ladies and gentlemen; thank God. We don’t sacrifice one for the good of many, just because it’s easy or convenient. One of the great beauties of our legal system is that we respect each and every one of us as unique and special. Which is why we don’t find innocent men guilty of crimes they didn’t commit.”

He walked back to the lectern and stood in front of it so all twelve jurors and eight alternates could see him easily.

“My client isn’t the easiest person in the world to defend. He has a juvenile record, he comes from a class of people who are nowadays too often automatically under suspicion. But that’s one of the great things about our criminal justice system, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Someone’s background, or what they did in the past, doesn’t count in a trial. All that matters are the facts in this case. That’s what innocent until proven guilty is all about, and it’s one of the main reasons we’re considered the greatest country in the world.”

He was cloaking Marvin in the flag, apple pie, and motherhood because he had to. His client was everything juries looked for in justifying a guilty verdict. So you had to massage them, guilt-trip them. And remind them of their sworn duty.

“You have a sworn obligation to judge the evidence in this case carefully, soberly, and with great attention,” he said. “Only the evidence—
not
what my client looks like,
not
where he comes from,
not
what he’d done in the past. And I know that is exactly how you’re going to conduct yourself.

“Marvin White didn’t kill these women,” he told them. “You’ll see. And when you do, you’ll return the only verdict possible. A verdict of
not guilty
of these crimes. And you’ll free this young man who never should have been here in the first place, and let him walk out of this courtroom a free man.”

H
E AND JOSEPHINE HAD
a working dinner in the office. Walcott stuck his head in. “Heard it went well today,” he commented.

“Pretty good,” Wyatt agreed.

“Considering it’s your first criminal-defense opening, I’d say it went better than ‘pretty good,’ ” the head of the office told him.

“He kicked serious ass,” Josephine chimed in.

“This one’s a tough critic,” Walcott said. “She doesn’t pull her punches.”

Wyatt gave a mock shit-kicker shrug. “The jury was paying attention. The stuff about building a case on nothing but circumstantial evidence and a jailhouse confession—they definitely heard that. And if I can work in any evidence of collusion with the police or the DA’s office—
anything,
even if it’s off the point—that’ll hit home hard. These people want to trust the cops on this one but I think it’ll be easy to turn them around if we can find something discrediting.” He looked at Josephine. “Review every instance we’ve got of police, sheriff’s, and district attorney’s office malfeasance or other kinds of fuckups over the past five years. Let’s see if we can find any kind of pattern we can use.”

She jotted the request down in her always-ready notebook.

“See you mañana,” Walcott said, leaving them.

Josephine leafed through her notes. “I checked into the stuff from this morning,” she said. “Physical evidence on the last body linking her to Marvin—I don’t know what that means. They do have sperm samples from her and the two previous victims but they never did DNA comparisons with Marvin’s.”

“They have a confession and an eyewitness placing him where it happened. Why take the chance of muddying the waters with a complicated DNA result?” He took a bite from a slice of mushroom pizza. It was cold, but he scarfed it down anyway. “Let’s spring for a microwave tomorrow. The least we should be able to do is eat a slice of hot pizza.” He stuffed his papers into his briefcase. “See you tomorrow.”

T
HE MESSAGE LIGHT WAS
blinking. He called in. There were two messages.

The first one was from Moira and Michaela.
“Hi.” (Moira.) “We’re doing fine here. The weather’s starting to clear, we were able to go to the beach today and get in some swimming. Michaela’s amazingly active, considering she’s lugging ten pounds on her leg. We went to Boston yesterday and had it checked
—
she’s doing great, ahead of schedule,
s
he does her exercises religiously. We found a nice psychologist here and we’re going to start seeing him twice a week. The good thing is we’re talking to each other, really talking. I hope you and I can do the same some day.”

Michaela kicked in. “
I hope your first day at the trial went really well, Daddy. We’re having lots of fun here. I miss you a lot.” (There was a pause
—
he could hear talking in the background.) “Mom does, too. I wish you were here, so finish your trial off as fast as you can and come.”

Moira came back on.
“We’ve been going to bed early, so if you’re going to call us it’s better to do it in the morning or early afternoon. We’re always home by eight
—
we’ve been watching videos every night. Talk to you soon.”

The message ended. He checked his watch—it was after ten. If he had the time he’d call tomorrow during the lunch recess, or right after court finished for the day.

His daughter missed him. His wife did, too, after some prompting.

The second call was more recent, logged in at 9:30.

“I’m glad I’m talking to a machine. I don’t know if I would have had the guts to stay on if you had answered. I know I shouldn’t be calling you. I wanted to be in the courtroom today but Mrs. Abramowitz said since I’m a witness I can’t come until after I’ve finished testifying.