Lassiter 08 - Lassiter (25 page)

Whereas I might say: “A desperate and hungry little girl, intending no harm, sought refuge and sustenance in an open and inviting house.”

It had taken four days to pick a jury, a dozen citizens, good and true. Castiel gave them his trial smile and intoned, “First, I want to thank all of you for coming down here and devoting your time and effort to your community.”

Because if you ignored the jury summons, I’d have you arrested
.

He spent three or four precious minutes waving the flag and telling the jurors how wonderful they were. True blue Americans and all of that.

“What I’m about to say to you is not evidence,” Castiel continued.

A lot of lawyers start that way. I don’t know why. It’s like telling the jurors they don’t have to listen. I wondered if Castiel might be a little rusty. These days, he only prosecuted a couple cases a year, attaching himself to high-publicity trials like a lamprey to a shark.

“The evidence that you will consider,” Castiel was saying, “will come to you from the witness stand and in demonstrative exhibits from the crime scene. What I’m doing now, and what Mr. Lassiter will do when I sit down, is give you a preview of each of our cases.”

Thanks, Alex, but I’m not gonna give them a “preview.” I’m gonna start indoctrinating them with the theme of my case
.

What’s a theme? Lawyers used to say it’s a telegram, the short, punchy summary of your case. No one uses telegrams anymore, so I suppose it’s a twitter, or a tweet, or whatever you call it. To construct your theme, you deconstruct your case. Pull it apart brick by brick until you’re left with the barest structure. The marketing whizzes who write movie taglines know how to do this.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

Or … 
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.”

Castiel stood three feet in front of the jury box. Close enough to demand their attention without spraying the front row with spittle. “This case involves an obsessed woman who stalked a man she wrongly believed had harmed her sister, then in an attempt to kill him, shot and murdered another man.”

“Obsessed.” “Stalked.” “Shot.” The thematic words Castiel would hammer throughout the trial.

I patted Amy on the arm just to let her know nothing Castiel said concerned me. To let the jury know, too. In reality, the State Attorney had everything he needed for conviction. Eyewitness testimony. Fingerprints. Ballistics.

What did Amy have? An ex-jock mouthpiece who didn’t necessarily believe her story.

“You will hear from an eyewitness, Charles Ziegler, a respected businessman and philanthropist.” Castiel was rolling now. “Mr. Ziegler was the intended victim, and he witnessed the shooting. He will tell you under oath that he saw this woman, Amy Larkin, fire the fatal shot.”

Castiel pointed at Amy, as prosecutors are inclined to do.
J’ accuse!
Amy didn’t blink and she didn’t turn away. She didn’t look angry and she didn’t look scared. She merely stared back at Castiel, her head cocked a bit, as if listening to a fairly interesting discussion that did not involve her personally.

“You will be presented with evidence that the defendant stalked Mr. Ziegler. You will hear from a fingerprint expert who will identify conclusive matches, placing the defendant at the scene of the shooting. You will see cigarette butts bearing the defendant’s DNA that were found on a construction site adjacent to the crime scene. And you will hear from a ballistics expert who will testify that …”

While Castiel pounded away, I took inventory of the jury. I was reasonably happy with our Dirty Dozen. I landed five women, three in their twenties, a pedicurist, a homemaker mother of twins, and a colon hydrotherapist. I didn’t ask the last one any detailed questions about her work.

Another woman, a pharmaceutical rep, was a striking redhead in a short skirt. Drug companies like their salespeople young, female, and pretty. The final woman wore safari khakis and worked as a python wrangler, clearing the snakes out of neighborhood canals.

The seven men included two retirees, a guy who drove a Doritos truck, two wannabe actors, both waiting tables. One man was unemployed, and another said he was a life coach, a term neither Don Shula nor Joe Paterno ever used.

Castiel picked up steam, repeating his key words, “obsessed,” “stalked,” and “shot” a few times. When I got my turn, I would talk about Amy as little as possible and the two pals, Perlow and Ziegler, a lot. My key phrase would be “an army of assassins,” which I hoped would perk up the jurors’ ears.

“Enemies, criminals, and assassins. That’s who could have lurked outside Charlie Ziegler’s windows that fateful night. Max Perlow was a lifelong gangster with deep connections in organized crime. Charles Ziegler spent years as a pornographer, a world crawling with crime and corruption. These men made enemies. Yes, there could have been an army of assassins lurking in those bushes that night.”

Before I could give that spiel, Castiel had to finish, and he seemed to be having too much fun to stop.

“Remember that no one piece of evidence is conclusive of guilt or innocence,” the State Attorney was saying. “Think of your favorite recipe.”

Gin, vermouth, olive … if you’re talking to me
.

“Take strawberry shortcake. If you just eat the dry cake, it’s not all that tasty. Add the strawberries and we’re getting there. But it’s the whipped cream that ties it all together. Please wait until the whipped cream is on top before reaching any conclusions.”

Castiel sat down, and the judge said, “This seems like a propitious time for our lunch recess.”

A criminal trial is not the last half of a
Law & Order
episode. It does not sail along with pithy questions, furious objections, and searing answers. A criminal trial is a slog through the mud, boring and repetitious, with fits and starts and endless downtime. It is played out in an arena cold enough to preserve fish—and hopefully keep jurors awake—under yellow fluorescent lighting that makes even the robust and hearty appear jaundiced and sickly.

The days crawled by as Castiel methodically put on the state’s case. An assistant medical examiner with a Pakistani accent testified as to the autopsy results.

Max Perlow, deceased. Death classified as a homicide. Gunshot wound to the chest. Cause of death, exsanguination. The decedent bled to death
.

The bullet tore a wide path through bone and tissue and blood vessels. The M.E. explained that the bullet’s kinetic energy slowed down when it crashed through the solarium window. A slower bullet causes
greater
tissue damage. He used a blackboard to describe a mathematical equation.

“Kinetic energy equals the weight of the bullet times its velocity squared,” the M.E. said, “divided by gravitational acceleration times two.”

I wouldn’t have cross-examined that, even if I knew how.

The mention of the bullet’s weight segued smoothly to the ballistics tech, who testified that the slug pulled from Perlow was a .38 caliber. He
compared the striations of that spent bullet with those of the two slugs pulled from the tires of my Eldo. Yep. All three were fired by the same gun.

The state didn’t have the murder weapon but didn’t need it. The day after the M.E. testified, two witnesses from the gun range told their stories. Both said they saw Amy Larkin slay my innocent Michelins with a weapon they recognized as a Sig Sauer .380. The logical paradigm was simple and straightforward:

Then came the physical evidence I’d been expecting. Amy’s finger-prints were on two panes of glass in the solarium windows. A scrap of fabric taken from the jagged leaves of the bayonet plants matched a unitard seized in Amy’s motel room.

On cross, I got both the experts to admit that the prints and the cloth could have been left several nights earlier. That’s what defense lawyers do. Wait for the state to launch a clay pigeon, then try to blast it out of the air. What makes it tough is when the state has more pigeons than you have ammo.

Sitting next to me at the defense table, Amy remained composed. When I glanced at her profile, I sometimes saw her sister. The same angular jawline, the same girl-next-door quality.

I had told Amy that I was still looking for Krista and that I’d found Snake, the biker-turned-reverend. I expected the news to excite her, but she expressed little curiosity, even after my telling her that Snake placed Krista at Ziegler’s party.

I gave Amy a legal pad to make notes. Clients sometimes come up with better questions than lawyers. But Amy didn’t give me any help. She doodled. She drew pictures of a house with four people standing out front. Mom, Dad, and two daughters, a bright sun in the sky. It reminded me of the artwork in the women’s jail, cheerful paintings mocked by the grimness around them.

At one lunch recess, I joined Amy in her cramped holding cell, just down a corridor from the courtroom.

“What’s Ziegler going to say on the stand?” I asked, yet again.

“What did he say when you took his deposition?”

“You know damn well. He saw you outside the window.”

“So …?”

“So I’m wondering if he had a change of heart.”

She was tying the bow on her silk blouse, fumbling a bit without a mirror. “If you must know …”

“If I must know! I’m your lawyer, dammit! When Ziegler came to the jail, what did he say?”

“That he was going to do what’s right.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“The son-of-a-bitch told the cops you were the shooter. He signed an affidavit to that effect for Castiel. In deposition, under oath, he repeated the same thing to me. It’s a big deal to recant. But you didn’t ask?”

“It’s in God’s hands.”

“Let’s hope He doesn’t have butterfingers.”

“Don’t be blasphemous.”

Playing the religion card. It could have been an act. But with Amy, who knew?

We had about two minutes before court would reconvene. For weeks, I’d been pressuring her to tell me what Ziegler had said during his jailhouse visit. This
do the right thing
bit was the first crack in her
can’t tell you
armor. I decided to stay quiet a moment. In court, it’s a trick I use to keep a witness talking. Give the room a moment of silence that demands to be filled. I looked into Amy’s green eyes and waited.

“Charlie’s different than I expected.”

“Yeah?”

C’mon, Amy. Talk to me
.

“He asked for my forgiveness.”

“For what?”

“For taking advantage of Krista all those years ago. For my being in the situation I’m in now. He blames himself and he’s looking for redemption.”

Ziegler had talked to me about redemption, too. But talk’s cheap, and the man was a born bullshit artist.

“He had tears in his eyes,” she continued, “and seemed truly repentant.”

What’s next? I wondered. Amy and Ziegler as Facebook friends?

She grabbed one of my hands and clutched it in both of hers. “Charlie told me that after all this time, he’s almost certain Krista is dead.”

“Sounds like he might feel guilty about that.”

“I think so, too. But not in the way you mean.”

“How, then?”

“Looking at him, listening to him, I don’t think Charlie had anything to do with Krista’s death. In a strange way, that brought me peace.”

She managed a small, soft smile. Placid and accepting. I tried to measure her sincerity. It’s what I do for a living, but if I had to deal with Amy every day, I’d go broke. From day one, the woman has been a mystery.

“I don’t want you at peace, Amy.”

“Why?”

“To help me at trial, I need you alert and wired. Not in some Zen state. Not the president of the Charlie Ziegler Fan Club.”

“I can only be who I am, Jake.”

Just who the hell that was, I still didn’t know.

Kip promised to clean his room, do all his homework a week in advance, and never talk back for the rest of his life … if only I would take him to the erotica convention.

I turned the kid down.

“C’mon, Uncle Jake. Why should you have all the fun?”

“I’m gonna interview Angel Roxx. It’s strictly business.”

I knew Angel had a special relationship with Charlie Ziegler. She’s who he sent to my house that first night, and she was at his place when he invited me over for sushi and tough-guy talk. Now I wanted to see what the porn actress knew about her boss’s relationship with my client.

“You took me to the gun and knife show,” Kip said, pouting. “You let me watch
Reservoir Dogs
on DVD.”

“So?”

“Violence is okay for kids, but sex isn’t? That what you’re saying, Uncle Jake?”

Where in the world did he learn the art of cross-examination?

“I make the rules, Kip. Deal with it.”

“That’s so arbitrary!”

“So’s life. Deal with that, too.”

I try to be a good surrogate dad. I really do. But sometimes Kip can be a real pest. How do parents handle it? The ones with three or four kids, always
yapping, always wanting something. Where does that patience come from? Only this morning, I got a phone call from Commodore Perkins at school. My latest request for a continuance was denied. I’d have to show up for Kip’s official disciplinary hearing next week.

“Jeez, I did all that work for you and this is how you treat me,” my nephew whined.

“You researched a porn star. It wasn’t like digging ditches.”

Kip spent last night happily downloading material from Angel’s fan sites. He also printed out several photo sets. Some were highly educational.
101 Positions to Try at Home
illustrated the difference between reverse cowgirl and rodeo, something that had always puzzled me.

I skimmed Kip’s research and learned that Angel grew up in horse country in Central Florida. “I was just another little cocksucker from Ocala who decided to get paid for it,” she was quoted as saying. “Charlie Ziegler discovered me. One day I was doing
Stable Girls in Heat
, and the next I was a legit personality on reality TV. I even have health insurance!”