Without a Hitch (33 page)

“No sir, I don’t
want any of this on my conscience,” Webb replied.

“Good, we can
agree then.  You need to testify.”

“I will not get
on the stand and lie,” Webb said defiantly.

Pierce moved
closer.  “Son, I don’t know what your problem is and I don’t care, but you
filed a police report, and I expect you to stand by that report.  Now can I
count on you or can I not count on you?”

Webb didn’t
respond.

Pierce glared at
him.  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.  In my thirty years in this office,
I’ve never heard of an officer doing what you are doing now.”  Pierce jabbed
his finger into Webb’s chest.  “You need to talk to your friends, talk to your
fellow officers, go pray, whatever, and get over this.  You filed a police
report and if you don’t stand by that, there will be repercussions.  Now get
out of my office!”

Webb left
without a word.

Pierce called
Morales into his office.  “I don’t care what you need to do, make sure that guy
testifies.”

Meanwhile,
Corbin and Beckett sat in Beckett’s office eating Chinese take out.  “I’ll bet
Eddie Pierce is kicking himself for trying to make an example of Beaumont,”
Corbin laughed.

“I wouldn’t be
too confident just yet,” Beckett cautioned.

“What do you
mean?”  Corbin kept his face in the food container, but his eyes watched
Beckett closely.

“This case depends
on Webb.”

“I can’t see
that.  You made Russell look like a liar and Smith recanted.  Right now the
jury’s thinking Pierce set the whole thing up.  Not to mention, Sutherlin sounds
like he may dismiss the case.  All their evidence, what little there is, is
tainted by the illegal search.”

“It doesn’t
matter,” Beckett said abruptly.  “Webb is all that matters.  If he doesn’t show
up, we win.  If he does. . . all bets are off.”

Corbin didn’t
follow up on Beckett’s comment.

Corbin rubbed
the cold, steel gun against his forehead.
 
“We’ve
got a problem.”

“What?” Alvarez
asked.

“Beckett
destroyed their witnesses.  The jury is ready to string up Eddie Pierce and
personally escort Beaumont to the exit, but Beckett’s obsessed with the idea
they’re going to convict.  I don’t understand his thinking.  He claims the only
thing that matters is Webb.”  Corbin tapped the gun against his forehead
several times.  “I think he’s lost his mind.  I think he wants to turn himself
in.”

“He wants to be
a martyr,” Alvarez agreed.  He was angry and didn’t bother hiding it.

“Yes.”

“I fucking
warned you!” Alvarez spat out.  “All you did was put off the inevitable and
make this a thousand times more difficult.  You need to act
now
.”

They sat in
silence for several seconds.

“Do you have a
plan?” Alvarez finally asked.

“I have a plan,”
Corbin said coldly.

Chapter 40

Trial started
promptly at 9:00 am the following morning.  Much to Beckett’s chagrin, Beaumont
showed up in a maroon suit.  The suit had a hat, but Beckett grabbed it from Beaumont’s
head and stuffed it into a briefcase.  This caused Beaumont to take verbal
shots at Beckett for wearing the same gray suit as the day before, though he
did change his striped blue tie for a mauve paisley tie.  Corbin stayed out of
the argument.

Pierce spent the
morning introducing two people whose identities were stolen.  Both were
locals.  Under Pierce’s guidance, they told sob stories about the time, expense
and emotional trauma it cost them to deal with this issue.  Pierce got them to
lay it on thick. . . too thick, and the jury stopped listening.  When jurors
stop listening, they put down their notepads and their eyes wander around the
room.  All but one of the jurors reached that phase within minutes.  Pierce
also called Officer Sanchez to testify about the chain of custody for the gun. 
Sanchez explained how he took the gun from Russell and placed it into the
evidence locker, where it was tagged to be produced at trial.  The jury didn’t
care.

After lunch,
Pierce called Natasha Freet.

Freet stared at
Beaumont.  The jury waited for her answer.  They already knew she worked at
First Regional Bank as a teller.  They knew she didn’t like her job or her
boss.  They also knew she wasn’t a very nice person.  What they did not know
was whether or not she could identify Beaumont.

“Yeah, that’s
him,” she finally said in her thick Philadelphia accent.  It sounded like she
was popping gum when she spoke, even though she spit her gum out when she
reached the witness box.

“Are you sure?”
Pierce asked.

“Like I say,
that’s him.  He was wearin’ this nasty red shirt and black pants when I seen
him, but that’s him,” said Freet, who wore a hot pink mini-dress that was too
small for her midriff and gold hoop earrings over four inches in diameter.

“This was the
man,” Pierce pointed toward Beaumont, “who asked you on June 14th of last year
how to open an account?”

“Yeah,” she said
impatiently.

“You remember
him specifically?  No one showed you any photos of him to jog your memory?”

“They showed me
like photos, but I remembered him before they showed me them.”

“What happened
after he spoke to you?”

“Who?  The cop
or him?” she pointed an excessively long, silver fingernail at Beaumont.

“Mr. Beaumont,”
Pierce replied.

She shifted to
the edge of her seat.  “He wanted to know where to like open an account.  So I
pointed him to account services, and he like went.”

“Did he open an
account?”

“Objection,”
Beckett said calmly.

“Sustained,”
Sutherlin responded without looking up.

“Yeah, he did,”
Freet added after Sutherlin spoke.  The smug look on her face told everyone in
the courtroom she knew she was not supposed to speak.

Judge Sutherlin
slapped down his file.  He glared at Freet.  “When I sustain an objection, you
will not answer the question,
do you understand me
!”

Freet looked
away from Sutherlin before shrugging her shoulders and snarling her lips.

Sutherlin then addressed
the jury:  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will disregard the witnesses’
last comment.”  He picked up his file and leaned back in his chair again.

“Ms. Freet, how
long would you say Mr. Beaumont stayed with the account services people, if you
know?” Pierce asked.

“I’d say like
maybe half a hour.  I kept seeing him sitting there, fillin’ out papers and
stuff.”

“Who would have
opened the account for him, if you know?”

“Mindy Wright. 
She was like the account services lady.”

“I’m going to
show you a video, Ms. Freet.”  Pierce motioned to Morales, who slid a videotape
into the projector.  “Can you explain to the jury what this video is?”

“Yeah.  It’s like
the security tape from June 14th.”  She began playing with one of her nails.

“That’s right,”
Pierce replied.  “This is a security video from June 14th from First Regional
Bank.”

Beckett had
previously stipulated to the authenticity of the tape so Pierce didn’t need to
call a security person from the bank to verify what the tape was or explain how
it was made.  This allowed Pierce to treat the tape as a settled fact. 
Stipulation is customary when there aren’t any disputes regarding the validity
of certain evidence.

“Do you see
yourself on the tape?”

Freet stopped
picking at her nail and looked up at the screen.  “Yeah, I’m on the left at the
second window.”

“Do you see a
time code?”

“Yeah, it says
like 1:10 pm, June 14th.”

Corbin and
Beckett looked at the video.  There, in the background, sat Alvarez filling out
paperwork at the account services desk.

“Do you see Mr.
Beaumont?”

“Yeah.  He’s
kind’a hard to make out, but he’s the second one in line.”  The image didn’t
look much like Beaumont, especially as the man had hair.  But the video was
also grainy, which made identification difficult.

“You’re
absolutely sure that’s Beaumont?” Pierce asked theatrically.

“Yeah, I
remember him.  Then they showed me the photos and I pointed him right out. 
Then the cops like showed me the video and I pointed him out there too.”  Freet
went back to picking at her nail.

“Let’s move the
video forward,” Pierce said to Morales.

As the jury
watched, the man approached Freet’s window.  They spoke briefly before he went
to account services.  The video continued to run for several more minutes as he
sat down at the account services desk with a woman, who was presumably Mindy
Wright, filled out some paperwork, and left.

Pierce leaned
against the podium on his left arm.  His right hand was still thrust into its
permanent place in his pocket.  “You’re 100% sure that was Mr. Beaumont?”

“Absolutely.”

All eyes turned
to Beaumont.

Beckett looked
almost bored when he approached the podium.  “I’ve just got a couple quick
questions, Ms. Freet,” he said, placing his notes on the podium.

Freet visibly
stiffened in her chair.  Clearly, she viewed Beckett as the enemy.

“What color was
Mr. Beaumont’s hair. . . it’s difficult to tell from the video.”

“Black.”

“Can you
describe it?  Was it thick, thin, was he wearing a wig?”

Freet smirked
and let out a derisive laugh.  “No, he wasn’t wearing no wig.  It was black and
kind’a like thinning.”

“He doesn’t have
hair today—”

“No, he must’a
shaved it off,” Freet interrupted him.

“Did Mr.
Beaumont give you anything to open the account?”

“Why would he
give me somethin’?”

“You tell me?”

“No, he didn’t
give me nothin’.  He just asked where he could open an account, and I told
him.  He did’n give me nothin’.”  She scrunched her lips at Beckett.  Several
members of the jury shook their heads at her hostility.

Beckett started
to leave the podium, but stopped.  “One more thing, Ms. Freet.  Do you think
you could tell the difference between Mr. Beaumont’s natural hair and a wig?”

“Yeah, I could
tell easy.  That was his real hair.  There ain’t no way that was no wig.”

“Nothing further,
Your Honor,” Beckett said to the surprise of many in the courtroom.

Pierce called
Mindy Wright next.  Wright looked like Maggie Smith, only she was tall and
thin, almost stork-like, and she wore an overly-ruffled blouse that gave the
impression of being a bib.  Like Smith, she was very pleasant and did her best
to be helpful.  She had no recollection of opening the account and could not
identify Beaumont, but she did confirm that someone using the name Jason
Hammerlin opened an account at First Regional Bank on June 14th, though she
couldn’t state the time the account was opened, nor could she identify Beaumont
from the videotape.  She also confirmed that the documents she was shown by
Pierce were copies of the account documents that would have been provided to
Hammerlin when he opened the account.  She did not keep a photocopy of
Hammerlin’s drivers license.

Wright was
equally pleasant and helpful with Beckett.  Beckett, in turn, was pleasant with
her.  “Ms. Wright, when you open an account for someone, do they usually give
you money to put into the account?”

“Usually. 
Sometimes they give us a check,” she replied.

“But they always
give you something?”

“Oh yes.  We
can’t open an account with a zero balance.”

“How much did
Mr. Hammerlin give you?” Beckett asked.

Wright looked
through the paperwork Pierce gave her earlier.  “It looks like he gave me $100
in cash as an initial deposit.”  She took one more look over the documents. 
“Right, it had to be cash or I would have put down a check number.”

“If you don’t
mind, Ms. Wright, let’s watch the video again, as you did with Mr. Pierce.  I’d
like you to pay particular attention to the transaction going on and please
tell the jury everything that changes hands between you and the man in the red
shirt.”  Beckett signaled Corbin to start the video.

Wright narrated
as she watched the video.  “He must have asked me about the account, as I’m
handing him account documents.”  The video continued.  “He’s filling out the
documents. . . now he’s giving the documents to me. . . I’m looking them over.
. . I’m. . . that’s odd.”

Beckett signaled
Corbin to stop the tape.  “What’s odd, Ms. Wright?”

“I put the
documents in the wrong drawer.”

“What do you
mean ‘the wrong drawer’?”

“That’s the
drawer for the ATM card applications,” she said, sounding perplexed.

“Is it possible
he was applying for an ATM card?”

“It might be?”
she admitted without reservation.

“Let’s finish
the tape.”  Beckett signaled Corbin.

The man spoke briefly
with Wright and left.

Beckett signaled
Corbin to stop the tape.  “Ms. Wright, did the man in the red shirt give you
any money to open an account?”

“No, he didn’t.” 
She sounded even more perplexed.

“Can you open an
account without some sort of deposit?”

“No, you can’t.”

“You put the
application in the drawer for ATM card applications, not where you would have
put it if it was an application to open an account, right?”

“Right,” she
agreed.

“If he was
applying for an ATM card, wouldn’t he necessarily already have an account?”

“He would have
to, yes.”  She began nodding, as she saw her mistake.

“Looking back on
your actions, do you still believe the man in the red shirt came to open an
account?”

“It doesn’t seem
that way, no,” she conceded, before adding, almost to herself, “but then how
did the police get Mr. Hammerlin’s paperwork?”

“That’s a good
question, Ms. Wright.  Thank you for your time.”

Pierce immediately
took Beckett’s place at the podium.  “Ms. Wright, is it possible you simply put
the paperwork in the wrong drawer by mistake?”

“I suppose it
is, but I can’t explain why he didn’t give me any money to open an account.”

“Is it possible
Mr. Beaumont came back later to complete the account application, that he came
back to give you the deposit?”

“I suppose so,”
she said, though her shaking head and the hesitation in her voice left no doubt
she didn’t accept this possibility.

“Nothing
further.”  For the first time, Pierce looked shaken.

“Call your next
witness, counselor,” Sutherlin ordered from the bench.

“May we
approach, Your Honor?” Pierce replied.  A moment later the four attorneys were
at the bench.  “Your Honor, we’re still waiting on Officer Webb—”

Sutherlin cut
him off.  “Do you have any other witnesses?”

“Just the
handwriting expert,” Pierce replied.

“Why can’t we
hear from him?” Sutherlin asked.  His frown grew more pronounced.

“We can put him
on, but he will need to testify about documents obtained by Officer Webb, and I
suspect Mr. Beckett will object vociferously,” said Pierce, trying to shift the
blame for his failure to produce Webb onto Beckett.

“Mr. Pierce, you
are on thin ice already.  If Officer Webb does not testify in the morning, I’m
leaning toward dismissing the case. . . strike that, I guarantee you, I will
dismiss this case.  How do you want to proceed?”

“We’d like a
continuance until tomorrow morning.”

“The defense
would object to that, Your Honor,” Beckett interjected.

Sutherlin put
his hand up to stop any further discussion.  “Your objection is noted, Mr.
Beckett.”  Sutherlin pointed at Pierce.  “I’m going to give you until the
morning, Mr. Pierce.  Then I expect you to finish your case in chief.  Return
to your seats.”