“They are here, and here, on the left and right cheeks on the defendant's face.”
Wallace then takes maybe thirty questions to elicit the information he could have gotten in two. Not only were the blood and skin under the fingernails of Denise McGregor that of Willie Miller, but Cassidy has determined that the scratch marks on Willie's face were made by those same fingernails.
Wallace turns the witness over to me. If I can't get the jury to doubt Cassidy, it's game, set, and match.
“Mr. Cassidy, what other foreign material besides Willie Miller's blood and skin did you find under the victim's fingernails?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“Which part of the question didn't you understand?”
Wallace objects that I'm being argumentative and badgering. Damn right I am. Hatchet sustains the objection. I restate the question, and Cassidy answers.
“We didn't find anything else.”
I feign surprise. “To the best of your knowledge, was Willie Miller naked when he was arrested?”
“I wasn't there, but I believe he was fully clothed.”
“Is there any reason to think he was naked when he committed the crime?”
“Not that I'm aware of.”
I bore in. “Were there scratches anywhere other than on his face?”
“No, those were the only scratch marks. But there were needle marks on each arm.”
The medical examination of Willie had shown needle marks on both arms, but since a blood test revealed no drugs in his system, the prosecution was precluded from bringing it out in direct examination. Wallace smiles slightly, assuming that I ineptly opened the door through which that information reached the jury.
“Yes, the needle marks, we will certainly hear more about those,” I say. “Now, what was the defendant wearing when he was arrested?”
“Objection,” says Wallace. “The answer is already in the record. His shirt and jeans,
Hatchet sustains the objection, and I bow graciously to Wallace. “Thank you. It's so hard to keep track of all this conclusive evidence.”
I ask Cassidy, “His shirt was cotton, wasn't it?”
“Yes.”
“But there were no traces of cotton under her nails?”
“No.”
“So she went after his face only?”
“It was only his face that she actually scratched,” he says.
“I can't say for sure what she went after, I wasn't there.”
“No. Neither was I. Can I borrow your pointer? It's a beauty.”
He would like to hit me over the head with it, but instead he grudgingly hands it to me, and I walk over to the large photograph of Willie in all his scratched glory.
“By the way, did you find a ruler near the body?”
“A ruler?”
“You know what a ruler is, don't you? It's like this pointer, only smaller, flatter, and straighter.”
Wallace objects and Hatchet admonishes me; business as usual.
“The thing that puzzles me,” I say, “is that I personally cannot draw a straight line, yet the victim managed to scratch two of them.”
I point to the scratch marks on each cheek, which are in fact close to perfectly straight and perpendicular to the ground.
“There are no normal patterns for this. Every case is different.” He's getting more smug as he goes along. It's time to de-smugitize him.
“No normal pattern? Isn't the existence of any pattern at all by definition abnormal?”
“I don't know what you mean.”
“Then let me explain it to you, Doctor,” I snarl. “Here we have a woman who is being beaten and stabbed to death by a drunken man, who must be pretty unstable in his own right. So she's flailing away, desperately trying to defend herself, trying to stop the knife from penetrating her, trying to stop his other hand from hitting her-”
“Objection!” yells Wallace. “Is there a question somewhere in this speech?”
“Sustained.”
I push forward. “Okay, here's a bunch of questions. Why didn't she touch his clothes? Why didn't she touch those hands? Why, in her panic, did she choose to scratch two perfectly straight marks on each side of his face?”
The smugness is gone. “I can't say for sure, but it's possible-”
I interrupt. “It's possible that someone held her hands, after she was dead, and scratched Willie Miller's face, when he was too drunk to even know it.”
Wallace stands again. “Objection, Your Honor. Must we continue to listen to Mr. Carpenter's ramblings about his visits to Fantasyland?”
I turn and address Wallace directly, which is something Hatchet will come down on me for. “If I'm in Fantasyland, you should visit it. Things seem to make more sense here.”
After court is over, I find myself alone with Wallace in the men's room. We exchange typical standing-at- the-urinal small talk, and then I ask him a question which has been on my mind.
“Richard, you were in the office at the time … why did my father prosecute Willie Miller?”
“Come on, Andy. Don't believe your own speeches. There's a mountain of evidence here.”
“No,” I say. “I mean, why did he handle the trial himself? He was the DA by then; he hardly ever went into a courtroom.”
Richard thinks for a moment. “I don't know; I remember wondering about that myself at the time. But he was adamant about it. Maybe because it was a capital case. Maybe with Markham involved, your father wanted to be the one to take whatever political heat would result if the trial went badly.”
I nod. “Maybe.”
Wallace zips up, says goodbye, and leaves me to ponder all the other possible maybes.
Hatchet adjourns for the day and I go back to the office. Nicole has called and left a message reminding me of a promise I had made to go to Philip's estate after the evening meeting at the office. He is throwing a fund-raiser for a local congressional candidate that I wouldn't vote for if he were running against Muammar Qaddafi.
We convene our evening meeting early, at five o'clock, mainly for the purpose of discussing tomorrow's cross-examination of the eyewitness, Cathy Pearl.
Laurie is not coming to the meeting; she has gone to see Betty Anthony, to try and do what I couldn't-get her to talk about her deceased husband, Mike.
Kevin and I go over how I will handle Cathy Pearl's appearance tomorrow, and we believe that we can be reasonably effective. The exciting, nerve-racking, dangerous thing about cross-examination is that there truly is no way to accurately predict how it will go. There is an ebb and flow that develops between all the players in the courtroom that is volatile and can lead in various directions.
The lawyer conducting the cross is most like a point guard in a basketball game. It's his or her job to set the pace, to try and dictate the way the game will be played. But like in a basketball game, the lawyer cannot determine what defense, what tactics, the other side will employ.
Most important, unlike in basketball, it's not a four-of-seven series; there's not another game in two days. Cross-examining a witness takes place once, and it's generally winner take all. It can be scarier than the Lincoln Tunnel.
Kevin has been a little down lately; his enthusiasm has seemed to wane even as we have had some success challenging witnesses. I ask him about that, and he reveals that his conscience is rearing its ugly head. In short, he thinks Willie Miller is probably guilty, and while he wants us to win, Kevin worries that we might cause the release of a brutal murderer out into society.
“So,” I ask him, “you think we might be better than the prosecutors?”
He responds, “I think you might be the best defense attorney I've ever seen.”
That's a subject I could talk about for hours, but I try to keep the focus on Kevin. He's in some pain over this,
