ten dollars an hour. Rosalie was the same age, but I got the impression that she would have done it for free.
“Now, remember what I told you,” I said as we got up to leave for the courtroom. “Just tell your stories. When Snodgrass comes after you, stay calm. He’s going to insult you; he’s going to accuse you of being liars. Rosalie, he’s going to bring up every theft and forgery charge that the judge will let him get away with. His entire strategy is to make both of you look like you’re not credible witnesses, and that’s exactly what I want him to do.”
I turned to Alice. Her strawberry-blond hair was shimmering; her blue eyes were clear. She’d worn a conservative, high-necked blue dress and looked like a young girl on her way to church. It was precisely the look I’d hoped for.
“Are you ready for this?” I said.
She nodded.
“Do you have it in your purse?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t mention it until I ask you about it. It won’t be until after Snodgrass cross-examines you.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s do it.”
By one thirty, we’d picked a jury, broken for lunch, and were ready to start the trial. There were three newspaper reporters and one television crew in the gallery. The only other people in the courtroom were William Trent’s wife and his mother. Cody Masters was sitting at the prosecution table next to me, while Trent, dressed in a dark blue suit and yellow tie, sat next to Joe Snodgrass at the defense table. Trent was a slight man, around five feet, eight inches, and skinny, with receding sandy blond hair and expressionless brown eyes. He was chewing his fingernails as I walked into the room.
The judge was Brooks Langley, a skin-headed, seventy-year-old retiree who was sitting in because both of the regular criminal court judges had accepted campaign contributions from William Trent. I’d dealt with Judge Langley through a couple of motion hearings and was impressed with both his knowledge of the legal issues and the way he ran his courtroom. I didn’t think Snodgrass would be able to get away with much grandstanding.
The jury consisted of seven women and five men. All but one of the men had daughters, and all but two of the women were mothers. In picking the jury, I wanted to be sure I stacked it with as many women as possible. I intended to remind them what it was like to be fifteen.
During the initial questioning of the potential jurors, Snodgrass had strongly hinted that his client was falsely accused by two conniving former employees who became angry when they were fired for poor work performance and insolence. He intimated that the girls were planning to file a civil suit if Trent was convicted. It was the first time I’d heard that allegation.
The judge handed me the indictment, and I read it out loud to the jury. It charged William Trent with ten separate counts of sexual abuse by an authority figure. Mooney had framed the indictment so that I had to prove only five dates on which the sexual abuse occurred. On all five of those dates, both Alice Dickson and Rosalie Harbin claimed that they had “threesome” sex with Trent. I was impressed with the way Mooney did it, because it meant that each girl could corroborate what the other was saying on the witness stand.
As soon as I finished reading the indictment, Judge Langley asked me whether I wanted to make an opening statement.
“I’ll defer to Mr. Snodgrass,” I said.
Surprised, Snodgrass grunted and stood up. He’d cleaned up a little for the show. His hair wasn’t greasy and his shirt wasn’t wrinkled, but he still reminded me of Jabba the Hutt. Snodgrass spent the next thirty minutes telling the jurors-in his uniquely bellicose way-what a wonderful human being his client was, and that a terrible miscarriage of justice was being perpetrated on Mr. Trent by an unreasonable, even cruel system. When he was finished, I walked over in front of the jury, spread my feet, clasped my hands behind my back, and looked them straight in the eye.
“This isn’t going to take long,” I said. “We don’t have any physical evidence to present to you. I wish we did, but we don’t. All we have is a story to tell you, and the story will make your skin crawl.”
I turned slowly and pointed my finger at Trent.
“That man sitting right there, that perverted man, used his supervisory power and authority-power that he held by virtue of being an employer-to satisfy his own selfish sexual needs. He took advantage of his employees’ youth and station in life, and he abused them over a long period of time in the most shameful of ways. When you’ve heard this story, and you’ve heard his pathetic denials and excuses for why he’s being falsely accused, you’ll come to the same conclusion that I have. He’s guilty. He’s guilty as sin.”
I turned and walked over to the podium.
“Are you ready to proceed?” Judge Langley asked.
“I am.”
“Call your first witness.”
“The state calls Alice Dickson.”
Masters looked at me curiously from his seat at the prosecution table and mouthed the words, What are you doing?
My original plan had been to put Masters on the stand first to tell the jury how the investigation came about and then to follow him with Rosalie Harbin and then finish with Alice. It’s the standard in trial work: you start slowly and then build to a climactic finish. But the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that I’d call only one witness in this trial, and that witness was Alice Dickson. I knew Snodgrass would make Cody Masters look like an idiot on cross-examination. He’d referred to him as Barney Fife during his opening statement, just like he did in my office a couple of weeks earlier. I didn’t want to give Snodgrass the opportunity to take the focus of the trial away from the real issue, which was whether his client was a pervert and had been screwing underage girls for years.
I’d also decided not to put Rosalie Harbin on the witness stand. She oozed sexuality, and she was unpredictable and often flippant. I believed she would anger the women and make the men think she probably got what she asked for. She also had a habit of committing crimes of moral turpitude, things like theft and forgery, and it was entirely possible that the jury would dislike her so much that they’d acquit Trent on every count, no matter how convincing Alice might be.
So Alice was it. All or nothing. A multiple-count felony case with only one witness.
I’d never heard of anyone trying anything like it before.
Alice walked in with her eyes downcast and slowly climbed the steps up to the witness chair. Her hair was shoulder-length, her face smooth and cream-colored. She looked frightened, and as I led her through the routine preliminary questions, her voice was trembling. But when we got to the serious questions, she sat up straight and started talking directly to the jurors. I started at the beginning, asking her about her life, how she’d been abandoned by her mother and had no idea who her father was, and how she’d grown up impoverished, one of five people sharing a bathroom and two bedrooms in an old trailer. I asked her about the sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle, and she told the jury, in a moving moment, that she blamed herself for her aunt losing her husband. After twenty minutes or so, we got around to Trent.
“Do you know the defendant?” I said.
“Yes. His name is William Trent. We called him Bill.”
“And would you point him out, please?”
She looked right at him and held out her hand. It wasn’t shaking. “That’s him, in the blue suit.”
“Let the record show the witness has identified the defendant,” Judge Langley said.
“Miss Dickson,” I said, “would you tell the jury how you came to know Mr. Trent?”
“My girlfriend Rosalie and I went to his restaurant and applied for a job.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Four years ago. I was fifteen.”
“The indictment in this case alleges that William Trent used his supervisory power and authority over you to
