“There you go, Sheff,” said the judge. “I think you have a problem.” “Well, I want to see an affidavit,” said McSheffrey.
“I can give an affidavit in the, in, in the form that I have just said,” Dana said. It was only a minor, barely perceptible stumble. But in the presence of two men who had spent decades reading witnesses and juries and other lawyers, and been involved in thousands of eyeball-to-eyeball negotiations over everything from life sentences to multimillion-dollar claims, such barely perceptible slips signal much.
“No, not some general, vague, ‘I have used my best efforts’ or ‘I verily believe’-type language. What actual steps were taken? If my very learned friend spent three days looking on 100,000 documents, and was able to discern where allegedly thirty-seven documents are allegedly missing, she should tell us how she did that. A best-efforts-type affidavit won’t do here.” “Well, that won’t be a problem, will it, Ms. Wittenberg?” Judge Mordecai was softening a bit on her. To have put those documents together over a weekend was impressive.
“I can swear an affidavit in the form that I have said. The documents have been reviewed with scrupulous care and thirty-seven documents are missing,” she replied evenly, mindful of the promise she had given Turbee.
“No, no. This should not be a problem. You swear an affidavit setting out exactly who did what so that the court can be assured that these thirtyseven missing documents truly are missing documents. Sure, if you had help from whomever at Blankstein deFijter, good for them, those jackasses finally accepting some responsibility for something. But just set out who did what, be back here by two, and we will carry on. Don’t tell us that the documents have been reviewed with care. Who reviewed them and what exactly was done?”
“M’lord, I can give you an affidavit in the form that I have said. I am afraid I cannot go beyond that.”
“What?”
“I cannot go beyond that. The documents have been reviewed with scrupulous care.”
“You almost had me fooled there for a second, Wittenberg. I actually thought you were doing some lawyerly things for a second. You have just made it easy for me. Either you give the court an affidavit showing to my satisfaction what you did to determine that thirty-seven documents truly are missing or you don’t get to make the pitch about missing documents to the jury. Not to me, not in front of the jury, not to any witness, period. Got it?”
“But m’lord—”
“Easy choice. Swear an affidavit to show that the thirty-seven documents are not in the bankers boxes Mr. McSheffrey gave you. Either you went through them yourself or people went through them with you and you describe how that was done, and how your binders were put together, or you are done with this line of inquiry. How hard can that be? You worked three days straight. Good. Tell us what you did. Period.”
Dana gave up and slumped into her seat. She could not give up Turbee. She had given her word. Archambault, who knew what card McSheffrey had just played, congratulated him, sotto voce, “Absolutely brilliant, Sheff. Awesome.”
McGhee leaned over and stage-whispered to Dana. “You just don’t want to swear an affidavit that your mutt-job donkey-sized ugly-ass dog did the photocopying, do you, huh, Scarface?”
“You bastard,” she hissed, sweeping her hand vigorously outward and away from her body. This had some unintended consequences. When Dana made her dismissive gesture, the edge of her sleeve, a long, drooping sleeve, caught the edge of a well-worn Blankstein deFijter binder, carrying it to the edge of counsel table where it landed, spine edge first, causing the metal clamps to open, scattering more than a hundred pages of documents and document tabs across the courtroom floor between the prosecutor and defense tables. A titter ran through the courtroom.
“I think my ex-ceed-ing-ly learned friend,” said Sheff, accentuating the syllables, “might require a few moments to compose herself.”
“Yes, Sheff, it kind of looks that way. Very good, then. We’ll take the twenty-minute morning adjournment a little earlier, and Ms. Wittenberg, try and regain some composure, would you? This is a court of law” He banged his gavel and was gone. Dana did not even stand when the clerk commanded the court to do so, keeping her face a centimeter from the computer screen into which she wished she could disappear.
Danson and McGhee exited first, jabbering excitedly at McSheffrey’s masterstroke. They did not know there actually were thirty-seven deliberately suppressed documents sitting in a locked drawer in McSheffrey’s office. Turbee had scored 100 percent.
Archambault and McSheffrey strolled out more slowly and were engaged in quiet, earnest conversation. As the two exited the courtroom, Archambault shook his head. “How the hell did she do that, Sheff? There were more than a hundred thousand pages in there. How could she have organized them all?”
“She did more than that,” McSheffrey said. “She’s got them all into a database. She had to input them. And then somehow she found out about the thirty-seven documents that we had pulled out.”
“I’ve done these types of cases before,” Archambault responded. “It’s not physically possible to do that. She could work twenty-four hours a day for three weeks straight and not have all of that close to being cataloged. She had assistance.”
“Yeah she did.”
“That old relic in the back of the courtroom maybe?”
“No. Penn-Garrett’s too far over the hill,” replied McSheffrey. “She had help. Serious, big-time guidance from someone. Someone with a lot of computing power. There’s wheels within wheels here, Archy. She doesn’t want to disclose who her friends are. We’ve used that against her but we have to tread carefully. We were able to keep Dana here off balance because of her inexperience. But this thing could unwind on us.”
25
They were heading south along Mauripur Road towards the harbor.
