Thursday, March 22, 2007
12:00 p.m.
United States District Court
for the Central District of California
Abby, Will, and Antoine are seated around the small table in the witness room. Antoine has brought in sandwiches from Quiznos, and Will, his appetite back, is tearing through his meatball sub, pausing occasionally to swipe at the lower half of his face with a balled-up paper napkin.
Antoine’s ability to order the messiest thing on the menu and escape unscathed has always impressed Abby. He’s swept his tie over one shoulder, and though his Reuben is drenched in Russian dressing, he manages to confine the drippings to the sandwich paper.
Luz, her legs tucked under her, is seated on the carpet beside Cristina’s removable car seat, which she rocks with one hand while taking small bites of her ham-and-cheese sandwich with the other. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is playing low on repeat from her iPod.
Abby gamely picks up her can of Ensure and takes a swig. Outside, Nic is waiting with Cal so she can feed him. There had been no time to pump, yesterday or today. She has fifteen minutes to finish this can before she has to meet them, and she’s dreading it. For two days, Nic has not said a word to her that wasn’t absolutely necessary; last night, he slept on the couch. When she had gotten up in the middle of the night to pee, he had opened the door and looked past her sitting on the toilet seat at the empty bathtub, before closing it. After trial, she had told herself that morning, blotting her lipstick in the bathroom mirror while doing her best to ignore Cal, who was screaming like someone was trying to murder him. When Abby had tried to nurse him, Nic had said, “I’m warming up a bottle, so why don’t you get ready for work” in a voice that said, Get the fuck away from us. All morning she has trained her full attention on the task at hand: apply mascara, cross-examine Jackie, choke down chalk shake.
They eat in silence, the mood grim. After Jackie, Shauna had called her final two witnesses, ending on a triumphant note. The first, a mousy-looking woman from Sprint PCS in an ’80s dress-for-success outfit complete with a neck-bow, had testified to the ten phone calls between Luz and Estrada that spanned ten months, ending with the final ninety-seven-minute call on October 10. Over Will’s objection, Shauna had moved Estrada’s billing records into evidence. Without Estrada, there was no context for any of it, but looking at the jury, Will wondered if that made things worse. The absence of information was the absence of an innocent explanation, and there was no getting around the fact that Luz had talked to her lawyer at great length seventy-two hours before stabbing her husband to death.
Then there was Henry Chu, the twentysomething representative from Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance; with his crew cut and crisp answers. Chu had met with Travis stateside in 2002 to fill out the original $400,000 life insurance policy naming Travis’s parents as the beneficiaries. He had also taken Travis’s call on September 25, 2006, requesting to change the beneficiary, and duly carried out Travis’s instructions, faxing the paperwork to Germany and receiving it back with Travis’s and Ravel’s signatures a few days later on September 28.
The dates landed like stones and Shauna drove home the timeline by posting it on the computer screens. Luz’s second-to-last call with Estrada had been placed on September 24, 2006. Twenty-four hours separated that call and Travis’s call to Chu asking to remove his parents as the beneficiaries and replace them with Luz. On cross, Will had done his best. They had introduced Travis’s father’s death certificate into evidence and Will had gotten Chu to admit that the policy ought to be changed under those circumstances. They had also introduced Cristina’s birth certificate, and Chu had stated that, yes, new parents often changed their policies shortly before the birth of children and no, minors could not be named directly and yes, many service members did name their spouses. But the timing. There was no getting around the fact that Travis had made no effort to change his policy after marrying Luz a year earlier, or that nearly a year had passed since his father’s death.
Will had asked, “If the named beneficiary is convicted of causing the death of the insured, can she collect the proceeds from the life insurance policy?” Chu had replied no.
“In that circumstance,” Will continued, “the proceeds would go to the alternate named beneficiary, Travis Hollis’s mother, correct?” To which Chu had replied that would in fact be the case.
But it was Shauna who had the final word on redirect.
“What would happen if the named beneficiary is charged with murder and found not guilty because she claimed she acted in self-defense?”
“There is nothing in the policy that would prevent her from collecting.”
“Meaning she would receive the entirety of the $400,000?”
“She would, yes.”
When Will speaks now, the sound of his voice is almost startling in the thick silence.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, “about the jury instructions.”
Abby and Antoine look at each other quizzically. Antoine says, as if speaking her thoughts out loud, “It’s a little early for that, man. We haven’t even put on our case.”
“Luz is our case,” Will points out, “and she starts this afternoon. We could be done as early as Friday.”
“The jury instructions are the least of our problems,” Abby says icily, amazed that Will would want to talk about something so mundane. Their entire case is about to rise and fall on Luz’s ability to tell her story in a way that will explain how someone with no defensive injuries, tremendous financial incentive, and explosive evidence that her husband had an affair and another baby could have acted without any premeditation or intent
