It couldn’t have gone any better. I leaned down and asked Bailey if there was anything I’d missed. She shook her head. I sat down. Time for cross.
Ronnie O’Bryan wisely refrained from getting into Dorian’s credentials—a losing gambit for him since it would only add to her credibility—and went after the damning inferences of the evidence she’d found.
“Now, you’re not trying to say that Melissa got attacked as she pulled that suitcase down off the shelf, are you?”
“Counsel, I’m not
“Exactly so. I agree. And so you don’t know whether Melissa pulled down that suitcase and kicked it under the bench and left it that way herself, do you?”
“Of course not—”
“And you don’t know whether Melissa deliberately cut herself and wiped the blood on that scarf you found either, do you?”
With any other witness, I would’ve objected. The questions called for speculation and were argumentative, intended only to broadcast the defense. But when it comes to objections, less is more. Juries hate objections; it makes them wonder what you’ve got to hide. Besides, this was Dorian. I knew from hard experience that she hated this kind of conjecturing.
Dorian glared at O’Bryan. “Counsel, we can sit here all day talking about the things I don’t know. String theory, the God particle, I don’t know about ’em. I describe what I see at crime scenes. That’s what I know. You want to speculate how the suitcase got where it did, how the scarf landed on the floor by the stairs, how the blood got on it, fine. Have at it. But that’s not what I’m here for.”
A quick glance at the jury told me they were in love with Dorian. Now most of the jurors were smiling, and a few were even chuckling. Score one for the good guys. O’Bryan thanked Dorian and tried to sound as though he meant it. Ronnie had on his poker face, but I was gratified to see that Saul looked worried. That is, until Ronnie sat down and whispered to him. I knew he was telling Saul to chill out. Sure enough, Hildegarde nodded thoughtfully and put on a neutral expression.
I looked back at Nancy and Bennie to see how they were holding up. It hadn’t been gruesome testimony by any means—at least, not compared to what I’m used to. But Dorian’s testimony had left a clear, if inferential, picture of a violent confrontation in that garage, and somehow her understated delivery had made it even more compelling. Nancy stared straight ahead, covering her mouth with one hand and clutching Bennie’s arm with the other as though it were a life preserver. But Bennie was staring hard at Saul and with such searing intensity it wouldn’t have surprised me to see Saul’s head burst into flame.
We moved on. I called Kwan to talk about the blood on the scarf and in the car: it matched Melissa’s. I called a representative of the luggage manufacturer. He testified that the suitcase under the tool bench and the suitcases on the shelf above belonged to the same set.
It was time to put on the “soft” witnesses: the ones who’d describe the demise of Saul and Melissa’s marriage. The friends told of the fights, the lawyer told of how Melissa had consulted him about a divorce, and two of Saul’s girlfriends, who were surprisingly forthcoming, told of how he’d cheated on Melissa with them. I’d wanted to call the volunteer Melissa had caught him with, but she’d decamped to France. Supposedly for a job. Maybe this one would let her perform her duties in a vertical position. Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t necessarily change the nature of her “work.”
“Did you know Saul was married?” I asked the girlfriend named Wendy. Or, as Bailey called her, Winsome Wendy.
“Well… yeah. And I know I was wrong to do that, you know? And I’m sorry. I guess—”
“Objection!” O’Bryan said, half rising from his chair.
But Winsome Wendy, either because she was tougher than she appeared or because she didn’t understand, plowed ahead.
“I guess that’s why I was willing to come here today. To make it right, you know?”
“The objection is sustained,” the judge ruled. “For what it’s worth. You want the answer stricken, Counsel?”
The jury looked at O’Bryan, and I could swear Juror Number Four had raised an eyebrow. O’Bryan did the wise thing and used the moment to endear himself.
“Nah, who’m I to stand in the way of redemption?”
It got him a laugh and earned him some juror love. Score one for the bad guys.
I looked at Saul to see if he was laughing—a mistake because he should be looking remorseful; even if he hadn’t killed his wife, he was a shitheel for cheating on her. The corners of his mouth twitched, but he’d managed to rein himself in. Damn.
I’d planned to call a few more friends to paint the picture of marital discord, but since no one had seen the defendant get physically violent with Melissa, and the jury’s eyes were starting to glaze over, I decided it was probably overkill. I leaned over to Bailey.
“Time for the trump card, such as it is?” I whispered.
Bailey nodded and went to fetch our witness: Officer Susan Abrams. Still in uniform because she was in the middle of her shift, Officer Abrams raised her right hand, swore to tell the truth, and adjusted the microphone as she sat down. I quickly established that she was one of the police officers who participated in the search of the house in which Melissa and the defendant lived. Then I pulled out the photograph of the room where she found our key piece of evidence.
“Officer, did you personally search this room?”
“Yes, it’s a small study at the back of the house.”
“And what, if anything, did you find of significance there?”
We always say “if anything” to avoid the objection that the question assumes there was something significant to be found. It’s a silly formality. Why would I be asking her about the search if she didn’t find anything of significance? Lawyers have to say a lot of useless things like that.
“I found a diary.”
I turned to Bailey, who produced the actual diary in a plastic evidence envelope. Pulling on a set of rubber gloves, I took the envelope and the box of gloves up to the witness stand. Officer Abrams gloved up and removed the diary from the envelope.
“This is the diary I found.”
“Please look at the last entry.”
She turned to the page.
“Is that what you saw when you found this diary?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Please read the entire page for us.”
The officer did so, and concluded with the final line: “ ‘I know if I don’t get out of here, he’s going to kill me. If I’m dead when you read this, it’ll be because he killed me.’ ”
Officer Abrams did a nice job of it. A few peeks at the jury while she was reading from the diary showed that they were riveted. Juror Number Four was nodding to himself and taking notes. Excellent.
“No further questions,” I said, and sat down.
Bailey leaned in and whispered, “I think I saw Juror Number Nine wiping away a tear.”
More excellent still. Score another one for the good guys.
Ronnie’s cross started out to be an uninspired do-over of all my questions on direct—the typical move defense attorneys make when they really have nothing to ask. And then he dropped the bomb. It started innocuously enough.
“Now, Officer—and I trust the prosecution will not object to an obvious point that may be a little outside your field of expertise—there’s no way to know exactly when that last entry was written, is there? At least, there’s no forensic science that can tell us when ink or pencil was put to paper, correct?”
I wanted to object, because I had a bad feeling about where this was going. But I knew this to be true, and any expert—mine or his—would agree to the unremarkable proposition. I sat tight and held on to my poker face. Officer Abrams shot a quick, puzzled glance my way but answered without further hesitation.
“No, not that I’m aware of.”
