Contempt: A Legal Thriller

by Michael Cordell

  “Actually, it’s not. I’ve been doing this for a while.” The clerk managed to open the casing with his pudgy fingers and held it up to his ear. “Keep good time?”

  “Within a minute a year.”

  The clerk sighed, as though every item that ever crossed his counter was in mint condition. He closed the watch casing and examined the back of it. “I’m going to need I.D.”

  Gideon glared at the man for a moment, then pulled out his wallet and slipped his driver’s license under the glass where it was scrutinized by the clerk.

  “It’s an old license,” Gideon said, “but it’s still me.”

  “Gideon Spence,” the clerk read aloud. He then checked the back of the watch again. “The monogram is T.G. Let me guess: it’s your great uncle’s.”

  “Nope. Grandfather’s.”

  “But of course. So what’s the ‘G’ stand for?”

  “Stands for gimme some damn money,” Gideon said. “It ain’t stolen, if that’s what you’re fretting about.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  The clerk pried open the back casing and surveyed the inside mechanisms, then put the cover back on. He stared at the counter for a moment without moving, the wheels turning inside his head. He finally gave a professional shrug of indifference.

  “Forty dollars—and before you start acting all outraged, let me tell you the monogram really cuts down the value. Plus, who do you think carries pocket watches anymore? My only chance to sell it is going to be some old geezer who can’t see shit.”

  Gideon scowled at the clerk but knew the figure wouldn’t change. The man likely wasn’t the owner of the shop and would be just as happy for Gideon to storm out so he could go back to watching the basketball game.

  “Forty dollars. That’s fucked up. Can’t hardly buy nothing for forty dollars.”

  “You can get a good buzz on.”

  “Yeah, cause I’m a black man and that’s all I’m looking for. Fuck you, you greasy fat piece of shit. Just give me the forty.”

  The clerk pulled out a journal from under the counter and copied down the information from Gideon’s license. “City requirement,” he explained.

  Gideon snatched his license back along with two twenty-dollar bills and shoved them in his pocket. He stopped and checked the score of the game one more time before leaving, since he wouldn’t be able to afford a new TV that night.

  His team, of course, was losing.

  Thane sat on the window seat of his and Hannah’s apartment at 3:00 a.m., a legal pad resting on his lap and his eyes watching the street below. The neighborhood had called it a night; even the gang of teenagers who rose like vampires when the sun went down had packed it in.

  The trial opened in seven hours. He had spent the last five working on his opening statement, but his mind was blank now. Previous drafts lay crumpled on the floor around him, numbering in the dozens. Kristin had offered to write his opening remarks for him—he knew she would have worked the entire case for free if she’d been allowed to present it in court—but Thane said the words needed to be his. Now he just had to find them.

  On the sidewalk below he caught the movement of a strolling prostitute, constantly tugging the hem of her dress as she ambled down the street. Thane had noticed her in the area before: she lived a couple of blocks away, but didn’t work the neighborhood streets. He wondered what she had been like before turning to prostitution. Even now she carried herself with spirit, shoulders back, chin high, announcing that she was who she was, no apologies needed. Thane wondered whether or not he would get to that point himself.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  Once again, the rubberneckers were forming a line outside the courtroom long before the morning newspapers were delivered. Murder trials always attracted groupies like this, but today was different. Today, nobody cared about Skunk or the dead Ted Gruber. They wanted to watch Los Angeles’s rock star District Attorney do battle with Thane Banning again.

  Thane and his team huddled in a small meeting room across the hall from the courtroom. Sitting at a wooden table, his forehead propped up on one hand, Thane crossed something out on his legal pad and jotted down something else in its place. Words and sentences throughout the page had lines drawn through them, making the document resemble a cobweb. The muffled rumblings of a crowd outside the door and down the hall rolled into the room; nothing discernable, but the energy was building.

  Kristin paced along one side of the room, occasionally looking outside at the mob of people. She had arrived at the courthouse an hour ago, wearing a brand-new black pantsuit and carrying a leather Prada briefcase. Thane wasn’t sure there was anything inside, but she looked formidable carrying it.

  Gideon leaned against the opposite wall, looking at nothing in particular—just passing the time like everyone did at Forsman. He had grumbled about there not being a TV in the room, but other than that he was keeping out of the way. He started digging around in his denim shirt’s front pocket until he found a cigarette. Kristin immediately stopped her marching and vigorously shook her head, pointing toward a No Smoking sign on the door.

  Gideon looked at Thane, but he just shook his head, so the cigarette was stuffed back into the pocket. “Can’t smoke in the room,” he said, “can’t smoke in the building, can’t smoke on the steps. What the hell happened while I was in Forsman? Give me a fucking break.” He pushed away from the wall and sulked toward the door. “Anybody needs me, I’m driving to Arizona for a smoke.” The door slammed hard behind him.

  Kristin watched Thane as he stared at his notes, then took a seat across the table from him. She continued looking at him, but he refused to look up, so she finally broke the unbearable silence. “You nervous?”

  He stopped writing, leaned back in his chair, and considered the question for a moment. “Once in Forsman, I was working by myself in the laundry. Usually I worked with two other guys, but one was in the hole for jumping a guard, and the other had been taken to the ward for some reason, so it was just me. I started getting a bad feeling, and I looked up to see this nut job convict named Wally—three hundred eighty on a trim day—just grinning at me, holding a butcher knife.” Thane looked at Kristin and shrugged. “Then, I was nervous. This is nothing. How about you? You doing OK?”

  “I don’t get nervous.”

  “You never met Wally.”

  He returned his attention to his notes.

  “Are you kidding me?” she said. “So what happened in the laundry room?”

  Thane crossed through one more sentence, then placed the legal pad in his briefcase and stood. “Nothing. He was just having some fun with me, to see what I would do. Wally was kind of odd like that.”

  He picked up his briefcase and turned toward the door. “What do you think?” he asked. “Ready to fight for justice?”

  The courtroom was so crammed that it was hard to breathe. The overhead fans worked nonstop, spinning in vain. Most of the spectators were observing Thane at one end of the defense table, with Kristin on the other end, leafing through piles of notes. Tucked safely between them in an orange jumpsuit was Skunk, slouched over, staring down at his shoes like his spine was missing.

  Gideon sat in the front row of the gallery directly behind Thane, the smell of cigarettes still emanating from his shirt, causing the woman next to him to sniff in disgust. Gideon had said earlier that he’d sat at the defense table enough times in his life, and that he’d feel more comfortable watching the proceedings from the cheap seats.

  On the other side of the aisle, Stone conferred with Winston and Keaton, turning as far away from Thane as possible. After Judge Reynolds entered and called the court in session, Stone pushed away from the table and rose, every movement polished and assured. He wanted to make it clear that this was his house.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “I have good news. You have an
easy job today. I have phone logs. I have eyewitnesses. I have modus operandi. I have so much evidence, in fact, that I don’t want to waste a second more of your time talking about it when I could simply show you. I’m just that proud. Usually an opening statement describes each piece of evidence in turn to ensure that you understand what I’m about to present, but everything in this case will speak just fine for itself.”

  Stone paused for a moment to look across the room at Skunk, then returned his focus to the jury.

  “As you all know, this is a capital case. A man’s life is on the line. The question of whether or not there is sufficient evidence to take another human being’s life is usually a difficult question. This time the answer is easy—and I look forward to showing you why.”

  He walked back towards his seat, his associates nodding in assent at their boss’s performance. Several reporters scribbled in their notebooks, surprise written across each of their faces at the brevity of his opening statement.

  Stone sat down, but Thane didn’t rise from his seat immediately, instead staring at his written statement without moving. Judge Reynolds waited a moment, then finally called out:

  “Mr. Banning?”

  Thane remained frozen, then finally rose. He started to turn toward the jury box, then stopped and placed his legal pad face down on the table. He looked up, aware that he wasn’t displaying the confidence offered by Stone. He walked toward the jury, haltingly at first, feeling like a nervous kid walking up to ask out a girl for the first time. He started speaking slowly as he neared them.

  “District Attorney Stone says this is a simple one. Says this case, your verdict, the final judgment you’ll be called upon to make—that they’re all going to be easy.” He paused, still working out this concept in his mind. “I say that’s true—but only if you aren’t willing to look deeper.”

  He walked up to the jury box, placing his hands on the front railing. A petite young woman wearing a pearl necklace leaned back slightly, doing everything but letting out a small ‘yip’, Thane’s proximity obviously making her nervous.

  “Imagine you’re sitting at a café counter,” Thane continued, quickly taking a step back, “and you ask the man sitting next to you to please pass the salt. He ignores you. Doesn’t even look your way. You ask again and finally he mutters something and reluctantly slides the shaker your way. You make the easy judgement: that man is a jerk.”

  Thane turned away from the jury, approaching the witness stand, where he leaned against the cool wood.

  “The man then tells you his wife just died. Ah . . . suddenly your opinion changes. He wasn’t being rude: he’s in shock. Grieving. You’re filled with compassion for the man. That, too, was easy.” Thane paused, looking down at the floor for a moment, then looked back at the jury. “The man then turns toward you and says he had just killed his wife. My God, what should you do? You are afraid. You want to run and call the police. Again: easy.”

  Thane again approached the jury box, staying a few feet back from the railing this time.

  “Then the man tells you his wife was sick. She suffered horribly for months—terminal cancer. The pain was too much, she begged to be released from her agony, but it was hard for him because he loved her so very, very much. Finally her anguish was more than he could stand, so he turned up the morphine in her IV, just like she asked. Within an hour she was dead. You feel sorry for the man. Your heart breaks for him. That, too, was easy.”

  Thane quietly stepped forward until he was once again leaning on the front railing of the jury box. This time the nervous woman didn’t lean back.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is not always easy. What is right, or fair, or real, is not always easy. I’m not here to tell you I have all the answers or that everything I say is going to be perfectly obvious to you. I simply ask that you not blindly accept the first scenario offered to you. That you not accept what someone else tells you is easy. I ask that you dig for the truth. If you truly want justice—if you demand justice—then you’re going to have to question what you’re being told. Because believe me, this case is anything but easy.”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  The first witness for the prosecution was Vince Struthers, a highly decorated police detective only five years from retirement. Thane could see why Stone had picked him for a first witness: Struthers sat comfortably in the witness chair, looking for all the world as if he were merely sitting on his back porch, sharing a few drinks with friends.

  Stone walked the detective through the murder scene, starting from the time Struthers and his partner arrived at the scene until the coroner’s confirmation of the cause of death, although a bullet to the head made that simply a formality. Struthers rattled off the necessary details requested by the District Attorney so that no piece of the story was left out: the location of the body, the estimated time of death, the list of items suspected to have been stolen.

  “So, Detective Struthers,” Stone said, “you’re saying you identified Mr. Burns as a suspect within a couple of hours?”

  “Yes, sir. The intruder bypassed the security alarm with a couple of twisties—like you find in the produce section. Mr. Burns had the same MO from previous break-ins. As far as I was concerned, he might as well have signed his name at the door.”

  “So you had a suspect. What did you do then?”

  “We got lucky. We checked phone logs from Detective Gruber’s home and found the number to a factory where Mr. Burns worked. We estimate the call was made about ten minutes before Mr. Gruber was killed.”

  Stone nodded. “Good work, Detective.”

  Struthers turned his head and looked directly at Thane. “It’s not always that easy. But sometimes it is.”

  The corners of Stone’s mouth kinked up. “Yes, Detective, I have to agree with you on that,” he said. “No further questions.”

  Thane stood without speaking for a moment, simply looking at his notes. He had never cross-examined a witness before. “Detective,” he began, “the twist-ties you mentioned: were they stripped completely clean?”

  Struthers looked bored.

  “No, just the ends were stripped.”

  “You have detailed knowledge of my client’s MO, Detective. You’ve read his file. Isn’t it true that Mr. Burns stripped all of the plastic coating off during his previous string of burglaries?”

  Struthers shrugged nonchalantly. “Maybe. I think you might be right, but Burns is the only one we know who used them at all, stripped or not. I don’t really see what difference it makes.”

  “It could make a big difference, Detective. A few minutes ago, you mentioned some of the stolen items: a DVD player, a coin collection, a wallet—but isn’t it believed that a computer disk may have also been stolen?”

  “A number of disks were scattered on the floor, but I can’t say whether or not any were taken.”

  Thane stepped away from his table and toward the witness for the first time during his cross-examination. “The disks were numbered. You put them back in order, didn’t you? And found one was missing?”

  “There was a gap in the numbers, yes, but that’s not to say the disk was ever there. For all I know, the victim tossed it. Or lost it. I didn’t even know anyone still used disks anymore. Who knows how old they were?”

  Thane looked down at the floor and shook his head, as if he were trying to make sense of this but it just wouldn’t take.

  “That may be, but Detective Gruber kept them right next to the computer, so we can assume he used them. And the way the disks were scattered on the floor, we can assume the perpetrator deliberately went through them—trying to find something, perhaps. I mean, why else would a burglar waste his time with something that obviously wasn’t worth anything? He would have simply left them in the case. Plus, although you mentioned a few things that were stolen, there were still a number of valuable objects in plain sight, u
ntouched. Some of them were worth more than all of what was stolen put together. That seems a little strange, doesn’t it? Why rifle through all those disks when there was a fortune sitting on the mantelpiece in the next room?”

  Struthers shrugged again. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’d have to ask the burglar.”

  “Detective Struthers, you testified that my client’s name came up within a couple of hours. Were you the one to make that connection?”

  For the first time, Struthers hesitated slightly. “No, District Attorney Stone read the police report and remembered this guy’s MO,” he replied at last. “It was real impressive. He had all the facts from the previous case up in his head already. When he suggested we look into him, we made the connection to the phone log.”

  Thane glanced back toward Stone. “So it was Mr. Stone who suggested you investigate the defendant.”

  “Yes, but we would have come up with it ourselves in time. Mr. Burns’s dealings were well-known amongst our team.”

  “That was nice of Mr. Stone to give you all the credit today for putting my client on your radar. So it’s safe to assume Mr. Stone knows a lot about my client’s criminal history, since his office prosecuted him on a couple of occasions before . . .”

  Stone tossed his pen on the table and stood. “Objection, Your Honor. Relevance?”

  “Sustained.” Judge Reynolds looked down at Thane. “Let’s move this along.”

  “Detective Struthers, you said you reviewed the victim’s phone records, but you didn’t mention that those records also showed three calls to District Attorney Stone’s office earlier that week. Why is that?”