“Let’s talk about the wire,” says Lenore. “Had this ever happened before? Trouble with the electronics?”
“A few times,” he says.
“Do you know what causes it?”
Frost makes a face, an expression for a million reasons. “The things are touchy. Sometimes they get wet,” he says.
“Was it raining inside the room that night, Sergeant?”
Some smiles in the press row.
Frost looks at her, the picture of sarcasm. “No.”
“Was the decoy taking a shower?”
“No, but she might have been sweating.”
“Was she sweating?”
“How do I know? I wasn’t inside the lady’s bra.”
“You couldn’t see her, could you?”
“No.”
“There was no keyhole in the door, was there?”
“No.”
“What kind of lock was it?”
“Electronic,” he says. “You slip a card in a slot and pull it out, and the lock releases. You push the latch and the door opens.”
“How thick was that door, Sergeant Frost?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t pay any attention.”
“Well, was it one inch thick, two inches?”
“Like I say. I didn’t pay any attention.”
“Was it heavy, hard to push, when it was unlocked?”
“It was a hotel door,” he says. “I didn’t break it down. I just opened it.”
“Do you know if it was wood or metal?”
“I didn’t send it out for analysis. I couldn’t say.”
“Sergeant Frost, would it surprise you if I told you that door was an inch and a half thick, steel frame and outer case, filled with insulation, so that it was not only fire rated, but virtually impervious to sound?”
He makes a face. Gives her a shrug. “Maybe the walls were thin,” he says.
“What was the tone of voice Ms. Hall and the defendant used that night?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, were they shouting, whispering, talking in a normal tone?”
“I don’t know.”
“A moment ago you told us you heard them.”
“That’s right,” he says.
“So what tone of voice were they using?”
“Normal,” he says. “Normal talk.”
Lenore turns away from him at the podium. She drops her voice an octave: “Sergeant, when did you last have your hearing checked?”
“What?”
“Objection, Your Honor. A cheap trick,” says Kline. “I would have hoped for something more from worthy counsel,” he says.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but you were able to hear me.” Lenore turns Kline into her own witness.
“You were facing toward me, away from the witness,” he says.
“The witness by his own admission had a locked door between himself and the two people inside the room that night, an inch and a half of steel and sound insulation, and he just told us they were talking in a normal voice. If he couldn’t hear me, he couldn’t hear them.”
“Now you’re an acoustics expert,” says Kline. “You have no idea what he heard that night.”
“Neither does he.” Lenore points at Frost. “Next he’ll tell us he has X-ray vision. And I’m sure that before we’re all finished he’ll don a cape and tights in a bathroom stall somewhere, and fly around the room for us.”
“Counsel”—Radovich doesn’t like this—“if you have objections, couch ’em the right way, and address ’em to the court.”
“I’d like this . . . this . . . this . . .” Kline searches for a term sufficiently low to describe Lenore’s antics. “. . . this stunt”—the best he can do—“stricken from the record.”
“Overruled,” says Radovich. “The witness’s ‘what’ will remain in the record.”
“I’d like an answer to my question,” says Lenore. “When was your hearing last checked?” Insult to injury.
“I have a complete physical every year.”
“Does that involve a complete auditory test, or do they just look in your ears?”
“Look in the ears,” he says.
“Did they find anything inside?” she says.
“Objection.” Kline’s back up.
“Sustained. Ms. Goya, you’re testing the patience of this court.”
“Sorry, Your Honor.”
“Get on with it.”
Kline sits down.
Lenore studies the ceiling tiles of the courtroom for a moment, collecting her thoughts.
“Sergeant,” she says, “were there any instructions given to Ms. Hall that night in order to ensure her personal safety?”
“Like what?” he says.
“Well, here you had a young woman, going behind locked doors with strange men. You had no idea whether potential suspects might be armed. There must have been some precautions taken. Was she armed?”
“No.”
“Was there any kind of signal that she might give if she got in trouble?”
“Like what?”
“Like a signal word. Some way to communicate that she wanted help?”
“We had a signal,” he says.
“So if the signal is spoken by the decoy you would pick it up on the electronic wire and that would be the clue that she was in trouble. You’d come running?”
“That’s right.”
“The police report talks about a backup safety device used that night.”
“There was a panic button,” he says.
“Could you tell the court what a panic button is?”
“It’s in the report,” he says.
“Fine. Tell us what it is.”
“It’s an electronic button set to a different frequency than the wire. Sometimes it’s pinned in the decoy’s clothing. Usually it’s in her purse.”
“Sort of a signal of last resort?” says Lenore.
“If you like.”
“Was this button something that you used all the time?”
“No. Just in certain cases.”
“Why was it used in this case?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it have been because someone anticipated that the electronic wire wasn’t going to function in this case?”
“No. Nothing like that,” he says. “We just used it in some cases and not in others.”
The point is well made here, that if the cops wanted to set Acosta up, some bogus reason for a meeting between Hall and the judge, they would not want a recording of their conversation. If he became angry, a safety word would be worthless with no wire to pick it up. The button was Hall’s lifeline.
“So what instructions did you give Ms. Hall? How was she instructed to use the safety signal and the panic button?”
“Signal word first,” says Frost. “Button second, only if the first didn’t work.”
“Why not use the button first?”
“There was always risk in using it. The john might see her do it. Get violent,” he says.
“Was Ms. Hall pretty bright? Cool under fire?”
“Yeah.”
“She knew what she was doing?”
“You could say that.”
“She would follow instructions well?”
He makes a face, concession, and nods.
“I take that to mean yes?”
“Yes.”
“Had she ever used these safety procedures before, to your knowledge?”
“The safety word. She needed it a couple of times with other johns. The button, she’d never seen before. We had to tell her how to use it.”
“What was the
signal word that night?”
“A phrase. Something. I can’t remember. We change ’em all the time.”
“‘It’s a hot night’?” says Lenore.
This was not something contained in the police report. Kline looks at Lenore, his eyes venal little slits, knowing there is only one place she could have gleaned this information: her interview with Brittany Hall that day in her office. He makes a note on the outside of his file folder as I look at him.
“Was that the safety signal for trouble that night?” says Lenore. “‘It’s a hot night’?”
“It coulda been,” he says. “Sounds right.”
“Did you hear those words uttered that night by the decoy, Ms. Hall? Did you hear her say, ‘It’s a hot night’?”
“No.”
“But you were listening at the door, right?”
“Right.”
“And you heard the conversation between the defendant and Ms. Hall? Voices in a normal tone, stating all the terms of commerce?” says Lenore.
“That’s right.”
“But you never heard the decoy utter the words ‘It’s a hot night’?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it a fact, Sergeant, that the decoy uttered that phrase not once, but three separate times, and you couldn’t hear it, because you couldn’t hear anything through that door?”
“That’s not true,” he says.
Lenore could only have gotten this from Hall, and Kline knows it.
“Then how do you explain the fact that you responded to the signal of last resort, the electronic signal from the panic button, which Hall had been instructed not to use unless the safety word failed?”
This is recorded in the police reports, an undeniable truth. Frost entered the room only after being told that the signal had sounded.
“Maybe she panicked,” he says. “Made a mistake.”
“Right.”
It is the problem with little inconsistencies. They tend to breed like flies.
“Sergeant Frost, you say you heard this conversation between the defendant and Ms. Hall from your position outside the door. What exactly did you hear?”
“I heard the defendant offer Ms. Hall money in exchange for sex.”
“Yes. We all heard you testify to that. But what were the defendant’s words. Precisely?” she says.
“I didn’t write them down,” he says.
“So you can’t recall the defendant’s words?”
This could be fatal to Kline’s argument.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what did he say?”
“He negotiated with her,” says Frost.
“Looking for a bargain, was he?”
The witness makes a face, like it happens.
“What were his words, Sergeant Frost?”
He thinks for a moment. “How about two hundred—two bills—something like that.”
“That’s as precise as you can get?”
Frost screws up his face, thinks for a moment.
“He said . . .” Some hesitation. “He said, ‘I’ll give you two hundred dollars for sex.’”
Lenore almost laughs at this, the colloquial pitch put forth. Like the john was buying milk.
“Those were his exact words. ‘I’ll give you two hundred dollars for sex’?”
“Right.”
“A moment ago you said half-and-half.”
“What difference does it make?” Acosta in my ear. “It is all lies.”
“Then we should cut it out like a cancer,” I whisper back to him. When our eyes meet, there is, for the first time, some melding of minds here, a sense in his expression that makes me believe him. It is not that I believe the Coconut is incapable of these acts. He has probably done them at one time or another. But I do not believe that he has done them this time.
“Maybe he said, ‘I’ll give you two hundred dollars for half-and-half,’” says Frost.
“Which is it?”
“Half-and-half,” he says. “It was half-and-half.” A satisfied look. A story he can live with. How big a lie can take refuge in ten words?
“And you’re sure about the two-hundred-dollar part?”
“Absolutely.” Frost gives her a judicious nod.
Acosta flinches at my side. “A fucking lie.” He at least has the adjective right.
“I want to testify,” he tells me. A disaster in the making. I tell him to be quiet.
Lenore turns away from the witness for a moment, shuffling some papers. She reaches over and flips a single page onto the table in front of Kline. He picks it up and reads. Before he can finish, Lenore asks the judge if she can approach the witness. Radovich nods, and on the way she delivers another page to the judge.
“Sergeant, I’m going to show you a document and ask if you can identify it.” She passes a third page to the witness. He looks at it.
“Do you know what that is?”
“Inventory sheet,” he says.
“And where does it come from? Who generates that particular sheet?”
“The county jail,” he says.
“And what’s the purpose of this particular form?”
“To account for a suspect’s personal belongings when he’s booked.”
“You’ve seen these forms before? Maybe not this particular one, but others like it?”
“Sure.” He drops the form onto the railing in front of the witness box, and turns his attention from it.
“And does this particular form have a name on it?”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t look.
“Whose name?” says Lenore.
“The defendant. Armando Acosta.”
“And the charge?”
“Six forty-seven B,” he says.
“Is that the personal property booking sheet for the night in question?”
“Appears to be,” he says.
“Is there a box on that form, Sergeant, entitled ‘Cash in Possession’?”
Frost’s expression is suddenly vacant, like the eyes of a man turned inward, searching for a soul that isn’t there.
“Sergeant, I would ask you to look at the box entitled ‘Cash in Possession’ and tell me what it says.”
Frost picks up the paper and looks, and suddenly it settles on him. He is a stone in the witness box, not responding to her question.
“Tell me, Sergeant, did your decoy take credit cards? Or maybe she was in the habit of taking personal checks from johns? What does it say in that box, Sergeant?”
He looks at Kline, who cannot help him.
“Tell us, Sergeant, how is it possible that the defendant could have offered your decoy a two-hundred-dollar fee for services, when he had only forty-two dollars and twenty-seven cents in his possession that night? Was she offering discount coupons? Tell me, Sergeant.”
“I don’t know,” says Frost. “I only know what I heard.”
“Isn’t it common practice, Sergeant, in such an undercover arrest, to wait until after the suspect pays his money before effecting an arrest?” This is a problem for them, since the police report makes it clear that Hall had never been paid.
By now Frost is a face filled with concessions. “In some cases,” he says.
“In virtually all cases, isn’t that what you are told? To wait until you see the color of their money? Isn’t that, the payment of money, usually the overt act required to make an arrest?”
“Sometimes,” he says.
“Not sometimes, Sergeant. Isn’t that what you are told? Isn’t that standard operating procedure in such an arrest?”
“Objection, counsel is arguing with the witness,” says Kline.
“Sounds like a good argument to me,” says Radovich. �
�Overruled.” The judge is waiting for an answer.
“Tell us, Sergeant, why did you enter the room that night before the defendant paid any money to your decoy?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “The wire failed. I guess I panicked.”
“But you heard everything that was going on. That’s what you told us. Isn’t that right?”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t it a fact, Sergeant, that no money was paid over, because no offer of any money was ever made by the defendant that night? That their conversation had nothing to do with prostitution?”
Pencils scratching in the background. Dense looks from the press row, wondering what they could have been talking about.
“That’s not true,” he says.
“Then how do you explain a two-hundred-dollar offer when the defendant didn’t have two hundred dollars?”
“Maybe he was gonna have her put it on the tab,” says Frost.
“Move to strike. Nonresponsive,” says Lenore.
“Granted,” says the judge. “Answer the question,” he says.
“I can’t,” says Frost. “I don’t know.”
It is always the problem with a lie.
CHAPTER 12
“IT’S WHAT I TOLD YOU ABOUT RADOVICH,” SAYS Harry. “He may not know the law, but he has a sixth sense for what is right.” Harry likes the cow-county judge.
“Probably a Democrat,” he says. Hinds would take a bleeding heart every time. When I look at Harry’s clients I can understand why. This morning, however, I will say that Radovich ranks right up there, next to the Almighty, on most of our lists, Lenore’s and mine included. He has granted our motion for a stay. There will be no separate trial on the solicitation charge.
“I thought the argument on joinder went right over his head,” says Lenore.
“Probably did,” says Harry. “But he needed some cerebral hook to hang his hat.” Harry’s looking at the court’s minute order, the single-page document announcing Radovich’s decision. Then he hands it to me. Harry’s take is that the judge was not going to allow Frost to poison a jury pool with obvious lies. Since the question of credibility belongs to the jury, Radovich decided the matter on the issue of joinder.
Though she won, this seems to irritate Lenore. She calls the judge “result oriented.” “The right decision for all the wrong reasons,” she says.
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