I thought about all of this and realized there was one more exception to consider. I would not have to report the intended jury tampering if I were to stop the crime from happening.
I straightened up and looked around. We were on Sunset coming into West Hollywood. I looked ahead and saw a familiar sign.
“Patrick, pull over up here in front of Book Soup. I want to run in for a minute.”
Patrick pulled the Lincoln to the curb in front of the bookstore. I told him to wait in front and I jumped out. I went in the store’s front door and back into the stacks. Although I loved the store, I wasn’t there to shop. I needed to make a phone call and I didn’t want Patrick to hear it.
The mystery aisle was too crowded with customers. I went further back and found an empty alcove where big coffee-table books were stacked heavily on the shelves and tables. I pulled my phone and called my investigator.
“Cisco, it’s me. Where are you?”
“At home. What’s up?”
“Lorna there?”
“No, she went to a movie with her sister. She should be back in—”
“That’s all right. I wanted to talk to you. I want you to do something and you may not want to do it. If you don’t, I understand. Either way, I don’t want you to talk about it with anybody. Including Lorna.”
There was a hesitation before he answered.
“Who do I kill?”
We both started to laugh and it relieved some of the tension that had been building through the night.
“We can talk about that later but this might be just as dicey. I want you to shadow somebody for me and find out everything you can about him. The catch is, if you get caught, we’ll both probably get our tickets pulled.”
“Who is it?”
“Juror number seven.”
Forty-three
As soon as I got back in the Lincoln, I started to regret what I was doing. I was walking a fine gray line that could lead me into big trouble. On the one hand, it is perfectly reasonable for an attorney to investigate a report of jury misconduct and tampering. But on the other hand, that investigation could be viewed as tampering in itself. Judge Stanton had taken steps to ensure the anonymity of the jury. I had just asked my investigator to subvert that. If it blew up in our faces, Stanton would be more than upset and would do more than give me the squint. This wasn’t a Make-A-Wish infraction. Stanton would complain to the bar, the chief judge, and all the way up the line to the Supreme Court if he could get them to listen. He would see to it that the Elliot trial was my last.
Patrick drove up Fareholm and pulled the car into the garage below my house. We walked out and then up the stairs to the front deck. It was almost ten o’clock and I was beat after a fourteen-hour day. But my adrenaline kicked in when I saw a man sitting in one of the deck chairs, his face in silhouette with the lights of the city behind him. I put my arm out to stop Patrick from advancing, the way a parent would stop a child from stepping blindly into the street.
“Hello, Counselor.”
Bosch. I recognized the voice and the greeting. I relaxed and let Patrick continue. We stepped up onto the porch and I unlocked the door to let Patrick go in. I then closed the door and turned to Bosch.
“Nice view,” he said. “Defending scumbags got you this place?”
I was too tired to do the dance with him.
“What are you doing here, Detective?”
“I figured you might be heading home after the bookstore,” he said. “So I just went on ahead and waited for you up here.”
“Well, I’m done for the night. You can give your team the word, if there really is a team.”
“What makes you think there’s not?”
“I don’t know. I just haven’t seen anybody. I hope you weren’t bullshitting me, Bosch. I’ve got my ass way out in the wind on this.”
“After court you had dinner with your client at Water Grill. You both had the fillet of sole and both of you raised your voices at times. Your client drank liberally, which resulted in you driving him home in his car. On your way back from there you stopped into Book Soup and made a phone call you obviously didn’t want your driver to hear.”
I was impressed.
“Okay, then, never mind that. I get it. They’re out there. What do you want, Bosch? What’s going on?”
Bosch stood up and approached me.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said. “What was Walter Elliot so hot and bothered about tonight at dinner? And who’d you call in the back of the bookstore?”
“First of all, Elliot’s my client and I’m not telling you what we talked about. I’m not crossing that line with you. And as far as the call in the bookstore goes, I was ordering pizza because, as you and your colleagues might have noticed, I didn’t eat my dinner tonight. Stick around if you want a slice.”
Bosch looked at me with that half smile of his, the knowing look with his flat dead eyes.
“So that’s how you want to play it, Counselor?”
“For now.”
We didn’t speak for a long moment. We just sort of stood there, waiting for the next clever line. It didn’t come and I decided I really was tired and hungry.
“Good night, Detective Bosch.”
I went in and closed the door, leaving Bosch out there on the deck.
Forty-four
My turn at Detective Kinder did not come until late on Tuesday, after the prosecutor had spent several more hours drawing the details of the investigation out on direct examination. This worked in my favor. I thought the jury—and Julie Favreau confirmed this by text message—was getting bored by the minutiae of the testimony and would welcome a new line of questions.
The direct testimony primarily regarded the investigative efforts that took place after Walter Elliot’s arrest. Kinder described at length his delving into the defendant’s marriage, the discovery of a recently vested prenuptial agreement, and the efforts Elliot made in the weeks before the murders to determine how much money and control of Archway Studios he would lose in a divorce. With a time chart he was also able to establish through Elliot’s statements and documented movements that the defendant had no credible alibi for the estimated time of the murders.
Golantz also took the time to question Kinder about all the dead ends and offshoots of the investigation that proved to be ancillary. Kinder described the many unfounded leads that were called in and dutifully checked out, the investigation of Johan Rilz in an effort to determine if he had been the main target of the killer, and the comparison of the double murder to other cases that were similar and unsolved.
In all, Golantz and Kinder appeared to have done a thorough job of nailing my client to the murders in Malibu, and by midafternoon the young prosecutor was satisfied enough to say, “No more questions, Your Honor.”
It was now finally my turn and I had decided to go after Kinder in a cross-examination that would stay tightly focused on just three areas of his direct testimony, and then surprise him with an unexpected punch to the gut. I moved to the lectern to conduct the questioning.
“Detective Kinder, I know we will be hearing from the medical examiner later in the trial, but you testified that you were informed after the autopsy that the time of death of Mrs. Elliot and Mr. Rilz was estimated to be between eleven a.m. and noon on the day of the murders.”
“That is correct.”
“Was it closer to eleven or closer to noon?”
“It’s impossible to tell for sure. That is just the time frame in which it happened.”
“Okay, and once you had that frame, you then proceeded to make sure that the man you had already arrested had no alibi, correct?”
“I would not put it that way, no.”
“Then, how would you put it?”
“I would say that it was my obligation to continue to investigate the case and prepare it for trial. Part of that due diligence would be to keep an open mind to the possibility that the suspect had an alibi for the murders. In carr
ying out that obligation, I determined according to multiple interviews as well as records kept at the gate at Archway Studios that Mr. Elliot left the studio, driving by himself, at ten forty that morning. This gave him plenty of time to—”
“Thank you, Detective. You’ve answered the question.”
“I haven’t finished my answer.”
Golantz stood and asked the judge if the witness could finish his answer, and Stanton allowed it. Kinder continued in his Homicide 101 tone.
“As I was saying, this gave Mr. Elliot plenty of time to get to the Malibu house within the parameters of the estimated time of death.”
“Did you say plenty of time to get there?”
“Enough time.”
“Earlier you described making the drive yourself several times. When was that?”
“The first time was exactly one week after the murders. I left the gatehouse at Archway at ten forty in the morning and drove to the Malibu house. I arrived at eleven forty-two, well within the murder window.”
“How did you know that you were taking the same route that Mr. Elliot would have taken?”
“I didn’t. So I just took what I considered the most obvious and quickest route that somebody would take. Most people don’t take the long cut. They take the short cut—the shortest amount of time to their destination. From Archway I took Melrose to La Brea and then La Brea down to the ten. At that point I headed west to the Pacific Coast Highway.”
“How did you know that the traffic you encountered would be the same that Mr. Elliot encountered?”
“I didn’t.”
“Traffic in Los Angeles can be a very unpredictable thing, can it not?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you drove the route several times?”
“One reason, yes.”
“Okay, Detective Kinder, you testified that you drove the route a total of five times and got to the Malibu house each time before your so-called murder window closed, right?”
“Correct.”
“In regard to these five driving tests, what was the earliest time you got to the house in Malibu?”
Kinder looked at his notes.
“That would have been the first time, when I got there at eleven forty-two.”
“And what was the worst time?”
“The worst?”
“What was the longest drive time you recorded during your five trips?”
Kinder checked his notes again.
“The latest I got there was eleven fifty-one.”
“Okay, so your best time was still in the last third of the window the medical examiner set for the time of these murders, and your worst time would have left Mr. Elliot less than ten minutes to sneak into his house and murder two people. Correct?”
“Yes, but it could have been done.”
“Could have? You don’t sound very confident, Detective.”
“I am very confident that the defendant had the time to commit these murders.”
“But only if the murders took place at least forty-two minutes after the killing window opened, correct?”
“If you want to look at it that way.”
“It’s not how I am looking at it, Detective. I’m working with what the medical examiner has given us. So, in summary for the jury, you are saying that Mr. Elliot left his studio at ten forty and got all the way out to Malibu, snuck into his house, surprised his wife and her lover in the upstairs bedroom and killed them both, all before that window slammed shut at noon. Do I have all of that right?”
“Essentially. Yes.”
I shook my head as if it was a lot to swallow.
“Okay, Detective, let’s move on. Please tell the jury how many times you began the driving route to Malibu but broke it off when you knew that you weren’t going to make it before that window closed at noon.”
“That never happened.”
But there had been a slight hesitation in Kinder’s response. I was sure the jury picked up on it.
“Yes or no, Detective, if I were to produce records and even video that showed you started at the Archway gate at ten forty in the morning seven times and not five, then those records would be false?”
Kinder’s eyes flicked to Golantz and then back to me.
“What you’re suggesting happened didn’t happen,” he said.
“And you’re not answering the question, Detective. Once again, yes or no: If I introduced records that showed you conducted your driving study at least seven times but have only testified to five times, would those records be false?”
“No, but I didn’t—”
“Thank you, Detective. I only asked for a yes or no response.”
Golantz stood and asked the judge to allow the witness to fully answer the question but Stanton told him he could take it up on re direct. But now I hesitated. Knowing that Golantz would go after Kinder’s explanation on redirect, I had the opportunity to get it now and possibly still control it and turn the admission to my advantage. It was a gamble because at the moment, I felt I had dinged him pretty good, and if I went with him until court adjourned for the day, then the jurors would go home with police suspicion percolating in their brains. That was never a bad thing.
I decided to risk it and try to control it.
“Detective, tell us how many of these test drives you broke off before reaching the house in Malibu.”
“There were two.”
“Which ones?”
“The second time and the last time—the seventh.”
I nodded.
“And you stopped these because you knew you would never make it to the house in Malibu within the murder window, correct?”
“No, that’s very incorrect.”
“Then, what was the reason you stopped the test drives?”
“One time, I was called back to the office to conduct an interview of somebody waiting there, and the other time, I was listening to the radio and I heard a deputy call for backup. I diverted to back him up.”
“Why didn’t you document these in your report on your driving time investigation?”
“I didn’t think they were germane, because they were incomplete tests.”
“So these incompletes were not documented anywhere in that thick file of yours?”
“No, they were not.”
“And so we have only your word about what caused you to stop them before reaching the Elliot house in Malibu, correct?”
“That would be correct.”
I nodded and decided I had flogged him enough on this front. I knew Golantz could rehabilitate Kinder on redirect, maybe even come up with documentation of the calls that pulled Kinder off the Malibu route. But I hoped that I had raised at least a question of trust in the minds of the jurors. I took my small victory and moved on.
I next hammered Kinder on the fact that there was no murder weapon recovered and that his six-month investigation of Walter Elliot had never linked him to a gun of any sort. I hit this from several angles so that Kinder had to repeatedly acknowledge that a key part of the investigation and prosecution was never located, even though if Elliot was the killer, he’d had little time to hide the weapon.
Finally, in frustration, Kinder said, “Well, it’s a big ocean out there, Mr. Haller.”
It was an opening I was waiting for.
“A big ocean, Detective? Are you suggesting that Mr. Elliot had a boat and dumped the gun out in the middle of the Pacific?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Then, like what?”
“I am just saying the gun could have ended up in the water and the currents took it away before our divers got out there.”
“It could have ended up out there? You want to take Mr. Elliot’s life and livelihood away from him on a ‘could have,’ Detective Kinder?”
“No, that’s not what I am saying.”
“What you are saying is that you don’t have a gun, you can’t connect a gun to Mr. Elliot, but you have never wavered in believing he is your man,
correct?”
“We had a gunshot residue examination that came back positive. In my mind that connected Mr. Elliot to a gun.”
“What gun was that?”
“We don’t have it.”
“ Uh-huh, and can you sit there and say to a scientific certainty that Mr. Elliot fired a gun on the day his wife and Johan Rilz were murdered?”
“Well, not to a scientific certainty, but the test—”
“Thank you, Detective Kinder. I think that answers the question. Let’s move on.”
I flipped the page on my notepad and studied the next set of questions I had written the night before.
“Detective Kinder, in the course of your investigation, did you determine when Johan Rilz and Mitzi Elliot became acquainted?”
“I determined that she hired him for his interior decorating services in the fall of two thousand five. If she was acquainted with him before that, I do not know.”
“And when did they become lovers?”
“That was impossible for us to determine. I do know that Mr. Rilz’s appointment book showed regular appointments with Mrs. Elliot at one home or the other. The frequency increased about six months before her death.”
“Was he paid for each one of those appointments?”
“Mr. Rilz kept very incomplete books. It was hard to determine if he was paid for specific appointments. But in general, the payments to Mr. Rilz from Mrs. Elliot increased when the frequency of the appointments increased.”
The Brass Verdict Page 30