“It seems you can add me to the list of people who owe you their thanks,” Karp said.
“Aw, shucks, Marshal Dillon,” Pardo said, affecting a western twang. “ ’Twern’t nothin’ . . . But seriously, I’d probably be dead if Marlene hadn’t shown up when she did. So I guess we’re even.”
“Obviously, these guys were trying to help Johnson,” Murrow said. “Do you think Nash was involved?”
“I hope not,” Karp said. “I really do. As arrogant and ideologically driven as she is, the system doesn’t need any more blows; people are going to stop believing, and that’s when we’ll really be in trouble. Defense lawyers trying to knock off prosecution witnesses would be another nail in the coffin. In the meantime, let’s turn our focus back to the trial.” He looked at Pardo. “Do you think you can testify in about an hour?”
“Yes, I’m ready. In fact, I think in a weird way, having to fight for my life has made me more determined than ever to see this through.”
Karp nodded. “I’ve met some tough characters in my time, starting with Detective Fulton and Kenny Katz, who between them have been blown up and shot more times than Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Terminator movie. But I don’t think they have a corner on the market with you and Marlene around.”
“Thanks,” Pardo replied. “If I remember correctly, you took a couple for the team yourself.”
“And that wasn’t the first time,” Fulton added.
“Okay, okay. If you folks can get past this tough love fest, what do I tell the press?” Murrow asked. “There was a television crew on the scene when they were still trying to get Marlene’s truck off the one guy, and the others are clamoring for a comment.”
“Same as we always tell them,” Karp replied. “Come to court, that’s where we do our talking, otherwise no comment.”
“That will make them happy,” Murrow said.
“The taxpayers of New York County don’t pay me to please the media,” Karp said with a smile. “Okay, then, I believe Ms. Milquetost is ordering sandwiches; let’s have lunch and go over what’s next.”
An hour later, with Judge Kershner on her dais and the jury seated, Karp stood and nodded to Fulton. “The People call Judy Pardo.”
As Pardo entered the courtroom, the spectators and members of the media in the gallery craned their heads to get a look at the cop-turned–heroin addicted prostitute they’d all heard or written or talked about. Such a buzz of muted voices rose from the benches that Kershner banged her gavel to bring order to the courtroom.
While Pardo was sworn in, Karp used the opportunity to see how Johnson was reacting. The defendant was glaring at Pardo, but he must have felt the eyes of his nemesis on him and turned to meet his gaze. Karp allowed himself the slightest smile, and was pleased to see the fear in Johnson’s eyes before the killer looked away.
Karp began by asking Judy Pardo to talk a little bit about her upbringing. He wanted her to get comfortable with answering questions, looking at the jury as she did so, and he was also setting the stage for when he had to deal with less pleasant subjects.
“Well, I was born and raised in New Jersey and had a good childhood for the most part,” she said. “Pretty typical Italian family. Dad was a plumber, mom was a stay-at-home housewife. Me, my sister, and brother all went to Catholic school.”
“Were you a good student?”
Pardo hesitated. “Well, I tried hard. I’m dyslexic, though back then they called it ‘slow learner,’ and I had a hard time reading. Some of the other kids called me dumb, so my self-esteem took some hits.”
“How did you compensate?”
“My mother worked with me a lot. And I had some good teachers who were patient and understanding. I don’t take standardized tests well, but I do great with verbal testing.”
“So you made it through high school?”
“And two years of dental hygienist school with a lot of hard work, tears, and frustration. But I got mostly A’s.”
“Are you still dyslexic?”
“Yes. It’s not something that goes away with age. With a lot of time, I can read and write . . . slowly. You learn to compensate, but it’s still there.”
“Are you going to school now?”
“Yes,” Pardo said with pride. “I’m studying to be a sonographer.”
“Is it difficult?”
“Yes, there’s quite a bit of reading material and I have to be able to look at results and interpret what I see. But we’ve come a long way in understanding dyslexia and helping people cope. Such as word recognition software my guardian angel bought for me.”
Karp knew who her “guardian angel” was but left the statement alone and moved on to more difficult topics. “Was there an incident, or incidents, during your childhood that also affected your self-esteem?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” Nash said. “This is more Oprah than court, with all due respect.”
“Your Honor, please take this subject in connection with respect to the subsequent revelations of her character, which the People will disclose shortly through her testimony,” Karp responded. “I suspect the defense will try to use it to its advantage. However, understanding Ms. Pardo’s character will better enable the jury to determine the truth of her testimony.”
“Very well, objection overruled, please proceed,” Kershner said.
Pardo nodded. “Yes. My parents liked to have friends over for cocktails and card games. There was one friend of the family, we called him Uncle John, who was over a lot. He used to insist on ‘tucking me in’ when it was time for the kids to go to bed. And he used to touch me inappropriately.”
“These touches were sexual in nature?”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Not right away. I was only seven or eight when this was going on. He told me that I would get in trouble if I told anyone that he’d touched me down there.”
“Did you eventually tell someone?”
“Yes, when I was nine, maybe ten, I told my priest.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said it was my fault. That I must have ‘enticed’ Uncle John.”
“How did you react to that?”
“I believed him,” Pardo said with a shrug. “He was the priest. He spoke for God. I felt even worse about myself, though I didn’t know what I should have done differently.”
“Did you ever tell anyone else?”
Pardo nodded. “I eventually told my mom, and she told my dad.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly, but Uncle John quit coming to our house. I assume my dad said or did something to him.”
“How do you think the sexual abuse affected you later as you got older, became a young adult?”
“A sexually abused child has a difficult time with boundaries,” Pardo said. “I also dealt with a lot of depression in my teenage years and to this day, really.”
“Did you and are you getting any help to deal with this?”
“Yes. I’ve gone to counseling since I was a teenager, though I haven’t been much over the past ten years or so. But I’m seeing a counselor now, and a lot of that is coming to terms with what happened to me when I was a little girl.”
Karp waited as Pardo poured herself a drink of water and took a sip, her hand shaking as she held the cup to her lips. “Ms. Pardo, did you at some point join the New York Police Department?”
The question caused the gallery to start buzzing again. This was the lead-in to what they’d come to hear. But they quieted down with a look from Kershner.
“Yes.”
“Would you tell the jurors how that came about?”
“I was twenty-one and dating a police detective named Gary Proust,” Pardo began.
“Excuse me for interrupting, how did you meet?”
“I answered an advertisement for a ‘consultant’ to work ‘undercover’ for a loss prevention firm,” Pardo said.
“Which is . . . ?”
&nbs
p; “A company that worked with other companies to cut down on their losses, such as employee theft.”
“Whose company was it?”
“It was Gary’s; he’d started it about five years before we met. It was supposed to be a sort of moonlighting thing in his off hours, but he probably spent more time on the company than he did police work. I met with him and it sounded exciting. He wanted me to work undercover, gaining people’s trust and then busting them if we could catch them.”
“Were there indications that not everything was on the up-and-up?” Karp asked.
“Yes,” Pardo said. “Some of these theft rings were pretty big, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sometimes when we caught them, Gary would let them buy their way out of trouble—he called it a ‘fine’—and we wouldn’t report them.”
“Why did you go along with that?”
Pardo took a deep breath and shook her head. “I guess I was young and stupid. He told me that it was the way things were in the ‘real world.’ He said the companies were covered by insurance, but if we turned these people in, their lives would be ‘ruined’ by criminal charges. He said lots of cops did things that weren’t entirely legal or within the rules—like take money to patrol a little extra in a high-crime area or look the other way on drug deals, so long as the dealer was paying them off. He complained that he couldn’t make it on his detective’s pay—not with two ex-wives, three kids, and all the support he had to come up with every month. Plus, he liked nice things: cars, a boat at his place in the Hamptons, a condo in Midtown.”
“And you believed him about this kind of widespread corruption on the police force?”
Pardo shrugged. “I was twenty-one when we met. He was quite a bit older, forty, and seemed really worldly. I didn’t have a reason to doubt him.”
“At some point did your relationship turn from professional to romantic?”
“He started coming on to me almost right away. But I wasn’t interested, at least not at first. But he was charming, good-looking, and really sure of himself, and I found that attractive. He bought me flowers and nice dinners, even took me to Las Vegas once but was a gentleman and got us separate rooms. Eventually I gave in . . . I guess you’d say I fell in love.”
“So at what point did you decide to become a police officer?”
“Well, I enjoyed the investigative and undercover aspects of what I was doing,” Pardo said. “Gary would tell me stories about his work as a cop, and it sounded interesting and exciting. As I was saying earlier, I lacked self-esteem—which is probably why I was with a man twice my age—and I thought maybe being a cop would restore my lost self-confidence.”
As Karp spoke, he moved along the jury rail, occasionally looking at the jurors’ faces. In reality he was gauging their reactions to his witness, and so far they were attentive and obviously following the story. “Was there an issue, however, with becoming a police officer?”
“Yes. Before you can be considered for the Police Academy, you have to take a written exam, and there was no way I was going to pass that with my dyslexia.”
“Did your boyfriend, Gary Proust, have an answer for that?”
“Yes, he knew someone who oversaw the testing. I went in and took the test, but to this day I have no idea what most of it asked. Most of it was multiple choice, so I guessed and filled in the little dots. I didn’t write anything on the essay part. But two weeks later, I got a notice in the mail that I had passed.”
“Did you think you were doing anything wrong?”
“Yes, but I told myself that I could make up for it by being a good police officer and helping people.”
“How did you do at the Police Academy?”
“I struggled with some of the written work, but Gary helped me and, when necessary, got his friend involved. But in everything else—driving, physical fitness, knowing the law—I was at or near the top of my class.”
“Did that include marksmanship?” Karp asked, allowing a little bit of a smile remembering her account of what she said to the gunman earlier that morning.
Pardo smiled back, relieved to have that inside joke to break the tension. “Yes, I was third in my class.”
“So then, you are familiar with firearms?”
“Yes. We learned to shoot handguns, rifles, and shotguns.”
“What sort of service weapon did you carry?”
“I preferred a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. It’s sort of old-school—everybody else was packing semiautomatics, which hold more bullets and can be fired somewhat faster. But I was more accurate with the revolver . . . and I didn’t think I’d ever need more than six.”
“So you would know a revolver as opposed to a semiautomatic by sight?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Would you be able to tell what caliber a weapon was by sight?”
“Well, obviously that would depend somewhat on how close I was, but even from a short distance I might have a good guess. Maybe not between a thirty-eight and a three fifty-seven revolver, which are very close—in fact, thirty-eight-caliber cartridges can be fired from revolvers chambered for a three fifty-seven, though the converse is not true. But it would be possible to tell the difference between a large-caliber revolver—such as a forty-five or a forty—and a smaller-caliber weapon, like a twenty-two.”
Karp leaned against the jury rail. “Let me back up a little. So after the Police Academy, you applied to and were hired by the New York Police Department?”
“Yes. It was one of the proudest days of my life.”
“I imagine it was also good for your self-esteem?”
Pardo beamed at the memory. “Yes. I remember like it was yesterday, the first time I put on the uniform. I didn’t feel dumb anymore or like I was a slow learner. And I wasn’t just Gary’s girlfriend and employee. I was somebody.”
“So was it all about the exciting nature of the job?”
“No. That was part of it, to be sure, especially for a twenty-four-year-old woman who a few years earlier was studying to clean people’s teeth,” Pardo said with a laugh. “But I think what I was looking forward to the most was helping people.”
“How did the fact that you were a victim of sexual abuse as a child figure into that?”
Pardo looked at the jurors. “Maybe it sounds corny, but I really did think about being somebody a child could turn to if he or she needed help. Maybe not a sex abuse victim. Maybe just kids who needed someone to care about them.”
Karp left the rail and strolled to the well of the court. “Ms. Pardo, have we met in my office to discuss this case, as well as your background?”
“Yes, several times.”
“And during one of our conversations, did you tell me about a dream you had as a young officer . . . something you wanted to accomplish?”
Pardo laughed. “Well, like any young officer, you get tired of writing traffic citations and hauling drunks off to detox and maybe breaking up a brawl and writing them up for disorderly conduct. To be honest, most police work tends to be a little boring and routine, especially when I compared what I was doing to what Gary did as a detective working on major cases. So I had this little daydream about taking a bad guy—a really bad guy—off the streets so he couldn’t hurt anybody else.”
“Did you ever get that opportunity?”
Pardo’s face fell. “No, not really. I made my share of arrests, including a liquor store robber who had a toy gun. But nothing really dramatic.”
“How long were you an officer?”
“Two years.”
“And during that time were you still dating Gary Proust?”
“For about the first six months after I joined the department.”
“What happened after six months?”
“I was starting to have issues with his moonlighting,” Pardo said. “I stopped working for him after I joined the department. In fact, I was learning that not everybody on the job, except maybe Gary’s pals, took bribes or were corrupt. Yes, a few badge-heavy guy
s liked carrying guns and having power over people’s lives. But most of the cops I worked with were in it for the same reason I was—to help protect the community.”
“You didn’t know it was wrong before that?”
Pardo hung her head. “I’d be dishonest if I said I thought it was all okay. I knew even before I got out of the academy that it was wrong. But I was young and in love, and I’ll confess, I liked the money and having things that I couldn’t buy when I was younger.”
“What did Detective Proust do when you told him you didn’t want to work for him anymore?”
“He laughed. Called me Miss Goody Two-shoes. Said fine, do what I wanted.”
“But you continued in the relationship for another six months?”
“Yes. And I reaped some of the rewards of Gary’s activities. He was still generous, bought me things, even proposed and gave me a beautiful engagement ring when I said yes.”
“What happened to end the relationship?”
“I heard that he wasn’t just ‘fining’ these people who were stealing from their employers,” she said. “He was actually receiving stolen merchandise and then selling it off. He had a whole network set up to do it.”
“Did you report him for these crimes?”
Pardo shook her head. “I should have, but I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him he had to stop or I was going to leave him.”
“What was his reaction?”
“At first he didn’t believe me and just laughed. But when he saw I was serious, he got angry. He pointed out that I’d made a lot of money under the table, which was true.”
“Did you stick with your ultimatum?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And he chose the money.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“I was devastated. I thought he loved me, but all he wanted was a young woman on his arm and in his bed.”
“Did you follow through?”
“Yes, I broke off the relationship and gave him his ring back.”
“How’d he take it?”
Without Fear or Favor Page 22