Undue Influence

by Steve Martini

  ‘We should have the right on redirect with this witness, Dr. Angelo,’ she says. ‘To the extent the defense raises the issue on cross.’

  ‘For what purpose? You’ve got your evidence. The elements are proven by the stipulation,’ says Woodruff.

  ‘If the defense opens the issue–’

  ‘Read my lips, counsel. Not a single w-o-r-d or I will declare a mistrial. Do I make myself clear?’

  Cassidy gives him a sick grin. ‘You won’t hear it from me,’ she says.

  ‘Just so we’re clear.’ At this moment Cassidy is staring into the bushy eyebrows of death. There is not a doubt in my mind that if she crosses him on this point, Austin Woodruff will draw and quarter her.

  We huddle over the table to craft the language of a penned stipulation, something that Woodruff can read from the bench into the record.

  Harry doesn’t have the heart for this. He wanders off, out of chambers, to talk to Laurel.

  I’ve got Angelo on the stand, staring at his beady little eyes in the box.

  I have told Laurel what I have done, the stipulation. She seems to accept this with equanimity.

  Woodruff has read the stipulation to the jury, a lot of bobbing heads and wondrous looks like they don’t know exactly what to make of all this lawyer talk. But the consensus, if I am at all literate in idioms of body language, is that it was not good for the defense.

  Angelo has done our case immense damage and he knows it. At this moment he is wary, though he has no reason. It is the first rule of cross-examination: if you can’t score, don’t wade in.

  ‘I have only a few questions,’ I tell him. ‘Points of clarification. ‘Doctor, you testified at length regarding powder residue, the lack of tattooing on the body.’

  He nods at me.

  ‘Did you bag the hands of the victim at the scene before moving the body?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Can you explain to the jury why this is done?’

  ‘It’s a usual procedure,’ he says. ‘Paper bags are placed over the hands and tied or taped at the wrists to ensure than any microscopic evidence under the nails is not lost. It also protects the hands from becoming contaminated by fibers or other trace evidence during transportation.’

  ‘Did you check the victim’s hands for such evidence during the course of your examination of the body?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And did you find anything?’

  ‘Nothing of any consequence. The undersides of the fingernails were clean. No fibers or tissue. No hair samples. Nothing that might have indicated a scuffle or struggle by the victim prior to death.’

  ‘Did you examine the hands for gunpowder residue?’

  He gives me a considered look. ‘No.’

  “Why not?’

  ‘There didn’t seem to be any point. We determined the range of fire to be too far away to have deposited any substantial amounts of residue. And what was the point? She hadn’t shot herself. The gun wasn’t in her hand.’

  ‘You didn’t think it was important to determine if she had grabbed the gun, struggled with her assailant?’

  ‘No. I’ve already testified that wasn’t possible.’

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he says.

  I nod and leave it.

  ‘Let me ask you, did you ever resolve in your own mind the caliber of the bullet?’

  ‘It’s difficult,’ he says. ‘Some calibers are very close. Looking at the bullet alone, you can’t always be sure.’

  ‘I understand. But have you resolved the question as you sit here now?’

  ‘I think ballistics has clearly indicated,’ he says. He looks in his notes. ‘Nine-millimeter,’ he says.

  ‘And you concur with that?’

  ‘I would defer to them on such questions,’ he says.

  ‘Have you dealt with such bullet wounds before? Nine-millimeter?’

  ‘Many times. It’s a common caliber in street crimes.’

  ‘Then you’re familiar with the type of wound a nine-millimeter bullet can make?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The kind of damage it can inflict?’

  ‘At close range it can be very destructive, quite deadly.’

  ‘Would you say that the normal nine-millimeter round has good penetrating power? Have you ever seen a nine-millimeter wound that has passed completely through a body?’

  ‘I have seen such wounds.’

  ‘Even when the round strikes bone?’

  ‘On occasion, depending on the size of the bone, the girth of the body, it could pass through.’

  ‘You say that the shot that killed Melanie Vega was fired a distance of only four to six feet before it struck the victim, and yet it lodged in the midpoint of her brain. Can you explain that?’

  ‘Very few people can explain the course of a bullet. There are too many variables. The powder charge, the weight and substance of the bullet, the density of objects it strikes on its path. Any one of these can account for variations in the depth of penetration.’

  ‘So if a bullet passed through an object, it might slow it down?’

  ‘Depending on the object. Of course.’

  ‘Let’s talk a little about the unexplained fragments of metal in the wound. You testified that you found small specks of metal – steel, I think you said?’

  ‘Low-quality, low-carbon steel. Yes. There were I believe four or five of these.’

  ‘Did you conduct any kind of microscopic examination of these before submitting them to metallurgy for testing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Shavings. Like little twisted metal threads.’

  ‘And you have no idea what they are?’

  ‘As I said at first, I thought they were shavings of lead, from the bullet. Apparently that was not the case.’

  ‘Would you defer to ballistics on this?’

  ‘Sure. If they know what they are.’

  ‘Doctor, let me ask you, how did you first discover that the victim was pregnant?’

  ‘During the course of a complete autopsy it’s general procedure to enter the abdominal cavity–’

  ‘Then it wasn’t obvious to you from external examination that Melanie Vega was pregnant?’

  ‘No. She made extraordinary efforts to keep her weight down.’

  ‘Isn’t it strange that no one told you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he says.

  ‘I mean, this is a woman, four months pregnant, and her husband never told you?’

  ‘I never talked to Mr. Vega.’

  ‘But there was no record of such a disclosure by Mr. Vega in the investigative reports, as part of his interview on the evening of the murder? You read those reports, did you not?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘And there was no disclosure in the reports, was there?’

  ‘No. Not that I recall.’

  ‘Don’t you consider this unusual, doctor? I mean, a distraught husband, his wife murdered, talking to the police, and he doesn’t think to tell them about this double tragedy?’

  ‘Objection. Calls for speculation.’

  ‘It calls for expert opinion,’ I say. ‘The doctor has performed thousands of autopsies, read thousands of police reports in connection with those autopsies. I’m asking him if as an expert in the field he does not find the failure to disclose such information on the part of a distraught husband to be peculiar.’

  ‘I’ll allow the question,’ says Woodruff. ‘With reference only to your realm of experience, doctor?’

  ‘A little peculiar, perhaps,’ he says. ‘But I suppose the man was quite upset.’

  ‘Hmm.’ I do a little pirouette in front of the witness box, so that as I speak I am looking away from the witness and toward the prosecution’s table.

  Harry and I have come up empty on the semen from the sheets of Melanie’s bed. The laboratory which examined these for us was unable to complete DNA testing. The
dried semen was too old for a valid sampling. So we have finally come to the moment of confrontation. I can no longer conceal my hand.

  ‘Doctor. As part of your examination did you by any chance determine the paternity of the unborn child?’

  Cassidy’s eyes flash and she grits her teeth. I have crossed the Rubicon, the first overt assault on Jack, the outlines of my defense now seeping through the fog.

  Cassidy whispers into Lama’s ear. I suspect the same instruction I gave Harry this morning, a subpoena to take blood from Jack Vega. By the time we are finished Jack will have more holes than a pincushion.

  There’s a stirring in the press rows. Notwithstanding admonitions by the court, it will not take long for this inquiry to filter back to Vega. As a witness he is sequestered outside, where our process server will no doubt find him this afternoon, ministrations with sharp needles to follow.

  ‘It’s a simple question, doctor. Did you determine the paternity of the child?’

  ‘To what purpose?’ he says.

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘There was no reason.’

  Angelo may not think so, but as I look at them in the box, the question of this child’s origin is not lost on the jury.

  Chapter 24

  This morning as the jury files into the courtroom, Dr. Angelo’s plastic skull of Melanie Vega rests on the top shelf of the evidence cart, its head pinioned by the steel rod which protrudes over the front edge of the cart, empty eye-sockets engaging each juror as they take their seats. Cassidy has no doubt arranged this grim greeting; Melanie’s plastic proxy silently asserting its own brief for justice.

  Laurel seems gripped by this as she sits next to me, flanked by Harry on the other side; a gruesome visage, she seems to falter just a bit.

  As Cassidy arrives in the courtroom, she goes through the same exercise she has performed each day for the past week. Dressed to kill, no pun intended, in a designer suit, she wears a pair of white running shoes. In full view of the jury she opens a paper bag and pulls her leather pumps with two-inch heels. She changes into these at the counsel table. This is a message to the jury that she is no Mercedes-minded lawyer, but just one of the folks, a working stiff like them.

  This has several of the women looking, silently taking note. The subtle messages that influence.

  As she tries her case, Cassidy is methodical in the way that Sherman was on his march to the sea. She leaves in her wake a scorched landscape of twisted testimony and half-told truths. If there is a single piece of physical evidence she suspects might give us comfort, she will torture it until any effort to explain its relevance is lost on the jury.

  Yesterday Morgan brought on a fibers expert who identified the bits of fluff from Melanie’s bathroom floor. She goaded the witness until he finally identified the fibers as similar in all respects to carpet fibers taken from the rug found in Laurel’s possession at the time of arrest.

  All during this Laurel was protesting in my ear that the carpet taken in Reno was hers, from her own apartment.

  This seemed to be borne out by the witness’s later testimony. Three minutes later, under cross, I got him to concede that the fibers were as common as grains of sand on a beach, sold by a score of manufacturers and found in half the homes of America. The witness readily conceded that he could not state with scientific certainty that the fibers in the evidence bag came from Laurel’s rug. I could tell that by the time he left the stand the man was wondering why Cassidy had called him at all. But then she leaves no stone unturned. After all, the other side can always stumble.

  For Morgan it was just one more reach, but no ring, so this morning we do ballistics.

  Nico Perone is the resident ballistics expert. Short, balding, and with a gut that hangs over his belt like Santa’s toy bag. As a witness he does not make a good appearance. If you were selling scandal on a national scale and Nico had a corner on the market, you would not race to put him on the tube’s morning talk-show circuit. The man’s respiration is elevated by the two-step climb into the witness box. Perone could work up a good sweat in January on a stroll in the Arctic. As for his dress, Nico wears part of this morning’s breakfast and what looks like last evening’s dinner on his tie.

  In the battle of cops against criminals, he is a partisan and a front-line fighter, a friend and follower of Jimmy Lama’s. There is nothing objective about Perone’s science. I have seen him slip and stumble in a few cases, usually into pits of his own making, stretching the evidence to fit the crime.

  This morning he is on the stand, ready to swim in his own perspiration. The sleeve ends of his coat are already dripping from where they have mopped his head, and Cassidy, the friendly one, has merely asked him his name.

  They cut through the preliminaries, the courses Nico has taken at the FBI Crime Lab in Washington and other places that qualify him as a witness. Morgan shows him the bullet in the little bag, and he identifies it as the one he examined and upon which he rendered a report in connection with Melanie’s murder.

  ‘Mr. Perone, what can you tell us about the characteristics of this bullet? Its caliber and weight?’

  ‘Nine-millimeter, Luger,’ he says.

  ‘Is that a make?’

  ‘Style,’ says Nico. ‘Some people call it a parabellum. First introduced for use in the Luger automatic pistol in the early part of the century,’ he says. ‘That one weighed in at a hundred and twelve grains. I’d be willing to bet, however, that it was a hundred and fifteen when it was made.’

  ‘Is that a professional opinion?’

  ‘Yeah. ’Cuz they don’t make it in a hundred-and-twelve-grain weight,’ he says.

  There’s a few smiles in the jury box.

  ‘I’d take book,’ he says. ‘The rest of that bullet got itself lost somewhere inside the victim,’ he tells her.

  ‘You mean fragments that dislodged?’ says Cassidy.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Watching them work together, Nico and Morgan, is an experiment in chemistry. Nico has never come across as professional. He has all the polish of a cast-off pair of shoes on the feet of some vagrant.

  ‘Besides its caliber, can you tell the jury what kind of bullet this is, what it’s made of?’ she says.

  ‘A lead alloy,’ he tells her. ‘That’s what is known as a lead hollow-point. That particular kind of bullet comes in three types,’ he says, ‘lead hollow-point, lead with a partial steel jacket, and a fully jacketed round. A jacket means the lead in the bullet is either partially or fully covered in a steel outer casing,’ he says.

  ‘What’s the difference in performance?’ says Cassidy.

  ‘Lead and partial-jacket have a tendency to jam, but they got more stopping power. Full jacket works smoothly through the action of the firearm, don’t jam as much, but it don’t spread either. Less stopping power. The lead, when it hits something hard, tends to spread. You can see on this one we got a little mushroom.’ Nico’s holding the bag with the bullet in his hand now.

  ‘A mushroom?’ says Cassidy.

  ‘Yeah. You can see where the bullet hit something, probably bone, and ballooned out at the tip.’ He points with his thumbnail.

  ‘See? Right there,’ he says.

  ‘And this would cause more damage?’

  ‘You bet. If a bullet spreads, it transfers more kinetic energy to the target. That causes more damage. What shooters call stopping power.’

  ‘Would you consider this a pretty deadly round?’

  ‘Sure. At close range it’s real effective. What many police agencies use today, though most of their bullets are jacketed.’

  ‘So in your professional opinion the bullet in this bag has more stopping power than bullets used in standard-issue police weapons of the same caliber?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Whoever used this one was looking to do a number,’ he says.

  ‘Objection.’

  ‘Sustained. Just answer the questions,’ says Woodruff.

  Cassidy moves away for a moment to r
egroup. This gives Nico a chance to wet his coatsleeve to the elbow.

  ‘Let me ask you, Mr. Perone, did you have occasion to perform any kind of microscopic examination of the bullet in that bag?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘The lands and grooves, the marks left on the bullet from the barrel of the firearm, indicated a right-hand twist. Pretty common for many types of manufactured handguns.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yeah. There was something wrong with the gun. Besides the lands and grooves, there were little ridges cut in the sides of the bullet, some kind of a defect in the bore of the weapon.’

  ‘Could you tell what caused this?’

  He makes a face and shakes his head. ‘If I had to guess –’

  ‘No guessing. Your professional opinion,’ she says.

  ‘Sure. My professional opinion. I would guess maybe some oxidation in the barrel. Little pits of rust,’ he says. ‘Sometimes these cause little microscopic ridges that drag on the bullet as it runs down the barrel.’

  Cassidy’s giving him slow nods on all of this. Her task here is not to score any particular points. A bullet is a bullet. This particular one happened to kill Melanie Vega.

  Instead Morgan’s role is to account for any anomalies in the evidence, to raise any possible inconsistencies before we can, and to resolve them as nothing unusual, to steal any wind we might try to use to puff up the sails of our case, to prevent us from making our own theory of what happened seem more plausible than hers.

  She moves to the evidence cart and comes back with another little bag, this one containing the brass cartridge found on the floor at the scene.

  ‘Mr. Perone, I would ask you to look at the bullet casing in this bag and ask if you’ve had an opportunity to examine it.’

  He turns the bag over, studies it for a moment.

  ‘Yeah. I have.’

  ‘Can you tell us what caliber it is?’

  ‘It’s a nine-millimeter Luger.’

  ‘The same as the bullet in the other bag?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is there any way that you can tell whether this bullet and this cartridge were at one time part of the same loaded or complete bullet?’