The Associate

by Rachel Sinclair

  “I have no clue. Obviously, she won’t be able to testify to anything that Shelly told her, as that will be hearsay, plain and simple. Perhaps she will just be a character witness.”

  “And the same thing with Yasin Ahmadi, who is also on the list” Harper said. “I can’t imagine why they would be calling him. Again, he can’t testify to anything that Shelly might have said, so why is he going to be called? The great thing is, I can cross-examine him. If they’re going to put him on the stand, I say more power to them. Yasin is somebody that I think that we need to cross-examine by asking questions that might lead the jury to believe that he did it. Or that his father did it.”

  I looked at the witness list for the prosecution and saw that they hadn’t planned on calling any other witness.

  “Okay,” I said. “So, let’s go over our witnesses. We have Yasin on our list as well. We also have Abdullah Ahmadi. We have Wells Armstrong, and Shelly’s father, Andrew McMason. As I see it, we can call all of them as hostile witnesses, so we can use leading questions on direct examination. I also have decided to go ahead and call Irina Kovokosky, who is going to be none too happy about coming out here in the dead of winter, but it can’t be helped. She’s a vital witness to try to tie our theory of the case together.”

  Harper was sitting across from me and she was thinking about something.

  “What are you thinking about? You look like you’re lost in thought over there.”

  “Yeah, I am.” Harper nodded her head. “I am. What do you think about us calling Sargis himself to the stand? I still wonder if he had something to do with it. I think that perhaps Sargis and Erik weren’t exactly on the best of terms. The fact that somebody is lying about whether or not Sargis knew Shelly’s story before she was hired tells me all that I need to know. Either Erik is trying to drag Sargis under the bus, or vice-versa. Either way, there’s a rat there somewhere. I think that we need to smoke it out.”

  “Sure. Let’s go ahead and call Sargis. He’s on our witness list, so it’s not too late to go ahead and call him.”

  We had to get our witness list into the DA’s office 10 days before the start of trial. Anybody who wasn’t already on our list couldn’t be called. It wasn’t like in the movies where there’s suddenly a surprise witness who shocks everybody in the courtroom, including the other side. Movies like The Verdict, which was actually one of my favorite movies, couldn’t happen in real life. In that movie, there’s a surprise witness who changes everything. She couldn’t be found prior to trial, so the other side didn’t have the chance to depose her or find out what her testimony was going to be. The other side didn’t ask for a recess so that there could be a motion in limine to determine if the testimony should even be allowed. While that dramatic moment when the witness made her statement at the end made the movie incredible, unfortunately, in real life, that moment never could happen.

  I didn’t really know what was going to happen when we called Sargis. For that matter, we didn’t really know what was going to happen when we called any of these witnesses. Each witness that we called were simply going to be questioned about their relationship with Shelly, and the questions were going to be geared towards showing how each person had a reason to murder her. That was the best strategy that Harper and I had at the moment, and that was the only strategy that we could even try.

  “Okay, let’s go over our voir dire questions,” Harper said. “How confident do you feel about your jury selecting skills?”

  “I feel reasonably confident,” I said. “I usually have a good intuition as to who might be good for our side and who might not be. I firmly believe that choosing a jury is an art as opposed to a science.”

  “Well, that’s the best way to approach that,” Harper said. “Because it truly is an art instead of a science. What questions are we going to ask on our voir dire? Aside from the usual ones, of course – the questions about whether or not they know our client, whether or not they have been the victim of a crime, whether or not any potential members of the jury know the witnesses or any of us. Also, of course, whether they are a member of law enforcement or in the legal profession. Other than the usual questions, what are you going to ask?”

  “I’m going to ask them if they have heard anything about the case or if they knew Shelly at all. Even if they had met her one time, I need to know that. I think that I should also ask some questions about whether or not, if they have knowledge that our client is a member of the Armenian mob, would that cause them to be prejudice against him. Maybe ask some questions about what they know about organized crime and the people who are a part of these types of organizations. That’s pretty important to note. I need to see if they have any kind of prejudices against our client going in.”

  “Okay,” Harper said. “But I don’t know if that’s a good idea to go down that road. Bear in mind that we might not put Erik on the stand. If we choose not to, then the jury might never know that our client is in organized crime.”

  “But they will know because the prosecutor’s office is putting Ara Babyan on the stand. He’ll testify that he’s in the Armenian mob and that he is second-in-command to Erik. Then the prosecutor will ask him all these questions about what he does, and that’s the back-door way that Nick Wright will get all of Erik’s activities before the jury. It’s clever, really. They know that they can’t ask Erik about prior bad acts, but they can establish his criminal activity by calling his counterpart to the stand. I think that we need to tackle Erik’s colorful background head-on. No use pussy-footing about it. It’s coming in, so we might as well prepare the jury for it. And we might as well find out what kind of prejudices they are going to have going in.”

  Harper nodded her head. “Okay, I think that you’re right about that. Let’s go ahead and ask questions about that. What other questions might you have for them?”

  “I think that it might be a good idea to ask some questions about how they feel about hackers. Shelly was a computer hacker, and she used her computer hacking skills for nefarious means. I can ask questions to see who is passionately against that kind of behavior, and that is going to be the person that I’m going to want. You see, there’s psychology at work. If we can’t show that somebody else might have done her in, the next best thing would be to subtly show that she got what was coming. That way, we have the possibility of some kind of jury nullification.”

  “Jury nullification,” Harper said. “I hope that we don’t have to rely on that, but I like your way of thinking. That’s another risky strategy, blaming the victim, but if that’s all we got…”

  “No, that’s not all we have, of course. I still like the idea about bringing in all those other witnesses who might have wanted her dead. And who knows? There might be something else that might come up. Some other motive that one of them might have had to do Shelly in. That’s the beauty of this strategy, really. I have a list of questions that I’m going to ask all of them.”

  “And Irina? What questions are you going to ask her?”

  “I need to know why it is that Shelly only wanted to meet men who were well-placed in the pharmaceutical industry. I think that she might know more than she is letting on. Perhaps I can get something from her on the stand that will help us try to figure out who might have further motive to have killed her.”

  “Well,” Harper said. “I think that we need to get Erik in here one last time and prep him for the stand. Are there any motions in limine that we need to bring up in front of the judge?”

  Motions in limine were motions that requested that certain pieces of evidence might be kept out. For instance, if there was something that was found in an improper search, the attorney would ask the judge to keep out that evidence. The best way to do that would be with a motion in limine.

  “We could conceivably ask that Ara Babyan not be allowed to take the stand,” I said. “After all, there is a good chance that his testimony will be more prejudicial than probative.” In this case, if I decided that Ara Babyan not be allowed to
testify and I filed a motion to keep his testimony out, the judge would ask for him to testify in court without the jury hearing the testimony. The judge could then rule on whether or not Ara’s testimony would prejudice the jury while not providing any clear probative value.

  “That’s good thinking,” Harper said. “Excellent thinking. If we can exclude Ara from testifying, then we’ll be able to maybe keep the fact that Erik is in the Armenian mob out of the jury’s ears. At any rate, even if we can’t prevent the jury from realizing that Erik is in the Armenian mob, we can at least lessen the damage of them knowing. We don’t want them to know everything that Erik is involved in with the Armenian mob, and the best way to do that is to exclude Ara. If they don’t call Ara, then perhaps it wouldn’t be a good idea to call Erik to the stand, either. We don’t want to open the door to the prosecutor asking him about all the dirty deeds that he has done for the mob.”

  I wrote that down on a piece of paper. “Okay, so we’ll try for a motion in limine on Ara’s testimony. Chances are we won’t get it, because I have the feeling that the DA’s office wouldn’t be calling Ara unless Ara had something extremely relevant to add to the case. In other words, I think that Nick Wright knows better than to call a witness who will simply get up and testify about what he does for the Armenian mob. They know that they’re going to have to tie him to Erik, and they’re going to have to be tight about doing that. If they aren’t tight about doing that, the entire testimony is going to have to go out the window. So…” I nodded my head. “I have a feeling that Ara is going to testify that perhaps Erik confessed to him about killing Shelly. Or he might have testimony about Erik’s relationship with Shelly. Perhaps he witnessed the two of them fighting or having words. Maybe there was tension between the two of them somehow. That’s what I think that this Ara is going to say.”

  “I think so too,” Harper said. “That said, it’s worth it to try to exclude him. Go ahead and try the motion in limine. That will be useful, because it will give us a heads-up on what his testimony will be. We’ll be able to prepare better for him when we’re in front of the jury if we can go ahead and hear his testimony ahead of time.”

  “Is there anybody else that we can try to exclude on their list?”

  “I don’t want to exclude Yasin,” Harper said. “I don’t know what he can add to their case, but I like that the prosecutor has opened the door to us cross-examining him about his relationship. We need to find out if he ever knew about Wells or about Shelly’s call girl activities. If he did know about that, then we can ascribe motive to him from there.”

  “What about Charlize Allen?” I asked. “Should we try to have her excluded as well?”

  Harper shrugged. “I don’t know. I still don’t know what she’s going to add to their case. I suppose that we could ask for a motion in limine for her testimony as well. If the prosecutor is going to put her on the stand to testify to things that Shelly might have told her, then obviously her testimony won’t be allowed. That would be impermissible hearsay unless Shelly testified to something that was against her own interest. We know that Charlize won’t be able to testify about a dying declaration, because nobody was in Shelly’s car at the time that she crashed it. Nobody could have heard Shelly’s dying declaration – she was killed instantly.”

  The hearsay exception, when the witness was unavailable, which Shelly was, stated that dying declaration and statements against interest are permissible. Everything else that the deceased might have said would not be. Therefore, Charlize wouldn’t be able to tell the jury anything about what Shelly might have said about whether or not she was afraid of Erik or any kind of similar testimony. I imagined that this would be what the prosecutor was going to try to elicit, and I was going to have to shut that down immediately.

  “They’re also going to call Lena Williams,” Harper said. “She’s the editor at the Star who was in charge of Shelly. She was the one who gave Shelly the assignment, and she was the person who Shelly was reporting to. She’s obviously an indispensable witness to them, because she corroborates the fact that Shelly was infiltrating Erik’s clan and that Shelly was getting her story ready for publication.”

  “How should we cross her?”

  “Well, let’s see. Without her testimony, it would be difficult for the prosecutor to establish that Shelly was ready to publish her story about Erik’s operation.

  Harper and I went through the case thoroughly that day. We took turns trying to anticipate any holes that might need to be plugged up, and we ran through the witnesses, one by one. We wrote down tentative cross-examination questions and we bounced theories off of one another. In the end, we both felt that we were ready to go. We had our strategy, we had our tactics, and we knew where our blind spots were going to be.

  Winning this case was going to be an uphill battle, especially since the case was so close to Christmas. That was a problem because we knew that the jury’s minds were not only going be elsewhere, but we also knew that they were going to hate us. We were the reason why they had to spend the week before Christmas in a courtroom, as opposed to spending it going shopping or baking or seeing their friends. We were going to have to somehow counteract that resentment that the jury was going to naturally feel towards us.

  I ended up feeling confident in our case, but not completely so. There was still the chance that we were going to be blind-sided by one witness or another. There was always that chance.

  We just had to prepare for it as best as we could.

  Chapter 21

  December 18 - The First Day of Trial

  I met Erik at the courthouse. I had him in the week before and I prepped him for what he could expect to face. I found that Erik actually made a decent witness. He stuck to his story, even though Harper cross-examined him relentlessly. I was impressed by Harper’s skills. She was a natural – she was aggressive, but not overly so. She knew just what questions to ask to try to break him down. Yet, Erik was steadfast in his testimony. He firmly stated that he had nothing to do with tampering with Shelly’s brakes and that he didn’t know who did it. He also handled the testimony about his “job description” remarkably well. He matter-of-factly talked about what he did. He believed that he was like a CEO of his clan, which meant that he wasn’t actually the one who was doing the dirty work. He wasn’t finding the girls for prostitution, nor was he involved in kidnapping people and selling them into white slavery. He wasn’t hacking and he wasn’t drug dealing. Rather, he was managing the people who were doing all of these things. Like a CEO.

  Not that it made it any better that he wasn’t getting his hands dirty. The reason why it was so important to emphasize the fact that Erik didn’t micromanage his soldiers was pretty simple – since he wasn’t involved in the crimes at the granular level, he wouldn’t have been the one who would have carried out the hit on Shelly. He envisioned his role as being that of an overseer, and that meant that he not only didn’t commit crimes, but he didn’t order individual crimes to be committed, either. The way that his organization works, as he explained it, was that individual hits were ordered from the intermediaries. Each division of his organization had a boss. That meant that his white slavery “division” had a boss, the hacking “division” had a boss, the prostitution “division” had a boss and the drug dealing “division” had a boss. The individual bosses of the individual divisions were the ones who ordered hits. The soldiers beneath them were the ones who carried out the hits.

  Erik explained the hierarchy in a different way. “Think of it like the military. You have your generals, and then you have your sergeants and then you have your privates. Right? Well, think of me as the general. I’m not down on the field directing the privates to do anything. That’s the job of the sergeants, who are directing their platoons. Now, if a sergeant directs his privates to do something wrong, then that’s not on the general, right? The general has no idea of what is going on. The general’s job is to oversee and plan military attacks. And if an individual employee in
a large corporation does something wrong, it’s not the fault of the CEO. If a team leader in, say, a large bank, directs his team members to do something illegal, that’s not the fault of the CEO, either. I have no involvement in hits.”

  I had to admit, it was a good defense. I had no idea if it was going to fly. A good cross-examination by the prosecutor could poke holes in his testimony about how he doesn’t get his hands dirty. Still, it was better than anything else we had. I was going to have to use that defense and hoped that it flew.

  As for the motion in limine, it failed. Ara Abayan was going to be allowed to testify, because he apparently had something relevant to say. I was happy that I tried to get him banned from testifying, however, because I was able to get a sneak peek on what his testimony was going to be. He basically was going to tell the jury that Erik and Shelly were having a love affair, and that Erik was upset with Shelly on the day that she died. According to Ara, Erik and Shelly had words in front of him, because Erik had just found out about Yasin and Wells.

  When I told Erik what Ara’s testimony was going to be, he laughed out loud. “Oh, I get it, I get it,” he said. “That bastard. He’s trying to say that me and Shelly were having an affair because that would mean that I would have a personal reason for killing her, as opposed to a business reason.” He shook his head. “Brilliant.”

  I knew what Erik was talking about. His defense was that he didn’t get his hands dirty, and if somebody in his organization killed Shelly, he had no knowledge of it and he didn’t order it. But if a more personal motive was established, then her murder could be directly tied to Erik himself.

  “Is it true?” I asked him. “Were you and Shelly having an affair?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not true. Listen, Shelly and I were friends, I’m not gonna lie. But I knew that she was into Yasin. She talked about him all the time. I didn’t know about Wells, though. I may be a lot of things, and I might do a lot of bad things, but I don’t fuck with other guy’s girls. I draw the line there.”