by JF Freedman
I’m emotionally wrung out. This beats anything they could concoct on Perry Mason or The Twilight Zone. The television talking heads will be in a frenzy tonight.
Sitting alongside me, Salazar is like a sphinx. I look behind me, at Amanda and Salazar’s wife. Amanda has her arms around Mrs. Salazar. She shakes her head in amazement and gives me a smile that is equal parts surprise and joy.
I turn back to Joe. “Can you believe this?” I ask him in astonishment.
“Someone got to her.”
I feel like I just touched the third rail. “What?”
“Someone got to her,” he repeats. His voice is muted, so only I can hear him. “Either threatened her, or bought her off.”
“Who would have done that? Who could have done that?” He cocks his head toward the gallery. “Who do you think?” I turn and look at Amanda again. She’s still smiling.
The prosecution team, clumped together at their table, look as if they have just attended a funeral. Maybe they have. Maybe it was their own.
Their witness used the recess to refresh her makeup. There is a trace of mascara smeared on her cheeks, as if she put it on in a dark closet. My stomach feels like a kettledrum—the baby has been kicking up a storm, protesting being emotionally disturbed. I can’t help that, she’ll have to bear it a while longer. Her mother is a gladiator, girded for battle in an expensive maternity dress.
“This man you saw with the victim, the night she was killed. How far were you from him?” I ask the witness from my place at the lawyer’s podium.
The witness thinks a moment, squeezing her eyes together to concentrate better. This must be something she learned in Acting 101, how to look serious convincingly. She isn’t convincing me, but the jurors sure are fascinated by her.
“Ten feet, about,” she ventures.
“Ten feet.” I leave the podium and stride to the witness box. I’m so close to her I can smell the Altoids on her breath. They didn’t completely mask the halitosis that comes from a dry, frightened throat. I turn around and walk four steps away, turn back and look up at the judge.
“I would like the defendant to come stand next to me,” I request.
“Go ahead.”
I motion to Salazar. He gets up, adjusts his coat, and walks over to me. I turn to the witness again.
“About this close?” I ask.
She swallows, trying to raise some saliva. “Yes,” she says, in a voice that sounds as if she’s been eating sand.
I walk to the stand and hand her the glass of water that is provided for witnesses. She grabs it from me and gulps it down. When she has drained it, I take the empty glass from her hand, because if I don’t, she might drop it, cut herself, and bleed to death—the only act that could top her performance so far. Then I go back to Salazar, take him by the arm, and march him a step closer. Now we are about six feet from her. If she had been ordered not to fire until she could see the whites of his eyes, her guns (if she had any) would be blazing.
I take a step to the side so Salazar is alone in the center of the floor, standing in a figurative spotlight. “Can you say, with one hundred percent certainty, that this is the man you saw that night?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “It looks a lot like him, but I can’t swear to it.”
“Do you want him to come closer?”
“No!” she cries out in alarm, recoiling against the back of her chair. “I can see him fine. It doesn’t matter how close he comes. I can’t swear it’s the same man. I’m telling the truth. What else do you people want from me?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
SOMETIMES YOU WIN, SOMETIMES the other side loses. That’s what could happen here. Loomis, on redirect, tried to bully his witness into recanting, but she held firm. Salazar might be the man she saw, but she won’t swear to it. Judge Suzuki finally has to step in and save her from the prosecution’s hounding. Their own witness, their star.
She was their last witness, so they rest their case. A feeling of gloom pervades their half of the courtroom, even though we haven’t presented our side. They still have powerful forces behind them, the panties being the strongest, as well as Salazar’s proximity to at least two of the murder sites. But a witness who turns like that can poison the well. We will have to wait for the verdict to find out if she did.
Tomorrow, we present our side. It will be short. We only have a few witnesses—Carlos, Salazar’s friend who was with him the night of and the morning after one of the killings, a couple of Salazar’s customers who will establish his working habits, a psychologist we hired to evaluate Salazar, and finally, Salazar himself. He will testify in his own defense. He has to. If we don’t put him on the stand, he will be judged guilty by omission.
I sit at home, reading over the transcripts of the prosecution’s case, to see if there are any glitches. As I’m about to call it a night, a few lines of testimony from two of their witnesses catch my eye.
I read them over again, and compare them to each other. Then I pick up the phone, and call Joe.
“Recall Sasha Koontz,” the bailiff says in his clear, loud voice.
Cheryl Lynn Steinmetz’s roommate comes forward. As she has already been sworn in, she is still under oath, so she doesn’t have to do that again. She sits down and looks at me with a puzzled expression.
This will only take a few minutes. Either I guessed right, or I didn’t. I lay the relevant page of her testimony on the top of the podium and read from it. “Lieutenant Cordova came to our house. It was early; he woke me up.” I look up. “This would have been what time, Ms. Koontz? Seven, seven-thirty?”
“Oh, no,” she answers. “It was much earlier. About five.”
I can feel the buzz behind me, like a swarm of bees returning to the hive. “Five in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure of that.”
“Yes, because when the doorbell rang, I looked at my clock. It was right after five.”
“Who did you think it was?” I asked.
“Cheryl,” she replies. “I thought she had forgotten her key. She did that, sometimes.”
“You’re absolutely sure of that time. That it was before six-fifteen.” Six-fifteen was when the 911 dispatcher got the anonymous phone call about Salazar.
“Yes, I’m sure. It was a few minutes after five o’clock in the morning.”
“One more question. Where did Ms. Steinmetz keep her dirty laundry?”
“In her hamper.”
“Which was where?”
“In her closet.”
“Her bedroom closet?”
“Yes.”
Cordova is on the stand. If he’s nervous, he doesn’t show it. Although Joe cross-examined him before, I’m doing it now. I found the glitch, it’s my right to explore it.
I have the pertinent page of Cordova’s testimony in front of me. “Let me read some of your testimony back to you,” I tell him. “Question: What were you looking for? Answer: I was looking for something that might tie the victim to the suspect. Question: Like what? Answer: A note, something like that. People write things on their calendars. I thought maybe she had done that, something about meeting a man. A name, a place. Something to tie her to …” I pause. “… Salazar.”
I look up. “At five o’clock in the morning, you had not yet found Roberto Salazar. So why did you say his name? Why did you give all of us the impression that you had gone to the victim’s house after you had found and arrested Roberto Salazar, not before?”
Cordova remains unruffled, at least outwardly. “It was a mistake. A slip of the tongue.”
“A slip of the tongue? Something that important and it’s nothing more than a slip of the tongue?”
“I was hoping to find a name,” he repeats stubbornly. “Nothing more.”
“At five in the morning. Alone in her room. With a killer at large on the streets of Los Angeles.” Before he can answer, I turn my back on him and announce in a clear and authoritative voice, “No further questions.”
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On redirect, Cordova explains that going to a victim’s home is standard procedure, for the reasons he gave, and also in case the next of kin lived there. So he was going by the book. But my point about Cordova saying Salazar’s name before the police had found him has been made, and the jury is going to remember it.
THIRTY-EIGHT
OUR FIRST TWO WITNESSES are two of Salazar’s regular customers. Both swear that Salazar begins their yard work at seven o’clock on the dot, and is often parked outside their houses as much as an hour before he is scheduled, drinking coffee, reading a magazine, or talking on his cell phone. Sometimes he’ll start earlier—watering the flowers, hand-trimming bushes, chores that don’t make noise. Their testimony establishes that Salazar is often on the Westside early in the morning, and that his presence there on the day of his arrest was not an aberration.
A decent enough start. But then Carlos, our one good alibi witness, fucks up royally. Even though Joe and I spent days with him going over his testimony, he falls apart almost immediately. He confuses times and locations, can’t remember names—the whole nine yards. It is an acute case of stage fright by a man scared to death of the system. Joe, who is conducting the examination, is constantly interrupted by Loomis’s objecting to his leading the witness, which he is—he has to—and Judge Suzuki invariably rules in Loomis’s favor. By the time Joe finishes, I don’t think there is one person in the courtroom who doesn’t feel sorry for Carlos, nor does one of them believe him. The looks on the faces of the jurors are clear they sure as hell don’t.
Loomis practically sprints to the podium to begin his cross. He eviscerates Carlos, shreds him into confetti. The poor shlump is drenched in sweat.
When Loomis is finished, there is less man than hulk on the stand. Judge Suzuki, attempting to be humane, frees Carlos from his ordeal as nicely as he can while remaining impartial. Carlos is bent over almost in half as he leaves the room, like a man holding in an acute case of diarrhea. I wonder if he drinks. If he doesn’t, he should start, immediately.
“That went well,” Joe remarks dryly, as Carlos vanishes out the doors at the back of the room. His remark is so off the wall I can’t help but bleat out an involuntary laugh. Immediately, I cover my mouth with my hands, but Suzuki heard me. He favors us with an inquisitive and unfriendly look.
I point to my stomach as if it’s the culprit and I’m an innocent bystander, then make a wringing motion with my hands.
Suzuki nods in understanding. “We’ll take a ten-minute recess before the next witness,” he announces.
I retreat to the ladies’ room for a much-needed pee. As the baby gets bigger and bigger, it’s harder and harder to control my bladder. I’ve begun wearing two pairs of cotton underpants to absorb any errant moisture. And I’ve sworn off asparagus. I remind myself to talk to Judge Suzuki about my delicate situation so that if I have to ask for breaks, he will automatically grant them. He wouldn’t want me piddling on his courtroom floor.
Back in the courtroom, with a few minutes left in the recess, I take the chamber’s temperature. There is a roiling mood of anticipation in the air, coupled with such palpable tension you can almost physically touch it. We have one more witness left, the psychologist we hired to evaluate Salazar (it was positive, or we wouldn’t be putting him on), then Salazar himself will take the stage. How he handles himself during our examination, and more important, at cross-examination, will be critical to our success or failure. All the rehearsals have gone well, but as we saw from his friend Carlos’s travesty, you can throw the practice performances out the window when you actually open on Broadway.
In a corner of the room, Joe and the psychologist are talking quietly, a last-minute rehash of the questions Joe is going to ask. Usually when a lawyer from our office uses a psychologist, it is because we have a client with some severe mental illness, and to put such a person behind bars without medical supervision is nuts; yet it’s done all the time. We get a disproportionate number of mentally ill people, because we deal with society’s dregs. Salazar is actually an exception.
Joe excuses himself from the witness and joins me at the defense table. “I think Dr. Silk will help with damage control,” he says. The psychologist’s name is Leonard Silk. “Let’s face it,” Joe says with a twisted expression on his face, “we have nowhere to go but up after that clusterfuck with Carlos.”
To me, Dr. Silk is more cotton than silk, but that’s good, because slickness doesn’t work with juries—they develop a good bullshit detector for condescension, a trap many expert witnesses fall into. They fall in love with their knowledge, and want you to know how smart they are. Like that kid in school who always raised his hand and knew every answer, they can become pains in the ass fast. And juries tend to fade out when experts are talking—technical material is boring. We’re putting Silk up there because, one, he’s going to say good things about Salazar—that he doesn’t fit any pattern of a serial killer—and, two, because he’s the only other witness we have. To go directly from Carlos to Salazar could be ruinous, because the jury would still have the taste of that fiasco in their mouths. Bridging them with a more objective witness is smart. And he isn’t Latino, which is also important. It might be racist to say that, but it’s true. Even in this so-called enlightened age, white men carry an aura of authority about them.
The prosecution didn’t have a psychologist witness, because the one they brought in to evaluate Salazar concluded that he wasn’t crazy, was not faking his belief in his innocence, and didn’t fit any serial-killer patterns. Silk, who arrived at the same conclusions, will present Salazar as a rational man without major hangups. Having our doctor testify will be beneficial to us, except for whatever tidbits Loomis can squeeze out of Silk on cross. Joe and I are not worried about that. Silk is a veteran, he knows how to avoid the prosecution’s traps.
After establishing Dr. Silk’s credentials, Joe addresses the issue Loomis will bring up if he doesn’t—that Silk has been an expert witness in hundreds of trials, almost all of them for the defense. That’s the nature of the beast. After fifty years of lawyer shows on television, jurors are sophisticated now; they know that every expert who is involved in a trial is partisan to one side or the other. But you still need to establish that your partisan witness isn’t bending the truth. He may be interpreting it to your advantage, but he can’t lie. On the rare occasions that they do, they invariably get tripped up. So they don’t.
One thing Dr. Silk learned during his sessions with Salazar, which none of us knew, because Salazar never told us, is that he was adopted at birth. He does not know who his birth mother was, and doesn’t care. He grew up in the Southwest, New Mexico and Arizona, and left home after he finished high school. He moved to L.A., went to work for a gardener, learned the business, then started his own. Both of his parents are dead, and he has no siblings. He has led two lives, before Los Angeles, and after. He loves his wife, he loves his kids, he loves his work, and he gets fulfillment in his ministry and youth work.
“Are there studies about adoptive children?” Joe asks Silk.
“Thousands.”
“About their behavior in society?”
“Are they more social, less social, that sort of thing?” Silk answers with a question of his own.
“Yes. Or other characteristics that separate them from non-adoptive children.”
“Not across the board,” Silk answers. “If they came from an emotionally and psychologically stable family, they’re like anyone else, statistically. It’s all about the individual. In some ways you can equate them to children who come from families in which the parents divorce. They often are more stable, not less, because they crave stability.”
Joe moves to the heart of his argument. “Do serial killers or killers in general exhibit social or psychological qualities that differentiate them from people who aren’t killers?”
“If it’s a crime of passion, which most killings are, no,” Silk answers. “But if they aren’t, the answer is yes.
A person who kills in cold blood is a sociopath. They do not feel empathy or remorse toward their victims, or anyone.”
“In your professional opinion, Doctor, are these murders the work of a sociopath?”
“Yes, they are.”
“You examined Roberto Salazar, is that correct?”
“Yes. I met with him on several occasions.”
“In your opinion as a clinical psychologist, with decades of experience in this special field, is Mr. Salazar a sociopath?”
“No.”
“Does he have any sociopathic tendencies at all? Any indications of them?”
“None that I could discern,” Salt answers decisively. “He has compassion, warmth, decency. In my opinion, his personality is the polar opposite of a sociopath’s.”
“So from a psychological point of view, he does not fit the pattern of a serial killer.”
“No. He’s about as far away from that as you can get.”
Loomis doesn’t spend much time on Silk. It’s the end of the week, and Loomis knows the jurors are itchy to be released from their bondage, so he doesn’t prolong their agony. Unless technical testimony brings forth something new and shocking, it goes in one ear and out the other. Two hours of back and forth and Silk is finished.
Today is Thursday. Court is adjourned until Monday morning, at which point the perfect storm that will be Roberto Salazar testifying for his life will begin.
THIRTY-NINE
I THREW UP LAST NIGHT. I would like to blame my delicate stomach on my being pregnant, but you don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I have been a lawyer for seven years and have handled over a thousand felony cases, and none were as remotely important as this one. Starting today, Roberto Salazar takes the stand in his defense, and I’m conducting the direct. This will be the most important day, or days, of my career. I’m more uptight than I’ve been since I don’t know when. Worse than the first time I took my clothes off in front of a bunch of strangers. Almost as bad as when my mother shot me and I was afraid I might bleed to death.