Against the Wind

by J. F. Freedman

  We wrap up shortly before four-thirty. Judge Martinez is checking his watch; he’s ready to call it a day.

  “If we are finished with this witness …” he begins.

  Moseby’s on his feet. I’ve never seen him so nimble.

  “I have a couple of questions to ask on redirect, your honor.”

  “Fine. We’ll start in tomorrow.”

  “With the court’s permission, I’d rather ask them now. They won’t take long, and I want to pursue something that was brought up earlier.”

  Martinez cocks his head in our direction.

  “If it won’t take long, we have no objection, your honor,” Mary Lou states for the defense.

  “Let’s proceed, then,” Martinez says. “If it appears to me that we’re going to get embroiled in detail, I’ll adjourn until tomorrow.”

  “I’ll try to ensure that we don’t,” Moseby assures him.

  He turns to Grade.

  “You’ve previously stated that the victim died of the forty-seven knife wounds, not the gunshots to the head.”

  “That is correct.”

  “And you’ve also stated that there was an abnormally small amount of bleeding,” Moseby says.

  “Yes, I also made that statement.”

  “Shouldn’t he have bled a lot? I mean, forty-seven stab wounds. You’d think a man would be practically drained from that many stab wounds.”

  “Under normal circumstances, yes,” Grade says. “But as I stated earlier, these were not normal circumstances.”

  “How is that?”

  “The victim was stabbed with a knife or knives that were hot. The heat would have sealed the wounds and prevented any substantial bleeding from occurring.”

  “That’s an interesting theory, doctor. Rather unique. What made you think of it?”

  “I had come across a comparable case in a medical journal,” Grade says, “not too long before I examined this corpse. The similarities were too close to ignore.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stands up. Rita Gomez had testified that the bikers held their knife over a fire before they stabbed Bartless. We’d assumed that was a bunch of crap, like everything else she was saying. Now here’s Grade with a theory that confirms her, almost perfectly.

  “Excuse me, your honor.” I’m on my feet, glancing at my partners. They look at me; they’re as confused as I am. “I’ve read everything in Dr. Grade’s autopsy report and the subsequent reports he’s made pertaining to this case. I’ve never seen anything in there about hot knives.” I look at Moseby. The fucker’s standing there like the cat that ate the canary. “If the prosecution has withheld material from us, your honor, material pertinent to our case, we’d like to know. Now.”

  ‘So I can file for a mistrial’ is what I leave unsaid. Martinez hears my unspoken remark loud and clear. He leans forward, looking at Moseby.

  “Counselor?” he queries.

  “We haven’t withheld anything, your honor,” Moseby says, seemingly without guile. “And anyway, we didn’t raise this issue. Defense did, in their cross-examination less than two hours ago. They ‘opened the door,’ and if Dr. Grade came across some interesting material in a journal, as he’s now informing us—material that while it would not necessarily be linked to the direct cause of Richard Bartless’s death, might help explain a certain incongruity in the way the corpse was presented, I think we’re entitled to hear about it. It might strengthen the connection of the defendants to the murder,” he adds.

  Paul’s first on his feet. It was his question that gave Moseby this opportunity. “We need some time, your honor.”

  “Granted. We’ll adjourn until tomorrow morning.” Martinez bangs the gavel and exits immediately.

  Grade leaves the stand. Moseby strolls over to his side of the room. Something’s wrong here; he spent the whole trial setting this trap for us, and we walked right into it.

  We huddle; nobody’s heard anything about this, or knows about it. Hot knives? Some kind of ritual, what? We’d discounted what Rita Gomez had said, she’s an obvious liar and freak. But to have a pathologist as prominent as Grade confirm it in virtually the same language scares the shit out of me.

  We send Ellen out to start cross-checking it in the medical and legal journals, then question our clients. The bikers don’t know what Grade’s talking about. How could they?; they were never there to begin with. The whole story of hot knives means nothing to them; just more legal bullshit to try and railroad them.

  “WHAT DID HE SAY?”

  Mary Lou hangs up the phone.

  “The same thing all the others said: no.”

  “Fuck!” I scream at the ceiling.

  “You betchum, Red Ryder.”

  It’s almost midnight. We’re in my office. For the last several hours we’ve been manning the phones like a PBS telethon, trying to locate a reputable pathologist who would be willing to rebut Grade’s testimony; or at least, cast some doubt on it. We can’t even find one who will examine the case and give us some advice; certainly not on notice this short, when the doctor concerned is someone with Grade’s bona fides.

  “The hardest thing in the world is to get a doctor to say another doctor is wrong,” Mary Lou says. “I can’t tell you how many malpractice cases our firm defends every year for the insurance companies, legitimate stuff, not ambulance chasing, where the physician is clearly incompetent, and you can’t even get his hospital to deny him privileges, let alone become a party to a decertification proceeding.”

  “They’re worse than lawyers,” Paul notes with his usual dry wit.

  The humor falls on deaf ears. We fidget, looking at each other, at the walls.

  “It’s too late to call anyone else now,” Paul observes, checking his watch, “even on the west coast. We’ll have to start in tomorrow.”

  “We’re in court tomorrow,” I reply, testy. I hate being caught up short. I say it: “I hate being hung out to dry like this. I feel like a rank amateur.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mary Lou protests. “To yourself or the rest of us.”

  I know that, but so what? We got caught with our pants down today, and all the world was watching.

  “And it wasn’t in any of the discovery,” she adds. “We don’t have a crystal ball to tell us what might jump out.”

  “We’re supposed to know what’ll jump out,” I rant. “That’s what a good lawyer does. That’s what we get paid for.” I’m illogical, I hear it in myself even as I speak, but I can’t help it. I’m freaked.

  “Maybe we should’ve checked into Rita Gomez’s story more carefully,” Tommy ventures cautiously.

  “Like how?” I snap.

  “She had mentioned heating up knives. Maybe we should’ve checked to see if there was a fire up near where the body was found, for instance.”

  “Rita Gomez’s story is a piece of shit from beginning to end is why we didn’t check out stuff like that,” I answer. “We’ve proven that in open court.”

  “The jury’s still out, counselor,” Paul gently chides me.

  “Meaning?” I challenge. I’m a bitch tonight, I’d probably take my own child’s head off if she looked at me sideways.

  “The fact that you don’t believe her doesn’t mean the rest of the world automatically doesn’t, too,” he replies evenly. Paul’s not a fighter like me; he doesn’t like a fire burning in his guts, but in his quiet, unassuming way he stands up for what he thinks. It’s one of the qualities I prize in him; normally.

  “Are you saying you think there might be some truth to what she says?” I fire back.

  “Will …” Mary Lou tries to deflate the tension.

  “I think they raped her, yes,” Paul answers calmly.

  “They’re not charged with rape,” I flash back at him.

  “You asked if I believed any of her story.”

  “Okay. Let’s say they did rape her. What does that have to do with murder?”

  “They say they didn’t.”

  “It’s a
moot point,” I tell him.

  “No,” he says. “It isn’t.”

  “Guys. Stop this bickering. We have work to do.” Mary Lou steps between us. Tommy’s to the side; he wants no part of this.

  “If she’s telling the truth about that, which I tend to believe,” Paul continues, “and they’re lying, which I also believe, then maybe other parts of her story are true, and maybe other parts of theirs aren’t. It’s not a moot point, Will.”

  I exhale slowly.

  “You think they’re guilty, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you do.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “But I do know that they’re guilty of something; something connected to this case.”

  “They didn’t kill this guy.” I’m churning inside, I’m a dervish spinning out of control. “Don’t you know that? By now don’t you at least know that?”

  “I’m not as convinced as you, no.”

  We stare hard at each other. It’s a déja vu moment—we happen to be in the conference room, the same room I was in when Fred and Andy lowered the boom, and as was the case in that incident, we’re on opposite sides of the table.

  “Then why the fuck did you take the case?” I demand.

  “Because I needed it,” he answers honestly. “And they needed me.”

  “They needed somebody to fight for them, tooth and nail,” I tell him. I’m yelling.

  “I am,” he answers. He’s still calm, at least outwardly.

  “Opening the door on the goddam hot knives shit, that was really fighting for them,” I throw at him without thinking. As soon as I say it I wish I hadn’t.

  “Will! You’re out of line!” Mary Lou is in my face.

  “I know I am, I know I am,” I answer as fast as I can. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I’m sorry, Paul,” I tell him.

  “You didn’t mean it,” he says. “We’re all testy tonight.”

  I slump against the wall.

  “Moseby set us up, the bastard. He set us up and we walked right into it. Right over the goddam cliff, like lemmings. I thought I had the slimy bastard’s number and he outfoxed me like I was a first-year law student.”

  “It’s one point, Will,” Mary Lou says. “It’s not the case. We have a good case.”

  “We shouldn’t have let it happen that way,” I reply. “We can’t afford mistakes.”

  “We’ll be okay,” she says. “Once we start presenting our witnesses that testimony will be all washed away.”

  This is the woman talking, not the lawyer. She’s trying to help me, soothe me. I wish I could let her.

  “Hey, listen,” Tommy kicks in. “If it hadn’t been introduced this way, they’d have found another way to get it in. Paul just happened to be in the line of fire. It could’ve been any of us. They want to win this case and they’re not going to play by the rules unless the court forces them to.”

  He’s right. I can feel the anger ebbing out of me. It isn’t Paul’s fault. He’s doing the best he can. And if in his gut he doesn’t believe in their innocence, completely or even partially, so what? A lawyer can defend a guilty client as well as he can defend an innocent one. If all your clients had to be innocent, most of them wouldn’t have lawyers. It’s one of the best parts of the system.

  As we’re breaking up, Paul puts a fatherly arm around my shoulder.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “I will be. I just hate surprises.”

  “We all do.” He smiles at me. “I had an ulcer once, because I got pissed off one time too many. Like you’re doing. You do the best you can, Will, but you can’t let it kill you.”

  The problem is, it’s the fire that sustains me. If it ever goes out inside, I won’t be worth a shit as a lawyer; and right now, that’s all there is to me that is worth a shit.

  “YOUR HONOR. We would move at this time for a continuance of sufficient time in which to analyze this portion of Dr. Grade’s testimony and to procure an expert of our own.”

  We’re in Martinez’s chambers. Us and Moseby.

  “We object, your honor,” Moseby says.

  “I figured you would,” Martinez says. He leans forward in his chair.

  “I can’t do it,” he tells us. “I won’t do it. That testimony yesterday resulted from your actions, not the prosecution’s. I’ve got a jury impaneled here. I can’t stop this trial now, not for this.”

  He glances at Moseby, back at us.

  “Here’s what I’ll do for you, though. You can supplement your witness list. I shouldn’t allow it, but I want to give you every opportunity. We’ll be in trial another week or so. If you’re going to find an expert, that should give you enough time.”

  I’d like to thank you for your help, judge, but I can’t. The possibility of finding a credible expert, acquainting him with the case, and convincing him to testify against a fellow doctor, are somewhere below the proverbial slim or none.

  “IT’S A SIMPLE PROCEDURE,” Grade says. It’s an hour later, we’ve reconvened.

  He’s talking to Moseby but looking at the jury, patiently leading them. “Not at all complicated. Something struck me when I first viewed the corpse. Granted, it had been decomposing for a few days, and was certainly not in good shape, but something about it seemed out of the ordinary.”

  “Which was?” Moseby asks.

  “That there was, as has been noted, hardly any bleeding. Forty-seven knife stabs, some of them rather deep, there should have been bleeding.”

  “Why wasn’t there, then?” Moseby continues his questioning. “Why wasn’t there more blood?”

  “Because,” Grade says, and now he leans forward, he’s going to say something important and he wants the room to know it, and they do, judge and jury are leaning forward with him, “the wounds were cauterized as they were being made.” He stands, picks up the pointer lying next to the easel. “May I?”

  Martinez nods. Grade steps down from the stand, comes around to the easel. He points to one of the wounds in the photograph.

  “As you can see, there’s darkness around these edges. Like a crust.” He moves the pointer around the wound.

  I can see the dark contours around the wounds; I thought they came from the traumatic impact the knife had on the body, that’s the way it had been explained to me. I don’t see any crust, but it’s only a photograph.

  “You can see this dark crust around almost every wound on the body,” Grade says, pointing to various knife wounds in the picture. “I came to the conclusion that they were formed by heat. The heat cauterized the wounds and stopped the bleeding. It’s common in medicine.”

  “Are you saying, then, Dr. Grade,” Moseby asks slowly, dramatically, “that these wounds were caused by …”

  “Hot knives. Yes.” Grade finishes for him.

  “That each time before the victim was stabbed,” Moseby continues, “forty-seven times in all, the people who stabbed him heated the knife and then stuck it in?”

  Grotesque bastard. The jury hears that, they’re lapping it up, it’s drawing them in like moths to a flame.

  “That is exactly what I am saying.” Grade puts the pointer down, resumes the dock, but remains standing, towering over everyone but Martinez.

  “That’s an interesting conclusion, Dr. Grade,” Moseby says, “but not very common. In fact I’d never heard of it until you mentioned it to me.”

  No shit, I think. Neither had anyone else. Except the state’s star witness.

  “I agree,” Grade answers. “And if I hadn’t come across this theory only a short time before I examined this corpse, it would have slipped by me completely.”

  “In a medical journal?” Moseby asks.

  Grade nods. “I don’t recall exactly which one—I read so many. You have to, to stay current. As I remember, the doctor who wrote it was an expert on homosexuality and in particular homosexual murders.”

  I can feel the heat rising from Lone Wolf. Jesus, we don’t need this. This guy’s liabl
e to freak right here if he’s wrapped into a gay killing. I lean towards him.

  “You better control yourself, man,” I warn him.

  “If that motherfucker calls me a faggot I’m going to tear his fucking heart out,” he growls.

  “You do,” I hiss at him, “and you’re sealing your verdict.”

  He scowls at me.

  “I mean it,” I say.

  He sits back, seething. Just get us through this, Lord, without it blowing up in our faces, that’s all I’m asking.

  “It’s your opinion, then, doctor, that this murder has homosexual overtones?” Moseby asks.

  I grip Lone Wolf’s wrist, hard. His teeth are grinding so tightly he could fracture his jaw.

  Grade refers to a folder. “Rectal smears taken from the victim’s anus revealed sperm,” he says. “That’s in the report.”

  “I know that, doctor,” Moseby states. “I just wanted to make sure it was part of the trial record.”

  Asshole. A straight-forward lawyer would’ve presented that in an honest way. This is more bullshit playing to the crowd.

  Grade puts the folder aside. “If I could add something …”

  Moseby smiles at him. “Of course, doctor. You’re the expert.”

  “Even if there had been no sperm present I would have drawn the same conclusion.”

  “That it was a gay murder.”

  “The man’s penis was cut off,” Grade says with a show of disgust, almost as if he has to spit to cleanse his mouth. “It was a heinous and brutal and disgusting act. Whoever did that is sick.”

  A rumble moves through the courtroom. The jury sits tight-lipped. Several look over at my clients.

  “I must add,” Grade continues, “that whoever did do it has to have some sexual problems. Some conflicts about his …” he pauses; then pointedly, “or their sexuality.”

  “Objection!” I shout.

  “Sustained. Witness will refrain from supposition of that nature,” Martinez tells Grade.

  “I’m sorry, your honor.”

  “Strike that last sentence,” Martinez instructs the court reporter.

  Big fucking deal.

  “About this homosexual killing … excuse me, this possible homosexual killing …”