Wyatt extracted a slip of paper from his notes. “Did Marvin White spend the night of August eighteenth of last year at your home, is that correct?” he read from the paper.
“Yes, it is,” she answered.
“When did he arrive,” he asked her, “and when did he leave?”
“He arrived after he was finished work, about a quarter to seven, and left the following morning shortly after seven-thirty—he had to be at work by eight and he didn’t want to be late. I made him breakfast,” she added. “Pancakes, from scratch.”
“How is it that Marvin was able to spend that entire night at your house, Mrs. Carpenter, if you are married? Did he sleep in your bed with you?”
“Of course he did. That was the point.”
He looked at her inquiringly.
“My husband was not home that night,” she answered in reference to the earlier part of the question.
“You knew that with certainty?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.” Her jaw was jutted in front of her like a centurion’s shield.
“And how did you know that?”
“The private detective I hired to follow my husband had phoned to tell me he had booked a hotel room for that night, and had checked in by four-thirty. So I knew the good doctor wasn’t coming home.” She paused. “He did that frequently—stayed out all night. This time I was prepared to make my own arrangements.”
Wyatt walked briskly to the defense table, picked up a two-page report, and walked back to the witness stand. He handed it to her. “Does this report from the Floss Detective Agency confirm what you have just told us?”
She glanced at it. “Yes, it does.”
“I offer this report in exhibit,” Wyatt said to Judge Grant.
“So ordered. This will be defense number … seven,” he instructed the clerk, looking at his sheet.
Wyatt handed the detective report to Grant, walked across the narrow aisle, and gave a copy to the prosecution. Windsor snatched it from Wyatt’s hand and passed it to a subordinate without looking at it.
“If you’ll notice, Your Honor,” Wyatt said, “this is dated August twentieth. It refers to August eighteenth as the night Dr. Carpenter was not going to be home, because he had booked a hotel room at the Carlton Hotel, and had checked in earlier in the afternoon.” He paused. “As I’m sure you recall, the fourth Alley Slasher murder was committed on the night of August eighteenth, between the hours of ten that night and three the next morning, according to Dr. Ayala’s official report.”
“Objection,” Abramowitz called from her seat. “Dr. Ayala’s conclusions and reports are not the subject of this examination.”
“Sustained,” Grant gave her. “Save these linkages for your summation, Mr. Matthews.”
“Certainly, Your Honor.” The jury had heard the connection; that’s all that mattered. He’d hammer it home during his final summation. “No further questions,” he said, gathering his notes and returning to his chair.
“How many delivery boys or other men you aren’t married to have you had sex with since you’ve been married, Mrs. Carpenter?” Abramowitz asked, going straight for the jugular.
“I had one other affair, many years ago,” Agnes answered with an equanimity that was amazing, under the circumstances. “The man was a colleague of my husband’s who knew of Leonard’s philandering. It lasted only a brief time. I had no other sexual partners after that until Marvin.”
“No one-night stands?” Abramowitz bore in. “No quickies with the pizza boy, the plumber, the UPS man?”
“Objection,” Wyatt sang out. “This is not only irrelevant, it’s offensive in the extreme. Mrs. Carpenter has put her reputation at great risk by appearing here, and she doesn’t need to be treated shabbily.”
“I agree,” Judge Grant said. “You’re risking a contempt citation with this kind of badgering,” he warned Abramowitz.
She nodded curtly, but didn’t apologize.
Agnes answered anyway. “I have had no ‘one-night stands’ or ‘quickies,’ as you crudely put it, Miss Abramowitz, or whatever your married status is. Perhaps you are ascribing your own standards to me; I don’t appreciate it,” she said firmly.
Oooooh, Wyatt thought. Talk about being hoisted on your own.
Abramowitz, frozen in place by the vicious barb, flushed crimson. She started to retort, but bit her tongue. A thousand-dollar contempt fine was a healthy chunk out of her paycheck; much more importantly, she didn’t want to alienate the jury. “Did you pay Marvin White to sleep with you?” she asked instead.
“Yes,” Agnes answered without hesitation.
Wyatt had gone over that issue thoroughly with her in their practice sessions. “Don’t lie about stuff like that,” he’d cautioned her. “They’ll catch you up, and it’ll tarnish all your other testimony.”
“How much?”
“It varied.”
“What is the most money you ever paid Marvin White to sleep with you, for one encounter?” Abramowitz asked.
“Objection. The witness has already testified she paid the defendant to have sex with her. The amount is irrelevant.”
“Sustained.”
Abramowitz tried to compose herself. This was going nowhere. “Does your husband know you’re testifying here?” she asked.
Agnes scowled. “Yes. He knows.”
“When did you tell him about this?”
“Three days ago.”
“What was his reaction?”
“He’s enraged,” Agnes answered. “He’s filing for divorce. As far as he’s concerned, I’ve ruined him.” She stared at Abramowitz with hurt and pain—the first signs of suffering Wyatt had ever seen in her. “He can sleep with every chippie nurse in the hospital, flaunt it to my face, and then accuse me of ruining him because I’m standing up for a boy whose life is at stake? I’m ruining my own reputation,” she cried out.
“Thank you,” Abramowitz said hurriedly. “That will be all.”
Agnes wasn’t finished. “Don’t you think my life is going to be a disaster because I’m testifying about this?” she wailed. “I could have kept quiet and protected myself. I’m the one who’s ruined,” she lamented loudly. “But I had to, I couldn’t stand quietly and watch an innocent boy die.” She looked up at Judge Grant. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
TOP THAT, WYATT THOUGHT. And he would, with Leticia. Agnes Carpenter, although a compelling witness for Marvin, had no backup witnesses to buttress her story that she and Marvin had been together on the night of August 18, only her own naked, public humiliation (which situation Abramowitz, who by the time she got to her summation and had recovered from today’s horrifics, would hammer home). Agnes Carpenter was a spurned woman who could be accused of lying to protect a young stud who had given her something no man had given her in years—a good fucking on a regular basis. Plus the fact that she obviously hated her husband for his philandering, and knew her humiliation would be his as well.
Leticia Pope, on the other hand, had no axes to grind, complicated or simple. She and Marvin had spent a night together. End of story. Except the night was the night of another Alley Slasher murder, and she did have witnesses, lots of them. And there were the photographs—hard, incontrovertible, physical evidence.
Some housekeeping first. “Recall Detective Dudley Marlow to the stand,” the bailiff sang out.
Abandoning the lectern, Wyatt stood as close to Marlow as he could, the police report Josephine had discovered in hand. “Do you recognize this?” he asked the veteran detective, handing him the sheaf of pages.
Marlow leafed through the report. “Yeah, of course. It’s some of my reports from the murders.”
“All of them,” Wyatt corrected him. “Everything that’s on file at county records.”
“If you say so,” Marlow answered affably. “Didn’t we go over this already?”
“Yes, we did, but there’s a discrepancy here I’ve discovered. My staff discovered,” he added, wanting to give Josephine her d
ue. “Do you see the date these files were removed?” He flipped to the proper page and pointed it out for Marlow.
“Yeah.”
“This is what, about five days after the last murder took place?”
“Five days, that’s about right, yeah.”
“You were back on the case and you wanted to review the earlier killings, is that why you took them out?”
“Sure.”
“That’s SOP?”
“Yeah,” Marlow answered laconically, shooting his cuffs. “So what’s the problem?” he asked with the peevish voice of a busy man who’s wasting his time here.
“I’m trying to find out if there is a problem,” Wyatt told him, “because the particular time you took these files out you did it via your computer. They were transmitted to you through the modem in your computer, Detective. Here.” He turned to another page and showed Marlow where the access status was listed. “It says it right here: ‘accessed via computer.’ ” He turned to face Marlow directly. “You testified under oath that you had never accessed these files by your computer, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” the detective answered grumpily.
“That you always did it by going down to the records department and taking them out in person. You said that?”
“Yes,” came the world-weary response.
Wyatt shook his head. “This says otherwise, Detective. And the fact that it was done three days before Dwayne Thompson went to the grand jury makes me suspicious, you know what I mean?”
Marlow reared up in his seat. “What, are you accusing me of passing information on? You gotta be crazy. I never even met this guy.”
“Then how do you account for this?” Wyatt demanded, shaking the report in Marlow’s beefy face.
“I don’t know. But I never took any files out over my computer. I don’t know how to do it,” he said plaintively. “Ask anyone in the department. They’ll tell you.”
“You’re certain you didn’t take this set of records out through your computer,” Abramowitz asked, now that it was her turn.
“I just said that, Ms. Abramowitz,” he told her, clearly showing signs of stress and anger.
“But you might have taken them out,” she went on. “By going down to the records department. You were taking records of the murders out around this time, correct?”
“Of course. Especially after this last one, with all the heat that was coming down.”
“Let me show you something, Detective.” She walked to her table, picked up a bound stack of papers, and carried them back to the witness stand. “Would you look at these, please?”
While he shuffled through the set she’d handed him one of her flunkies tossed a duplicate set onto the defense table. Wyatt glanced at them quickly and put them aside.
“Do you recognize these reports?” she asked.
“Sure,” Marlow replied. “They’re the files from a series of armed robberies I worked on about three years ago.”
“Your files.”
“Yes.”
“Turn to page seventeen, please,” she asked him, “and read the sentence I’ve highlighted.”
He turned to page 17, which was the second-to-last page. “ ‘Report accessed via phone line to requestor’s computer,’ ” he read.
“Did you request this report to be transmitted to your computer three years ago?” she asked him.
“Hell, no.” He turned to the jury. “Sorry.” He looked at Abramowitz again. “I didn’t even own a computer three years ago.”
“Then how do you account for …? Ah, one moment, please.” She turned the last page over. “Here we are.” She read, “Transmitted over counter. Correction to previous listing.” She showed the last page to Marlow. “Is that what this says?”
He glanced at where her manicured finger was pointing. “Yeah,” he agreed, “that’s what it says.”
Wyatt looked at the last page of the report. The mistake had been fixed, in living black and white. He dropped the report on his table like it was a steaming dog turd.
“In other words,” Abramowitz continued, “the previous accounting for how this was given to you was in error.”
“That’s what it looks like,” he agreed again.
“Clerical error.”
“Yeah.”
“Does that happen occasionally,” she asked him. “Clerical errors in the police department? Or are you guys normally perfect, and this was a onetime mistake?”
“Perfect we’re not,” he said. “We’re way out-of-date, Ms. Abramowitz. These kinds of mistakes happen all the time.”
Putting that report down, she referred to the one Wyatt had brought in. “So it’s possible that the way you got hold of this report was also erroneously recorded?”
“Very possible.”
She walked back to her side of the room, shooting Wyatt a smug “Don’t fuck with me” expression. “No further questions, Your Honor. I hope we’ve finally put this red herring to bed,” she added pointedly.
Win some, lose some. Abramowitz had made a point with the jury with that clerical-error bullshit, but that didn’t mean the transmission of the Alley Slasher files had been screwed up the same way. There was no correction on the current report. As far as he was concerned, until he was shown conclusively that it hadn’t been sent via phone line to someone’s computer, he was going to go on the supposition that it had.
No biggie. Agnes Carpenter had come through great, and his ace was still in the on-deck circle. Tomorrow, when she testified, he was going to nail this fucker shut.
FROM THE REAR OF the large chamber, hunched down in her seat so she wouldn’t be spotted, Violet Waleska had watched Wyatt’s virtuoso handling of Agnes Carpenter. He’s convincing me, she thought; and although she wanted only the best for him, her paramount concern was seeing her friend’s murderer brought to justice. But the deeper they got into it, the more doubts she had about whether or not Marvin was guilty. The woman could have been lying, to make her husband look bad. Any woman knew that feeling and could empathize with her; but it also meant that any woman could understand her less-than-pure motives; more than a man could, even a man as smart as Wyatt Matthews, her once and pray-to-God future lover.
She went to lunch, and by the time she got back it was too late to get inside for the Marlow reexamination. She would do so after the next break; if that wasn’t possible, she’d be here bright and early tomorrow morning to make sure she got the seat she wanted. Now she sat on one of the hard, worn, epithet-carved wooden benches outside the courtroom, watching the astonishing variety of human experience pass before her eyes.
A group of male prisoners, shackled, handcuffed, and bound together by waist chains, shuffled by her. They were led fore and aft by deputies, who ushered them into the courtroom across the hall from the one in which the murder case was taking place. As they passed her, something about one of them made her look at him more closely.
For a moment, the prisoner’s eyes met hers. Then he turned away and followed the man in front of him into the courtroom.
Who is that man? she thought. I’ve seen him somewhere. Where could it have been? She burrowed into her mind, but couldn’t place his face with a location. Having nothing better to do, and feeling a nagging urge to satisfy her curiosity, she got up and pushed open the double doors, entering the courtroom where the prisoner had been taken.
The room was almost empty; only a few spectators were scattered about in isolated pockets. The prisoners, now unshackled and uncuffed, sat shoulder to shoulder in the front row on the other side of the barrier. Violet, taking a seat near the rear exit, found her man easily; she could identify him by the back of his head—the hairdo looked familiar.
The men were being arraigned. As each name was called the prisoner stepped forward, to be joined by one of the lawyers who were congregated in the first few rows up front. The charges against them were read, they made their pleas in turn, the judge set bail, and the next prisoner was called.
“Elvis Burns
ide,” the bailiff read off from the list on his clipboard.
The man she’d been watching stood up. As he did, he glanced lazily around the room, as if to convey his extreme boredom with the proceedings. Again, for a fleeting moment, his eyes met Violet’s.
She remembered where she had seen him.
Staggering to her feet, her legs suddenly gelatinous, she walked as fast as she could to the doors and out, barely hearing, as they swung shut behind her, the charge against him, aggravated rape with deadly force, and his plea—“not guilty.”
She fidgeted nervously, shifting her weight from foot to foot, praying for a recess in Wyatt’s courtroom before the proceedings in the one she’d just left were over, so she wouldn’t have to see the man again when he came out.
Mercifully, the doors to courtroom 1 swung open. Spectators came out, stretching their limbs from the confinement of sitting still. She pushed past them into Judge Grant’s courtroom.
Wyatt was standing at the defense table, talking with his client and a black woman who was there every day and must be the client’s mother. As she walked down the aisle toward them he looked up and saw her. His eyes narrowed as he recognized her; he immediately gave an imperceptible shake of his head.
She knew better than to approach him. Instead, she walked to the woman who was working with him, his paralegal assistant she had talked with over the phone.
“Could I have a word with you?” she asked Josephine, bending her head in close so she could keep her voice low.
Josephine, startled by this sudden, unexpected approach, looked to Wyatt, who nodded, his eyes engaging Violet’s for the briefest of moments. “Okay,” she said warily. She led Violet to the rear of the courtroom.
Violet told Josephine about what she had seen in the adjacent courtroom. “Are you sure?” Josephine asked, feeling a rush of blood to her head.
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