by Jay Brandon
‘Do you know when it was made?’ Cynthia asked quietly. Edward was grateful for her question. It wasn’t exactly pertinent, but he didn’t mind if the judge focused on the wrong thing, as long as she ruled in his favor. This could be the whole trial in miniature, right here.
‘No, Your Honor,’ the prosecutor admitted.
‘Where?’
‘We haven’t been able to identify the background, Judge.’
‘Who made the recording?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t know that, either, Your Honor. It was mailed to us anonymously.’
Judge Miles cocked her head, looking at the prosecutor as if he were her subordinate and she wasn’t pleased with his performance.
‘It’s admissible as showing the relationship between the victim and the defendant prior to the crime, which is specifically admissible in a murder trial, Judge.’
Cynthia looked off into space thoughtfully. Edward realized something else. David Galindo was in front of this judge every day. He knew what she liked to hear, knew the arguments that made sense to her. It was one of the many advantages prosecutors enjoy over defense lawyers.
‘Through competent evidence, yes,’ Edward said hastily. ‘Just because the subject matter is relevant doesn’t mean you can introduce it through inadmissible evidence.’ As Cynthia continued to hesitate, he added, rather lamely, ‘And he’s drunk on the recording, Judge.’
He was counting on how moralistic Cynthia seemed to have become. Cynthia wouldn’t look back at him. She just stared into space. When the prosecutor started to speak again, she waved him to silence. Finally her eyes snapped back down to the level of the lawyers.
‘The court is going to reserve ruling at this time,’ she said levelly. ‘Both sides may submit case law. We will run this objection with the trial. The court will rule at the time the evidence is offered.’
Fuck, Edward thought. He had been prepared to win this or lose this today, forgetting the third option always available to a judge.
‘Your Honor,’ Edward said hesitantly, ‘I was hoping to have a ruling on this so I would know how to prepare a defense …’
‘Then I guess you need to prepare two ways, don’t you, counselor? You are both excused. We will hear this matter again.’
‘You were great,’ his sister said afterwards. She had watched from the first row of the spectator seats. ‘I was right about you.’
‘We have a problem.’
‘What?’ Amy asked, genuinely perplexed. ‘You were great, I saw you. You know she’ll rule in your favor come trial.’
Come trial.
‘I even think the judge may like you. Did you and she ever have a thing?’
Edward stared at his sister.
‘This isn’t middle school, Amy. Do you understand you’re on trial for your life? Here’s the problem. She didn’t give me a ruling on whether she’s going to allow that video into evidence. If she lets it in, we’re done. You’re in prison. Your ex-husband saying you’re going to kill him, when most people would say that’s a reasonable hypothesis to begin with? We’re as screwed as screwed can get. And Judge Cynthia, with whom you asked if I had “a thing,” just said she’s not going to make that ruling until we’re deep into trial. So it’s a little hard to prepare for it.’
Edward turned and looked back at the judge, who was now hearing two other lawyers at the bench. Cynthia must have felt his stare, but she wouldn’t glance in his direction. Replaying some of what she’d said in his head, he realized she had become one of those judges who either referred to herself in the third person, as an institution – ‘the court will rule’ – or in the first person plural. ‘We’re very grateful to the voters that they chose to keep us in this position from which we try to serve them to the best of our ability.’ She never seemed to break character. He’d bet she’d tell her clerks, ‘Hold any calls to the court, we’re going to the bathroom.’
This loftiness was always a bad sign in a judge, either of insecurity or an enormous ego, or both – a good judge, confident in her authority, doesn’t have to keep reminding lawyers that she’s the judge – but in this case it seemed particularly dangerous for Edward. Cynthia was so determined to show no sign of favoritism toward him that she might bend the other way.
ELEVEN
Tracking down other women Paul had dated wasn’t hard. He hadn’t been secretive about any of it, quite the contrary.
This one seemed quite a catch herself. Laura Martinelli was the director of a charitable foundation, with long legs, eyelashes and neck; she looked a questioner frankly in the eyes, with her own lustrous green ones. She sat behind the rather small desk in her relatively unadorned office – the money should go to the sick kids, not her – and answered every question Edward and Mike had in a low, deeper than average voice that made a man lean toward her.
‘How many times did you and Paul go out?’ Edward asked. It seemed like a safe, beginner sort of question, but Ms Martinelli turned it back on him, looking at him very directly but speculatively.
‘How many dates did the late Paul and I have?’ she repeated, sort of. ‘I could ask you to define “date,” of course, and all sorts of rigmarole, but let’s just say five or six, depending on how carefully you define “going out.” Sometimes we stayed in.’
Oh good, they were going to have badinage. Edward looked at her and Laura looked back, two honest stares of appraisal. She looked like a rich, beautiful woman at the peak of her appeal. She was standing atop it, looking at him with ever so slight a smile in her eyes.
Mike interjected himself. ‘Did you think it was leading somewhere?’ he asked in his quiet, deep voice.
Laura Martinelli gave him a look that should have made him question whether he should have been put into ‘special’ classes in school.
Inclining her head, she said, ‘Yes, I thought I was going to walk down the aisle on my daddy’s arm and be happy ever after. Imagine my devastation when I found out I wasn’t the only woman in his life. Now you want me to say, “If I couldn’t have him no one would,” right? Do you have a tape recorder?’
Mike looked like he was gathering his forces for a comeback, but Edward took over.
‘So did you ever hear he might be reconciling with his wife? My sister?’
‘I always assumed he would,’ she said. Even though there was a desk between them, Edward could tell by her change in posture that she had just crossed her legs. He wished the desk weren’t there.
‘Really?’ he said. ‘So you weren’t—?’
‘In it for the long run?’ She shrugged. Laura Martinelli blinked. She was doing Edward the honor of considering the question honestly. ‘Maybe. If it had worked out that way.’ She looked up and the moment of introspection was over. ‘We were just getting to know each other and I wasn’t sure I even liked him yet. I knew he still had feelings for his wife. They may have been intense, contradictory feelings, I don’t know. If he started talking about her I let him, but then he’d look at me and cut himself off. But it was clear their story wasn’t over.’ She shrugged again. ‘Maybe that would have played itself out and he and I would have had something. But I would have been OK either way.’
I’ll bet you would, Edward thought. Laura had a great stare, composed of appraisal, humor, a bit of sexual invitation, but an honesty that downplayed that into let’s wait and see.
‘I’ll bet you raise a lot of money for charity,’ he said, starting to rise.
She just sat there, giving him a little smile that said, You know I do.
Laura Martinelli turned out to be the most forthcoming of the lot. The others would acknowledge being seen in public with Paul, because they couldn’t deny that, but were more circumspect about what went on in private. No one wanted to claim membership in the conquest-of-the-month club. The most significant of them gave up very little, but what she did say added a telling detail.
Dr Louise Fisher was Paul’s research partner. Not a full partner, even she acknowledged that – and there were a
couple of associates who claimed she’d been little more than a note-taker – but they had worked closely together every day. She wasn’t nearly the obvious catch that Laura Martinelli was, but the fact that Paul had wanted her at all said something about him, or the phase of his life he was enjoying. No woman can resist me, he would have been projecting by being seen having drinks or dinner with Dr Fisher.
According to her, that’s all it was.
‘I knew about the others,’ she said. ‘I had no intention of being one of them. He’d come to work sometimes with a sly grin and scratches on his neck, like he was in a rough relationship. It was disgusting. But, after he asked me enough times to have a drink after work, it seemed rude to keep saying I had to get home to my cat.’
Edward had met her in the lab, Dr Fisher actually wearing a white lab coat and walking along black-topped tables holding beakers and tubes. She laughed.
‘One time he turned that on me and said he’d like to meet my cat.’
‘And did he?’ Edward asked as non-interrogatively as he could.
She turned and looked at him. She had nice eyes, he noticed for the first time, brown with an indication of depths.
‘I think having sex with me might have been superfluous,’ she answered the unspoken part of his question. ‘He just wanted to be seen as desirable.’
Louise Fisher turned away. It was hard to tell much about her figure in the lab coat, but she walked well, and her hands appeared very competent as she made small adjustments among the lab objects.
He realized she hadn’t answered his implied question, about whether she’d slept with her research partner. Maybe the answer she had given was good enough, but Edward needed to know more. Even as objectively as she spoke about his late brother-in-law, that might have been hard-won wisdom from after the fact of falling prey to him. And a woman seduced and abandoned had a classic motive for murder. Edward didn’t know if she was a good suspect, he just wanted to have alternative suspects he could throw out for the jury. Show enough people who might have wanted Paul dead and Amy no longer looked so obviously guilty.
‘I’m sorry, Dr Fisher, to be so insistent, but you know it’s not prurient interest. So after one of these working dinners or drinks, did Paul ever invite you back to his place?’
‘Oh no,’ she said, turning back to him abruptly. ‘No one ever went to Paul’s. I don’t even know where he was living. No one did.’
‘No one?’
‘No one I knew. He was secretive about it. A couple of times something would come in that we’d been waiting for, after he’d left for the day, and I’d call him and offer to courier it over to him. He always said no, either he’d come back in to pick up a copy or I could scan it and email it to him. It seemed odd because otherwise he was very secretive about anything involving our research. He wouldn’t have liked some important report scanned into the system, but he kept an even tighter lid on where he lived.’
She was watching Edward with those brown eyes, which could turn very studious, as if looking to him for some insight into the man who had been his brother-in-law. Edward had nothing to offer.
A few minutes later he left without knowing for certain whether Paul and his research partner had ever been intimate. Only her cat knew.
Was it infidelity? Was Paul cheating on Amy? What if they were separated, didn’t that make it OK? What if she thought they were unseparating? Wasn’t that a classic motive for murder?
But for whom? The wife or the girlfriend(s)?
‘OK, so we can interview the other girlfriends, if we can track them down,’ Mike said in the coffee shop in which they met to compare notes. ‘And maybe they’ll have the same story or maybe one of them will seem like a murderous psychopath. I’m not sure I’m qualified to spot that. You?’
Edward shook his head. ‘I don’t know what people are thinking. I don’t even know what I think.’ He was picturing his brother-in-law’s life, his newfound freedom. Edward didn’t know if Paul had really considered his marriage a prison. He’d been courting his ex-wife again … or had he just been leading her on while dating women he’d probably fantasized about banging for years?
But now he felt he’d gotten what he needed from Dr Fisher. She had more than one motive. If Paul went back to his wife and to his position in her family, presumably he’d also be taking his research back to the senior Dr Hall, Amy’s father, which would represent a double betrayal of Dr Louise Fisher.
‘Hey,’ Mike interrupted his thoughts. ‘I don’t see you much around the apartment any more. You and Linda getting ready to make it legal?’ He laughed to make it seem not a real question, but his curiosity was obvious.
Edward said, ‘Why should I start being law-abiding now?’
This time Mike’s laugh was genuine.
Later, this time with Linda herself, who had worked for years in his own profession and had learned a lot, he mulled over the issues about who might be lying. Linda was a good reader of people, he had learned that.
‘I started out taking Amy at face value, of course I believed her, but now I don’t know anything. I’m trying to evaluate everybody else, what about her?
‘What do you think?’ Edward said, looking at her. They were sitting on the little porch in the dusk before dinner. The last light of the sun showed him Linda’s face. Edward watched her, thinking how many changes he’d seen in her in the relatively brief time they’d been together.
‘How would I know?’
‘No, really, tell me what you think. Please.’ He found he really wanted Linda’s opinion on this, because she had only met Amy a few times, had never spent any time alone with her. In other words, she knew her only very little better than jurors would. So her impression was significant.
‘How can I answer that?’ Linda said. ‘I’ve only seen her in social situations and only a couple of times. I never saw her with Paul, or with any other man. How can I possibly know what she was like in those situations? Was she a jealous lover with a terrible temper? It doesn’t seem likely. Sweet little Amy. But we’re all different in love.’
‘But you must—’
‘It seems much more likely to me,’ Linda said, giving in, ‘that she’d be the type to run away and cry her eyes out rather than grab a gun and blast him. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘Thanks,’ Edward said, and he meant it. Linda had just given him an idea of at least two ways to go at trial. Get the jury to think they knew Amy – ‘sweet little Amy,’ in Linda’s phrase – so they’d never be able to picture her as a wild-eyed jealous murderess. Or keep them from knowing Amy at all, so they still couldn’t judge. If they didn’t think they knew what she was like at all, they couldn’t think her a murderer. Right?
Summer was almost over. The next time he went to court, it would be for trial.
TWELVE
‘Ready,’ the prosecutor announced easily, barely bothering to stand before slouching back down in his chair.
Edward stood more slowly and formally. ‘The defense is ready, Your Honor.’
He didn’t feel that way at all. Amy smiled up at him, putting her hand over his on the counsel table, the woman on trial for her life trying to reassure him. But her face also brimmed with confidence in him.
Edward felt none in himself. He stood there waiting for the first prospective juror to come filing in, hoping no one could see him trembling. The judge sat behind the bench, Amy to his right, the prosecutors to his left and, up there, stood the empty witness chair. In this chair they would interview the prospective jurors, eighty or ninety or more strangers, twelve of whom would become the jury that would decide Amy’s fate. Edward just needed to find one. The one who would hold out against a guilty sentence, who would question everything the prosecution did. One prospective juror into whose eyes Edward could look and see that promise to be the renegade and, at the same time, fool the prosecutors into letting him or her remain on the jury.
The terror of trial. Edward had never felt it before, certainly not in this
virulent a form. As a prosecutor he’d always felt confident of winning. All the prospective jurors who walked into the courtroom would look at the defendant and immediately think, I wonder what he did. They’d deny thinking that, but they couldn’t help it. The defendant always looked guilty, just by virtue of being the defendant. After all, a police investigation had put him there, hadn’t it?
Edward hadn’t felt the fear as a defense lawyer, either. In that position he had the opposite comfort. He was expected to lose. The defense always lost. On those rare occasions when a defendant was found not guilty, it was big news that shot around the courthouse quickly, that got reported in the press. A lawyer who could pull that off became a nine days’ wonder of a celebrity. There was no pressure on a defense lawyer. If you lost it wasn’t your fault, the odds were just too stacked against you, yet there was the enticing, exciting prospect of beating those odds and becoming that minor celebrity. And the stakes were so tiny: the life of some stranger sitting beside you. The client was probably guilty, probably belonged in prison and meant nothing to the defense lawyer anyway.
Amy’s hopeful smile as she looked up at him made his trembling worse. He wanted to tell the judge he was a fraud and run screaming out of the courtroom. But he couldn’t. Paradoxically, that smile of his sister’s that scared him so much also held him in place. He believed what she believed, that he was the best hope of saving her.
Consequently, when they began questioning would-be jurors, Edward did it much more carefully than he ever had before. He stared at each one as he or she answered the prosecutor’s questions, looking for a tell that the person was a liar, prejudiced against white people or women or otherwise poison to have on a jury.
‘Yes, I saw something about it on TV,’ the first one said, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, who listed her profession as ‘homemaker.’ Did that mean she’d resent a professional woman like Amy?
When it was Edward’s turn to question her, he stood formally and said, ‘Hello, Mrs Acosta, my name is Edward Hall. This is my sister Amy.’