Local Rules

by Jay Brandon

  “You and she had worked on a project together, hadn’t you? A speech?”

  Briggs actually smiled. “Jenny must have interviewed every law enforcement officer in the county for that speech. It’s too bad we never got—”

  He’d started to make a joke, a pleasantry, but it died along with his smile. Officer Briggs swallowed hard.

  “Have you arrested a suspect in her murder, Officer? Has anyone?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  Briggs shrugged. “Best suspect was already in custody. Now he’s sitting right there beside you.”

  “You mean Wayne Orkney. And why did you consider him the best suspect?”

  Briggs shrugged again. “Two people killed the same day, both beating deaths, you tend to think the same person did ’em both.”

  “That’s it?” Jordan said. “Do you have any evidence to connect Wayne to Jenny Fecklewhite’s murder?”

  Briggs thought hard. His hands were on the railing. “He was seen in the vicinity,” he finally concluded.

  “He wasn’t the only one, was he, Officer?” Jordan said and let a scornful beat of silence pass before he added, “I pass the witness.”

  Arriendez favored him with a short glare, an expression that said, I’m not going to play your stupid game. “No ques­tions,” he said.

  “Call your next witness,” Judge Waverly instructed. Jordan took a deep breath. Here we go. “The defense calls Dr. Bob Wyntlowski.”

  Mike Arriendez gave Jordan his first satisfaction of the trial by leaning over to say, “Who?”

  11

  At my request,” Jordan asked, “Did you examine an au­topsy report and accompanying evidence concerning the death of a young man named Kevin Wainwright?”

  “Yes, I did,” Dr. Wyntlowski said. He was a friendly man; he favored the entire room with one quick, bright smile, apparently not noticing that no one smiled back. Jordan had established the doctor’s credentials as an assistant medical examiner of Bexar County who had performed thousands more autopsies than the local doctor. Wyntlowski had been accepted as an expert, but no one, from the judge on his high seat to the interested parties in the audience, had any idea what Dr. Wyntlowski was doing in their courtroom.

  “And do you agree with Dr. Prouty’s stated cause of death, coronary arrest?”

  “I certainly agree that his heart stopped,” Wyntlowski said easily. “That’s all coronary arrest means. And his lungs stopped pumping air and his blood stopped flowing. But why those things happened is an open question.”

  “You can’t determine cause of death from the observa­tions included in the autopsy summary?”

  “Not to my satisfaction,” the doctor said.

  “What’s left out?” Jordan asked.

  This was the tricky part, the part where Wyntlowski had to criticize a fellow doctor. He tried his best to avoid it “The report is fine as far as it goes. It covers the standard, vital areas of inquiry. There are just maybe a couple of things I would have looked for if I’d conducted the autopsy.”

  “Such as?”

  Wyntlowski shifted his weight. “Dr. Prouty undoubtedly already knew the circumstances of the injuries, which I don’t. I’d be starting with a clean slate. So I would want to know why the patient died, as opposed to how he got in­jured. Because these injuries, although serious, were not nec­essarily life-threatening.”

  “Are you suggesting that something happened to him in the hospital to cause death?” Jordan asked.

  No, Dr. Wyntlowski wouldn’t commit to that. “Every pa­tient is different,” he said earnestly. “One will die of some­thing another would walk away from without treatment. We’re not machines, you can’t confidently predict that if you do A to us, B will always result”

  “But does this autopsy report exclude the possibility that something happened to Kevin Wainwright after the beating, something that resulted in his death?”

  “No.”

  Mike Arriendez had rejoined the party. He was not only facing forward again, he was leaning across his table, eyes narrowed as he studied Dr. Wyntlowski.

  Jordan heard murmurs at his back as well. Judge Waverly tapped his gavel lightly. The judge was also studying Dr. Wyntlowski, no longer hostilely.

  “What would you have looked for, Dr. Wyntlowski, to determine whether something like that had happened?”

  “Anything that would have increased the strain on his already weakened heart. Suffocation, for example. If some­one had held a pillow over the patient’s face or even a large hand cupped over his nose and mouth. Someone wouldn’t have had to cut off his oxygen long enough actually to suffo­cate him, just long enough to increase the strain on his heart, which was already weakened by his injuries. A minute of that, maybe less, could have resulted in a fatal heart attack, especially if no assistance was called in.”

  “And how could you have told if that happened?” Jor­dan asked.

  “I would have examined the insides of the lips,” the doc­tor said, indicating his own with his finger. “If something had pressed down on the mouth hard enough to shut off breath, the teeth should have left impressions on the lips. An impression that wouldn’t have faded if the patient died immediately afterward.”

  “Did Dr. Prouty check for that?”

  “Not according to his report,” Dr. Wyntlowski said as charitably as possible.

  “Any other possibilities for death-causing events in the hospital?”

  “Several. Some could have been detected by autopsy, some not.”

  “If the defense had been allowed to exhume the body,” Jordan said, directing the question at the judge, who under­stood perfectly, “so that you could have conducted a second autopsy, could you have found indications of what actually caused the death of Kevin Wainwright?”

  “Possibly,” the doctor said. “I could have looked at least.” Jordan passed the witness while he collected his thoughts. Mike Arriendez only asked one question. “Dr. Wyntlowski, your examination of Dr. Prouty’s autopsy report doesn’t sug­gest any actual evidence that anything other than the beating he suffered killed Kevin Wainwright, did it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Pass the witness.”

  Jordan had pushed one file away and pulled another toward him. He spread the contents before him as he began quietly. “I asked you to examine another autopsy report, didn’t I, Dr. Wyntlowski?”

  “Yes.” The medical examiner opened another file himself. “One concerning Jennifer Fecklewhite.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jordan felt the winds of stirring at his back again, and not only at his back. Mention of Jenny’s name seemed to cast a spell on the people of Green Hills, or to break one. “What did you think of this autopsy report, Doctor?”

  “Very thorough,” the medical examiner said with satisfac­tion. “It lays out the injuries and the probable causes very clearly.”

  “What did Jenny Fecklewhite die of, Dr. Wyntiowski?”

  Mike Arriendez rose to say, “I object to this entire line of questioning as irrelevant. No one is being tried for Jenny Fecklewhite’s murder.”

  “Overruled,” said Judge Waverly. His mild tone did not match his appearance. The judge was sitting at attention, one hand under his chin with the index finger crossing his lips, sealing them.

  “What killed Jenny, Doctor?” Jordan asked again.

  “She died as a result of a broken neck. From the support­ing evidence, the offense report, the death scene photo­graphs, it seems clear that what happened is that she fell backward, her neck fell across a tree root, and her head struck a rock. Either of those injuries might have caused death, but in my estimation it was the broken neck that did.” Dr. Wyntlowski was speaking clearly, briskly, but he un­derstood that the victim might be represented in the court­room by people who cared about her, which lent his voice a sympathetic tone. A much less sensitive man than the doc­tor would still have noticed the stillness of the room as he talked about Jenny. Jordan looke
d at Laura and saw that her hands were still moving purposefully, but Laura’s head was turned and cocked as if she saw something in a high corner of the ceiling.

  “Were those her only injuries, Dr. Wyntlowski?”

  “No. She also showed marks from being struck.”

  “By a hand?”

  “Yes,” Wyntlowski said positively. “Dr. Prouty noted traces of someone else’s skin in one of the wounds. Also the shape of one of the bruises on her shoulder indicates fingers squeezing very hard.”

  Jordan’s voice was quiet, too, but he kept it audible. He didn’t want anyone to miss anything. Particularly the judge. The testimony was having an effect on Judge Waverly; his head was slowly bowing as he listened. His normally sharp eyes had softened in distraction or distress. The judge’s head jerked ever so slightly as Jordan asked, “Was she hit very many times?”

  “No,” Dr. Wyntlowski said. “It wasn’t a beating. It was probably, in fact, a very unlucky punch that knocked her down, and she had the very bad luck of landing on the tree root and the rock at just the right angle to break her neck.” The medical examiner was displaying a preautopsy photo­graph that showed the marks on Jenny’s face. Jordan was looking at another photograph in his file, the blown-up hos­pital file photo of Jenny. What a pretty girl she had been. There was such confident expectation in her cocked head, her knowing smile.

  “Is there anything distinctive about her death you can tell us from the photos, Doctor?”

  “That the person who hit her was wearing a ring.”

  The silence of the courtroom broke. Murmurs swept for­ward, a wave breaking over the trial participants. The judge did nothing to quiet them. Dr. Wyntlowski sounded matter-of-fact and Jordan the same as he asked his witness how he knew about the ring.

  “I blew up the photo of her face,” the doctor explained, “and examined this one deep gouge to her cheek. In the blowup you can see the tears of the skin, sharp cuts that a hand or a knuckle wouldn’t make. The depth of the wound, too, indicates that the person who hit her was wearing some­thing on his hand.”

  “Do you think from these photos you could identify the ring that made the marks on Jenny’s face?”

  “I believe so. Normally I wouldn’t think I could, working just from pictures, but in this case the impressions in the wound are very clear. The ring should match up obviously enough for identification. Not like a fingerprint, but I could certainly tell you there’s a high probability of a particular ring’s having made the wound.”

  This was the moment at which Jordan had aimed all his trial strategy. He had wanted the case heard by another judge. When that failed, he wanted to understand Judge Waverly’s motivations precisely. In that attempt, he had no­ticed something else about the judge, leading him to a theory he hadn’t been able to test until this moment.

  “May I approach the bench, Your Honor?” Jordan walked stiffly, feeling hollow. He had never done anything like what he was about to do, nor had he ever heard of anyone doing anything similar.

  “Your Honor,” he asked loudly when he stood directly under the judge, “may I please borrow your ring?”

  The judge stared. But there was a roomful of witnesses at Jordan’s back. Judge Waverly couldn’t refuse. Slowly he brought his hands together.

  “No, sir, not your wedding ring, the other one, the heav­ier one.”

  In front of the bench, Jordan was standing beside Laura. He felt her, though he didn’t look anywhere but into the judge’s face. He thought Laura had frozen like everyone else in the courtroom. But the record of what he was doing wouldn’t matter.

  With icy eyes, the judge removed his ring and silently handed it to the defense lawyer. It was a heavy lodge ring, black in its crevices. The crown was red-faceted glass with crossed gold swords. Jordan carried it gingerly the few steps to the witness box and handed it to the medical examiner.

  “Is this the ring that caused the cut on Jenny Fecklewhite’s face?”

  Dr. Wyntlowski accepted the ring and bent over it, turning it, running his fingers over its crown, looking from the ring to the blown-up photograph of Jenny’s wounded face. Jor­dan found he’d been holding his breath and let it out in a long, ragged exhalation.

  Dr. Wyntlowski looked up and handed the ring back to Jordan. “No, sir,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That’s not the ring that caused the cut on her face.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I may not be able to identify the ring that did it with absolute certainty, but I can definitely exclude some, including that one. The markings don’t match up.”

  It seemed like a long, long time that Jordan stood stock still at the front of the courtroom. The ring was warm in his hand. He turned and handed it back to the judge, who ac­cepted it grimly. “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  Jordan’s fingers moved across each other, but he no longer wore a ring. Turning to go back to his seat, he saw Mike Arriendez’s wide eyes and then the district attorney’s hands splayed on his table. “May I borrow that, please?” Jordan asked, hoping the note of desperation in his voice was one only he could hear.

  “Is this the ring?” he asked the doctor, who barely glanced at the DA’s class ring before dismissing it with a shake of his head.

  Still moving in a daze, Jordan returned the prosecutor’s ring and saw a flash of light at the bailiff’s desk. Before he even took a step in that direction, Emilio was holding a heavy gold ring out to him with an almost eager expression as if they were playing bingo. Jordan conveyed the ring to his witness, waited for the ring to be exonerated, and re­turned it.

  Next he moved out into the audience, like a mindreader’s assistant. “Sir?” he said to Swin Wainwright, but then no­ticed that not only was Kevin Wainwright’s father not wear­ing a ring, but he was missing most of the ring finger on his right hand. Jordan passed on and came to Ed Fecklewhite in his aisle seat. “Mr. Fecklewhite, may I borrow that ring?” Fecklewhite gave up his class ring reluctantly, growing red-faced as the ring stuck for a moment. Jordan’s hope rose as he carried the heavy ring to his expert. He remembered Ed Fecklewhite’s assault conviction and the fact that Jenny had not been his biological daughter.

  “What about this one, Dr. Wyntlowski?”

  The doctor took his time. It was going to be all right, Jordan thought, beginning to recover his equilibrium. In fact, he was going to come off looking like Perry Mason.

  “No, sir,” Wyntlowski said, shaking his head.

  “No?” Jordan was starting to hate his witness.

  “No,” the doctor said mildly but emphatically.

  As Jordan returned the ring to Ed Fecklewhite, he talked to his witness. “So it couldn’t have been just any ring?”

  “No, sir, it would have very distinctive markings.”

  Jordan stood in the audience, casting around. Harry Briggs, excused as a witness, was sitting near the back, but Jordan had already noticed that Briggs didn’t wear a ring and didn’t have a telltale white band announcing one’s ab­sence. When Jordan glanced at him, Briggs held up his hands. Jordan gave him a tight nod. He had considered Briggs a suspect, given his closeness to the dead girl and his haste to make the murder scene, outside his jurisdiction. But the absence of a ring had cleared the police officer in Jordan’s mind.

  He saw no other suspects in the audience. Two or three of the men followed Harry Briggs’s example, holding up their hands. Jordan nodded again authoritatively and marched back to his seat. Judge Waverly was staring at him with a curious expression composed of hatred and hope.

  “So,” Jordan said, having regained the defense lawyer’s knowing tone that so often, as it did in his case, masks utter ignorance, “Dr. Wyntlowski, you feel confident you would know this murder ring if you saw it?”

  “Pretty confident,” the doctor said easily.

  Jordan looked at Arriendez as if the ball were now in his court. “Pass the witness,” he said, never so glad in his life to utter the phrase.
/>   Arriendez smiled at the doctor, who smiled back. “I have no questions,” the prosecutor said.

  Judge Waverly leaned down to say to Wyntlowski, “You’re excused as a witness, Doctor, with the thanks of the court.

  “Call your next witness,” the judge then commanded Jor­dan in a tone from which the warmth had instantly fallen out.

  Jordan stood. “Your Honor, in light of this new evidence, the defense requests a continuance in order to pursue fur­ther investigation.”

  Judge Waverly stared at him, trying to gauge the depth of the defense lawyer’s insincerity. Finally he said, “We will recess until tomorrow morning at nine.”

  “Your Honor, I don’t know if one afternoon will be enough time.”

  “Try,” said the judge, and left the room.

  Around Jordan, the stir that had been waiting to break out did so in full force. Spectators talked to each other loudly, making suggestions, dismissing possibilities. Even the jurors were talking until Emilio ushered them out.

  But Jordan was watching only Laura. She gathered up her day’s papers with her customary efficiency, and as she turned to leave, her eyes snagged on Jordan, apparently by acci­dent. She stopped for a long moment that made Jordan take a step as if she had called to him, but his movement hard­ened her face and propelled her out of the room, her back stiff.

  “Mr. Marshall? ... Mr. Marshall?”

  “Sorry, Wayne. What is it?”

  “Where’s the ring?” his client asked plaintively but with an underlying confidence that Jordan did not wish to dispel.

  “The great thing about being the defense, Wayne, is that we don’t have to produce any evidence. We just point out where the State didn’t do its job. And when you testify tomorrow and people see that you’re not wearing a ring --” Jordan checked hastily to make sure of that; Wayne’s hands were grimy with ground-in dirt, his knuckles were scarred, but his fingers were mercifully bare. “ -- then we’ll have cleared you of Jenny’s murder. That’s a big step, that’ll help— ”

  On punishment, Jordan had started to say, but it was bad form to confide to a client while the guilt-or-innocence phase of trial was still going on one’s certainty that it would be followed by a sentencing phase.