Blood in the Lake
Page 22
“I want twenty copies of Deuce’s plat of the ground floor of The Southern Wave, enough for the jurors and the judge, with a few extras. Not poster-size for those drawings. We don’t want to emphasize the considerable distance between Skipper Domingue’s location and the two men he overheard arguing.”
I was not at all happy with the orders, but I worked at keeping my cool. At this point I was totally invested in the trial myself. I wanted to do anything I could to help Tom succeed.
“I want a very large blow-up of an excerpt, with emphasis supplied, from the incriminating statement Remmy made in the hospital in Birmingham: Two dead on my watch.”
I talked back about this request. “Tom, that’s other crime evidence the jury can’t hear.”
“I know that. The blow-up is just to show to Judge Bonin. He’s going to have to figure out how I can explain what sent the detectives off to Birmingham, and I want to point out our very large problem. He’ll probably want to edit Deputy Hamilton’s testimony to say Remmy talked about one dead on his watch. We’ll need a new poster when we have the judge’s solution.”
Tom had even more requests for exhibits for the penalty phase of the trial. He wanted me to create a poster-sized drawing of the Boudreaux family tree, to locate the eightieth birthday party photograph we had made for PawPaw’s Celebration of Life, and to mount a collage of photographs taken of Mrs. Falgout lying in the pile of leaves at the site of the fire on Captain Cade Road. Of course we weren’t counting on pictures alone to impress the jury with that scene. The sight of Mrs. Falgout herself, up close and personal, would be our very best exhibit. That missing eye!
Tom asked me to make a trial book with 8 by 11 inch copies of all the exhibits for each juror, for the alternate jurors, for the judge, and for the defense as well. “Stop,” Tom corrected his instruction. “Make that two books, one for each phase. I can’t be showing them the Falgout stuff right off the bat. But then, Sarah might even agree to allow me to give the exhibit books to the jury; she wouldn’t want to appear to be withholding evidence from their eyes. Jurors hate it when they suspect something is happening they aren’t permitted to know.”
Tom had even more instructions for me. “Stick around. Richie is on his way over for our final sessions with guilt phase witnesses. He’ll be handling some of them on direct.”
I knew next to nothing about Richie Castille. In the months I’d been hanging around the office, we’d exchanged no more than good morning and goodbye. His huge drug caseload required him to spend every criminal cycle in the courtroom arranging pleas and trying cases. Also, he had a lot to do with managing the confidential informants the narcs used out in the field.
I was beginning to appreciate the complexity of his assignment. Rumor had it he’d been furious when Mr. Strait bypassed him to promote Tom to first assistant. I hoped that was water under the bridge. Having Richie on hand for this trial relieved me of a major worry. Tom needed experience and skill next to him in the second chair.
I knew the last two weeks before a capital trial would be tense, but Tom’s tunnel vision was gettin’ to me. Another order and I might explode. I felt like saying, “Tom, it’s me. Mandy. How about easing off a bit on the commands?” I knew part of my irritation came from worry about Taddy’s safety. I was looking around for someone to blame for my unease. When five o’clock rolled around, I was glad to go home alone, leaving Tom closed in his office with Richie.
Mom’s antennae were up again, and she brought up the topic of me and Tom.
“You don’t seem to be spending as much time with Tom, and I thought maybe he was a bit short with you the other night. Is everything OK?”
“I’m getting a lot of orders about prep for the trial, that’s all.”
I didn’t want to get into this with Mom, or let Aunt Mazie’s remarks about Tom’s serial girlfriends find any room in my head. I left the room quickly.
The next morning Richie Castille met us in the library. Big guy, cool dude. He shaved his head and wore blue jeans and cowboy boots. He was given to theatrical gestures and pauses for emphasis. I could believe he enjoyed doing his imitation of Mr. Strait at the annual Christmas party, and that he could give his drug-case juries a show.
Richie rubbed one palm against the other.” Who’s up first, Tom?”
“I’d like Deuce to be the detective who walks the jury through the initial investigation,” Tom responded. “He kept the investigation notebook so he’ll be less likely to get caught in any of Sarah’s machinations as she works through her cross. But today Deuce is out of town. We’ll talk with him as soon as he returns. We have Skipper Domingue waiting right now.”
“You have his statements for me?” Richie asked.
I’d pulled Domingue’s initial affidavit and a typed version of our first interview. Tom held out his hand to me as if he were summoning an operating nurse to give him a scalpel. I slapped the papers on his palm. “Yes, doctor,” I said. He didn’t even notice my attitude, just passed the papers to Richie.
Richie speed-read four sheets in less than a minute. When he’d finished, he dropped them on the table and raised his hand. “Bring him on!”
With the help of Deuce’s drawing of the ground floor of The Southern Wave, Richie grilled Skipper Domingue about every detail in his testimony. Tom listened intently but didn’t interrupt. After Skipper left, I commented that our witness now seemed a good bit more certain of the details, not only about everyone’s location at the time he overheard the conversation, but also about what had been said.
Richie smiled. “There’s an art to getting good testimony out of your witnesses. We don’t take ‘em out to the woodshed to beat what we want into their heads, but we do question them so many times the answers we like get more forceful and more specific. We can’t get carried away and have the witness alter anything that’s in the initial account. Sarah would chew Skipper to bits over any discrepancies between what he said in his first affidavit and what he says in court.”
An art, yes. Does the artist distort reality?
The process of witness preparation fascinated me. I didn’t know if Tom and Richie were better at it than other prosecutors with ten years of experience, but at the time I thought so. I felt fortunate to be on the inside.
Damn. I was star-gazing again.
Mark Hamilton, the Birmingham, Alabama, officer who’d located Remmy in the hospital and overheard his incriminating statement, had come to Louisiana two weeks earlier to testify at Sarah’s motion hearing when she’d argued that Remmy’s words were the product of delirium, or failing that argument, coerced, and should be excluded from the trial. Tom had won the motion; Remmy’s statements would come in as excited utterances, totally voluntary. Tom didn’t want to require Hamilton to make a second trip to Louisiana only to have him come a third time for the trial itself, but Richie thought they should bolster up a few details to reinforce the absence of any coercion on the part of the Alabama officers. They agreed to give Mark a phone call to go over his testimony one more time.
Tom and Richie worked together smoothly. Richie appeared to have buried past grudges, but maybe he just loved working with witnesses. I could see Tom respected Richie’s trial experience. They really were a good team.
Then the two of them got into what to do about the unknown caller who had tipped off the officers about Remmy being in the Birmingham hospital. Buddy and Deuce had been pretty sure the caller was Remmy’s cousin, Dudley LeBlanc, but they had no confirmation of that fact.
Tom had a suggestion. “Buddy’s downstairs in the sheriff’s office. I’m going to call him up here for some creative thinking about how to approach cousin Dud.”
“I was just on my way up to see you guys,” Buddy said. “First thing, before it slips my mind, Deuce just called in from the Harris County Jail in Houston. He’s always a cool cat, but I could hear the excitement in his voice. He says he’s onto something important about the death of his informant.”
“Wait a minute, Buddy. Let me
put you on speaker. I want Richie to hear this.” Tom punched a button on the phone. “OK. Keep going.”
“Deuce wants a meeting with you as soon as possible, Tom. He asked me to see if Mr. Strait might be available also. Friday, if he’s back in town, but Monday, at the latest. OK?”
“Any time, Buddy. Mr. Strait stays nearby when we have a big fire burning. What does Deuce want to talk to him about?”
“He’s pretty close with the details, but apparently there’s a connection to our trial. An important tie, he says. He didn’t elaborate. Just said he needs Mr. Strait. I’m up in five.”
“Hey.” Richie stuck in a thought. “If drugs were involved in the murder of Deuce’s informant, we might have another capital case on our hands. What trumps? Murder or drugs? Would it be your prosecution, Tom, or would it be mine?”
Tom knew better than to rank the cases and activate Richie’s resentment. “Strait’s call. We have job security, that’s for sure.”
When Buddy joined our meeting, a broad smile had smoothed the wrinkles from his bulldog face.
“You’re looking triumphant,” Tom said.
“Guys, I do believe I’ve found a wedge to get the cooperation we need from Remmy’s cousin Dudley.”
“Shoot.”
“First, I’ll go back a bit.”
Tom’s lips tightened. Trying to get Buddy quickly to the point worked on his last nerve. This time, if Buddy didn’t get there soon enough, I’d go out and get what worked last time—fresh coffee.
“Back when we were looking for Remmy, we picked up Dudley’s name from the list of kin in Remmy’s five-year-old probation report, same list where we got the name of his mom, Sylvia Tolbert. And from the same probation report, we picked up a prior arrest—assault at the Tiger Lounge in Jeanerette in a fracas over a poker game. Victim: one Dudley LeBlanc. One and one make two—yoo hoo! We went looking for Mr. LeBlanc to see if he knew where we could find his drinkin’ buddy, Remmy Richard. Maybe druggin’ buddy as well.”
Buddy smiled—no, smirked—as he watched Tom’s pen twirl through his fingers like a miniature drum major’s baton. Buddy enjoyed dragging out his reports just to get Tom’s goat. I was right. A jerk.
“Deuce and I found Dudley working the counter at a local plumbing supply store. He flat denied knowing Remmy’s whereabouts, but something about the way his eyes kept slipping sideways didn’t pass the smell test. That’s why, when the anonymous call came in tipping us off to find Remmy in a Birmingham hospital, we suspected cousin Dudley was the caller. Who else could Remmy ask for help in his time of need? Remmy had no family, and we’d never found any friends except the Falgouts. No friends for good reason. Look what he did to them.
“So I ran Dudley’s record. He’s got five pending charges, disturbing the peace up to assault. No convictions. The witnesses listed on the affidavits of arrest were probably all criminals themselves so the charges would no doubt just sit there until the defense figured out the DA would never put them on the stand. But Dudley might not know that.” Buddy wore his leer again, which he passed from Tom to Richie, skipping me. “I got to thinking. I could tell cousin Dud I’d make those charges disappear in return for a little ‘cooperation.’”
“Go for it, Buddy.” Buddy left and Tom turned back to Richie.
“Here’s a bonus. If we get Dudley under the tent, I could use him as a witness in the penalty phase to testify about the fight at the Tiger Lounge. Then we’d have some evidence about Remmy’s propensity for violence.”
* * *
Buddy went to work. The following day he came back to our witness preparation session with good news. “Blind hog found an acorn, as my bourrée buddies like to say about an unexpected lucky hand. I think I’ve got Dudley on our team.”
Maybe we had an example of good luck, but it looked to me more like an example of the DA’s advantage. Being part of the victim’s family, I was grateful to have the prosecutor’s hand to play.
We called Dudley, and he came in. Buddy had figured it right; Dudley admitted he was the caller. After an hour of back and forth, Dudley agreed to testify, voluntarily, that Remmy had asked for money to make a getaway. And Richie extracted an important bonus, actually a very tasty acorn for the blind hog. Dudley would quote Remmy as saying he needed the money to skip town because he had done in two.
We now had corroboration of the incriminating statement Remmy had made in Birmingham a week later.
But Tom wasn’t going to be able to just slip the statement in. The law had built in balance. Tom had a continuing obligation to disclose to the defense, and Sarah would surely go to work on suppressing Dudley’s testimony. A prosecutor has power and resources, and can use a few tricks, but he has to share the rewards of his edge.
I watched Tom make two notes on his legal pad. “Statement for Judge: edit.” “Disclosure?”
Now I felt more sure of Remmy’s guilt, and about Tom’s ability to prove it.
Richie looked at his watch. “It’s dark outside. Are you walking out?”
I thought Richie was asking me, but Tom answered.
“We’ve got hours to go yet, but I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Watch out for Honoré’s ghost!” Richie said, and left.
I told Tom I felt a lot better about his chances.
“I know we don’t have a sure thing, Mandy, but I owe it to your family to give this trial everything I’ve got. I’m convinced Remmy killed your grandfather. I represent the victim’s family, your family. Full speed ahead.”
I couldn’t ask for anything more. Although I had a nagging worry about the Bar Exam results due Monday, and was just a bit miffed Tom didn’t mention them, I felt pretty good.
“But what’s this business about Honoré’s ghost?” I asked. “I heard Buddy say the same thing?”
“Remind me to get Richie to tell you the story. Local legend, and he’s best at that. I’m just a north Louisiana boy. Short version: the ghost is supposed to haunt people who work too late.”
I now had backdoor privileges to the DA’s office, so I no longer came and went by the courthouse steps. But that night when I left, I drove around to look at the building from the front. I perched on Iberia Street and took in the scene. There she stood, Lady Justice, stunningly illuminated against the gleaming white facade of the building.
Do your job, Lady, I told her.
Sister Bev
TOM BECKONED ME into the library. Sarah sat at the end of the table, her right hand flat against her temple. No fancy briefcase in sight today. Tom had what the hell is she going to come up with next all over his face.
“Why the gloom and doom, Sarah? Did somebody die?”
“I’m about to piss you off and piss the judge off even more. I’m filing another motion for continuance.”
“Jesus! You must have a death wish. We’re ten days before trial. It’s Friday afternoon. Judge Bonin is long gone from the courthouse and probably already out at his camp a few inches into Jim Beam. You gotta be kidding.”
Continuance? Now? We were geared up to begin picking a jury. For sure SOB would show Sarah why his initials made an appropriate nickname. What earthly reason was she going to give him?
Sarah squeezed her eyelids together. When they opened, those incredible emerald pools were as lifeless as swamp water.
“I’ve lost my client’s sister,” Sarah said. I could barely hear her words.
Tom shook his head in exasperation. “Bev Dubois is lost? I suppose you’re telling me St. Anthony is no help.”
Sarah didn’t appreciate Tom’s attempt at levity. She frowned, straightened up in her chair, physically gathering strength to explain her situation.
How could she look so damn good when she appeared to be in major distress?
“I thought I had a chance to get Bev Dubois on board to testify for her brother. Where there’s life, there’s hope, as they say. Well, when there’s death, there’s no hope.”
So Tom called it. Somebody did die.
I didn’t get it either. Why on earth was Sarah crying over her client’s sister?
Sarah pulled in enough breath to be able to get out two words. “My fault.”
“What? Your fault?” Tom had the frown now. “So tell me.”
Sarah ran her tongue over her top lip and swallowed hard before she could speak.
“Mike, our investigator, located Remmy’s sister in a trailer park in Anse Noire, on the levee. Well, you know where she lives; your detectives found her place when they were looking for Remmy. My guess is she gave them no help.”
“That’s what they reported to me at the time. She said she didn’t know where Remmy was, and didn’t care either.”
“You know what it’s like out there. Everything’s temporary. The wheels never come off the trailers ‘cause you gotta be able to make tracks whenever there’s a threat of a bad storm coming or a report of too much rain falling upriver.” Sarah could paint a picture with just a few words.
Sarah said Mike drove over there three times trying to catch Bev at home. No luck. Each time he wrote Please call on a card, which he left in a tilted mailbox with DUBOIS hand-lettered on the side. Bev didn’t call. On a fourth blank trip, when he turned his truck around to leave, he caught a glimpse of a face in the window of the trailer next door. He knocked. A shriveled-up woman with a dark shadow over her upper lip, hair screwed up in pink sponge curlers, raised the window and asked him what he wanted. When he said he was looking to talk with her next-door neighbor, the lady suggested he come back some day around five-thirty, the time when Bev and her husband—the lady called him Spike—came home from work. But, she warned Mike, they kept mostly to themselves, didn’t have much to do with people.
Sarah had a grip on her emotions now and calmly continued her story. I took my cue from Tom and sat absolutely still.
“Something told me I should take over for Mike and try to see Bev myself. I arrived one day around five-fifteen and parked thirty feet up the road, around a left-hand curve so I could watch the driveway in my rearview mirror. My little ragtop would set off alarms if I perched her in that neighborhood.”